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When the waitress finally comes round, it’s half-past midnight.
Ryan orders enough to feed a small army.
Naim adds on a scramble to his stack of pancakes for when Ryan works through the three plates of his own and is inevitably still hungry.
“That motel we passed had a pool,” Naim says, stomach yawning, echoing its protests. The last hot meal they’d had been somewhere around Gundagai and had been split so they could afford the petrol. Naim wonders vaguely how they haven’t contracted scurvy.
“Whopper,” tries Ryan, mouth full. His serving’s cut into 4 bear-sized, carnivorous pieces, and the sawing of his knife makes a gnawing screech against the plate.
“Hope you’re not planning on choking to death,” Naim mutters, eyeing him warily, and Ryan huffs through his nose.
“What, the lifeguard doesn’t know how to give mouth to mouth?”
The cash they’ve got left after the petrol is barely enough to cover their breakfast, crumbled dollar bills shoved into an apron front pocket. A real room in a real, big city motel would be an awful and unquestioning waste of money. It would be better to suffer the sore necks and shoulders, find an empty parking lot somewhere police wouldn’t come patrolling and burrow into the leather of the backseat with the heat on.
A room would be a bad idea.
Naim thinks of an afternoon spent half-covered in sand in Adelaide. Circling Ryan in clear water and brushing skin against skin trying not to drown each other.
The pool might be nice, though. And the bed.
The shitty diner speakers are halfway through a tinny rendition of Big Yellow Taxi; there’s an undetermined stain on the bar seat to Naim’s right.
It’s their first night in Sydney, and it feels good to be anonymous.
Naim slides the scramble towards Ryan and watches his eyes brighten.
Later, on their backs in the ill-advised motel room, skin still wet from the clinging chlorine, they talk.
There’s much to do.
x
Naim, first name. Origins:
Arabic; Derives from the Arabic word na'im, meaning "serene," "peaceful," "happiness," "comfort," or "paradise".
Hebrew: Translates to "pleasant," "agreeable," or "delightful."
Naim (Nain) is mentioned in the New Testament as a village in the Galilee where Jesus performed a miracle.
Definitions, and plenty.
Hoped for and planned by a husband and wife, happy once (they must have been) and expectant. Ripe with hope. A baby and his brown, brown eyes. His wonder. His lack of words.
Disobedient without shouting, in small ways, ways his mother isn’t pleased with, but that the doctors say are normal for his age. He kicks his feet against the pew in front of him. He draws. She wishes he would shout. She wishes he’d stop looking at her like that; like he wouldn’t know how to breathe if she didn’t promise it was okay for him to try first. He’s so, so quiet. Eyes wide and searching.
She prays that he’ll be happy, and healthy. She wonders if the name she chose really belongs to him, or if it’s only hers that she’s tried to make fit. She prays some more. Tom gets laid off. Naim looks nothing like either of them but sort of resembles him about the mouth; Naim’s eyes are hers, though. Nothing happens until everything happens.
X
They meet her on the south side of the city, huddled tensely together in the corner of a chip shop. Naim is ambiguously nauseous. They’ve brought a pack of cigarettes as a sort of peace offering; one of the nicer brands, the kind they keep behind a glass case. Ryan’s borrowed a light from the boy behind the counter and smoked through a quarter of the pack in a seemingly vaguely suicidal attempt to burn through the nerves.
A girl enters. The bell rings.
The girl looks only slightly older than her picture on the courthouse website.
It had gone something like this:
The public records office computers hadn’t had much on the name Naim’s mother had written down, nor had the standoffish woman at the front office been willing to hand over a private citizen’s sensitive personal information to two scrappy looking boys with dirt permanently embedded into the knees of their jeans. Ryan semi-joked that it might’ve been his pierced ears, and Naim tugged on the studded lobe in a kind of commiseration.
“Well, I like them,” he whispered into Ryan’s shoulder, weathering the desk woman’s withering stare over Ryan’s turned back.
What they had received was someone who might know more.
Enter: The girl. Her name was Ella, according to the Times New Roman. Size 12 font.
All that the desk worker could legally tell them about her was that there had been a court case. Unknown date, unknown reason. It had since been closed; charges, whatever they’d been, apparently dropped.
“Hiya,” the girl says, Ella says, chipper for meeting two strangers in a dark part of town several hours past supper.
Naim recognizes that it’s a unreasonably defensive, wild part of him that zeroes in on her hand as she shakes Ryan’s. Jesus. He wonders what in the hell is wrong with him, neurons animal and misfiring, tries to smile convincingly as she moves forward. No use in scaring her off when they’ve made it this far.
Ryan breathes out, smoke exhaled like dragon’s fire.
“Well,” Ella starts, once they’ve settled into a hard booth at the back. It feels a bit like an interrogation. Ella at one end, Ryan and Naim essentially sewn together at the other. “Your phone call was a bit of a shock. I didn’t know there were any records of it. I guess I’m even more shocked that anyone would bother to look for them.”
Naim’s aware that to the ordinary person, it might seem like they’re psychopathic. Clinically insane miscreants bothering a poor young woman, picking at her flowing, staticky red hair and university jacket and years she’s put between herself and It. Going digging in yards, for bones, that never belonged to their claws. You get a call in the middle of the day from a pay-per-minute corner phone and it’s a boy you’ve never met. And he wants to know about the worst day of your life. About the man who made it happen. His voice is shaking and you probably want to run away; against your better judgement, you do not.
“Um,” Naim begins, on uneven footing. “Sorry, first off. This is probably weird.”
Ella smiles. “Bit stalkerish, yeah.”
Naim feels himself go red. “Ella,” Ryan interjects, glancing over at Naim, “we’re not crazy. Promise. I think that you’ll believe us, if you listen.”
“We’re looking for a man,” says Naim, before he loses his courage. “He might’ve… hurt you, maybe? We found your court case at the public records office,” Naim says. Ella’s face shutters, polaroid-quick; brown eyes open and shut in dumbwaiter precision. It reminds Naim of a flame, really. Orange glow and knife’s edge.
Ella looks out the window. Whatever she sees doesn’t keep her attention for long.
“He’s done it to you, too,” she decides, turning to look at them straight on and chin raised. “You’re looking for him.” Her eyes flit mechanically between the two of them.
“Fire keeps it back,” Ryan says. His fingertips tap soundlessly on the Formica. He can’t light up inside, not with the smoke alarm blinking technicolor. Naim lets the bitten-down shape of his fingernails be something of a makeshift tether; a sort of gravity to tie him, reef knot, to the moment. Ryan continues. “We can’t get one to light, anymore. We think he’ll know why.”
There’s an uncomfortable lull between the three of them. Ella’s nose, an almost too sharp thing out of Edvard Munch and Guernicas, is twitching like a hunted rabbit. Naim takes in the rest of her face, otherwise still in its silence. Skin whiter than the palest part of Naim’s inner arm. Eyeliner that’s almost convincing enough to pass as part of her, if it weren’t a bathroom tile shade of teal. She’s a fully fledged girl, Naim thinks. A real, human person. She’s got friends and a life and parents, probably, she picked out her own phone case from the colorful rack at the shopping mall. Maybe she had a dog. A fish in a glass bowl. They should leave her be. It would be the kindest thing.
And then Ryan shifts a bit, shape of a knee knocking Naim’s, and Naim refuses to make that specific trade.
“I, um,” Ella says, voice notably quieter. More subdued. It’s like she’s turned acrylic to charcoal all within a minute and a half. The fluorescent lights are suddenly a centimeter too sickly. “My mum sent for Reverend Haddock when a cinema worker caught my girlfriend and I in the back of an oldie rerun.”
Empire Strikes Back, apparently.
Her mum had been waiting with the deliverance healer when she’d showed up for their weekly movie night. They’d been planning on following up with Return of the Jedi; Haddock had been sitting on the couch. Polite, like.
“They sent Hannah, my girlfriend, to military school or something, further North. I don’t know what happened to her after that,” Ella sighs. She rubs a hand across her forehead like she’s got a tension headache. Kneading skin as though it’ll keep the shape she wants it to. “It looked like her for a while, but it’s not like it could trick me. For all I knew, she wasn’t even in Australia anymore.”
Naim considers. “Is it still Hannah?”
“No.” Ella smiles, wryly. “It stopped looking like her after a few months. She was kind of a dickhead when we were together, anyway. After that, it would show up every so often, looking like whoever else.”
Naim is reminded of Ryan’s voice wrapped around a pretty birdsong; a chained-up heartbreak. I want it to look like you. It hurts, suddenly, very deep down and nestled within the marrow of his heart. The way Ryan had twitched and screamed on the floor of Hunter’s living room. Defile. Reform. He wishes, suddenly, that they’d met sometime else. Childhood or deathbed or somewhere, anywhere that would’ve let them escape this.
Naim frowns. “How’d it get to be a court case? How’d you find him, I mean?”
The deliverance healer operated in Naim’s mind like a handful of loose soil off the windowsill. Spilled out from your worst behaved potted plant, rotted and speckled with dead insects and scavengers. You picked it up, swept it into your hand only to stain them dark and make them itch. You’d never be clean of it, it seemed. Unless you threw the pot out with it.
“My mum broke down. She regrets it, now. I mean, fat lot of good it did me, feeling sorry. I can’t live on sorry,” Ella says, voice tight. She shakes her head, and her hair moves with it, rippling. “But she helped me try for a civil against him. Emotional distress, or something. We had to make something up for the courts, say I had lasting medical issues from the healing.”
“In the end,” she says, “nothing happened to him. He argued it was a religious service. Condoned by my parents. I had no ground to stand on, really. Felt good to try,” she laughs, although it sounds hollow. “I did learn a bit about him during the deal, though. The church he belongs to, which isn’t really a church. It’s mostly just him. Something about a brother, too, if I remember right.”
Ella outlines for them what she could access about the court proceedings; his lawyer’s name, parents, employment history. Seeing it in different handwriting solidifies the name into something physical.
Arlene, Ella; two people who had born witness. Coagulated into ink. Terror and man and nonfiction.
“I figured out about the fire at scout camp,” says Ella, answering the unspoken question. “Even if I was alone, there, the campfire would keep it away. Mine’s never quit on me, though,” she pulls out a pink lighter and sparks it to life underneath a thumb.
Naim nearly laughs out loud. Even Ella, who’s unluck seemed to match theirs, had more to cling to. He imagines that he can feel the burning heat, even though he’s too far across the table for that to be true.
“Hey,” Ella says, pinning the paper listed with stalks of secret crop down before Ryan pulls it forward. Her face is set hard in stone. Youth, and blue fire. “I’ve got a life here. Roommates, a job. There’s ways to stay ahead of it, if you do it right.”
Naim folds the notebook paper with Ella’s ballpoint information and sticks it haphazardly through the zipper pocket of his coat. She eyes him, sharply.
“Ask him about his brother, when you find him,” Ella says. “My lawyer did. I wasn’t allowed in the room, but. From what I hear, he squirmed.”
x
There’s a creek at the bottom of the biggest hill in town, past the Bandi cardinal sign and far left from Georgie Lemmer’s dad’s garage.
It’s murky, thinned out from drought.
Ryan remembers it, principally, in motion.
Framed narrow with the two sandy banks, and littered with all sorts of trash and beer cans and overfed frogs with sticky backs and grotesque sorts of croaks, the creek seems more like a river when he’s younger. The Danube during the siege. The Rubicon. The Tigris, the raging Atlantic beating against whale-chased skeleton sailors.
Ryan likes to think of his blood as having grown entangled with the brush and dry grass there, the rare bright flower that’s kicked up through the grain. Sometimes, he would skin his knee on purpose, the palms of his hands, on the bike to the creek so that he could kneel in the soft ground and pack the red into the earth of it. It felt a bit like an end to something. Conquered. The planting of a flag. In those days, Ryan was always looking for them. The endings. It made you feel brave, to finish what you’d started.
When he grew tired of watching the same decided FIFA matches on the telly while dad snored parallel, and when the creek started to dry up, Ryan started walking. The silos. The mill. No background noise in those hidden treasures, was there? Things that were just his.
It was the walking that had led to Hunter.
He was funny.
Ryan liked that he was a bit rude, sometimes. The boys at school liked him, mostly, and his parents were always trying to encourage Ryan to enroll in the sleepaway camp Hunter and Izzy booked off to every summer.
Critically, Hunter looked at him. Ryan learned to kiss under the hard, insistent press of his mouth.
On the rare days when Izzy would have a swim meet out in the city, when the house was locked down and salient, Hunter would invite him in. Ryan felt like some narrative storybook creature, on those evenings. Vampiric, maybe. Howling. Those were the only times they wouldn’t hurt one another first.
The first time Ryan got him off, Hunter wouldn’t speak to him for two and a half weeks. Not until Izzy’s semifinal meet and the house had emptied down to its wood. Then, on their backs in Hunter’s bed, clothes pristine besides unbuckled belts, they breathed tensely for an hour until Hunter checked his sister’s location and told Ryan he had to go out through the window. It had been… lukewarm. Hunter had been breathing like he’d just run a marathon, and they’d rechecked the locked bedroom door four times before they’d believed it.
Ryan remembered the next service that Sunday, the reading. He could feel Hunter’s stare at the back of his head through the entire predictable set-up of it.
Proverbs 25:28. Like a city whose walls are broken through is a person who lacks self-control.
Don’t tell anyone, he’d said.
Do I look like a fucking idiot?
When they’re seventeen and Ryan begins collecting postcards for elsewhere like it’s a full-timer (Honolulu, Mont-Saint-Michel, Launceston, fucking Point Nemo), things change.
Well.
One thing.
It starts with period 2 Literature. McNiff’s on about villanelles and there’s a general smothering, sinking about it. Twenty thousand leagues under.
There is a boy, and they’d introduced him in roll call but Ryan had been too busy trying to tip the desk forward in the back to catch it. He’s quite shy, Ryan thinks, and when he’s called on for reading, he does so without raising his eyes from the page. They look away when he’s finished but Ryan doesn’t. He’s not really sure why.
The boy’s got a strange name, turns out, and a mother who closes her eyes and sways like she’s hearing more than just Izzy’s $60 a week voice lessons. Ryan watches. He’s not talkative but he smiles sometimes, cautious when Ryan gets him on his own in line for ciggies at the corner shop with the cashier who never asks for ID.
“For my mum,” he lies.
“Yeah,” Ryan says, smirking, “me too.”
Ryan sits at home and thinks of Proverbs. He buries his face into the pillow and only turns his head when his vision starts to go spotty.
He could say he doesn’t know why he decides to kiss him, but that would be a lie.
It was the instinct to hold a baby bird in delicacy, to not crush it with your too-tight grip.
And either way that first kiss, that feeling at the mill is the first helping of a street drug, dust up his nose and covering his hands, crumbling off his clothes, sticking to his shoes.
Something biblical about him, and maybe it’s the name, something sacrificing and prophetic, some Mandelan anti-violence, rare breed of unassuming care etched into the softness around his dark eyes. He shoves, and at first Ryan’s reminded of Hunter. But when Ryan pushes, Naim goes down easy. He lets himself be pinned like a butterfly in a case, and laughs. Turns his underbelly up into Ryan’s hands like he trusts him to be tender. It’s new. Ryan isn’t sure what to do with him.
And so.
He starts with what he does know.
Don’t tell anyone, Ryan says, a broken record, fucking obvious, and the look on Naim’s face is a little nauseating. After, house gone quiet and dull, Ryan eyes himself in his bedroom mirror. The purpling smudges made by stones and evenings spent with that same lukewarm feeling.
He looks long enough for his eyes to go fuzzy and unfocused and tries to find evidence of the afternoon somewhere on his person.
Could you catch an indent from his body, that close and painless? Could you bottle that feeling, that ease?
He closes his eyes. Slides his own hand up to his cheek, around slowly to the back of his neck. Gentle. If he moves all of his rings to his left hand, he can almost pretend that it’s Naim’s palm against the carotid instead.
After, Ryan seeks him out like a bad dog.
Naim lets him, because he is full of that breakable even-temper, and because he is probably insane. Irresponsibly, Ryan drinks it in. Walks with Naim around the perimeter of the mill. Makes fun of him, wrestles with him as an excuse to touch him until he feels like maybe Naim would let him touch without it. They’re warmer days and it’s sunset so much quicker than you’d expect.
Turns out Naim’s got a stash of weed bigger than the Taj Ma fucking hal.
“Not much else to do back home,” he says, and Ryan’s sure there must be something seriously wrong with him at the way he can’t rip his eyes away from the sight of Naim rolling a spliffy against the concrete floor. He licks it closed. Ryan swallows, hard.
There’s a Billie Holiday song that his Nan used to spin when his parents would go out of town; echoey and strange in the way all old, poorly kept records were. Aged out. Ryan would lay on the carpet until it printed patterns into his cheek, thatch and 3d, while he pet Nan’s lazy mutt’s panting body. He thinks of it now, absurdly, the loving spoonful words, as Naim kisses smoke into his mouth. Any old time, Ryan thinks, any time at all.
He goes and sees Hunter that night to see if the itch underneath his skin is real or imagined. It’s hardly a remedy. In fact it’s an awful lot like Poison Oak.
And then it’s Hunter’s funeral, and Naim’s black suit leg is pressing against his on Izzy’s springy mattress, a door down from the lukewarm evenings where they’d kiss without opening their eyes.
Ryan thinks of the creek.
He wonders if Naim would like it there.
x
With Ella, and her well of treasures, the directionless frenzy of their lives solidifies into a creative sort of thought-creature. They lift necessities from stores that don’t yet suspect anything from them, blend in easier under the throngs of Sydney thousands. There’s a busy energy, fragile and tightly curled, clinging to their shoulders in a persistent parabola of anticipation. They turn over and over, fold in on themselves in a double helix, ouroboros.
For now, they sit and wait. They’ve no clue what they’ll do when they get to him. Unsure what they’re waiting for, but certain that it’s something necessary as water, they choose to be patient with the bloodthirsty animal pacing on every held breath.
They learn to live on the edge of the world. A splitting open.
x
Naim has sent a thousand ships and taken 20 years to sail, dragged Hector around the gates for days, and yet for all his capable planning still fell for the same Trojan Horse with each appearance at the city gates.
It’s couch surfing with two dubiously sober busboys they’d only met that night, at the back of a West Sydney bar, and it’s decisions born of whiskey and the swaying beauty of Ryan’s lips against his neck.
It’s the sparking possession of a heavy arm secure around your waist in a low, inebriated crowd. It’s knowing the strength of those hands, that they’d touched you and would touch you again if you only turned and asked.
It’s the reckless expectancy of the waiting.
Everything’s a bit colorful and wonderful and blurred; they’re drunk and Ryan’s asleep on the couch parallel two sardined strangers. Naim is melting. It’s a heatwave in winter, and he’s on fire. He’s trying to engineer a way to kick the bartended roommates off of their own couch and get Ryan alone, into that molten fishbowl space of Us and Them, when he finds his way, stumbling, to the bathroom in the hall.
His blood’s too much tequila, sans the sense. It’s why, he’s sure, he forgets to be afraid.
The bathroom light comes on behind him, and the door shuts. Naim smiles giddily up at Ryan, behind him in the small mirror. When he turns, Ryan’s hands come up to splay across his back, sweaty and boyish and angel-winged. Naim has a million and one things to tell him.
Before he can, Ryan kisses him. Naim can’t help but smile into it; it makes the kiss messy, sure, and their teeth kiss more than they really manage to, but. He can’t be bothered. Ryan’s hands are the most familiar of machines, cogs turning in tune with the gear shifts of Naim’s ribcage. Naim pulls away because he cannot stop laughing.
Ryan slips his tongue warmly into Naim’s mouth as three knocks sound on the outside of the bathroom door.
“Should’ve slept in the truck,” Ryan whispers into the skin of Naim’s cheek. Naim huffs out a laugh, but pauses. With the way they’re situated, Naim faces the mirror with his back to the door. It’s an odd sort of sandwiching feeling; cold wood and warm body on either side.
Naim isn’t sure how he knows. Nothing’s different, really.
Only, he looks over Ryan’s shoulder, into the reflective glass, and sees himself. Ryan’s kissing his neck, now. Naim focuses on the line of Ryan’s shoulders from the back, and watches himself frown. Something is—
“Open up, I’ve gotta piss.”
Naim freezes. Suddenly, he feels quite sober.
“Ryan,” Naim says, loud enough to move through the door. The thing doesn’t seem to realize Naim’s breathing’s picked up..
“Yeah,” it whispers, into Naim’s skin. “Yes.”
There’s a stillness to the air, besides the increasingly frenzied movements of hands and mouth and fabric. A monster in the woods, Naim realizes, slowly bracing himself on its chest and urging it back, and you’re holding its face in your hands. It doesn’t pounce. It doesn’t remove its lips from Naim’s neck, either.
“Ryan, open the door,” Naim says, breathless, and the thing raises its head too late to lash out, eyes cloudy with some unknowable hesitation, almost—
Naim shuts his eyes as the space behind him swings open into hollowness, and trips frantically backwards into something solid.
“Hello,” Ryan whisper-shouts, laughing, “’bout bowled me over.”
His eyes are bloodshot, a bit, and he’s crossed beyond belief. He nearly trips over his own feet steadying Naim against the wall. Naim blinks into the looming, dimly lit bathroom doorway; it’s empty. He squints to see himself in the mirror, still, and wonders, bewildered, why it hadn’t dug its teeth into his neck. Why it hadn’t drawn blood. It certainly could have. Even between the kisses and the moment Ryan had knocked, it had had plenty of time to realize that Naim had noticed its identity.
The real Ryan takes his chin between a thumb and forefinger, and draws Naim’s eyeline forward.
“You with me?” he asks, still smiling, and Naim is too desperately overcome to do anything other than hug Ryan so fiercely that the wind’s briefly knocked from his chest. Ryan must realize, even through the alcohol and myriad other misting machines.
For a long minute, he lets Naim just— breathe. Quick-paced, and shallow into the smoke-laden meat of his clothed shoulder. Naim remembers being young and waking in the night, tiptoeing out to the kitchen afraid of every horror movie animation under the bed, around the corner. Burying his head, shutting his eyes, Naim can’t remember if his parents had ever made an attempt to comfort him, then. Ryan brings a hand up to hold Naim’s head secure.
“Y’alright, darl?” he mutters, and Naim could cry with it, there, in the middle of an unfamiliar hallway. Ghost of the moment still a Peter Pan’s shadow on the wall.
“I don’t-” Naim starts, I don’t know why it stopped, I don’t know why I’m not bleeding. I don’t know why it didn’t seem to care. It acted just like you. It acted just like you, this time.
All it seemed to want was to hold me.
He swallows against the soreness of his own throat. “Let’s just. Let’s go to bed,” he decides, paranoid.
He makes Ryan keep the door open as he takes a piss, and sits atop the sink counter watching as he struggles to aim. Despite the uneasy feeling, it’s second nature to tease him for it.
“Shaddup,” Ryan laughs, and steers him like a mother cub around the nape.
When they cross out into the main room, the two fellas from the bar have pulled a disappearing act. The only trace of them on the likely stained couch is a set of bold tennis jackets, dry-fit. It’s a testament to how gone they must have been. Letting two less than stand-up lads into your flat share, expensive watches flashing open on the kitchen counter.
“Fucked off, finally,” mutters Ryan, stretching, and tumbles backwards onto the newly unfolded pull-out. Naim’s eye catches on a sliver of skin, exposed as the motion pulls his shirt loose.
Naim feels a little like an animal dying of mange, with an owner who feels very bad for him as he howls outside. The owner knows that you might kill yourself and him, that you’re shadowed by something sinister, and opens the door all the same.
The owner, eyes beseeching, pulling his shirt off with only a minor unbalanced tipping over, catches him looking and shakes his head. He raises a hand.
“Come here,” he says, and it’s not exactly a question. “And get out of those jeans.”
Although Naim probably should refuse, should insist they double-check the locks on the windows or make sure that the men from the bar wouldn’t walk out on them half-naked, all he can do is everything Ryan wants him to, and strips down to his underwear. He lets his body follow that directive North Star, head swimming, heart still too-quick, and feels the wild animal calm as it reaches him. Naim’s a contagious animal, he knows. And there is nothing contagion loves more than to sprinkle itself in warm, safe places.
After lying still and symbiotic for half an hour, the rest of the bar-effect seems to burn off and they decide to fight their way into a shower. Hospitality was hospitality, after all, and they’d be gone in the morning.
Ryan sobers up visibly and considerably the rest of the way once the warm water hits him. He obediently lowers his head for Naim to scrub the clotted smoke out, to make him clean and very Ryan-like again. Skin nothing but itself. Naim can see his curious gaze, and is aware that he’s being managed. He doesn’t mind. He feels a bit fragile, still, and cold. He thinks he might be getting sick. It was nice to know you were looked after, at least.
They scrounge up hesitantly clean sheets from the hall closet and Naim rolls his eyes at Ryan’s theft of a pre-opened bag of pistachios. He forces himself to breathe slower. Examines the feeling of a shitty mattress beneath his hands and tries to balance the bowl of pistachios on the pillow with his knee. Ryan watches him from the doorway. It’s funny, how often they trade baring their souls to one another like this.
What Ryan does do is plug his wire headphones into his phone, charging on the carpet, and let Naim scroll to The Kinks. It’s a little touching because he sort of hates them but knows that Naim does not. There’s probably earwax nestled into the earpiece.
“Budge up,” Ryan asks, and he does ask, even though it was his right and he should have been telling.
It’s very unfortunate and probably deranged that Naim’s next thought, deliriously, is to do with the line of Ryan’s waist disappearing into his boxers. The music glitches briefly and it’s mildly deific.
Naim huffs out a breath and flips onto his back. The pistachios rustle with the movement. “How come you never say no to me?” he sighs, inspired by Ray Davies’ general effect.
Ryan looks down at him in all his freshly scrubbed, ruddy cheeked glory. The cold always took so long to leave his face, and the flat isn’t exactly warm.
“I usually try to, first. I figure it’s better that way, you know, that I at least try,” he says, shrugging. “I don’t like saying no to you, these days, though.” Naim swallows.
“You should,” says Naim, because he is on edge by the whole thing and desperately wants to do something with all of the psychotic feeling that Ryan’s existence inspires in him. They’re probably bad for one another. Codependent. Naim could no longer, apparently, tell the difference between him and the Not-him. Ryan should say no, and say it often. He should walk away and never look back. Naim, however, also feels that perhaps Ryan’s destined to be the only person who’ll ever actually understand anything about him.
And really, Naim is only human.
Human, and haunted, and all the entirety of his tired, unsettled mind left wanting this one, essential thing, and this only.
“Naim,” Ryan says, miming long-suffering. “Come on. Settle, dove,” he says, and the finger he drags lightly down Naim’s nose gives him shivers.
Naim rolls over onto his stomach and digs his chin into his own forearm. “Sorry,” he says, and he does mean it. “I wish you would say no. I say no to you plenty.”
Ryan sighs, and moves to lay halfway on top of him.
It’s like a paperweight. Naim feels himself calm with the contact. Ryan Whelan, boy of 18, and watercolor and campfire and everything beautiful. Naim hopes it isn’t too obvious how he goes immediately limp underneath him, although he knows that Ryan has definitely noticed.
“No, you don’t. It’s mostly my fault, anyways. You’re easy to say yes to. If you were really asking me or something maybe I would say no more often.” Ryan presses a kiss to Naim’s temple, and rests his head against the skin. “But I like being what you need.”
Naim frowns, although his heart jumps with warmth at the words. It feels important that he impart this; that he voices the fear. That he tells Ryan every single, needling, terrifying thought. He can’t seem to stop talking.
“I do. I ask you all the time. Even if it’s not an actual question or whatever, I’m always asking,” Naim whispers. See, thinks Naim, because I just did. I lay here and I knew exactly what I wanted you to do and you went and did it because you love me. And it’s perfect, and that’s how we fit. It’s my lungs and my life, and I don’t know how I could ever be here without you, after all of this.
Naim knows he’s probably not making any sense. He feels his brain, jumbled and a little dizzy; Jesus Christ. We’re going to meet a monster and you’re going to get hurt.
“Let’s just listen to some music. Maybe you can practice driving in the morning,” Ryan whispers into his shoulder. “We could go get brunch or something.”
They aren’t brunch people and more importantly Naim should say no and demand that they do something useful, something violent. He doesn’t, of course. Nor does he want to. Actually, there is nothing he wants less.
“It came into the bathroom,” Naim whispers, and sees the suspicion solidify on Ryan’s face.
“Shit. I’m sorry, fuck, I was drunk and-”
“No,” Naim says, kisses Ryan’s mouth because there’s no universe in which he doesn’t, “No, listen. It didn’t hurt me. Not even when I realized it wasn’t you.”
Ryan’s eyebrows draw together.
“It just touched me,” Naim confesses, taking in the flitting resetting of Ryan’s blue eyes. “It was so different. It almost looked confused.”
They sit with the unease of it between them, for a moment, and Naim sees the movement of Ryan’s throat as he clears it from croaking. “I wonder if it’s connected. You know, to the lighters,” he says. “Like, it’s—I don’t know. Changing.”
“With us?” Naim whispers. Ryan nods.
“With us, maybe.”
They breathe into one another in the silence of the dark, cool room. At some point, Naim reaches for the hoodie Ryan had shucked off earlier in the evening. He feels himself shivering.
“I’m a bit jealous, I think,” Ryan mutters, eventually, tentative smirk reappearing. He’s trying to get Naim to laugh, he thinks; Naim loves him for it. He does, softly, mostly so that the concern will melt off Ryan’s handsome features. From somewhere in an adjoining bedroom, one of the boys is snoring.
Naim licks his lips.
“Will you-”
“Yeah, Naim.” Ryan says, softly, and then puts the rest of his weight down onto half of Naim’s back, drapes a heavy arm across the lower stretch and snakes his palm up Naim’s overlarge sweatshirt to rest against the warm skin mid-spine. Naim hadn’t asked for that, exactly, had he. Improvisation from a lovely boy with lovely hands.
Naim thinks: Somehow, I will get a good night’s sleep tonight, and I will not be afraid. Even though I maybe should be. You should be, too. But. You know. I’m here, and so are you. The heat of Ryan’s bare skin travels as though Naim is wrapped up in copper wire.
Some untenable time later, with the stillness privy only to the middle of the night, Naim wakes to Ryan sitting up and fiddling with his phone. “Ry?” Naim mumbles, because it really is late and he is heavy and tired and overwarm and feels vaguely sticky. Ryan sets the phone mummified with his earbuds on the coffee table, and the screen’s still pulled up and open. Bay City Rollers filters softly in, playing loud enough to be heard through the put-away headphones.
Then, Ryan climbs back over and to his credit immediately presses his hand back to the bare skin of Naim’s spine. The whole thing’s a bit timeless and spaced out.
Naim closes his eyes again for only a second before Ryan says his name.
“Hey,” he whispers, brushing his knuckles over T-6 through T-10. “I think you have a fever.” He has Naim sit up and pilfers him water from the fridge with an inexplicable apology when the iced glass brushes too-sensitive along Naim’s achy hands.
Two ibuprofen later and Naim recognizes that he feels not absolutely intact. What a few hours could do. “Can I shower,” Naim says, a bit nonsensically, an image of warm water and salt and sand confusing itself in his heated brain as remedy. Ryan shakes his head.
“We already did, remember? Besides, you’ll pass out and die, probably. Here, arms up,” he says, and helps Naim out of the gray sweatshirt that is now infinitely too hot. “Wait for your medicine to work. Do you want me to put on something else?” He’s referring to Bye Bye Baby.
Naim shakes his head. Although the song does make him sad, in a way.
Only, sometimes Ryan would call him baby, when he was being funny or sweet or under the influence, and so it sort of aches in that distant way that it all does nowadays. He does like the band, though.
After that, there’s some blurry memory of Ryan’s bare chest beneath his overwarm cheek and a general feeling of comfortable wallowing before he awakens to a vague shouting match between Ryan and their now unfriendly hosts. They’re kicked out onto the street to try and remember where Ryan had parked the car the night before.
Naim spends the next two and a half days ill with a mysterious virus that Ryan, somehow, does not catch. The worst of it is the fever, which comes and goes but when it comes is of a mildly concerning height. He’s fine by Wednesday but his voice is still a bit hoarse.
“It’s sexy,” promises Ryan, just to be a dick.
X
The morning of his 19th birthday, Ryan forgets what day it is.
Growing up, mum would bake red velvet and tape curling streamers to the ceiling. He’d go with dad to pick out a model plane to build, would come back to some stuffed, colorful animal sitting on his pillow with a party hat strapped to its fuzzy face.
“Whatever the birthday boy wants,” mum would say, when dad asked what was for dinner.
That had been before many things.
Here, crammed into the backseat of a Ford Ranger off some pothole-riddled NSW highway, Ryan only remembers once he opens up his phone to check the time and happens to see the date.
He doesn’t mention it, but of course Naim realizes.
“Pull off,” Naim commands, when they’ve been driving for half an hour, and makes Ryan attempt a mostly illegal left turn across the median to pull into the glaring Big W.
“Fuck you,” he says primly when Ryan looks at him like he’s on one.
“Fuck you too,” Ryan shoots back, and Naim rolls his eyes.
He bodily spins Ryan around by the shoulders somewhere about the dairy section and tells him to go and make himself busy in the adjoining aisles with the ten young mothers searching for discounted baby formula. He holds the bag he finds Ryan with behind his back as they step out to the car and gives Ryan the evil eye when he tries to skirt round him to look.
Ryan mostly forgets about it until that evening, when they stop for food and lay in the back of the truck like they do when it’s sun-setting gold and the weather’s kind. Naim shakes him awake when it feels like he’s only been out for a minute or so.
“Hey,” he says, and stacks a light something on Ryan’s chest. He’s sitting up, looking down at Ryan on his back against the hard tin, with that smile. “Happy birthday.”
Ryan looks at him, confused. He motions impatiently, and Ryan sits up the rest of the way to placate him. There’s a colored pencil drawing on white paper, folded into a card. On the outside, there’s a cake complete with three tiers and raspberries shaded beautifully against the imagined frosting. There’s a line of colorful candles outlined at the cake’s top, and the flame sprouting from each of them is as real as Ryan can remember any fire being.
He blinks up at Naim, owlishly. “When did you-”
“You sleep like a log,” Naim says quietly, looking down at his hands.
Ryan thinks of the thick watercolor paper he’d nicked off of Arlene’s stainless refrigerator. That boy, on his own, against the fleeing plane and the bruises sky.
You paint these?
I did. While ago, though.
Above the drawing, each letter a different sketched-in color, the “Happy Birthday” arches cheerfully.
“You drew me a cake,” Ryan mutters, deadpan.
He watches Naim go red with an animal sort of fascination.
“Real candles wouldn’t light, now would they? Besides, I thought you-. Never mind, it’s stupid, give it back, asshole—”
“Excuse me,” Ryan protests, pushing Naim away and holding the card up above his head so that he huffs and gives up, “That’s my birthday present.”
When he turns open the card, there’s an impossibly technicolor snake coiling up one side of the fold. It is bright green with a purple and red belly, eyes slitted and oil slick dark. On the other side, a blue, waterlike bird feathered in with visible strokes of indigo. In the white open space, Naim’s slanted handwriting has printed those three simple words.
“I haven’t drawn in a while,” Naim says, words tripping together, “and I was always a better painter than pencil. Anyways, they’re not very good. I wanted to do something nice for your birthday, but all we really have the money for was this. I’m sorry.”
Ryan nods, feeling dizzy, thrown at the pure ridiculousness of the apology. He pictures Naim, leaned with his back against the vehicular metal, the cheapest colored pencils money could buy and thin computer paper. He wonders how long it had taken. He wants him to erase it all and do it again, the exact same way, this time with Ryan awake and able to focus his eyes on every infinitesimal movement of his fingers. He wonders if his own rings against the paper had smudged any of the lines, if he’d sketched with graphite first before letting the color bleed in. It feels like Naim’s carved something out for him, here. Flat, cool fire made of wax crayon.
“We’ll get you watercolors,” Ryan says, and it’s out before he really realizes what it is he’s saying. “That’s what you like, right?”
Naim looks at him like he’s lost it.
“What?”
“Anything you want,” Ryan promises, sounding delirious even to his own ears. “Paint, markers, whatever you need. Just promise you’ll keep at it.”
It strikes him, burningly, that there might be a life after this. That, even if the lighters never kick back on and even if the deliverance healer isn’t where the map says he will be, they could have a life. They could stop running. They could walk, ride, run somewhere; Naim could paint and be what he would like to be. There will be other birthdays, and hundreds of nights, maybe, where they’ll kiss without worrying in the middle of a motel pool’s shallow end. Naim’s lips will taste like salt water and chlorine and the only Naim he’ll ever touch is the real one. Ryan wants it. Needs it, like air.
Naim looks at him with a sadness about his mouth. “Ryan-”
“Tell me it’ll be alright,” Ryan says, suddenly, and holds up the paper card between his fingers. “It’s my birthday, so. You’ve got to.”
Instead of shouting or hitting him, which is probably what Ryan deserves, Naim just shakes his head and laughs.
“Whatever, mate. Sure. It will be. Happy fucking birthday, okay?”
Ryan utilizes his birthday privilege to get Naim exactly where he wants him; skin to skin, windows fogged, eyebrows drawn together in nothing but pleasure. Ryan thinks he would kill for the way Naim says his name. He’ll have Naim paint it, maybe, the fire of their hands come together, the way Naim goes to his knees without Ryan having to ask. Some kind of a blue-green imitation of prayer.
Naim likes to be touched and held tightly and sometimes would just let all his limbs go and lean forward with all of himself, except for his arms which stayed secured tightly around Ryan’s shoulders. You make me very sad very often, thinks Ryan, but it was nothing but in a scenic sort of moonlit way.
Ecclesiastes 4:9-10: Two are better than one. If either of them falls down, one can help the other up.
Ryan remembers all the mornings, the evenings, lukewarm and hotter than hot in the furthest pew back that he could climb into.
John 14:27: Do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.
Pastor Rob and Hunter’s bedroom and Izzy’s monthly swim meets.
Proverbs 27:6: "Wounds from a friend can be trusted."
The Not-Naim reaching for his hand as it laughed, teased him for holding the gate open for him. Its teary eyes. Its tongue tracing the shell of his ear.
1 Corinthians 13:4-7: Love does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.
Ryan had never believed them when they’d come spilling like flies out of Pastor Rob’s mouth. Had never before felt a shred of conviction. A modicum of faith.
The artist’s hands unfurl like flowers as Ryan holds them together. Holy bread and wine.
John 16:33: I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace.
Naim’s fingers grip his hair and Ryan believes in them all.
x
The ordeal mostly sets a unique seed of unknowing into their chests.
They don’t talk about it, after.
They bottle up the stolen ibuprofen and go and get brunch.
Something is changing. Churning. The clock ticks.
They sleep tangled together.
On Thursday, silent in the cabin of the ute, they decide that it’s time.
Ryan puts the gear shift into drive.
x
Alfred didn’t start out this way.
Once, his arms were bare and his skin was young and elastic.
His hair was a shock of dark brown, his nose straight and unbroken. Alfred had older brothers and a younger sister, a middle name, something he wanted to be when he grew up. An inability to ride a bike. Fear of spiders. Chicken-scratch penmanship.
Like every monster, Alfred wasn’t always one.
First, he was merely different.
And, crucially, the wrong people had noticed.
The first day of primary school had been more trying than mother had said it would be.
“I’ve told you,” Joseph said on the way home, letting Alfred swing their arms between them, “When the teacher calls your name, you’ve got to answer.”
Alfred sighs. He doesn’t see what the massive deal is. She knew that he was Alfred, otherwise she wouldn’t have given him the name tag that read of his first and last name. There was no point in having to speak it aloud other than to make their faces go red and brush-bitten.
“It’s scary,” he complains, scuffing the brand new polished shoes against the road, “they all turn and look when I stand up.”
Joseph laughs, jostling him. “Who would’ve thought. My shy little brother. I wonder what father will have to say.”
Shoved into Alfred’s leather schoolbag, growing heavier over the years:
-2 pencils, sharpened to a point.
-Lunch bag, nestled neatly with the predictable sandwich, the expected apple and crackers.
-Notebooks, and extra paper for the boy behind him who always forgot.
-His bible.
It all goes to hell when Stephen’s family comes to town.
The addiction of it is mostly crippling.
This is, of course, the work of the devil, and Stephen knows that it’s true even as he lets him move closer, ever closer. But it’s hard to feel particularly culpable, particularly devoted to anything other than the urgent heat of Stephen’s hands in the darkness of the church band’s instrument closet.
They’re in the orchestra together; it’s impossible to escape.
Alfred comes to associate the twin-feelings of Stephen’s body against his with the long-beloved whine of the violin strings against his bow. It’s especially jarring, that way, when Stephen kisses the notes from his fingers; surrounded by the triad of worship, Alfred can almost forget why it’s wrong.
He’s always begging, Stephen; always asking for more.
“Play for me,” he says. “Let me see you.”
“Take it off for me,” and “My parents aren’t home tonight.”
“It’s okay,” (it’s not) and “You’re beautiful” (you aren’t) and “If I could, I’d do nothing but kiss you all day long” (he’s lying. You know that he must be.).
One Sunday after service, Joseph walks into the instrument closet and the look in his eyes is enough to haunt Alfred long after the moment is passed.
Alfred is fifteen when the deliverance healer comes from the neighboring town.
He’s sixteen when Stephen tries to kiss him again, for the first time since.
He is seventeen years old when Stephen’s family moves to Queensland and Alfred is left alone with it. The thing doesn’t change. It’s still Stephen’s face knocking at his bedroom window.
Alfred is alone in the world.
Joseph can’t even look him in the eye.
When the boys show up at the front door of the church building, Alfred feels something long-dormant flutter in the bottom of his brain stem.
“Remember us?” the blue-eyed one says, voice hard and mean and wild.
The Not-Stephen is gone for now; scared away for once by the presence of another. Alfred’s fingers twitch without the feel of the lighter in between them. He doesn’t get visitors.
They sit at the head of the table, side by side instead of the straddling, facing off chairs like Alfred might have expected.
The lighters have stopped working, they say.
And does he know anything about that?
The dark eyed one stares with a strangeness that evokes a primal, fearful corner of Alfred’s mind. The weight of that stare, the confessional. He believes, Alfred knows, as Peter believed, as John, that he is justified. Alfred can see it in the protective lethality of the blue eyed boy’s hand resting between them on the table. There’s questions unasked in the trembling lines of their underfed shoulders.
Why did you do it?
What words, what sacred, dark words did you speak over me? Over my soft, animal body?
I’m young, still, and I deserved a life.
I deserved to have my secrets stay secrets.
Why did my mother bring me, begging, to you, and how did I cry and gag and scream on the carpeting and yet walk out still believing that she would never damage me on purpose?
Alfred had wondered the same, then, still gripping as tightly as he could to the meat of Stephen’s hand as they dragged him away.
Stephen had sent a letter, once, from Port Douglas. The beautiful, open teal of the ocean had sparkled even through the fabric of the page. I miss you, it said. Alfred had watched, dead-eyed as Joseph had taken it from the mailman and let it flip unceremoniously into the curling fireplace.
At thirty, Alfred swears himself to the church and breaks up with the one nice girl he’s been able to flag down in all those lamplit years of listless searching. He sees the suspicion, the knowing, in Joseph’s eyes, and wishes that he could stand his ground. He’s dripping with it, the hate, as he tells Brandy that he’d never truly loved her at all.
“You must repent,” Alfred tells them. “You must elocute to God, and tell him of your sins. He has darkened the flame of his spirit, to show you the urgency of his plea.”
Night falls. Stephen should be on his way.
x
When his brother and the other men come into the room, the boys stand and move to the door as quickly as they can.
It is not quick enough.
Four grown men and two stupid sons of Adam.
Joseph takes the blue-eyed boy by the arms and forces him face-first onto the floor; he kicks, and shouts, and offers his teeth to the soft skin of Joseph’s arm, but. He’s only exactly what he is. And Joseph’s twice as tall.
Abel, Alfred thinks, and Cain. Who was who, now that they were grown and both still biting down?
Alfred sees the silhouette of Stephen outside of his window, and, in another life, apologizes.
x
Through the blood in his mouth, Naim tries to speak.
“If you just let me see him,” Naim pleads, feeling pathetic and feeling ashamed and most of all feeling desperately, desperately afraid. “I promise, I’ll do whatever you say. You want me to give it to God? Fine. I’ll fucking—”
“Naim,” says the deliverance healer, infuriatingly calm. “You’ll behave.”
He flips open a lighter, and the flame crackles obediently to life. Naim pulls again against the grip on his shoulders, and winces at the unnatural pull. He’d felt a crack when the back of his head had connected with one of the men’s noses. He hopes it at least heals crooked.
When they lock the door, and the unfamiliar men drop out with a pointed look at the deliverance healer, Naim is let go. His knees hit the wooden floor with a dull, private thud that sounds exactly like you’d imagine it would. Hollow, sad. His body is tight, possessed by some black-winged thing, at the knowledge that he has no idea where Ryan’s gone. If he’s alright. His bad ear had split open, when they’d shoved his cheek into the ground.
“I’d like to hear about what you’ve done since we talked last,” the deliverance healer says, face the same as Naim remembers it.
Naim scoffs, and looks around. The room is quaint, minimal. He’s sitting on a plaid-covered bed of green fabric, and the deliverance healer is leaned up against the dresser with those tattooed arms crossed. He looks at ease. Naim is sick with it. He wants to hurt him. Wants to rip at those ink stains and feel the iron blood run through his teeth.
“Talked,” Naim spits. “You held me down and cursed me.”
The deliverance healer hums. “I’m sure you see it that way.”
Naim stands, and pushes his hands against the man’s chest. The dresser rattles. “Alfred,” he says, “Alfred Haddock, I know who you are.”
Alfred weathers Naim’s hands stoically.
“I’m sure you believe that, as well.”
Naim exhales a noise of pure frustration. He paces, like a caged animal. Ostensibly, the door is just there. The deliverance healer is only one man. If he runs, if he can just-
He doesn’t know where he is. The men could still be out there.
He’d be alone.
Weighing the pain on Libra-balance, Naim swallows against the crawling of his blood-soaked throat; he’d bitten his tongue when he’d gone down.
“I’ll do it, then. What you want. Will it get the lighters to work again?”
Mostly, Naim wants to fall to his knees. He’ll rip out a lung, he’ll let the man peel his fingernails off, one by excruciating one, if it gets him out of the room. If he can just get one, measly glimpse of that blond hair, he’ll do whatever the man says. What were they thinking, coming here? Did they think they were invincible? It had certainly felt that way, naïve and imagined and wished into the space between them on a bus seat.
The deliverance healer kneels, and looks down. “Join me, Naim,” he says, and Naim limply falls to the floor in mimic.
“Heavenly father,” the deliverance healer says, eyes closed. Naim stares into the side of his aging face and imagines a red, angry hole opening wide, showing all of his teeth and the muscle attached. “We come humbly before you and ask for your forgiveness. We atone.”
Naim is silent.
“Naim,” prompts the deliverance healer, voice hard.
“I atone,” Naim mutters. Shell-shock, he thinks, and trembles.
“I have sinned.”
“I have sinned,” he repeats.
The deliverance healer pauses, then, and puts a hand on Naim’s back. “It’s okay, Naim. It’s not too late. I hope that you can see, one day, how this helped you. It’s a hard life,” he whispers. The last part sounds unattached. Naim looks at him. “A hard life,” he says, again, eyes downcast.
He glances up, briefly, just over Naim’s shoulder and out the bedroom window, and Naim understands.
“Please,” Naim says, suddenly, seeing a new angle of the light flashing off the man’s eyes. “Please.”
The deliverance healer stands. Naim has to sit on his hand to force it not to reach for the man’s pantleg.
“I am going to leave, now,” he says, and Naim can’t help it; he begs. “And you, Naim,”
“No, no, please don’t go—"
“You will ask to be forgiven.”
“Please.”
When the deliverance healer closes the door, Naim can’t help the sound that leaves his throat.
He hears the door lock, and it’s simple.
He’s alone.
Naim sits in terror, waiting.
Easter vigil; rolling the stone away. He feels himself shaking.
He knows it will come; it’s only a matter of time. It always does. And so, when the tapping comes on the window, he doesn’t move like he should. Blood works slowly down the side of his face, warm where his eyebrow has split and cold where it reaches the line of his jaw. He wipes it away with the heel of his hand and stares dumbly at the red streak left behind. Naim allows himself, indulgently, the effort it takes to cry.
The window starts to crackle. Naim chances a look over his shoulder; the Not-Ryan has slammed its own forehead against the thick glass. It’s wearing the same black shirt Ryan had pulled on that day, when Naim had him within reach. He should’ve touched him. Should’ve reached out and ran a hand down his arm before he slipped it into the sleeve, gentle like he needed, and not teased him for the goosebumps it would cause him.
He stands so suddenly the room lurches.
The doorknob rattles uselessly beneath both hands.
"Ryan?" he calls, hands flat and pounding against the wood. “Ryan!”
He presses his forehead against the door. “Ryan,” he begs again, “Ryan, Ryan, Ryan.” The last clean name he has left to throw.
Naim tells himself to think. If he could just wrap a rope around his own brain and yank it down from wherever it’s flown off to in its abject terror—
Behind him, the window shatters.
“Shit,” he curses, and throws himself once, against the door. All it does is hurt his shoulder; the thing grabs impossibly for his leg.
“Baby,” it says, smiling wider than a human being could smile, “it’s only me.”
The room is silent, then, with Naim’s indecision. The thing stays where it’s at; they circle one another. Naim gets his back to the window. The thing is slower than Naim is used to; it reminds him of the bathroom, when it had forgotten, seemingly, to flex its claws.
The mill. The confusion in its face when something had been soft with it despite knowing what it was.
Fuck. It’s worth a shot, Naim figures.
It’s that or die sooner.
“You’re not Ryan,” Naim says, stepping backwards, closer to the window. The thing steps forward. Still, though, it doesn’t attack. “But. You are, a little bit. Aren’t you?”
The thing pauses. Its smile starts to fade. Naim presses on, probably stupidly, he’s signing his own death warrant but its needling at him; its been needling more and more and more. Every time it appears out of the corner of his eye. Every time Naim catches it watching from afar; in the bar, in bed, out of the truck window. The bus. Its eyes almost coveting, wanting.
Maybe it wanted to be real, they way that they did. Maybe it looked at their hands on one another, at the shared silence, and wanted to be held, too.
Naim had felt that way, once. A lifetime ago. He remembers the sound of stones connecting with flesh, two boys harsh with one another in their haste. The feeling of his heart dropping to his feet. The hurt, the ensuing fear.
“I’m not afraid of you,” Naim says, quietly.
The Not-Ryan stares at him. Unmoving, unblinking.
There’s a distant crashing sound from somewhere undetermined in the building; Naim’s eyes flit to the door on instinct. Ryan, he thinks, prays. In a turn of luck, dumb, bloody luck, the Not-Ryan turns its head to listen, too. Naim takes what he can, and throws himself out of the first-story window, forcing his body to not react to the following noises of movement from inside; the urge to freeze. The Not-Ryan’s strong, crushing hand closes around Naim’s shoe, and he pants on a gasp of pain.
Naim curses, and gets a glimpse of the thing’s unfeeling eyes, so distant and unlike the blue he knows, as he kicks frantically at its face. It manages to wrench one of his too-dirty sneakers off, and Naim yanks his leg the rest of the way out of the window. The glass is a gaping maw of stabbing shards, cutting through the denim of Naim’s jeans and leaving stinging lines ribboning against his palms and through the fabric of his shirt.
Naim falls to the dirt outside the building and has the breath knocked from his lungs with the impact. He scrambles to his feet, uneven and shoe missing, and follows the will of his legs after too-many near deaths by the same mirroring monster.
He runs.
He pushes through overly watered, perfect peonies, through manicured shrubbery that looks cut out of a home magazine. It’s every horror movie he’s ever seen. There’s a ghost, and it’s haunting him, it’s hunting him like prey, wants to flatten him like roadkill. It’s been trying to flatten him into nothing, into a shell of the Naim that he is, since the second he started to look like something they hadn’t wanted him to be. He runs until his lungs burn, hears the fast, pounding footsteps of the thing just behind him. When he finds his way by instinct to the front of the building, the old house of yellow plank sidings and vintage looking looped-through window frames, he stops for an unaffordable moment.
The thing is close.
Naim should turn, and run, and find a servo or overnight diner or fucking anything, any place where there’d be people to see him and therefore save him—
But. Well.
Ryan.
There is no universe where he does not run back up the front steps, instead. That pulsing, sick body throbbing behind him. He shoves himself through the front door into the same room that was now painted with their blood; his, and Ryan’s, and slams the thing into the small sliver of openness as it tries to squeeze itself through to him.
“Get out,” he gasps, “Leave me alone.”
The thing hurls its body against the doorframe without flinching. Naim cries out as it scratches at his face, forces his chest away from its guard against the thing’s entry.
It tackles him to the floor with all of his weight. Naim’s head hits the wooden post of a coffee table, and everything goes frighteningly black for a shuttering moment. When his vision clears, dizzy and shocking, the Not-Ryan sits astride him, hands steadily sliding up with hard pressure up to his neck. It’s a gripping sense of déjà vu, thinks Naim. In every sense of the word. If he were to squint, to convince his brain to ignore the signs of something wrong, the blood, the nearly infant, lightless eyes, he could almost mistake it for the real Ryan. His hair curls the same, just around his ear. The weight of him, caging Naim in, would be welcome. He thinks of a hundred sacred nights in motel beds, shared twins in hostels, the flat of the truck, the floor of the mill. It’s the final image that pushes Naim to do it. He knows, somehow, past the fear and knowing that he should be afraid, that the fear keeps him alive, that it must be more.
Just like the night that the mill had burned, charred and violent, Naim slides a trembling hand upwards. Instead of using his nails to claw at the hands squeezing tighter, more crushingly, around his neck, he lets his left hand drift lightly to the side of the thing’s face. A piece of glass is stuck through its cheek. Naim brushes it away, as gently as he knows how. As he’d somehow known it would, the Not-Ryan pauses for Naim. Freezes, rather; like it doesn’t believe it. Like it’s unsure where to go from here. It doesn’t know what to do, he realizes, with the love. Without the hurt.
“It’s okay,” Naim whispers, curling his fingers into the back of those familiar curls. “You’re okay.”
The thing’s eyes are wide. Naim tries to breathe through the pressure around his windpipe, just beneath an eventually lethal height.
“You’re alone,” he says, strangled. “I’m sorry about that.”
The Not-Ryan’s lips move around the phrase, mimicking. It’s a bit sickening but mostly reminds Naim of a baby bird. Fallen out of its nest, maybe. Abandoned by its mother, its siblings. Screaming and snapping its beak at passerby, fending off predators but scaring off anyone who could help, too.
“I feel sorry for you,” Naim says, and feels a tear sting its way down his cut-up cheek, “but I don’t need you anymore.”
For a moment, the room is silent.
The thing is just as heavy, just as still atop him.
He begins to think he was wrong, then, for a moment, the deep, cutting, inhuman frown that forms on the thing’s face so grotesque and righteous he panics and tries to shift, tries to run—
And then, impossibly, it lets go.
Its hands fall limply to its sides, and Naim lets his own hand unfurl and tumble down the thing’s back to the floor.
With every labored breath, the thing’s body moves. Naim can’t quite believe his eyes. The thing, face blank, eyes surprised and tragic and so, so blue, pushes itself off of him. It folds its legs straight, and stands. And, with a core of shock enough to burn through each and every layer of Naim’s skin down to his nucleus, it opens the door, and walks away.
Naim watches it go with a fascinating wealth of sorrow. In the darkness, the house is preternaturally silent. Naim breathes in raggedly, disbelieving. He crawls on his knees like a distorted ghost, out of body glitch, towards the open front door. There’s half a string, it feels, attached from the top of his skull pulling him forward until he’s out on the front porch, staring out into the night. Some memoryless, stringed-up puppet.
He barely registers the fact that he’s still alive. The uncrushed trachea, the still beating heart. Crucifix hanging above the door behind him, still nailed in place, staring down at him. The thing’s back has disappeared from sight. It’s too far to see.
It’s only because he’s seen it, black t-shirt and contrasted light hair, limp off, salient into the emptiness that he doesn’t bother springing to his feet as the footsteps sound from behind him.
If it’s the deliverance healer, he thinks, he’s only human. What could he do to him, now? Anything he could say would run off Naim’s skin like water.
Tabula Rasa, Naim thinks, as the footsteps slow.
Washed anew.
The body falls heavily to its knees, by the sound of it, and Naim feels the heavy head drop forward against his back. He’s nearly sick from the relief, as the scratched-up, strong arm loops around his waist and tugs him backwards. The hands, familiar and dear, silver enveloping the knuckles.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” says Ryan, voice hoarse and teary and devastatingly innocent. And it’s the real Ryan, finally, after so long spent wondering every time he re-enters a room. The suspicion, the untrust inherent in never knowing for sure if the face of the boy you loved best would save you or be your ruin. Naim lets himself collapse into the heavy embrace, feeling like a mountaineer abandoning the climb. The fear had been addictive. The adrenaline; the vigilance, the security.
Naim can’t help it.
Deliriously, through tears, he laughs.
18 and three quarters to 19 years old, open-eyed and half-orphan and non-believer, artist and lover and grown to be nothing he was wished to be, the fear hanging off the tips of his fingers like running water, Naim decides to lay it down.
X
At Joseph’s family home, out in the East of Sydney far enough from the church building, from mother and father’s house, to feel the shuddering of the wrongness, Alfred prays.
As usual, he prays for forgiveness.
“You haven’t played your violin in a while,” Joseph says, lighting up a cigarette in the front room as his son, Henry, sits silently watching the FIFA match run on the tv.
“I’m going for a walk,” Henry says when it’s silent, and Joseph waves him off uninterested.
I haven’t’ played the violin because there’s nothing left to play, thinks Alfred. If I picked up that bow, my fingers would crack and crumble into volcanic ash. I’d hear the strings and have to run away screaming, face boiling, sloughing off in gullies. There is no music left. You’ve taken it all. I’ve burned every score.
Alfred digs the lighter, rusted, from his coat pocket. He flips the top open, flame rising loud and angry.
“Here,” Alfred says, reaching out to offer it to Joseph in the opposite chair. “I want you to have this.”
Joseph blinks at him. “I’ve got one, thanks,” he says.
“Well, then, have two.”
Alfred thinks of the words, the furious Latin, that his tongue has wrapped around through the years. Staving off the punishment, prolonging the inevitable. In every young face, the same affliction. The longing. The fatal longing.
“You know,” says Alfred, wondering how much blood there would be to clean off of the wooden floors this time, how much Joseph would have to scrub on his hands and knees. “I never liked you very much.”
Joseph laughs unkindly. “Jesus, like I didn’t know that. Keep your fucking lighter, Alfred.”
That evening, alone in the pale of Joseph’s guest bedroom, the rest of the family’s gone out for supper. Some snow crab for $35.00 per person. Henry, returned from his walk, and Joseph and Joseph’s wife, the little girl, Alfred’s niece.
Alfred sits with both legs hanging off either side of the bed, and opens the window.
The lighter sits unused, out of reach on the kitchen table.
When the Not-Stephen comes, lies down with him for the first time since he can remember, he feels the dark, crushing weight press down, anvil-like and frantic atop his chest. And then, all of a sudden, like it always had, it lifts. The Not-Stephen smiles, and it seems so honest. Even the callouses on his fingertips are the same.
“Kiss me,” he asks, and it does.
When it bites, Alfred closes his eyes.
At least it’s almost the real thing. At least it’s finally over.
x
They nearly kill one another 4 times before they even make it inside of the airport.
Ryan’s got it in his head that they’re going to fall from the sky in a fiery heap somewhere in the middle of the Pacific. As he can’t seem to stop thinking about it, he also can’t, apparently, seem to stop making poorly-timed, incredibly detailed jokes about it. If Naim has to placate one more fearful looking, overhearing child, he might take advantage of the water-filling stations they’ve got placed at every corner and drown Ryan in one.
He feels marginally more sympathetic when he realizes that Ryan’s never flown before.
“If you take a gummy,” he says, mostly teasing, “you can knock out for most of it.”
“I think I’ll vomit if I do that, thanks,” Ryan deadpans.
It’s taken selling about 80% of their accumulated belongings to afford the tickets. Even then, they’re on the cheapest airline with the worst possible seats, everything they own collectively shoved into their falling-apart Jansports and Naim sporting mismatched runners. Each of them covered in Star-Wars band-aids. Selling the truck had been more of an ordeal; it turned out that there were few legal avenues for two runaways to sell a stolen vehicle without being detained by the police. They leave it on the side of the highway and sell the parts to the least reputable mechanic’s shop they can find. It’s been a hitchhike to SYD still a bit in disbelief, Ryan’s jeans a little long on Naim and stepping out at the airport with Ryan kneeling to roll them up at his ankles.
Ryan catches him eyeing a travel sketchbook at the overpriced service kiosk outside their gate and buys it without asking.
Sharing a McDonald’s meal with their bags at their feet and the noise of the crowd pressing in on all sides, Naim feels his eyes grow heavy.
“Boring you?” Ryan says, mouth full, smirk lazy. Naim shoves his shoulder and shifts so that he can lean more comfortably. It makes him warm, a bit, the way Ryan switches his phone into his opposite hand with its blurry episode of Cheers run halfway through, to stretch his arm out around Naim. He falls asleep to Ryan’s breathing like he has for nearly two years, nose shoved into his cotton ribcage.
When he comes to, it’s gone dark outside the big, bay windows.
Shuffling his way out from under Ryan’s weight is easier said than done, as he’s got his neck at a concerning angle and might be dead with the stillness of the rest of him, eyes closed. Naim shuts his phone off and shoves his coat underneath his head, so he won’t need a neck brace for the rest of his life, at least, and gets up to grab a new pair of headphones and a crossword from the gate shop.
They stand in line for boarding closed-in on all sides by kids up too late to be well-behaved and parents too exhausted to admonish them. There’s an old woman who runs over Ryan’s foot with her wheelchair and apologizes so profusely Ryan eventually pretends to not understand English.
Their passports are brand new and shiny from the Officeworks in Sydney; Naim runs a thumb over Ryan’s face printed square and still-framed on the front page.
It’s late, and Ryan’s half-asleep through the tunnel. He trails after Naim mostly unresponsively as they squeeze through the aisle, hand looped through the hook handle of Naim’s backpack. Naim pushes him into the window seat and tries not to wake the nearby sleepers as Ryan retaliates with shoving his hands into Naim’s ribs, his armpit.
The flight attendant gives Naim a pointed look as Ryan mouths off into his neck, slapping and roughhousing at one another, but Naim’s too giddy to mind. She doesn’t come back round to offer them champagne, which Ryan swears is intentional.
“Y’like, pay for it when you buy the ticket, mate—”
“Have you ever even had champagne?”
Mostly, Naim stares out the window and catalogues the continent he’s worked his life up to leaving. Ryan had told him, the night they’d left the deliverance healer’s church unknowing where he’d gone and entirely, massively uncaring, about the postcards he’d used to collect in Bandi.
“I even had one from Jakarta, whenever my aunt went,” he’d said, eyes gone watered and cagey whenever Naim would try to ask what had happened to him when they’d been separated, door to door in the church house. From all Naim could gather, the Not-Naim had caused Ryan to develop an inability to let Naim get out the door without kissing him first. Naim couldn’t complain. He’d tell him, someday, Naim knew.
For now, 3 hours into a buzzing flight to a stopover in Bangkok to Charles de Gaulle, Naim struggles through a medium difficulty crossword out of Best 100 Mind Puzzles, title printed expressively and outlined in bright bubbled letters.
8 letters, #14 across. Clue: Lucky Charm.
He thinks Ryan’s asleep, head cushioned forward against his arms. Naim’s frowning, Lauryn Hill in one ear, til Ryan’s finger points unexpectedly out along the page. Turning to him, face blue-lit by the plane light, Ryan moves to speak into Naim’s ear over the turning engine and seatbelt sign announcement.
“Try talisman,” Ryan says, voice warm in the shell of Naim’s cowrie ear. He pulls back just slight enough to bump his forehead against Naim’s, bit like an affectionate tortoiseshell. “Is that French?” he jokes, eyes tired but bright. He was always doing that, thinks Naim; tossing the string and trusting Naim to catch it in his can, always at the other end. Golden record and E.T. Trying to make contact. Alien boy, thinks Naim, fondly.
“No,” mutters Naim, laughing, feeling the bloom begin in his capillaries, the white tulip garden of musical sort of joy, the beachfront pull of creek water and dragon’s smoke ease of him. “But this is,” he says, and Ryan’s mouth is warm and welcoming as they kiss it all to dust.
Where Ryan’s forearm covers one of Naim’s ears, blocking the rest of the sound out as Naim smooths his fingers through the hair at the back of his neck, the words echo all along Naim’s left side.
Miseducated, and thoroughly modern, halfway to France and hands finally clean. Lauryn Hill and a plane chalk full of people, mothers and fathers and kids like them, people in love and starting over and beaten down. Silence, and what he’s met there: pure, untainted belief. In himself, and in a boy.
Blooming, Naim lets himself be kissed.
(Now I may have faith to make mountains fall
But if I lack love, then I am nothin' at all).