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The freezing air from outside chills the plastic-covered room even further when the door is open. Yuri stands in the doorway, hugging himself and watching as Otabek trundles across the uneven snow of the yard with the wheelbarrow, lit starkly by the full moon.
The wheelbarrow is an inelegant solution, but the best one they have. It’s deep and stable enough, and Otabek guides it past the bumps and ice with only minimal slipping. When he comes up to the barn, he grunts, pushing it up the slope and onto the crinkling plastic. Yuri hurries the door shut, deadbolting it.
“Did you see the parselenae?” Otabek asks. Under the bright LED spotlights of the room, his face is quite pale, no cold causes him to redden anymore. His breath doesn’t steam.
“No. What are those?” Yuri asks.
“The moon dogs. They form in the halo around the moon when there are ice crystals in the air.”
Yuri hadn’t looked at the moon or the dark sky. “No,” he repeats. He clenches his fingers, hoping to warm them up. “Okay. Let’s lift him.”
The limbs spilling from the wheelbarrow are stiff and white. Yuri lifts by the arms, while Otabek grabs under the legs, and they hoist the body onto the old dining table. It, too, is covered in plastic, billowing out with static as Yuri steps close. Otabek never has the problem.
“It’s kinda sad,” Yuri says, arranging the body of the white-haired man neatly, arms at his sides, legs straight. From the pocket of his rubber apron, he picks out two silver coins and lays them on the closed eyelids, and tapes them into place with medical tape while Otabek moves the wheelbarrow out of the way. There’s only limited space between the two tables and under the burning lights. In return, he wheels the table with the instruments closer.
“I find it reassuring,” Otabek says. “You make death less unforgiving.”
“Do you think it’s kind of like magic?” Yuri picks up a bottle of oil. It smells buttery. He dips his fingers in and draws a short cross on the cold forehead of the silver-haired man, then turns towards the other table. He finds it reassuring to have Otabek there, just standing by the wall. He doesn’t need the help, but the company is nice.
“Absolutely not. Magic is for twinkling lights and card tricks.”
On the second table, a second man lies. His body is pliant and warm, and his head is turned to the side, breathing through an open mouth. His eyes are already taped shut with coins, and his limbs held down with cuffs linked to the legs of the table. Yuri slicks a cross on his forehead too, then another one on his chest. He isn’t sure if they’re required, but he likes the formality, the blessing, even if he does it with rapeseed oil.
“What do you think it’s like then?” Yuri asks, putting down the oil and picking up a knife. “Beka.”
He doesn’t need the help, but it’s nice to have it all the same. Otabek picks up the bigger butcher’s knife and pushes up his sleeves. The scars on him will never go away, but they’re faded, like silver tattoos ringing his arms and legs. Yuri thinks he’d done a good job stitching.
The blood that sludges out in the wake of Otabek’s chops has already turned black. The white skin is spattered, and the table quakes with the strength of his blows, as he cracks open the corpse’s sternum. Yuri is kind of used to the smacking, cracking sounds. The bone saw is meant for the ones still alive.
“That good?” Otabek asks after the chest cavity is open.
“Yeah.” Yuri steps in with the smaller knife. “Bucket.” The organs are good, just dead. He has gloves on, but mainly to help with handling the slippery stuff, and the black blood rises up to the elbows of his shirt as he works, taking out things and letting them slop into the enamel bucket Otabek holds out.
“If not magic, then what do you think this is?” Yuri glances up. Otabek’s eyes are slightly different colours, but Yuri kind of likes it. He’d done his best. The scar on his forehead is barely visible.
“Religion,” Otabek says after a while. “Faith has a lot of fear.”
“It does?” Yuri pulls off the gloves when he turns to the unconscious man. This part he needs to feel in his fingertips. The threads, the blood, the life.
“Yeah. Fear of doing wrong or going wrong. Fear of punishment. Fear of mortality. Death. Afterlife. Everything.”
Yuri rolls up his sleeves too. He picks an even smaller knife. Cutting up someone still breathing takes a little more finesse. He glances up at Otabek, who is unbothered by the cold of winter or the smell of death. He’s made of those things. Full moons and faith.
“I think this is creepy,” Yuri says. He cuts his own hand first, pressing a warm-blooded handprint onto the man’s chest, over the oil. “Who wants to live inside another person? Or as part of them? Geh.”
“Fear of separation.”
“So clingy,” Yuri says. He doesn’t need anaesthetics or heart monitors. He doesn’t do science. Or magic, according to Otabek. Maybe all he does need is a little faith.
“You brought me back.”
“Yeah, but as your own person.” It hadn’t been out of clinginess, just a deep sense of unfairness. That he would have to live in a world without Otabek so soon.
“Well.” Otabek says slowly. “As your person. They call me the golem in the village. The clay man.”
Yuri has smudged his blood all over the man’s chest. “Can you just wash the stuff?” He nods towards the slop bucket. “Before a goat comes and smashes you into pieces.”
Otabek passes through the sheets of plastic hanging from the ceiling of the barn with the bucket and its slippery, silky innards. He turns on the hose which spits out ice for a bit, tinkling against the concrete floor, and which Yuri thinks sounds like magic. Almost like the tinny popping of carbonation in a glass. The man wearing a smock of Yuri’s blood is still breathing. Yuri cuts him open in three swipes, forming a Y on his chest.
If two people want to live as one, it’s not his business. If one of them is already dead, he can only do his best. The living tissues squidge and squish and slip in his bare fingers very differently from the dead ones, hot and cloying. It never smells like antiseptic in the barn, but the thick odour of an open body and blood easily covers the cold-metal smell of snow. Otabek brings back the bucket, the organs floating in icy, bloody water, then hands Yuri the bone saw, making sure it’s plugged into the extension cord.
The body cavity sears Yuri’s cold fingers after the long while of sawing, metal scraping against bone in a high-pitched whine. The heart flutters on his palm like an animal. Otabek fishes out the dead heart from the bucket. His fingers no longer grow stiff with cold, and sometimes his face doesn’t move at all, but Yuri is used to it. He’d done all he could with the small muscles, but he does miss the small, warm smile sometimes.
Yuri tips the cold water out of the dead heart onto the floor, then places it into the open chest. “Beka.” He swipes at his hair, leaving a tacky smudge of blood on his cheek. Otabek is there in a breath—Yuri’s breath, not his—first to pull Yuri’s hair back and then wiping away the blood with a cloth.
“Beka,” Yuri says again, nodding towards the knife. Otabek knows this, too. He picks up the knife, his grasp not slippery, and as Yuri holds out his bare forearms, he slices down each of them, down the familiar path marked by his veins, now covered in red. The man on the table groans, spit bubbling at the corner of his mouth.
“I like watching you work,” Otabek says. He hands Yuri dead organ after another, and Yuri places them in, coating them with his blood. If it was science, he’d know how and why it worked.
“Thanks,” Yuri rasps, breathing a little harsh.
“That was the last one.” Otabek places the bucket down. “What else?”
“The eye.” Yuri nods at the dead man, and Otabek picks the smallest knife.
The blood on his arms steams, slick and glistening, sluicing down over his fingertips, making him dizzy. He watches the steam coil in the corners and folds of the plastic, in patterns and swirls. He always sees twinkling lights at this stage, fading. He starts tucking the sawed-off piece of sternum back in the man’s chest. The bone knits back together, slowly. He pulls the skin together, gluing the edges with blood.
“Beka.”
“It’s art, too,” Otabek says. He has one bloodshot blue eye in his palm which he tips onto a tea saucer on the instrument tray. “Sacred, fearful symmetry. Like the Vitruvian man.”
“The what?” Yuri mutters. Otabek hands him the curved needle with its looped tail of fishing line. Yuri is used to stitching with wet hands. The man gurgles on the table, brow furrowing and hands trying to clasp something, clawing at the air. Otabek holds the hands down, and the man’s chest pushes out instead, legs starting to kick against the restraints.
“The proportions of the human body according to Vitruvius,” Otabek mutters. “It’s a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci. The ideal body proportions.”
“I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” Yuri grunts, looping the fishing line over and over through the struggling skin. The stitching is just a precaution.
“Can you finish it?” Otabek asks, only slightly strained.
“Yeah,” Yuri says although his vision is tapering at the edges, like a candle burning out. Otabek pulls the medical tape and the coin off the man’s eye, and it snaps open, staring blankly up at the LEDs. When Yuri digs his thumb into the eye, the man’s mouth opens in a rigid, voiceless scream.
Otabek had screamed a lot, too. He doesn’t now. He doesn’t sleep. He doesn’t warm up. Sometimes he eats words written on paper. He holds the man’s head down as Yuri pulls out the hot, streaming eyeball, slicing the nerves with a knife. His breath strains in tandem with his patient’s, hacking and sharp over the struggles of the man under his hands. The blue eye slips into the gap he’s holding open with his fingers, covered with blood. He forces the lid to close, and tears and blood stream out from under it. Otabek replaces the coin and the tape, although it doesn’t stick well to the clammy skin.
Yuri’s rubber boots squeak on the plastic and the blood and the spilled water. He knocks his elbow into the dinner table, and Otabek catches him and drags him out as the man starts to really scream, convulsing on the table next to the body parts of his dead lover. But the roar in Yuri’s eyes is the interior workings of his own body, protesting the loss of blood. He catches sight of the full moon and its halo, two bright spots on either side, and then he’s plunged into a snowbank, the ice crystals tearing through his sore arms and labouring lungs.
Then he’s warm, and the lights are gone from his eyes. The moon dogs, the twinkling magic lights, and the bright LEDs of the barn. Otabek wraps his arms with gauze, using the blood-spattered roll of medical tape to secure the ends. Yuri is bare of his rubber armour and clothes. Otabek wipes Yuri’s hands, one by one, finger by finger, crease by crease, with a warm washcloth. The blood sizzles under the gauze. Otabek soaks the tips of Yuri’s fingers in the warm, red-tinged water, then carefully cleans around and under his nails.
He presses his cold lips against Yuri’s. “Sleep well, Yura,” he says. “It’s not magic. You work miracles. From the Greek thaûma and érgon.”
“Why do you know that?” Yuri mumbles. The small light of his bedroom is scattered between his lashes, making stars.
“I consume knowledge,” Otabek says and kisses him again. “I ate a dictionary.”
“Stop it,” Yuri slurs. The blood tingles under the gauze, burning his skin. The man in the barn is going to have a worse night. “Stop eating my books.”
“Shh.” Otabek presses their lips together a third time. Yuri can feel the scar across Otabek’s lower lip. He knows there’s a scar down the length of his tongue. He’d almost bled himself dry, putting Otabek back together. He’d used a whole spool of fishing line. “I’m going to go chop up the corpse and put it in the furnace,” Otabek whispers, then pulls the drapes shut around the alcove, leaving Yuri in the warm dark. The door creaks when he leaves the small house. Yuri can hear the screaming from the barn.
Humans are such cruel, selfish creatures, not wanting to let go when they should.