The Seventh Day Flight

On the seventh day after Frank first locked himself inside of his apartment, I decide to make him a pair of wings. They grow inside of my head. I stand in the center of my studio apartment on 72nd Street with the curtains laced up tight; the wire is thin across the lines of my palms, pliable, burning. I feel it crying. I get down on my back and this is where the wings should go, this is how far, this is how long. These are the metal strips for the feathers, and this is how they would shine if the curtains blew open and let in a little light. Down on my knees, I bend the wire with my stiff fingers, everything and my skin quivering with quiet excitement; it’s been a long winter. It weaves between my fingers like an infant serpent, looping, pinching, mirroring. The early morning light strains against the thick, dusty curtains draped across my windows, it wants to celebrate with me and all that I am finding to be true inside of me. Hey, Gerard, the wings whisper to me, we’re ready to fly now. I smile, “Wait,” I tell them, and they do. Longing has a way of breeding the most fertile patience.

When I am finished I hang them from the open rafters and all the hands on all of the clocks applaude. The wings rotate in small half-circles above my head. I dial Frank’s number, cradling the receiver between my ear and shoulder and using my free hands to pull the heavy curtains back on either side. Light floods the sparse apartment and embraces my wings with thin, brilliant arms. I smile on his answering machine and hope that he gets the message. The sunlight infiltrates every aluminum feather, sprinkling the paint-flecked walls with shafts of crystallized light.

That’s when I find myself outside of my studio apartment on 72nd Street, the delicate wings strapped to my back. “I am walking down the street to Frank’s place to give him wings. This is what I am doing right now,” I muse to myself. I get on the 59 Bus, and then get off again without getting back my $1.25 after realizing that without the sun and the open air, these metal feathers won’t chime and the silence in my ears will be enough to make me deaf. And that’s a lonely thought.

It doesn’t take long, but by the time I reach his apartment my legs have gone numb. My hands have gone numb. My face has gone numb. I am positive that I haven’t sleep in seven hundred years. That is older than some stars.

“Frankie,” I croon into the intercom, “It’s Gerard. I’ve come to make sure you’re alive in there.”

There’s no response. An elderly man in a hand-knit scarf and black slacks peers at me through wire-rimmed glasses as he walks down the sidewalk. A shadow passes over his face, and I see for a moment that he fears me, fears the thought of who I might be with my wings and my pale, pale skin. Then the moment passes and so does the shadow; when the man’s face comes back into focus, he’s looking out at the street, where a sad-faced woman is picking up change from the gutter.

Leaning on the intercom button again, I press my cheek to the round speaker. “Frank, I know you’re in there. Open the door, I’ve brought you something.”

Static crackles through the speaker. “I don’t want it, Gerard. Please, leave me alone.”

“You know I can’t do that. I mean, if you don’t let me in now, I’m going to have to wait outside of here until you do, facing the highly probable chances of getting raped, pillaged, or a really good blow job from the insanely good-looking man who just stepped out of your building…” I wink at the man in question, who grins and looks me up and down. He holds the door open. “Frankie,” I whisper into the intercom, “Looks like I’m coming up,” and I slip through the door just as Frank is telling me to go fuck myself.

I climb the staircase at my own pace, careful not to graze the walls with Frankie’s wings. The light in here is buttery and it smells like lavender and something very human. It’s the leaving smell, I think. The sadness smell, the lonely smell. It leads me up six flights of stairs to Frank’s miserable doorway; I am suddenly shocked by the beauty of Frank’s closed door. Someone has exited from it, truly left, and so the chipped paint carries a finality about it, a wretchedness. I rest my palm against it and am briefly overwhelmed. I knock quietly.

“Goddammit, Gerard, go away!” Frank shouts from behind the door.

“Just let me in, okay? You can’t stay locked in there for the rest of your life.”

“Watch me.”

I sigh and tell him, “Don’t be such a drama queen, Frank, you’re just proving his point.”

A single pained second goes by and then the door flies open. Frank, red-faced with fury, screams, “You bastard! How could you even think about saying something like that when you know that I—”

“Because it got you to open the door, didn’t it?” I say softly, pressing a kiss to his cheek before moving past him into the apartment. He slams the door.

“Gerard, you can’t stay. I don’t want you here.”

“Why?” I ask, sliding the wings off of my shoulders. “Because he’s my brother?”

Frank’s face plummets from a reddish-purple to ashen gray. “Yes,” he replies through gritted teeth, “That’s exactly why. Could you go?”

I drop onto the couch and spread out my limbs, propping my feet up on the low coffee table. “No, Frank. You see, what you’re not understanding here is that I can’t. I can’t leave you here alone because he already did that, and I’m not him. Just because we’re brothers doesn’t mean we are on the same side. I’m still your best friend.”

Frank is silent then, livid. His tattooed hands quiver by his hips. I hold onto his eyes for no more than four or five seconds, and then he deflates. It happens just like it does to balloons and breathing chests and wide-eyed characters inflated on peoples’ front lawns around Christmas. Frank’s fists unclench first, all of the colour draining from his face. Then slowly, as if someone has pulled on a plug or flipped a switch somewhere, his back stoops over and his chin droops down to his chest. He crumbles like a marionette cut loose. I scramble from the couch and grab onto his shoulders just as his fragile knees buckle, and Frank collapses into me like a child.

“What did I do, Gerard?” he sobs raggedly into my chest. His thin fingers curl and uncurl around the collar of my coat. “What did I do to make him leave?”

“Shh, shh,” I soothe, cradling his heavy shoulders. “It’s going to be okay, Frankie.”

“How do you know that?”

“I don’t.”

He pulls away from my shirt, furiously wiping at his eyes. “Then why would you say that, Gerard? What uses is any of this if I don’t even know if it will be okay?”

“Just trust me.”

“God, fuck this…just…please, Gerard, I just want to be alone now, okay?” he mumbles in frustration into the palms of his hands. He moves away from me and walks over to the bay window, folding his arms over his chest as the sunlight filtering in creates a silhouette of his curved, t-shirted spine.

I sigh and step quietly out of the living room, flipping on the kitchen light. Fluorescent radiance hits me in violent shockwaves, flickering slightly. The kitchen is immaculate. The counters have been bleached, the floor waxed. Every cup, every plate placed back inside the cherry wood cupboards. I feel like I shouldn’t touch anything, but I do. I slide open the cabinet above the dishwasher and pull out two mugs as the water in the sink runs hot. Then, filling them nearly to the brim, I drop the last of Frank’s chamomile flowers into the steaming water and throw the purple box away. The water plumes a dirty yellow colour at first.

From the living room I can hear him breathing. There is a slight hitch to every slow intake, a sigh on every release. That scent, the sadness scent, wafts over to me in giant, drifting waves, settling just under my skin and on the hairs of my arms. As the tea starts to darken, I strain out the flowers and put them into the microwave to heat them up one last time. I shut my eyes. This apartment tricks me into hearing voices that aren’t really there, seeing people who have already left with suitcases in their hands and reflections of doorways in their eyes. My blood knows who I am, but it’s my heart that knows who I love. From the living room I can hear him bleeding.

I shake out my hand that has fallen asleep, chasing the tingles out my fingertips where the waiting mugs of tea burn my palms. It is a nice feeling to feel at all. I turn off the light switch with my elbow and carry the tea back out to the front of the apartment.

Since I left the shadows have changed. Near the window Frank is just a sad, blackened outline against the sharp blue of light, his shape leaking like ink over the hardwood floor. I notice that, on the floor, in the small alcove where the bay window is located, there is a scattered mess of papers and envelopes strewn about. They stand out like scars in the otherwise blindingly clean apartment. Carefully handling the mugs so that I don’t spill scalding tea on my hands, I climb the pair of steps leading into the raised alcove. Frank does not turn around. I watch the tension of the muscles beneath his shirt, the sad arms wound tight around his middle just to keep a solid grip on here and now and why, although the last one is so abstract that his fingertips are blossoming white with the pressure of it all. The mugs clink together as I set them down on the small antique side table that used to belong to my grandmother when she was still alive. For some reason it belongs here now more than it ever did when my brother’s things still adorned its glossy, hand-painted table top. It stands against the wall now, haunted and lonely, grateful to be useful once again, and warmed from the tea.

“Frankie, I made you some of your favourite tea. Why don’t you come sit with me and talk for a little while,” I tell him softly.

He doesn’t turn from the window. “I don’t want to talk,” he replies sharply.

“Alright, that’s fine. We could just sit here, or we could go out, or—”

“Gerard, I don’t want to do anything!” Frank pivots around, and his face is ravaged with pain. “I don’t want to talk, I don’t want to go out! I just…I can’t do any of those things. Not…not yet.” His breaths come in quick, short bursts, released like blinded knives. I try not to flinch. He worries the hem of his shirt with angry, twitching fingers, tugging the material so that it stretches down to mid-thigh. And then he closes his eyes. Takes a deep breath. Uses both hands to violently scrunch up his hair so that it pokes out in static frustration.

“I don’t know how I can do any of those things anymore, Gerard,” he finally grits through his teeth, “I just can’t remember what it’s like. It’s been too long.” He stands just feet away from me, vulnerable, his arms dangling by his rejected sides. There is a look on his face that makes me want to peel off all of my skin.

Reaching out, I wrap my fingers around his wrist and pull him towards me. I kiss his sad pink lips hard enough for my teeth to pinch at the inside of my mouth and then hug him close to me again. “I am holding my very best friend in the world and trying to absorb some of his pain into my body. This is what I am doing right now,” I murmur against the shell of his ear. Then I shakily whisper, “Don’t make me like this, Frank. I won’t be able to stand it if I don’t see you smile this very second.”

He pulls out of my arms slightly, staring at me with parted lips and swollen green eyes, but no smile graces his face. His fingers are wound tightly around the open flaps of my jacket. He says, “I think I need you to stay here with me now, okay?”

“Okay.”

We sit at the center of the alcove, facing each other with letters and envelopes between us, the tea at our lips. I pick up a paper that is torn and wrinkled from uncountable handlings. “What are these?”

“Letters from…oh, probably eight or nine years ago, just after I met him. He wrote to me while he was at that school in Germany.”

I read it over quickly and blush at my brother’s clumsy, lustful prose. The paper slips easily from my hand.

“I’ve been sitting here for a week, reading them all over and over again until I’m exhausted. Then I get up and clean because I don’t know what else to do. And then I read them all again.”

I feel the calming affects of the tea inside of my arms, and then inside of my head. “What are you looking for, Frank?” I ask him drowsily.

“I don’t know,” he replies, shrugging his thin shoulders. “I just…I feel like I need to find just one reason why I even loved him in the first place.”

“Why?”

“Why did I love him?”

“No.” I shake my head, picking up a fistful of the wrinkled papers. Pushing them at his face, I tell him, “Frank, there’s no use analyzing his words, trying to see where you went wrong or right. It will make you tear yourself apart.”

Frank scrambles for the crumpled letters. “I know that, Gerard, but I just—”

“You shouldn’t be looking for reasons why you loved him, you should be seeing all of the reasons why he loved you.”

Somewhere outside a car alarm goes off. A child shrieks with laughter and is joined by another happy voice. A telephone rings. The world just beyond this window is breathing, and here I am, here Frank is. We are not a part of this because he has chosen not to be. I rest my hand against his knee.

“Go ahead, Frank, I’m serious. I want you to look and see just why you deserve to be loved.”

His hands are shaking slightly; I hear the leaves of paper rustle as they brush up against each other. He stares at them for a long time, and then when his fingers loosen, they dance to the floor. “I can’t,” he admits in a whisper.

“Why not?”

“Because they’re just letters, Gerard, they don’t mean anything. He left, remember?”

“And so now you don’t think there’s any reason for anyone to love you? You think that’s all they are? Just words on fucking paper?”

“That is exactly what they are.”

In the silence that ensues I watch him. Watch the way he gnaws on his lower lip and pulls absently at the raw skin around his chewed-up nails. There is blood that he isn’t noticing.

And I have to ask him, “What made you so goddamn bitter, Frank?”

“Gerard,” he breathes, his voice small and clogged with tears. “I wasn’t enough. I wasn’t enough of a reason to make him stay.”

A sudden, unforgiving rush of anger and frustration streams through my veins, reddening my cheeks. I stumble to my feet with clenched fists and walk away to the window as he had done before. I don’t look back. “That’s bullshit and you know it. You fucking know why he left,” I growl.

“Yeah, you know what? I do. He said to me, ‘Frankie, I can’t deal with this anymore’,” Frank mocks angrily in a fair imitation of my brother’s voice. “‘I just can’t be with you like this, it’s ripping my brain and my heart to pieces’.”

“That’s not all that he said,” I push through my teeth at the glass.

I hear Frank push to his feet behind me, the crush of old paper neglected beneath rubber soles. “He said, ‘I’m gonna get out of here, Frank, because I don’t know how much more of this a guy can take before he starts to get real fucking messed up in the head’,” he shouts at my back in a voice broken and worn with static.

I close my eyes with the rush of heat to my cheeks. “Frank,” I sigh, “Tell the rest. What else did my brother say to you?”

There is only the sound of Frank trying to catch his breath. I can picture what his face will look like in my mind, fury tangling his dark eyebrows and pinching his pink lips together. I know it for a fact inside of my spinning head.

Then he says quietly, “He said to me, ‘Somebody loves you so, so much, Frankie, and…and it can’t be me anymore. So I’m going to…to leave’.” He pauses, forces himself to go on. “ ‘And a week or so from now you are going to be okay again. I…I promise you that, Frankie. You will be alright’.”

Frank is right behind me now, his feet carrying him closer to me across the alcove with each remembered word. I press my forehead to the window and absorb some of the warmth that radiates from outside. Cars drift lazily by beneath the wrought-iron balcony.

“Oh, Gerard.”

My shoulders twitch as his hand comes to rest between the protruding blades, and my whole body renders itself rigid. I flex my fingers against the white window frame and exhale a fine mist onto the glass.

“Is it true then? What he said before he left, Gerard…is it true?” he asks gently. His hand is so solid, so very close to my skin.

I turn around then, my arms falling to dangle by my hips. And I tell him, “I would never lie to you, Frank. It doesn’t matter if you read those letters or not; you deserve to be loved.” Lifting my hand, I tenderly cup his cheek and smooth my thumb along his cheekbone. The skin there is sticky with dried tears, the softest skin I have ever touched. I smile.

Moving past him, I cross the alcove and descend the stair-couplet to the living room. The wings rest on the floor like shattered bits of glass. As I bed to pick them up they shimmer like wind chimes, all the slivers of metal clinging together. The magic in them seeps through my burning skin; it sends a deep shiver down my spine.

“What is that?” he asks from where he still stands at the window, dazed with shock.

I hold the wings out in front of me across my entire spread wingspan. “I made you a pair of wings. Tissue paper, wire, aluminum. In case you ever want to see things from a new perspective.”

Frank’s eyes stay steady on the chiming wings as I carry them back to the alcove. His face is bewildered and sweet.

“Turn around,” I tell him.

His face splits into a puzzled half-smile; he presents his thin, t-shirted back, arms spread eagerly and waiting. I can’t help but grin as I slip the wings over his left arm, then his right, securing them at the curve of his shoulders with strips of elastic and metal. They reflect the light pouring through the window, fragmenting it across my front and the walls around us. I smooth my fingers down his spine and lean forward to place a kiss at the base of his neck as he trembles beneath my touch. Then I step back and lean against the bookcase.

Frank stands there for a long moment, his arms still outstretched, fingers spread as if he’s reaching for something that I can no longer see. Tears prick at the corners of my eyes and I don’t know why. Spinning on his heels he breathes, “Gerard!” and that’s it, his unlined face radiant and beautiful. It is enough. He springs onto me, arms fastening around my neck. Jingle metal. Rustle tissue paper. Whisper, “Thank you, thank you.” Press of sweet, dark lips to my lips. Whisper, “The seventh day, Gerard. You saved me on the seventh day.”

I wrap my arms around his slender waist, burying my face into the top of his head. He smells of lavender and unwashed hair; the sadness smell is very faint, lingering on his skin. “I just wanted you to be able to see everything the way that I do,” I murmur against his scalp.

He pulls back to look up at my face, beaming. The wings tower crookedly above his head, casting shadows along the floor and his pale arms. And then he lifts onto his tiptoes and kisses me, a very short, small kiss that numbs my bottom lip. I kiss back in the brief moment before he pulls away, pressing my hands into the small of his back, seeking out the small dents there with the tips of my fingers.

“I am experiencing the very best kiss of my life with my very best friend in the world, whom I love more than he knows and who will continuously save my sorry ass for the rest of my life,” Frank whispers against my cheek, his lips tugged into a teasing smile. “This is what I am doing right now.”

I grin next to his temple, biting hard on my lip just to keep from breaking into laughter. I pull away from him and smooth back his hair from his face, curling some of it behind his ear. We laugh together somewhat nervously, somewhat deliriously, somewhat frightened. But Frank kisses me again, on the corner of my mouth, a series of kisses that are terrifyingly lovely and wonderful and strange.

Squatting, I pick up one of the abandoned letters and fold it into a triangle against the hardwood floor. I crease it tightly and then neatly tear off the excess; my brother’s words smear and fray as they scatter in pieces across the alcove. Frank hovers above me, his protests held on the tip of his tongue in lieu of his curiosity towards my actions. Unfold, fold again. A triangle, a square, a diamond. Tucks and rips and creases and folds. Within two and a half minutes my brother’s letter submits to a grand rebirth, reemerging as a yellowed, tattered crane.

“Teach me,” Frank commands, dropping to his knees beside me.

I guide his hands along sheet after sheet of paper, pressing his fingers to crease, sliding the corners along the lines of his palms. The cranes spill across the floor, flooding our space, falling between our legs and our arms and in the gaps between our torsos. We are quiet. Hand language. Body language. Magic language.

Frank leads me out to the balcony, the breeze rushing through our thin clothing and ruffling our hair. His hand closes around mine. “Are you ready?” I ask him in a low voice.

He nods.

We throw up our arms in unison, a flurry of paper cranes exploding against the luminous blue sky. The breeze instantly catches them. Frank’s astonished, happy laughter fills every hollow in my body as the cranes glide above the city, raining down into the street. The aluminum feathers of his own wings chatter in the gentle wind, the tissue paper floating around his face in thin waves.

I am smiling.

This is what I am doing right now.