sonorant/dissonant | lethargic\entropic

“Goddamit, Max, would you just —!” Conrad called after the brunette, catching up to him outside the diner. “You’re so fucking … God, if you could just, for one damn minute, get out of your head and — You were dead, you son of a bitch!” The declaration was accompanied by a sharp shove to the shoulder delivered with one hand.

“You were dead and gone and it was important, ok,” The blond continued, frustration and anger simultaneously freeing and tying tongue and mind, voice rising. “It was important to me to get that useless shit. To get it and and to have it and to keep it out of the hands of anyone else. And you know what it did? It sat there and it reminded me — every goddamn day it reminded me — that you were gone and that thought killed me, Max. Every. Fucking. Day. It killed me. So yeah, I broke your damn door, because saving pieces of you was more important than preserving your precious fucking privacy because I needed something of you because ….” He turned, still checking his words for the moment, hands running over his face and back through close cropped hair, and when he faced the Italian again the defeated air about him was almost palpable. It had to be said, even though he had as good as said it before.

"Listen to yourself," he said with an eerie calmness despite his storm, a sea of smooth silver upon which the other was afloat. "You sound like a child, petulant because you can't have what you want-- what you think you deserve. Conrad, you have no idea, no speck of a clue how much of a burden it would be to be around me all the time, to see my face staring at you from a mutually shared doorway. You're lying to yourself. What about when I die next time? Or the time after that, or the time after that? What about when I die for real? You, a policeman, want to occupy your time with me, the gutter-rat that you are supposed to be catching? Just that thought alone makes you crazier than me."

The cruelty of those words delivery, though far from negated, was somewhat lessened by the Italian's perceived factualism of them. He disliked the thought of severing any ties that could prove (that had, indeed, proved) beneficial to him, but perhaps, in that moment, he disliked the idea of being yelled at in the street more. His ire-tinged compassion for the blond dulled into something more like resignation. Love and pain were all the same in extremes, right?

He was glad, though that word didn’t seem to quite fit but it seemed close enough to be the truth, that Maximo had been taken care of by what family he had. The thought of him being as close as Lake Michigan compounded an already absurd situation. Conrad thought briefly of the pauper’s grave he had visited, believing his friend lay beneath its soil, and the conversations he had held with himself at its foot, the promises he had made.

"Yeah. I do have that." The cop knew he should be grateful, thankful, to have even gotten so much as the illegibly garbled attempt at a letter. But more than intimacy, he supposed he wanted recognition, validation, of the grief he had lived with for all this time. Both wishes were startlingly selfish and brought with their realization sharp pangs of guilt. What was the hurt and trauma of a broken heart to a chest full of lead?

"Try lowering your expectations, maybe one day you'll be surprised," the brunet said, tongue sharp like the pangs that came creeping back to his chest.

On his turn, he ordered a simple BLT with a side of coleslaw and gave the girl an apologetic smile as she took their menus and turned away to place their orders. The Italian’s stare was met and maintained, Conrad fetching cigarettes and matches via touch rather than sight. One was tucked in the corner of his mouth, lit, match extinguished and discarded in the provided ashtray before he ventured to speak.

"My aunt's house on the shores of Lake Michigan, after they let me out of the hospital. She's my next of kin, though she probably wishes she wasn't. Who knows. Maybe the loss of her sister has hardened her... her eyes were so deep and sad when she would say goodnight or bring me a meal or medicine. I was too mortified to even look at her most of the time." The deeper currents of the Italian's tone were a stew of complication. Though it was easily translated that he felt remorse, pity, and embarrassment, those emotions were not reserved for him as much as they were for others. Regardless of him being a factor in the cause, he felt bad that his aunt was denied the happiness of a complete family; he felt bad that Conrad was that attached to him to be so clearly upset at his exit and entrance. But indeed, the pity was not for his manipulation, but rather for Conrad to even have those feelings at all - the weakness of co-dependency and fundamentally needing another human being to connect with on a level deeper than friendship. The need for love, that need he so sought to eradicate from feeling himself, regardless of how successful that may or may not have been.

It was a continuing struggle, too, to keep his hands to himself. Surely affection played some small role in it, but that self-same selfish desire to be reminded of the real and the physical carried the larger burden by far. In a small way, Conrad was glad for the still chilly night air and the overcoat it had forced him to don; its pockets kept him from being overly friendly, overly attached, overly annoying to the affection-shunning Italian.

He broke that barrier once. A bare hand reaching out and landing on Maximo’s back, it’s slight weight guiding the other back to the path the blond had chosen after the brunette had wandered too far astray.

“Not much further,” the cop answered, gesturing with chin’s jerk to the diner that lay just another block up. Conrad didn’t really think of it as ‘their’ diner, though they had been through its doors a few times before, drinking coffee as they each struggled with bouts of insomnia, but he supposed it could be counted as such. It was close and it was familiar and he was almost certain they could find a semi-private booth and, with enough of a tip, a waitress willing to leave them be.

"Toast," he said. The request was simple enough, but the awkward pauses between compounding additions made way for slight irritation from the girl.

"And an egg.

"... Fried.

"....... Hard.

"............ On the toast."

"................ With another piece on top. Like a sandwich."

It was a wonder how easily and quickly they fell back into the rhythm of their interactions. Conrad’s memory of his emotional outburst (pure, unadulterated truth, all of it) faded, felt as if it belonged to another person in another time, though it was his and only minutes old. How odd it was the way time worked and distorted and eased and comforted. 

“O friend, In the garden of thy heart plant naught but the rose of love, and from the nightingale of affection and desire loosen not thy hold …” Conrad laughed again, struck by the absurdity of everything: This night, this conversation, Max’s return, his own maelstrom of emotion. It would be some time, he knew, before the surrealism of the evening wore away; before reality fully, finally returned, but he was getting there. Every minute spent at the Italian’s side undid days of torturous grieving and sorrow. 

Turning onto the street, he passed beneath the glow of street lamps, past the blur of foggy clots of spirits and slithering trails of lights, the sea of stars that fell to Earth in a sluggish dump of rain-like moonlight rivulets. Through the primordial postulations posed from the anhelous atmosphere, Maximo walked in a delirious direction, not any which way that could have been useful to the question he had previously answered. If the sky was falling not another soul would have known, and this made him happy. Happy to be moving in the ditheric division between consciousnesses, the systematic separation of the torporific troposphere.

A question formed, abandoned; the would-be letter’s garbled contents sowed the seeds of further confusion, presented further questions in need of answers. Taking the moment to collect himself, to reign in the wild running of emotion, Conrad took in the entire picture presented: The borrowed jacket, the handkercheif, the careworn look of his friend’s face. He was certain most of the mystery’s solution lie in these images, but his mind refused to put them in place, so overwhelmed was it still with the reconciling of Maximo’s death with his apparent resurrection.

As if to reassure himself that the man was indeed there and not a cruel figment, Conrad brought a hand to Maximo’s face, fingers brushing against cheek, a lock of hair, before coming to rest at the nape of his neck.

"You were dead," he repeated, more clearly this time, though tears still showed in fierce blue eyes. "I came here to pray for you. I’ve been praying for you." As if naming those actions could somehow make sense of anything that was happening. "I’ve been dreaming of seeing you again … What happened, Max? Where did you go?"

Face haphazardly planted in an open palm, he looked aside to Conrad.

Maximo had believed in this: Lighting candles and prayers for the dead, saints interceding for departed souls, moving said souls along on their journey through damnation and perdition. Conrad didn’t know who else would pray for him, so he did it, though he also didn’t know that improvised recitals from a Methodist come aethist and part-time sodomite would be heeded, but it was better than doing nothing.

He returned to the cathedral after that first night, becoming a nigh-regular in the first few months of his grief, then tapering his attendance off as his loss became easier to bear.

Tonight marked his first visit in some weeks, his return spurred by a day full of small, painful reminders.

A sympathetic old woman had taught him, some time ago, the proper etiquette for the lighting of the votives so, tonight, Conrad lit one and, eyes closed, mentally rehearsed a variation of the prayer he had been saying.

The piano had been mostly ignored, its sounds a sort of white, background noise he had come to associate with this holy space. It was only when that soothing chorus took a turn to the dark and disjointed that it came to the forefront of his mind and concentration, wrenching his attention from the task at hand.

Annoyed by the disruption, this latest black mark in a day running over with them, he stalked into the church proper to give the pianist a piece of his mind.

All recriminations died, stillborn, when he saw just who it was who was playing. Even in the dim light, and even viewing the man from behind, there was no mistaking the pianist’s identity. Conrad stopped dead in his tracks, knees growing weak, threatening to buckle and bring him crashing to the ground. His heart dropped then, with the same sickening velocity, rose to his throat before settling in its rightful place albeit with a force that surely would splinter its ribbed cage.

The blond took one unsteady step forward, then another, then another and another and another and he was there, at Maximo’s side, sliding ungracefully onto the bench, strong arms wrapping around the slender shoulders he remembered so well and thought he would never behold again. Face pressed to one shoulder, a torrent of unchecked words came spilling forth and he held the Italian even closer, “oh God oh God you were dead you were gone and I thought I would never see you again oh God I missed you so much Max I love you I love you Max don’t ever leave don’t leave me” The words tripped over each other, the rush was so great, the need to have them said and heard so overwhelming.

Adoring tears dampened the shoulder of a coat that was not the Italian's, clearly displayed by the way its tailored lines failed to fit his shoulders. He sat. Exhaled. Winced. Struggled to be free from the weight of embrace.

"Ow," was the solemnly whispered word born from his fidgeting struggle, hands immediately plunging into the pockets of the foreign coat. The first product of his procurement was a scarlet handkerchief, the other a folded slip of paper. Max handed Conrad the paper and kept the swathe of cloth for himself, turning away like he was going to wipe away some shred of humanity that may have escaped him in that poignant moment. Unfortunately he only took a deep, lung-quenching breath from its silken fabric.

The sheet, unfolded, was little more than a sloppy collection of what was either supposed to be the letter c, or an assortment of wobbly lines. The handwriting was childish, or demented, or both.

Alban stood outside the door to the shop, relishing the five minutes of sunshine that he was able to soak up in between waves of customers. He leaned against the wall, eating a few bites of the sandwich that Brie had sent with him for lunch. He had finally convinced her not to pack a full course meal for him everyday as he never had time to finish it.

"I can cut it up if you’d like …" The blond let the suggestion hang, not wanting to rummage through Maximo’s cupboards and drawers uninvited.

Then, attention drawn back to the actual gift he had brought, his face brightened. “Go ahead and open it, see for yourself.”

If he obeyed that friendly instruction Maximo would reveal a shirtbox stamped with the cursive logo of L.S. Ayers, an Indianapolis department store. Removing the box’s top would further reveal a sweater nestled in tissue paper, its pattern cream and pale blue stripes of alternating widths.

"This is very generous of you," the Italian started, pausing briefly to carefully fold the thing to fit back in its package, "Thank you, Conrad. I worry that I won't ever have an occasion to wear it - you know my day to day is hardly... uhm, clean - but I adore it all the same; yes, rest assured that I adore it." Smiling down at the box, he then picked it up and took it away to his small bedroom for safe keeping.

Standing to one side, he gave the Italian room to unlock and open the door to his home, stepping through the doorframe with a nod and small, crooked smile. Keen eyes picked up the blossoming bruises unfurling across the other’s knuckles; if Maximo’s eyes were as sharp he would note that Conrad’s lip had healed with only the faintest of scars to show that any damage had been done to that tender flesh.

The packages in Conrad’s arms were deposited on the kitchen counter, freeing his arms so as to remove his jacket. The walk, despite the air’s chill, had warmed him.

At Maximo’s question, blue eyes glanced from boxes to their intended recepient and that same lazy, crooked smile returned. “Those would be for you.”

Conrad moved the smaller of the boxes to one side, cutting the string with a pocket knife, and carefully unfolding top and sides to reveal a chocolate cake. Despite the baker’s box, the confection it contained was obviously home-made. It wasn’t a sloppy, ugly thing, but the tell-tale spoon swirls in the fudge icing and its slightly uneven application gave away its humble origin.

The days since Conrad’s brawl and stolen kiss had turned cooler, shorter, closer. Late summer gave way to autumn and even that season was making way for winter’s icy approach. Trees having changed color from verdant green to golden red-orage now shed their leaves, preparing for their brief deaths and inevitable rebirths. It was a melancholy time of year, Conrad thought, a time of in-between things and thoughts and people and places. Cold mornings and nights bookends to chilly days, the weather not even able to make up its mind.

Still, in all this cooling malaise, there were spots of brightness and warmth and cheer. Maximo’s birthday was today and the cop had something special planned for his unsentimental friend. The pair had drifted, slightly, in shades and inches, since the incident on the Italian’s fire escape. On Conrad’s part this separation had only been somewhat intentional; it was his desire to give the other time and space to think and process and be. Work and unexpected, though largely pleasant, familial duties conspired to see that time lengthened.

No matter what had transpired since that August day, Conrad was set in his plans. A gift had been purchased while he had been away, boxed and wrapped and sitting presently on the kitchen counter where Prufrock inspected it with nose and teeth and, finding it satisfactory, rubbed his feline face along the corners and sides. A second package sat higher up, momentarily in a cupboard, boxed as well in plain brown cardboard and tied with a thin cord. Its contents were, perhaps, the more precious of the two; having never fancied himself a cook, the blonde had conquered the task of baking a cake. Bowls and spoons and forks and plates sat in the sink, waiting to be properly washed, a testament to his struggle and triumph. 

Checking his pocket-watch once more, Conrad nodded absently and slipped on his overcoat. He wore a brown flannel suit today, maroon tie at his throat, head hatless because his had been crushed in an unfortunate sitting accident. The two parcels were stacked neatly, handled with care usually reserved for infants and fine china, and he was out the door.

Eyes, not expecting the sight with which he was greeted, briefly glanced up from his task at hand to the blond. His heart hitched with a touch of nerves for remembering the day, but such feeling was best suppressed to expressionless silence - the standard greeting for that man so internal. As he plunged the dull key into the lock of his apartment's door, his knuckles, protruding and sharp, were dotted with bruises; splotches of brown and red that pooled together as a sickly green like an oil spill under his skin. He held the door open for the blond and his parcels, then stepped in behind. Latch-click disturbed the still air of the dark room in which they stood.

In a fluid motion, the Italian gathered and lit a lamp that served as meager light upon the coffee table in front of his couch. He took off his hat, but opted to keep his coat, for the season was seeping through the windows.

Maximo’s comment about death and the fear of it posed an interesting question in the butcher’s mind. “Do you mean to say that Death fears those who do not fear him?” He concentrated on the first initial cut that dislodge the bone from the socket. “I think it’s a pity that so many waste so much time fearing death. We are all human and are destined for it one day. What good can come from fearing the inevitable?”

"Anyway, excuse my hypotheticals - they're not meant for answers. My comrades and I are quite different. They waste their time with decadence of the flesh; I'd rather not bother."

Stealthily shifting his position, Maximo took a few steps to the side to observe the buckets into which the boy's severed parts were sorted.

Nimble fingers flipped through the tissue thin pages, muscles retaining the memory of where, roughly, his favored book was located. There, as always before, he found it almost exactly halfway through: The Song of Solomon. Six pages, certainly one of the shortest in that holy text, but those pages had had a profound effect on Conrad in his younger years. 

Eyes ran over the familiar words of his favored passage, vision reacquainting itself with recalled memory. A sharp thought was spared for the ever silent, ever present, ever judging saints ringing the nave; If only you old bastards knew who read me these lines …

Conrad lost time in re-reading those pages, a common occurrence as the written word, when presented, trumped nearly all else in the man’s life. He was unaware of how long Maximo had been gone only that the man had returned.

Closing his purloined Bible, Conrad cast a curious look to his returned friend. Actions, again, spoke louder than any words. Under the Italian’s hand, the Welshman turned his own, pressing their palms together, his fingers wrapping about the other’s and giving it a brief, affectionate squeeze.

Interrupted, he looked back to Conrad when the man spoke. The index finger of his free hand lifted to cover his lips, syllables forthcoming as a soft, "Sssh."

He loitered in the narthex, though he remained ignorant of its name, as Maximo lit his candles and said his prayers. Idly, vaguely, he wondered if the display was sincere or a show and, if a show, just who the Italian was hoping to impress. Feet then followed the Catholic to the nave and, receiving that enigmatic look, turned to find a seat in one of those well-worn wooden pews.

The atheist sat towards the end of one, well away from those enjoying the choral concert, and turned an eye to the saints silently passing judgment on all below. He thought of the pastor of his youth and his damning of idol and saint worship, his absolute conviction in the belief that it was Jesus Christ alone who interceded on behalf of man. Thoughts turned to his poor, ever worrying mother, too, and her desperate desire that her fallen son return to the church and experience Sanctification in order to save his eternal soul.

He scoffed softly at the idea, settling back in the rigidly uncomfortable pew, hand rubbing over his weary face. Eyes looked towards the confessional booth and his mind’s wanderings turned towards Maximo and the priest and just what confessions, and judgments, were passing between them at that moment.

A flash of anger followed, wild and unruly, clumsily aimed at the priest and church and the whole damn institution. An argument repeated in his head, one he had first heard in college, a passionate plea that fell from the lips of that first lover he had so briefly named; what harm did it do to love one’s own sex so long as both were citizens in good standing? Conrad amended this thought; certainly more harm was done in Maximo’s chosen line of work and through his own headstrong recklessness. So, again, what real harm came of a kiss, an intimacy, a desire to love and to be loved?

It was himself. He was hoping to impress himself. The sin and salvation was a twisted braid of a crutch, one grasped to mask the shut away belief that the either-or, the give and take was actually naught. He couldn't muster actions holy enough to dig his way out of the grave in which he lie, but that still didn't subdue his drive to desperately try - the claw marks were deep in the earth of his existence, his fingernails filthy with the dregs of humanity.

And yet, as he hid himself away from the eyes of those saints, stared into the eyes of the priest to whom he really had nothing to say, the boys beyond that dark closet sang on. Their throats vibrated in innocent ecstacy and the syllabic song of a language on the verge of death. He pressed a palm into his forehead and recited the line for his impending repentance, but was unable to delve beyond that superficial call for help, and so, sat in the silence of supposed non-judgment.

Minutes later, when he mustered the strength to face the world in all its brightness, Conrad in all his humane beauty, Maximo emerged - calmer, quieter, but not anymore absolved than the monster that had entered.