by Laura Argiri
In his mural, there were scenes of public and private celebration, of religious awe, of private quietude and entwined sleep, and of sexual ecstasy, but there was no violence, no hurt. “This isn’t in the picture, it never should have happened,” thought Doriskos. (Oh, gods, you know it shouldn’t have happened, that it’s all a mistake. This was never in the picture. Take it back, paint over it. Take me back to that evening and that poem. Let me have my pain in any other form in the world but his.)
His head hummed with tears for what seemed the thousandth time since all this began. He ran Simion’s ugly words through his mind’s ear and took them in, ate them, digested them, as penance and as communion.
Doriskos, under siege, soon understood something that no one else seemed to—in spite of the danger, Simion wanted, craved, and intended to have an apocalyptic row with his contrite lover. There would be no relief and no resolution until he got it. Until that particular lamp lit up in his head, Doriskos had turned the other cheek by inclination and in obedience to Karseth’s orders; he did not argue back until he perceived that going unanswered made Simion much angrier than having his volleys returned. Understanding that, Doriskos began to return Simion’s thrusts—a mode of cooperation he’d never yet imagined, but life with Simion was teaching him some bizarre lessons. Intimates that they were, they conspired even in their estrangement; Doriskos listened as Simion spoke his mind in a sort of whispered yell. The declared subject of these disputes was unimportant, like the five-note theme of a set of ninety piano variations. Fugue, pavane, passacaglia, sarabande, and variations in the key of Anger!
Moreover, these exchanges illuminated facts that shuddering contrition had not. In some ways, he and Simion were complete opposites, and even without the cataclysm after that jaunt to New York, they had plenty to fight about. On one such evening, when Simion was catching his breath after delivering a five-minute dose of character assassination, Doriskos answered him. “Yes, I hurt you once! Yes, I loathe myself for it! It showed me evil within myself that I didn’t know was there. But what about you?” he whispered. “You hurt yourself continuously, every day, every waking hour! You’ve done worse things to yourself than anyone else could even imagine doing to you! You have to be the most self-destructive creature I’ve ever met! You’re maddening and obsessive, and watching you rip yourself to shreds is enough to make anyone crazy!”
“You don’t need anybody to make you crazy! You’re who’s maddening—you waste ninety percent of your time! And you win the practical incapability prize. You can’t make your own horse behave, you can’t even keep your own ledger. I’m surprised the bank hasn’t come after you yet, now that Moses doesn’t allow me to do your damn accounts. And that’s the least of it. If you didn’t have Kiril, you’d walk around with food on your face and be late to class!”
“At least I’m not a slave to a stack of books or a ledger or a clock or some stupid college’s system for giving grades. You don’t catch me at any of that,” Doriskos returned boldly.
“You’re saying I’m a slave to books and money and clocks and grades?”
“I am, I am saying that! That’s exactly what you are! You’re a slave to fours in recitation!”
“It’s part of a quest for perfection. The quest for perfection is noble, goosebrain!”
“My art is part of the quest for perfection. What you beat your brains out for is the quest for fours in recitation. You want your deluded little blond head patted for doing your arithmetic right. You wouldn’t know the kind of perfection I’m after if it came up behind you and bit you.”
“You’re beyond contempt! You can’t do your arithmetic right! An Oxford graduate, talking such rubbish! It’s not my fault that you can’t organize your life!”
“Damn the whole idea of organizing my life, Simion!” said Doriskos. “I got through Oxford with a double first without ever for one second organizing my life! I didn’t want to and I don’t want to and I’m not going to! And you’re not going to organize it for me, either. It’s stifling. It’s one of the few luxuries I care about—not organizing my life! As for organizing one’s life, you’ve organized yours until it screeches like a mouse in a trap. You even sh…you even relieve yourself at the same time every day and night!”
“Not any more,” said Simion, sly blame implicit in every syllable.
“Six in the morning. And eight at night, before you bathe. I could set a clock by you.”
“It’s orderly.”
“It’s strange. It’s akin to this business of stopping eating—it’s wanting to have a stranglehold on things. Well, I let you have a stranglehold on me, because I…I let you have it. But you needn’t be so righteous, so damnably smug! You needn’t think I’m dreaming while you huddle in that bed and stick knives in me with your words! I think…” Doriskos paused.
“What were you about to say? Are you afraid that if you say it, I’ll laugh at you?”
“I don’t think there’s any laughter left in you. There’s precious little of it at the best of times,” said Doriskos. He felt as if someone else were saying this for him, or as if he were saying more than he’d known, at least before this conversation began. “I was about to say that I love you. Which I do, nasty little tyrant that you can be. Or I wouldn’t have held your head over a basin for half this past term and drunk your tears and let your misery go inside me and rage around like violent weather. And if I didn’t, I wouldn’t even contemplate taking this endless guttersnipe abuse of yours.”
Slam! Cracking noises of heavy crockery—Simion had not laughed. Rather, he’d thrown a dish. Noises of booted feet up the stairs. Doriskos was expelled, the door was slammed in his face. Yet he felt peculiarly elated—they had been as truthful in their anger as they’d been in their long, ravenous kisses that aborted time in bed. The anger might be the fiery passage that would lead them back to the kiss.
Behind the door, Doriskos heard a crash of glass, then Karseth emerged with the sticky pieces of a broken plate in his hand. He looked very angry, with a bright splotch under each cheekbone. “Didn’t I tell you not to egg that young hellion on? Well, I’ll tell you again—don’t encourage him in his tantrums! Don’t lend yourself to any arguments or answer him when he fusses! Don’t argue back, no matter what he says. He finished that exchange with a pulse of a hundred and ten and that murmur of his as loud as I’ve heard it. It sloshed like a full bucket. Deuce take it all!”
“I think he has something to say and needs to say it,” Doriskos ventured.
“He can worry about speaking his mind once we’re sure he’s going to have his nineteenth birthday, which he won’t if you let him become overexcited. I’ve sedated him—he wouldn’t swallow the dose, so he’s had it by needle—and it ought to calm him down in a couple of minutes. I’m so sick of putting needle-bruises on him that the sight of a hypodermic’s started to make me queasy—if he had fur, he’d look like a goddamned Dalmatian. Anyhow, you wait until he’s asleep, then go in there and watch him. If I have to stay in there right now, I’ll hit him myself.”
Those ugly exchanges eased the pain considerably for both the participants. However, Karseth was right—Simion’s body could not stand the excitement. Despite the easing of his emotions, he got sicker: First he couldn’t keep down food, then he threw up blood as well as whatever he tried to eat. He caught a grippe, and it reduced him to a state of deathlike depletion and dehydration. Karseth declared an absolute moratorium on conflict, in fact upon superfluous conversation in general, even when he was better from the grippe.
This ban, though, was no real remedy. There was something about it that Simion couldn’t stand. He had hit some inner wall of the emotions, some absolute zero from which he couldn’t move without help. No one seemed to know what help he needed; he was pinioned there, skinless in the cold, and frantic. If he’d been able to explain, he would have said that his hunger was beyond food, his pain beyond anodynes, but he was in such a state that he couldn’t answer far simpler questions than that. H
e’d been a difficult patient; now he was a hellish one.
There were more disobediences, more refusals. If they refused to take away the food he declined to eat, Simion had no compunctions about throwing it. He also flung every juicy curse he’d been unable to speak aloud in Haliburton.
And then suddenly, he made a shift that was both capitulation on his own terms and the worst rebellion yet. He wasted no more energy on conciliation, on manners for the occasional evening’s truce; his actions would be the perfect language of his despair. He decided to refuse solids, whatever the natural consequences and Moses’s penalties; he refused baths, help cleaning his teeth, human touch; he refused to swallow any of Karseth’s drugs, ever. When Moses tried angrily to reason with him, to frighten him into compliance, he threatened to refuse the liquid foods as well, frightening both himself and Moses at how this tactic rattled the redoubtable physician. By day, Simion turned his face to the wall. No longer able to make any headway with him, Moses had to encourage his caretakers to woo him with any and all safe divertments—none of which drew any response but apathy or the occasional appalling tantrum.
On the second afternoon of Simion’s revolt, Doriskos roused himself to play some of the music he knew that Simion particularly liked on Helmut’s pianoforte: Liszt, some of the wilder Transcendental Études. He played it louder than normal and left the intervening doors open so that it would carry upstairs. When he went up, he found Simion asleep with his starved hands over his ears. Music did not take the place of speech.
In the depths of that night, Doriskos roused to Simion’s usual demand for water and fancied that he looked worse, more wasted and waxen than when he’d dropped off to sleep a few hours back. Doriskos brought him his water and propped him up so that he could drink it without choking. He was having some slight trouble swallowing, which sent off a wave of instinctual alarm in Doriskos—he’d never been told that this symptom was a harbinger of approach to the dark border, but it filled him with primitive fear, then anger. “What are you trying to do?” he whispered. “Are you trying to commit suicide?”
“Dori, the great genius,” rasped Simion.
“Keep your voice down, we’re not supposed to be talking, but answer me! Are you?”
Simion made a musing pause. “I’d like to do more than commit suicide.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I’d like to have never been—failing that, I’d like to diminish. Contract, rather. Shrink into a seed pod, or a stone. Get reborn as a spruce tree or a river. Even a desk chair. Something that can’t feel human pain—anything but a human being and myself. I don’t want a name or a history or aspirations. You should understand. I think you’re a human being by accident, and maybe…your real nature…perhaps you’re really a swan, or a wisteria vine,” said Simion. That explanation seemed to satisfy him. Smiling a little, he shut his eyes as if he were going to drift off to sleep, as he did often, these days, between one breath and the next. But Doriskos took him gently by the shoulders.
“What?” asked Simion, almost civilly, half-sentient.
“I am not a human being by accident, or a swan or a wisteria vine, you know. Or a mollusk!”
“Mollusk,” Simion said, almost smiling. “That’s the best yet.”
“That was Stratton-Truro’s metaphor for me. He hurt me once, as badly as I’ve hurt you, and I didn’t talk to him for a while. He always collected junk, well, then he started collecting shells. As if the ninny thought I couldn’t see what he meant by it. He had a whole bookshelf full of whelk shells before that craze burnt itself out. He’d contemplate them like they were my kindred and could tell him about me. I felt like saying, Damn you, I may not be an Englishman, but I am not a mollusk.”
“It’s true. I’ve never in my life been beaten up by one. A mollusk, that is.”
“Please try with me in this. If chewing on my heart would do you any good, you’d be well and strong this minute.”
Simion hoisted his golden eyelashes for a look of weak anger—though that was not precisely the right way to put it; the anger was as strong as a ten-foot python, the boy himself too weak to see straight. “You talk if you want to.” (I may not listen.)
“I do want to. Mollusks don’t. I can understand why I might seem like one, but I’m not. Well, I’m naturally shy, and perhaps things were done to me to exaggerate all my tendencies and to make it painful for me to articulate my feelings, but I’m not a plant or a stone or some kind of elaborate oyster misborn as a man. I’m a man and a human being who happens to love you more than anything else in the world. If I didn’t know that any other way, I’d know it from the pain I’m in. I don’t know how all this got started or how things miscarried so monstrously, but I do know that I’ll do anything, go anywhere…to put things right. Is there anything, anything at all that I can do for you?”
“Oh, please. I’m tired. I just want to rest. I want to sleep. It’s all in the world I want.”
“It’s not all in the world you want. Oh, please, listen! We had a quarrel! It was a very bad quarrel! Neither of us knew how to act properly, so we didn’t. But you needn’t die because of it! Oh, please!…”
“I really can’t take any more of this,” said Simion. His tone was unsteady, yet painfully controlled: the adult in him surfacing at the most unexpected of times. “I’m not trying to be nasty, I really cannot. What I really want is some water in that silver cup I like, and to be alone awhile.”
“I’m not supposed to leave you alone.”
“You can sit across the hall and hear every breath I take. Take a nap, read a book. Whatever. I’m sick of feeling watched and being picked at. I can’t take much more of it politely. Please oblige me.”
“You won’t do something awful to yourself? You don’t have something sharp stuffed into that mattress, or more cigarettes?”
“Cigarettes…no, damn it, I haven’t had one in an eternity, it’s mean of you to talk to me about cigarettes! Dori…please.”
The pet name and the concentrated pain in the voice moved Doriskos to compliance, though he might have persisted if Simion had not seemed so utterly worn out. He found the engraved silver tumbler, one of Helmut’s old school prizes, and filled it with fresh cold water. Simion drank, then turned his face to the wall.
Doriskos finished a ghost-ration of thin sleep at noon after that disheartening night. He looked at the calendar with a brief trivial amazement: It was February 20, his birthday had passed unnoticed yesterday. He was thirty-two; he had a headache. The windows were beaten by a hard noisy rain, and the permeating wet chill had no doubt contributed to the ache in his neck. At first he thought the rain had wakened him, but the noise that actually had broken his sleep cut through the rain again—a cry of shock and pain. He dashed across the hall to find that Simion had had some kind of heart seizure: It left him looking like a breathing corpse, his nostrils flaring with each breath. Moses and Helmut were hovering over him in barely-subdued panic.
“Breathe, damn it, breathe,” hissed Moses under his breath. “In and out, in and out. That’s it. Good boy.”
“He looks blue,” Doriskos thought, in stock-still panic. Could that be? Simion put his right hand to his breastbone and tried to rub it, and his nails actually seemed to have that blue tinge.
“Rest,” said Moses, taking the hand down. “I’ll put something warm on it to ease it. Save your strength. Just breathe.”
Later Moses would explain the situation to Doriskos, show him the scope that he used to listen to heart sounds, and let Doriskos listen to his own to understand what normal ones were like. Even he could tell that the murmur had grown worse; Simion’s heartbeat had developed a sort of wet swishing sound on every third beat. It was a sinister, unnatural sound. From time to time, this already erratic pattern deteriorated further, producing a characteristic chest pain that led swiftly to unconsciousness, this grayed-out face, this starved hunger for air.
“This is very bad,” said Karseth. “Do you understand? There must
be absolutely no conflict, no unpleasantness. No more of these midnight discussions. You can have them later, if there is a later…and if there’s to be one, he’s got to be kept entirely quiet. He’s going to have to stop fighting me if he’s to make it through, and even so we’re going to need lots of luck. God damn it all!”
“And what do you do for it?”
“Digitalis for when his heart fades, atropine for when it goes too fast. Kisses to the arse of the evil old god who doesn’t take care of any of us,” said Moses.
The next week was dominated by these desperate remedies; Moses moved into the room with Simion, delegated his labs to his teaching fellows, and dashed out to give his lectures, after which he returned without pause. Nights, he’d wake from a dead sleep whenever Simion stirred, coughed, arched his back, and fought for breath, then crouch over him with his little bottles of tinctures and droppers. When he’d coaxed the heart muscle into a more or less regular limp, Moses would straighten up, a battleground fatigue on his face.
“Does he understand?” Doriskos could not help asking.
“He knows that he wakes up having trouble breathing,” Moses told him, too tired to lace his words to Doriskos with his usual contempt. “I think he’s too far away to know the rest.”