The Wanderers

by Meg Howrey

  They are off. The stairs are narrow and if you get stuck behind someone who stops, there is nowhere to go; marching in place is a disqualifying move. Ilya executes a half pirouette to slip to one side of a fat lady, and for a moment Dmitri loses sight of him, but that’s okay. It’s not a race; they are most satisfied when they are both successful. Dmitri has to circle a trash can twice while he waits for a family to get its act together and clear his lane, then it’s on to the far south staircase, which is looking good. Ilya’s heading for it too; if Dmitri gets behind Ilya on the staircase he’ll be able to draft up behind him. This happens. The boys ascend, laughing. Now it’s the main concourse and here the game opens up for more creative opportunities. Dmitri is not as graceful as his brother, but he is good at this challenge—clever about seeing openings in the crowd, judging distances, avoiding collision. He flies in between identically puff-coated and uncertain old people, does a kind of backward skip to avoid one of those idiots who walk in one direction while looking in another, sees Ilya weaving toward the A train entrance like a hockey player. The main concourse is crowded with people, and everyone has bags, though there aren’t any dogs like you see in Russia unless they are police dogs or special-neediness dogs. Penn Station smells like urine and doughnuts. Dmitri dodges right, to avoid the kind of woman who is not going to move for him. Now Dmitri has to circumnavigate some tourists. Tourists are the worst; he really almost has to stop for a sloppy family and—by God—a double-wide stroller. Ilya wouldn’t see if he stopped, but they are honorable about this game. No, he’s okay, he got past it, and has his screen ready, heading for the train turnstiles where Ilya is pacing, looking for a good opening that will take him through the barrier and down the final flight of stairs. Dmitri sees an opportunity on the far left and Ilya gets behind him. The downtown train is entering the tunnel and they have to do a funny dance to get down the crowded platform without stopping, but then they are both in the car.

  They recap: near misses, artful evasions. Dmitri makes eye contact with no one but his brother. Or women or girls. There are men everywhere, but he does not look at them yet. “Your elbow is close, but you can’t bite it.” They don’t have that saying here. They say, “So near and yet so far.”

  Outside the building where Ilya takes his classes, the brothers exchange a ritual farewell. “Don’t be an asshole,” Dmitri says. “Go fuck yourself,” Ilya says, without rancor. Ilya is only in a bad mood after class, never before.

  Dmitri has an appointment now.

  This will be the eighth appointment of his life, the second time he will be meeting Robert, and the first time he has met anyone twice.

  • • •

  DMITRI MET ROBERT in the huge, fancy furniture store during one of his excursions. Dmitri was conspicuous in the shop, and knew it. It wasn’t the kind of place guys his age went by themselves. He could see women glancing at him, perhaps wondering why he was there, but a certain kind of man was not confused. Dmitri always had the same sentence ready: “I have one hour to kill before I pick my cousin up.” He likes the phrase “killing time” for its cruelty.

  When Robert smiled at Dmitri as they passed by each other in Carpets, Dmitri had smiled only very slightly in return, and not stopped. Robert was too young—maybe only a couple of years older than Dmitri—and ordinary-looking. But when Dmitri left the store twenty minutes later, Robert was waiting for him outside.

  Robert said, “How’s it going?” and Dmitri said, “Good” and Robert had indicated his screen and said, “I was thinking of maybe trying to meet someone, but I’d like to meet you” and Dmitri said, “I have one hour to kill before I have to pick up my cousin” and Robert held up a bulky shopping bag from the expensive store and said, “Want to help me with my new lamp?”

  Robert was a college student at the New School. He had a room in the dormitories a few blocks away. This was not at all what Dmitri had heretofore experienced: hotel rooms, lofts, once in the back office of a restaurant with the manager of the restaurant. Going to a school dormitory felt very risky, in an unpleasant way. He wanted to say no, but when he was standing closer to Robert, it was hard.

  At the dormitories, there was a terrible moment when Dmitri was told he was required to show identification to a security guard. His high school ID had his date of birth on it, and also his name, which was not the name he’d given to Robert. The only other option he had was the Prime ID card he’d gotten in Utah, which didn’t have his date of birth, but he had no idea what would happen if it was scanned at a place like this. Total humiliation (“I’m sorry, minors aren’t allowed in here”) versus risk of exposure (“Yes, Mrs. Kuznetsov, this is Prime Space security, and we’ve just picked up that your son has entered the building of a school with a known homosexual”).

  He chose the Prime ID but had to write his name down on a list, and so Robert learned that Dmitri’s name was Dmitri, and not Misha.

  “Misha is like nickname,” Dmitri said in the elevator, working out furiously in his head a story for his Prime-minder, or his mother. (“I took a walk and met a student who offered to give me a tour of his college so I could see what American university is like.”) When they passed kids in the hallway on the way to Robert’s room Dmitri assumed the vaguely preoccupied face of someone who knows exactly what they are doing. This had seen him safely through hotel lobbies and corridors, but he was nauseated with anxiety. He did not like this kind of risk, and for what? Robert was not special.

  Robert’s suite was the first living place Dmitri had seen in America that wasn’t enormous. They sat on the bed and talked for fifteen minutes about how Dmitri was Russian and then Robert had said, “You’re gorgeous,” which was Dmitri’s cue that he could stop talking and put his hands on Robert’s head, which was the one thing he knew how to do.

  And after, nothing had come of it at all. Nobody had been called, nobody knew. Dmitri had given Robert his message number before leaving, just in case he needed to cover some tracks. He hadn’t planned on seeing him again. But then he changed his mind.

  • • •

  TODAY, ROBERT GREETS DMITRI in the lobby of his dormitory building. Robert has recently taken a shower, his hair is wet, he looks different from how Dmitri remembered, younger and less sexy. Robert has not asked Dmitri’s age. Dmitri is sixteen now, but it is still illegal for anyone to have sex with him. It is called statutory rape, even if Dmitri utilizes a train and a subway car and a walk and three erased messages on his screen and a handful of lies to various people for the specific purpose of getting raped.

  And people tell him that he must be glad to be in America, where there is so much more freedom. They’re all children here.

  “Are you meeting your cousin again?” Robert asks.

  Dmitri says that this is so, and he has only one hour.

  Robert’s dormitory room is mostly a square with single beds set against opposite walls, and identical desks at the foot of both beds. There is also a small kitchen with room for a round table, and a bathroom with only a shower, no bathtub. On the first visit, Dmitri hadn’t noticed many details of the room, although he had pretended to look around. He hadn’t wanted to see anything, still doesn’t; he’s positive that he will see something embarrassing that will put him off. And he very much wants to have Robert blow him today, he’s been thinking about it all week.

  So has Robert, apparently, because Dmitri does not even have to put his hands on Robert’s head, Robert right away undoes Dmitri’s pants just as Dmitri is taking off his coat. So Dmitri sprawls back on Robert’s bed and shuts his eyes, until Robert says, “I want you to watch me,” which turns out to be a good suggestion. He can see Robert, and his own dick, and he can sort of see the two of them, as if he were watching a video. Only at the end does he shut his eyes. He thinks of this moment as being like a supernova. Nobody ever sees a supernova.

  After, Robert wants Dmitri to take off all his clothes, and Dmitri feels so good he
does not object to this. Robert takes off all his own clothes. The bed is narrow. They sort of grab at each other. Dmitri can only see Robert in pieces: a shoulder, a thigh, some of Robert’s stomach. Robert wants Dmitri to do more things.

  Dmitri is nervous about escalation. He has definitely never done anything to do with buttholes. He thinks that he just likes getting his dick sucked, that’s all, and he might not even be bisexual, let alone gay. He thinks that he might be just as happy if a hot woman came up to him and offered to suck his dick, only that never happens. The porn that Ilya likes also works for him, so that proves it. Dmitri doesn’t watch the girl in those videos, but that’s only because girls don’t have much of anything to see down there. And all he’s doing right now is killing time. The things you do when you kill time don’t count.

  Dmitri’s surprised, when he gets down to it, how manly it is to suck a guy’s dick. He can’t see himself, but he’s sure that he looks a hundred times better than the girls in videos, much more natural. He understands now why people get so excited when they do this to him. Actually, now that he’s in their position, he’s surprised they were able to control themselves as much as they did. Dmitri can smell Robert under his soap, and Robert says “easy, easy” because Dmitri is not being gentle, but no, he can’t do it any easier, he wants to cram himself full of Robert and Robert is making the best sounds ever. He finds he totally knows what to do, even though he’s having a hard time doing anything other than more, more, more.

  “Oh there, oh there,” says Robert. And Dmitri is here. He’s right here.

  After, for a few minutes, they lie naked almost on top of each other because of how small the bed is. Dmitri’s hand is sticky with Robert’s semen, which smells and tastes like blin batter. “The first blin is always lumpy,” Dmitri says, out loud, in Russian. It is a proverb. Dmitri doesn’t know the equivalent in English. “What was that?” Robert asks. Robert’s mouth is on Dmitri’s neck and one hand is on Dmitri’s ass and Dmitri feels like his entire body is yawning in a happy way, but he needs to get up.

  “I have to meet my cousin,” he says.

  “Right,” Robert says. “The cousin.”

  Dmitri’s shirt is underneath Robert’s legs; his pants and sweater are on the floor. He does not see his socks. He needs to wash himself. It’s always like this, the ending, but what is he supposed to do? Robert’s skin is very white, except for a vertical flush of red on his chest and two horizontal marks on his thighs that may configure to the shape of Dmitri’s hands.

  “I can use bathroom?” Dmitri asks. Robert nods. Dmitri would like to gather his clothes together and dress in the bathroom, but he doesn’t want to drag his shirt out from under Robert. He does take his satchel with him to the bathroom, as he always does, it’s a safety thing.

  The bathroom is not as clean as Dmitri would like. In hotel rooms, the bathrooms are very fancy and perfectly clean. The towel on the rack in this one is still wet, as is the bathmat. The trash bin is so full the lid cannot close; the area around the tiny sink is gummed with the spilt contents of bottles. Dmitri’s father told him once that Americans become very distressed if everything is not perfectly clean, but perhaps this only applied to American astronauts. Dmitri uses a corner of the damp towel and some of the soap still in the plastic dispenser to scrub at his stomach, his dick, in between his legs. When he comes out of the bathroom, Robert has put on pants and is sitting cross-legged on his bed, playing with what looks like a cross between a rain stick and an abacus. Dmitri dresses. Robert tilts the thing in his hands and silver disks slide down the rails, producing an atonal tinkling. Dmitri looks out the window. A row of paper books are lined up on the ledge and he reads a few titles. They all have something to do with music.

  “You are music student?” Dmitri asks. In his encounters, he exaggerates his accent and makes no effort for grammatical English because everyone likes it when he speaks poorly.

  “That’s the first question you’ve asked me,” Robert says. “Yeah. I’m a composer.”

  Dmitri zips up his pants and points with his chin to the thing Robert is playing.

  “You make this?”

  “I designed it,” Robert says. “My roommate, Harald, made it for me. He’s a 3-D imagist. We’re supposed to be doing this project involving found instruments and nature. My problem is I love, like, super-old-fashioned music, so there’s no chance of my having a career in the United States. I should have been born in the nineteen fifties so I could have played in an orchestra. Harald says it’s pretentious to be naive, but I’m really not trying.”

  Dmitri swallows this speech without chewing; swallows also the vertical line that appears between Robert’s eyebrows when he speaks, the green sheets on Robert’s bed, his thin hands, the fact that the red vertical flush on his chest has disappeared, the expensive-looking lamp clamped to the headboard of the bed that must be the lamp from the furniture store, the handles of suitcases and what looks like the handle of a tennis racket that can be seen underneath Robert’s bed, the pieces of paper taped to the wall above the bed, covered in spidery writing.

  He feels sad. Robert is interesting. Dmitri is not. So far, he’s been able to get away with this, but it can’t last forever. Mostly it has been enough to be obedient, and lately it has been sufficient to have a hard dick.

  Robert tilts the construction of rods, makes the metal disks drip rapidly onto one another.

  “It is like rain.” Dmitri points at the instrument. “But more angry. Like acid rain.”

  Robert shakes his head like he is an amazed person.

  “That’s what I call it,” he says. “It’s an acid rain stick.”

  Robert looks at Dmitri with a face animated with liking, which makes Dmitri realize that 1. Robert hasn’t maybe liked him until now and 2. He likes Robert and 3. He should go before he messes anything up.

  • • •

  DMITRI HAS MORE time to kill before Ilya is done, so he walks to where people take their dogs in Union Square Park. It has snowed a little more; the trees and ground and benches and old-fashioned street lamps are all dusted with it. He tries to think of an interesting observation about it all, but it’s just snow.

  Two men are walking hand in hand toward Dmitri, one of them holding the leash of a large black poodle. It is nothing for two men to hold hands in America. It’s supposed to mean nothing to him too.

  The poodle catches Dmitri’s eye and makes unequivocally for him, tugging along the man holding his leash, who lurches forward, tugging the man holding his hand.

  “He’s friendly,” the man says. The poodle sits in front of Dmitri, absurdly dignified, like an old man who has been forced to wear a poodle costume but refuses to let it diminish him. Dmitri does not think that the dog wants to be petted, exactly, so he just looks at it. The poodle tosses its ludicrous head and marches off, causing another chain reaction in the men, who laugh.

  If this were a movie, Dmitri thinks, a bomb would explode now, giving poignancy to the men, and the dog, and the moment they all just shared, and the thing that happened with Robert, and the sound of acid rain bells. But no bomb goes off and no meaning appears. Dmitri finds it hard to take a deep breath, his lungs are constricted with all the potential meaningless moments of life.

  LUKE

  You missed it,” Luke says. “Yoshi started screaming at Sergei after Sergei gave away the ending to Doctor Zhivago. And then Helen started crying and went to the bathroom and gave herself bangs.”

  “Ha ha.” Nari thunks herself down in the chair next to Luke and holds out a plate of cookies. “The party is raging in Mission Control. People are doing traditional wassail and there’s a snow machine.”

  On the screens in front of them, the astronauts are cleaning up after their special Christmas feast and will go to bed soon. It is almost midnight, Primitus time.

  Four in the afternoon, Earth time. Luke is struggling. His circadian rhyth
ms look like a Jackson Pollock painting. It affects them all a little differently, and Luke—to his shame—is sensitive.

  He’s also been up for eighteen hours, working for sixteen of them. Since today was a free day for the astronauts—no training, no sims—it was a full day for observing social and recreation time. Two members of the Obber team drew Christmas vacation, so they’re down to four. Luke and Nari have spent the day watching the most hypnotically boring reality channel on Earth.

  It was a joke among the Obbers. “You can’t look away,” they said. “It’s mesmerizingly dull. It’s Chekhov in space.”

  According to the astronauts, the astronauts were fine! They were happy as tinned clams. They answered every question, filled out every questionnaire, filed every personal report with monotonous cheer. No, they were not stressed. Yes, they felt engaged. No, there were no conflicts. Yes, they were sleeping. They liked the food. Their health was good. They missed their families at entirely appropriate levels that were absolutely manageable. Occasionally, an astronaut would submit thoughtful ideas on small modifications to their situation or equipment. Sergei would be brief and cheerful in his punctuation selection; Yoshi was exquisitely polite; Helen sent them under the heading: Things to Think About.

  According to the face and voice scanners, the astronauts were not always fine, but the Obbers were still struggling to read these. The astronauts switched languages a lot in casual conversation, and their facial expressions changed according to language, as did the pitch and tone of their voices. Additionally, they sometimes spoke to one another while engaged in another task, and might be reacting to the task, or the person. They chatted for hours about technical things Luke could barely follow.

  Aristotle had written that it was easy to become angry—the difficulty was in being angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way. Put like that, it seemed not just difficult but impossible.