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Venice. A Brothel. The middle of the night.
By the time he’s watching the conversation between his ship’s captain and the madam of the house, Arun knows enough of their language to understand what they’re saying. He learns the words of business— florin, lira, trade, contract — serving tea in the captain’s quarters as they pull into harbor after harbor on the path away from Delhi. He listens to the negotiations over muslin and indigo. He learns the price of the people in the cargo hold, but never has a clear enough grasp on the currency to know whether the buyers are being ripped off.
When the tea is gone they feed him simple verbs and nouns: kneel, strip, mouth, boy . Arun finds that it is better to hear what they’re saying than to feel what they’re doing. At night he tends to the bruises on his knees, the scratches down his back, and it feels like he’s looking after someone else’s body. He sits among the sleeping bodies below deck, washing the blood off, thinking who did this, what happened, it looks like it hurts.
He turns fifteen off the coast of Madagascar, eats hardtack beside a barrel of cardamom to celebrate. The cook gives him more than he’s supposed to and teaches him his numbers up to twenty. Arun forgets the kindness but remembers the words; the first time a client asks how old he is he knows the answer, quindici , but they’re pushing their fingers past his lips before he can finish saying it.
Dubai. The penthouse. Sunrise .
Louis picks up a little Bangla alongside the Arabic, says that they could learn it together if he wanted. He knows the importance of home, of being able to call a thing by its proper name. Armand thanks him for the gesture but he doesn’t see the point; nothing sounds the same as it did five hundred years ago. When they want to share a secret in public, they speak French. When Louis wants him pliant and open and hollowed-out, he speaks pidgin Italian.
Venice. The brothel. Sunrise .
The captain pushes for a better price. Arun learns he could have been worth more if the sailors and merchants had been able to keep their hands off of him. The men here like to break things, the madam says. They pay less for something already broken.
His eyes wander. Red silk on the furniture, lanterns hung from the ceiling. Muffled shouts and moving furniture on the second floor. Through an arched doorway he can see a girl a few years older than him, bright skin and dark eyes, grinding down on an old man’s lap. She turns her head so that he can bury his face in her neck, and for the first time Arun can see what it looks like when he crawls down into his stomach and waits for it to be over— when his body starts to move without him. He can feel the glassy look on her face; the untethered way her limbs move. She pulls herself out of it just long enough to give him a sympathetic smile, a knowing roll of her eyes toward the man.
Later, she’s the one who brushes Arun’s hair until all the sea salt is gone, slips scraps of fabric between his wrists and the bindings, says it’s not so bad if you do what they say. Look at you. They’ll love you.
Rome. A bathouse. A pale orange evening .
Amadeo sits dutifully still while his master bathes him, dresses his wounds, shows him off. He spends hours covered in other people’s eyes. I shall have to paint you someday , Marius says, scrubbing the last of the Delhi dirt from under his fingernails. You’re like a muse. Melpomene, do you know her? Daughter of storms and memory.
The first time Marius leaves him alone with a friend— the negotiations, the wink, the hands on a slow path downward— Amadeo feels relief before he feels anything else. He’s felt unstable since he arrived in Rome, tangled in the lines drawn between lover and servant and portraiture. But this, he knows. This, he’s good at. They loved him in Venice. Now they’ll love him here.
Sometimes, if it’s a particularly detailed painting, Marius tells him stories while he works to pass the time. It’s during one of these sessions that Amadeo learns Melpomene is the muse of tragedy.
Venice. The Biennale. The first time in four hundred years.
They tell each other that they’re just here for the art— that they’re both capable of walking along the canals without imagining what they looked like from the other side of a brothel window. That it isn’t the closest thing to a homecoming that Armand can stomach. Louis is putting on the costume and playing Maître more than ever these days, but it stops the second they step off the train in Italy.
As they walk through the rows of paintings, the myth scenes and portraits, Armand wishes he weren’t being so careful. Easier to let Louis break him completely than it is to carry the boy who used to live here, nameless, formless, home to an all-consuming darkness that gets closer every day to swallowing him whole.
Venice. The working rooms. The last time .
Arun learns pieces of Spanish and Greek lying motionless on the bed while his clients put their clothes back on. He learns to brush a hand down their arms when he laughs, to keep his mouth a little open and his eyes pointed down. He learns to leave his hair a little long so they have something to hold onto.
He drifts in the water below the brothel, half-asleep, dragged occasionally to the surface to look in on himself. He watches time pass like it’s an order he’s been given: wake up half-drunk in the salon for just long enough for a man to ask you why you’ve stopped smiling. Wake up in one of the bedrooms still tied to the headboard, the man who put you there long gone. Wake up hiding on the roof, sharing a stolen cigarette with one of the girls. She’s from Agra, fresh from the same journey you took around the Cape of Good Hope.
Wake up in the cellar for the first time in weeks, in the dark, starving to death. Above you a god with ashen skin and a velvet cloak, promising that you’ll be away from this place by sunrise.
Arun forgets to say goodbye to the girl from Agra. He forgets a lot of things on the road to Rome.
Rome. The studio. The first decade he remembers.
Faced with a dark hole where a boy used to be, his master gives him a new name. Amadeo takes it, grows around it, molds himself into something that suits it better. The boy, whoever he was, follows him at a distance. He cries when something reminds him of home, flinches when one of Marius’ companions stands too close.
Amadeo doesn’t cry. Amadeo can stay perfectly still when they ask him to. Amadeo kisses a middle-aged man in front of a picture of an angel, and the angel looks just like him. Or it looks like what he could look like, if everything about him were different.
It’s mercy. That’s what Marius gives him. He doesn’t know any other word for it.
Venice. The Biennale. 1954.
Louis talks to some of the artists, easy effacing Southern charm. He’s good at this. He could have been a great actor. By the end of the weekend he’ll have all the pieces he wants.
Armand stands at his shoulder, looking pretty, laughing at his jokes. It reminds him too much of the salon five hundred years ago, but that’s the point. Louis’ here on business; he’s here on penance. That’s the life they’re living, after Paris: the rich eccentric and his strange friend in the expertly-tailored suit. In public, they pass as human. In private, they pass as lovers.
The man standing next to them, a sculptor, takes a sip of champagne and leans in closer. Honestly, I don’t even like it anymore. I’d sell it for a blowjob in the bathroom at this point .
Armand excuses himself before Louis decides it’s finally time to meet Amadeo.
He walks between the pavilions. The air smells different than it used to: less paint thinner, more carbon dioxide. He tunes out the thousand pounding heartbeats and wanders into one of the galleries, and it’s there that he sees the triptych for the first time, that terrible gut-punch of an artwork that stops Armand in his tracks.
Three paintings side-by-side; three nameless figures. One hunched-over and long-haired, draped in bloodstained bedsheets. One on a pedestal, teeth rotting from a plague. One screaming and starving, blind on a blood-orange background. He feels like he’s going to vomit every single thing inside of him out onto the showroom floor. His stomach drops the same way it did the first time he saw the de Romanus exhibit in the National Gallery, with the knowledge that every eye in the room is on him .
The rich eccentric catches up with his strange friend an hour later, still frozen in front of the pictures. Armand feels as if he’s standing guard. Protecting the paintings from something. Louis followed the sound of his thoughts, disjointed, more sensation and image than words. Suddenly there’s a hand on the small of Armand’s back, a soft voice in his ear: Let’s go home, then.
They sit with him, the boy and the muse, the whole train ride back to the hideaway in Prague, like children on their mother’s lap.
San Francisco. A house on Haight Street. The early seventies.
Louis comes home from his ninety-sixth boy to find Armand sitting on the floor, hacking at his hair with a kitchen knife. Later, when the madness passes, he’ll admit that he doesn’t know where he got it— why there are any utensils at all in a house of people who never eat.
Dark curls fall in pieces on the hardwood and he’s surprised when they don’t turn to ash. It’s enough that I see him on the walls of every fucking museum we enter. Do I have to see him in the mirror, too?
Louis leaves again and returns twenty minutes later with a set of electric clippers. He gives Armand the manual as he works so he can stare at the diagrams, dead-eyed, studying the way the parts fit together.
By the time they wake up the next evening, it’s all grown back. You can’t change a ghost. You can’t take away paint that’s been added to the canvas— not without a great deal of poison. But for a moment he looks different for the first time in centuries: a little more boyish, a little more butch, the scar on his scalp from the corner of a Venice bedframe a little more obvious. Louis stands him up in front of the bathroom mirror, kisses his head, tells him he looks good.
Armand shaves his head every day at sunset for a week and then he gives up. Too much effort for something that really doesn’t change anything. Too much pain to watch it grow back again every time. It’s easier to let that spineless perfect angel haunt him through every shop window and public bathroom for the rest of his life.
Rome. The guest bedroom. While the paint dries.
Amadeo thinks that he would accept this as a form of payment, too, if he had to spend so many hours in the studio looking at his own naked body. He thinks that if the God he’s supposed to believe in now has any sort of divine plan for him, this is probably it.
Dubai. The penthouse. The interview.
Maybe if they hadn’t sold the paintings Louis would’ve tossed him off the balcony instead, watched him plummet towards the marina and finally learned what it felt like to be Lestat the night he rose two miles above the Rue Royale and dropped him. Or maybe he would’ve aimed Armand’s body more precisely when he threw it, made sure the canvas ripped and the frame cracked.
As it is, the paintings are wrapped in plastic on the back of a first-class freight aircraft. The second Armand saw Daniel glance from the apocalyptic orange canvases to his seat by the window, he had to get them out of his house. He’d posted the listing from his iPad while Louis waxed poetic about the nightclubs of New Orleans, desperate to get rid of anything Daniel could extrapolate from. He would have sold the de Romanus in the dining room, too, or burned it, but it’s one of the only survivors that wasn’t paid for with a night on his knees. Sentimentality is the wrong word for it. He’s not sure if the right word exists in English or French.
Armand stops begging for another chance the second he hits the concrete. It’s hard to form a cohesive argument when your skull is knitting itself back together; when any words you say will never add up to be greater than a pile of ash on a stage, a seat in a theater box.
Louis leaves without speaking to him. Suddenly there’s nothing in the whole of Dubai worth looking at.
Venice. The cellar. Too dark to know what time it is.
Arun lies on his back in the pitch-black, so still and quiet he can hear his body slowing to a halt. Sometimes he prays, not because he thinks anyone is listening but because he wants to remember the words, remember the way they sound when spoken aloud.
He knows he’s going to die. When the body goes long enough without food, it starts to eat itself. He tells himself it’s better than being eaten by someone else, but he believes it less with each passing minute. By the time the door opens and the room is filled with the blinding light of Marius de Romanus, he’s stopped asking God to be allowed to live and started asking that something better rise from the ashes of him.
Rome. The bedroom. The weeks of empty space between Arun and Amadeo.
He’s nursed back to health, bandaged and spoonfed, propped up on the pillows in Marius’ bed. The hunger fades with the bruises. The other boys wait on him, read him books all written in Greek, gossip when they think he’s asleep. He spends long hours staring at the city outside the window, or the mural on the ceiling: angels done up in hellfire red.
His new master paints through the night and sleeps through the day; at dawn he comes back and holds his face in his hands, checks to see how much the shadows under his eyes and cheekbones have receded. During Amadeo’s lucid moments, he feeds pieces of his own life back to him. There’s the record of his passage on the ship from Delhi, the receipt of his purchase in Venice. There’s his old name, a smudge of black ink in an alphabet he doesn’t recognize. There’s his new one on the invoice that brought him here.
Marius tells him the meaning: lover of God . Once he’s able to walk again, Amadeo spends his time searching the city for the face of a god he recognizes, for something familiar to devote himself to. All he ever finds is the stone-white face of his master.
Paris. A haunted apartment. After the fire.
Louis crawls out of his daughter’s coffin sometime in the late afternoon, streaks of blood dried down his face. He doesn’t speak. He curls up against Armand like something newborn, a child learning about death for the first time. Armand cradles the back of his head, whispers into his ear and cracked lips and coffin-dust clothes, apology after apology after apology. Every language he speaks, plus some that he doesn’t.
Now that he’s broken someone, he doesn’t understand why anyone would do it for fun. He doesn’t feel powerful. He doesn’t feel anything at all aside from the grease in Louis’ hair under his fingers, the tearstains forming on his shirt.
Armand grabs a handful of Louis’ shirt and holds on tight, breathes in the mausoleum smell of him. We’ll go to London , he says. Dublin. Wherever you want.
There’s no response; just another long hour in the dark.
Rome. The bedroom. Bloodless afternoons.
Amadeo speaks Italian, Greek, a little bit of Latin, a little bit of French. He doesn’t speak Bangla but sometimes he wakes up screaming in it, insensate. Marius holds him when it happens, lets him cry against his chest, tears on granite skin. He runs cold fingers over the puncture wounds on Amadeo’s throat, wrists, inner thighs. Mio angelo, musa, you’re pretty when you cry. He holds him until they drift back to sleep together, the coffin closed above them. If there’s any more nightmares, he doesn’t remember them.
Venice fades until it’s gone completely, replaced with a yawning hole at the center of him. It takes all the strength Amadeo has not to let anything else fall into it. Sometimes he loses his grip, slips back under the water. Wake up at a party, a young artist sketching you as you sit with your arms around your master. Wake up with teeth in your neck. Wake up and they’re telling you you’re twenty-three, ventitré , almost a decade has passed since you last saw the house where your mother raised you. Try to picture it: the house, the river, the market where you bought your food. Come up empty.
Dubai. The floor. The first hour alone.
Daniel leaves shortly after Louis, and then there’s nothing. Silence for the first time in almost eighty years. No sign of another person; no heartbeats heard through the walls, the turning of a page as Louis reads, the water running in the kitchen.
Armand paces the apartment, stubbornly refusing to let the dust settle. Every ten seconds he walks past the place where the Bacons used to hang. The cracks in the concrete expand, run a little further up the walls as they struggle against the weight of the ceiling and the stars above.
He stays there for days. Waiting for someone to find him, claim him, tell him what he is. To say: here are the tapes, that’s the sound of your voice. Here’s the new name I picked out for you, and here is what it means.
When he’s hungry he drinks from his own wrist, sings the old Latin, the only words out of his mouth his first hundred years in Paris. The excess blood falls to the floor, joins the stains and the skull fragments from where Armand was thrown. There’s nobody left to clean it up.
Venice. A gallery. The end of the Biennale.
Louis buys him the triptych. Pays for it with Lestat’s money, which is technically Magnus’, which according to the Great Laws is technically Armand’s, but it’s a matter of principle. They stand side by side as a team of workers boxes them up. He feels protective of them, somehow. He watches every movement, wishes he could grab each of them by the throat and say be gentle. No, even gentler than that. You have no idea what it’s like, do you, to be three monsters all at once.
The boxes are shipped ahead of them back to Prague, where they sit propped against the boardinghouse wall, watching Armand with eyeless faces as he eats and sleeps and holds his lover through long nights of grief-struck incoherence.
They’ll never need to worry about sun damage here. The five of them— Louis, Armand, the figures at the crucifixion— sit together, far too much alike, deformed creatures with teeth that shine in the dark. They all come apart in pieces.