#crow.fic

“Aiming to”—because Matt still remembered well when he used to cut his hair with scissors. His black nail polish, his lipstick phase. He was a faggot in a 800-pound suit. Matt knew the core of him. He wasn’t letting go of that, not easily.

Matt lay on his back on his bed in his flat, picking memories sweatily off his damp fingertips. “Investment banking”. “I-Banking”, for those in the know. Sounded like Eye Banking. A safe full of sclera. Matt had been “eye banking” the boys down in Hulme Park in the backwash swill of 0200 Saturdays, pocketful of lorazepam to take the edge off. On about 3 to 3 and a half milligrams of lorazepam he started to really feel good about cruising, he’d catch a rhythm and a glide, prowling the bushes and benches like a sickass panther, a sickass shark, deep sailing over the continental rift.

Mello had an advanced degree; Matt had an appointment at the free clinic on Nell Lane. Mello got a promotion and Matt got chlamydia. Matt got a prescription. Matt got antibiotics for his burning stream.

MATT: wowww work thing!!

MATT: whatt a crazy life

MATT: club bumpin

MATT: ladies xpecially bumpinnn >o>

Mello read the message, then exited the thread; he didn’t look at his phone for the next 90 hours. New York on a June evening was stuffed with shining surfaces: neon, fountain shake, pavement shimmer off dropped dress sequins. Life moved here, not like back in grey Winchester. Everywhere, deals being made, everyone walking with purpose, the backs of their shoes stepped on with their haste to get on with it. Crypto swam through the air like the odor off a kebab cart. And Mello was hungry. He wanted to eat songbirds and the comfort off the indolent rich.

Making money felt good; last week he’d gotten high and sat in his bathtub with a couple of bands, rubbing the bills up and down his arms.

So he was dating a woman; well, what complaints did Matt have? Her arse was even skinner than Matt’s; she was like a little dickless boy; she was an Equinox junkie, sometimes she did 4 classes a day and then Barre for cooldown. She had breasts but Mello didn’t have to look at them if he turned her over. She liked being turned over. She was a half-Brazilian half-Norwegian model who thought it was sexy when Mello spoke Russian, even though half the time Mello’s Russian was Ukrainian. She couldn’t tell the difference, which was ideal. Matt was a freak for languages. He spoke Cobol and a surprisingly passable Surzhyk.

[MELLO is offline.]

The problem with Matt was that you couldn’t give him anything, not a millimeter, not a breath or piece of hair. If you texted him a vile insult it still made him happy, brimful with your acknowledgement. Matt could run off air and a peanut shell, affection-wise, obsession-wise—there was no difference with him, between Mello and lines on tables, he was blissful either way, cutting and chopping and sniffing and screwing and sputtering and reaching round your hip for more.

Matt’s idea of a workout was the half-crunch to fetch his cigarette off the nightstand.

MATT: sk whenss the wefding

MATT: j can give a spech

MATT: sleech

The thing was, that Mello had to be a different type of person now. Different friends body style face stride posture place in the world. He was cultivating an American accent. He was cultivating saying he was from Russia. He was running upgraded firmware, fucking hardass shit, a sexy version, like, 21.x, while Matt was hung up on the beta release of Mello that had weak wrists and who kissed.

[MATT is offline.]

Lot of onion layers ago, the beta version.

[MELLO is online.]

[MELLO is invisible.]

It turned out twelve ignominious years of earnings in Formula 1 still didn’t pay well enough to get you out of arranging your own threesome.

Obviously, even one single season in Formula 1 could purchase many threesomes with many parties of individuals. But since the other individuals were, in Daniel’s case, Max, Kelly—their millions and millions and millions came to nothing.

Max started a group thread on WhatsApp but Kelly said WhatsApp wasn’t secure so they got on Telegram instead. And then it turned out even on Telegram she and Max had made their accounts using pseudonyms, whereas Daniel just named himself Daniel, so that he was made to feel like a fucking bozo talking with “Catherine” and “James”.

For a trio where two of the people were, let’s face it, basically unemployed, their schedules were proving impossible to align. Kelly did something clever where she overlayed their calendars but the results looked like the Rosetta Stone. Discouraging. The chat jerked on in fits and starts like an engine on its last legs. Either Max was slow to respond, or Daniel was.

Finally, Kelly had had enough. She suggested sweetly they do a “Zoom call”, and then him and Max went Noo Noo, and Kelly canceled something and Daniel canceled something and Max dug a hole in his schedule like a badger digging in the garden for voles.

He took over most of the towel and promptly fell asleep.

Mello put on his sunglasses, and then he was free to look at anything.

Matt's legs were wet, the hair plastered down. He had gotten bushy and tall over the last summer, overgrown like a hedge. His body took up more space and stank more and was generally obtrusive in various ways. Sometimes Mello caught a whiff off his trainers which would curl your toenails right up.

Wavy red hair. The water had darkened the strands and made them more visible than usual. They dipped and sworled like moss under a river. It gave Mello the feeling he'd fall in if he looked for too long, like Matt was concealed beneath like an animal in a tidepool, and he had to look hard for him. The hair would be soft and wet to the touch, and then crunchy and hard later, when it stood up.

"Is it gross?"

Matt wasn't sleeping. "What?"

"Like should I shave?"

"I don't know. I don't care."

"I don't think girls like it," Matt said mournfully.

MATT: anyway all to say shes the highlight of my week

MATT: big fat titties done up in leather. like watermelons doing bdsm

MATT: and the blonde bob cut even the same but i have to say shes working it a lot better than you do

MATT: like giving major dominatrix energy

MATT: where you mainly just looked like a twat

MATT: might have to start dating her ;)

MATT: she could give me a handie anyday in those gloves like jeessus!

MATT: *did

MATT: *ever did 

MATT: maybe you’ve changed your hair by now

MATT: christ i hope so

MATT: oh thanks for asking mello i was buying some rolling papers and kinder maxi

MATT: and condoms :) magnum

MATT: since you left mostly nothing has changed. same room same kids same shit life. i got some new bedsheets and a recreational drug habit but its nothing to write home about as they say

MATT: wonder where you are now. in winchester it’s midnight and cloudy out

MATT: you know i could find out (literally. anytime) but i am CHOOSING not to :)

MATT: because actually i totally agree with the decision you made to be independent and free and not be total freaks about one another and not lick each others ears after maths and be each others only friends and exhibit worrying faggot behavior and be alienated and hate everyone

MATT: like i get it

MATT: we should grow up

MATT: but like just fyi you were my first hj and i was yours

MATT: and that won’t change no matter how many people you sleep with (dont doubt its many at this point)

MATT: handjob brotherhood 4 life :)

MATT: no gcac (goth chick etc) today. devestated

MATT: i did heroin about it and i feel muchh better

MATT: graduated today. did heroin about it. didn’t feel much

MATT: woowwww wasted my whole fickingg sumerrrr

MATT: im so high rnn

MATT: went back to chilbolton aldis for the first time in a long time

MATT: like literally took the train up from london

MATT: i was thinking if goth chick was there id ask her out proper but no cigar. just a bunch of fucking twelve year olds from the house. so fuckin depressing. i didnt even buy anything just fucked off and took the train straight back

MATT: i was thinking

MATT: about how you kind of ruined my life

MATT: like i am pretty confident i wouldve turned out normal if i never met you. i wouldnt even be popping a semi over goth chick i would just be like wow what a freak and marry a girl in a tshirt. id move to california and do a phd at stanford and invent an algorithm that tells you if your dog is sick and make a million dollars and retire age thirty six off dog cancer money

MATT: like my life would be pretty good. boring af but kind of nice

MATT: compared to my current situation

MATT: which is like.. living in this rundown building post-apocalypse style, chilling with ten thousand roaches, ceiling blasted open wind screaming through asbestos coming down like snow 

MATT: metaphorically

MATT: metaphorically camped in an abandoned ruined fucked fucked fucked falling down building that could cave in and kill me any time literally every other person has run away screaming from but i cant leave

MATT: but i cant leave

MATT: because im afraid youll come back and missm e

MATT: im so tired of feeling so stuck all the time :(( 

MATT: it would honestly be easier for me if you died

MATT: inn sorry dudbt mean thyt

MATT: in this metaphor youre the nuke

MATT: idk

MATT: basically just trying to survive

MATT: and not even managing that

[MATT is offline.]

[MELLO is online.]

MELLO: You know I can see you typing all the time, Matt.

MELLO: + presumably backspacing since this whole fucking conversation is blank

MELLO: If you’re going to say something, say it

But no, there came the loud low growl—like god’s dumpster rolling across the sky, Matt had always thought. Lightning did not impress him; in his childhood, in Amarillo, Texas, every storm was a thunderstorm. His mother’s friends and relatives were always hauling him out of lakes. “Boy,” they said, “quit tempting the devil.”

The weather in the UK was boring and undramatic. Steady, even-tempered rain.

“This isn’t even real weather,” he attempted to boast to his new classmates. “In a real storm the sky turns green.”

No one was listening. “I’ve been hit by lightning before,” he ventured, and a sticky-fingered girl said, “Whoah, sick.”

At least he’d thought nobody was paying attention, but later, Mello pointed through their dormitory window and observed, “The sky’s green here too.” And it was. They listened to the lightning come down in Winchester.

Now Matt watched Mello pad silently through the house. Gun in his waistband; at least not in his hands yet. Moving like a panther, searching for predators. You’re the most dangerous thing in this house, thought Matt; who could come kill us? He felt safe. He went back to sleep.

Mello moved through the rooms. He did not have a particular algorithm for clearing a house, but rather moved on instinct, towards wherever he felt the danger was greatest. Everywhere felt dangerous. Wind paced around the walls.

The kitchen revealed a blender and a dull knife; in the bathroom his face was spotted by the dirty mirror.

He drank some water from the tap. The thunder had woken him from a dream where Matt got shot. Not here, it looked like. Somewhere in Asia.

The dream had a terrible clarity to it, so unlike Mello’s other, vaguer torments—like a highlighter ring drawn in yellow around it, so that Mello feared it was a vision from God.

For the past several years, Mello’s future had been tightening around his neck. The infinite possible destinies he’d envisioned in his childhood were closing and dying off, one by one. Now the path to victory seemed narrow as the eye of a needle. Where Kira died, the world was reborn, and he and Matt and everyone good lived.

He wandered, like the prophet in the desert. Seeking to pass the camel through that needle’s eye. Could he be a rich man? Could they reach the Kingdom? Or would awful, rending sacrifice be needed?

Would he even want to enter the Kingdom, with that sacrifice made—half your torso ripped out, the heart the mind, everywhere Matt had touched?

Maybe he’d bleed out on the steps before the gate, just to give the Lord the trouble of cleaning up.

The house was empty; nothing moved but the jump of Mello’s eyelid in the mirror. Stress tick. He needed to sleep. He got back into bed, pushing Matt out of the center he’d shifted to occupy.

Matt did not wake up at Mello’s ungentle nudge. He was stuck fast in the elbow of a dream. In the dream he rode horses on the Mongolian steppe, following an eagle which would lead him to Mello. There he was, by the water. Matt rode down to him.

“A hare,” Mello said, unhooking the prey from the eagle’s talons.

“Let’s have it tonight.”

Tomorrow they would invade a city. They were soldiers at the behest of an army the shape of fate. The foam on the rim of the wave of empire. Young men, easily spent.

He tapped his cigarette off into Mello’s car’s cupholder. “You think I have less problems and they’re smaller and, like, easier to deal with.”

Mello resisted the urge to claw into the cupholder and throw the ashes out the window. “No one is saying your life is easy. Ash outside.”

Matt stabbed the window-down switch. “Basically, everything is my own fucking fault,” he complained, over a hot stream of traffic, but he was running out of steam. Mello had never once claimed that Matt’s addiction was his fault; how could he, when Mello too had been an addict? Who’d once undergone surgery to fix his cocaine-perforated septum?

“Can they fix your snoring too?” Matt had joked at the time.

Mello helped pack the last few pairs of underwear into the suitcase, since Matt had by then wilted totally, and was slumped silently by the headboard, arms slack around a pillow.

That had made Mello a little angry. His posture of enduring being sent away. As if the rehabilitation was a punishment Mello was visiting on him, and not a medical decision he had consented to as an adult. If you didn’t want to sign the forms, you shouldn’t have signed them.

But he had written: Matthew Jeevas, Matthew Jeevas. He departed for 100 days of inpatient treatment. Tomorrow, he was coming home. It should be a nice home, Mello thought, unlocking the front door. He deserved that.

The washing machine was broken and the drying machine was broken and the microwave was missing its plate.

He found the plate on the nightstand, where Matt had been using it to crush his powders.

Mello brought the plate to the kitchen and rinsed it, and replaced it atop the turntable ring. He pulled on gloves and disassembled the towers in the sink. He killed the mold at the sink’s bottom. He killed marching lines of ants with long brushstrokes of bug spray, harvested their corpses with swipes of paper towel. Only with the house less rife did he begin to pick items off the floor, which felt at first like picking leaves from a forest: futile and neverending.

Whey packets, self-help novels, empties and loosies.

Frustrated, arms beading sweat inside their rubber casing, Mello began to do what he swore he wouldn’t, which was to toss things of Matt’s which were clearly beyond redemption. If Matt wanted a new sachet of whey, Mello would be happy to buy him one which wasn’t 2 years expired. If he wanted a self-help book Mello would loan him a library card.

He didn’t own a library card, but how hard could it be to get one? Children had them. It would be easy.

The drugs went in the toilet, obviously; Mello didn’t worry over those.

The holey boxers and broken-necked cables and $1 buy-one-get-one red-stickered DVDs—he’d stopped worrying about, also.

Quarter-full shampoo bottles. Stained restaurant clamshells.

It was 08:30 by the time he finished hoovering (with a vacuum he hauled over from his own flat, since Matt’s was, of course, broken), and then there was no time for sleep, because in half an hour he had to leave to pick him up.

Matt had sold all his working appliances to afford his dealer’s prices.

Mello showered quickly in the stall he’d just cleaned and felt vaguely dissatisfied.

You’re just sleep-deprived, he told himself. Strong front.

And then there was Matt, looking neither well nor unwell in the passenger seat.

“Hi.”

“Yeah, hey.”

“You look—better.”

“I guess I’m supposed to be.”

Emitting a very muted energy, as Mello negotiated the fast lanes of the freeway.

“Wow,” he said, monotonously, as he stepped through the door.

“Did some cleaning.”

“I see that. You threw all my stuff away.”

A headache process booted up in Mello’s upper-right temple. “I didn’t ‘throw away all your stuff’. I kept everything you’d want,” he said, showing Matt the possessions he’d neatly binned for him, organized and stacked against the bedroom wall.

“Because you know completely what I do and don’t find valuable.”

“I’m sorry, you’re right, I should have kept all the moldy takeout so you could finish eating the mold out the bottom. I should have kept your socks with fifty holes in them.”

“What if my mom knitted me those socks?”

“Your mom never knitted you any socks, she was a fucking heroin fiend,” snapped Mello.

Matt’s eyes bugged slightly, where he was crouched over a bin, which is how Mello knew he’d taken him off guard. With his meanness and undeserved cruelty.

You went there, dude. You went to “dead mom”.

Stop it, enough. Apologize. Mello didn’t, because he felt that actually Matt owed him an apology. For spending 13 hours cleaning his house, and receiving not a syllable of gratitude.

Fuck. How was it all going so wrong already?

Mello caved first and retreated. He went outside to the tiny landing over the stairs, to look out over the overgrown backyard. He hadn’t tried to do anything about the yard, because it didn’t make Matt sad the way the inside of the house did. Its messiness was okay. Milkweed and cactus, weeds in tire planters.

A leak of steam from down the wall announced that Matt was in the shower.

He emerged onto the patio bare-chested, with a towel around his shoulders.

When he saw Mello was smoking, he held his hand out and said, “Don’t leave me hangin’.”

Matt sucked down the cigarette like a soda on a hot day. “They tried to get me to quit this too,” he added, sliding Mello’s carton over and extracting a new stick. “I was like, come on. You gotta give me something.”

“Like, if you only feed me broccoli, I’m gonna bust out of Alcatraz,” he joked.

“What did they feed you?”

“We had, uh, turkey tetrazzini. ‘Sloppy Joes’.”

Matt squeezed around the grimed lawn chair in the corner, which brought him into Mello’s orbit. He edged behind him to put his forehead on his back.

“It looks like when I moved in,” he said, resting his elbows on Mello’s waist. “The house. It kind of freaked me out. I mean, it’s nice, but. I guess I feel like you have these, like, high expectations of me, and I’m afraid I won’t meet them.”

“I don’t have expectations of you.”

“Wow, thank you.”

Mello revised: “My expectation of you is you come with me to Tito’s and you pay for my quesabirria.”

“Done. As long as I don’t have to eat a vegetable.”

“You’ll have to eat a vegetable, eventually.”