Chapter Seven #2
It came in with the southerly, which Sasha would find bitterly funny later -- thirty-one degrees all day and then at four in the morning the pressure dropped over the bay and the wind swung and the whole city exhaled at once, and he woke in the dark already gone.
There was no gradual. That was the lie they told you in school.
There was asleep, and then there was awake with his heart going like something driven and every inch of his skin reporting the sheets in outrageous detail and the blocker patch at his nape burning like a coal against a thing it could not possibly hold.
He got it off. He remembered getting it off. He remembered the relief of it, of nineteen months of chemical politeness coming off his body all at once, and then the room filling up with him.
And a sound in the hallway.
A chair, pushed back.
Then nothing, for a long time. Long enough that Sasha, on the floor now with his cheek against the boards because the boards were cold, understood what the nothing was: a man in a corridor, five feet from a locked door, deciding every second individually.
Then Matteo's voice through the wood, absolutely wrecked, saying:
"I'm here. Say what you want."
Sasha got to the door on legs that didn't work.
He turned the key -- his key, his hand, his choice, and he would hold onto that detail for years the way you hold onto a receipt -- and opened it.
Matteo was against the far wall of the corridor.
He had made himself go to the far wall. That was the first thing Sasha understood, and it undid him more thoroughly than anything that came after: that the man had got out of the chair and crossed the hallway to put as much distance between himself and the open door as the house would allow.
He was in yesterday's shirt with the sleeves shoved up and his pupils blown, and the smell of him went through Sasha like a hand closing.
He had the list in his hand.
He had been sitting in a hallway all night holding a piece of A4.
"Say it," Matteo said. "I need you to say it."
"Come in."
He didn't move. His head went back against the wall.
"One," he said.
"Matteo--"
"One. Nothing happens in that room that you haven't said out loud.
You wrote it. You made me say it back twice.
" His voice was coming from somewhere further back in him than usual, low and slow and barely his.
"I have been in this corridor for two hours and I am not going through that door on an inference. "
And Sasha -- shaking, furious, so far past dignity that he could no longer locate where he had left it -- laughed, once, with nothing behind it. Because of course. Of course. Eleven years of chemistry coming up through the floor of the man and he was still going to insist on procedure.
"Then read me the rest," he said, "and I'll say them back, and then you'll come in."
Matteo read them.
He did it from the far wall, in the dark, hoarse, one at a time, and Sasha stood in the doorway with his hand on the frame and answered each one, and it was the strangest and most formal thing that had ever happened to him: two men reciting a schedule at each other at four in the morning while the air between them went slowly out of true.
Water, every hour.
The key stays inside. Altona stops everything, including tomorrow, including if he isn't making sense.
And when tomorrow's Sasha contradicts Friday's Sasha, Friday's Sasha wins.
"Six," Matteo said.
Sasha said nothing.
"Six, Sasha."
"Amend it."
The corridor went very quiet.
"No."
"I'm not -- listen to me, I can still do this, I'm still here--" He got a hand on the doorframe above his head because it gave him something to hold.
"I wrote six at four in the afternoon in a room with the lights on and I was wrong.
I was protecting a version of me that was going to walk out of this house in March with a clean neck and no complications and that person is a fiction, Matteo, that person was already a fiction on Friday--"
"Three," Matteo said.
"Don't you dare--"
"Three. When tomorrow's Sasha contradicts Friday's Sasha, Friday's Sasha wins.
" He had not moved off the wall. He had not moved off the wall the entire time, and his hands were shaking so badly that the paper was making a small dry sound.
"You are the cleverest person I have ever met and you will build me a beautiful argument in the next three days.
You'll build six of them. And I'm going to lose every single one on the merits, and it isn't going to matter, because I'm not listening to you. I'm listening to Friday."
"I hate you."
"I know."
"Come in anyway."
"Say the whole sentence."
"Come in," Sasha said. "Please come in and shut the door and lock it and give me the key. Please. Please--"
He never got to the end of the sentence.
Matteo crossed the corridor.
Sasha did not see him move. There was a man against a wall five feet away and then there was the wall of his own room arriving behind his shoulders and a hand at the back of his skull, over the bare place on his nape, and Matteo's face going into the side of his throat -- and the sound the man made there, not human, not quite, something out of the back of the chest.
Sasha heard himself answer it in a register he had not known he owned.
Somewhere in it the door shut. Somewhere in it the lock went over, and the key went into Sasha's hand, and he closed his fist on it and kept it, and that was the last administrative act either of them managed for three days.
"Wait--"
Matteo stopped instantly.
That was the moment Sasha would keep. Not any of the rest of it.
Twelve years from now, in a kitchen, in ordinary light: the fact that he said wait with his mouth against the man's ear and a rut eleven years overdue coming up through him like water through a floor, and Matteo Ferrante went absolutely still, holding him up, breathing like a bull, waiting.
"I'm not stopping you," Sasha said. "I'm testing it."
"Don't." Matteo's hand flexed against his back. "Don't test it for fun."
"It wasn't for fun."
It was, in fact, the last piece of arithmetic he was going to be capable of: that a man who would stop at wait would stop at Altona, and that therefore he could put the whole thing down now, all of it, the entire apparatus of watching himself, and be -- for the first time since a container yard at four in the morning -- somewhere he did not have to audit.
He put it down.
"All right," he said. "Then don't wait."
***
The rest of that first hour he kept in a kind of order.
The good coat on the back of the door, and the room going past sideways, and being lifted -- actually lifted, again, the absurd effortlessness of it -- and saying so out loud, item one, that, yes, do that, and being answered in Italian by someone who had stopped choosing his language.
Getting his mouth on the ridge of the scar. Four inches, healed badly, the third closure's fault. The only piece of the man he had made himself.
Matteo's hand spread over the whole back of his neck, bare now, nothing between them, holding him -- not doing anything with it, just holding, the way you hold down a page in a wind -- and the fact that the hand was shaking, and did not stop shaking, for three days.
And at some point, at the very worst of it, at a moment Sasha would have described under oath as the least interruptible instant of his life: Matteo stopping.
Reaching over. Getting a glass off the sill and putting it against his mouth and saying, in a voice like gravel going down a chute, "Four. Drink."
"You are joking--"
"Four."
He drank it.
After that the order came apart.
Fragments after that, because that was all he ever kept of the rest:
Matteo's hand at the back of his neck, over the bare place where the patch had been, holding him still — and shaking.
Being held down and being held up turning out to be the same gesture.
A glass of water at his mouth on the hour, every hour, all three days, because a man in rut had been given one instruction and had turned it into a religion.
The second night. Some black hour. Sasha with his forehead against Matteo's collarbone and Matteo saying, over and over, in Italian and then in English, that he was here, that nobody was coming, that the door was locked.
And Sasha saying: "Bite me."
Everything stopping.
"No."
"Please. Matteo. Please, I'm asking, I'm—"
"You said no." Matteo's whole body was rigid with it.
His voice was barely a voice. "You sat at my desk and you told me you'd never know.
You told me you'd audit it for forty years.
Sasha — tesoro — I'm the only one in this room who can still hear you from Friday, and I'm not going to be the reason you can't."
"I hate you."
"I know."
"I hate you—"
"I know. Drink this."
***
And then the third day, in the afternoon, at the very end of it, when the fever had broken and the wind had swung back round to the north and the room was full of that thin gold late light that comes after a change.
Sasha, awake. Properly awake. Wrung out and clear-headed and himself, more himself than he had been in eleven days, lying on his side looking at a man who had not slept in seventy hours.
"I'm not in heat," he said.
Matteo's eyes opened.
"I want you to check that," Sasha said. "I want you to look at me and check, because I need this next part to be admissible."
"You're not in heat."
"No. And I'm not frightened, and nobody's stolen anything from me since Friday, and I've had three days to think about exactly one subject.
" He reached up and touched Matteo's face with the back of his hand.
"I've done the audit, Matteo. I did it in real time.
And the answer is that I'd have wanted this in March, on the last day, in the car park, with my bag packed. "
Matteo closed his eyes. "Don't say it if—"
"Bite me," Sasha said. "Ask me again in an hour and I'll say it again. Ask me in a year."
Matteo didn't answer for a long time.