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“Nothing is real down here,” D— said, his eyes fever-hot. He clutched for my hand, and, intrigued despite myself, I let him take it, leaning in to meet him. “It can’t be. The whole city — a dreamscape, a shared hallucination. We are making it up as we go along.”
“You’re insane,” I said, and kissed his cheek. “That’s Parabola, I believe. We are in an underground city overtaken by a sentient market and hidden from Death, and it is so unbearably real that only the mad reject it.”
D— simply stared at me as I stood, the ends of his mouth twisted down into a parody of heartbreak. Devils take the bastard, he had really believed I would indulge him, believed I would follow his mad whims as I had in our New York childhood. I tugged at his hand, and, when he did not come easily, I planted my feet and yanked him to his.
“You need to leave this flat, darling,” I said. “Let’s go to the races, and it’ll be easier to put together your pieces again.”
“I’m not broken,” he said, mulishly, but followed me out the door all the same, taking his hat on the way out.
Down the stairs, smoke choking the air; out the door and onto the street, where the city stench did the same. “No, you’re not broken,” I replied. “You’re despairing and lonely and you stink of sweat and wine, but nothing is wrong with you. You are acclimating to the city. We all do it.”
“Why do you stay?” D—’s great brown eyes were fixed upon me, just as mine were fixed upon the distant figures leaping from fungal cap to fungal cap. “In the city, I mean. You must have thought about going home.”
“I have.” One figure flubbed a landing and had to clutch at the mushroom to avoid falling entirely. It stood, shakily, and leaped again. One more mistake like that, and it would be a great profit for me.
“Then why? ”
I sighed and turned to face him. “Imagine yourself at home.” To his great credit, he took my words at face value and closed his eyes. I watched a lock of dark hair lie delicately across his pale forehead and ached to stroke it aside. The business at hand, however, beckoned. “No, don’t remember it as it was. Imagine returning home, explaining the places you have seen. Imagine how your parents would ask what money you had earned or lost. Imagine your sister begging for stories about the people you met. Imagine your sweetheart taking your hand, asking why your temperature is so high, why your skin is so papery-dry. And imagine yourself, wearing hats that don’t bite, reading safe books which would never dare touch your mind, dancing with humans and not devils, sleeping in peace and comfort.”
He opened his eyes — those eyes! — and the misery in them speared me to my awful and empty heart. I did not think myself capable of gentleness anymore, yet when I spoke, it was silk-soft. “It’s torturous, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” D— said, and his face crumpled. He reached blindly for me, and, sucker that I am, I went as called. He was warm, and his skin drier and smoother than bone, and I yearned, longed, hungered to feel it against every inch of me.
“It is an addiction, this city. Worse than Prisoner’s Honey. It is the most selfish, most skilled, most cruel and violent lover one can take. If you can give it up, you will be the greatest man I have ever met.”
Against my ear, his breath shuddered in great, heaving, gulps. Perhaps I had broken D— with this truth. But his hands were large and clutched at the small of my back, and — Masters help me — I had sold my soul years before, and I had loved him as a weak and lonely girl in New York, and here he was before me now, my first and only friend, as friendless and out of place in London as I had been then, as desperate for my comfort as I had been for his touch —
I did the criminal act. I committed the great sin. We cannot die here, and anyway I have done far worse things, but truly I wish to hang only for this act. I leaned away just slightly, looked into his tearstained face, set my hand to the back of his neck, and kissed him.
And God forgive me, for he kissed me back.
D— was gone in the morning. I woke to empty space on either side of me — a rare event in my new and gilded apartments. No note left anywhere, and no sign of him when I called at his home.
I asked around, and for once, my skill with words did me no good; everyone looked down or to the side and avoided my questions. I switched to threats, then, and had no luck there either. I ran through two useful acquaintances before giving up.
In the end, it was the Struggling Artist who told me. The irony was not lost on me — my first friend and lover in the Neath breaking the news of my first friend in the Above, now a lover I should never have taken.
“He’s taken a ship,” the Artist said, familiarly out-of-sorts in his shabby clothes. “No destination, but they’re saying he was seeking answers.”
My head jerked up, and I seized his hand where it lay on my shoulder.
“No!” His grip tightened as well. “Not that way. He’s not going to get lost down here — he’s going up. Your Dewy-Eyed Lover is fighting his way back to his fiancé.”
I had no right to cry, and still I did, for D— had hated epithets and demanded that I use his name, even if the Neathy air struck it from my memory each time I said it, and now he was the Dewy-Eyed Lover , and not even my lover.
And the Struggling Artist, curse him, kissed me as I cried, and in my weakness, I let him take me to bed and put his mouth to my cunt for hours.
After, he lay next to me, though neither of us slept. I knew that the same thoughts ran through both of our heads — We are survivors, we are sinners, we are idiots and weaklings and addicts. We are maggots crawling upon the decaying corpse of a city that should have died a century ago.
In the dark, I reached for the spoon upon the table next to me, and the Artist mirrored me, taking the bottle of honey from the nightstand on his side.
“I’m not leaving,” he said, pouring a drop for me.
“I wish you would,” I said. “I wish we all would.”