by Laura Argiri
So that was what he did with his lunch. “Let’s not discuss it,” rasped Doriskos. “I haven’t the strength to discuss that or anything.”
“You never want to talk to me.”
“I can’t talk to anybody now. It’s nothing personal. Not this time.” He wished he had the energy to conjure some remark sharp and stern enough to get the creature to leave, but he couldn’t; besides, he doubted that he could stay on his feet and walk far enough to summon less dangerous aid.
For the next half hour, the vile cycle continued. He threw up, or tried to, broke into a brief torrential sweat, turned cold and shivered, and almost dozed as the pain let up. Then it gathered itself again, and the whole mess was repeated.
“This could go on quite some while. You’ll miss your next class.”
“I would miss all my classes for you in your hour of need,” said Peter.
Doriskos opened his eyes slightly. “You would miss all your classes on slighter pretexts than that. And this is the first I’ve heard of you rescuing poor souls felled with migraines and letting them puke all over you.”
“I don’t give a damn about most poor souls,” said Peter, trying to be amusing and ironic, but not succeeding. “But you, as you know, are a different story. You can do anything you want all over me. I would drink your bath water and let you beat me with a riding crop if it would make you happy.”
“It wouldn’t,” sighed Doriskos. “It would confuse me horribly.”
“Don’t people take things for these attacks?” Peter mused, trying a new angle. “Morphine, laudanum, stuff of that sort? Can I get you some?”
“No…snow, if you must. Laudanum just makes me drunk and helpless. A couple of pounds of snow, in a towel. I wrap it like a turban round my head. That helps.”
“Your wish is my command,” said Peter in that worshiping voice. “I’ll be back in just a tick.” Carefully, he eased Doriskos down inch by inch until he was lying flat on the floor, then rolled his jacket up into a little pillow and put it under his nape. Doriskos shut his eyes against the light.
After an interval that seemed inordinately long, Peter crouched back down and swathed Doriskos’s head with clean snow wrapped up in his jersey. Then, feeling a cold cup at his lips and a sudden passion of thirst, Doriskos opened his mouth, anticipating water. Instead, there was the sick-sweet, faintly licorice-like taste of laudanum. Peter stroked his throat, and he’d swallowed the stuff before he could protest. He was too sick to bethink himself that he’d given Peter just the information to motivate him to bolt through the snow and ice, take a cab to the nearest apothecary’s shop, buy the strongest laudanum drops available, ask what the appropriate dose was, double it, and sluice it down his captive’s throat.
“I told you no—”
“Come, now, it’ll do you good,” Peter purred.
Depleted as Doriskos was, this dose hit him like a speeding freight train. Already lying on the floor, he felt as if he were falling in slow motion like a feather, a tilting, sinking fall, carrying with him his faintly dimming pain. He shut his eyes, but opened them again quickly. Peter had availed himself of what might be an unrepeatable opportunity and kissed his forehead. He felt his shirt being loosened and the soft but all too strong hands kneading his shoulders and neck. He was divided between passivity and panic. “Why the hell not?” he thought. “I don’t deserve any decent person’s affection. Besides, no one else will ever want to kiss me again, and if he’s a bad lot, perhaps I’m worse and deserve him.” Then, remembering Peter’s enthusiastic remarks about his bath water and a riding crop: OH NO. He feigned another retching attack, though his stomach had quieted, bowing to this stronger panic. The effort brought back the pain in his head, re-evoked the nausea, and gave his performance the charm of authenticity.
“Sn…ow,” he managed to say. “More snow for my head, please. Go get me some cold…water from the pump.” And when Peter had desisted and gone out, Doriskos heaved himself up to his hands and knees and crawled to safety in his supply closet. It was across the hall and had an old slidebolt inside the door—it must have served as someone’s tiny office at some time. He crawled into this cave and slid the bolt in place. Silently, he blessed the person who’d put the bolt there. He leaned his cold lips to its colder metal and kissed it. He thanked the darkness that laid its hand across his eyes. Then he put his back against the door and braced his feet on the side of an old bookcase. He tried to hold his hand hard over his mouth during the next bout of retching, but Peter returned inconveniently and heard him. He tried the door and understood the situation.
“Damn you, damn you!” he cried in a sobbing, outraged voice, and kicked the door.
Luckily, however, people began to come out into the hall, so that Peter had to go away. And sometime thereafter, despite the discomfort of his position and the fact that his hair was soaked through with sweat and snowmelt, the laudanum knocked Doriskos out.
When he came awake, he found himself curled into a fetal position, hoarding all his heat, and through the tiny high window of the supply room, he could see the last lingering light of sunset. When he pressed his palm to his head, the bones of his face seemed violently sore, and he reconstructed the morning and remembered why he was here amid the spare charcoal pencils, casts, and plaster of Paris. The migraine had diminished from its Battle of Waterloo level to that of an ordinary headache. He shuddered and picked himself up to go back to Karseth’s, wondering what horror awaited him there.
Doriskos had already noticed that, while migraines in the plural were unforgettable, the individual one tended to be forgotten except for short disjunct shards and flashes: a brown blanket fastened up on the window during one headache, perhaps, or the sharp perfume of some flowering tree during another. Yet the memory rejected the pain itself, intolerable and always the same. Later on, his memories of the next two weeks would become likewise attenuated. He could not even conjure back the thoughts he’d had during this nightmarish progression of events; perhaps he’d had only one real one, the guilty grief that went on like a low, groaning pedalpoint from an organ, endlessly sustained.
Simion seemed to improve over the next couple of days; indeed, he was so coherent, so much himself, that one could forget his imperiled state for odd moments. At night, the light of a couple of candles kind to his wasted face, he could have been any boy recovering from bad grippe or pneumonia, sleeping. To be reminded, though, one needed only to see him undressed or to note how weak he was: He couldn’t turn himself in bed, and it tired him to hold a book for ten minutes. Anything tired him, in fact—even being turned every couple of hours so that he would not get pressure sores tired him. Still, he soon began to dedicate his limited energies to a battle of wills with Moses. This tired him too, but that did not deter him. Their conflagrations grew in frequency and heat; Simion did not like involuntary dependency, and his hatred of being told what to do ran wide and deep. Even deeper, though, was the formidable and desolate anger that woke up with his stirring vitality. Will without forgiveness and stubbornness without hope, it inspired him to break as many rules as possible, because they were for his good.
And there were plenty of rules to break. Because of the bouts of heart failure caused by his sustained fast, Moses did not allow Simion to get out of bed or to engage in any form of activity but eating and strictly necessary hygienic processes. He had also decreed, “There will be no more of this infernal nonsense about food.” According to his orders, Simion was served three meals a day and a glass of eggnog—no rum in it, naturally—at mid-morning and mid-afternoon. The meals were substantial German loads of meat and potatoes, milk and pudding and fruit preserves, for Karseth had forbidden invalid food as not worth the energy it took to eat. If Simion finished his food, he could claim the reward of having Helmut read to him for an hour after each meal. If not, no one talked to him for the rest of the morning or afternoon, and if he craved diversion, he could memorize the cracks in the ceiling.
“It’s not exactly that it makes
me feel bad to eat,” he thought, considering his own resistance and sense of being bullied. His ulcers, expertly medicated, lay quiet. When he ate, he felt heavy and stuffed, but he was in no actual pain from it. Yet, in his state of mind, he had preferred the deathward stillness inside him, and he hated the sensations of his hibernating organs awakening and stiffly, faultily resuming their work. He hated the juiciness of it, the feeling of ferment inside himself. Even the clearing of his head, once he’d had a few days of square meals, was a blessing so mixed that he couldn’t regard it as one. “I don’t consent to this,” he thought distraughtly—in eating, in cooperating, he was letting himself be compelled to say a yes to life that he felt unready to say.
After three days of compliance, Simion issued the challenge of refusing his supper. “Very well, you turn in for the night,” said Moses, whose anger at that point was still well submerged. He brought Simion one glass containing a sedative, another of water to chase it. Simion, surprised at the extent of his own defiance, said, “I don’t want that either.” His own voice sounded mild, almost polite—he had gotten into this confrontation too fast to work up a really fine heat of rudeness.
“It is not a question of whether you want it. It isn’t a question at all, in fact. I told you: If you don’t eat supper, you go straight to sleep. You and I know I can’t force you to eat without grievous harm. You’d be so upset there’d be no doing anything with you. But if I can’t get you to eat, I can at least get you to rest, and if you won’t swallow it—”
“I won’t. Just leave me alone, will you.”
Karseth received this comment with a faint start, a showing of the fabled whites of his eyes. His nerves, he found, were no more up to this discussion than Simion’s general health was. With no further discussion, he took his leave and returned with his hypodermic. Simion might have backed down from his refusal, but was not vouchsafed the opportunity. The drug knocked his mind numb even as his arm still sang with pain.
Moses’s scrupulous and unhesitating firmness angered him more than some form of mild maltreatment would have; being bullied would have allowed him to feel like himself, but being handled as Moses handled him made him feel like a child or a lunatic. Simion knew about Moses’s temper and wanted a sight of it; unmanning someone else would make him feel less unmanned.
For the next evening, Simion had a more deliberate turn of the screw ready for Karseth, and Moses was on his guard too. When he brought Simion’s supper tray that night, he said, “You have half an hour for that.” He didn’t stay to argue or observe. Simion beguiled his time by eating the buttery middle parts of his toast and a spoonful or two of blancmange. He left the meat, the noodles, the milk, and everything else. When Moses came, he had the same little glass with the calmative in it. Simion accepted it with a show of amiability, then poured it out over the buttered noodles he hadn’t eaten, wasting both medicine and food. He gave Moses a quizzical little look and watched him quickly turn his gaze away and clench his lips and start filling his syringe. Simion closed his fingers around the handle of his mug of hot milk, which was still quite hot, and when Moses turned toward him, Simion flung it at him. He hit him right on the wrist of his shooting arm, in fact. His heart sped with the same unholy joy he’d felt when he pulled the turtle soup onto John Ezra, despite the lack of other parallels in the situation.
But instead of bringing the tray down over his head, Moses just yanked his steaming sleeve up and thrust his forearm into the water pitcher, then looked at Simion in a way that made him most uncomfortable. “I will not talk to you now,” he said, and he left the room. He stayed away for what seemed a long while, then returned grimly composed and in a fresh shirt, syringe in hand. “That hurt no more than usual,” Simion thought, falling into that enforced sleep with the hateful smell of white spirit blooming in his nostrils. He had a fleeting memory of the scent of alcohol in Lincoln’s house; he thought of that, and of Karseth’s grim gentleness. Was there some connection? He was too much asleep to think, already. They might let me finish my thoughts, he complained within his mind, on his way down.
The next day, he behaved himself in hopes of the chance to finish a few thoughts. Incredible as it seemed, he’d lost track of some of the events that had brought him to this pass. But that day’s full rations seemed to wake up departments of his brain that had been asleep, and not having the sedative, though he didn’t want it, somehow made him irritable. Having the drug had made him feel bad in one way; not having it made him feel bad in a different one. Yet, even suffering the nerve twinges of withdrawal, more awake and alive than he’d been in a while, he managed to finish a few thoughts. And, having finished them, he turned in mid-anger, for he remembered who had wronged him first: the man he had never expected to wrong him, who had seduced him with gentleness and then done to him what he couldn’t bear. With this foremost in his mind, Simion left off being vile with Moses, except when he really wanted to be, and was wholeheartedly vile with Doriskos.
At first, Moses dealt with this development by assigning Doriskos the night watches. At night, Simion seemed stunned, adrift in some amniotic repose and barely himself. However, he made the most of whatever daytime opportunities to get at Doriskos came his way. The fact that Moses insisted upon a calm supper alone with Helmut before the nightly contest of wills with Simion over his evening meal afforded Simion his chance; while they had supper, Doriskos had Simion, and Simion had him. Nor did Simion waste any other such opportunity.
“You think I’m some sort of a toy, a doll for you to put clothes on and teach table manners?” Simion said after pitching a water glass, almost accurately, at Doriskos upon one such occasion. “Well, I came up here to become a significant famous person, not to be a puppet for a damned degenerate! That’s what you are, a degenerate! And a muddle-headed idiot! Fuck you!” This in an age when that expletive retained all its last-ditch, shocking rudeness.
Helmut dashed up the stairs at the sound of that raised, raw voice. “You can’t have company if you’re going to upset yourself. You’ll have to have your dose and lie down for a while, and then we’ll see how you do.”
“I don’t want a sedative or a nap! A chance to get at that Greek pathic of mine would do me more good than any of that!”
“Still, what you’d better have is a sedative and a nap…perhaps a cup of hot chocolate.”
“I don’t want any damned hot chocolate! Unless, of course, I can throw the cup at his head and see which one breaks,” said Simion.
“I beg your pardon, it’s not damned hot chocolate, I make it, and it’s very good,” said Helmut, towing Doriskos out of the room. Not that Doriskos, from his vantage point outside the door, couldn’t hear every syllable of the foul fit his loved one threw. (“Pervert! Coward! Trash!” and another piece of crockery hurled at the door at which the unlucky lover listened.)
Safe in the kitchen, Helmut looked shaken. “My God, he’s a handful. I’d rather shovel wet snow than try to coax him into taking medicine he doesn’t want. He’s a little genius with the vocabulary of a little gutter rat, the high-handedness of a Borgia, and the…pardon me, Doriskos…”
“He has a vile mouth on him, that’s what you want to say? Go ahead. I know it better than anyone.”
“I mean… I barely know how to say it. He’s utterly relentless. People who love each other can have quarrels, even quite serious quarrels,” said Helmut—it was a topic he knew from experience. “But they don’t go razor-shod over each other’s tenderest vanities. They know where to stop. He’s like…like someone so poor that he doesn’t value anything. He doesn’t stop where any decent person would. He doesn’t know where to stop!”
“And he wouldn’t if he did,” said Doriskos, beginning to feel some connection about to be made. For the moment, he was much less shaken than Helmut about the names Simion had called him.
“Well, you needn’t subject yourself to him any longer until he’s in a decent mood,” said Helmut. “I’ll take him now; you just sit here and have some te
a, or whatever, and try to put all that out of mind,” said Helmut. He ventured touching Doriskos’s hair; Doriskos gave himself to the caress like a sad cat. Later, upstairs, he could hear Helmut, his voice scoured of indignation—again the soother and stroker of angry beasts.
“Now, let’s just calm ourselves. If you’d stop bristling and looking like you’d like to bite someone, I think I might enjoy reading to you for a while.”
“I would like to bite someone. Not you,” conceded Simion.
“How charming of you. I’m very flattered.” Irony unappreciated, unheard!
“Anyhow,” said Simion, a weak challenge—“you’re not supposed to read to me when I’ve been bad, and I’ve been twice-bad. And I doubt by now that you could enjoy doing anything for me, except perhaps knocking me in the head.”
“You were a perfect terror, but I’m not a member of the Barbarians’ Club, or whatever types go about knocking invalids in the head. There are other ways to solve disputes than knocking people in the head or saying horrible things, and when you’re feeling better, perhaps I’ll tell you about them. Meanwhile, being bored won’t do you any good. I’ll divert your mind and see if you don’t feel calmer in a while. Will Les Misérables do?”
Across the hall in Moses’s room, Doriskos listened for a while to the cadences of Hugo’s prose in Helmut’s polished French. After a while, he heard Simion interpose tentatively: “My back, please? I feel stiff.” Doriskos watched as Helmut put down the book and helped Simion turn prone, turned the book so he could see it, and slid one hand up under Simion’s jersey to rub his back. While so doing, he read on. When Simion had had enough, he said a gentle and civil thank-you and was soon fast asleep. “When did he last use that tone with me?” Doriskos wondered. It had been a few days before the New York escapade, a sad evening when Simion hadn’t the will to do any schoolwork; he’d wanted to sit on Doriskos’s lap and share a glass of Chartreuse with him and have Poe and Baudelaire read aloud to him. That long-gone evening, Doriskos had read “Invitation au Voyage” to him, changing the addressee to mon enfant, mon frère. He had thought that the poem was rather like the mural in his locked room, and Simion had felt less sad over Lincoln and smiled, and had rested in Dori’s arms as if he were a well-loved and completely trustworthy parent.