by J L Aarne
Jonathan pants soft laughter. It fades and turns to a groan when Aarom draws his legs up his sides. “I have sex. I’m not a slut, but it does happen,” he says. He thinks about it, then admits, “But yeah, I bought that for this.”
Aarom pets a hand through his hair. “What do you mean?”
“I mean… it seemed like something that might happen,” Jonathan says. “It’s seemed that way for a while. Then I wondered because, well… you’re you. So maybe not. But I thought it couldn’t hurt anyway and besides, I’d already bought it.”
“That’s nice, I guess,” Aarom says.
Jonathan’s smile is quick and amused. “Well, I’m a nice guy.”
It’s also weird because of the apples. Because of the strong feeling he has more and more as the days go by that the worlds are bleeding into each other in little, coincidental ways.
Jonathan pulls him down the bed a few inches, over his knees and Aarom lifts his hips as he pushes inside him, lets his breath out on a cry and wraps his legs around him. There’s more urgency and need than pleasure to that first slow stroke, but it gets better, it builds to pleasure and pleasure grows like a gasoline fire. Aarom clings to him, holds him tightly, arches against him when Jonathan takes his hands, holds them down to the mattress and laces their fingers together. They rest for a few minutes, then they do it again and Aarom rolls Jonathan beneath him and rides him. The world narrows to the two of them, their bodies and senses, the motion and friction of them, each desire satisfied giving rise to new ones.
In the end, they both come unraveled and stop more out of sheer exhaustion than lack of desire. Even lying there spent, Aarom’s hands stray to touch Jonathan, marveling at his new freedom to do so. He has combating memories inside his mind and it’s both new and not new, but for now it’s new and he doesn’t dwell on the rest. He traces his fingers down Jonathan’s spine, kisses his shoulders, his neck, runs his hands over him until Jonathan laughingly pushes him away.
Aarom lays back and closes his eyes.
“I have to cut out your chip,” Aarom says. It occurs to him as he begins to drift off to sleep and jerks him awake.
Jonathan grunts in affirmation, but puts a hand on Aarom’s chest to make him lay back down. “Later,” he says. “It’s fine. Right now all that happened is I missed a day of work and didn’t call in. You cut it out now and we’ll have to hurry out of here, so just wait.”
Aarom relaxes back on the bed. He yawns. “Naptime?”
“Mhmm. That’s my personal goal right now,” Jonathan says. “Followed by molesting you at least once more before I drag my ass to the shower. Then we can get down to cutting me open, okay?”
Aarom smiles sleepily. He’s happy, which is strange and wonderful, not entirely because he just spent a couple of hours having sex with Jonathan, but it’s definitely a contributing factor. The idea of cutting him shouldn’t please him as much as it does, either, but it does.
“You can live with me,” he says.
“Figured I’d have to,” Jonathan says. “Where do you live anyway?”
“The sprawl,” Aarom says. “I have an apartment. The building looks like a shithole on the outside, but it’s not so bad inside.”
“You like it that way,” Jonathan says. It is not a new revelation into Aarom’s character that he should know this. “Because it’s camouflage.”
“Mhmm, it is. No one cares about it very much. The old monuments that used to be so important are crumbling. There’s a huge museum, several buildings full of stuff, most of it outlawed, but a few old people from before still watch over it. I’ve been there. It’s interesting, but people don’t care about any of that, either. The cameras get broken—no one fixes them. The sentinels get stolen—no one replaces them or cares where they went. Service announcement posters end up in the gutter or taken for the smartpaper. There’s graffiti, shine, contraband, addicts, whores, thieves, rebels, outlaws and there’s me. Me and a few others.”
“That sounds… Do you like it?”
“I love it.” This is a bit of a revelation to Aarom, but even as he says it aloud, he realizes it’s absolutely true.
He does worry that Jonathan won’t like it though. He is used to a completely different way of life. Most acolytes are in the beginning, but Aarom’s never had an acolyte and he doesn’t think he’d care about another one the way he does about Jonathan. He wants Jonathan to be happy with him. He doesn’t want being a prophet, not dying, to be the end of his life and something he’ll come to regret.
Some of this must show on his face or Jonathan senses a change in his mood and his worry. He tilts his head on his pillow and regards Aarom with calm affection. He tucks a lock of his hair back from his face and smiles.
“I’ll get used to it,” he says. “If I can get used to caves in the desert, I can get used to that. Let’s go to sleep now, what do you say?”
“Sure,” Aarom says.
He’s still a little worried about it, but he closes he eyes anyway and in no time, he falls asleep.
When he wakes a couple of hours later, he sees the stars again, but there is no moment of confusion this time. He knows precisely where he is. He’s in Jonathan’s bed, but Jonathan isn’t there, he’s alone. He swipes a hand out over the sheet beside him and finds it still faintly warm from his body. He lays there for a minute and hears the water running in the shower in the adjoining bathroom.
The water shuts off and Jonathan strolls into the bedroom with a towel slung low around his waist, ruffling another through his hair. He drops down on the bed next to Aarom and bends to kiss him. He tastes like mint toothpaste and smells like citrus and flowers.
“I have to cut that chip out,” Aarom tells him again when the kiss ends.
Jonathan sighs. “You know, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you were getting off on the idea of hacking into me.”
“No,” Aarom says. “No, but it has to be done.”
“Yeah, well let me pack some things first so we don’t have to run out the door,” Jonathan says. “Go shower. You smell like sex. Not that it’s a bad fragrance for you, but you know, places to go and all.”
“All right.”
Aarom starts around the bed to the bathroom, but Jonathan stops him. He doesn’t say anything for a moment and sits frowning with Aarom’s wrist in his hand. “My parents can’t know, can they?” he asks.
There’s a plunging sensation in his stomach as Aarom shakes his head. “You’re only really safe if no one knows,” he says. “They are only safe if no one knows.”
“So I’m dead,” Jonathan says.
“Yes,” Aarom says. He squeezes Jonathan’s fingers. “And no.”
Jonathan takes a deep breath, lets him go and says, “Okay. Okay, go on and shower.”
Aarom doesn’t move. He rests a hand on Jonathan’s shoulder. Jonathan reaches up and takes his hand, slips their fingers together briefly before letting go and nudging him toward the bathroom.
“It’s okay, Aarom,” he says. “I’m okay.”
He wants to be alone for a little while. Aarom can tell. He leaves him and goes to clean up. He takes a little longer washing his hair and lathering the soap into his skin than he needs to give Jonathan a few more minutes of privacy.
When he emerges from the bathroom, Jonathan’s packed and waiting for him in the living room. He hasn’t used a suitcase, rightly suspecting that it might be noticed, and has packed what belongings he can’t live without into a gym bag. From a look around the house, what he can’t live without consists of a few changes of clothes, the photographs that were on the walls and the books Aarom has given him over the years.
When Aarom cuts the chip from his hand, the authorities will know what’s happened to him, but to his friends and family he will be dead. The story they tell the people in his life depends on the person; in Jonathan’s case, an unavoidable accidental death during the commission of a robbery might do best because of how close his house is to the slums. Officially dead, unofficially an outlaw—it�
��s how they all live together without the firmaments crashing down around them.
They go to the kitchen to do it and Aarom tries to be as smooth and quick as he can be with the cut, but his hand shakes a bit. The crescent shaped cut isn’t as expertly done as he’s seen Sabra do it. The scar won’t be as clean as his own. But it gets the job done. He crushes the chip while Jonathan holds his hand under the water. Then he offers him shine to dull the pain, but Jonathan refuses it, so he fishes a milder pain medication out of one of his inside pockets and Jonathan swallows that. It’s just as well, they have to leave and it’s still early evening and light outside, so he can’t carry Jonathan down the street. Someone would notice.
Jonathan is in pain, but well enough that he hefts the gym bag over his shoulder and follows Aarom out of the house. Aarom puts an arm around him to help him along when the worst of the pain really hits him and he almost collapses. A block over and a mile west, Aarom waves down a taxi. He uses his proxy chip so Jonathan doesn’t have to identify himself and pays with untraceable credits. These are things that come naturally to him which Jonathan will have to learn.
On the way to the inner city, Jonathan passes out. Aarom tells the driver that he had a little too much to drink and the driver doesn’t press him about it. When the taxi lets them out, he carries Jonathan and his gym bag up the fifteen flights of stairs to his apartment, stopping several times to rest.
He tucks Jonathan into bed, writes him a note in case he wakes and goes out to pick them up something hot to eat for dinner.
12.
They both attend Jonathan’s funeral. No one knows that they’re there. They stand far away from the mourners so that it will appear they are standing over another grave, there for a different reason. They wear coats with hoods that they pull up over their heads to hide their faces. It’s raining so the hoods don’t even seem out of place.
Jonathan’s mother wraps her grief around herself like a cloak and does her best to carry herself with grace and dignity, her tears sliding quietly down her face, her ex-husband holding her. Aarom is grateful to the woman for that. If she wailed, he thinks it might break Jonathan’s heart. It might take more than words and reason to keep him from going to her.
“I feel like Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer watching their own funeral from the church rafters,” Jonathan says.
“I don’t,” Aarom says.
Jonathan considers it. “I suppose you’re right,” he says. “If I remember, they were… flattered by the attention.”
He wipes at his face, trying not to let Aarom know that he’s crying. His voice doesn’t betray him, it’s steady, and the rain disguises it some, but Aarom still knows. He doesn’t mention it though.
“I just wish I didn’t have to do this to them,” Jonathan says.
“I know. I’m sorry,” Aarom says. “It’s a lot to give up.”
“Don’t do that,” Jonathan says. “You didn’t ask me to do it and it’s not like I didn’t know the risk. I’m lucky to still be alive, don’t think I’ve forgotten it.”
“I’m not trying to remind you,” Aarom says gently.
He puts an arm around Jonathan and Jonathan turns in to him, puts his face against the side of his neck and hugs him back. Aarom feels his warm tears turn cold on his neck and part of him wishes things could be different because Jonathan in tears, wracked by grief, feels so wrong it makes him a little sick.
Jonathan steps away from him and looks toward his funeral again. His expression is inscrutable, his tears sliding steadily down his face, dripping with the rain onto his coat. He says, “That’s my Great Aunt Roxanne. I haven’t seen her since we moved here. You know she used to tell me she was named after a famous song. I looked it up once and you know the only song I could find about a girl named Roxanne is about a prostitute? I wonder if that’s the one she meant.”
Aarom smiles, privately thinking that it makes a good story either way.
“Do you regret it?” he asks.
Jonathan stiffens. Then he turns his head and looks him right in the eyes. “No,” he says. “No, I don’t. It’s hard, but I’ll be fine.”
Aarom nods. It is hard. He still visits his mother every week, after all. He hasn’t moved on, but she has and he won’t take that away from her. He envies her the ability to let go; he has never been good at letting go. Maybe Jonathan will do it better.
“We saved them, didn’t we?” Jonathan asks. “I mean… we chose right. Didn’t we?”
He felt it, too. That moment when they could have chosen one world or the other. Both of them chose to stay in this one.
“I don’t know,” Aarom says. “I think… I think it takes more than two of us to change the world though. Then again, there’s Howard Vaughn. I think maybe the answer is subject to change.”
“Subject to change?” Jonathan says. He smiles teasingly. “Like the terms of a contract?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know. I think right now it was the right answer. I think maybe… maybe someday it won’t be anymore.”
“Here’s hoping we’re not around when that happens then. Let it be someone else’s choice. I don’t think I could do it. Send us back to the Stone Age. Kill all those people.”
“It is much easier to do it one at a time.”
Jonathan snorts. The laughter is a nice change in him. He’s going to be okay, Aarom thinks. They’re both going to be okay.
Jonathan raises Aarom’s hand in his to his mouth and kisses his fingers. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“Making me laugh. Letting me cry on you.”
“You’re welcome.”
Jonathan looks down at the wet ground and kicks up a clump of sod with the toe of his boot. “Is it hard the first time?”
He knows what he’s asking. If there’s a flag, tonight will be Jonathan’s first reaping. Aarom will go with him, but Jonathan’s will be the hand the supplicant takes and he will open the door and build the bridge and show them the way. He will tell them their story and give their death to them. He’s nervous and Aarom doesn’t blame him. He wouldn’t be Jonathan if death was something that came to him easily.
“It’s different every time,” Aarom says. “It’s harder at first. It sounds awful… but you get used to it.”
“That does sound awful.” But he seems relieved to hear it.
They stand there without speaking for a while and watch the gathered mourners. They are burying a casket without a body inside, though it’s unlikely they know it. Aarom did not attend his own funeral and he has never had any reason to attend another, so he doesn’t know how it’s done now. Whether they fill the casket with sandbags and rocks or if they have a body substitute created. When his father died, Aarom was a very small child. They had dressed his father in a suit, his face was too smooth and he hadn’t looked very much like Aarom’s smiling papa at all.
The people he knows now are all supposed to be dead, but he hasn’t known a prophet other than Matthew who has ever died, and he did not really know Matthew. There is a ritual for the disposal of a dead prophet, but Aarom has never bothered to ask Sabra or anyone else what it is. Fire seems most likely. He finds the idea more comforting than the prospect of being lowered into the ground in a box, six feet of cold, heavy soil shoveled in on top of him.
When Aarom’s father died, there was music. His grandfather recited from the Qur’an. Aarom hadn’t understood a word of it, but he understood that his father was gone and never coming back, that his mother was so sad she couldn’t stop leaking from the eyes and that all of this fuss had something important to do with it. There was a reception after and food and Aarom hid under one of the tables until everyone was gone and his mother called for him.
Jonathan isn’t in the box they lower into the earth, he’s standing right beside him, but the sight of it disappearing into the hole in the ground still sends a chill along his arms. Aarom is the only one of them who still knows he’s alive, so he doesn’t share their grief, but he can imagine it.
He hasn’t been to many of them, but Aarom thinks it’s the saddest funeral he’s ever attended.
“I want to go home,” Jonathan says.
The funeral isn’t over, but there isn’t much left to see. The casket has been lowered and everyone is standing around talking in low voices and weeping. Jonathan’s eyes are fixed on his mother and father, but he abruptly turns his back on the sight and looks at Aarom.
“I’m tired, Aarom. I want to go home.”
“Okay,” Aarom says.
The tombstone they’ve been standing beside reads, DEBORAH HASTINGS, BELOVED DAUGHTER. The name is familiar, but it takes Aarom a few seconds to recall why he knows it. Then he remembers and he smiles and holds out his hand for Jonathan to take. Deborah Hastings, the young woman eaten by wild dogs like Jezebel in the Bible.
He touches the tips of his fingers to the top of the stone and thinks, I remember you.
“Let’s go home,” he says to Jonathan.
They walk around the stones until they reach the pathway that leads out of the cemetery. Behind them, Jonathan’s funeral is over and the first people begin to leave. Their condolences carry on the breeze to Aarom and Jonathan as soft, wordless sounds like music turned down so low it’s nothing but noise.
At the gate before they leave Aarom leans over to pick a flower growing beside the pathway. It’s a bright yellow dandelion with rain caught in the clumps of tiny petals. He gives it to Jonathan, half expecting him to throw it away when he thinks Aarom isn’t looking, but he keeps it. He holds it in one hand and Aarom’s hand in the other and they walk home through the rain.
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