They were lying in lionel’s bed again, facing each other.
“Where are you from?” Lionel asked, and then, because the question seemed too personal, even though they had just fucked, he said, “Not that you have to tell me.”
“Bangor,” Charles said. “Maine.”
“What’s it like there?”
“Cold. Wet. Empty,” he said. “It’s kind of a bleak place.”
“That seems dramatic.”
Charles didn’t say anything after that, and Lionel was afraid that he had been too sharp. He put his hand on Charles’s chest and moved closer to him beneath the blanket. The bed’s complaint under his shifting weight drew his attention to the fact that he was yet again sharing this lumpy mattress with another person. So remarkable was the thought that he could not hold it still, and it slipped down out of his awareness. It was just as well.
“Sorry,” Lionel said.
“What are you sorry for?”
“You got quiet.”
“If I’m quiet, I’m quiet.”
“Okay,” Lionel said, “sorry for being sorry.”
Charles flicked the bruise on Lionel’s cheek with the same casual gesture he’d used to spin his fork around last night. Lionel could still feel the indentations of Charles’s teeth. The skin was swollen and a little tender from the hickey. But it was nothing, really. By morning it would be gone. It seemed sad that it would fade or that things had to end. When he was a child, that had depressed him. When his mother read him stories, he’d bawl at the end even if the little duck found its way back to its mother or the bears and the girl became friends or green eggs and ham were eaten. It didn’t matter if the story had a happy ending or if things turned out okay and all the scary things were put away. He hated that vertiginous feeling of things ending. That sense of the world dropping off under his feet. It had been the same at math camp. Everyone rolling up their sleeping bags, putting away their clothes for one last time. Saying good-bye, or pointedly not saying good-bye. There was, too, something unsurprising in all that. After all, his father had left them suddenly. Or it had seemed sudden, at least to Lionel. One day, his dad had packed up for a trip the way he always did. But then weeks went by, and when he asked his mother where his father had gone, she turned to him and said, as if describing the weather forecast, that he wasn’t coming back and that Lionel should get used to it.
It seemed impossible, though, with Charles’s hand coming to rest between his thighs, that he’d wake up tomorrow and be alone again. Yet it was true. That was what would happen. Charles twisted some of Lionel’s wiry pubic hair. The skin over his pelvis grew taut when Charles pulled. They were connected by that single fiber, that single black thread of hair. He imagined the place down far in his skin where the hair was rooted. He could graph in his mind the function that would perfectly describe the growth of hair over a period of time. And then he could see the derivative of that function. Nested inside each other, the calculus of his changing form. And, too, the function that would describe the application of a force at a radius the length of a public hair. It was a comfort to him, this math. This easy, direct calculus. All of life was shifting equations.
But then Charles pulled so hard that the hair came free of Lionel with a burning jolt, and he yelped at the surprise of it.
“There you are,” Charles said.
“What do you mean?”
“You kind of spaced on me. You were just zoned-out there.”
“I was thinking about functions to describe biological processes,” Lionel said.
“Was that your project? Before?”
Lionel laughed and Charles pulled three more of his pubic hairs free. Lionel tried to get loose, but Charles pushed his shoulders flat and rolled on top of him.
“Why’s that so funny, tough guy?”
“I’m not much of a modeler,” Lionel said. “That stuff is so dry. It sounds cool, but it’s really tedious. Imagine spending your life picking nits out of eight million lines of code. Modeling is so awful.”
Charles blinked at him slowly, and though they were physically touching, Lionel felt far away from him. It was not merely the difference in their chosen fields. It was a difference in the very constitution of their minds. Lionel felt lonely there under Charles. He had made a poor choice. He should have stayed with the host last night. There was some shared language there.
“You should get back to Sophie, I guess.”
“I don’t have to be there.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure,” Charles said, mocking Lionel a little. “Do you want me to leave? I can.”
“No,” Lionel said.
“Good.” Charles sat back on Lionel’s legs, and Lionel gasped. It was the pathetic, involuntary sound of his body giving in without his permission, opening itself. “Oh, little baby wants.”
“Yes,” Lionel said, because the light had come into Charles’s eyes again.
“Little baby.” Charles pressed his fingers into Lionel’s mouth. “Suck, little baby.” The tips of Charles’s fingers were chalky. Lionel could feel the whorls of the fingerprints as they slid across his teeth and tongue. Charles watched carefully, and it was the watching that made Lionel hard. The seeing. The witnessing of what he was doing to Lionel. Charles pressed his fingers deeper, and Lionel tasted his knuckles and the spaces between his fingers. Lionel could taste himself and Charles and everything that Charles had touched, a whole world sliding into his mouth, down his throat. Charles worked his fingers past Lionel’s lips, back and forth, in and out, fucking Lionel’s mouth with his fist. Down to the knuckles and back. Lionel’s teeth scraped his knuckles, and then there was the coppery taste of his blood. Lionel shivered beneath him, breathed hard through his nose.
“Good. Greedy little baby.” Charles pulled his fingers from Lionel’s mouth, and there was a terrible, gaping emptiness inside him.
“No,” Lionel mouthed. “No.” He wanted it back, needed it back.
“Shhh,” Charles whispered. Then Lionel felt it, the slick heat of Charles’s fingers inside him. There was an awful heat, and then more pressure. Charles was opening him again, with the wet from his own mouth, wearing thin the membranous boundary that kept the world out.
“Yes,” Lionel said. “Yes.”
“Good,” Charles said.
Lionel had nailed a pillowcase over the broken window. He’d tried to make it as taut as he could, but there was still a little give in the fabric that let in the cold air when the wind blew particularly hard. Charles was leaning over the sink inspecting Lionel’s work. He stuck his finger through a gap between the window and the pillowcase.
“Some handyman you’d be,” he said.
“I’m a discredit to my dad.”
“Oh yeah?”
Lionel had taken the carafe from the fridge and was pouring cold water for the two of them.
“My dad was always good about that sort of thing. I’m sure I did about ten things wrong.”
“You might have gone with plastic. Or called your landlord.”
Lionel didn’t want to say that even the idea of calling his landlord and asking him to replace the window made his stomach hurt. Just using the phone to call the department secretary to cancel his proctoring a couple weeks ago had almost put him on his back. It was another of the things that seemed easy for other people, as if they were born knowing how to use the phone without having their throats close up and forgetting all their words. He tried to handle everything with email. Or text. Even face-to-face wasn’t as bad as the phone.
When his parents split up, his dad used to call him every Thursday and on weekends. But Lionel didn’t know what to say to him, and they’d spend a couple minutes on the phone in total silence. Then his dad would ask to speak to his mom, and Lionel would give the phone over to her. Lionel wasn’t sure what you were supposed to say to other people over the phone. That time last year, when his dad came to see him after he’d tried to kill himself, had been the first time they’d seen each other in years. And what had his dad said? You look homeless.
“I’ll send him an email,” Lionel said.
Charles hooked his finger over the top of the pillowcase and pulled. It was looser than Lionel first thought, and the nails wedged into the wall squeaked.
“I don’t think you secured this,” Charles said. “Is this just plaster?” Charles tapped the wall with his knuckles and frowned.
“You’ve made your point.”
Charles lowered himself to the floor. He was wearing a gray sweater and just his underwear, no socks. He stretched his legs out under the table and brushed Lionel’s ankles with his big toe. He rested his head against the cupboard doors and closed his eyes. Then he started to hum, and his toe switched back and forth over the knobs of Lionel’s ankle bones in time to the humming.
“Is that what you’re working on?”
Charles shook his head, but the humming grew louder, and he smirked a little. He was having fun at Lionel’s expense.
“Very funny.”
“You don’t know Tchaikovsky?”
“Did Bach write that?” Lionel said.
Charles laughed loudly, and it was like that sound from last night when he’d stood on the porch and howled.
“Is Bach the only composer you know?”
“I know about Chopin,” Lionel said. “He’s a composer.”
“Well, with Bach and Chopin, you could probably fake your way through a dinner party.”
“Is that what you do? Fake it?”
“Don’t you?” Charles asked.
Lionel felt stupidly hurt by that. Not because he objected in principle, but because it implied that the two of them sitting in Lionel’s kitchen was fake. Not real.
“Sure,” Lionel said. “I’m a big faker.” He left the table and sat next to Charles on the floor. Closer to the window, he could hear the wind kissing the narrow gap at the top of the pillowcase. He reached up and back, his shoulder pinching a little, and pulled the broken halves of the ruler down. On the back, the blue marker had faded to black. He’d written his name there and the year he’d gotten it. Charles took the ruler from him and put the two halves together.
“This has seen better days.”
“Yeah,” Lionel said.
Charles made to throw the ruler into the trash across the room. Lionel reached for it.
“Don’t do that.”
“It’s busted,” Charles said, holding the ruler out away from Lionel. “What’s the deal?”
“It’s not yours. You can’t throw something out when it’s not yours.” Charles turned toward him and pushed him onto his back. Then sat on Lionel’s stomach. He held the ruler over his head, out of Lionel’s reach.
“Your boyfriend give you this?”
“No,” Lionel said. “No.”
Lionel closed his eyes so he didn’t have to see Charles mocking him. But then Charles started to drum on the kitchen counter with the ends of the ruler. It was the music he had been humming. Charles squeezed his knees tight to Lionel’s sides.
“This isn’t funny,” Lionel said. “It’s not a joke.” He reached up for the ruler, and Charles caught his wrist, held his arm still. His first thought was that Charles was going to tickle him, and he flinched in anticipation for it. The extension of this horrible game. But Charles did not tickle him. No. He did something much worse. He leaned down and looked closely at the keloids. His breath was close on Lionel’s skin, warm, damp. But it was the brightness in his eyes that made Lionel look away. He didn’t want to see Charles seeing him.
Lionel tried to pull his arm free, but Charles was stronger than him. They both knew that, and it made Lionel feel more pathetic for struggling as he did.
“Don’t,” Lionel said.
Charles kissed the keloids, and Lionel almost jumped out of his skin at the shock of it.
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” Lionel said.
“Watch me,” Charles said. He kissed the heel of Lionel’s palm, and then moved down the tributaries of his veins, down the whole length of his arm. Kissing him again and again, until they were face-to-face. It was an ugly, cruel thing to do, Lionel thought. It was as mean a thing as he could have imagined. He couldn’t look at Charles, not after Charles had done what he did.
“I wish you hadn’t,” Lionel said.
Charles got off him then, and Lionel sat up. Blood had pooled in the back of his head, making him dizzy. He rested his back against the legs of the chair. And he took the pieces of the ruler from Charles. He felt safe with them there. A part of his old life, who he used to be.
“Why’d you do it?” Charles asked, and when Lionel did not answer, he added, “It must have hurt like hell.”
“You know how sometimes an animal will chew its arm off to get loose if it’s desperate enough?” Lionel turned his arm over and looked down at the scars there. They were mute. Whatever wisdom or clarity they had given him was gone. What he saw was a mass of tissue stitched back together. What he saw was only evidence of his body’s history. And to try to discern old moods, old insights, was just chasing shadows.
“Be serious, Lionel.”
Lionel wanted to laugh at that, being accused of not taking his own suicide seriously enough because he had tried to tell the truth about it. There was no why. No coherent theorem. It had been all gesture, as empty an idiom as the references from the potluck last night. When you tried to explain it, all the meaning went out of it. But Charles was looking at him with the expectation of an answer, and Lionel did not have one. Not a satisfactory one anyway. He felt as unprepared now to answer the question of why as he had when his mother first asked him last year. Why was an anachronism.
“You only ask why if you’ve never tried it,” he said.
Charles took Lionel’s hand in his own. Lionel saw Charles’s eyes flick to the particular array of scars. The hashwork of them. Nothing systematic or intentional about it.
“I think you’re very brave,” Charles said with a degree of sincerity that made Lionel wish he could take back everything he had said. Sincerity was a condescending emotion. People went around calling you brave when you tried to kill yourself and failed. They called you brave when you went limping through your life, as if the very difficulty of it were a sign of moral courage or valor. But there was nothing noble in suffering. There was nothing brilliant or good about the failed endeavor to exit one’s life. There was nothing courageous about the persistence of life, the prolonged project of living. People called you brave for going on because it affirmed their own value system. They considered their own life worth living, and so they considered every life worthy.
But it had to be true that life could be discarded when it was no longer of use. It had to be true that a person could ball their life up and throw it out with the trash if they found they had no desire to go on. Some lives, Lionel thought, had to be ordinary or ugly or painful. Ending your life had to be on the table. If you were the one really in control, and you were in it for yourself, then ending your life certainly had to be an option if you wanted it to be. But people called you brave for going on. They called you brave even if you only lingered in the world because you’d lost your real courage at the moment it mattered most.
“That’s what people say when they’re uncomfortable,” Lionel said.
“What?”
“I’m not brave.”
“Don’t get worked up,” Charles said.
“Man, whatever.”
Lionel lay down under the table. Gray spiderwebs and caught dust billowed in the corners of the legs. He could see the pencil marks of the carpenter who had made the table. He reached up and brushed the faded blue numbers. He scratched the wood with his nails. Charles crawled under the table, too. They lay on their backs, head to head, looking up into the blank underside of the table as though it were the night sky.
“You ever feel like your life is getting away from you, Lionel?”
“Yeah. All the time.”
“If I don’t get this thing at PNB, I think that might be it for me.”
“As a dancer?”
“Yeah. Maybe you can put in a word for me at your proctoring thing.”
“Absolutely. You bet.”
“A dancer only gets so many years. And that’s if they’re brilliant.”
Lionel knew better than to say that Charles was brilliant. It would have been insulting. Charles sighed.
“I’m going back to the program in the spring.”
“If I had another three years of this,” Charles said, waving, gesturing to Lionel’s life, apartment, world, whatever. “You had this little blip. And you’ll get to go back.”
It was true, Lionel thought, that he’d return to his life. That had been the thing he wanted most. But listening to Charles, it sounded childish. It sounded simple and easy. It was another form of condescension.
“You’re kind of self-pitying right now,” Lionel said.
“All I’m saying is, you’ve got this nice setup. And I’m here with a bum fucking knee, about to suck some old guy’s dick so maybe he’ll arrange an audition for me. So that maybe I can get another two years out of doing the thing I love most. You tell me who’s self-pitying. You’re the cutter.”
Lionel almost gasped at the fluidity of the remark. The way it snapped off at the end.
“I think it’s possible for my life to be shitty and also for your life to be shitty. Maybe you should keep your eyes on your own paper,” Lionel said. He was grateful then that he hadn’t said more to Charles, that he’d recognized the pitying, facile nature of Charles’s regard for him. For what he’d gone through. He was grateful he hadn’t betrayed himself by feeling more than he’d let himself feel.
“I didn’t mean that,” Charles said.
“You’re selfish.”
“Yeah, probably.” Charles turned and reached for Lionel. But Lionel moved away. He slid from beneath the table, and Charles followed. They sat up together. It felt like a game. Every time Lionel moved, Charles followed. They were locked in a round of Simon Says.
“Stop it,” Lionel said, but Charles just assumed his posture. Lionel huffed and spun around, and Charles did the same. Charles’s ability to copy not only his actions, but also the attitude each action contained, was uncanny. Lionel had the feeling of watching himself in a mirror, though on a delay. After a while, he forgot to be angry at Charles. They sat facing each other, doing mirrored gestures.
“This is one of the first things I learned to do. You learn to watch people. Imitate. Improvise.”
“You’re really good at it,” Lionel said.
“No. I’m not. The best people make you feel like you’re copying them. This isn’t even close.”
Their palms didn’t touch, but Lionel could feel the static from Charles’s skin. The human warmth of him. When Lionel sped up, Charles sped up. Except there was no gap between Lionel doing the thing and Charles adjusting. It seemed that they decided upon what they would do at the same moment. Lionel reversed direction, but there was Charles right in front of him. No matter what he did, there was Charles. They made a circuit with their hands, a figure out. Then more complicated sinuous patterns.
“We’re all just selfish assholes,” Lionel said. “Just like Sophie said.”
After a few minutes, Charles said, “I need a haircut.”
“You do,” Lionel said, but he was only half paying attention.
“You weren’t supposed to agree,” Charles said, a little pained.
“But it’s true. You’re kind of shaggy.”
Charles sat in the chair with a towel draped over his shoulders. Lionel got the trimmers from the bathroom. He didn’t like electric clippers. The buzzing irritated something fragile in him, and the vibrations sometimes stayed stuck in his head for a long time. But ever since the hospital, he had been too anxious to use manual razors—as if a part of him worried that, with sufficient opportunity, he might try again. He found that he could use the clippers on the lowest setting. Mostly, he used them for his head because his facial hair was far from formidable. He reconsidered this as he looked at Charles’s broad head, shaggy like a large, friendly dog’s. There was also the fact that Charles had white-people hair, which was a unique complication in this endeavor. White-people hair was smooth and slippery. He didn’t know how it would react to the trimmers. His own hair was woolly, fibrous. It came away in clumps, little balls of light brown fluff. It was easy to shear him.
“Okay,” he said, turning on the clippers. “Let’s do this, I guess.”
“That does not inspire confidence,” Charles said.
“I’ll have to take it all off. I can’t do anything else.” There was a pause. He could feel Charles turning that thought over in his head. He thought he could suggest that Charles take care of the front and instruct him on how to do the back or the sides. He bit the tip of his tongue.
“That’s okay,” Charles said. “Do it.”
“All right,” Lionel said, and drew the trimmers back through the first, delicate layer of Charles’s hair. He enjoyed running his fingers though it again and again as he buzzed it all away. It seemed like such a shame to do it to hair this good, this beautiful. It hadn’t even started to thin the way his own had. Charles had the kind of face that was suitable for any kind of hair, but the curls suited him most, brought out the boyishness in him. Without them, he would be too severe, too intimidating, too much like a man. But it was too late, all gone. Charles caught whatever hair he could and piled it in a little mound on his lap. Lionel slid his fingers against the fuzzy scalp that was slowly emerging from beneath the hair. He occasionally scraped too close, and Charles hissed at him, which made Lionel hard. The reprimand reminded him of how they’d fucked.
It was done in about twenty minutes, and Lionel was proud of how even it all was.
“You look good,” he said, appraising him. “You look really good.”
“Let me see,” Charles said, and went to the bathroom. He stayed in there a long time. Lionel could hear the water running. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, rocking his feet back and forth, testing the strength of his ligaments. He was chewing the edge of his lip raw. He could see falling snow through the window over the bed. It fell through the blue light of the street lamp, drifting sideways in the wind. It was accumulating on the sidewalk and the windowsill. He let the window up, and cold air blew in on him, clear and perfect.
“I like it,” Charles said from the bathroom. “You did a great job. I feel tingly all over, raw.” He came from the hallway, rubbing water into his hair. He had been rinsing away the loose bits. His face had lost its softness. There was still warmth in his eyes and in his brow, but now there was also sharpness, clean, cruel lines.
“You look different,” Lionel said, and Charles frowned at him.
“Bad? I thought you liked it.”
“I do like it,” he said. “I do. You look great.”
“I don’t believe you,” Charles said. His feelings were hurt. Lionel got up from the bed and gathered Charles’s hair into his hands.
“We have to burn it,” he said.
“Why?” Charles asked.
“So that birds don’t take it and make you crazy. It’s something my grandma says.”
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
Charles made a small circle in the snow, a place that he excavated with his bare hands. When he was done, his fingers were red and numb. He put them under Lionel’s shirt and held them there against his skin. Lionel shivered, but he didn’t move or make Charles take his hands away. He could do this, could give his heat, at least. Then Charles set the hair down in the middle of the circle and tried to light it, but it wouldn’t stay lit. A couple of strands turned bright orange then immediately burned themselves out. The ground was dampening the other hairs, making them hard to burn. Lionel went back into his apartment and came out with a small pot. He set it on the ground and put the hair inside. He took out a sheet of paper and handed it to Charles.
“Try this,” he said. Charles smiled at him and crouched over the pot. He lit the paper and nestled it into the hair. The smell was awful, as the strands turned to fire, like little worms writhing as they burned themselves out. Their light was insufficient to illuminate anything, but for a while, it was beautiful to watch.
Charles put his arms around Lionel, and Lionel leaned back against him. The wind was at their faces, the smoke rising toward them, then above them, and then away. Lionel felt he might fall asleep right there, standing up—drift off and never come back to his body. The snowfall was even and slow.
“Let’s go inside.”