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When I shove my childhood bully down a set of stairs I don’t anticipate his death—the crackle of splitting bone, the blood spurt, the nauseous silence, the limpness. I don’t anticipate that this will be the day I am ejected from his father’s horrible, polished preparatory school for boys and sent into the city. I don’t anticipate how much I will come to love the recklessness here, the sweet hum of potential, the pedestrians all meeting eyes and glancing laughingly away. I don’t anticipate a boy juggling figs in a park, surrounded by other boys who look as if they could snap his neck if they so choose, all bared teeth and muscle, somehow charmed into submission, into awe. I don’t anticipate the way he will someday say my name:
Pa-tro-clus.
Clear and warm. Defined.
…
I’m coasting through drowsy metropolitan heat on a scarlet bicycle. There are other children nearby, their giggles tumbling around us like asteroids, but as usual they don’t see me. Still, it's a good day. Not good, perhaps, but closer to normal than usual.
I consider challenging one of the kids to a race, a girl with prominent brown eyes and lips sticky with fruit juice, when my bicycle hits a dip in the road and I go flying. Whirling, tipping end over end until I can't tell up from down.
When I come to a stop, my ribs ache and the metallic tang of blood pulses in my mouth. My vision has gone fuzzy around the edges, shivering like a mirage. Someone says something to me but it sounds garbled and hollow and is nothing I can make sense of.
I roll creakingly onto my back and blink at the sun, a blazing white whole in the bleached blue of the sky.
"Hey.”
My head is beginning to throb.
"Hey!”
Birds circle overhead.
"Hey!”
Breathing is painful, like filling a balloon with more helium than it should contain. I have to remind myself to do it; in out in out in out in out, and then I start to forget what order I am supposed to be going in, and start breathing in in out in out out out in out in in out in out out out out out—
The world goes dark.
When I open my eyes next, I’m still lying on gravel, aching. A kaleidoscope-eyed boy is standing over me with a scrutinizing expression.
"No concussion," he says, as though he could possibly know such a thing at his age, and someone out of sight heaves a sigh of relief. He looks unbearably familiar.
I brush my hand against my throbbing forehead. There is a bandage of sorts there, rough beneath my fingers like canvas.
The boy tells me I'll be lucky not to have a scar.
…
Later, I realize: The fig juggler.
I say this aloud and he laughs.
“I’m Achilles,” he tells me, extending a remarkably beautiful hand.
I shake it.
“Come with me?” he asks, his supple fingers drumming nervously on the asphalt and I know I answer his question (yes), and say words after that (should we—are you sure—where are we goi—my name is—), but all I can hear is fight with me fight with me fight with me.
…
Achilles is wealthy. I can tell from the way he carries himself, confident and rosy and bit naïve. I am expecting him to take me to some grotesquely overpriced high rise with grand pianos and high definition television and eight laptops per room, but he doesn’t. He takes me to a charmingly furnished apartment with just enough of everything—not too much. He takes me to his father, Peleus. Explains my injury.
His father tells me to stay the night.
…
I wait for the nightmares to come, the thought of the fact that I killed someone dead. Truly and completely. A decaying boyish corpse in an earthy grave.
I wait for the desire to plunge, to find that line where land ends and emptiness begins and let my weight tip me over the edge and fall fall fall fall until I hit solid ground and snap into too many shards to ever be whole again.
It doesn’t come.
Achilles takes me to his room and does what no one has been able to do since I was sent here. He makes me laugh.
Somehow he’s managed to balance a rolled up towel on his dog Atlas’s shaggy head. It looks like a terry-cloth turban, wobbling with every movement the poor creature makes. It's the most inanely ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen, and both of us clearly find it comedic gold.
Peleus pokes his head around the door-frame and sees the two of snickering and bowing before Atlas on bended knees.
"Oh, Atlas, you are the most majestic of all canine royalty," sings Achilles, pink-faced from suppressed mirth. He produces a wreath of dried flowers seemingly out of thin air and slips it over the dog’s neck with utmost satisfaction. "Your eyes are infinite tarns of beauty, your teeth glisten like porcelain—"
The pillow broadsides Achilles just where Peleus wanted it. I lunge, catching Achilles by the arm to keep him from falling to the floor in laughter.
We go to bed soon after, staring side-by-side up at his ceiling full of adhesive glow-in-the-dark constellations. I am immediately furiously jealous of what he has, and my fist tightens in spite of itself. As if reading my mind, Achilles says, “You can’t stay in that orphanage.”
He doesn’t say it with arrogance or judgment, but with a pleasantly straightforward air so much of the world lacks. My envy abates somewhat and I turn on my side, temple giving a twinge of pain from my earlier spill. “Where would I go?”
“Here. With me.”
“Why?”
“Because I like you.”
This startles me. “No one likes me,” I blurt, and he frowns as though he himself has been personally offended. “I killed someone,” I continue helplessly, impetuously. “That’s why I’m here in the first place.”
“Was it an accident?”
“Yes.”
“Then that’s a different story.”
“Still.”
“No, Patroclus.” Pa-tro-clus. Pennies in a well. “An accident doesn’t make you a murderer. Stay here, please.”
“Your father wouldn’t—“
“He won’t object to anything I ask, if asked the right way.” Achilles grins and flops onto his back, leaving me to admire the slope of his nose and the flawless parabola of jaw to neck. “I promise.”
“I don’t know,” I sigh, shaky.
“Sleep on it.” He nuzzles into the blankets and tips onto his other side, his back facing me. I count my heartbeats and try to sleep, but just as the muzzy sensation of fatigue is about to overwhelm me, he speaks.
“You saw me with the figs before.”
“Y—yes.” My voice is raspy with exhaustion.
“Then why didn’t you come nearer, like the others?”
I think about this for a moment, puzzled even at my own actions when pressed to explain them.
“I didn’t need to,” I say finally. “I could see everything.”
…
I make my decision the following morning.
We eat mouth melting pancakes with fresh raspberries and Achilles blinks at me, glowing hopefully. Fight with me fight with me fight with me.
I give him the answer he wants, I want.
Yes.
Yes.
…
We play soccer in the streets. Achilles wrestles with mathematic equations far beyond his years and I do my best to help him. We wear matching rope bracelets bought from a flea market on the pier. He teaches me to juggle, though I never manage it as well as he does. I ask him about his mother and he prickles, tells me that she left him soon after he was born. We scramble onto his roof and look at real stars. My nightmares begin to ease. We shout and we run and we roar.
Achilles tells me how he has always been drawn to danger, excitement, and adrenaline with an insatiable kind of lust. Since he was small, he's longed for the white-hot scorch of exhilaration to burn him up from the inside out. Maybe it is a silly wish, he says, but it stays with him, chasing him through adolescence like a tireless shadow.
I do not share his lust, but something about him has roused a brashness in me, a brightness, a hugeness. Because since the day I opened my eyes under the fig juggler’s careful watch, something wholesome and reckless has been emerging from my core, ripping its way out to unfurl in the light at last.
Wild. We are wild.
Achilles makes me feel sort of like I’m falling up. Except you cannot fall up. I know this. I know about physics and Newton's apples and gravitational laws. There are no exceptions to the rules of science, not even when you're making stupid metaphors that are sadly necessary for expressing the superb.
Regardless, we’re always together that summer; an ineffaceable plural. Going on madcap adventures and getting ourselves into trouble as if it's an art form, and in the moments when something goes wrong and we know hell is about to break loose, we find each other's gaze and laugh and laugh until we're breathless, giddy, heads spinning with the height, the adrenaline, the impossible brilliance everywhere.
We fly.
…
I hurry along the pavement at a light jog. Twigs snap beneath my feet and wind blows fallen leaves around in a dizzy waltz. If I don't hurry I won't make it back home before the heavy clouds overhead give way to torrential rain.
But it seems luck is not on my side, because my left sneaker decides to come unlaced and I have to stoop to retie it, and suddenly the first drops are rushing down and plunking in the dirt and I’m going to get soaked, I know it.
I get to my feet and break into a run. I’ve almost reached the apartment when I bump into a nameless new neighbor woman with strangely pale skin. I wish this mortifying blunder wasn’t our first meeting.
I disentangle myself, grimacing remorsefully when I see the mud I spattered on the hem of her skirt.
"That's alright," she says, following my gaze. "It was time for a new one, anyway."
I stare at her, not sure if I should attempt polite small talk or simply side-step my neighbor to avoid further embarrassment. It is raining, after all. A vehicle barrels past, plowing through a fresh puddle and dousing us both with dingy water. I glare at its license, memorizing it as though I will have to identify the driver in a police lineup later on. I run my tongue along my bottom lip, tasting motor oil and dirt.
I look back at her, flushing under the watchful stare of those large, dark eyes.
"I wish I had some sort of beautiful metaphor for the rain,” I say. “Something about renewal and new beginnings, but all I can think of is what my father told me when I was very young—that rain is just angels sweating."
The woman laughs, clearly more out of surprise than amusement.
"I'm sorry," I mutter. "That was weird, wasn't it?"
"Not at all." Her voice sounds like stones being rubbed fast together. She rocks forward on the balls of her feet. "Would you like to come inside out of the wet? I'm just about to make flan.”
"Thank you, but I really can’t.” I look toward her apartment, feeling an inexplicable pluck of uneasiness as I stare at the amber glow shining from each window.
"Ah, completely understandable. Another time." She waves and moves away, gliding down the sidewalk.
I am soaking wet and considerably cold, but I stand on the pavement, watching her until she reaches her door and disappears inside.
I realize too late I forgot to ask for her name.
…
When I catch pneumonia, Achilles fusses over me; fixing and worrying and pacing like some kind of restless guardian angel.
"He'll be fine," his father tells him. "The doctors gave him antibiotics."
Achilles turns on Peleus with a vicious expression and tells him to get out.
I don’t understand why I am so thrilled by this behavior, by his possessiveness. All I know is that I watch him fall asleep beside me like a weary rag doll, and can’t recall ever seeing anything so beautiful before now.
…
Shortly after my twelfth birthday, I have my first kiss.
The most popular girl in our grade approaches me after lunch and takes my head in her hands, tilting my face toward hers and pressing our lips together in front of everyone. Despite her bravado she is clumsy, fingers tangling in my hair as she traps me in a terrifying embrace.
I press my palms against her shoulders and push her away back, pulse jumping when she glares at me with narrowed cornflower eyes.
"Why did you do that?" she demands, voice low and threatening. “You’re humiliating yourself.”
“I don’t want to kiss you,” I say quite plainly. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be, dumbass. It’s your loss.” She stalks away and leaves me standing amid a swarm of preteens, pinioned in the harsh stares of boys who would have given anything to be in my place.
…
Days, weeks, and months slip by, a depressing side effect of time and being caught in a perpetual revolution around the sun.
Achilles loses the last of his cheeks. I outgrow all of my clothes.
Life marches on, and we are captive to its grueling tempo.
…
"You turned down how many girls?" asks Jackson, our black-haired sometimes-compatriot, his eyes fairly popping out of his head.
"Seven." Achilles takes a bite of his food, scowling at Jackson’s look of astonishment. "What?"
"Well, most guys would do whatever it takes to get a date to the dance and here you are with an abundance of potential girls and you tell them all no."
"Dances are puerile. So is dating. You're the Casanova, not me."
"So you're not going?"
"Of course I'm not going. I'll probably be at home, practicing fencing with Patroclus, if he’ll agree to it. There may be a little calculus on the side." Achilles grins at me and I burst with affection.
"That'll make Orthrus’s day.”
"What will?"
"You not being there to steal the spotlight."
"No,” Achilles scoffs. "That's a thing of the past."
Jackson eyes Achilles over the rim of his reading glasses. "There's where you're mistaken."
Achilles nibbles at the crust of his quiche, fixing Jackson with a baffled stare. "There is no reason for anyone to be jealous of me.” I snort and he kicks me under the table. “Name one."
"You're a fantastic athlete and very intelligent and you’re not fairing too badly in the looks department either.”
"Please. Our waitress has been waiting desperately to give you her number for the past half hour. Look at her." Achilles jerks his chin in her direction. "She's rapt.”
"That's because I winked at her when we walked in."
"And that's because you're a relentless flirt."
"Fair point." Jackson laughs and twists his napkin between his fingers. "Just—have pity on Orthrus. He's obviously a lesser mortal."
Achilles stiffens at this. I frown at him, questioning.
"I don't care about Orthrus. He have all the girls he wants."
"Even Aphrodite?”
The question blindsides me. My pulse quickens and there is a sudden glowing pressure in my chest. There's no denying that the concept of Achilles and Aphrodite being together bothers me, but I blame the abrupt stab of possessiveness on the fact that Achilles is my best friend. There is always the possibility that he would go out on a date with Aphrodite, enjoy her company, and essentially leave me in the dust. That would be the end of our friendship; an unbearable thought. So, is this the true basis of my reaction? Envy stemming from the feeling of friendship?
Surely, I am not attracted to Achilles.
But I know I would be lying if I claimed never to have indulged in a few more than platonic sentiments involving him. I falter, desperately trying to pinpoint the source of my fascination. There is something there, something in those moments when Achilles laughs where others would balk, tells the truth when others would lie, and is simultaneously unflinchingly stubborn and explosively kind. He is, for lack of a better word, extraordinary. And this doesn't bring me any nearer to understanding the meaning of the sure, magnetic pull that tugs stronger at me each day.
I hope none of this shows on my face, because Jackson is glancing at me with a concerned expression, making me feel horribly exposed. I clear my throat.
“Not really my type,” Achilles remarks, and my stomach unclenches in a rush of sudden, soul-deep relief.
Shit.
…
A stuffed horse, several pairs of shin guards, some tattered papers, a splintered arrow, three crayons [emerald, saffron, jade], a sandwich bag full of scavenged pebbles, a shriveled fig, a collection of dog-eared adventure stories—
The box is full when I finish. I push it into the hall and stare and stare and stare at the discarded possessions until my stomach goes quivery and I can't breathe right. There is nothing sweet about nostalgia. Achilles toes his own box through the doorway of his bedroom and positions it beside mine, our respective childhoods symbolically cast-off. He lays his hand on my shoulder and warmth explodes in my gut.
“I feel like I’m erasing myself,” I tell him, full of a shivery sensation of doneness, and resentment at the imminent future.
“You’re not. Just changing shape.”
I turn my head a fraction to the left and look at him, so gold and bright and vaguely super-mortal. I breathe him in like frigid glittering mouthfuls of fog. He is exquisite, and he is with me.
"I have a concert in March," Achilles murmurs suddenly. "You should come."
I snort. “I can’t believe you’re actually going to play the lyre in front of hundreds of people, voluntarily. That’s a kind of social suicide.”
“I don’t care,” he says, grinning, and I am seized with astonishment at his easy detachment. He really doesn’t care and this is oddly wondrous. “But I do care if you come.”
"I will." (I would fight my way through a swarm of axe-wielding warriors for him. Anything.)
So I do.
…
I’m wearing a simple black button down and trousers when I arrive at school, and the air is singing with the excitement of being somewhere after-hours, the feeling of rebellion and celebration. There is already a stream of people moving steadily into the building, shoving the double doors wide enough to allow a pool of light to stream onto the linoleum staircase. Judging by the abundance of cameras and congratulatory flower bouquets, I can only surmise that these people are mostly parents, proud and giddy in their affection. I wonder if perhaps Achilles’s mother will be in the audience—if she will somehow have found out about this and come here to witness it. I feel murderous at the thought of all she has missed.
When we reach the entrance to the auditorium, the crowd funnels hastily inside and a young usher checks my ticket then leads me to my seat. I take the proffered program—velvet tasseled and weighty—and flip through it, stopping when I see what I’m looking for.
Achilles (Lyrist)…… Eye of the Storm
I smile. He must have composed it himself. He mentioned something a while back about composing an original piece to perform this year, and at the time I suggested he called it The Song of Achilles, to which he responded by punching me in the bicep hard enough to hurt, but in a good way, because I was teasing him, because I had kind of wanted—in a perverse, youthful way—for him to punch me. I wanted to see meteors in his eyes and his fist clenched, arcing toward me. Because I liked it.
I raise my eyes from the program as the lights begin to dim, and the eager rustling in the audience dies away. The burgundy velvet curtains part, revealing a quartet of two violinists, a violist and a cellist, somber angels clad in black. The instruments in their hands seem alive. Behind them sits the lyre, gleaming woodenly in the spotlight. Said lyrist is sitting stiffly atop his padded stool, somehow making it look like a throne. His eyes are fixed upon the conductor with electric focus.
I can't help it; I grin, hiding it with one hand because I’m afraid it will seem indecent in such a formal setting.
Fortunately, this is when the first violinist, a svelte girl with gingery curls, places her bow gently against the strings and with a nod to her fellow musicians, the first tentative chords make themselves known.
I never really listen to classical music, largely because I’ve never had much patience for the usual lethargic thrumming of base cellos and aggravating whine of soprano violins. Yet this is different. The musicians are not merely good, but downright outstanding. Every member of the string quartet is sure of themselves, each swipe of bow against strings making a streak of fluorescent sound that dances in the dark. The music transports me, makes me feel as if I am a sparrow fluttering over lush treetops rejoicing in the simple fact of being alive.
But summer ends and the piece gathers a dark momentum, howling softly at some unseen moon, reminding one of frost and ice and wind. The audience gives up all pretense and leans forward in collective awe, as though lessening the physical distance will somehow make them a part of it, the aching beauty. Then Achilles puts his hand to the lyre and joins the song, adding a sweet, bright melody that seems to languish far above the crust of the earth.
I know I’m staring like a besotted fool, watching with helpless captivation and feeling my heart quiver and quake in time to his golden strokes of sound.
It will be the end of me.
Then comes the real prize, the piece which Achilles himself has written. A roll of the shoulders, a soft exhale, a moment of pure, impeccable silence.
Then he touches the lyre and it flutters like a butterfly leaving its chrysalis.
In my seat, listening to the oscillating veils of sounds with barely parted lips, I have to close my eyes because it's too much, the knowledge that Achilles has the power to create magic. I watch with wonder as the trembling hands of music have their way with my body and soul. The song deepens, becoming more and more demanding in its intensity and brilliancy; woeful triplets turning to shimmering harmonies, gentle legatos to blazing trills of hope, until finally, a cry of unequivocal joy is flung into the subsequent silence.
And then.
And then.
I shoot to my feet and begin to clap, the sound of my applause mortifyingly frail in the stillness. I keep going anyway, so full of reverence that if I don't do something to express it I will surely implode.
Achilles stands, blinking in the sharp glare of the spotlight, frowning out at the sea of faces as he tries to identify the source of the sound.
His eyes land unerringly on me. I wink. He gapes right at me, cheeks blooming with color, while the rest of the audience joins me in a standing ovation. Then the conductor motions at Achilles and says something I can't make out. He nods and takes his seat, placing a new sheet of music before him.
At the conductor's orders, the quartet rises and concludes the concert with two pieces that blend seamlessly together. This time the music is something soft and tender, unbearably sweet. Slowly the sky clears and Eye of the Storm ends on a final chord, a fresh bolt of sunlight after so much rain.
…
"You were amazing."
"Really?"
"Stellar."
Achilles takes us to a hole-in-the-wall ice cream parlor and we order two banana splits, laughing obnoxiously when he spills hot fudge on his gray trousers and has to tie my sweatshirt around his waist for the remainder of the evening.
…
A month and a half later, we are both accepted into the University of Troy.
We gasp and grab each other and fall to the floor hollering. When Achilles gets back to his feet, breathless, he extends a hand toward me. I take it and I do not acknowledge the fact that I hold on far longer than necessary.
…
I am a physics major. I study trajectory and velocity and momentum—and astronomy in my spare time—spend hours pouring over the possibility of making it out of a black hole alive, wonder over the great phenomenon of time and space and the ways in which they merge, hang out of my window at night with my face tilted skyward, frowning quietly into the metropolitan dusk because all we are is sacks of temporary consciousness hurling through space on an infinitesimal rock. I don't drink or smoke or inject, but I am intoxicated all the same. With the theories. The potential. The unknown and the unknowable.
Achilles studies peace and conflict. He studies battle and fist-clench and heart ache and courage and gore and spear-glint and gun shot. He studies love and death. And even when his textbooks are shut and put away, he is always making the same request, the same soft demand, with his eyes and his movement and his dogged radiance:
Fight with me fight with me fight with me.
…
Briefly, Achilles dates a girl.
She is petite and curved and everything I am not. Her name is something ridiculous, Shannon or Septer or Shawshank Redemption, something useless I can’t bear to remember. He brings her to my room and the three of us occupy the same space, breathe the same air. They sit on my bed and laugh, and I ignore them, or pretend to, but I am seething with a wholly frightening rage.
When Achilles staggers wearily over the threshold one Decemberish morning—alone—and tells me of his break up, the news fills my stomach with a strange oozing warmth I prefer not to examine. I try thinking about lactobacilli and staphylococci, about the evolution of meiosis, about the glowing precision with which the earth orbits the sun. I fail, spectacularly.
So this is love.
I am not going to put a word to it, whatever it is.
I refuse.
…
"Hmm, this is a hard one."
The coffee shop is drowsy and warm and generally devoid of people, save for an elderly woman in an unexpected biker jacket, me, and Achilles.
"Invert the fraction," I offer, glancing away from the way the slow swim of sunlight flecks his hair with little bursts of dazzle. A moment later, he makes a strangled noise of triumph and his face splits into a wide smile. I could write eighteen novels about that face, with several side adaptations and a dubious collection of haikus. I curl my fingers into fists beneath the table top and looks back down at my book: Radioactivity and Nuclear Physics.
"It's really a shame students have to take required classes. I thought I was finally free of these damn equations."
Achilles is teasing me. Probing at me with his jolly little one-sided conversation. It's impossible.
"I dislike your face." My words pop out like some ghastly kind of belch. Startling and acrid, they dangle in the midair, giving me a moment to pray for an apocalypse that will turn me to ash in under two milliseconds.
"What?" Said face rises over its calculus textbook like the sun or moon or Jupiter or whatever planetary body—the point is, it's got me caught in its gravity—I revolve around it, I’m utterly trapped.
That awful face, that atrociously tolerant, horribly kind, abominably brave face peers at me quizzically. Waits so patiently I can positively feel the affection emanating from it. There is no shield from this Medusa, all I can do is look away as quickly as possible. Turning to page four hundred and eight, I stare resolvedly at a model of nuclear decay, refusing to meet Achilles’s inquiring gaze. In fact, I am never going to look at his face again. Not ever.
Which is apparently three seconds.
My traitorous eyes dart up and there it is, same as always: Warm and open like an embrace, the faint laugh lines around his eyes drawing attention to the emerald irises. The rosy scraps of lip curled up at the edges just enough to make my stomach feel quivery.
It's unfair in every sense of the word. How is a person supposed to look at a face like that and not feel?
"You don’t like my face?" Achilles looks so endearingly perplexed that I fear my simmering outrage is about to reach a point of fatality.
"Yes, I—it's a terrifbly—never mind." A voluminous huff of vexation follows my blunder and I leap up from my chair, flailing over to the sticky marble counter for more tea, failing to stomp as loudly as I had planned.
It can't go on. It cannot. Achilles has been tormenting me with this face for years, and now, when I am especially frustrated, he has the nerve to use it against me. I grab wildly at my refilled mug and storm back to the table, ready for battle. I loom over Achilles’s chair as forebodingly as I can, and he—
Glances up.
Has the audacity to beam. "Sugar's right here if you need it." And with that he goes back to his calculus, but not before pressing the porcelain sugar bowl into my hand with a wink.
All my sharp and beautiful crossness melts into a soft pile of sludge with an almost audible pleh.
For fuck’s sake. I’m wrecked. Utterly.
…
He is simply a mess of cell and tissue and bone; a disease vector; heat and mass, I remind myself, but this is a lie.
He is sun and stardust and screaming light.
He is divine.
This, even, is woefully inadequate.
…
Months pass. And then:
…
"You stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid—“
I launch myself at Achilles’s prone body and envelope him in a fierce embrace that makes him wince and clutch at his bandages.
"Patro—"
"I'm not surprised," I blubber, giving a cracked laugh and blinking very hard. "Only you would go and get impaled during a fencing lesson."
"It was only—"
"Shut up," I tell him, and he does. "You can explain later. Rest, goddamn it.” I sit quietly down in the polyester plush of the hospital armchair, watching him slip back to unconsciousness the way one might stare at Rembrandt's Night Watch. Because it is valuable; glorious beyond spoken expression.
I place my hand over his. In sleep, his fingers curl into mine.
…
The common room is devoid of students, lit only with the hazy glow of a single lamp and fluttering fire.
I fold my limbs in a plaid armchair and swallow. I am watching the fig juggler read, waiting for him to comment on the tangled plot of War and Peace—something our favorite teacher, Chiron, would be glad to assist with if he were here—or perhaps just watching, slightly mesmerized by the rapid back-and-forth movement of his eyes across the pages. It's amazing, really, that focus, the intensity in his irises, molten with reflections of the firelight. They are eyes that see everything, always, and I wonder what they must see when they look at me. Much as I work to conceal my emotions, I feel transparent in his presence. Achilles is an X-ray that cuts through the calciferous cage of my skeleton and gets me right in my heart, the four chambered organ that inconveniently empties all of its thumping red plasma into my cheeks when he’s around. He must see how I feel, how clumsy and awkward I becomes, how inexplicably flushed and unsteady and bee-hearted. It's obvious. Has to be.
"Patroclus?" Achilles’s eyes stay resolutely trained on his book.
"Yes?"
"What were you thinking just then?"
I blink, give a quick, uneasy spurt of laughter. "What?"
"It’s just—you were staring."
I splutter, mouth opening and closing. I can feel my face darkening several shades. "I—no, I wasn't."
"Yes." Achilles hauls himself into a sitting position, running his fingers absently along the carpet's tasseled perimeter. He lays his book aside, never breaking contact with my darting eyes. "You were."
"I was not."
"This is the fifth time in an hour you've done it," Achilles continues, ignoring me, and I am intensely charmed that he has been keeping count. "Is there something wrong? Has my wound started oozing puss?" He chuckles, trying for nonchalance, but misses it by a mile. There's something in his expression that gives me reason to believe he is just as nervous as I am.
"Nothing's wrong. I wasn't thinking about anything."
"I was."
I feel a sudden stab of warmth in my stomach. My heart leaps into double-time. "Are you going to tell me what?"
Wordlessly Achilles stands and moves forward, dream-like, his face unusually pale but for a smudge of rose at the cheekbones. When he reaches my chair he stares down at me for a moment, then kneels, and presses his mouth to mine.
The kiss is clumsy, a fleeting, dry collision of closed mouths with open eyes. It's more of a bump than anything. Embarrassed, Achilles grimaces and pulls back, but I reach up and place a palm on the concave nape of his neck, holding him in place.
I cannot decide what to focus on, flitting between his eyes and lips, waiting for him to crack, to break, to shatter the illusion and tell me it's all just some massive joke, because I know there will be no going back if this is to happen. And I cannot see it happening—in my mind, perhaps, but not in reality. I will drive Achilles away, shut him out, close him down, the way I inevitably do everyone. The two people whose lives have been irrevocably entwined since our first meeting will be ripped apart for once and for all, and that will be the death of me. The only acceptable end to this predicament would be no end at all, and I cannot bridge the blazing gap between us if Achilles does not understand the permanence.
"Achilles,” I gasp, helpless, “If we—I can't—you have to underst—"
"Yes," he says. "Yes, I do."
"No, you—"
"I want it, all of it. Please, Patroclus.”
Pa-tro-clus.
A trio of falling stars.
Fight with me fight with me fight with me.
My breath stops. The universe comes to a sheer standstill. Then Achilles’s eyes flick down to my lips, and the evidence is incontrovertible. This is all I need to know, the final step after nearly a decade of climbing. I lean forward and pull him to me and we meet a second time. Explode, implode, shatter, regenerate, burst, bloom, yes.
With the oscillating firelight behind us we cast a flawless silhouette, our profiles shaped as two figures in a shadow play, two figures melting into one. Because I, who am no longer the mulish, stoic person I once was and Achilles, who is no more the naïve, unseasoned juggler of ripened figs, are falling together.
Because everything is a running river of warmth and heartbeat, and I thread my fingers in his hair, feeling his arms come up to encircle me as we reach for the edges of this new bright thing, finding it boundless, and yes oh god yes this is it this is kissing
this is kissing—
…
Hats flutter down through the air, landing amidst rows of cheering graduates. I am picking mine off the grass a few feet to the right of my folding chair when I am enveloped from behind in a startlingly tender embrace.
"Patroclus!” Briseis’s hair smells of lavender and sage, and my chest swells with affection. "You were wonderful."
I laugh, shaking my head. "I felt like I was going to vomit the entire time. I'm never agreeing to be the keynote speaker at any graduation ever again, even if I am valedictorian."
"Don’t be ridiculous, you looked calm as could be. Achilles and I were practically shining with pride.”
And there he is, speak of the devil. Achilles threads his way through the crush of people, holding a plastic flute of champagne in one hand and a bouquet of daffodils in the other, his necktie crooked just slightly to the left. I wave and he returns the gesture, grinning like a maniac.
"Patr—" His attempts at speech are aborted entirely as I tackle him in a fierce and rather uncharacteristic hug.
He staggers backward in an effort to absorb the momentum. "Hello, you,” he says, with the same softness of tone one might say hello sun, hello stars, hello my whole universe.
"Hello." I draw back, face hot, and see with no small amount of dismay that the flowers are a bit crushed. Achilles hands them over anyway and I take them, beaming. "Thank you.”
"I was amazed but not surprised by your performance. Well done."
I shrug. "I was just telling Briseis how nervous I was.”
"I never would have known." Achilles squeezes my shoulder and Briseis nods her agreement, tucking a wayward blossom behind one ear.
"I can't believe you’re graduates,” she sighs, and takes a sip of her drink. "What are you going to do next?”
"I don’t know,” I say at the same time Achilles says, with a lot of zeal, “Everything,” and we catch eyes and erupt into simultaneous laughter.
"I wish you all the luck in the world.” Briseis examines the stem of her own champagne glass, nose near enough to the rim to inhale the ethyl released from each miniscule bursting bubble. Her mouth is downturned at the corners and I reach for her, pulling her to me and clasping her smooth shoulder in my palm.
“You look sad.”
“I am.”
“Why?”
“You’re not going to have time for me,” she says plaintively, and my throat tightens.
“We’ll make time.” I am fierce, sincere. I can tell she believes me.
Achilles lays his hand on her other shoulder. “Beautiful Briseis,” he murmurs, eyes crinkling at the corners, and she closes her eyes, stricken with what are all stricken with: grief and nostalgia and gratitude.
We wander through the city that evening, ending in a little bakery with the best baklava known to humanity and candles on every available surface.
Briseis takes the blossom from behind her ear and leaves it beside her napkin. Then she lifts her glass and says, “To a new chapter. To hope and shattered ceilings. To you.”
“To you,” Achilles and I say in unison, and we toast and we beam and we talk.
My heart shimmers bittersweet light, like the little stars in Achilles’s bedroom all those years ago.
…
He comes, spurting wetly into my palm, coating my hand in his DNA.
I lean over him, find my way to his mouth. We kiss and for the moment it is the point of everything. For the moment this kiss is the beginning and end of all life, an utterly cataclysmic epiphany. For the moment this kiss is a second birth, a beautiful, furious, messy, white-light of self-creation.
“Patroclus,” he gasps against my neck. Three syllables. Gleaming.
I kiss him, and again and again and again. I am dizzy with love for every part of him.
…
We close our eyes and the world spins, because that's just what the world does, doesn't it?
It spins and spins and spins and doesn't ask any of us if spinning this way is alright, and years pass and pass and pass and everyone gets older, more jaded, more harsh, more lonely. But then, if you're lucky, The Good Thing comes, rosy and brilliant with beating wings and eyes like flaming nebulae to pull you out of the ashes by the scruff of your neck and set you ablaze again. My Good Thing comes to me battered and bruised, as though it has been shuttered away in the dark for eons, but when it happens it shines furiously bright, like the cosmic bodies I so admire through the plexi lens of my telescope.
…
It’s a lovely day. The city has recovered its vigorous pulse from the befuddling heat of summer and now everything is as it should be; schools open, business hours as usual, autumn sunshine inflaming the smears of color on store awnings, buses, and late blooming urban gardens.
"How blue the sky is,” Achilles remarks, and I nod.
“How blue indeed.”
What I don’t know is that I am approximately fourteen seconds from being asked for my hand in "—uh, er, oh fuck—" as we perch on a newly painted park bench eating turkey and provolone on rye. What I don’t know is that right now, as I step into the street, there is a little satin bag deep in Achilles’s pocket with a promise inside, an oath cast in steel.
What I don’t know is that everything is going to change in three, two, o—
A van swerves mercilessly from its lane and knocks me off my feet.
…
[coma: from the Greek koma, meaning "deep sleep," a state of unconsciousness lasting more than six hours, in which a person cannot be awakened]
…
If this is drowning, it's not an altogether unpleasant feeling. It's like drifting ever downward, tumbling through indigo, aquamarine, navy, without the need for oxygen, without the barest hint of pain. It's a hazy contentment, like you can climb out anytime you want.
I don’t.
…
Someone straggling on taking breath after dragging breath in the slim margin of "twenty percent chance of survival" is chilling for those who observe. Achilles. Chiron. Briseis. Their tears and trembling are useless.
But it is not like this at all for those of us who have slipped into the blue.
I live in a light-shot darkness, and it's extraordinary, beautiful, and bizarre. Obscenely fascinating for a physicist like myself; refraction and photometry, fiber optics and prisms, holography and polarization, color intensity and mirror, all melting together in a stunning bioluminescent swirl.
The noises of the hospital are tides that come and go. Lights that flare and dim. I hear Achilles’s voice now and then.
"You're a selfish bastard, you know that, right?" Something brushes at my wrist, warm and uncallused. "Look at you, still trying to slip off.”
…
"Refraction is the bending of a wave when it enters a medium where its speed is different. The refraction of light when it passes from a fast medium to a slow medium bends the light ray toward the normal to the boundary between the two media. The amount of bending depends on the indices of refraction of the two media and is described quantitatively by Snell's Law."
…
Achilles sends light down into the blue, but it only goes so far before splintering, shattering, rupturing in too many directions to provide much illumination.
I'm trying to come to the surface, I want to say to him, but it's dark down here in the depths. I'll get the bends if I rise too quickly. I'll get snapped up by a shark. I've got to be careful.
He squeezes my hand in his own. Says naked, aching things. Like:
"I'm here, Patroclus.”
and
“I'm not leaving.”
and
“Come back.”
and
“It's time."
and
“Goddamn you.”
and
“I need you. I need you.”
…
I try opening my eyes and it never works. It never works until it does work, and suddenly I’m staring into a white room with the love of my life standing disheveled beside a window, looking out. He turns and sees me and his eyes are impeccably clear in the morning sunlight—
"Patroclus.”
How am I supposed to say that I have decided to carry on living? Especially when I still feel like an iron weight is sitting on my chest and have bruises that will last for months and can't quite remember how to breathe? My heart drops but when I look up Achilles’s brilliance makes me forget almost everything else.
"Don't," I murmur clumsily, when tears begin gathering in the corners of his eyes. "I was in the deep for a while. That's all."
…
The driver who hit me is identified as a woman named Thetis. A woman who did not have an accident, but wished for me to die. A woman who, the police discover, is Achilles’s mother.
“We share DNA,” he says to the wall, wrecked, and I cry out when I look at her photograph, because the instant I see her I recognize our childhood next-door neighbor. The woman with a voice like stones rubbing together.
Achilles clutches my hand and I return the gesture. We are twin boats, anchoring each other to earth.
…
I am rummaging through the highest shelf of the cupboard several months later, groping blindly around for the salt shaker. I’m too lazy to fetch the fold-out stepstool, so I have to stretch up on my toes until my fingers make contact with the dusty paneling at the back. My sensory neurons alert me of objects I cannot see:
- Old rubber bands
- Screwdriver
- Candle wax
- Cereal crumbs
- Paperclips (I hiss in pain as I pricks my index finger on an exposed tip)
- Something soft. Satiny. A small sort of bag with—
Wait, what is—what is that—
…
He's standing by the asparagus, eyes downcast in a solemn examination of an overripe cluster of bananas. I push my way through the thicket of shoppers with my heart in my throat, fist clenched around the gold satin pouch, and skid to a stop before him. An aging woman gives me a sour look and stalks past.
Achilles drops the bananas into his cart before glancing up, away, and back again, eyes widening. "Patroclus! What are you—“
I wrench the ring from the pouch and hold it out, brandishing it like an archaeologist would a sacred artifact. It is sacred, this little piece of metal, and I lift it skyward so it gleams in the overhead fluorescence. Less charitable bystanders will call it a shout.
"Marry me."
He goes rather white and the pomegranate in his left hand plummets to the floor with a wet thump. He is gaping at me, swaying on the spot like a person at high altitude about to faint.
God—was this—? This was the wrong decision.
I should never have—I’m so stupid, so stupid and exposed and hopeful standing here with an engagement ring that has been gathering dust for who knows how long and a whole shopping market of people gathered on all sides, pressing in like water.
Panic twists its icy grip within my abdomen and I lower the hand with the ring. Damn it damn it damn it damn it to hell, I think miserably, but then—
"Yes. Yes."
Something pools in my abdomen and I stare at Achilles, dazed, barely aware that time has slowed to a dragging, honey thickness. There are bees in my ears. I am underwater. The air is thick, electric.
But I am not afraid. I never am, not with him. I am, however, astonished. Entirely.
"Pa—“
I move forward with the force of an army and kiss him, right there, never mind the spontaneous audience watching us. I do so with a ferocity bordering on feral. "Excellent choice," I murmur when we part, breathless and horribly ecstatic, "Because it wasn't a question."
Achilles just laughs and laughs and laughs.
Around us there is a smattering of applause, then everyone trickles off to go about their business, leaving us alone among ripening produce.
"Here," says Achilles, taking the ring from me. "Give me your hand." He slips it onto my finger and odd sparks flare in my stomach. He's giving me one of those looks, as if I am the only thing he can see, as if he would not notice if the whole world burned to cinder around his ears. "I love you."
If sunlight had verdigris eyes and gilded hair and a strong, strong jaw—
"I love you," I correct him, and kneel to retrieve the bruised pomegranate.
We leave the store hand in hand, pouring light. The rumble of our commitment is bone-deep, constant.
"All right," Achilles says, and it is half a question. His tone is even, but wondering.
"All right," I answer. It is not a question at all.
…
It's Christmas. We are on the roof.
"Lie back,” says Achilles. “The constellations are so clear tonight."
We do.
There is laughter. Eyes bright like moonbeams. Mumbled declarations of adoration. And the driving December wind just can't seem to cut through the flare of warmth gleaming at my sternum.
Everywhere they are wisest.
Especially on the snow swept roof of our humble apartment in the city of Thessaly; one dark head and one light, nestled together like sparrows in a storm. In love and in luck and in hope and in bliss, flat on our backs.
…
On New Year’s Eve, the phone bleats and I answer it. It’s Peleus. He asks to speak with Achilles and I don’t like the way his voice quivers around the request.
I leave Achilles in the living room but I’ve barely made it halfway up the stairs when he makes an awful sound. “You’re lying,” he bellows, choking on a mixture of rage and grief so intense it frightens me. “She can’t be.”
He disconnects the call just as I step back into the room. His face is pale and wild.
“What is it?”
“Thetis, my mother. She’s not of this world.”
I blink at him, baffled.
“She’s a goddess, Patroclus,” he explains, and I drop into my chair with a gasp.
…
I am in love with someone half mortal, half something infinitely more.
Think starlight crossed with blood and earth. Think wingbeat crossed with gravity. Think paradox.
Achilles asks me if I regret my decision. I touch him. My lips feel the changing texture of his mortal and immortal flesh as it warms and burns. My tongue tastes sweat from the areas near his clavicle, shoulder blade, eighth rib, navel.
There is no surface in our home I do not love him upon.
This is my answer.
…
"Listen to this," he says, brandishing his lyre, and there's ferocity in the quiet and something else, mournful and sure, forgiveness, the anticipation of all the ways we might be, are, will be, unbreakable. I hear us in his music; laughter, longing, tangled fingers, footsteps, always double, following each other right to the ends of the earth.
"I," Achilles says afterward, clearing his throat, "Wrote that because—well, it's an anniversary of sorts, isn't it."
"The day we met."
"Yes."
I kiss him.
"You," he murmurs later, drawing back to study me with the very same expression he wore so long ago upon finding me spread-eagled on the cement beside my battered bike, "look like the meteor that killed the goddamn dinosaurs."
…
Saturn is above us. The whole solar system is above us. The mobile that hangs above our bed sways lazily in the breeze, planets waltzing in slow circles, suspended from fraying string.
I tuck my head into the sweet curve where her Achilles’s neck meets shoulder.
When I was very small, I had thought that it was the sun around the earth, thinking how overwhelming it would feel if one were constantly moving, constantly in revolution.
"Tell me," Achilles says, tenderly, into my scalp. “It never ends, does it?"
"What doesn't?"
"This.”
Taken at face value, the remark makes little sense, but then I begin thinking of a potential greater meaning, this being consciousness, subsistence, actuality, worldly pain and worldly joy: life. Well, of course it ends, I reason. Everyone's neurons eventually blaze to black in a last comet streak of electricity. The blanket of ultimate darkness falls comes for us all. Eternity isn't real, simply a concept created by those who cannot bear the passage—no, the expiration—of time. Humans are soft-hearted, frightful beings who want to believe we live more than once, that we will die and one day be born again, that all time is a great, unending loop with room for legacy and memorial and remembrance.
But there also, on the periphery, are people like myself. People who have come to accept the fact that mortals exist on a finite continuum and that each individual burns brightly but fleetingly, and that our contributions to the world will someday be nothing more than a blip on the face of history.
For the first time in my life this rouses a feeling of horror. Prove me wrong, I beg of the universe. Please, show me another truth.
"I don't know," I admit eventually. "But from what I know of the world, it does not.”
Then we turn and fill all the bruised, stinging parts of our humanity with the pressing of bodies to bodies, of mouths to ears, of mouths to mouths. We lie on our mattress, an entanglement of arms and legs, thinking how things subsist and shatter, bloom and wilt, rise and fall, dominated by the whims of an indifferent earth.
Feet twisted together on the over-worn cotton of their bedclothes, Achilles says, "I wish we had longer, Patroclus.”
Pa-tro-clus.
Snapping branches. Wistfulness and sting.
"Yes," I agree, simply, and we do not dwell on it.
…
In the end, it is a tumor that takes Peleus from us. Something no one, not even brave, brave soldier-spirited Achilles can fight off.
We throw dirt on his grave in thin April sunshine and I look at the ill-fitting mask Achilles is struggling to keep on, at the desperate way his entire person seems to be shivering, twitching, clamoring for what is lost, and then I turn my head and see how no one else notices any of this.
But I look at him and I think, heartbreak made flesh.
…
"Move with me," says Achilles. There is no music but I take his hand and look into his eyes, unshaken, and I move with him. Hearts beating in tandem, we sway, shuffling in a waltz inaudible to the rest of the world.
"Like this,” he adds, and then we are spinning around the room and time is nothing more than a washed out blur. We’re both gagging on humor and tragedy, nauseous with the mixture of it.
We trip unwittingly on the foot of an armchair and Achilles sighs around his laugh. He is rueful, beautiful. I lift my hands to cup his face, precious, fragile being that he is, and see myself in his glistening irises, the devotion absolute. He tugs me along, shaking with emotion not to be defined, at his wildest reverberation, and whispers, "I love you, I love you," and we move, we dance.
…
There's a quote I once stumbled upon in my youth which goes like this:
"Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting a gladiator. Don't stop to think, don't interrupt the scream. Exhale, release life's rapture. Everything is blooming. Everything is flying. Everything is screaming, choking on its screams. Laughter. Running. Let-down hair. That is all there is to life."
I think of these words sometimes. They whir to the surface of my mind at certain intervals—Achilles lost in his lyre; Briseis peddling her fuchsia bicycle across campus in pouring down rain; Chiron at the podium of an environmental activism rally; a gold-headed boy who taught me to juggle figs, who said softly, “Catch,” all flame and raw euphoria.
Absolute chaos. Absolute joy.
Fight with me fight with me fight with me.
I do.