Work Text:
“It’s a great deal,” the real estate agent had said straight-to-his-face with a smile sitting pert and perky just below his round pink nose. The white of his teeth had been brilliant enough to reflect light, wet-and-nervous, but there were more important things to consider like the possibility of a real home. Malik signed the paper with a flutter in his chest and a giddy feeling knocking around in his head. Oh and the real-estate-agent with the nose like a clown had kept right on smiling as he slid all those important-papers back across the table in tidy little piles.
--
“I did it,” Malik said to his baby-brother over the phone. He was pacing back-and-forth in his shoebox apartment, stopping short at three foot intervals of stubbing his toe on something (a table, a chair, a stack of books with no place to be). His hand was in his hair and his phone was pressed in the sweaty space between his left shoulder and his ear. It was hot-as-hell in the room. “I can’t believe I did it. I did it. Fuck, Kadar,” he said as he fell back into the chair. He only barely caught the phone in his right hand as it slid out of place. “I have a house.”
His brother’s voice was tinny and vague, travelling from far-across the ocean. He said, “this is a good thing, Malik.” But he had-to-go (of course he did). Malik laid back in the chair with his knees spread and his hand turning his phone in circles on his thigh, thinking-thinking about having a real home.
--
“Well, it was cheap,” was all that Maria said when she dropped the last box of things in the dusty front room of his house. She wiped her hands across the sides of her jeans, careful not to get any on her favorite shirt, and looked at the off-white color of the walls and the cobwebs spun in delicate little strings all around the blades of the ceiling fan. Her eyes conveyed the utmost skepticism but her smile was as genuine as possible. “This is good,” she said to him.
Malik nodded, wiped his hand against the towel hanging over his shoulder and the motioned her toward his kitchen. “Want a beer?”
“Now that is my kind of man. You don’t even have a bed put together but you’ve got beer.” She followed him to the kitchen and sat on the long peninsula that separated the kitchen from the dining room area while he unpacked dishes. She was smiling over his collection of old jelly jars with cartoon characters on them. “I can’t believe you still have these,” she said with beer-wet-lips and a silly shake of her head.
“I keep what’s important,” Malik said.
Her thumb smoothed across a chip in one of the rim of one of the glasses when she said, “yeah. Yeah I get that.” Then she tipped the beer up and finished it in one long gulp. “I’m going to go put your bed together, sweet cheeks and then I’ve got to go. You sure that you’re fine?”
“Yes,” Malik said. He waved her away and she made a crude face at him before being going.
--
“It’s nice somebody bought the place,” Madge, his neighbor on the right, said across the white tips of her picket fence. Her dog (a curiously fat beagle) was expressing his own unenthusiastic approval as well. “Patricia was lovely, God rest her soul, but she just withered away after what happened to her grandson. Oh, it’ll be good to have someone spruce it up again.”
“I’ll do what I can,” Malik assured her. He was on his way out, wearing clothes for work, and acutely aware of the way Madge looked at his face and his house and his shoes but not at his pinned up left sleeve. He waved at her and she smiled with a raise of her soft-old-hands and wished him a good day.
--
“How’s the new house?” Rebecca asked. She fell into the spare chair in his office rather than sit like a normal person. Her back against the arm and one of her legs across the other. She was chewing on the long end of the headphones hanging around her neck. The short-slick length of her hair pulled away from her face as she cocked her head and looked at him with more blatant curiosity than most of the office was capable of.
“Dusty,” Malik said.
Rebecca smiled with a hiccup of a laugh and nodded her head like it was some long-secret joke between the two of them. But then everything seemed like a conspiracy coming out of her mouth. “Good for you,” she said. “So many people tell you not to make big decisions like that after life changing events but you know—sometimes you just have to do it.” For one-half-moment she was looking at him with too-much curiosity, not at his arm but his face, right at his eyes, and then it relented before he could open his mouth and ask what she wanted. She was on her feet again in a dainty motion of many limbs and on her way out.
--
“You must be the new guy,” was the stranger standing in his backyard when Malik went out the backdoor to take a few extra dishes out to the storage shed in the back. The door was old-and-scarred, held in place with an old combination lock but the building was sturdy-and-sure. Malik had kicked it once or twice during the initial tours of the house just to be sure. The stranger, tall and slim, didn’t have the decency to look embarrassed to be caught. He was standing on Malik’s property with two hands pushed into his jacket pockets and all the presumptive entitlement in the world resting on his shoulders.
“Yeah,” Malik said. He set the box down on the back porch under the cover of the slanting roof. “Who are you?”
The stranger’s smile turned sideways as he looked left at the house with a dozen cars parked in the driveway and out on the street. His cheek was centimeters from touching his shoulder before he straightened up entirely again, as if the answer suddenly occurred to him. “What happened to your arm?”
(Hot-metal-and-shrieking fire.) Malik frowned and the stranger put both of his hands up, palms out. He took two steps to the left, lingered on the dying grass by the fence and then without another word hopped right over it and disappeared behind a shed in the neighbor’s yard.
--
“I just want to know that you’re doing alright,” was Adha’s careful little whisper through the phone. She had always been like that, for as long as Malik could remember. A soft-spoken wisp of a girl with big eyes and a victimized smile. Her friendship was worth its weight in gold (as basically useless as it was) if only because she was an acute reminder of how good people should behave. “You made such a drastic move. You’re—there’s an ocean between us now and then you bought a house? I thought you were just going to take a few months at a temporary position.”
Malik closed his eyes because there was a sharp pain in his head, that space just behind his ear where the scar tissue still pushed outward from under his hair. He moved his left arm to rub it with his thumb and remembered-too-late that he’d left his hand behind months ago. But the sensation was there, the memorized phantom of his left-hand smoothing across his hair. It went like a shudder down his spine. His forehead was a raging burn against the cold screen door as he looked at the drizzle of gray rain. “I’m looking for something,” he said.
The stranger was standing on his side of the fence, hood up over his head casting a shadow across his face that made it hard to see anything but the droll line of his mouth and the strange fullness of his lips. His hands were shoved into his pockets and for a moment Malik could feel-but-not see how the stranger was staring at him.
“Do you have friends there?” Adha asked. “Are there people you trust? People that can look after you.”
“I don’t need looked after,” Malik snapped into the phone. He looked away from the back yard and put his back to the screen door. “I am a grown man; I lost my arm not my mind.”
Her answer was a sigh tinged with a teardrop. She said, “I’m sorry Malik. I didn’t mean to make you mad, I’m just worried.”
“Don’t worry. I have friends, I have a house. It’s good.” He turned to look out the screen door again and found the stranger was gone-by-now and the drizzle of rain had filled out into a downpour. The water was filling up the cardboard box of dishes he’d forgotten to put in the shed days ago. “I’ve got to go,” he said.
--
“I’ll mow your lawn for five dollars,” the stranger said across the fence. He was there on a exceptionally cool afternoon. The rest of the inhabitants of his house were having a rave or something. The throbbing beat of their intolerably loud music was shaking out of the confines of their house and filling the space around it. But the stranger was there, hands in pockets and nodding down toward the scrubby-brown-grass that covered the backyard in awkward patches.
Malik laughed. “That’s overpriced.”
The stranger shrugged with a generous smile on his face. “Help a guy out, huh?”
“Help you out with what?” Malik asked. He set the rake he’d been intending to use on the few leaves that fell in the storm against the scratched door of the shed. He put his hand against the chilly metal of the chain link fence and watched the stranger’s face go rosy with embarrassment. His eyes went half closed and he looked left-away-from Malik instead of right at him. His tongue was a pink drag of regret across his dry lips as he tried to think of something to say. “Oh,” Malik said, “oh.”
The stranger shrugged. “So I think you’re cute.”
Malik smiled. “If you’re looking for help with your flirting, it might help if you told me your name.”
The sound from the house reached a high point and Madge-the-neighbor was banging open her front door and shouting about how she called the cops. The stranger looked regretfully toward the sound of her voice and then back at him ever-so-fleetingly. He said, “Altair. I’ve got to go now.”
“Sounds like you better.” Malik didn’t watch him walk away but went back in the house to avoid the spectacle of police intervention.
--
“It’s going to be a cold one,” Madge said to him on a sunny fall day. The weather was considerably milder than Malik thought it would be. Her fat beagle barked his general agreement. “It’s good to have a fireplace for a cold winter, don’t you think?”
A shudder went down Malik’s spine but he managed to nod his head at her question. An echo of (shrieking fire) was cutting into the flesh of his left arm (but wasn’t, because there was no arm) and he bit his lip as he lifted the newspaper he’d come outside to get and nodded back toward his house.
“There’s good coupons this week,” Madge told him. “I always clip the coupons.” She kept talking even after he started walking away. Her voice like a bird’s song warbling across the yard and then stopped short when he shut the door after it. The wood was cool against his back but the boil of sweat on his face overcame him. His knees bent and he started shaking. The world went in-and-out of focus around him as he pressed the heel of his hand against the soft part of his eye.
The empty fireplace stood solemn and menacing at the side of the room, its gaping-black-mouth stained by years of use and poorly hidden by a stack of hard back encyclopedias he picked up at a yard sale. Malik tried to close his eyes, tried not to look, but the fire came belching out of the black void like (shrieking) and his ears were bleeding from the sound of (hot-metal).
“No,” he said into his wrist, “no, no, no.” But it came, as it always came, sidling across the floor with tall-red-flames and spindle-thin fingers, digging-and-clawing into charred-white-flesh.
--
“You okay?” Altair (the stranger) asked. He was alone in the evening, standing on his side of the fence when Malik finally made it away from the panic. His whole body was sticky with sweat and his hand was still quivering as he held onto the cold bottle of beer. He raised it in silent assertion that he was fine-just-fine. Altair cocked his head to one side (cheek almost to his shoulder) before putting his hands (rarely seen) against the fence and lifting himself over it. His whole body moved with lithe grace as he pushed his hands back into his pockets and stopped short one-or-two feet from where Malik was sitting.
That box of dishes he’d been meaning to put in the shed was a poor pile of things with bits of pulp brown cardboard hanging loosely around the center. Altair looked at it with a raised eyebrow but then looked at the shake in his hand. “I wish you’d let me help,” he said.
“I don’t even know you, why would you help me?” Malik asked. But he couldn’t look at his face (not right now).
“What do you want to know?” Altair asked. “I’ll tell you anything.”
Malik took a drink of his beer and felt it slip cool-and-welcome down his swollen-hot-throat. He pressed his forehead against the cold neck of the bottle and tried to grasp at any question that seemed relevant. “What’s your job?” he asked when he couldn’t think of anything else.
“I was a soldier,” Altair said softly. His legs were bending, just blurs in Malik’s peripheral vision, and he stayed there in a crouch, hands in his pockets and face caught in perpetual worry. “What about you?”
“I work in finance,” Malik said in a mumble. His head was aching and the air was too warm to sooth the ragged edges of his nerves. He shoved himself upright and knocked a cup out of the pile of dishes. It shattered against the brick steps and he cursed at it. “I’m going in. Sorry, I’m going in.”
--
“I wish you’d call me when it’s happening,” Maria said. She had invited herself over after Malik ignored her phone calls for three days. He’d made it to work and home and spent a few hours sitting in his bathtub with a book, a phone and a fire extinguisher at his side. (Thinking, all the time, that water-put-out-fire and he was safe-there-at-least.) It was mostly gone now, but the weight of it was lines on his face that anyone in the world could have seen.
Maria pushed him into a chair, leaned across his back to unbutton his shirt and eased it back off his shoulders. “Fuck your pride,” she said to him. “This is your life, Malik. If it doesn’t mean that much to you, think about the rest of us.” Her hands were strong and sure as they kneaded at the knotted tightness in his neck and shoulders. Her voice was a steady drone of reproach that tapered to a stop. “You’re not listening,” she said.
“I was,” he said.
She laughed. “How’s your house, Malik? Is it as nice as you thought it would be?”
Malik nodded. Maria’s hand was in his hair, rubbing at his scalp in that way she liked to do whenever she was stressed. The space between her fingers pushing his hair up, spreading it out against the natural direction of growth. Her skin was so pale and his hair was so dark she said it was mesmerizing like a zebra-running. “It has been nice,” he said. “One of my neighbors has a crush on me.”
“Man or woman?” Maria asked. Her voice was close to his ear but she was careful not to drape her body across his back.
“Man,” Malik said. “He’s not bad looking.”
Maria made an approving noise. “You should invite him over. It might be good for you.” Then she pulled her hands free from his hair and came around to stand in front of him, put her hands on the arms of the chair he was sitting and squatted in front of him. Her face was washed-out-white and her eyes were pink at the rims when she stared at his face. “Call me next time,” Maria said. “Please.”
“I make no promises,” Malik said. Then, “I’ll try.”
--
“Five dollars to rake your leaves?” Altair asked when Malik came outside to clean up the broken glass (days later). He noticed the old broom and the dustpan with the long handle and his eyes got all bright and his face flushed with color. “Five dollars to sweep your steps?” His lips were quirked up in a grin that only looked good on victorious college kids and ridiculous on grown men.
“You really must improve your pick up lines,” Malik said.
Altair let himself over the fence and came close enough the spotty pink anxiety on his cheeks was clear enough to trace the constellation-like intensity. His knuckles were poking out through the thin stretch of his jacket pockets. “Are those space pants you’re wearing?”
Malik was halfway to asking him what the hell he was talking about when Altair’s smile turned stupid and embarrassed and he said, “because your ass is out of this world.” Then the spotty redness of his face was a solid pink flush and he turned back toward the fence. “I’ll just go.”
Malik thought about stopping him and couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t more embarrassing than that ridiculous pick up line. He settled for grinning at the broken glass and by the time he looked over his shoulder, Altair was gone.
--
“There is no way he really said that to you,” Rebecca howled. They were standing in the narrow break room around the coffee machine slowly spurting hot water into the glass pot. It was an ancient thing, made sometime in the eighties (possibly) that was on the verge of slow death. Malik wasn’t even sure (now) how the conversation had started or how it had turned to Altair-the-neighbor-stranger and his brilliantly embarrassing line. “Oh my God,” Rebecca said. “You have to go out with him, Malik. That is too precious. You have to.”
“I’m not sure I’ll ever seen him again after that. He was as red as a tomato,” Malik said.
Rebecca took the pot first to fill her cup until the tea bag was floating in the water. The reddish-brown seep of color spread out under the surface of the water as the little puffs of steam rose from the mug and Malik took a subconscious step backward. Rebecca said, “didn’t you say he was a soldier? You’d think they would have better lines. I mean, come on, these guys go all over the world, right?” She poured water into his cup and he closed his eyes as the steam rose like little puffs of smoke. If she noticed the strangeness, she didn’t comment. Her own mug scraped against the counter as she said, “where are you from?”
“Syria,” Malik mumbled, “originally I was from Syria.” He turned away from the cups, “I’ll come back for my cup. I should get back to work.”
Rebecca didn’t say anything but an agreeable noise in her throat and the sound of her breath cooling the surface of the steaming water in the mug. Malik moved like a wooden thing march-march-marching all the way back to his desk.
--
“Bad day?” Altair asked from the fence.
Alcohol was not a substance Malik had taken to lightly. It was fundamentally against everything he was taught as a child, but there were times like now, in the after-dark cold of a foreign land when he needed nothing as badly as he needed some rich-brown-liquor served in a childish jelly jar. This one had some cat chasing after some mouse on it with a crack in the rim that cut his lip every time he forgot exactly where it was. “Bad life,” Malik corrected. “You can come over.”
Altair came, hovered just inside the yellow glow of the porch light with his hands in his pockets and his breath like a ghost in front of his face. “Want to talk about it?”
“If I did, I would not be drinking.” His smile felt crooked on his face. There wasn’t enough liquor in the world to drown the feeling creeping across his back. (Those long-orange-spindle fingers smoky-and-terrible.) “Want to join in?”
“I gave it up,” Altair said without irony. He didn’t look old enough to have started a habit, much less kicked it. “You’re not looking good, Malik.”
Malik shrugged. “Want to hear a pick up line I learned in Syria?”
“Sure,” Altair said.
“Want to fuck?” Malik said. He looked up at Altair and thought about what that pretty blush would feel like under his cold hands (no, hand). It was such an intense desire that he couldn’t stop himself from standing up the way Altair didn’t seem to be able to stop the sway of his body closer to Malik’s. “Pretty good, right?” he said when they were close enough to trade body-heat and the worn-out cotton of Altair’s jacket was buttery-soft and body-hot under his palm.
“Yeah,” Altair mumbled. Then he kissed him and it wasn’t anything-like that hesitant-shrugging-boy he’d been across the fence with worried-pink lips and unsure words. He kissed Malik with two hands on his face and the whole of his body pressed tight against him. His mouth was hot-as-hell and they stumbled back, into the screen door and then through it to the warmth of the house beyond. Altair was stripping his shirt off with remorseless efficiency, not even bothering to look at the scarred flesh of his left arm. His teeth were blunt-and-hard against Malik’s throat as his hands ran down the uneven skin of his back.
Malik’s head was falling back, his feet stumbled one-two-steps until he hit a wall and Altair shuffled forward on his knees to follow him. His hair was short-and-tight to his head but smooth against his palm, the thickness of his skull a prominent feeling just below the nearly exposed skin on the top of his head. Malik was staring at the wrinkles on his forehead while Altair pulled his pants open and down and his mouth (his stupid fat lips) closed around his dick.
Maybe he was drunk, or the world inverted, but he was feeling soupy with an orgasm and Altair’s voice was in his ear saying, “I miss you, Malik.” And wasn’t that strange thing to say to someone you’d never met before.
--
“I think my neighbor is crazy,” Malik told Adha when she called (again). It was the only thing safe (enough) to mention to her. The only thing that wasn’t made of (shrieking) fire that she might have cared about. Work-was-work and they never talked-about-work because numbers had always confused and bored her.
“Why?” Adha asked. “Because he’s interested in you?”
“No. You don’t have to be crazy to be interested in me. My face is still pretty enough to look at.” And most of his body was solid and well made. The parts that weren’t were easy enough to avoid and ignore if necessary. “He says weird things and he never wears anything but his jacket.”
Adha’s voice was a cheerful laugh. “There are worse things. Besides, I think it is a thing for you: boys that wear jackets. You can’t resist them.”
Malik smiled into the phone. “Yeah, maybe. But that doesn’t make him any less weird.”
“You’re smiling. It’s good to hear that again.” There was more that she wanted to say, the unspoken things that Malik didn’t want to hear. Those things just waiting for an opportunity to slither out of her petal-pink lips so he cleared his throat before she could say anything.
“I have to go,” he said, “things to do. Owning a house is all work.” He hung up on her and sat on his bed staring at the phone as if he expected it to ring and the terrible things she hadn’t said to ooze out into the air. But there was nothing, only the silence of his restrained breathing and the leaky drip of the kitchen faucet.
--
“It’s going to snow tonight,” Madge warned him. She made a motion at his unused chimney as if she could force him into using it. “Make sure you keep yourself warm tonight, huh?” Then she was calling her fat beagle into her house and fussing at him about dirty paws.
Malik was warm from the car ride home and instantly chilled by the crisp air gathering in his front yard. Snow was still a novel experience for him, something he hadn’t seen with any frequency in his life. The locals that he’d talked to (at the store, at the gas station, out in the parking lot at work) said it would snow. They said they could taste it in the air. He stuck his tongue out and tried to lick the taste from the air.
“It’s like ice,” Altair said. He was standing there, inexplicably in the front yard like a real person. His worn cotton jacket providing a poor covering for the chill in the air. “It’s hard to explain if you can’t taste it for yourself. Just imagine the coldest, driest ice and the taste of it when it first touches your tongue. Just before it starts to melt—that’s the taste of the air before it snows.” He looked acutely aware of how ridiculous he sounded trying to describe a phenomenon that Malik did not believe in.
“I don’t taste anything,” he said.
“You were so close to being perfect.” Altair said.
Malik was going to leave him standing outside (leaving him and his awkward statements behind) but he stopped on his front porch and said, “come in for a while?” Maybe because he wanted to see Altair smile. “I’ve got hot chocolate and hamburgers.”
--
“Is this your brother?” Altair asked. He was standing by the fireplace (that ominous black void poorly covered with stacks of things) looking at the pictures spread on the mantle. “He looks like you.”
Malik had to leave the kitchen to see the picture, the one of Kadar grinning boldly at the camera with his arms behind his back. There was a hovering group of people in the background snickering over something but Kadar was pleased-as-ever with blue-blue eyes. “Yes,” Malik said.
“Who’s the lady?” Altair asked. His hands were stuffed into his pockets still. “Girlfriend? You have a lot of photographs of her.”
“She was a translator that worked in my city. We were friends—she lives here now, actually. It’s Maria. You should have seen her around the house sometime.” She had come by often enough to share a drink or a story that someone must have seen her coming and going, certainly someone that stalked his backyard as often as Altair did.
“No,” he said. And then, “I don’t see everything.”
“Of course you don’t,” Malik said. Then, “come to the kitchen and I’ll make you something to drink.”
“Sure,” Altair said. They went to the kitchen for hot chocolate served in old jelly jars. Altair leaned against the peninsula with his sleeves pulled over his hands as they cupped around the steaming jars and his face rapt-in-attention while Malik told him of Maria’s adventures in Syria.
--
“It’s too cold to go out there,” Altair said long after dark when the first sprinkles of snow were lazily drifting down from the sky. He was leaning against the front window, his shoulder holding the curtains back as his breath made a thick fog on the windows.
“You live next door,” Malik said. The scatter of their dishes was spread across his living room like a performance peace, a full cup there and an empty plate over there. Altair’s food pushed around the plate but hardly any of it missing. Malik was sipping apple cider (a seasonal favorite, according to the lady at the grocery store) and sitting in the worn space on his couch.
“That’s too far walk,” Altair said. He turned in a circle, hands in his pockets, socked feet against the wood floors. “I’m not dressed for the weather. Look at me.”
“It’s next door,” Malik said again.
Altair stuck his lower lip out at him and made the most pathetic attempt at wide-innocent eyes Malik had ever seen. “But it’s cold outside.”
Malik relented in good humor and Altair sat next to him on the couch, leaned in against his left side with his cheek across the bumpy scars on his shoulder. “It really isn’t that cold,” Malik said to him, “didn’t you grow up here?”
“Yeah,” Altair said. “I grew up here.” Then he leaned his weight against the back of the couch and it was only his leg that was brushing up against Malik’s as they watched the snow falling through the thick glass of the front windows.
--
“I thought you got your paper delivered,” Madge said (out of nowhere) when Malik was trying to trudge up the front path of his house in fancy-finance officer shoes. His socks were wet and his feet were cold and he didn’t care what preconceived notions she had about the state of his newspaper.
“They forgot,” he said.
“I saw them this morning,” Madge said. She was looking at the ground as if the supposed newspaper would show itself if only she could spot in the damp slushy piles of melting snow. He left her to do it, went into his house and dropped the paper on the table by the door. He frowned out the window at Madge’s cold-pinked face and her shrewd little eyes peering at his front lawn with incredulous disbelief.
--
“Your neighbor thinks you’re hording newspapers?” Maria repeated. She was sitting on the peninsula again, legs crossed neatly in front of her and fingers wrapped around a cold beer. She had run into the house wearing her ridiculous jeans and favorite T-shirt, like she didn’t own anything more suitable for the weather. “How do these things keep happening to you? First the crazy guy next door and now the suspicious older lady?”
Malik shrugged. “I don’t think the guy next door is crazy. I think he’s weird and possibly socially inept.”
Maria’s eyes expressed her disbelief on all accounts. “Pretty sure you had it right the first time. He sounds crazy. But what does she think you’re doing with the newspapers if you’re hording them?”
Malik shrugged again. “Building a pyre to Satan? Papier-mâché? I really don’t know. It seems like a stupid thing to care about.”
“Yeah. But to each their own. Tell me about work.”
“Nobody wants to hear about work,” Malik said. “Numbers, Maria, numbers!”
She fake screamed and they fell into easy laughter at a joke as old as their friendship. Later, after she washed the dishes and they were sitting in the living room listening to commercials, she rested her cheek against his right side. “Are you happy here, Malik?”
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s good.”
“Good,” she repeated.
--
“Knock, knock,” Altair called through the back door. He was standing out there just under the eaves of the roof while the rain broke icicles that were shattering against the steps and the gravel. Malik opened the door and let him in.
“You have hands,” he said.
“I don’t think you have any proof of that,” Altair said with a sly grin. He kissed Malik and it was all chapped-and-cold. Then he was moving away before Malik could root one of his hands free from his stupid pockets. “I smelled something delicious and invited myself over to eat.”
“You smelled pizza or you saw the man the delivered it?” Malik said.
Altair shrugged as he continued on his way into the living room. “This is my favorite movie!” he said to the screen.
“Of course it is,” Malik said back. “What is it?”
“It’s—that one about the guy that wore the sweater and did stuff,” Altair said. “I love it.” The lie was pitiful but Malik threw a piece of pizza on a napkin and set it in front of him. They watched the movie that was far from anyone’s favorite before it lapsed into reruns of old shows neither of them had seen.
“You look tired,” Altair said.
Malik nodded agreeably.
“You always look tired now.” Altair stood up while his eyes were closed and pulled at his arm to get him on his feet. His hands definitely existed as they turned him toward the hall to the bedrooms and pushed him slowly-but-surely toward his room. They crawled into bed, Malik tucked safely beneath the covers and Altair curled up next to him with his stupid hands in his stupid pockets. “I wish I knew how to sing,” Altair said.
“Mm,” Malik said. “Just don’t leave yet.” He wiggled closer, rolling onto his side so his back was against Altair’s chest. Altair’s hand was resting so lightly against his waist that Malik might have imagined it.
--
“How come you never put any recycling out?” Madge asked him from her front porch. “People around here recycle.” Her fat beagle was sitting at her feet with rolling eyes and a droopy smile.
“I’ll remember,” Malik said.
“Paper, plastic bottles. That’s what we recycle around here. Do you have any paper in your house?”
Malik ignored her, pretended he didn’t hear a thing she said and went inside. He dropped the paper on the table by the door and went to change out of his work clothes.
--
“Did you finally get some sleep?” Rebecca asked. She was dropping a stack of papers on his desk. Her fingernails were painted black and her hair was tipped with a deep purple color (maybe, maybe not). She put one hand on his desk and tipped her head sideways to look into his face. “Looks like you finally got some sleep. Is it your soldier friend?”
“Go away,” he said.
“You should get a picture of him. I have heard so much and seen so little.” She winked at him as she left. Malik looked at the refreshed stack of things left to do and thought fondly of his bed and Altair and the quiet shush of falling snow.
--
“Is that a camera?” Altair asked. He stopped in mid-stride with a frozen look of indignant shock on his face and his arms caught in the motion of rising to his sides in outrage. The whole backyard was mud under his feet with splatters on the bottoms of his pants. When the flash was gone, Altair just sighed and shook his head. “And what do I owe the prestigious honor of being photographed against my will?”
Malik slid the camera into his pocket to keep it away from Altair and said, “people are starting to think you don’t exist.”
Altair’s smile faltered for a half-second and then he made a derisive, dismissive noise. “We should go inside, it’s cold out here.” They wound up in bed again, Malik intent on reliving the frantic blowjob from weeks ago and Altair content to lay on his bed with their foreheads touching making faces at him. “You need the sleep,” he said when Malik was only half-awake. Altair’s voice sounded so very far away, (dreamlike) the way his lips against Malik’s forehead felt when he said, “but I miss you.”
--
“So let me see it,” Maria said. She was sitting on the peninsula, reaching forward with greedy hands to swipe at the photograph that Malik was holding out of her reach. “Come on. I, like everyone else, am starting to think you’ve just made this guy up. A physically attractive but inherently embarrassingly dork like former soldier? He doesn’t exist, you made him up because you’re a sad, horny old man living alone.” She spread her hands across her hips and opened her eyes with exaggerated wideness like a dare.
Malik tossed the photo at her and she caught it between her greedy palms. Her tongue was peeking out between her teeth as she turned it around. The sparkle of glee a very nearly real glimmer of sparkle on her skin. And then when she looked down at the picture, her mouth dropped open.
“He’s not that bad looking,” Malik said. He leaned his right elbow against the peninsula and looked at the picture in Maria’s bone-pale fingers. “He’s making a stupid face right there but he’s still pretty good looking.”
“Malik,” Maria said (oh-so-quietly). Whatever she meant to say next stuttered in her mouth as she put her legs out in front of her and pushed off the island. She pushed the photograph against his chest and turned away from him with both of her hands in her hair. He could see the white rise of her knuckles as she tightened her fingers in her hair. When she turned around she put her two palms together.
Malik looked at the picture in his hand. “What?” he said.
“Malik,” she said again. “Ok, this is all my fault. I let you move in here. I let you come here. I thought that it was just something that you needed to get out of your system and then you were actually sleeping and I thought, okay maybe this wasn’t a bad idea. Oh my God, Malik.”
“What are you talking about?”
Maria’s face was desperate and her arms were (spindle-thin) stretched out toward him with her fingers curved like claws as she said, “just listen to me, okay. Just try to listen to me. It was so crowded that day, remember? There were so many people that you could hardly move.”
“What?” He shook his head and she grabbed his face in her (cold, cold) hands and held him still. He tried to grab her wrist but his fingers were closed tight around the picture and the best he could manage was pushing at her bony arm.
“Remember there were so many people that day. Remember he was telling you about where he grew up—again. Do you remember, because you had just bought the plane tickets already even though it was months away and he was so excited about showing you real snow. He was telling you about it, remember that? The way the air tastes right before it snows?”
Malik shook her hands away from his face. There was a crush of sound breaking in from the somewhere to his left, that smoky-forgotten thing that came from the black-void of space. “Stop it, Maria!”
“You heard it before you felt it!” Maria shouted at him as he walked away from her. The sound of her footsteps against the ground dull thuds, bony heels over slippery-paper-cover. She grabbed him by what was left of his left arm. “Shrieking fire, Malik. I know you remember! You don’t forget things like that!” She was furious then and it brought living color to the pallor of her face. “Turn the picture over.”
“Fuck you,” Malik snapped at her. “Get out of my house!”
“No,” she said. “Turn the picture over.” Her voice, after the shouting, was a breathless whimper of sound. She put her hands out, like she wanted to pull him close and hold him but she didn’t have the right (and she didn’t). “He told you all about where he grew up, didn’t he? It was all he talked about, the snow and the town and the house.”
And the—“Jelly jars,” Malik said softly.
“The ones his mother bought for him before she died. He hated jelly but his Grandmother bought him those stupid jars for years because his Mother started the tradition. He’s probably haunting the stupid jars.” Then she took a step closer, hands still hanging uselessly in mid-air. “Look at the picture, Malik. Just turn it over and look at the back. He gave it to you, remember?”
Malik felt slow, and thick. The air around his face moved like hot syrup as he looked down at the picture. It wasn’t brand-new (freshly printed) but blunted at the edges and dirty on the corners. He turned it over and felt a spike of something painful and real at the tight lilt of the letters: Altair, 17. His throat was thickening up and a long-quieted rage made his teeth grit against that noisy-black-void. “No,” he said to her.
“It was so crowded that day,” Maria said again. “I know you remember.”
The press of so many bodies, the distraction of noisy children somewhere ahead of them. Merchants were calling sales over the noise of so many feet and voices. Altair’s arm was around him as he chattered on-and-on about the things they would see. It was a fresh excitement from a man who was rarely moved to emotion. Malik teased him, he said: “I think you’re making that up.”
Oh-God-but, “He’s dead.” Malik looked at the picture, ran his fingers across the sticky surface of it and the world blurred out watery-and-indistinct before he blinked the tears out of his eyes. He turned to his left, to where Altair was standing with his hands in his pockets.
“So is Maria,” Altair said softly.
“Don’t listen to him,” Maria said. She grabbed Malik’s face and pulled it back around to look at her. “Malik, Altair died.”
“Her clothes never change, Malik. She’s worn that shirt since the first day, hasn’t she? And she’s here. Why would she be here? Look at her face, Malik. She died that day.” Altair’s voice was close at the back of his ear, not so far from the raised scar just beneath his hair. His presence was a shadow at Malik’s back. “Tell him the truth, Maria.”
“We all died,” she said (as simple as that). “Your brother, Altair and me. Kadar and I died first, we were closest to the impact when the bomb went off but Altair didn’t die right away. Look at his hands, at his arms—he used his body to cover yours and the fire burned him but he didn’t die.” She held up her own arms. “Look at me! I’m not scarred, I’m not burnt.”
Malik turned to look at Altair and he held his hands out, showed the white-ash of the deep burns, blackened over exposed bones. The cuffs of his jacket were filthy with oozing blood and oily burnt skin.
“Let him go, Malik,” Maria said quietly. “You have to let him go or he’ll kill you.”
Altair turned his whole body toward Malik’s, stepped as close to him as he had been that day. His smile was the same thing it had been then, the excitement in his eyes as real in that moment as it had been in the last moment of fully-conscious memory Malik had. They were arguing about the taste of snow in the air when the sound came like a hot-snarl, somewhere to the left. But there was no sound now, only Altair’s smile and the sound of his voice saying, “I miss you, Malik. I miss you all the time.”
Maria’s hands were trying to cover his ears, she was trying to wedge her body between theirs. The frantic push of her elbows and hips barely more than an annoying buzz of an unwanted animal. She was saying (over-and-over): “he didn’t die right away. He kept burning and burning. Look at him, Malik. He’s not right. You have to let him go.”
Altair’s hands were over his, the smooth touch of his fingertips made sticky and hot by the red-gold-flames that filled in the empty spaces where his skin had once been. The fire snaked up under the sleeves of his jacket, broke out like a rash across the back of his neck, illuminating the flush of blood in his face from all sides. His eyes were soft-and-brown, looking at him with such plain devotion as he took the picture from Malik and pressed the lighter into his palm. “I miss you,” he said, “I miss you all the time.”
Malik moved his foot and the heavy pile of papers under his socks ruffled uselessly up at the motion. The papers were everywhere, the smell of the newsprint almost overwhelming. Malik didn’t look at them as his thumb brushed across the metal top of the lighter. His eyelids fluttered and he licked his lips. “Look at you,” he said. His hand pressed against the smoldering holes in Altair’s flesh, slipping on the liquefying fat-and-skin as it bubbled apart. “You left me,” Malik said.
“You’ll never be free, you’ll be stuck here forever,” Maria was hissing.
Altair’s arms went around him, his burning cheek pressed against Malik’s. His fingers like bones clinging to him with all the strength left in his body. (Shrieking-fire and hot-metal, the sound of screaming and the rolling black smoke all around his face. Altair’s voice caught in a high-sound of pain the last sound he ever heard his lover make.) Malik closed his eyes and leaned his cheek back against Altair’s.
The lighter made the smallest sound, so different from the sound of a human ripping apart at the explosive power of a homemade bomb. The little flame barely bright enough to illuminate the dark space of his living room. The papers under Malik’s feet crinkled when he shifted his weight. Altair’s eyes were brilliant-in-detail, a hundred different hues of brown-and-gold, his lashes that exact dust-brown of his hair and the unshaven bristle of hair still caught on his slow-charring face.
“He was on fire,” Maria said again, uselessly, from the left, “he just kept burning.”
Malik pulled Altair down with one hand around his neck, pressed their foreheads together as he closed his eyes. “You grew up in this house, you wanted me to come here with you,” he said softly. “I found the rings, I found the tickets. I found everything in the stuff you left behind except for you.” His uncurled his right arm from around Altair; Malik felt the heat of the fire still burning Altair as he slowly set the lighter against the stacks of papers.
--
“That house is haunted,” Madge-the-neighbor said when the pretty young couple came with a burgeoning burden just starting to show under her dress. The real estate agent was a strained-smile-over-hostility. Madge and the fat beagle were saying, “the last guy that lived there went crazy and burned the house down. That place is haunted.”
Altair leaned against the porch posts, Malik sat in the dainty swing they had installed when they rebuilt the house. It swayed in the light breeze as he pushed his feet to the fresh-stained wood and pushed with all of his concentration. Altair smirked at him from where he stood with his fingers outstretched to run across the back of the woman’s neck.
“This house is haunted,” Malik said to the passing couple that were busy listening to the real estate agent prattle on-and-on about how everything was brand-new, shushing their fears about a ghost and a house fire. Malik leaned back into the swing and Altair peered through the door. “I like them,” he said, “I hope they buy it.” When he smiled, the fire showed between the gaps in his teeth.