The God in Flight

by Laura Argiri

  “Do you do that, Simion?” asked Stearns, licking his lips. He was a master of the compressed insult, and showing his mastery now: Without saying a thing to that direct effect, by oiling the name with contempt, he delicately suggested that it was a déclassé thing to be christened, while truly modern and proper people were named after villages.

  “He’s talking to you!” hissed some stranger into Simion’s ear.

  “Pardon?”

  “Do you allow Mr. Carpallon to copy your homework?” Again, infinitely suggestive, as if copy your homework meant put his hand in your pocket.

  “I don’t even do my own homework lately,” said Simion, much too unhinged to manage a direct lie on any subject.

  “Andrew Carpallon and his last year’s companion, Phaon Larson, used to misdemean themselves under the windows of North College while I was a tutor there,” said Stearns. “They positioned themselves under my windows and caterwauled songs from operas. Carmen, among others. They say that the fashionable and idle Mr. Carpallon is going, as they put it, on the operatic stage, which seems appropriate enough to me. Perhaps there it will be of slight consequence that Mr. Carpallon can barely add and subtract and needs the kind assistance of our resident child prodigy, whom Dr. Kaddish, I mean Karseth, assures me is a genius. Come down out of the monkey gallery—how strange that you’re not here in your place in the front row with your little hand in the air!—and try to solve this example.”

  “May I pass, sir?”

  “What! Our little prodigy, pass?”

  “I feel sick, and I’m having trouble seeing things,” said Simion, beginning to feel a numb mortification. “I’ve never asked to pass before. We’re allowed five passes per course per term.”

  “Well, you, little sir, are not allowed one right now.”

  “I can’t make it out. I can’t solve it if I can’t see it. Please?”

  “Get down here upon the instant.”

  Simion pushed himself to his feet and groped his way down the stairs. The figure on the chalkboard looked like an untalented four-year-old’s free-hand sketch of a cowshed, and that was about all he could make of it.

  “Can you see it now?” asked Stearns, in a luxury of sarcastic concern.

  “No.”

  “Well, if you will be brawling in taverns,” said the ass, with an elegant shrug and an allusion to the bruise on the side of his victim’s face.

  “I haven’t been. And if I had, it would still be the business of no one here.”

  “My, my. Such impudence. Such plebeian deportment. That’s no way to make an academic career. We can’t have you falling down in your studies, not with the very generous arrangement the college has made you! Why, they got you out of the dear dirty Southland and practically pay you to study here, and Professor Klionarios houses and boards you, and you neither do your homework nor let poor Mr. Carpallon copy it, and, to top it all off, you can’t solve this example.”

  Simion, activated by the sudden conviction that he would die if he couldn’t sit down—but that before he died, he’d have dry heaves in front of this evil young man and thirty-nine snickering boys—made a desperate ploy.

  “If you’ll read it to me, maybe I can calculate it in my head.”

  “Anything more out of your mouth that is not an answer to this problem will get you into the worst disciplinary difficulties of your priggish young life, and anything that isn’t the right answer to this problem will get you the first zero you’ve probably ever received, and I will give it to you with pleasure.”

  Someone, Simion would never learn who, read the problem aloud for him. “Given the trapezoid ABCD, with E and F as midpoints of the nonparallel sides AD and BC, what is FG—”

  “Silence!” Stearns rapped out.

  “Sir, I think he really is—”

  “FG is the middle of what looks like a cowshed drawn by an idiot to me right now,” said Simion.

  “And you are a bad actor and a grubby-handed mess, probably straight from a cowshed,” pronounced Larch, much more pleased than he’d have been had his victim actually gotten the right answer by some desperate luck. “Moreover, you’ve just gotten the first zero of your eminent career, and your tutor shall hear about the part you’ve acted here today.”

  “Well, at least I don’t act the part of a horse’s arse,” said Simion, struggling with his gorge—luckily, for it kept him from being heard with pellucid distinctness, though Larch well enough suspected what he’d said.

  “You don’t what?” demanded Larch, his porcelain face brightening further.

  “He says he’s not a horse’s arse!” squealed Peter.

  “Shut up and take your seat, you half-literate idler!” hissed Larch, now the color of watered claret. Peter made him a sardonic bow and fluttered the fingers of his right hand, and the monkey gallery applauded. He already considered it a good day’s work, having gotten both Simion and Stearns where it stung; term was getting off to a ripping, roaring start.

  Topher made one of his few verbal contributions to math class: “Huzza, old Pete! Get ’um good!”

  “He’s not so unlike you,” Simion said in Larch’s direction. “You both have the same quaint notion that people can help where they’re born and that it means something,” he continued, beyond caring. “I thought I was coming to a place where people were scholars and gentlemen when I came here. But now I wonder what I’m paying for. I’ve never seen such a pack of mean-spirited, empty-headed, contemptible snobs.”

  “You think I’m a mean-spirited, empty-headed, contemptible snob?” Larch shot back.

  “I know it for sure. And you talk like some prig out of Thackeray.”

  “Get out of here! Get out!” cried Larchmont Havelock Stearns. And Simion found himself out in the slushy street, having been seized by the shoulders and shaken and slapped over the side of the head with a grade book; he had a roaring in his ears. He heaved up a mouthful of bile. It occurred to him that he would like to go to the stables; the barn had been one of the few places in Haliburton where he could cry if he absolutely had to, and the smell of the horses might comfort him. But he was cold, and the strength was going out of him as if he were bleeding.

  In some manner, he got home.

  By no effort was he ever able to remember precisely what happened during the rest of that day. He came home panting, with an awesome burning sensation in the bones of his legs, a physical scream of weariness and starvation. His head felt stranger than he could ever recall. He paused in the kitchen and huddled on the hearth as near to the coals as he dared, wishing the warmth would seep into him. He had not been warm in days. He wanted to add a few sticks and stir up the whole business with the poker, but he found that he couldn’t lift the poker anymore. Around him were the ordinary smells of Doriskos’s kitchen, that fine cool smell of cinnamon and chocolate, overlain today by that of chicken roasted with thyme. There had been a chicken leg in the last lunch he’d thrown over the fence of the asylum. Back out of this while you still have the strength to do something about it, his own mind told him. You can make yourself a pot of chocolate and heat some of that beef broth in the kettle and drink it slowly and carefully, and maybe you’ll throw up, but some of it’ll stay down. You can pull out of this. But the voice of common sense was answered by woe: What for? I’m going to get thrown out of this place in disgrace. And rage: I escape from the old kind of barbarians right into the house of a new kind of barbarian. I think I love this man, and he then tries to break my jaw. When will I ever learn? Then again, what is there to learn? That men are wolves and brutes and even an Oxford education doesn’t change them and love is a dream for fools to dream while they suck their thumbs, and that’s just how the earth turns as it circles the sun? That the blackest, most hopeless, most dead-end things I ever suspected are true? I needn’t have put myself out to get here to learn that.

  Doriskos’s recent expression—that tremulous hope and incomprehension—made Simion so angry he would have liked to break a bottle and eat the pi
eces. “And I just might,” he thought, shivering by the stove, his bones hurting, his head hurting, the craziness of starvation expanding in rings within him. I just might. He crept upstairs to his room with tears smarting his eyes, crawled under the covers like a poisoned animal going to ground, and fell asleep.

  In the evening, he woke feeling bad in a way he could not remember, a guttering feeling—pains in the chest and a sort of swooning nausea. It was as if his heart had stretched until its walls were paper-thin and bits of his brain were going numb. He felt a dreamlike terror, more like the floating fright of a dream than a waking state.

  “If I’m going to die, I want a cigarette first,” he thought. “I hope I have a cigarette.” He riffled with a numb hand in his book bag and found a pack of Straight Cuts with one left, and this he shakily lit, and inhaled every iota of the noxious-delicious smoke he could. He lay on his bed and smoked his cigarette to a nub, crushed the nub out on the headboard, and wondered why his head seemed to tip so far down when he wasn’t even moving.

  Doriskos had not slept all the while that Simion had not eaten, and by that night he was looking out at the world in a kind of delirious horror in which faces were deformed, light hurt, and sound assailed his ears, its timbre soured and unnaturally loud. It was a monstrous world that reflected his own monstrosity and tortured him as he felt he deserved. He had also eaten very little and over the last few days had mostly sustained himself on coffee, which laid every nerve in him raw but kept him, after a fashion, awake. He had stopped talking to Simion through that door, for every apology that could be made had been offered, every possible peace offering rejected. It was true what he’d said: that he would have accepted any retaliation Simion thought necessary, any Sadean torment that he could dream up. Simion had chosen the ultimate punishment of doing nothing, of refusing expiation entirely. By the tenth day after their conflagration, speech being so useless, Doriskos had stopped talking to anyone except in the briefest phrases. But just as it seemed that his speech was about to go, his mind brought itself back from the brink. Then sleep hit him in a staggering wave, giving him barely time to fall coverless upon his bed—he was out.

  When he woke up several hours later, Doriskos was right under a rift in the poisonous clouds of the last two weeks’ immobilizing melancholia, and almost before he opened his eyes, he realized that he was, however temporarily, free. Sensing the intense external silence of falling snow, he felt as if he were returning from a very far place. He came awake to his body place by place. He began to be aware of a bad taste in his mouth, as if he’d not cleaned his teeth for days. He scrubbed them, wondering what in Hades he’d had in his mouth last. His stomach hurt: He’d forgotten to eat. Something even smelled bad, and that was him too: dead sweat, the rank reek of craziness.

  “Curious,” he thought. “I feel as if I’m alone in the house. The silence. The absence. Has he left?”

  He pulled himself up from his bed and walked across the hall, feeling liquid-legged. He knocked on Simion’s door and fancied that the sound was more hollow than usual. No response. He called out; no response to that either. He rattled the lock. His next words came out with surprising fluency: “If you don’t say something, I’ll break this door down!”

  And, taken over by something stronger than his usual indecision, he went straight downstairs and took a candle out to the shed to find the hatchet. He swung the hatchet at Simion’s bedroom door, faintly surprised that it actually gave in to his force. Finally the gashed pieces, eggshell paint and creamy lacquer over wounded wood, lay on the floor, and he stepped through the hole in the door.

  After that brief fit of violent activity, the stillness of the room assailed him: its foul air, its fireless cold. Simion lay curled on his bed with an empty cigarette box at his hand. Doriskos turned him onto his back and shook him; he didn’t stir. His waxen flesh radiated a raging heat of fever. A harder shake didn’t wake him, and his breathing was not right. Doriskos noted that the ordinarily so-fastidious little creature was as grubby as himself. The small current of air from Simion’s mouth was awful, a smell like wine that has gone to vinegar and then to that stage beyond vinegar. Doriskos’s fog cleared entirely, replaced by pure panic. He snatched Simion up and went sliding through the new snow to Karseth’s house and pounded on the door.

  X. The Consequences of Starvation

  Siehst, Vater, du den Erlkönig nicht?—

  Den Erlenkönig mit Kron’ und Schweif?

  —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Erl-King”

  (Father, don’t you see the King of Shadows?

  The Erlking with his crown and cape?)

  A lamp had been burning in Helmut’s room when Doriskos began pounding on the door; Helmut, wakeful, was reading while Karseth slept beside him. For several days, all unknowing, Simion and Doriskos had already agitated this household; Doriskos had excited comment for the manic stupor in which he breathed and moved these days, and the incident of Simion and Larch Stearns had gone the rounds. Karseth and Kneitel had caught glimpses of both Simion and Doriskos and held counsel on the matter. They held unlike theories on the trouble between their all-too-near neighbors. Karseth, eager to think ill of Doriskos, maintained stubbornly that it had been a matter of sexual force, a man over thirty forcing himself on a boy.

  “If that were going to happen,” said Helmut, “it would have. Long ago.” He restrained his vexation as best he could; Moses liked hating the well-born or well-funded, enjoyed it in a way that could entirely overshadow his common sense. The chance to witness the hanging of an earl or viscount would have probably made him happy for years. He knew the accidental and tenuous nature of Doriskos’s connection with the aristocracy, but he apparently regarded it as good enough to work with. After the two of them had gone to bed, Helmut laid his finger on Moses’s mouth every time Moses attempted to talk further about the upcoming fray; he expected to get his fill of it tomorrow.

  In fact, it did not take even that long.

  Ten minutes past three in the morning, he was standing up on cold feet and handing things to Moses in the surgery. There was Simion, half-dead, on the table, a stringy-haired wreck. In spite of the dank chill of the room, Moses was sweating as he worked over him, trying to regulate his careening heart rate with digitalis. To his horror, he’d found a murmur that had not been there even so recently as the time of Simion’s brandy spree. Doriskos sat on a hassock, shaking as if in the throes of a violent chill. He had not been able to say an articulate word since his pounding on their door had roused them; he would try mightily and manage only to produce a strangled sound a little like the moan a person makes during a migraine. Helmut wondered just what horrific thing had happened between him and Simion. Whatever it was, it had been horrific for both of them as well as nearly fatal for one. He risked stepping over to Doriskos and putting a hand on his shoulder: “Shh. Don’t try so hard to speak. Moses is going to help him. And if you can calm down, perhaps you can tell us about it.”

  “Helmut, get over here! Leave him!” snarled Moses. “Get out,” he said venomously to Doriskos. Doriskos turned strained and tormented eyes toward him but made no move to go. He shook his head.

  “Hush, Moses, concentrate on the boy,” said Helmut. Rather surprisingly, Moses was content to accord Doriskos one more glare of blazing contempt. Then he rolled another towel up and put it under Simion’s neck to elevate his head and tucked a clean blanket and a couple of hot-water bottles around him. “The breathing’s a little better, and his heart’s holding up for the moment,” he muttered, half to himself. “Helmut, will you get me some more hot water and find me some camphor and liniment?” Moses dried his hands, then spooned some more honey from a jar he’d fetched out of the pantry earlier. He tipped a careful half-spoonful under Simion’s tongue, listened for Helmut’s movements two rooms away to make sure he was out of earshot, and hissed at Doriskos, a sort of whispered yell: “Damn you and damn me along with you for my lily-livered hesitations! This poor little devil looked thinner and gla
ssier every day, and what did I do but bide my time! Hoping not to bring trouble upon you, you sick mess with shit for brains and slime for morals! When I ought to have gone down to the constabulary and told them to arrest you on every morals charge on the books. I’ve heard some odd tales in my time, but I’ve never met anyone who got his jollies from starving his catamite! How do you account for yourself, Klionarios?”

  Doriskos raised his right hand a little, a helpless, drowning gesture. He tried to speak—Moses had seen people having babies less effortfully. At any rate, Doriskos could not answer him before Helmut returned with the kettle, the camphor and liniment, and the tincture of valerian.

  “How much of this is safe?” Helmut asked Moses, gesturing with the valerian bottle.

  “For whom?”

  Helmut made an impatient gesture to Doriskos: Who do you think!

  “For him? Give him the whole goddamned bottle,” said Moses. “Better yet, go get the hatchet and split his head open.”

  “Moses.”

  “Two tablespoons. Though it’s the first time I’ve ever heard of anyone thinking that rapists deserve soothing syrups.”

  “You don’t know that anyone here is a rapist, and I want you not to go on about it,” said Helmut. “It’s not the only bad thing that can happen. You’re being perseverant about it. And vulgar. You don’t know that any such thing is true.” They might have had a brief shouting match on the subject, but for Simion, who shuddered and simply omitted to take the next breath. Moses shook him hard, then forced his own breath into him until his chest lifted on its own.

  “I’m not going to be able to take my eyes from him,” said Moses, himself getting shivery, when this crisis was over. “My God! He nearly got away from me.” He willingly took the reheated coffee that Helmut brought him. For quite a while, there was nothing but their silence against the noise of the fire Helmut had built in the small white surgery stove. The room warmed, though all the human flesh in it stayed cold.