The God in Flight

by Laura Argiri

  “What’s the matter with people around here? They think of nothing but getting drunk,” said Simion, frowning. “That and running about in the mud with bats and balls. What’s the matter with Peter, that he hangs on Topher so? Topher’s beastly to him.”

  “That,” said Andrew, “is a complicated question, and one I can’t answer satisfactorily in a public restaurant. They have a peculiar relationship. Perhaps sometime in my room. You have the most intriguing air about you…it’s rather quaint, archaic, and at the same time you ask such very direct questions…you have the look of someone who’s shocked and disappointed, though not for the same reasons most people would be.”

  “Oh, not with you, you seem very interesting,” said Simion. “Civilized too.”

  “Thank you,” said Andrew, imagining that he didn’t extend that accolade to many. He thought of Simion’s economical movements, dressing himself that morning and putting his things in order. “Certainly not boylike,” thought Carpallon. “Not girl-like either,” he added, in spite of his personal lack of interest in girls. “Rather, almost catlike in his neatness, his solipsistic absorption. Alas, a tad lacking in humor, although one may be able to do something about that.” He envisioned having Simion in his room for tea or chocolate or brandy and wondered if he would submit to some mellowing familiarity like an arm about his shoulders once they knew each other better.

  “It’s puzzling, about Peter and Topher,” said Simion, not one to let go of a subject. “I mean, who wants an abusive friend? It’s worse than an enemy.”

  “Well, you’ll be happy to know, I’m not an abusive friend,” said Andrew. “Who else is interesting and civilized here?” he asked Simion.

  “Professor Klionarios is… I’d never seen a foreigner before him. He’s doubly a foreigner, since he’s both Greek and English. And I like that Dr. Karseth who gave a couple of the natural science lectures in October.”

  “That’s brave of you. I find Karseth terrifying.”

  “How do you find Professor Klionarios?”

  Andrew smiled bemusedly. “Oh, Klionarios is…himself. No other way of putting it. I’ve known him since last year, and I flatter myself that he warmed to me a little—he had me sit for him several times. And yet that just means that he acknowledges I’m alive. But he seemed different at lecture this week. Excited, agitated, as if something’s stirred the waters somehow…”

  “It’s not true that I can’t get on with people,” Simion was soon telling himself, delightedly—he and Andrew got on famously. Andrew had mixed sweet drinks for Simion in the privacy of his rooms and played music on his spinet piano; they had talked about Baudelaire and Poe and Pater. All the auguries for happy intimacy and durable friendship were fine. Andrew invited him to stay over in his room that night, giving Simion a chance to inventory the significant differences between the cheapest and the costliest dormitories. Durfee had lavish heat, housecleaning services, and indoor plumbing. Simion had a hot bath in Andy’s big tub and wore one of Andy’s white cashmere nightshirts. Andrew had a soft four-poster amply big enough for two, and in this bed he drew Simion close in a friendly, matter-of-fact way. “Come here and get warm,” he said, and almost as casually kissed him upon the brow. He sounded so much at his ease, and his loose embrace seemed so comfortable and harmless, that Simion could not figure out whether anything improper was going on. Quiet and warmth more than outweighed impropriety, if there was any. Was it wickedness with another boy when you shared the same bed and were gently and lightly held?

  So he wondered.

  And, not the slavering predator of John Ezra’s dreams, but something bright and languid and many-colored as cathedral glass, sex spread its gorgeous, iridescent wings.

  Those few hours of comfort did not, however, make Simion any better able to deal with the reality of South Middle. The savagery when he returned to his own domicile was like Topher’s bucket of cold water over his head. The first thing he encountered was Peter, lounging on the stiffened sheets of Topher’s bed and smoking a cigarette: “D’you know what Nero did to Sporus?” asked Peter, extempore.

  “No—did he cook him?” Peter’s tone had inferred something shocking, and Simion thought to shock him back.

  “You might find what he did even more interesting—he cut his little balls off, dressed him as a girl, and married him. Made him empress,” said Peter.

  “I’m sure you made that up. It’s the kind of thing you like, isn’t it?”

  “Ask Klionarios,” said Peter, leering. “He’ll tell you it’s perfectly true, and you might find it interesting to see how he reacts to the suggestion.”

  “Tell Professor Lunaticos that you can’t quite decide between him and Andy Carpallon but that you’re working on it,” suggested Topher. And so on, and on, and on, ad infinitam nauseam and further. Until finally fate opened its hand and threw Simion a coin that shifted the balance of power slightly in his favor, and he found out what Andrew had demurred to tell him.

  Two nights later—having the fresh grievance of being introduced to visitors to the suite as Sporus Satterwhite—Simion was flickering in and out of a thin sleep during the usual noise around the card table. His disquietude and outrage had sunk to their usual level: He had a grinding ache down in the pit of his body, in the shallow cradle of his pelvic bones—he felt as if he’d eaten several wooden alphabet blocks and they’d stuck there. He wanted nothing more on earth at the moment than the chance to heat a brick in the coals, wrap it in a couple of towels, curl up around it, and let it warm out the pain. Even before this whole fracas started, though, he couldn’t have gone through the laughing group to heat a brick for a bellyache; even less now, when he’d figured obscenely in the conversation several times. They were now discussing women: “How many times’d she give it up?” and, “A slut like that’ll go off like a Fourth of July firecracker,” and, “You can’t hurt girls like that, you can just bang away on ’em all night,” and, “You ever know a whore that could suck off two men at once?” They returned to Simion as a complaint topic: “If he’d move out we could sneak in a couple of nice frisky chippies. But no, if we did it, his ladyship would shriek—”

  At long last the party wore down; ragged renditions of Gaudeamus Igitur, “Dirty Durfee,” “Naughty Sophie Brown,” and other charming songs were sung several times. Simion had come down to sit wrapped in his quilt upon the window seat, within reach of his chamber pot. He leaned his queasy head to his knees and must have gone in and out of a light sleep. Finally, he came awake and perceived darkness and, except for the tired chuckles and cracklings of an almost extinct hearth fire, silence. At last, it seemed that he had a chance to heat his brick. He got up, soft-footed, still well lessoned in the silence he had learned from living with John Ezra. At the dark doorway, he hesitated, because he heard someone speak in what he would have sworn was an empty room. It was Peter’s voice, and it had in it a strange mix of pleading and insistence.

  “…let me do it, Topher…Topher…Topher…”

  Then Topher, as if he were having trouble breathing. “Least…I…will if you let Gibbs do you too at the same time. I always did want to see that. Thass right, Gibbsy, let’s stuff ’im up at both ends, he’ll think he’s died and gonta heaven. He’s a bigger whore than all the trollops down at the Mershaw Mews put together, and he don’t charge nothing. You love it, Pete, you know you do…” Peter, whose mouth was now fully occupied, made no verbal response to this.

  Simion had come the next few steps from his room, his nostrils crisped by the keen beery reek of the common room, and now he saw Topher Holloway sprawled in the one armchair, legs apart, and a look of drooling delight on his freckled face; his mouth was open, you could see his tongue. More puzzling yet was the form Simion recognized as Peter’s, in a kneeling crouch with his head in Topher’s lap. Topher and Gibbs seemed to have their clothes on, but Peter was naked.

  “What a disgusting position,” Simion thought, bemused. “He looks daft with his butt in the air like that. What�
��s he doing, reading something on Topher’s breeches buttons?”

  This scenario was promptly complicated by Gibbs, who had shucked his trousers and whose prick sprang free. He did the curious thing of scooping up something—butter?—from the squalid table, full of scattered cards and empty hock bottles and stale supper. He did the even more curious thing of putting it on his prick. The reason he did this was promptly clarified.

  “This is an orgy,” thought Simion, who had heard and heard and heard this word in John Ezra’s sermons. “Now I’m actually seeing one,” he thought, with a sort of stunned clarity. The silence pointed up keenly their small wet sounds, sucking sounds and grunting and pushing sounds. John Ezra had evidently been right on the subject of dissipation at Yale, though this was not how Simion had imagined it—he’d anticipated something on the line of gentlemen gambling and having duels, like the ones in Nicholas Nickleby, at the very worst. This was more like animals mating, only animals had the sense and good taste to do it in twos. Gibbs had stuck himself into Peter and began pumping, a brutal in-and-out that provoked sounds of suffering pleasure from his victim. As he understood exactly what he was seeing, Simion’s insides clenched up like a fist, and he made a small gagging sound.

  Topher’s hand moved on Peter’s head as if trying to alert him, but Peter paid no heed. Simion took another step closer, then saw what Peter was doing.

  “Be quiet!” hissed Topher. At that point, Peter realized something was wrong and desisted from his work; he removed his flushed face from Topher’s open fly and stared at Simion as indignantly as if Simion were the one caught in this uncouth posture. Gibbs realized that he was observed and desisted posthaste.

  “Be quiet!” Topher hissed again. “You don’t know what you’ve seen, you haven’t seen anything. And if you make a sound, I’ll wring your neck!”

  “Spying! Isn’t that just like you!” spat Gibbs, looking over his shoulder while trying to cram his gibbals back into his pants.

  “I just wanted to heat a brick. I have a stomachache,” said Simion in a half-sentient, childish voice.

  “You wanted to heat a brick to put on your little belly like my sisters with a hot-water bottle when they’ve got the thrums?” inquired Topher politely. “Maybe you have, for all we know.”

  “There you go again about whether I’ve got a cock. You know so, because you sneak to look at me when you can,” said Simion, getting louder as his anger rose. “If you’re such a man, why aren’t you out putting yours into one of those chippies you snicker about all the time instead of here sticking it in another boy’s mouth?”

  “Pipe down! And don’t you go talking about what you think you’ve seen! I’ll give you the best beating you ever had if you even think about it!”

  “I bet you’ve never done it with a girl, that’s the kind of practiced libertine you are,” said Simion. “I bet you don’t know how. I bet no girl would put up with a filthy fiend like you even for money.”

  At this point Topher would have risen, probably to take Simion by his nightshirt collar and throttle him to the point of brain damage, but Peter, frozen on his knees before him, blocked his way. So all he could do was utter a threat and then try, with scant dignity, to do up his buttons.

  “I live here!” Simion said. “I paid good money to live here! I’m not doing anything I haven’t the right to! You trample everyone’s rights underfoot, you steal my groceries, you make noise all night so I can’t sleep, and then you wake me up doing something filthy that there probably isn’t even a name for, and then you threaten me?”

  “Shut your mouth, you little bag of rags! You haven’t heard a thing!”

  Simion, galvanized to rage, disputed this. “I heard you the whole damned night! I heard every word of your nastiness, and then the three of you here sucking and grunting! So, this is why you’re known as a degenerate,” Simion said, turning to Peter.

  Peter rose to his feet, grabbed a shirt and held it over his belly, and made a warding-off gesture to Topher. He was cowering—trying to do it with grace, but cowering. “I’m very sorry for any misunderstanding,” he began in a voice very different from the one he ordinarily used with Simion. Later Simion realized what a shock it must have been to the trio to be confronted by an indignant child’s steel stare and semi-hysterical voice at this point.

  “There isn’t any misunderstanding, and you’re not sorry about anything. You’ve made my life Hell this term! You egg Topher on to pester me when you can’t be here to do it yourself. You give me no peace and aggravate my ulcers! And now you’re literally having an orgy. You have some nerve to talk about what anyone else does. You may be rich but you’re stupid and lazy and vulgar! And now it turns out that you’re degenerates as well as brutes! I’m going to tell the proctors exactly what I saw, I’m going to get you out of my suite, I hope they throw you out of here and all the way back to where you came from! I didn’t pay my tuition in order to live with people like you!”

  That young voice, sizzling with contempt and disgust, decided Peter on his course. “Shh,” he said, laying a finger to his lips and producing a terrified smile behind it. He darted a glance to the bedroom, where the solid threnody of Jed’s snores was uninterrupted. “I’m sure that we can reach a little compromise here. I notice you keep mentioning money, Simion. Perhaps you would like some to compensate you for your inconvenience. I happen to have some cash upon me—”

  “Upon you? You don’t have anything upon you but some butter on your behind,” said Simion.

  “All right, in my jacket. And if I give it to you, you must be a gentleman about this, and make no noise, and say nothing to anyone. Are you a gentleman and a good fellow?”

  “Never you mind good-fellowing me,” Simion said.

  Peter wound the shirt around his waist to protect what remained of his modesty. He found his jacket and produced his wallet. He looked drily at his partners in crime. “The collection plate’s going around, fellows. Three play, three pay.” With murderous looks, Gibbs and Topher consulted their own pockets. Between them, they produced a fat roll of notes, plus change.

  The sight of money had come to affect Simion peculiarly, as food might a starving man; it made something in his head draw tight and cold. His hand wanted to reach out and take what was offered, but he made himself pause. “We won’t do business unless you all agree to stop making my life a burden. You can hold your noise and your abuse and your filthy suggestions, all of you, and you can stay out of this suite, Peter Geoffrey. If any one of you ever, ever, ever has the slightest thing more to say about me, about Andy, or about Professor Klionarios, I’ll see that everyone on this campus knows all about what you’ve been at tonight. I’ll put a notice in the Yale Daily, I’ll write it in letters a foot high on every fence: PETER GEOFFREY SUCKS TOPHER HOLLOWAY’S PRICK AND LETS GIBBS BAKER BUGGER HIM. MAYBE THEY ALL TAKE TURNS. I don’t draw as well as you do, but I think I could manage something that would look enough like the little performance I just saw that people would get the idea.”

  “For God’s sake, lower your voice! Very well, all right!”

  “You too, Topher, have we got a deal, or do you want all Yale to know that you’re a—”

  “Don’t you call me that, I ain’t!”

  “Why don’t you put on that performance in front of all South Middle and ask them whether you are or you ain’t? Have we got a deal? You leave me alone, you stay out of my way, my life in this suite is peaceful and happy, and I refrain from posting your picture and your habits on the college fence?”

  “We’ve got a damn deal,” growled Topher.

  “Gibbs?” asked Simion politely.

  “Very well.”

  “I bet you do this all the time, too,” said Simion. “Probably other nasty things too. And give me no peace, when I don’t do anything but sleep and study.”

  “All right, Simion, all right,” soothed Peter. “Here’s the money. Buy yourself something decent to wear. We’ll stay out of your way and let you study.” Peter, as
if managing some less crucial cash transaction, extended a handful of money which turned out to amount to $76.34, and said, “Very well, then. You’ve seen nothing. You’ll have nothing to say. And we’ll bid you good-night.”

  Simion said nothing. He watched them while Peter dressed and the others straightened their clothes, as if they were some kind of brand-new animals. “You three are enough to make anybody sick,” he said. “It’s worse than coming unawares on a bunch of buzzards eating, finding you doing whatever you were doing. Now clean up this revolting mess,” he added. Topher took a step toward him, but Peter seized him by the sleeve, and Topher subsided. Peter simply swept the dishes and stale food and empty bottles up in the tablecloth and hoisted the clanking bundle. He then took Topher by the elbow and towed him doorward with more firmness than one would expect from his pudgy hand and beckoned Gibbs to follow, which Gibbs did without argument. Simion flipped through the notes as the three backed out.

  “Ass!” he heard from Topher as they descended the stairs. “You cocksucking dimwit! I’ve already been expelled from one place! D’you want to get me expelled from here too, or what?” And from Gibbs: “I ought to kick your pansy arse!” He could not hear Peter’s replies, if any.

  Simion woke late in the morning, having carried out his original intentions and gotten his hot brick; coming awake curled around the towel-wrapped brick, he remembered. He found the money under the waistband of his underwear. It had not been a dream.

  He remembered always the strangeness of his sensations that morning; he felt somewhat defiled and shocked, but by no means as shocked as Peter had assumed he was. He could imagine that someone’s mouth might feel good on one there, but not seventy-six dollars’ worth. His mind replayed the scene for him, the instantaneousness of the offer—how Peter had not offered him five dollars or twenty, but all he had. Simion pushed the brick down to the foot of the bed and counted the money again. Books! he thought—a rush of exuberance at how cash opened up the possibilities of the world. A quiet warm room! Clothes! What hunger should he feed first?