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i. The high hits you like a headrush, like a freight train. One moment you’re you, clear-headed and cold in the sterile air of the storage locker, the crushed-up pills a chalky mass dripping down the back of your throat, and the next your head is full of cotton, teeth gumming together like they’re full of sticky candy. The forgetting will come later, as it always does. For now, you’re already starting to lose feeling in your fingertips and that’s almost enough. For now, you have the painting tight in your arms, tucked under your chin, a mother’s embrace in reverse.
The newspaper crinkles as you shift into a more comfortable position, let your spine relax against the concrete floor. Ars longa, vita brevis, you think, out of the blue. Something your mother said once, maybe. Art is long, life is short. If only she knew how true that was.
ii. Sometimes you let yourself think about him, but only when it’s dark and quiet - at least, as much as it ever is with the chaos of New York City just a few stories below. Opening that window in your mind, pulling the curtain aside and allowing yourself just a peek, I swear - it fills you with a strange, dull sort of pain. Something like a toothache that echoes all throughout your body.
His hand on your hand beside the pool, his hands in fists around your throat as you struggle to the surface, his thigh brushing yours against the sticky vinyl of the bus seat - a series of bullet points, a montage of moments behind your eyes.
His strange, scraggly teeth gleaming in the moonlight, the feel of his cracked lips against your fingertips, the feeling of his heartbeat rabbiting against your own the first time, just before - the look in his eyes the morning after, something you’d never seen on him before and never on anyone else since.
You curl into a ball like a child and dream in sense memories you never quite remember in the morning.
iii. In the years following your return to New York you have a series of recurrent daydreams in which he comes back to you. It’s embarrassing, childish, something you’d never in a million years admit to anyone because it’s enough to make you blush and burn with shame just to think about in the privacy of your own head.
In one, you bump into him on the street - There you are, Potter. Have been looking for you. In another, you wake up to a text - CRZ NWS, DAD CMNG 2 NEW YRK 4 BZNIZ!!!! and you spend a glorious few days showing him the sights. In another, you go looking for him instead – in Australia, Indonesia, Poland – anywhere and everywhere on the whole “planet of Earth” he’s ever mentioned to you.
There are several months, when you’re first back, that you startle a little every time the bell rings at the front of the newly-opened shop, every time the wall phone in the kitchen rings to life, every time Hobie calls up the stairs to you from the basement to Come down, I have a little surprise for you.
As you get older, these hopeful fantasies fade away little by little. But still you catch yourself - every now and then - spinning wildly in the street at the sound of a certain cackling kind of laugh, feeling your heart lurch spasmodically at the sight of some underfed teenage stoner.
Of course when your paths do cross again, it’s nothing at all like how you’d always imagined. And yet, it’s exactly right. Almost too late, just in the nick of time. Such is life these days.
iv. It happens on one of the many, many nights you wake in a cold nightmare sweat, the taste of ash thick in your teeth, a silent scream crawling its way up your throat. You’re shaking, trembling, choking on every breath, begging someone to save you. Boris is there, of course, shhing you and pulling you to his chest, hands stroking gently over your shoulders, your elbows, your spine. He’s holding you like there’s nowhere else in the world he’d rather be, cool hands against your burning skin, singing that stupid fucking cat song just like always.
It should be strange, you think. It should be annoying, irritating, too much to handle right now with your skin feeling this uncomfortably snug on your bones. It should be anything but what it is - comfortable. And safe. You’re all warm inside in a way you haven’t been since your mother died and that’s really all you could possibly ask for in the end.
Your breathing settles down and you scooch up the pillow until you’re forehead to forehead, nose to nose, and then - because it’s the middle of the night and nothing’s really real except for the way you feel right now, in this exact moment - you kiss him. He kisses back, slow like a dream, and then there is movement and hands and clothes on the floor. It’s not enough and then it’s plenty and then it’s very nearly too much – and then it’s over.
You go to school the next morning, for want of something to do and someplace to be. You slouch into your first-period desk and wonder if anyone can tell. If they know what you did, what he did, what you both did together. There are soft, faint bruises like ghosts beneath your shirt. Like overripe skin on a piece of fruit.
He’s quiet most of the day, which is good because you don’t know if you have it in you to carry on a conversation today. You’re hardly sure your voice will even come out at all. For the first time in all the months you’ve known him, you sit across the aisle from each other on the bus.
At his house that night, you sit stiffly on the bed, back flush to the wall as a shitty horror movie plays out on the tiny television screen across the room. His shoulder brushes yours and you flinch so violently it makes him jump too.
You look tired, Potter, he says after a while. Do not think you slept so good last night.
And there’s something about the way he says it, unsure and quiet and looking just about as off-centered as you feel, that you turn your head and smile at him.
Yeah? And who’s fucking fault is that, huh?
The next time your shoulders touch, you don’t move at all.
v. You don’t own a car, which is unfortunate because you love to drive. Sometimes you’ll rent one anyway as a treat to yourself and drive south to Brooklyn or across the river to Jersey.
There’s nothing you really want to do in any of the places you end up, no destination in mind. It’s just the act of driving itself that you love, hands at ten and two, soft music on the radio, cars and bikes and buses disappearing into a chrome blur outside your window.
Of course, there are times you are so lost in an opioid daze you lose all sense of time and end up smack-dab in rush hour traffic heading out of the city. On these days, the comfortable tedium of your routine turns into a nauseous swirl of red lights and shiny bumpers. Without fail, the songs on the radio will switch over from bubbly and bright new pop music to something older and gloomier, laced with so much nostalgia that you want to heave. Radiohead or something close enough. A song you listened to a thousand times in Vegas, one earbud for you and one for him as your feet tangled together in the chlorine murk of the pool.
You change the station but it happens again and again until you almost think someone is out to get you, that every radio station in the area is hosting an hour straight of depression classics. Eventually, fed up, you switch the radio off altogether.
On the good days, everything falls into place and you drive for hours, on and on until the itch is satisfied and you can turn around and follow your headlights home. Even then, there’s something about the world that makes you want to disappear – the strongest desire to pull the wheel on the Brooklyn Bridge and tumble thirteen stories straight down into the East River, the irrepressible wish that the walls of the Holland Tunnel will crumble and cave in, locking you in the tightest embrace you’ve ever known.
The thoughts are sudden and fierce and sneak up unexpected every time, without fail. You always forget them in the morning.
vi. He makes you walk for what feels like hours and what, in hindsight, probably is. By the time he finally lets you slump on a bench and catch your breath, your shoes are soaked through and your fingertips are sparking with a curious pins-and-needles numbness.
He drags you to a café and forces a cup of coffee on you, coaxes you to eat little bites of food off his own fork. There’s still bile creeping up your throat and the coffee isn’t doing much to help force it down, but you’re in no shape to tell him no. A strong breeze would probably make you to keel over at this point.
You’re miserable – head pounding, teeth clattering together, wet heat gathering behind your eyes and threatening to spill over – and you just want this to be over, but Boris won’t shut up about your bird and reward money and happy Christmas, Potter.
You don’t like to be helpless. Not at this stage in your life. You were helpless for so long in so many places - the desert, the city, the gallery, cold houses, lifeless rooms - it feels almost like overkill at this point. Boris seems to realize this and asks if you’d like to come back to his hotel for a night or two, Just until you’re better.
You don’t know how to thank him for his kindness, how to explain the way your heart is so full it makes your teeth hurt. The pressure in your head finally gives way and a few tears escape, slipping along the sides of your nose. His hands come up to lift your glasses off, wipe the tears away. You try your very best to live in this tiny, perfect moment forever and ever.
vii. Every so often your typical dreams – the painting, your mother, Pippa, blood and dust and sweat – start to give way to stranger, more concerning ones flavored like lukewarm vodka and illuminated in flashing neon. Dreams that you wake from twisted in your sheets, sweaty and over-warm and half-convinced there’s another lost soul in the bed with you, another knobbly spine pressing into your own.
You try to keep them at bay with whiskey and sleeping pills, anything you have on hand, but soon enough the only way to stifle the little bonfire in your chest is to go out and meet a girl at a bar, or else call up one of the handful of exes in your contact list, and spend a few nights sleepless for some other reason besides run-of-the-mill insomnia.
It’s not ideal, not what you really want to be doing. Quite frankly, you always feel a little gross after one of these hookups, sleazy and self-loathing and wondering if maybe you are exactly like your father after all. Anything is better than the alternative, though – waking up flushed with memories of hot sun and cold beer, of wind and sand and stars, moonlight on pale skin, a cool hand on the back of your neck. Or worse, waking with tears in your eyes and a soft voice whispering Polish nonsense in the back of your head.
It’s worth it, you decide, to keep these memories from rising to the surface as you sleep. You’ll do whatever it takes to keep the past in the past where it can’t hurt you anymore.
So you continue to sleep with women you hardly know – even get engaged to one – despite the sick feeling it puts in the pit of your stomach, despite the fact that the memories creep in anyway, unbidden, when you least expect. You close your eyes and let your body take over and it’s almost what you really want. Close enough, anyway.
viii. You stay in Amsterdam for just over ten days because, as Boris puts it, You look like dead man. Nobody in right mind would let you buy plane ticket.
You spend your days wandering the city, taking turns tracing paths in bright blue Sharpie across the foldable paper map Boris stole from the hotel lobby. On his days to choose, Boris makes it his personal mission to find new and serpentine routes to get to the red light district, ever since the first time you walked right past a window, oblivious until the woman behind it rapped on the glass and scared the living daylights out of you. Boris had laughed his head off as you flushed and stammered and half-ran down the alley – only to come across more and more windows, faces and bodies and cobblestone streets glowing a seductive red in the coming twilight.
Is complete accident, Potter, he says each time. Lots of women, lots of windows, very confusing city.
Personally, you think he’s a little too invested in his goal of getting you laid. Especially since you’ve only just gotten over the shitting-your-brains-out phase of withdrawal. It’s a game for him, a challenge for you both. Who will make a fool of themselves first?
When it’s your turn, you drag Boris along to shops and cafes and parks and open air markets. You both have an unspoken agreement not to visit any museums – it seems too much like tempting fate at this point. There are enough antique stores in the city to overwhelm even Hobie but you make a valiant attempt to visit every one you can, just to breathe in the scent of hundred-year-old wood and varnish if nothing else. Boris becomes uncharacteristically charmed by the blue-and-white Delft pottery they sell at every single tourist trap and buys you a little magnet with an even tinier songbird on it at a stall off the Prinsengracht. You tuck it in your suit jacket and trace its smooth outline with a fingertip as you walk.
ix. You fly around the world for a year and solve your problems, one after another. Chests on chests on tables on chairs on every goddamn lie you’ve ever told in your adult life. Airports, planes, tarmac sticky and hot in the summer and dusted with sugary snow in the colder months. Layovers, stained cloth-covered seats, shitty breakfast sandwiches from the café just outside the security checkpoint.
One endless blur of desperately craving a Xanax and then the quick despair of remembering your sobriety. Long nights, red eyes, sleepless hours spent shivering in recycled air.
In between it all, making your grand apology tour to the pitiful number of people you can still tentatively call friends. You spend many a hazy afternoon at Hobie’s kitchen table, accepting cup after cup of strong black coffee as you both pore over the paper trail of the mess you’ve made. There are afternoons in the workshop, too, meticulously sorting different-sized nails into various recycled medicine containers to the tune of Hobie sandpapering a table leg into glasslike perfection. Scritch-scratch, back and forth for hours. You even accept his invitations to dinners with Ms. So-and-So and the theater with Mr. What’s-His-Name. You come home bone-tired and smelling like old lady perfume, and try to catch a few hours of sleep before your next flight.
As for Pippa, you apologize so many times and in so many ways you completely lose count. She says she forgives you and you believe her, because she’s not the kind of person who lies about that sort of thing. You keep doing it, though. Just in case she hasn’t really forgiven you all the way. You even go to her summer wedding in London, shake Everett’s hand and tell him he’s a lucky man. He cries a little when she comes down the aisle and your opinion of him softens ever so slightly.
By the time the year is up, you’re so exhausted you think you could sleep forever and still wake up tired. The last flight back to LaGuardia is surreal, simply for the fact that you can’t really believe this is it, that it’s finally over. The taxi drops you off a few blocks down and you walk the rest of the way to Hobie’s wondering what the hell exactly you’re going to do with your life now.
Like an answer, like a prayer, Boris is waiting for you on the front step.
x. In Antwerp, you watch Boris shoot up heroin and feel your stomach drop to your toes.
Bare, whitewashed walls. Cold moonlight peeking in through broken window blinds. You look around the room and can see with perfect clarity what the rest of his life is going to look like. Glint of the hypodermic needle, track marks crawling up his arms like ivy overtaking an abandoned house. Grime, gore, bloodborne infections. Dead and cold in the ground by thirty-five.
You don’t know if you can stand to lose anybody else. The next time someone dies, they might as well just take you with them.
Boris notices your worry, must be able to read it like fault lines in the topography of your face, but he misunderstands the reason. You don’t have it in you to correct him, to explain the sudden crushing weight of knowing he’s going to die someday. Probably right in this very room. Because he saved you – over and over again – and you can’t save him, and it eats you up inside.
He falls asleep quickly after the drugs hit his bloodstream, slumped on the couch, floating in an opioid daydream. It’s a kind of heaven, as you know only too well. You cover him with a blanket, make sure to tuck his feet in so he doesn’t get cold. You sit in an armchair and allow yourself to look at him – just a glance – as he sleeps. It makes you feel prickly all over, so you turn away and try to sleep instead. You dream of wandering the Nevada desert, lost and utterly alone.
xi. There’s only one bed in Boris’s hotel room. Because of course there is. When you complain, he brushes it off with excuse after easy excuse.
Don’t want to make big fuss at front desk. Easier this way – share like old times, eh?
It’s every cliché fucking romantic trope in the book, especially when you are both fully aware of how those “old times” always turned out. And usually you’d fight him on it, but you’re still too dopesick to sleep on the floor, so you’d rather not push it. The universe seems to be playing yet another big, cosmic joke on you but this time, you’re determined to have the last laugh. So you pull yourself together, heave one last big sigh, and crawl under the starchy sheets without any more discussion.
One or two nights turn into four or five and before you know it, it’s not really his hotel room anymore but rather both of yours. By some miracle, you don’t dream about him at all for the ten long nights you spend sleeping next to him in a too-small bed for two overgrown men. Aren’t the Dutch supposed to be the tallest people in the world? you think. Why the fuck are these beds so shitty?
Maybe it’s something about him just being there that tames the small animal of your subconscious, soothes it into submission. Maybe it’s the sudden lack of dopamine in your brain that shuts the whole system down for a while. There has to be an explanation for it, or how else are you not losing your sanity just being around him twenty-four hours a day?
Scratchy palms on your skin, smoothing the sweaty hair off your neck after a nightmare. Flash of pale shoulder, white thigh as he searches for clean laundry at the bottom of the suitcase and you pretend not to look. Everything on display as you clip away the stitches in his arm, change the bandage, help him into the shower to wash away the last trickle of blood. It should be breaking you down into bite-size pieces but here you are, somehow, still whole.
On one of your last nights there, suddenly brave in the dark and quiet, you ask him the question that’s been burning a hole in you for ages now.
Did you ever love me? you ask, voice just this side of too-loud in the soundless hush of the hotel room. When we were kids?
Of course, he answers. I love you still.
You don’t know what to say to that, every ounce of bravery sucked out of this new, gaping hole in your chest.
I think I did, too, you say after some time. Who knows where the words came from. They taste strange on your tongue.
And now? Boris asks. Too quiet, especially for him.
I don’t know, you say. It is the most honest you have been in years, decades even, maybe your whole life. When his hand finds yours amidst the tangle of sheets, you hold on for dear life.
xii. The very worst thing is that you’re almost certain you’re never going to see him again. It’s simply been too long, lightyears past the day or two he promised you out on the street that night, yellow taxi idling at your back. Sealed with a kiss, like that actually meant something to either of you. Like he hadn’t been a flight risk since the day you met him.
He hasn’t answered your texts in months but that doesn’t make you want to stop trying, just on the off chance that this time he does.
You go to college for a while and it’s a mess – house parties every weekend and some days in between, cocaine and ecstasy just to feel something, then shots of whatever it takes to make all that feeling stop. Term papers, reading assignments.
Fucking Dostoyevsky, your namesake from another century, another continent. Fyodor, Theodore. A rhyme unto itself. In all your time together, he never called you that. Potter this, hey you that, but never Theo.
A professor mentions, offhand one day, that the Russian language doesn’t have an equivalent for the th sound in English. You spend a good several days ruminating on that, spiraling around an explanation of some kind. What would your name have sounded like coming from his mouth? It just about kills you to realize you’ll never know.
xiii. Getting Boris into your bed – again, as proper, consenting adults this time - is so much easier than you would have thought. All it takes is a soft kiss in the entryway, your bags shoved to one side of the tiny hallway. A reverent Yes? whispered into the cool afternoon quiet. A nod of your head.
Before long you’re in your room, stripped down to your dress shirt and not much else, Boris heavy as sin on top of you. His socked feet clutching one of yours – bare – between them.
A tear sliding down your face, slow and ticklish. A hand on your neck. A hand on your waist. Hands everywhere. Boris laughing into your mouth, sighing against the curve of your neck. Whispered Russian in your ear, half-translated on the way to your brain, dirty words, a laundry list of things he wants to do to you.
His leg slides up between yours and you can’t help the way your stomach jolts at that, can’t resist the sudden bolt of arousal that turns your bones to jelly. You want to tell him to stop, it’s too much, you’re not like that. It all feels far too good to be anything but bad.
You’re burning up, full of some foreign emotion and scared of this person you think maybe you’ve been all along. You need to get some control back before you lose your shit and cry for real – or else push Boris away and start calling him horrible, ugly names, throwing words like darts in the hopes that one might stick. You twist your hips a little instead of cursing him out, get your own thigh slotted up right against his.
He tries to push it back down. Is not about me tonight, Potter, he says. This is all for you.
Well, that’s stupid, you say. It should be about both of us.
He laughs, breathless. Like a woman, or someone far more delicate than he. Oh, so you are communist now, huh?
You shrink in on yourself a little, because it hurts to hear that tone from him right now. Maybe he’s right. Maybe your clingy affection is something comical, pathetic.
No, no no no, he says, eyes crinkling, crumpling, with something heavier than mirth. Am not making fun – not laughing at you. Promise! Look so nervous, Potter, just want to make you smile. We will do whatever you want, is all okay with me.
The fondness of his tone aches like a broken rib and rips any words you might have spoken in response straight from your mouth. By way of an answer, you raise his left arm up to your eye level, inspect the thready dark veins beneath the skin and the faded red rash of track marks that dot them like pins on a map. You bend your head down and trace the whole messy constellation with the tip of your tongue to its nexus at the crook of his elbow. You press a kiss to the ropey knot of scar tissue there and he gasps a little, soft and broken.
I quit, he says, an answer to a question you didn’t ask aloud. Have been clean six months.
There isn’t much talking after that. There isn’t any need.
xiv. Twat, says the boy across the aisle, looking for all the world more like a movie character than any actual, real-life human being. He meets your gaze and raises an eyebrow and for just a moment, it’s like you two are the only people in the entire world.
Oh? you think, like a question without an answer. You feel with a sudden, perfect clarity that the two of you are going to be friends. You wonder what kind of trouble this burnout-looking kid will get you into. You wonder who you’ll be at the end of it all.
You wonder what your mother would think.