(no subject)
2: to satisfy your curiosity
77° East:
Fourteen hours travelling with a couple of hours on the ground in Munich leave him gritty and tired. They land in the middle of a thunder storm and, for a moment, Nate’s heart is in the back of his throat and he realises that he’s never done anything dangerous in his life. At his side, Brad is still and he’s got his eyes closed. As the light flares and throbs around the plane, Nate reaches out and threads his fingers with Brad’s. Brad doesn’t pull away.
Until the wheels hit the tarmac, all that Nate can think about is how fucking unnatural flight is. How, if men were meant to fly, they'd be born cocooned in wings.
The queue for immigration is long and convoluted. They stand side by side, and they don’t touch because the guidebook told them not to. He watches a couple of young Indian guys skirt the hall with their fingers intertwined. He watches Brad watching them. He thumbs through his passport and looks at his visa for the tenth time.
Brad goes to an agent ahead of him and Nate just watches him for a moment, the long, neat lines of him in worn khaki and soft cotton. His hair shaved short and his camera bag thrown over his shoulder. Nate’s always been content to go whichever way the wind is blowing but Brad Colbert is something new - older and sharper and, sometimes, Nate’s not sure that Brad even wants him around. He’s taking care not to push too hard. Half the time, they sleep in separate beds and he wakes up with Brad pressed close and his fingers slipping towards his dick.
He doesn’t complain but he wishes that he could figure it out.
Shoulder to shoulder, they pass through a crowded hallway. People holler and jostle but they maintain a united front, head for the cabs that can be trusted, carry their own bags the whole way. Out of the corner of his eye, Nate watches Brad shift his camera to the front of his body. Wallets and passports are already in front pockets, shoved as close to his balls as he can get them. He keeps glancing against them with the corner of his hand.
Outside the terminal, the rain is still pouring and the heat is damp and oppressive. Nate shrugs his shoulders in his t-shirt, shifts the straps of his backpack. All around them, people moving with purpose, black umbrellas jostling against each other.
Brad’s negotiating how much it’ll cost them to get to their hotel in Nizamuddin. Nate stands there with his head tipped back and the rain slamming into his face and chest. He’s got hit with rain like this in Cambridge but it smells completely different.
It takes him a long time to realise that Brad’s saying his name.
“Hmm?”
“Come on,” says Brad, palming rainwater from his short hair. “Let’s go.”
*
No air-conditioning in the bathroom and he can feel the humidity as he peels out of his damp clothes. There’s a plastic tub on the corner of the bath; the water pressure isn’t good enough to shower properly. He looks at himself in the mirror for a long moment. He rinses his face and under his arms with tepid water. He puts on fresh deodorant. He pulls on pyjama pants but stays shirtless.
In the bedroom, Brad is lying on top of the sheets, stripped to his underwear, flicking through the cable channels. Nate stands and looks at him for a moment. Questions have a weight in the pit of his stomach. There’s a lot that he wants to ask Brad Colbert but, when it all boils down to it, he doesn’t know him, so what right does he have to expect anything?
He sits down on the edge of the bed, wonders if tonight will be a night when Brad wants to fuck or whether he’ll lie there, in silence, his body wanting for other beds.
He’s lonely, but that’s nothing new.
He lies down on his side, facing the door. He wraps one arm around himself and closes his eyes. After a few minutes, Brad reaches out and trails his fingers against the bare ridge of Nate’s spine.
Nate closes his eyes.
He misses knowing what the fuck he wanted out of life. He misses having the confidence to know that what he wants is this beautiful fucker in the bed beside him and he’ll figure everything else out as he goes along and fuck Brad Colbert’s apparently broken heart; a broken heart is the best explanation for the way that Brad sometimes looks when Nate breaks a kiss.
Nate’s twenty-six years old; it’s not like he’s gotten through with an entirely unbruised heart.
But still, it’s shitty when he used to be so assured.
*
Delhi is easily the most foreign place that he’s ever been. It’s noisy and hot, the humidity creeping up towards unbearable. In motorised rickshaws, Nate tugs a bandana up over his nose and mouth to try and keep back the traffic fumes. They change dollars into Rupees in marble hotel lobbies. Nate catches himself arguing about a cab fare and then realising that he’s bitching about less than a dollar. Ashamed of himself, he drops a note onto the seat and gets out without another word.
The city never sleeps. They drink and drink, carry litre bottles of water with them at all times and still end up dehydrated.
Half the time, it feels like they’re friends, and it’s fine. The rest of the time, they’re either fucking or Nate’s painfully aware that they’re not fucking. He’s not sure which is worse.
He has no idea why they’re here.
Stealing moments at the computer in the hotel lobby, he writes long emails to his sister. He tells her about the constant heat, the smell of greenery going to rot, the red dust and the monuments, how good the food is, how sweet the soda is, how he’s terrified and exhilarated all the time and he’s not sure how he sleeps.
He doesn’t tell her about Brad Colbert.
At night they sleep with Brad’s camera in the bed between them.
“This is a terrible fucking movie,” says Brad, lying beside Nate with the ceiling fan whirring idly overhead. Nate looks up from the novel that he’s reading, bought for him by a college friend when she heard that he’d be going to India on this trip.
“Why are you watching it then?”
Brad shrugs and looks back at the T.V. Nate swallows down the urge to punch him in the jaw and goes back to his book.
In the book, it says men are fragile and fluid in their sexual identities.
*
Five hours on an air-conditioned coach with an Israeli woman telling stories about national service from the back row and they’re delivered to Agra in the pouring rain. From the line, it doesn’t look like much but then it all opens up in front of them. The gardens are beautiful, symmetrical and manicured. A girl passes them, wearing a blue scarf looped around her neck. The dye has run and stained her hands and the sides of her face.
“Can I take your picture?” Brad asks, holding up his camera.
“Absolutely,” she says in accented English. She holds up her hands for the picture. She smiles broadly.
The Taj Mahal comes close to breaking Nate's heart. He can’t imagine loving another person so beautifully or so deeply or for so long. He looks at Brad and he can’t imagine being in love at all anymore. He left that in Cambridge with his books and his winter boots.
They take off their shoes to climb up onto the monument itself. The rain is falling so hard that it bounces up to waist height from the marble. There’s a crush of people, all desperate not to bump him with their shoulders. He walks slowly, careful not to slip. He turns a corner and, all of a sudden, he’s left the crowds behind. Brad is standing at the far corner, leaning on the wall, his camera bag slung across his shoulder.
“This is the Yamuna river,” he says, as Nate walks closer. “It’s a tributary of the Ganges. If you bathe in this fucking river, you’re supposed to emerge unafraid of death.” He shoots Nate a meaningful look. “I’m pretty sure if you survive bathing in that river, you haven’t got anything left to be fucking afraid of.”
Soaked to the skin, Nate looks at that river. He imagines wading into it, feeling it warm around his thighs and then sinking down until it covered his shoulders, until it closed over the top of his head. He imagines sinking down to silting bottom. He imagines floating back towards the light.
“It wouldn’t be so bad,” he says.
But he has more and more that he’s afraid of.
#103: from the back, he could be anyone. Bare arms, a shirt gone translucent in the rain. Easier to pick out the muscles of his back. His hair slicked back, arms outstretched like he could embrace the river. Like it might embrace him back. Small, in the face of the whole world.
*
He’s had a hard time finding the beauty in India. He’s had a ball of tightly wound anxiety in his gut and not all of that is something that he can lay at Brad Colbert’s door. On the bus ride back from Agra, he lets his temple rest against the glass of the window. Out of the darkness, roadside cafes draped in fairy lights emerge. Mopeds and motorcycles race by. Exotic women ride side-saddle, the loose ends of their saris flaring. If he squints, Nate thinks that he can see a different side of this country.
Brad reaches out and traces the back of his fingers. Another bike roars by; like all the others, the woman wears no helmet. The silver edging her clothes catches the light.
Nate finds himself envying that sort of fearlessness.
*
On their last day in Delhi, they walk the Old City. They pass shadowy doorways, ranks of sari silks in impossible colours. Nate pauses in front of a narrow house painted in a garish clash of pastels and Brad steals a quick photo; he won’t let Nate look but he grins and reaches out, glancing his fingers against the slope of Nate’s nose. They pause and Nate buys silver and peridot earrings for his mother. He tucks them into his backpack, slung against his chest.
The heavens open and the rain pours down. Nate slicks his hair back from his face with one hand. In a shadowed corner, they suddenly find themselves alone. Nate reaches out and pulls Brad in close against him. It’s barely a kiss, more a graze of lips but, still, Nate feels warmth bloom through his chest.
They duck into a Jain temple that was built a thousand years ago. Nate wanders around, trailing his fingers around the walls, imagining how many times America’s whole history could fit inside.
They donate one hundred rupees. The old priest marks their foreheads with saffron. He tells them that it will help them stay closer to God.
Nate hopes. He doesn’t know what for, but he’s aching to believe.
*
88° East:
Kolkata is a sprawl that makes his heart ache in a way that he finds difficult to articulate. Cambridge is neat and straight by comparison, a place composed of entirely straighter lines. He palms the sweat-damp skin under the open collar of his shirt. Brad reaches out and squeezes the back of his neck.
“Come on, then,” he says. “Where are we going?”
And this is the plan: do something useful - make yourself worthwhile.
This was always the plan.
“They’re expecting us,” he says.
In the taxi, they lean against each other as they rattle through the crowded streets. Nate closes his eyes and, for a moment, lets his head rest against Brad’s broad shoulder. Brad’s fingers graze against his jaw. For a moment, before they pull apart again, conscious of the driver’s eyes on them in the rear-view, Nate feels centred again.
There’s a hand-painted sign above the door that says “SALIMA HOME FOR CHILDREN”. There’s something written in Arabic underneath it. Nate thinks it’s Arabic. In the doorway, there’s a guy standing smoking. A bandana pulled down low on his forehead. Scrubs and a t-shirt printed with a faded logo. He’s straight-backed, square-shouldered and he smokes like he really loves it.
By the time they’re out of the cab and shouldering their backpacks, his cigarette is done and he’s standing with his hands on his hips watching them. He hasn’t shaved in a day or two, maybe. He doesn’t look like he gives a fuck.
“You must be Nate,” he says, walking down the steps towards them. The building is old, repurposed. Nate glances up at the façade and finds himself wondering what it might have been before.
He realises he hasn’t answered.
“Nate Fick,” Nate says and offers his hand. “You must be Tim.”
“Must be,” he says and shakes Nate’s hand. “Call me Doc. Every other fucker does.”
The air inside the orphanage is damp but moving, circulated by the great, slowly turning fans. Brad pulls out his camera and tips his head back, takes a photo of peeling paint and a strand of greenery that’s found its way in through an open window. A small boy wanders into their path, chattering to himself; Doc bends and picks him up easily, settling him on his hip. The little boy rests his head against Doc’s shoulder and watches them with wide dark eyes.
(Later, Brad shows Nate a photograph of that small child, eyes and the pout of his bottom lip, the short stubble at the nape of Doc Bryan’s neck. The colours are all greens and blues, like it was designed that way).
“We’ve only got one guest room,” Doc’s saying, not pausing to glance back over his shoulder. “Because we were only planning on Nate.”
“That’s okay,” says Brad, glancing at Nate. “We’ll make do.”
Doc huffs a laugh and, this time, he glances back.
“I bet you will,” he says.
The kitchen is cool and dim, full of the smell of something cooking slowly at two-thirty in the afternoon. When he sees the man standing at the stove, patiently stirring, Nate feels his heart jump and then settle in his chest. Mike Wynn was a friend of Nate’s father’s first, a young lawyer before he left the States to found to do charity work. Nate’s dad always joked that Mike had woken up one morning and been afraid for his immortal soul; Mike always said he just wanted to do something that helped people, for once.
Either way, he met Timothy Bryan on the train from Mumbai and something like history was made.
Carefully, Mike turns down the heat under the pan before he steps away from the stove. He takes hold of Nate by the shoulder and pulls him in for a strong hug. Nate lets himself be held, taking comfort, for a moment, in something familiar.
“It’s good to see you, Mike,” he says, his mouth against Mike’s t-shirt for a moment before he starts to pull away.
“Glad to have you, Nate,” says Mike.
He glances over and takes note of the way that Brad’s holding back.
“Mike, this is Brad Colbert,” he says. Brad shifts his grip on his camera before he shakes Mike’s hand.
“Well, you’ve met Doc already,” says Mike, glancing towards Doc sitting at the long table, lent forward until his forehead butts gently against the forehead of the small boy sitting beside him. They’re both speaking in soft tones, utterly oblivious to anyone else in the room. “And then there’s Sharahah. She’s at the market; back for dinner.”
Nate nods and Mike squeezes his shoulder again.
“C’mon,” he says. “I’ll show you the guest room. It’s not much but we finally managed to get decent water pressure about half the time, so that’s something.”
*
The first thing that he does is strip out of his sweat-stained shirt. He doesn’t bother unfastening the buttons, just pulls it over his head and drops it on the floor. He stretches out the kinks in his spine. When he turns around, Brad’s looking at him.
“What?” he says.
Brad shrugs.
“You’re fucking beautiful,” he says.
Brad’s sweating too and Nate lets his fingers drag against damp cotton as he slides down on his knees between Brad’s spread knees. Brad combs his fingers back through Nate’s hair; his nails feel amazing against Nate’s scalp. Through the open window, the sounds of the city filter on the warm breeze.
It sounds like a beating heart.
Brad cradles Nate’s head with both hands as Nate pushes his shirt up and kisses down his belly. His lips brush against the metal button of Brad’s jeans; it’s warm because it’s taken the heat of his body. Nate lets his lips linger there for a moment.
“Really?” asks Brad, breath catching and Nate doesn’t miss the lift of his hips. “They know we just came in here.”
“So?” Nate, popping open the stud on Brad’s jeans, pulling his fly down. “They know we’re fucking, Brad.”
He mouths against the thin cotton of Brad’s briefs. Brad’s fingers tighten in his hair.
“Nate…”
He hooks his fingers over the top of Brad’s underwear and starts to tug them down, but Brad’s hand is on his shoulder, pushing gently.
“Nate, stop.”
For a moment, he can’t actually believe he’s hearing it. He rocks back on his heels, half-hard and flushed, his hands still resting on Brad’s knees.
“What?” he asks. He’s almost surprised by how sharply it comes out. “What, Brad?”
“I’m not doing this now,” says Brad, shifting his hips, starting to straighten his jeans. “With your friends just down the hall and we just got here. I’m not doing that.”
“Are you fucking kidding me, Brad,” says Nate, both eyebrows raised. “Is that seriously what you’re telling me?”
Brad doesn’t say anything. He looks away.
Nate pushes up to his feet; he’s not doing this on his knees. He straightens his clothes and pushes one hand back through his hair.
“What are we even doing here, Brad? Why the fuck did you even come here?” He busies his hands with yanking his backpack off and puts it on the bed, starting to pull out t-shirts and underwear.
“I thought…We were both travelling,” says Brad. “I thought…”
“You didn’t think,” snaps Nate. “Neither of us did. But…if you’re…” He swallows. “I feel like I’ve spent the last couple of years fucking pretending, Brad. And I’m done. I’m not doing it anymore.”
“I’m not pretending.”
“Alright,” says Nate. “But I’m just here to suck your cock when you feel like it, Brad. I’m not just here so you can feel like the tortured fucking artist because you don’t get what you want in life.” He feels his mouth twist. “Nobody gets what they want unless they work hard for it, Brad. And, right now? You’re just starting to look like more and more of a disappointment.”
Brad’s on his feet then, crossing the room, taking hold of Nate’s shoulder and Nate doesn’t shrug him off. He turns.
“I am done feeling nothing, Brad. Fuck that.”
He pulls Brad in for a kiss, mis-judged and hard, and there’s a moment before Brad kisses him back, before Brad’s fingers tighten, almost imperceptibly, on his shoulder.
He’s so tired of thinking. He’s so tired of measuring his worth in what he knows.
Brad’s fingers curl around the back of his neck, his bicep, holding onto him. Standing there, even though he’s a few inches shorter than Brad, Nate finds himself feeling tall and solid.
They lean together, Brad’s hands on him, Nate’s fingers curled around Brad’s hips. They sway, more like dancing than fucking. Nate closes his eyes. He feels held and like he’s drifting closer to something solid.
*
After dinner, they sit in rickety chairs and drink cold beer. Doc’s wife, willowy and foreign in battered t-shirt and cotton skirts sits with a child curled into her belly and the soft press of her breasts. She combs her fingers through dark curls. Nate notes the way that Doc Bryan looks at her. He remembers feeling that way about girls and boys but only for a moment.
He looks at Brad, neat and lanky, head tipped back to look at the muddy sky where the stars should be and he wonders how it would feel to have it last.
Mike eases himself down into a chair, groaning about his weary bones. Nate finds himself grinning; some things never change.
Sharahah gets up, palming her dark hair back from her face. The child dangles from her hip for a moment and then she drops him into Brad’s lap, graceful and graceless, brooking no argument. Brad looks at him for a moment, bemused, until he settles.
The boy tells Brad that his name is Rahi. It means ‘traveller’.
Nate tips his head back and imagines constellations, the better to be guided.
*
>> interlude