Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  Mills jumped down the porch steps and scanned the Muldoons’ lawn for traces of Tommy. Tommy had promised to return Jeff Trader’s journal, but in the past few days every attempt to corner him had been met with annoying evasion, like trying to get a mosquito to return some blood. Mills had thrown pebbles at Tommy’s window, only to watch the light turn off. He had tried to wave down Tommy’s car in the morning, only to see it speed away. Mills had considered ringing the doorbell, but the sight of Pam Muldoon in the front windows stopped him short. Maybe Tommy had found Jeff Trader’s secrets too enticing to return. Maybe he’d discovered the key to the book’s value, the reason Magdalena Kiefer had been so insistent on obtaining it. Mills tried not to imagine what reckless uses Tommy might be envisioning for this fresh cache of secrets. He dreaded the moment Beth would stop by, today or tomorrow or any moment now, to pick it up.

  He opened the back door of the Mercedes and started collecting the small, lopsided pumpkins in the crook of his arm. As he glanced through the back window he saw the rain-blurred silhouette of a young man walking up the street. A ghostly shape marched defiantly through the gray afternoon. He let go of the pumpkins and ducked out of the car.

  Tommy strode toward him, his shoulder blades scrunched, his eyes cellophane-white and leaking across his cheeks. Was there anything more beautiful than a young man crying? Anything as rare? His knuckles slashed at his tears.

  “I’m done with it,” Tommy said, staring directly at him. “Done trusting people. Done believing in them and acting good for everyone else. Staying in my place. Always in my fucking place,” he sputtered. “Where does it get you? What the fuck difference does it make?”

  Mills had no idea what Tommy was talking about, but the knuckles hadn’t stopped the tears. “What’s the matter?” Mills shut the car door and met him halfway down the drive.

  “There’s no point if they just disappoint you,” Tommy said through chokes. “What a liar. So pathetic. Nothing ever changes. People turn out to be the worst things you could ever think of them. God. What a fucking embarrassment. I’m not going to end up like that, I’ll tell you that much.”

  “What’s wrong?” Mills asked again, reaching his hand out but afraid to make contact with Tommy’s black windbreaker. He held his palm open an inch from Tommy’s arm, as if asking for permission to land. Tommy’s eyes narrowed and he sucked snot into his throat.

  “Nothing,” he snapped. “None of it matters anyway.” Tommy’s fingers grabbed at his own windbreaker. “Jesus, all I want to do is get out of here.” Here could have been Orient—or, by the way his fingers were grabbing at his chest, his own body. “To not be stuck like this.”

  Tommy’s upper lip was shaped like the wheel well of a speeding car, his jawbone pivoting and clenching. Mills felt there was a violence to such beauty, the way it disturbed the air like a rogue frequency scrambling the airwaves. The rest of the world faded around it, dull and overcast and easily forgotten. All of Mills’s vital organs seemed to deactivate in Tommy’s presence. Say you want to mug me, I will go with you. Tell me to lie down in the middle of the street, I will lie down. It was torture not to touch it, a bird at sea unable to find a place to land, but he knew that the torture grew worse after beauty departed, leaving the dull stillness of the landscape without its only beacon.

  “I need to get that book back from you,” Mills said, his brain still mildly operable. “I promised Beth.”

  Tommy spit yellow phlegm on Paul’s dead blueberry bush. “You want to come to my room. That’s what you want. Fine. Let’s go, then.”

  Mills followed Tommy through the front door and up the carpeted steps. He heard someone in the laundry room, pressing buttons to bring the dryer to its coughing tumble. That was the order of the world downstairs, and now he and Tommy were on top of that order, quiet as thieves in the second-floor hallway. They reached his bedroom, and Tommy closed the door behind them. Mills saw his own dried blood spots by the foot of the bed. The star-constellation sheets had been removed, replaced by a constellation of NBA logos. Posters of successful black men—glistening basketball players; hooded, gold-chained rappers—covered the walls. Tommy leaned down and worked the combination on his safe. He took out a room-temperature beer and opened it, gulping down half the can. He pulled his windbreaker off and threw it on the bed.

  “You have my flask, don’t you?” he said without turning around.

  “Yeah. It’s in my room.”

  “It’s not your room. It’s Paul Benchley’s room. You’re just a visitor here. No one knows who you are.” Tommy seemed to make that distinction for his own peace of mind. That fact was worth more to him than it was to Mills.

  “So where’s the book?” was all he could think to say.

  “Is that what you want?” Tommy turned around and snapped off the can’s metal tab. He pressed his thumb against the broken ring. His face was red from crying, but the tears had stopped. The blood under his skin brought out the yellow of his hair, a cartoonish yellow, a crayon’s idea of blond. Tommy’s eyes fixed on him, their blues as shallow as they had always been but deep enough to accommodate an unspent sorrow. “I know what you want. What you’ve been waiting around for. Mills milling around for scraps. Is that why they named you that? Whoever named you did a good job.” Tommy was too untethered for the insult to sting. He leaned against his desk, curling his fingers behind him on the edge of the wood, as if he were bracing himself against an impending acceleration of the Earth. Mills swore he could feel its rotation shift. He thought of astronauts in retirement jumping around their Florida living rooms, trying to free themselves from gravity again.

  “What happened? Was it something you found out about in that book?”

  “Don’t pretend you care.” Tommy smiled coldly. “I know why you’re up here.”

  “Why am I up here?” Mills knew why he was up here. Or he thought he did. His reasons had changed, a motivational shuffle in his heart and underwear.

  “How long are you going to stay in Orient?”

  “Not long,” Mills lied. He planned to stay for as long as Paul would let him, but it was unwise right now to give Tommy an indeterminate timetable.

  “Good. I figured.” Tommy widened the stance and took a teeth-filtered breath. “So it doesn’t matter, right?” His lip snarled. “Go on. If this is what you want, fine. I dare you.” Even desperate to perform an act that he couldn’t undo, Tommy stuck to the jingoisms of adolescence.

  “Dare me?”

  “Are you just going to stand there and repeat everything I say?” His voice was slick with momentum, though his body seemed frozen in place. Tommy waited with the tense posture of a man who had climbed into a lion’s pen. Mills froze in the center of the room, presumably the lion that didn’t know what to make of the unusual food source. Tommy’s voice erupted. “What? You too scared? You’re a pussy, Mills. You know that. Go on. You have my permission. There won’t be another time.”

  “I don’t think I—” Mills stalled.

  “Yes, you do. It’s them that don’t want you to.”

  “Are you asking me—”

  “Just shut up before I change my mind.”

  Mills stepped forward. Tommy swiveled his chin, as if rejecting a kiss before it was even offered. The refusal broke Mills’s sympathy, and absent of sympathy, he found the courage to shove his hand against the zipper of Tommy’s pants. He felt the spongy bulge of delicate instruments. Blood rushed to his head, his vision numb and starry as if it were on some sort of time delay from reality. When he unsnapped the top button, he was shocked by how easily it opened. He consulted Tommy’s face one last time. Tommy squinted, took a breath, flicked his tongue across his overlapping front teeth, and brought his head to rest against the shelf above his desk. Mills dropped to his knees and unzipped Tommy’s pants.

  Missing kids. Mills didn’t know why, as he leaned on his knees and hooked his fingers over the waistline of Tommy’s jeans, he thought of missing children. Kids missing for years, for deca
des; kids who went out on bike rides or on walks to the store and never returned. Kids on milk cartons and on billboard posters in the last picture taken of them, “Have you seen this child?” though the picture was ten years old and the kid, if alive, wouldn’t look like that now. All their parents had left was a description: “Last seen wearing gray sweatpants, a green T-shirt, blue size nine Air Jordans, white socks,” as if the clothes were what the parents wanted back because they couldn’t have their child. Tommy wore blue jeans, a yellow T-shirt, black Converses, brown socks, and even as Mills lowered Tommy’s jeans he could not imagine the body underneath them.

  Mills pulled the pants to Tommy’s kneecaps. Hair flurried around the bone and disappeared up his thighs. The skin turned from tan to white, like the sand on a beach when the tide went out. He lifted Tommy’s shirt to find a matching trail of hair swirling around his stomach. Mills tugged the underwear down until it fit into the valley of his jeans. Tommy’s penis bobbed like an animal that had been exposed from under a rock, moving clumsily without the protection of its hiding place. His pubic hair was a gnarled yellow, like the burnt edge of a fried egg. His penis shot upward, uncircumcised. Mills opened his mouth.

  Not a missing kid at all, but a young man right in front of him, alive and well. Mills slowly rocked his head, acclimating his tongue and teeth. Tommy took over the task of holding up his shirt, the expression of his face strangely neutral, almost scientific, as he stared down. He whimpered and timidly pressed his hand on the back of Mills’s head. This is what Tommy wanted. And what Mills had wanted. He kept reminding himself of that as he dredged his glands for spit. This is what I wanted, since that first day on the lawn. But it was hard work, his neck muscles straining, his knees fatigued from the weight of holding himself up, his tongue feeling a slight uncertainty, which caused him to draw his lips tighter and quicken his rhythm. Mills’s foot kicked the desk chair. Sunlight found its way across the carpet. A car alarm bleated down the block. It was hard work. It was what he wanted.

  Tommy lifted his shirt over his head, until it stretched around the back of his neck but still sleeved his arms. His chest contracted with thin blue veins. Mills could taste brine mixing with his saliva, like the taste of expired Mountain Dew, and, with each breath through his nose, he smelled tinny sweat and soap. Maybe in all of the labored breathing he didn’t hear the footstep on the stairs, but Tommy did. Tommy suddenly shoved him on the shoulders, and Mills fell backward on his knees. From his seventeen years inhabiting the house, Tommy instinctively calibrated the exact amount of time between foot on stair and hand at door. He wrestled his shirt over his head, and waddled, jean-shackled, to the window, making safe distance. He stood next to the open safe, motioning Mills to get to his feet while he yanked his underwear back up around his hips.

  As Mills rose, he saw Jeff Trader’s journal lying in the safe. His blood, which had traveled in so many directions in the last ten minutes, stalled in his throat.

  “Can you at least give me—”

  “Definitions,” Tommy hissed. “That didn’t mean—”

  The bedroom door swung open, rearranging the shadows across the floor. Mills had assumed Tommy had locked the door. How could he not? A teenager who kept such minor secrets in a safe and a big secret out in the open in an unlocked room. Pam Muldoon gazed in, asking, “What is going on in here?” She looked directly at her son. His underwear was on, his T-shirt tucked into the elastic, but his jeans were still balled around his knees. Pam looked around, confused, and then saw Mills on the other side of the room. “What are you doing in my house? You are forbidden to be in my house!”

  Tommy glared at him. Mills’s lips hurt when he tried to move them. He stood in the gray light of the bedroom, unsure of his place.

  “Mom, calm down,” Tommy said, lifting his pants and struggling with the button. “Nothing’s going on. Jesus, can you knock first?”

  “Oh, something is going on!” she shouted, her voice trembling. She stared at Mills almost hopefully, as if he might provide an answer, as if he could protect her. “What are you doing in here? What made you think you could come up here?”

  “Stop it,” Tommy whined.

  “I will not stop it.” Her fingers squeezed her forearms so tightly they yellowed. No, she wasn’t looking at him like he could help her. She was looking at him like someone had left a gate open at a house in California and he had run two thousand miles across the country to come sniffing around her family. “I’m thinking about your future,” she said to her son. “And this kid doesn’t have one.”

  “Shut up,” Tommy screamed.

  Mills was too stunned to ask for the journal now. The situation had moved past any chance of getting what he’d come for. He would be lucky to get out of the house without being hit.

  “For God’s sake, why were your pants down?”

  Mills knocked against Pam’s elbow as he raced out of the room. He rounded the hall and skidded down the steps, his left shoulder sliding along the lime green wall. He opened the front door, triggering the blare of an alarm, and broke into a headlong sprint. He didn’t look back, afraid he’d discover that Pam Muldoon was chasing behind him as if trying to get her son back.

  He ran into Paul’s house, up the steps, and into his bedroom. He stripped off his clothes and fell against the beams of the floor. The wood took the beats of his heart, and the cement took the beats of the wood, and the soil took the beats of the cement. Kids in the world went missing every day and so did parents. Mills knew that no one was looking for him. No one was waiting for a phone call with news about where he was. So he delivered the news to himself. I’m here. I’m alive. He gave his excitement to the floor.

  CHAPTER 15

  When the rain stopped, the seagulls stalked the road. They flapped their black-tipped wings on the cement and left the trees to inland birds. Mills kneeled on the sofa cushions, staring out the parlor window. He wasn’t there to bird-watch. He was scanning the front lawn for angry Muldoons to appear and pronounce their hatred of him, the violator of their blameless son. He half expected Pam or Bryan to ring the doorbell to have it out with Paul. Mills would be given fifteen minutes to pack his bag before being put on the first train back to New York. An hour passed, and then another. Paul worked on his laptop in the dining room, oblivious to the coming threat.

  Paul asked him more than once why he was looking out the window. “Are you waiting for a delivery? Are there birds falling from the sky?” Paul left his chair to examine the view himself. “Seriously, Mills, enough. You’re making me nervous. There’s nothing out there.”

  Mills had never told a foster parent about his sexuality. The secret swam inside of him like a great white shark that couldn’t escape the channel of his windpipe. It wasn’t that he was ashamed of being gay; in fact, it was one of the few dependable shelters he knew in the chaos of temporary homes, like a prayer he could recite every night in any unfamiliar bedroom or over any badly cooked meal. It simply made no sense to come out multiple times to multiple sets of foster families, each overcrowded kitchen falling silent at the news, each eye staring interminably into the distance where other people’s messes began to undermine their own sense of order. So, early on, Mills toughened the parts of him that were weak, the weakest parts being the quickest to callus. He acquired the grunts and skirting eyes of secret-keepers. His plan since childhood had always been to move east to the city where no one cared what men did with each other.

  He had now overshot that city by one hundred miles, and Paul stood in the center of his living room, waiting for an answer.

  “I was over at Tommy’s,” he started.

  “Tommy’s,” Paul said.

  “Yeah, and I don’t know. His parents don’t like me.”

  “I told you not to worry about the Muldoons.”

  “Just for the time I’ve spent with their son. Like it’s my fault he gets into things they don’t approve of. I’m not sure there’s such thing as a bad influence, not if you want the same thing
s.”

  Mills glanced at Paul with a painful smile, and he was sure Paul knew, understood, right then. Paul let out a whistle and started clearing the dishes from lunch. Twelve oyster shells circled the plate. Paul had eaten six of them, but Mills had lost his appetite for quivering mucus.

  “We’re not talking about drugs here, are we?” Paul asked. His face was an unreliable barometer.

  “No, not drugs, of course not,” Mills replied. “I told you, I’m done with that.” How clean did he have to come? Should he tell Paul about the hand job he gave to a thirty-eight-year-old truck driver on a highway in Arizona? About the young, handsome hitchhiker with low-lidded eyes from Fort Bragg, California, a guy about his own age named Millford Chevern, who took his virginity in a cornfield near the Nebraska border? It was a little late for confessions, and explicit details only confused the point. Mills sat on the sofa, cupping his mouth in his hand. “I hope you know I wouldn’t consciously do anything to upset you. Or ruin your standing with your neighbors. You’ve been so kind to me.”

  Paul didn’t hesitate. He rested the plate on the coffee table and leaned over the couch. “There’s no trouble with me. Got that?” he said. “There’s nothing you could do that would make you unwelcome here. So please, for the love of God, get away from the window. I’m willing to buy a television right now if you promise not to go near that window for the rest of the night.”

  For a second, their eyes locked, as if they were test-driving each other for a future they were both too old to share: son to father and father to son. Paul held the stare until Mills broke it. If other details about himself had been a lie, this truth went deeper than the fact of his real name. Paul carried the dishes into the kitchen, and Mills got up to stack kindling into the fireplace. The fire ate the logs.

  It was the sound of Beth’s car in the driveway that brought Mills racing back to the window. She slammed her car door and proceeded up the porch steps. Her clothes were rumpled and her skin was iridescent, glossy as porcelain left out in the rain. Still, Beth had the confident walk of someone beautiful, the stride of someone who had been told she was attractive early in life: even if the beauty eventually faded, the confidence remained. Mills opened the front door before Beth had time to ring the bell.