by Cara Hoffman
He said, “Stop it. What are you doing? Stop it.”
His eyes were black and he was weaker than I expected, and I could feel his heart racing, feel him getting hard. I pressed my chest to his, crushed my shoulder up into his throat, and listened to him gasping while I undid his belt.
If he had truly meant no, I’d never have been able to knock him down.
It was the first handwritten scraps of In the Shadow of Machines that delivered Milo from a transient life, to the Gothic and Greek revival architecture of a city campus seven miles from the council housing where he’d been raised, and Athens became like a dream he’d had in childhood. He found work on the docks, studied in a building that looked like a temple, spent chill afternoons in stone buildings. And found other people to love. Thrilled by their voices in class, sitting with their backs against the stacks in the library, words rising all around them, or sitting in the pub. He was charmed by what they thought was drinking.
And he loved them in bed in their various forms, too, the boys that would never be Jasper. The women who could never be Bridey; lying on their backs in cheap flats listening to the Pixies on an ancient turntable that friends had picked up off the street and made work. He loved them, up writing all night. Everyone going to be a poet, but for real, not a poet of the Monastiraki metro station. He loved their love of school. Their lack of sadness.
But they didn’t know about people like Bridey, wasted and sweaty in the bar of the 309 reading The Clouds. They didn’t know about people like his mother reading Verlaine in council housing because she’d taught herself French when she’d been sacked and had nothing to do, or monsters like Declan shut up with Seamus Heaney in the evening after killing in the day.
His friends, his professors, thought Milo was an exception, not evidence that a broader, wilder intellectual world existed, and he loved them still, loved drunken nights dancing, loved praise in the classroom; whole rooms full of serious queers talking about death and rights. But he knew none of it was the kind of freedom he’d had with Jasper and Bridey, who never once called themselves a name or believed the things they did with their bodies could mean anything to anyone but them. He was all for the GMFA, or marching or making sure the kiddies had condoms, but when boyfriends at school wanted the sexual philistines to include them in their rituals, to admit they were “just like everyone else” Milo wanted none of it.
“I’m not the least bit like them, am I?” he said. “Don’t need a fascist to acknowledge my humanity.”
Then the book was published and he was supposed to let the school or the country lay claim to him, and that’s when it all came apart.
He spent months crying after the Witter Bynner. Couldn’t get through a conversation. Couldn’t hear “Congratulations” or “Well done” or “Fair play to you.” Cringed through interviews. The recognition was blinding and blighting, and after the award he became a blank to himself unless he was writing; thought nothing about Jasper or Bridey for years at a time. But when he put pen to paper they were all that would emerge. Odes to lovers who had believed in his work when he lived on Amstel and handouts. If his current friends had seen him then, they would never have given him a second glance.
The book was out, the loves fleeting, no sense in explaining who he wasn’t for another second. There were years of silence and work and more silence. Milo wrote Running to find Bridey. He imagined her sleeping in a park, washing her hair in a public bathroom with hand soap, walking the corridors of a train station or airport with one small pack. She’d stop to go through the book racks and then see it: a slim volume that had implausibly made it there. The blatant coded name Running, then his name beneath it. That was how he would speak to her. She’d read her initials in the dedication, see the references to Jasper, whose name he hadn’t changed, get to the sentence at the end saying he lived in Salford, and she’d come for him.
But that never happened. And when the New School made their offer, he took it. Thought it was a sign that he would go to her instead, go at last to America. And he dreamed that night of Bridey walking toward him, a halo of fire around her dark hair.
I went home and took off my goggles and Dare hosed me down by the gravel drive and already I could tell it was too quiet.
Out in the wet grass the pale exposed bellies of the frogs were drying and growing taut. An indictment. Shining silver beneath the blue sky, their arms flung back and limp. Brown speckled fish were scattered on the swampy bank and near them the soft, wet, lifeless form of a rabbit hit by a flying stone or killed by the blast. I knew I should take it for the fur, but I buried it instead. I wept as I put the fish into the basket and carried them home.
Dare made trout and wild garlic and a salad from things we’d grown. After all the venison we’d been eating, it was light and clean and delicious.
When we sat on the porch, there was no piping song calling up from the pond. No echo of peepers from the hollow. I could see the land as I’d never seen it, shockingly vivid and close. Fireflies glowed, afloat in the dark clearing. The forest rose around us in the distance and the meadow near our house was a tall tangled mass of grasses. I could see my uncle too. His skin weathered, hair shaved nearly to his scalp. His eyes pale and almond shaped. His body solid. Dare was alone except for me, living in a one-story ranch house that sat upon a large underground room at the edge of a flowering hillside in a tiny town with dirt roads. He was strong and kind, had trouble understanding things.
That evening the house materialized around me as if it had long been obscured by a bank of fog. In our living room a sunken plaid couch covered with a wool blanket hunched against the wall in front of a pellet stove. Every room had prints or paintings of the forest and of deer and raccoons and other animals that lived in the woods. There were no pictures of people on the walls—not even pictures of us. There were some threadbare chairs, and a coffee table piled with my books. An oval braided rug covered the kitchen floor; the table was painted pale blue and had a metal top. The pantry was full of shelves, packed with mason jars, canned vegetables, dried beans, braids of garlic. The place had a strong smell I’d never noticed before.
I wandered into my room, shocked that the books I’d brought with me were still there, Dewey decimal system stickers on their spines. I sat, silent on my bed, astonished by the relentless emptiness of forms. Models of airplanes and cars and monsters were sloppily painted and strangely arranged on a dresser made of glossy wood-grain plastic. The room contained a tyranny of objects: rain boots, sneakers, chin-up bar, a fragile table lamp made from antlers. A spool of thread and a half-empty drinking glass were particularly disturbing, sitting there on the nightstand like evidence.
Think,” Jasper said, his voice cool and quiet, “we can take planes instead of stowing on boats. Get farther, travel longer, have more to read. We could live in a house on the islands, a place in Thailand or Prague or wherever, wherever, really.”
Milo said no, because they didn’t need the money and Jasper couldn’t be trusted with it anyway, as he was barely coherent. They could hitchhike away, work wherever they found it. It was inconceivable to him that they now lived in a partly condemned building in the worst part of town, with a five-hundred-quid Persian rug.
“If we can sell even one more . . .” Jasper’d said. “We can leave next time Declan goes off for work somewhere. Make a clean break.”
Bridey pointed to the rug, pointed to a pair of candlesticks, to some leather slippers he had bought, then gave him the finger. There was nothing else to say.
Bridey passed the bottle to Milo.
“We just need someone to distract Sterious or that other waster,” he said. “That’s it. That’s all, then we can take them from the desk.”
“They’re probably in a safe,” Milo said.
“You think this rat hole has a safe?” he asked.
“For passports or money or something?” Milo said. “Yeah, a little safe.”
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“Have you seen it?” Jasper asked, taking the bottle.
“No.”
“He just shoves them in the desk drawer with everything else,” Jasper said.
“If there’s a safe, we can blow it up,” Bridey said.
Jasper gave her a condescending nod.
“We could,” she said, her eyes bright. “It doesn’t take much.” She went to her bag and retrieved a narrow metal canister of lighter fluid, some firecrackers, black tape, a knife, a ball of fabric or cotton or paper, and something that looked like a sewing kit.
Bridey crouched on the tile floor, the roll of electrical tape around her wrist like a bracelet. She assembled a tight little package, doused it with something that burned their eyes, but smelled nothing like butane, then jammed the firecracker into the center, pushed all this into an empty Amstel bottle, and sealed it with black tape. They followed her as she walked out and down the hall, placed it by the door to the roof, then lit the fuse, and they ran laughing back into the room, shut the door, knelt behind the dresser.
The noise that followed was a thunderous shock, shook the walls and rattled the door in its frame.
When Jasper yanked the door open, the hall was bright and thick with ash. A narrow ribbon of fire licked up the wall and undulated across the floor. Bridey watched the flames gutter, then stepped forward into the swirling dust.
The archway was blown open. The heat of the city already rushing in to fill the space. There was now nothing separating the roof terrace from the hallway. It was pure luck the blast didn’t go through the floor and open the ceiling below. Sounds of doors opening, slamming, people running, frightened voices, echoed up the staircase.
“Fuck’s sake,” Milo said. “Had you not built one of those before?”
She walked over and stamped out the remaining flames. Dust floated in the streams of sunlight filtering in from massive holes in what had minutes before been a solid wall. The concrete and plaster sagged as if waterlogged, then more rubble tumbled to the floor, a sharp ceramic scraping as brick dislodged and slid down the wall. Grainy sand that’d once been mortar and chunks of brick covered the floor.
The fire was burning out—had eaten all the accelerant—but sent black wisps of smoke up into the air.
They stood in the debris with their shirts up over their noses, eyelashes thick with the stinging dust, waiting for the sound of sirens. But there was nothing. No one came.
After some time they heard the plodding echo of a single pair of footsteps on the stairs. Sterious pulled himself up onto the landing and stood in the haze of disintegrated plaster looking out at the newly open view of the low white skyline and sighed.
“Someone should call the police or the fire department,” Jasper said as he slipped past Sterious and down the stairs.
“How this wall has come down?” Sterious asked.
“It crumbled,” Bridey said.
Sterious squinted. “You are okay?”
Milo took a breath to answer but started crying before he could speak.
Sterious stepped closer to him and Bridey reached out to hold Milo’s hand. This didn’t make him stop crying. Milo pitied them for not feeling what he felt, covered his face, and sobbed.
“We’re okay,” Bridey said.
She and Sterious talked about him as if he weren’t there. Then they talked about places Sterious had docked when he was young and in the navy. Bridey asked him questions and he seemed to be making up answers. He said something about mermaids. They were laughing.
Jasper returned whistling and carrying a bottle in a paper bag.
“What the fireman said?” Sterious asked.
“About what?” he said. “Oh, right. Nothing, they’ll send someone by.” He unscrewed the cap on the bottle, handing it first to Sterious. The four of them stood in the center of the hallway drinking Metaxa and looking out at the unobstructed view of the city. The building directly across from the blast was lower than Olympos; they looked down at people on the rooftops, bringing their washing in from the line and staring up at them.
No one else came to see what had happened; no one called the police.
No one cleaned up the larger chunks of debris. Sometimes, Milo thought, if he went back there he would still see their footprints in the dust.
“I tell you this,” Sterious said, once the new bottle had gone around. “It’s not look so bad.”
They could see across to the hills and cranes and ruins. Sterious stretched his palm out flat so it looked like the Temple of Athena was resting upon it. “Who has camera?” He smiled. “I have picture at home of holding up the King Tut’s grave too. Also the moon.” He pinched his fingers together. “Like a Communion wafer.”
Once Sterious shuffled back downstairs, Jasper emptied his pockets. On his way through the lobby he’d checked the front desk. He tossed eight passports onto the bed.
“There was no safe,” he said.
On the TV above the bar, a car chase flickered brightly by. After leaving the hotel we had nowhere to be until the 309 but Drinks Time. Milo put his feet up on the table and tipped his chair back. Jasper went up to get more pints, leaving the passports facedown on the table like cards in a memory game.
“Truly, we can’t be the only people doing this,” Jasper said when he returned, setting the glasses out in front of us. “What about Dieter the witch-boy? How does he have money to travel or buy his pointy magic shoes or whatever?”
“Is that a real person?”
“Where?” Jasper turned around.
“No,” I said. “Dieter the boy-witch.”
“Witch-boy,” he said. “He’s real, Bridey. You should pay more attention. That German waster with the knuckle tattoos. I don’t like him very much at all. Always trying to be helpful and keeps telling us about moving to Amsterdam or Berlin to do something. He wants to do something about how they are always telling us what to do. Wants to go to Berlin and put up a banner outside an empty building or something. Utter moron.”
“I don’t even know who that is,” Milo said, then muttered “Witch-boy” to himself.
“Well, it’s probably because he cast a spell on you so you can’t remember.” Jasper lit a cigarette. “But I am not going to go live in Berlin, and no one is telling us what to do. I told him as much.” He took a long drink from his pint. “I said no one is telling us what to do and he said there’s all these rules about living or this and that. And I said you know that rules have an implicit intelligence test attached to them, right? If you follow them, you fail.”
“You think there are no rules?” Milo asked.
“Bridey,” Jasper said, “are there rules?”
“For what?” I asked, annoyed that he’d given me an empty pint.
“But you and Dieter think the same thing,” Milo said.
“Darling,” Jasper said, “do you really think someone with mystical symbols tattooed on his knuckles doesn’t believe in rules?”
“Why do I have this empty glass?” I asked.
“You’ve finished it,” Milo said. “And it’s your round.”
Jasper was opening each document. They seemed like toys, like monopoly money. All the stamps and stickers, these IDs that defined you as a citizen of a made-up place men claimed by repeatedly pouring blood all over the ground.
When I brought back the next three pints, Jasper had separated the passports into piles.
“Dunno if these are good to have or not,” he said. “Some places won’t let you in if you’ve got a stamp from Israel—but there’s certainly people who’d want to get their hands on one.
“Oh, hel-lo,” he said interrupting himself. He held up a red passport with gold lettering, turned it sideways, handed it to Milo.
“We can’t sell that,” Milo said.
“Of course we can,” Jasper said. “Bet we can get a thousand quid for
it.”
“We shouldn’t do it ’s’what I mean.”
“Of course we should,” Jasper said, his voice growing malign. “It has a picture of an Arab on it, from a lovely socialist democracy, no travel restrictions, stamps from far and wide. It’s the best one in the pile.”
I pulled it from his hand. “No way, man. What’s he gonna do?”
“Why do you care? Since your pilgrimage to the oracle you haven’t said one word to him.”
Milo said, “All he’s got to do—right?—is go to the consulate like everyone else, say it was stolen . . . which isn’t a lie.”
“I thought you were against it,” I said.
“I am,” he said.
I said, “We’ve already spent fifteen hundred dollars on drinking and on junk from the flea market which he has hoarded, destroyed, or given away.”
“It was a mistake to have bought that bale of copper wire,” Jasper said.
He lit a cigarette off the one he’d finished. I could see the long, thin scar by his jaw. I could see every bone in his face, sharply defined, when he turned his head.
Murat’s passport brought in the most money. Two others earned four hundred quid each. The rest Jasper kept, said he would sell them when they got to wherever they were going.
As before, Milo sent his share to his mother, this time with a letter.
Colleen was not the kind to question where he was or how he was getting by, maybe for her own peace of mind. The only time she came to one of his matches she became so enraged at the other boy, he thought she might duck under the rope. Afterwards she stood beside Milo’s trainer, pushed the ringside doctor out of the way, held the icy eye iron to his face herself to press the swelling down.
She wasn’t so much older than him, Colleen. And once he’d left school they were more like flatmates than before. People liked to point to it and say this is what a broken home is. No discipline. No authority. Milo knew the only authority growing up was your own mind; he knew Colleen’s confidence in his thinking and in hers. He knew Colleen loved him and he knew being stupid was a sin. She just hated stupid people so much, he’d never let himself be one of them. Living with Colleen, you could be weak, you could be a drunk, you could have any kind of desire. But if you were dumb, there was nothing for it.