original fic: maybe it's called aching

[synecdoche]

maybe it's called aching

r, original fiction, 8125 words, for fated_addiction as a rescue operation from the third challenge at inrevelations

[I had a lot of fun writing this -- although I definitely took some new risks and things -- and I guess my hope is that you enjoy it, too?]



James’s first memories are as muddled as any little boy’s, birthdays and running up stairs and tearing the pages of his picture books. They retain, as he grows older, that hazy and glowing feel that vague recollections have: half-glimpsed nostalgia, beloved but never quite grasped.

But when James was five years old, he flew for the first time, and that memory is sharp and clear, as though, now so much older, he could reenter the memory and live it of his own choosing.

He was alone, that day, maybe Mama and Daddy had turned a different way in one of their neighborhood trails or he had sneaked off when he was supposed to be taking a nap, but that part is a piece of the usual fog of his memories. He remembers being on top of a grassy hill and looking over the forest -- at the time he appreciated the sight without realizing how rare it was -- and suddenly he was a little higher, his legs kicking into nothing beneath, dangling as though he were sitting on a very high chair. The air sucked out of his lungs and he was floating, swimming out his arms, batting them against nothing at all like the newest member of the mobile above his baby sister’s bed, spinning in the slightest breeze. On a whim he turned about. He only flailed a little, his breath hitching into a laugh that sent him spiraling higher, higher. The valley fell away beneath him, the dark green of the trees and bluish-violet mist, then only a little intermixed with smog. He’d always lived in the middle of the trees, the mountains and hills rising up as in a bowl, and he remembers how clearly the walls of the bowl had become level with his eyes, gray and brown rock raw and straining, pushing up from the ground. The air became thinner as he rose up, and then he was gasping, he was falling. Fast at first, then a little slower. He’d landed on the grass with a bump. His teeth had rattled in his head, pinching his lip, so the metallic taste of blood was always there in the memory, too, like a sun warmed penny oozing in his mouth.

Of course he couldn’t see himself mid-flight, and there was nobody around to take a picture, but still he can see himself spread eagled in the air. He was looking for the bounds that contained him, then. If he could fly, maybe he could do anything. Mama and Daddy sometimes argued in loud voices, then, when he was supposed to be asleep. Sometimes they talked about super children and testing and sometimes he could hear Mama cry or Daddy’s voice go into a whisper so low and dangerous it was a texture more than words. But this part, too, is hazy and maybe James invented it over the years to make sense of it all.

He never tells anybody about flying. He’s asked about it and always, always, James lies.

Mama and Dad are hippies and he only figures it out because of the Net. They buy him a pocket laptop for his fifteenth birthday, more because he’s only asked for books for the past three years and they shoot each other worried looks when he goes out for solitary walks that have a tendency to span whole afternoons. How would he tell them he goes flying? The nearest city is thirty miles away and he can hardly breathe the opaque, smog-laced air. He’s only gone there once. There was nobody on the streets of Idaho City, anyway, and he’d coughed and coughed for days and Mama had made him stay indoors for six days and he had to swallow crushed roots and flowers. Mostly he flies the mountain ridges, empty save for pine trees and the occasional birds. Once he saw a moose, antlers thrashing through the low hanging branches.

But the Net makes him realize that none of this is normal. There are kids younger than him, their faces plastered all over the screen once he maneuvers to the right places, ten and eleven and twelve. There are kids who can fly, who list it as a favorite activity, and kids who wish they could fly, and he even finds a website for Super Children. Give your child a special ability, starting at $1599! There are kids, years and years younger than him, living alone in cities, programming pocket laptops and developing formulas for artificial sugars, which he’s never ever tried. There’s an eight year old whose favorite drink is coffee, which his parents have promised to let him try when he turns sixteen.

Nobody writes about reading Shakespeare plays and acting out all the parts, or about their dads teaching them to play guitar. Nobody writes about their parents at all, as if they were hatched from eggs or something.

There’s one website, the National Geographic Archives, with pictures from fifty years ago, and James starts clicking through pictures of his own state. There are pictures of woods just like his, with captions like The rapidly vanishing Northern Rocky mountain ecosystem can still be found in patches of the state and Rare owls can be spotted by patient observers. There’s a picture of a house that looks like his own, made of tree trunks. And the caption says Conscious of the influence of early 21st century society, brave recluses raise families, alone amidst the Idaho wilderness.

Alone amidst the Idaho wilderness. After a week of sitting in front of the little computer, James pushes it shut. There are haloes around everything from the light of the screen and it doesn’t make him feel any less like himself. Which, he figures, is probably what his parents had been going for.

Sometimes James will carry a book with him and he’ll fly and fly until he finds a sunny spot, a big smooth rock, and he’ll read until the sun starts to set. Then he flies home to the brave recluses in their house made of tree trunks, his little sisters with their pigtails and lisps. Mama and Dad give each other looks when he says he’s been walking and reading, again and of course alone.

It bothers him, a little, that they never guess what he’s really doing.

There are special schools for boys who can fly. James found out about them on his laptop, before he put it away. Apparently that power comes with a host of other powers, as though he is some kind of superhero.

It's not so much that he wants to be normal, it's only -- he knows this insular life isn't perfect, and still. Maybe it's that he's gotten so used to keeping the secret.

The first time James flies in a plane is on the way to college. It seems like a huge waste, the stale smell of the air, the way the seat in front of him is stocked with too-sweet carbonated drinks. His parents went over, down to the most precise details, how to survive the airport, how to deposit and collect his bags, how to make sure he doesn’t miss his connecting flight. Everything he owns is packed in two red suitcases, his pants and shirts and only his most important books, which nonetheless made the one bag so heavy he had to pay extra money.

He looks out the peephole window and below the windows is a patchwork quilt of smog overlaying the ground below. His sisters asked him if it was really true, that most people these days live underground. Maybe he’ll find out. Anyway, how could people breathe? His college is in the middle of Iowa and he’s not exactly sure about anything much about it, except that he said he wanted to study English and Mama and Dad helped him fill out applications on the Net. There were a few pictures and they looked glossy and exciting on the screen and he thought maybe it would be like a very drawn out flight, far away and new.

Now, trapped inside a flying machine, he’s rethinking the idea. Last night he went on one last Idaho flight and there was a mockingbird chirping away in a tree. It’d been months since he’d seen one. A few leaves had taken on a yellow tinge in the late summer twilight. It was entirely his.

But he kept it a secret, the flying and the flights. It’s too late to tell anybody. There’s something new out there. Maybe seventeen years of one thing is enough.

James clenches his fingers into a fist, takes a swig of Coca-Cola, and steels himself enough to smile.

He learns by February, that if someone says the best television show of all time was Grey’s Anatomy, he is to give them a look of utmost derision, that if they choose one of the classics, like I Love Lucy or Bewitched, he is to incline his chin at a certain angle indicating amusement. He is to nod for anything made by the BBC, but after that he always manages to go a little fuzzy. It’s a specific kind of nostalgia, but Mama and Dad only had one little television and he hardly ever watched it. All the broadcast networks went under before he was born and it’s all reality shows and talk now. He stays quiet, mostly, and people assume he knows it all somehow.

Nobody listens to CDs. They’re passionate about mixed playlists, though, which are exchanged through disk drives smaller than his little finger as a sign of friendship. Before classes start, he always spots one or two being distributed, with exclamations and laughter.

Girls and boys are hardly ever friends, his roommate David explains to him in the first week of class, unless you’re a boy that likes boys. Girls are for fucking, but still it takes months before James can work up the nerve. He goes on a blind date and the girl’s hair is orangey gold and curled at the end. The skin of her thighs is smooth and she makes little moaning noises while he plants kisses all over her. It reminds him of a kitten they’d had when he was very little, but the memory goes hazy once he’s inside the girl and his body takes over his mind, rocking and thrusting to a rhythm all its own. The poems he’s reading for 20th Century Free Verse take on that rhythm for weeks afterwards, and he and the girl meet up a few more times, until the time, post-fuck, when he starts telling her about how he’s started dreaming in E.E. Cummings poems and her smile takes on a glazed cast.

Anyway, he doesn’t really like the word fuck too much.

There are other things he learns, outside of class: the “cool” boys drink beer but the boys who write good papers and read his favorite books, they drink scotch, sometimes neat and sometimes on the rocks. He’s learned so many silly sounding phrases, that he should avoid bloody marys and red-haired sluts, liquor before beer. It sounds like a poem, almost. After he’s had some scotch the room always spins just a little, enough to be pleasant, and it seems as though every girl is looking at him like she wants a kiss. He’s learning how to kiss, the right angle and timing to the opening of his mouth, the right mechanics of it. Sometimes it feels really good. Sometimes it seems like he’s following a recipe. Maybe it’s supposed to feel like that, though.

You’re right, he tells his sisters, their voices crinkly over the phone, everybody does live underground! The school is underground too, it’s so flat here that the smog is everywhere. I went above ground once and I coughed for a week. They giggle and James isn’t sure they really believe him. It’s okay. He wouldn’t have believed it a year ago. How would people breathe? When he thinks about it, the air starts to taste stale, like the air on a plane.

After the girl leaves him, he grabs the mask Mama sent him for Christmas and climbs the tunnels and ladders until he’s above ground. The smog sneaks around the edges of the mask but he can breathe without coughing and with that peculiar tug his feet are dangling in the air and he’s going up, up, up and he’s forgotten the girl and her honey hair because he’s over the smog and he can see it forming shapes below him like clouds. And above him are the stars, almost the same as his Idaho stars, shimmering in the sky in their spangled patterns. It’s like they knew he would come back.

James learns so many things that he doesn’t have time to wonder if they matter, but when he dreams, after he’s dumped for the first time in February, he extends his arm and his fingertips brush up against nebulas and supernovas like the rainbow backs of CDs. When he wakes up there are haloes around everything.

He stops going out at night.

The first summer home, he is always flying.

His second year, parties start catching him by the corner of his eye. His roommate keeps inviting him. You haven’t had a girlfriend since that girl. The hand slapping his back is worried. But he’s started writing poems, dizzying the syntax with grammatical whorls as though it’s slicing neatly through the air, like gravity is suspended on the page. He goes to bed after his roommate staggers into their cube of space with his latest-fuck buddy, his favorite music of the day just loud enough to distract him from the moans and squishing noises around him. Sometimes the girl will ask if it’s okay, and David will murmur something low and ragged into her ear and she’ll giggle and it’ll go on just as usual, the smacking noise of kisses and the click-clack of fingers typing.

Dad sends his old guitar and sometimes he’ll piece together his chords, fingers snug against the warm wood and strings and the room is filled with Bon Iver and the soft old Beatles songs, the ones they’d worked on for years in snatches after dinner. Maybe what he is feeling is homesickness. He can’t quite parse it into sentences, only disjointed words.

You haven’t been to a party since last year -- what are you so afraid of, all of a sudden? When he was five years old James was hoisted into the air by some unknown force and he was hardly scared at all. He’s been at the edges of parties, and since then he’s heard all about the nights before and the nights to come. He’s said nothing and he smiles and it’s okay, it’s fine. He used to go last year. It was nothing at all.

Okay man, it’s going to be great tonight, you really have to come. Maybe what he’s missing is not Idaho, not a house made of tree trunks or his sisters who learned over the summer how to french braid their hair, maybe it’s not that. Maybe what he wants is something he’s never seen.

He says fine, okay, he’ll go tonight. He tries not to look too excited.

The music pounds against his temples but thankfully David poured him a drink before they came over and another was pressed into his hand right as he walked in, and the room is spinning just a little. Supposedly the theme is Ghetto Beats, which seems like a silly title, mostly because James isn’t sure what it means, but the music is too loud for him to ask anybody. He swallows the rest of his third drink, allowing it to burn its way down his esophagus and sit glowingly in his stomach. Then he throws himself on the dance floor.

He tells himself it’ll be like a kind of flying, and it is, a little bit, the way he can toss his arms around and jive his legs and nobody gives him a funny look. In fact, some of the girls catch his eye and smile. But they don’t really matter, the music is inside his head (we know you’re one of us -- what’s all the fuss? just do it!) and he moves as though he is a robot with precise and wild instructions, as though he is a mockingbird stuck on dance floor flypaper. Somehow there is always enough space for him. There’s a part of him that feels like it’s exploding, or maybe that’s just his arms and legs detaching themselves from the rest of his body to move to the ocean of beats and harmony surrounding him. Why didn’t he ever try this before? He can’t stop grinning.

The song ends and there’s a pause as the next one loads. James can hear his lungs heaving inside his chest and his eyes sting with the sweat dripping off his forehead. It’s okay. It’s like very fast flight. Then the next song begins and he gulps in air and his body jolts into motion, his extremities their own entities. Someone raises their arms into the air and James tries it, too, and lets out a whoop. He sees people looking at him but they’re still smiling, the girls are pushing sweaty pieces of hair off of their foreheads and they’re grooving along with him. Has he dreamed something like this? It feels familiar, like returning, but no matter, maybe he’ll dream it later. Now he’s fitting himself into the space between chords and the hit of drums, knees bending and shoulders twisting.

There’s a glimmer of silver that catches his eye, sparkling like a constellation under the rainbow lights. It’s a dress made of little pieces of silver. Sequins. The music fragments his thoughts into collections of disjointed words. It’s a girl, her wavy hair bouncing to the beat. Her eyes are closed. Her eyelashes brush up against her cheeks, revealing eyelids silvered, as though she’s been metallized. She’s dancing toward him. Not on purpose, her eyes are closed. Maybe he’s dancing toward her, pulled by the fact that he’s staring, he’s staring, but his hips remember the rhythm they assumed when he fucked that girl last year and his body has become its own being in the last few minutes and it wants this girl. Her body is slim and tall like a blade of grass or one of those thin tree trunks on the mountains, winter stripping it of leaves and silvering it with some kind of freak snow. Sequins. Her lips are painted dark red and they’re thin and curved as she smiles slightly. He is so close to her, now, if he gets any nearer he’ll be able to examine her pores but instead they collide, arms against arms and she’s looking him in the eye and he’s turning red to her silver. The lights might be too dim for her to see but she does see, there’s something in the quality of her smile. For a second, a few beats, they are still, staring at each other and then they start again into synchronized motion, so close he can’t fit a fist in the air between them. He wants to erase that pocket of space but for some reason he doesn’t. Air has always been so familiar. Maybe.

“I’m Sam!” She shouts it over the music and her voice is low, thrumming in company with the bass. He likes it.

“James,” he says, hoping she can hear him. She smiles and then she turns around, her back pressed up against him and he wraps his arms around her and they join in the beat together. He can follow her legs and the twist of her hips like they’re one multi-limbed person, her black ringlets bouncing against his chest, catching a little against the fabric of his sweater. The sequins are scales against his fingers, Sam is the dance floor mermaid and he’s caught her like some kind of drunk prince charming. She’s pressed tight to him, surely she can feel the bulge in his pants, but she keeps dancing, her hands running against his arms. Maybe she’s smiling. He can’t see her face, but she’s probably smiling. Everyone is drunk and dancing and happy. He really has to start going to more parties.

The next song ends, then another begins, so softly that James could hardly explain why he’s still dancing, except that Sam is, too, and he’s drunk but it seems like a halfway decent reason to hold the rhythm in his arms, the grind of his hips against her ass. He’s starting to lose track of time, maybe two or three songs have blurred together and he’s been mashed up with this girl for hours and hours but the crowd is still thick so probably not. But anyway another song starts, a slow song, and Sam turns around. His teeth clack together in the beginning of a shiver, the way they do when he’s been flying too long, but now it’s the absence of the heat of her body. The synthesizers (or whatever they are) start to go all hazy, and then her hands reach up and cup his cheek and her thin lips are on hers. Her teeth are broad but she’s a good kisser, she’s not sloppy like some of the other girls he’s kissed, she’s an expert dance floor mermaid. He takes a step closer.

He takes another step closer and there’s no space between them but there’s something weird. There’s a bulge poking out the front of her dress like the one in his pants and her teeth are broad and her voice is low and her lips are thin and her body is shaped like a blade of grass and she’s too close and he’s warm and oh fuck, oh fuck, he’s suffocating on this dance floor, his choking against her lips and he pushes himself away and her lips form a perfect o and her hair is slightly askew, it’s longer on the right than on the left, but he sees this all in less than a second. He’s turned away and there’s a weird gasp from the people around him but he’s coughing too loud to hear it and he’s running, running, running so fast he can hardly breathe.

Back in his room, he hovers, wavering, above his bed but his ears are pounding and the walls are too close.

He skips his Monday classes and flies until the mask doesn’t do any good and he’s coughing mid-air and his eyes are stinging and watering tears that drip off of his chin. When he breaks it all down, it isn’t so bad, it’s just the composite, the surprise and the realignment of the facts, the beat of the music and the pulse pounding in his temples, the burn of the scotch down his throat. Sam, the dance floor mermaid-merman, everything illusory and still gorgeous.

It’s that. She or he, whoever Sam is, that person is still gorgeous in his memory. James has secrets but none of them stings and twinges like this one.

The next day James grabs his books and heads to class but once he steps outside of his room he’s aware of all the bodies that pack the hallways. There are so many people who eat meals, who go to thousands of classes, who get drunk at parties. Sam could be any of them. Or Sam could’ve been a drunken apparition, visible only after three glasses of scotch and a certain amount of time spent dancing.

It’s not until he gets to Survey of Russian Literature that he notices a pair of thin lips, a pair of eyes he last saw under black ringlets. This time the hair is short, brown, fine, maybe a little wavy and the face belongs to a boy in a sweater like the one he was wearing on Saturday, yellow instead of blue. James stares until Sam’s head turns toward him and then his breath hitches and he looks away, extracting a piece of fuzz from between the keys of his laptop.

When he sneaks a look back, there’s a smile playing on Sam’s thin lips and James almost doesn’t realize it, but he’s smiling through the e-lecture on the merits of the narrative voice in The Brothers Karamazov. He’s not paying attention.

“Look, it’s pretty obvious you don’t want to talk to me, but hey, I just wanted to say I’m sorry.” There’s a slight tug on his shirt and Sam’s voice for the first time in a week and a half, except for the time on Thursday where he had a question about Ivan Karamazov in Russian Lit. “David told me how sheltered you were. I didn’t know that at the party.”

James stops in his tracks and turns around and there’s Sam, his arm twisted but fingers still grasping at his button-down. This is the part where he’s supposed to say something. He has to make a decision. The thing is, there are so many words and too many decisions in his head and instead of compressing them into something that can come out a sentence, he just stares at Sam’s face. He can still break it apart into components. He still remembers what he saw on that dance floor, the sweat stinging a little in his eyes. There was a girl and now there is a boy standing in front of him, his hand pulling out of his sweater sleeve.

“Tell me one thing,” he says, the words each new as they leave his mouth, “why?”

Sam’s smile is like a flower blooming and something stings inside James, expanding inside his chest. His breath hitches. Sam takes a step forward, right next to him.

“I can explain, but do you think we can get out of this hallway? We’re going to get trampled if we stand here much longer.” And suddenly the sound of scuffling shoes and rustling papers becomes audible again. James nods. This isn’t what he imagined. It’s too easy, way too simple.

When they start walking again, their arms swing in the same rhythm and it would be so easy to take Sam’s hand. So he doesn’t.

Sam’s bed is covered in fabric the color of brand new grass, dulled only a little from the smog obscuring the skylight of his bedroom. He’d drawn for one of the nicest rooms, obviously. He smooths his hand over the bed, leaving five little indentations on the paths his fingers followed.

“I don’t know how much you know about everything,” Sam says, looking at his hand, “but I could be a woman if I wanted. My parents kept asking me if I wanted, once they found out -- they saw me at a party, it was really pretty embarrassing and awkward. I want to be what I am, though.”

“What are you?” The words sound coarse and awkward in this room, grass-colored and almost sunlit. He should know this already, but he was a brave recluse instead. So he doesn’t know anything at all.

“They used to call people like me drag queens. Forty years ago they were everywhere, not quite everywhere, I guess, but enough that everyone knew. They danced at clubs and things. It’s not a permanent occupation, mostly, I think. Mostly they’ve died out, now it’s so easy to switch if what you always wanted to be was a woman.”

“Then what do you want to be?” James leans against the doorframe, letting Sam’s words spill over him.

“Only, what I am. I’m a man and then, with a wig and paint and a dress, I’m a woman, just so long as you don’t look too closely. I’ve had some work done, some hair taken out, but still, if you’re a man that’s what you are, when it comes right down to it. But I can choose, mostly.” James sneaks a look at him and there’s this little smile on his face and there’s something he recognizes, something he’s known for a while.

“But why,” he says, biting his bottom lip with his two front teeth, “why did you trick me?”

“The way you were dancing. You didn’t want to look cool to fuck a girl or impress anybody. You were in your own world, the music and your body intersecting and god, I needed to get as close to that as possible.” There’s some of that smile in his voice and it comes over James, like a wave, what’s familiar about this and it rushes over him, swimming through his thoughts.

“I can fly,” he says, before he can think about it. His breath catches in his throat.

Sam looks him in the eye and he doesn’t look away.

“I can’t believe one of the natural Super Babies ended up in fucking Idaho,” Sam says, crunching spinach between his teeth. They’ve just gotten out of Russian Lit. “How did that work out?”

“I’m not sure. When I was little my parents would argue about some kind of testing, I don’t really remember. They don’t know about anything.” The end of the sentence tapers off into an almost-whisper. It’s not entirely secret, not any more, but anyway what good is flight in this maze of tunnels? “They always thought I was going on walks. I think they worried about me.”

“Well, you’re so quiet.” There’s the ghost of green eyeliner tracing his eyes, bringing out the golden flecks in his irises. “They probably knew they had no idea what you were really doing.”

“Maybe.” James takes a bite of his sandwich. He’s still not sure how he feels about white bread, after over a year. “I spent so much time alone, I could’ve been kidnapped or something. Normal parent worries, I guess.”

“In all those books you read, perhaps. My parents were too busy mixing drinks and going shopping.” There’s something brittle in Sam’s voice, something that could snap. “Tell me about flying.” Sam keeps his voice low when he says that last part, and James smiles his gratitude.

“It’s like... gravity stops working and my feet are dangling. There’s always that instant of realization. Even though it’s mostly a conscious thing. I guess it’s a little bit like swimming in the air.”

“The Christ Mutation.” Sam singsongs his voice as he twirls a radish slice in the salad dressing.

“Is that what they call it?”

“There are lots of names. I researched this whole thing once on the Net,” Sam explains, dismissing his own expertise with a wave of his hand, “and there are lots of conflicting studies, like there always are. I guess someone hypothesized that the reason Christ could walk on water was the same reason the flying Super Babies could, y’know, achieve lift off. A certain mutation of the DNA, the more it was repeated, the more effective the flight. Or water-walking.”

“I’ve only flipped through the Bible a little,” James says, skittering away from the topic. “Mama used to read it, sometimes, early in the morning when she thought the rest of us were still asleep.”

“You really do live in the middle of nowhere. It must be beautiful, though.” He ruffles his fingers through his hair and a few pieces stick straight up. James could smooth them, nobody would notice in the echoing cafeteria, but instead he takes another bite of his sandwich.

“I didn’t realize everybody lives underground. Doesn’t it get hard to breathe after a while?”

“How can you breathe the air outside? I guess it’s hard to give up flying, though, even if it’s shit to your lungs.”

James only looks at him, finishing his salad, saying just the right thing like he’s talking about their latest Russian Lit class, and he doesn’t need to say anything at all. The bustle of a thousand other people recedes into almost nothing.

I met someone, he could say to Mama or Dad or even his sisters over the phone, and I’ve kept a secret from you for sixteen years but I told him and maybe it was the right idea. But then he would have to tell them about flying, and how could he explain it? He could read them one of his poems, maybe, but every time he tries, just to hear the reverberations, the poems become limpid and useless. On paper, they’re like explosions and gravity reverses itself. Everything is new.

“I don’t know how I feel about Tolstoy,” James says, skimming his thumb against the pages of Anna Karenina, “every time I read him, I want him to be more epic.”

“You’re stuck on Dostoyevsky, I think. It doesn’t get more epic than all those details about the entirety of Russia.” Sam is sprawled on his grass-green bed, his arm pillowing his head. “And I think Anna’s pretty epically conflicted at the end.”

“I guess only Tolstoy managed to work in opium dreams.” This is his favorite kind of conversation, where they sound like he could call them intellectuals and not be very wrong. “Maybe I need to try a different translation or something.”

“Or you could learn Russian. I can’t believe how many books you’ve read. It would give you something new to do.” The smog shifts outside the skylight, a little, and the room is illuminated by a hint of sunlight. “Seriously, was all you did growing up fly and read?”

“Not really. My dad taught me how to play guitar. Stuff like that. The house was full of books, and every so often a box would come with new books and my mom would smile for days.” He’s trying to frame a thesis in his head, an academically friendly way of saying that Dostoyevsky is actually more epic than Tolstoy, only how would he go about framing it? He runs his palm against the nap of the carpet. “The walls were lined with shelves.”

“This is kind of a dumb question, but I’ve been wondering it since you told me about Idaho. How did you get any food?” The thing about Sam is, though, none of his dumb questions sound stupid, they don’t hang awkwardly in the air. They make James want to answer.

“Mama and Dad would drive into the city every few weeks. They had these crazy masks, when we were little my sisters and me always thought they looked scary. They’d leave me in charge for half a day and we’d make sandwiches and work on math problems or read through plays and then the car would come back full of food and things. Mama used to say it was like Christmas.” He tosses the book into the air and it smacks against his palms, twinging warm against his biceps. “You grew up in Boston?”

“What’s left of it, anyway. Who would’ve expected Harvard to disappear like it did? I guess it’s hard to move all those buildings underground. You practically need a hazmat suit to go up, though. I tried it a few times. Once I went to the beach. I thought there would be dolphins or whales or something, I don’t know why except maybe I’d read something, but it was just empty water peeking out under the smog.”

“Is anything there?”

“I don’t know,” Sam says, and his voice is far away, as if it’s still at that lonely beach, locked up in an airtight seal, “I could’ve looked it up in ten seconds, but I didn’t want to find out the ocean was just water with nothing else.”

James lets the book thunk to the carpet. The bed spread is silky and rough under his hand and he just lays there, next to Sam but not touching him. The sound of their breathing is the only thing in the room.

The first time they hold hands, it’s like this: James is standing at the bottom of a staircase, debating whether it’s worth the stinging eyes and heaving lungs to sneak in a flight before dinner, and suddenly, hardly without the sound of footsteps, Sam is right there next to him and he reaches out and there are fingers entwining with his. He can feel the pulses of their thumbs beating against each other.

“Hey,” Sam says, voice low like a secret.

He writes a paper on the use of the unreliable narrator in The Brothers Karamazov and it actually gets really exciting after the first few hours, so of course it comes out twice as long as the teacher assigned, with secondary sources and an annotated bibliography. After a confusing fifteen minutes, he finally tracks down his professor’s email address, and gets a terse reply within five minutes: Nobody has written more than the minimum except you. It’s fine this one time. He emails a copy to Mama and Dad. They won’t email him back for a week, and after that they’ll probably reread the book, which will be the best part of all of this, probably.

He also writes another paper, which he entitles “Clash of the Russian Titans: Why Dostoyevsky Is More Epic Than Tolstoy,” which ends up being only three pages long, and also lacks a real thesis, mostly because he can’t stop laughing as he types. He slides it under Sam’s door and has to content himself by imagining his friend’s laughter. Still, it’s true.

“I want to kiss you,” Sam says, one night after they’ve ditched a party and spent two hours listening to James’s favorite music.

“Okay.” James arches his back against the side of the bed, tilting his head to meet Sam’s eye.

“Is that all right?” The words sound harsh against the swirl of guitar and voice, too concrete. “I need you to tell me, either way. It’ll be fine.”

“Why, though?” They don’t hold hands too often, mostly when people aren’t looking, but given that his roommate has fucked about twenty girls since that one party, shouldn’t kissing go without saying anything?

“If it’s not all right...” There’s a flash, inside his mind, Sam with ringlets and a silver dress, long eyelashes and lipgloss. But he blinks and there’s this Sam, limbs strewn across the bed, his index finger uselessly smoothing the bedspread.

He doesn’t say anything, instead he stands up and leans over him, presses his lips against other lips, smoother against his bitten ones, tongue a little bitter with the coffee they drank a while ago. He can feel the tension in Sam’s mouth, the surprise. You’re so quiet. He brings his hand up to Sam’s cheek, which is soft and smooth like he imagines a cloudless sky would feel, spreads his fingers until his pinky bumps into Sam’s nose a little. And then there are hands cupping the bones of his shoulders, smoothing the fabric of his cardigan and rumpling it again, pulling him towards the bed, making his spine a bridge from the carpet to Sam, leaning forward and forward. It’s like he’s forgotten the kissing he perfected last year but it doesn’t matter because there are little moaning noises accenting the music that’s still playing so it must be good, it must be okay.

When they pull apart he can’t quite breathe and he can feel his lips smiling.

I heard you’re fucking Sam, David says a few days later, and James feels his neck twinge, that’s how fast he turns away from his book. It snaps shut and he has no idea what page he was on.

I’m not! They’ve kissed a few more times and Sam read his one silly paper out loud yesterday and he did all these crazy voices and they laughed until it hurt their sides. We’re just --

Just what? David taps his pen against his teeth. His smile looks weird and the room is too dark. What, Jimmy?

Something you’ve never even thought of. James isn’t quite sure how the words make their way out of his mouth. They weren’t swirling around his brain. Maybe they’re one of his poems, decoded subconsciously after months or years of attempting.

Anyway it sounds true.

One night he goes to bed early. His roommate’s probably going to bring a girl back, but for a few hours there’s a cube of air, empty except for him. Of all things, he starts thinking about his Russian Lit professor, who’s moved on to Turgenev. James has never really liked him. The lectures the past few days haven’t been especially inspiring, which gives him the feeling the professor doesn’t much like Fathers and Sons either, although that could be the downside to e-lectures, a general sense of unenthusiasm.

His Russian Lit professor is famous, though. Somewhere in Idaho in a house made of tree trunks, Dad has a copy of one of his books. James has never read it but he remembers the name on the spine, the letters bubbling off the paper, imprinted there to meet his fingers. Still, there are people who want to know him. The thoughts that are spinning through his head.

But the thing is, behind the camera, the professor’s feet might not be touching the ground. It could all be hidden by a particular series of camera angles, a controlled hover or a half-dozen other things. He could be flying and nobody in that far-away Russian Lit class he’s teaching would ever know the difference. James thinks, half-asleep, that maybe he’ll tell Sam about it.

He forgets this line of thought by the time it’s morning, though.

“Why is everyone so into television?” They’re in James’s room for once and luckily David’s out in some class or another. Sam looks different spread out on his bed, but it’s okay. The flannel blankets are comfy, at least. “I get movies. We had movie nights at home. But television?”

“What else did we have to do?” Sam doesn’t really sound like he’s focusing. They have a Russian Lit test in a few days and apparently all the names confuse him. “You start watching Friends and that gives you a few weeks where you can just watch. Plus, vintage New York City?”

“And I guess you had all those friends, for the few weeks.”

The words hang in the air, but it’s not their usual silence of mutual understanding. James feels the muscles of his body tensing. He’s always been the lonely one, but what if --

“Well, it’s not like anybody came up with a wildly successful show called Mortal Enemies, right?” Sam laughs and the silence bursts.

“Really? I thought that was your favorite,” James smiles, and he’s thinking about continuing the joke but there are lips covering his and then the room is quiet again but he softens, relaxes into the semidarkness of his little room.

I wanted to tell you -- he starts, on the phone with Mama. They’ve been talking about poetry, and about how his littlest sister started watching their old opera DVDs one after the other last week and what a shame it is, that there are no opera companies any more, and it’s like Mama is right there in his room, close enough that she can still pull him on her lap and listen to his little-boy confessions.

What, darling? He imagines her, tucking a loose strand of graying hair behind her ear, around the telephone. Are you all right?

I’m fine, Mama. All the possible things he could say next kaleidoscope inside his head. They all pull his mother close.

But maybe this is growing up, dealing with it himself.

I'm fine, Mama, he repeats, forcing himself to smile, I just wanted to say, my Russian Lit professor really liked that paper I wrote. He says I should submit it to this one journal, even. Who knows if they'll accept it, though?

The phone is warm against his cheek as though he's holding her smile close to him. He's fine, he's fine, he's fine.

Sam opens the door of his room and the first thing James sees are the ringlets. Then the red lips. The silver dress. And music washes over him the second he steps inside, pounding at his temples like a sonic tidal wave, pulling him in and under, and the only thing he knows to do is reach out to Sam, press his lips against those thin red lips, hold on tight. The sequins scratch against his fingers but he can hardly breathe with Sam’s lips on his, Sam’s hands untucking his undershirt and working at his belt. The music goes at the same rhythm as his hips. I’m fixing to thrill, the music goes, and Sam goes, and James doesn’t know if this is quite being thrilled, but there are stars and sparkles in his vision. From the sound, from the lack of air, from the reflection of the light off of Sam’s silver dress, the press of his palms.

They’d talked about fucking, obliquely, the other day. The word had never been used, but still. It hung in the room. James hadn’t said no.

But this is different, the press of Sam against his own body, and inside his head this is all juxtaposed against Russian Lit and inside jokes and the way it felt to hold hands in an oddly deserted hallway. And still he cups Sam’s shoulders with his hands, inches up his, her, dress with his knee. The ringlets brush against his fingers with their own beautiful weight. They shouldn’t be so substantial. He shouldn’t be thinking about this. He pulls Sam even closer, maybe that’ll drive out thinking entirely.

Sam scoots him towards the bed, the back of his knees against the fabric of his jeans against the fabric of the bed spread, the green grass color, just the way it looked at home during the summer on his long flights, his sun-dazzled eyes.

He breaks away and gulps in a breath and then he catches a look at Sam and it’s like he’s seeing him again, at the party, his wig askew, and there’s this look in his eyes that is so terribly familiar. It’s lonely. And James thinks, I’m right here. But the thing is he saw that look on that girl’s face, last year, he’s even seen it on David’s face, fleetingly, caught the expression in the halls. Does everybody here look that way? I’m right here!

The other times he’s been with Sam, it was as though they were touching without needing touching, close as a person can be to another. And now, against each other like one body, how can he have that far-away lonely look in his eyes? He takes a gulp of air.

And then he takes a step away and another and another and he’s walking out of the room without completely knowing why or even how, really. He couldn’t put it in words. There’s only the action itself and the fading throb of the music, behind him.

You know what, fuck you, goes Sam’s voice on the voicemail to James’s cell phone, which he will maybe never hear, I should’ve known you were one of those closet cases. There’s something wrong with you. Don’t call me back.

James won’t see how Sam pulls the phone away from his face, fast before the speaker can pick up the sob expanding in his chest, maybe wide and empty as the ocean.

Everything is blurred and James couldn’t find his mask but his feet carry him up stairs and ladders until he finds his favorite hatch, the one that will lead him outside.

He always manages to forget, how much the air burns his throat and lungs the minute he is above ground, but still that peculiar mechanism of flight overtakes him and he is rising, the heavy bitter air whisking the tears off his face. He closes his eyes, holds his breath, counts to ten and then one hundred, lets out the air like an explosion. He inhales and he coughs and he is floating higher, higher. The night against his face is cool, then cold, and then he opens his eyes.

And maybe he’s dreaming, but there he is, above the smog, the stars above him like a spangled tablecloth. Usually he wants to fly outward, to crane his neck and look at the stars as he flies but tonight. Tonight he walked away from Sam. Tonight he flies upward, up and up. Thin air, he’s never thought before, is so much better than smog and his smile twinges with cold as he flies, the stars not quite retreating but certainly not advancing towards him.

Tonight, if he reaches out, maybe tonight he’ll brush up his fingers and touch starlight.