The God in Flight

by Laura Argiri

  Kiril moved into view, as if to lend force to his employer’s words. Peter seemed to find it politic to withdraw at that point and did, smirking. The door smacked smartly shut. Simion wanted to see that smirk fall off his face, so he raced to his front window and looked avidly down at the hectic figure staring up at the slammed front door. Then Peter looked up, and Simion looked down at the pink face already getting blotchy. Then an appropriate horror of being seen seized him, and he fell to his knees on the floor. He heard Doriskos speaking in rapid-fire, cold anger to Kiril and Kiril making his soothing replies. Dreading that anger turned in his direction for exhibiting himself to the enemy, Simion crawled under his covers and pretended to be asleep, to have been asleep all the while. When he descended for supper, he found Doriskos looking sallow and drawn, a dark person’s version of pale. He was not hungry, but in a mood of somewhat exaggerated charm and sociability, as if he wanted to cancel his outburst of temper, and no reference was made to it.

  Kiril laid his hand on Simion’s shoulder early the next morning and said, “Look, you have your first chance now to be helpful to Dorias. I want you to wake up and go post his classes.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “He’s got one of his headaches. He gets migraines. This one’s from that damned scene yesterday with that student of his, that big fat booby. I’m glad to see the back of him, but the scene…one might have predicted it…anyhow, go post his classes, if you will.”

  “How about a doctor? I could go get Dr. Karseth.”

  “No, medicines really don’t seem to help. It just has to run its course.”

  “Well, can I just go and tell him I’m sorry he’s ill?”

  “Bloody Hell, no! He’d be mortified if you saw him like this. Now, get on, do, I have to attend to him. I don’t like to leave him alone in this state.”

  Before he left, Simion put his palm on Doriskos’s door and opened it two inches. The only light in the room was the little from the screened fire, for the shades and drapes were drawn tight against the snowlight. Doriskos was sitting up and doing the unlikely thing of leaning against Kiril, who pressed an ice pack to his brow. Eyes closed, he didn’t hear or see Simion, but Kiril did and waved him angrily away. Simion did as he was bidden. He came back at lunchtime and again was waved away like a pesky child, then was assigned the errand of gathering a bucket of clean snow for head packs. In the afternoon, he found the house deep in a convalescent quiet and Kiril asleep in a rocking chair in the kitchen, so he crept upstairs. Doriskos’s door was locked, which hurt Simion’s feelings in some vague, foolish way. Idly, he tried the next door; it was locked too.

  The studio was across the hall from Doriskos’s room. It was open, the aquarelles of campus scenes commissioned for someone’s office antechamber candidly displayed for anyone to see.

  Later, Simion knocked cautiously upon Doriskos’s door and got a groggy but polite “Yes?”

  “Are you feeling better?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “Can I do anything for you? Other than shut up and go away?”

  A silence. Then the curious request—“If you really don’t mind, please go out and get a box of mixed chocolates. Kiril will give you the cash.”

  “Of course. What kind do you like?”

  “Oh, the brand doesn’t matter, I’m not a connoisseur of these things. Half milk and half dark, though.”

  “Curious,” Doriskos explained himself, down in his dressing gown at suppertime. “I really do not like sweet things, but after these headaches I crave chocolate. It’s the only thing that seems to put life back into me after these attacks.” He was sitting on the raised hearth in the dim kitchen, letting the barely-sweet dark chocolate dissolve in bits on his tongue and cautiously sipping a cup of strong creamy coffee. He looked done in—the sallow pallor of yesterday augmented by a bruised darkness around his eyes. Despite his tiredness, he held his spine exaggeratedly straight; he usually developed these headaches in the night, with his head down, he explained, and leaning or just slouching comfortably could bring them back on. Simion recognized the oversensitive look of someone who has been in recent and severe pain. But even so, such manners.

  “Thank you for indulging my little whim,” Doriskos added.

  “You’re very welcome. I’m glad you feel better. You’re not eating the milk ones, don’t you like them?”

  “The milk ones are for you, after you finish your meal.”

  Simion hurried with his food, then joined Doriskos on the raised hearth over the candy box for the somewhat unusual pleasure of sharing dessert with him.

  “Why don’t you like sweet things? Ordinarily, I mean.”

  “Don’t know—maybe it’s one more symptom of the unusual template from which I’m cut. I am, you know, not exactly like the general population.” This candor was accompanied by a smile of great sweetness, of unconscious invitation that made Simion think he might offer successfully to go up with Doriskos and read to him, to rub his head, or that he might even ask him a few more nosy questions.

  “That door next to yours, why do you keep it locked? What’s in there?”

  A bad choice. The door that had just opened and let out a shaft of rosy light closed and locked, one more in a house of locked doors. The confidential smile went; the social one, pale and strained, was offered him. “Nothing,” lied Doriskos, beset by this fresh complication. “Nothing.”

  A couple of nights past that one, Simion had gone to sleep, and he’d been asleep a couple of hours before he heard the voices downstairs. Doriskos’s quietness he accepted as part of the house’s proper atmosphere; his normal speaking tones barely carried into the next room, and Kiril followed suit. This time the other voice was not Kiril’s, but quickly identifiable as that of Moses Karseth in some mood of special truculence and urgency. “What on earth’s the matter? And at this hour,” thought Simion. He sat up and reached for his tea-colored robe, crept out to the stairs, and sat down to listen. He had to get halfway down before he could catch even part of Doriskos’s half of this discussion, though Doriskos was angry enough to raise his voice and too angry to stutter.

  “…good suffering God, Klionarios, enough is enough! I heard that he stayed here once before, that was bad enough, but this is going too far! How do I know your business? I know it because that student of yours, that Peter Geoffrey, has done everything but tell it to the newspapers! Since you stopped his lessons, he’s been telling anyone who’ll listen that you’ve invited Simion Satterwhite to live with you for purposes that won’t bear description in polite company! That’s how he’s putting it!”

  Simion strained without success to hear Doriskos’s low response.

  “…then what do you want him for? He’s a child. A nervous and sickly child, who, furthermore, is not up to any real work. A couple of hours of clever conversation is as much work as he ought to be doing. What do you need a secretary for, anyhow? You aren’t writing a book.”

  “I write letters, and I hate doing it,” said Doriskos. “He has lovely handwriting. I also have a horse but don’t have the time to exercise him. Simion is good with horses.”

  “I’d bet my left foot that you don’t write twenty letters a year. Not enough to justify boarding a seventeen-year-old in luxury to copy them out. I’d bet my right foot that you intend him to write letters on his stomach.”

  “No, on notepaper,” Doriskos managed out of some vagrant scrap of self-possession. Arguments confused him, but he seemed to have worked up to some fine head of anger that sustained him in this one.

  “Damn your smart mouth, that sounds like his. He has an answer for everything, that little sinner. Why don’t you have any furniture in this parlor? It looks daft.”

  “Because this way, it doesn’t encourage callers like yourself to stay half the day or night. I like your manservant better than I do you. He’s a charming person.”

  “Most people say that,” said Karseth. Simion could not see him do it, but he was rubbing his head at b
oth temples, signifying that special confusion that conversations with Doriskos inspired in him. He gave his head a final clutch, as if he hoped to squeeze something out of it, before returning to the fray. “We aren’t discussing my personal charisma, but your personal peril. This is an issue too grave for sophistry. I think it would be a complicated matter to convince you that this is an immoral situation—you do show the most astonishing density on the subject—but perhaps I can convince you that you’re in danger. That both of you are in danger.”

  “In danger? What about that damned dormitory, that pack of filthy fools there, the dirt and cold and bad commons food that he can’t eat? That filthy hound Topher Holloway and Peter Geoffrey, threatening him? Did you hear about their famous tract party? How about that for endangering?”

  “That isn’t danger, that’s aggravation. The dormitory’s not a good place, but the stuff between his ears is just as sharp as his little forked tongue, and I don’t think it’s beyond him to learn to manage among his peers. They won’t actually castrate him—just threaten to. He needs to learn to eat like a human being and to contend with the athletes and other young hounds—and he certainly knows how to use that mouth of his for the latter purpose. He has to effect some sort of working compromise with that part of the world, and the sooner the terms are established, the better. He’s less endangered there than by a complicated friendship with a weird, solitary grown man who’s just showing his first interest in humankind by advertising his proclivities as a pederast. You do him a disservice by assuming that he can’t make a place for himself among his peers and spiriting him away—”

  “I don’t want those people touching him, breathing on him, even talking about him,” said Doriskos with iron conviction, not even bothering to be offended by Karseth’s last utterance. “He’s too rare.”

  “Well, after this they most certainly will talk about him, unless you shoot them all at dawn. And about you. You don’t like speculative attention from the gossips, but you’re going to get more than attention here; you’re going to get a scandal the likes of which you haven’t imagined in nightmares unless you pack up that boy and send him back to his dormitory before too many people have noticed he’s here! If you’re interested in a calm and happy life, you’ll have that servant of yours pack up Simion’s little duds and send him home, not even tomorrow but tonight. Buy him things if you like, give him money, but keep your hands off him and get him out of your house before matters get out of hand in the personal and private way that’s worst among the perils here.”

  “So, you think I do disgusting things to him?” asked Doriskos reasonably.

  Karseth looked him over as if calculating a sum in his head. “I wouldn’t expect you to do disgusting things to him yet,” was the end result of this musing. “I would expect you to woo him from his independence, make him forget how to get along with what he’s got, seduce him in the really important way that subverts the will, and then do disgusting things to him. He’s a stubborn little article, so all that could take a long time to happen, but it would. Don’t stand there looking handsome and dense, I’m not taken in!”

  “I haven’t been trying to take you in. Indeed, I wish I hadn’t let you in. But suppose my intentions are entirely honorable? That I hope to offer him a comfortable home and all I want in return for it is another human’s breath in my house, a little conversation, and the pleasure of knowing he’s safe?”

  “That’s not all you want. And even if it were, the public result would be the same.”

  “Suppose it’s worth it, to both of us?”

  “Another human’s breath, a little conversation, and the pleasure of knowing someone’s safe are not worth an incendiary scandal. Not to anyone who doesn’t need his head examined, at least. Not that that’s really all you want; you aren’t old enough for all these saintly attitudes you’ve expressed, and you know what I’m talking about, damn all!”

  “I’m afraid not,” said Doriskos with his own special brand of argument-blandness. “You’re the one who best knows what you’re talking about. Probably something you got from some nasty yellow-paper novel you’ve been reading.” His tone suggested, in its fox-hunts-and-titles accent, that Moses spent most of his leisure time with yellow-paper novels and worse.

  “You have to be the most impossible person I’ve ever met,” hissed Karseth, clenching his fists. “No wonder your foster father wanted to be rid of you. Didn’t that fat ass ever sit you down and tell you something about discretion? I’ll take up the slack. I don’t know whether you’re honestly not bright or whether you’re bluffing, but I’ll tell you plainly, it doesn’t matter whether he’s writing your thank-you notes or if you’re pedicating him nightly as far as the town’s concerned; it might as well be the latter. You could lose your position, you could find yourself in the New Haven jail and on trial on every available morals charge, or worse! And I’d bet my bottom dollar that if you did get yourself in a legal mess of that kind, you’d lose even if you were innocent according to the strict letter of the law, unlikely though that would be. I’m telling you, unless you want to start the Inquisition all over right here in New Haven, get that boy out of your house!”

  But by now Simion had made his way down to the parlor. He’d taken in the sight of the two men in this empty room lit by one lamp, fiercely arguing; now they turned to see him in the doorway. “I’m not going anywhere,” he told Karseth. “I like it here. I never lived anywhere nice before in my life, and I’m staying.”

  “Young man! You don’t have any idea of the complications you’re courting here!”

  “Well, I’m not going back to South Middle to be called dirty names for doing nothing. If I’m going to be called dirty names, I might as well have something to show for it,” Simion told him. “You were talking about Topher, he used to do anything he could to catch looks at me while I washed, then accuse me of having bad thoughts. Here at least I can take a proper bath with no one to gawp at me. I hated every single minute I spent at South Middle, and I wouldn’t go back at gunpoint. I didn’t pay my hard-earned money to live in the company of violent ruffians who don’t even make any pretense of being gentlemen and scholars.”

  “Simion, what you had to deal with in South Middle,” faltered Karseth, “as unpleasant as it was, it is…well, ordinary suffering. Something that’s part of the game for someone with your qualities, and you might as well learn to fight the fools and win. The world is full of people who make no pretense of being gentlemen and scholars—do you want to turn that dog pack on yourself? By doing what you’re doing now, you’re letting yourself in for extraordinary suffering. For something that is not part of the game or one’s normal knocks in life. You don’t know the world at all, or you’d know how this looks to anyone who does,” said Moses, aware that he was half begging as he looked into that resolute face.

  “How what looks?”

  “A college professor and soi-disant artist, verifiably uninterested in all humanity, who suddenly invites a college boy to live with him like his pampered mistress. Who laps up that boy’s lightest utterance like honey, in public. Yes, I’ve seen you simpering at each other, so don’t protest. Who dismisses Peter Geoffrey as his private student because of Geoffrey’s bad behavior to you, and would probably have challenged him to a duel if it were still the done thing.”

  “I would have,” said Doriskos without irony.

  “I’m sure you would have,” said Karseth, beginning to tire.

  “I don’t officially live here,” Simion pointed out. “Officially, I share Andy Carpallon’s rooms. I plan to stay there a couple of nights a week.”

  “In saying that, you tell me plainly that you more or less know what I’m talking about. If you think that arrangement will deceive anybody, you’re as daft as Klionarios here. And if you’re not suicidal as well as daft, you’ll move the rest of your meager property into Carpallon’s suite and stay there, though I doubt it’s any safer for your morals than this ménage here.”

  “I’
m sure Andy doesn’t want me there all week. I daresay he’d find it tedious to live with someone who studies most of the time, gets up at five, and is unconscious by nine. In fact, I was in bed asleep when you came—I woke up because I heard you yelling. I’m not going anywhere, and if there’s a scandal, it’ll be of your own making.”

  Karseth gave him a long hard look. He might have returned to the attack had he seen the stubborn, angry look of an embattled child, but Simion had delivered his last remark in chilly composure and with the look of an adult with his mind made up. Karseth saw, at any rate, the futility of further wrangling.

  “Your actions here mean more than you think,” said Moses, thinking of Helmut and himself and their renewed danger, with this parallel ménage of professor-and-lover-disguised-as-servant right down the block. “Very well, then. I knew you were an extraordinarily intelligent boy; now I see that you’re an extraordinarily mulish one as well, and I can imagine how unreasonable you are when you get that look on your face, so I’m going home. However, if you make any unpleasant discoveries, or if things go wrong, or if you need my help, you know where I live. And I hope you won’t be too mulish to ask it. My temper isn’t proof against much more of this argument and willful insolence on both of your parts, so I’ll tell you once again that you’re a pair of suicidal fools and bid you good night.”

  Simion and Doriskos looked at one another while Karseth turned and let himself out, then heard his angry footsteps on the walk, gritty with ice and gravel. Then each took a step toward the other and they found themselves in spontaneous embrace. Simion pressed his face into Doriskos’s chest and heard his heartbeat, his speeding pulse; he locked his arms around him with all his strength. Doriskos ran his hands into Simion’s hair and drew in its summery scent—it even smells blond, he thought, a vision of gilt and wheat and moonlight. After they drew apart, Simion smiled at Doriskos and went wordlessly back upstairs, and Doriskos’s soul settled back into its bed. He stood for a few moments on the field of his victory—unfamiliar sensation—committed, with the oddest tranquillity, to whatever there was to come.