The Coming Storm

by Paul Russell

  Outside the window, the snow was still falling thickly, on village and forest and river and castle. Märchen. He had tried to think of that word earlier. Fairy tale, diminutive of the word for rumor. Sighing deeply, he lay down on his austere futon and closed his eyes to a darkness in which countless rose-red princes lay dreaming, in thorn-clad bowers, of other, waking princes, and kisses, and warm, warm lips.

  He wasn’t sure how long he had been asleep when a movement wakened him, a hand on his shoulder, a choked voice close to his ear saying, “I think this is what you want.”

  XII

  The sun, shining more brilliantly than seemed possible, smothered the room in light. He rubbed his eyes in amazement, not remembering, for a moment, where he was or why, till he looked out the window to see acres and acres of snow, snow piled so high, so deep, it would be spring before you ever glimpsed the ground again.

  When he’d slipped naked and shivering into the dark bedroom and gently lifted the covers to slide in next to Tracy’s recumbent form, he’d had no idea what would happen, but he’d come this far and figured the most Tracy Parker could do was throw him out of his bed. But that hadn’t happened; Tracy had not pushed him away. Instead, with a sigh that sounded surprisingly like misery, he’d opened his arms and pulled him close, not saying a word, only holding him tight, the way you might hang on to a life raft if you thought you were drowning.

  And after that? He must have fallen asleep right away in the warm lock of that embrace, exhausted by the day’s wanderings, passed out on a surfeit of urgently achieved fulfillment, because the next he knew light was flooding the room and beside him, curved protectively away on the other side of the futon and dead to the world, was Tracy Parker. And beneath the both of them, like despair itself, Noah felt the starkly familiar sensation of a cold, urine-soaked sheet.

  It couldn’t have happened, he couldn’t have pissed Tracy’s bed, but of course the shaming possibility that haunted all his nights had come true.

  “Fuck!” he said, half aloud. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” The incantation, as usual, changed nothing. He’d been so careful, those nights he’d stayed over to house-sit, to bring a plastic undersheet along just in case. He’d always been so prone to accidents of one kind or another, whether breaking bones or losing things or pissing the bed or setting forest fires, that his therapist back at the other school had worried: too many accidents are no accident. Sometimes it seemed like there was some implant in his brain that made him sabotage everything that came his way.

  And to think that he had been on the verge of everything. After months inside his head, he’d wanted reality, and that’s what he’d gotten, only reality was turning out to be more than he’d bargained for. Shifting onto his side to face Tracy’s back—just a bare shoulder, spread with a few freckles, and the curve of his straw-colored head were visible outside the covers—Noah struggled not to weep in frustration. That Tracy Parker was actually lying beside him in the flesh seemed too good to be true. That in a matter of minutes, half an hour—it didn’t matter, did it?—Tracy would wake up to find Noah had pissed in his bed seemed too awful to live through. You stupid fucking baby, Noah accused himself. You’ve ruined it. There was no way Tracy Parker would have anything to do with him after this.

  The only thing left—a melancholy, desperate task—was to salvage whatever he could from the wreckage of his dream. Gingerly he scooted himself closer to the sleeping figure, cozying up under the covers till he nuzzled his chest against Tracy’s back, his hips against Tracy’s boxer-clad buttocks. His hard penis lay pressed up flat against firm flesh. Lightly he kissed that exposed shoulder, then allowed his lips to linger against the papery texture of skin. He draped an arm across the unconscious body, letting his palm rest against Tracy’s chest, his fingers splayed among the blond hairs there. Don’t wake up, he willed the sleeper. At least not yet. He kissed Tracy’s neck, the back of his earlobe; circled a nipple with his thumb. Then he trailed his hand lower, past the navel, the relaxed, slightly convex stomach. Did he dare? His fingers toyed with the waistband of Tracy’s boxers, and the sleeper moaned groggily, coming slowly, indolently, out of the depths, then seeming in an instant to bolt fully awake.

  “What?” Tracy said in alarm, sitting upright and looking around with a wild, confused look. “Oh yikes,” he said. “What a nightmare. Somebody,” he added almost as an afterthought, “went and pissed the bed.” He stood up and threw the comforter aside. There, like a kidney-shaped swimming pool, was the faint yellow outline of the offending stain.

  “I’m really, really sorry,” Noah said, all at once conscious of his nakedness, his erection that lay against his stomach.

  Tracy looked at him curiously. “Oh Jesus,” he said, gazing nonetheless at the arousal Noah defiantly made no effort to conceal, “don’t worry about the futon.” He laughed nervously, ran a hand through his heroically mussed-up hair. “That’s the least of my worries.”

  By now they should have been totally carried away, surging upstream toward the source of the mysterious river that was love, life, happiness, but Tracy Parker didn’t want him, and why should he ever have thought that he did?

  “Make yourself decent,” the unhaveable Tracy Parker said firmly, though Noah could feel his naked body thoroughly, even greedily scrutinized. “Go take a shower. We’ll sort this all out later. We’ve got plenty of time.” His voice, attempting to sound casual, nonetheless quivered, though whether it was with anxiety or excitement, Noah couldn’t tell. “What’s it look like out there?” his teacher continued nervously. “Two feet? Two and a half? For better or worse, neither of us is going anywhere today. So let’s say I make us some breakfast, and we’ll act like civilized human beings here.”

  Feeling both chastised and bestirred, Noah got up slowly from the futon and forced himself to stretch luxuriously, facing Tracy, allowing the man full view of his slim body, hairless except for its treasure trail and patch of pubic bush that sprouted a penis still as upright as a teapot’s curving spout.

  What would have been really civilized, Noah thought, but what Tracy Parker unfortunately didn’t suggest, would have been an offer to share the shower’s hot, healing stream with his rowdy young guest.

  The last thing he wanted to think about was his dad, but his dad was exactly the subject Tracy had to bring up. They sat before big bowls of oatmeal topped with sliced bananas and granola—his staple, Tracy bragged, from carpentry days in New York. “Will he be worried?” he asked in an exasperating voice of concern. “Shouldn’t you at least give him a call, let him know you’re okay?”

  Noah shifted uneasily in Tracy’s luxurious maroon bathrobe and resented the kindly proffered advice—as if Tracy could possibly know anything about the way it was between him and his dad. He tried to sound indifferent, though he worried, even then, that he might well be inadvertently giving something away. “Oh, he’ll be fine,” he said. “It might do him some good to worry now and then.”

  Tracy didn’t seem too pleased, but what could he do? He’d gone and dressed himself as if for an ordinary day: jeans, a red flannel shirt, white socks but, of course, since he forbade them indoors, no shoes. Noah liked that his teacher sort of needed a shave. He’d never seen the immaculate Tracy Parker unshaven, and the dark stubble definitely had its appeal.

  Sipping his tea and frowning a bit, Tracy said, “So I guess things haven’t gotten any better between the two of you.”

  Noah tried not to talk too much about his dad; he had the distinct feeling that Noah Senior did not like to be described or analyzed behind his back, and he could never get over the paranoid notion—but who said it was paranoid?—that everything would eventually get back to him. “I have my ways” wasn’t his dad’s favorite sentence for nothing. So maybe, on second thought, Tracy Parker should be worried after all. It was highly unlikely that his dad would go to the trouble of tracking him down—he’d just wait to give him hell or worse later—yet it wouldn’t take too much to figure out, if he were so inclined, that
if he hadn’t gone off to his mom’s house, then the Forge was probably the next likeliest destination.

  Well, that would certainly be enlightening, wouldn’t it, an eye-opener for everybody if his dad came barging onto the Forge campus, making a beeline—but how could he know?—for Tracy Parker’s nice faculty house. You paid for me to get educated up here, Noah challenged the absent but unforgiving figure, so what did you expect? That I wouldn’t take advantage of the opportunities? Maybe the possibility never occurred to you that I might be as good at seizing opportunities as you ever were, Mr. Phillips Andover and Dartmouth College.

  “You really want to know my dad?” he said to Tracy. “Here’s Noah Senior in a nutshell. He tells me I have to be in New York for Christmas, so I go. No big deal. And then he doesn’t show up. He’s got business. Okay, no big deal either, though I could’ve gone to see my mom if I’d known, which is probably why he wanted me to be in New York in the first place, so he could fuck with whatever plans she might have made. Because that’s all they do, is fuck with each other’s heads. I mean, they haven’t been married in, like, seven years, and they’re still fucking with each other’s heads like there’s no tomorrow. My dad’s worse about it, but she does it too. It’s like their way of relating. Or my dad’s way of relating; he does the same thing with his other former wife. And his fiancée.”

  “Your dad’s working on number three?” Tracy said. “I never knew that. I’m impressed.”

  “You don’t know my dad,” Noah told him, feeling, despite himself, a defiant touch of pride. “If he wants something, he goes after it. Like he’s going after Central Asia right now. The old Soviet underbelly.” It was his dad’s phrase, and he was surprised to find himself using it.

  “Like father, like son.” Tracy laughed.

  “No,” he corrected Tracy touchily. Why did everyone always have to say that? “Definitely not.”

  Whatever he thought about that, Tracy knew well enough to take the hint. “So back to your story,” he urged. “And have more oatmeal if you want.”

  But the detour had taken Noah too far afield; he couldn’t remember exactly what story he’d wanted to tell, only that under no circumstances did he want to include the part about Chris Tyler and his doctor friend, the threeway that had nearly happened but then, thank God, didn’t. Remembering that close call, though, took him back to the broader outlines of his narrative. “Okay,” he continued. “So I’m fucked, and my mom’s fucked, and my dad’s nowhere to be seen, and I’m stuck with Gunila.” Should he mention that she was Stolichnaya Spokesperson to the World? He didn’t want to get off track again because the tricky part was coming up.

  “After a couple of days I make my own plans; I’m supposed to hang out with this guy from school. And a friend of his,” he added, thinking, Why not stick as close to the truth as possible? “So then right before I’m supposed to go over there, what does my dad do? He shows up and says he’s taking us out to dinner, me and Gunila both, and when I say I’ve got other plans he says, well cancel them, and when I say no, I’ve already made these plans, Dad, these are my plans…”

  “It escalates from there,” Tracy finished for him. “Well, I still think you should call him. Just for good measure.”

  Don’t press me, Noah thought, though what he said was, “I’ll think about it.” There was lots of stuff from the holidays Tracy Parker didn’t need to know about. He didn’t need to know, for example, that Georgiana Baldrick, the coke-fiend wife of his dad’s lawyer, had slipped her tongue in his mouth when she unexpectedly kissed him good-bye at the end of a Christmas party. He didn’t need to know that a certain not-so-innocent somebody had already had a cock in his mouth as well, albeit briefly and meaninglessly. He certainly didn’t need to know just how close, out of desperation, out of hopelessness, that somebody had come to taking up Chris’s New Year’s Eve proposition, and all because he’d nearly given up (and thank God it hadn’t been completely) on the possibility that he and Tracy would ever be together, even if it only meant something so complicatedly simple as their just being the kind of friends it had seemed, for a while during the fall’s golden excitement, they had been on the verge of being.

  If certain places you came to in your life felt right, then how many others were just as clearly the wrong place to be? It would have been nothing but perversion, pure and simple, to have ended up in bed with Chris and his doctor friend. It would’ve been no good for anybody. The world, when you got down to it, was disturbingly full of close calls.

  “All finished?” Tracy said with a repellent cheerfulness that was utterly beyond Noah. “I tell you what: why don’t I do the dishes, and you can dry.”

  Why don’t we just go back to bed and get it over with? Noah thought bitterly. He’d neither washed nor dried a dish in his entire life, but if that was what it took to get Tracy Parker to love him, then he was game for it.

  Since there was only the one snow shovel, he and Tracy took turns uncovering the driveway. He hadn’t exactly seen the point since the road in front of the house, because it was a dead end with only two other houses on it, would probably remain unplowed till tomorrow. But Tracy wouldn’t be dissuaded. “Better sooner than later,” he said, a bit hypocritically, Noah thought, given how things were turning out. But what could he do but go along as good-naturedly as possible? Soon his shoulders, unused to the exercise, were aching. His lungs stung with icy air; he exhaled clouds of frosty vapor. But it was great to be outside, to be under a sky so blue it shone like enamel, to see Tracy’s house settled into snowbanks like a ship stranded by Arctic ice floes, as if they were explorers armed only with the scantest of provisions, now set out on foot toward some unimaginable discovery just over the horizon.

  He never used to like snow, its suffocation of the landscape, till his seventh-grade biology teacher, Mr. Brookner, had said, “Think of it as a protective blanket that’s actually keeping all the plants warm.” Surprisingly, that had done the trick, and ever since then he’d felt strangely nervous in winters when there wasn’t a cover of snow, everything naked and exposed to the killing winds and frozen star-haunted nights.

  The Toyota was completely buried; nothing but a hillock marked its secret grave. He shoveled a narrow path toward the driver’s side and managed to pry the door open. That dim space, lit only by eerie snow-filtered light, beckoned mysteriously; he couldn’t resist sliding into the driver’s seat. It was the den of some hibernating animal whose happy plight, slumbering safe from the wild world months at a time, he profoundly envied. Not fifty miles away, under this healing white comforter, his ruined forest likewise slept; in twenty years it would be as if nothing had ever happened there. Twenty years in nature’s clock was a catnap, the wink of an eye. Before his eyes, as if caught by time-lapse photography, he saw the hated settlement of Forest Haven collapsing into ruin, the roofless brick shells of the houses strangled by vines, the rooms invaded by shrubs and saplings, grass sprouting through cracks in the asphalt of abandoned roads, great trees surging up, splitting walls, their roots turning under the last evidence that the place had ever been violated.

  “Hey, you there,” Tracy called. “Back to work. It’s not naptime yet.”

  But he’d had enough. “Your turn,” he told Tracy. Reluctantly he forsook his lair and, handing Tracy the shovel, stood aside to survey the meager amount of driveway he’d cleared. Tracy launched into the task with vigor, and Noah liked watching him at work; he could glimpse his fit friend the way he’d been back in his carpentering days. Without warning, Tracy’s many years before the Forge fell like a shadow over the present moment. To him I’m just a kid, Noah reminded himself. Tracy had lived ten unimaginable years before he was even born; twenty-five before he’d ever met him. And he thought with sick anxiety of all the people, utterly unknown to him, who had moved through the bright orbit of that life. Arthur, for instance, the teasing voice on the answering machine. He’d been up for a visit in December, Noah knew, but Tracy had kept them far apart. Still, Noah had
seen the two of them in the distance once that weekend, not on campus but in town, Arthur a lean, lanky faggot—there was no other word for it—with a yelping laugh that drifted quite clearly across the distance separating Noah from the two friends, or whatever it was they were.

  “Hey Trace,” he said abruptly. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”

  Tracy stopped his exertions—his progress down the driveway put Noah’s feeble attempts to shame—and leaned himself, raptly attentive, on the upright shovel. But now Noah felt stupid. His question would seem strange, out of nowhere. That was what people always said about him: that he was hard to follow. But if they knew all the logical connections in his head they wouldn’t think that.

  “Who is Arthur?”

  Tracy looked either perplexed or evasive, and Noah wondered: had he somehow gotten the name wrong?

  “Your friend from New York,” he prompted—and on further thought, realized he hadn’t gotten the name wrong at all. “You know,” he said. “Arthurina.”

  “Arthurina,” Tracy mused, almost as if he’d never encountered such a silly word before. “Why do you ask?”

  “He came up to visit you, right?”

  “Yes he did,” Tracy said. “Arthurina, as you call him, is a very dear friend of mine from way back, when I first lived in New York City. Before I went to Japan. I don’t think you’d like him much. He can be a little alarming at first. Unfortunately, these days, he’s very sick.”

  Noah thought grimly, It just keeps coming up, doesn’t? Like those heads popping up all around you that used to scare him so much in that game Whack-A-Mole he’d played once out at Coney Island. “You mean AIDS,” he said.