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Ten Names For Unnameable Things
3775 words
NC-17
(Harsh Realm/Tabula Rasa, post-Island. Poetry cuts are "Saying Your Names" by Richard Siken)
Names of spells and names of hexes, names
cursed quietly under the breath, or called out
loudly to fill the yard, calling you inside again,
calling you home.
1.
The thermometer in the car has been broken since Tom can remember but if he was made to guess he would say it’s well into the eighties and squatting there, refusing to move on no matter how dark it gets, and so humid the sweat runs down between his shoulderblades and tickles him. He rolls onto his stomach and thinks of insects walking, and then he thinks of the witch in the ruins of the Ninth Ward with her house painted in red runes and pentagrams, how when they set foot inside the constant whine of mosquitoes fell silent. Like they ran into a wall. Like it was all dead space. Space for the dead. A wall made of the lost.
Mike’s hands on him, half-frantic nails digging into his shoulders, pushing him inside.
There was fire in the dark, and incense and the smell of dead meat and cayenne, sage, rosemary. The witch’s hands moved over the fire and he couldn’t see her eyes. But in that dark in the hollows of her face he could swear he saw something shining.
He closes his eyes now and he can see Mike crouching by the fire, leaning forward with his hands full of dog bones. They rattle and Tom thinks of Dexter and looks away.
This is all in his mind. Now he thinks it might be clearer than when it happened. Hindsight, twenty-twenty, and doesn’t that just make more sense that he wants to admit even now.
The witch cast a circle; he remembers that. Closed her hands around both of their wrists and drew a silver blade across their forearms. Her hands were the exact color and texture of ancient paper and there were tattoos scattered across her fingers like faded newsprint. He tried to read them as she caught their blood in her palms, mixed it, finished the circle with two intersecting lines in the center--red crossroads seen from miles high.
Blood calls to blood calls to him.
It’s so dark out there between. So cold.
It’s so hot in this fucking field and the swamp beyond it is screaming with noise. Tom touches the crusted slash on his arm. Listens to Mike breathing a few feet away, beside the circle they burned into the ground.
This can’t work. He doesn’t even know if he wants it to work. He doesn’t even know what it is. He turns his face into the circle of his arms and tries to fall asleep. But in his head the witch is muttering.
Blood calls to blood.
Wait. You’ll know when it’s right.
Names called out across the water,
names I called you behind your back,
sour and delicious, secret and unrepeatable,
the names of flowers that open only once,
shouted from balconies, shouted from rooftops,
or muffled by pillows, or whispered in sleep,
or caught in the throat like a lump of meat.
2.
Mike won’t tell him. The list of things Mike won’t tell him could already fill a book. Now it’s a library full of them, but every time he looks at Tom the stacks shake and everything tumbles onto the floor. One of these days the wrong thing will fall face-up and open and he’ll spill it all.
Once upon a time. Long ago in a faraway land. Many years ago in the time of your grandfather’s grandfather.
Come my love and I’ll tell you a tale.
See, there’s this island where I died. And I know this sounds crazy. I know exactly how fucking crazy this sounds.
If he laughed the way he wanted to he’s pretty sure Tom would run away screaming.
He saves it for when he’s on watch and Tom’s asleep, and then he wraps his arms around his own middle and lets it take him like a seizure, shaking in the dark. The dark. Oh, the dark and what happens inside it and what it hides, what it knows, all the names it hears and keeps.
GI. Stupid goddamn idiot. Moron. Captain fucking America. Liability. Sweetheart. Love. Baby. Bitch. Slut. Whore. God.
Anything. Anything for you.
Somewhere in Georgia they’d run out of gas, had to leave the car and walk it. They got off the road for the sake of a joke called safety; the woods closed around them, piney and alive, and he found himself thinking of jungle, jungle noises, heat, smells, sweat and skin under his hands.
They walked together in springy pine-needle silence and he was thinking about Tom with his back up against a tree and his shirt up under his arms with his head thrown back and his hands stuttering and his mouth babbling yes yes oh my god Mike that’s so good
He put his hands at his sides and kept them there. Imagined cuffs and restraints and that didn’t especially help things.
He’d grab the crowbar in the trunk and bludgeon what he knows out of himself if he didn’t want to spare Tom from cleaning up the mess.
So there has to be another way.
I try, I do. I try and try. A happy ending?
Sure enough - Hello darling, welcome home.
I'll call you darling, hold you tight. We are
not traitors but the lights go out. It's dark.
3.
The moon is down. Tom doesn’t immediately realize that his eyes are open until he sees something moving in the dark. He turns over, sits up, leaning on one hand. There’s dirt worked into the cut on his arm, mixing with sweat, stinging.
Mike breathing, close--fuck, that close so suddenly. By his ear, almost. A hand sliding up his arm, thumbnail digging into the cut. He hisses pain but for some reason he isn’t pulling away.
I remember, Mike is murmuring in his ear. Tom is distantly aware of being completely freaked out. It doesn’t seem to make a lot of difference. I remember. I know you don’t. It’s okay. Hands on his shoulders, knees on the sides of his hips--Mike is straddling him, fucking straddling him in the middle of a fucking field with both their shirts off and sweat glues their skin together when Mike leans down and bites, very delicately, at the skin just beneath the left side of Tom’s jaw.
I don’t want this, he thinks, and it feels like a hundred different kinds of lying. I don’t want this, not him, not this way. Hands on Mike’s thighs, tightening when fingers get his fly open and a hand--a hand, because that is so much easier to process than Mike Pinocchio’s hand--snakes in and closes around his dick and strokes him.
He comes so much faster than he wants to. He’s gasping when he does but otherwise he’s silent, and when Mike withdraws his hand and rolls away from him he doesn’t move.
He could say that it’s just one of those things that happens. It’s stress. It’s whatever the fuck has been eating its way through Mike’s brain lately. It’s blowing off steam. It’s nothing. But he’s still gasping, and Mike is moving again, back toward the circle, dropping to his knees and doing something that Tom can’t make out. Until he hears Mike let out a strained, breathy curse, sees his body twist in the starlight, arch, release.
Oh.
The stars go out all at once. It’s like someone flipped a switch. Tom finds his feet. Stumbles. Claws at the dark.
When the stars come back on, Mike is crouching inside the circle, lifting something into his arms, laughing, laughing.
When Mike laughs like that it sounds like screaming.
His voice on tape, his name on the envelope,
the soft sound of a body falling off a bridge
behind you, the body hardly even makes
a sound. The waters of the dead, a clear road,
every lover in the form of stars, the road
blocked.
4.
I don’t remember.
Mike looks like he’s been stabbed. Which Tom would recognize by now. And the dark-haired boy--Neil, his name is Neil, how the fuck do I know that his name is Neil--turns away, hands thrust in his pockets. Skinny shoulders hunched like he expects the whole world to hit him and he's just daring it to try.
I don’t remember either of you assholes.
Tom thinks We should start a fucking club.
Mike parks the car in the middle of the road, gets out, spends ten minutes hitting the metal cage with his fists and his shoulders and his body, throwing himself against it, shouting things Tom can’t understand. He stops when he’s bleeding pretty much everywhere, slumps down against one of the wheels with his head in his hands. Tom sits in the car with Dexter on his lap. Neil is behind him, silent, shocked under the sullenness.
Tom writes a letter in his head, which he does when he doesn’t have any idea what the fuck else to do.
My dearest Sophie
My only friend in the world here jerked me off last night. I think it might have been part of some kind of magic.
The magic made someone appear out of thin air who apparently hates both of us.
Basically we’re losing our minds.
The sun takes a long time to go down. It’s too cloudy for stars.
All night I stretched my arms across
him, rivers of blood, the dark woods, singing
with all my skin and bone Please keep him safe.
let him lay his head on my chest and we will be
like sailors, swimming in the sound of it, dashed
to pieces. Makes a cathedral, him pressing against
me, his lips at my neck, and yes, I do believe
his mouth is heaven, his kisses falling over me
like stars.
5.
Bitch said it would work. Bitch lied.
Except not really.
He should be on watch. He’s slipping out of it. He’s exhausted, lost, hurting and mad, folding himself against Tom’s body in the darkness, thinking I can’t protect you I can’t protect him I can’t protect anyone and I brought him here, what the fuck was I thinking, I brought him here and he hates me for it.
All the trees around them are dead. They hiss and rustle like whispers, like secrets.
He can feel Neil’s eyes on him as he presses his face into Tom’s neck. He stops caring when Tom doesn’t push him away. He scratches his arm open and without really meaning to he paints his blood across Tom’s bare chest--the lines of his palm, his fingerprints. It’ll all wash away in the morning.
He can’t leave marks that last.
Your name like an animal
covered with frost, your name like a music that's
been transposed, a suit of fur, a coat of mud,
a kick in the pants, a lungful of glass, the sails
in wind and the slap of waves on the hull
of a boat that's sinking to the sounds of mermaids
singing songs of love, and the tug of a simple
profound sadness when it sounds so far away.
6.
I know you.
“You don’t know shit.”
I know you, why won’t you believe me.
A laugh, sharp and cruel and hard with tears he knows Neil wishes he couldn’t hear. “You tell me about our kids again and I’ll kick your ass. I don’t give a shit if you’re bigger than me.”
I wouldn’t stop you.
Touching is like chasing. He feels ashamed when he does it where Tom can see, because it’s openly and nakedly pathetic, but can’t they understand that he can’t help how much he needs? Because he’s tried, he’s tried so fucking hard to stop needing. He’s following Neil with his hands, chasing him from fire to car to road to forest to car and fire and back again. If he had sense, if he wasn’t such a selfish prick, he’d stop.
Neil is here. That’s exactly the level of selfish prick that he is. That’s evidence.
If he wants more, all he has to do is crawl under Tom’s blanket again and see how long it takes for Tom to decide to make him stop.
Ten miles outside what’s left of Tulsa he gives Neil a gun. Makes Tom show him how to shoot it because he’s really not that much of a masochist, or at least for an hour or so he’d like to pretend that’s true. Five miles outside of Tulsa they find what they’re looking for: a stolen Republican Guard cache being guarded by seven men with lots of weapons and diverse facial scarring.
In the woods, in the dusk, Neil lets him paint his face with mud for camouflage. He manages to keep his hands steady as he traces cheekbones, brow, nose, chin, jaw, like a sculptor, like a blind man trying to see with whatever he has left.
He has two good eyes again. He’d trade them both. He’s not even entirely sure for what, at this point.
Neil is incredibly solid with a gun when he gets half a chance. It’s like he already knew how.
Here is a map with your name for a capital,
here is an arrow to prove a point: we laugh
and it pits the world against us, we laugh,
and we've got nothing left to lose, and our hearts
turn red, and the river rises like a barn on fire.
7.
Lincoln is in flames.
It could be people. Could be lightning. Chemical reaction. Spontaneous or long-foretold. Doesn’t matter. They stop on an empty stretch of highway and watch it burn. Mike breaks out a bottle of whiskey and between the three of them they cut it down by about half--something about which Mike might once have bitched, before he lost his mind and started screwing his best friend, and now it kind of doesn’t seem to matter all that much.
Tell me again how you got me here, Neil says, and it’s mocking, meant to hurt, but maybe not as much as it used to be. Mike tips his head back, mouth stretched into something that isn’t a smile.
Well, there was this witch in New Orleans.
Magic, Tom thinks, watching a sky full of sparks. He looks through the bottle and the world is half honey, dark and glowing. Magic.
A lot of that half a bottle of Jack went into him, if he’s honest. It takes him a few minutes to notice that Neil has sealed his mouth over Mike’s to make him shut up.
Names of poison, names of
handguns, names of places we've been
together, names of people we'd be together.
Names of endurance, names of devotion,
street names and place names and all the names
of our dark heaven crackling in their pan.
It's a bed of straw, darling. It sure as shit is.
8.
I was supposed to die for him. But we’re not going to win.
He says it to Neil when Tom isn’t around. It’s a truth but that doesn’t mean he’s ready to tell it like that. He pretends to be blunt but that’s kind of a lie too.
Neil looks at him, turning the gun over and over in his hands, running his fingers along the barrel in a lazy kind of fascination. Sun is shafting through cracks in the barn roof, through the dust, and for the moment it looks like a kind of ancient, golden heaven. The closest he might get.
“Does he know that?”
No.
Yes.
I don’t know.
Neil rolls up to his knees, lays the gun aside, crawls toward him. They should be sleeping while they can. This area is hot with Guard and tonight they’ll have to move in the dark. And Mike does feel tired, but he’s used to it, and when Neil settles into his lap it doesn’t feel like it matters.
“You should tell him.” Hot mouth against his neck, tongue like something fucking prehensile, oh god, oh god. This isn’t heaven. Can’t be. But he’s so fucking greedy for it. He tangles his fingers into already-tangled dark hair and feels Neil smile against the base of his throat. “You are fuckin’ him.”
I’m not. I never did. Not here. Here there aren’t words for what he does. Settling against Tom’s body, framing him with his hands, outlining. Almost forensic. There are things he’s trying to understand. When he moves against him, it has nothing to do with penetration. When he comes it feels completely inconsequential, except that it banks down the fire in his head for a while.
This, though.
He fucks Neil practically dry, vicious, wanting it to hurt, wanting it to be good, shoving him down into the old straw with his hands leaving bruises on skinny shoulders. Neil laughs and hooks an arm around his neck, rolling his hips, dragging his orgasm out of him--and yeah, he’s fighting it. He’s tired of being weak. Resents it like hell.
But this is heaven and Neil is glowing when he spills into Mike’s hand.
By the time Tom comes back in to sleep their clothes are back on and they’re in opposite corners. The straw is still matted down in one place. The air still smells like fucking.
Tom looks at the two of them, face unreadable. Then he goes and lies down in the depression they made, turning away from them both, head cradled in dying sunlight.
If there was one thing I could save from the fire,
he said, the broken arms of the sycamore,
the eucalyptus still trying to climb out of the yard -
your breath on my neck like a music that holds
my hands down, kisses as they burn their way
along my spine -or rain, our bodies wet,
clothes clinging arm to elbow, clothes clinging
nipple to groin - I'll be right here. I'm waiting.
9.
They don’t try to get out of the rain when it comes. They’ve all been tense, hard, snapping at nothing, and the thunder feels like a break. Feels like pressure blowing off in huge cracks. So it’s dangerous--stupid, really, because there’s lightning and it’s out in the open and they don’t have weapons easy to hand and it just makes no sense, none of it, and that might be what makes it okay. The nonsense. The ridiculousness. They collapse into it. They let go.
Neil’s running away from the car, soaked in less than thirty seconds. Tom is following, shouting warnings and entreaties that melt into laughter, and Mike catches both of them thirty or forty yards from the road. Clothes are wet so it seems like it makes all the sense in the world to get them off, drop them into the tall grass, let them get washed by the rain. Tom tackles Mike, gets him down on his back in the mud--and it’s a field, straddling, slick bodies and the world getting dark and echoes of a circle made of fire out of which magic can be drawn, and Neil is suddenly very close and watching as Tom reaches between them and grasps, strokes, drags a moan past Mike’s lips with his teeth.
It’s very un-Tom-like.
I don’t give a fuck what you remember. This is what’s happening now.
Mike frames Tom’s face with his hands, presses their foreheads together. I don’t remember anything.
Tabula fucking rasa.
The world comes clear in flashes of lightning: Neil between them with the two of them dueling for a favored place at his mouth, kisses that splay out and extend and might incorporate any combination, they’re so flexible. Tom’s hands on Neil’s head, pressing down, streaks of mud moving from skin to skin, grit between their teeth.
Skin feels so meaningless when bodies get this close.
Mike pins Tom to the ground, works himself open; when he lowers himself and Tom is arching helplessly up into him the thunder drowns out the sound that both of them make but they both feel it anyway: deep and wrenching, something beyond a cry in chorus. Neil catches it, lets it pull him forward, lets it close his hands around the back of Mike’s head as he thrusts into his mouth. When they move together in a single rising wave, none of them have to think about a goddamn thing.
In the end the rain washes them clean.
Say hallelujah, say goodnight, say it over
the canned music and your feet won't stumble,
his face getting larger, the rest blurring
on every side. And angels, about twelve angels,
angels knocking on your head right now, hello
hello, a flash in the sky, would you like to
meet him here, in Heaven?
10.
Magic is real.
What about God?
I don’t know about God. But gods are real.
And we had children there.
We did.
I don’t believe it.
You don’t have to.
The road, the moon. Quiet after rain. Dry clothes. Tom is asleep in the backseat with Dexter on his chest, breathing steady and even and somehow in sync with the soft rumble of the engine. Neil turns himself in the passenger seat, lays his head in Mike’s lap, and Mike works his fingers into Neil’s damp hair.
“You brought me here because you couldn’t fuckin’ stand it.” Slowly, revelatory, like he’s only really understanding it now, even though Mike has tried to explain it five hundred times: how lonely he was. How desperate. How crazy. “And you’re still the only one who remembers.”
Mike looks ahead at the road, fingers working. He’s no longer sure of what he says and what he only thinks, but he’s sure enough about the truth of all of it.
None of it matters. This is what’s happening now.
And we aren’t going to win.
“Did you ever even want to?”
Mike closes his eyes. He can feel the road under the car, under them, pulling them on. There are a lot of things that he could want. Maybe it’s time to pare it all down a little. Magic might be real but he’s only used it for one thing.
I have what I want.
Here is my hand, my heart,
my throat, my wrist. Here are the illuminated
cities at the center of me, and here is the center
of me, which is a lake, which is a well that we
can drink from, but I can't go through with it.
I just don't want to die anymore.
3775 words
NC-17
(Harsh Realm/Tabula Rasa, post-Island. Poetry cuts are "Saying Your Names" by Richard Siken)
Names of spells and names of hexes, names
cursed quietly under the breath, or called out
loudly to fill the yard, calling you inside again,
calling you home.
1.
The thermometer in the car has been broken since Tom can remember but if he was made to guess he would say it’s well into the eighties and squatting there, refusing to move on no matter how dark it gets, and so humid the sweat runs down between his shoulderblades and tickles him. He rolls onto his stomach and thinks of insects walking, and then he thinks of the witch in the ruins of the Ninth Ward with her house painted in red runes and pentagrams, how when they set foot inside the constant whine of mosquitoes fell silent. Like they ran into a wall. Like it was all dead space. Space for the dead. A wall made of the lost.
Mike’s hands on him, half-frantic nails digging into his shoulders, pushing him inside.
There was fire in the dark, and incense and the smell of dead meat and cayenne, sage, rosemary. The witch’s hands moved over the fire and he couldn’t see her eyes. But in that dark in the hollows of her face he could swear he saw something shining.
He closes his eyes now and he can see Mike crouching by the fire, leaning forward with his hands full of dog bones. They rattle and Tom thinks of Dexter and looks away.
This is all in his mind. Now he thinks it might be clearer than when it happened. Hindsight, twenty-twenty, and doesn’t that just make more sense that he wants to admit even now.
The witch cast a circle; he remembers that. Closed her hands around both of their wrists and drew a silver blade across their forearms. Her hands were the exact color and texture of ancient paper and there were tattoos scattered across her fingers like faded newsprint. He tried to read them as she caught their blood in her palms, mixed it, finished the circle with two intersecting lines in the center--red crossroads seen from miles high.
Blood calls to blood calls to him.
It’s so dark out there between. So cold.
It’s so hot in this fucking field and the swamp beyond it is screaming with noise. Tom touches the crusted slash on his arm. Listens to Mike breathing a few feet away, beside the circle they burned into the ground.
This can’t work. He doesn’t even know if he wants it to work. He doesn’t even know what it is. He turns his face into the circle of his arms and tries to fall asleep. But in his head the witch is muttering.
Blood calls to blood.
Wait. You’ll know when it’s right.
Names called out across the water,
names I called you behind your back,
sour and delicious, secret and unrepeatable,
the names of flowers that open only once,
shouted from balconies, shouted from rooftops,
or muffled by pillows, or whispered in sleep,
or caught in the throat like a lump of meat.
2.
Mike won’t tell him. The list of things Mike won’t tell him could already fill a book. Now it’s a library full of them, but every time he looks at Tom the stacks shake and everything tumbles onto the floor. One of these days the wrong thing will fall face-up and open and he’ll spill it all.
Once upon a time. Long ago in a faraway land. Many years ago in the time of your grandfather’s grandfather.
Come my love and I’ll tell you a tale.
See, there’s this island where I died. And I know this sounds crazy. I know exactly how fucking crazy this sounds.
If he laughed the way he wanted to he’s pretty sure Tom would run away screaming.
He saves it for when he’s on watch and Tom’s asleep, and then he wraps his arms around his own middle and lets it take him like a seizure, shaking in the dark. The dark. Oh, the dark and what happens inside it and what it hides, what it knows, all the names it hears and keeps.
GI. Stupid goddamn idiot. Moron. Captain fucking America. Liability. Sweetheart. Love. Baby. Bitch. Slut. Whore. God.
Anything. Anything for you.
Somewhere in Georgia they’d run out of gas, had to leave the car and walk it. They got off the road for the sake of a joke called safety; the woods closed around them, piney and alive, and he found himself thinking of jungle, jungle noises, heat, smells, sweat and skin under his hands.
They walked together in springy pine-needle silence and he was thinking about Tom with his back up against a tree and his shirt up under his arms with his head thrown back and his hands stuttering and his mouth babbling yes yes oh my god Mike that’s so good
He put his hands at his sides and kept them there. Imagined cuffs and restraints and that didn’t especially help things.
He’d grab the crowbar in the trunk and bludgeon what he knows out of himself if he didn’t want to spare Tom from cleaning up the mess.
So there has to be another way.
I try, I do. I try and try. A happy ending?
Sure enough - Hello darling, welcome home.
I'll call you darling, hold you tight. We are
not traitors but the lights go out. It's dark.
3.
The moon is down. Tom doesn’t immediately realize that his eyes are open until he sees something moving in the dark. He turns over, sits up, leaning on one hand. There’s dirt worked into the cut on his arm, mixing with sweat, stinging.
Mike breathing, close--fuck, that close so suddenly. By his ear, almost. A hand sliding up his arm, thumbnail digging into the cut. He hisses pain but for some reason he isn’t pulling away.
I remember, Mike is murmuring in his ear. Tom is distantly aware of being completely freaked out. It doesn’t seem to make a lot of difference. I remember. I know you don’t. It’s okay. Hands on his shoulders, knees on the sides of his hips--Mike is straddling him, fucking straddling him in the middle of a fucking field with both their shirts off and sweat glues their skin together when Mike leans down and bites, very delicately, at the skin just beneath the left side of Tom’s jaw.
I don’t want this, he thinks, and it feels like a hundred different kinds of lying. I don’t want this, not him, not this way. Hands on Mike’s thighs, tightening when fingers get his fly open and a hand--a hand, because that is so much easier to process than Mike Pinocchio’s hand--snakes in and closes around his dick and strokes him.
He comes so much faster than he wants to. He’s gasping when he does but otherwise he’s silent, and when Mike withdraws his hand and rolls away from him he doesn’t move.
He could say that it’s just one of those things that happens. It’s stress. It’s whatever the fuck has been eating its way through Mike’s brain lately. It’s blowing off steam. It’s nothing. But he’s still gasping, and Mike is moving again, back toward the circle, dropping to his knees and doing something that Tom can’t make out. Until he hears Mike let out a strained, breathy curse, sees his body twist in the starlight, arch, release.
Oh.
The stars go out all at once. It’s like someone flipped a switch. Tom finds his feet. Stumbles. Claws at the dark.
When the stars come back on, Mike is crouching inside the circle, lifting something into his arms, laughing, laughing.
When Mike laughs like that it sounds like screaming.
His voice on tape, his name on the envelope,
the soft sound of a body falling off a bridge
behind you, the body hardly even makes
a sound. The waters of the dead, a clear road,
every lover in the form of stars, the road
blocked.
4.
I don’t remember.
Mike looks like he’s been stabbed. Which Tom would recognize by now. And the dark-haired boy--Neil, his name is Neil, how the fuck do I know that his name is Neil--turns away, hands thrust in his pockets. Skinny shoulders hunched like he expects the whole world to hit him and he's just daring it to try.
I don’t remember either of you assholes.
Tom thinks We should start a fucking club.
Mike parks the car in the middle of the road, gets out, spends ten minutes hitting the metal cage with his fists and his shoulders and his body, throwing himself against it, shouting things Tom can’t understand. He stops when he’s bleeding pretty much everywhere, slumps down against one of the wheels with his head in his hands. Tom sits in the car with Dexter on his lap. Neil is behind him, silent, shocked under the sullenness.
Tom writes a letter in his head, which he does when he doesn’t have any idea what the fuck else to do.
My dearest Sophie
My only friend in the world here jerked me off last night. I think it might have been part of some kind of magic.
The magic made someone appear out of thin air who apparently hates both of us.
Basically we’re losing our minds.
The sun takes a long time to go down. It’s too cloudy for stars.
All night I stretched my arms across
him, rivers of blood, the dark woods, singing
with all my skin and bone Please keep him safe.
let him lay his head on my chest and we will be
like sailors, swimming in the sound of it, dashed
to pieces. Makes a cathedral, him pressing against
me, his lips at my neck, and yes, I do believe
his mouth is heaven, his kisses falling over me
like stars.
5.
Bitch said it would work. Bitch lied.
Except not really.
He should be on watch. He’s slipping out of it. He’s exhausted, lost, hurting and mad, folding himself against Tom’s body in the darkness, thinking I can’t protect you I can’t protect him I can’t protect anyone and I brought him here, what the fuck was I thinking, I brought him here and he hates me for it.
All the trees around them are dead. They hiss and rustle like whispers, like secrets.
He can feel Neil’s eyes on him as he presses his face into Tom’s neck. He stops caring when Tom doesn’t push him away. He scratches his arm open and without really meaning to he paints his blood across Tom’s bare chest--the lines of his palm, his fingerprints. It’ll all wash away in the morning.
He can’t leave marks that last.
Your name like an animal
covered with frost, your name like a music that's
been transposed, a suit of fur, a coat of mud,
a kick in the pants, a lungful of glass, the sails
in wind and the slap of waves on the hull
of a boat that's sinking to the sounds of mermaids
singing songs of love, and the tug of a simple
profound sadness when it sounds so far away.
6.
I know you.
“You don’t know shit.”
I know you, why won’t you believe me.
A laugh, sharp and cruel and hard with tears he knows Neil wishes he couldn’t hear. “You tell me about our kids again and I’ll kick your ass. I don’t give a shit if you’re bigger than me.”
I wouldn’t stop you.
Touching is like chasing. He feels ashamed when he does it where Tom can see, because it’s openly and nakedly pathetic, but can’t they understand that he can’t help how much he needs? Because he’s tried, he’s tried so fucking hard to stop needing. He’s following Neil with his hands, chasing him from fire to car to road to forest to car and fire and back again. If he had sense, if he wasn’t such a selfish prick, he’d stop.
Neil is here. That’s exactly the level of selfish prick that he is. That’s evidence.
If he wants more, all he has to do is crawl under Tom’s blanket again and see how long it takes for Tom to decide to make him stop.
Ten miles outside what’s left of Tulsa he gives Neil a gun. Makes Tom show him how to shoot it because he’s really not that much of a masochist, or at least for an hour or so he’d like to pretend that’s true. Five miles outside of Tulsa they find what they’re looking for: a stolen Republican Guard cache being guarded by seven men with lots of weapons and diverse facial scarring.
In the woods, in the dusk, Neil lets him paint his face with mud for camouflage. He manages to keep his hands steady as he traces cheekbones, brow, nose, chin, jaw, like a sculptor, like a blind man trying to see with whatever he has left.
He has two good eyes again. He’d trade them both. He’s not even entirely sure for what, at this point.
Neil is incredibly solid with a gun when he gets half a chance. It’s like he already knew how.
Here is a map with your name for a capital,
here is an arrow to prove a point: we laugh
and it pits the world against us, we laugh,
and we've got nothing left to lose, and our hearts
turn red, and the river rises like a barn on fire.
7.
Lincoln is in flames.
It could be people. Could be lightning. Chemical reaction. Spontaneous or long-foretold. Doesn’t matter. They stop on an empty stretch of highway and watch it burn. Mike breaks out a bottle of whiskey and between the three of them they cut it down by about half--something about which Mike might once have bitched, before he lost his mind and started screwing his best friend, and now it kind of doesn’t seem to matter all that much.
Tell me again how you got me here, Neil says, and it’s mocking, meant to hurt, but maybe not as much as it used to be. Mike tips his head back, mouth stretched into something that isn’t a smile.
Well, there was this witch in New Orleans.
Magic, Tom thinks, watching a sky full of sparks. He looks through the bottle and the world is half honey, dark and glowing. Magic.
A lot of that half a bottle of Jack went into him, if he’s honest. It takes him a few minutes to notice that Neil has sealed his mouth over Mike’s to make him shut up.
Names of poison, names of
handguns, names of places we've been
together, names of people we'd be together.
Names of endurance, names of devotion,
street names and place names and all the names
of our dark heaven crackling in their pan.
It's a bed of straw, darling. It sure as shit is.
8.
I was supposed to die for him. But we’re not going to win.
He says it to Neil when Tom isn’t around. It’s a truth but that doesn’t mean he’s ready to tell it like that. He pretends to be blunt but that’s kind of a lie too.
Neil looks at him, turning the gun over and over in his hands, running his fingers along the barrel in a lazy kind of fascination. Sun is shafting through cracks in the barn roof, through the dust, and for the moment it looks like a kind of ancient, golden heaven. The closest he might get.
“Does he know that?”
No.
Yes.
I don’t know.
Neil rolls up to his knees, lays the gun aside, crawls toward him. They should be sleeping while they can. This area is hot with Guard and tonight they’ll have to move in the dark. And Mike does feel tired, but he’s used to it, and when Neil settles into his lap it doesn’t feel like it matters.
“You should tell him.” Hot mouth against his neck, tongue like something fucking prehensile, oh god, oh god. This isn’t heaven. Can’t be. But he’s so fucking greedy for it. He tangles his fingers into already-tangled dark hair and feels Neil smile against the base of his throat. “You are fuckin’ him.”
I’m not. I never did. Not here. Here there aren’t words for what he does. Settling against Tom’s body, framing him with his hands, outlining. Almost forensic. There are things he’s trying to understand. When he moves against him, it has nothing to do with penetration. When he comes it feels completely inconsequential, except that it banks down the fire in his head for a while.
This, though.
He fucks Neil practically dry, vicious, wanting it to hurt, wanting it to be good, shoving him down into the old straw with his hands leaving bruises on skinny shoulders. Neil laughs and hooks an arm around his neck, rolling his hips, dragging his orgasm out of him--and yeah, he’s fighting it. He’s tired of being weak. Resents it like hell.
But this is heaven and Neil is glowing when he spills into Mike’s hand.
By the time Tom comes back in to sleep their clothes are back on and they’re in opposite corners. The straw is still matted down in one place. The air still smells like fucking.
Tom looks at the two of them, face unreadable. Then he goes and lies down in the depression they made, turning away from them both, head cradled in dying sunlight.
If there was one thing I could save from the fire,
he said, the broken arms of the sycamore,
the eucalyptus still trying to climb out of the yard -
your breath on my neck like a music that holds
my hands down, kisses as they burn their way
along my spine -or rain, our bodies wet,
clothes clinging arm to elbow, clothes clinging
nipple to groin - I'll be right here. I'm waiting.
9.
They don’t try to get out of the rain when it comes. They’ve all been tense, hard, snapping at nothing, and the thunder feels like a break. Feels like pressure blowing off in huge cracks. So it’s dangerous--stupid, really, because there’s lightning and it’s out in the open and they don’t have weapons easy to hand and it just makes no sense, none of it, and that might be what makes it okay. The nonsense. The ridiculousness. They collapse into it. They let go.
Neil’s running away from the car, soaked in less than thirty seconds. Tom is following, shouting warnings and entreaties that melt into laughter, and Mike catches both of them thirty or forty yards from the road. Clothes are wet so it seems like it makes all the sense in the world to get them off, drop them into the tall grass, let them get washed by the rain. Tom tackles Mike, gets him down on his back in the mud--and it’s a field, straddling, slick bodies and the world getting dark and echoes of a circle made of fire out of which magic can be drawn, and Neil is suddenly very close and watching as Tom reaches between them and grasps, strokes, drags a moan past Mike’s lips with his teeth.
It’s very un-Tom-like.
I don’t give a fuck what you remember. This is what’s happening now.
Mike frames Tom’s face with his hands, presses their foreheads together. I don’t remember anything.
Tabula fucking rasa.
The world comes clear in flashes of lightning: Neil between them with the two of them dueling for a favored place at his mouth, kisses that splay out and extend and might incorporate any combination, they’re so flexible. Tom’s hands on Neil’s head, pressing down, streaks of mud moving from skin to skin, grit between their teeth.
Skin feels so meaningless when bodies get this close.
Mike pins Tom to the ground, works himself open; when he lowers himself and Tom is arching helplessly up into him the thunder drowns out the sound that both of them make but they both feel it anyway: deep and wrenching, something beyond a cry in chorus. Neil catches it, lets it pull him forward, lets it close his hands around the back of Mike’s head as he thrusts into his mouth. When they move together in a single rising wave, none of them have to think about a goddamn thing.
In the end the rain washes them clean.
Say hallelujah, say goodnight, say it over
the canned music and your feet won't stumble,
his face getting larger, the rest blurring
on every side. And angels, about twelve angels,
angels knocking on your head right now, hello
hello, a flash in the sky, would you like to
meet him here, in Heaven?
10.
Magic is real.
What about God?
I don’t know about God. But gods are real.
And we had children there.
We did.
I don’t believe it.
You don’t have to.
The road, the moon. Quiet after rain. Dry clothes. Tom is asleep in the backseat with Dexter on his chest, breathing steady and even and somehow in sync with the soft rumble of the engine. Neil turns himself in the passenger seat, lays his head in Mike’s lap, and Mike works his fingers into Neil’s damp hair.
“You brought me here because you couldn’t fuckin’ stand it.” Slowly, revelatory, like he’s only really understanding it now, even though Mike has tried to explain it five hundred times: how lonely he was. How desperate. How crazy. “And you’re still the only one who remembers.”
Mike looks ahead at the road, fingers working. He’s no longer sure of what he says and what he only thinks, but he’s sure enough about the truth of all of it.
None of it matters. This is what’s happening now.
And we aren’t going to win.
“Did you ever even want to?”
Mike closes his eyes. He can feel the road under the car, under them, pulling them on. There are a lot of things that he could want. Maybe it’s time to pare it all down a little. Magic might be real but he’s only used it for one thing.
I have what I want.
Here is my hand, my heart,
my throat, my wrist. Here are the illuminated
cities at the center of me, and here is the center
of me, which is a lake, which is a well that we
can drink from, but I can't go through with it.
I just don't want to die anymore.