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Your name is Amir, you’re 23 years old, your father is your business rival, and your mother is dead.
(Your name is Amir, you’re 23 years old, your mother won’t die, and your father won’t let her.)
Your name is Amir, you’re 23 years old, your business is taking off, your dad doesn’t talk to you anymore, your friends aren’t really your friends, and on top of it all, you’re gay.
You’re gay, and lately you’ve been dealing with this… thing.
It’s not that the weird guy you’ve been buying truffles from every week for a while now is hot—he’s not, really, at all—he’s filthy and reeks and barely ever utters so much as a grunt to you every time you show up for the goods. It’s just that you’re utterly, completely fascinated by him: how he lives out here, completely alone save for the pig that sniffs around your ankles and always gets mud on your shoes despite all your best efforts, the sullen, distant look in his eyes, the tight draw of his mouth amidst his scraggly beard.
You show up, you get your truffles, you leave. The pig snorts after your trail. He never says a word to you from his spot on the porch.
(Except one time, you remember, one of the first few weeks: pass me that pan, gruff and rumbling in his throat. You’d looked back, your heel bumping into the requested pan on the ground amongst the damp leaves. You’d picked it up and handed it to him, and he’d taken it without a word and disappeared back into his cabin. He had more truffles for you than he usually did, that week. It was entirely a coincidence, but you remember it anyway. You like to think it meant something, somehow, cosmically.)
(You don’t really believe in higher powers, anymore, though.)
And then he calls you, one Friday, which has never happened before; he calls you from a number you don’t recognize, and he says, somebody stole my pig, and he says, come pick me up at the diner, and he hangs up.
You barely understand what it is he’s asking of you; you definitely don’t understand why you’re the one who has to deal with it. But he needs a pig to get truffles, and you need truffles if you’re ever going to convince your dad you can handle yourself.
And so you go.
You’ve never been in a tweaker’s trailer before. You feel almost a little guilty, for no reason, sitting there while they talk and twitch. Mostly you just feel unclean.
It’s horrible, but it’s beautiful, the way his body sways and then crumbles—with dignity, somehow, impossibly—under the chef’s blows, and then rebuilds itself, staggering upward like a giant of Olympian myth. The silence that lays over the room is suffocating, broken only by his ragged breathing as he catches himself on Edgar’s desk. You want to go to him.
So you unstick your feet from the cement, and you go to him.
Even with the legendary Chef Feld beaten and bloody in front of them all, you can still feel eyes turn to you when you step forward, gazes itching at the nape of your neck, glancing off the side of your face. Each thread of your expensive blazer settles heavy against your shoulders.
You lie awake for a long while, in the dark of your room that night. First you turn over on your side and squeeze your eyes shut, but you don’t feel yourself getting any closer to sleep that way. Then you pick up your phone, squinting against the glow of the screen, as if you’d find an answer to the cacophony of half-formed questions swimming through your head on your Twitter feed. Of course, that doesn’t work either. You have a text from the owner of one of the restaurants you’ve been courting telling you that they’re going to be taking your father’s offer after all, sorry, best of luck with the business.
You turn your phone off and set it back on your bedside table with a sigh, the backs of your eyes prickling—you’re tired, deeply so. And yet.
If you keep quiet enough, lay very still and stare up at the shadowed ceiling, you imagine you could hear his labored breathing from the living room. You strain your ears for it, for a sign that you are, for perhaps the first time, not alone in your apartment tonight.
You’ve never had anyone stay over in your home, not even to crash on the couch like he is now. You feel a little bad about that, once it occurs to you, how sore he was already going to be in the morning even without having to sleep on your too-small sofa, stiff and dusty from disuse. But it’s not like you were going to let him into your bed to bleed all over your sheets. You’ve never—. You’ve never had another man in your bed.
(And that’s a stupid thing to get hung up on, a hilariously idiotic thing to get hung up on, because it’s not like that even the tiniest bit. The man just wants his pig back. He doesn’t care about you. You’re not sure when you started caring about him.)
You get out of bed, because you haven’t fallen asleep and probably won’t for a while now, and then you leave your room for a drink of water.
There’s just enough light filtering in from the city on the other side of your big glass windows for you to navigate around your kitchen cabinets for a cup. You turn to the sink, and then you look up past the granite countertops, and then you are looking at his motionless figure on your couch, and you forget what it was you even came out here for.
He’s just an indistinguishable dark mass on your couch, really, muffled yellow light spilling over his hunched shoulders and throwing his face into shadow. His great form (Olympian giants, fallen towers, you remember from earlier) is still and silent; for a second you panic, thinking he might have just up and died from internal bleeding, but then he shifts, sort of snuffles and grunts in his sleep, and all the air comes rushing back into your lungs.
You go to the freezer and take a bag of frozen fruit from the top shelf. You approach him with careful steps, like a thief in a dragon’s den, and delicately switch out the long-thawed bag of peas under his cheek for the new makeshift ice pack. He barely reacts, thank god. You don’t know what you would do if he woke up now.
You stare at him, a little longer, lingering on the dried blood and purpling bruises you can just make out on his skin, underneath the shadows and the wild tangles of his hair.
And then you go back to bed, and lie very still, and listen for the breathing you can’t actually hear, until the soft black of sleep finally washes over you.
Breakfast is an ordeal. Breakfast is embarrassing, especially when you turn around from hopping up and down batting your coat against the fire alarm trying to dispel the smoke from your failed attempt at eggs and find him looking at you with one cracked eye, especially when you set the plate in front of him and he glances at you wordlessly, especially when you say that was your spot and he doesn’t say anything, especially, especially, especially.
He wants to go to Eurydice for lunch. You know you can’t do that. You look at him without really looking at him (because he will know, if you do) and say you can, anyway.
You pause for a moment and stare at yourself in the mirror as you’re slicking your hair back with tap water and rehearsing your pitch. Not for the first time in these past 24 hours, you wonder what the hell it is you’ve gotten yourself into.
(It’s insane how much power the name Robin Feld has around here.)
Eurydice blows, though you can’t help but feel bad for the chef as he quivers to pieces in the chair next to you.
And then.
And then.
And then we can skip over the next part. You don’t want to think about this part.
You feel something, when you ask him why the fuck did we do all this and he says I love her and nothing else . It’s the cold metal of your car against your back and the warmth of your bodies humming in the air between the two of you, and it’s your heart hammering in your chest looking up at your father’s dark, empty house.
You feel something, when he holds that second biscuit out to you. It’s the soft billowing warmth of the heater and the shift and groan of the car underneath you as he buckles in and it’s your lungs forgetting to expand on the stutter-step of your breath in. You don’t tell him about the space waiting for him next to Laurie Feld. You think maybe you don’t need to. You think he already knows, on some level.
And you feel something, in the golden light of your father’s pristine kitchen, when he eyes the way you hold the knife and reaches across the counter, folds his broad hands over yours and guides the blade, a clean cut, snnk, against the wood. It’s—.
It’s something. You manage a smile, sheepish and quivering at the corners. He dips his head at you like a stag bowing its antlers to the ground—a sign of respect or a threat, you’re not sure.
It’s something.
And then, and then.
What it is is horrible, and not beautiful, how he falls apart on the floor of your father’s office. It’s horrible, and wretched, and it’s ugly, the sounds tearing out of him like a dying animal.
(Ha, dying animal. It’s so ironic it’s circled past being funny and just back to being tragic all over again.)
You don’t understand it, what it was that brought him here, nor why you’re here with him, but whatever it is has burrowed its way between your ribs and started to fester, or maybe it’s started to bloom. You don’t bother to catch the tears that pool and drip from your chin. You wonder nonsensically if it will water or wash away the great awful something in the space between your heart and your lungs.
And then.
You okay, you ask him. He’s looking up into the dark treeline, or past it, looking at the moon, or the stars past that.
I think I’m gonna walk, he says, and so you ask again, because you think it’s strange, probably, to walk home through the woods in the middle of the night. But it has been, if nothing else, a strange two days.
He looks at you, when you shake his hand, in a way that pins you to the ground, strips you completely and leaves you shivering when he pulls away. The coarse warmth of his glove lingers in the form of his fingers squeezed around your own as you watch him go.
You watch him go until he disappears into the trees. Then and only then do you get in your car. You turn the key in the ignition. The radio clicks on with the engine.
The man you’ve never met, don’t know the face or history of, poshly articulates, the three elements on which music rests, melody, harmony, and rhythm—
(He shut it off.) You shut it off. You shut the car off. You don’t want to be told how to love a thing anymore.
You don’t know how you’re going to learn from here; you don’t know if you can. You’re shivering as you sink down and curl up in the driver’s seat of your dented yellow Camaro; you’re shivering as the tears roll hot down your face.
But you’ll see him next Thursday. And the Thursday after that, and the one after that, until you can’t or you don’t need to anymore. And you figure that has to count for something, maybe.
You could ask him to teach you how to make French toast the proper way, the way your mom used to make it when you were a kid. That could be something, maybe.
Maybe next Thursday, or the one after that.