What are you doing here, I ask in the doorway. He stands there for a moment holding the turned knob of the door.
He turns to face me. Anger in his face? Bewilderment. I remember the day I caught him as he fell, fainting. His body surprisingly light. I was reminded of my biology, the lesson about the hollow bones of birds. His face, just then, much like it is now. We enter the house together.
Whose house is this? I ask, as we climb the stairs.
The Whites. I’m looking after it for them.
A picture of the twins on the wall at the top of the stairs confirms this. Cherubs.
In their bedroom, he falls across the enormous bed, facedown. Are you all right, I ask.
You should go home, he says.
I should, I say. But you have something to tell me. I realize then, until I saw him on the bed I’d no intentions. Really. He was a child to me, he didn’t exist. But his confusion was making him more than a child, as if that was what an adult was. And now he is sitting up to face me. He hands me the photograph. His bravery oscillates wildly. How did you get the picture, I say. I know what it is immediately.
How did you, he says.
A long time ago, I say, deciding to tell the truth, I was in love. I was in love with someone, and I knew he’d never love me, so I took the picture. Instead of trying to tell him how it was I loved him.
Me too, he says.
The silence between us eats me. I can’t go away again, can I? I can’t. His lips taste like wet grass, cold at first. That was the first kiss. I sit there and he moves about me as if I am a statue. As if I were something he’s made. I will be, soon: his kiss, this silence, they make me into someone else. Someone I don’t know. All of the ways I have of judging remove themselves from me like offended friends.
He tastes clean. Or empty.
What happens next goes by like a blow.
I get up, pull his clothes off. His eyes are wide, like something is trying to fit into them that can’t. I put my hands on him and it seems like as my mouth moves across the hollows of his neck, as I put my tongue across his open mouth, as I hear him choke and go quiet, and I am dizzy, as if the world is spinning faster with each thing we do, faster and faster, so that by the time I leave, by the time my foot spreads to set itself down on the ground outside, this world should be spinning so fast no one could stand on it. No one could stand it.
12
TELL ME WHAT I did. If this then that.
Warden, even in front of me, still a memory of green eyes on fire, of gold melting, a memory not of fire but of what the fire burned. A boy who reminded you of something that constantly eluded you. Do you remember the way you caught Warden that day. See the gold flesh, so familiar from a hundred practices, the gold hair, flax but not tow, the gold that was everywhere on him, the one who burned first, the one you chased as far even as this. Remember the times you walked with him in sunlight and caught yourself looking at the way the sun caught on the gold hairs of his body, the tiny hairs shorter than eyelashes. Remember that you knew from first introductions how it was with him, how he wanted you. You.
Walk the stairs to the back of Wardens dorm. What had eluded you for so long was there literally on the tip of you, gold on you everywhere as if he could gild you. Him on you as if he could turn into light and cover and color you completely, so that he was a million times a million particles of altered color tossed into someone else’s eye to show you, to take you out of the awful realm of being alone, in your body, to the realm of a shared thing, something seen. This journey that has always defeated you.
For a few short weeks, it goes like this. You at the dorm. On the roof at night. He is cold as the wind every time it starts, warm like a tear when you are done. Every time you feel less, every time you are more of a stone thing. And you go back every time hoping to feel again.
13
WARDEN SLEEPS ON the front seat. I put a blanket over him. He’s a student of yours, my mother had asked, as he went into the bathroom, when we were at her house earlier this evening.
Yes, I’d said.
How do I feel, I ask myself now, in the car.
You feel great, he says, appearing suddenly by the window, a wind with green eyes made this time from dark leaves. Yowu. You feel like you know what you have to do. I nod at him, and he is gone again. Warden struggles with a dream, does not wake up. I lean my face against the car door and it warms slowly under my cheek.
Metal is like love, it takes its temperature from touch. How did we get here?
This way.
Open me, the day says to me that morning. Go ahead. Sunlight on the lawn, the gold stitches of the needle of light coming through our trees. I go outside with my coffee and dew steams off on my bare feet, until they are cold, and then I return to the house. The phone rings and I glance down to my caller ID, and I see the name, in block letters, flash there under the number: GORENDT, ERIC, and I freeze, watching it flash, letting it go to the machine, and then go, as the caller hangs up.
What happens next, is the phone rings again, and I pick it up, even as the name flashes back across the screen.
Hello, Warden says, even as I know who it is. Even as I know now who he really is. Fee.
Yes, I say.
He’s crying then, and then he coughs and clears his throat, and he says, I need you to come here.
I can’t, I say.
No, I really, really need you to come here. I’m not going to make it. I may not make it even if you come, but please.
And inside the cold space in me, still cold like my feet, I hear myself say, Not one more. Not even one more. And I say, Okay. I am coming. Where are you. As I say it, knowing and yet, really not knowing, where that man lived in this world.
I thought he had killed a woman, at first.
His legs stick out from behind a chair, like the way it is in monster movies. I know it isn’t him anymore, that he’s not there in the body, but I say his name. Eric, I say. I see the pale legs, rounded calves, the pale, pale feet. And I turn to see Warden come toward me. His pale face. Angel, I say. Why. I say it and the word fills up with my fear.
And he comes toward me, wraps his arms around me. Fee, he says. And then he lets go.
Love’s not Time’s fool, Shakespeare writes. No, Love’s not. He’s still right. Love buys time like we used to buy ice, cold pieces of it brought home to keep what’s loved preserved from every days heat. In a box in the basement are the pictures. Here, he says to me, hands me a sheaf of pictures, programs, clippings. Here, you’re right there. Aphias Zhe. First soprano.
Ways to kill a fox-demon:
Burning. Trap it in a house. Set the house on fire.
He knows who you are now, and then you know now, too: he was Baby Eddie, the big-headed baby who peed down his mother’s leg, the boy who bounced like a toy strung on a sunbeam, standing there with these pictures of you, transmissions from oh-so-far away, of Little Eric and you side by side in a sleeping bag, your hands slanting over your eyes as you hold your hands out to stop, as if you could stop, the light from landing on the film to color the negative, to make the space that burns the silver into place on the contact sheet, that makes the photograph. I did this for you, he tells you. After he does it. This is what you don’t see: he has all the pictures, he is burning all the pictures, he is scattering fire, and then the house is burning, and he leaves, and you leave, and there is nothing and everything between you and him. There is a way he was meant to be with you more than Bridey, except that what you had for each other you have given each other and if there is more for you and Bridey it has nothing to do with what is meant by gods but what is chosen, in the most mortal way. Which one wins? The Fates rocked my cradle, Oscar Wilde once said, and you remember this saying right then, thinking that perhaps that is what this wild swinging of the earth is.
We decide that he has to go to the police and confess. I wait in the car for him. When Warden comes out finally, he’s smiling.
What, I say.
Noth
ing, he says. Just happy to see you.
We drive in silence, or rather, you do. You drive him. You don’t know what’s going through his head and you don’t ask. His happiness seems unlikely to the far extreme, it seems a product of insanity, but it’s really, you find out, for some other reason altogether, when, as you near the exit sign for the highway, he looks at you and says, Take it.
What, you ask.
Take the exit. The house is burning now.
What?
Fee, he says. We have to go somewhere else now. I couldn’t go to the police. And he curls up in the seat. He rolls the window down and produces a cigarette from his pockets, which he lights with the lighter. Smoke from his mouth. I set the fire, he says, and it’s as if the fire is inside him. The house burning but the smoke coming out of him instead.
Jesus, you say, and you really are calling for him when you say it. For you see, Warden’s happiness is from him thinking that he has you now.
And so in the car as you drive you realize that Eric is dead, and to the sky in front of your eyes, receding as you approach it, you address yourself to him, you say, I knew it from the beginning, always something you wanted, always, that there was something in you you wanted to have seen: that you were like us somehow, that inside the heavy body of you was something small and heavy, fear tidied up in muscle and skin. I wanted you dead and now you are dead and now I run from what I know, now I see what you always wanted us to see, the part of you that was just like us burns free now somewhere behind me. Zeus is you is the sky is dead. Ganymede getaway car. Escapes nothing.
You want to tell this boy next to you, how his father isn’t dead. Not the part he wanted to kill. Not as long as you are there. He’s hiding inside us now, you want to say, but you drive him away from the fire instead.
14
I GO TO my parents’ house. I let Warden and myself in the back door, leave a note to my mother that I am napping on the sunporch, and then do so, lie down on the beat-up couch under a sunbeam as thick and warm as a blanket and there in the bird-chirped quiet of the afternoon abandon myself. Warden sleeps on the floor below me.
I wake sometime after the sun had started setting. The sky deep blue above me leaves me nothing but a cold night’s rest, waiting for me to resume it. For a moment I forget everything of why I am there. My mother, in the doorway, watches me as I raise my head. I was expecting you, she said.
I screwed up big, Mom, I said. She smiles.
Bridey called here, she says. We spoke. He’ll be all right, I think. He said you’d had a fight, but he didn’t say what and I don’t want to know unless you want to tell me. He certainly didn’t.
I laugh. It’s not a fight. Not exactly.
Your father won’t be home tonight, by the way, she says. He’s got a conference down in Boston so he stayed in Portsmouth. Did you and your student want something to eat?
He spoke to you, I say.
You know he’s my outlet buddy. He’s my boy. Oh Fee. Come have some coffee.
In the kitchen, I drink her coffee. Warden walks around the yard, smoking, and I watch him through the windows. Did he tell you where he’d gone to, I ask.
He went to New York, she says.
Who’s he staying with?
I think he’s staying with John Mark, she says. It looked like his number when I wrote it down.
Did he mention anything else?
Fee, why don’t you call him yourself.
I dial the number. It was indeed John Mark’s, my friend, whom Bridey had gotten along with better than I had. John Mark, I think, had loved me in secret for some time, and then scorned me underneath that love, and so when Bridey arrived, he could welcome him. They’d become friends quickly. Bridey picks up the phone. Caller ID, he says. Hello Mister. Or is it Mom?
How’s John Mark, I say.
He’s okay. He’s been busy. He put a bid in on an apartment, and so we’re sitting here planning the garden.
What does he want, I ask.
What everyone wants. Low-maintenance greens, regular appearances by flowers. This isn’t what I want to talk about, though, he says, and I hear the scrape of something closing. It isn’t even what you’ve called about, unless I really don’t know you.
I need help, I say.
You’re crazy. I used to think it was charming but now it’s just dangerous. You call it love but it’s just humoring you, that I do.
There’s something you need to know, I say. I can’t say it over the phone.
I need to know, he says. You know what I need to know?
What, I say, afraid.
I need to know, he says. I need to know what that was.
Come here to believe me. Come back.
That day, he says. When I met you. I thought you were beyond belief. My diaries are full of entries about you, before I knew you. Me guessing this or that, talking about the things I’d heard about you. I loved you even then. But now it feels like I was set up.
I watch the insides of my mother’s house. All of this furniture, all of these boxes. All of this life. No, Bridey. You never said this, I say. But, more importantly. You were set up, just not by me.
He’s a boy, Fee, he says. He’s a child, even if he’s a beautiful child, or a mature child. He’s a child. I look at him and I wonder what he’ll look like when he grows up. I want you to think about that, he says. I’ll call you tomorrow. And then he hangs up. I look up to see Warden in the door, looking at me.
16
FROM THE OBITUARY page the following day:
Eric Gorendt, of Lincoln Falls, died sometime early in the morning the night before, at the age of 52. He had recently been released on parole, electronically monitored, to finish serving a sentence of twenty years in prison for sexually molesting twelve boys in his charge as their choir master for the popular singing group the Pine State Boys Chorus. An accomplished director at an early age, he is survived by his parents and a son, Edward. The cause of death was listed as burning.
In the dark morning, still roofed in blue and stars, Warden nibbles a doughnut, wanders the doughnut shop. We’ve gone out to get the paper and I am thinking now of how we should leave. Never come back. I shuffle the paper shut and look around. No one else here, except the counterperson.
You think no one is going to suspect us, I say.
No, he says. I think no one is going to find us.
17
I LEAVE HIM in a hotel room near the turnpike that night.
I check in, and he sneaks in once I’ve got the room open, so the clerk doesn’t see. He’s exhausted and so am I, and he falls back across the bed, arms over his head, in surrender, falling asleep almost at once. I look at him in the cheap yellow light of the room and take in the smell, of old smoke from the thousand cigarettes that must have gone out here. It’s not us, I want to say. I want to wake him and tell him, that we need to escape this, that what he’s done has trapped us and not freed us, but the planes of his sleeping face rebuke me, which is when I see myself in the mirror above the bed: tired, lonely, him stretched out below me, looking for all the world like I’ve knocked him out or worse.
You did this, I tell myself. Not him.
I don’t want to be the one to turn him in to the police. I want him to do that or not. I want him to have the choice, to say he did it or not, but I want him to choose what happens next even as I do, as I walk toward the door and, leaving the key inside on the carpet, close it. From a pay phone I call the hospital and say I need an ambulance for room 322, that my friend has closed the door and won’t answer and I think it’s an emergency.
He’s unconscious, the operator asks.
He won’t wake when I call him, I say. I am lying only a little. What he needs to hear he’ll never hear if I say it.
I roll the car down the drive to turn the engine over in the street. Drive off without headlights for the first two minutes, and then, when the headlights pick the night’s hem up off the road, I head for Cape Elizabeth, for Fort Williams. There are empt
y houses over there, perfect to hide for a little while. A night.
I park the car at the edge of the beach and I begin walking out on the sand. I stopped it, I tell myself, not sure where I am walking. I stopped it. He didn’t die. It is low tide. Dawn will be up soon and here on the beach there are scattered pools of water, shallow as a plate. The three streetlights along the beach’s edge fret me a shadow three ways around me, so that I look like a walking crowd when I look down. Walking, I see the reflections of stars in the pools, my shadows across them. And I stop at the sight of one shadow that takes a pool of night for a face, two stars where the eyes should be.
Hello, he says.
I say nothing. I want him gone, even as I know, my standing here is the only way he can speak to me.
You know who I am now, don’t you, he says.
I do, I say. The two shadows to the side of this one seem suddenly shadow wings, ready to take him away and take me with him. The night turns over us like a stile.
You know who I am now too, I say. So stay.
I wake up the next morning in the charred room of a ruined mansion that burned partly to the ground here in Fort Williams Park some time ago. No one rebuilt it. Supposedly the house is haunted, or cursed. The other houses in the historic neighborhood park, kept empty of residents to preserve them, were locked against me when I tried them, the good people of the town thinking no doubt of someone like me.
There’s a blanket over me that I didn’t put there. I get up, checking it, and then go to the window.
Bridey sits on the hood of my car, looking off to the sea. He blows on a cup of coffee, squinting. There’s a car beside him I don’t recognize, looking suspiciously like a rental.
Why did Lady Tammamo take her life instead of living forever? Love ruins monsters. She didn’t need the spell of a thousand livers to become human. She just had to love one man. Feel the change come over her: the fur recedes across her brow, the fangs flatten to a smile. The paws turn to feet and say good-bye to flight. The danger of her hides itself in shame. I wrap myself in the blanket and walk down, and then I run down the stairs set in the hill, stopping only when I am in front of him. He doesn’t move, just looks at me. It’s not the time just yet for questions, not just yet.
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