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In his spartan and very cold room in Holyoke Ren was burning palo santo and setting up on a tripod the video camera he had borrowed from the Hampshire College library. "I told you I'm not letting you film us fucking," Hux said from the door. He set down his leather satchel warily on Ren's floor atop a stack of his old sketchbooks.
When Ren looked up he had a limp and unlit cigarette in his mouth and there was ash on his face, as it seemed there usually was. "Please," he said, "that's so cliche."
"Then what's it for."
"I told you you owe me a favor."
"I do not owe you a favor."
"I couldn't sit down for a whole day and I had three lectures."
"The thing is I know that you enjoyed that."
Ren turned back to the camera and seemingly satisfied by its state of operation he drew his lighter from the back pocket of his hideous charred Carharts and lit the cigarette in his mouth. "Okay asshole, I did, but it was inconvenient. And degrading."
Sometimes he regretted even taking the Hampshire class, solely to satisfy his humanities requirement at Amherst, in which he had met Ren in the first place. "Fine," he said, "what's the favor."
"I need you to hit me, like as hard as you can."
"This isn't fucking —" he pinched the bridge of his nose. "You piece of shit. This isn't fucking fight club. We are — civilized human beings."
"Speak for yourself," said Ren. He cocked an eyebrow. Indeed he was an animal, Hux remembered. Often when they weren't hanging out Hux tried to rationalize the whole thing but it was harder in his presence to pretend it was about anything other than the obvious. Civilization vs. chaos, etc. Hux had read Heart of Darkness. Ren was like a human id and something about it was alluring because Hux was a man otherwise so principled. “You know you want to, Hux."
"I do fucking desperately want to but I can control myself."
"No you can't." Ren dropped the cigarette and ground it out under the toe of his boot on the carpet which was generally ash encrusted but especially around his futon mattress, lying on the floor like some cowboy bedroll strewn with Ren's clothes (shades of black) and open books, esoteric titles borrowed from statewide libraries and/or stolen from Simons’ Rock, most with their spines broken. "Come on," he said. He bounced a little from foot to foot like a boxer. "Beat the shit out of me."
Hux took a careful step. Under his foot something crunched. Likely it was a dead insect. Your naked back has touched this floor, he reminded himself. Your naked knees have touched this floor. Your naked mouth has been pressed very tightly against this fucking floor.
"I can give you an excuse if you want," said Ren.
"What's this even for?"
Hux was watching his red mouth move. On his finger he adjusted his Exeter class ring — his nervous habit since he had received it — and wondered if he should take it off. But Ren probably wanted to bleed.
"You can leave it on," Ren said. Sometimes Hux feared he was a mind reader. "It's for my Div 3."
"You want me to beat you up for your Div 3."
"I am not about to just write a fucking paper, Hux."
Hux of course was thirty thousand words deep into his American studies thesis at Amherst, which was about pre-1700 colonial government in Massachusetts and took, he thought, a refreshing standpoint on Cotton Mather.
"So you can say you went to Hampshire and got a degree in artistic masochism."
"Fuck you," said Ren. "You're trying to explain away the Salem witch trials."
"At least that's something that hasn't been done to death."
Ren smiled a little crookedly the way he did when he knew he was going to get what he wanted. "Now you're getting somewhere."
Hux took off his jacket and his tie and cuffed up the sleeves of his Oxford very slowly inch by inch because he knew Ren liked the sight of his narrow freckled forearms. "Are we fucking after this."
Ren shrugged like he hadn't already planned this complete encounter. "If you want to."
"I suppose you want to top."
"I don't know. I was going to feel it out."
"Don't fucking kid yourself," said Hux, "you always want to top."
"I don't always."
"God, shut up. Say something horrible so I can hit you."
"Have you ever hit anyone before in your life?"
"Not with my fist."
"What?"
"It was when I played lacrosse at Exeter."
Ren laughed his bright stupid cackle like the sound Hux had always imagined a fox might make. In fact though he would deny this it was what he had first noticed about Ren in sophomore year when they took a class together called American Legacies: Power, Performance, and Pride. That was the semester Hux had worn cravats for some reason and it was the autumn after Ren had had an internship in New York with a gallerist named Snoke that he said had changed his life. "You are the most repressed and disturbed fucking faggot I have ever known."
That did it even as much as Hux understood he was being goaded. Some tiny intelligent thing in the back of his mind said, do not give him what he wants. But when he thought about it really he was altogether too far gone. His first punch split Ren's pretty mouth and his second was to the gut. Yet three minutes later they were on the floor still mostly clothed and Hux, feeling drunk, tasting Ren's blood thick in his throat — altogether like some shade of primitive man — pulled Ren's dick out, snagging his roughened knuckles on the zipper, slicked it up with saliva and grasped it tightly. One of Ren's eyes was full of blood and wouldn't focus but he was hard and he was holding Hux tightly by the ribcage with his big bruised hands and Hux thought, disturbingly fondly, you massive pathetic idiot. Himself he had been hard since he threw the first punch. In the end it turned out they had forgotten to turn off the camera but in the wide frame of it only the crown of Hux's head was visible — flyaway red hair mussed from its neat slick by Ren's roaming hands — and all the panting and shouting and barked expletives could have been from fighting anyway.
At dawn Hux woke drooling on the horrific floor. His clothes were rumpled possibly beyond repair and cumstained to hell. Ren was already up and sitting in the window like a villain out of Nathaniel Hawthorne because his eyebrow would not quit bleeding. When he took away the filthy old t-shirt he had been holding to it to show Hux it was matted dark and thick with blood. Together in a heavy silence in the car Hux drove him to Urgent Care on Route 9 in Hadley. A pretty technician in pale pink scrubs gave Ren a set of neat stitches while Hux sat in a dizzying swivel chair, watching, itching for a cigarette. Then they went to the bakery for bread and coffee and ate together still in silence sitting on the old UMass crew docks on the Connecticut. It was Saturday and it was silent in the valley and the hills were flushed with coming rain and the sky was a pale soft gray over the river and the air smelled like Spring.
“I should have had you film that,” said Ren finally, with his mouth full.
“What, the stitches?”
“Yeah.”
He had not made any kind of grimace at all during the process and in fact his face had been very composed as it often was while he slept. And the only sign he had been in pain was that his big strange hand was clenched very tightly on his thigh. The technician had kept looking between them, because she could see Hux’s knuckles were bruised and bloody, and perhaps he had been looking at Ren with some more of that disturbing and in fact very livid fondness, but this was the valley, and as such she had to have seen worse. Now there was a tight gathering in the corners of Ren’s eyes which suggested the local anesthetic was wearing off. He reached across the loaf of bread between them and took Hux’s cigarette.
“It wouldn’t’ve been very good,” Hux said.
“What do you know about art, Hux,” Ren asked, but he was kind of smiling.
“I’m a historian; I know enough.”
“Your historical inquiry stops at literally 1700.”
“Shut up.”
“I’m playing devil’s advocate.”
“I know you are. But shut up.” Hux took his cigarette back and another crusty piece of the bread. “What are you cutting together this footage with.”
“You’ve seen the rest of it, I think,” said Ren. “All the burning stuff.”
“Isn’t it a little out of context with the burning stuff?”
“No.”
There were hours of footage on Ren’s laptop that Hux had perused once while Ren slept. He had borrowed the computer to “get work done” but had summarily been sucked into the vortex that was Ren’s video editing software and all the different untitled pieces he was working on, which included footage of him setting appliances afire with a blowtorch (“Untitled 6: Necropastoral Modernity”), draped in white robes in a wet field, in the style of Kate Bush, burning a pile of his black clothes (“Untitled 19: Vestment Performance”), burning what Hux assumed to be his parents’ effigies on a bonfire (“Untitled 25: Sins of the Fathers”), and burning assorted paperwork relating to his student loans (“Untitled 37: Performance After Gary Rader”). Hux had concluded that Ren’s parents’ divorce had fucked him up beyond what he’d assumed to be the norm. Not long afterwards he had shown up at Ren’s house before Ren himself did (later Hux learned he had been filming “Untitled 24: Blessing of Ashes”), was let in by a stoned roommate, and found in a corner of Ren’s room a sketchbook dating from his senior year of high school, containing lovely and vivid hallucinatory watercolors so layered and dense they seemed to vibrate — shimmering and fanciful acid-trip pastorals and forest scenes and run-down Adirondack towns in the melting snow with the ice dripping from the eves of the brick houses. And Hux remembered Ren was from Plattsburgh, or so he claimed to be, and that the name on his Hampshire ID card wasn’t Ren. Tucked in the back of the sketchbook was a dark polaroid photo of Hux himself asleep in Ren’s weirdo nest that winter, with his hair a mess and a bite mark on his shoulder. Not long after that discovery he had heard Ren’s telltale heavy booted footsteps on the stairs. For a moment he thought he was going to call Ren out but he didn’t. Instead he set everything back down where it had been and took out his Norton anthology and sat in the window.
“We should go back,” Ren said. Perhaps it was the fog but his skin was lusterless. “I feel sick.”
“You’ve lost some blood.” Some of it in fact was still in the crevices of Hux’s Exeter ring like a fake casting of dull gemstone. He wanted to clean it but doubted he would be able to get it off his finger for a while because the knuckles were swollen purple and thick like new growth on a maple sapling.
“Will you stay over with me? There’s a show tonight.”
Hux hated every band that played at Ren’s house and he hated most of Ren’s friends but still he said, “Okay.” He helped Ren up and they walked up the floodbank toward the car. When they were passing Hampshire it started raining but by then Ren was asleep. The fog was thick and cold as smoke in the hills.