These Violent Delights

by Micah Nemerever

  It should have been more conspicuous, the secret they carried between them like two children playing at spies. It glowed in their skin, filled their horizon with colors no one else could see. Before now he’d never liked the way they looked together, because next to Julian he’d felt graceless and undeserving. But there was no longer such an agonizing asymmetry. When he saw their reflection in a shop window or a windshield or the rust-flecked bathroom mirror in Charlie Stepanek’s apartment in Polish Hill, Paul didn’t see the weaknesses and imperfections in his own body. Instead he saw how the secret held them together—made them vibrant and too-alive.

  (The first time they visited the bridge, Julian asked Paul to pull over partway down the hill so they could take a picture. Julian had brought his little Japanese camera, still half full of black-and-white film from his freshman photography class. He put it on the roof of the car and set the timer, and they waited hand in hand under a canopy of leaves. Before the shutter clicked, they locked eyes and couldn’t keep from smiling. As if they couldn’t see anything beyond each other; as if they couldn’t believe their luck.)

  They were wild and delirious and invincible, and it was strange that no one else could see it. But even Paul’s mother had given up on looking at them directly—she was determined to go on liking Julian at all costs, no matter what she had to ignore. They moved like ghosts through the halls of the strange apartment complex and parked unseen for hours across from the shipping depot. They were the authority on whether or not they were visible, and no one dared challenge them.

  They made a game of concealing the secret, talking around it with code words and jokes even when they were alone. Speaking too frankly was fatal to productivity—once it began, they would try to one-up each other with violent honesty, until they were both so giddy and overwhelmed that they couldn’t get anything done. So Julian’s notebook was nicknamed “the football,” after the briefcase full of launch codes that was always within snatching distance of the President’s hands; the police, rarely mentioned, were “mutually assured destruction.”

  The most vital unspoken rule was never to use the word kill, so of course Julian gleefully broke it. He would finish unrelated sentences with “. . . and then we kill the bastard,” which always startled Paul into laughter. But when they discussed it seriously, the word could derail the entire conversation, and Julian knew better than to use it as anything but a joke.

  So the final phase of the project was not a killing, certainly not a murder, but an endgame. The code name fit better, anyway, because a murder necessitated a victim. An endgame had only victor and defeated, and even those were beside the point. It was a coup de grâce born of pure reason, that could only live by destroying. The subject, now that he’d been chosen, was no longer “the subject.” Instead he was “our friend”—a friend whose voice they had never heard, glimpsed only from a distance through Paul’s binoculars. They’d circled one name in the end, and there was no need to say it out loud.

  Audrey was the only one who could see any change in them. She took to asking where they were going, though Paul’s mother was content to let Julian whisk him away for hours without explanation. (“You always hated it when Dad asked you,” Paul pointed out, but she only shrugged and replied that she was curious.) Now and then some fragment of dinner-table conversation would remind them of the project, and they would fall into a nervous laughter that made Audrey raise her eyebrows. She might not be able to name it, but she was the only person who could even tell a secret was there.

  She seized the chance to confront him the first time they were home alone together. She hadn’t planned it, Paul could tell—when she heard him descending the basement stairs with a basket of laundry, there was a note of alarm in her voice.

  “Hello?”

  Paul paused midway down the staircase. A pungent sandalwood smell rose from below, from the candles Audrey liked to burn to cover up the smell of grass. He rolled his eyes and continued downward. “It’s just me,” he said. “Ma’s still out.”

  Silence—Paul thought a rather chastened one. He spotted Audrey past the cloth curtain over the laundry-room doorway. She was putting on a record and staunchly pretending there was nothing of interest between her thumb and two forefingers.

  “You know Ma’s going to have an aneurysm if she finds out you’re still doing that in the house.” Paul flicked on the washing machine and pushed open the curtain. Audrey flashed him a rude gesture, and he put his tongue out with deliberate childishness. He felt like he was getting away with something, falling back into the role of the pedantic little brother she expected him to be. Lying came easily now, without even a flicker of discomfort. It felt natural, as if he were meant to have been living a bisected life all along.

  The autumn chill had swept through the rest of the house before settling in the basement. Audrey wore her sheepskin coat and knee-high boots. The space heater coughed under the weight of the cold.

  “Is Julian here?” She threw herself back onto the couch and exhaled a mouthful of smoke. When Paul shook his head, she motioned for him to sit down.

  He felt no fear. He was already certain she couldn’t see him, so he knew it was safe to dare her. He looked her in the eye and folded his hands, just barely bracing himself.

  “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about him,” she said.

  She tapped ash from the end of the joint before leaving it to rest in the tray.

  “Look,” she went on. “I know he’s having problems with his family right now, and it’s not that I don’t sympathize. But my first priority is you, and I’m worried about what you’re getting into.”

  An odd urge to smile, so sudden that he barely managed to suppress it.

  “When you hang out together,” said Audrey, “do you feel like he actually likes you for who you are, or does he make you feel like you have to impress him?”

  This time he did smile—and then laughed, incredulous, which she didn’t seem to expect. You don’t see me. You can’t. You never could.

  “Stop being such a fucking teenager and listen to me for a second, will you?” she said tartly. “I’ve been seventeen, okay? I know there’s a type that acts like perfect little angels around adults, but in private they make you feel like you owe them something for being your friend. And you don’t owe him anything. I don’t care how horrible his parents might be—if he makes you feel bad about yourself, there’s no excuse.”

  She fidgeted with her hair and avoided his eyes, as if she found her own sincerity ridiculous. He pitied her, watching her love and fear for the fragile child she saw in his stead.

  “You want to turn it into something simple and boring and pathetic.” He could tell she had expected him to be defensive; she couldn’t make sense of how calm he was. “It isn’t like that. It isn’t anything anyone else could understand.”

  “Well, I’m sure you’re right,” said Audrey. “I’m sure no one else in all of human history could ever—” But she stopped herself, sighed, and leaned forward to take a long drag from her joint. “Ugh, whatever. It’s your life, you’re entitled to make your own mistakes, just . . . if I’m actually right, I want you to know you deserve better and you don’t have to put up with it.”

  She couldn’t see him any better than anyone else could. Whatever her gut told her, she would morph it in order to preserve the illusion of what she thought he was. They had nothing to fear from her; the secret was safe.

  When Julian arrived the next morning, neither his mother nor his sister asked where they were going. As they were leaving, he could feel Audrey’s gaze behind them, so he laced his hand through Julian’s and refused to look back. The stories his family told about him weren’t the affront he’d always thought they were. They were a shield. He had never realized before how much power they gave him.

  “With you,” Julian said, “the line between clever and fussy is vanishingly fine.”

  The car was idling so they could warm their hands in front of the heating vent. Paul lowered
the binoculars and turned to face him, but Julian wasn’t looking at him; he was taking a sip from the thermos, shoulders squared against the chill.

  “It isn’t fussy,” said Paul. “Do you have a better way to get him to move under his own steam instead of bowling straight through us? And if you say ‘just make it look like a mugging’ one more time—”

  “Yes, yes, I know, ‘introduces too much volatility to the situation.’ I think you just don’t like it because you think it’s vulgar.”

  “Well, it is.” He refused to be abashed. “The point isn’t just getting away with it, the point is making an example of him.”

  “Fussy,” said Julian, and Paul lifted the binoculars again rather than argue.

  He watched Stepanek hop down from the back of a truck and dust off his ungloved hands. Paul never managed to hold their friend’s face in his memory. Stepanek’s every feature faded as soon as he was out of sight; Paul often had the strange feeling that he was already forgetting the face even before he was done looking at it. There were only a few photographs on the walls of the grim bachelor apartment, all featuring Stepanek in a group—three buzz-cutted children in a Sears family portrait, a uniformed mass of shoulder pads and football helmets, sweat-streaked war criminals grinning arm in arm on the deck of their patrol boat. Paul had seen his face in person more times than he could count, but no matter how closely he examined the photographs he could never decide which figure was him.

  But he was a big man, solidly built, a full head taller than they were. That detail never faded, because it posed a serious problem.

  Julian elbowed him gently and handed over the thermos like a truce flag. He’d cooked the minestrone himself, part of his ongoing project to save money by learning to cook; predictably, he’d left it on the stove until it disintegrated into oversalted mush. Paul didn’t particularly want to accept the offering, but it was endearing, the way Julian tended to his comfort as if it mattered as much as his own. There was such a reflexive, unguarded sweetness to the gesture that Paul decided not to notice the defects in its particulars. He drank enough to satisfy Julian’s concern, then handed it back with a nod.

  “All right,” said Julian bracingly. “Let’s have a look and see how much trouble you’ve gotten us into.”

  In Paul’s pocket the vial had grown warm with the heat of his body. Julian took it from his hand and inspected it, as if he might unearth some understanding from a years-old prep-school chemistry class.

  “It won’t put him under completely.” Paul was proud, and defensive because of it. “Just enough that we can get him to do what we need him to do—walk out onto the bridge, maybe even jump. And he won’t feel pain. That’s the main reason they use it, when there’s no time to prep a full anesthetic. It gets used a lot on battlefields.”

  “Maybe he’s had it before.” Julian said it without compassion. “How did you even get this?” he asked. “Don’t they keep this kind of thing locked away?”

  “I was getting something else out of storage for my microbiology lab. Yes, my name’s on the log sheet,” he added before Julian could ask, “but hundreds of others will be too, by the time anyone notices it’s gone.”

  Julian bit his tongue and didn’t argue. “Will I trip if I see how it tastes?” he asked instead. Paul shook his head, so he carefully unscrewed the cap and tapped a drop onto his fingertip. When he tasted it, he winced, then shrugged.

  “Could be worse,” he said. “Kind of bitter and soapy, but I guess if it was diluted enough he might ignore it . . .”

  Paul took the vial back and tightened the cap before pocketing it again. “It means we don’t have to change the method,” he prompted. “We just give him some coffee or soup—something warm—he’ll appreciate it, it’ll probably be cold outside. Put it in the cup itself, not the thermos, so he can see us drinking from it and won’t get suspicious. And if he doesn’t take it,” he went on, prouder and more defensive by the moment, “it means we can safely abort. Nothing to cover up, no reason for him to be suspicious, no volatility. It’s—”

  “—Clever,” Julian conceded. “A little fussy, still. But clever.”

  In the distance, one of their friend’s coworkers was telling a joke. The rest of them laughed, but their friend only smiled. When the others went inside the warehouse, Stepanek dawdled to tie his bootlace before joining them.

  Paul looked away because something about the moment irritated him. They were there because of Stepanek’s very forgettability, his eagerness to surrender his conscience to the crowd. Paul preferred it when their friend blended in with the others. It made it easier to remember what he represented—what he was still capable of doing if the right person gave the order.

  “He’s built like a goddamn quarterback.” Julian’s gaze followed Stepanek until he disappeared into the warehouse; then he looked at Paul, skeptical and wary. “Are you sure there’s enough in one bottle to bring him down?”

  It was beginning to annoy him that Julian was still second-guessing him, but he held his tongue. It was a necessary part of the process, even this late in the game. Julian wasn’t asking anything Paul hadn’t asked himself already; he should feel better, not worse, knowing that he had an answer for every question.

  “The dosage formula is very straightforward,” he said. “It’s the same one Sullivan used for the fox. It’ll be more than enough.”

  12.

  They cut their afternoon classes the first Wednesday in November, two weeks to the day before the start of the holiday weekend. Come endgame it would be a little different—no work or classes, an entire day to account for each other’s whereabouts and collect receipts for Julian’s little green ledger. But it was an acceptable deviation, as long as the rest of the dry run followed the plan to the letter. There were always details that couldn’t be anticipated, but they had to hew close enough to the plan to ensure there would be no major surprises.

  “What did you tell your mother?” Julian asked when he picked Paul up outside the Biology building.

  Paul pushed his knapsack into the back seat and slammed the door. “I had a whole spiel planned about prepping for our stats final, but she didn’t even ask. I shouldn’t have bothered.”

  “I can’t figure her out,” said Julian; Paul only shrugged.

  “She likes you,” he said, and gave Julian a wry smile. “God only knows why.”

  At first it felt like a game, gathering the pieces of an alibi they never planned to need. First a pair of ticket stubs at the art-house theater, where they whispered and roughhoused and covertly kissed through a dispassionately European black-and-white film neither had the patience to follow. Then a receipt from the bookstore, where Julian bought Paul a book of Shirley Jackson stories and himself an incomprehensible novel by Andy Warhol. It was the latter purchase that triggered an expansive, almost-unserious argument while they were waiting in line. They were boiling with talk and laughter, play-acting fiercely as versions of themselves that were immune from fear, and an eruption was all but inevitable. Their quarrel drew dirty looks from the other customers, but adrenaline had cured Paul of all his self-consciousness.

  “We should’ve saved that for the endgame,” Julian remarked while they were leaving. “People would remember us.”

  “I’m sure you’ll think of something else to be wrong about by then,” said Paul, unabashed. “His work is just so pretentious, I don’t see why you—”

  Julian wheeled around on the sidewalk. There was something off about his body language, but it took Paul a few seconds to recognize it.

  “It’s like the worst kind of jazz,” said Julian. Paul burst out laughing—it was a facsimile of Paul’s own voice, his vehement gestures, made unfamiliar at first by the cigarette between Julian’s fingers. “That’s what it is, it’s self-referential and all about technique and theory, and for all the bright colors there’s nothing alive in it—”

  Paul almost couldn’t recall how much it had hurt, the first time he saw the shape of himself echoed
in Julian’s body. For all the lingering awkwardness and clipped, too-sharp consonants, Paul barely recognized the person Julian was imitating. He had already become something more.

  “Well? All it does is make critics feel clever.” Paul gave him an agreeable shove. “Stop party-tricking me, you creep.”

  “Whatever, you love it.”

  As he spoke, Julian relaxed back into his own skin. He pushed his cuff up his wrist and looked at his watch. The faint tension that appeared now was entirely his own.

  “Getting to be that time,” he said, exhaling in a rush. “Shall we?”

  A little less talk now; a little less playful. Their energy hadn’t ebbed, only remembered its purpose. They parked midway up Polish Hill and walked the rest of the way. The narrow avenues were bounded by a chaos of trees and devouring vines, cast in shadow by a sun that was already setting. It was steep and wild here, unlike Paul’s own neighborhood even at its most neglected. Before they chose their friend, Paul had made a few sketches of the vista outside the apartment—the low moss-stained wall, the steep drop into the woods, and the shining freight tracks far below. The drawings were rough-hewn and verdant, rendered with a grace he hadn’t known he’d possessed. He’d had to burn them with everything else.

  Their friend worked swing on Wednesday nights. By the time they arrived, he’d already gone, but so recently that there were still echoes of him. There was a fresh glister to the motor-oil stain on the asphalt parking lot. They let themselves in with the key he kept under the doormat, looped on its tongue-colored gumband. Inside, a faint ghost of aftershave traced his path around the house, from the bathroom to the bedroom to the door.

  As always, Julian paused in the kitchen to pet the little brown terrier, then pulled a piece of jerky out of his pocket and coaxed the dog up on its hind legs. Paul turned to the wall calendar, crooked on its nail and open to November’s photograph of a mountain in Alaska. There were X-marks up through the day before. Paul uncapped the red marker, hands a little clumsy in their gloves, and he mimed crossing out the Wednesday their friend would never see through.