These Violent Delights

  Dedication

  To Ollie

  Epigraph

  I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous—a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.

  —Friedrich Nietzsche

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part I 1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  Part II 1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  Part III 1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  Part IV 1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  15.

  Author’s Note

  Recognition

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  By the time Charlie punches out it’s well after midnight, and everyone else has long since gone home. He switches off the lights and watches the long aisles cascade into darkness, then pulls the roll-up door shut behind him. When he steps out from under the awning the rain drapes over his umbrella like a shroud.

  The air clots around his breath. At the far side of the warehouse a train wails past. Charlie thinks about knitted blankets and hot chocolate, half-forgotten childhood comforts he’s a few years too old now to admit to missing. The others all have families and wives and happy plans for the holiday; Charlie just has matinee tickets and Lucy begging for scraps of his TV dinner. He’s exhausted, he thinks, because it’s easier to remedy than being lonely.

  As he turns onto the side street he fumbles, thick-fingered, for his keys. When he opens his car door a crown of rainwater disperses from the roof and scatters. The air inside is even colder than outside—Charlie blows into his cupped hands and hopes the chill hasn’t seeped between his bedsheets.

  He starts the ignition. The engine screams. The rasp of tearing metal is followed by a heavy death rattle. Charlie quickly shuts off the engine and holds the wheel in white-knuckled hands. He’s accustomed to dead batteries, flat tires, engines too stubborn to start in the cold, but whatever just happened was far worse.

  He’s drenched by the time he remembers his umbrella. He lifts the hood with a squeal, hoping there’s a miracle waiting in the unreadable mess of his engine. But Charlie has never been much of a mechanic. There’s nothing in there for him to see.

  He steps back and heads toward the phone booth, but stops in the middle of the street—he squints through the rain and sees the receiver swinging from its cord. For the first time Charlie lets his dismay tip upward into anger.

  “Fucking—teenagers.”

  He will have to return to the telephone in the warehouse break room. He exhales hard and stalks back to the car, leaning inside to grab his umbrella. There’s the germ of a headache now, just behind his eyes.

  Charlie slams the door and straightens. When he looks out into the street again, he is no longer alone.

  “Are you okay?”

  A battered black car has appeared in the street beside him. Rain slicks down the windows and roof, but the passenger door hangs open. A boy is leaning toward him, one arm braced above the doorframe. His dark hair is artfully untrimmed, but he’s dressed well. Argyle pullover, toffee-brown jodhpur boots; a suburban choirboy in halfhearted revolt.

  Charlie stares at him, and he smiles.

  “That looks like fun.” The boy nods toward the steaming hood of Charlie’s car. “Have a wrecker on the way?”

  Charlie slowly shakes his head. “Phone booth’s out of order.”

  The boy gives a sympathetic wince and turns toward the unseen driver. Then he nods and turns back to Charlie.

  “We can give you a lift home if you want,” he says. “Car’s not going anywhere—you might as well call the tow from someplace warm.”

  Charlie lifts the hood again to take one last, hopeless look into his engine. He sighs and slams it shut.

  “I’m in Polish Hill,” he says. “Is that out of your way?”

  “Not at all.”

  The boy slides to the middle seat, and Charlie shakes off his umbrella before he gets inside.

  The driver is a kid, too, copper-haired and slim. His clothes are as well cared for as his friend’s, but they’re conspicuously cheaper; his plaid flannel shirt has a generic plainness to it that makes it look as if it had been sewn at home from a pattern. Behind the boy’s Malcolm X glasses his dark eyes are solemn, and when he greets Charlie he does not smile.

  He stares just a second longer than he should, then catches his friend’s prompting glance, chews his lip, and looks away into the road.

  “He’s shy,” says the dark-haired boy. “Don’t mind him.”

  Charlie nods, unoffended. The boys are younger than he’d thought, maybe even still in high school. He wonders what these two were doing, driving around all by themselves. Honor-roll types, clean-cut, out for a midnight joyride. It’s a poignant thought, almost charming. Charlie was a different kind of teenager—lousy grades, on the football team but never great at it, a lumbering straight man to the class clowns. But he knows what it is to wonder what everyone else is doing differently in order to be happy; he knows what it is to skirt at the outermost edges of friendship. He can still remember the companionable quiet, the fleeting warmth, of the moments teenage boys spend being lonely together.

  The wipers click and the vents breathe hot. The redhead steers with his hands at ten and two on the wheel, as if he hasn’t been driving for very long. The other boy reaches across Charlie’s knees and takes a thermos from the glove box. The contents smell of hot broth and rosemary, something Charlie’s grandmother might have made when he was sick as a child.

  “Want some?” the boy asks. “It’s chicken and rice.”

  “Nice of you,” Charlie agrees.

  He holds the metal thermos mug steady while the boy carefully fills it. The first mouthful burns Charlie’s tongue, but it shocks the cold from his bones, and it tastes all right. At first there’s the barest tang of soap, as if the mug wasn’t rinsed properly, but after a moment he can’t even taste it.

  The dark-haired boy takes a sip from the thermos and offers it to his friend, but the driver shakes his head curtly and keeps his eyes fixed on the empty street.

  It’s quiet for a while. Charlie finishes his soup and rolls the mug between his hands. His scalded taste buds are starting to itch.

  “What are your names?” he asks. He’ll forget the answer as soon as he hears it, but he’s grateful for the promise of home and the weight of hot food in his belly, and he wants to be courteous.

  The boy beside him thinks before he answers, like he’s deciding whether or not to tell the truth. He looks apprehensive, but doesn’t appear to know it.

  “I’m Julian,” he answers finally. He
gives his friend a pointed look. The other boy is silent for a moment, as though summoning the will to speak. His jaw is a nervous taut line. This one gets on Charlie’s nerves a little, as anxious people often do. Shyness he can forgive; cringing dread is harder to stomach.

  “Paul,” the driver says, blank-faced, so quietly Charlie almost can’t hear him.

  Charlie looks between them, at how differently they are dressed and how Paul avoids meeting Julian’s eyes—how little they look or behave like friends. Once again, more insistently now, he is curious what they were up to before they found him. But there’s no reason for him to be uneasy. They’re just kids, and he’s on the verge of reaching home. Once he’s there, it won’t matter anymore.

  His fingers are too warm around his empty cup. The heat from the vent suddenly clings like his childhood Ohio summers. He fumbles with the zipper of his parka, but his fingers are rubbery and fever-fat. The thermos cup is rocking on its side between his ankles before he even knows he’s dropped it.

  Julian grins suddenly and elbows his friend’s arm, as if to include him in a joke.

  “Where exactly are you in Polish Hill, Charlie?” The sudden clarity of Paul’s voice is startling. There’s an echo of Murray Avenue in his vowels, but he overenunciates as if he learned to speak by reading—in the middle of exactly, where Charlie has never heard it before, there’s the precise, conspicuous click of the t.

  “Uh, north of Immaculate Heart,” Charlie answers, “if you turn right on—”

  The numbing heat is trickling through his hands and up his arms, from his burnt tongue outward to his lips. He brings a hand to his face and smears his fingertips across the line of his mouth. He feels nothing.

  The car is idling at a railway crossing, waiting out the clang of the bell. The boys watch him with unblinking eyes. Julian is still smiling; Paul looks as if he never has.

  They’re both wearing gloves. They’ve shed their coats in the stifling warmth, but they’re still wearing their gloves.

  “My name.” His tongue is so thick he could choke. “I never told you my name.”

  In the moment before he manages to smother it, Julian dissolves into sharp, jittery laughter. But Paul doesn’t flinch. His eyes are bright and pitiless. His every word is tight and mannered, as if he’s practiced in front of the mirror.

  “Do you think the neighbors will notice that you’re gone, Mr. Stepanek?”

  Charlie tries to will his unfeeling hands to the door latch. His arm lands hard against the door, and his body slumps uselessly in the corner of his seat.

  “You don’t want to do that,” says Julian. It isn’t a threat. He speaks as if he’s trying to coax a reluctant child. “Could I see your wrists, Charlie? Behind your back, if you don’t mind, it’ll only take a few seconds.”

  He tries again to wrest his body back under control, but he lurches forward and falls against the dashboard. After that his limbs will no longer obey him. He can’t even hold still.

  What’s going to happen to Lucy? It’s his only intelligible thought.

  At Julian’s request, Charlie’s arms move as automatically as if he still controls them. He can just barely feel the loops of rope around his wrists and the tug of a tightening knot—a nagging, distant feeling, like someone gently pulling on his clothes. The car trembles from the passing weight of the train.

  “Thank you,” Julian says. “See, that wasn’t so bad. You like following orders, don’t you? No matter what they tell you to do.”

  “We’ve read all about you.” Paul’s voice is soft. “We know exactly what you are.”

  But Charlie doesn’t know what he is, not anymore. Maybe he never has. Fear makes you forget everything—turns you into something that only knows it can die.

  He’s felt it before, and seen other people feeling it. He knows what it looks like from the outside, and from the boys’ faces he knows they see it too. In this cloying heat, smothering as the Vietnamese sun, he remembers the relief of deciding not to see.

  When the train is gone, it leaves a ringing emptiness in its wake. Julian coaxes Charlie to sit upright and refastens his seat belt for him. Paul watches, stone-faced, then draws a deep breath and shifts the car into drive.

  The numbness bleeds into Charlie’s vision. He sees everything through the veil of a dream. The widening black between the streetlights; the silent strangers alongside him looking out into the dark. They’re kids—just kids. He doesn’t understand, and he never will.

  The boys still won’t meet each other’s eyes. They’re afraid, both of them, of what they might see.

  Part I

  1.

  The pills let his mother sleep, but they didn’t help her do it well. They left her lower eyelids dark and thick, as if she hadn’t slept at all. Paul could tell when she was taking them because she became sluggish instead of jittery. Most sounds still startled her, but they reached her at a delay, enough that she could brace herself first. She moved languidly, low-shouldered, as if through water.

  It wasn’t much of an improvement, at least not for the rest of them, but Paul wasn’t the only one who had given up on that.

  She was sitting by the living-room window, where she had always claimed the light was best. The winter light cast her face in the same creamy gray as her dressing gown. Paul watched her sweep her fingertips under her eyes; the shadows vanished beneath a film of concealer.

  “There’s nothing wrong with your present,” his mother was saying. Her eyes were turned toward the compact mirror but not really watching it, as if she had surrendered her movements to muscle memory. “It’s beautiful. Bubbe Sonia’s always loved your artwork.”

  Paul was already dressed for the party, in the brown corduroy suit and knit blue tie he wore to every party. The blazer had grown too tight across his shoulders, little folds of fabric biting into the flesh whenever he lifted his arms. The sleeves were too short by an inch. Paul hated the look of his own bare wrists, with their shining blue veins and the skin stretched too thin to hold them in place. They reminded him that his body was a thing that could be taken apart.

  “She won’t love this,” he said. “If I were her I’d hate it. It’s a slap in the face.”

  “Who puts these awful ideas in your head?” His mother had the doleful dark gaze of a calf. When he forced himself to keep looking at her he felt a dull, insistent ache. “You’re forever assuming the worst. I don’t know how I feel about those books they’re making you read.”

  “No one puts ideas in my head,” said Paul. His voice was sharp, but it took a moment for her to wince. “It’s an objective assessment. She’ll despise it, and she’ll be right to do it.”

  His mother slowly clicked her compact shut. She smiled at him, but with a weary finality designed to end the conversation.

  It was snowing, large wet flakes that were stained gray before they even hit the ground. Outside the window, the family Buick hydroplaned in the slush before pulling to a stop. Audrey ducked out of the driver’s side, shaking her long strawberry-blond hair out of her face, and sauntered up the walk with a paper bag swinging from one hand.

  “Well, it’s the fanciest I could find for the money,” Audrey said by way of a greeting. She shook the wine bottle free of its bag and inspected it. “Whether it’s fancy enough for Mount Lebanon people is a whole other matter—Ma, Jesus, are you ever planning to actually get dressed for this thing?”

  It had once been the job of Paul’s mother to play the sheepdog, to chase everyone into place and keep an eye on the clock. Now it had fallen to Audrey, who up till a year ago had always been the one stumbling from the basement in half-tied shoes while their mother fretted at the head of the stairs. Audrey was ready in time today, bootlaces pulled tight, but she was still so skeptical of the idea of punctuality that she struggled to convince anyone else of its necessity. By the time she’d coaxed their mother upstairs to get dressed it was clear that they were going to be late.

  The three of them waited in the front hallway in the
ir party clothes and winter coats. Paul stood very still, elbows tucked in, trying not to fidget with his cuffs. Audrey kept lifting her sleeve to look at her watch; Laurie, ignoring them both, leaned against the railing and listened to her transistor radio.

  “I’m going to go see if I can give her a nudge,” said Audrey after a while. “Paul, what’s that face? You look like you’re going to cry.”

  Paul glared at her back as she made her way up the stairs. Laurie took out one of her earphones and heaved a sigh. She was doll-like and scrubbed pink, wearing T-strap shoes and a flowered pinafore dress their grandmother had sewn for her. She looked much younger than her twelve years, but she had already adopted an air of adolescent lofty irritation.

  They exchanged a long, wordless look. Paul summoned a wry smile; Laurie deliberately didn’t return it. When a door finally swung shut above their heads, she tensed almost imperceptibly.

  “God,” she said. “This thing is going to be a drag and a half.”

  Audrey drove, a little too fast. His mother rode shotgun, gloved hands folded in her lap, watching the window. She didn’t complain about Audrey’s driving, or her decision to take the interstate; she didn’t even mention the unseen tangle behind Audrey’s right ear. Whenever the car entered an underpass, the reflection of his mother’s face became visible in the shaded glass. Paul took measure of her—the blankness of her eyes and the fine lines at their corners, the way her lavender knit hat cinched into her dark auburn hair. It was easy for him to hate her; it was almost primal.

  They were late enough that the rest of the fleet of cars outside their aunt Hazel’s house were already dusted with snow. After Audrey parked she drew a deep breath, then turned to give Paul and Laurie a sardonic grin.

  “Okay, gang,” she said. “Let’s go pretend to be normal.”

  It was just like every other family gathering—filled with well-meaning, exhausting people, eager to pull Paul’s scars open and uniquely qualified to do so efficiently. Hazel’s husband, Harvey, who adored Paul without reservation, had a way of behaving as if Paul’s every interest and gesture was outlandishly wrong for a boy. Today he rattled Paul’s shoulders and asked, as if even the premise of the question were a laugh riot, “So when’s your next butterfly-hunting expedition?”