The God in Flight

by Laura Argiri

  “You needn’t have, you know,” said Doriskos in that whispery voice he had first used with Simion. “This lock, that is.”

  “I’ll pay for the damage to the door from the lock,” said Simion from behind it. (I have the right to protect my own life.)

  “You needn’t.”

  “As soon as I can, I’ll decide what I’m going to do,” said Simion formally, as if he were deciding whether to leave a flat before his lease was up.

  “Can’t we talk about it?”

  “We are.”

  “Looking at each other.”

  “I’d rather not. My face is bruised from the last time we talked looking at each other. Does your arm hurt from hitting me?”

  End of conversation, that one at least.

  For days, Simion’s ears hurt as they had after some of John Ezra’s blows to his head. It produced a light-headed nausea that dogged him throughout the painful days of the new term. For once in his life, he was utterly uninterested in the classes he attended. In an ominous and gradual fashion that he could barely keep up with, he stopped even trying to eat the food he’d laid in and smoked cigarette after cigarette in the evenings, trying to keep himself awake to study. His lungs ached, protested, then submitted, or perhaps he could no longer feel the pain he was inflicting on them. He found a fierce, well-focused little pleasure in smoking in Doriskos’s house; when he was alone in the mornings, he smoked all over it and left his stubbed butts in the kitchen, in the pantry, in the plant pots, floating in chamberpots. In the evenings, behind his locked door, he smoked while staring out the windows at the wide and hollow sky, and even in bed. One evening, he did something terrible and disgusting to himself. He rolled up his left sleeve and, instead of stubbing the current cigarette out in the Spode saucer he’d already filled with stale ashes, pressed it into the inner curve of his elbow. It hurt so much that his vision grayed out, but he did it again. By the fifth try, he could do it with a straight face, staring into his own eyes in the mirror. He did have the presence of mind to get up and find the bottle of peroxide and immediately wash the mess he’d created, or he might have died of tetanus within the week. The burns turned into ugly brown scabs that would scar, reminders of his own attack against this flesh which turned against itself by inspiring people to hurt it—his attempt to hurt it even more.

  Doriskos, cooperating with Simion’s attempts to avoid him, left the house before he did in the mornings, but he left lunches for him on the kitchen table, with a sprig of fern or a hothouse flower and once, unbearably, a note that said, “I will never believe this is over.” In the week after the disaster between them, there would be other notes, though Simion did not read them.

  Over the course of that week, Simion developed a ritual. Aimlessly walking during the luncheon hour on Tuesday, he’d found himself in the vicinity of the lunatic asylum. The place had a high fence, fiercely but ineffectively spiked at the top. From one of the points, unmistakably, fluttered a piece of some escapee’s britches. Waiting until some of the lunatics were let out into the bleak walled courtyard, he thought of tossing his lunch over the fence to them, did so, and listened with satisfaction to the yells and gulps as the inmates fell upon it. That day’s lunch was a sandwich of thin-cut brisket, an orange, and a slice of gingerbread with lemon curd in the middle. He wished he could throw them Doriskos’s whole kitchen. Every day for a week, he threw them his lunch. Once a harassed-looking keeper with a big stick and a nervous, swollen face, yelled over the wall: “Don’t do that, boy! You make ’em fight! You’ll make ’em bust out their brains!” Of course he did it again. It was even worthwhile to come out into the snow and get chilled to do it.

  Andrew heard of this latest lark of Simion’s from Peter, who had somehow managed to observe it. Peter had sidled up to Andrew and drawled, “Well, Lancelot Coeur de Lion, yesterday I saw your little ami down at the asylum gate trying to persuade them to let him in…” Andrew caught up with Simion that day slightly after noon.

  “What are you doing! Tu es complètement fou, ou quoi?”

  “I’m throwing the lunatics my lunch and watching them fight, what does it look like?”

  “That is what it looks like. And you look like the tail end of bad luck. What the devil’s going on here?”

  “You leave me alone. You and your piffle about the power I have unless I choose to give it up. You’re a cad and a libertine and a damned liar, and if you get any closer to me, I’ll blow my nose on you. The day you get your hand into my pants again will be a cool day in my father’s Hell and Christmas in July all rolled into one.”

  “Care to tell me all about it?” asked Andrew, beginning to be afraid.

  “ ‘Care to tell me all about it?’ ” Simion mimicked nastily, and accurately, Andy’s French accent. “Yes, I would CARE TO TELL YOU ALL ABOUT IT! He hit me! There! How do you like that as the upshot of your little weekend in New York and all your fine rich-boy claptrap! He hit me! He by Hell hit me TWICE! And threatened to stuff a wad of money down my throat because I’m vulgar! I ought to have just referred him to you, of course, but I didn’t think to. Vulgar!” cried Simion, imitating that Oxonian pronunciation in a tone that poured scorn on both it and himself.

  “And did he?” asked Andrew. Simion took a hard look at him to see if he was joking, but he wasn’t.

  “No, but he’d have liked to. After his smacking me around, I wouldn’t have cared.”

  “I would have cared,” said Andrew, who had gone pale and a little white around the mouth. “I do care. I want you to come home with me this minute.”

  “You’re very unlike me, then. I don’t give a damn. If someone would blow my brains out this minute, I’d send him a posthumous thank-you note.”

  “Where’s that deuced Kiril Theros, doesn’t he know that Klionarios is setting himself up as a candidate for residence here?”

  “Kiril’s gone to New York; he wants to get married. Dori’s very displeased about that, too.”

  “His Doriship has very high-handed and feudal views of other people’s amatory lives and the extent to which they’re his business, doesn’t he? Did he bruise you?” asked Andrew in low and level tones, his golden eyes narrowed.

  “Yes. And I bit him. And don’t try to touch me now, or I will say something unforgivable. Please. Go away and don’t try to make me talk about it anymore.”

  “Come in out of the cold, please. Get your things from his house and put them in my room. Some things are complicated, but this one’s quite simple: Get yourself out of this man’s reach.”

  “Go on, Andy,” said Simion not kindly, but politely. The distance in his voice chilled Andy’s bones. The blue blush showed in his right cheek. “If I move in with you, you’ll just decide you despise me, and maybe even hit me too. I seem to inspire it. If you have any sense, you’ll keep clear of me. And keep clear of Dori, whatever else you do.”

  “That’s the damnedest rot I have ever heard in my whole life! I see there’s no use talking to you. I’ll keep clear of your deuced Dori. But that doesn’t mean I won’t settle his hash in one fashion or another. I’m going to do something about this,” said Andy. “I hope you know. I don’t promise not to.” Though he hadn’t the faintest intimation of what.

  “Well, it’s a matter of supreme indifference to me what you and the rest of the world do,” said Simion, wishing with all his heart that he meant it.

  “…but this puts me at such a disadvantage,” whispered Doriskos through the door.

  “Disadvantage! I’m the one at the disadvantage. For one thing, you’re about twice my size. And you’ve recently given me to understand that it matters. This way it’s at least slightly skewed in my favor, and it doesn’t deprive you any. With the door open, you came raving in here and hit me. With the door locked, you can stand out there and hit the door. You aren’t deprived of anything, and I don’t get bruised.”

  “I don’t want to hit either you or the door. I’ll go downstairs.” A note of cracked hope, wistfulness nearl
y. “Then you open the door. I found something I…I want you to have.”

  “Not perchance a bodyguard? That’s what it looks like I need. If perchance you’ve brought me a pugilist about nine feet high who promises to work for me rather than you, I’ll let him in.”

  “Look…” the voice now came from a different level, waist rather than ear level, and Simion realized with an ugly thrill that Doriskos was leaning against the door on his knees. “You want me to beg, I’m begging. I seem to have said I’m sorry about a hundred and fifty times. I couldn’t…predict myself…in such a thing. I didn’t know I was even capable of such anger. There’s no excuse for my actions, but I still maintain that you couldn’t have understood my feelings. I’ve never let anyone touch me in order to be, well, pure for you. Never. You’re so young, your life hasn’t been very long, and you can’t understand this, but from the time I was fourteen until I was thirty-one, I lived without human touch. I understand the madness of the docked horse whose hide crawls with flies…can you imagine that? The lavender faction at Oxford thought I was out of my mind. I—”

  “Smart fellows, that lavender faction at Oxford. Right on the money.”

  “I could have been as heartlessly promiscuous as…well, suffice it to say, I wasn’t. Half-distracted, perhaps, but chaste. I don’t want to sound conceited, but I could have had my pick of the lot. As many of them as I wanted, as often. I didn’t want any of those people because I didn’t love them. Those intimacies are for people who love each other as I love you, as I thought you loved me… I stopped myself for you, because that was the bitter way I was called upon to show it. And then you went and did it with Andrew Carpallon!”

  “How do you know I did that?”

  “I knew! As I’d know it if I had a slit in my chest and my blood was on the floor! And I remembered everything…at Oxford, where I spent my evenings drawing you…as I knew of you even before I knew you. I’ve never told you this, I haven’t had the chance, but I did, I knew you from my dreams. I waited for you, I answered all the love-letters I got with thank-you notes. Had headaches, lived with a headache or the possibility of one or one wearing off. Light hurt my eyes all the time. All this so you could get a grown man as untouched as a convent-school girl, which is just what you got. Maybe you don’t find it a valuable gift, but I made it to you. When I realized you were gone and with whom, I suppose that’s what set me off, thinking of all those headaches, that bright silvery pain, and my heartbeat slamming in my ears in an empty room. What I’m saying now is…open the door and do what you like to me. If you want to hit me in the face, whatever…you can do it in safety. I say this knowing how imaginative you can be, and how cruel. Whatever you think will make you feel better and even the score.”

  I’ll do it from right here, thought Simion. Aloud he said, “No wonder you’re so inept. No practice. It would have been fine with me if you’d taken advantage of all those willing boys at Oxford and learned something, such as how not to throw a filthy tantrum like a lunatic.” He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror, speaking of lunatics. Over this week, his reflection had become a peculiar thing to see in that ormolu gilt frame. His hair had gotten dirty and stringy from the night sweats he was having, his face still bore its bruises, and he hadn’t bothered with a bath since that last one in the big hotel tub. The harsher angles of his face were starting to show. He also hadn’t bothered to empty the pot, and the room had begun to smell like an unkempt kennel. He thought that any strong and right-minded adult would break the door down and take him firmly in hand—never mind that he would have hated forever the person who intruded upon him in this squalid privacy. “Well. I see that you must have suffered very much during all those years with no one to suck your prick. That’s really dreadful. Nevertheless, what I’d really like is for you to go somewhere else while I try to do my work for tomorrow. I like the lunches you’ve been making for me, make me another lunch, there’s a good dog.”

  “You’ve been eating them, then?”

  “I like them,” said Simion. Never mind what for. Upon which he drank a glass of brandy to take the bad, starved taste from his mouth. He had not really eaten for three days, so the brandy knocked him over like a sniff of ether. He could barely get himself into bed before he was asleep. When he opened the door in the morning, he saw an armload of white roses, extravagant things, of such a blanched purity one would have thought them diverted from the death of a nun, or from the funeral cortege of a priest or a child. And their hothouse smell, fragile, pleading.

  Death flowers, he thought, and how appropriate. He had been considering the monstrous unavailingness of it all. He had wakened in the grip of a bottomless fatigue, at once vacant and heavy as stone. Into it had come a vision of himself as a small child laboring uphill to the Haliburton house, having come out of the wood’s edge with a bundle of cut kindling and a hatchet, dragging the load in by the back stairs to make himself a fire. He seemed to see and feel himself intensely both from within and without: memorization, tactical discussions with madmen, desiccating fevers, nausea, cold, physical strain as acute as a toothache over his whole body, the whole uphill and against-the-odds journey that was to take him beyond the demons and dangers of that life and into a warm and safe place—to this reward.

  After nine foodless days, midway in the second week of the spring term, Simion had slipped even further from himself. He had long ceased to feel the least intimation of hunger, but it seemed he couldn’t get enough air. He remembered opening the front door of the Haliburton house at this time of year—one thing the place had in its favor was air as pure as it must have been at the dawn of the world. He imagined taking long, deep breaths of it, as you might imagine water to comfort a thirst when you couldn’t get any. He seemed to have lost his heat, his gravity; he drifted, exiled from all comfort. He had entered some region of unreality where everything was transparent and depthless and without echoes, as if painted on the air.

  He rather wondered whether Doriskos was undergoing any similar dissolution. He had stopped whispering at his door. They had seen each other only in short flashes, by accident, by pseudo-accident. Simion had seen Doriskos leaving the house in the early mornings, and on several occasions they’d sidled past one another in the upper hall, like bristly cats.

  Now, at ten this Wednesday morning, Simion found himself sitting in advanced analytical geometry, seeing double. He remembered nothing on any of the pages he had stared through all evening every day since barricading himself in his room. The classroom was full of the smells of wet wool, male flesh, stove smoke. The mathematics professor, the agreeable Carus Perrin, was home with the grippe and had given the class to his tutor, the horrid Larchmont Havelock Stearns. Stearns, at twenty, was no older than some of his students, unsure of how to manage them and secretly terrified of most of the boys for one reason or another. He had never taken this particular group alone, without the amiable and order-keeping presence of Professor Perrin. One of those lower-echelon New England aristocrats made up of surnames, Stearns was a frigidly handsome ephebe, mean-spirited and supercilious. He was a Harvard man and despised New Haven and Yale, a view he liked to point out to anyone who didn’t already know it. Stearns had been trying to build a Babbage calculating machine in his landlady’s basement, a project that had interested Simion at once and attracted his inquiries and offers of help. Stearns had answered them with arctic condescension and ever since then had shown Simion the dislike of an ex-almost-prodigy—one of the nastier species of Academic Man—for a prodigy, and of the barely well-born for the aspiring poor. Simion didn’t know that that was what it was, but avoided Stearns when possible and rather took pleasure in the news that the Babbage calculator project had failed to progress. Today he took shelter in the gallery of the lecture hall, hoping to be overlooked.

  Peter was holding a piece of chalk up to the board, meanwhile, and enduring a tirade on his inability to solve some damned problem. He looked bored but not unamused; math class afforded him a chance to offend
persnickety mathematicians with the good goddamn he didn’t give. He had already worn years off the lifespan of Larchmont Havelock Stearns and aimed to subtract some more in the new term.

  Simion’s vision pulled some fancier than usual trick; he pressed his fingers against his eyelids. “Seeing just one of Peter is bad enough,” he thought. “And looks like two anyhow.” He wondered just how much sweet alcohol and greasy food, pounds of ham and salty turnip greens and fried this-that-and-the-next-thing, had gone to make that softening body. His mind imagined it laid out, acres of it, and he nearly gagged. There were things about people that revolted him so much these days that he clenched his starved hands and wanted to scream. Seeing them chew, for instance. Or give each other meaty, brotherly slaps on the back. Or seeing the slick of oil on their foreheads and noses.

  “No, sir,” said Peter, patiently answering a familiar regional insult that ­Stearns had aimed his way, “we can none of us understand analytical geometry in Georgia. Even my mother, who’s a very clever woman, makes no pretensions of understanding analytical geometry. I suppose we’ve got no use for it. You know how we frivolous Southerners are—always going dancing, and chasing women and foxes and things, and gambling, and frequenting saloons, and torturing niggers. That doesn’t leave us too much time for analytical geometry, sir. Ask Satterwhite to solve it, sir. He comes from a part of the country where they haven’t got dancing and pretty women and fox hunts and gambling and saloons and niggers. In fact, they generally lack amenities and amusements. Maybe they have time to learn analytical geometry. Little Satterwhite understands it. He lets Andrew Carpallon copy his, too.”

  At the mention of Andy, Stearns bit his lip. Last year, he had been the recipient of one of Andy’s little cards, which Andy had had printed up as a stimulant for bored and boring professors. The cards read, “Andrew Saxton Carpallon presents his compliments to Professor________ and regrets that he cannot ______________ in consequence of______________________.”