The First Day Page 12

  I watched Oki bite his tongue. What did they get you for? He was careful to use his brother’s language.

  Nothing. Made up.

  What though? Oki asked. He was younger than Jonathan, by five years. He was used to this, I could see; of wearing his achievements lightly so as not to upset the traditional balance, of choosing his questions cautiously. On the few occasions Oki had mentioned his brother, the picture he had painted had been quite different. I was conscious of being brought into something, into a new relation, a confidence.

  Jonathan walked to the window, ignored Jasmin’s arm reaching out to him as he passed her. Drugs, he said.

  Trucks rumbled along outside, rattling the windows as though contributing to the conversation.

  But they made it up? Oki said.

  Jonathan looked out the window, peering up and down the street, staring purposefully. He didn’t answer.

  It was hardly any, Jasmin said.

  I could see Oki’s anger. So now what? Oki asked.

  Now he has to leave the country in three weeks, she said. Unless you can do something.

  Oki threw back her disgust. Unless I can do something? He fairly spat the I.

  I excused myself, requested the bathroom. I stood inside, listening through the thin door as the accusations began to grow, Oki being blamed for everything, his success a form of betrayal, as Jasmin had it. I emerged to see Oki stand up, shaking his head.

  I came because I thought you’d been treated unfairly. But you haven’t. There’s nothing I can do.

  Jonathan turned from the window and looked at his brother. Fuck you, he said.

  Oki picked up his bag, nodded to me.

  We walked down the stairs, out into the street. Jonathan leaned out of the window. Fuck you, Oki. I don’t need you. His voice carried. People turned around, followed the sound. Oki stopped for a moment, looked up, then walked on. Fuck you, the voice at his back continued. You piece of shit. You fucking piece of shit.

  We hardly spoke on the train home. Oki simmered, his anger close to the surface for a couple of hours, but by the time we reached Troy it had dissipated, and a melancholy had taken over. Let’s get a drink, I said.

  We went to a small bar on the fringe of the campus. We chased beers with shots, round after round, and by midnight both of us were well drunk. Oki lurched from moments of introspection, his head lowered, barely moving, to flights of bold declaration, anger beating a path through his thick verbs, mocking and hurt. I moved around the edges of his conversation, more padding than responding. I watched him and saw, for what seemed to me the first time, how raw and present were his wounds. Oki had always held himself with such swagger, such apparent freedom, that it was startling to realise how much he too was carrying. His family, I learned, had not paved the way for him to come to the US to study, as he had previously implied, but had rather felt it as unfaithfulness, and had paid him little attention since. They blamed him too, now, for his brother’s increasing difficulties; Jonathan, though older, had followed Oki a year after his arrival, but had abandoned his studies after just a few months, and lived thereafter on shaky ground, his student visa now legally useless. He had moved to New York and barely saw Oki, drifting in and out of informal jobs, soon disappearing almost entirely from his brother’s life, popping up—often unannounced—when he needed money or, once, when he was on the run from a dealer in DC, where he had been staying for a few months. Oki helped him out where he could, but still his family blamed him for Jonathan’s transformation, his increasing isolation.

  We staggered home, Oki much the worse for wear, leaning heavily on me. Oki was six foot two, almost half a foot taller, and we must have made a strange pair stumbling along College Square, a four-legged lopsided beast. Oki pulled up, asked me where I was taking him.

  Home, I said.

  My house is too far, he said. I’ll stay at yours tonight.

  I hesitated, briefly but consciously, and wondered later whether if I had given myself a little longer might I have worked it out; might the strength required, or the weakness, whatever, have come to me.

  We cut across the square, to my dorm block. I switched on the light. Oki switched it off again immediately.

  Jesus, Sam, he said. It’s the middle of the fucking night. He laughed as he said it.

  He pulled off his shirt and trousers and dropped on to the bed. I watched him, watched his scar hidden in the virtual darkness, felt I could see it even though I could barely see anything. I took my shirt off, and pulled out a sleeping bag from the wardrobe. I threw it on the ground and lay down on top of it.

  He sat up. What are you doing? he said. I’m not going to kick you out of your bed. You can sleep here too.

  It’s alright, I said.

  He spoke louder. Fuck, Sam, I’ll sleep on the floor then. You’re not sleeping in a sleeping bag in your own room.

  I’ll put it away, I said.

  Oki lay back down, turned his body to the wall. I lay down on the other side of the bed, hearing myself breathing, feeling that it was giving me away. We lay there in silence, me on my back, Oki facing the wall. I stared at the ceiling, the blackness slowly giving way to shifting greys and blues, my eyes adjusting, calibrating. I remembered, as a child, being on a bus with my mother, somewhere in France, in the country, late at night. I was staring out the window when the driver turned off the internal lights, and the sky, which just a second before had been a black smear, flooded suddenly with light, stars flung messily to every corner.

  I turned my head towards him, and saw the scar, the light skin upon the dark, a line flat now before me. I could not take my eyes away, and a feeling of sympathy hit me, not for Oki nor even for myself, but for all the people I had hated for refusing the temptation of my own. I reached out my hand and ran my fingers along it, a ridge where the skin had healed. I held my breath as I did so, waited for his reaction, his anger. But it did not come, and he curved, I was sure, his body ever so slightly towards me. I flattened my hand out, took up more of his back. I heard him breathing now, the slight quickening, the air coming in stronger, faster. I pressed heavier, unmistakable, and still he didn’t react, or reacted by not reacting, and my own breathing almost stopped, slowed to a still, long moment. I leaned over and put my mouth to the line, moved my lips along it. I moved my hand down his back, found the small valley at the top of his ass. I moved further still, under his boxers, the elastic giving as my hand went further, between and within. He tightened but stayed where he was, his breathing now slowing, sinking. I moved myself closer, finding him with my body, the gap closed. I moved my hand around and found his cock, already growing, and edged it through the gap in his boxers. I played the length of it with my fingers, gentle, and felt the weight rise in my hand. I moved my lips now to his neck, his ear, and still he said nothing, still did not turn, but let it happen. I pulled on him, my hand full and tight, and felt him push back, moving to my movement, joining me, participating. His chest moved, the air filling his lungs faster and stronger. He breathed louder, and I pressed myself into his neck as we moved quicker. He came in less than a minute, the low groan escaping him as though forced out, like an animal dying. He did not move though, did not speak, did not turn to me. I stayed where I was for half a minute more, pressed closely to him, still holding his cock as it retreated. I waited for something from him, anything, but he remained closed off, silent. I moved back, let go, and lay where I was before. I put my hand, wet now, on my own stomach, and stared again at the ceiling. The excitement gave way to an emptiness, flat, and I lay there unmoving until, ten minutes later, I was sure that he was asleep.

  I got up and walked the corridor to the bathroom. I washed my hands, my face. The mirror threw back more fear than I had imagined. I stared at myself for a minute, two minutes, but could not put words together in a way to make a coherent thought, except to realise that not putting words together made thinking difficult, an irony that at another time might have amused me. I did not know what to do next, whether to
return to the room or not. I waited five minutes and then retraced my steps along the corridor, committing myself to the truth of what had just taken place. I pushed open the door, and though it took a few moments for my eyes to adjust again to the darkness, I knew immediately that Oki was gone.

  The next morning I woke late. There was a lawnmower going already below my window; I remembered that I was supposed to be working. I quickly threw on clothes, splashed water on my face, and ran to the outhouse.

  The rota had me in the main college square, but because I was late someone else had been sent there. I was grateful to be exiled to the back fields. By the time I returned, later than my hours demanded, everyone else had packed up. The shed was locked, and I realised I had left my key at home. I didn’t want to leave the tools unattended, so I drove the mower across the campus to the dorms, half a mile away. As I passed the science buildings I saw Oki emerge, with a girl I didn’t recognise. He looked up and spotted me—I was no more than thirty yards away, and driving towards him—and I waved. He didn’t respond. Instead he said something to her, handed her his bag, and moved quickly back inside the building. I kept driving, and drew level with her. I nodded as I passed, and she smiled back, nonchalant, careless. When I reached the end of the street, another fifty yards further along, I turned to see Oki and the girl walking in the other direction. He had his arm around her.

  I spent the evening preparing for a test on the Monday, and waiting for some contact. My mobile sat in front of me, taunting in its silence. I moved back and forth in my own mind, from decision to decision, but could not, when it came to it, hit the button. I slept roughly, jarring awake three or four times, alert and expectant. There was no fear; it was a steady, austere certainty, hope draining slowly, blood through a pinprick.

  I didn’t see Oki all week. I thought, obviously, of nothing else. I began to wonder what had actually happened, the repetition in my mind breaking down, moving between memory and imagination, until I was uncertain which of the pictures I returned to were true. Oki’s skin, though, the smooth dark surface of him, was irrefutable.

  On the following Saturday I walked to his apartment. It was early, a little after eight. For the first time the ground had a thin grey-white crust; it crunched as I walked. I had a key, but didn’t use it. I knocked, at first lightly, then with more force. After a couple of minutes Oki opened. He looked startled, as though he had not expected to see me ever again.

  What? he said. The door was only slightly ajar. He did not open it further. Most of his body remained out of sight.

  Are we going to talk?

  He shook his head. About what?

  Oki, I said.

  There’s nothing to talk about. He looked behind him.

  I could feel my heart pounding in my chest. I’d always imagined that was a cliché.

  Look, Sam . . . Oki paused, stuck for words. Nothing happened.

  It did, I said.

  Oki moved forward, his hand reaching towards me. Even as I write this I watch it come, and feel a shock of joy before it touches me. I stumble back a few yards. Oki moving out now, into the corridor. He is wearing only underwear. It fucking didn’t, he says, maybe. I’m not sure. Oki’s fist hits me in the face as the words come out, and I fall, crumple almost. Another cliché: slow motion. Everything slackening. Oki’s foot in my diaphragm, pain the only speed, everything else heavy, sluggish.

  It didn’t last long, I suppose. I walk home, my ribs—one broken, I later find out—press against something inside, and I fear a rupture. The sky is dull, like lead, and I remember other skies, other days, like this one but not like this one. I am strangely satisfied. I had it coming, I think to myself. I had it coming. I taste blood in my mouth—literally for once—and swallow it. I raise my hand to my face, and remember, for the first time in months, and I am back in my mother’s bedroom, and the pain gets taken up, lifted into another pain. One pain becomes another. Plus ça change.

  Philip was dead. Inasmuch as absence is death. In the weeks after the attack (a spade’s a spade) he was hunted, the law and social media in unholy alliance. But to no effect. He was sixteen, and it was thought to be inevitable, a matter of time, that he would appear, either of his own volition or by the simple mistake of allowing himself to be seen. But he wasn’t. No CCTV revealed him, no cash machines, no passports. He vanished, sucked up into the air like Christ himself. What these days and weeks were like I know only second-hand, of course—even by the time I was old enough to understand, the stories had collected themselves into a sort of opaque myth, and the surfaces I scratched at revealed more about Orr and Anna’s respective ways of dealing than they did Philip himself.

  Anna encouraged me to talk about it, to speak of what I remembered, what I feared, what I hated. Perhaps she saw it growing in me, the event accreting, layer upon layer. I was so young that it didn’t happen only once but rather kept happening, each moment of recollection, as my vocabulary grew, not simply a retelling but a reenactment, the words themselves palpable, structural. The randomness—something happened to me—gave way, over and over again, to sharper, more brutal redescriptions, more specificity. For Anna, at least if I could speak it the less would those words own me, burn themselves through me.

  Not so Orr. I saw him less, of course, growing up. Sometimes, for months, not at all. Still, when I did, confusion carried; the bluntness with which he spoke to Anna was avoided with me. I do not know, even now, how much of that was a result of Philip’s actions. I was too young, of course, to remember how he treated me when I was an infant, though I have a vague, hazy sense of genuine affection. There is something that exists for me, too insubstantial to be called a memory, of his face and mine in correspondence, my smile learned from his, an unarticulated kindness; even—God help me—devotion. But after the event (event?), I remember (remember?) only reticence, a hushed stillness on his part. I do not know how much of this is my perception—when I looked at Orr did I see Philip?—or perhaps instead, or as well, he could not see me without seeing Philip, and what must that have done to him, what necessities of restraint must that have involved him in? Philip, in his absence, became more present than he could have imagined. Or a further perhaps—I raise my hat—he knew this perfectly. Philip the mediator. Except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abides alone; but if it die, it bears much fruit.

  But the boy himself, the body, the person—he was gone. I asked Orr once, much later—just before, in fact, he came to live with me in Brooklyn—if he had looked for Philip. I mean, beyond the conversations with the police and so on. He stared blankly out of the window in the room we were sitting in, high up on the side of the Cavehill, with views—not that he could see them—down on to Belfast Lough, and told me that, for the year and a half after he disappeared, he would walk out once or twice a week, the same time of the day, in the belief that Philip was watching. He would stalk the same route, setting himself up, making of himself a target. He was convinced, he said, that he would appear, emerge from some alley with a poised violence, a wail of anger. He knew, he said, that Philip’s ambition was him, Orr, and not me, that the wrath—I remember this word—he had enacted already would not be sufficient to him.

  But there was no appearance, no showing up. Nothing. The police, after the requisite few weeks, had opened a missing-persons case, but after a year of no sightings, they shelved it. Not closed it entirely; but it was widely suspected that whatever anger Philip had directed towards me had been converted into guilt, and that he had enacted on himself the remainder of the violence he had within him. Anna accepted this wisdom, or perhaps affected to accept it, providing as it did a line underneath it of sorts, even if only in pencil. Orr, however, did not. He resisted the shrug, the giving up, and though there was little else he could do, he still carried some expectation of return.

  I grew up, then, surrounded by nothing, but feeling the weight of it. Philip I remembered as a fairy-tale figure, the beckoning finger in the tale that promised and threatened at th
e same time, painted the picture and scored it out. I do not wish to make too much of this—I know—but it is hard to draw the lines, the connections between things, when the things themselves have such little form. The one thing I knew was that Philip was gone. My face was his last act, and then he disappeared, and was never seen again. At least, I knew that until Orr—as I was about to leave that afternoon—took my arm and pulled me back down on to the bench beside him and told me to wait. There was more.

  It was never easy with Orr. So many expectations in the first few years of his moving here were overturned that it felt at times like violence; as though, in my preconceptions being proved wrong, my father was actively correcting me. It was not like this, of course. I had, naturally perhaps, but unfairly, built a version of my father that was crueller, less interesting, than he turned out to be. But it had still pained, this encroachment of the real Orr into the image I had, and had been content with.

  He moved here, I should explain, because he was alone. His sight had begun to blur in his early sixties. He had ignored it at first, and continued to live as he had before, still preaching, pastoring, carrying himself with his regular swagger. But week by week things became more difficult, and eventually a young woman at the church, a nurse, spotted him struggling to read. He had got by for so long pretending because he knew the texts so well he could quote them. Within six months he had lost all the vision in his left eye, and 50 per cent in his right. He took it with good humour—we see through a glass, darkly—but he knew the direction it was all heading, and knew the comedy would be more difficult to sustain. I had not been to Belfast in a few years but I made a trip home, a couple of months after I found out. I asked him—his vision almost gone entirely by this point, already making his way around with a stick—if he blamed God. Your God, I asked, if he blamed your God. You’re fond of that possessive pronoun, aren’t you? he said, and when I ignored the jibe, he continued, blunt as you like: He’s taken everything else. Why not my eyes?