Paul took the bottle and drank; it seemed the only thing to do before making what he already knew would be a mistake. The alcohol scorched the inside of his throat.
“So you’d be able to do me,” he said. “Wouldn’t you?”
A pause.
“I could, I suppose,” said Julian. “But you wouldn’t want me to.”
“Don’t tell me what I want.”
Julian stopped walking. He looked very young in that moment, wind-bitten and flush with drink, and Paul could see the effort it took for him to keep his gaze steady. His smile had become opaque and careful.
“Go on.” Paul stood in front of him, watching, not sure what he expected or wanted to expect. At his side he held the bottle by the neck; its brown wrapper was freckled with melted snow. “I want you to. I won’t be angry.”
He could see Julian’s disbelief, then the impulsive resolve as he decided to make the mistake along with him. Without asking if he could, Julian reached forward and pulled Paul’s glasses from his face.
“If you insist,” he said. When he put on the glasses, he disappeared behind them.
There was nothing cruel about it, except for its accuracy. Paul hadn’t already noticed all the details Julian observed in him, but he still knew instinctively that they were true, the same way he would have known his own face even after years without a mirror. He watched Julian’s shoulders sag as he curled in on himself like a too-tall weed growing in the shade. He recognized the solemn bow of his head and the anxious sharp line of his jaw, and the truth in the way his hands moved, their halting delicate gestures like fine-petaled flowers bowing in a breeze.
Paul could have accepted it if not for the frailty there, the uncertainty and the overwhelming fear. He couldn’t see anything about himself that was immune to yielding to the right lie—to biting his tongue and saying “Yes, okay, just this once.” The transformation was perverse and unforgivable. It was evolution in reverse.
Julian only maintained the illusion for a few seconds. He exhaled hard when he let it fall.
“How do you stay sane, Pablo?” The sincerity in Julian’s voice took both of them by surprise. “It’s exhausting. Everything’s so bright and sharp, it’s like there’s nothing protecting you—”
Paul didn’t notice that Julian was reaching toward him until he’d already snatched his glasses back and turned away. He walked quickly, barely noticing the cold.
It took Julian some effort to catch up. There was a hazy echo in his breathing, like music from a dusty speaker.
“You said you wouldn’t be angry,” he said. He took firm hold of Paul’s arm, as if to hinder his pace, but when Paul slowed down, he didn’t let go.
“I’m not. Not at you.”
“Don’t even try,” said Julian almost gently. “You know you’re just about the worst liar I’ve ever met.”
Down toward the river. The bottle was drunk down enough by now that it sloshed like a full stomach. They crossed over the railyard on a pedestrian bridge caked in graffiti; as they made their way along the waterfront, the sidewalk gradually crumbled from the outside in, until the asphalt finally gave way to tar-blackened gravel and long gray grass.
They came upon an abandoned building. It had been a slaughterhouse once, according to the fading letters whitewashed onto the brick. Moss streaked the windows and climbed the walls; the corrugated metal doors were creased with rust. The only sign of life was a mushroom cloud spray-painted onto one of the doors, captioned, in jaunty block letters, walk it off sunshine.
Julian climbed over the chain-link fence, holding his cigarette between his teeth. Paul passed the bottle to Julian and dropped his knapsack onto the gravel, then cautiously followed after him. The rusting wires shivered and squealed under Paul’s weight, and it took him a moment to convince himself to climb the rest of the way.
“How long has it just been sitting here, do you know?”
Paul shook his head. Julian finished his cigarette and ashed it on the heel of his boot. With his coat collar turned up, leaning carelessly against the fence, he looked like a film still of James Dean. Paul could never decide if Julian was borrowing mannerisms from the movies or if it was the other way around—that the movies were trying to synthesize an image that came to Julian naturally.
Paul turned away and tucked his glasses into his breast pocket. Then he scooped up a rock, tossed it from his right hand to his left, and pitched it straight through a windowpane.
He thought he heard Julian speak, but a wool-thick quiet had settled over him, and no sound could penetrate. He worked his way along the bank of windows, smashing them column by column, each filthy mirror to the sky collapsing backward into black. Empty panes gaped, ringed with fragments of glass like broken teeth. He could imagine nothing beyond this moment; there was no reason, no goal. He had been here all his life.
Then the final pane fell away and he had a body again—sore muscles and roaring blood and fierce mortal heart, skin taut against the chill and damp snow. The air splintered in his chest, and what was left of his father lay in a box in the frozen earth with a tunnel through his skull, and for all that he raged against it, nothing had changed.
Paul sank down to the tangled grass and brushed the dirt from his hands. He was too exhausted to cry, or to hate himself for wanting to. He wasn’t certain, once he sat down, that he would be able to stand again.
Julian stood in front of him, carrying the bottle by its throat. His lips were chapped, his nose and fingertips pink from the cold. For the first time since Paul had known him, he looked uncertain. He offered the bottle, but Paul shook his head. He couldn’t put a name to what he felt, but he knew it would be dishonest not to feel it. He fought against what the alcohol was already doing; he wanted the world to stay clear and sharp and unbearable.
Julian emptied the bottle into the snow. He knelt beside Paul cautiously, as if he were approaching a wounded dog. When he touched Paul’s face, the gesture seemed at least as experimental as it was affectionate.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You don’t have to.” Julian brushed Paul’s hair back from his face and darted forward to press a kiss to his forehead. The gesture seemed to startle him far more than it did Paul. “But there has to be something I can do. I can’t stand it. What am I supposed to do?”
He didn’t remember how to speak. He couldn’t have given the answer even if he’d had one.
8.
He would never get used to the scar. It looked like a dead tree, milk-white, bare branches grasping. The whole right side of Julian’s torso was given over to it. He claimed it didn’t hurt anymore, though he’d had it for so long that Paul wasn’t sure how Julian could know what his body had felt like before. The lung inside was so heavy with dead tissue that it didn’t remember how to be a lung anymore. When Paul put his ear to Julian’s back, he could hear the asymmetry, the way the left lung had to drink in almost more than it could hold in order to keep its twin from drowning.
He had pictured Julian’s body wrought from marble, flawless and intangible even under his undeserving touch. “You said you wouldn’t stop me,” Paul would say, and Julian would let him take what he wanted, because he’d promised he would. But even in his most shameful fantasies, that was all Paul let himself expect. He never allowed himself to imagine Julian wanting him. In Paul’s mind Julian only ever made himself an object. He was pliant and receptive; he would surrender to him as smooth unbroken skin, as hips and collarbones and acquiescent mouth. But if the imaginary Julian ever deigned to kiss him back, it was only to draw forth another unanswered I love you. Paul could never reach past Julian’s surface, no matter what he did to him.