10. Elias #2
What I do to him then I do slowly, and I do cold.
I make him beg through all of it, beg with the collar at his throat and my hand on the lead, beg how I want it and again when the first time isn’t enough.
I take him hard, no kindness in it, my fist wrapped in the lead, my other hand at the back of his neck.
I tell him what he is in a low flat voice while I do it, the filthy patient ledger of it, look at you, the captain, this is what you came across the city for, this is the only thing that quiets you now, and every word goes into him and lights him brighter.
The humiliation isn’t the cost of the relief for him, it IS the relief, the permission to stop being the great Roman Vane and just be a thing that’s held.
I keep him on the edge and I don’t let him have it.
I make him ask. I make him beg for the one thing his body’s screaming for, and I hold it back until the asking is total, until there’s nothing of him left that isn’t the asking.
Only then, when he’s all the way down, all the way given, do I let him come.
The sound he makes when I finally allow it is the sound of a man set down after carrying something too heavy for too long.
And then, for one second, in the slack of his face, I see Sam.
It’s nothing he did. It’s the after, the bottomless emptiness that comes over a face when the wanting’s spent and there’s no armor up yet, the open ruined peace of it, and I have seen that exact expression before, on another young man, in another locked room, in the months before the night they found him.
The resemblance isn’t physical. Sam was slight and dark and Roman is none of those things.
It’s the look. The total surrender, the floor finally reached, and under it, if you’re the kind of man who can see it, the small bright thing that’s already dying.
The room tilts. For one second the antiseptic smell is the other room’s smell, the body on the floor is the other body.
I am, for one second, standing exactly where I swore I’d never stand again, having done exactly the thing the file in my drawer is supposed to stop me doing.
What might be horror moves up through me cold and fast.
Because I did love Sam. That’s the part no inquiry would ever understand, the part that makes me worse and not better.
It wasn’t nothing to me, whatever the clean story would need it to have been, a predator and a victim, clean roles, clean villainy.
I loved being his whole world. I loved it like you love the only warm thing in a cold life, and when he died, I didn’t feel the relief of a man whose crime has covered itself over.
I felt bereaved. I went to a different city, built a different practice, waited the regulation length of time for a man whose references have gaps.
The whole while, the thing I missed wasn’t a person exactly.
It was the feeling of being necessary to the point of someone’s survival.
I have spent four years in a controlled empty apartment starving for it, and now it’s here again, on the floor of a locked room, wearing a hockey player’s face.
I am not horrified that it’s happening. I’m horrified at how glad I am.
There’s the truth I’ll never write in any chart.
A monster who didn’t love them would be easier. I’m the other kind.
Then I straighten my cuffs.
That’s all it takes. The motion of it, the familiar small adjustment, the wrists, the fabric squared.
The room rights itself. The smell is just antiseptic, the man on the floor just Roman, the second gone like it was never there.
I’ve had a lifetime of practice closing that door.
The horror was real. The horror was brief.
The closing of it took less effort than it should, which is the truest and worst thing I know about myself, that I can see Sam’s face rise out of Roman’s, feel the whole weight of what that means, and then make it go away.
“Clean yourself up,” I tell him. My voice does what I tell it. “Water tonight, not whiskey, with the new dose. I’ll see you at the next session.”
He slowly gathers himself off the floor, wrecked and grateful.
I unbuckle the collar from his throat and set it back in the drawer.
I do not let myself look at the drawer below it, the locked one, where the file is, where Sam is, two lines of my own old handwriting and an incident note with the hour on it.
I make the thought go away. I am very good at making the thought go away.
That’s the reason there’s going to be a second file someday, and I know it, standing in the bright room while Roman ties his shoes with shaking hands, and I do not stop, because knowing has never once been the thing that stops me.
He says good night at the door, quiet, hopeful, already half-gone on the new script and the old need.
I tell him good night back. I lock the building behind us both.
And I drive home through the empty city with Sam’s face hovering at the edge of the windshield the whole way, surfacing and being squared away, surfacing and being squared away.
Somewhere past the halfway mark I stop fighting it and just let him ride along, the boy I keep in a drawer, the proof of where this goes, sitting in the passenger seat of a car driven by a man who has decided, fully and in advance, to go there again.
At a red light, I catch my own eyes in the mirror and they’re calm, untroubled, the eyes everyone in the organization trusts, and I hold the look until the light changes.
There’s nothing in them. There never has been.
That’s the face I built on purpose; the one that gets a man like me handed the broken ones gift-wrapped, and it works on me too, most nights.
Tonight, it doesn’t quite. Tonight, Sam rides shotgun the whole way home, and I let him, and I do not slow the car.