These Violent Delights

by Micah Nemerever

  His father’s lawyer friend was winding down his argument. Paul saw him check his watch and sigh. The prosecutor’s shoulders sagged, and with stone-faced urgency he paged through his folders. Their case is D.O.A.—Paul hadn’t believed it, and he still wasn’t sure he could, but in the lawyer’s weary Yinzer drawl the nasty coincidences stopped sounding like much at all.

  Paul couldn’t ignore Benton any longer. He was still looking at Paul; once he spoke, Julian abruptly lowered his eyes.

  “There’s still the baseball bat.” An ugly silence echoed. Even without looking, Paul could feel his mother tense; Julian grasped Paul’s hand tighter.

  The lawyer didn’t blink. “The one you never found?” he said, as if the problem were long solved and its continued discussion was beginning to bore him.

  “The one that’s very conveniently gone missing.” Benton’s frustration pushed up against the confines of his self-control, but it didn’t break through. “Left-to-right swing, just like your client’s, but by some strange coincidence—”

  “He gave it away nearly a year ago,” said the lawyer, checking his watch again, “which people sometimes do with things they don’t need anymore. Not to mention that if I read the coroner’s report right, it was only a cylindrical object the size of a baseball bat—I’m sorry to get gruesome, Mrs. Fleischer,” he added, because she’d made a quiet strangled noise, “but it could just as easily have been a pipe.”

  “Hell if it was,” Marinetti muttered, but Benton gave him a warning look and he fell silent again.

  “I’m going to be late for dinner,” the lawyer went on, as if he hadn’t heard. “Christ, Sal, are we really doing this? It gets dismissed the second a judge claps eyes on it, you don’t want to waste the court’s time any more than I do.”

  Paul didn’t register the shallowness of his own breathing until the prosecutor and detectives disappeared behind the mirror, and he drew a sudden deep inhale. His mother slowly let her hand slide free of his arm. He expected to see relief in her face, but her eyes were glassy. She swept one fingertip under her lower lid, but there were no tears there to catch.

  “I’m so sorry about this.” Julian’s voice was raw-throated and little-used all day. Paul turned quickly, but Julian was leaning forward, looking down the table toward Paul’s mother. “It’s all my fault,” he said, so miserable and eager for absolution that he hardly seemed to be wearing a mask at all. “Trying to buy grass of all things, it was so stupid, if I hadn’t gone up there none of this would have happened.”

  At first Paul’s mother didn’t parse what he was saying. When she finally focused on Julian’s face, she was bewildered, then pitying, but there was something elusive and frightening in her eyes. “I don’t understand why your parents aren’t here.” Her voice was so vague and faraway that any warmth faded away across the distance. “Someone needs to be looking after you.”

  “They’re probably in France for Christmas,” he said. Julian was asking her for something Paul wasn’t sure she could still give. “I don’t want their help, anyway. They’ve been very clear that I’m not their problem anymore.”

  Paul couldn’t bear to look at his mother any longer; it took enough of his nerve just to look at Julian. “He has me to look after him,” he said.

  When the door into the hall swung open, Benton was alone. He’d pulled all the anger back inside, but Paul could feel it, and he knew what it meant. He told himself to be relieved, but he couldn’t even imitate it anymore.

  “Well?” asked the lawyer, but he’d already clicked his briefcase shut.

  Benton looked from Paul to Julian and back again. Then he lifted one hand to shield his eyes from the setting winter sun.

  “We’ll be in touch,” he said, and he stepped away to let them pass.

  He had braced for every possibility but this one. There was supposed to be a world outside for them to unite against, and they were supposed to forgive each other once they knew no one else would. He was ready for anything but the fog that hung between them now as they sat in the back of the family car, waiting for Paul’s mother to come drive them home.

  She was talking to the lawyer, and had been for a while. In the rearview mirror Paul could see her, standing on the police station steps in her purple winter coat. The lawyer was one stair above her, headless in the reflection. Paul couldn’t understand the hopelessness in her face, the way she hugged herself as she spoke. “He’s a good boy,” she had told the lawyer, and then the police, over and over, in a voice so small they could pretend to ignore her. “You’re out of your minds. Both of them are good boys.” It hadn’t occurred to Paul before now that she might not believe it.

  “I can’t stay in this city.” Julian sat in a slouch, one leg crossed over the other, a coil-tight caricature of repose. Cigarette number four wasn’t allowed to burn inside the car, so he turned it between his fingers and tapped it against the armrest. Paul could picture every point in the constellations of his freckles. Paul saw a faint impression of his teeth at the side of his neck, a mark that Julian’s skin had already almost forgotten. “I don’t care where we go.” Julian stared straight ahead, unblinking, but he nearly managed to sound indifferent. “Anywhere. I just want to get in the car and drive until I forget what the air here tastes like. I wake up in the middle of the night and feel like I can’t breathe, I just want . . .”

  It was agonizing how little the word we surprised him. Refusing Julian would have been a kindness, and Paul knew himself too well to try. All he could do was need. Even if they never forgave each other; even if it ruined them both.

  “It should be a real city,” Paul said quietly, and he hated Julian for refusing to flinch when he touched him. “I know you’d like that better than Vermont-or-Maine. I don’t care either way, you’re all I need, I’ll go anywhere you want.”

  It was a handsome silk lining for the inside of the shadowbox they would trap each other in, and both of them knew it. But Paul could tell from his smile that Julian almost didn’t mind.

  “Maybe Montreal,” he said. “You’d like it there. I could teach you French.”

  Paul sensed his mother approaching before he let himself see her, a dim violet shape moving past the glass. She slid into the driver’s seat, as slowly and gingerly as if her back ached. “You’ll have to help me navigate, sweetheart,” she said to Julian, but she didn’t look either of them in the eye.

  They ghosted through the quiet streets, hardly speaking. Paul rested his head on Julian’s shoulder and watched the snowflakes melt on the windshield. The city was a jagged, verdant dream already slipping from his memory. He wished he could believe anything better would replace it.

  When his mother pulled to a halt in front of Julian’s building she leaned forward, clutching the steering wheel, and looked at it with bleak dismay. She didn’t turn off the engine or even pull the parking brake; she was as eager to leave as Julian was. Paul followed Julian out of the car, but his mother jerked her door open and grabbed him by the sleeve.

  “No,” she said. Her voice was shaking, and she looked as if she might cry, but Paul had never seen such flinty resolve in her eyes. “No, Paul. You’re coming home.”

  Julian stood on the steep sidewalk, one hand still outstretched toward Paul’s wrist. He looked between them with badly concealed panic. Paul took his mother’s hand, imagining he could pacify her if he clasped it tenderly enough.

  “I’ll be back in a few days to get my things.” He just had to make himself into a convincing enough authority on the truth. “We have to leave, it doesn’t matter what really happened, they’ll never leave us alone if—”

  “No,” she repeated. “This isn’t a negotiation. You’re seventeen. You’re still a child. You don’t get a vote.”

  Paul was too incredulous to be angry. She’d never issued him a direct order in his life—hundreds to Audrey in the depths of her adolescence, but never him. He tried to think her ridiculous, this tiny round-faced woman trembling in her purple coat. But he
couldn’t dismiss her. He couldn’t even make himself break her grasp.

  “For god’s sake,” he said in exasperation. “You know you can’t actually stop me, right? What are you going to do, call the police?”

  Her jaw was a tight line. “If I have to,” she said quietly. “If you make me.”

  “Mrs. Fleischer.” Julian had fallen back, hands hanging at his sides. But he approached her again, as if it took all his courage to do it. He touched the open driver’s-side door; it was a long, sickening moment before Paul’s mother forced herself to look at him.

  “Please,” he said, and for the first time Paul saw her flinch. “I don’t want you to think . . .”

  “I don’t.” She gave him a rueful, bracing smile. “Oh, Julian,” she said. “I hope you can find someone to take care of you. I mean that. You need it so much.”

  One obstacle shattered, then the next. She looked back up at Paul and tugged gently on his sleeve. “Front seat,” she said. “I want to be able to look at you.”

  Paul tried to promise Julian without words that he would wait it out—until his birthday, past it, however long it took. But Julian was looking straight through him.

  Paul’s mother backed the Buick down the hill, out into the holiday-emptied street and the shivering light of the streetlamps. It would have been better for her to hate him, but when he searched her face he couldn’t find hatred, or even anger. Instead she grieved, with her entire body. It was nothing like the way she grieved for his father. It was worse.

  “It wasn’t a year,” she said. They were nearly home; he’d stopped waiting for her to speak. “I remember. Your bat was still under your bed a few weeks ago.”

  Of course there were reasonable explanations. She expected them, and he gave them, and they went through a ritual of pretending. It didn’t change anything. Nothing ever would.

  13.

  January 6, 1974

  I’ve only just had the chance to slip across the street. I was afraid they would have fixed the board or god forbid found the archive behind it but it’s all still here, and I ought to hide it somewhere but I can’t stand to let it out of my sight. Even if I can’t bear to look through it, even if I never can, I need to know that it’s still there and within my grasp and real, it was real, it was always real.

  The rest of the house is nearly back to normal but I’m leaving my room the way it is. I have to pick across the floor to get to my bed over a bunch of clothes they threw out of the closet and a dresser drawer no one bothered to pick up. I like to sit there and look at the destruction until I feel like I’m boiling from the inside out.

  (The specimens are all intact and the drawers are neatly closed. Very considerate. It isn’t quite the absolute dismemberment I deserve.)

  It was so arbitrary the things they took. My copy of Eichmann in Jerusalem is in an evidence locker somewhere and probably will be forever because apparently it proves something to someone. A few drawings too but not even the ones you’d think—some sketches of J., a few forest landscapes, like they deliberately chose things they knew I would miss. But of course “[t]he items you have requested are determined to have continuing evidentiary value”—it was a form letter with my name typewritten in after the fact. Something about it made me think of Jean Valjean and his convict papers. How impersonal it is when there’s hardly anything more personal than what they’ve taken from me.

  But I have my archive now. They didn’t leave me any other photographs. Every other trace of him is gone.

  January 21, 1974

  No school this semester. I didn’t fight it.

  They haven’t decided what to do with me yet. They have to keep me from him obviously. Their other objectives remain unclear, probably even to them. What possible action can they take without admitting that they think it’s true? House arrest is the only solution they can stand because there are benign reasons for it that they can feed to my grandparents and pretend to believe themselves. I’ve been so delicate lately. I’m not coping well with the stress. I’ve suffered under the malign influence of a friend I should never have trusted. (By necessity nobody tries to articulate what he might have influenced me to do.)

  It’s better if I stay home and rest. On her way home every Thursday Audrey stops at the library and picks up some books for me—braving the public would obviously be too much for me right now. If I’d like to go for a run one morning someone would be happy to accompany me to the track but it’s such nasty weather lately so swimming would be better. I’m safest and happiest when I’m surrounded by walls and by people who love me unconditionally and who aren’t afraid of me, they promise.

  One fine day I will feel better but not yet. It may be years before that miracle arrives.

  February 3, 1974

  She’s been taking her pills lately to get to sleep. She slept through the entire call.

  It was so brief, just seconds, and it only made the emptiness grow wider. We didn’t talk about anything real, just I love you I miss you I can’t keep doing this. What is “this”? Neither of us wanted to say. So we pretended “this” is just being apart because that is a binary condition with a theoretically easy resolution.

  But I’ve done some archival reading today. I know what this is, what it’s been from the start and how hard I worked to keep it that way. I know that nothing about this is easy and nothing about this can be resolved.

  We can’t keep doing this. It will kill us if we keep doing this.

  February 17, 1974

  Dear fucking diary, today I put my forearm on a hot burner on the stove and leaned on it with all my weight until they pulled me back.

  I don’t think I decided to do it. If I had I would have done it properly without anyone in the room so they would’ve had to take off the arm. How it really happened: room full of people (mother, sisters, grandparents). The burner wasn’t hot enough for third-degree burns. The E.R. doctor said if I’m lucky and I care for it right it might not even scar.

  They are moving more quickly now. Laurie is staying with grandparents “until things” (until I) “calm down.” And there is an appointment on Friday that I’m not supposed to know about but it isn’t at a hospital yet—some doctors apparently still make house calls. The doctor hasn’t been told the whole story and I’m not to take the liberty. We are still playing the make-believe game about how delicate I am.

  No one will speak to me directly. My mother has been crying since she got off the phone, back to her old standbys. Audrey is the only one who can stomach helping me change the dressings, but even she’s run out of things to say to me.

  Fuck them. They wanted crazy. They’re getting it.

  Still February I think.

  There is sufficient data. No more putting it off. Time to talk conclusions.

  -

  FACT: The current state of things is intolerable.

  FACT: The state of things is changing. Some things have yet to give and others are in the process of giving. He will run out of money eventually and have to go somewhere I’ll never be able to reach him. My family is already inching toward it and soon they will finally pull the trigger and do whatever the good doctor recommends. The police

  (Let’s not dwell on the police. Any action on their part is unacceptable.)

  The status quo is intolerable for us, and as time marches forward the odds increase that a new status quo will emerge. It will be worse. In all likelihood irreversibly.

  But inevitably

  FACT: Being apart is an abhorrent void. It would consume us alive.

  -

  CONCLUSION:

  Self-evident. Isn’t it?

  This is the only choice we have. When he needs to he will understand.

  He couldn’t swim until his arm healed, so they had to let him run. Audrey always accompanied him, reading a music magazine on the bleachers while he circled the track. But she didn’t follow him when she thought he was just headed to the men’s room. For a few moments every morning he was able to reach the bank o
f pay phones, and he could pause just long enough to open the directory in the second booth.

  No matter how early it was, the day’s note was always waiting, tucked between the pages advertising the local travel agencies. Paul wrote his answer on the other side and hurried back to the track.

  Tell me where and when. Soon. I can’t do this anymore.

  Sunday, 6 a.m., old Esso station west of Laurie’s school. Backroads + rural border crossing, harder for anyone to follow.

  Julian always took the notes away by the next morning, as if he knew Paul might not be able to resist keeping them. Instead, late at night while the others were sleeping, he would take one of Julian’s old letters from the archive and try to memorize the shapes of the words.

  Cashed out savings—OK for gasoline, then hostel but not sure for how long.

  I’m not worried. We’ll be all right.

  If you haven’t forgiven me I hope you can pretend for a while. I’ll do anything to make it up to you.

  Stop—it’s going to be better now. There’s nothing to forgive.

  No note on Wednesday. Thursday, another torn scrap of fine paper grayed by the newsprint—a sliver of the stationery with the nautilus shells.

  Tell me you still love me.

  He heard it in Julian’s voice—that note of false carelessness Paul had only recently recognized for what it really was. It wasn’t about control and never had been. It was as simple as Julian waking from a nightmare and reaching for his hand in the dark.

  Paul turned the paper over and picked up the pen tethered to the pay phone. Always, he wrote, and then couldn’t stop writing.

  By the time he ran out of space his handwriting had devolved into a scrawl. The word echoed like a scream from edge to ragged edge.