America, 1956
Nothing much happened that long, hot summer. No rain fell; no storms shattered the silence of the sky. People stayed indoors, confined to their meagre scraps of shade; men stewed in their cars and bars and offices, simmering in sweat; women dashed to the stores and home again with barely a pause for conversation, aching to be out of the heat. It was enough to drive one mad, with the white-painted houses shimmering with pure, blinding light in the midday heat and nothing, nothing, nothing happening at all.
Not much happened that long, hot summer. Nothing happened at all until Mathias Køhler, an ordinary man with a neat white house and a charming wife and a handsome little boy and a pretty little girl, left work one evening. Nothing happened until he pulled out of the parking lot and started the short drive home, humming along to the radio, and became so absorbed in the song that he failed to look to his right. Nothing happened until he felt the heavy jolt of the impact and heard the crunch of metal under his wheels. Nothing happened until he climbed out of the car and peered nervously at the scene before him – a young man sitting on the ground, his trousers ripped and a streak of blood all the way up his leg, and a mangled bike lying beside him.
"Are you ok?" Mathias asked stupidly, feeling a little dizzy with the shock of what had just happened; faintly, he heard the hiss of the radio, still tuned to the hit station.
The young man scowled, shrugged, got to his feet with a pained intake of breath.
"Yes. No. I'll walk it off." he said.
"Jesus, I'm so sorry," Mathias replied ruefully, running a despairing hand through his hair. "Christ, I must've just looked away from the road for a moment, one moment, and then… Look, you can't walk anywhere on that leg. Let me drive you home."
"Do you really think I trust your driving?" came the sharp reply. The young man bent to pick up his bike, examining the wreckage of the frame with a look of irritation.
"I'll pay for that," Mathias said hastily. "You can get it fixed up, no trouble," He sighed. "Jesus, I feel so bad right now. Just take a ride home with me. I promise I won't hit anyone this time."
In the end, the young man accepted and climbed into the front passenger seat, his hands clasped between his knees in a tight, awkward knot. Mathias was still shaken, terrified of hitting something else, and scanned the empty roads like a madman, tensing at hallucinatory dust clouds. And yet his eyes were drawn again and again to the man beside him, to his slicked hair that gleamed in the thickening, amber-coloured light of evening, to his elegant hands, to his thoughtful, inscrutable expression.
"You got a name?" he asked. The woman on the radio kept singing, rode the wave of a mounting crescendo, dropped back into mournful quiet again.
"Lukas." the young man replied, his eyes on the endless fields and the mountains, distant enough to be shadows, that stood over everything.
"You from round here?"
"I'm visiting."
Mathias laughed. "Not much to visit here," he said with a smile. "Unless you like fields, I guess."
Lukas shrugged. "It's just a stop on my journey," he replied, turning to Mathias, and Mathias saw that his eyes were blue, the blue of the last hour of night, the last hour of darkness before the world awoke. "I travel a lot. I see places," He gave a wry smile of his own. "Even the boring ones."
The song ended, and the announcer began to talk about the latest Hollywood gossip. Mathias turned it down, then switched it off completely, and then only the rattle of the engine was left to break the silence. A slanted column of light came through the window, illuminating the specks of dust that swirled like a thousand tiny dancers. Lukas looked tired, but not vulnerable; youthful, but with a deeper sense of… something. I used to like boys like that, Mathias thought to himself, before I got better.
They reached their destination, a shabby hotel on the edge of the town. They both got out of the car, standing awkwardly for a moment, then Lukas wordlessly opened the back door and lifted his bike out.
"Thanks for the ride," he said eventually. "I guess it would've been hard to walk all the way."
Mathias nodded in agreement. "You look after yourself now," he said. He reached into his wallet and took out $10, handing it to Lukas. "That should cover the repairs, I think."
Lukas thanked him and took the money. "I'll find a way to give you the change." he reassured him.
Mathias smiled. "Keep it," he said. "Have a soda on me."
Lukas raised an eyebrow. "I'm old enough to drink, you know." he replied.
"Don't start," Mathias said in a tone of mock warning. "You'll never stop."
Nothing much happened that summer. The river where people went to swim dried up, vanishing to a slow slick of mud, and they all had to pay for the nice pool with the lifeguards and the stinging chlorine and the bar that sold drinks for three times the usual price. Children sprawled on their lawns, reading or drawing or playing with dolls, or else hiding from the heat in front of the black-and-white square of the TV. High-schoolers hung around the diner and the soda fountain, and were triumphant when the man in the liquor store forgot to ask them for ID. Nothing much happened until Mathias took a walk into town and came across Lukas wheeling his bike down Main Street.
"Thought you'd want to get out of here as soon as possible," Mathias said to him, but inside he was thrilled, thrilled, and his heart stammered out a terrified rhythm.
"I haven't decided where to go next," Lukas said with a shrug. "This isn't such a bad place, anyway."
"I see you got your bike fixed," Mathias said, changing the subject. He felt anxious, uncertain, his eyes not knowing where to settle. "Did I give you enough money?"
Lukas nodded. "I got that soda you suggested," he said, smiling. "And the bike's as good as new. I suppose you did me a favour by knocking me down," He cast a glance at the bag Mathias was holding. "What have you been shopping for?" he asked, in a tone that carried a faint suggestion of artificiality, as if he were searching for reasons to continue their conversation, their encounter. Or so Mathias hoped, but he was over all that kind of thing now. He'd liked men once, but years ago. Those feelings were gone now, completely gone.
"Just something for my daughter," he said. "It's her birthday on Wednesday. She'll be six."
An unreadable expression came over Lukas's face and hovered there, masking whatever thoughts were struggling within him. "Six," he repeated, a little weakly. "I remember when my brother was six. They're sweet at that age."
"She's a precious little thing," Mathias replied, thinking of her smile and feeling unaccountably guilty, as if he had done some terrible thing that was as yet beyond his knowledge – something he had not yet even conceived in his mind. "Well," he continued, suddenly at a loss for words. "I guess I'll see you around."
"Yeah," said Lukas. "I don't think I'll be leaving for a little while."
Nothing much happened that summer. Mathias had a dream one night, a dream about a man whose face he could not see, and then woke up next to his wife and felt an agony worse than anything he had ever known before slit him open and tear out his heart, and the fear settled on him again, the fear of his unknowable self that he had thrown off so many years before. His daughter's birthday came, and he handed her her gifts, and she replied with a smile that was the mirror and replica of his own. The local news station went into a minor frenzy as the thermometers indicated the hottest summer since 1895, and people went out less and less. Nothing much happened until the fans at work broke down, and the boss let everyone go home early, and Mathias decided to go and walk by the river for a while instead of going home. It was still dried up, the mud cracking and congealing, but nevertheless it had a sort of beauty about it, just as a desert or ruined house has beauty, and Mathias felt a sense of great calm as he approached.
Nothing much happened until he saw that someone had reached the place before him, and until he looked again and saw that that someone was Lukas, sitting at the top of the steep riverbank and staring out across the empty bed to the other side. Third time lucky, thought Mathias. Three's the charm. But what sort of good luck did he want?
Lukas turned at the sound of his footsteps. His face registered shock, then recognition, then broke into a shy smile.
"I'm starting to think you're following me." he said as Mathias sat down beside him.
"It's a small town," Mathias replied. "You might as well get used to seeing the same damn people a million times." He instantly regretted the sharpness in his voice, the bitterness that curdled his words with venom.
Lukas seemed unperturbed. "Town is one thing," he said. "Running into you at a dried up river is another. I didn't think people came here, except to swim."
Mathias immediately felt like an intruder. He knew so little of Lukas – what he thought, why he thought those things, what it was that was pushing him from place to place. "I'll go, if you'd rather be alone." he said gently.
Lukas shook his head. "No," he said. "Stay. I spend my whole life alone."
They sat silently together for a while. Mathias watched Lukas, and wished that he could somehow stop watching him. Even just looking at him seemed wrong – seemed unbearably, unspeakably intimate. He blamed Lukas for being beautiful, for choosing this town over the thousands of others he could have picked. He blamed himself for not looking at the road that day, for being too weak to stop his suppressed attraction from rising monstrously inside him.
"Lukas," he said after a while. "I… I think…" he swallowed and started again. "You're a nice person. I can't think why you'd be alone all the time."
"Thank you," Lukas replied, blushing faintly – or was that just a touch of sunburn? Impossible to tell, Mathias thought. "But I have my reasons. And solitude isn't as bad as people think."
"I suppose being with people isn't as good as people think either," Mathias replied, thinking of his own life, and of how rarely he managed to escape the hordes of humanity, the oppressive crush of souls in every corner of his existence. "Maybe you're right. Maybe it's good to be alone."
"It is," Lukas agreed. "But sometimes people don't get to choose to be alone. It just happens. They don't get to live how they want to," He sighed. "You're a nice person yourself," Mathias," he continued after a while. "I'm glad I met you."
Nothing much happened that long summer. Mathias saw Lukas more and more, but nothing happened. They talked, and went for walks, and sometimes Mathias was able to forget reality for a few moments. For those few moments, he was no longer married, no longer a father, no longer chained down to his job and his house and a world that stretched no further than the dusty horizon. But those moments never lasted long. Nothing much happened until one evening when Mathias told his wife he was going to the bar, and he met Lukas instead, and Lukas showed him the place he'd found, a hillside where you could sit and see the drive-in movie without having to pay.
"You can't even hear it from this distance," Mathias complained, watching the tears streak down the heroine's face as she drove away from her lover's house. "I have no idea what that argument was even about."
"These things never have great dialogue," Lukas replied wryly. "Or plots."
Mathias sat forward a little, watching the screen but not the movie. A few minutes passed in silence. The hero and heroine were back together now, kissing, and then suddenly he whispered something in her ear and she burst into tears again.
"Do you think they'll be happy in the end?" Mathias asked.
Lukas shrugged. "Probably," he replied. "I've never seen a movie like this that didn't have a happy ending."
Mathias felt tears springing to his eyes, blurring the screen into a uniform mass of grey. The movie continued, and now the heroine was talking to another man, laughing at something he was saying and touching her hair self-consciously as if he had just complimented her on it. Without a word, without even really understanding what he was doing, he put his arm around Lukas's waist, his hand cupping the curve of his hip. And Lukas rested his head on Mathias's shoulder, and they stayed like that for hours. The movie ended, and the woman married the original hero. They sat there in the dark, watching the blank screen, loosely joined in their chaste embrace, each one afraid of his own feelings and yet knowing, knowing with agonising certainty, that they were in love with each other.
"You know I'm married, don't you?" Mathias said after a while.
"Yes." Lukas replied, and no more words passed between them all that night. And even though Mathias dreamed of kissing him, of unbuttoning his shirt and laying him down on the soft grass and gently, ever so gently, making love to him, he did nothing. He simply sat with his arm around Lukas and Lukas leaning against his shoulder, and closed his eyes and imagined all the things that he could never do.
Nothing much happened that summer. It rained for the first time since April, and Mathias watched his son watch the slow slide of the drops down the windows. His daughter lost her first tooth and he slipped it out from underneath her pillow while she slept, leaving the shiniest quarter he could find in its place. He bought his wife a new pearl necklace, and was disappointed when the gesture did nothing to calm his guilt. Nothing much happened until he met Lukas at the bar, and Lukas told him he was leaving town.
"I was never planning to stay so long," he admitted. "But I was a lot happier here than I thought I'd be."
Mathias smiled sadly. "I guess you just gotta move on," he said. "There's no life here for you. None for me either, really."
Lukas sighed. He closed his eyes for a long, lingering moment, and Mathias knew that he was trying to stem the tide of tears. "I'd ask you to come with me…" he began, then tailed off.
"Only I can't," Mathias finished for him. "I know, I know," I love you, he thought despairingly. I love you so much. "But good luck, wherever you end up," he said. "And remember that you don't have to be alone all the time."
"I think it's the best thing for me," Lukas replied sadly. "It's the safest way to live, for now at least. But thank you. I do think I'll find a place I want to stay one day…"
"Just not here." Mathias said, finishing for him again.
"No," Lukas agreed. "Not here."
It was a terribly long summer, but nothing much happened. Well, Mathias's family took their annual trip to that log cabin they always rented. And his daughter turned six – that was something to celebrate. And he took the little champ to the barbershop to get his first real man's haircut – now that was a milestone in any boy's life. And he knocked the most gorgeous-looking young man he'd ever seen off his bike, and gave him a ride back to his hotel, and paid him $10 for the repairs. And then he fell in love with him, fell so hard that he could barely think about anything else for the whole summer – not even the barbecue party he and his wife hosted, not even the meaningless figures he dealt with every day at work, not even his tenth wedding anniversary. And he fell so hard he knew he'd never be able to fall for anyone else in quite the same way ever again. But no, nothing much happened that long, sweltering summer.