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He is like a hurricane, thought Nikolai as he followed Pyotr’s hurried steps, from one place to the next. He was going to make a revolution in the sewers of the city. And Nikolai found it fun to watch.
Days blurred into each other when you were bored, or high, and most days Nikolai was both. Destroying his own life gave him an unprecedented sense of agency, which he scarcely experienced under Varvara Petrovna’s watchful gaze. His heart was a cracked vase barely held together by glue, and the longer it remained intact, the more broken he felt.
Now, he made it his personal mission to fall apart, for he was born broken, and would always be.
Pyotr was different. He was an air-headed fool, and at best an incomprehensible maniac. He was an anxious ball of inexhaustible energy, believing that he was in control, that he could lead these imaginary people in his mind by the nose. He only very narrowly missed reality, this little blond bastard. And he had a very funny way of speaking, like he intended for others to see him as a fool.
What held you together?
Why fight for a worthless life?
As much as he mused about death, Nikolai couldn’t find the courage to die. The dead were no longer allowed to drop words from their tongues. And he still felt like he owed a confession to the world, to his audience, who sniffed around his life like sharks after blood.
He no longer believed in God, but God’s gaze had never truly left him. Knowing this filled his chest with ice. He was lying flat on his back, his eyes blood-shot from lack of sleep, and he snickered, thinking how he must have looked like a madman. The cigarette in his hand had already lost its fire.
He wished he could be mad.
“Penny for your thoughts?”
That voice again. Nikolai moved to cover his eyes with his arm, feeling his bones crack under dry skin. Pyotr was a cold, uninvited rain, knocking on his window at the most inopportune time. Nikolai didn’t remember why he decided to let Pyotr spend the night at his flat. Maybe he was feeling benevolent.
“The usual,” Nikolai answered, because he was bored, extremely bored, like a sea buckthorn tree withering slowly among the sand. “Nothing and everything. How annoying you are.”
His nonchalance won him a chuckle. “So you are tired of me, huh.” Pyotr said, and inched closer. Nikolai expected him to be warmer for all his enthusiasm. But no; when he raised his eyes to look at Pyotr, he found that the latter was unusually pale, trembling in Nikolai’s t-shirt, a size too big on his thin frame. “Luckily, I can’t feel too discouraged when nothing in the world interests you already.”
“Girls interest me. Drugs. Winning money in gambles.” Nikolai was whispering now, because they were indefinitely close, and closeness invented a fake sense of secrecy. Security. It was weird how comfortable he felt with the nightmare of the city, the sweet-talking devil, who shamelessly snuggled into his arms and yearned, in his silent way, for a love lost since childhood. “And you are but an unfortunate addition to the stack of things that keep me occupied.”
“So I’m useful after all.” He could not see Pyotr’s expression. But his words, too, came in a whisper. “I’m glad.”
The moonbeams, when they were not obscured by the city’s monstrous shape, shone bitter and sharp through the flitting curtains. Pyotr’s tone seemed to have stiffened with the night; Nikolai wanted to shake some life into him. So he asked,
“Do you ever regret it? Meeting me.” He decided to push an inch further. “Falling in love with someone who only sees you as a one night stand.”
Pyotr’s hair was silky and long, but it was a different kind of smoothness from a girl’s tender curls. There was a wildness about him, the impish little schemer. His hair baked through by the sun like summer grass, his eyes a flimsy grey woven like cobwebs, he was a wasteland forsaken by gods and men both.
But Nikolai could hear it, the wasteland’s heartbeats, the wailing wind that cut through its hollowness. He pressed his cheek to Pyotr’s forehead, and shut his eyes, knowing not what kind of changeling he had held in his arms.
“How can I regret loving beauty,” Pyotr tilted his head; his lips brushed against Nikolai’s chin. “When all around me are fools who have never tasted the sweetness of faith?”
“And,” as if in fear of sounding too much like a poet, he added rashly, “you’re still seeing me, despite everything. That’s too many a one night stand in a row.”
Only Pyotr could be smug and triumphant about this. Nikolai swore he could see the other man’s devious smile, stretched against his neck, a ripple of happiness that caused something within Nikolai to reverberate, an echo.
Did that make him Narcissus?
But he was so ugly — so ugly and messed up inside — he could barely tolerate the presence of a mirror.
After that exchange, they remained quiet for some time, Nikolai burying his face in Pyotr’s hair, and Pyotr clinging closer to his body, like an ill-minded butterfly obsessed with a single flower.
“Let’s practice saying goodbye.” Nikolai said, with no particular objective in mind. A light bulb, blackened from use, was dangling from the ceiling, and its dim light became suddenly too bright for his eyes. It was summer, but soon it would be winter. People lived and soon they would face death. Pyotr loved him, but soon he would be tired of it. Love was erosive; it changed one, in a bad way.
Pyotr pressed a kiss to his chest, right where his heart was. “How are we gonna say goodbye?” Another kiss, this time on his shoulder. “Like how we did every morning?”
To Nikolai, and he suspected to Pyotr as well, sex no longer held its initial appeal. They did it too many times to feel new. Different. And every time felt the same, blurring into each other, ecstasy fading into routine. But Nikolai would still kiss Pyotr and hold him and bend his body to his will, in a familiar, tired way, like a drug addict at the end of his life.
Pyotr was a hurricane when he trembled, begged, cried out in pleasure. A whirlwind of emotion and wanton, that just happened to satiate his hunger, for a little while each time. A hunger born from all that was unfulfilled in him, missing pieces that he didn’t know where to search for. A craving for the wilderness, the delicious loneliness. For something as hollow as himself to scream where he was silent, and to rebel where he was compliant.
Nikolai laughed, and Pyotr, half-understanding, laughed along. They did it for the first time that night; Pyotr had said he was too tired after going to the Mayor’s during the day. He was less enthusiastic today, and the sounds he made were hoarse, weak, a bird fluttering under him with hurt wings.
“We can stop if you want,” Nikolai told him, and Pyotr shook his head, almost too quickly, as if he was scared. It made Nikolai want to say something, a promise of sorts, that he wouldn’t love him less because Pyotr did not go along with his desire. But it was a lie because he never loved Pyotr, and probably hadn’t despised him since a long time ago. He couldn’t love and it was exhausting, it was exhausting because what he felt for Pyotr he couldn’t even vocalize.
Well, for one, he liked watching him, scurrying about doing god knows what. And he liked the way Pyotr’s body fit perfectly into his arms like a lost puzzle piece. He liked it when morning arrived and Pyotr’s soft hair was haloed in such light, his eyes half-lidded and voice heavy with sleep, and on those mornings he was Petya, Petrusha, Petrushka.
Then Pyotr would call back sweetly, with an angelic expression that would fool anyone into thinking that he was harmless, sheepish even. “Kolya.”
He watched Pyotr’s mouth curl around a silent scream, watched his eyes roll back and his cheeks flush with color. Meek, feverish red. Nikolai felt sick.
He heard something break inside.
Just as Pyotr loved the idea of an idol, Nikolai loved how being with Pyotr made himself break.
And who was Pyotr, exactly? Nikolai looked down and he could no longer recognize him, a thousand faces passing through familiar features at once. A crystallized tear. A wistful memory. A disappearing fear.
Fear: that Nikolai had thought it all too simple. That Pyotr had climbed inside him, unbeknownst to both, and became one of his very, very broken pieces that rattled and sighed.
Are you ever afraid? Pyotr asked him once.
Afraid of what?
I don’t know. Of falling? I’m scared of heights, and deep water. Not because they could kill, but because they lures one with freedom. But I’m not stupid; I wouldn’t jump.
Don’t you think life is a small price to pay for a second of freedom?
Ah, Pyotr was looking at him now, with eyes so dark that the tint of uncertainty almost drowned in their depths. He sighed like a cat and bared his neck, a dream undulating with tacit forgiveness.
All his life, Nikolai had imagined that he would one day be saved; for he was way past the point of saving, and all humans anticipated miracles. He was tired of playing others’ messiah, of the love that people suffocated him with.
Understand me. Know me.
Leave me alone.
“You are the sun,” Pyotr had said to him, and Nikolai, irritated, had called him a madman. But now he thought of it, perhaps Pyotr was the only person who would say to him, I don’t need you to save me. I don’t need to be saved.
Save yourself. For you were of use to me. You were important and I was not. I will have everything settled for you, I will bring you what you want, you won’t have to face any consequences for your action. But, for whoever’s sake, save yourself, for I need you.
Is this love, or is Pyotr also breaking himself, like a hurricane that dies destroying the world?
Is this love, or some sort of cosmic selfishness, chaos embracing chaos?
“You know,” Nikolai bent down and let his lips linger on Pyotr’s skin, pale, cold skin, with the reddest blood thrumming underneath. “I’d like you to stay here tomorrow, too, and the day after tomorrow.” He grabbed Pyotr’s hand and felt all of its callouses. “After that, I couldn’t tell. Maybe I’ll leave the city. Maybe I won’t.”
Pyotr brightened at his request. “Sure. Anything you ask.” He managed out, because his eyelids were already falling shut. But his lips were still moving, trying to form words. Nikolai held his hands tighter. “I think,” at last he said, “I think I’d stop loving you, some day, but not today. So use it when you can.”
Eyes closed, he raised a hand to touch Nikolai’s cheek.
So one day they would say goodbye, drift apart like nothing had ever happened. Pyotr would again plunge himself into darkness, and by then, Nikolai was probably already gone.
Breaths mingled in an everlasting farewell.
“I know.”
Nikolai smiled.
“Before then — come and fade me.”