by J L Aarne
“You’re such an idiot,” Jonathan says. He looks at Aarom like he wants to say more, but then he huffs out a soft, tired laugh and shakes his head. “Sorry,” he says. “I’m really tired. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right,” Aarom says. “I guess I am sometimes. An idiot.”
“I guess we both are,” Jonathan says. “That’s how we got here.”
“Do you want me to leave?”
“I want you to stop asking me that.”
“Oh. Well… do you want me stay?”
“Do you want to stay?”
Aarom clasps and unclasps his hands between his knees. He nods. “I think… um. I’d like to talk. You know, like we used to?”
“Don’t worry, you can stay in the guestroom,” Jonathan says. “I won’t touch you if that’s what you’re nervous about.”
“I think I’m probably always like this,” Aarom says. His lips quirk in a faint smile when Jonathan laughs.
They don’t talk for a little while and the sound of the room becomes the sound of their breathing. Aarom is usually a quiet person by nature, but he feels the discomfort in the silence, wonders what Jonathan is thinking but doesn’t ask. Jonathan is in an uncharacteristically dark mood.
“It must be awfully freeing to not exist,” Jonathan says.
Aarom lifts his gaze from his own clasping hands to Jonathan’s face. “Sometimes it is,” he says. “Sometimes you just feel empty. The emptiness can be an unbearable burden. Jonathan, what’s this about?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I’ve just been thinking a lot about it lately. Since the last time I saw you. Maybe a little before that even. Aarom?”
“Hmm?”
“Would you let me kiss you if I was dying?”
Aarom sits up and puts out a hand to touch him before he remembers himself and snatches it back. “Don’t say that,” he hisses. “You’re not dying. Don’t even think about it.”
Jonathan laughs and puts his head against the back of his chair. “Because it’s up to you. It’s your choice, not mine and I’m asking your permission,” he says sarcastically. “Answer the question.”
“No,” Aarom says. He’s angry, his voice sharp and a little too loud, but Jonathan’s scaring him. “No, I wouldn’t. I won’t. If you do something like that, you’ll have to do it without me.”
The smile doesn’t leave Jonathan’s face. He closes his eyes like he’s having a beautiful daydream. “Liar,” he says.
“I’m not,” Aarom says. “You can’t do that, Jonathan.”
Jonathan opens his eyes and looks at him. “Doesn’t feel very good, does it?” he asks. He sits up and they’re close, too close to be safe, but Aarom doesn’t move away from him yet. “That fear right there that you’re feeling? Remember it. That’s how it felt when I found out what you’d done.”
“It’s not the same thing at all,” Aarom says.
Jonathan jabs a finger at him. “It’s exactly the same,” he snaps.
“Jonathan.” Aarom scoots to the edge of his seat and has to keep his hands in his lap because the urge—the need—to reach out and touch him is so strong. “Jonathan, you can’t.”
“Why not?”
“You’re not really thinking about…”
Jonathan steeples his fingers and touches the tips to his mouth. “Why can’t I? I probably know better than most of them what a horse really looks like. I’m not all that artistic, but I could swing it. Why not?”
“Because…” Aarom’s pulse beats painfully behind his eyes and makes his throat itch. “Because, Jonathan. Just because.”
“Why?” Jonathan insists. “Tell me, Aarom. Why?”
“I don’t want you to die,” Aarom says miserably. He’s shaking and he puts his head down in his hands. There’s that wanting to cry feeling again and he hates that. It makes him feel stupid and weak, especially with Jonathan looking on.
He tenses when he feels Jonathan’s hand on his bent head. Jonathan’s fingers lightly tunnel through his hair, pushing it back from his face, tucking it behind his ear, and Aarom feels more than ever like he’s going to weep. Shaking, his skin alive with the force of his awareness of that simple touch, he picks his head up and finds Jonathan just as he expected; watching him. He looks weary and sad, which is strange to see in him, though even stranger for the way it seems to make him more beautiful. It hurts how badly Aarom wants to put out his own hand and touch Jonathan’s face, but he doesn’t. He closes his fingers into fists and makes himself be content with only looking.
“You don’t have to be so afraid,” Jonathan says.
He moves his hand from Aarom’s brow down to his jaw, strokes his thumb out over the slope of his cheekbone. Aarom unconsciously tilts his head into the touch like a cat and Jonathan smiles a real smile for him.
“I don’t want you to die,” Aarom repeats.
“I’m not afraid of you and I’m not afraid of dying,” Jonathan tells him. His hand moves to hold Aarom’s chin up, his thumb touches the swell of his bottom lip. It’s all as shocking to Aarom’s senses as electric current. “And if they’re the same thing now, I’m not afraid of that either.”
Aarom’s eyelids flutter, but he doesn’t close them. This is as close as he’s ever been to what he wants and as close as he’ll ever get if he wants Jonathan safe and alive because he’s right: Aarom has become death.
He sits back and Jonathan’s hand falls away. “I am,” he says. “I’m afraid.”
Jonathan closes his hand and stands. His expression changes, mouth pressed tightly closed, eyes narrowed. “You dumb shit,” he says.
He turns, leaves the room and marches down the hallway. The slam of the bedroom door makes Aarom flinch. He shakes his head and sits back, imagining he can taste Jonathan’s fingers on his lips. His eyes sting with unshed tears and he is dumb because he’s pushing Jonathan away. He can feel the growing distance, but he doesn’t know how to stop it. It seems like whatever he does, he’s going to lose him anyway. He would rather lose him and know he is alive somewhere, but Jonathan’s right: it’s never really been up to him.
9.
For a couple of weeks, Aarom stays away from Jonathan. He stays away from Jonathan’s house and only passes down his street because he has to every night. It’s part of his district and it’s his responsibility. He walks by and doesn’t stop or pause and tries hard not to even look too long at the house where he knows Jonathan is sleeping. Sleeping and thinking his dark, existential thoughts and leaving him behind. He’s sitting there in his chair or at his kitchen table or at his desk when he goes to work and Aarom’s losing him. He feels it like a weight pressing on his chest and he tells himself that he’s letting go, but he’s not. It wouldn’t hurt so much if he were capable of letting go.
One night, Sabra calls him and tells him to meet him at his place across the river. He wants Aarom to walk with him on his rounds. The request alone makes him curious, but things have been incredibly slow, so he agrees and catches the night train over the bridge to the other side of the river and meets him. There have been many nights lately with no supplicants at all, like they got most of them when there was a surge in their numbers the previous month and now there isn’t anyone left. It’ll level back out eventually as it always does. Given a little time to think about it, there will be more.
For now, Aarom stands waiting on Sabra’s doorstep. While he waits, he turns his back to the door and looks out at the city. Here where Sabra lives, the streets are spotless, the cars and houses are expensive, the people work in the high-rise buildings that enclose the sprawl like a fence and look down on the city like gods peering at an anthill. The sky is grey and blue and phosphorescent. It’s going to thunder and rain.
Sabra comes outside pulling the collar of his coat up around his neck, looks at the sky with Aarom for a moment then starts down the steps ahead of him.
“Did you have a problem getting here?”
“No,” Aarom says. “I’m going to need another proxy chip
though. Especially after what happened to that guy Matthew.”
“That is a problem easily solved,” Sabra says. He doesn’t comment on Matthew’s murder, which says a lot on its own. He takes something from his pocket and holds out his hand to Aarom. “Here. Sebastian Burge, welcome to the world.”
Sabra scissors his fingers open and a chip falls into Aarom’s open hand. He puts it away in his pocket. “Thanks.”
Sabra smiles. “You’re welcome. You’re safe, you know. They don’t know about you. I made sure of it.”
Aarom doesn’t ask him how. Sabra has ways, he’s always known that and he’s just grateful for it. “Thank you.”
“It could have been handled better, I suppose,” Sabra says.
The first raindrops begin to fall and they are fine, more mist than real rain. Aarom pulls the hood of his jacket up. “It was a message, wasn’t it?” he asks.
“Was it?” Sabra says.
Aarom frowns at him. “Yes.”
Sabra’s smile flashes in the dark. “And what was the message, do you think?”
“Be quiet,” Aarom says.
Sabra laughs. “Is that all?”
“I think that’s enough,” Aarom says. “Be quiet. Don’t let them see you. Don’t make so much noise and draw so much attention.” He shrugs. “Be quiet.”
“Concisely put,” Sabra says. “He was rather vocal about it all. We operate in the dark for a reason. They mostly ignore us and tolerate us because we keep the world sane. We serve a purpose. It’s a very symbiotic relationship we have with the machine whether they want to believe it or not. As long as we don’t make too much of ourselves. As long as we don’t shout about it on street corners. As long as what we do is secret—or everyone pretends it is—they ignore us and leave us alone. Matthew had his own agenda.”
“So Matthew’s dead,” Aarom says.
“Or perhaps Matthew just pissed off the wrong person,” Sabra says.
Aarom doesn’t doubt that Matthew did piss off the wrong person. He finds himself oddly unmoved by the idea. The way he had died is disturbing, but the fact of his death is a necessary evil. He hadn’t liked the man, he had been a nuisance at best, a danger at worst, and if Sabra killed him he had his reasons. There is no official chain of command among their kind, but people instinctively form around leaders and in their city, Sabra is theirs. If he had to kill Matthew to silence him, he did it to protect them all.
Sabra is not as unmoved by what he did as he pretends to be though. Aarom knows him better than that. He is, however, an expert at hiding his emotions, at showing only what he wants to show and keeping his own council. His voice does not crack or waver, his gaze is steady, his manner bordering on blasé. Mathew was a problem; problem solved.
They turn down a residential street lit by floating halo lights along the sidewalks. They pass houses and look for flags in the windows or on the doors. The black material can sometimes make them hard to spot, but they’re both so used to looking that they pause when they see a flap of fabric that can’t be a curtain or a dark spot on the glass of a windowpane that could be paper.
If it’s not a flag, and it’s usually not, they keep going. People who really want their flag seen tend to place it where it’s easily noticed from the street. It is the biggest, most important decision they will ever make and one of the last things they will do. They treat it that way, some almost ritualizing it. Flags are nearly always somewhere well lit, lights left on in the room of the window where it’s hung, the porch light on if it’s on the door, placed near a street light if it’s on a gate or a fence.
There aren’t any flags and Aarom and Sabra walk in companionable silence between the high-rises, through the alleyways, going up elevators and rolling staircases to the floors of apartment buildings, down their many hallways. They pass people occasionally, but no one speaks to them. Some sense something off about them, perhaps even intuit what they are and the business they’re about, and those make a point of either staring or turning their faces away in fear.
They leave the apartment and office buildings behind and enter a nice residential area with large houses surrounded by carefully tended grass and flowerbeds. People here put fences up, they have gates, they own big dogs that bark when someone ventures too close. The halo streetlamps are all lit, casting a foggy blue glow, it’s full dark and cloudy, the rain coming down hard at a slight angle. Any dogs in the neighborhood have retreated inside out of the rain. Distantly, the soft boom of thunder like boulders rolling deep in the earth comes as a warning several seconds before lightning shatters the sky.
“I want to show you something,” Sabra says.
Aarom glances away from the sky to look at the house he’s pointing at. It’s unremarkable as houses go, smaller than most of the houses surrounding it, all on one floor squatting in the middle of a quarter acre of grass that looks a little sun crisped and long. From the street, it seems like all the lights inside are on.
“Nice house,” Aarom says.
Sabra grins. “Not really.”
“Okay. Why did you want to show it to me?”
“Guess whose house it is.”
Aarom has no idea. “Whose house is it?”
“This is the residence of our noble Chief of Police, Marion Flowers,” Sabra says.
Aarom takes a better look at the house. There’s a magnacar parked outside. One of the windows on the passenger side is down. The house is a little older than those surrounding it, built before the area attracted developers and wealthier residents. It still isn’t a very interesting house. Except there’s something hanging in the window that makes it the most interesting house he’s seen all night.
“Sabra, look.”
Sabra is already looking. “Yes, I see it. I do believe there’s a flag hanging in yon window.”
“Yon?” Aarom says.
Sabra nudges him with his arm. “Yon,” he confirms. “Cheer up, Aarom. You’re nearly as damn dreary as this weather we’re having. Smile. This is wonderful.”
“Ah. I don’t know,” Aarom says. “If this is Marion Flowers’s house, don’t you think that’s… strange?”
“Yes I do,” Sabra says. He’s already reaching for the flip latch on the gate to the fence though. “I think it’s strange and wonderful. Like a unicorn.”
“What?” Aarom says. He follows him through the gate and down the walk. “Sabra, he’s the chief of police. All he’s been doing the last few months is publicly condemn us as murderers and swear to rid the city of us.”
“Yes, I know. He talks an awful lot, doesn’t he?” Sabra says. They’re on the porch and he leans out over the railing and cups his hands over his eyes as he peers through the window into the house. “But it’s talk. He’s running for reelection after all. He has to talk about something.”
“This could be something else,” Aarom insists. He glances around, looking into the shadows, but there isn’t anyone lurking there. Marion Flowers doesn’t even seem to own a dog. “This could be a trick. A trap. Or… I don’t know. Murder.”
“Murder?” Sabra asks, looking at him with one eyebrow lifted. “How so?”
“Well, suppose you wanted to kill Marion Flowers?”
“Suppose I did.”
“You can’t kill him because you’re a citizen, not a prophet. So… So maybe you make a flag and you hang it in his window one night.”
Sabra snorts laughter and shakes his head. “Maybe,” he allows. He taps the window glass over the flag. “Except it’s on the inside.”
“Oh,” Aarom says. “It could still be a trap.”
“Could be you’re the most paranoid motherfucker I’ve ever known, Aarom, you know that?” Sabra says. “Which is saying something. You want to wait for me out here?”
“No,” Aarom says. He doesn’t have any deep-seated urge to meet the police chief face-to-face, but he will not let Sabra walk into a possible ambush alone either. “No. I’m coming with you if you’re determined to go in there.”
“Oh, I am,” Sabra says. He surprises Aarom by leaning in to kiss him on the cheek. “You’re sweet. Paranoid, but sweet.”
“Thanks,” Aarom says. “I guess.”
The door is unlocked and Sabra enters the house first, but Aarom’s close behind him. Flowers is waiting at his kitchen table. There’s a plate in front of him with a crust of toasted bread on it and a coffee cup steaming near his right hand. Sabra walks into the kitchen while Aarom shuts the door. Flowers looks calmly between them and raises his cup to sip.
“Saw you boys through the window here,” he says.
His voice is raspy and not as loud as Aarom has heard it in the news and the public announcement posters. There’s one particular poster Aarom has walked by countless times a mile from Iniquity that spans one entire side of a ten story building. Marion Flowers looming ten stories tall and vowing to hunt prophets to the last man is a hell of an imposing figure. Marion Flowers at his kitchen table drinking mellow tan coffee with too much sugar, a drop of mayonnaise from the sandwich that was his last meal on the collar of his blue T-shirt, three days of greying beard growth on his cheeks, staring at them with bloodshot eyes and speaking rather softly is not very intimidating at all. He’s only a man and he’s reached the end of his rope like so many others; a realization that on his face looks like humiliating defeat.
“You might want to be more careful than that. That’s all I’m saying,” he says.
“Not much point in being too careful,” Sabra says. “We’re the only ones anyone has any reason to be afraid of.”
“True enough,” Flowers says. He makes a beckoning gesture with the fingers of one hand waving Sabra forward. “Come on then.”
“Quick as that, hmm?” Sabra says. “No chitchat? No foreplay? No explanation at all for what is, I have to confess, a rather surprising and remarkable change of heart?”
“You’re Sabra Lamar, aren’t you?” Flowers asks him.
Sabra blinks at him. It’s the only sign he gives that hearing his name pass the man’s lips has surprised him. “I am.”
“See, I knew I was close,” Flowers says. “I’ve been trying to find you for a long, long time.”
