It had started raining in the time it took for him to get down from a rooftop and take the six block walk to his—their—apartment. But he kept his hood down and let the water run down his neck, beading on tight skin while he bent to tie his shoe on the steps of the complex. A worm worked around a circle near his shoe and there was the intrinsic urge to step on it, because it didn’t really matter, but then there was the cracking bones or what he had envisioned to be shattering in his hands, their hands. The sunken black eyes of a god, a God, staring back at him. He picked the worm up and tossed it back into the grass.
As he came inside, the cool damp of fabric on his neck itched and he tore the hoodie off, letting it drag along the floor. The hall was barren, a silence lined along the baseboards stretching below flickering light. Golden arches of unordered numbers, a mezuzah on the side of number 74. His own footsteps echoed down into the elevator, second floor. He had looked over his shoulder twelve times since it happened. But the bitch of a bird was gone, leaving him, leaving them to wonder if he had ever truly been there. Wouldn’t that be a treat for whatever files Stark had on him.
Insane. Unhinged. Doesn’t know who he is—says it’s DID, but he may just be crazy.
Imagined talking to a god since childhood.
Different gods each time.
The doors opened and a boy looked up from the hall floor. Not a boy, his name was Peter, right, Peter Parker? Maybe. Wasn’t he like, twenty-five?
Wasn’t he in Queens three weeks ago?
“You’re back,” Peter said through a mouthful of a sub sandwich, lettuce hanging from his lips.
“Yes.”
“For good?”
“Who’s to say.”
He took another bite, started to stand but thought better of it and Marc moved on, hand on door number 62. There used to be a mezuzah on the side of this one, too, a lifetime ago. Maybe three lifetimes.
His fingers stalled with the key. “You get locked out again?”
“What? Oh. No.”
“You’re eating outside.”
“Yeah, well, I mean I can’t eat in there—I already cleaned.”
Marc raised an eyebrow at him before shrugging and unlocking the door, but before he could step through, Peter scrambled to his feet.
“Hey-uh, what are you doing?”
“Going inside? Probably gonna take a piss, then a nap.”
“No—“ he laughed a little bit and the key loosened, stuck inside the doorknob. “For Pesach.”
Was that already? “Uhhh…nothing.”
“It’s tonight and you’re not doing anything?”
There was a beige nick in the dark wood, big and bruised as of a shard of glass had ripped along the edge. Peter took a bite.
“I didn’t know it was tonight.” Abandoning the door, he turned to face him and hopefully make the awkward tension in his wet neck go away.
“Bet your place looks like shit. Kept thinking you’d show up eventually.”
“It’s my place.”
“Who was it this time, you look like you took a beating.”
“You should see him.” A cracked skull along the rims of eyes, his own hands, squeezing, squeezing.
We never needed you.
He had told himself, had told that piece of shit god that he would be okay.
“Well, you’re welcome to come over tonight.” Peter caught the last bite from the air and flipped a key from his pocket. “For seder.”
Taking his cue, he turned back to the door. “I’ll think about it.”
And shut it tight.
Peter had been right, however out of his place he happened to be. The apartment was a mess of blankets thrown over a couch, crumbs all over the floor and the faint stench of burning alcohol spilled in the carpet from a past fall. He slipped his shoes off at the door and pushed them into place, tossed the hoodie to the ground and stripped waist down. With a shiver, he went around and peeked out the curtain as the rain picked up, nailing into the window.
The rain slipped down the arch of his nose, past the cut and bandage and to his cracked lip. Blood ran down his fingertips, smeared inside a pair of perfect white gloves. Stop, stop. A cracked skull, veins of bone from his fingertips.
We never needed you.
The curtain slipped back into place and he scratched his thigh. There was no food in the kitchen. He brought a box of pasta down from the shelf and set a pot to boil. The clock on the wall clicked its tongue with every second, once was a comforting lullaby carving into the sides of his head. Like a Bloch composition, the low piano notes of Nigun and a final scratch of violin as the skull exploded.
Pasta bits fell to the floor and he kicked them underneath the stove. His hands hesitated over the water, and when his brain caught up he slid them gently into the box, swept the pasta back out from the floor.
And flushed the broken into the toilet. His stomach growled and he rooted around the freezer for a box of knishes. When he couldn’t take another minute of the lullaby, he turned the TV on. Across the hall he could hear elated voices in fast Yiddish and then Peter’s distinctly high-pitched voice called Chag Sameach.
He turned the volume higher.
And higher.
Until the rain stopped, and he rolled his head back to stare with unfocused eyes, breathing in and out in slow succession, counting each breath. Under his skin, their skin, under, under, under. He dragged his fingernails down his neck, and tugged the chain that lay on itchy skin. With a sharp inhale, he ripped it from his neck and let it fall to the alcohol-stained floor. Steven would pick it up, eventually. If he ever found it.
He would find it.
The sun fell in golden lines along his bruised arm, eyes fluttering open. For a moment, he pressed his bare palms to his arms, his chest, legs, neck. When he had caught his breath he sat up, hair between his eyes and mouth agape.
His stomach was growling, again.
He could reheat another bunch of knishes. Instead he stood.
He could go out, get takeout. He grabbed a pair of sweatpants from the floor.
And closed the door behind him.
“Chag sameach!” Peter grinned from the doorway, moving to let Marc in. Heartbeat steady in his throat, he came inside. It was…clean, not a single thing left out of place. Not surprising, they were the only two in the room.
“Where is everyone?”
“Oh…” Peter hung from the door as if deciding what to do with it, and Marc took the initiative to look further as if someone would be hiding under the folded blanket on the couch arm. Instead, there was a gray furry thing that jumped to the floor and passed him. “It’s just me. And Miri.” Marc turned to see Peter gesturing to the old cat.
“Pesach with two people?”
“I had nobody else to invite. Sorry, that’s…weird.”
Little bit. He kicked himself mentally, gave Peter a shrug. He had mentioned something about an aunt. And shiva. Months ago, before Marc had taken off with an anger and a bitter word to the only person in the apartment who had ever treated him like…like…
Like he was human, like there weren't so many things wrong with him.
“Not at all.”
Peter shut the door and ushered him to a small wooden dining table set with lit candles and a seder plate in the middle, a lone plate and cutlery set with a large bottle of wine. He stood, shifting a bit inch to inch as Peter got out a second plate and invited him to sit.
A tune played in the background of the dinner set, and Marc wondered if he was out of his depth, out of his mind, for coming here. Peter was speaking, though he couldn’t catch exactly what was being said with the music. He hadn’t been to a seder in at least a decade, the motions seemed to be stuck somewhere below the surface.
And yet, his fingers twitched over the matzah plate, pretending to straighten the napkin before clenching his fingers into fists at his side. Peter came back around to the front of the table holding three cups. Marc blinked as he set one at the end of the table, and one in front of him. When he went for the wine, Marc snorted softly.
“Frog kiddush cups?”
“Yeah,” he grinned and set the bottle cap aside. “You wanna do it?”
“You want me to make kiddush over a…frog cup?”
“His name is Falito.”
Now he really did snort, running a finger along the rim of the green frog-faced cup. The bottle of wine swung gently as if locked in a prayer with the piano and there was an odd sense of vulnerability, as if he were naked in the brightest room.
“I don’t really remember how,” he lied.
“You sure you’re Jewish?”
“Are we allowed to ask that?” Peter’s grin filtered behind the candle light as he poured them the first cup of wine as he shook his head. “Ethnically, more than anything. I’m not the most religious man anymore.”
“Me neither,” Peter took a deep breath but stopped, and shrugged. “But it’s…comfortable.” And then he started with Hebrew in a voice barely above a whisper and a shiver ran down his back, leaning him forward in his chair as if trying to catch every syllable with his eyes. He had almost forgotten how hungry he was until his stomach made a noise and Peter breathed away a laugh, finishing Shehecheyanu and they raised their glasses to each other.
The wine pooled in the pit of his stomach, a warmed contrast to the burn of whiskey and rum in his own apartment. When the last of the cups had been drained and refilled with a clumsy hand–Marc had to grab the candle stand to keep him from knocking it down–they moved on to karpas. Then to the matzah, a crack along the middle with one half hidden away at the other side of the table under a napkin.
When he was a child, barely six and stumbling around his room talking to…not himself, he knew it wasn’t himself. When he was talking to Steven. He remembered him and Randall running through the house like screaming beasts on the hunt for the afikomen. Randall always found it first, tucked between a book on the shelf or a challah cover in the drawer.
They would hide it in either of their pockets and give their parents wicked grins.
Peter was silent for a brief moment, an acknowledgement of the part they could not perform, the questions and the stories engraved in their minds and the minds of everyone who came before, of those who lived it. But they weren’t children anymore.
And they had heard the story enough.
They drank the second cup and then both stood to get the food from its stash, Peter handing still warm dishes of potato kugel, of tzimmes, of soup after it had been reheated.
“It feels weird,” Peter muttered after swallowing a bite of chicken and matzo ball together. “Without her.”
They nursed the third cup a bit slower, both already feeling too loose in the shoulders, in the muscles that stretched over weak bone.
Shattered bone, cracks underneath.
Marc swallowed but before he could say anything, Peter added: “At least you’re not alone.” How full had he filled that damn frog? His fingers tightened on his fork.
“I wish I was.”
Had everything they said on that roof been a lie?
We never needed you.
There was nothing left over his shoulder but a spotless kitchen and a small brown radio. Peter tucked his knee under his chin, elbow propped on the table to keep him upright. “You think there’s something wrong with you.”
“Well, medically, you gotta admit–”
“But there isn’t. And I know you don’t believe me, so I’ll keep saying it until you do–however long that takes.”
We are going to be okay. We are going to live with who we are.
Jake had walked until it started to rain, until they came closer and Marc had needed–had needed to see.
Marc grabbed the bottle and refilled the last cup, holding it as steady as he could over the third frog cup, then to Peter’s own.
“I’m sorry about your aunt.” He gestured to the cat curled in a corner of the room on the floor, a cheap boho style blanket dragged from the couch. “Is that why you got her?”
“Miri? No, she was my aunt’s. But…there was nowhere else for her to go, and you know, I can afford a cat. Sorta.”
“You can afford all this.”
“A lot of it was given. The seder plate was my uncle’s—not…Ben.” They brought the cups to their lips at the same time and something inside, a tension, an apprehension he had walked in with seemed to dissipate. An agreement of sorts in the wine in their cups, in their bodies, a handshake across the plates.
By the time they abandoned the table to lean back on the floor by the couch, Peter with his face in the cat’s fur and Marc’s eyes closed on the ceiling, neck craned and letting the coziness of wine warmth spread through his face and fingers. The rain had started again, gentle on the window, and the TV flickered with life as Peter turned on The Prince of Egypt.
He could go back to his own apartment and rest. Sleep this all off and forget he came in the morning. But Peter seemed to need someone, at least one person, and he could be at least one person for tonight. And maybe a tiny part of him wasn’t looking forward to a dark, empty apartment either. He reached for the box of store-bought matzah and took a piece out, crunching it as if it were the best thing in the world.
Peter leaned back on the floor and their heads knocked together, a cringe and apology and a clutched box of annoying laughter. The rain picked up speed and Miri wrapped her tail on Marc’s bare feet.
“Hey, how—um—how does Moses make beer?”
Marc pretended to think. His brother had a little joke book, long ago. They used to play shadow puppets under the light of two flashlights and stifle laughter with sheets.
“Hebrews it.”
“Hebrews it, yeah. Yeah?” He titled his head and Marc looked back to the screen. “No?”
“Dumb.”
“Ok…ok—oh! What shoes did the Egyptians wear during the plague of frogs?”
“Not the frogs.”
“The frogs are great, they’re my favorite.”
Marc spoke through a mouthful of matzah, “You have a favorite plague? Wait—what was the joke?”
“Open-toad,” he said with a small giggle. There was a beat of silence before Marc snorted, and they both started to laugh, clutching shoulders and falling onto each other until he didn’t know if it was the joke, the wine, or the snorting that had set them off.
“Wait,” Peter wheezed, words shuttering,”What’s your favorite?”
“Favorite plague? The tenth one.”
“No!”
“Only joking! The darkness one.”
“Oh, of course you would.”
“Of course.”
Peter scratched Miri behind the ears. “The tenth one isn’t literal, is it?”
“I didn’t think any of them were.”
“Frogs are real. Gotta be.”
Groaning, he pushed Peter back. “You and the damned frogs.”
Peter reached the remote, head on Marc’s shoulder, and turned the volume up just as Miriam and Moses were reunited. He pointed to the screen and muttered something to his cat and Marc plucked another matzah cracker from the box, heart settling down in his chest with his eyes fixated on the movie.