by Adam McOmber
It had become Pascal’s habit, in every public space, to watch men. Young men or old, it did not matter. As long as they were handsome. As long as he could dream about them. He disregarded everything else. Decorations were exhausting. Women, of no interest. He liked men who were tall, men who had brooding faces. He often imagined what a man’s lips would taste like (cigar smoke or the blood of red meat). He wondered what it would feel like to kiss the delicate hair on a man’s chest. Or to put his hands around a man’s smooth waist and draw him close. Pascal’s imagination had grown so powerful, so intoxicating, that he could become intimate with any stranger he encountered without even as much as saying hello. He made love to phantoms in the aisles of the marketplace and on the soot-spoiled platforms of the train station. He drank the sweat from ghosts. His aunt had once glared at him with her single good eye and said: “Pascal, your mother always feared you might go—how should I say—Greek.” He’d concealed a grimace. No one should ever know of his desires. To be discovered would be a kind of death. “I’m French, my dear,” he assured her, patting his aunt’s liver-spotted hand and maintaining his composure. “As French as you or poor dead Mama.”
In one gray corner of the museum, Pascal found what he was looking for: a young man standing before a painting. He was blond-haired, beardless. His wide shoulders impressively filled out his traveling suit. And he held himself with a certain sense of fortitude, as one who had perhaps taken part in various rugged sports at school. The painting that captured his interest depicted two dark haired youths. They lay, entwined, on a low velvet couch. The lither of the two held a bouquet of red poppies, and he rested his head on the broader youth’s shoulder. Both appeared as if they might never stir again. Behind their sofa, a colonnade opened onto a star-filled night.
Pascal observed the painting in silence, edging as close to the blond young man as he dared. He imagined removing the man’s suit jacket, unbuttoning his linen shirt. He would rub his lips against the young man’s shoulders. He would slide his tongue along his ruddy neck.
Then, something surprising.
The object of Pascal’s unfolding fantasy turned. “What do you think of it?” the young man said.
Pascal only stared at him for a moment. Such a thing as this had never happened before. And he wondered briefly if he’d imagined the words.
“I’m sorry,” the young man said, running one hand through his thick blond hair. “I don’t speak much French.”
“American?” Pascal asked, feeling a pleasurable chill.
The young man gave a nod. “Nobody here speaks English. It’s not like Paris.”
“My mother, she—” Pascal said, pausing to search for the word. “She instructed me.”
The young American grinned. Such a handsome grin. “What a lovely mother,” he said. “So these two—” He pointed at the silent youths in the painting. “What do you think?”
“They are—” Pascal said, looking at the still bodies once more. It suddenly occurred to him that they might be corpses. They were so pale. So calm. He knew this was absurd. But he could not stop himself from saying: “Are they dead?”
“Oh no,” the young man said. “No, no. They’re gods. Lesser gods. One is Sleep. The other is Death. Brothers.”
Pascal rubbed a finger against his chin, examining the painting further. “They look—not like brothers.”
The American laughed. “Alexander Hartford,” he said, extending his hand. Pascal shook it and introduced himself. “All the gods are brothers,” Alexander continued. “But these two in particular—these two—I’m going to use them in my argument.”
“Argument?” Pascal asked.
“A paper,” Alexander said. “For my dissertation.”
“You are a student?” Pascal said.
“That’s right.”
Pascal allowed himself to drift once more into fantasy. As a boy, he’d read many romantic novels. The idea of an American student traveling alone in France made him feel positively lightheaded. He wished his life might ever be so exciting. “Sleep and Death,” Pascal repeated, looking at the painting. He enjoyed the way Alexander smelled—like the dark American wilderness.
Alexander cleared his throat, looking back at the painting. He appeared to consider something before speaking. “Which do you imagine yourself to be?” he asked finally. “Sleep or Death?”
“Which?” Pascal asked, surprised by the question. For what could such a question mean? “They’re very much alike, aren’t they?”
“You must be Sleep then,” Alexander said, taking a step closer. “Sleep is unsure. Death always knows his purpose.”
Pascal ran his fingers through his own dark hair, feeling the dampness of it. He wondered what might be happening. He was suddenly afraid to imagine anything beyond this moment.
Alexander smiled. “Maybe we should go down the street,” he said. “The little cups of coffee that they serve at the shop on the corner—they look, well, just right.”
2.
At the coffee house, seated before a large window, Alexander talked about his paper as he sipped coffee from a bone-colored cup. Most of what he said, Pascal did not understand (something about the effect of religious art on the human mind . . . the significance of the icon.) Yet when Alexander stopped speaking, Pascal said he approved of the ideas. He felt so nervous. He wasn’t sure what else he could say.
“I think you might be the sort who likes almost everything, aren’t you?” Alexander said.
“Today,” Pascal replied, feeling a blush rise on his cheeks. “Today, I suppose I am.”
“Do you want to know more?” Alexander asked. “Would you like to accompany me on my investigations tomorrow? I could use an assistant.”
“Please,” Pascal said, having wanted nothing more in his entire life. “Please, yes I would.”
3.
They met for a light breakfast the next morning. Alexander announced they would go to the ruin of a church at the western edge of the city where they would observe a number of frescoes. By the time this decision was made, a giddy fresh feeling had come over Pascal, the sort of emotion that triumphs over dust. His aunt had watched him leave the house that morning. She’d been seated in her high-backed wooden chair. She looked like the Queen of the Dead, he thought, arrayed on a ghastly throne. “And where are you going today, my dear?” she’d intoned.
“To see someone,” he replied. “A friend.”
“You have no friends here, Pascal,” she said. “You have only just arrived in Nîmes.”
“I’ve been here six months,” he said. “I met him yesterday.”
She stared at her nephew. “You must be careful about new friends,” she replied. “I have always kept to old friends myself. The “new” is often remarkably dangerous.”
Pascal and Alexander made their way down the narrow, cobbled streets, laughing together. The persistent antiquities of Nîmes seemed to flower in their presence.
“New friends,” Alexander said, laughing after Pascal had told him the story. “They are the very best sort, I should think.”
“My aunt thinks I should stay always at home,” Pascal replied. “She thinks I should mourn my mother’s passing.”
“Your mother?” Alexander asked, looking surprised. “She is dead?”
“It’s been half a year.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t—”
“We don’t need to talk about it now,” Pascal said.
“No?” Alexander said.
“No,” Pascal replied. He brushed the young American’s hand with his own and then walked on.
4.
Later that evening, Pascal found himself drunk on wine. He and Alexander sat together in a candlelit café. Alexander seemed even more emboldened than usual. Every word that sprang from him seemed of a new and vibrant tongue.
“Do you know the story of Apollo and his male friend Hyacinthus?” Alexander asked.
Pascal raised his brow. “I suppose I do.” A youth and a god, he thought
. They fell in love. One of them became a flower.
“What about Achilles and Patroclus?”
“Of course.”
“And do you believe in—as they say—beloved friendship? Between men, that is.”
Pascal smiled faintly. “There are so many stories. How can it not be true?”
They both paused. They sipped their wine.
“What if two men should find themselves in such a state?” Alexander asked finally. “What should they do?”
Pascal pondered this, staring into his glass of dark wine. He thought of his aunt. He thought of his mother. “They could both drink poison, I suppose. Put themselves out of their misery.”
“I don’t think so,” Alexander said.
“Or they could flaunt convention? Do as they please.”
Alexander leaned back in his chair, lacing his fingers behind his head. “There we are.” He reached forward suddenly and touched Pascal’s hand. “You’re such a surprise, you know that?” he said.
Pascal took another sip of wine. “So are you.”
5.
In the days that followed, the world around the two men shimmered with fantasy. Pascal spent his nights dreaming a life with Alexander. Perhaps they would live together in the countryside: tend a small farm, read poetry, make music. For the rest of their days, they’d exist in a kind of bliss among sheep and goats. He liked picturing Alexander in rough peasant’s garments, carrying wood.
After supper one night, Pascal’s aunt spoke to him from the shadows of her velvet drawing room. “And how is your new friend, my dear?”
“He is well,” Pascal said. “He is an American.”
“Christ’s blood,” his aunt said. “What foolish game are you on about?”
“It’s good to know someone,” Pascal said. “This city has been a lonely place.”
“The Americans are nothing but rudeness and vigor. You’ll certainly collapse if you attempt to follow him about.”
“I doubt that,” Pascal said.
“Your mother is dead.”
“She is,” he replied. “But I have recently discovered that I am not.”
6.
Pascal and Alexander visited an old chapel one evening to see another relic. A local priest had forbidden them to enter the place, but they’d gone anyway when the priest had ventured off for his dinner. Alexander said that, even if the old man returned, he’d be drunk, and they could easily escape him. Disobedience, Pascal had begun to realize, was part of the fun in Nîmes. Everyone moved so slowly in the old city. One could never be caught for anything.
The tapestry they aimed to see hung behind a wooden partition and was illuminated only by the light of the boys’ own lantern. “The greatest of the sacred arts,” Alexander said, “makes the invisible world visible.” He touched Pascal’s arm as the two of them stood before the vast and threadbare tapestry. The scene displayed was a Greek pastoral—playful erotics in a sunlit field. Young men and women lay together in various states of undress. Over the years, this particular field had grown gloom-ridden. Gray nymphs and yellowed satyrs could be seen lurking in the surrounding woods.
In one corner of the tapestry, rising from the woolen grass, was a pale figure. The figure didn’t immediately draw Pascal’s attention. The bodies in springtime ecstasy were more obviously compelling. But then slowly, Pascal’s gaze gravitated toward that lonely figure. The creature, he thought, was difficult to see even when Alexander held the lamp close, and the yellow light spilled out over the woven surface. The figure stood on two legs, and its body was covered in a layer of dirty white hair. No elegant horns sprouted from its head, nor did it carry any antique musical instrument. It was a blunt form, simian in appearance. A sort of pale ape, though not precisely an ape. It had terrible eyes. Pascal later thought they were not like eyes at all. They were instead bleak instruments, orifices that did not gather images but devoured them. The white ape appeared to study the lovers in the field.
“What god is that?” Pascal asked, not wanting to get any closer to the pale form. He hoped there would be some explanation, just as there had been with the figures of Sleep and Death.
Alexander knelt before the image to get a better look. “I don’t—” he said. “It looks like it was added. It doesn’t belong.”
“Who would put such a thing there?” Pascal said, gazing at the beast.
Alexander shook his head.
“We could ask the old priest,” Pascal said.
“He wouldn’t know,” Alexander said, glancing again at the tapestry. “And even if he did, I don’t think he’d tell us.”
As they spoke, Pascal felt as though the creature’s regard had suddenly and impossibly fallen upon the two of them. It was as if the beast—covered in its blight of hair—had heard them speaking quietly in the nave. And now it watched the two boys as it had previously watched the lovers in the field. This presented a sort of upset in Pascal’s heart. The fantasy he’d been living for the last few weeks with Alexander suddenly seemed under great and inescapable scrutiny.
Alexander must have felt the beast’s gaze as well because he bowed his head, as one might in the presence of something holy.
“It’s come to haunt them,” Pascal said. “To haunt the people in the field. It wants to make them miserable.”
Alexander remained silent.
It was in that moment that the young American appeared transformed. His face—the face Pascal had come to think of as the most beautiful he’d ever seen—appeared glasslike, fragile. The light of the lantern actually seemed to pass through Alexander’s flesh. All the futures Pascal had dreamed for them became as thin and fragile as that face.
“The priest was right,” Alexander said. “We shouldn’t be here.”
“They should take the thing down,” Pascal replied. “Put it in a chest.”
7.
Pascal and Alexander left the chapel just as the stars were beginning to shine. That evening, they got drunk on tavern wine again. But the wine tasted sour, and Pascal felt sick from it. Together, they stumbled back to Alexander’s rented rooms and ended up in the same bed, entwined like Sleep and Death. It didn’t feel like they were gods though. It felt like something altogether different.
Pascal awoke that night, startled. He felt a presence at the foot of Alexander’s bed. He couldn’t quite see the figure, but he could feel it watching them. And he could smell it too. A scent like ashes. Like old death. Pascal imagined that the tall shadow at the end of the bed was the creature from the tapestry. Something ancient and watchful. Something that stood beyond the ages of man. It didn’t care for the two boys. It didn’t care for anyone. It hailed from a silent realm. A place where things were meant to remain invisible. Pascal called out, loudly enough to awake Alexander.
“What do you mean, the creature was here?” Alexander asked after Pascal explained what he’d seen, half in English, half in French.
“It followed us,” Pascal said. “It sees us.”
Alexander rolled away, facing the wall. “Go to sleep, Pascal,” he said. “You’re drunk.”
8.
The two boys saw less of each other after that. Alexander announced that he would soon be leaving Nîmes. He’d come across a description of a church in London with paintings of Paradise. He said he needed to view it for his project.
“Isn’t this paradise enough?” Pascal asked. It was an attempt at humor. Yet he found he felt disgusted by the desperate sound of his own voice.
Alexander looked away, pretending to be distracted by a white chicken roaming the cobbled street.
9.
“And where is your new friend?” Pascal’s aunt asked one evening when she saw him seated alone in the library of the dark house. The rasp of her voice was almost too much for him. She was like some gray revenant in the doorway.
“He’s gone,” Pascal said.
His aunt swayed in the threshold, squeezing the black handle of her walking stick. “Back to America?” she asked.
; “No,” Pascal replied flatly. “Just gone away.”
“These things happen, my dear.” There was a note of sympathy.
“Yes,” Pascal replied. “For the rest of my life, I suppose.”
10.
Pascal’s cousin, Elise, came to visit Nîmes in the month that followed. She was a pretty, dark-haired girl with ambitions of marriage. She was also the sort of person Pascal could sometimes reveal things to. Elise had a way of not being shocked—largely due to her own self-involvement. They sat together at an outdoor café, and Pascal told his cousin about his time with Alexander.
“The world of men,” Elise said before Pascal had finished. “I cannot say I understand it. What did auntie say?”
“She was afraid,” Pascal said. “And then I was afraid. I wonder if I’ll ever be free of him—the memory, I mean.”
Elise adjusted the satin folds of her dress. Wordlessly, she peered down the boulevard, as if the cold wind there had suddenly cohered and become a visible body. Pascal wondered, for a moment, if his cousin really could see something there. The thought frightened him all the more.
Elise began talking of her own mother’s interest in planning a wedding. “She wants white lilies, of all things, near the altar,” Elise said. “Can you imagine that, Pascal?”
“Like a funeral,” he said.
Elise shook her head. “The very same.”
Night Is Nearly Done
1.
When no bear was in the fighting ring, the metal collar lay in the dust—a black shackle, shot with rivets, fitted with an adjustable hinge. The Bear Master invited patrons to examine the collar before the fight, and men like my father spent time listening to the satisfying snick of the latch and discussing the finer points of its construction. Father threatened to put the thing around my own neck on more than one occasion, and the other men laughed as I scrambled away. He dragged me to the fights every week. He was drunk and loud, singing the common songs and calling out the names of the bears to the darkened houses along the way. Sackerson, the blind, eyes put out with a searing brand; Whiting and Stone, the twins; and behemoth, Harry Hunks, a god in fur.