by Paul Russell
In the next room Noah slept beneath the blue blanket Tracy had carefully draped over his unconscious form. Though he had certainly not bought a modem for the specific purpose of tracking down the Brewer Twins, it was nonetheless to a site called the Brewer Shrine that Tracy had experimentally made his way—and with a feeling of great urgency, as if those images before his eyes came not from some ghostly electronic matrix but from the troubled depths of Noah’s imagination itself, a secret key, perhaps, to the boy’s volatility, his capacity for betrayal, for self-destructiveness, for sheerly wanton acts of sabotage.
The rains, in the next image, had stopped; the twins had moved outside into the sunlight. A fringe of woods loomed in the background as they faced each other. Brewer I—who could tell which was which? A predicament both uncanny and alluring—had reached out playfully or provocatively to unsnap his brother’s jeans. Chin tucked down, grinning, Brewer II watched those transgressive hands, then he too joined in the horseplay, the two of them over the next several stills sliding each other out of their jeans, laughing sunnily at their crazy antics, wrestling each other into nakedness. On the ground, they grappled together in close embrace, rolling amid cool ferns, seeming both to beckon and resist each other, their penises sublimely limpid throughout, till in the final image—the luminous crucifixion capping these stations of the cross—the brothers surrendered to their mirror selves, kissed and were kissed, perfect beauties, perfect twins.
So these were the images Noah had found his way to some solitary afternoon or evening as he poked around in the dark of cyberspace looking for phantoms to inflame him. This was the double-dream of eros that had so seized his imagination, and which he had called forth that night he’d jumped Tracy in the kitchen with his hapless cry, “This is how the Brewer Twins do it!” Now Tracy knew how the Brewer Twins did it, and he felt both aroused and profoundly sad. Oh Noah, he thought. No one is like this in real life.
For that was what it came down to, finally: real life. The world as one finds it, peopled by norms and policed by laws. And what were the Brewer Twins, their beauty a kind of vacancy that could bear any amount of dreaming, if not a perfect invitation to the impossibly-dreamed and never-to-behad, the excruciating predicament of those whose desires were still—and no doubt always would be—defined as criminal?
Had Noah jerked off to these cool, studied inducements to desire? Had he sought, in real life, to re-create this lovely fever dream, concocted by a cunning photographer and his compliant models, of perfect, infallible communion? Tracy felt a pang of unadulterated tenderness toward the impossible boy whose life he had clearly done his share, under the guise of help, to ruin.
With a resounding conviction of his own imminent ruin, he disconnected himself from the World Wide Web and turned off the computer. He had tried calling Arthur earlier, but the line was busy; Arthur was like a spider at the center of his own worldwide web, sustained by friends near and far with whom he chatted nightly. Even before he’d gotten sick, in those tumultuous weeks when he and Tracy had been together, a time Tracy remembered now as positively halcyon, Arthur’s phone bills had been astronomical.
“Ah,” Tracy told his friend when the other picked up after barely half a ring. “So I’m the lucky one who got through.”
“And I was just going to call my mother,” Arthur said. “So I’m the lucky one too. What’s up, gorgeous?”
“Arthur,” Tracy said, pausing a moment before taking the plunge. “I need to talk to you. I’ve done something pretty terrible, and you’re not going to like it.”
“You didn’t go and get yourself a Prince Albert too, did you? Copycat.”
“I’m being serious, Arthur. I’ve totally fucked up my life. I fell in love with one of my students. A sophomore. He’s fifteen. I really thought I could manage things and be cool about it, but I didn’t. It all got away from me. I’ve been messing around with him for the last month, and now everything’s quite majestically fucked.”
On the other end of the line was a long silence, broken only by a siren that rose and fell in the background—as if, by some transposition, the police were converging on Arthur instead of him.
“Oh. Well,” Arthur said finally, when the siren’s moan had subsided. He laughed a nervous laugh.
“I feel like I’ve betrayed a lot of people here,” Tracy told him. “But especially you. I mean, after everything…”
“History will repeat itself,” Arthur said, perhaps a bit tartly.
“You’re my closest friend,” Tracy confessed. “You tried to warn me, in your way. I have absolutely no excuse for what I’ve done. What I’m doing.”
He heard Arthur inhale and then exhale heavily. His friend spoke slowly and sorrowfully. “How old am I? Thirty-two, thirty-three? I no longer keep track. But do you want to know what conclusion I’ve come to at my greatly advanced age? I’ll put it to you simply: love is the enemy. That’s my conclusion. We should all live in our little monk cells and never venture out—which, come to think of it, is what I do these days. But you know what the problem with that fine solution is? We’re not made to live like that. We’re born starving for love, and almost by definition it’s what we can’t have. Not the way we want it. At least, homosexually speaking. Maybe for straight people it’s different. I wouldn’t know, and frankly don’t care to. So what can I tell you? If you want to know the truth—if I were you, I’d be totally unrepentant. Fuck the system. It certainly never helped me when I was fifteen and starving. Jack Emmerich and all his moral scruples can go straight to hell, which I presume they did.”
Tracy was listening hard. Arthur, of course, had been on the other side of things. He hadn’t had to face Tracy’s particular predicament. Only Jack Emmerich had done that, and of course Jack Emmerich was the lucky one right now. Jack Emmerich was safely out of it all.
“What I’m doing,” Tracy said. “It’s not sustainable. You see that, don’t you? My God, fifteen years old, Arthur. Anything could happen, and if it does, I’m looking at serious jail time. Years and years. Who knows? The rest of my life, maybe.”
“Then keep loving him,” Arthur said simply. “You have to have faith in that.”
“But it’s not going to work,” Tracy cried.
“Probably not. But it’s what you’ve got to do. Better to burn than to rot. Isn’t that what somebody in some Conrad novel says? The instant you stop loving him because you’re scared is the instant it’s all over.”
But Tracy had to wonder, even as he heard Arthur’s words: how could he be sure that something like that hadn’t in fact already happened? That fear hadn’t killed whatever mad dream had once burned there?
Arthur, it seemed, knew his thoughts exactly. “Tracy,” he said. “Trust me. Love him. I don’t have any other advice than that.”
“Except to get a good lawyer,” Tracy said despondently.
“Well, it can’t hurt,” Arthur told him. “Just don’t give Noah any reason to hate you. Then keep your fingers crossed. For a very long time.”
A shiver of alarm went through him, as if he stood naked and exposed for all the world to see. “How did you know it was Noah?”
“The way you talked about him when I was up there.”
“But I didn’t even know myself then,” Tracy countered.
“Of course you did. You knew all along. That’s why you can’t be regretful. You knew from the start and still couldn’t resist.”
“A lot of help that argument’s going to be.”
“It’s the truth,” Arthur said with certainty. “Love takes us over. It ruins us and never looks back. The Greeks had it right when they said all you could do was obey the gods’ demands, no matter how terrible they might be. Jack Emmerich, bless his unlovely soul, taught me that—and you know what? It turned out to be true. Poor Louis could never understand that one thing, and it’s why he’s had such a respectable, meaningless life. But don’t even get me started on that. The more I talk the less help I’ll be. My brain sort of fades in and out t
hese days. But remember—if you ever need a place to come to, my apartment’s always here. It’s so small it almost doesn’t exist. They’ll never think of looking for you here. There’s just one thing I should tell you, though.”
“I’m listening,” Tracy said, though he had stopped listening some time before.
“I talked to my doctor today. He gave me some not-so-good news. Seems I’ve failed the Crixivan regimen. My viral load’s way high, rumor has it my T cells have gone south for the winter. There are other drugs he can try and put me on, so it’s not hopeless. I asked him, Should I be despondent? Tell me honestly. And he said, No, not yet. He said, I’ll let you know when you should be despondent. So, I don’t know why I’m telling you this except to say, it looks like we all have our little problems these days.”
“I’m dying,” Tracy told his handsome twin in the mirror, but his twin, implacable, only returned his gaze, a young man who did not look at all as if he were dying. The truly difficult thing, after all, was to live.
He took a deep breath and opened his bedroom door. On the sofa, the blue blanket had been folded neatly into a square. Tracy went from room to room, but the rooms of his house were all empty. What he had wished for earlier appeared to have happened. Noah had vanished.
And so, it seemed, had Betsy as well.
XVI
Walking Middle Forge’s deserted streets, past heaps of snow gone gray, or standing on the otherwise empty, heavily salted Metro North platform, or boarding the night’s last Grand Central-bound train, where he and Betsy sat alone in the Washington Irving car and his reflection stared moodily back at him from the black window, he thought he might have discovered, with great clarity, a truth that went something like this:
Once there was a boy who was nothing special, a boy accidents seemed to cling to like metal filings to a magnet. A boy who was, literally, a walking disaster, who’d been told that by everybody in the world who might know: his dad, his teachers, his counselors, the few friends he’d managed for a time before losing them, the various doctors who’d set his several broken bones down through the years.
He told himself:
I am the boy who set the woods on fire.
I am the boy who cannot concentrate.
I am the boy who wets his bed.
I am the boy my teacher fell in love with.
I am the boy with the tattoo.
The boy who is HIV positive.
There was a certain logic—wasn’t there?—to that last part. A kind of harmony sounding out of all those different random noises. So he would have AIDS. It was like the end of a story where you reveal the truth. And the truth was, he mused as a bridge spanned the black gulf, the scattered lights of a town blazed on the other side of the wide river, the truth was that AIDS was just a different way of proclaiming yourself. He could never be someone like the Fatwa, aloof and defiant and stupendously indifferent; that took too much courage. But he could be who he was.
He could be the boy who would burn brightly.
It seemed like a relatively hopeful conclusion, given everything, to come to at one A.M. on a Friday night—or did you call it Saturday morning already? “Hey Betsy,” he said to the dog curled on the floor under his seat, “is it Friday or Saturday? What is it in dog time?”
He had no idea why he’d taken her. Maybe he hadn’t expected to go for anything more than a walk around the frozen lake and then bring her back. Maybe he’d just wanted to scare Tracy Parker. But what was the good of that? Tracy Parker was scared enough already, and it wasn’t fear Noah had ever wanted from him. No, it was the opposite, some proud bravery his teacher had failed to deliver.
Tracy Parker, you’re irrelevant, he told himself angrily. But what did that mean?
When he was ten he’d had a best friend named Liam; for an entire year they were inseparable at that Upper East Side academy he’d gone to for a couple of years before his dad, in one of his fits of mysterious disappointment, yanked him out. A short, spunky kid with a crew cut and ice-blue eyes, Liam enchanted him. He wasn’t just another ten-year-old: he had a whole history to him. The summer before they met, he’d been abducted by aliens from his family’s weekend house in upstate New York; little gray men had lifted him through the roof of the house and into their spaceship.
“Did they do experiments on you?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Like what?”
“Like—they put their hands inside me. They touched my heart and my lungs and my kidneys.”
No way.
“Their hands went all inside my body like it was Jell-O. Honest to God, I’m not shitting you, Noah. Oh man, it was this weird feeling when they stuck their hands inside me.”
Was that the first time he’d wondered, though of course he’d been way too young to know anything about it, what it would be like to get fucked? He’d look at Liam and think, Aliens put their hands inside you, and it was like something magic had happened to Liam, and he wanted it to happen to him as well. He wanted Liam’s hands to go through him like he was Jell-O.
But then at the end of the school year Liam’s family moved away—to Chicago, Cleveland, somewhere in the Midwest. He hadn’t really taken it in till the last day of school. They were in the little fenced-in recess yard, standing by the sandbox under the sycamore tree and talking in a way that felt very serious and grown-up. He’d loved that feeling, even though there was grief in it. “I’ll write you a letter,” Liam told him. “And then you write me back.”
Why did he do what he did? Without saying a word, he reached down into the sandbox and scooped a handful of sand and flung it in Liam’s face.
So is that where we are, Trace? he asked himself, remembering with a stab of regret that innocent joke Tracy had made: like father, like son. The evil part was, it wasn’t a joke. One of his dad’s favorite expressions had always been “Fuck the world.” And Chris Tyler had warned him, in that conspiratorial way he had: “Once you get fucked, sweetie, that’s it—you won’t be able to stop.” So there he was: he’d wanted to get fucked ever since Liam, and now he’d done it, he was even getting used to it the way you got used to every great or terrible thing. And there was no stopping him. It was all very clear. Like father, like son—only in the mirror. Which was of course why his dad hated him so much. And of course why he’d thrown sand in Liam’s eyes. And of course why Tracy Parker didn’t want him anymore. Of course, of course.
But just when he thought it all made perfect sense, none of it made any sense. He was too tired, or too stupid—and it didn’t matter. Deep in the bowels of Manhattan, the Metro North train was pulling into Grand Central Station. The lights flickered and went out, then came back on, and the train jerked to a halt. At this hour the subterranean hive, usually swarming, was a graveyard of stilled trains, desolate platforms. Even the high-ceilinged main hall, its walls draped for renovation, looked disquietingly vacant, as if it had been hurriedly abandoned by its inhabitants.
“Well, Betsy,” Noah said aloud. “Looks like we’re here. Got any bright ideas?” Instead of helping, talking to a dog only made him feel lonelier. He could go to his dad’s apartment; all he had to do was scoot around the corner to Fifth and head thirty blocks north. But that was the last place he wanted to go, especially with Tracy Parker’s beagle in tow. No, the person he really wanted to see, of all people, was the Fatwa.
You could hardly say they were friends. He even suspected, sometimes, that Chris didn’t like him that much, that he had his own reasons for hanging around with Noah that had little to do with anything so simple as friendship. But that had always been part of Noah’s fascination with Chris: his unreadable attitudes, his inscrutable choices.
When Chris had told him he was positive, his first reaction hadn’t been to feel scared. It was so strange—almost like something you’d dream—how in a completely unconscious way he’d known all along the Fatwa must have AIDS.
“It’s the nineties,” had been his brave response. This was somebody he’d stuck
his unprotected dick in. He spoke for both of them. “Anybody who doesn’t use a condom—”
“It’s not that simple,” Chris had countered, but Noah hadn’t wanted to talk about it anymore.
“It is for me,” he’d said in a way that ended the conversation right there. Later it broke over him like a cold sweat. Still, he didn’t blame the Fatwa. He knew what it was like to want something so much you were willing to forget the inconvenient little things that might get in the way of your having it. Be honest, he told himself: you’d have used any lie to get Tracy Parker to fuck you.
He’d written the number of Chris’s doctor friend on a slip of paper, which, fortunately, hadn’t disappeared from his wallet like most things did. When he dialed from a phone booth on Forty-second, the phone rang seven or eight times, then just when he expected an answering machine someone said, “Yup?”
There was something so unexpectedly intimidating in that adult voice that he almost hung up. “Is, uh, Christian Tyler there?” he asked diffidently.
“Do you know what time it is?” the voice accused.
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s just that I really need to talk to him.”
