2
Winter had started abruptly while he was immersed in the ministrations of his head that day; a draft of snow curled his way as he trudged across the carpark. The one lamppost above his car, at the furthest end of the compound, flickered on and off ceaselessly. The light pouring down his cheeks turned his face sallow.
A wave of recognition washed over him: the overpowering realization that he was so weathered, dreary wrinkles above his forehead, the various dents in his face. A carton of milk, maybe, that had been run over a multitude of times, worn and fully disposable. Old? Not old. But things had changed with him. He looked around the empty darkness around him, felt all of it sink in his bones. He could die today, tomorrow, and New Haven wouldn’t bat an eyelid about it.
Erik knew he was long past his days; that when a detective started thinking about things like these, it was during their sixties, a time to live on retirement budget and attempt to forget a life of gore and death. It wasn’t a matter of finance that tethered him to his job, but this one was all he had. All he was.
Arms crossed on the steering wheel, he sighed, gave the Star of David hanging from his front seat mirror a tentative glance. It was all but faded in the darkness. With a deep sigh he got out of the car and heaved the body-bag in the passenger seat over his shoulder. LAUNDROMAT flickered in a cold, artificial light above him.
The autopsy reports would be in at top speed, hopefully early that morning. Erik had spent the whole day sifting through files, connecting notes from the recent murder to the one long ago, trying to dig up connections. He’d been there until he was cross-eyed for no good reason.
Clothes in, mind out. Time ticked by in the hollow corridor as the snow drafted and squalled, a creature of its own. Erik’s eyelids fluttered. The washing machine spun in never-ending circles.
Beep.
His watch? His phone? A coffee grinder?
He paused at that last thought (stumbled, not paused. To pause wielded a far greater connotation of alertness than he could muster at the glorious hour). Laundromats didn’t boast coffee makers. Sometimes the nice lady who worked or resided or hovered in this tiny square at the end of the block would emerge to offer him a box of complementary fabric softener as if it wasn’t commercial bullshit. Anti-static? Who the fuck in this economy was paying for that scam?
Unpleasant thoughts in an unpleasant mind. Erik indulged in them as his eyes rolled to the back of his head. The crisp white light from the ceiling pierced his vision, dark and bright at the same time.
War and Peace. There was a woman who held that book in her hands. When Erik first saw it in his greasy overalls at Gil’s repair shop, he had squinted, caught a Tolkien or Tolsoi or something, and then his eyes had wandered up the woman’s star-freckled arm, her unassuming visage tucked into a shadowy corner, and seen her nose, her crooked nose like an eagle that had crash landed and would never pick on more than lentils ever again.
It looked good on her: the despondency, the fat pages of a book Erik’s eyes would merely glance off of. She wasn’t beautiful, wasn’t ugly. She was just something different, a new curiosity in his daily scrap and tinker of metals.
“Excuse me.”
Erik’s head was tilted back against the wall. There were six more seats in his row; he was unable to find reason in the British voice’s request. He remained silent.
Mr. British plopped down next to him, the hem of his shirt or coat brushing Erik’s thigh.
“It’s awfully cold out. Let’s grab a cup?”
Erik heaves like he’s got the five oceans filling his lungs. Atlantic was salty this time of the year according to NAT GEO. It always seemed to be playing on his contraption of a TV when he got home.
“It seems we’ve both got five minutes till our clothes dry. Starbucks is just around the corner.”
Erik sucked a breath in through his teeth. He had eyebrows that could cut diamonds and some rather lovely locks too, salt-tinged from the blasting air and torrents of snow and matted well to his head, but they framed him like the Mona Lisa. Or The Scream. Erik remembered sitting in class in high school and thinking that they looked exactly the same, just that one version was painted drunk.
“Not interested,” Erik said. Nothing came out of his mouth first, so like a clogged up chimney he coughed out the soot and adjusted the crumply tie around his neck. It felt like a noose most days, which was as good a reason as any for Erik to keep it there.
Brit sat straight, back peeled off the wall. He smiled at Erik. Surely it was meant to be bitter and pouty—he had the sort of mouth shaped perfectly for it—but Erik saw something else beyond the teasing, some general good will he got from most people in Walmart when he wheeled his cart around with his badge and uniform.
“It’ll be good, officer. My treat to thank you for taking care of CT.”
“I don’t need thanks.” CT was one of the easier places anyway. He’d just been transferred here at the wrong time. Or right. All very subjective.
But Brit stood up and leaned against Erik’s washing machine so, being veiled beneath Brit’s thick coat, Erik couldn’t see the his clothes swirling inside. Erik cupped his face in his hands, mangled pink sleeves and dried blood lining his eyes.
“All right. Five minutes.”
Brit’s entire face lit up like it was Christmas again, that damned holiday where Erik refused to leave the house unless Magda pretended to be sick. Then he’d do the groceries and cook. Most days it smelled of burnt toast and it became something of tradition that they’d have a mini crackpot celebration of their own at home.
Erik lifted the huge body-bag from the floor to the nearby table. Washing clothes was the only habit he still retained from the “past”, one divided by a fine line. What happened before, and what was happening now. Spinning clothes grounded him.
Erik took another look at the Brit. Boyish cheeks and a gash across his mouth, vibrant red lips that seemed impossible in the harsh blue and white December winter. He looked like one of the boys who went to Yale, but why Yale when there was Oxford back home? He must’ve been sucking on chopped chili for the past four hours. There was too much in the smoothed-out lapels and the voluptuous visage of his upper lip for Erik to handle looking at properly.
“How curious,” was all Brit said. Then he put his hand out, friendly and terrifyingly American. “The name is Charles. And you are?”
The only other Brit whom Erik knew was in a grave, dead on the day before her court case. Her last words had been “For the queen of England,” and Erik heard it every night he went to sleep for months to come. It was good he didn’t sleep much.
“Trying to do my laundry,” Erik looked at the washing machine. Just over three minutes. “Or at least I was.”
Erik left him behind, but Charles rushed to his side like an eager pup. He could’ve been thirty-two or twenty-three. Somehow Erik knew he’d be wrong if he guessed.
“I know who you are, detective,” Charles said outside the laundromat, wind howling behind them. Across the street there was a seven-eleven sign erected next to a dead tree. “I’ve heard many great things about you.”
Erik felt strangely like this was a good moment to slip a cigarette between his lips, but he’d quit decades ago and had never had the urge since. Everything was slightly off now, canted to one side, displaced by an inch or two.
They started walking. Erik had his hands rammed deep in his pockets to ward off the cold. Charles had his out, gloveless. They were painfully cold to glance at, on the verge of frostbite with the brittle nails, but he seemed to like them that way. Just like Wanda, who took after his mother and after the unforgiving landscape of Poland.
Unforgiving? Flashes of running his hand through her hair while the two were crouched behind bushes, watching the bison move languidly across the grass. One time she walked up to them and they eyed her, all eight of those massive creatures, whiffing against the soil. Waiting.
“So you live around here?”
“No. I live in Middletown and drove two hours to this destitute shithole just for the laundromat.”
“In my humble opinion, New Haven has been one of the better places, though. You should see Hartford.”
“I used to handle cases there.”
Charles laughed. It sounded necessary, like someone had given Erik a much needed scratch on an itchy patch between his toes. But that was what happened with itches: they went away and came back twice as urgent, and suddenly you would’ve gained a dependence on your scratcher, a little like the junkies down at central.
Erik wasn’t in narcotics. It wasn’t his job to deal with the junkies so he liked to spend his mornings at the park there, eating artificially-colored crabsticks and mustard-drenched hot dogs that were buying him a direct ticket to testicular cancer. It felt like ages ago, though it was just last week he’d been watching a young girl dig around for a stash. Brown poodles barking. The man who jogged in circles as the sun draped over him, spilling over his shoulders, mingling with his sweat.
And it was clicking now—Charles, the park, a distinct memory of their eyes locking that first time, the recognition that something was different about this man in a way Erik couldn’t pinpoint. It irked him, nagged at his brain, but the cases afterwards placated him. They always did.
“Ah,” Charles said. “It’s clicked, hasn’t it?”
They were standing under the streetlight now, and the way a dimple formed on Charles’s left cheek made Erik want to slap him. He had a face that asked to be hit. Erik caught himself, thought that his work was getting to him, and smoothed the crease between his own brows.
Charles pushed the door open, turning so Erik couldn’t see his expression. He ordered a flat white, lactose-free, a dash of cinnamon and get rid of the foam please, thank you. Erik watched him, a little stumped, no more lavish with the hard planes of his face than the barista who was punching shit in the register, exhausted and eager for the night to end.
Erik proceeded with half a shot of café latte (basically milk) and the gambit began. Two men one bill. Charles paid. He had the good-natured kind of face that looked like it was born to pay anyway. Erik said nothing, though he knew he’d feel foolish about it later.
There was only one lone figure curled on a couch, laptop screen casting a supernatural glow on their face. Erik checked his watch, saw that he’d be running late today (yesterday? Tomorrow? Time had broken the fifth wall long ago) and for once felt like he couldn’t give an ass about it.
“You know what?” Charles asked when he passed Erik his drink. Erik didn’t hold it by the sleeve. He knew what. Had seen it in his eyes, the pretty brown hair, furtive licks of his lips.
They went back, got their clothes packed up and then for once in the past five years someone who didn’t wear the uniform was seated in Erik’s car. Erik drove them to his flat, the derelict one near HQ that the owner had been fighting a lawsuit over, and when he switched off the engine and got out of his car Charles kissed him on his cheek to be sure the man wasn’t dumb.
“Yeah, I know. Just for the night.”
And so he had someone in his room now, a man no less who striped his coat off and hung it over the television where it glared at Erik, almost indignant. Erik peeled his clothes off and threw on some casuals, drugged into a hypnotic cloud of sleep by the milk, the soft, flexuous milk. I’ll think about this in the morning, he thought, even though his alarm clock was showing 4.04am already.
“You can’t stay forever,” Erik mumbled for the sake of having something to mumble, because now Charles was pressing up against him and he didn’t look anything like a woman, to be sure, but the red lips tricked him into thinking about Mags. She’d be fine with this. It was Jewish spirit to be kind, or something.
“Mm,” Charles purred. “Thank you. It’s hard to find good company nowadays.”
“You stink.”
Charles leaned into him with that quirky smile on his lips, his red lips scorching. If he kept smiling like that the sun was going to explode from sheer shame. “I’m afraid I’m too tired now, to shower, even if you were to run the heater for me.”
Erik’s nose had been assailed by everything from maggot-ringed bodies by lakesides to festering bodies in elevators. Nothing smelled like anything anymore. Stinking was just a fact, an observation, the way one would look at the word toothbrush on a grocery list and go to the aisle for it. Was there an aisle to politely decline a stranger crawling into his bed? Perhaps, but Erik hadn’t seen it before.
“I trust you not to nick.”
Charles’s laundry haul comprised of clean cashmeres and corduroys that weren’t appropriate for spinning. He also had a Rolex around the bony taper of his wrist, but that could be a cheap imitation, only that it wasn’t.
There were not a great many things to nick in the tiny room anyway besides the square TV, copies of crime files and foul socks kicked under the bed. Charles belonged somewhere with teapots and porcelain busts, but he slept like a baby anyway in the ruddy flat.
Erik did too. Though sleep was a loose word, and he felt more like he’d been floating above his mattress for the single hour before work. The sheets were moving under him. Charles had slipped his hand under his waistband and was tugging himself lazily beneath the sheets. Erik didn’t know what happened. He didn’t want to, and when the alarm went off he sat up to the pretty boy next to him fast asleep, his cheeks just a little flushed.
Supposedly there was something in Erik’s lazy pit bull eyes or brisk manners that was very attractive. Erik got up, threw his shirt on and called Quested because calling a stranger was decidedly better than calling Nur. He stared at the pockmarked wall as they talked.
“News?”
“No.” His voice was primed, devoid of sleep. Newbies were always like that. They wasted energy when it wasn’t needed only to be out-of-commission when it was. “Nothing new. I’ve been talking to Mortimer and he’s processing the body as quickly as he can. Says what he’s got now is a 3D render of the blade. Sent you a copy of the file.”
“Good. See you in.”
Erik got his laptop running while he had a cup of coffee, then two more shots when that wasn’t enough. The knife was general, an unimpressive clay mold, but there was the estimated length of it and the depth of the incision that he burned to the back of his mind.
Charles shifted behind him. Erik had packed his case by the time Charles was awake, hands stretched over his head. Whatever he’d been doing under the sheets last night, he clearly didn’t think Erik was aware.
The message got across anyway. Charles was a sight there, wooly sweater slipping off a shoulder, his hair a tossed-up mess. There were those doll eyes, his cupid lip’s slightly parted to say something, but neither of them had figured out what.
“Listen,” Erik said. “You leave when you’re ready. That could be this morning or afternoon—no later. I’m not gay. I have—“
Had past relationships with women? He puzzled over what he could say that was true and sounded right to himself. He glanced at his left hand, the ring that used to adorn his fourth finger. Days when he used to wonder how he’d ever been alive without it, the accumulation of his life honed into that one throwaway job he did for a place to sleep in the Polish countryside. Bzzt. Oil-slicked fingers. You’ve grease on your forehead, Kochanie.
“No, you’re not,” Charles smiled, gently this time, like he saw through the hardness in Erik’s eyes and was trying not to hurt his inflamed heart. “But you’ll call me, won’t you.”
And it wasn’t a question. Maybe Charles had laid it all out, every connotation from the way he said that excuse me to the half-hearted masturbation and Erik was just too absorbed and tired to think about it all.
He wound himself back. Put the recent murder to the back of his head, and studied Charles with a clear head. Wealthy, a fox’s way with words, a proposition of some sort then. The night felt like a test Erik had written without knowing. He got the impression that Charles had been following him around for a bit and shivered at the thought. The best stalkers blended in.
“If that’s what it takes to get you to leave.”
Charles crawled out of the bed, naked from the navel down. Erik wasn’t sure where to put his eyes at first. They slipped away in every uncomfortable direction away from his crotch. Then Charles was in front of him. He took Erik’s hand in his and placed it on the left side of his belly. Charles sucked in a tedious breath when Erik continued to stare blankly at him.
“You don’t remember at all?”
And there it was, the trick of light, Charles stepping back for it all to come together. There was a small scar on his side where he’d put Erik’s palm that could’ve easily been mistaken for a birthmark. A bullet wound, miraculously superficial.
“Professor?”
Charles blinked. Or winked. They looked like the same thing, wielded the same powers. He was a goddess in disguise. That one.
“Your memory is terrible, detective,” Charles remarked. “It’s a wonder you got through high school.”
Erik didn’t get through high school, more because he had to work to help his parents than anything to do with his memory, but that was beside the point. “I thought you flied back to London,” he said, a breath of wonder in his voice now. “Put some pants on, please. This is very strange now that it’s come back to me.”
Charles took the towel that Erik had tossed on the bed a while ago. He draped it reluctantly over his crotch. “I did go home, but not for long. It was a surprise to see you here, even more so at a laundromat. I assume from the state of your living condition that you’re a single man now.”
“I’ve always been a single man,” Erik said, after he cleared his throat. It was in the sense which he heard it, singular in effort, singular in dedication to his work. Those things hadn’t changed about him. “And you’ve always been gay, then?” he added, lacking something better to put him on equal footing with Charles. “America’s the right place to do it anyway.”
“Mm, but I came back for you specifically. Had you not pushed me out of the way, I might’ve been paralyzed hip down.”
“You can thank me by letting me go to work, then.”
“Of course, detective. But I would really like to meet up again. So you will call me, yes?”
It wouldn’t be the other way round because Erik had his contact number in his file—information he lawfully shouldn’t access. But the law was just words on paper anyway, and it wouldn’t be the first time he’s dug through old cases to solve new ones. This was a personal case though, and Erik wasn’t even sure if he wanted to solve it.
“Sure. Now if you’ll excuse me—“ Erik took his suitcase, knuckles whitening around the handle.
“Not even a moment to catch up? My, this crass culture is scarce one I’ll ever get used to.” Charles tilted his head playfully aside. “Farewell, Erik.”
He was at the doorway by then, reminiscing the case that had involved one Charles Frances Xavier, the genetics professor he had so desperately gone to when the other forensics were slogging through the pile of dead bodies, dragging the days out until the case was sure to go cold. He’d saved Loren because of him and she was in Prague now, like all the other women in his life who knew that being around Erik meant underground networks and backhanded deals, people thirsting for revenge. It was better this way.
But Charles, he enjoyed it—fire burned in him for the danger. Adrenaline junkies and workaholics, both of them. An endless slough of obsessions and addictions.
Erik stopped at the door, one hand in his pocket. The day was much colder in the morning. He let it settle in his bones.
“Goodbye, old friend.”