Are you sure he’s still with us?
Should be. His eyes are still moving.
Beneath them the world rocks back and forth, and he is on his riverboat in Vietnam, and the sun glares and the air clings and sweat slicks down his back. The boys are boys again and there are even odds they’ll both be dead within the week. The green smell of the swamp rises like steam, and there is a cloud of blood in the murky water, it’s his mistake, it’s his fault—
—No. He’s sorry, he’s so sorry, but he can’t stay. What he has to do is too important.
Then something gives, buckles like a knee. The loop of rope is large and loose.
Something is stirring far away. He remembers his legs. But no, he can’t move them, not yet. He can’t let them see, the two stone angels. When he moves one wrist an inch farther from the other it is a secret they don’t see. He must keep the secret. He has to wait.
The world is still.
The car doors open and the rain chatters like teeth. He holds the secret tight and grasps the rope so they won’t see it fall loose. They hold him at each elbow and ask him to walk—not tell, ask, Would you walk with us? Thank you, Charlie. Just a little walk.
Charles Raymond Stepanek Jr., Petty Officer Third Class, two-six-eight, four-one—
They walk him out into the rain, and the trees shine from the headlights and slice like knives into the pitch-black sky. He forgets how to speak again before he even registers he remembered.
Their grasp is breakable and spider-thin. They aren’t angels; they’re children. His body only walks because it expects to walk. He will make his body expect something else. The secret can save him. It’s the only thing that might.
He lets the rope fall. Lets his wrists come free. The secret is out.
He twists away. He staggers forward.
He runs.
Part IV
1.
When he was six or seven, Paul saw a sparrow kill itself against the kitchen window. It didn’t die right away. He remembered dropping his mitt and looking down at it in the grass. Spine twisted, tiny frantic heart pumping blood loose into its cerebellum, the short-circuit spasm of its wings. It wasn’t a bird anymore. Dying turned it into something else, fluids and electricity—membrane and follicles and little hollow bones. He knew even as a child that it would be kinder to kill it, but he didn’t know how, so he just watched until it was over. The stillness afterward was a mercy. He remembered that. He wouldn’t have been able to put an end to it now without the memory.
The crush of panic had been too thick for him to hear the rain, but he could hear it now. He shivered at the remnants that found their way down to him through the trees. He got to his feet and wrung his gloved hands on his shirt. There was no question that his clothes would have to go, but they were so drenched there was no hope that they would burn.
“Hey.”
Julian hadn’t moved. He was still standing with his back to a tree trunk, eyes shut. The bat lay between them in the mud. Paul kicked it into the shadows as he approached. It was a distraction Julian didn’t need.
“Julian.” Paul pressed his fingertips to his forearm, just hard enough to guide his hand down from his mouth. “It’s all right now. You can look.”
It took a long time for Julian’s eyes to open. He breathed as if he were playing dead, small sixteenth-note breaths.
He looked past Paul, then at him. He closed his eyes again, hard, but only for a moment.
“All you did was knock him out,” he said. “Right?”
The barest pause before he could summon his voice. “I didn’t check.”
“It has to be both of us,” Julian said again. His eyes didn’t focus properly on Paul’s face. He looked very young. “Paul, please, it has to be both of us, tell me he’s still alive—”
Paul took hold of both his hands, certain the calm would pass between them, somehow.
“I didn’t check,” he said. “We can’t ever know for sure. So it’s still both of us. Okay?”
Julian drew a sharp inhale, held it, exhaled slowly. It wasn’t enough to steady him, but they couldn’t wait around for better. All Paul could do was promise wordlessly that the stillness inside him would find its way to Julian eventually.
“It’s not that far to go.” Paul looked over his shoulder. Every ugly detail blurred; all that remained was equations, distances over rough terrain, weights and measures. “Fifteen, twenty yards,” he said. “It’ll be easier once we get to the bridge. Then it’s just far enough to get out from over the shallows. Do you think you can do that?”
Julian didn’t answer. For a long silent moment he stared at the inescapable shape of it just downhill, stark and cold in the headlights. Then he laughed.
“Lazy bastard,” he said, “isn’t holding up his end of the bargain at all.”
Paul could never remember afterward how they managed it. There were only fragments, as if he’d woken briefly while sleepwalking. The downpour reaching them at full strength when they emerged from the trees, sloughing down in frigid sheets that flattened their hair against their scalps. The chill in his chest, so thick he might have drowned in it. Julian having to pause once they reached the bridge, choking suddenly on the cold air—but that didn’t stop either of them from dissolving into horrified laughter when Julian lost hold of the left ankle and the leg landed on the rail with a sickeningly decisive thump.
Other sounds lingered, but he could never recall the collision of flesh against water. He remembered only the quiet afterward, the concentric circles of impact radiating over the surface of the river. Even without his glasses, he could see the pockmarks of the rain.
The bat would have floated if they’d thrown it in the river, so Paul scraped a trough into the mud and buried it under damp soil and leaves. The bat had been a failsafe they were never supposed to need, and because of it they had to deploy contingency plans—but they were still plans, orderly as clockwork, nothing improvised. There was something peaceful about falling back on them. It meant even the deviations were under control.
Julian retrieved Paul’s canteen from the glove compartment and poured it over Paul’s hands so he could scrub away the worst of the contamination. (“Your face,” said Julian suddenly, as if he were noticing for the first time. There was a delirious threat of a laugh in his voice, so Paul knew better than to ask for details.) They took turns holding the subject’s umbrella while they changed into dry clothes; the old clothes and gloves went into a Kaufmann’s shopping bag, topped off with rocks and destined to sink in one of the other two rivers.
For a long moment Julian sat behind the wheel, holding it as if he feared it might slither alive. Then he slid over to the passenger’s seat and looked out at Paul with unfocused, glassy eyes.
“You drive,” he said. “I can’t, I can barely feel my hands.”
Paul crumpled the subject’s umbrella into the shopping bag and moved inside to switch on the heat. Every sound was needle-sharp. The growl of the engine coming to life. Windshield wipers whining, bright rattling rain.
When he finally put his glasses on, the world gleamed with detail, and he lost all sense of depth—it was like looking at a painted illusion and then leaning in too close to see anything but brushstrokes. He could feel every fold of fabric against his skin, every goose bump and fine hair on his forearms. But the details didn’t fight with each other anymore. They didn’t cling to his limbs and pull him downward. They washed through him like a symphony.
After the edge of the woods was the steady thrum of streetlights and darkness. Beside him Julian stared forward into the street, holding very still. He had his thumb and two forefingers pressed to his lower lip, fingernails skating over the thin chapped skin.
“How are you doing?”
Julian looked at him as if he’d forgotten he was there. Behind his hand, his face shifted slowly into a grin.
“I’m fine.” His voice was a rising singsong, teasing and impatient. “How about you? Feeling okay? Need me to hold
your glasses so you can throw up?”
Paul wasn’t sure if Julian wanted him to smile. He couldn’t quite parse the remark, as if it had been intended for someone else. “Do I look like . . . ?” he said, distantly curious, but Julian burst out laughing before he’d even finished speaking.
“Jesus, look at you.” Julian’s eyes were wide, alight with something too shimmering and elusive for Paul to name. “Nothing can touch you, you’re high as a fucking kite. Hold out your hand.”
Paul raised his hand from the gearshift and held it outstretched, flat and steady.
Julian let his hand fall from his face and lifted it to hold next to Paul’s. It was shaking so hard that he couldn’t keep it in place for very long.
“You scare the hell out of me,” said Julian. He darted over to kiss the side of Paul’s neck; his smile didn’t fade. “You really do.”
They were back in the city, now. The car crept along a side street thick with houses, then ducked beneath the dim arch of an underpass. Julian rested his head on Paul’s shoulder. His pulse was so strong and quick that Paul could feel it through his shirt.
A sharp detour north. They idled on the Sixteenth Street Bridge to drop the shopping bag into the river. Paul wanted to do it himself, so he could revel in looking down from the height and feeling no fear. But Julian followed him, clambering over the railing onto the pedestrian path.
A single car passed behind them, not stopping, headed in the opposite direction. Julian took Paul’s hand and stared down into the black of the water. The city light cast his face in sickly yellow.
“We should go.” The other car didn’t worry Paul, but it reminded him that he was capable of worry. “So we can . . .”
Julian’s fingers threaded through Paul’s and squeezed tight. It was something he liked to do in bed, when Paul pinned him down and let him feel the teeth behind every kiss. Out of context it was painfully intimate, far more so than any less chaste gesture would have been.
“I know,” said Julian. “We just need a moment to breathe.”
It was the first time he could believe Julian when he spoke this way, as if they were one mind, one heart, one pair of lungs.
The car returned to the repair garage. The lot was eerie and gleaming beneath its floodlights on the deserted street. Julian wiped down the steering wheel and any other surface they or the subject might have touched, while Paul went inside to write the car’s new mileage in his grandfather’s records. It was past two by now, and Paul’s muscles were beginning to ache, as badly as they ever had after a punishing run. But he felt cool and soft, like an empty garden beneath fresh snow. He imagined a deep and dreamless sleep, and how he would wake to find the world new.
He nearly let sleep overtake him as Julian drove them back to his apartment. He was just on the edge of dreaming; the street signs appeared nonsensical until he focused long enough to sort out the letters. He watched Julian absently light a cigarette and blow the first breath of smoke slowly through the part of his lips. It hung like a cobweb in the dark.
When they returned at last to the apartment, they showered together in the too-bright light, and the last evidence of the earth left their skin. Julian cleaned the remnants of mud from Paul’s face as reflexively as he had from his own fingernail beds. They moved together automatically and without hesitation. They watched each other’s eyes, rested their foreheads together as if from opposite sides of a mirror. Their bodies belonged to each other because they were the same body. They had been just one person, long ago, but had been cut from one another before they were born.
Paul nearly succumbed to fatigue the moment he collapsed into bed, but Julian’s voice pulled him back from the ledge. “Stay with me. Paul, wake up, I need you.”
He was too exhausted to do more than acquiesce, but that was all Julian asked of him. He wrapped his arms around Julian’s neck and tried to pull him beneath the surface, into the dreamlike peace.
“I love you.” Julian’s mouth was snow-soft against the side of his neck; he spoke nearly too quietly to be heard. “I mean it. Like crazy.”
Paul believed him. He couldn’t remember ever doubting.
2.
He looked the same as he always had. He’d expected to see a change, even if it were so subtle that only he could see it. A mature sternness about the eyes, something strong and resolute in the line of his jaw. It nauseated him when he caught sight of the mirror and saw the same face. The dark hangdog eyes, solemn and grim; the boyishness at his outlines, the soft movements of his hands and the uncertainty of how to hold them. He still looked like his father’s son. Worse, he looked like his mother’s.
The house whirred with voices. Even from the upstairs hallway he could smell the holiday—sweet potato, maple, toasted walnut, the crayon-pink scent of Laurie’s strawberry perfume. Familiar and festive smells, artifacts from his old life. The world went on as it always had, mistaking him for the weak and obedient boy he’d left to die in the woods beside the bridge. He would have felt better if he could see even a glimmer of the truth in his own face. He never wanted to forget that they were wrong.
Mushrooms were hissing in the frying pan. Laurie and Paul’s mother assembled a sweet potato casserole at the table, and Audrey gestured with the spatula as she talked, recounting a political article she’d read in one of her magazines. Their mother’s apron wasn’t long enough for her, so Audrey wore their father’s old woodworking apron over her jeans.
Only Julian took notice of his return, half turning from his plate of uneaten toaster waffle. He’d been so restless since they arrived at Paul’s house that it was clear he’d barely slept. His eyes were too bright and shadowed deeply underneath. There was a chemical edge to his movements, as if caffeine and adrenaline were the only things keeping him upright.
As Paul sat beside him, Julian met his eyes with maddening caution. “Are you all right?” he asked under his breath. It wasn’t the first time he’d asked, and it was wearing on Paul’s nerves. He made a face in response, and Julian rolled his eyes and turned back to his plate.
The question, like the shape of his body, belonged to the version of himself Paul had abandoned. The state he was in defied easy judgment. It wasn’t all right—it was something better, more alive. If his serenity was fading a little at the edges, he would just work harder to maintain it. The flutter of unease in his chest was just muscle memory; as he settled into his better self, it would be replaced by something new.
He felt like a convalescent awake after weeks of delirium. His whole body ached. He was ravenous, so exhausted he could barely speak.
“Do you have plans for the rest of the day, sweetheart?”
Paul had eaten a full breakfast without complaint, so his mother’s concern had shifted to Julian. When panic passed through Julian’s face, she looked at him with anxious pity.
“I thought . . .” Julian fired Paul a sidelong glance and wrung his hands. It was such a rare gesture of uncertainty that it broke through Paul’s calm and landed hard on his nerves. “I mean, Paul sort of—”
“He’s coming with us.” Everyone looked at him now. Before last night it might have made him falter. “You said he’s always welcome.”
“He is.” His mother reached across the table to squeeze Julian’s forearm. The gesture made him jump. “You are, always, of course you are—Paulie, do you want to step into the living room for a moment?”
“Not particularly.”
There was a burn of red in his cheeks and at the edges of his ears—another reflexive remnant he would have to unlearn. That Julian needed to be accounted for all day was nonnegotiable. Perhaps Paul shouldn’t have trusted the solution to be this simple without confirming his assumptions, but it was too late now to abandon it.
His mother gently let go of Julian’s arm and pressed her hands together. “It’s just that it’s at your auntie’s house.” She gave him a heavy, plaintive look. “And she—well—no one’s going to be expecting him.”
“I can prob
ably still get a flight to New York.” Julian pretended he didn’t mind one way or the other, but the alarm hadn’t quite left his voice. “My friend Joy—ugh, never mind, they go to the Keys—”
“It’s one more chair,” said Paul curtly. “There’s always enough to feed an army, so what’s the big deal?”
His mother’s fondness for Julian was a weapon she’d willingly given him, so she had no right to be angry with him for using it. She pursed her lips, and Paul watched her resolve crumble. Behind her Audrey was watching them, prodding inattentively at the mushrooms.
“Well,” his mother said wearily. “I guess I’ll have to let Hazel know.”
Another piece of the calm chipped away. Paul tried to seal it back into place, but it was gone, and without it he couldn’t figure out how to settle back into his new skin. Details began to sting again, so slowly and insidiously that he didn’t notice in time to stop the slide. Food smells clung in his throat. When the hall telephone rang, inevitably, the trill of the bell was a shade too loud to ignore.
None of it should matter, and it didn’t, exactly, but that didn’t stop him from noticing it. He saw the way his grandparents’ faces fell when they caught sight of Julian in Hazel’s doorway. He felt the way the air swelled with quiet when he entered a room, and the way it contracted again after he left. Some of the family pretended not to mind Julian’s presence—his uncle Harvey, in particular, was as scrupulously friendly as if Paul had helped him win a bet. But the others addressed Julian with polite dismissiveness, the way they might have spoken to a door-to-door salesman. Paul knew, without wanting to know, that they were assembling a story to tell each other behind his back; it didn’t matter, but it struck him at full strength. However fiercely he tried to ignore it, he couldn’t stop himself from seeing.
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