tyger tyger
It was raining the day he met the boy with the green eyes.
This is what he allows himself to remember: the tracks of mud on the carpet runner, scuffed by suitcases and careless soles. The drum of thunder. The insistence that there was not enough room, and that it was—like anything else, he’d been thinking even then—temporary. The name, of course, the name, and the shadow of it. He silhouettes Harry’s face and first-night tears and cold-shouldered overtures and eventual late-night whispers with the shape of it, the whisper-soft darkness. The promise of temporary: that he would leave, on his own, that Tom would not have to make him. Even then he found it easier to begin something already knowing its end.
(Oh, who is he fooling? He allows himself to remember everything. There is no other choice.)
It is raining the day he meets the no-longer boy with the green eyes. (The world: blurred. Rain outside the windows. Stormcloud sky: bad omen, good omen. What does it matter? Someone is always going to die, anyway. Someone is always going to be left behind.)
Especially in a hospital, for that matter.
Tom makes it, umbrella-less, through the parking lot, already thinking ahead to the night shift, when a stranger forges up the adjacent path and an ill-timed step brings them into collision.
The error is almost insultingly mundane. Infinitesimal, for the way Tom freezes in his tracks, speared through and held fast to a world tilting on its axis. For an instant, he thinks of the boy he has allowed himself to forget.
Temporary, until a hand steadies him—another bolt of gut-wrenching feeling, part terror, part rapture—and he looks into Harry’s eyes.
The instant stretches, pulled thin, and dissolves into forever.
The air in his lungs vanishes and in its place blossoms a name.
He doesn’t realise that he’s been starving for it until Harry’s shoulder brushes against his and the wave crashes down all at once. Gnawing ravenousness. Want so deep it makes him feel sick, physically, organs crumpling in on themselves. Emptiness so huge it expands to fill all of him, lining his skin, curling round his ribs, one-two-three-four-five-twelve pairs, the false ones and the true, rounding his spine and his liver down to the distal phalanxes. Imaginary want pooled liquid in anatomical snuffbox. Imaginary hand tangled with his. How dare you, he wants to say, to spit, to cut with words and a scalpel, the sudden wild urge to rip something apart until the insides fall out. How dare you make me aware of my own wanting.
He looks at Harry, the long lines of limbs, the stiffness of spine, shoulders, back. He is more solid than Tom recalls. More distinct. If he has grown into himself it is only the mundane kind, the adult kind of being comfortable with loneliness, long hours, more time awake than asleep in a lonely bed.
—without Tom, a forbidden whisper rankling deep inside—it is only because Tom has always remembered him as wanted, by everyone, and by him—and the crassness of being like the common man, if he did care about such things anymore, would rankle too—and it does not seem real enough, tangible enough, ballooning drifting mist held up to the warm closeness of another person, small and huge in the hollows of Tom’s aching mouth.
He is so angry, and so empty, and between these two he thinks there has only ever been this, only this, nothing else. That this is what he is made of. That he can only hold so much. I would never let a thing such as love soften you, he thinks, bitter in truth—his truth, and therefore something true, made real by belief.
And still: You are my one exception, he wants to say, and it feels like truth, too, the storm of it, and he is in the eye and he is being torn apart, a man holding these opposing truths together in his mind, a man therefore proved sane, a man run deranged. There is some sort of supreme irony there, ironic in the rightness and righteousness: Tom. Love. Madness.
(Dead man walking.)
(Orpheus, or Eurydice?)
(I know the things you'd have me do while I hold you down…)
And still, his hand twitches, imperceptibly, without warning, without thought, toward Harry’s. His body knowing the risk before it registers in his brain. And still the bitter embrace. Evidence of a love that transgresses desire.
Exceptions prove rules. This, too, is true. But proof is treacherous, double-faced, and he no longer knows what kind of language he is supposed to comprehend. There are a thousand words he could say. Wants to say. Doesn’t know how to say. A thousand more that no longer exist in any language known to humanity.
The rain pools liquid in his clavicles. This is part of his notable traits, the points that chart a human being, the Tom that exists when perceived. Tall, dark, handsome, competent. Asocial. Lean.
A lean physique, yes. Easy to maintain when—well. What other hunger is there but this?
And then he realises. The feeling. What it means. (That long ago he allowed the promise of temporary fool him into planting the seeds of his own destruction.) What his lungs will flower for. For whom.
He realises, and he bites his tongue bloody as he shifts free of the man’s grip and strides away.