A Measure of Disorder

The phone rang, ending a brief and halting sleep. Dr. Godfrey picked up. “Okay,” he said finally. “Okay, calm down. I’ll be right there.”

In the dark he found a pair of jeans and a sweater. “Was that Olivia?” said Marie.

“No,” he said absently. At some distance he was aware how treacherous and truthful it was that in a semilucid state this was the first thing to occur to his wife. But he could worry about that later; it would have to take its place in the queue. He looked out the window. There was a misting of dew that made the night outside look like wine through a glass and he had the strange and pleasing thought: No time like the present for a swim. It occurred to him he may actually have said this out loud, but he wasn’t sure and Marie gave no indication. He laced his shoes.

Down the hall, Letha was in the bathroom. She heard her father’s descending footsteps and quiet exit, and waited another few moments for any sign her mother was going to stir. Then she crept down to the study and knelt at his file cabinet.

* * *

The police were already at the Neuropathology Lab, waiting for Godfrey’s arrival. Nurse Kotar came to him. Her eyes were red and her hair looked like she had just been given a serious going-over in the bedroom, an appearance so unlikely it could only spell disaster. He put his hands on her elbows and told her to go home and take a few days off.

She nodded docilely, then abruptly clung to him tightly and shook like a child.

“Go home,” said Godfrey again, his gentleness of tone hiding his resentment that to some this remained a solace.

Sheriff Sworn waited for her to leave, then approached Godfrey with a smile meant as a frown. “Some funny math here,” he said. “You have a highly disturbed individual and a straightforward—or at

least these days close enough—suicide, whole thing caught on camera. But. The security situation here, it’s no joke, right?”

It was a rhetorical question, but Godfrey nevertheless confirmed no joke.

“Thing is,” said Sworn, “you watch the tape, this wasn’t a break-in, but there was no assisted entry either.” He paused in considered disapproval of a world that had once held up its end of what he’d considered an understanding. “The door, it just opens up for him. As if … well … as if to say, Come on in, pilgrim.”

Dr. Godfrey looked to the floor of the far end of the Brain Barn. Francis Pullman lay on the floor. There was the plunger of a syringe in his hand. There was the splintered needle of the syringe in his temple. What was that Dorothy Parker line? I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.

Godfrey stifled the only sane response to this tableau, the latest somewhat dramatic addition lying at the wall of three thousand orderly Tupperware-housed specimens. The only response a certifiably sane

person could have in this asylum. But it would not be appropriate for a man of your position to laugh.

* * *

At first light the master bedroom door opened and Olivia emerged. She wore a white satin robe and passed down the hall and stopped at the door with the Dragon on it and entered. The room was dark; morning light visible around the edges of the curtains. He was still sleeping. She came forward and stood over him. His bare chest and neck were long and lean and white. She placed the backs of her fingers to his neck and felt the living miracle of the young heart in his chest, the conduit between it and her own. His eyes opened. She caressed his face and his scalp.

“We’ll need to bleach you soon,” she said. “Your roots are showing.”

* * *

On his way to homeroom Peter stopped at his locker and found sticking through the slats a folded page of notebook paper. He looked at it and he knew in his Swadisthana that it had been delivered by the same hand that had sent Lisa Willoughby the invitation. He took the page and unfolded it. There was no writing on it, only a picture. A crude drawing of the severed head of a brown wolf. The head lay in a pool of dried blood that in color and texture was clearly real blood, and the head itself seemed at first appearance to be brown shoe polish but no. He realized, after a moment, that’s not what it was. Peter grimly folded the picture and placed it in his backpack. He looked at a poster on the wall of a hand with an extended

index finger with the caption WHEN YOU POINT ONE FINGER, YOU POINT THREE BACK AT YOURSELF.

“Shit,” he said.

He turned to head down the hall but saw Roman approaching. “Shit,” he said again.

But this had all the trimmings of one those days. They stepped out an eastern exit next to the loading zone and overlooking a steep embankment over a housing development. They kept the door open a wedge with a half brick to keep it from locking behind them and Roman lit two cigarettes and handed one to Peter and said he had a lead.

Peter looked out. It was the sort of day that had the birds all in a dither. They gathered by the dozens on high wires like dark clothespins against slate sky only for some mysterious birdbrain impetus to send all of them into drunken wild flight, God shaking pepper into a whirlwind, and then just as suddenly to alight once more on the same wire, but facing now in the opposite direction. Whatever it is that gets into birds on days like today.

“I think something is going on at the White Tower,” said Roman. Peter smoked and watched the birds.

“I don’t know if it’s connected or not, but I can get us in,” said Roman. Crosshatching the sky were gauzy tendrils of black. Rain later. Roman saw it in his face. “What?” said Roman.

“No,” said Peter.

“What do you mean, no?” said Roman. “It’s over,” said Peter.

“What are you talking about?” “This is over. We’re done.”

Roman looked at him and saw he was serious. Suddenly he wanted to rip that faggot fucking ponytail out of his head. He wanted to find whatever words it would take to make him change his mind.

“Why?” said Roman.

Peter did not answer. He hated that he was having this conversation; this sort of thing was no less

suffocating to him than when he was younger and an older cousin would trap him in a blanket and sit on him and it felt like the worst of all possible deaths. Getting mixed up in other people’s feelings, only himself to blame. Also he blamed Roman.

“What, you mean the cops?” said Roman. His tone reflected the boringness and triviality of the incident. “You said get rid of them and I did. Oh, and that was very considerate, dropping my car off with an empty tank, incidentally.”

He waited to see if interjecting levity made the situation any different but it didn’t.

“Okay,” said Roman. “Okay, it was stupid. It was really stupid and I’m an asshole and what is there to say other than that I was being an asshole, but come on. Think about what you’re doing. You can’t walk away over a stupid thing like that. You can’t walk away from … this.”

He pronounced this in the phonetically correct fashion, but somehow it still rhymed with us.

Peter thought about how he might explain things to Roman in a way that wouldn’t upset him further. Explain that they were not alike, that however different from the rest of the world Roman felt, he was still rich and so tolerably different. He did not know what things were like for Peter, he did not fear the cage. The cage was the worst of all possible deaths. But there was no way to make that real for someone like Roman in the same way you could hardly say to a tiger in the jungle, Do you know how free you really are? Because how can he know any other way to be? There was no way to make this a picture in Roman’s brain, so he bounced his heel off the railing for a while and wondered if he could get away with not saying any more than he’d already said.

“Will you fucking say something,” said Roman.

“You should go,” said Peter. “There’s no good for you here. You should get away from this death and this town and your name. Make it all clean. And I don’t know. Figure it out from there.”

Roman regarded his hand. His hand was shaking and wasn’t much use for holding a cigarette, so he flicked it. “I bet you’d like that,” he said. “I bet you’d find that very convenient, you Gypsy piece of shit. You know if you fuck my cousin, I’ll kill you.”

Peter looked at him.

“You’re not better than me,” said Roman, bitter. Peter kept looking at him.

Roman turned his head. “That’s a faggot fucking ponytail,” he said.

Peter got up and went inside. Roman looked up at the glowering sky. “Fuck,” he said. There was a constriction in his throat.

Then there was a movement in the corner of his vision. Peter coming back out, not leaving it like this. Like before, Peter getting the hard-on thing out of his system but coming back to him. Roman looked pridefully ahead but knew he would let him. That was just his way, Peter was all right for a hard-on. Roman would let him come back again. But the door did not open and Peter did not come, and the movement he had seen was suddenly in the opposite side of his mind’s eye, and it was like dark fingers of black shadow performing sleight of hand to get his attention. Roman’s eyes fluttered. He bent and picked up the brick and the door closed after it and he hurled it over the hill. There was a metallic crunch and a car alarm went off and Roman sat against the locked door and after a moment held up his still-trembling hand palms outward and scurried his fingers in the air, watching the dance of spidery veins.

* * *

When school let out Letha appeared by Peter’s side as he approached his bus and he did not question as she boarded alongside him. He walked to his customary seat in the back and gestured for her to sit and she did. She reached into her purse and pulled out an old, wrinkled envelope, which she handed to Peter. It was to her father, no return address. He raised his eyebrows and she nodded, pleased with herself.

“Did you read it?” said Peter.

She was offended. “I would never read someone else’s mail,” she said. “Unless it was about me.”

He put the letter in the front pocket of his backpack, joining the fragment of Goblin Market and the shitty picture. He did not know if this would all ultimately come together as something meaningful or if it was like the opposite of those paintings made of dots, the illusion of order a consequence of proximity; if you stood at the other end of the universe seeking resolution you would just end up feeling like an idiot for trying.

When they passed Kilderry Park Letha looked out the window and said, “He’s dead.” “Who?” said Peter.

“Francis Pullman. The one who saw. He stabbed himself in the brain last night.” “Oh,” said Peter.

Letha moved her hand as if to take Peter’s but changed the motion into picking at the duct tape patching a rip in the faux leather of their seat. The bus came to a stop at the mouth of Kimmel Lane and she got off with him and started down the hill. Still, neither commented that this was outside the normal run of events.

“Roman seemed weird today,” she said. “He’s pissed at me,” said Peter. “Why?”

“Because there’s a big Roman-shaped blind spot in the way Roman sees things.” “What happened Saturday night?” said Letha. “Were you there when he was arrested?”

“Your mom using the sheriff’s department to give you a time-out isn’t the same thing as being arrested,” he said.

“What are the things you’re leaving out?” she said. Peter said nothing.

“You don’t need to leave stuff out just because I’m a girl,” she said. Peter looked at her to see if she really believed that. He said nothing. “I should sock you,” said Letha.

As they approached the trailer, the rain that had been threatening all day began lightly to fall. They jogged inside. The car was gone and they had the place to themselves. They sat on the couch and listened to the rain.

“Do you believe in angels?” she said.

Peter saw no way out of this conversation and regretted for the second time today that it was only one night of the month that he got to drop his human mouth on the ground.

She clasped her hands on her stomach. “It scares my parents, because they don’t believe me. But I guess I wouldn’t either in their shoes. I know it sounds a little crazy.”

“It actually sounds a lot crazy,” said Peter. “Do you believe me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you just saying you don’t know because you think I’m crazy?” “Well, I think you probably are crazy, but I still don’t know.”

She looked at him but he looked away. He felt her still looking at him and wished she would stop, but still tried to make his profile handsomely contemplative. The cat leaped onto the coffee table and sat on the jigsaw puzzle Lynda was still working on and began to groom, not actually disrupting any pieces but proving that it could.

Every cat is a woman, thought Peter. “Well!” said Letha.

“Well what?” said Peter. He knew but had learned that if there was one advantage to the male sex it was that your obtuseness would never be underestimated; if you pretend you don’t know what the problem is, half the time it just goes away.

“Are you going to try to fuck me?” she said.

Peter sucked in breath. “Well, here we are,” he said. “What kind of thing is that to say!” she said.

Peter grimaced. “What is it?” she said.

His grimace tightened and he licked the back of his teeth. “Roman,” he said.

“What does Roman have to do with the price of rice in China!” “You know,” he said.

She was quiet.

“Do you like me?” she said.

Peter shrugged. He didn’t not like her. Per se.

“Are you sure it’s not—” She moved her hands over her bump. “No,” he said. “That’s kind of hot.”

“Pervert!” she said, beaming.

“Look,” he said. “If the dynamite’s on the tracks, you think twice about stepping on that train.” “Smooth talker!”

They were both quiet.

“You’re really saying no?” she said.

* * *

Roman stood in his room regarding the coupling link mounted on the wall. While it looked like worthless junk, this was the first item produced by Jacob Godfrey for the Pennsylvania Railroad and its value was beyond measure: an empire had been built on it. Roman picked it up and held it in front of his heart and pulled with both hands as hard as he could, but to no avail even a century after its production: it was Godfrey steel. He put it back on its mount and went to his dresser, where there was a glass of vodka and ice and a small mound of cocaine on a pewter tray. He took out his mint container, where he stored a blade for a box cutter and segments of straw, and divided the cocaine into several lines and snorted them. He took a heavy sip of vodka. He looked at himself in the mirror.

“Godfrey steel,” he said.

He held the blade of the box cutter to the corner of his eye and made a quick vertical slash down his cheek. He closed his eyes and felt the pleasing warmth as blood issued onto his face. He opened his eyes and put a finger to the cut and traced it under both eyes and over his lips in a parody of his mother applying makeup. He batted his eyes for the mirror and puckered his lips.

“Shut up and kiss me,” he said.

The doorbell rang. Startled, Roman hurried to the bathroom and washed his face and applied a Band-Aid to the cut. He grabbed his drink and went to the foyer. The caller was a petite black woman wearing a dark trench coat and holding a badge.

“Are you Roman Godfrey?” she said. “Yeah,” he said.

“You’re bleeding,” she said. “Close shave,” he said. “Let me see,” she said. “It’s fine,” he said.

“Hold still,” she said.

She lifted the bandage, gauging immediately that the cut was superficial and self-inflicted. Further that the boy was high and recently had had his heart broken and that this made him defenseless and dangerous,

so conveniently incautious for her purposes. She told him to keep it clean, but he’d live. She introduced herself but it was obviously not news to him.

“You know who I am,” she said. “You’re the dogcatcher,” he said. “Might I ask how you know that?” “Small pond,” he said.

“Is your mother home right now?” she said. “No.”

“Do you expect her?” He shrugged.

“Is your sister in?” she said. “My sister doesn’t go out.”

“Do you think I might talk to her?” “She doesn’t talk.”

“That’s fine, I’d just like to say hello. If that’s okay.” “Why do you want to meet Shelley?”

“Maybe I should come back when your mother is around.”

This bluff trumped the boy’s suspicion: he could not in good conscience make a choice that responsible.

Roman led her upstairs and she stopped short in the second-floor hallway. “Is this your door?” she said.

“Yeah.”

“What’s this?” She pointed to the cross and serpent. “It’s from a video game. Why do you ask?”

“Just thought it looked familiar.”

They continued to the attic. The door was closed and string music played softly from within. He knocked and said, “Shelley, we have a visitor who’d like to meet you.”

Chasseur noted the softening of his manner. He held some things sacred. There was a pause and then a loud scraping noise followed by several slow creaking steps. The knob turned and the door nosed open and Roman pushed it and entered. Chasseur followed. The music was coming from a computer; on the monitor was the dense text of an academic article on biomimetics. Roman stood off to the side, his sibling awkwardly before her.

Dr. Chasseur was legendary for keeping certain physiological responses in check—her fame within her unit in the Corps dramatically increased one poker night when she won the pot with a royal straight flush with no hint of a tell, and a first husband who would never hear a woman say “I love you” again without flinching. But it took the full exercise of her talents not to gasp out loud seeing the elephant in the room, hands like gloves with hands inside them nervously fussing the folds of her dress, that brute face and eyes so bright and clear and sad.

“This is Dr. Chasseur,” said Roman. “She’s here to take a bite out of the vargulf.” She turned from the girl to the boy. “Excuse me?”

And she saw now his positioning was not accidental: he had strategically placed himself to cover an easel, but the outline was unmistakable. Ouroboros.

She looked back to Shelley with a smile and said, “I don’t mean to be rude, dear, but I think I need to have a word with your brother.”

A sound like a thousand lightly tapping fingers filled the attic: the rain had begun.

Roman and Chasseur went down to the living room and sat and she made her eyes into scalpels and cut him into very small pieces.

“Yes?” he said with badly feigned innocence.

She continued to look at him and he drank, uncomfortable.

“Roman, I’m going to ask you a few questions,” she said. “But before I do, there’s something I want you to do for me. I want you to think about what kind of person you want to be. I’m here because people are getting hurt, and the more honest you are with me the more it will help me do something about it. I want you to take a second and think about that, okay?”

Roman looked down at the glass in his hands. He set it on the coffee table and nodded. “What is your association with Peter Rumancek?”

“We … hang out.”

“Is there anything else you want to tell me about your relationship?” Roman was quiet.

“Does Peter believe he is a werewolf?”

“No,” said Roman. “People just say that about him.” “Do you have any idea why they would say those things?”

“They’re afraid of him. You should hear the things they say about us. I guess you have.” “Do they have a reason to be afraid?”

“No. Peter would never hurt anyone.” “Why did you go to the first murder site?”

The word hung in the air for a moment like a smoke ring before it dissipates. Murder. “I followed Peter.”

“What was Peter doing there?” “Rubbernecking.”

“Did you dig up Lisa Willoughby?” “No.”

She reached into her coat and produced her badge and set it facedown on the table. “Did you dig up Lisa Willoughby?”

“I said we didn’t,” said Roman. She looked at him.

“Yeah,” he said. “We did.” “Why?”

“It was a ritual or something. Some Gypsy thing. I don’t know.”

“Roman, desecration of the dead does not fall under the rubric of ‘some Gypsy thing.’” “It wasn’t desecration.”

“What was it?”

“Peter … thought he could help her.” “She’s dead.”

“Peter marches to his own beat,” said Roman.

“Upstairs you used the word vargulf. Why did you use this word?” “Because I don’t want you to bother my sister.”

“Why do you think I would bother her?”

“I don’t want you to think she’s the vargulf.”

“When you use this word, what exactly do you think it means?” He looked down and fussed at his already smooth lapels.

“It’s a kind of sickness,” he said. “It’s like … hunger with no appetite.” She was bemused.

“Where did you learn this word?” she said. “I don’t know where I learned it.”

“Where did you learn this word?” she said. “Peter,” he said.

“Can you tell me anything about an experiment being conducted at the Godfrey Institute for Biomedical Technologies called Ouroboros?” she said.

“I know that symbol means something. I mean, all symbols mean something, but that one means something—I don’t know, something … happening.”

He picked up his glass and drank and set it down. His fingertips missed it so he picked it up again. The ring of condensation from where it had first been placed joined the ring from where he lifted it and made a ∞.

“I see things sometimes,” he said. She nodded.

“Do you know what it means?” he said.

She regarded the boy: a narcissistic, insecure, oversensitive, and underparented adolescent heir to a Fortune 500 company with a substance abuse problem and homoerotic tendencies—it would have been more surprising if he didn’t “see things sometimes.”

“I can’t know what it means to you,” she said.

He hunched and ran his thumb up and down the sweat of his glass. “I can help you,” he said.

“Your cooperation is very helpful.”

“I can do more. The White Tower. Ouroboros—I can find out what it is. My father built that place. My name is Godfrey.”

“A name is only a name,” she said. He was doubtful of this premise.

“It’s good that you want to help,” she said. “It’s very good of you. But you can’t.”

She observed him try inexpertly to conceal how deeply this cut and had intimacy with this pain. No insult to the heart like being not needed yet.

“Why not?” he said.

She looked at his watery eyes with impatient compassion. She knew what he needed to hear, the first and fundamental tenet on which the rest of her training was founded, though it was unlikely the boy was any more ready to hear it than she herself at enlistment age, when the fight was more important than understanding why you fought. Teenagers. How thankful she was to be needed for something other than maternity.

“God doesn’t want you to be happy, He wants you to be strong,” she said.

Roman’s native response was to send an acid-tipped barb straight in the exposed heart of this display of conviction but his tongue was silenced by the sudden uncertainty whether this was the most shit-for-brains or most important thing he had ever heard.

She reached for her badge. Staying any longer would be redundant: there was nothing to take from here but pain.

“Roman, would you like to introduce our guest?”

They both looked up to find the boy’s mother in the entryway, holding a grocery bag. Chasseur looked out the window and saw the black pickup. It had not been there moments ago but its silhouette in what was by now a shower gave it a quality like some monolith from a primeval age. The mother stood in a white velour track suit and sunglasses and both were dry.

“May I ask your business here?” she said politely.

“There are certain inconsistencies in this investigation,” said Chasseur. “I’m just dotting t’s.”

“Say no more,” said Olivia. “Of course we would be thrilled to offer whatever you would find of assistance. Not a pleasant business at all, anything we can do. May I offer you a tea or perhaps a brandy?

Things are getting frightful outside.”

Chasseur could imagine no climatic condition more forbidding than the smile on the lady of Godfrey House inviting her to stay. Chasseur made her excuses and gave Roman a parting look and that look was really a prayer.

Once they were alone Olivia took the glass from Roman and sipped. Her eyes flicked down to the beaded rings on the table, which she wiped with her sleeve.

“You know,” she said, “there is no shortage of coasters in this house.” He mumbled an apology.

“What happened to your face?” she said. “It’s just a scrape,” he said.

She smiled sadly.

“Silly monkey,” she said.

His phone then rang and he stepped into the next room and answered.

“Marie is hysterical,” said Dr. Godfrey. “But this place has been a zoo all day and I just can’t get away yet. Do you have any idea where Letha might have gone?”

He stood by the hall window looking out at the rain and the trees. “Yes,” said Roman. “I have an idea.”

* * *

“You smell nice,” said Letha. “You smell sweet like a puppy.”

She was sitting astride him on the couch and his shirt had made its way off but they were otherwise clothed. He ran his fingertips down the back of her arm.

She shivered and smiled and said, “Goose bumps.” She walked her fingers down his chest hair to his navel and lay her hand flat. He was hairy and his belly gently convex like a glass filled just to the point of overflowing.

“Tell me a story about being a Gypsy,” she said. “Do you people realize I’m half Italian?” said Peter. “Right, but who cares!” she said.

Peter thought about it.

“One time Nicolae caught a fairy,” he said. “What do you mean, a fairy?”

He was annoyed. “I mean a fairy, what the heck am I supposed to mean?” He went on. “I was at his house one night in the summer, I must have been eight or nine, and Nic said he wanted to show me something, and he turned out the lights and gave me this jar with a little light inside. I say, Nic, that’s a lightning bug. He says, Look closer. So I held it up and it wasn’t a lightning bug, it was a person, a girl, no taller than a thumbnail, with wings like a dragonfly. And she had this little light.”

“What was she wearing?” Peter arched an eyebrow.

“I say, Holy shit, Nic, where did you find her? and he says she was just flying around the porch light with the moths. First he tried to catch her with his hands, but she stung him.”

“Fairies sting?”

“Are you kidding? Fairies are meaner than fucking hornets.” This news pleased her.

“What did you do with her?” “Kept her. For a while.” “What did you feed her?” “Flies.”

She was indignant. “Pretty fairies do not eat flies!”

“Yes they sure do. Get ’em right in the air and tear ’em apart. It’s better than watching a tarantula go after crickets.”

She was thoughtful. “What happened to her?”

“She died. They don’t last so long in captivity. One day there was just this tiny old woman at the bottom of the jar. Her wings had fallen off. At first I thought she was just taking a nap so I shook it a little. Definitely dead.”

“You didn’t clap your hands?” He gave her a look.

“Well it’s a fairy!” she said. “They’re magical.”

Peter shrugged, philosophical. “Death is fucking magical,” he said.

Letha was quiet. Then abruptly she pushed herself up so she was straddling him. “I’m sorry, these things are killing me.”

She pulled her shirt over her head and reached behind her, biting her tongue in concentration, and unclasped her bra. Her breasts fell free, the undersides bitten by wire. She made a relieved noise. Peter ran his hands along the swell of her belly.

“Are you serious!” she said.

She moved his hands over her breasts, leaving her own atop his and slowly kneading. She exhaled with contentment. Peter watched this surprising gift of his hands on these swollen tits with ambivalence.

“You should know I’m not any good being a boyfriend,” he said.

She looked at the ceiling in wonder. “Tell me how such a big hairy retard can smell so good?” she said.

“What I mean to say is that what you’re talking about is a whole deal and everything,” said Peter. “Fucking?” she said.

For a young man who devoted a predictable amount of mental resources to who and in what manner he would like to fuck, he did not like this business of her using this word. It wasn’t girly and made him ill at ease.

She sat on top of him and enjoyed his discomfort. She could pinpoint the exact moment that she decided Peter would have sex with her today and it had been this morning, when she had attempted and discarded in frustration numerous ensembles and realized it was completely for his benefit and if he was going to cause her all this hassle he had better hold up his end of the bargain.

But as to her virginity. In her view the reason most of the time a girl was a virgin amounted to she wanted to feel special and not like just any old whore. Letha had never considered this her own motivation. She thought it was the height of dumb that anyone could look at this nonchoice as some kind of accomplishment and if a girl wanted to have sex with a bunch of boys or a bunch of sex with one boy and that made her happy, what could be wrong with that? What could be wrong with wanting what makes you happy? So she had told herself that when she met the person she really really wanted to get to know without her clothes, all bets were off; she was just waiting for when it felt right.

Letha did not know if it felt right to have sex with Peter Rumancek; she could in fact find no shortage of reasons why it wouldn’t. But something had happened. An angel with a halo of every color had brought her a miracle and after that happens you don’t get to tell yourself lies anymore, the right has been revoked. And if Letha was honest with herself, there had been plenty of boys she wanted to get to know without her clothes—she wanted to feel their breath on her skin and to hold their penises in her hand and believably pull off lines like, Are you going to try to fuck me—but the thing that was really holding her back was the idea that this nonchoice was some kind of accomplishment, that she was special, not just some whore. And this was not acceptable anymore; lying about her deepest self was not an option in a world that had

reached into her and left grace behind.

* * *

Roman watched.

Sheets of rain washed over the glass and Roman watched the two of them inside. They were on the couch. She was facing down and he was on top of her. Her arm was outstretched and his fingers laced through hers. Roman stood in the hemlocks with his hair matted to his forehead and arms dead at his sides and watched. Peter worked his hand under her and up her clit and her mouth made a moan and his hair brushed her face and her mouth closed. Sucking on it. Sucking his fucking rat faggot hair.

Rain hit a puddle by his feet like a thousand damned mouths wailing O.

Roman turned away and walked around front and got into his car. His wet clothes suctioned him to the leather and he tried counting the worms of rain racing down his windshield but they all ran together. It was nothing but a measure of disorder. That was all it was.

The shadows dancing in the corners of his eyes laced gently together now, forming a merciful black.

* * *

The walls went white as there was another CRACK, the kind like it’s all coming apart, and Ashley Valentine yelped as the lights went out. Her heart calmed in the dark and she laughed. We can’t know if we laugh at ourselves for being silly or to forget that we’re not and that we are still here only by a sufferance that can be no more predicted than appeased. Like most things, probably a little of both. Ashley went to the window and looked out to see who else the outage hit. The whole block was dark and it took a moment to notice a strange shape in her yard. A person. A man. A strange man standing in her yard, unmoving. Her heart clutched and now she emitted no sound. Her parents were out and would not be home until much later. She fumbled for her phone, unable to take her eyes off the man in the rain and his weird stillness. She began to dial the police but it was then she noticed the car in the street, a Jaguar. She flipped her phone shut and went downstairs and opened the front door.

“Roman?” she said.

At first she thought he hadn’t even noticed; he remained queerly still like a kind of retarded lawn gnome. But then he looked at her and said, “No light.”

“Roman—are you all right?”

He turned his palms up and regarded the waterburst. “It’s just rain,” he said.

“Roman, I think you better come in.”

He did not disagree but did not move and she stretched her hand outside. There was a low roll of thunder. He took her hand and she led him upstairs to the bathroom and gave him her pink Victoria’s Secret kimono.

“You have the legs for it,” she said.

He handed her his wet clothes through the door and she put them in the dryer, then lit several votive candles in her room. When he entered she put a hand to her mouth to stifle laughter—that baby pink and his pale, skinny thighs.

“Here,” she said. She sat him on her bed and pulled her comforter around his shoulders and sat on her rocking chair looking at him. Here he was, Roman Godfrey, cross-dressed and swaddled on her bed. Her heart was a flicked mold of gelatin.

Not that she had a thing for Roman. He was not just the worst kind of conceited jerk but a genuinely sick person, the kind who would come up to you at a dance and give you a corsage made of tampon wrappers—which he had in the ninth grade—and she had always prided herself on being immune to

whatever inexplicable attraction he seemed to hold for other girls. But here he was. This poor soaking creature staring distractedly at a candle’s flame—and even if you were absolutely immune to the charms —as if—of Roman Godfrey, how could your heart not go out to such a pitiful display? What a loser!

“What’s wrong?” she said.

He lowered his head and did not meet her eyes. The candle flickered over the hard geometry of his face. She noticed the stain of red under the bandage on his cheek.

“Roman, what happened?”

He was staring blankly and his cheeks gleamed because he was crying. “Okay,” she said. “Okay, hey.” She went and sat next to him and took his hand. “Hey.”

He did not raise his head.

“Why don’t you tell me about it?” she said. “Maybe you should talk about it.” He shut his eyes and bunched his face into a hard ugly fist. He relaxed it. “Roman,” she said.

“I’m ugly,” he said. “What?” she said.

“I’m ugly. I’m an ugly person.” “Roman!” she said.

“I have an ugliness it’s impossible to love,” he said.

He withdrew his hand from hers and he put his face into his hands and he wept. The comforter fell away and his scapulae showed through the robe in sharp relief, racking up and down as though he was trying to fly.

* * *

Soon enough one thing led to another and Roman took one of Ashley’s hands and guided it through the bars of the bed frame, followed by the other. He pulled the sash free from the kimono he was still wearing and tied it around her wrists in an elaborate and apparently practiced knot. She said he was crazy, did he know that? He kissed along the hem of her panties, and in her mind she said, Finally … She said he ought to be locked up.

He pulled her panties off. Her heart hammered and her wrists jerked, but wherever he had learned that knot, it wasn’t for show—resistance only strengthened its hold. He knelt over her and the folds of the robe opened and his torso was like a tightly braided rope. He parted her legs and lowered his head. The headboard rattled. After a few minutes he pulled away and she caught her breath.

“Your turn,” she said.

He looked at her. There was something childish about the wetness on his face, and with his disheveled blond hair it gave him the momentary appearance of a Renaissance cherub.

“Your turn,” she said again.

He stood and stripped off his Jockey shorts. Her tongue thrilled at his hardness. “Untie me,” she said.

Roman ignored her and took her ankles and flipped them purposefully, but because of her hands she could not turn all the way and ended up with her legs scissored unintuitively, and suddenly things were different. Ashley had heard girls tell stories of getting into situations and changing their minds as though this made them victims of what happened next, like that was how it worked, that you got so far and it switched off just like that and they were not themselves to blame for being little sluts and cock teases in the first place. But now she understood: it was not like that. Changing your mind was not the thing that happened at all, what changed was your body telling you what was right and what was wrong and before now she had never known the way things can just like that go all wrong. She worked at the knot but it held

her tight.

“Roman,” she said.

A quality of thereness was missing from his face, his green eyes were windows to nothing. He was mercurial.

“Roman, please untie me,” she said. “I don’t like this, Roman.”

He braced her hip with a firm grip and slipped himself into her. She was very wet from her own arousal and his saliva and there was something uniquely horrible about the ease of this violation.

“Roman. Roman, hold on.” Maintaining the remote hope he was just getting carried away as boys would from time to time. But that was not what she saw in his eyes: something had gone away to she didn’t know where.

He thrust his hips hard and fast. She tried to twist her legs to force him out but he clamped a hand hard on her thigh.

“Roman, stop!”

The scariest part was, he could have at least looked like he wanted to do what he was doing.

Part of her broke off and felt unconnected with this hateful thing that was happening to her body but the headboard kept time with the violence, reminding her. She felt too terrified for speech but heard herself regardless, she heard herself crying and resisting and sounding exactly like the sort of hysterical female who would get herself hit or cut or whatever it would turn out a person capable of this was capable of. Be quiet, she communicated to her body. Whatever he needs for that, do not give it to him.

But her body did not cooperate. She heard it continue to fight him and beg him and reject that allowing this to happen until it was done was the best thing. It refused to accept this use of the flesh. And she resigned herself to the fact: her stupid body wasn’t wrong.

Roman stopped then. He leaned forward and brought his face close to hers. Whatever he was capable of, now it was coming. He looked into her eyes. His eyes were windows to nothing. And then there were no windows, there was only the nothing.

“Want it,” he said.

And then she found herself back in herself, in this room, in this bed, being fucked by Roman. His body clashed with hers like a wreck replaying on a loop: thin, hard veins ridged his neck and arms, the kimono fluttered wraith and ethereal behind him—and she wanted it more than having it could satisfy.

He looked into her eyes and told her to tell him he was ugly and she did. He made her repeat it again and again. It hurt him just the same every time. He looked into her eyes.

“Come,” he said.

She shrieked as this command swept through her most inviolate regions of self.

* * *

Roman collected his clothes from the dryer and returned to her room and worked the knot of the sash and untied her. He pulled her panties up her legs and then a pair of pajama pants. He lifted her arms and pulled a T-shirt over her head. He pulled her comforter to her chin and took her hand and held it. He looked into her eyes.

“I was never here,” he said. “Dream about something nice.”

Date: 2016-01-05; view: 570