The God in Flight

by Laura Argiri

  “And you know how these things go!” said Moses, who was back home and had flung into Helmut’s room, where Helmut was bathing. He was finally safe to voice his darkest trepidations: “All I need is something of this kind two houses down from me! You know what a short hop it is!”

  “From there to here?”

  “From filthy queer to filthy Jew. Both in the same person in yours truly,” said Karseth. He clenched his back teeth together.

  Helmut flinched. “Do you really think…anyhow, don’t grind your teeth and tighten your neck like that and give yourself a headache. After all, it’s not you doing this.”

  “But I am, only with you rather than a seventeen-year-old boy who looks fourteen. All a matter of degree. Neither would get a man the crown and palm of New Haven public opinion if known. A fire doesn’t only light itself.”

  “It sounds as if Simion has a rather strong role in this development as well.”

  “That he does, the deuced little mule!” growled Karseth, always amazed by stubbornness in other people. “He stood there and told me that if there was any scandal, it would be of my own making! The hauteur of a viscount, he has. The presuming little urchin! I’ve a good mind to let him stay exactly where he is and enjoy his shock when he discovers that Klionarios doesn’t want him there to talk about Plato.”

  “Why shock? He’s seventeen years old and a strong character in his way, and it’s possible he knows his own mind.”

  “It’s not his mind that’s involved here.”

  “Well, he may know himself in that way too.”

  “Helmut,” said Karseth, clutching his skull on both sides, “you have to help me with this.”

  Helmut, though, was unable to provide much reassurance. When Doriskos came to his kitchen a couple of days later to return some borrowed cookbooks, Helmut asked him, in mild and casual concern, how Simion was. Doriskos must have misheard the question and taken how for what. “He’s a pagan angel, a meteor from heaven!” said Doriskos, with the dazed and tremulous smile of a man crazed and drunk with love. When Moses asked him about this conversation, Helmut repeated it verbatim, and added, “I always wondered how he’d act if he ever found anyone he really liked. And the answer’s that he’s purely rapt, enthralled, drunk with love in a way that’s visible at five hundred yards’ distance.”

  “That bad?” asked apprehensive Karseth. “Damn him!”

  “Well, you might not notice his condition if you were deaf and blind.”

  “And that little he-minx is in the house with him.”

  “Reading Plato,” smiled Helmut.

  “God’s teeth, eyes, and balls!” swore Karseth.

  In fact, Simion was not reading Plato at all; he was prying at Doriskos and discovering that it was rather like trying to pry a fog. You pry a fog, he reflected, by trying to walk through it, and it closes both behind and around you, hiding the landmarks of a second ago.

  His interest had been piqued by the room next to his own, locked not only the first time he laid his hand on the knob but on all occasions. The locked room was an easier mystery; unlike Doriskos Klionarios, all locked rooms have keys. Simion never saw Doriskos go in there, but he’d wake occasionally during the night and fancy that he’d heard something from that direction. The minute he was convinced he’d heard something, dead silence would prevail for as long as he could stay awake to notice it. “It’s as if whatever that is hears me hear it,” he thought.

  Balked by the room and by Doriskos’s sweet reticence, Simion commenced promptly to explore as much of Doriskos’s life as circumstantial evidence would allow. He did this methodically, putting objects back exactly as he found them, but beyond that, he made no special effort to conceal his nosiness.

  He had not been in his protector’s house two days before he’d gone covertly into his bedroom and burrowed into his unmade bed, delighted by its flannel sheets, which were not as pretty as those on his bed but even sweeter to the skin. He had pulled the covers over his head and breathed in every suggestion of Doriskos’s scent; he had deduced that Doriskos liked to sleep naked. The nightshirts hanging clean and untouched day upon day in the closet suggested this pretty strongly too. Not content with this racy detail, Simion had looked through Doriskos’s every drawer, examined everything in his dressing room, flipped through his books for stray letters.

  What was most remarkable was how little he found that was revelatory. The one letter he located was an order for daffodil bulbs, a first draft appropriately filed away in a volume of Keats. What a complicity among all those mute objects! There weren’t even any photographs among them. All of them awaited him in inanimate candor, as if willing for him to pick them up and scrutinize them. Indeed, Doriskos seemed to be offering Simion this opportunity at clandestine encroachment—part of his pliancy where Simion was concerned—as if he stayed out of his house on a schedule so that Simion could snoop through it in confidence—at least to a certain extent. And the certain extent was the locked room, for which he could not find a key. True to the general orderliness of the house, the spare keys to every other lock there hung on an ironwork rack in the kitchen, ready to oblige you if you lost your own, and Simion had tried them all without results.

  “So, what’re you going to do,” said Andrew, “when you locate the damned thing, and we open the damned door and find the drained corpses of the last half dozen pretty blond boys who weren’t content with their own charming friends, but wanted to sleep under lace comforters and indulge in the roses and raptures of vice with the handsomest man in New Haven?”

  Simion was halfway under the big claw-footed escritoire in the library at this particular moment, feeling around the bottom of the massive thing for a key taped to underside or pediment. “Oh, stop it. You know he doesn’t lay a finger on me. And don’t tease. I’m nervous enough as it is. I oughtn’t to be doing this, but I somehow can’t not do it,” he said in a muffled but irritable voice. “It’s mean and vulgar of me, and I’m doing it anyway. It’s like having poison oak. You don’t want to scratch, but you do, because you can’t help it.”

  “You’re obsessed,” said Andrew. “Let’s go skating, then back to my rooms, and then I’ll do what I can to divert your mind. I must say, I don’t share your interest in Klionarios’s broom closets or admirably neat underwear drawers. Actually, I imagine there’s something mildly weird and entirely uninteresting in there—a decade’s worth of jam and chutney jars all neatly stacked, or all his old clothes from babyhood forward. Something obsessive but harmless, and not worth this kind of effort. Or even, God help us, something sensible and boring, like seedlings for next year’s kitchen garden. Wouldn’t you be disappointed to find tomato plants and hunks of sprouting potato? Come on out of there, it’ll only be good light for an hour and a half more.”

  “And I’ve only got half an hour before he gets back. We can skate in the dark.”

  “But we’re not going to,” Andrew told him.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t want to skate in the dark. This is becoming boring, this precious key. It’s straining my best-ingrained chivalric instincts. If you don’t come on, I’m going to take you by the feet and haul you out. You are really being most tedious and tiring me exceedingly, and, more importantly in your considerations, it’s almost time for Professor Bluebeard-Le Grec to come home.”

  Simion unwillingly acceded. On the way to Cargill’s pond, new skates slung over his shoulder, he thought aloud about it.

  “A wealthy man who hasn’t a few photographs isn’t usual. Perhaps he didn’t want to remember their faces. Perhaps he left wherever he came from in anger.”

  “Strange, that house,” said Andrew. “His having nothing at all in the rooms he doesn’t use. The way it’s divided into used and uninhabited zones. There’s something either tremendously secretive or tremendously ungenerous in it. And some obsession about perfection in silly little things; no, not perfection, correctness. So clean, so tasteful, so lacking in vulgarity but also in t
he personal. It’s a mode of concealment also.”

  “He doesn’t want people to get at him.”

  “I’ll say.”

  “He and I don’t think alike. He would hide a key in a place I’d never imagine,” said Simion, dreamy-eyed. “We don’t think alike in the least. I’ve never known anyone like him, he has so little and so much, well, presence. I feel him in the house as if he were a flower scent, the odor of ferns…no weight, no light, no gravity, but everywhere. Where would he hide a key?”

  “Oh, deuce take him, his key, and where he hid it,” thought Andrew. When they got to Cargill’s pond and sat down on a log to change into skates, he took in Simion’s expression and could have slapped him. That newly enamored look, unpresent, misty, and soulful-eyed—it really was unendurable. Andy liked seeing the cynical, inventive, hard-headed person looking out of those gorgeous eyes; Simion amused him most when he talked about cutting up pickled frogs in the lab at the Sheff or earnestly explained one of those practical intricacies he was full of, such as how to dose a horse for a chest cold. He watched Simion circling on the ice, which looked like a great dull pearl in the light of the young evening. He was trying fancy moves that he hadn’t been able to execute in the clumsy old skates he’d brought from home, skates that strapped on over his boots and slipped every five minutes. His hair fanned out after him, veiled his face as he bent, and seemed to take up and absorb the pale cold light.

  It did not yield, this look of exaltation, even as they walked back to campus in the early dark.

  “You look like a Pre-Raphaelite painting,” said Andrew, a little dig meant to rouse him from his reverie and draw a sharp retort.

  “I don’t know what a Pre-Raphaelite painting is,” Simion said. “I’ll get Professor Klionarios to tell me.” Then he turned to Andrew with that new expression of his, as if lit from within by the whitest of candles. (“The Angel of the Annunciation,” Andrew thought. “Or Salome, licking the delicious spit of John the Baptist off her face. It’s something, that look. Holy joy. Fainting carnality!”) He smiled gently to Simion in spite of himself.

  “Did I tell you,” Simion added, “that after that conversation we had with Professor Karseth, he let me hug him and hugged me back? He didn’t kiss me, but he held me hard. I could hear his heartbeat. I wanted a taste of his actual flesh.”

  After that, there was little more to say.

  Then, a couple of days later, while taking a break from the key hunt, Simion found the key in a jar of crystallized honey he was sampling; in fact, he came within measurable distance of swallowing it. The honey had been made by wild herb-feeding bees; it was so dark and thick that its rich, sticky density obscured the little key. Andrew was watching as Simion sat on the kitchen stool digging a spoon into the cold-thickened, waxy, opaque stuff, coming up with a spoonful, tasting, making faces. He expected him to say, “Tastes strange. Too bad. It’s a pretty color.” But he didn’t say this; instead, he said, “Ow!” and spat the mess out in his palm, grimacing—he’d closed his molars on this cold and painful bit of metal—then stopped in mid-grimace and grinned. He held up the key. Not a regular-sized key, but a small one that would fit into a teaspoon, or readily find its way into a boy’s mouth if concealed by an eccentric and furtive gentleman in a honey jar.

  But Andrew heard the noise of wheels through slush outside. “Simion, put that back at once and wash your hands, he’s coming.”

  “It’s not time—”

  “I don’t care if it’s not time, he’s home, damn it, put it back!”

  “But I’ve had it in my—”

  “Put it back and wash off those paws!”

  Simion put the key back in the jar, stirred up the honey, and thrust the jar back onto the shelf, hoping that he’d placed it in the right spot—there was no time for certainty. Then he washed his hands and tried to look innocent.

  Doriskos came into his kitchen with a net bag containing a dead chicken, a half dozen lemons, and a pound of thin-cut Virginia ham. He found the two boys sitting on the raised hearth, eating the caramel rolls he had made for one of them and giving no evidence of the half-minute of violent activity that had preceded his entrance.

  “Thank you for the sweet rolls,” Simion purred. “They’re delicious. We’ve just been gorging on them.”

  “You like them, then?” said Doriskos.

  “Actually, there isn’t enough sugar on them,” said Andrew, which earned him Simion’s rapier-like looks and a sharp dig in the ribs when Doriskos turned his back to put on a pot of coffee. He shouldn’t have been drinking it in the afternoon, but he needed it, what with his excitable nights—the secret time that he spent watching Simion sleep, or in the locked sanctuary the boys hoped to invade.

  The next afternoon, in the White Wave with a bottle of hard cider between them, Simion and Andy awaited their hour and got mildly drunk to get their nerve up. Their project had shed any aura it might have had of lighthearted mischief; it was more like desecrating a church or reading a forbidden text of necromancy than playing a prank. Theirs was a dim corner table, sticky with the last diner’s grease and crumbs but well removed from the group of wagon drivers at the dark bar. Andrew took a careful look around to gauge if anyone was near enough to listen and decided not. “The extremity of this little amour of yours is really daunting. At seventeen I wouldn’t have dreamt of setting up house with someone nearly twice my age and rifling his secrets. What use does a sensible scientific type like yourself have for this Keatsian passion? And the way you seem to want to ally yourself with him…it’s, well, consequential…it’s joining battle with the established way. I, the way I am…I don’t comply, but I don’t defy it either. I sit cheerfully on the fence and please myself. I let people imagine things about me, whatever they want, and since what they imagine is generally to their liking, I have no difficulty from them. You need to understand what this is and what it could bring—you’re looking to smack the civilized world in the face with your glove and challenge it to a duel. Do you really need to jump in so deep as all this, so fast? Why not string him along awhile, and leave his locked room alone and come play with me?”

  Simion took a long drink, then spoke in a curiously gentle and detached voice. “I expected better things of civilization once I got to it. But when I got up here, I found myself getting the same treatment I got from dear Father, only with words rather than a man’s fist or foot. I’m not the civilized world’s little friend, I don’t owe it anything. The inevitable row might as well come over something worthwhile, mightn’t it? He’s worthwhile.”

  “Civilization! You’ve barely been around civilization a day in your life! There are ten million things you haven’t seen! That squawking gander of a Topher isn’t civilization, it’s not as if you had to choose between him and the difficult Mr. Klionarios. And what if we find something frightful? That’s why you have me in on the investigation, isn’t it? Because there’s about a twenty percent chance of something nasty? Why else does a man go to such strenuous lengths to lock a door? I don’t think he drinks blood, but I wouldn’t put it past him to do something else weird and unattractive. The scarlet speck is there underneath all that dizzy charm, and I’ve seen it. Yes, he’s sweet and dreamy and can’t keep up with his house keys or discipline his horse, but he’s also plenty strange. What will you actually do if we open that door and find something you’d rather not have seen?”

  “I’ll have to ask him about it,” said Simion, inhaling greedily.

  “And what if he should catch you at it? What then?”

  “He would never hurt me,” said Simion. “I can’t imagine him hitting me, no matter what I did.” He said this in the same tone that Andrew would expect if he’d said, “He loves me.” He looked down and then up again, and the smile he gave was genuinely shy, an expression of his own funny kind of modesty. Then, puzzled: “Why are you taking on so about this? You’re sweet and kind and tolerant as a saint, but you aren’t in love with me.”

  “I’m not?” asked A
ndrew, trying to conceal his shock. He remembered how drink could sometimes render Simion not only precise but painfully truthful, and braced himself further.

  “The lack of…put it this way, when I met him, I knew I was in the presence of something dire and wild and daemonic. I don’t mean he’s primitive and bestial, but he has a kind of wildness I like. Kindred, that’s what it was—not like me, but complementary…kindred. And when I finally get him to talk to me, he and I are going to understand each other in a way that you and I couldn’t if we talked for ninety years. Everything is already there, you see?”

  “What makes you think I don’t understand you?”

  “You don’t. You’re kind to me. It’s different.”

  “And love…is there no room in your philosophy for love that isn’t dire and wild and daemonic? That’s sweet like a Mozart opera, and full of little kindnesses and pleasures, and larks and capers, and pebbles with notes tied round them thrown in at your windows, and macaroon ice cream with claret sauce?”

  “No. That’s a nice, playful friendship, not love. And I don’t care for Mozart operas, and I’m no good at manners. You see?” he said, to Andrew’s visible chagrin. “Also, if I don’t see what’s in there, and see it soon, I think I’m going to go straight out of my goddamned mind, so let’s do it. I think I’m drunk enough now.”

  “Simion, you are a shocker,” said Andy—for once in his life, shocked. Not so much by the last remark as by the several preceding it and their cumulative effect.

  “I don’t sit down and plan it out, you know. Being a shocker, that is. But my point is this: I don’t think he’s going to find me shocking.”