Anigel had said she was going up to Saint Alban’s for the weekend to visit Ross and would Russell like to come along to see his cousins and hang out with Flipper? How much Anigel knew about his relationship to Flipper, Russell was unclear, but he said yes.
“We should ask Cameron too,” he thought, and Anigel said that was a good idea.
“I would love to go,” Cameron said, “But I’ve been snagged into meeting Chris’s parents.”
“That’s a good thing.”
“I guess,” Cameron said to Anigel. “I hardly want to be around my parents, I can’t imagine wanting to be around someone else’s.”
The ride was two hours, and Russell was excited about seeing Flipper. More, he admitted, than he was about seeing Jimmy or Macy. He would have to visit them first, of course, and they’d all have lunch together. They would bring Flipper with them. It would be just like this winter. He looked forward to a college like Saint Alban’s or maybe even Saint Alban’s itself. The world made sense there.
Anigel was not someone who believed in talking to fill up space. They took turns controlling the radio and knew every song, and Anigel said she like psychology better and better and Russell said school was easier than it had ever been. While he did not go into his love life, he had no trouble going into Gilead and Mark’s.
“They weren’t talking for a while. Mark was going through some things. But they’re good now.”
“Mark is fine,” Anigel said, frankly. “I have to keep reminding myself he’s still a kid.”
Two hours later they were in Saint Alban’s, parking before the three story renovated convent that was Abelard Hall. They walked up to the third floor as if they owned the place, and the dormitory was warm and full of life that Saturday afternoon. Anigel and Russell made their way to the common room where Jimmy and Ross were smoking, and the boys came laughing to greet them.
“Russ, I didn’t know you’d be here,” Jimmy said.
“Last minute. Sort of a surprise.”
“Well, we’re glad to have you,” said Ross. “What’s going on in the high flying world of Our Lady of Mercy?”
“Not much,” Russell said. “Nothing so high flying I couldn’t come with Ani.”
There was, though, Russell remembered some mete Mark was in, and he had originally planned to accompany Gilead, but Gilead didn’t seem to mind him not coming.
“Go and get your man,” he’d told Russell.
While Ross and Jimmy and Anigel planned out the rest of the day and Anigel said, “We’ll head out around noon tomorrow?” Russell only nodded and paid the briefest attention. He was waiting to say that he needed to slip away, that he was going upstairs to the men’s restroom.. He needed to find Flipper.
Russell had been having sex, but he had not been sexy, not thought of himself in any way. It was only a few weeks ago when he was naked in half light, that he had turned to see himself in the mirror, and regarded his nearly six foot body, alabaster a poet would call it, withwell made shoulders and a good chest. He’d seen the dark red of his hair, and marveled over his eyes, surprised to understand he was goodlooking. He felt it. Looking and up and down himself, for the very first time he felt like a sexual being, and he felt so beautiful to himself he was trhilled. He thought only Chayne, or possibly Cody would know how he felt, but he told it to Gilead and Gilead said, “I know what you mean. It happened to me one night while Mark was sleeping next to me. I saw myself the way I see him. Or maybe the way he sees me. It was almost like losing my virginity a second time.”
So today Russell had worn brown courdoroys that fit snug like Cody’s, and like Cody he wore no underwear. He wore the fitted turtleneck that Flipper would wear, and he came like this to Flipper’s room and knocked on the door.
“It’s open,” Flipper called in something between merriment and laziness.
Russell went in and almost shrieked and then stammered, “I’m…. shit. I’m…”
He closed the door and heard Flipper swearing, the other voice in the room mumbling.
Of course, they were grown ups here and used to Flipper. And his friends would have known what was going on, and who but his friends would be here? But he had not expected Russell, and Russell had not expected to find Flipper, mostly naked, lounging in bed with a completely naked Andy Lagger.
Russell would have felt foolish for running, so he waited for the door to open and Flipper to come out in his boxers, some of his black hair sticking up.
“I…” Russell started.
“I had no idea you were coming,” Flipper said.
“I was surprising you.”
“You….uh… succeeded.”
“Are you mad?” Russell said.
Flipper frowned.
“No. I’m… Are you mad? Are you okay? Are…”
“We’re all going to lunch in a few minutes. Are you coming?”
“Yeah,” Flipper said, looking back into his room, where Andy was.
“Yeah.”
Lunch was odd because Andy came with them and Macy whispered, “He never does that shit.”
But by the afternoon, the usual suspects were back in Abelard Hall planning what do with the rest of the day, and Coral had suggested the mall, but her heart wasn’t in the suggestion, and Money said she had these friends down in Miskatucket, and there would be an interesting party.
“When Money says interesting,” Ross noted, “I’m usually interested.”
“We don’t have to stay all night, and the guys’ll be chill.”
This meant some pot and maybe a little bit of blow, but mostly people just sitting around drinking and smoking, nothing loud, nothing crazy, an hour away from campus. They agreed. Russell went up with Flipper because Flipper seemed to want to talk to him.
“We never said anything about how we were to each other,” Russell said before Flipper could say anything.
“We never said anything about what was going on when we weren’t together. And we weren’t together. I mean, we don’t see each other except for twice a month, so…”
Russell was, if anything, fair. That moment when he had turned and seen himself in the mirror had been in Jason’s bedroom, after they’d had sex, and he and Jason were definitely going to have sex again. He couldn’t really fault a grown Flipper for carrying on with Andy.
Flipper dug his hands into the pockets of his joggers.
“You got it all figured out.”
“I don’t have anything figured out,” Russell said, a little sharply. “But this,” he made a vague gesture to Flipper’s room, “isn’t worth flipping out about.”
“You could stay with me tonight.”
Russell shook his head.
“That feels weird,” he said.
“Can we just hang out?” Flipper said. “Can we ditch everyone else and just you and me hang out?”
“Sure,” Russell said. “Hanging out is kind of what we do best.”
Nehru knew he was being foolish, but he didn’t care. Once, at Chayne’s house, his cousin had been reading Tarot cards and pulled up the Fool in his almost jester’s costume, dog at his side, tripping along with a bundle at the end of the stick he carried over his shoulder. He was about to fall off a cliff, or maybe he wasn’t. The dog was about to keep him from jumping or maybe not, and Chayne had said, “All things begin with the Fool. Sometimes you have to be the Fool.”
So that morning, when he ran down to the beach and the sky was grey blue and the water was grey and grey green and the beach was grey tan and Brad followed after him, Nehru had a plastic bottle and he was going to take away a gallon of Lake Michigan. He’d done it before. In the summer he went into the water, plunging the plastic gallon bottle down into the waves, and it bubbled and bubbled and when it stopped bubbling, he knew it was filled.
But it was not summer now. This morning, he skated along the edges of the freezing March water, trying to scoop up some little water until, at last:
“Nehru, what the hell are you doing?”
His green jade beads were around his neck, a gift from his Jewish mother who was half a Hindu, who had named him after the first Prime Minister of India. He remembered one warm summer when the waters were blue and green and Indian men had been in the water with a baby Krishna, dipping him for .Janamashtami, Hindu Christmas, the birth of the Lord Krishna. They had been on a sand bar. He’d passed them and fallen in the water laughing, and they laughed with him and the sun was hot and the water was hot and Lord Krishna smiled upon him.
This was not Hindu time. This was Nordic time. This was Loki time. Before he could think he took of his shoes and socks, rolled up his pants and went into the freezing water. His hands would chap, his skin would dry and he would rub it in special lotion till all the old skin fell of and new skin appeared. You could make your will and your mind move past the cold, past most things. He plunged in the plastic gallon jar and his legs, his toes grew to almost love the cold as he watched the gallon jar bubble and bubble, stop bubbling, be full.
“You’re nuts,” Brad declares while he walks with Nehru to the rocks, so he can put his shoes back on.
“I’m keeping the heat on in the car. I don’t want you to catch a cold.”
Nehru only catches something like extreme happiness, On his way back, the heat on his feet, he is glad they have an almost two hour drive, two hours for him to scribble notes, to look at the brown fields then to look at Brad who pretends to be put out, to look at him, to look at him, to look, to love.
A sentence will save us.
Listen, if you want to write
poetry it is as simple as speakng the truth,
collapse the cheap house with all its bullshit,
How long have you sat at this window,
not looking out this window imagining it
was something else?
Alright.
So no matter how many words
this feels like the first word,
this feels like the first groping
toward something.
Nehru pitied anyone who was not in this moment, who had not experienced eternity, who did not know like he knew right now that this moment would never end and that, though he still longed for last night, when he was reduced to sound and sensation, when he was an ass, a home, a receiver and Brad was a seeker, a pilgrim, a cock, a dumb cock and they were insistently fucking on the bed, someplace, somewhere, that piston motion was still happening. He was still running into the water. Brad was still scolding him and helping him to put on his shoes, still driving beside him shaking his head. Still kissing him tenderly on the cheek and going to pay for gas and return with a drink and a hot deli sandwich
I, I, I
forgot how many volumes I had messed
up my mind with
the memory of finer things.
I divine here, another thing.
I have lived eight years here and before
that I never lived at all.
They lied, they lied about it all.
They said it was a hawk
when it was just a raven
They lived, they lied so tall
making mountains out of mole hills
and beaches out of shavings,
fingernail clippings
and this is where the bugs are.
Some time, in a time after this car ride, they were in an apartment above the Noble Red putting music to that poem, Brad and Cody, heads close together, tearing a poem apart to make it a song, and Nehru had retired to write down more poems. He knows many of his words would not be set to music. While the guitars trill, he makes coffee. He makes sandwiches. The heat is turned up so his feet are bare. He thinks he is like a wife with two husbands. Cody sings.
“The mercy of sandmen came to put me to sleep
Such a little mercy and it made me weep
The sandmen have to put me to sleep and I don’t know
who brings the morning.”
Artificial light is made. Artificial night is made. The bed and breakfast was beautiful, but this place is twice as wonderful. While Cody lies beside him, tracing his face with the back of his hand, and Brad lies on the other side, the scent of marijuana drifting from the ashtray as he blows smoke into Nehru’s mouth, the Bible passes through Nehru, the ancient story of his first ancestors. Jews who not only were not white, but were not yet Jews.
“And Laban had two daughters: the name of the elder was Leah, and the name of the younger was Rachel. Leah was tender eyed; but Rachel was beautiful and well favoured.”
Ah, but they both have soft eyes. The softest brown eyes, the softest peat colored eyes, looking on him with love, the softest lips, on his lips, on his chest, on his nipples, now, oh, God, on his cock, Cody’s mouth so warm, and such hands, kneading between his thighs darting in his asshole, that mouth that mouth, all of the deep soft hair. Brad’s gentle moan, his chin rests on Nehru’s shoulder, his back pressed to him, his cock, heavy as a club, or as love rising, pressing between his buttocks.
They are half singing, half saying. Nehru is half remembering the rest of the poem that will be the song, that is their life
Here we are in this shameless time,
Days before and not after guilt
you cannot shame he to do the right thing,
but you can’t shame him into love
Sighing, and opening and closing, the tender shouts, arms closing over arms, backs to chests to chest to back, the bottle held to the nose, the fumes that dizzy, take one out of the body, the entry… Brad fitting slowly into him, Cody’s mouth, the house for his own growing sex.
Here in this shameless time….
Here in this shameless time….
Here in this timeless time.
The amber daylight stars wink, and a world is in them. Nehru moans and presses back. Brad is in him. They move with quiet laughter and rejoicing. Both Nehru and Cody shudder and moan as Nehru enters the moist heat of Cody Barnard. They move together.
Time without time
It’s Brad who cries out first, locked in Nehru. Nehru feels the flood of him, heat blooming inside of him even as he is taken to his crisis and feels himself shooting in Cody. Even as heat sprays across the bed sheets, makes a sort of baptism.
Stop lying, start unlearning
Leave behind the old dead country
Love again, love your skin,
Love the one who lies beside you
Love me.
They are without motion, locked together by the strength of passion, by absolute bliss and perfect trust.
Love again.
Love me.
