Chapter Text
With nowhere to go and an eternity ahead of him, Armand decided to work his way backwards.
In San Francisco, he drank. He stumbled from 440 to Badlands to Oasis to Powerhouse, ears ringing and vision blurry. He lost himself in a sea of skintight clothes and sweat and musky cologne and drowned himself in overpriced cocktails. On many nights he got drunk enough to forget all of his names. One morning he woke up at the wharf to the smell of butchered fish and vomited off the side of the pier. Should that have been the end of things? Armand wasn’t concerned with should anymore. He nursed his aching head with the blood of a sturdy-looking gentleman in coveralls and got drunk all over again that night.
At The Stud he was pinned to the wall by a leather daddy in assless chaps and kissed so thoroughly he expected to come out of it melting. He sucked someone off in the bathroom. Someone sucked him off in the bathroom. Under pulsing lights and warm hands and throbbing bass he could pretend he was loved.
Music he’d never heard, people he didn’t know, a facade of a life that wasn’t his. To the couple he found himself sandwiched between as they bit his neck and licked his chest in their shared bedroom, he was a hot piece, alluring and mysterious and down for whatever.
But then one of them, a woman with electric blue eyeliner that jumped out against her dark skin and a hoop in her nose, asked him if he was okay. And the facade broke. They were never supposed to ask .
“Perhaps I should go,” he said, rising from the bed on wobbling legs. The woman whose name he didn’t know and her equally anonymous boyfriend saw him to the door. The man, Armand’s height but larger in stature — and yet his presence softer than Armand’s somehow, no sharp edges for Armand to cut himself on — put his number in Armand’s phone and said to text when he got home safe.
The taste of them both still lingered on his tongue by the time he reached 503 Divisadero, now sandwiched between a liquor store and a boutique salon. He'd sold this property to a real estate company decades ago, hardly inclined to hang onto it after all that happened in that house. He and Louis had stayed in the area a while longer, but not here.
Armand closed his eyes, peeling back the low hum of intoxication coursing through his brain to search the house of occupants.
Two men and a child. A girl, sleeping soundly in her bed with a stuffed animal tucked under her arm. The couple asleep on the couch in front of the television as it played a late night talk show, a blanket tossed over their bodies.
Armand had the courtesy to stumble off into an alley before he vomited.
In the morning, in spite of the hangover that urged him to remain in his cocoon of blankets and hotel pillows, he dressed in sheer cream-colored linen and went to Baker Beach.
The world was constantly shifting, empires rising and falling, borders drawn and redrawn. But the ocean, for the most part, remained unmoving. In millions of years when the landscape of the planet would be unrecognizable, he wouldn't be able to say that. But for now, for this half millenia, it had stayed the same — heated considerably and overflowing with plastic, sure, but its presence held. The white foam of the shoreline and the roar of the waves remained.
The northernmost part of Baker Beach, closest to the Bridge, was “clothing optional” — a courtesy to those who wished to avoid tan lines, or an opportunity to embrace humanity’s prehistory when breasts and genitals were merely part of the scenery and nothing to gawk at. In all his years in San Francisco, Armand had never ventured there before. He did now.
In art history, there was a difference between naked and nude. Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass , with the undressed woman and her wrinkled heap of clothes beneath the picnic basket, coupled with the two fully clothed men — this was a naked painting. Michaelangelo’s David, that incomprehensible tower of marble muscle, was nude. Nudity was a natural, idealized state of being. Nakedness was the act of undressing, evidence of a previously clothed state. It extinguished the fantasy.
Arun and Amadeo had known this. They had been taught to already be undressed before any guests entered the room.
Marius would be proud that such thoughts lingered, Armand thought, as he stripped naked on the sand, lit up a glittering orange by the sun. His linen pants and matching button-down pooled at his ankles. Marius would be proud of his incomparable art collection and the amount of time he spent fretting over what it meant to be naked, to be nude, to be exposed in paintings and photographs and the lenses of the human eye, the intangible albums of memory. That’s what all art was, really; a preservation of memory.
Sand clung to the soles of his feet as he approached the water. His heart pounded with the hyper-awareness of his nudity, not remotely soothed by the knowledge that everyone else was just as naked. They weren't, really. No one could ever be as naked as he felt.
It was cool in San Francisco even in the summer, and the temperature of the water startled the ache out of his head. The velveteen ripple of the ocean was a mercy. The sun caught his skin but didn't burn it. He closed his eyes and let himself float, arms spread wide, rocking with the rhythm of the waves.
He ignored the anvil of grief in his chest, pushed down the last seventy-seven years worth of memories. He ignored the angry and desperate calls of his fledgling, his Daniel, who knew everything there was to know about him as soon as Armand had shared his blood. Daniel had seen it all. And what did people do when they saw it all? What had Louis done, and Lestat before him? Armand would not be left again. So he left first.
But no ocean was big enough to drown out the screaming pain of solitude.
He caught many a pair of eyes as he breached the shoreline and — no, that wasn't true. It was imagined, the looking: the old women with buzz cuts sunning their wrinkled breasts, young women decorated in tattoos that eeled over their limbs; lanky men without a single hair on their bodies besides their heads, men the size of bears with hair to match; and in-between bodies with any combination of long hair and flat chests and curved hips and bearded faces. The sky might as well have opened its eyes to see him on the shore, his dark hair shimmering with seawater and his ass cheeks turned up toward the sun as he lay down on the towel.
No one approached, no one jeered. Was he nude, or naked? They had seen him undress. Had he disrupted the fantasy? Why was he so compelled to fulfill it? What would it look like to be real?
He was certain people used nude beaches to cruise. But for him, the humid heavy air that preceded a potential fucking was entirely absent. It almost felt wrong, like the lack of proposition meant he’d made a mistake somehow.
In the 1950s, being queer in the States was as great a threat as being a communist, perhaps even greater. And if you were one, it meant you were probably the other. He remembered quite vividly what the general (white, heterosexual) American public used to say (continued to say, just under their breaths) about people like him and the spaces they used to find each other — the beaches, the parks, the underground bars, the bathhouses. He and Louis had read about it all in the papers and seen it on the news as they traveled port to port. They had given it another decade before braving the U.S. Of course, the 60s had its own string of events that the nation now preferred to forget and glazed over with federal holidays and history months, sanitized commemorations that ignored the government's failures. But free love — that had appealed to them.
These people weren’t threats. Never had been. They were human, just as he had once been a human, existing honestly, without the veneer of clothing. Anyone who looked his way was simply appreciating beauty where they found it. It was not their fault it made Armand sick to his stomach, while at the same time he craved it the way some did heroin. It was not their fault he would kill to get it just as much as it killed him to have it.
He took the Bridge to Muir Woods National Monument, seeking refuge from the harsh truth of the sun.
He and Louis had gone once, at night when the park was closed, when it was only the two of them and the wildlife and the stars. The trees had loomed high above them, disappearing into the canvas of leaves blacked out by the moon.
It was another world in the daytime. Redwoods over two hundred feet tall stretched towards the sky as if the earth itself was reaching to the heavens. Laurels and maples and tanoaks grew beneath the canopy, absorbing the light that danced over the trails where it managed to trickle through.
No. He'd come here more than once.
Most of the trees here are 500 to 800 years old.
Older or younger than you?
… Many are my peers.
Daniel with his camera and his shitty hiking boots and his tawny curls. He'd asked Armand if Louis knew about this — a question that was, not very subtly, really about whether he could guarantee he'd make it out of this interaction with his life intact. Armand had said yes, Louis knew. Louis had kept tabs on Daniel all these months, and would continue to. If Daniel turned up dead and exsanguinated in a ditch somewhere, Louis would know.
So of course Armand vowed not to harm a hair on Daniel's head. This was at a time in Armand and Louis' relationship where Armand was still trying to keep up the pretense of servitude and trustworthiness.
Daniel had brought tapes, but Armand had crushed them one by one in his hand. Daniel had let out a half-groan, half-whine in frustration.
C’mon, man, those aren't cheap.
I left the recording device. You should thank me.
I just wanna hear your story.
Armand had hummed in amusement, lifting his head to the vast canopy of shimmering leaves and wondering, for a moment, how much more vast this forest would have become if not for those who had painted the soil red with indigenous blood in the name of their God. How wide the landscape, how deep the roots, if nothing had ever been torn up.
It had been 1979 the last time he was here, a mere two years before an entire generation of queer men would begin to wither into husks of their former selves, quietly passing in crowded hospitals under Reagan’s willful negligence. He and Louis would move on when the nation’s ocean of grief began to lap at their door. Death all around them, but unable to touch them. The same could be said for the outpour of love that came with it. The loneliness, even with each other’s company, had been too much to bear.
Armand had looked at Daniel then, a gentle smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.
You haven't earned the right.