The God in Flight

by Laura Argiri

  They were in and out of eleven of the less elite hostelries, some down by the docks and emitting an inconceivable stench, before even finding a clue. At the Mershaw Mews, the landlady told them that there had been a boy of Simion’s description asking for a cheap lodging at her place—“But I didn’t take him in, sirs, he was that much too young, and this place, if you know what I mean, sirs, it’s got girls.”

  “Ah! A cathouse!” said Andrew, with shaky humor. “I’ve never before been to a cathouse in my life. This is a new experience for me.” He filed away for future amusement the company in which he had visited his first cathouse.

  “You can call it what you like, but I did what I oughter and told him he was too young and had no business at my place. I sent him on.”

  Somewhat later, Andrew felt Doriskos’s gaze rest coldly upon him, and met his eyes quizzically.

  “I can’t imagine why you’re grinning,” Doriskos answered that look, and Andrew realized that he was smiling a hysterical little smile. Naturally, Present Company could not imagine why.

  “It’s just peculiar, you know,” said Andrew. “I mean, being in a carriage with you, outside a whorehouse, looking for him.” Getting no answer, he persisted: “A penny for your thoughts? A silver dollar? A coral rose?”

  “I’m going to make Peter Geoffrey wish he’d never been born, much less gone mucking with tracts. He’ll be the one who runs away when I get through with him. The presuming, ungrateful swine. I’ll bring him down in flames.”

  “In that endeavor, I and every other civilized human being at the college wish you luck.” And Andrew actually thought it possible that Doriskos in his current incarnation might take Peter apart with a few icy, perfectly timed words.

  “If he could have brought himself to come to me…whyever…?”

  “Ah…well, you know, he’s used to settling things for himself. Also, shame,” said Andy. “He thinks that you…maybe he includes me in this, too, for he couldn’t seem to get away from me too fast after it happened…would extend your horror of those tracts and the person who made them to him, and assume that he’s tainted and primitive in the same way.”

  In a wounded voice: “I would do no such thing.”

  “Actually, he is primitive, but not in that way. He’s so terrified of primitivism that he governs his life with iron rationality, with as much mathematical logic as he can apply. He has a sort of choke hold on himself.”

  “I don’t think running away and hiding all night like a criminal is precisely iron rationality,” said Doriskos, being surprisingly swift.

  “Well…iron rationality when possible. Total hysteria when not. Not much of a middle path.”

  “And it’s not iron rationality to assume that I’d blame him for these tracts.”

  “You may be at pains to prove as much,” Andrew told him.

  Doriskos maintained a pained silence for a slow and cold five minutes, then asked diffidently: “But how did he…what did he say? How did he act?”

  “He told me on the way over to go ahead and shake him off if I wanted, and meanwhile tried to shake me off. I tried to keep him from going there, but of course he wasn’t hearing me. And I’ve never seen anyone turn so white with rage as he did once we were in there. Peter said every low thing you might expect of him, then…what did he say? He asked Simion if God would secure his revenge, and Simion said, ‘Think of me when we’re forty and see how I’m living then.’

  “Then he walked out, and I stayed and spoke my mind to Peter and Topher, in part to keep them from following after him, and then, when I got out, he’d vanished. I’d say that it wasn’t very nice, the way I got treated, only you can’t expect someone in that kind of pain to think of you.”

  “I’m the person who should apologize, I suppose,” sighed Doriskos. Then he explained, with disarming simplicity: “This is about me, you know.” Andrew did, of course, but had never expected to hear the fact mentioned aloud. “I shall have to disabuse Peter of his notions. He has long imagined that his position as my talented student was much more than it is. That must end.” Icy, British that must end. Andrew thought it would end, too.

  By midnight they were poking around on the outskirts of town, and the cab driver wearied of their search. “Much obliged for the fare, sirs, but the evenin’ and the time and myself are cold and late and tired. I’ll take you back where you come from, and that’s it for the night.” He drove them back to Doriskos’s house.

  But the subject of all this contumely, meanwhile, had not gone far—he was in the single-stall stable in Doriskos’s backyard where Doriskos would stable his horse Gray Matter when he didn’t have time to return him to the livery stable. On this twenty-degree night, Simion was the single occupant. He had been to a couple of the hostels where they’d searched for him, but the places had been frightening, and the attendants had told him to move on; he’d wasted two dollars in cab fares before coming here. He’d wanted to be near Doriskos but couldn’t bring himself to talk to him; his throat was so stuffed with shame that he could barely swallow, much less meet someone’s eyes and speak. He could imagine this disgusting, graceless secret that wasn’t one anymore spreading far and wide at Yale, the laughter like a field of knives; he imagined his own crawling return to Haliburton. He imagined further: sleeping again in that dingy crypt of a bedroom, begging for a position at the Latin School, forming a prominent reference in John Ezra’s next sermon on the Sin of Pride. And this was only an introit to the bad old vision he resuffered next: himself at twenty-five or -six or -seven, thirty if he was lucky, a young man with an old man’s pain-ridden walk, creeping around the late-afternoon schoolhouse. In that loveless light, he could see himself plainly, the lifeless cornsilk of his hair around a skull-face like Lincoln’s in his fading years. He knew just what kind of death sentence that life would be, and the slow stunting and deformity that would occur before the coup de grâce. And what would he do with the memory of Klionarios’s vagrant kindnesses and the time when his life had lit up with them? What would he do with that in ten or fifteen years’ worth of haggard days?

  For the immediate present he set up camp, lighting his candle and setting it on a box carefully away from the hay, then bedded down in the stale straw between his two old quilts from Haliburton. He’d stopped en route for a bottle of brandy and now took a swallow periodically to anesthetize himself against the cold. By the tiny flickering light, he tried to read Chatterton’s poems. His body was mostly numb and, with any luck, his mind would be soon. He heard Doriskos come home around half past midnight, had time to wonder where he’d been at such an hour, and then heard Andrew’s voice along with the distant crunch of their boots in the snow. Simion could not resist slitting the shed door; through the kitchen window, he descried them heating something to drink and conferring at the table. In the name of decency, he should have gone and knocked upon the back door then, but he couldn’t. The next time he checked, there was a lit lamp or candle in every window of the house that he could see, an incongruous festive blaze of late lights. These remained until the sky had shown that faintly yielding blackness, that horizon-glow of false dawn that means at least four o’clock in the morning. Then, lamp by lamp, the downstairs darkened.

  Then Doriskos’s silhouette appeared in the studio window, and Doriskos peered out into the frigid darkness that concealed the object of his search at nearer range than he guessed. He finally bent and blew out the light he carried.

  Finally, Simion groped his way around the right side of the house, where the windows of the blue and crimson bedroom faced out. At one of its windows was the house’s remaining lamplight. Then that light too withdrew, for the exhausted Doriskos had flung himself down on his bed. Simion stood there for perhaps fifteen minutes after the passing of that last light. Perhaps it was the cold, or perhaps he was so tired that he gave in and let his emotions talk sense to his mind. He thought how Doriskos had chosen him, just him, to be with him on his birthday, and how Doriskos smiled for him and none other. Also o
f the way that they had looked at each other—one particular smile over those glasses of wine and that stare of rapt recognition at the entrance examination. A look like that is to affection what a cashier’s check is to money, something said to him in his head. Then he scooped a handful of soft snow and fashioned a light ball and threw it up at that window. He repeated the process. The light came back, the window swung open, the light was held out and fell upon his face. Simion gave Doriskos a sheepish little wave. In about five seconds, he was pulled inside into the heat.

  Andrew would always remember Doriskos’s face in that witching light, how it contracted with grief and how he actually cried out as if someone had crept up behind him and hurt him in some cruel and startling way, finger-jabbed him right between the shoulder blades or touched him with something hot. Simion wavered there on the kitchen doormat, wearing the greatcoat Andrew had worn when he was fifteen, a copy of Chatterton’s verses in his blue-white hands. Bits of straw clung to the coat.

  “I hope you don’t mind too much,” said Simion, sounding utterly extinguished. “I am moving out of South Middle, and I needed a place to stay for a night before I decide what I have to do.”

  “Where have you been?” asked Andrew, who had been half asleep on the downstairs sofa. Simion pointed out into the dark.

  “There. The shed.”

  “Oh, this is too much,” said Andrew, putting his hand over his eyes. “Oh, I could wring your neck for running away and hiding out there and freezing yourself! Oh, you’re the most impossible thing walking upright! Whoever wants you can have you!”

  “Sorry, Andy,” said Simion, in that same dreamy and extinguished voice. “Andy told you?” he asked Doriskos.

  “About the tracts?” Doriskos asked him.

  A bleak nod and casting down of the eyes. “I have to go somewhere.”

  “Oh, my dear, I don’t care about those tracts,” said Doriskos. He took the tranced-seeming Simion into his arms, and to Andrew’s very great surprise, Simion leaned his head on Doriskos’s shoulder and tentatively returned the embrace. Andrew saw Doriskos’s eyelids flutter, as if his eyes had teared up. “Stay with me,” Doriskos said, as if he were the one doing the begging, as if he’d been the one out in the cold.

  VI. In the Sanctuary of Wishes

  The slow float up from a stunned sleep, ascent to the surface of the sleep and to one’s self…far into the day, Simion woke. He noticed first the odd weight of something on his feet, sat up, and peeled back the layers of quilts that had been laid over him. There was a thick silk-covered top quilt, a thin summer eiderdown, and a layer of linen sheet bordered with Battenberg lace; between the quilts were hot-water bottles. He was wearing a long soft-spun garment of white wool with some Asiatic-looking embroidery on the chest and sleeves. “I’m in his house,” he thought. Then he sat up and looked at this room, in which he’d slept far into the morning after his night in the shed. Doriskos had settled Simion in his own bedroom on his first night in this house, the night of the wine, because a fire had been burning there. He was in a different room now, a much lusher and more luxurious room.

  The walls were a rich medium gold, and there was a warm, reverberating depth to the color: amber subdued with cream. The woodwork had been painted in a creamy white and then lacquered. The furniture was made of some citron wood even blonder than olive, and it was spare and delicate: this double sleigh bed, a little desk and bookcase, a clothespress, and a screen to conceal the chamber pot and washstand. The three windows had lace panels and were draped in a damask silk somewhere between rose and wine, a color Simion liked but would have been afraid to buy for himself because of what the store clerk would have thought—if you even bought such things from store clerks. There was a small but very efficient white stove. Two little armchairs, deeply cushioned but of an almost flowerlike delicacy of form, were upholstered in the pale, keen green of a new leaf. And when he got out of bed, he would set his bare feet upon an extraordinary rug, a vanilla-cream scattered with yellow flowers. Interesting above all were three pictures on the wall, forming a loose triptych: an autumn maple, seen as if the painter were looking up through the branches; a flowering dogwood; and a sycamore seen from a distance. Simion liked the austere focus of the pictures, the fact that they were just of trees, very intensely of trees, as if the trees were people. The sycamore was the superfused green that trees appear at twilight in July and August. For a moment he quite lost himself in the sycamore and the purple sky behind it; though it was a still image, he could imagine the tree swaying to the evening wind and feel the dying evening heat.

  The table by his bed held a tray, upon which there were an ice bucket filled with melting snow around a pitcher of what proved to be orange juice, a glass, a bell, and a silver plate of grapes. He took two grapes and savored their sweet-tart astringency. This room was like some chamber of temptation in a fairy tale, so apt it was, so suited; it was as if someone who knew everything about colors and fabrics and furniture had climbed inside his head and found out what he would like best, even before he knew himself. He got out of bed, stiff from his long chill, and looked at himself in the mirror—feeling a puzzling lack of natural displacement.

  Earlier that morning, after no sleep, Doriskos had made yet another check on his guests and left Simion his tray. In the brass-bright light of early morning, Simion had looked wasted; even the resilient Andrew, whom Doriskos had bedded down on the studio sofa, had looked worn after the events of the night. Doriskos closed the curtains against the morning light. Then he shaved and put his greatcoat on and went out, not entirely sure at first of what he intended. Sometimes his emotions were like the distant rage of yet-unarrived weather, or lava churning miles below a glaze of ice, and this was how he felt now. The morning’s astringency aroused him—the frigid air crisping the insides of his nostrils, his solitary boots breaking the snow, and the uncompromising eight o’clock light. Strolling over to North College, which was full of boys still deep in Saturday morning sleep, he entered unnoticed and walked softly up the stairs. The littered hall of the third floor bespoke a party; among the debris underfoot were numerous “Satterwhite Gallery” flyers. Doriskos picked one up and held it up to the yellow glare of a window, noting that Peter had had this ugly junk printed in deluxe fashion, probably at considerable expense. And for Simion, what had the sight of this been like? Electricity along the veins? Some rodent thrown, maggot-gnawed, onto his doorstep?

  The door to number 41 was ajar. Doriskos pushed it open with his fastidious fingertips and beheld Peter’s domicile and Peter, who was sleeping off his fun, sprawled in his evening clothes on a chaise longue and snoring faintly. The open door had let his room get damned cold, though it had not dissipated the alcoholic reek of the festivities. Peter, however, had a warm and rosy look to him. When Doriskos stretched a hand in Peter’s direction, heat came out and met his palm. Though it was just robust bodily warmth, Doriskos was vaguely revolted. Then he realized that he was smelling not just leftover wine and brandy punch but sweated-out alcohol as well, intimate and disgusting as a stale crotch. Peter had wine and the orts of a cream bun on the front of his boiled shirt and an empty bottle near his hand, and his weak chin was sunk into his neck. “This is what he’s really like,” thought Doriskos, who had always sensed that the glib and obliging social self that Peter showed him wasn’t the authentic article. He was seeing the authentic article now—incipiently gross, with pale bristles coming out on his jowls.

  Doriskos surveyed the table, the dregs of two bowls of punch with the butts of cigarettes and cheroots floating in them; he counted fourteen empty bottles. The floor was sticky in spots between its scatter of little fake-Oriental Belgian rugs. He took in the room: the silly fabric-hung walls, the white ceramic copies of classical statuary, the lack of books, and the many photographs of a small dangerous-looking woman he took for Peter’s mother. If he had opened a certain drawer, he would have been unpleasantly surprised to find a collection of mementos of himself—snitched bits of the h
air that Kiril had clipped from his employer’s head, fingernail clippings, the desiccated cores of apples and pears he’d eaten during Peter’s lessons or during drawing classes at the college, and one of his handkerchiefs, well used during a messy cold—a particularly appalling souvenir of raving obsession. He would have recognized the rest by the hair and understood the situation better, but this room was bad enough without looking beyond the surface, and he didn’t, nor did he riffle through Peter’s sketchbooks and find pictures of his naked body in the most indecent conceivable positions, though there were plenty of them and it wouldn’t have taken him long to locate them. He went straight for the tracts. He pulled out the pins that secured them to the walls, feeling a sudden raging loathing for contact with anything Peter had touched as well as for the tracts themselves. He made sure he got every one of them, plus all the flyers he could find. When he got the stuff home, he burned it—a reverse desecration—took the ashes out to the privy where they belonged, and considered what he’d say when Peter next came to this house. Angry as he was, however, he realized that Peter was not the only nemesis he would have to contend with upon Simion’s behalf, nor even the worst one; there was also the person who’d written and illustrated those tracts, and who was responsible for older and darker troubles and griefs than that night in the shed.

  Usually, when Simion slept after some consummate humiliation, there would be a moment or two after he opened his eyes during which he didn’t yet remember what had happened, and he’d recall that blessed minute with a pang from time to time during the day. The mornings would start that way until the edges of the experience had been blunted by time. He’d wake with a mind clear as water in the sixty seconds before the shame settled on him, then experience its awful onset, like a toothache.