by Paul Russell
“No we do not,” Tracy agreed, even as he saw Louis’s gaze settle upon Noah. The boy stood apart from the commotion, coatless and thoughtfully holding Betsy on her leash; he seemed to be contemplating that same Orion he and Tracy had gazed at a few nights before.
Like a timpani roll that swells ominously and then subsides, Tracy could feel the perturbation go through Louis’s system. The older man frowned, made a bitter expression with his lips, an expression of distaste—or even disgust. So now he knew everything; now he knew he had been lied to. For Tracy even to try to explain it away would be an insult. And Louis, it seemed, did not expect him to. He did not say a word, but with a gesture of great weariness turned away. Doug Brill cast a smiling glance Tracy’s way to show that, although he did not entirely understand, he nonetheless could intuit that something noteworthy had just happened; then, ever solicitous, he took Louis’s arm to lead him back down the treacherous driveway to the waiting security car.
Tracy breathed a grim sigh and slid his cold hands into his pockets, finding, in the warmth of his right one, the hastily stashed-away condom. His fingers worried the ring of latex as he watched the security car whisk Louis and Doug Brill away. So it had struck at last. More than anything, he felt relief—the way any fugitive must when finally he admits the game is up and emerges from his makeshift hiding place, hands raised in quiet, even grateful, surrender.
The snowy crunch of footsteps coming up behind made him turn around.
“Well, young man,” the fire marshal told him, “looks like she’s gone and burned herself out.” Tracy stared at that flushed face and realized, with a flicker of disdain, that Louis was not the only one who had been called away from his liquor this evening.
“I’d definitely take your friend’s suggestion,” the fire marshal continued, “and get that flue cleaned out as soon as possible.”
“Yes, sir,” Tracy told him. “Thank you very much.”
“All in a night’s work. It’s what we’re here for.” The marshal held out his right hand, and Tracy reluctantly grasped it with his own. If only he knew, Tracy thought. But the irony that might once have pleased him gave Tracy no pleasure at all, only a sick feeling in his belly. “You just call if you have any other problems,” the fire marshal said. “Only—there’s one thing we don’t do.” He leaned in close, and Tracy made himself breathe in the hot stink of the good man’s breath. “We don’t do cats in trees. Everybody thinks we do, but we don’t. You have a cat in a tree, don’t call us.” With a wink he released Tracy from his grip. “You got that, now?”
“I’ll try not to forget,” Tracy told him, his guilty hand retreating to his pocket to worry, once again, the slick texture of the condom that betrayed him utterly, though not a soul could see.
He watched as the fire engine pulled away—it seemed ungrateful, after all, to turn his back on his rescuers. One by one the curious neighbors faded back into whatever domestic tranquillity or desperation the fire had diverted them from. Only then did Noah come forward. Had he stayed aloof out of discretion, or had he simply withdrawn from trouble once it appeared? He won’t stand by me, Tracy thought with sudden, frigid certainty. If it comes to that, I’m on my own.
“Sorry about all the to-do,” Tracy apologized, not exactly sure why he thought he owed the boy an apology.
“Excitement’s fun, I guess,” Noah told him. “Bets certainly thought so. Right, Bets?” He nodded vigorously, the beagle’s impromptu spokesman.
“Noah.” Tracy interrupted the comic interlude. He spoke with seriousness and urgency. “I think we’d better get you to the station now.”
The boy looked at him uncomprehendingly, as if he’d suggested they take the next rocket to Orion.
“The train station,” Tracy told him. “Aren’t you going to New York?”
Noah continued to regard him blankly. He shook his head, said “No,” emphatically drawing out the “o” as if offended by the very suggestion. “I thought I was staying with you.”
“Well, I…” Tracy started and then stopped. “Let’s go inside,” he said. “It’s freezing out here.”
The chill, however, would not be so easily shaken off. Firemen had trampled their way through the kitchen to the living room, the mud and ice of their footprints amplifying the trail Doug Brill had first blazed. All traces of the fire logs, coals, ashes—had been removed from the fireplace, as if it had never been. Only the acrid odor of smoke lacing the air gave any hint of the mishap.
“This is very bad,” Tracy said, all too aware there were other mishaps whose traces no amount of wishing could remove. “It’s exactly what I was afraid was going to happen.”
“So we don’t use the fireplace anymore,” Noah said with a shrug.
“That’s not what I meant,” Tracy told him. Was it possible, he thought with alarm, that Noah could be so naive? But as if he expected their evening to resume exactly where it had left off, the boy planted himself on the sofa. With an eager yelp, Betsy joined him.
“Betsy,” Tracy said sharply. “You know you’re not supposed to be up there.”
“Oh, she’s just excited,” Noah said.
“Betsy, down!” Tracy commanded, startled at the anger suddenly erupting in him.
Noah seemed startled as well. “Trace,” he said in a tone of hurt and alarm. “What’s wrong?”
“Noah, you don’t seem to understand. I’m not talking about the fireplace. What just happened was exactly what I was afraid was going to happen. I mean, you being over here. You and me together like this. It doesn’t look so good.”
“Trace, you’re being paranoid,” Noah said with a huff of exasperation.
“I am not,” Tracy insisted. “This is not a joke. If people find out—”
“It’s none of their business,” Noah said reasonably.
“That’s not hos they’ll see it. You could get expelled. I could get fired. I could—”
He stopped. He had never discussed any of this on purpose. To speak such fears, it had always seemed, was to beckon them. Or was it because he had always been afraid of giving Noah ideas? The realization chilled him: what did it mean—for everything—if it turned out he didn’t, couldn’t, trust this boy he loved more than he was supposed to?
Only this morning a small article in the newspaper had pointed its accusing finger. A thirty-five-year-old Long Island dentist was charged with sexually abusing a fourteen-year-old boy from New Jersey. According to the Middle Forge Record, they had met in an on-line chat room, then in person several times. On at least four occasions the dentist had sodomized the boy. Sodomized: all day the stark, Old Testament word had hung heavily in his mind, like a battered body left to dangle from a tree limb. The smallest thing had betrayed them, a minor traffic accident: the boy was driving the car and the dentist, to whom the car belonged, was in the passenger seat. When the police questioned the boy, he’d talked freely about their relationship, insisting it was entirely consensual. The dentist was being held on $100,000 bond.
Thank God Noah had had the sense, earlier, to keep clear of the commotion on the front lawn. What if the day came when, unaware of the consequences, he talked freely?
Gazing down at the boy he’d sodomized, consensually, he said firmly, too little far too late, “You can’t stay here tonight. I’m sorry. I’m either taking you to the train station or you’re going back to your dorm room. It’s too risky for you to stay here.” He would do it, he thought; he would end it here. But then he remembered a terrible thing. Hadn’t Arthur told him that everything had been okay till Dr. Emmerich had freaked out? He’d thought he understood that; he’d thought he could negotiate the tricky path to the clearing where everything would somehow be fine. But how, under the circumstances, not to freak out?
I’m dead, he thought. I’m already as dead as Jack Emmerich.
But Noah remained undaunted. And wasn’t that exactly what Tracy had always loved about boys—the shining recklessness, their vigorous disregard of danger? Now that the god
had him completely, it would calmly destroy him. Slowly, deliberately, as if the world were no match for his beautiful youth, Noah pulled the rugger shirt he wore over his head and tossed it to the floor. “Just relax,” he coaxed, “and come on over here.” He patted the sofa and half lowered his eyelids in langorous anticipation of pleasure. Tracy stood transfixed—but not by the boy’s smoothly dimpled chest and ruddy nipples. Something else held the whole of his attention: a mark on Noah’s upper left arm, just under his vaccination scar, not a bruise or a cut, but as if someone with a felt-tipped pen had drawn on him an intricate design.
“Noah,” he said, “what’s that on your arm?” He took a couple of steps closer, the better to make it out, and then he was reading the words uncomprehendingly, reading them over and over without their coalescing into any kind of sense even as some other part of his consciousness registered the design, and the words that were part of it, with such perfect clarity that the shock was already flooding his system before he could begin to say what he was seeing.
Beneath a line of black barbed wire that was twined about a series of small pink triangles, seeming in fact to grow out of the barbed wire, a tangled and grotesque extension of it, was the phrase, rendered in precise lowercase letters, hiv positive.
He felt his heart clench, a sensation eerily like implosion.
“I got a tattoo,” he heard Noah say. The boy held out his arm to display the grim handiwork. “What do you think? I wanted to make a statement.”
Tracy recovered himself just enough to utter, “What on earth kind of a statement is that? And who would agree to do that to you?”
“New York City,” Noah said. “Don’t you love it? There’s always somebody willing to do anything you want them to.”
The words chilled Tracy, opening up, as they did, the unwelcome image of Noah wandering the streets of Manhattan, not only vulnerable to but somehow welcoming whatever trouble might come his way. Had Noah been drunk when he’d let this be done to him? Had he taken drugs? What other mortal things about Noah Lathrop III didn’t he know?
“I was out with my friend Chris,” Noah continued, “and we both decided to get one.”
“Chris,” Tracy said numbly, aware he had no idea, in his selfishness, who Noah’s friends might be. Certainly he had never considered them a threat, though to have overlooked that possibility, it was now clear, had been a terrible mistake.
“We decided ‘HIV positive’ would really get people’s attention. You know, wake them up with a jolt.” Noah turned his arm this way and that to admire the jolt now forever inscribed in his flesh. “In Chris’s case,” he said, “he really is positive. I’m not supposed to tell anybody, but I can tell you.”
“Wait,” Tracy said desperately, his heart squeezed to a tiny, dense knot and threatening to disappear altogether, stressed into another dimension that might well be the dimension of hell. “Are you saying there’s a student at the Forge who’s HIV positive? Are you making this up? Does anybody else know about this?”
“Dr. Tremper knows. I think he’s the only one.” He flexed his arm and the thorns, for that was what they were, rippled as if a breeze had blown through them, Like roses, the pink triangles nodded. The terrible words pulsed as if a whisper of life stirred there. “And some of the guys on my hall,” he went on. “I mean, they don’t know. It’s hard to explain. They have…suspicions.”
Tracy felt dizzy and sick. He hated the way panic could completely master him. He hated the unsteadiness in his voice as he asked, “And how do you know this Chris…what’s his last name?”
“Tyler,” Noah said. “The guys on my hall call him the Fatwa, don’t ask me why. But I got to know him. He’s pretty strange, and aloof, but he’s got this, I don’t know, this attractiveness. Sometimes I wish I was more like him.”
“I wish you’d told me you were considering this move,” Tracy scolded, stroking the violated flesh with his thumb, peering into the abyss of this boy’s dangers. The thought that, after all these years, he’d gone and fallen in love with another Arthur Branson positively made him want to shout with despair.
“I wasn’t considering it,” Noah said. “At the time it just seemed like a good idea. Now, maybe…I don’t know. Chris can be very convincing when he wants to be. Very charismatic. Haven’t you ever gotten carried away and done something totally spur of the moment like that?”
“Everybody gets carried away from time to time,” Tracy told the boy who had carried him away.
“I should tell you,” Noah said, his voice carrying a note of warning so subtle only a lover fully attuned to the growing certainty of complete disaster could have heard it. Tracy held his breath and waited. “Not to freak you out or anything. But Chris and I fooled around some. Don’t worry, it was back in the fall. I just thought you should know.”
It could have been worse, Tracy thought, even as Noah forged on. “I got carried away one night. I told him about you and me. I couldn’t help it.”
Tracy dropped Noah’s arm as if those thorns had stung him. “You didn’t,” he said sternly.
“I had to tell somebody. And like I said, Chris is cool. What I mean is, he’s the Fatwa. Nobody talks to him, and he doesn’t talk to them either. He hates this place. Dr. Tremper’s the only person on campus he’ll speak to. I mean, Chris practically doesn’t even speak to me except when we see each other in New York. Up here it’s like we don’t even know each other. It’s like, protection.”
Tracy hardly even listened. He wanted to laugh out loud—perhaps in a kind of relief. Why not simply surrender to one’s doom, since one was so clearly, so spectacularly, doomed? For as long as he could remember they had been partying on the sinking ship, scarcely acknowledging that with each passing day or week or month the orchestra was playing more urgently, the deck tilting more alarmingly toward the bow, the stern rising higher from the water. And who were they? Why, all the gay men he knew, from whose ranks he had vainly thought to escape. All his life he had wanted to make love to a boy, and now he had; didn’t that mean the end was coming? A truly treacherous desire stoked its fires in him, a violence that both thrilled and surprised him. He wanted to throw Noah on the floor and fuck him till he whimpered with sweet abandon. He wanted them both to writhe and sob. He wanted them to hurt. He wanted never, never, never to have fucked him. Never to have touched him. Never even to have met him.
“I’m taking you to the station,” he said brutally. Responsibly. Dishonestly. “Or you’re going back to the dorm. It’s up to you.” He stood up abruptly from the sofa as if that might force Noah to follow.
“Trace,” Noah pleaded. Obstinate, he crossed his arms over his chest and pouted. Tracy watched him with desolate pity.
“Don’t freak on me,” Noah warned.
And don’t try to manipulate me, Tracy returned the warning, albeit in silence. “You’ve got to go,” he said aloud. “Don’t you see? At least for tonight.”
But Noah didn’t see. And why should he? No doubt this disappointing adult’s actions seemed baffling, even vengeful. He’s in love too, Tracy realized with a sorrow more searing than he could have imagined.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I love you so much, but this is just too crazy.” Then, to his utter surprise, he knelt in front of Noah and in complete renunciation—or was it absolution he was seeking?—rested his forehead against the boy’s bony kneecaps. His sob, involuntary, followed by bitter silent tears, surprised him painfully.
The way he often did when Betsy sat herself loyally at his feet, Noah laid his palm on the top of Tracy’s head and laced his fingers through strands of hair. “You’re crying,” he said with a strained note of wonder.
How else to take it but as the god’s blessing?
“This is the end,” Tracy said, though he was no longer crying. His tears had come and gone, a brief surrender brutally stanched.
He rose to his feet, reached out his hand to help Noah off the sofa. But the boy refused to register the change. Tracy stood at a complet
e loss.
“This isn’t what I want to happen,” Noah said sullenly.
“It’s not what I want to happen either,” Tracy said. “We’ve got no choice.”
But the move was still Noah’s. In a single motion he curled himself up onto the sofa, fetal, withdrawn, and into his mouth, childishly, distressingly, he stuck his thumb.
“Noah, Noah,” Tracy coaxed wearily. “You can’t stay here. Do you hear what I’m saying?”
But Noah, if he heard, made no sign. He had shut himself away; he was inviolable. Tracy could do no more with him. Angrily he left him there on the sofa and went to the kitchen—as if anywhere in this haunted house could offer any refuge. With envy he gazed at Betsy, who had slunk away from the drama to doze peaceably on her cushion.
Remembering the practically untouched bottle of vodka in the freezer—Stolichnaya, a house-warming gift from Arthur, who liked his vodka and tonic before dinner—he reached into the otherwise empty chamber and took a dissolute swig straight from the bottle. The icy liquid burned bracingly as it went down. A comforting warmth spread through his stomach. He’d always wondered what, exactly, drove people to drink. He took another gulp and then, with a spasm of loathing, stashed the bottle back in the freezer. This was despicable, he thought, but how did one go about evicting a recalcitrant boy from one’s home? He could practically read the newspaper copy: “When the police arrived they questioned the boy, who spoke freely about their relationship, insisting it was entirely consensual.”
Feeling grimly resolute, he returned to the living room. Noah lay as he had left him, curled up on the sofa, though his thumb had slipped out of his mouth. He seemed to be lightly snoring, as if pretending to be asleep—or perhaps, even more perversely, he actually had fallen asleep. And the longer Tracy stood and stared at this boy he had once convinced himself in was in love with, the more likely it began to seem that the second possibility was actually the case.
The silvered image floated before him: two blond boys, perhaps eighteen, perhaps not yet, in what appeared to be some kind of rustic summer house. Both were shirtless but wearing faded, beltless jeans slung very low on slim hips. One boy had turned away; the other gazed at his brother’s bare back with an expression of moody, wistful longing. Facing the camera full on, he’d thrust his left hand deep into his front pocket, while with his right he cupped his crotch, just to one side of the zipper, as if clasping his partially erect penis through the fabric of his jeans. The quality of the light in the room suggested that beyond the windows it might be raining, the two boys bored and aroused on a thundery afternoon. Their haircuts were identical: short in back, longer in front, a sunbleached blond that revealed darker roots. He could not see the face of the boy who had turned away, but his twin brother possessed, or was possessed by, a grave, heart-breaking beauty.