Verge: Stories

THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS

Bosch centers his vision on the forehead of the clock and says, Six, twelve, six. On at six, off at twelve, on again at six, off again, on again. Salmon and sea bass slide beneath hands, his hands palming and fingering the scales and the touch of slime, his breath in the sea and the guts of thousands of slit-open bellies.

There’s a new guy next to him, pimply, bleached-blond hair, fingers like an artist’s; he won’t last a month, or else he will, he’ll be reborn and vex his family. His thoughts curl around the young man like water. Bosch already wants to take him home. He can’t help it. In the small gray-green of things, the young man sticks out like delight. Bosch can smell his hair. His mind’s eye is envisioning the man’s head resting on his chest, he’s thinking of showing him the ropes, how to take care of his hands, how to sleep awake, how to turn the body to cruise control and let the limbs, hands, move themselves, thoughtless. Something about his face. How young in the eyes. How little membranes stretch over the blue eyes, like the film of a fish eye lensing over in sight.

The new man is smoking in the alley after the shift, his left foot up against the side of the building, the cigarette drooping from his lip. His hands are shoved down into his pockets so hard he looks armless. This is what a young man looks like, Bosch thinks, hunched and smoking in the night, his whole life ahead of him but his body resisting itself. Wanting but not. It’s too easy to offer him a drink from an inside pocket filled with warm surrender. Easier yet to take him home after maybe ten minutes of not saying anything, just passing the bottle back and forth, their breath hanging suspended in the white-cold night air there before them. Home to a one-room house packed to wood walls with one small black stove, one square white icebox, one makeshift bed, one toilet behind a curtain, one window, asking night.

“Nice place,” know-nothing says.

“Works for me.”

“Bet you never expected this, huh?”

“What?” Bosch begins the slow undoing of layers of clothing, his skin hot and cold at the same time.

“This.” The man’s clothes shed themselves, his collarbone and shoulders dipping and curving, his hands hanging down the length of his arms.

Bosch thinks and thinks what “this” means. Is it the man before him, his crotch bulging up like prayer between them, the gap of not knowing each other at all luscious and ripe and making him salivate? Or was “this” his whole life, the long wait waiting again and again until new seasons and tides and moons turned the world over? The younger man’s lips puff out. Mama’s boy, Bosch thinks, only it’s a mouthful of bliss.

The room heats up in nothing flat, stars illuminate their naked. Bosch can’t see his own hands, but they find the form, working and reaching and sliding their way along. The man is swimming beneath Bosch, he is licking and teasing, he is moving in the underwater of night. Breathing forgets itself back to its blue past. Their mouths gape and suck.

Their two faces point up toward the surface of the night. Bosch tells him about the last guy his age to come through. People saw him out there in the nothingness making a goddamn snowman with his bare hands, frostbite, but the dumb motherfucker didn’t know it, pumped himself so full of acid that his hands were two numb clubs, came to work, worked the row without the massive yellow rubber gloves, until someone finally looked over and said, Jesus God—look at that, he’s got meat for hands. And they took him away with those red and useless weights of flesh hanging from the ends of his arms, and he lost one of them. Couldn’t have been more than twenty-two years old.

“That’s the trouble,” he found himself saying. “You’re all fucked up on dope and shit half the time. A guy could get himself into a lot of shit out here that way. There’s no room for error. You have to find the rhythm of the place, being here. It’s a whole different existence. Don’t come to work fucked up. I’m telling you right now. Guys’ll take advantage of you, try to mess you up, because when you’re out, their pay goes up. All you young guys come out here, college boys, trying to score the big bucks over the summer so you can quit waiting tables during the year, or buy some shitty-ass car, or more dope, or whatever it is you do. Just… all I’m saying is, watch yourself. Pay attention. You’ll be all right.”

The man runs his finger over Bosch’s stomach, light as feathers, flesh whispers. Everything inside him—intestines, muscles—squirms and lifts toward the touch.

HE IS IN THE BED of his childhood, in his mother’s house. His father has been gone for two years now. His father a no-good his father a cook at a diner his father a clerk at a 7-Eleven his mother needing to feed her baby. It is night. The front door is rattling and cracking and splitting open with his mother and a man. Laughter brings their bodies into the house; he holds his breath, his heart dull-thudding in his ears. He is sweating under the covers from not moving. Not breathing. They careen off edges, furniture, cacophonous, they nearly crash through the wall of his room; no. They are going to her room, to his parents’ room, blue walls, blue bed, perfume, and a mirror.

In the morning the man drives away in a Pinto wagon. Bosch eats cereal, his hair a mess, his hands little fists around spoon and bowl. He stares at the milk, the flakes floating there, bobbing up and down, stares and stares at anything but the tired woman entering the kitchen smelling old and distilled and too sweet. Something—breathing?—gives him away.

“What are you looking at, you little shit? Ain’t gonna find any goddamn answers in your Wheaties, that’s for sure!” Snorts of laughter. “Hey. Mr. Man of the House. I’m talking to you. When are you going to get a fucking job and start earning your keep? I can’t keep stuffing your little fat face with food, you know. You’re old enough to take care of yourself. Goddamn little suckerfish, that’s what you are, a bottom-feeder. Suck suck suck. You make me sick.”

Bosch looks up for a slow second before she leaves the room with a bottle. He sees her eyes magnified and blurry, sees bubbles escaping from her mouth instead of words; his mind drifts away from her without sound, water filling his ears, his nose, his mouth. Only his heart beats out a rhythm. She dissolves from sight until she disappears in a wave of stained silk.

THE MAN’S NAME IS ARAM, and he is out of sight, down and down the line from Bosch. Now and again Bosch can see a patch of his bleached-blond in the corner of his eye, and he is glad. His own flesh seems warmer than before; he can feel his own pulse, and his hands glide and cup and dive between the fish bodies as never before. His neck does not ache in a knot at the base of his head after three hours, his vertebrae do not feel leaded and distorted when he has an hour left, his feet don’t throb and spike with the day coming down on them. It’s as if his mind is coming back to him in small increments. He sees an image of Aram gently turning in the night, his torso, the muscles of his back barely visible, the fin of his rib guiding his sleep. The salt smell of the sea mingles with his image of the boy, and the image overtakes the present moment. He breathes in the sight, he lets go the work, his body moves without thought, his mind’s eye deep in the tangle of memory, or is it the future, coming to him like a pool of water?

ARAM PUTS HIS MOUTH over Bosch’s cock. He can see the woodstove and its little light just behind the boy’s head appearing and then not, like that, in the dark of night. His cock sucks thought from his brain. He closes his eyes, and when he comes, it is into the mouth of the world, young and in the shape of an O. He is lost there. A younger man’s mouth takes him out of himself. He places his hands on Aram’s head, his hair a bright stunning halo. He is caught there for a moment, dazed and electrified.

IN SEATTLE THERE WERE JOBS, but the boys emerging from Issaquah and Chehalis and Sequim were malformed somehow, their bodies twisted away from offices and college degrees. A high school diploma was simply a ticker tape running across his forehead for anyone to see, saying, I do not speak your language, you must speak more slowly, what are the directions? Seattle had a different smell, different air—even their hair and shoulders looked different. Contained and quick smart like the click of heels on pavement. When he’d landed a job at the corner bar as a busboy, his mother had said, “That fucking figures. You’re exactly like your father, aren’t you, pretty boy? I just hope you can do something for a lady with those hands—that’s all he had going for him, I can tell you. You got shorted on the brains, and come to think of it, the brawn, too. Nothing in this life gonna come easy to you. You got big lips like a mama’s boy, too. I bet you get your nose busted before you’re eighteen.” And she laughed with the open mouth of a bass, huge and obscene and devouring.

Nights he’d come home and she wouldn’t be there, and then she would, him in his world of a room with earphones closed so tight around his skull that his lips puckered, and she’d bang on the door or even open it, swagger in framed by the disconnected air around them, foreign and malevolent. Then she’d cry, or shout obscenities at him.

Other nights men would come, men with hair greased black, slick as a record album and with teeth missing, or with leathery skin and marbled eyes swimming in their sockets. Once, in the earliest hours of morning, he saw her walking naked to the bathroom. Her breasts dropped down like dangling glass globes. Her shoulders sank, as if her spine had given over years ago, her ass dipped in instead of out, and her belly, rotund and hard as a melon, balled out from her spine like a child’s. She’d fallen to the floor just in front of the bathroom that morning, and in the bruised light and half consciousness of the vision he’d watched her wriggle there on the floor before turning her head back, contorted and begging, in the direction of his room, her mouth slit downward in a terrible arc. He closed his door, not listening, not thinking. In his bed his mind made waves. I am weightless, I am adrift and nothing.

ARAM DOES NOT QUIT. What’s more, in the space of half a year, Bosch has learned more about this one man’s beautiful body than about any other body in his life. Sometimes he closes his eyes, and he can feel the younger man in his hands.

Hot coffee between palms; dusk.

“Did you think it would be like this?” Bosch says.

“No. Yes. I mean the work. Yes.”

“And this?”

“You?”

“Me.” He signals nothing in his eyes, just sits there looking at the beautiful man in his one-room world, this fire-headed boy who gives light to a dark making.

“No. I didn’t figure there would be anyone like you out here. And I wasn’t thinking about anything… well, happening.” Aram slides from his chair to the edge of the bed where Bosch is sitting like an old beast of some sort. Hunched over and quizzical in the face. He entwines himself—arms, legs, torso—in between the lines of Bosch’s body, the spaces where limbs move away like fins. He makes soft cooing noises.

Bosch closes his eyes and focuses on this feeling, so he’ll remember it when it’s gone. For it will be gone, will it not? That is the way of things, that is time, and time is a fucker, and except for this one time in all his life he’d never cared about the boot-sludge drone of time, and suddenly it is everything, isn’t it? It is the whole of life and death stuffed into a tiny room with not enough oxygen to breathe or keep a fire going. It is strange to be remembering before the thing itself is gone from you, strange to have that pressure to fold images and impressions into the gray labyrinth of brain. Picture them over and over in the mind’s eye, day and night, like the never-ending glow of white on white in winter in Alaska.

“I want to know you. I want to know every inch of you,” Bosch says, almost begging.

“But we do know each other,” he says, grinning. “We keep knowing each other more and more.” And he traces lines on Bosch’s back, up and over the shoulder to his chest and heart, as if he knows the way, knows it by memory every vein, every scar, every road of skin or thought since before he was born. Bosch’s heart beats too heavy in the chest, it tightens and squeezes into a hard ball. His face twists as if he might cry, then releases itself. He remembers himself as a boy and then grinds the memory gone with his teeth.

What is a boy?

HE HAS A BLACK EYE, a shiner from a man he’s never met except in the hallway of his mother’s home. For no reason he could tell, just there at the wrong time, wrong place, sledgehammer-hand big man drunk coming down the hall at him saying, “What the fuck are you grinning at?” Alone in his room with his stinging face pressed against the wood grain of the door, he hears them arguing, the rise and fall of voices, the thud of fists or something breaking, a glass, a rib. She is all mouth, his mother, she can rage on with the best of them, she doesn’t flinch, she’s gutsy that way. But then he hears her incomprehensibly quiet. Even with his whole head against the door, he hears her not at all. He hears the lumbering dull and swollen-thick man banging his way out of the house, wall to wall to floor and slamming out, Camaro screeching away. Nothing nothing nothing from the other side.

Sweat forms on his upper lip. His face is swollen and wet and white. He bangs his head gently against the door.

“Mother.”

Nothing.

He opens the door to his room and crosses the hallway to her room. He opens her door. There she is, as he pictured she would be, curled out on the floor, her mouth bloody, her eyes puffy, her peach satin negligee twisted up her torso, the blue of the shag carpet floating her still body.

“Mother.”

He helps her up, walks her to the bed. She is not dead. Just submerged and bleary-eyed, mumbling and slurring. “I’ve got to get it out of here,” she says.

“He’s gone now,” he tells her. “I’ll lock and bolt the door. He’s gone.” He puts ice in a dish towel and soap on another. He washes her face and holds the cold to her eyes and mouth.

Her lips bulge and the words keep spilling out, she shakes her head no and no. “Out of me, it’s in there.” He thinks, what is it like for a woman to get fucked like that? It is foreign to him. Nothing about her seems like him.

After she swims toward sleep, he goes back to his room. Just before dawn he thinks of icecaps and the white expanse of Alaska. He thinks of an ocean bearing us all away into an arctic otherworld.

THE YOUNG MAN takes off his hood, unzips his gigantic red parka. The down shape of him shrinks, as if he is removing layers of himself, like a Russian doll within a doll within a doll. He pulls his wool sweater over his head by reaching at it from the back. His hair ruffles. He unbuttons the silver tabs on his Levi’s, popping them all in one swift pull from the top. He stretches his torso down and up to take off his T-shirt; his nipples harden instantly. His lip quivers for a moment. He inches his long johns down goose-pimpled legs, over muscle and knee and bone to ankle, twists each foot out. Down go his boxers. He is a naked man at the beginning of his life. He is beautiful and almost absolutely still. His breathing is the only thing that moves. Bosch feels as if he might weep. Bosch smells him: sweet sweat and soap and skin. His cock grows, pulses up red between them. Bosch’s mouth is watering, and his hands ache at the ends of his leaded arms.

He wants to hold him like an infant, he wants him to suck at his tit while he rocks him and squeezes his cock. He pictures an almost perfect medieval painting of Madonna and child. He nearly vomits from desire before he reaches out to touch him.

They wrestle-fuck on the floor. As Bosch is driving into him, he is also handling his partner’s cock in front. Aram arches his back so hard that his head tucks between Bosch’s shoulder and neck; he can see his face, contorted angel. Aram comes first, all over himself and all over Bosch’s hand; Bosch can see the milk-white spray, and his own release pulses out of him and up inside. Aram says he can feel it in his spine and lets out a kind of laugh, glorious. He says, “I want to stay like this forever, I never want anything to change, it’s this I waited my whole life for, this feeling.” Bosch thinks sentences give us hope in all the wrong ways, language tortures us into faith.

What’s true is that they can only stay like that on the floor until the heat begins to die in the room. Eventually Bosch has to get dressed, go out to the woodshed, and refill the woodstove. He leaves Aram, thinking, He’ll get into bed, and then we can sleep for a few hours. He leaves Aram inside but keeps the smell of him sucked nearly all the way to his heart as he enters the white outdoors.

WHEN HE AWAKENS, Bosch hears birds. He thinks of a boat taking him to Alaska, of seagulls. But then it is not birds. It is fainter, human. Soon he recognizes it as the little whimper of a boy; no. It is his mother whimpering. He goes to her room. She is not there. He goes to the sound. She is in the bathroom. It is barely light. Something smells wrong. He does not want to open the door, and then he does, and there they are on the white floor, mother and child, a little red-and-blue lump of fetus curled near her. Five months, six? His mother is so pale she looks dead. As if she’d run out of oxygen hours ago. Her mouth opens and closes. Her hand twitches for an instant. He bends down and looks at things. It is a boy. It was.

AT THE WOODSHED it is clear that more wood needs splitting. Bosch considers not taking the time, then remembers how much Aram likes to sleep, decides that an hour will have no meaning to a beautiful sleeping man. Let him dream. Let sleep take him below the surface of things. Let the image of death be reborn, every single night. With each heave he lets loose a terrible and mindless sobbing. He fills his arms with wood; there is no weight heavy enough to release him.

With arms full of wood, he has trouble opening the door, but then it gives, and a great whoosh of warm air hits the incoming cold. It’s a wonder that lightning doesn’t form from their meeting like that, Bosch and Aram, two men at different ends of something, or some electrical charge, some white spark crackling between inside and outside. There he is, unmoved on the floor where Bosch left him, a beautiful pale smile on his face, his eyes closed, lashes painted down onto cheeks. His arms are stretched out on either side, his blue veins making rivers across his infant-thin skin at the wrists. Bosch thinks, There is no other heaven than this, this is heaven on earth, and he closes the door and builds the fire like a new faith for all the white against them.