These Violent Delights

by Micah Nemerever

  “They’re all dead at the moment,” Paul answered, forcing a smile, “but thanks for checking in.”

  The family treated all four of them with conspicuous delicacy. His mother was pillowed on all sides by his aunts’ soft voices and gentle pats on the arm, so that nothing too sharp stood a chance of reaching her. When Paul and his sisters drifted too close to any group, conversations became artificially light. Younger cousins, who had clearly been instructed to be careful, fell silent altogether rather than cause offense; they exchanged panicked glances, then retreated in a flurry of whispers.

  There was something different about the way the family dealt with Paul; there always had been. But now it had distilled—the fascination, the wariness, the anxious undercurrent of worry. He tried to be polite, which was the nearest he could get to making himself too small to see. He forgot conversations as soon as they ended; all he could remember was what people said as he was walking away. Ruth says college isn’t doing any better for him as far as friends go. No surprise—it’s not his fault, but he’s a little intense, isn’t he? Oh, it must be so hard for her, he looks more like his father every day . . .

  His grandfather caught him creeping into the pantry, where he’d been hoping to gather his thoughts. He gave Paul a knowing smile, which Paul couldn’t find the energy to return. Just past his grandfather’s shoulder Paul could see Hazel, resplendent in her first-generation suburban finery, trying to convince Laurie to taste a spatula of frosting.

  “It’s a bit much, isn’t it?” his grandfather said. “All this fuss.”

  Paul pressed his shoulders against the dry-goods shelves and shut his eyes. He didn’t need to nod. He and his grandfather had repeated this exchange at every family party since he was five.

  “Holding up all right? You’ve got no sort of poker face, Paulie.”

  “Everyone’s treating me like a time bomb,” Paul said, more frankly than he would have dared with anyone else. “So there’s that.”

  His grandfather made an amiable, dismissive noise at the back of his throat.

  “It’s in your head,” he said, as if this would be a great comfort. “What, you think anyone’s still upset about that business with the Costello kid? Boy stuff, the whole thing. That was nothing—ancient history. Your mother might feel a little different,” he added, “but she wouldn’t know, would she? A boy has to defend himself.”

  He was deflecting and they both knew it, but Paul let him believe he hadn’t noticed. After a moment his grandfather gave his arm a quick shake.

  “Come on,” he said, “why don’t we go show Mamaleh what you’ve painted for her?”

  He’d put it off as long as he could, but there was no avoiding it now. His great-grandmother had been placed in the den, her wheelchair folded and set aside to give her a place of honor in one of the good armchairs. She looked like a baby parrot, kindly faced and vulnerable, tiny beneath her blankets. The air around her had a sweet, powdery smell of decay.

  When Paul leaned down to kiss the rice-paper skin of her forehead, she clasped a hand around his fingers. She looked toward Paul’s mother and nodded, so feebly that the gesture was almost invisible.

  “You and Jakob had such beautiful children, Ruthie,” she said, and Paul felt a rare moment of kinship with his mother when he noticed the falter in her smile.

  An awkward hush fell over the room as his great-grandmother struggled with the wrappings. When the paper fell away, the silence didn’t lift.

  Paul had based the painting on the sole photograph to survive his great-grandmother’s adolescence in Lithuania. He had invented from it a proud, handsome girl with long black hair, and a smile—not unlike Laurie’s—that had a trace of mischief in it. He had meant to make the painting happy and gentle for her, something to brighten her dimming days. He watched her adjust her thick glasses to look at it more closely, little hands shaking like thorny branches. He knew, even before she spoke, that it was the cruelest thing he could have given her.

  “It is very strange,” she said, accent distilled by memory. “Strange to think that I am the only person who remembers me this way.” She smiled at Paul, peaceful and resigned, and Paul wished he could fade into the air. “It is always the same, you know, in my mind. No matter how old, when I look into a mirror, this face is what I expect to see.”

  He couldn’t hide his dismay, but she was too nearsighted to see it. She reached for his hand again and squeezed it; her skin was feverishly warm.

  “It is a beautiful memory,” she said. “Thank you.”

  He retreated as soon as he could without drawing notice. He found himself in his aunt’s bedroom, where the dwindling sunlight was blotted to a thin stripe by the curtains. It was cold; Hazel still wasn’t middle-class enough to leave the heat running in an empty room. Paul sat in the window seat, stretching out his thin legs and trying to forget that he existed. His only companions were the shadows of family photographs and the quiet, snuffling snores of the cat at the foot of the bed.

  The door slivered open, and Laurie edged inside. She put a finger to her lips, grinning, and installed herself beside him on the window seat.

  “This is so fucking boring,” she said, reveling in a word that hadn’t yet lost its novelty. She swung her stockinged legs up to drape over his; Paul only gave her a halfhearted shove before yielding to the intrusion. “Hazel wanted me to find you and tell you there’s cake in a few minutes. It’s gross, though, the frosting is full of coconut.”

  “You’re the only one who doesn’t like it, weirdo,” said Paul automatically, but he couldn’t muster any enthusiasm to tease her.

  Laurie rolled her head to one side and touched her temple to the curtains. The family always noticed Paul’s likeness to his father, but no one remarked on how much stronger a resemblance there was in Laurie. Alone among the Fleischer children, she had missed out on their grandfather’s red hair. Her face was fuller than Paul’s and far more kind. But the others didn’t expect her to take after their father—it was something only Paul noticed, something that now and then could strike him breathless with grief.

  “Are you okay?” Her eyes met his, and she made a quick, matter-of-fact assessment, nothing like the rest of the family’s self-interested concern. “You look really sad.”

  Paul was tired of being asked, but he was also tired of pretending the answer was what everyone wanted it to be.

  “Aren’t you sad, too?”

  Laurie made a noise that was a shade too angry to be a laugh.

  “I miss Dad,” she said. “He messed everything up.”

  “Well.” Paul tucked his glasses into his breast pocket and shut his eyes. “You’re not wrong.”

  2.

  He remembered the boy from freshman orientation—months ago now, but the memory still lingered. Paul had only seen him from a distance, then; he was a laughing dark-haired blur with a straight spine, perpetually surrounded by people as if he took for granted that he ought to be. He’d reminded Paul of the golden boys he knew in high school, the state-champion track teammates and stars of school plays. Paul remembered writing an elaborate life story for the boy in his head while he picked at the label on his soda bottle and spoke to no one. He couldn’t remember any details of the story now, but he hadn’t chosen them to be memorable. Paul assumed such people had the luxury of leading uneventful lives.

  The boy had come to class alone, which looked unnatural on him. He sat a row back from Paul, carefully draping his satchel and wool winter coat over the back of his seat. He wore his sleeves folded back from his forearms, which he leaned on as he listened, attentive to the point of impatience. His hands were very like Paul’s, long-fingered and lean, blue delicate shadows of vein just visible. There was a winter-faded smear of freckles beneath his skin, and his watch (burgundy leather) was a shade too large for his wrist.

  The professor was making a list, ethical issues in the sciences. Paul turned forward again at the squeal of the chalk. He thought he felt the other boy glance toward
him, as if he’d finally noticed that he was being watched, but Paul didn’t dare look back.

  “So many eager volunteers,” said Professor Strauss. He picked up the class roster again, holding the chalk between his fingers. He wore a film of eraser dust on his hand like a white laboratory glove. “Let’s see, how about—Paul Fleischer, Biology. Perhaps you can think of a pertinent problem in experimental ethics?”

  His classmates were looking at him, not staring, but in that moment the distinction felt very fine.

  “Well,” he said, “there’s the fact that doctors keep medically torturing people in the name of science whenever they feel like they can get away with it.”

  All the air left the room. Strauss took a moment to shake himself.

  “Human subject experimentation,” Strauss said to the class, “is an excellent example of what we’ll be talking about in this class. The places where the demands of scientific inquiry come up against the boundaries of human need—”

  “Pardon me for interrupting,” said the boy behind him suddenly, “but I don’t think that’s what he was saying.”

  Paul turned, slowly, to look at him. The boy sat at attention, turning his pen between his fingers. When the other students’ eyes landed on him, he hardly seemed to notice.

  “Of course it’s an example,” the boy said, “but it’s not his example. I think what Fleischer is actually getting at is a widespread failure of the scientific conscience to consider the humanity of its subjects at all.”

  “Yes,” said Paul, “yes, that’s it exactly,” but he was speaking so quietly and the words felt so thick that he didn’t think anyone heard him.

  “I think that’s sort of a melodramatic way of putting it,” said a voice from the front. Paul knew the speaker slightly—Brady, an upperclassman in Chemistry who had been the student assistant in Paul’s laboratory section the semester before. There couldn’t have been more than five years between them, but he was decisively a man rather than a boy; his hands were broad and thick-fingered, nails wider than they were long. “This isn’t the Third Reich,” Brady said. “Scientists here operate under ethical standards.”

  “Yes, and those standards work so well,” said Paul acidly. “That’s how we get, what, only a few decades of letting innocent people die of syphilis in Tuskegee before anybody thinks to complain—”

  “Sure, there are problematic studies, conducted by a few bad apples who manage to avoid notice, but we’re doing something about it. With institutional review boards and the like, we’re imposing—”

  “But you can’t impose morality from the outside.” Paul knew anger had seeped into his voice, but he didn’t care. “The whole idea of an infrastructure of ethical oversight is a symptom of the—the ‘failure of the scientific conscience.’ I’m saying there’s something about the way we conduct scientific inquiry that’s actually appealing to people who want to slice people up just to see what happens. Because they sure seem to do it the second they think the infrastructure won’t notice.”

  “A review board is just a hedge on liability,” said the boy behind him. “We can’t and shouldn’t pretend it functions as a conscience. Let’s not delude ourselves that we can send Mengele on his way with a stack of consent forms and pretend that solves the problem.”

  “Spirited debate!” said Strauss with a clap of his chalk-streaked hands. “Highly preferable to dull-eyed terror. Hold that thought, gentlemen, because the readings for week seven in particular will prove pertinent . . .”

  Paul sank back into his chair and exhaled slowly. As the conversation shifted, he felt a stir of movement at his side. The dark-haired boy had gathered his belongings and settled at the desk beside him. Paul watched him, but the boy’s eyes were trained on the professor. They were the same shade of green as sea glass—a soft and striking color but very cold, an eerie contrast with the dark of his lashes.

  Strauss had moved on to a girl from the Physics department, who suggested nuclear weapons research. Paul only half listened to the discussion as he sketched a skeleton with Brady’s barrel chest and wide jaw. He blackened the bones and haloed them from behind with the shadow of a mushroom cloud. Further achievements in American ethics, he wrote underneath. A superior system.

  Something tapped at his ankle—the toe of a jodhpur boot, stained with a faint crust of sidewalk salt. The dark-haired boy was looking over at his notebook, leaning forward so he could see past Paul’s arm.

  Paul felt his face flush. At first he considered turning the page, or tucking his arms around the notebook to conceal it as he’d done countless times, protecting his sketchbooks from the singsong girls who liked to pester him in the cafeteria.

  Instead, scarcely recognizing himself, he pulled the page free and placed it in the boy’s hand.

  “We haven’t had an example from you, yet.”

  Paul jumped, but Strauss was talking to the boy beside him, with a teacher’s well-worn glee at catching a student unawares. The boy hid the drawing under his desk and smiled, unabashed.

  “Just two names to go, and I have to doubt you’re Ramona,” said Strauss serenely. “So you must be—”

  “Julian,” answered the boy. “Julian Fromme.”

  “I see.” Strauss glanced down at his roster again. “And I see I have you down as ‘undeclared’—surely the lives of the indecisive are beset with ethical quandary.”

  A polite titter made its way around the room. In his place Paul would have wanted to melt into the floor, but Julian Fromme endured it without a trace of distress.

  “It’s Psychology, actually, as of yesterday,” Julian said. “And I’m interested in social psychology in particular, which is inherently problematic. Every method of social research does some kind of harm. If you observe social phenomena from a distance, you often only see evidence that conforms to your hypothesis—‘objectivity’ is a lie scientists tell themselves, even in the hard sciences, and with qualitative research, forget it. But if you observe from up close, then your presence alters the nature of the data. And social experiments in controlled environments have certainly been conducted, but they all require some degree of deception to get untainted results—which may or may not cross ethical lines,” he added with a glance at Brady, “depending on the particular conscience your IRB has imposed on you.”

  “Am I to understand, Mr. Fromme,” said Strauss, “that you want ‘social psychology in general’ listed as an ethical debate in the sciences?”

  “Just put me down for ‘confirmation bias,’ ‘observer’s paradox,’ and ‘informed consent,’ please,” said Julian briskly. “I believe that’s the order I cited them in.”

  Strauss raised his eyebrows and smiled. “Very well, Mr. Fromme,” he said. “I suppose we won’t throw you to the wolves just yet.”

  Strauss turned toward the blackboard again, and Paul watched with alarm as Julian casually set the drawing on his own desk. He looked down at it for a moment, stone-faced and calm. Then he wrote something in the margins with a lazy flourish.

  By the time the drawing arrived back in Paul’s hands, Julian’s scarlet ink had bled straight through the cheap paper.

  Crime rate reduced to 0%, Red Menace permanently defeated—an apocalypse for the greater good.

  (Sign this. I want to keep it.)

  It didn’t occur to Paul to wait. At the end of class he pushed his books into his knapsack and zipped his army parka up to the throat. Beyond the second-story windows a soft snow was falling. With the stain of soot blurred by distance, flakes paler than the dark sky, it almost looked white.

  He lingered at the top of the stairs to uncurl the ball of his knit wool gloves. Brady pushed past him. When Paul heard someone call out behind him—“Hey, wait a second”—he thought at first that Brady was the one being pursued. It took the sound of his own last name for him to turn and look back.

  Julian Fromme smiled when he caught Paul’s eye. His gait was brisk but unhurried; he slung his scarf around his neck as he approached, a single lang
uid movement that betrayed an unthinking sureness in his body.

  “In a hurry?”

  “Not really.”

  “Could’ve fooled me.”

  Julian joined him at the head of the staircase, fastening the last button on his double-breasted coat. He looked meticulously cared for, like a rare plant in a conservatory; Paul felt abruptly shabby beside him in his anorak and snow boots, too careworn and practical to be worthy of attention.

  “You look familiar,” Julian said. “Did we see each other at orientation?”

  Paul had forced himself to forget, the memory too humiliating to dwell on. They were supposed to remain strangers—the other boy had been meant to forget him, because Paul couldn’t be the first or last person he’d ever caught watching him. He remembered Julian’s faint smile, the slight rise of his left eyebrow. That eyebrow was sliced through by a thin scar near its outer edge, an incongruous imperfection Paul had noticed with sudden ardor and then stowed away.

  He’d spent the rest of the mixer on a bench outside, waiting out the ninety minutes he had promised his mother. He remembered wanting the strange boy to follow him, but of course he hadn’t. They never did. That was how it was always supposed to end.

  “I don’t really remember,” he replied, and reflected in Julian’s face he immediately saw the weakness of the lie. “I didn’t stay very long, those things give me a headache.”

  Julian smiled, but he didn’t answer. He started down the steps, watching Paul impassively over his shoulder. He didn’t use the railing; Paul tried to ignore it himself, letting his fingertips skate along the edge on the way down as if he paid it no mind, but he’d been nervous about heights all his life and couldn’t quite force his hand to fall.