Chapter 12 #2
unexpected snippiness, something hesitated inside me before dropping out all at once: “But we also knew there was an abandoned
baby in the middle of a forest last winter and we did nothing about it. The world’s full of surprises.”
“What?” Simon’s eyes darkened. “That has nothing to do with any of this.”
“It has everything to do with this—we could have done something, but we didn’t.” Emotion burned the back of my throat. The
words were too far gone to take any of them back so I kept talking. “We left a baby to die. I was too shocked to realize that’s
what it was, but it was. We could have done something. Well now I’m doing something.”
“We couldn’t have done a thing.” Simon came back with fighting words. “It was winter, we barely had any food. We could have
died ourselves and it’s a miracle we made that journey alive, don’t you dare put that on me, George. You don’t get to play
your little routine and pretend you didn’t know any better, or you didn’t understand what was going on. You chose to move
along, just like you’re choosing to move along now and run away to Scarborough. You’re just as guilty as you think I should
be, but I’m not, because that was about survival.”
“Going to Scarborough would be about survival,” I said.
“It’s not,” said Simon, “and you know that. Going there would be giving up. Which is something I know comes naturally to you.”
Hot, angry tears stung my eyes. We had never spoken to each other like this before. A sick part of me almost enjoyed getting
to see this new part of Simon and I felt a wicked expansion of my heart. I didn’t know what else to say or do besides shake
my head and hear Prince Edward’s words repeat in my mind: You need to find someone who has his own mind, not just yours. He couldn’t have been any further from the truth. Clearly Simon had one.
We trudged back home through the ashen wasteland. The direction of the wind had saved our neighboring hill and woodland from
complete decimation and slowly the greenery came back, the air freshened up, the sky became blue again. Once we looped around
the hill, down the slope, our house was the same as it ever was: the mossy rock walls, the slow evaporation of steam from
the thatched roof and how it caught the morning sunlight, our animals in their pens, which were all fine—if they sensed some
new, fire-breathing beast at the top of their food chain, they didn’t let on. The only noticeable intrusion was the space
Edward and his men had occupied in the meadows, where the long grass had been trampled down. Their tent was still there, abandoned.
Who knew who would return to occupy it again, and how soon.
Simon and I spent time apart over the next quiet days of recovery—apart only because of the distance I had thrown between
us so quickly, so blindly.
I worked on fixing up the banks of the canal that the men and their horses had trodden over.
I cleared ashes and leaves out of the water, reestablishing the flow.
Then I went across the meadow and tended to the hedgerows that bordered our plot and had been neglected for days.
I marveled at the speed with which they had turned unruly.
I had spent all spring tucking their woody tendrils inward, weaving a wall of branches that didn’t follow any formal pattern, and now I regretted it.
A summer explosion of offshoots and leaves cluttered the whole hedge, threatening to strangle itself.
I needed a saw but we didn’t have a saw.
I needed a hatchet but our hatchet needed sharpening.
What I needed was a motorized hedge trimmer.
What I needed was a phone with an app I could use to hire someone with a hedge trimmer to come take care of the hedgerow.
I tossed aside the blunt hatchet and instead went and got the heavy sword I had taken from the dead soldier. It was still
coated with tentacles of melted rubbish from the dragon, but I knew a sharp blade was still underneath. I swung it at the
hedgerow blindly. I swung hard, not like a baseball bat or a golf club, but like a sword, whacking at branches while making
a note in my mind that this was something I would need to be able to do—I needed to train these muscles. I needed to accept
that this was a reality that required holding swords, gripping and slicing, feeling the strain across my back. This was my
world and this was where I would be. Stay, George, stay.
Why was I so beelike and distracted, even out here in man’s most natural state? Look how easily I could be swayed by modernity,
by fine clothes, clean bodies, logos on bottles. I had let one week with a dumb, horny prince distort so much of what I had
held dear. I had let self-consciousness—a relic of another age—still be the driving force of my inner compass, even when I
had everything I could ever want and nowhere I would rather be.
I have everything I want, I said to myself, as limbs of the hedge went flying. I said it again. I knew I wanted Simon. I wanted
our land, our life together. If anything, I was the one tailing Simon, clinging to him for my own advantage, not the other way around.
But the arrival of the prince and his men, the dragon and its force-fed memories of the future, had discombobulated me once again into a shame I didn’t know what to do with. I hadn’t been paying attention.
As I butchered the hedgerow, bits of charred debris broke off the sword.
Rocky gray chunks fell apart, revealing rubbery veins more stubbornly adhered to the metal.
I went and got a knife from the house—ignoring Simon and Simon ignoring me—came back to the hedge and carefully sliced and unpeeled the remains of what appeared to be a long white extension cord wrapped around the sword.
Jesus Christ. The white rubber had melted and hardened into a flat smear across the blade and on the underside were glimmers of hairlike copper wires like the bones of a fish—all it was missing was the nubby head of a USB or a charging plug, ugly and incongruent with the greenery of the hedgerow.
Someone, somewhere, was looking for their charger.
Hah. I choked on a sad laugh that stung with vomit in the back of my throat.
This triggered a coughing attack and I hacked up a clot of wet gray ash across the goldenrod ground.
Tears pulsed behind my eyes as I held the extension cord aloft, my brazen serpent, so despicably easy, so antithetical to how the world was supposed to work.
Who needs the oath-like balance of exertion and reward when all you need is a charger, free Wi-Fi, free refills, annual leave.
What chance does the miracle of a hedgerow have against the splendor of an EasyJet flight to Spain, an arrow shooting across the sky chock-full of manchildren plugged in and streaming—airplane not just an airplane but a flying phone charger.
Did anyone give a flying fuck? That right there was obliteration.
That was blue hands grasping across dirty sand.
Pure magma. Pink and orange lights cutting across sandy divots of shadow.
Nightclub wails muffled by crumbling stucco walls.
Back in Sitges, in Spain, on that boys trip from hell, on the beach outside the club that awful night decades and centuries
ago, I smoked a cigarette and wished I was drunker, wished I was more numb and on my way to forgetting the whole city existed
at all. I felt the filth of it—the litter across the sand, clubgoers stumbling along, every drink just a warm dreg or a broken
bottle, a crushed can. I sat on the beach alone. I assumed the ocean was out there somewhere, but probably with its back turned,
just as embarrassed of everyone as I was. I felt shame. I felt internalized homophobia, which actually felt good and self-soothing
in a way. Then I felt shame for being ashamed of things I wasn’t supposed to be ashamed of anymore. Some imaginary voice in
my head saying, “Umm that’s internalized homophobia, you should get that sorted out.”
My boyfriend and our friends were still back at the club with the strippers. They had seen me leave and probably assumed I
was just stepping outside to smoke a cigarette, which I was doing, but through bewildering tears and with no intention of
going back inside, no intention of anything but sitting in the middle of the beach and waiting for the ocean to come crawling
back, pull me in, and pummel me to its depths.
The throbbing music behind me grew louder—a side door opened.
A shadow cut across the orange streetlight-stained sand and I watched it grow longer, nearer.
Smoke joined mine. Vapor, actually. Fruity flavored.
I turned around. It was the same stripper I had just seen come onstage.
He wore a pink thong now, and took a long drag from a disposable vape.
A dire peach-vanilla scent washed over me, which he made no intention of blowing in any other direction.
I raised my eyebrows but nothing else. I had seen all there was to possibly see of this stranger, and I had nothing to say.
“You didn’t like my show?” he asked. He remembered me. We had locked eyes back there but surely I was just another lost soul
in the crowd, just as empty-eyed and vacant as he had looked to me.
“You got cum on my shoe,” I said.
He smirked. “Workplace hazard.”
This eked out a smile in me. I wiped my teary eyes as he stepped closer and sat down beside me. Up close his body lost its
stagecraft splendor. There were razor bumps on his thighs. His muscles were impressive, but like rocks in a plastic bag, like
they weren’t quite adhered to his body properly. A few stray wrinkles near his eyes betrayed the whole act. I stopped myself
when I realized the same critiques could be made of me. I hated myself.
“Sorry,” I said.
“For what?”
“I don’t know. For walking out on your grand finale. It’s been a weird week.”
The dancer shrugged. “It’s all right. It’s probably not fun to watch something like that on your own.”
“I wasn’t alone. I was with people there, they were just on the other side of the stage.”
“You’re just lonely then.”
“Sure.” I flicked my cigarette into the sand in front of us.
It landed filter-side down so the fading ember kept burning.
It looked like the beach itself was smoking.
The dancer finished his disposable vape and tossed it into the sand as well.
I thought nothing of this. What was one more vape tossed into this litter box of a beach, where the sand itself was litter, imported from some foreign quarry.
The dancer stood up and brushed sand off his butt cheeks.
He stretched, knowingly, and made to leave but I suddenly wanted him to stay.
“Do you do that every night?” I asked. He must have sensed the tone of desperation in my voice because he smiled and spun
around. He stepped back so he was standing right in front of me, looking down at me. I watched the tight bundle between his
legs.
“Just sometimes,” he said. “I usually get a little assistance, if you know what I mean. But tonight was all natural, if you can believe it.” He looked down and adjusted himself, revealing
for a moment the smooth base of what I had already seen. “That’s probably how it was able to hit your shoe. The jet propulsion
of willpower.”
We stared at each other in silence. He knew my words were all backed up in my throat. Words that had been sliced up and held
in reserve, from days and years of conversations cut short or mis-said. He possessed a conniving kind of patience, that smirk
on his face, the tilt of his head, when I looked him in the eyes and asked, “What does it feel like?”
“It. Feels. Like . . .” His voice held on to every syllable, making each one last as long as each slow step he took toward
me. When he was right at my feet, between my legs, he knelt down. “It feels like the very edge. It’s the brink.” He placed
his hands on my knees and ran them slowly up my thighs. “Everybody’s watching you but you’re up there alone, practically anonymous.
You could be anyone, really—even though every part of you is on display. Your very DNA is up for grabs. And maybe that’s what
it is: hell. You get that horrible shame feeling, but it’s a curtain that comes and goes and before you know it, you’re through
it and: ahh, bliss.” He grabbed me, up through my shorts. “You were in heaven all along and nobody bothered to tell you.”
“But that’s what makes me so sad,” I said through a moan. “That nobody bothered to tell me. I’m out the other side but I’ve
brought all the muck with me. I can’t push through it and pretend it’s not there—like it was never there to begin with.” The
tears were back in my eyes, pulsing in rhythm with his moving hands.
“Oh, but you can push through it,” he said. “You must.” He pulled my shorts off, lifted my shirt, lifted my legs. His thong
was off and tossed away into the sand.
“I can’t.”
“You must.”
He tasted repugnant. The hint of peach-vanilla on his breath was like a chalk drawing on the wall of a cave, a horrid representation
of beauty. His body was just fists under slippery seal skin. Both he and the music throbbed inside me, growing louder. Shadows
crossed the beach and he was lost in me and my vicious loneliness. I knew a crowd was gathering and it made the thrill of
it all the more intense, the shame all the more heavy, the curtain whipping me left and right. My boyfriend’s voice. Laughter
and cheers. Then applause as I came onto stinging, sand-rubbed flesh and I can confirm that what the dancer said was all wrong.
We were always and still in hell.