The God in Flight

by Laura Argiri

  “Isn’t there anything else?”

  “That’s all I can think of.”

  “Well, I’ll certainly do that,” said Andy, pained by the awkwardness of this confessional farewell and by his consciousness of their danger.

  Forty minutes later, Doriskos and Simion were en route to Springfield. They had a whole carriage of this night train to themselves, one of the day’s few mercies. In the privacy of their compartment, Doriskos eased himself down with seasick care and put his head into Simion’s lap. His bad arm throbbed if he put it down on the cushions, so he situated it gingerly on the curve of his hip.

  “Dori?” Simion asked, after a time. “Are you asleep?”

  “Not yet,” came the dreamy answer. “Uncomfortable. If someone comes, just slip out from under me and put the carpetbag under my head. Laudanum, I hate laudanum. It makes me feel as if I’m in pieces and floating around near the ceiling. Touching you makes me feel somewhat all in one place.”

  “Did you think of anything? During all that?”

  “Come to think of it, I did. You telling me once that you’d rock me. Did you?”

  “You, kissing me good night on the palm so your shadow wouldn’t scratch my face.” For this was the sort of thing you couldn’t remember until a danger had passed—it had been the memory of that simple and considerate gesture, just a shadow or impression of it, almost just his hand’s memory, that had informed his courage and was still informing it. A gesture that had informed him, as certain gestures can, as Andy had told him, that he was loved in a way that few might even dream of and that whatever anyone might take from him, they remained the poorer, the deprived. “If it wouldn’t hurt you and get germs on you, I’d like to kiss your hand,” he whispered.

  “Maybe just a nice head rub,” said Doriskos. Soothed by the fingers in his hair, by the rush of wheels as well as the laudanum, and suddenly monstrously tired, he went right to sleep, and Simion kept vigil.

  Simion kept watch, in fact, for two weeks. During the time that Doriskos slept for the last time in his house, Moses had given Simion a short and intensive course in the care of bullet wounds and in recognizing the symptoms of tetanus and gangrene. Moses had told him that a bullet from an old gun made a very dirty and dangerous wound with a possibility of lockjaw that could not be ignored—one of the most horrible deaths, short of outright torture, known to flesh. He had also given him a supply of tincture of opium and specified the dosage in case the symptoms should appear. This suggestion was not intended as a cure, for there wasn’t one; the dosage he suggested would have killed half a marching band. Neither of them said anything about this, but Simion took Moses’s meaning plainly. He had been given the responsibility for rescuing Dori, if the need arose, from that end. Having taken his own life in his hands, Simion now held Dori’s, watching with morbid dread for muscle spasms and chills and tightness in the jaw.

  The following fortnight was spent in trains and in glum hotels in Springfield and Albany and Buffalo. Doriskos slept a great deal and ran episodic fevers, and one night he had a sore throat that scared Simion to private tears and actual prayer under the covers. However, the wound wept only clean lymph and watery blood. And by slow degrees, it began to close. Having decided to embark from Charleston or Savannah, even Jacksonville, they began to feel that they should wend their way south toward those warm ports. Ironic to be living like vagabonds now, while planning to accept the Canova Prize in August in a land so ancient that it made the American provinces seem newborn.

  On June fifteenth, they got off a third-class coach in Charlottesville. An exchange of wires with Moses informed them, “Loon in loon asylum stop adjudged criminally insane stop all cautiously well stop other loon home with mother stop.” Simion noticed that this message did not answer his query to Moses about his status at the college, which omission was an answer.

  Still, the day of their arrival in Charlottesville was a cool, windy day, and the dusty sunlight was mustard-gold and sharply shadowed over the mountains. Simion could not help but bask in the highland light, which was at once sharp and melancholy, quite unlike light on the seacoast, and familiar to him. It was a beauteous day. It was the first lovely day they’d noticed in quite some time.

  They put up at the Jeffersonia Hotel, a quiet and luxurious place. He had taken very good care of the wound, and in spite of the fatigue, the dirty trains, and the formidable emotions of the past few weeks, it looked ready to knit up in serious. And now Simion was the one who slept. They had a suite with two bedrooms, one of which Simion used for his naps, which were sometimes half a day long and quite sufficient to mess up a bed and create the impression that it was slept in during the night.

  All this sleep, however, was no indication of calm. He tended to wake in anxiety at having taken his eyes from Doriskos, as if this might cause his wound to go bad and his fever to rise. It didn’t affect his nervousness that these symptoms didn’t appear, that in fact the danger seemed to be receding, and that he usually found Doriskos just as he’d left him, reading something or trying to draw with his left hand.

  One afternoon, about a week into their sojourn in Charlottesville, Simion fell asleep after lunch and did not wake until late afternoon. And when he woke this time, Doriskos was nowhere within sight or hearing.

  Because the mind holds together when the danger is sufficient, Simion hadn’t fully panicked during their time of greatest peril in New Haven. But now he did. He searched the hotel, not daring to ask anyone anything, then flung out into the familiar streets and combed all the shops, the bookstore, the library, even a tavern or two. By the time he got back to the hotel, he knew himself to be on the verge of outright hysteria. But when he unlocked the suite door, he found Doriskos finicking over a vase of roses and delphiniums. “Life isn’t a bed of roses, but this is,” Dori said, indicating a scatter of petals he’d tossed on the coverlet. Evoking roses piled on Simion’s bed in New Haven.

  “Dori, how dare you?”

  “How dare I what?”

  “Handle those dirty things, for one thing! Moses told you not to be handling things that might have soil on them! And absconding without warning, for another. You scared me,” said Simion, holding on to his equilibrium very tightly indeed. “How could you go out and wander around, with your arm the way it is and the dangers the way they are, and in a town you don’t even know? What kind of a way is that to act? After all we’ve been through with that arm?”

  Doriskos rolled up his sleeve and peeled back the bandage. “Look. It’s closed.”

  So it was, fragilely perhaps, but closed, completely seamed up with healthy mauve scar tissue.

  “I’ve been avoiding looking at it, you know, but I decided to have a look at it myself today while you napped. It was closed, at long last, and I felt fine, so I decided to go out.”

  “Mightn’t you have left me a note?”

  “I did.” Raven-brows furled in puzzlement. “Wait just a moment.” Searching the night stand, then going down on his knees to find the bit of paper, which was under the bed. “The wind must have blown it. We have the damnedest luck with notes.”

  Simion took it, read it, and found himself laughing a bit.

  “I’m perfectly well. I feel fine,” said Dori, offering him a sweet coaxing smile. “Look at your roses, aren’t they pretty? They aren’t florist roses. The lady who gave them to me said they’re called Killarneys.”

  As some wines have a dash of rose in their aroma, these roses had a dash of wine. They were long-budded, of a pink almost edible in its lusciousness. They felt cool and live to the hand. The delphiniums were a fierce blue, almost indigo. There was some featherfern for green.

  “A lady gave these to you?”

  “I just stood at her fence and admired her garden, and she gave them to me. A good thing, too, for I don’t know where any florists’ shops are here. Anyhow, flowers grown in a proper yard smell better than hothouse ones. She and I agreed on that.”

  Well, if Dori had been bold enough to
saunter around and talk about flowers and beg them from perfect strangers, proper appreciation was called for. Simion took a look to see that the door was closed tight and the curtains drawn, then made himself available for a kiss.

  “I want it to rain tonight,” he thought, as the direction of the evening became clearer and his heartbeat seemed to slow and deepen in anticipation. “It rained when we were interrupted by the wire. And if it’ll rain for us tonight, loud and windy and thundery, I’ll never let myself be distracted again for anything else.” And, though the afternoon’s sky had been clear blue with only a few high indolent clouds, more clouds convened, as if to convey the smile of destiny at long last. By eight o’clock, it was raining hard. Not New Haven’s thundery summer rain, but something cool and driving, and driven by a wind rich with oxygen, an air light and wild. He felt within himself a yielding rather like the release of terrible pressure in the air just before a summer storm. Doriskos sat in one of the wing chairs, very watchful and still, as the curtains fanned in. Simion pulled all the shades down, lit candles, and took one into the bathroom. He left the door open and ran himself a bath, threw in some bath salts, and got in. He thought of all the times he’d listened to the gentle lap, lap of water as Dori bathed, or perceived him outside the door as he had his own bath. But Dori was almost entirely silent as he got up and padded to the door, and Simion was almost startled when he finally got there and stood looking down with that almost-frightened look of lust that came first with him. Then Simion smiled to him and said, “Come on in.”

  When it was over once and Simion was not yet asleep, he thought: both the swan and the horse, as I knew, by that look of the startled beast in your eyes. Your embrace is both gentle and wild, like a horse is, at once you ride and carry me, and I know the ancient secrets!

  Opposite of opposites, he thought. He’s a dark light! Simion recognized that daemonic thing he’d caught in a photograph on the beach; he realized that the walls had fallen, were down absolutely in a way that few people ever could let theirs down.

  Once on the bed, he shrugged out of his robe, then knelt up to kiss Dori and run his hand demurely down him from shoulder to loins to the rock-hard heat down there. My stallion. Caressing someone this way made him feel the oddest mix of fear and flattery—all that helpless tension for him! And would the pain of accepting it sharpen the later unmanning pleasure? He beckoned Dori close. He has that wild look about him, when he touches me it’ll be as if he’d pounced, thought Simion, and it was his last articulate thought for a while. For he was in the embrace of the daemon prince, who did everything that Simion had wanted of the more timid everyday Doriskos—who found the keenest places of his skin and kissed them until his whole life seemed concentrated there, until it almost hurt, until it hurt agreeably, until he could barely breathe, then moved on. He didn’t stop where once he would have stopped, where Andy would have stopped, where even the most famished ordinary man would have stopped because pleasure beyond a certain point can frighten—he didn’t stop there. Simion’s nerves woke, sang, cried, then sang again. Then, suddenly, he couldn’t feel Dori at all, just the cool air between them—then the hands were coaxing him over on his side, urging him to curl up. “Ahh,” he heard, a sign of happy satisfaction, as if Doriskos were simply enjoying the sight of him in this nautilus position, both furled and open. Again Doriskos withdrew his hands entirely, and the lack of them felt cold. Then he was back, mouth first—Simion could feel the heat of that tongue in the bones of his spine, in the spaces between them. Then the hands turned him prone, gently but not to be denied, and also like that opened his legs. The touch, with its combined gentleness and absolute insistence, amazed him; he would not have resisted even if he’d wanted to, which he didn’t. It was the only thing in the world that would slake the terrible singing tension he felt at the base of his spine. With a current of defenseless fear pulsing in him for his vulnerable position, Simion felt himself kissed more; the hair wiped from the back of his neck and his nape kissed, his naked back, the backs of his thighs and the insides of his knees. Finally Doriskos worked around to the most abject point of his body and gave it his worship, his unselfish mouth. Simion could feel his temperature rise and his tears come, as if he were turning to liquid from sheer helpless pleasure. “Oh, don’t,” he gasped.

  “Do you mean that?”

  “No, of course not!” said Simion—faint, hating to hear words at such a time, but after all, he’d begun it. “Hurry,” he said, but Doriskos didn’t hurry. He resumed, delicately, deliberately, feeding a flame. He’ll go on until I catch on fire, Simion thought. Then his heart seemed to lift and miss a beat at the slow shock, and he was ridden hard and slow, farther and farther, in and in. Finally Simion spilled and slipped into some agreeable half-faint. How naked and ethereal, somehow, those moans of release. They were what made this power as well as capitulation; letting someone into you like this, you knew his most intimate sounds, his most naked avowal of need and easing, and this pistoning motion that took you over from yourself and scanned like a gallop. Swan and horse, swan and horse, swan and horse.

  As he came up from an extinguished sleep he’d known for the first time, Simion thought how the sleep after this kind of lovemaking closes over you and is utterly private, a uterine mer-world, as long as it is sleep. One candle guttered in the wind—light beaten like gold, blown like feathers. The first conscious thing he did was to finger Dori’s healed forearm, wondering if he could feel the scar in the dark. He could. At his touch, Dori woke up, then woke more, then was suddenly quite thoroughly awake. “The Theory of Vibratory and Undulatory Motion,” thought Simion, remembering an old course title which, now one knew why, had always intrigued him. He was just sleepy enough not to understand the physical suggestion Dori was offering him there in that dimming, gilded darkness immediately; Doriskos finally slipped down under Simion and took his fingers to his gentle mouth, inviting him to crouch over him—offering him his clear willingness in an open-mouthed kiss. “I want you to do me,” he whispered. Simion, in shocked, unholy excitement, did his best to oblige. He perceived soon that Dori didn’t want the violent ride he’d craved and finally gotten, but something slow and sustained, with a sort of hard gentleness to it. His muffled cry of physical startlement at the beginning was mirrored by the caught cry of the end, the pleasure-shock. Simion found it all a complete surprise: He’d never have guessed this particular generosity in Dori’s desires. Nor that someone with so much cover in the outer world could manage such rapturous and active submission, nor that the taking of someone’s virginity actually was the arcane and holy act that the old gods had said it was. He wondered what Dori had thought of it—appalled by the pain once the fierce excitement wore off, or simply appalled at himself for letting any human touch him so intimately? His questions were answered. Doriskos whispered into his ear again: “When we’re safe in a place of our own, I want you to do me in your riding clothes. Actually just your boots and breeches. The harshness of the cloth, you know, to contrast with your sweet, smooth chest. That ought to be very exciting.”

  “Dori!”

  “Yes?”

  “You’re a scandal, you know,” Simion told him.

  Rather pridefully: “Yes, I know.”

  “Remember telling me that you weren’t a mollusk?”

  “Yes. And?”

  “Well, you aren’t. You definitely aren’t.”

  “Shocked?”

  “Yes!” By the ease of that, thought Simion, after everything that’s been difficult.

  “Well, we’ve already paid for what we want. I think we might as well have it.”

  XVI. Omega

  Ego sum alpha, et omega, primus, et novissimus, principium, et finis.

  Apocalypsis Ioannis 22:13–14

  (“I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.” —The Revelation of Saint John the Divine, The Holy Bible, the King James Version)

  Charlottesville, July 1, 1882. A dark young man and a fair one, you
nger, both strangers, called at a livery stable and bought a used buggy and a resigned-looking roan gelding with a white splash like an untidy communion veil on top of its head. They drove out to the university to visit Edgar Poe’s old rooms. After that, they bought hock and cider and a substantial basket of fried chicken, biscuits, cold pie, and summer fruits from one of the better local taverns. They drove out of the city, north and west into the foothills. As the terrain began to rise and the air thinned, the landscape changed. It became at once rigorous and voluptuous, became mountains.

  The mountains could overwhelm you even if you were quite cheerful, not, like these two, still rattled by a riot and the unsettling stimulation of being shot by a maniac. In the summer, there is nothing in the world so green as those heights, so clean as that air, so golden as the light between five in the afternoon and twilight. The green has a depth and force to it. In the meadows, the grass is waist-deep by this time of year. Even though it doesn’t get cut, it breathes out a green smell. This is a potent, wind-filled, violently colored world. By five in the afternoon, the air was almost chilly and fully laden with grass scent. Simion, finding a turn he knew, gave the reins a light pull and turned the compliant horse in at a trail marked at the side by a little hill of stones.

  “I’ve been here,” said Simion happily. “We can go in here if we like. This isn’t a place that anybody owns.”

  “The wilderness, huh? Are there bears?”

  “In this general region? Of course. I’ve seen them at close range. I was up in a tree once and saw a whole family below, making their way to a dewberry patch. They saw me, but they didn’t bother about me. Bears’re not like people. If you don’t go out of your way to bother them, they won’t bother you.”

  “That’s very sporting of them,” said Doriskos, unconvinced. He wished he could wrap up their picnic and the oats they’d bought for the horse, so as not to advertise food’s presence and their own to any bears in these wild-looking, overhanging woods. He had not expected, as a consequence of winning the Canova, to find himself in a fourth-hand buggy laboring up a horse path in Middle of Nowhere, Virginia. He did not feel endangered, merely exhausted, transparent, psychologically worn to the bone, and yet…