Chapter Text
Alex is somewhere between glad and grieving when they get to Newark for the long, long trip back to Chapman and then on to their new combat outpost. Tim transforms into the Gutterson that he thought he knew so well, serious and focused, with a grin that only escapes him sometimes. “Tell me what you’re thinking,” he says to Alex somewhere in transit. He’s half-asleep.
Alex says, “Plane—plane from planus, level, or planos, wandering, and depending whether you think it’s from Latin or Greek, you can get to level in the air, like steady, or wandering through the air—and that was the trouble with the first flying devices, they wandered uncontrollably, but even when the Wright brothers—and wright means a maker, maybe that’s why they get the credit—figured out how to stabilize it, that’s what let us wander so far—and their first flights were by a place that was named Kill Devil Hills.”
“Vade retro satana,” Tim mumbles.
“Yeah,” Alex says, and he wants to stroke Tim’s hair, but he can’t. [Bye, bye, Birdie—the Army’s got you now—I’ll try, Birdie, to forget somehow—]
It’s like traveling back in time, arriving at the new combat outpost. Oh, they’re in a different part of the mountains, but Barry and Travis are already there, having had their usual fight over who gets the top bunk—Barry won, as usual—and so are Muñoz, Edelman, Wood and Daniels. There’s a lot of wrestling and good-natured shit-talking and everything that Alex has come to expect, and it warms him even as it drives him insane. Wood’s hair is back in cornrows—Alex gives it three days, max, before someone in charge notices and orders him to take them out—and Edelman is sunburnt bright red across his nose.
Their first mission back is like stepping back in time too, wanting to touch Tim and stopping himself from doing it. They hike a long way, so far that they have to be close to the border, to find their target, and set up a nest to watch the village where he’s supposed to be. “Tell me what you’re thinking,” Tim says, huddled close to him. He still acts like he’s trying to convince Alex that he really does want to know, like he really didn’t mean it when he said—what he said.
“I was thinking about Tati,” Alex says carefully. “I told you about the encyclopedias—we used to play word games too, when I was a little boy. She didn’t understand most of them, because her English was never very good, but I think it was comforting to her to know that English was so easy for me.” He looks at Tim. “This is where usually a person would share some kind of touching story about his own grandparents.”
“Didn’t know ‘em well, leadin’ to a dearth of touching stories.”
“Dearth, nice.” [Dearth—something that’s dear but missing, an absence like an abscess, from abscedere, but not like an abecedarium or abecedarius, an ordered list of all the letters of the alphabet, incomplete only for magical purposes—words were always magic.] He checks his watch. “The target’s usually up and moving by about 0600.”
Tim’s teeth are almost chattering. He knows Tim could suppress it if he tried, but Tim likes to be dramatic sometimes. “Bet he’s got some nice hot coffee waitin’ for him. You know, everybody said I’d get sent to the Middle East, I figured it’d be nice and warm.”
Alex doesn’t bother pointing out, yet again, that Afghanistan is not the Middle East. “It was 110 last time we were at Sykes. I’ll take Afghan mountain ranges any day.” He’ll take just about anything over Iraq. He checks his watch again. “I say that after we take him out, we get lost on our way back and visit the Throne of Solomon.” [Solomon, nothing to do with solemn, wisest because he knew a baby’s mother would rather watch someone else raise her child than let it die—what a terrible story, no one would cut a baby in half—we don’t do anything by halves—]
“Dunno,” Tim says, “if we’re gonna get lost on our way back, I can think of a whole lotta things I’d rather do with you than run off to Pakistan.”
[Partition—splitting into parts—separation from service.] Like run off back to America, Alex wants to say, but he doesn’t. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance,” Alex says instead. “We’ll have plenty of time after, for us—” That’s Tim’s side of the argument, isn’t it, the one they always seem to be having under the surface. “Don’t worry,” he says. “I’d never break it off with you just to visit a place with incredible religious and cultural significance—” [Partition again—everyone separates from something—]
Tim’s squeezed in tight against him, so tight that Alex can feel him shiver, and he turns just enough to touch his forehead to Alex’s. “You better not,” he says.
No, Alex thinks helplessly. No, he wouldn’t.
On the way back, they set up their shelter as early at night as they can justify and then Tim’s pressing as close as he can get to Alex, chilly hands sneaking under his shirt. “I fucking missed you,” he says, and kisses Alex.
“I’ve been here the whole time,” Alex tells him. This is what Tim wants, isn’t it? Years more like this, stealing minutes or hours, a month here or there.
“I can hear you thinking,” Tim says breathlessly. “Tell me?”
“Time fleeing—sed fugit interea, fugit irreparabile tempus—and stealing time to keep it. The Greeks thought the liver held all human emotion—Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity, and they punished him by sending an eagle to tear out his liver every day, like we’d think of tearing out his heart—I always thought they must be punishing him for giving in to his heart, some foolish love for humanity. Frankenstein was called the modern Prometheus—the scientist, not the creature, and he was punished by losing everything he loved—and the creature was all alone too, killed everyone around Frankenstein because he wanted a mate—”
“Jesus.” Tim pulls Alex tighter against him.
“You asked.”
“I know.” Tim kisses his mouth again, his neck above the collar of his coat, then starts working on undoing his coat. “I’m not goin’ anywhere.”
That’s the problem, neither of us are, Alex wants to say, but he’d rather touch Tim.
Tim’s all right sleeping out in the open, when they’re out on missions, but he keeps having dreams when they’re back at the outpost. He tosses and turns and flails so badly that his bed shakes, sometimes makes awful quiet noises, and once Wood yells, “Jesus, Gutterson, shut the fuck up,” and throws a shoe at him. It’s not exactly something Tim’s going to talk to Alex about, though, so Alex lets it be, tells Major Hammond honestly that it doesn’t happen in the field and he doesn’t consider it a tactical concern, and no one does anything else about it.
Time slips past them. [Sed fugit interea, fugit irreparabile tempus]. Their next leave coincides with Alex’s 26th birthday—Alex can’t fathom how that’s true—and they spend two weeks in Rome, where the cooks at every place they eat seem to take it as a personal challenge to fatten Tim up. Tim eats it all and then drags Alex on runs every morning, early while the sun is still rising and the street-sweepers are out and the stone paths are hell to run on. They go to the Sistine Chapel and Tim says, “Tell me about it.”
Alex looks up at the ceiling and tells him about Michelangelo’s poem describing the pain of painting the frescoes, then badly misquotes the only two lines he remembers: “Crosswise I strain me like a Syrian bow: for ill can aim the gun that bends awry.”
They spend two hours there, Alex just looking while Tim tells him facts from a printed pamphlet that’s so old it still has a lira price printed on the front, until Tim says into his ear, “I want to watch you eat more gelato.”
“We’re in a church,” Alex hisses, but he can’t help grinning.
“Whole lotta naked men,” Tim says. “Can’t blame a guy for gettin’ ideas.”
“Yeah, I bet you’d even get ideas looking at a Bosch painting.” Alex sways against him, just a little, so that his forearm brushes against the softness of the shirt Tim bought because he doesn’t have many civilian clothes. “Come on.”
They spend the money on renting two rooms, though Alex is starting to wonder why they bother, and maybe that’s a dangerous thought. On his birthday, Tim wakes him up even earlier than usual and says, “Tell me what you want, anything.”
“You, you idiot,” Alex tells him, and pulls him down into the rickety bed. “And to not go running this morning,” he says, when he’s halfway inside Tim.
Tim laughs and kisses him and then groans as he moves. “Just—fuck, just this once—but on my birthday we’re goin’ running twice—”
“We’ll see,” Alex says, and Tim clutches at him so hard that his fingernails leave indentations in Alex’s hips. It’s raining outside, but they wander along the streets anyway and end up in the Colosseum. “Quando cadet Roma, cadet et mundus,” Alex murmurs, and when Tim elbows him, translates, “When Rome falls, so falls the world.” Tim drags him into a niche where they’re sheltered from the rain and no one can see them, then kisses him until Alex can’t think.
“Omnia vincit amor,” Tim mumbles against his mouth, “right?”
“Right,” Alex says, and he doesn’t know if it’s the words, or that Tim remembered something that Alex blurted with almost no explanation in the middle of half-panicking, and must have looked it up to decide it was worth saying, that has him feeling like he can’t breathe. There’s a noise nearby and Tim steps back to a safe distance, but Alex thinks that anyone looking at him could tell exactly what they were just doing. They go back to the run-down hotel and pull each other’s damp clothes off and fuck again and doze. When they finally go back outside to find dinner, it’s dark and the clouds are gone, the moon reflecting off the wet streets. It’s good that they aren’t somewhere that the two of them could get married, because otherwise Alex thinks he might do something very stupid.
“How was Italy?” Wood asks when they get back.
Tim glances at Alex. “Good. Real good. Laid on a beach and drank a whole lotta wine.”
“Right,” Wood says, and doesn’t roll his eyes too obviously.
“An Italian would spit on this meal for calling itself chicken parm,” Alex says. [Latin, spuere—Greek, ptuein, like ptooey—everyone had their own ideas of what it sounded like.]
“Really hock it up and spit, not just casually,” Tim adds. “The food there was fucking amazing.”
“Gutterson, everybody knows you’ll eat anything,” Muñoz calls from down the table. “Bet you ate dirt as a kid.”
“I always liked that Oreo dirt, with the gummy worms in it,” Alex says, and Muñoz laughs.
“Next person can catch a scorpion, I dare you to eat it,” Tim says.
Wood reaches out and slaps his hand. “You’re on.”
* * * * *
“We find a scorpion on the way back, we’re gonna catch it and I’ll eat half and make Wood eat the other half,” Tim says as they sit up in their perch.
“I’m not going to kiss you if you eat a scorpion. You know the bite’s supposed to be incredibly painful even if you don’t get stung.”
“I’m not gonna eat the fangs, or the stinger,” Tim says, like that’s the stupidest thing he’s ever heard.
“Oh? So you and Wood, you’ll—what, spice it, roast it and then eat it?”
“Ye of little faith.”
Alex laughs. “You’re going to quote the Bible at me about eating scorpions? I guess I’m not sure Leviticus had anything to say about scorpions in particular—”
“That’s the Bible?”
Alex would elbow him, but Tim’s holding a very large gun and they both have more sense than that. “Please don’t eat a scorpion just to show the other guys what a bad-ass you are.”
“I did eat dirt a couple times when I was a kid,” Tim says in a very different voice.
“It’s good for the immune system,” Alex tells him. “And there are lots of minerals in it.” He watches the target leave his kid at school. “One of these days, I’m going to introduce you to my parents,” he tells Tim.
“Real fuckin’ weird time to say that.” Tim doesn’t look up from his scope.
“We’re only doing recon,” Alex points out. “It’d be insensitive if I said it while we were getting ready to take him out, but not that strange for it to have triggered the thought.”
Tim snorts. “What’re you gonna do, say ‘hey, Mom and Dad, here’s one of my Army buddies?’”
Alex takes a deep, quiet breath. “We won’t be in the Army forever.”
Tim only laughs, but it’s dismissive, as though Alex has said something absurd. “Sure, you could be a professor or somethin’, what the fuck’m I gonna do?”
“Anything you want,” Alex says. He doesn’t point out that, given that he hasn’t even finished college, the possibility of being a professor is particularly remote. “I’ll go back to college, and you can—” Tim never talks about what he might like to do. Tim’s never talked about hobbies or interests. If Alex asked Tim what he’d wanted to be when he grew up, he thinks Tim might have another breakdown. [Tabula rasa, the empty child.]
“Next time,” Tim promises.
He and Wood split a scorpion back at the outpost. Wood gags on it and retches, but Tim crunches it a couple times and swallows the whole thing. When he opens his mouth to prove it, there’s a little bit of blue blood on his teeth. [Blue blood like ichor—‘Icarus, take the middle way, in case the moisture weighs down your wings, if you fly too low, or if you go too high, the sun scorches them,’ drowned when he flew too high—] “You’re both gross,” Alex tells them. “Really gross.”
Tim grins.
* * * * *
They’re spending a full week of leave with all the other guys in Cyprus when the question comes around again. Alex already isn’t in a great mood about it, but Tim’s not wrong that every time the two of them go off alone together, it looks a little more obvious. And Cyprus is a beautiful place and their hotel rooms are next to each other, with balconies overlooking an old tiled fountain—all in all, there are worse places to be stuck with Tim and six more-or-less brothers.
Tim sneaks into Alex’s room late that night and then says, “One more tour,” before Alex can say anything. “Just one more, okay? And then I promise we’ll do whatever you want, we’ll quit and run off together.”
“You know they’ll send us to Iraq again. You remember what Iraq was like?” [When you die, there’s a vast desert to cross with nothing but your thoughts—]
Tim shakes his head. Alex knows exactly how miserable it was for both of them, and he wonders what’s so terrible in Tim’s mind about leaving that would be worse than that. “Just one more.” His face closes off. “You don’t have to stay.”
“Don’t,” Alex says. “Don’t say something you can’t take back, Tim.” His throat feels raw. [‘I only know that summer sang in me a little while, that in me sings no more.’] “Just—at least think about it, all right?”
“I’m not sayin’ anything I’d wanna take back,” Tim tells him. “You want to leave me, go start your dream, start college, learn everything—you go do it, and when I’m done in the Army, I’ll come find you.”
“How many ‘one more times’ will it be then, if I’m not even around to tell you that you’re being stupid?” [One last job—just one last job—]
Tim jerks his head toward the hotel in general. “Those guys, some of ‘em are married, have families, everything. They see ‘em when they’re on leave, between tours—ain’t that what we’ve got now anyway, more or less? You don’t come back, I’ll see you that often—”
“You’re telling me that would be enough for you?” Alex challenges him, and Tim can’t meet his eyes. “Look at me—you’re telling me it would be enough to see each other maybe two months out of the year?” Tim won’t look at him. “If I asked you,” Alex starts, and this is the wrong place to ask it, this is the wrong question to ask. “If I said it had to be—”
“Don’t.” Tim sounds like he’s in agony. “Just—” He leaves the room and Alex can’t chase him, not when they’re here with the others.
He’s always been the even-keeled one, but he’s angry, getting angrier, at Tim for acting like Alex is being—unreasonable, outrageous, harping on this. He hears Tim’s voice outside, splashing, and when he looks out from the balcony for a minute, Tim and the other guys are all sitting halfway into the fountain and drinking from bottles of zivania.
Tim doesn’t come back to Alex’s room that night, and why would he, after all? Alex hears his voice until early in the morning, and when he runs into Barry the next morning, picking at the breakfast their hotel serves, Barry looks pretty worse for the wear. “Didn’t let your boy drown in the fountain,” Barry assures him, eyes closed. “He was pretty trashed, though.”
“He’s not my boy,” Alex says tightly.
Out in the streets of Nicosia, he smells the smells of childhood Sundays—rose and myrrh—and realizes it’s Sunday. What better to do, he thinks bleakly, than wander into an Armenian church for services. He stopped going to church well before he left home, one of the few fights he ever had with Tati, but it’s like being ten years old again when he walks in. He always thought the icons were beautiful, even when he was terrified that their eyes were following him, but he can’t bring himself to kiss them the way he was taught. Armenian is all around him—murmured greetings, mostly, until the priest starts the service—and when the liturgy begins, the song flows around him. He remembers struggling to breathe with the weight of the incense, the heat of the room with so many faithful closed together, all standing and singing and swaying. There’s one old woman near him who catches his eye and smiles at him—not strictly part of the service—and she beckons him to lean down so that she can give him the kiss of peace when the time comes. “Krisdos i mech mer haytnetsav,” she says in a cracked voice, and the response comes automatically from his mouth. She doesn’t really look like Tati, but she sounds the same. He doesn’t take communion of course, but he accepts his piece of mas.
He leaves church two hours later with his head muzzy from the incense and his throat dry from singing the liturgy. If he’d hoped for some kind of peace or revelation or something, he certainly hasn’t found it there. The deacon’s recitation of sins for the public confession—terrifying when he was a little boy—only made him sad, made him think of Tim and how much he wants and keeps telling himself it’ll be all right, it’ll come in time.
“American?” It’s the elderly woman.
“My accent embarrassed my tati,” Alex says in Armenian. It was one thing to sing the liturgy or to answer a call-and-response, and he can still understand well, but it’s been a long time since he tried to hold a conversation properly. “Yes, I’m with the Army. In Afghanistan. Visiting here.”
“My name is Anahit, and you are welcome in my home for your meal,” she says. She’s speaking slowly, carefully, like she thinks his Armenian understanding is on par with his speech.
“Thank you—thank you,” Alex says. “I would love that.”
Somehow he’d imagined that Anahit’s home would be close to the church, when she invited him, but instead she leads him to a very old car and drives for nearly twenty minutes until they reach a massive housing complex. [Away with us he’s going, the solemn-eyed—for the world's more full of weeping than he can understand—] She leads him inside, up a very small beige elevator that creaks and jolts, and to an apartment that smells like home.
“Tati,” a very pretty young woman says, “Not another one.” She looks at Alex with a resigned smile.
“Er, hello,” Alex says.
“Oh! An American—Tati likes to bring home nice boys to meet me,” she says in rapid English. “I hope she didn’t lure you here under false pretenses.”
“Only lunch, no mention of marrying off a granddaughter,” he promises. “Sorry, I don’t want to be rude—I can speak Armenian decently—”
Alex spends the entire lunch in something of a daze. Anahit heaps his plate high with lamb keshkegh and stuffed eggplant, and he drinks tarkhun soda and then a cup of Armenian coffee, and he has to remind himself not to finish his plate because it’ll only be refilled. They would love to feed Tim, he thinks with a twinge, and then reminds himself not to think about Tim. He does his best to keep up with eating and Anahit’s questions and her granddaughter Mariam’s laughing apologies every time Anahit gives her a pointed look.
“She kidnapped you, didn’t she,” Mariam says at last, after Alex has protested enough times that he couldn’t possibly eat more. “I’ll drive you back into town.”
“Would you mind taking me to the Famagusta Gate? We were—I was planning to start there.” As they leave the apartment, he says, “I don’t want to disappoint your tati, but I’m not exactly—available.”
Mariam waves it off. “Neither am I,” she says, “but it makes her happy to bring lost lambs home to meet me.” She looks him up and down. “I can take you to the gate, but if you need a tour guide, it’s been a little while since I had a good excuse to wander around and show off the old city just for fun.”
Mariam doesn’t tell him much about herself and doesn’t ask him anything about himself, which is a welcome relief from Anahit’s sharp interest in him. Instead she tells him about the old mixed neighborhoods that Tati has told her about in turn while they walk along the Venetian Walls, points to the little Taht-el-kale mosque that’s been closed for decades, points to the newly reopened entrance to Ledra Street and tells him about Murder Mile, then up Shacolas Tower and waits patiently while he spends altogether too long in the museum there. When it starts to get dark, they go drink zivania with meze and Alex says, “Thank you.”
She looks a little startled. “I’m not paying for this,” she tells him, and then flashes a smile.
“Fair enough,” Alex agrees. “No, I needed to get out of my head, and—” He inhales sharply and presses his lips together for a minute. “I really appreciate this.”
“I’ll tell Tati that you declared your passionate love for me,” she says, and lifts a glass of zivania. “Kenadz.”
By the time he finally makes it back to the hotel, he’s pleasantly relaxed, enough that he goes out to sit at the fountain. Barry and Wood are both out there again, but Alex is honest enough with himself to admit that he went out expecting to find Tim too. “Hey,” he says. He wants to say, where’s Tim, but that’s a bad idea. “Have a nice day?”
Wood nods and lies back on the stone wall of the fountain. “I figured there’d be more carousing, but Barry’s got a weak stomach, it turns out.”
Barry snorts. “Who’s the one who couldn’t choke down a scorpion?” He eyes Alex. “You look weirdly chill, Petrosyan. Where’s Gutterson?”
Alex goes cold, though he tries not to show it. “Dunno,” he says, purposely casual. “I went to church and then a little old granny tried to fix me up with her granddaughter.”
Wood whistles. “Bold, picking up old ladies at church.”
“Well, one of us spent most of the day with a gorgeous woman and one of us complained about not enough carousing,” Alex points out. [Carouse—German gas aus trinken, drain the cup.] “You haven’t seen Gutterson?”
“Not since last night,” Wood says. “He went out when I finally called it.”
God. It’s not that he thinks Tim can’t take care of himself, under normal circumstances, and it’s not as though Tim didn’t used to spend his leave pretty drunk with his friend Mark, before he and Alex met, but—Alex meets Barry’s eyes. “Shit, he could be in Turkey by now,” Barry laughs, but he doesn’t look happy at all. “You’re supposed to be his babysitter, Petrosyan, and you ditched him for church and a hot chick?”
Alex hates that he doesn’t know whether he should just assume that Tim will come home eventually or start trying to call up hospitals. “They would put that on the news, a drunk American ranger wandering onto the Turkish side of Cyprus,” he says.
“He’ll show up eventually.” Wood offers his bottle of zivania to Alex.
Alex accepts it and mimes taking a sip, small enough that Wood can’t tell he didn’t. “Yeah, he’s an asshole like that,” he says, and it doesn’t come out joking like it should.
Daniels and Edelman and Muñoz show up as the night goes on, because Travis has apparently found a lady friend for the night, but Tim never does. When Alex finally goes to bed, he tells himself that it’s nothing to worry about, that he’ll start calling hospitals tomorrow if Tim doesn’t come home.
Alex wakes up to banging on his hotel room door. “Krisdos,” he swears, his mind still full of Armenian. He scrambles out of bed and hisses, “Tim, shut up!” When he unlocks the door and jerks it open, Tim almost falls through. He reeks of zivania and old stone gutter.
A door opens down the hallway and someone calls, “What the fuck.”
“I’ve got him,” Alex says, and he shuts the door.
“Sorry—” Tim manages, and more or less crumples to the floor. “‘m so sorry—”
God. Alex’s whole chest feels heavy, so heavy that the weight of it makes him sink down onto the floor next to Tim. [‘It is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in your corresponding quarter—if many miles of land come between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapped and I’ll take to bleeding inwardly.’ What an asshole Rochester was, and yet—] He hauls Tim up until he’s half-sitting, leaning against Alex. “Did you find my door first? Or just bang on every one of them until someone answered?”
“Can’t,” Tim says, and his head tips back against Alex’s shoulder. “I can’t—don’ fuckin’ ask me to choose—I just—I want you, I just can’t—”
[The lion had to let Androcles pull the thorn from its paw, didn’t it—Damocles wanted his king’s throne—’There was a sharpened sword above his head that hung there by the thinnest simple thread.’] “You know I’m never going to trust someone else to be your spotter.” It feels like his throat is full of glass. He wraps an arm around Tim’s chest and pulls him closer. “Only one more, promise me.”
“I’ll—make it up to you, promise,” Tim slurs, and that’s not the promise that Alex asked for, but he thinks it’s the only one he’ll get.
“Come on.” He half-drags Tim over to the bed and makes him drink a glass of water. Tim drinks it and passes out, his face slack in sleep, and Alex cards his fingers through Tim’s hair. His eyes burn. [Lacrimal reflex—the lacrimal glands flushing an irritant to protect the eye—Prometheus formed man by mixing clay with tears, Prometheus torn apart eternally for giving man fire—]
Alex wakes up curled together with Tim. Tim is flushed very red. “Sorry,” he mutters. “Guess you get sick of hearing me say that so much.”
“I’ll tell them you’re sick,” Alex says. “Food poisoning or something.”
Barry, Wood, and Daniels are all slouched around a table eating breakfast in the hotel’s courtyard. “You find Gutterson?” For all that he’s bleary-eyed, Barry’s gaze is sharp on Alex.
“Yeah. He’s—not feeling well. Food poisoning or something. He said he’s going to take it easy today.”
“Yeah, or something,” Wood mutters. He takes a roll out of the pastry basket on their table and tosses it to Alex. “Take good care of him.”
When Alex gets back to his room, Tim is sitting up in bed, hair damp, dressed in a pair of Alex’s shorts. “You—get to see the city at all yesterday?” Tim asks, and the roll disappears in two bites. “I know—”
They’d talked about what they’d go see, how much they’d have to stick close to the other guys, how careful they’d need to be. “I did, actually,” Alex says. He sits down next to Tim. “There’s an Armenian church near here. I ended up going, and on the way out a little old lady lured me back to her house with promises of lunch.”
“Oh yeah? It turn out to be built out of candy?” Tim sneaks his fingers up under the hem of Alex’s shirt.
“They go to her in the story, you know,” Alex says without thinking. “Their parents abandon them in the woods, starving, and they discover her house and start to eat.” He feels Tim stiffen. [In Cambodia, they laid landmines around the sacred temples to keep them safe, so safe that no one could approach.] “There’s an entire classification system for folktales, with numbering of all the basic plots—the riddle tales, the persecuted heroine, the animal bride—what an incredible project, to catalog the folklore and decide whether Baba Yaga should be the supernatural helper or the hungry witch—”
“So Baba Yaga brought you home from church to eat you?” Tim bites very lightly at his shoulder.
Alex looks at him and wonders how it’s possible to feel so many different ways about the same person. “No, she has a granddaughter, Mariam—the church lady, I mean, not the witch. Apparently she makes a habit of bringing home lost-looking young men to introduce to her granddaughter. I got to remember exactly how poor my conversational Armenian is while she did her best to fatten me up. You would have liked the food.”
“I like all the food,” Tim says.
“Yes, well, eventually Mariam rescued me and drove me back to town. She gave me a guided tour, more or less.”
“Oh yeah?” Tim’s voice has changed a little, and he slides his hand down from Alex’s shirt to his belt. “How guided?”
“It was a good tour,” Alex says. He shifts his hips as Tim unzips his zipper. “All around Nicosia, or what we could get to. Dinner and drinks too—” His voice breaks a little as Tim strokes his cock and kisses his neck at the same time. “God, Tim—”
“We can—you can show me today—”
“Tomorrow,” Alex says, as Tim leans down to take Alex’s cock in his mouth. “Tomorrow—I told the guys you’re sick today—”
Tim looks up at him for a minute, then pulls off long enough to say, “So we got all day for me to make it up to you?”
“Yeah, but don’t say it like that.” Tim sucks him in again and Alex tries to hold back a groan. The walls aren’t that thick. “I just want—God—” Tim spends a long time sucking his cock, long enough that Alex is having trouble holding himself together. Eventually, Alex says, “Stop, stop,” and pulls Tim back up. He opens Tim up slowly, even though he knows that at any time, one of the guys could decide to bang on his door, and he means to go slowly when he slides inside but he’s so worked up that it doesn’t go quite that way. Tim groans too loud—for someone so worried about being caught, he’s not that careful about the things that might actually get them caught—and Alex puts a hand over his mouth. The bed creaks if he moves too quickly so he has to slow down again, keep everything slow and deep, until he and Tim are both gasping and trying to stay quiet about it. He strokes Tim’s cock as he thrusts and Tim comes staring up at him, gripping Alex’s hips tightly. It’s the way Tim’s watching him that pulls him over the edge, and the bed creaks in protest.
He lies next to Tim and drags in a couple deep breaths. “Any water left?” he asks.
Tim gropes around and finds the empty glass from last night. “Sorry, drank it all.” He gets up and refills it from the bathroom sink, then collapses back onto the bed while Alex drinks. “Hope you didn’t need those shorts.”
Alex looks at the bottom of the bed, where the shorts that Tim borrowed are crumpled. “I suppose it’s worth the sacrifice.” Tim wedges himself close to Alex, close enough that their sweaty skin sticks a little. The only way he knows to apologize, Alex reminds himself, and drapes his arm around Tim’s shoulders. The fan overhead isn’t enough to cool them down, but he’s not about to risk opening the doors to the balcony right now.
“The other guys in our unit, they been talking about all gettin’ tattoos,” Tim says at last. “Matching ones, y’know.” Maybe that’s what they were all talking about, that night at the fountain.
“Are you going to tell me that you want me to get something on my body that matches Barry? Or Travis?” Poor Travis, everybody’s whipping boy because Barry’s kind of an asshole but also very very good. [Traverse, travail—from trepalium, the three-staked torture tool.]
“It’d match me,” Tim says, and Alex’s throat tightens. “I figure that’s maybe the more important part. Ain’t like we’re gonna just—get our own two, just us.”
No, it ain’t like. [Men didn’t start wearing wedding rings until the Great War, to remember their wives at home—thinking of the old lie, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori—about the same time the Army decided to give out two tags per man, one for the body and one for the records—] “And where are we supposed to get these tattoos?” He kisses Tim’s throat. “Trachea?”
“Seems like an awful dangerous spot,” Tim says, and Alex can feel the vibration of his vocal cords.
“Here?” He tries Tim’s collarbone, just next to the chain of his tags. The skin is thin under his lips—Tim’s never had a pound of excess weight on him. It seems like no matter how much he eats, he’s always starving.
“I hear it’s pretty painful, right on the bone.” Tim’s voice is uneven.
He’s broken out into goosebumps. Alex flicks his tongue against Tim’s nipple, then kisses above it on the right side. [Historical methods of tattooing includes a series of pinpricks rubbed with charcoal or ink—or scarification, with ink or ash added when the cuts were still open—signs that someone was an adult man—]
“Yeah—yeah, that’d be a good spot—” Tim’s half-hard again, and Alex is, improbably, getting there too—but of course he is, like their bodies know that they only ever have so much time. He ghosts his hand over Tim’s cock and Tim gasps out, “Not—fuck, no tattoo there—”
“As long as you never tell anyone how you persuaded me,” he says into Tim’s ear, and closes his hand around Tim’s cock. Tim eases onto his side and Alex sucks at the skin of his neck, too lightly to leave a mark but enough to make Tim squirm. The head of his cock catches against Tim’s rim and slides in a little.
“Fuck—yeah, I can—leave out some of the details—when I tell the guys you said yes—” Tim clenches tight around the head of Alex’s cock and Alex groans quietly. “All the—all the details—”
“Nobody.” Alex thrusts in and out with tiny shallow strokes. “Even after we’re out,” he says, and Tim shivers all around him. “No—no dinner party stories—” He tries to imagine Tim at a dinner party, emptying a platter of hors d'oeuvres, but his mind supplies him with an image of Tim sucking his cock in a coat closet instead, no fear of getting thrown out of the military.
“Dunno what—dunno what people usually say at—Jesus fuck, you just gonna keep doin’ that—”
Alex lets himself sink in all the way. “When we’re out,” he says again.
Tim jerks. “Yeah—when we’re out—no fuckin’ dinner parties—” He tries to thrust forward into Alex’s hand. “Just say you—oh fuck, fuck, Petrosyan—say you lost a bet or somethin’—”
Alex imagines, absurdly, some faculty dinner party, showing off a tattoo that matches Tim and saying he lost a bet. “No—no eagles carrying guns or something—” He can hear laughter out in the courtyard, and he tightens his hand on Tim’s cock.
“Howabout—oh fuck—” Tim comes, thrusting back hard onto Alex’s cock, and Alex can’t help the noise that escapes him at the feeling of Tim around him, the feeling that sweeps him when he comes. He doesn’t pull out, even though it’s a jolt every time Tim clenches around him. “One of those—one of those shapes where everybody sees somethin’ different—”
God, Alex loves him. He presses his lips very carefully to the edge of Tim’s ear. “A Rorschach test? Nerd.” [da Vinci used ambiguous designs to try to understand people—they’ll have to pick one of the cards to share—]
“You must be rubbin’ off on me.” Tim groans as Alex eases out of him. “Fuck, I’d stay here forever with you.”
No, Alex thinks, Tim wouldn’t, and that’s the problem. “Yeah,” he says, “me too.”
* * * * *
They get the tattoos done in Germany before scattering every which way to spend their two months of freedom before they all get shipped back to Iraq. God knows there are plenty of American soldiers looking to put some kind of ink on their skin. There’s a brief argument over which card to use—Barry wants card IV, Daniels wants card V, and Tim argues hard for card VI, which makes Alex feel warm because it’s the one he would choose too. Travis gets Barry to give up on card IV by saying, “You really wanna get a tattoo that looks like a guy with a third leg?”
Tim shuts up Daniels when he tells him, “Jesus, Daniels, we’re in the Army, not the fuckin’ Air Force, and you ain’t fuckin’ Batman.”
“Everybody’d fuck Batman,” Daniels says, but he gives up on it.
Afterward, they end up at a bar, where everyone takes turns buying rounds of alcohol. Alex drinks a little and watches Tim drink a lot, but at least it’s a happy kind of drunk. Barry comes wandering over with far too many shot glasses in his big hands and passes one out each to him and Tim. “Don’t be a bitch, Petrosyan! Baby’s first ink!”
“You’re making me regret this more and more,” Alex says, taking the glass. “What, you’re telling me you never noticed all my prison gang tattoos?” Barry laughs, and all three of them drink. Barry turns his head to shout something at Travis, and Alex asks Tim, voice low, “What do you see when you look at yours?”
“You,” Tim says, too low for anybody else to hear, but Alex elbows him anyway. Tim’s leaning against him, getting careless the way he does sometimes. “Barry’s mom!” he says louder, as Barry turns. “Shit, I thought that’s what we were all getting?”
“Fuck you, Gutterson,” Barry says, and gives them each another shot. “Come on, drink!”
Alex passes his glass off to Tim while Barry’s drinking his own, and Tim knocks them both back. Then he grins at Barry, pats his belly, and says, “Drinking for two.”
Barry snorts. “Sure hope it’s Petrosyan’s. If you’re keeping Travis as a side piece—”
“I ain’t the one who’d be knocked up if me and Travis were fucking,” Tim says, and Alex doesn’t think about that too hard.
Thank God, Barry gets distracted by betting Muñoz that he can hook up with more women over their two-month break between tours than Muñoz—a particularly stupid bet, since Alex knows they both have girlfriends that they’re pretty devoted to—and Alex mutters to Tim, “I can’t believe there’s something on my body that looks like that man.”
“Come on, you know you’d be sorry if he died,” Tim says. He tries to snag Alex’s belt loop with his finger, but Alex smacks his hand away before Tim can manage it.
“You’re drunk,” he tells Tim. “You’re stupid when you’re drunk.” Stupid and dangerous and—unkind to get too close when they’re right out in front of everyone else.
“You know you’d be sorry,” Tim repeats.
“Don’t say shit like that.” Talking about the possibility of Barry dying means recognizing the cold fact that at some point Tim could die, and every time they go on another tour of duty, it’s months more of risk. [Odysseus tricked Achilles into going to war—if Achilles had never gone, Patroclus would never have made his choice—] Alex is pretty good at not thinking about it, but for all that his heart twists and his lungs seize up at the thought of losing Tim, he can’t help hoping that, if one of them dies, it’ll be Tim. Not because he’s afraid of dying, though of course he doesn’t want to, but because he’s not sure Tim would survive it either.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” Tim says into his ear. He hasn’t been doing it as much lately, has trusted Alex to believe that Tim does want to hear it, but he must see something in Alex’s face now.
“Minefields,” Alex tells him. “UXO—indiscriminate danger, and how you’d say someone has a discriminating palate if they have good taste—”
“So I’ve got an indiscriminate palate—” Tim leans against his shoulder and gives him a little smile, like he’s trying to pull Alex off this path.
“A sunken Polish battleship full of UXO exploded in the 60s and set off a tremor that was more than a 4 on the Richter scale—how a rictus is a frozen grin or grimace, when it used to just be ricti, open mouth—Antony said Caesar’s wounds like dumb mouths, do ope their ruby lips—and then rictus took on the grim connotations over time, like a rictus of despair—and how appropriate it actually is, even though grinning sounds like it should be happy, because it comes from grennian, showing your teeth in pain or anger, but we took the pain and anger out of it so that grinning is only showing your teeth and we mostly say grin to mean happy—” [‘They beg the voice and utterance of my tongue--cry havoc! and let slip the dogs of war,’ after lean Cassius, who thinks too much, betrays Caesar—]
“Jesus Christ,” Wood says from behind him, “Jesus Christ, Petrosyan, it’s a party, don’t say shit like that, nobody wants to hear it.”
“I like hearing it.” Tim darts a glance at Alex. “Come on, you gotta like the part about the earthquake from an exploding battleship, at least.”
“Yeah, sure,” Wood says, looking between them. “Hey, Barry! Gimme one more round for these guys before they head back to the hotel!”
Tim stiffens. Alex takes both shot glasses that Barry brings over and drinks them one after another to distract from Tim’s reaction. “No rush,” he says, throat burning. “Let’s see how much more of Barry’s hazard pay we can squeeze out of him before he goes and blows it all in Monaco.”
Wood whistles. “Shots fired!”
“Fuck you all, I’m gonna win a million bucks and buy a Ferrari,” Barry tells him. “Gonna make Travis count cards the whole time and give him ten percent.”
Travis must hear his name, because he saunters over with what’s either a beer or a horrifying mixed drink. “Count your own goddamn cards,” he slurs. “Bet you’d be good at it.” He gestures vaguely at Alex. “Brain.”
“Nah,” Tim says, “I just make him look good ‘cause I’m such a good shooter. Gotta recalculate everything he tells me, dumber’n a box of rocks.” He elbows Alex.
“Yeah, you know this whole Rorschach tattoo thing was Tim’s idea? I’d never even heard of the guy.” Brady raises an eyebrow and Alex realizes, shit, he said Tim instead of Gutterson. “Timultuous,” he says. Those two shots hit him pretty hard. “See—Gutterson’s a boring name, Timultuous is funnier. Because tumultuosus is Latin, means lots of confusion—and they think the Latin might be like the Sanskrit word for noisy, you have to go all the way back to Proto-Indo-European to find their link, though, and there’s a verb, tumultuate, means start a riot—”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Barry says, “I can’t even tell if you’re insulting him or not, just have another drink.”
“I like it.” Travis pokes at the bandage on his chest. “Ow, fuck.”
“That’s our spotters, dumber’n a box of rocks,” Barry agrees. He actually reaches out and rumples Travis’s hair. “Good thing they’re so pretty.” Travis looks somewhere between startled and pleased to have Barry being openly nice to him, which is sweet and sad at the same time.
“Speak for yourself,” Tim says. “I’ma get more—you want vodka?”
“Żubrówka. It’s banned in the States,” he tells Barry and Travis and Wood. “Made with special grass.”
“Weed vodka?” Wood looks very skeptical.
“Holy grass.”
“Yeah, holy in the church of rasta?”
Tim returns with two glasses and gives one to Alex. “Hierochloe odorata,” Alex says, and all three of the non-Tim guys groan loudly. “Bison grass. Non-marijuana grass.”
“Boooo.” Barry dips his fingers in Travis’s drink and flicks some at Alex. “So close to being cool.”
He and Tim do stumble back to their hotel room together, later. Alex is—pretty drunk, the room not quite spinning. “You remember,” he says breathlessly, “you remember that first night—”
“Yeah.” Tim bites his lower lip, sucks at it a little before releasing it. “You know how long I spent thinkin’ what it woulda been like, I’d asked you in? If you’d’ve come in? How many times I jerked off thinkin’—”
“I’m glad you didn’t,” Alex tells him. “I’m so glad—” They fly back to the States tomorrow, he can do anything he wants, and he kisses Tim’s neck, his chest, catches the skin between his teeth and sucks a mark over Tim’s heart, just where the tattoo is on the right side. “It would’ve been one night and then we never would’ve—”
Tim slides his hand into Alex’s hair, pulls him back up to kiss him again. “I promise—I promise, this’ll be the last tour,” he says against Alex’s mouth. “I promise—”
Their two months race by. They rent a house outside Flagstaff, where neither of them knows anyone and it’s cold and clear and the rocks around them look like alien monoliths. After Tim says, “I could try sleepin’ in the same room, maybe, if it weren’t the same bed—” they spend an afternoon disassembling the bed in his room and reassembling it in Alex’s, and he still dreams at night, but Alex will gladly exchange a few hours of sleep disruption for having Tim there with him. They run in the eerie shapes of slot canyons [one-line sky for miles and miles] and go to the Grand Canyon and Tim buys him a telescope and mumbles, “I figure you’ll wanna see all the constellations, I read it’s a dark-sky city.”
“God, Tim,” Alex says, and kisses him for a long time. The telescope comes with a guide to the night sky, and they find Andromeda first. “Her mother said Andromeda was more beautiful than the sea-daughters, so Poseidon sent a monster to destroy Andromeda’s father’s kingdom. They chained her to a rock to sacrifice her—”
“Either this is one of those happy stories where a beautiful young man shows up to save her,” Tim says into his ear, while Alex peers up at the sky, “or it’s one of those real fucked-up ones, where the queen wants to fuck a bull or a swan or somethin’—” He kisses Alex’s neck.
“Happy enough.” Alex’s voice is a little shaky as he tells Tim about Perseus and Pegasus and how Pegasus was born from the blood that dripped when Perseus decapitated Medusa—Medusa, transformed into a monster whose gaze turned men to stone—the medusa, jellyfish, and a group is called a smack of jellyfish—in existence long since before Medusa would have existed—medusa is the name when they’re ready to reproduce—
Tim is never calm, never easy, but he runs and climbs and cleans and tries to learn how to cook without worrying he won’t have enough to eat. Sometimes Alex looks at him sidelong, when Tim isn’t paying attention, and thinks that if Tim just had something to do, anything, it might help him see that there will be life outside the Army, once they finish this tour.
On their last night, they take Tim’s bed apart again, move it back into the second bedroom, reassemble it, and then spend three hours in it together. “I promise,” Tim says again, when Alex is deep inside him, “this’ll be the last tour,” and Alex looks him in the eyes and wants to believe Tim so badly that he tells himself he does.
* * * * *
The sun is merciless. [“The quality of mercy is not strained; It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven,’ but this place hasn’t seen anything gentle in years.] Alex’s shoulder stings where he cut it when the ground went out from under him, and Muñoz put a pressure dressing on it because he thinks he’s really funny. The truck they’re riding in keeps wheezing like it’s going to give out, and they’re sprawled out in the back under the shade of a tarp trying to entertain each other.
“Okay, here’s one,” Alex says. “What's the difference between a joke and a rhetorical question?”
It takes Tim a second, and then he cracks up. “I hate you both,” Muñoz says.
“How do you tell a shooter from a spotter?”
Tim rolls his eyes. “One of them’s a ho?”
Everything goes dark.