Miles. Part 12

The orphan pines while the oppressor feeds.

The Rape of Lucrece I sat with my bare legs folded over each other, staring at my record collection. I had just gotten out of the shower. I was now taking a shower before I went to bed and another after I had finished jogging in the morning. It seemed like I was running further and further with each pa.s.sing morning, and stayed in the shower longer and longer. I was cold, sitting in my tartan robe, but wouldn't put on any more clothes.

The Firebird. Cinderella. The Magic Flute. Die Meistersinger von Nuremburg. Katerina Ismailova. A Soldier's Story. Symphonic Metamorphosis. The Water Music. Samson et Delilah. Romeo and Juliet. The Alpine Symphony. The London Symphony. The Leningrad Symphony. The Unfinished Symphony. Heligoland. Billy Budd. Babi Yar. Carnival of the Animals. Brandenburg Concerti. Les Nuits d'ete. Finlandia. Spartacus. The Age of Gold. Enigma Variations. Faust. Jewish Folk Poetry. Jeux d'enfants. Death and Transfiguration.

Requiem. A couple of those. Requiae? Requiea?

I wandered into Dad's bedroom. The large dimensions seemed even bigger with the shadows of emptiness hanging over the old-fas.h.i.+oned colonial furniture and the half-full, half-empty moving crates still cluttering up the floor.

I wasn't sure Uncle Alex would want the room, even as a painting studio, or whatever he called the room he did his work in. I wouldn't.

My hand slid across the bottom of Dad's sock drawer until it reached the hard leather holster concealed in the ma.s.s of unsorted hose. I pulled it out of the drawer and took the vintage .25-calibre Beretta automatic into my right hand, balanced it in my palm, and slowly held it up, extending my arm fully, moving the pistol around the dark room until the reflection of the moon on the edge of the backyard window was in my sights.

I unchambered the hollow-point round and pushed it back into the small clip, which I slipped into a side pouch of the holster. The bullets were hand-loaded by Salvatore, a maddeningly fastidious tailor who had a small storefront in town. The elderly Neapolitan immigrant had evidently once worked for Beretta itself, and maintained, modified, and crafted ammo for Dad's little automatic as if it were his own. I liked the gun. It fit my hand perfectly, even though I knew it wasn't all that powerful a gun.

Seven shots.

Aunt Dutch. No jury on earth would convict me. Aunt Melody. A bullet before the gin got to her. Cousin Julia. Think of the price I'd get from her twenty or thirty ex's. Cousin Matt. Forget a head shot with his thick skull. Uncle Albert. Who could tell the difference if he had been shot? That lunatic twelve-year-old cousin just off the boat that wouldn't leave me alone at the wake. Veronica. Save Uncle Alex a lot of trouble, down the line.

Back in my bedroom, I began to level the pistol at Felix, who was sound asleep, curled up facing my side of the bed, but felt another wave coast over me, a cooler, more penetrating one that made me stop in mid-gesture. I quietly put the gun in its holster and stuffed it into my own sock drawer, before slipping into the covers next to Felix, who stirred as I moved closer to him.

I could see his eyes open slightly from the moonlight that touched the top half of my bed from outside the frosty bedroom window. He asked in a whisper, "Are you okay?" I nodded my head, but started to cry without much in the way of sound effects, something I considered an achievement at that point in my life.

I let him pull me into his arms and hold me like I was his little brother who had just gotten roughed up by the bullies down the block. I didn't realize until I had finished that Felix's hands were both settled along the waistband of my underwear, and that he had cried, too, just not as long as I had, and much more discreetly.

I woke up the next morning after hearing the front door close behind Felix, as he left to go back to his apartment "for some clothes", according to the note. I watched him walk slowly across my backyard and through the neighboring small park, both still covered in snow. The cloud cover was low and grim. It would probably snow some more, I thought, crossing my arms over my chest as I trudged to the bathroom.

I tried not to think about Felix when we showered separately, pretending I didn't really believe he wasn't coming back that night.

Well, he didn't. I let Lawrence take me to his house for dinner with his family, his macabre, intact, happy family, hoping someone would try to call me that night and not get an answer.

The light snowfall pasted itself over my face and in my hair as I walked to the cemetery, in lieu of having a good jog the following day. I had deliberately overslept. I didn't much feel like jogging or getting out of bed. I lay there, leafing through Nicolasha's photo alb.u.m, until almost noon, when I decided to walk off a few of my blues.

Hah.

If the temperature had been seventy-degrees, under a bright, clear sky, with a soft spring breeze blowing in the air, the cemetery, h.e.l.l, any cemetery, would be depressing. A giant field decorated with granite slabs and statues, stuffed with boxes that held the leftovers of people you used to share life with. Christ, I thought, what a concept. The ocean sounded more appealing to me. "Where is so-and-so buried?", someone might ask. You would then point outward, to the warm blue Pacific or the cold green Atlantic, and reply, "out there".

I began to consider other appropriate burial grounds, vast and forbidding, edge-of-the-world kind of places, like the Alps. I'd take a chopper through the middle of Switzerland and scatter the ashes. "Where did you bury them?" I'd smile, sweep my arm toward the line of perpetually snowcapped peaks, and respond, "In there". Or Baja California. Land or sea would work down there. The Australian Outback. Never been there, I said to myself, but it looked pretty edge-of-the-worldish to me. Or New Mexico.

Winter was much nicer up at the Schloss Unc in Minnesota, I decided. Lake Geneva, too.

I knelt over the pair of red stone burial markers and brushed the falling snow from the lettering. I didn't bring flowers. They would be covered in snow in an hour. It was cold again, and gloomy. The streets were swimming in dark grey slush and pulverized road salt. All the cars that pa.s.sed me were filthy. The cold wasn't a fresh cold, but, rather, an unformulated, damp, smoggy, clammy sort of cold. And why not? It was New Year's Eve. After tomorrow, the holidays were over. No more ornaments. Take the lights down. Put away the presents. Burn the tree.

I was certainly going to burn that awful, white-flocked artificial tree of ours.

From Thanksgiving to New Year's Day, the cold and the snow and the wind chill are all a perversely romantic addendum to the Chicagoan's holiday season. On January second, they're just cold and snow and wind chill, officially a pain in the a.s.s and something to despise until winter finally went away, which, in Chicago, could be as early as Easter Sunday, or as late as Mother's Day.

As I walked through the snow-covered graveyard back towards our empty and unlit house, I felt alone, absolutely, terribly, completely alone.

It didn't matter if Uncle Alex loved me, or Aunt Hilly and Cousin Lawrence were there, or that they all cared. It made no difference that my teacher Nicolas was a friend, or lover, or whatever I was supposed to call him, and that he would be there if I ever called. It was irrelevant that Felix and his entire family shared my grief as unselfishly as they shared their love for me, and trivial to mention the depth and sincerity of what had grown between Felix and me.

None of it mattered. There were people in my life, and love came from those people, it was true, a gleaming treasure trove of love, freely given, received, and sometimes reciprocated. But it didn't matter, because I felt alone. I may not have been, but that's how it felt, deep inside my heart, and my soul. Alone.

My G.o.d, I kept whispering out loud to myself, like a broken record skipping over a piece of ice from the empty winter around me. Alone.

X V I.

By his face straight shall you know his heart.

Richard III When I first saw someone waiting for me at our front door, I thought it might be Felix. Or hoped it would be, I don't know. As I got closer, I could see they were too tall to be my best friend buddy ol' pal from school, whoever it was.

Brennan DeVere was about six foot, the same height as me. His shoulders weren't as broad as mine, and his chest and waist were slightly thinner, which made him seem lankier than he was when he wore his school baseball outfit. His fingers and feet were long and, well, elegant, as was his long blond hair, which was thrown back from his ears and hung well below his shoulders. He was too good of a pitcher to hara.s.s, so our coaches left Brennan and his hair alone. He stuffed it into his baseball cap when he played. Everyone gave him h.e.l.l when he put it into a pony tail. He had bright green eyes that sparkled when he grinned or laughed, both of which he did a lot, because he was always telling jokes and playing with people, at least when I was around. His lips, eyebrows, nose, and ears were also thin, complementing the sharp lines of his cheek bones and chin, a handsome, almost adult face that was determined on the pitcher's mound and would have been equally sn.o.bby and arrogant in prewar Europe.

On a good day, I might get a single off of him.

His mom and dad were unrepentant hippies, cheerful dropouts who kept the better part of the sixties alive and well and living in their Volkswagen minibus, mature stoners that owned a small nursery on the edge of town, the edge that bordered the unfas.h.i.+onably working-cla.s.s (and integrated) suburb to our east, flower children whose only little boy did all of his pre-high school growing up in communes and collective farms somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. All of their money went to political groups that they called progressive, we called liberal, and the rest of my family called communist, so Brennan didn't expect to have a car of his own until after college, and bought all his clothes at the dingy Army / Navy surplus store he worked at all every evening to pay his own tuition at the Catholic high school he chose to attend.

The DeVeres lived in a grey brick Cape Cod house on a side road near the nursery. Their backyard blended into a small corner of Cook County Forest Preserve land, so it seemed like there was a miniature forest just outside their back door. The living room, family room, all three bedrooms, and the bas.e.m.e.nt each had a separate stereo system equipped with an 8-track tape player, as did their minibus. I had only visited Brennan at home once, and that was with the rest of the guys, but I loved his bas.e.m.e.nt, which was lined with psychedelic posters, many of which were lined with black felt and glowed in the black-light mounted on the ceiling. Brennan had one of those sound boxes, a molded plastic box the size of a stereo speaker that flashed different colored lights in a wild pattern, lights activated by talk or the music from their late-'50's style juke box. The room was filled up by a full-sized pool table with real leather side pouches and genuine ivory b.a.l.l.s that Brennan was banned from using. The fabulous antique looked out of place, surrounded as it was by cheap head shop posters. They even had a strobe light, too.

And all I could do was hang a stupid grin on my face, I was so happy to see him, to see anyone, waiting for me to come home.

"Is there a good reason why you haven't opened my Christmas card?" Brennan waved the yellow envelope under my nose. The mailbox was stuffed with unopened mail. I felt like an a.s.s. He slapped the side of my cheek with the card and smiled into my eyes. "At least you didn't throw it out."

I paused awkwardly. I didn't know whether I should have held out my hand or moved closer to hug him. I wasn't sure if our only other hug was just a hug to cheer me up, or the first in a long line of them. There was a lot about our walk home from the church that I wasn't sure about. Why had I felt so comfortable in telling him about what was hurting me so much, instead of holding it in and crying, like I had so often with Felix? Brennan grinned at my indecision before putting the card in my gloved hands. "Read my card, first."

It was the cheapest, tackiest drug store Christmas card I had ever seen, with a bad j.a.panese cartoon-like drawing of Santa Claus falling down a chimney into a lit fireplace. Wow. It cost a whole thirty-five cents! Kind of a step down from the gilt nutcrackers and village people at play. I opened the small card, read the inscription quickly, and looked up at a Brennan DeVere I had never seen before.

"Aren't you going to read it out loud?"

I smiled. "Why would I do that?"

"That's the least you can do, considering you didn't send me one, and left mine out in the cold for a week."

"A day or two," I corrected him.

Brennan leaned sideways against one of the house's front picture-windows, looking wistfully at our Christmas tree inside the house. "Dad says, when you write something down, it becomes real, but when you read something written down, it becomes forever."

That sounded like something his dad might say. Shyness overcame Brennan as I made him wait for a few more seconds. "Okay, okay." I cleared my throat as if I were about to recite from Shakespeare.

To my friend, Have a merry Christmas - get lots of cool presents - and a happy New Year - hit lots of home runs, just not off of me!

We've played ball together for years, but never played friends like we did after meeting in church. You opened up to me with honesty I didn't think I earned, or deserved.

Thanks for that, and letting me be your friend that night, now, and for a long time to come, I hope.

I need you too.

Love, Brennan...oooo.

The impact of what Brennan had written, intended or otherwise, began to sink in after I had read it aloud. The words were alive, deep inside of me. We looked at each other carefully, beguiled by our shared hesitation, but neither of us moved to close the three-foot gap between us. Our little stalemate was broken by the sudden flash of blinking and twinkling Christmas lights hanging in the front windows and the trees lining the driveway. I had forgotten about the timer I hooked up the night before.

Lights.

"What do the zeroes mean after your name?"

"Come on!" Brennan shook his head with a pursed grin. "You really don't know what they mean?"

"Nope." I shrugged my shoulders. I honestly didn't.

My baseball buddy and friend glanced down at his cheap and wet Converse All-Star gym shoes, silly looking red things, if you asked me. "X's and O's?! I know you know!" He looked back up at me and smiled. "They're hugs."

With a blush, I asked, "Then what does an X stand for?"

Brennan blushed back. "A kiss."

Hugs and kisses? I looked at the card again and felt myself s.h.i.+ver as a rare and welcome tide of warmth poured across me inside of Dad's greatcoat.

"Haven't you ever written anyone a card or letter?" Actually, I hadn't. Silly poetry and worse stories, yeah, but none of that. Until the last couple of months, who would I have written to, anyway? "You're just making me say it all out loud."

"What?" I tapped the top of Brennan's head with the card, yellow envelope and all.

"I want to give you a hug."

Camera.

I began to laugh, but stopped when Brennan seemed hurt. He didn't look away, however. I ignored the distant sound of a ringing phone inside of the house. I wanted to hold him, too. "Me, too."

The time and the place didn't seem important. I don't remember if it was still snowing, or how cold it was, or felt. I'm not even sure what kind of look I had on my face, but I can remember every detail on Brennan's: his long, blond hair, slicked back over his head and over his ears, dark from the moisture of the falling snow, the reddish tint on his ears and nose from the wind, the slight quivering of his bottom lip, the small wagon train of freckles at the top of his cheeks, and the wide open pair of bright green books that left themselves open for me to see, books that watched me read them with indulgence and a touch of desperation.

He was beautiful.

"Remember what you talked about? You know, after Confession?" I nodded, at once admiring and resenting how calm Brennan appeared as he looked into my eyes when he spoke. I felt like the little boy with the violin I had written about, the one in the courtyard, turning to stone as an angel carried me in their arms and music swirled up in the background, except that the music now was the invisible bridge connecting my eyes, and heart, with Brennan's. He started pointing his thumb at both of us. "So am I." His voice suddenly disappeared into a whisper. "Me, too."

I closed my eyes for a moment and lifted my head toward the heavens I was pretty sure were hiding behind all those winter clouds. Brennan stepped forward, put his arms around me, and pressed us softly together.

Action.

It wasn't like our first, hurried, awkward hug. It was weird the way one of his arms went across the top of my shoulders and neck, and the other went under my arm and around my back, weird like that was the correct way to hug and wed been doing it for years, not seconds. The sides of our faces rubbed together like chilled fleshy pieces of jigsaw. He slid one of his legs in between mine under the open greatcoat. Our bodies, despite our winter layers of coats and s.h.i.+rts and t-s.h.i.+rts and long underwear, fitted around each other perfectly. We stood in each other's arms, closer than even Nicolasha and I had, longer than I ever hugged anyone before.

It had to be the best hug anyone ever got, and it came from someone I had only known as a nice smile and a fearsome split-finger pitch, someone, I then realized in a second warm flash deep in my heart, I was going to be friends with for, yes, "a long time to come."

"I'm sorry I couldn't get here sooner," Brennan softly told me in my ear.

"That's okay," I murmured from his neck. "You're here now. I couldn't ask for anything else." Well...maybe just one other thing.

We reluctantly pulled away from each other. Brennan reached up and straightened my scarf under the collar of the greatcoat he looked over with envy. "It's, uh, really been a rough end of the year for you." Yes, I nodded with a blank, almost stoic look on my face, it kind of had. "Well, tomorrow's a new year." He wrapped an arm over my shoulders and shook me gently, smiling his way through my mock stoicism. "And we're new friends, right?"

I nodded again, holding open the front door for my new friend to enter. Warmth from the house poured over us as we shut out the cold and snow behind the closed door and headed into the family room to start a fire, which would soon include that d.a.m.ned flocked tree.

Flash.

X V I I.

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,

Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact.