Archive of Our Own

It was strange, how quickly it had fallen apart. Or not quickly; over a year, from that first moment of filtered panic, to the moment they drove the knife in. Not quickly at all. But it had felt quick, because right up until the end, right until the moment he’d gone, he had believed he would win. It was a thing tennis had taught him, to stare down match point and still know he would win. Belief becoming knowledge through belief, a kind of epistemological bootstrapping. There was something in the analogy; you could lift yourself by your bootstraps in metaphor all you liked but it wouldn’t get you anywhere in reality. And this was where it had gotten him:

Sitting in his apartment, in Monaco, on a Saturday afternoon, watching the world pass by. Hungry, a little bit; past time for dinner. But it seemed impossible, to sustain himself, to go through the process of preparing fuel for a machine he no longer needed. He let the stillness drag on until the hunger faded.

“It’s good to see you,” he said. “Come in, come in.” Carlos blinked up at him, maybe surprised: the flatness of his voice, hollow in his own ears. It was the first time they had really seen each other since the retirement.

And Carlos was moving to Monaco, as they all seemed to. Carlos had called asking for advice, a realtor. “Come look at my place. I haven’t decided yet for sure if I keep it.” There; something to give. He had not wanted to be pitied. He had wanted control over himself, which things he lost. He could choose to give some things up if he would be allowed to keep the rest, a bargain.

Now, Carlos. In his entryway, in his home. One of them was a ghost, but it wasn’t clear to him who was being haunted. Carlos smiled, or tried to, and then after an effort succeeded, and that cleared things up: Carlos was solid, bright. He wasn’t the one fading.

“You think you gonna move?” Carlos asked, while he made tea. He hoped Carlos didn’t want food, because there wasn’t any in the apartment. He had an excuse prepared but it was exhausting to go through the motions of it: haven’t gone shopping, eating out, sorry, sorry. Carlos repeated himself, not irritated. His brow furrowed, a little. He had said he was going to move, or implied it. It was the kind of thing he might have discussed with Carlos, before.

“I miss my family,” he said. It was a good reason, the kind of reason people would expect. The truth was he intended to disappear, and if he stayed he would not be allowed to. He had no interest in becoming a monument. He did not want to be remembered. “I miss the mountains, you know? The sky, the shape of it.” And some things were easier, now; he didn’t have to think about how it would feel to lose to Carlos, and so he could say it: “There isn’t much reason for me to stay. I don’t— being here, surrounded by it. It’s strange.”

“If I—" Carlos looked down at his hands as he handed Carlos the cup of tea. Herbal. Mostly he drank coffee, with a splash of milk. It was shocking to discover how little a body needed, when there was nothing to need it for. He had made it, after all, for a purpose; without that purpose, there was nothing to do but unmake it. “I always live with my family. Close.” He hummed, waiting for Carlos to continue. “It’s nice. Maybe a good idea, to go home.”

He was glad Carlos hadn’t asked him to stay. Carlos had a way of getting things he wanted— not on purpose, just because once you knew he wanted something it was difficult to resist giving it to him. This rule applied to more or less everyone except a few times Novak, and once or twice he, himself. He didn’t think he had it in him anymore, the strength to say no; it was only ever possible because he was saying yes to something else. But there was nothing else, now. Nothing to give himself over to. He sipped his tea, a little bit. He could manage that, if he went slowly.

“I’ll give you a discount,” he said. “Friends and family.” Carlos smiled at him, smiled and touched his hand, kissed him gently on the mouth. That was something; almost like a resurrection. For a moment it was his hand, again; he knew the bones and tendons, the strength of it, as his own. It was his heart, which ached and beat in his chest. His heart, the thing which tied him to this terrible loss, the thing which was dragging him down into the dirt. He did not want it. He set down his tea, full, and empty.

The body was a tool. He’d made it that way, crafted it for a single purpose. It was a little like a drawer filled with old charging cables that connected to devices that no longer existed. There had been power in them, once; the power to make something come to life, potential energy. And the cables were all still there, they still worked, if only you could— but you couldn’t. And so they were reduced, diminished. He didn’t know this body, this thing that carries him around. He’d known it only by what he could do with it, and now he can do nothing. It was no longer his. The only thing left to do was take it apart.

He’d learned that during the terrible embarrassment of his return. The first match he played he won, and the second. The third he lost. Not too terrible. Losses like this were to be expected, after the time away. It was ordinary; average. He had not been average before, and now he was. Not too terrible. Only a little like dying, a little. By pieces, going down into the grave.

He hadn’t lasted very long, after that. He hadn’t seen the point in clinging to it, in pretending. It wasn’t at all like giving up. Only— stepping aside. The world had gone past him. He’d waited long enough to do it in Australia, and then he’d gone too. And now here he was: still going, one piece at a time. It was not so difficult. By this point, it barely hurt at all.

And then he left that city by the sea. Carlos did not buy his apartment, but he bought one close to it, three buildings down the street. “You’re good?” Carlos asked, on the phone. “You’re with your family?”

“Yes, fine, they are glad to see me.” It wasn’t quite true; he hadn’t moved back in with his parents. Solitude was safer: he wanted to establish the new boundaries of his life, what was within it and what was not. What was within him, and what was not. Therefore, also: the phone calls, with Carlos. He did not think he wanted Carlos to see him, or touch him. Carlos knew him as he had been; Carlos knew that body, that life. He did not want to invite that back into himself, when he was doing such a credible job excising it.

“Okay,” Carlos said. “But you—you. Are you okay?”

“Yes,” he said. “You ask, why?”

“Don’t know.” A flash of sullen anger came into his voice, a tension. “Maybe because, in Australia, you say okay, thank you, goodbye, leave forever. It’s so hard to say Carlos, I’m thinking to retire?”

“Ah, well.” He sighed. He was walking, early in the morning, and the fog was burning off the hillsides; beautiful, temporary. He was lightheaded, a little, drifting. He wanted to keep walking for a long time, maybe forever. “I did not say to anyone.”

“Who else you have to say it to?” It was true; his team, his new team, he had not known well enough for it to matter. His family, his friends from home; they were quite distant from the life he had made. It was only Carlos, by then, to whom it might have really meant anything. “I—we are—and I find out from your press.”

He closed his eyes. “I’m sorry. I could not say it to anyone.”

“You don’t want to tell me, don’t want me to know.”

“Carlos,” he said, with a sharpness that was shocking to himself. The blue of the court, the blue of the sky. The sound of his own voice, echoing. He stopped walking. The hand was shaking. The edges of his phone were cutting red grooves into the soft pale flesh of the fingers. They looked strange in the daylight, skeletal and dead, like something pulled out of the water. “I could not say it. I could not.”

Silence. He imagined he could hear Carlos breathing, though he could not. He could not feel himself breathing, either. He looked down, the length of the body below him. It continued to function. The hand stopped shaking. It was not so difficult to remember it: the blue of the court in the sun, and his shadow like a monster, huge and ravenous in the evening, and the words shaped by the tongue and teeth and lips. “I’m sorry,” Carlos said. He sounded like he was trying not to cry. He didn’t want Carlos to cry, he didn’t want anything bad to happen to Carlos ever.

“No, I’m sorry,” he said, and Carlos almost laughed, watery.

“You say already.” He had always been good at apologizing. He understood how to take responsibility for himself; his actions, his choices. He had been sorry for a very long time; that morning, in the shocked blankness of his apartment, hearing it for the first time. It was not his fault—they had agreed to that much—but here he was, anyways. Taking responsibility. “I just—you know you can tell anything, to me.”

“I should have told you,” he said. He felt numb, strangely hollow. He had forgotten to eat the night before, or perhaps had chosen not to. He wasn’t hungry. If he was, he could not feel it. The hands were steady again on the phone. He flexed the fingers, watching the mechanical articulation of the joints. The palms, he thought, were a little smoother, less calloused. He had not touched a tennis racket in months. At some point he had started falling, in his mind; he was still falling.

“Yeah,” Carlos said, but the anger had gone from him. “When I retire, you can find out from La Gazetta, see how you like it.”

“Alright,” he said. “I deserve that.” But Carlos would not be thinking of him, when he retired. There would be nothing left worth thinking of, by then, nothing to be pulled up out of the dark aching grave of memory. The thought was almost a relief.

The days grew longer, in the mountains, as the summer came, and he dissolved. He watched the valley bloom green around him and heard the echo of cheering. He turned on the news one morning to see the grim expression of his own face reflected back at him, fist clenched in victory and mouth flat; the tour had come to Rome, and he was gone. They were mourning him like he had died, and he had. All of it was lost to him, everything.

He could not bear to hear it. His vision went: static, flickering. He could hear the thudding of the heart, panicked. A low whining in the ears, the desperate panting of breath. The numbness, spreading up the limbs. He had to get out, away from it, away from himself. The face on the screen that was not his face, that could not be his face, the hands that were not his hands. The light was piercing, violent. He heard a desperate gasping sob, felt the lungs seize, and seize, and something low in the chest—he stumbled into the bathroom and collapsed, heaving into the toilet, weeping, haunting, haunted. The throat burned with bile, the spine wracked with tremors. He looked up into the bathroom mirror and did not recognize the pale trembling mouth, the flat reptilian gaze, the shape of the skull visible through the skin.

He flinched back from it, shaken, nauseous. He could not feel the body, the coolness of the floor or the drag of the back of the hand across the mouth. There was wetness still on the cheekbones. He could not think. He could not imagine the next day, or the next. The shape of his life, dim and strangled, intolerable.

He slid to the floor, braced against the wall, unseeing. It was not his face, on the television or in the mirror. This sad sick useless thing, collapsed like a doll; this thing that could not go on; this thing that could not stand or eat or speak; it was not him. The weakness of it disgusted him. He wanted it gone. He wanted to be free of it. This thing that had been done to him, this thing he had been powerless to prevent. He wanted control: of himself, of his life, of the body. He would have control.

Carlos called. He picked up on his balcony, the wind piercing the hollow of his throat, the corners of his eyes. He was wearing only a shirt, pants. He could barely feel it. “Hello,” he said. His voice was strange and rasping, unpleasant.

“You watched?” Carlos asked. His accent was strangely heavy, like it was in his youth, hard to understand over the droning of voices loud in the background. Or no— he was slurring, sweeping over the edges of his words. He was drunk. “Did— no?”

“Watched what?” Silence. Silence. He knew what. It was the second Sunday in July, and the whole world was white and green. He had not watched. He came out to his balcony and closed his eyes and let the low gray sky pour down the throat. It did not hurt him, to think about it, his own absence. He could think of the whole production academically, the way one might study space, or the deep ocean. You knew you were never going to touch the stars, that it was not possible— physically, literally. It was no loss to admit that, no wound.

“Me— my— when I play.” He didn’t want to make Carlos say it, but he didn’t want to say it himself, either. “The match.”

“I didn’t, no. I don’t watch,” he said. Carlos made a low noise, a little wounded. He thought for a moment about apologizing, but he knew he wouldn’t watch the next one, either. It seemed more unkind to allow Carlos to believe this was something that might change. “Congratulations.”

He was assuming Carlos had won. It was a safe assumption: Carlos, drunk, around other people, calling him the night after a final. Carlos, playing tennis. “You mean it?” Carlos asked. People thought that Carlos needed approval, that he needed to be loved, but that wasn’t quite true. He wanted to be seen, and understood. He wanted not to be alone. That was the thing that had bound them together, once.

“Of course I mean it.” This was easier, now, too. But then again, he had always been happy for Carlos to beat everyone else. Carlos deserved to win; it was good that he had. It was good that this, maybe, could make him happy, when he knew that he could not. “Carlos, of course. It’s amazing. You are.”

“I miss you,” Carlos murmured. “I think about— we never play the final, a Grand Slam. I want it. Wanted. Want.” His voice wavered with some awful swell of emotion. “Not fair.”

Like the ocean, roaring, in his ears. It faded easily. Anger required something to dig its teeth into, some flesh, some physical receptacle; grief was the same. There was little enough of the body remaining, less and less. It did not hurt to be reminded of it. He felt the wind as a pressure against his face, no coldness, no movement. “Maybe not,” he said. “But it isn’t about me.”

“You think you ever come— back?” He felt like they were having two different conversations, that Carlos was trying to tell him something in a language he didn’t quite speak.

“You mean to a tournament?”

At the same time, Carlos said, “To play?”

“Ah.” Silence. “No.” The hands were shaking. He went inside, feeling the burn of heat against the wrists. There was a mug on the kitchen table, a ring pressed into the wood beneath it, a water stain. It was late, long past the time he should have eaten dinner. He had not. “Please don’t ask me.”

“No,” Carlos said, slightly mournful. “You’re—okay?”

“Yes,” he said. Carlos always asked him that, and never believed him. There was a buzzing in the back of the head, in the temples. It was difficult to remember, sometimes, that he existed to other people, that they thought of him when he was not there. He thought he might be more real to them, in memory, than he was here, to himself. The kettle was still half-full of water, and he turned it on. “Of course.” He thought of Carlos’s face, in the afternoon in Monaco, the energy in him, the warmth. “I’m okay. People retire all the time.”

“I know,” Carlos said. “But you’re not people.”

“I am people,” he said. It wasn’t anything spectacular, what had happened to him. Nothing terrible. There was no reason for him to worry, but he knew Carlos would, anyways. Carlos made a noise which choked off into a sob halfway through, and he flinched, reflexive. He had never been able to see Carlos in pain without feeling it himself. He could not feel it now, but the impulse remained. “Carlos. It’s alright.”

“I miss you,” Carlos said again. “You know I— I love you.” It was terrible to hear his voice. He felt a deep ache, right in the center of the ribcage, the solar plexus.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and closed the eyes. That was good; just darkness. “I know you wanted me to be there.” He knew he was not the man Carlos had fallen in love with, the man he was missing. He could not give that man back to Carlos any more he could give him back to himself. The phantom echo of applause, tension in his spine. Blue on blue, and walking back into the cavernous cool darkness beneath the arena, disappearing.

“Not what I mean, not—you don’t have to watch, this to me doesn’t matter.” His voice was wavering. “I don’t know how to help. I don’t know how— what I can do.”

“You don’t have to help,” he said. “I’m alright.”

“You’re not,” Carlos said, nearly snapping. “I know you. You’re sad. You don’t let me help, but you are.”

But he was alright. He had to be, because there was no way out of it. If he allowed himself to grieve it would eat him alive, so he gave it nothing to consume. He could not allow any tender edge for it to dig its teeth into, to drag him down into the grave. If he looked at that darkness, if he felt it, he made it real. He could explain none of that to Carlos, who had once known him better than anyone else, his self outside of him. Carlos had never once been empty, unmade. It was beyond his capacity to understand. But it was clear that Carlos was hurting, because of this thing he couldn’t understand, and he wanted to protect Carlos from that pain. “There isn’t anything to be helped,” he said at last.

“You don’t,” Carlos said, and then stopped. There was space between them that could not be crossed. He did not want Carlos to come to him, and he could not go to Carlos. He did not want to be alone. He had to be alone—it was the only way he could control it. The whole body shuddered, an almost convulsive movement, and then stilled. “Can I come see you?”

He did not understand for a moment that it was a question. Carlos tended to phrase his requests with the expectation of approval, not presumptive exactly, but with the anticipation of someone who was rarely disappointed. He was trying to think of how to explain it was a bad idea when Carlos continued: “I miss you. I want—to see you.”

He looked out into the darkness, the close and closing edges of his world. There was nothing to be seen. He turned the hand over, studying it; the tips of the fingers had gone slightly red from the cold. Carlos did not want to see this, this wretched rotting machine. Carlos wanted to see something that was gone, and he wanted to allow Carlos the comfort of that memory, a comfort he himself could not take. But he could not say no. He wasn’t strong enough to make that sacrifice, at the end of every other loss. He tried and found the throat had closed, the mouth refused to speak.

“Next week?” Carlos asked, taking the silence as consideration.

“Alright,” he said, quietly. “My home is your home, you know.” And that was still true, for as long as Carlos wanted it, though he knew how it would end: the loss would come. He’d only pushed it away a little farther, the end of the fall down into the grave. They settled the logistics, the frictions of living, a friction he had not considered in months. Then Carlos said goodbye, and left, a prelude to the final leaving.

And the night stretched on ahead of him, empty, long free hours. He’d used to dream of that: more time, the dreams a man with a full life can have; the space in which to live. What an awful sentence, to receive it.

He caught sight of the body in the mirror, after showering; bug-like, a pale skeletal slash. He had never thought he was vain, when he was younger— it was difficult to be vain, when he’d grown up looking like himself, and with no taste for dishonesty— but there was a certain vanity to the thing he’d done to it, this useless tool. Maybe he had always been vain, in the way he’d exerted such control over himself, building and maintaining and preserving it. He was in control, now: cutting away the pieces of him that could feel the wound, the excess, the things he had built and ruined. It did not hurt at all, so long as he was the one holding the knife.

There was a power, in that. The only power remaining to him. He felt little, to see what had become of it, the body, withered and faded, only a mild disdain. It was not his. He wasn’t in it, doomed, buried. He had gone somewhere else.

So Carlos came to see him, in the mountains. He was prepared for what would happen: this fragile balance, the tightrope he’d drawn out of his own spine, would shatter. Something would come apart, some last fortress. It was almost gone already. He avoided mirrors but he could see it when he dressed in the mornings; the sharp hollows of the body, the bruised spareness of it, alien and horrifying. He was not horrified. It was not, after all, his body; not anymore. He had removed himself from it.

“Good to see you,” Carlos said, when he opened the door, and kissed him in greeting, easily. He looked a little concerned, but mostly happy. They had not seen each other since Australia, more than half a year. His face was more, somehow, than it was in memory: more beautiful, more alive. It was hard to look at him. He was too aware of the pale face Carlos was looking at, its difficult features and its unkindness, starker now that it had been whittled down to the bones. He did not want to be made aware of it.

“The flight was fine?” He could not think of anything better to say. He wanted to protect Carlos, somehow, from what would happen; he knew it would hurt Carlos but could not think of a way to stop it. His own pain—the pain of the body, the pain of the ghost—was immaterial; it could not be avoided, it could not be endured, and so it would not be felt.

“Yeah, good,” Carlos said, putting his bags down in the bedroom, and then coming back out with intention in his face, and heat. It was late already, long after dinner—he had not eaten—and he knew what Carlos expected. This was the old routine of their reunions, how they had always fallen into each other. Carlos had stripped down to a t-shirt and shorts; he was wearing four layers, and wool socks. He was not cold, but without them the body shuddered violently, distractingly.

Carlos kissed him again, once, then deeply; picking up the threads of a conversation they had started long ago, a conversation that never finished. He was very aware of every point of contact between them, like he was seeing each place Carlos touched the body from the outside, in perfect detail. He allowed Carlos to guide the body back into the bedroom and waited to see what would be done to it next.

He had understood this, once; another use of the instrument he had built, another thing gone far beyond him. Carlos touched the body very softly, over the layers of his clothes, the soft disguising shape of them. “It’s okay?” Carlos asked, in that stilted earnest way of his, grasping a little, now; at the hips, the waist. He always wanted to be careful but had never quite mastered it. The wanting—that desire to love perfectly, to do everything with the innate goodness of him—was what he had loved in Carlos, or one of the things.

“Yes,” he said. He turned off the lights; silly, he knew, to push off the moment of discovery. He was not afraid. Whatever came, it did not have the capacity to hurt him. Carlos lay the body down on the bed, took off the first sweatshirt, then the second, and pressed his mouth to the chest, right over the heart, like he wanted to feel the beat of it.

That warm mouth brought him back, trapped him. He felt it. He felt—Carlos, over him, against him. The dark pit of loss looming under them both, a gaping maw, hungry for him, hungry for the scraps it had been denied.

A tightness, in the chest. Panic, fear. The hands were shaking. Carlos said a name, kissed him again. He could not hear the name and he was terrified he would not recognize it if he could. They had been in this position a hundred times before and he could not stop himself from remembering how he had felt then: possessed by love, consumed, hungry for life and for the living of it. The memory of that hunger was paralyzing. He had nowhere to put it. He wanted to be gone again but Carlos made him real, embodied him.

He took off his shirt, because that was what came next. It was cold. He looked at Carlos, touched his waist, the warm strength of his thighs. He was so beautiful. He was the most beautiful thing in the world, beloved. “What do you want?” He asked. Carlos was looking at the face, hunting for something. He could not breathe.

“Just to—” Carlos reached out, touched the curve of the cheekbone, the mouth. “Yeah. Yeah.” He had not been touched in so long. He had imagined, somehow, the body could not be touched, that it no longer existed. He could not move. He felt a tight burning in the eyes. The world was gray and fading. “Only, also, I want—"

Carlos turned on the lamp, and stopped. A blind white moment, roaring; he was outside of himself completely at last, invulnerable, gone; he did not exist, not in this room in front of Carlos, being looked at. But only a moment, and then he was trapped again. He wanted to go back. He wanted to weep. He could not bear the expression on Carlos’s face. He was sorry. He was still, somehow, falling. The pit was endless; it was the grave. He could not escape it, and he could not escape this moment: when Carlos would understand that he was gone.

“Oh,” Carlos said, strangled.

“Carlos,” he said, softly. His voice shook. He took Carlos’s hands, trying to be gentle. He would make it easy. He could not quite focus the eyes; it was like that morning, again, the face of a dead man on the television. He was in two places at once: inside the body, penitent and tender, looking down at Carlos as he pressed in against it, and somewhere else, outside or above, calm and cold. “It’s alright.”

Carlos touched the chest, and wept, curled over the body and mourning, as if making a shield of himself against the light, as if to hide. “I’m sorry,” he was saying, over and over, and his name. “I should know. I didn’t know.”

He closed the eyes, breathed slowly, evenly. That strange buzzing panic began to fade. The end had come, the end of himself. It was in the end very painless, the work of a moment. He was, after all, beyond pain. He was beyond everything. “It’s alright,” he said again, and allowed Carlos to cover the body: clothes, layers of blankets, his own weight, cradling it, as if he might capture the ghost before it slipped away.

At the beginning, some of them had tried to support him: how unfair it was, how he would be back. After the retirement they’d stopped, and he’d been glad of it. He hadn’t been able to bear kindness, at the start. He’d wanted a clean wound, an amputation, not this pitiful clinging. He’d tried for it. And he hadn’t wanted to leave Carlos—the best thing left in his life, and he wanted Carlos to have everything he wanted, always— but it seemed inevitable that he would, that there would be nothing to hold them together. He had tried to explain that, to make it easy. But Carlos had never been good at making things easy.

So he’d stayed, then, and he stayed even now, even though there was nothing left for him.

Carlos laid down with his head in the cradle of the thigh, pressed into the low hollow of the stomach, drawing the hands into his thick short hair. Like a pantomime: this is how you used to care for me. This is how we used to be. Carlos was so attached to the memories of their easy days, always pulling them back up from the grave.

“When do you have to go back?” He meant: back to your real life. Back to the world that has left me behind.

“Soon,” Carlos said. “There’s—yeah. Soon.”

He hummed, considering. He did the math in his head, the changing of the seasons. “Good luck, in New York,” he said, and Carlos peered balefully up at him. “What?”

“Good luck,” he said, disgusted, desperate. Carlos had been so terrified for him, in his bedroom, exposed. He was desperate to believe there was something that could be fixed, some way to undo it. He touched the body constantly, spoke of their past, the life they’d shared, as if he could resurrect it. “Don’t want luck. You don’t—you should be there.”

“Yes. Well.”

“I hate them,” Carlos said, “because they do this to you. Sometimes I hate everyone. Sometimes I don’t want to—to play, and pretend it’s the same. I can’t.” This had always been the way, with Carlos; his great depthless capacity for joy, for love, carried with it an equal propensity for the opposite. He had once imagined himself immune. But this emptiness he has cultivated, it is in the end only a different kind of despair.

“I don’t want that,” he said. “I want you to—to play, and be happy. I don’t want to haunt you.”

“Not haunt.” Carlos nuzzled into his stomach, mournful and tender. “Not a ghost.”

“There’s not much left,” he said. “Of me, I mean. Of who I was.”

“There is,” Carlos said, with conviction almost to the point of anger, like he could make it true if only he believed it hard enough. Carlos touched the hand, then the collarbone— sharp past the point of elegance, into danger. Often athletes went soft, in retirement, comfortable; their lives grew in around them. He had gone the other way: he had cut himself out of his life, and he could feel Carlos trembling with the discovery of that emptiness, where there had once been a man. “You’re—I know you. You’re right here.”

“You asked to see me,” he said. “I’ll always be here, when you ask.” Was it love, still? It must have been; he knew he had loved Carlos, once, and he hadn’t stopped. He hadn’t stopped loving anything he used to love, but it wasn’t in him, anymore. It was somewhere else, along with the rest of him, the parts he had taken out of the body so they could not hurt him. “But I think you’re still waiting for me to come back.”

“I’m not,” Carlos said, lying, lifting himself now onto his knees.

“No? Hm.” He kept stroking through Carlos’s hair, absent. He looked at the bones of the pale wrist against Carlos’s cheek, thought how beautiful Carlos was, how easy to love. If Carlos wasn’t waiting, then what could he possibly want? What was left for him? It was a terrible thing, for him to be trapped, holding a memory. It was unfair, that after everything he was stuck with this. “It isn’t fair to you, that I can’t. Come back.”

Carlos made a noise like something dying, terrible, and pressed his face hard against the chest, clutching. He didn’t want Carlos to look at him like that, fear in his face, this boy who had lived so lightly, with such joy. He did not want to be the one to teach Carlos that some losses were not a lesson; some losses were fatal. “You don’t listen,” he said, after a moment. “I love you. I don’t care about any of that, I love you. You come back, you don’t, doesn’t matter to me. I just want— whatever you do, whatever you want, that I’m still with you.”

It took bravery to say that; Carlos had always been brave, and he’d always tried to give some measure of courage back. He knew the words he could say to make it better, and Carlos would believe him, because he always did. But he loved Carlos, he knew that, and so he owed him the truth. “It’s— difficult. To want.” He swallowed. In the haze, some darkness, bitter and sharp, coming nearer. He knew the shape of it, the terrible weight of emotion. “Anything.”

“Do you want me?” There was something in Carlos’s face, not quite fear. Grief. He touched the ribcage, the stomach. Carlos was seeing the graveyard he’d made of himself, the mausoleum. Somehow he couldn’t say it, though he knew it was true: yes, yes. Yes. He curled down over Carlos and let himself be held, pressing the mouth against Carlos’s forehead, not a kiss. He shuddered, and shuddered. He was weeping, silent. “If you— don’t—“ It was unbearable for Carlos to think that, even for a moment. Carlos deserved— to be loved, to know he was loved. And he wanted— there was, after all, enough of him for that, and for a moment he hated Carlos for pulling it out of him, into the open, where what little he had left might be taken away. But there it was.

“Yes,” he said, and he did; he felt it: the hands and the trembling mouth and this terrible mechanical waste he was living inside, this thing that no longer belonged to him. And with it he felt the wound, the absence that had swallowed him up. They were standing over the graveyard together, looking down at it: the dark muddy pit, the definite walls. And there he was below already, a dead thing. He’d had to go down into it, and he didn’t want to. He was terrified of it, that darkness. All he’d been doing, all this time, was trying to find a way to make it bearable. He wasn’t in the grave if his body wasn’t in the grave, if it wasn’t his body. He wasn’t in the grave if there was nothing to put in it. “I want you.” I want, I want; the futile bleating of a child. I want to play. But that hadn’t mattered to anyone, what he wanted.

“Okay,” Carlos said. His mouth wounded, his eyes bright. He was crying, too. “Then stay with me. You don’t have to come back. Just— please. Please stop trying to leave.”

“I’m not trying to leave,” he said, his voice wavering. Carlos was warm and steady and it was so difficult, so terribly raw, to want him. But it could not be helped. He had wanted to be changed, changed so deeply and drastically that none of it would have the power to touch him, but he had not left this behind. The man he loved, the sport he loved. The life he loved, lost to him now forever, buried, and he was buried along with it, but he was still here, and it was unbearable, that both things were true. It was not survivable. “I just don’t know how to stay.”

The body that carried him, that fragile wreck; the body, which he had unmade along with himself. The thing shuddered, and shuddered, a dying animal, weak and pitiful, a thing he had made weak because he could no longer make it strong. He was inside it, and it was down in the dirt, and he was trapped. Carlos had seen it at last: the pointlessness of his vigil. “Please,” Carlos was saying, over and over again. “Please.”

“Carlos,” he wept, the name familiar in the mouth, beloved to him. He could do this much for the man he loved, even hollow and diminished, even removed from himself: he could say his name, and hold his dear lovely face, and kiss his trembling mouth. “I’ll try. I love you. I’ll try.”

To return to himself was a terrible thing, and slow. All that dirt to haul up out of the grave before anything could rise from it. It was not something that could be done through will alone, even if he had the will he’d used to have. He did not, and sometimes all the crushing dark weight on him was made worse by the glimpses of blue sky. And it was worse still to need help, to need someone to tell him that at the end he could come up, into the air, if only he could keep refusing to lie down and die. He was so aware of the fragility of that hand, stretched down into the darkness, asking for him.

There was—he had read about it, in the empty months—somewhere in the heart of the Asian continent a vast desert which had once been a sea, the Aral Sea. In a failed attempt to irrigate the vast arid plains of that region, the great lumbering beast, the grim hand of the Soviet state, had diverted the rivers that fed into the basin. And left behind: the steel skeletons of ships, half-buried, eroding. There were conservation efforts, but it was thankless work, and he was waiting for Carlos to grow tired of it.

But he did not.

It was almost painful, to allow himself to be cared for. It required presence, when absence was all he had wanted for so long. It stranded him in the desert of the body, the ocean he had hollowed out in service to a doomed dream. Carlos kept buying food, bringing it into his home until the cabinets were overflowing, and he cooked. In the old days Carlos had never cooked. He had done that, himself. Preparing sustenance, dedicating himself to the task of maintenance. He remembered it: not maintenance. Caring for himself. Tending to the warp and weft of his life. He watched Carlos at the stove, and it was as close as he could get.

He threw up, the first time. “I’m sorry,” Carlos said, hovering over him, floating in white.

“You should be,” he said, wiping the shaking wrist across the mouth, spitting into the toilet. Pain was no longer familiar to him, the way it had been, and it was brutal, debilitating. The whole body burned, the weakness of the chest and stomach, the razor-blade throat. Without the body he had not felt it. “Your cooking is terrible.” Carlos laughed, a little shaky, and he smiled, and they returned to the table, empty chairs at even distances and theirs pulled close together, side by side.

He could not eat what Carlos had made for him—salmon, some kind of vegetable—but he managed half a piece of toast, and watched Carlos glimmer in the low evening light, moved almost to tears. Carlos was still holding him, and without the body he could not have felt that either. Carlos was tracing very delicately the curve of his cheekbone, his jaw. He leaned down to kiss the hot space just above Carlos’s ear, and it was difficult, but there was the sky; there were his hands, pulling himself up out of the dark.

And it was worse, some days, again, and he was curled up like roadkill in the bath, half-floating, wishing again to be gone, and wishing at the same time to go back, and knowing neither were possible. Carlos’s hands were gentle against the scalp. He knew Carlos liked the hair, an affection he did not understand. He hadn’t washed it in weeks, maybe. It had been difficult to see the point.

The body drifted, insubstantial, as Carlos poured water over the head, cupping his hands beneath the water and lifting them. His eyes were wounded, bruised and wet.

“You don’t have to look,” he said. “I know it’s—I’m not what you remember.” He was grateful beyond words that Carlos was with him but he still felt the urge to protect him, or perhaps to protect himself. He did not want to ask too much. He did not want to discover the boundary of Carlos’s love, the places it could not follow him. He was afraid of the day Carlos would realize he was already gone.

“I don’t want that you hurt yourself,” Carlos said. He smiled, a little, bemused—hurt himself getting out of the bathtub? But Carlos wasn’t looking at the bathtub. He was looking at the insides of the wrists, the pale tender flesh of the thighs. He realized Carlos thought that what he’d done to his body was about punishment, that he’d done it because it hurt.

“I don’t think I thought of it as pain,” he said, trying to explain. “How it felt.”

Carlos was silent, uncomprehending. His wet hand was pressed over his mouth, trembling, panicked. He was looking at something that terrified him.

“I chose it,” he continued, after a moment. “It wasn’t—it didn’t hurt, because I chose it. As long as I could control what happened to me I could—oh, no, don’t—” Carlos had begun to cry, still silent. It was easier to be there, if Carlos needed him to be. He took Carlos’s hand, kissed his knuckles, the inside of his wrist. “I’m sorry. Carlos. I’m sorry.”

Carlos clutched at him, desperately, like he was trying to hold him together. “Promise,” he said, “Promise me.”

“I won’t,” he said. “I don’t want—I never want to hurt you, never.”

“Yourself,” Carlos said, looking up, the old fire in his face. He was fighting, now, for something he wanted. “Promise me you don’t want to hurt yourself.”

The pain hadn’t been the point, but it had been a consequence. He hadn’t felt it then, but he felt it now. Maybe Carlos was right to look for the more obvious evidence; maybe he was capable of such a thing, after all. He did not want to say it if it wasn’t true—could he promise that? He looked down at the pale slash of his body, an open wound. He wanted, still, to be rid of it. He wanted, still, to be changed past the point of grief, so changed that he would not even feel the loss; he did not want to drift, ghostlike, forever, through the apocalypse of himself.

But he thought of the sunlight, and the warmth of Carlos’s hands, and the ache of his shoulders; the bookshelves which were slowly filling in the living room, an emptiness restored. He thought of the kitchen, where dirty pans were still piled in the sink, the aftermath of the meal which he and Carlos had cooked together, and eaten together. Heat and spice and the slight sweetness of the squash. It was not a life; it was almost nothing. But the escape he longed for did not exist; the only other option was to stay down in the grave. He looked into Carlos’s eyes and the choice was already made.  

“I promise,” he said, another handful of dirt thrown up into the sky. Maybe this was the trick to it, learning how to stay. He could not see the shape of the world above, its color and vitality, but he believed it was there. He knew it was there.

The body returned to him slowly, over weeks. The weight in strange places, unexpected; the softening angles of the hips, the ridges of the ribcage easing through the translucent chest. At first it awakened a strange twisting disgust: he had been so close to escape, to absence. But then, gradual, thawing: relief, clarity. He had survived the end of the world, the depths of winter. He could not know yet what in him had survived, or whether it could really live, but here he was.

He had grown so numb to exhaustion, to the growing weakness of the bones, the aching cold, the way it hurt to move. He could feel the echoes of those withering days now, in the way the muscles quivered with the barest exertion, the sharp pain in the head when he could not sleep, the struggle, still, to eat. The first time he tried to run with Carlos in the cool morning he was humiliated by the magnitude of his impotence, his reduction. He woke sometimes in the small dark hours shaking with grief, a deep nauseous horror, remembering the years of victory, the years of joy he would never touch again. He could not go back. He would want to, for the rest of his life, with a desperation like madness, and the loss would sit forever in a space carved out of the center of him, the better part of his heart.

But the work was familiar to him. He had loved it, once, and he could love it still: the slow improvement of things, the careful path of progress. He had never been capable of satisfaction. He had never been capable of giving up, and he remembered that, too. He remembered hunger, and the sharp iridescence of desire. He had lost so much of himself, down into the grave. He could not imagine what could remain. But he had to believe that something did.

A quiet moment: himself, reading, and Carlos sprawled shirtless over the lap, eyes closed, his laptop propped open on his chest. He’d never cared for reading much before, but he found he liked the reminder of the steadiness of things beyond himself; how much there was of the world, how much there was he could still understand. Carlos snuffled a little, turning onto his side, and he had to reach down to stop the laptop from sliding off of him.

“Carlos,” he said, quietly, then a little louder. Carlos blinked up at him, shivering awake. “Hello. Hey.” Carlos reached up, pulled the face down to his, kissed the corner of the mouth, then the jaw, still half-asleep. He ached, looking down at that sweet lovely face. It was love, that he felt. It had always been love, even when he couldn’t feel it. It couldn’t bring him back, but it was something to stay for. “Up, a little. I need—ah—yes, thank you.” Carlos shifted, yawning a little, letting him stand.

“Don’t let me sleep more,” Carlos said, but closed his eyes and turned his face away from the windows. He brushed the fingers against Carlos’s shoulder, smiling to himself, and made his way into the bathroom. The afternoon was silent, and so still; he was the only thing moving. He washed the hands, carefully, thoroughly.

He looked up, and met his gaze in the mirror.

He knows that face, the pale strangeness of it, the knife-edge of his bones; it is his. His steady hands, his slash of a collarbone. His weakness, and his strength; his endurance, his resilience. A man who is not a ghost, a man who is not a memory, a man who is only a man. This is what Carlos sees, still, even now, when he looks at him. And for a moment he can see it too.

This hole in the ground is not his grave. It is the shadow of his life, dark and grim and diminished, but not ended. He can come up into the air, though it will always be right there beneath him. And so this is how he stays:

Tomorrow he will not be able to eat; he will not recognize his face in the mirror. Tomorrow the dark pit of loss will swallow him again. But for now, in the golden light of evening, it is his body; his instrument, crafted for no purpose but to live. Belief becoming knowledge through belief: he is still alive, and still himself. So little of him is left, almost nothing, but enough. Maybe one day he will make it true.

“Are you hungry?” Jannik asks, walking back into the living room, where Carlos is still sprawled on the couch. Carlos startles a little, smiles, nods. It hurts to look at him. He isn’t accustomed, anymore, to containing this much emotion, a shocking magnitude of love. This, too, will be lost to him tomorrow. Jannik leans down, kisses his soft mouth and then the warm edge of his hairline. “I’ll make something.”