The God in Flight

by Laura Argiri

  “I wouldn’t be too sure. I am quite a little mule, you know, and acting like one comes natural to me. My doctor in New Haven says so too, and calls me a scapegrace in addition.”

  “He’s right,” said Legare amiably. “Obviously he knows his patient. If you’d like to put something on, I can take you to the telegraph office and ticket agent’s to make your arrangements.” As Simion hesitated, Legare said, “Mr. Lincoln says to tell you, about leaving: ‘It’s the best wisdom and the highest act of conscience in the circumstance.’ He also says you have someone waiting for you, though I don’t know who he meant by that.”

  Simion got out of bed and looked for his shoes.

  His wire said, “SL ill departure necessary stop may I come sorry for impudent letter stop didn’t mean it lonely answer posthaste stop.” He waited at the telegraph office for the answer. Two hours, three, he waited, meanwhile imagining what might have taken Doriskos out of the house so early in the morning. However, the return wire came:

  “Nothing to be sorry for weather fine stop lonely specify when and where stop.”

  “Train station half-past eight July 20 evening stop.”

  When the ferry brought Simion back to the island, Lincoln was still fast asleep, drained as if something had fastened to his throat in the night. Simion put up the signal flag and packed.

  Early the next morning, he was prepared to leave. As if it were himself departing, Lincoln had been quite imperative: “Get yourself a first-class train ticket! And dress like a gentleman—let me see some of Andy’s clothes!” He still had his fever, but he had passed from lethargy to heated cheer.

  Accordingly, Simion dressed for him in the oyster-white linen suit and a blue silk broadcloth shirt, like a pale piece of sky, that he’d never worn before. The night before, he had washed his hair; Bond had trimmed the straggling ends. Lincoln looked him up and down with feverish pleasure but did not pay him any maudlin compliment.

  “There’s something I want,” he said, as cheerily declarative as a rich child at his birthday party.

  “I’ll get it if I can.”

  “You can. You’ve got four hours in Savannah before the train leaves. Find a photographer’s studio and have a picture taken. Send it to me. I’d like a picture.”

  “I will, then. How do you feel?”

  “Repulsively ill. Sit down. I haven’t yet told you all I wanted to. Bond, leave us alone and shut the door, if you will.”

  The two of them, alone, looked at each other over Bishop Lyte’s gift of flowers, a bowl of coral and white and yellow roses, all so lush as to be edible-looking, but almost vulgar in their cheer and health.

  “I thought that my isolation would prevent me learning any of the great secrets,” said Lincoln. “I was wrong, you know. It prevents participation, but not knowledge. Here’s one of them. You know what turns dirt into diamonds?”

  “Pressure. Weight. Heat,” said Simion.

  “The geological equivalent of torture. And solitude and loneliness are forms of torture, and they also yield some wisdom. I’ll give you what they gave me. The first thing is that there is nothing in the world more important than knowing and loving someone else well. And the second is, know your own nature, accept it, and let no one and nothing alienate you from it. You have as much right to it as anyone else has to theirs.”

  “People don’t want one to do that,” Simion observed, considering how much of the world’s violence, both of the hand and of the word, had something to do with this. “Why not?”

  “Because if you do, if you know your nature and accept it, you’re stronger than most of them. You can do what you want, not what they want of you. Remember, that father of yours has no place in a free new life. And remember, too, about what I’ve passed up, the life of the emotions. Part of that was the world depriving me, and part of it was me depriving myself, out of sheer terror. The world should go forward in your time and give you more latitude to use the courage you were born with. I want you to do what you want and fulfill your happiest possible destiny. I want the sweets of the world for you.”

  Non omnis moriar!

  Simion had the pictures taken in a small studio over a music store. Wanting to make them perfect, he bought some white buck shoes, which went better with this tropic-weight suit than boots; there was some difficulty getting the right fit, and they were half a size too big, but, after all, he didn’t have to walk in them for a portrait sitting. He thought of the return wire in his pocket as he smiled for the camera. And the pictures turned out, all of them, radiant carnal images, the kind of photographs that always seemed to him so much more beautiful than he was to himself in the mirror. It was as if the camera had the power to catch the best of you, and also the accrued romanticism of others, when it wanted. He chose a picture for Lincoln, had it wrapped, and posted it to him at Caroline, almost making himself late for the train while mulling over the note he enclosed. He had written first, “Say the word, and I’ll come back, as your lover as well as your student and your son. I am really your creation, and while you live, I belong to you.” But, honoring both Lincoln’s renunciation and his real desires, he tore that up and just wrote, “Thank you for everything you have done for me.”

  He got on the train in the oddest spirit of sorrow and exaltation. He was fairly sure that this was the last time he’d see Lincoln alive. He was happy, though, because of what Lincoln had told him. It would not have made sense to him earlier, but now it made exquisite sense. It was like the relief of some constriction so constant one did not think about it; as if Lincoln, one of the angels of his destiny, had cut at least one if not all of the bonds that constrained him. There is no love quite like that you have for someone who truly wants you to have your freedom.

  Two days later, he was almost back, fidgeting in the train as it approached the New Haven station. The July night was torn and windy with incipient storm, and he was fresh and feisty with accrued lust; he had thought about Doriskos as hard as it was possible to think, his mind’s eye replaying the man in both withdrawing and venturesome modes and reconjuring what had prompted them. Taking the lead, as he had in the carriage, would be his tactic of choice tonight. He thought that once he got the fire going, it would burn well without further help from him. And what would happen then? The delicious and fearful thing was that he didn’t know. But he thought it would be something so intimate and electric that it would make his games with Andy look like a handshake; he thought it would be something he’d remember on his deathbed when telling himself that his life had been well spent.

  He stepped off the train into a thundery dusk, one of a handful of passengers getting off in New Haven. For a minute he thought Doriskos had not come for him. Then he saw the tall figure beckoning him to the carriage. He took off running and within two seconds was inside it, behind its drawn shades and beyond fear and decorum. He kissed Doriskos on the lips, then the cheek, then the ear, before either of them could flinch.

  Doriskos started to blush, caught his breath. “You’re enough to drive anyone to spontaneous combustion. I’ve lain in bed all these sweltering nights feeling like I might catch on fire.” Simion caught a flash of anger-like distraction in his eyes, and fear. Yet never had he seemed more present, more actual and manlike, less dissolved on the mists. Surprise yielded to surprise; Doriskos got a good, unequivocal grip on Simion and kissed him hard and greedily. Simion felt a split second of alarm about all that strength and hunger, even knowing so well whose it was, but it was what he’d wanted—finally, the untentative embrace. He smelled almond soap and tasted, on Doriskos’s tongue, the soft bite of sweet alcohol. A harmless, velvety flame. At the outer corner of his right eye, his tears, which were slightly salty like rain near the sea. His right hand had engaged itself in some frantic fumble with Doriskos’s shirt buttons, wanting to feel his heat come up to its palm. Tonight I’ll find out, he thought, with a shudder of lust and agreeable fear, what he looks like naked. What he’s like, naked.

  Later, back in Doriskos�
��s house and having had the first bath, Simion was wrapped up in one of Doriskos’s robes, consuming a plum and a glass of white Burgundy—too excited for real supper. He listened to the growlings of thunder outside and, within, the lap, lap of water—Doriskos having his bath, something Simion had not yet seen. He recalled Doriskos’s eccentricities of last term. He was a fussy creature, not so much modest as possessed of an exaggerated distress about the physical; touch him, and he was divided between purring with pleasure and fretting lest he should, as he put it, “revolt” the toucher. His funny modesty, his hesitancy to use his looks as they could be used, had always touched Simion, but he intended to get round the former tonight. “A lucky thing I don’t have those hesitations myself,” he thought. “Or this could have taken years.” He got up and knocked on the door.

  “I’m finishing up…”

  “I know. May I come in?”

  After a minute: “If you like.”

  “Oh, I would like.”

  Simion let himself in to find Doriskos already in his robe, sitting on the low ottoman and using the edge of the towel on his feet—gingerly, as if they were someone else’s. Simion stepped before him to give him a gentle fond kiss, then noticed that he’d wrestled into the dressing gown before drying off.

  “You’ve put this on while you’re wet! You shouldn’t. Take it off and let me pretend I’m Kiril and dry you.”

  “Kiril doesn’t dry me,” said Doriskos. It was the truth. He was too ticklish to let anyone perform that intimate service for him. There were parts of his body where he could barely tolerate his own touch, much less someone else’s; a hand on his naked feet made him twitch like a docked horse. I have too many nerves in my skin, he thought, as he began to feel most of his blood make its way downward at the sight of this slight creature adrift in his white dressing gown.

  “I will, then. Come, don’t be shy.” He gave Doriskos a cajoling smile and began to slip the damp robe down; not so purposefully, however, that he couldn’t resist if he really wanted to. He didn’t. His eyes began to get that especially liquid, dilated look that alarm and arousal could give them; they were so dark that it was hard to differentiate the pupil from the jetty iris. Simion could see his miniature images reflected in them. He kept his hands busy with the robe, slipping the damp thing off Doriskos’s half-willing body. (I mustn’t touch him there too quickly and make him lose it like I lost it the first time with Andy; he’ll spend the next year hiding in his closet.)

  Finally he got the dressing gown out of the way and tossed it onto the floor. “Let me see you,” he said, standing and offering his hands, and Doriskos, who wouldn’t have dreamt of declining Simion’s direct request for anything, took them and stood. The lamplight rendered him in gold and umber, as it had in certain dreams of Simion’s. His adolescent lust was almost shaken by the sight of too much comeliness and too much man. He felt suddenly too little and too young, both timid and brazen—the scared child and the flower-crowned sensualist fought it out for a minute. His heart knocked like a ceremonial drum. He slid down to his knees and finished his stage business with the towel; Doriskos gave a nervous shiver as Simion’s hands went for the sensitive undersides of his thighs. But the twitch belied the next, surprisingly decisive thing he did; he took the towel out of Simion’s hands and picked him up bodily. Next, Simion found himself put down on the bed as easily as if he weighed nothing. Doriskos bent over him and only looked at him for a minute, a look Simion could feel on his skin like heat. Then he lowered himself over him, slowly, carefully, one knee first, yet without any shyness now. They explored one another’s mouths with careful urgency. They would always remember the heat of one another’s foreheads, hot as lamps.

  “Please,” said Doriskos in a suffering voice as the boy’s careful hand touched him experimentally, cradling his balls and running itself up the big hard shaft. He sounded as if in some pain, speaking to someone who had but mightn’t use his power to relieve it. (“So big,” thought Simion. “What’s it like to be so big?” He would have liked to look and touch some more, but all this seemed too urgent.) Trying to be gentle and steady, he pushed the foreskin back and touched his lips to the delicate glans. He had a nasty little flash of Topher and Peter in his mind’s eye and pushed it away, hard. As his hand lingered, using the pressure he liked on himself, Doriskos caught his wrist. “Do you really want to do this?” he asked in a choked voice, as if he couldn’t breathe. “I don’t insist, you know.”

  Strange as it seemed, Simion thought of John Ezra. He thought, May Satan in his marvelous sense of humor give you dreams, Father, and may he let you dream of me doing this, may you see it as clearly as your whiskey glass on your night table.

  “Yes,” he said, hoping John Ezra heard.

  He would remember it always in snatches and flashes, that night: a memory that refused to be sequential, that was like blue bolts and seething trees mirrored in some torn body of dark water. “I want to remember this in Hades,” he said, his hand on Doriskos’s head to prod him to ungentler kisses—“or Elysium, or whatever there is, if there’s only one memory I can carry out of this world, I want it to be this, so make it for me, be that storm out there, as you really are—”

  The wildness he wanted had risen to this incantation, and he could feel the weight and heat of the untrammeled being he’d always sensed beneath the layered fragility of Doriskos’s social self. He was dizzy and helpless as Doriskos bent over him and made love to him with an exigency and fearlessness for which he was not quite prepared. Dori continued very focused, very here, with no misty indirection about him, and fiercely intent. Once you got past the fear and foolishness, you were in the presence of a different creature, sexual as a centaur, utterly unsqueamish. Simion had all but forcibly incited him; now Doriskos took charge of him. He was no longer controlling this, had lost his lead in a way he’d not expected to lose it. The handling was both homage and ruthless exploration, an experimental playing of every nerve in his skin. There was the tongue in his ear, a shallow but startling penetration; the tongue on each of his nipples, which were excitable and sensitive even to his own caress. It started with the lightest licks, then worked to a soft clench with the lips alone. Nor would Doriskos give his mouth immediately to the heat it had stirred; he turned Simion and fingered the sensitive insides of his knees, stroked the backs of his thighs with open palm. The sensation of being looked at was as intense as the physical touch. Then, bringing new meaning to the phrase kiss my arse, that rude commonplace of schoolboys, Doriskos did, with Simion for the moment half incoherent with scandalized pleasure. Then the hand cupped him like a delicate fruit and, before he could cringe, performed a gentle and wicked caress. He feared it going into him, hurting him, shocking him out of his pleasure, but the finger only repeated its ever-so-delicate circular stroke until he could barely get his breath in and out, and tears of pleasure slipped from his eyes. All this famished handling had made of him a lightning rod for any and all sensation when it came—the interruption. He was primed, wildly acquiescent to the ring of piercing pain and the rolling thunder of pleasure he expected, when Doriskos paused and stiffened; then, crouching over Simion at half-mast, yelled, “What!”

  Simion groaned. He hadn’t heard the knock at the door. He heard the next one. He learned something new: the plunging pain in the belly that is caused by a knock on a bedroom door behind which you are trying to consummate your attachment to a man with whom you are crazily in love.

  “A wire!”

  “Well, deuce take it, Kiril, go sign for it! I’m not decent!”

  “It’s not for you, Dorias, it’s for Simion.”

  “He’s not either! Go sign for the damned thing. Haven’t you got any tact at all?”

  “They want him to sign for it. Special delivery.”

  “It’s all right, I will. I might as well,” said Simion. He was shocked and queasy all through before he even considered what this wire meant. His ears buzzed, and his spit tasted metallic, spoiled. Trying to conjure some
strength in his legs and backbone while his arousal faded into a balked ache, he pulled on a shirt and trousers. When he’d composed himself, he followed Kiril downstairs and signed for the little yellow envelope.

  Doriskos had put his robe on and had a cold cloth to his head when his loved one came back with the telegram message, from Dr. Pierre Legare, in his hand.

  “Dead,” Simion said, numb and glassy-eyed. “This morning, in fact. He was alone on the island, and he bled to death.”

  VIII. Virgin and Martyr

  Doriskos knew nothing about how the death of a beloved friend feels, so he could not have said how he would have reacted. However, he was ready to turn the embrace of lust into that of comfort, which Simion accepted with sudden, tentative dignity. He didn’t cry, just turned ice-pale, and every vestige of expression drained out of his face. He lay still and sleepless in Doriskos’s arms until, acknowledging that neither of them could rest, he asked in a small ragged voice, “I don’t suppose you have anything in this house to help a person sleep?”

  In fact, Doriskos collected sedatives as some people collect liqueurs, though they usually disappointed him. He picked the mildest of the lot, measured out a light dose, and brought it to Simion with a glass of milk. It did its work quickly, and Simion rolled away and curled up into a woeful nautilus position, his knees almost up to his chin, and didn’t wake until noon.