Crawling Between Heaven and Earth

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  Centuries from now, future archaeologists would open his grave and pry into his remains for clues into the twentieth century. They’d think they’d stumbled onto a new breed and he would be embalmed in some museum, displayed as the first Homo Chemicus.

  He took his tablets to the kitchen, set them on the violently yellow counter. Same counter, twenty years later. Nick had liked the color. He had said it was cheerful.

  Phil frowned at the counter.

  Cheerful.

  He got a glass from the overhead cabinets, filled it with tap water and started the endless job of swallowing tablets: one, two, three tablets.

  At first, a year or so ago, when he’d been prescribed this mix to keep full blown AIDS away, he’d read the indications on each of the medicines prescribed for him. The cross-linking of side effects had given him nightmares and he’d given up.

  He now took what Dr. Michelopolis told him to take. Two of the blue, three of the red, four of the light pink and half a dozen of the yellow.

  Oh, and swallow his multivitamins, everyday, like a good little boy and take calcium to prevent the medicines leaching calcium from his bones. Four, five and six. Seven, eight and nine. The tiny pink one and the mammoth purple capsule were last.

  He’d gotten so that he could swallow each pill dry, but he forced himself to drink a little water after each, and then drank a full glass afterwards.

  Done, he noticed a thin phone book on the counter and a glimmer of not-quite-hope made him reach for it and turn to the s. He ran his finger down the Stev-column—from Steva to Stevenson and back up—but there were no Stevelanos listed and, therefore, no Nicholas Stevelanos.

  Phil closed the book, pushed it away, set his empty glass down next to it.

  He hadn’t really expected it to be this easy. He couldn’t expect it to be this easy.

  To begin with, there was no reason for Nick to be in Gold-port. True, no one had picked up a trace of his leaving Goldport, but that could just be shoddy investigation. Surely, if finding Nick were as easy as looking in the phone book, one of the detectives would have managed it.

  Of course, Nick might be living with someone and the phone under his partner’s name. Gay men could be as hard to find as women who married and changed their names.

  The thought of Nick’s living with someone else hurt and Phil flinched from it, like a man favoring a twisted ankle, putting all his weight on the other. Even to himself, Phil couldn’t pretend that it would be logical for Nick to have lived celibate for twenty years now. He couldn’t hope that Nick had never found anyone to replace him; never found a love to compare to the sweaty groping and shaky promises of a twenty-two year old’s crush—composed as much of lust and relief at finding someone who understood, as of friendship and confused admiration.

  Phil made a face at his hollow eyed mental image of himself.

  Sure, boy. Nick has never found anyone to compare to yourself as a clumsy virgin. What about you? Didn’t you find others? How many Phil? Can you count them? Should we make an accounting of every one-night-stand, every grope in the dark, every time you thought you’d fallen in love and crossed your fingers and believed, really believed in ever after?

  And yet, through it all, ups and downs, hopes and disappointments, he had remembered Nick, hadn’t he?

  Maybe Nick remembered him.

  Maybe. Or maybe, maybe, just maybe, Nick only talked of him as a joke, a youthful mistake.

  Nicky, with his sensitive fingers, so nimble on the guitar strings, his perfect voice, his renaissance features, his quick, quick mind. Nick had deserved better, even then. Maybe he’d found it.

  The maybe felt like a nail, driven into Phil’s future coffin. A shiver went up Phil’s spine. Tired. He was tired.

  He stumbled to the bed, shoved his bag to the floor, pulled his jacket off, and fell, face down, on the mattress. Sleep overtook him immediately, as if a switch had been thrown.

  Sleep brought a dream, a dream he could neither define nor describe when he woke on his back, in the dark room, staring at the ceiling and listening to the radio.

  It played very low, just loud enough to be perceived as a whisper over the sound of the raging waves outside the window. But when the voice of the announcer came on, even low, what he said made Phil sit up, stark awake, trembling.

  “That was Nicky Stevelanos, folks, with his latest ballad The Songs I Wrote For You. All the talking heads say he hasn’t grown as a musician and that his songs need to develop some different rhythm and some different theme. Yeah, right. Bet you he’s laughing all the way to the bank, uh? Now, let us listen to one of his older hits, Saying Goodbye and see if any of you agree with the talking heads, uh? Call me and give me your opinion, right? The phone is”

  Phil repeated the phone number to himself—bemused—and got out of bed, and hung, speechless by the radio. Laughing all the way to the bank? Nicky was living off his song-writing? Off his singing? Was he well known? He must be a local phenomenon, or Phil would have heard of him in Denver. The detectives must truly be incompetent, not to have found Nick.

  Would the radio announcer know Nick’s address? Oh, please, please, please.

  It would be some other Nick, though. Someone with the same name. Unlikely but possible….

  The seconds before the song started stretched in Phil’s perception, endless and barren. He licked lips that felt too dry.

  Then the song started with a whisper of acoustic guitar, followed by Nick’s voice. Unmistakably Nicky’s voice, clear and pure and perfect, a voice that couldn’t be forgotten if you tried to forget it.

  Phil’s emotion caught in a knot at his throat, a pulsing in his chest. The song Nick sang was something that Phil had never heard. And yet, Phil couldn’t avoid thinking it had been written for him. The line about “My hand shall not hold yours ever again,” wrung his heart and “Though I still want you, I don’t expect your kiss, ever again,” might as well have been an accusation aimed at Phil.

  Closing his eyes, Phil could imagine that Nicky was right here, sitting in the living room, on the old brown couch, his guitar held like a lover, his eyes closed, his voice caressing every note as it dropped from his lips.

  Nick sang for him, for him alone. Nicky had forgiven Phil’s desertion, Phil’s indefensible cowardice.

  He wanted Phil back.

  The song ended. The music stopped. Phil waited for the announcer’s voice. Nothing. Not even static.

  Slowly, Phil opened his eyes, glared at the yellow-painted radio, now as dead as the table or the yellow counter top.

  He punched an ivory button, two. Nothing. He looked behind, to see if the thing was plugged in, but couldn’t even see a cord. The only plug had one cord attached to it, and that was the cord for the television.

  Well, Phil still knew the number to call. This was weird, but weird things happened.

  Maybe the radio had been on next door. That must be it.

  He found the phone behind a teddy bear on the bedside table, and dialed the number from memory.

  It rang for a long time, before it was picked up. “Yes?” a woman’s voice.

  “Uh… Ah…” Phil had no idea what the station was, or if it was local. No, wait, the phone number had dialed local But what information could they give him on Nick? They’d think he was a crank. “I—You asked for opinions on Nick Stevelanos. I—I’m an old college friend and I’ve lost touch—Lost touch. I don’t suppose you’d tell me what he’s doing these days and the name of his albums? I’d love to”

  “Who is this?” the woman’s voice sounded alarmed, on the verge of hysteria.

  Great, great. They really thought he was a crank. “I’m Phillip Cesari,” he said. “I’m a—I teach history in a community college in Denver. I—I’m not a crank—I”

  “Phil?” the woman’s voice said. “Phil Cesari? Little Cesar? Nick’s roommate?”

  Now it was Phil’s turn to be silent. Some woman in Goldport knew his college nick-name, his connection to Nick.


  “Where are you?” The woman asked. “I mean, where are you calling from?”

  “Uh… Gateways motel.” Right after saying it, he repented. What if it really was some sort of joke? What if

  “I’ll come and see you. Don’t go anywhere.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Oh.” The woman giggled. “I’m sorry, never thought you wouldn’t recognize me. I’m Nicky’s mother. Mrs. Stevelanos, I used be. When I came to town to look after Nicky’s—Well—To wrap up things, I—damn.” Her laugh turned to something that sounded remarkably like a sob. “Damn, I hadn’t thought of all this in years. I have a letter for you. Nicky’s” She drew in breath like a woman drowning. “How are you doing? What have you done with yourself?”

  “We can talk when I see you,” Phil said. She had a letter from him. A letter from Nicky. Even if it was a kiss-off letter, it would be closure. “If you’ll come over.”

  Minutes that seemed like hours later, she knocked at his door. He opened it and there she stood, tall and limber as Nick had been, with the same pointed chin, the same huge eyes. Only hers were light brown, and her hair honey-blond. Nick’s eyes and hair came from his Polish father.

  Mrs. Stevelanos, whatever her name was now, stared at Phil. Her eyes filled with tears.

  “You look younger,” Phil said, and caught himself, and smiled. “I mean, younger than my memories of you. I guess when I was a kid, you looked like this”

  She giggled nervously. “Grandmother. Yes. I imagine. I was only forty. I had Madeleine when I was sixteen and Nick at eighteen. I never got” She shook her head.

  She kept her hands firmly stuffed into the pockets of her short blue jacket, forming little protrusions on the side, as though she made fists in there. “You look older.”

  “So my mirror tells me,” Phil said. He nodded. “Would you come in?”

  “No.” She looked past him into the living room, looked away quickly. She shook her head. “No. These rooms are all non-smoke, aren’t they? I don’t want to—Why don’t you come out? We’ll walk on the beach.”

  Her mention of smoking made Phil remember his own cigarettes. He hadn’t smoked since he’d got here, probably the longest, other than plane trips, that he’d gone smoke-free in the last year, ever since he’d found out that no matter what happened he wouldn’t live forever.

  He got his jacket, felt the pocket to make sure his pack was in it, and followed Nick’s mom out of the motel, to the road, and down the short stretch to Anchor Street, and from there to the beach access stairs.

  “Imagine after all these years,” she said.

  They walked on the soft sand, well away from the sea that broke, heavily, against the sand a few feet away.

  Here and there a gigantic log lay, that the waves had carried in. Felled giants they looked mournful, out of place.

  Driftwood wasn’t supposed to be this big.

  When Phil and Nick had been here, it hadn’t been. There had been very little driftwood, in fact, and the sea had looked like a mirror under the cloudless sky. Though they’d been warned not to swim—and didn’t—they’d walked in the water, with their feet in the chill while the sun burned their bodies.

  Just the thought of it, made middle-aged Phil’s feet hurt, as if each of the little bones had been frozen.

  He offered his cigarettes to Nick’s mom and lit the one she picked, then lit one for himself.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Fancy you coming here, after all this time. Business?”

  “No. No. I just—Nick—I was hoping to find some trace of where he is, what he’s doing.”

  She stopped and looked at him. Her face, made very pale by the cold wind, looked like the face of one long drowned. “You don’t know?” she asked. “Damn. No one ever told you?”

  “Told me what?”

  It didn’t take very long to tell. She did it in gasping sentences, between breath intakes.

  The morning after Phil had left, headed to his first job in Akron, which would be followed by the job in Denver and the yet better job, also in Denver, Nick had woken up, read the goodbye letter Phil had left behind.

  That night they’d found Nick dead in the narrow bathtub, the walls splattered high with his blood.

  “They had to put a plastic enclosure around the tub,” Nick’s mother said. “Because they couldn’t get the stains off the walls. They called me. The reason—The reason Stan and I had paid for this vacation for you boys was that we wanted Nick out of the house while we negotiated our divorce. He was so sensitive and everything affected him so” She took her cigarette to her lips, inhaled deeply, blew the smoke out in an angry cloud. “Well, the fares to Goldport were good and we thought”

  Phil stood. “You—You mean, he killed himself because of—because I left?” And you’re talking to me, he thought. And I’m standing here, alive. And I’ve survived Nick for twenty years and enjoyed life.

  “Well…. Probably not just because of that. You were the one stable thing in his life, see.” She looked at Phil, winced, looked away. “I think he knew very well that Stan and I—That our marriage…. And he was never that close to Madeleine. He—Well—You couldn’t have known.” She sucked in nicotine, sighed. Her eyes were focused behind Phil, on the grey waves. Her tennis-shoe beat a tap-tap on the sand. “Please don’t. You were just a kid, yourself. And maybe it was all for the best.” Her words had the singsong quality of a learned speech. “When my husband found out what—what you two had been up to—I knew but I had never—I thought—Well, Stan said he would have killed Nick, if Nick hadn’t beat him to it, so you see.” She flung the butt of her cigarette towards the sea and turned to face Phil. “Please, don’t think I meant to accuse you. Nicky didn’t accuse you. I got his letters out of Stan’s hands. The one to us and the one to you. They were in the same envelope, so I read yours and besides, they had to be read, you know by the police.” She reached into her pocket and handed him a folded paper. “Here. Here, you see.” She wiped her eyes to the sleeve of her coat. “I need to go. God, I need to go. Carl will be home from work any minute now and II met him when I came down to—Well, it doesn’t matter. I—I’ll talk to you later.” She ran over the sand, up the beach access stairs, to the road.

  Escaping her memories. Escaping her own guilt.

  Phil stood in place, holding the paper. Nicky’s letter. At length he unfolded it, read it. The beginning was clear, business like, strangely at odds with Nick, particularly a Nick crazy enough to kill himself moments after.

  “Phil, I knew it couldn’t last and I understand your letter perfectly. My family wouldn’t take it so well, either, and maybe you’re right, maybe it’s nonsense, maybe there’s a woman out there you can love. I don’t know. I don’t think I could ever love anyone else. But I know it’s impossible and I don’t want to be a millstone around your neck. Go, Phil. Go and be happy. You say you don’t deserve me, but it is I who doesn’t deserve you. Forget me. Get married and raise a dozen Italian brats. Just—if you can—keep a corner of your heart—if not for me—for the songs I wrote for you.”

  It was signed in a shaky hand, emotion at last betrayed.

  Phil could see Nick sitting at the rickety kitchen table, perhaps with the letter Phil had left him, reading it.

  That letter would have come like a thunderbolt out of a cloudless sky. Nick wouldn’t have had any idea of Phil’s doubts; Phil had hid them so well. Phil’s letter, Phil’s absence, must have been a pounding shock. And Nick had taken his life… while unsound of mind.

  He wouldn’t ever know that Phil himself had contemplated suicide rather than leaving; that it had taken all of Phil’s self-control not to kill himself.

  Phil stood in the whipping wind, holding the letter in one hand: the last letter Nick had ever written.

  Phil should have killed himself. Then they could both be dead together. They could have departed, hand in hand, in search of whatever lay on the other side. They could have been together in their dreams.

  Phil swal
lowed and swallowed again, to keep his emotion in check, but by the time he got back to the motel, there was a taste of salt and tears down his throat.

  The songs I wrote for you.

  The songs Nick wrote. God, the songs he wrote. The pure emotion in Nick’s voice hadn’t lied. Nor could it endure betrayal.

  The radio program had been a dream. The phone number actually belonging to Nick’s mother had to be a bizarre coincidence. Chance.

  Phil sat on the bed and finished smoking his cigarette before realizing he’d brought it indoors, into the smoke free room. He threw the butt in the toilet and flushed, and stood staring at the little tub veiled by a pink shower curtain. Nick had died here. This small bathroom with its tiny built-in, triangular corner vanity, had been his last sight in this world. Nicky’s large, expressive eyes had stared at that ceiling as he died. His blood had run down these drains.

  Nicky was not middle aged, and fat, and happy elsewhere. He’d remained twenty-two. He’d never be older than twenty two.

  Crap, oh crap. It didn’t matter if Nick had committed suicide as much because of his parents’ divorce as because of Phil’s desertion. Phil had deserted Nick. Betrayed Nick. Made a mockery of the love they’d shared for four years.

  He might as well have opened Nick’s veins himself.

  For a moment, Phil stood, with the letter in one hand, looking at the bathtub. If he had any courage at all, he’d splatter his own blood all over these same walls.

  But then the dreams in his eternal sleep would be of Nick. They would always be of Nick, now.

  Again and again, like Sisyphus pushing his rock up an endless slope, Phil would write that last letter to Nick. Again and again, Phil would catch a glimpse of Nick in his sleep, Nick’s mobile face at rest, Nick’s voice stilled. And Phil would leave, unable to do anything else, knowing fully well he was killing the only person he’d ever truly loved.

  Phil dragged himself to bed and lay on it, fully dressed, with his jacket on.