Disclaimer: Not real, not mine, not making money from this.
The trails of light which they seemed to leave behind them in all kinds of curlicues and streamers and spirals, and which Gerald in particular admired, did not really exist, explained Alphonso, but were merely phantom traces created by the sluggish reaction of the human eye, appearing to see a certain afterglow in the place from which the insect itself, shining for only the fraction of a second in the lamplight, had already gone. It was such unreal phenomena, said Alphonso, the sudden incursion of unreality into the real world, certain effects of light in the landscape spread out before us, or in the eye of a beloved person, that kindled our deepest feelings, or at least what we took for them.
- Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald
It's something he dreams about with irregular frequency.
Alex's profile folded up in the trunk, sheen of sweat, textbook-perfect musculature on display. His eyes are closed but his breathing is too deep for sleep. He starts to stir, moans, a parody of sexual pleasure. He traces his fingers along the insides of the trunk, back and forth, back and forth, the way an ant will march the perimeter of dry land enclosed by water. He is frightened, Danny can tell, his eyes are squeezed way too tight, as though such an act might push him deeper into sleep and prove this all a dream. He pounds those perfect hands against the lid and cries out, but Danny cannot go to him; he is transfixed in a vantage point of light, heart rent and mouth dry in his voyeuristic enjoyment of a naked man in a sealed box. How much of him is culpable, how much of him the grieving romantic? Alex is sobbing now, reduced to snot and spittle. It dawns upon Danny that if he could just find a way to turn off the light he might save the man he loves. After all, lies and truths are but half-brothers in the dark. The light, he thinks, the light, and then the locks, sprung open to expel the torrid truth that a man can be condemned by his own invention within the lurid dimensions of the public imagination. The light, the light, Danny searches frantically as Alex starts to scream, but then he too is in the dark and cannot get his bearings, much less locate the switch. He stretches his hands out to embrace armfuls of air, helplessly watching as Alex turns his face to him and stares, neither accusing nor absolving yet no less arresting in a drawn-out fermata, the abyss Danny once thought he had averted now gazing back at him, and he awakes.
Alex ran every morning. His footfalls were measured, his breathing regular. If you keep a constant pace, your breathing remains regular. It is only upon rapid acceleration or a sudden halt that one's breathing falls out of rhythm, accompanied by a faint tingling in the quadriceps and the calf muscles, and a strange sense that one's body might surge forward without one's legs following suit. When he ran his mind quieted, no longer hankering after the next cipher or decrypting facial tics or toggling logarithmic expressions. Sometimes he lifted his eyes from the pavement and took in his surroundings as they marched past his peripheral vision. The gay clubs on one side of the river, MI6 on the other. Secrets ebbing away at the banks of time as it flowed, relentless and unforgiving. As he sped up the buildings on either side begin to blur into a single, mundane uniformity. What did it matter that he preferred men but never explored the labyrinth of dance and drink, or kept his predilections secret as he toiled in one of the honeycombs of the intelligence service? It was simply another inclination shelved under another name, as Danny would learn later, the knife-edge of deception that sharpened the family likeness of all griefs into something quite particular.
Much of human behaviour is predictable. Enact an action pointedly enough and you are sure to receive the appropriate reaction. Turn your back and square your shoulders and you will be left alone. Dress appropriately according to the formality of the situation to blend in with the crowd, or dress flamboyantly to garner attention. Huddle close to the mean for comfort and anonymity. Alex relaxed under the governance of norms, until a young man, shabbily dressed and drenched from the rain but blessed with the most open of countenances, having waited for him under the pretext of returning the empty drink sachet but obviously wanting something more, stared expectantly at him as though there was something in his possession that was worth getting soaked to the skin at six in the morning. Yet what did he have to offer, Alex wondered, but loneliness?
I don't want to go.
With those five words, Danny Holt presented himself as a puzzle Alex did not know how to decipher. He hated couching it in such terms since it meant Frances was right after all and never would he escape this method of reading people which had been drummed into his bones. Danny is a person, flesh and blood, as was he, or so he desperately wished to believe, a person, with desires and capabilities of inciting desire that could escape these structures. By that time Danny's questions had been exhausted and his respiratory rate evened out to a placid sixteen breaths per minute. He allowed himself one more glance at the spark in Danny's eye before they made the final turn to the entrance of the apartment.
Now that he thought of it, him emerging from the shower in nothing but a towel around his waist must have been interpreted by Danny as a provocative gesture begging for reciprocation. Had it been unconscious? His body had never been an instrument for pleasure, clothed, unclothed, it made no difference. With utmost gentleness, Danny would prove him wrong. He would teach him the contours of their bodies, warm fingers over his hand guiding him along the length of his cock as he shuddered and gasped, shame overwritten by a satisfaction he would always think of as stolen.
After all, what was one more secret beneath the sheets when he was raised amongst so many? Nanny, Mother, a father suddenly come into existence overnight who did not fail to make his disdain for Alex unfelt. Nanny used to warm milk on the stove for him when he couldn't sleep, Danny can see it now, Alex cradling the same enamel cup, sipping carefully so as not to scald himself. The dead are exempt from the boundaries of time and space. Frances would feign ignorance at those nights where he would steal to the kitchen craving Nanny's company, the unspoken fact that she was once his mother a touchstone between them as they sat across from each other, he pretending to be occupied with a banal elucidation question, she with her sewing. In those moments he felt that it was he who had done her wrong, that the honing of what Frances termed his gifts had bartered away what little kinship they shared and exchanged maternal warmth for bland solicitousness.
There was very little he consciously remembered of the move. These days it became a time that came back to him more and more, involuntarily at first but later like a scourge he carried out on his own memories. He catalogued sights, sounds, hurtling impressions. Tables towering above his head, a moat without water in it. A drawbridge that always remained lowered. Dark mahogany that kept the secrets whispered within door. Although of course back in the day he had not the words for this strange terrain. He hadn't spoken until he was five, after more than a year had passed in this guarded fortress that would soon prove itself a cage. At first silence was a mere by-product of his mind's sudden occupation. The dozens of puzzle books that Frances had lined the trunk with from edge to edge kept him content. Or perhaps it may have been the effect of a jarring change in the soundscape, having exchanged the colloquial lilt of South London for the clipped politeness of Received Pronunciation, compounded by the phantom pain of a name no longer to be answered to except in secret or distress. Alex, Danny murmured, come back to bed, and he smiled, passing a hand over his face as he remembered being agitated by the scratchy lining of a cap against his forehead, he who as a toddler had never been dressed in anything more than patched cardigans and over-sized thrift-shop pickings but was suddenly being outfitted in the uniform of a public schoolboy, starched to perfection from head to toe.
He had begun by reproducing phrases he heard. It was always yes, I would like that, please, complete with pauses at the appropriate places, and never just yes because that was what Charles said when asked about a boiled egg at breakfast. Him finally speaking had made Frances happy, almost as happy as the day he craned his neck up at the stone statue in wonder, every corner of the maze mapped out in perfect precision in his mind's eye. He learnt to doctor his mimicked sentences into socially acceptable responses. Speech became estranged from feeling, and consequently tainted by that stilted artificiality that set him apart from others. Danny, on the contrary, has always been spontaneity itself. Say it again. How? The same way as you did the last time. Danny laughs, why, what's it for?, and leans over to kiss him full on the mouth, his curving lips mocking the dead satisfaction Alex derived from symbols rearranging themselves on either side of the equals sign.
In many ways, being with Danny was like coming home to sensations submerged for years only to resurface in flashes he never knew he remembered, acerbic orange juice of inferior quality in half-filled glasses, bare feet against scratched linoleum as he crept back into bed, afraid to disturb Danny who had to rise early for the morning shift. Enveloping them was the stubborn marriage of cigarette smoke and bacon grease that clung to every inch of fabric. Alex felt safe, cocooned by a familiarity he never knew he missed but which his body somehow remembered and now clamoured after with an insatiable appetite. A residual Pavlovian element, perhaps, though he was hardly a fan of classical conditioning. It did not explain his growing longing to be known absolutely, to be known and then to be loved after, in full knowledge. He could not confess to Danny that they were both after the same thing. He did not need to confess to Danny that they were both after the same thing.
Anybody's immediate reaction upon waking to discover that one was trapped in a small enclosed area would be acute panic. Said person would exhibit an increased heart rate, shallowness and rapidity of breath, hyperhidrosis and dilated pupils. Alex wills his nerves to be still and assesses his situation. He is naked, confined in a box, depleting whatever scant amount of remaining oxygen with each shuddering breath that he inhales. So this is how it will end, he muses, the mode of execution chosen for him is suffocation, a strange choice for the staging of a suicide. Why would anyone willingly lock themselves up in a box? For a brief moment he wonders where they might have emptied the trunk's contents. He imagines the numerous ordinance survey maps that have marked both his and Danny's footsteps scattered at the bottom of a refuse bin at the back of the apartment, bound for incineration. There they will escape into the air. At present he has no means of breaking out of the trunk, either by force or persuasion. Frances is asking him a series of questions. There is a camera hidden somewhere, monitoring his reactions. It is not his answers that they are interested in; it is the way he delivers those answers that will determine if he lives or dies. He recalls all the moments of revelation in the apartment, both Danny's self-lacerating divulgences (I need you to know. I don't want to have any secrets from you, I never want to have any secrets ever again) and his own coded attempt, pitiful in its obscurity (I have to buy a battery for my laptop, I can't go without replacing it). Danny would understand. He always did. It baffled him sometimes, the way Danny successfully read sentiment from reticence, unhappiness from acquiescence. Danny had taken his trembling hand in his and quelled his rising terror on that very first night. Alex had hoped that when he offered up his own hand and their open palms met the second time he would be returning the favour. Now he sees his offer for what it truly was: a pale mockery of honesty, sheer cowardice that spat in the face of Danny's confession. Do not offer me candour when I am and will always be a patchwork of lies and deceit. Still, it's as much honesty as they will ever gather from the field study of his life. All those moments between them would serve as a control against which the words he now parroted would be compared. I will go to America. I'll never work on it again. I'll never speak to him again. Oh god, he thinks, oh god, as the finality of it dawns upon him. He starts to cry. Fruitless, useless sentimentality. By now he knows that it is impossible to end all lies. He wants to laugh at his own foolish ambition; what can he hope to achieve when he can't even end his own life on an honest note? He will die as Alastair Turner, failed protégé of the Secret Intelligence Service, more a myth than a man. Within the confines of this trunk he can only expose his own lies, which will then by exclusion illuminate the truths he had uttered as he lay on Danny's mattress, the words coming so easily to him that even he was surprised. You don't need to tell me anything; I love you. The truth, his truths, dragged out into the light.
The surface of the Thames is marred by ripples, a turbulent cousin to the pristine face of the countryside's estuary. Alex is perched on the riverbank, hair tousled by the wind. Danny is looking up at him, his fingers still clutching that ridiculous drink sachet, with such a smile over the face as he will get to see him have sometimes, in their eight months together, when he has sifted a particularly odd-shaped shell from the shore on one of their long walks, or when the fog lifts above Lambeth Bridge only to bring rain, or when he has finally gotten the geraniums on the terrace to bloom after three weeks of nagging care. And Alex thinks, I am numbered among all these special, mundane things, and is glad. His shoulders slump and lose a little of their stiffness as he blushes at the thought (he can feel the heat rising to his cheeks and must resist the urge to run, to hide) of being just as passingly precious to the person he loves, to be part of the natural landscape once again.