Boys of Life

by Paul Russell

  Carlos must’ve been wondering if this time he’d let the rope out too far. I’m pretty sure he was scrambling for it, though that’s looking back on it because he was always able to cover his tracks. But I wonder if he got scared at times like that, wondering what would happen—or whether if it all came apart he was just ready to shrug everything off. He was definitely some kind of survivor, but also I think sometimes he was sad about all the things he survived along the way. People he once knew but then made some kind of mistake with—Netta, for instance, and there were others I’d heard tell about, people who wouldn’t have anything to do with Carlos anymore because one day Carlos took everything one step too far, and then that was it. I didn’t know at the time what that step was, though eventually I found out too—but I knew, even then, that was what happened.

  I think Carlos knew, deep down, that the way he lived his life meant the day would have to come when he’d go too far with everybody he ever liked. Knowing that made him sad, but he’d decided that was the way he had to be: he was going to try to hang on with people as long as he could, and then when it was time to pay the price, he’d pay the price.

  But I don’t think I knew that then, which is why I completely launched into him with both my fists. I took him by surprise—I think up to that point he thought he was winning and he was relieved, and then all of a sudden my punches knocked him completely off the bed onto the floor.

  “Hey,” he said, but before he could do anything I was on top of him, straddling him there on the floor next to the bed and slamming my fists into his face. It was a complete surprise to me too, since I’d never really beaten anybody up in my life before—but that’s what you could say I was doing to Carlos right there, even though he was about fifty pounds heavier than me and worked out in a gym and if he wanted to, it would’ve been like that time back in the winter when he just grabbed my wrists together and there was nothing I could do. But he didn’t do a single thing to fight back—he let me pummel him for a while, like he knew he deserved it and he was just going to lie there and take it. It made me even madder that he wasn’t fighting back, because I think if I’m going to be honest I have to say—all I really wanted him to do was slam me once or twice and let that be that.

  But he wouldn’t do it, even though by now his nose was gushing blood and I had blood all over my fists and even on my chest. Under me I could feel his dick getting stiff, like he was loving all this. I hit him even harder, but that only made my dick start to get hard too, which was even worse because he could see it sticking up there in his face. It made him grin, and I was furious with my dick for getting hard, and even though I tried to make it go soft, I couldn’t. The more I hit him, the harder I got—I was almost relieved when finally he must’ve decided enough was enough. He gathered me up in his arms and tossed me off him, and that was that. Which was fine with me because I was exhausted. I knew he wasn’t going to hit me back or anything—whatever point we both needed to prove had just gotten proved and now there wasn’t any need to prove anything more.

  He got up off the floor and went into the kitchen, where I could hear him running the faucet. I sat on the floor for a while waiting, and then got back in bed like nothing happened. I was glad my hard-on was completely gone when he came back to the bed. I was relieved when I saw his was too.

  “Nothing like a facial massage,” he said when he lay down next to me.

  “Did I hurt you?”

  He laughed. Then he said, “Ouch.”

  “You deserved it,” I told him. I wasn’t mad at him anymore. I guess I got that out of my system.

  “Go to sleep,” he said. “First thing tomorrow we’re going to Brooklyn.”

  That was news to me. “Why’re we going to Brooklyn?” I asked.

  “We’ve got things to do,” he said in this completely matter-of-fact voice, like nothing had happened between us. “You and me. I’ve got some things to show you. I need your help.”

  “You need my help?” I couldn’t really imagine what kind of help Carlos would be needing from me, especially right now.

  “I’m making a new movie,” he said, just like that. “I need your help.”

  So there it was. I guess maybe I should’ve known, at least been able to guess—but I didn’t. I would’ve thought he would’ve told me.

  “You’re making a movie,” I said. “You’re making a movie and you didn’t tell me.”

  “I was waiting for the time to be right,” he said, and he even sounded like he believed it, though I wasn’t sure I did.

  I had to laugh. “You’re crazy,” I told him, leaning on my elbow to look at him where he was lying there with his face starting to puff up where I hit him. “You’re totally crazy.”

  “It’s been said. Look, do you want to be in this movie? I really need you to be in this movie.”

  “What’s it about?” Like that was the question to ask about Carlos’s movies.

  “It’s different,” he said. “You’ll see tomorrow.”

  “And this kid you’re fucking up the ass?” I said. “Is he in the movie too?”

  “It’s got a cast of thousands,” Carlos said. “It’s biblical, it’s an epic.”

  “Are you kidding with me or what?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m not. Just wait and see.”

  So we lay there for a while, him not making any move to touch me like he usually did, and me not making any move either. We didn’t know each other anymore—that’s what it felt like, this horrible cold clammy feeling starting somewhere around my heart and spreading out into my arms and my legs. Even the night which used to be summer, or the end of summer, didn’t seem that warm anymore.

  I had one more question. I waited a little while before I asked it, maybe because I was hoping he’d go to sleep and then I wouldn’t have to ask it. But finally I did have to ask it anyway.

  “Carlos,” I said, “you’re not going to fuck me anymore, are you?” It made my throat really dry to say that, but I had to.

  He didn’t say anything for a minute, like he was thinking—then he said, “No, I’m not.”

  “That’s amazing,” I said. “That’s just amazing.”

  “That’s what they say,” Carlos said. “That’s what they say about life. It wouldn’t be a good idea, would it?”

  Of course he was completely right, even if it was what I thought before when I was walking in the park.

  “It wouldn’t be a good idea,” I said. “No.”

  I hadn’t thought I was going to say that when the time came. I was used to deciding things and then having to undecide them as soon as I was around Carlos, but this time was different. Something had changed. I couldn’t put my finger on it but there it was. I remember once I was walking down Main Street in Owen and suddenly the temperature got ten degrees colder. Some kind of front moving through, I guess, but it was spooky—one minute it was seventy and the next instant it was sixty and if you took a step backward to step back into the seventy-degree air you couldn’t do it, you couldn’t find where that old weather went to. And that’s what it was like—some sudden dip in the temperature between us that happened just like that. Or we both suddenly grew up in some way, and things couldn’t be the same as they used to be anymore. I felt a lot older lying there next to Carlos, not touching him—sad about what was all of a sudden put behind us, but also I was feeling this kind of respect. Respect for both of us in some strange way.

  I guess all of it was just one more thing he set me up for. But if you spend your life going around looking for traps, you’re going to miss everything else.

  I‘VE GONE DOWN INTO SOME KIND OF UNDERGROUND cavern. In the dream it’s a carnival ride where you get in this little roller coaster car, and you go by all these scenes of people doing things. It’s supposed to be a horror ride, only the scenes are ordinary scenes from a factory—assembly lines and machines and people working the machines, and the whole place is humming with this quiet powerful hum behind everything, which is the power source for
the factory. Then while we’re gliding by these scenes in the little car, I somehow know it’s not a carnival ride, it’s only supposed to look like one. Because actually it’s an underground factory where aliens from outer space are making human beings, and the only reason I’m there is because they don’t think anybody who goes on this ride is going to guess that’s what’s going on down here, so the aliens think they can be safe and get away with what they’re doing right under everybody’s noses.

  Then I remember thinking, if the aliens are making all these human beings in this underground factory, then how can you know if the people around you are real, or if they’re just made by the outer space aliens in this factory too? What if everybody around you’s been made by the aliens, and there’s only you left?

  And then I’m thinking, what if you can’t tell whether you were made in the factory or not? What if I’m not real either? Then how am I going to know? What if all the human beings in the world are made by aliens in an underground factory and we just think we’re human beings but we’re really not? But also we really are, because then that’s all a human being is—something made by aliens in their underground factory. The instant I think that, I know I’ll never be able to know even when I wake up. Because if I was actually down in that underground factory, the aliens did something to my memory to make me think it was only a dream. That’s their way of protecting themselves. I’ll remember it and then I’ll remember it was just a dream I had, so it can’t be real and not to worry. So even if I catch on, like I’m catching on now, still I’ll never know for sure and that’s when I wake up.

  I bolted up in bed completely covered in sweat, with this prickling all up and down my arms and legs. They know I know. That’s what I immediately thought. They know I’ve figured it out and they’re out to find me, they’re going to take me down into the factory and re-make me so I won’t remember them.

  I lay there completely still for a while. All there was was the hum you hear all the time here at night, I guess it’s the Eddy’s heating system—this humming sound that’s almost regular but not quite. If you listen to it like I do at night, you notice it keeps going in and out of phase with itself. After a while the dream started to fade, so I wasn’t scared anymore—and now today it’s just another dream. But I want to hold onto it. I have this feeling I figured out something in that dream—I stumbled across something nobody else had caught onto. Not about the underground factory exactly, but something else—the way you aren’t in control, but just act like it because you see everybody else is doing the same only they don’t know it.

  NEXT MORNING WE TOOK THE TRAIN OUT TO Brooklyn, some neighborhood down by the water, which, if I thought the alphabets looked bad, I hadn’t even started to see bad yet. There was this totally rundown-looking warehouse, but when Carlos let us into it, I was just astounded. It was like opening a door to what you think is just some regular room in a house, and suddenly you’re on another planet. Carlos and The Company had gone and turned the whole inside of that warehouse into this crazy, beautiful city in the desert.

  From where I stood at the door of the warehouse, it was all sand stretching back in these low dunes with some palm trees here and there and at the far end of the warehouse—which was huge, the size of a football field—there was this city rising up on a hill, all spires and walls and turrets like in a fairy tale. And behind that a light blue sky.

  Still holding a hammer in her hand and nails in her mouth, Verbena came walking over to us. “Oh hello, children,” she said, like she wasn’t expecting us. “Welcome to Sodom.” She was wearing this enormous hot pink running suit she just barely fit into.

  “You’re looking at a masterpiece,” Carlos told me. I wasn’t sure whether he meant her running suit or the stage set. Which either way you had to give it to her, they were both pretty fantastic. And I told her so.

  “Honey,” she said, “there’s a very beautiful soul trapped inside this body.”

  “I like your body just fine,” I told her. And I meant it. I was always glad to see Verbena, even if she didn’t always remember my name.

  “Stroll on around,” she told me, “hang out in the cafés, visit the whorehouses. For angels, no visas required.”

  What was amazing were the shapes of those buildings, all piled up topsy-turvy on top of each other, and the colors, these chalky reds and greens, like once they were bright but from lots of hands touching them they wore down to the dull color they were now. You’ll say it was just a stage set made out of cardboard and plaster of paris, and you’ll be right—but if you haven’t seen it you won’t know how there was something about it that put its spell on you and made you feel empty and sad and faraway.

  “Amazing,” I told Carlos while he was walking me through the set that first time—we were climbing the scaffolding up to the platform at the top. “I never knew anything like this was going on.”

  “Ever read the Bible?” he asked. Which I never did.

  “The story of Sodom and Gomorrah,” he said.

  “Like in the last movie,” I mentioned.

  “Except all different.” We’d made it to the top of the town, which was all built on stilts so if you looked at it from the desert down below, it looked like it was on a steep hillside, but now from the top looking down you could see it wasn’t a town at all, it was just lumber and heavy cardboard latched together and all painted up. Down below I could see Verbena talking with Sammy. She was doing the talking. I couldn’t hear what she was telling him, but I could see he was busy banging the palm of his hand against his forehead in some kind of response.

  “Not much of a view,” I joked.

  “God wanted to send his angels to Sodom to see if there was a single just man living there. But the angels fell into the trap of the Sodomites—the trap of sexual knowledge, sex as knowledge, since in the Bible ‘to know’ means both—and so out of jealousy God rained fire on the Cities of the Plain.”

  “You’re not planning on burning all this down?”

  “Not exactly, no. I’m not following the Bible all that carefully. You might say I’m doing some long overdue revising on that old book. The angels’ll probably take one look around and just settle down, live happily ever after inside those human bodies of theirs. If that’s what angels do. I haven’t worked everything out yet.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. I’d seen it coming a mile away. “I’m supposed to play one of the angels.” But Carlos didn’t answer me—instead he said, “Remember back last summer, how we hooked the shower up on the fire escape?”

  Carlos never reminisced about the things we did together.

  “Yeah,” I said. I was touched he wanted to remember that.

  “That was pretty fun.”

  He put his hand on my shoulder, and one more time I remembered, We’re never going to have sex again—which all morning had been a bell chiming inside me, every fifteen minutes or so, that thought—it’s over, it’s finished, whatever this is, it’s something else now.

  “You know,” he said, almost like he was reading my mind, “fucking’s just something that happens. It’s like everything else.”

  I didn’t exactly see what that had to do with the fire escape. Or with the angels.

  “Fucking’s just a motion, an activity, see? It’s a set of physical principles.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked him.

  He turned and looked at me, holding both my shoulders with his hands and looking into my eyes.

  “This is really, really important,” he said. “I really need you. I really need you to do this for me.”

  “Do what?”

  “You remember how we’d get going out there sometimes, out under the water with it pouring down all over us and before we knew it we’d be fucking? And there were those guys who used to watch, and it didn’t really matter whether they were watching or not, it didn’t have anything to do with what we were doing, so they could see us doing anything they wanted to and it didn’t affect what we were doin
g one bit. And you even sort of liked it that they were watching, I remember you got into it because it gave them some kind of pleasure without taking anything away from your pleasure, in fact it even increased your pleasure because you knew how it was pleasuring them too without you doing anything different to your own pleasure than you’d normally do.”

  Carlos said all that really fast—it came pouring out of him like it’d been dammed up and now he was relieved to let it go.

  I realized exactly what he wanted me to do. “So you’re making some porn movie,” I said. “I told you I wasn’t going to be in any porn movie, no way.”

  “I know you said that. But think about it—you were a very different person back then, Tony. There was lots you didn’t know. I think you know more about yourself now,” Carlos went on. “And about making movies. You’re an actor, Tony. A very good actor. You understand about acting. Anyway, porn is hardly the word for it. Did you ever see a porn movie with a set like this? You don’t exactly go building a city right out of Piero della Francesca just to shoot a porn movie there.”

  It was odd being way up there near the roof and looking down on all that scaffolding and stuff, and knowing if you were down below and looking up it’d seem like we were two people standing on the very top ramparts of this fantastically strange and beautiful-looking city.

  “So what is it if it’s not a porn movie?” I asked Carlos. “You want me to take my clothes off, right? You want me to have sex where the camera can film it, right, and Seth can see everything I’m doing with my dick hard, and everybody else can too, and besides, who’m I supposed to be having sex with since you said last night we weren’t ever going to do it anymore?”

  “And we aren’t,” Carlos said. “We can’t. You understand why we can’t.”