These Violent Delights

by Micah Nemerever

  That touch had been his idea; it would buy them a false alibi for Thanksgiving, so that the receipts they collected on Wednesday might never be important. When he’d suggested it, Julian called it “elegant.” The word, whenever Paul remembered it, made the inside of his chest glow warm.

  “Then we lock up after ourselves and get back to the alibi.” Paul put the marker back into its cup. “That’s painless enough, as long as nobody sees us.”

  “Remember.” Julian gave the dog’s ears a final rumple and stretched his arms. “Bystanders—they’re fucking useless. I’m not worried.”

  One more receipt, this time from the family-favorite Chinese restaurant near his grandfather’s garage. It would have looked strange for them to eat in silence, so they talked, but it was a rehash of a conversation they’d already had, about afterlives—whether they would even want one, and how any heaven’s stasis would be agony for anyone who had lived a fully realized life. They didn’t choose the topic on purpose, and in two weeks they would have to opt for something less fraught. But it was comforting to retreat to a familiar dialogue, debating the merits of eternal recurrence and whether there was any practical difference between a selfhood and a soul. It steadied Paul’s nerves before he’d even noticed they needed steadying.

  Then, at last, the repair garage. From the line of numbered hooks mounted alongside his desk, Paul selected the key to a customer’s nicotine-steeped Chrysler. He tailed Julian back to his apartment, parking at the bottom of the hill and out of sight; he didn’t take off his gloves until after he’d followed Julian inside and set down the keys.

  Amid all the failsafes and meticulous logistics, they had failed to anticipate the sheer boredom of waiting. Over the long hours, the walls of Julian’s apartment contracted, and they paced past each other like two caged lions. The sound of his own voice made Paul snappish and uneasy, so he eventually stopped speaking altogether; Julian couldn’t stop, chatting aimlessly and relentlessly about anything but what was really holding their attention. They tried to break up the monotony by playing chess, but the games all inevitably devolved into ugly stalemates. The other obvious solution yielded only slightly better results, and eventually they decided to abandon that effort rather than go about it halfheartedly.

  “Did I ever tell you,” said Julian after a while, “my sixteenth birthday got ruined by the fucking hurricane last year?”

  Paul didn’t answer, but Julian didn’t seem to notice.

  “The storm surge flooded the cellar and everything,” he said, and tapped a fresh cigarette against the palm of his hand before lighting it. “We were stuck inside for hours, wondering if the trees were going to fall. You’re bored out of your goddamn mind, but you can’t relax because there’s a hurricane outside, and if you let your guard down for a second the winds might get stronger and tear the house in two—or at least that’s the kind of monkey-brain magical thinking you catch yourself doing, even when you know better.”

  “Our basement flooded, too.” Paul felt a brief flare of annoyance that Julian still wouldn’t stop talking. “It’s going to feel worse when it’s actually endgame,” he added a little unkindly, “so you’d better get used to it.”

  “I’ll just take a fistful of your mother’s reds next time,” said Julian.

  At a quarter to eleven they left. The nights were growing bitter, but the reek of stale tobacco in the Chrysler was so overwhelming that they rode with the windows down. When they reached the warehouse there was a cathartic flurry of tasks devoted to ensuring they’d given themselves enough time to set the stage.

  Paul had learned the first trick from his grandfather—it could be used, quite innocently, to pop the hood on a customer’s car if another mechanic had wandered off with the keys. All it took was a well-placed bent wire through the front grill. The second trick he hadn’t dared ask about, but he couldn’t imagine that it didn’t work. He knew little about cars, but he knew what the oil pan did and how to fill it. It didn’t take any great wisdom to know how much damage would be done by adding a few ounces of sand.

  “I’m going to need a second pair of gloves,” he said suddenly. He braced his hand on the hood and turned to face Julian, all but invisible past the shivering beam of his flashlight. “Otherwise I’ll get engine grease on the steering wheel. I didn’t think of that, for god’s sake, why didn’t I think of that?”

  “Let’s not spiral into self-loathing, if you please,” said Julian with deliberate carelessness. “See? This is what the rehearsal is for.”

  The pay phone across the street had to be left intact for now, but Paul examined it anyway. There had to be something unbreakable he could use to smash the receiver—and there was, an empty metal shelf whose directory book was long gone. The glass was etched with graffiti; his skin was lit in fluorescent green.

  Beyond the booth window he saw Julian leaning against the Chrysler, hugging his arms in the cold. Paul kicked the door shut and hurried across the empty street to join him. Through the dark and distance Julian had appeared almost afraid, but by the time Paul reached him, the look was gone, if it had ever been there at all.

  “How much longer?”

  “About half an hour. Still bored?”

  Julian shrugged.

  While they waited, Julian browsed restlessly through the stranger’s glove compartment—unfurling fast-food napkins, uncapping lipsticks to scrutinize their color. But he was quiet, even solemn. When he ran out of artifacts to examine, he shut the glove box and wrung his hands; Paul gently pulled one hand free and held it, but Julian didn’t relax. Somewhere in the distance, a church bell tolled midnight.

  Their friend left work late. He was alone and forgettable, round-shouldered in the cold. Paul only watched him for a moment before looking away. His place in the story was well-established; there was no need to dwell on it.

  Stepanek’s car rattled to life and disappeared into the dark. Paul pulled the Chrysler up alongside the place where it had been. Julian opened the passenger door and leaned out, one gloved hand braced against the ceiling.

  “Hey,” said Julian. “Are you okay?”

  A symphony of urban silence. The buzz of the streetlights; traffic, thin after midnight, each vehicle a lonely sigh in the distance.

  “No matter what mood he’s in, I’m patient with him. He’s having a rough night.” Julian spoke with his best stranger manners, as if he were still addressing their friend. “He gets in the car.”

  “If he doesn’t?” Paul didn’t doubt him, but he had to ask. The practice would be worthless if they didn’t account for everything.

  “Then we tell him ‘good night’ and go home,” said Julian. “But he’s going to get in. That’s why we like our friend so much—he doesn’t ask a lot of questions.”

  Paul drummed his fingertips on the steering wheel. Then he nodded.

  “He gets in the car.” There was a trace of a stammer, but he no longer feared Julian would laugh at him for it. “He has a nice hot drink, and we drive.”

  They were no longer restless. He’d never seen Julian so still. There was a presence beside them, a body-thick heaviness to the quiet; they wore the skins they used when they knew someone was watching them. When they veered from the route to Polish Hill, the last fragments of conversation faded into silence. There was nothing to say, anyway. They were well past that.

  It was a forty-minute drive, out to the suburban snarl of railyards and ramshackle houses. The chill sliced past the open windows. When they turned up the hill and into the woods, the world’s last sounds were smothered by the trees. Outside the car, the air was sweet. Moss and smoke; the warm smell of rust. There would be hardly any moon in two weeks, but for now it was high and shining. Its reflection shuddered in the river below. The bridge was bright angles and shadow. He wasn’t afraid of it; he never had been.

  “One,” said Julian. They approached the railing side by side. The presence walked with them, obedient and yielding.

  “Two.” Paul watched his face
through the ghost that stood between them. There was already the shadow of a transformation inside them. How could Paul brace himself for the real thing when the transcendence was already too terrible to bear? It would be like looking at God.

  “Three.”

  13.

  Here was the truth: it was the happiest they had ever been. He would never say that to himself afterward, but he always knew. Even when the time came that he despised himself for knowing it. Even when he reached desperately backward in his memory to find a joy he could still yearn for, an innocent and untarnished before that had never existed.

  No longer was there any danger in being gentle with each other. It was a relief to be able to trust, and the relief made everything else simple. Love was so easy they could take it for granted, so transcendental that they would never dare. They talked on the phone late into the night and hid notes in each other’s pockets like lovesick children; whenever they reached an empty stretch of sidewalk they drew together to hold hands, reflexively synchronized. Of course they would promise each other everything. Of course eternity would yield to them once they’d earned it.

  At a certain point they stopped talking about the plan. The logistics were set, and there was little else to say; it dropped beneath the surface. But it touched everything that belonged to them—everything they read, everything they believed, every idea they brought to each other to be dissected and loved. It was the key to their freedom from the world of obedience, the catalyst that would help everything else fall into place. Every hope for the future hinged on what it would help them become, and Paul never questioned it, not once. They were happy, and the plan was inextricable from their happiness, and he would never be able to forget that both things were true.

  Each day was shorter and darker, but they hardly felt the cold. They barely slept, and when they did, they didn’t dream. Instead they told each other the things they dreamed when they were awake. How they would never be apart, how they would take care of one another. How they would seal themselves off from everything outside and distill themselves to such purity that no one else could ever touch them. How this, in the end, was the only thing they wanted.

  Any other happiness dimmed beside it. It was unblemished by fear or reason, a joy in impossible things—the belief, hopeless and unwavering, that the center could hold.

  14.

  “. . .Tomorrow, Thanksgiving Day, when families across this nation will be . . .”

  He was a small child, walking the beach at Cape May with his father at his side. Past a veil of fog stood a rusted railway bridge, collapsing into the sea. Lying in the sand was a seagull, long dead, its eyes and breast and belly hollowed out by flies. A voice came from the place inside its chest where its tiny lungs and heart had once been. Beneath the roar of the sea the voice was faint, and the words didn’t make sense no matter how closely he tried to listen.

  His father didn’t want him to linger—“Don’t look,” he said, and covered Paul’s eyes. But then Paul heard the gull’s voice more clearly, and his father was no longer there.

  “. . . marked, in retrospect, not only the death of a charismatic and promising young President, but the death of our innocence as a . . .”

  His eyes opened, and the breaking waves receded. The split-flap numbers clicked softly into place, two minutes past his alarm. The radiator creaked and snapped, but the room was still frigid. He reached for the sweater hanging from his bedpost—an old brown pullover of his father’s, still sweet with pipe tobacco and aftershave.

  Familiar smells, familiar sounds, a life still marred by all its old fractures and disappointments. This was the day he would reforge it into something smooth and whole.

  “So as we gather around the family table to give thanks, let us remember our fallen—”

  He switched off the radio and got up to stand beside the radiator. As he tried to wring warmth into his hands, he could picture their friend doing the same, hunched over the baseboard heater in his dark apartment across town. He would be wearing a terrycloth robe, the wine-colored one that hung from the back of the bedroom door. The terrier would dance at his heels until he opened a can of horsemeat for it in the kitchen.

  Nineteen hours—Paul couldn’t stop himself from doing the calculations in his head. Heartbeats, one hundred thousand; eighteen thousand breaths, seventeen thousand blinks of the eye. The numbers were finite, but so were the ones that measured any life. The only difference was being able to reckon them with any precision.

  It was still dark when he returned from his run. While the household stirred to life outside his bedroom door, Paul hung his bath towel over the keyhole and pulled his sport bag down from the closet shelf. He forced himself not to rush, to lay everything out across his bed carefully to ensure that he didn’t forget anything. He kneaded his lower lip between his thumb and forefingers and went over the list in his head. Matches, two changes of clothes, toothbrush, aspirin. Tennis shoes, penknife. Baseball bat, wrapped end to end in grip tape to hide the bright green paint. An extra pair of socks.

  He waited till the last moment to retrieve the vial. He crept across the cold floor on gooseflesh and bare knees to unlock the paint box under his bed. Paul resisted the impulse to hide it in his bag right away, like a guilty child burying a broken piece of china. He set the vial out on his bedspread along with the everything else, between his spare glasses and his thrift-store driving gloves. One final inventory, then he packed it all away.

  He left the bag at the foot of the stairs, beside the shoe pile and the constellation of oval-framed childhood photographs. He followed the voices to the kitchen, where Laurie and his mother had already finished breakfast. They were assembling Laurie’s sack lunch, their mother trimming the crusts from her peanut butter sandwich. Laurie smiled at him, her flower-printed knapsack hanging from one shoulder.

  It could have been any other morning. Laurie chatted aimlessly until her friend Miriam summoned her outside with a shave-and-a-haircut knock. His mother always found fault with his scrambled-egg technique, so Paul waited to make his breakfast until she’d migrated to the sunroom to watch the morning news. Eventually Audrey drifted up from the basement, yawning and ruffling the loose tangle of her hair. In tinny strains from the open sunroom door, the television took up the lament for the long-dead President. Audrey set down her mug and settled in with her breakfast, a pickle spear and a liverwurst sandwich cut into triangles.

  Paul knew he had to put something in his stomach. Hunger would only make him shakier and more nervous. But it was as if he were swallowing clumps of wet cement. He minced his eggs down to gravel with the side of his fork, and the bulk of them went cold and uneaten. He waited until the others were distracted by conversation before getting up to scrape his plate over the bin.

  “The official story is full of holes.” Audrey was in a cheerful, combative mood; she had earlier tried to engage Paul in the same conversation, and was still annoyed at his lack of interest. “I’ll buy that Oswald was the triggerman, but the whole Castro connection, you’ll never convince me—”

  “Don’t be morbid, Audrey,” said their mother. She was still curled up in the wicker chair in the sunroom, half-obscured face turned toward the television. “I don’t like it, people turning that tragedy into a parlor game . . . Paul, do you remember your card?”

  Being directly addressed sent a shock through his hands. “My what?”

  “That sweet little card you made for the Kennedy children.” Her voice was almost wistful. “You were so worried about them. I wonder if they still have it.”

  “Oh.” Paul couldn’t summon the memory; he didn’t have the nerves to spare. “I doubt they ever saw it,” he said. “It probably went straight in the trash.”

  He hadn’t planned to leave as early as he did, but he couldn’t bear to stay in the house any longer. The air was too thick with a past he would soon be rid of. The boy who lived here didn’t deserve a goodbye.

  He intended to take the bus, but Julian was waiting fo
r him at the corner, windburned in the cold, leaning on the hood of his red Chevrolet. His hands were in his coat pockets, his scarf knotted close at his throat. Between gray earth and low sky, he was the only thing that shone.

  Paul came near enough to kiss him, but he didn’t quite dare. They watched each other’s eyes for a long moment; then Julian grinned and sidled free to open the driver’s-side door.

  “It took me ages to get dressed this morning.” Julian gave a brittle, nervy laugh and scraped his fingers back through his hair. “I nearly had a nervous breakdown over socks, of all things. I couldn’t stop laughing, having to decide what goddamn socks to wear the day I go out and—”

  “Endgame,” said Paul. “The day of the endgame.”

  Julian drew a sharp breath, as if to suppress another laugh. Then his unsteadiness vanished as quickly as it had appeared, and Paul soon forgot it had been there at all.

  * * *

  He knows what he has to do, even if he can’t remember why.

  It’s dangerous; it will kill him if he lets it. It itches and burns like hay, so deeply that he feels it in his teeth and throat more than in his skin. It loops around his arms and over his fingers, and he is so afraid of it that he almost forgets his mission. But he doesn’t forget. He refuses to forget.

  He can pull it, little by little, through the unseen clumsy knot that holds it in place. He knows he must. He tells his hands to keep pulling, even when he can’t feel them and can’t be certain they’re still attached to his wrists. He cannot forget how to move. It will kill him if he lets it.

  His every breath flows to his hands because they are all that’s left of him now. This is the most important thing he’s ever done.

  They haven’t noticed. Whoever they are, they haven’t noticed. When they glance at him they jitter and laugh, and they make remarks to each other that jumble together into nonsense before they reach his ears. Side by side they are twin angels on a headstone, cold and terrible and immutable. They were boys once, he remembers, but they aren’t anymore.