by Ezra Blake
Sometimes Jake’s feet twitch. Sometimes he curls a little tighter, but those are markers of a living body, not an inhabited one. He never moves more than an inch in any direction.
Elliot says, “Obtain for me a deep sense of modesty which will be reflected in my external conduct.”
Days. It must be days, because Jake is lying in piss too.
“I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science.”
One of the gel lights, the red one, begins to flicker.
“I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, some 4-CL-PVP and a little bit of norflurazepam to take the edge off...”
Elliot gasps and opens his eyes again. The light is out. It’s dripping breath or rainwater.
“Ja-a-ake,” he sings. “Wake up, buddy, we aren’t dead yet.”
He recites lectures until his throat is raw. Chemistry. Biochemistry. Physics. He says, “We suckle the same teat, Jake! Don’t cut it off to starve me!”
The stench of death overpowers him, and he vomits on the floor. He has the good sense to lean over, but some of it splashes his ruined tits anyway. They’ve formed itchy, wet scabs which grow thicker every time he opens his eyes.
The blue light pulses. His eyes gum shut and his emery board tongue scrapes the roof of his mouth. “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he whispers. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”
Though his stomach whines, the mere thought of food makes him retch.
“I love you so much.” He rattles his chains and bounces the noose up and down on his clavicles. “I loved you since I first saw you at the bus station,” he says, “and I was too stupid to ever say it.”
Jake stirs. He rolls his feet under him.
“And if you tell anyone...”
There’s a heavy slap of flesh on stone. Jake lies, heaving, in his puddle.
An electric shock courses through him. “Jake?” He asks. “Can you hear me? Jake?”
Jake forces a faint, hollow groan through the gag.
Words can’t capture the feeling. It fades. He clings and clings to the punchline but it always fades, and every time Elliot calls his name, the meaning trickles out of every phrase that tasted true. You’re at the end. It’s you. It’s us.
It’s beautiful. Then it’s gone, and he has a role to play.
He spends weeks blindly shoving the key against the manacles, and then, one day, it clicks. Elliot hollers triumphantly from somewhere across the chasm. Metal shrieks against the back of Jake’s neck. His head jerks and bobs around on the end of bolt cutters, garden shears—doesn’t matter. The padlock on his collar pops.
They flay his monstrous second skin to reveal duct tape, plastic, and a hollow white face that swells and reddens in the stagnant air. They drink water. They pour bottles and bottles of water over each other’s bodies, and Jake never once opens his eyes.
“Tell me when the light goes.” His jaw clicks on the hard consonants.
Elliot unscrews another lid. “It’ll be a while.”
“Just tell me.”
Water spills down their shoulders in dark rivulets. The blue light mercifully hides the filth, but the stench covers everything, ammonia so strong it burns their nostrils and stings their eyes. No gas masks. Elliot checked. The crates offer a hundred ways to bleed to death but nothing to eat and no protection. The doors resist both picks and pyrotechnics. The air grows thinner.
When he’s exhausted every option, Elliot sits in his ring of discarded implements and lets his eyes drift. Jake’s have been closed for the past hour, week, whatever. He mentions that some help would be nice, and Jake doesn’t answer, so he drifts a little longer, shivering. Could be cold, hunger, fever—it doesn’t make a difference.
One of the boxes is stuffed with white plastic tarp. He watches it swim and morph for a few minutes. Could be blue. It’s in his lap, and the fibers feel like wheat or sawgrass on his fingertips—rough in one direction, smooth in the other.
Elliot crawls across the floor, dragging the tarp behind him. Everything is heavy. He read somewhere that you weigh twice as much on Jupiter as you do on Earth.
He spreads the tarp over the wet mass of flesh that used to be Ash and says, “You can open your eyes now. I covered him.”
Jake opens his eyes. He avoids the tarp and fixes his gaze on the ceiling.
“Where did they go?” He asks.
“Ivan is dead. I don’t know what happened to Chris.”
“You killed Ivan?”
“No,” Elliot says.
Jake blinks at the light. It colors the whites of his eyes and makes him look shriveled and grim. “Well, it’s good he’s dead.” He doesn’t sound convinced. “We took out a serial killer. Even the FBI couldn’t get him.”
Elliot says, “I think I need to lie down.”
The next time he wakes, the blue glow is so dim and irregular that he first mistakes it for lightning. He’s drenched in cold sweat. Whether or not this cell is airtight, they’re running out of oxygen.
And Elliot is going to die soon.
Death festers in his mammary tissue. It rages in his acid-pit stomach and bubbles, burning, into his mouth. Under the tarp, his mother sighs and rolls onto her side.
“Jake,” he whispers. “Jake.”
Jake is touching his face. His hands are cold and he’s muttering about a fever, but he isn’t talking to Elliot. “I don’t know how,” he says. He pinches Elliot’s split nipple and peels one flap of breast away from its partner. The pain is a dull echo. “No.” He shakes his head. “Look. All of it is like that.”
He disappears for a while. Elliot closes his eyes and listens to his mother sing something soft and tuneless. It might be ‘happy birthday,’ but he can’t be sure. The light flickers.
Jake’s here, pouring liquid nitrogen over his chest. “We should have done this first,” he says. “Don’t move, okay? If you need to bite something—” he fumbles around in the near darkness, presses the leather hood into Elliot’s hand. “Bite this. I’ll be fast.”
And Elliot plunges into the frozen sea. By the time he takes his first breath of ice water, his nipples are gone. Jake’s face is a grimy blue mask and he is sawing, scraping, sewing, and Elliot’s mother sings louder and louder to drown out his sobs:
Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday dear Eli…
The light dies. Elliot cries from the cold and Jake blankets him with heat, their legs entwined, careful not to touch his chest. The fever breaks.
“He cut himself,” Jake whispers. “That’s how much he hated it, but he still kissed me.”
“She could do most things on her own, but she waited for me to help her.”
“When we were on acid, it’s like we became the same person.”
“Even when I was a girl, she always said I looked like Dad.”
“I’m scared I barely knew him.”
“I knew she was awake.”
“Fuck,” Jake says.
They lie in silence. He buries his face in Jake’s filthy hair. He smells like blood and shit, but it’s comforting, somehow; it lacks the antiseptic stench of the emergency room. Elliot’s chest throbs. Pain radiates down Jake’s side when he moves the wrong way. One of his ribs feels broken.
“Elliot,” he says. “I don’t want you to die first.”
Selfish, Elliot thinks. But he understands.
Chapter 32
He returns wearing a gold watch and a tie printed with amaranth. His hair is combed back into a stubby ponytail. He opens the hatch, flooding their tomb with sweet, vibrant sunlight, and doesn’t speak except to urge Elliot up the ladder.
Elliot can’t walk, so he clings to Christopher’s back while Jake plows along beside them, tripping several times on rocks and knotted roots. The air is damp and lovely, and the mud sucks their feet with each step, as though Mother Earth herself is grateful to see them again. Unfamiliar birdsong saturates the morning sky.
They sit o
n the floor of the shower while Chris silently inspects their wounds. Little can be done for Jake’s rib, but they clean and bandage Elliot’s chest as best they can. He counts the holes in the shower head. Until he looks, he’s beautiful, neat, and masculine, as God intended.
“I’m sorry,” Chris says.
Neither of them answer. They focus on all the least important details: the crown molding, the worn grout between tiles. Eventually, Chris takes the detachable shower head in hand and sprays his own wrist until the water is warm; he washes the grime and blood and piss and vomit down the drain in a sickening brownish swirl. Elliot lays his head on Jake’s shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” Chris repeats. “This wasn’t supposed to happen.”
He locks them in the master bedroom. Jake hears the latch; he doesn’t have the strength or will to test it, let alone to leave. They lay in bed with their arms around each other. Elliot sweats and slides against his naked body, and Jake whispers songs into his hairline: Amazing Grace and Bowie’s Five Years and everything from his favorite punk EP, The Decline. He stops once Elliot’s breathing evens out. Dusk falls.
They sleep like corpses and wake like corpses, creaking, shuffling. Elliot rolls around and moans. Jake stretches his neck and back and hamstrings until the door opens. Chris is wearing a suit. The pants are too long and the jacket doesn’t sit right on his shoulders.
“Do you need help getting dressed?” He asks.
Jake shrugs. He helps them dress. Elliot whines and winces as they tug a t-shirt over his head.
“I’m sorry,” Chris says. “All of it. I’m so sorry.”
And he isn’t going to stop saying that until someone answers, so Jake says, “It’s okay, Chris. It wasn’t your fault.”
Chris squares his shoulders. “So whose fault was it?”
“I…” Jake sighs and jams two fingers into his temples, rubbing, stretching his papery skin away from his brow. “I don’t know. But it wasn’t yours.”
“I’m going to make this up to you,” he says. “We have money. We’ll figure out someplace to stay and we can all start our lives over, and it will be a lot better this time. I promise. I’ll take care of you.”
He searches out Elliot’s gaze, but Elliot is staring deep into the space above the doorframe, motionless.
“I mean it,” Chris says. His eyes are bright and desperate. “I know what it’s like. I know it feels like you’ve disappeared and nothing is ever going to make sense again, but it will. It gets better. Everything is going to be okay.”
Jake sighs. “Okay, Chris.”
“Good. Are you hungry? I made dinner.”
“I guess.”
“Come on.” He tugs on Elliot’s limp wrist. “Come here. You’ll like it. It’s all vegetarian.”
They shamble down the hall toward the dining room. Jake could hoist Elliot over his shoulder and run, escape into the forest, contact the police. Except he can’t, and he doesn’t, and even the thought makes him sick.
“Ivan owns a villa in Italy, you know. Just outside Florence. It’s a good place to recover,” Chris says. “It’s on the lake, but in the spring the garden is so thick and full of flowers that sometimes you can’t even see it from the house. It’s really beautiful.”
“That sounds nice,” Jake says.
“It is. It will be. And Ivan says he’ll teach you Italian.”
They cross the threshold. The hall runner gives way to stone. The dining room is warm with the light of a dozen dripping candles, some in the candelabra, others jammed into melons and blocks of soft cheese. The table is laid out with chopped carrots and caprese salad, with wine, pastries, and pocked chunks of pomegranate.
Ivan sits in the chair at the center. He’s wearing a clean pinstriped suit. His copper hair is combed and gelled, his nails are manicured, and his breast pocket is packed tight with potpourri and scented disks of wax. The left side of his face is swollen and split so deeply that the white, gleaming ridge of his cheekbone is visible through the grayish-purple flesh. Ice packs nestle beneath his thighs, inside his lumpy jacket, behind the small of his back.
“Have a seat,” Chris says. “You must be starving.”
Jake doesn’t move.
“We did what we could, but this is nothing compared to the food in Italy,” Chris says, resting a hand on Ivan’s shoulder. “There’s a market in Florence that sells the most incredible brie. And the meat, too—they have cuts you haven’t even heard of.” He smiles. “You’ll have to try the eel sashimi.”
Chapter 33
There was a moment, as he bandaged together brain matter and fragments of skull, when he considered the unspeakable possibility that Ivan might never wake up. No matter how high he climbs the scaffolding propping up his comfortable life, there is no vantage point from which he sees it progressing sans Ivan. If he slipped into a coma, if he died, Chris would do the same.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers, pressing himself against Ivan’s rigid body. His skin is cold and clammy, but without the ice, the fever might kill him, so they’ll have to endure the discomfort.
“If I hear one more apology, I’ll be forced to gag you.”
He sighs gently and tucks his face into the crook of Ivan’s shoulder. They both know Ivan can’t gag him like this, but until the paralysis lifts—and it will—Chris will happily gag himself. He’ll smack himself. Hell, he’ll even waterboard himself if Ivan asks him to.
Chris laces his fingers in his blond chest hair and tugs. “Hey, can you feel that?”
“Yes,” Ivan says.
“How about…this?” He traces the furrow of his taut abdominal muscles and teases Ivan’s shaft with a loose, open palm.
“Mm, yes,” he sighs. “But I might not—”
“Doesn’t matter,” Chris says, and nips the raw, stone-burned shell of his ear. “I like you exactly how you are. I can do whatever I want to you.” He walks two fingers across his chest and grins. “Anything at all.”
“Christopher.”
“I know, I know. I shouldn’t take advantage.” A wet, open-mouthed kiss around his nipple. He drags his mouth downward, shifting toward the foot of the bed as he leaves a damp trail from Ivan’s chest to his inner thigh. “But you would tell me to stop if you didn’t want this—” he pops a finger in his mouth, sucks, and drives it into Ivan “—wouldn’t you, darling?”
He lets out a pained groan, and Chris knows he’d buck his hips against the intrusion if he could.
“Relax,” he coos against Ivan’s soft cock. He slips it into his mouth and sucks him gently as he works his fingers in and out. The trust between them is golden, rare and beautiful, so easy to crush—but Christopher’s hand is steady, and he knows how to hold it. He won’t ask.
And when they kiss, when he sinks into Ivan’s tight, cool body and kisses him like they’re the last two people on planet Earth, he doesn’t need to ask. The answers to his every question are tucked between their tongues. Ivan is infinite, full of unseen colors and unknown galaxies, notes left unplayed and words left unspoken, and Christopher Dour knows he is loved.
Acknowledgments
Special thanks (again) to Mars and Emily, who donated their time to reading and workshopping this manuscript. To Claude and Hellinger, who showed us a killer time on our “research” expedition. To our early reviewers and everyone who encouraged us. To Michael, whose art commissions kept me sane. To the real Jake, who I may never see again. To George, you fucking asshole. You are the devil.
And as always, thank you, dear reader.
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