Frisk: A Novel (Cooper, Dennis) (14 page)

Now you know. Here's what I'm hoping-you're who I believe you are, which means I hope you're like me, because we used to be so much alike, right? Trust me. I want you to live here with me and participate in this discovery, like we used to do in our teens, but with this major transcendence or answer I've found in killing cute guys. The Germans have gone to Portugal or somewhere for a while. So it'd be you and me. We'll do it ourselves. It's totally easy. Nothing's happened to me. I feel strong, powerful, clear all the time. Nothing bothers me anymore. I'm telling you, Julian, this is some kind of ultimate truth. Come on, do it. Am I wrong about you? Write to me care of the American Express office in Amsterdam.

Dennis

DENNIS. DON'T DO ANYTHING UNTIL I GET THERE. ARRIVING BY TRAIN 8 PM FRIDAY. BRINGING KEVIN WHO'S STAYING WITH ME. MEET US. JULIAN.

WILDER

1989

Kevin glanced up from his copy of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Book One. The train had sped two, three hundred miles since he'd last checked the view, but it looked like the same fenced-off field out there, only his face and Julian's were superimposed, and every detail, including them, was as gray as a silent film.

He kicked his brother's leg. It had wound up between his legs, resting against the right almost flirtatiously.

Julian's sunburned face spasmed, especially the mouth. "Huh?!"

"Your leg," Kevin said, lowering his eyes to the novel. This was the fifth time he'd read it. Its narrative felt like his ulterior life. There was a snapshot of him at ten or eleven years old with it perched in his lap. His eyes, which only seconds before had been deep in the novel, were fixed on the lens and resembled silvery, glistening caves to another dimension or some thing. He thought so. The shot belonged in one of those "unexplained phenomena" books, next to a crude little sketch of a UFO.

He read for a while, extremely lost, happy, etc.

He looked at himself in the glass again. It was so dark outside that an orangy reflection of Julian, him, the insides of the train, had superseded the view. Kevin's eyes looked messed-up in a positive way, like people's on Ecstacy. The train, other passengers, were just sort of there, a backdrop. Julian seemed nervous. No, not seemed, was. Nervous. Kevin closed the book arounda finger.

"What are you thinking about?" he said, swiveling in the seat to see the real world. It looked less exquisite than it had in the glass, much less than it did all dolled-up in the book.

"Dennis, naturally," Julian said, resting his forehead against the window/mirror. "Whether he'll actually meet us at the station. What he looks like now. Whether visiting him isn't totally insane under the circumstances. Why we're here. On this train, I mean. I don't mean why we exist, obviously." He sat up, grinned. The grin thinned immediately. "You look sort of . . . I don't know, carefree or something."

Kevin sniffed. "It's this book," he said, opening, reentering it. "I'm ... half with you, half ... in here. It's ... hard ... to ..." Tolkien's language began to affect him again. "... uh . . . " He forgot the train. Actually, a fraction of his eyes still registered it in a way, because he could sense his brother staring off, then watching him, then glancing around the compartment. But most of his thoughts trailed a handful of tiny, humanesque men around a sinister forest.

Gradually, like a filmic dissolve, his mind paved the fictional woods with that image of him at ten or eleven, his eyes full of Tolkien's fog. Perhaps, as Julian claimed, his face was just too near the lens and, so, slightly unfocused, but even if that was true, fate had unfocused him, he thought. Because it was the only great shot ever taken of him, or the only one where he wasn't compromised by the prettiness he felt so much ennui about. "Shoot." He'd just read three pages without learning anything. He folded the corner of page 121, shut the book.

A teenaged boy walked through the car. He was babyfaced, stoop-shouldered, six foot plus, wearing loose-fitting pale raspberry clothes, which only contributed to the sense that he was sleepwalking. From the loaded expression on Julian's fast-turning head, the teen obviously met some criteria of beauty. So Kevin checked him out too, or tried to at least, since he could never evaluate other cute people. He could only take sides, meaning theirs over people's who weren't cute. In this case the young brunet's, since at thirtythree, Julian wasn't particularly cute anymore.

The door at the end of the car shut behind the teen.

Julian untwisted his neck, smiled wistfully in Kevin's direction. "What's his story, Kev? I know he's not hot in the conventional sense, and I'm sure ... well, pretty sure if he was naked I'd yawn, but those clothes, that slight hunch, that spacey expression, those cut-glass features ... something there's devastating. You just want to ... I don't know what exactly. I'm not saying kill him, a la Dennis. Fuck him, eat him out, absolutely. But it's also got some sort of ... ethereal quality? Or no, less lofty-than that. It's more like-"-

"Amsterdam Centraal Station," announced a distorted voice. "Einde punt van deze trein."

Kevin shielded his eyes, pressed his face to the window. Amsterdam's skyline reminded him of a dessert tray. It was lighted so carefully, period detail after period detail, in such myriad of colors, Kevin wondered if it was being photographed for a children's storybook that evening. Or, if not, gee, what sort of people would live in there? He pictured friendly, bewhiskered, blond, diminutive types wearing quaint uniforms with a very slight fakeness around the collars and cuffs, like Disneyland employees. Just then the dirty glass wall of the station slid between him and that interpretation.

"Kev, hurry!" Julian disappeared through the sliding door.

By the time Kevin caught up, his brother was already out on the platform, talking with the teen they'd seen earlier. The teen looked dazedly at the back of Julian's hand, saying his telephone number in a weird accent, watching the digits appear on the skin in a craggy blue script.

"Please call, okay?" The teen smiled, waved, blended into a crowd of similarly dressed, equally tall people.

Kevin, Julian roamed the platform studying male faces. They didn't recognize any. No one registered them, aside from the usual gay men wiped out by Kevin's prettiness. Yawn. Julian raced off to check the crannies of the station. Kevin slouched on a bench on the platform, hugging his knapsack, head tipped back, thinking how palacelike the glass roof looked. He wondered what little changes he'd make if someone were to give the train station to him as a gift. Like would he clean off the soot up there, or leave the sky that swirly, dreamy brown? He was trying to make up his mind when he sensed someone eyeing him off to his left and turned, expecting to see the usual leering, mustachioed male.

It was obviously me. My brown hair had faded to dark gray. Fuller face. The same studiedly casual clothes. Bigger nose than he remembered. Same eyes. "Kevin?" Same voice. "Hey, it's you, right!?" I yelled. Kevin nodded solemnly. "You look unbelievable! Jesus! Where's your brother?!"

"Hunting for you," Kevin squeaked. He was practically strangling his knapsack. Weird. "You look, uh, nice too." He tried to recall how positive he'd been back in Paris, and how strenuously he had argued with Julian that my letter was fiction. At the same time he tried hard to loosen his grip on the knapsack but couldn't quite manage it.

I sat down beside him. "Kevin, I'm so glad you could..." Kevin smiled desperately at the far wall of the station, willing Julian to reappear at that instant. "... amazing discoveries I'm making about. . ." He could feel the small, fat rectangle of The Lord of the Rings, Book One, through the plasticesque fabric of the knapsack. "... because you won't believe how I can ..." He gripped the rectangle like it was J.R.R. Tolkien's hand.

"Dennis?" Julian traced my line of sight to Kevin's body. He'd drifted to sleep on my futon. "... uh . . ." Following the sightline more carefully, Julian came to his brother's ass. Ugh. "Listen, man," he whispered. "I understand the appeal. I mean of killing some guy you've completely objectified. Sure, sure. I can picture it. It's crossed my mind. Not as elaborately as it crosses yours. Still, you're actually murdering guys, and I'm not being moralistic. I'm talking fairness, which is not a particularly bad rule to live by, as rules go." He raised his voice. "You know?"

Sniffle. Kevin's head left the pillow, raised a foot, and gazed blearily at Julian. The lower half of his face had turned a moist purplish-pink with scraggly indentations; the upper half was the usual. If Opie, the kid on the old "Andy Griffith Show," had grown up cute like he was obviously supposed to, and not gotten chubby and bald like the actor who'd played him, he could have been Kevin's twin, minus a few million freckles. "Sorry, Kev," Julian said, grinning. Kevin lowered back down into sleep. "So, Dennis . . ." I was still studying the ass. ".. . why don't we take this conversation upstairs, eh?"

-- - - --- - - ---- Julian couldn't get over how otherworldly the windmill felt. The lower of my two floors was quite spartan, if livable, an arklike UFO. The upper floor, which he and I were touring at that moment, was a little bit smaller and extraordinarily dusty. Parts of the floorboards were stained with a black substance, shimmery as a dance floor, presumably dehydrated blood. Some young punk's, if Julian remembered the letter right. So these were the rafters the punk had supposedly dangled from, spewing stuff. Julian leaped up, grabbed one, did a few wobbly chin-ups.

Then he dangled there, spacing. I circled the wooden room, fingering my temples. Once, years ago, Julian had believed in some theory that criminal types had a black aura, halfway between a cloud and veil, which covered their whole bodiessix, seven, eight inches thick. In the right kind of drug state, the theory went, one could spot this covering. Julian squinted. I just seemed older, uh ... thicker, less sexy somehow, but no more physically dark than any thirty-three-year-old in inadequate light. Maybe my walk was too stumbly, or, uh ... Shit. I'd stopped circling, turned, and glared up at him.

"What's your verdict?" I mumbled. Julian dropped to the floor, lost his balance. Thud. . . thud, thud. "I think," he said, clambering to his feet. ". . . I think you remember our friendship selectively. Either that or I've changed a lot, which I doubt, though Kevin says I have too. Changed, I mean. Because that thing we used to do with the three-ways was druginduced youth shit, before I knew what I wanted in life, which, it turns out, is your traditional gay relationship with occasional affairs to keep myself alert. Anyway, no, I'm not interested. Sorry." He felt immediately guilty.

"But, uh, Kevin's always had this obsession with you, so maybe . . ." He froze. "Jesus! What am I saying? Shit. Forget that. Besides, Kevin thinks your letter's bullshit. I don't know what I believe, but I will say it's strange how you stare at him. At Kevin. It reads as desire, but under the circumstances, what's that to you? Because desire and violence seem inseparable, if I'm reading that letter right. I realize Kevin's cute. I've objectified him all my life in different ways. But he's my brother, which overrides everything technically. Point is, one, no, I won't help, and, two, lay off Kevin, man!"

I shrugged, nodded. My eyes looked kind of drugged. Amphetamine, maybe. Julian didn't know how else to place the tinniness of my expression. It didn't seem crazy exactly, at least not in the way actors' faces would suddenly lose it, explode. It was just a bit off, which is why he thought drugs, i.e., distortion, but ... "It's the weirdest fucking thing, Julian," I muttered. "About Kevin. He reminds me of something I felt before I stopped feeling anything. Pre-desire, previolence. That sounds ridiculous, I know. But I can't imagine it actually is, is it? Shit." I swayed in Julian's mind.

Something woke Kevin. It wasn't the voices upstairs, which resembled a clumsy drum solo, at least to his focusing ears. He hadn't sprung from a nightmare, because he either didn't have dreams or he never remembered them. Maybe he daydreamed so much that his brain used bedtime to take minivacations. He'd lie down, switch off, click, hiss ... That's how he imagined it. So what could have woken him? Maybe the windmill was haunted. He was positive the things in my letter were fiction, but say if they weren't, and there were these cute young ghosts drifting around in the mill in another dimension. He yawned, squinted, scanned the place. Nothing. "Shoot." So he made one up. A boy who looked like he did at ten or eleven, but transparent, frail, stooped, melancholy, whereas he'd been a bundle of nerves. Kevin made the "boy" float over shyly, hands behind his back, and announce in a wispy voice (this was the hard part), "Oh, I'm sorry to disturb you, sir. See, death is extraordinarily interesting and all, but sometimes, well, I get lonely." The ghost extended a see-through hand. Kevin reached out to grip it. That part was way too theatrical, he realized, for as soon as they "touched," the ghost not only vanished, it seemed like a corny idea in the first place. Besides, any ghost here would have to be nude, Kevin thought, and mutilated. He propped himself up on his elbows and tried again. The same "boy" drew close, nude this time, his hands cupping his genitals. Kevin had never seen anyone seriously hurt, so he just made the "boy's" chest look shredded, using as his model a painting by Rembrandt that some nut had slashed with a knife in some poorly attended museum. Cool, he thought, admiring his work. "Say something." The "boy" shuddered. "Don't be afraid," Kevin added. "I made you up, after all." The "boy" sat down gingerly on the edge of the futon. He seemed about to cry. Kevin smiled sympathetically, remembering not to try to touch the ghost, no matter how appropriate it seemed, lest-

"Tell me about him," the "boy" said, grimacing at the ceiling. He had a voice much like Kevin's own, though it equally resembled the sound of the little humidifier Kevin kept by his Parisian bed.