Stitches

“There are three things you talk about when you’re stoned,” he smirked to himself, holding the lighter to the spliff, poised but not yet.

“Me?”

“Everyone.” ‘Tschh’ – flame. “Everyone. It’s like – you state the obvious. ‘Whoah, things get bigger when you get closer to them!’ That shit.” That had been me. I crossed my arms. “The second is what animal you think you are. ‘Whoah, I’m a bird.’ The third –“ He grinned to himself. This was the punchline. He inhaled. “Is how fucking stoned you are.”

I laughed. “It’s true.”

“It’s true! It’s all fucking true!” An elderly man in blue walked past, his nostrils flared against the smell of marijuana, contemptuous. Bert continued to grin, watching him as he went, and the gentleman appeared unnerved, quickened his pace. “Damn right, fucker.” He was out of earshot. Bert wasn’t brave.

We ended up here often, Bert and I, on a bench in the park on summer evenings. This was August the fourteenth. It was hazy, New Jersey sweet and sour air all infused with golden light, beautiful clouds. I took a moment then, before I got high, before I imbued anything that could alter my feelings or perception, to notice that I was sitting on that bench and it was right then and I was right there, and as soon as I stopped thinking it that moment would be the past. I had a mental photo album of moments ruined by the acknowledgement that they would not last. If I stitched them all together I would see a happy life ruined by the constant presence of a jealous future self.

“What you thinking about, Gee?”

“I’m thinking you’re going to try to smoke that all without me noticing. Give it here.”

On August the fifteenth, Bert told me he was moving to his Dad’s in the September. I asked him where his dad lived, and he said Utah. For abstract reasons, I pretended to find this hilarious. On August the seventeenth I collected two more snapshots, beautiful things – we were walking down the street in the dark and we were drunk and Bert thought we were lost, because he hadn’t lived on these streets all his life, but I had, so I knew we weren’t, and these guys were following us in a big black car and Bert was pretending to be frightened, pretending to be really cute and gay and holding onto my arm, and I loved the fact that he was doing that and I loved the possibility that a gang was going to jump out, rob us and kill us. Keep in mind I was drunk. The second was in my room, and we were playing tapes and Bert took his shirt off and laid his head on my stomach, his hair haloed over my side in untended tendrils. He always tried to tell me difficult things by orchestrating awkward silences.

On August the twenty-third, Bert threw a rock at my head, knocking me unconscious. I needed seven stitches.

“Gerard?”

“Yeah?” We were walking down the street to the store, late afternoon. The sun was away – the light was coming from nowhere and the sky was white, but the heat was intense and charged with electricity. I was not dressed for the stickiness, and I was uncomfortable and craving air conditioning. There was no need for him to reclaim my attention, as we had been talking anyway, but I guess he felt it was required.

“I’m moving. In September. My mom’s letting my dad have me.”

“Oh. How long for?”

He shrugged, as if he didn’t know, then said: “Until I finish school, I guess.”

“So you’ll be back next summer?”

He shrugged again, this time not continuing. He was kicking a pebble along the sidewalk, and at this point he stuck his jaw out, which could have been a sign of concentration, or could have betrayed a lot of bitten-back sentences curdling at the back of his throat.

“Where’s your dad live, anyway?”

He looked up as the pebble bounced into the gutter, squinting at the sky. “Utah.”

I nodded. Utah was a mighty long way. For a split second I started to fathom how many times the distance currently separating Bert and I would divide into the distance between New Jersey and Utah, but was stopped by my own laughter, delayed and unexpected. ”Utah?”

The corners of his lips curled up, a familiar mischief in his pale eyes, far less unsettling than the deliberate distraction. “I know, right? Fuckin’ Utah…”

I didn’t know whether Bert even knew his father all that well, never mind whether he liked him or not. It didn’t seem to matter. There was something frightening and hysterical about Utah, perhaps made so by the way he said it, like he was spitting red Indian poison, and that was all that was acknowledged.

How we were that summer was simultaneously as light, as highly-charged and as deceptive as August the fifteenth. We were very casual, of course – it never came up in conversation that we were connected by an intravenous cord across the five streets that separated us in our homes, and seeing each other whenever we could was not a rule, but a compulsion – it happened, like clouds when there’s rain, thunder when there’s lightening. My mother said we were joined at the hip. Bert made a sucking sound and attatched himself to my side, said “Siamese.” Of course, you can’t be Siamese twins if you’ve only known each other since March, or if you don’t know the innermost workings of each other’s minds. We were fate’s Frankenstein experiment, stitched crudely at the hip, then, hobbling slightly and laughing as we went. Three-legged racers taking life slower for ease. We got nothing done except each other all summer. I stopped making anything. He turned me into an unproductive drunk, but it felt like I was living art for once, so that was okay. It was rudimentary stuff, silk-printed from photographs, pop art, but the colours were so much brighter than I was used to when we were hanging out, so it was art for that. The park was a stage and we enacted the same play evening after evening on our bench. The things we wrote on it in black sharpie are still there, I bet.

Bert forgot his lines, I think.

August twenty-third. ’Thunk.’ That was the sound that the rock made as it made contact.

I can imagine how the scene must have played out to an observer. It’s pretty interesting. Twilight. Chunky teenage boy, all in black, longish dark hair, girlish face thunderous. He bursts out from the bushes behind a much-graffitied bench, storms down path. It’s beginning to rain. Wiry boy about his age, long greasy hair, wide mouth in a rough-hewn face, emerges and runs after him. The first one turns around when the other calls his name. They exchange shouted words.

“What the fuck is your problem?”

“Just let me go home!”

“I’m not stopping you!” Boy one turns to go. Boy two appears a little at a loss, also hurt. Boy two runs after Boy one again. “Listen to me, please. I’m sorry.” Boy one doesn’t appear to be listening. He quickens his pace. His gait is round-shouldered; the other’s is nervy, gangling. “Hey, listen to me!”

Boy two seems angry, balls his fists as he half-runs, around five yards behind boy one. “Gerard! Gerard, LISTEN, FUCKER!” He stoops to the ground, picks up something, throws it overarm like a baseball. Boy one falls like his puppeteer just dropped the strings. Boy two stops, bends over forwards, laughs nervously, manically, as if it’s the last thing he wants to do. Intermittently, he says boy two’s name a few times. After a moment, he manages to control his hilarity. His friend isn’t answering.

Seven stitches. They could see my skull. Bert took me to the hospital, and left before my mom arrived. He came to the house the next day, a couple of hours after they let me out. I think he was scared of what my mom would say to him. She liked him a little less after that, it’s true.

“You look like fuckin’ Frankenstein.” He said it quietly, so he could pretend he hadn’t if I took badly to it. I considered taking badly to it – I could have flown up out of my chair and pinned him to the wall - I could have turned his face inside out, rearranged his bones to make a bed. I was bigger than him, probably stronger. I could have wrapped my hands round his neck and just twisted, but of course I didn’t want to do anything of the sort. It was only a rock. It was only a night in hospital. I stayed sitting, smirked. When I raised my eyebrows, the skin around my cut felt strange and puckered.

“You forgive me, then?”

“Okay, sure. It was stupid, but I forgive you. You lost your temper.”

“I wasn’t… just talking about that.” Mom was in the kitchen. If I got up and took Bert into my room and tried to have a conversation, she wouldn’t like it, I reckoned - not now. Bert was glancing sideways at the kitchen door, still standing. I was glaring up at him, weighing everything out and trying to decide not only whether to go to my room, but whether I was going to tell him I forgave him or not. There wasn’t really anything to forgive, but he didn’t know that. If he did know that, though, the whole situation would look absolutely ridiculous, and it was all my fault anyway in my mind that I had a hole in my head, but there was no need for him or anybody else to know that too. I got up, jerked my head towards my room. We sloped off, Bert leaving muddy sneaker-prints on the carpet as we got to the corridor, which I ignored.

My room smelled stale, and faintly of incense – the same scent of dry things burning which hovers under all the different perfumes. It was dark, except for my desk lamp and a slit of light through the gap in the blinds of a window that looked out on ground level. Our apartment was in the basement. I sat on the bed, and he sat next to me, a little tentatively. “You know, I was thinking, last night, after I left the hospital – and this is kind of funny, so sorry if you’re going to be serious and everything, but, um…” He seemed to lose his thread, staring at the pool of light on my desk, a clutter of old drawings and materials and found objects, a loose razorblade, some feathers.

“What?”

“Oh, it’s just…” He found it again, turning to look me in the face, smiling his crooked smile. “The only good reason I have – I mean, the only reason that sounds right, like I’m not just an ass – the only good reason I have for throwing the rock at you is to even out the number of brain cells between us.”

He watched my reaction carefully. I watched him back for a moment, blank, and thought seriously about what it was that he had said. There had never been any acknowledgement between us that I was any smarter than him, except for the occasions when he would have to pull me out of daydream reveries, and, well, that was not smarts but vacancy, the same as what someone who has had their frontal lobe removed might slip into. It was true I got good grades, and that he hardly went to school, but we didn’t go to the same school anyway, didn’t really discuss it, didn’t really care – or, at least, I didn’t. And when we were stoned – well, when we were stoned we were both as monkey-stupid as each other. But I didn’t think that Bert was stupid. I assumed he thought as much as I did and learned to do it in his own time. If there was a gulf between us that meant that I couldn’t discuss anything innermost with him, it was because we were men and each man is an island, I thought, and didn’t have shit to do with anyone’s IQ.

Only after all of this had gone through my mind did I laugh, and the two-second pause I had left Bert’s statement hanging in the air for made it all the more hilarious, somehow. His face cracked with relief, and he laughed too. We ended up in stitches.

“It’s not even that funny!”

“You think I don’t know that?”

It took a while, but we were laid back, crashed and sober, on my bed, and I forced a straight face and said “I don’t think you’re stupid.”

“Okay.” He left it at that.

“And I forgive you.” I turned my head to look at him. He was hardly smiling now, staring at my ceiling. I could almost see through his eyes – the desk light shone through them, and they were so pale I reckoned for a moment that they could be glass. I liked this idea. It would make seeing into his head a whole lot easier.

“Okay.”

“I mean, there’s nothing really to forgive, it’s not like – I mean, I –“

“I’m going to miss you so fucking much.”

“I mean I – Oh, yeah. God. I’m gonna miss you too.” I turned over on my side, curling my legs up onto the bed. He was still lying flat out with his feet on the floor over the side. He was still staring at the ceiling.

“I’m leaving a week tomorrow.”

“Shit.” He was being so desolate about it I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I wondered absently if I should crack open one of the bottles in the cupboard in my bedside table. I wondered whether to ask him if he wanted a drink.

“Utah is going to suck.”

“Hey, do you want a drink?”

“Sure.” He smiled again. “This is, like, what we are, isn’t it? We’re hash in the park and vodka in your room.”

“I like to think that’s not everything.” I leaned over, groped for a bottle, got it, opened it.

“You know, there’s three reasons why Utah can never, ever, be as good as here.”

“What?”

“One: My dad. Hate the guy. Two:” He said the first briskly, as if to get it out of the way. “Two: I’ll be so many more fucking miles away from New York.”

“Bert, you never go to New York.” We had been to New York once, a month ago, for the day. We spent the entire day in Central Park trying to find somewhere to roll up without being caught, and then we had to get the train home. It had been three hours.

“I like knowing it’s there, though, you know? I like knowing that I can go. It’s like…” He squinted at the air over my face. “It’s like when you’re going with someone, you know? You don’t have to always be making out with them or fucking them or even around them, but you just feel better all the time, because, it’s like, someone’s thinking of you like that, you know?” I looked at him, quizzical, smirking. He met my eyes and looked away again. I sat up, took a drink, handed him the bottle, and he sat up to do the same.

“Okay, it was a stupid analogy, but you get what I’m saying.”

“I wouldn’t even know.” I grinned at him. My cut puckered again with the raising of my eyebrows.

“The third thing that’s gonna suck about Utah– and this here, ladies and gentlemen, this is the biggie –“ He leaned back, watching me, his face earnest despite his flippancy “- Is that you won’t be there. The hardest part of this is leaving you.”

I guess I blushed. I stared into my lap for a moment. “Yeah, well I’m gonna miss you too.”

“I mean, it’s like…” he brought his hand to his mouth, chewed a nail absently, stared into the middle distance. “…I don’t know how I’d cope now, not seeing you, like, every day. Part of it is… I think it’s just, like, force of habit, you know? I mean, it’s that and then there’s, like… pot and vodka.” He grinned. “We’re, like, waste buddies. Poison pals. I dunno, toxic twins, you know?” He was peeling the label off the bottle, scratching almost frenzied with nails bitten down to the quick, and he chuckled to himself. I pictured us, our grinning faces oozing with radioactive waste, each other’s the only company that didn’t leave us feeling poisoned.

“Yeah. Yeah, I know.” I smiled wide and hoped he heard it in my voice, but nothing made me want to laugh. He was only laughing to be self-deprecating, and I knew that he had either forgotten yesterday or was deliberately leaving something unsaid, but I thought it unwise. We seemed as close, looked as close, but if I had felt how I had reacted, then the confessional path he was going down now was unwise. I would have to start shifting away at any moment if I wanted to keep him under the same impression.

But then, as he didn’t say anything else and we fell into silence, punctuated by distant traffic and the small, gentle sounds made by the liquid in the bottle travelling as he drank, picked at the label, handed it to me, I grew frustrated with myself. It had always been a failure of my self-image – it allowed itself to run along skimming the bottom like an air hockey puck for most of the time, but whenever I got the notion in my head that someone adored me, I got an ego. I couldn’t help it. With the ego – in fact, it was its bodyguard, its doorman, its chauffer –came hope. And I had let it assume for me that he would make another move, to compensate for my shocked knee-jerk reaction to the last one. But I didn’t let this realisation keep me silent. I would have to create my own second chance.

“You know, my only issue yesterday was that… you came on a little strong.”

Bert turned to me, blank. He stared for a couple of seconds, then nodded forwards, raised his eyebrows. “What.” It was incredulous, with no intonation of a question. But still, the corners of his mouth curved upwards a little, impish. His eyes were all but glowing in the half-light.

“Shit, I am so sorry.” I shuffled away from him, not quite sure why. He wasn’t advancing on me – he sat hunched forward with his hands clasped over the edge of his knees, elbows resting on his thighs, looking at me. After a few moments I begun to laugh softly at the way his face stayed exactly the same, but how I could see the cogs whirring, processing. It had been a farce, and I was left with my own Harry Potter scar from it. I laughed at this, and at his face. He flung himself backwards, covered his head with his hands, laughed like this: ‘Ha ha haaa!’, flung himself forwards again, like a man with a great idea, or a boy in the midst of a tantrum. He looked like he had a storm on the brain.

“Fucker! No! What? You mean you want me?”

The insanity had us both in hysterics. “I’m sorry! Seriously! It was just…”

“I could have killed you! I could have never spoken to you again!” He sat down again, face cracked open, singing out his weird villain-laugh. I moved over to sit by him, subtle. “I could have not come round today…” He sighed out the last wave of it, became still. He turned to me and I considered putting a hand on the side of his face, until he did it first. It felt awkward, so I tilted my head to kiss him. He pulled away slightly. Close, but not yet.

“You lied, though.”

“What?” He murmured it, distracted, eyes flicking all over my face as if they’d die if they stopped moving. When I first met Bert he told me he felt he would die if he stopped moving. I had got him three bottles of water and listened to his drug-addled babbling until the party had ended.

“If you loved me, you wouldn’t have hurt me.” I tried to lift its weight with a half-smile.

“I always hurt what I love?” It came out like ‘Do you forgive me?’

I chased his eyes for a while, trying to discern when the right time would be. It seemed to fall as naturally as something dropped, governed by gravity, right after I heard myself murmur “Okay.”

And so I built up a collection of captured moments with him this way, trying not to let the knowledge of their briefness spoil them, finally aware of what they were for. I had them as a ready-prepared photo album for when I missed him the most – not bringing tears or a pain in the chest, like looking back on a relationship that has ended with your acute heartbreak, but bittersweetness. It was what it was and it could continue, if he still wanted me in ten months time. I had a blanket for anytime I felt rough – I would go back to school and stretch my luck with girls I already knew were too pretty for me, and I would spend weekends doing pure distilled nothing and feeling lazy and pathetic, leaving myself with undone schoolwork that still had to be done sometime, but the girls didn’t matter in the end because when I got home there was always Bert, who had wanted me, and who could have me when summer came around next. And at the end of one of those weekends, I might get sick of my layered hangover and feeling sorry for myself and go outside, blink at the brightness, walk the four blocks to the park and sit on a bench, smoking nothing more potent than tobacco, and watch the sky go through greys and blues until everything went black and I walked home looking over my shoulder constantly, secretly wishing to be bundled into a gangster’s big black car, just for the adventure.

One evening in October I even stepped into the folds of greenery behind the bench. It was easy to enter, if you knew where to do it, and once inside it was a leafy dome all around you, and when the sun was out it shone through and made it look like a grotto, painted sunny tribal markings on your face.The sun was out this evening. I stood against the trunk and tried to conjure Bert - tried to feel August the twenty-third again. I closed my eyes against the dappled sunlight, and waited for the ghosts to start talking. The only thing that was the same was the smell of the leaves, the feeling of being under a verdant bell-jar where all outside noise was muted. I put a hand on my thigh where he had, tried to forget it wasn’t the first time, that it wasn’t August and I wasn’t shocked. I had nuances of his voice, individual vowels and his laughter, stored away in my mind, but when they chased themselves around, echoing, I still couldn’t bring back the exact words and how they had sounded – playful at first, then grinning, bordering on lecherous, jarring. In that moment it was strange, and not how I had imagined – the sudden volta in the situation made it feel like incest. Twincest. I pushed him. I probably asked him what the fuck. He grabbed the back of his neck then, I remembered, as if there was a fly on it. He apologised, said it was stupid, tagged onto the end of all this that he loved me. I was already tearing my way through the branches. I remembered all this, but the realisation came to me that I had forgotten how his voice sounded. His face was fully formed, with several photographs as evidence of his different expressions, but in that moment I found it was slipping away.

I opened my eyes, took the sensible route out of the confines of the tree, and decided to call him when I got home.