Chapter 2
William Arthur Ousman Solomon Savage was bored. After a solid week of being an undead abomination, he’d spent every optimistic perspective he could put on the experience.
He began by being unconscious. The traumatic experience of being wrenched back into the world of the living rendered his brain temporarily inert, until his body could re-adjust to balancing itself. Once his lungs could inflate on their own, and his heart pumped by itself, his consciousness slowly returned to normal. His initial awakening was confused and difficult to remember, almost like being an infant. Light, darkness and colors were a relentless assault that he could no longer parse, but as his memories returned the overwhelming input of data settled into familiar shapes. When his intellect re-asserted itself, his prior experience disappeared, as if having the words to describe it was enough to make it evaporate.
From unconsciousness and confusion he moved into delight. He was alive, whole, and safe. A new life presented itself to him. Even more exciting was that no one knew what to do with him. He existed in a legal limbo between the Church, the Country, and medical professionals who all viewed him as simultaneously alive and dead.
As was customary for the Church of the Eternal Mysteries, a priest came in to record his experiences of death.
“I saw a velvet field of night,” Willie began. “The stars glimmered in the distance. I passed between the fiery balls of gas that light up the atmosphere around our planet, and in the distance I saw a land that was both strange and familiar to me. I was drawn to it the way I am drawn to my own home, and when I arrived I found myself in another country. All around me were monuments, and between them people of all age, race and creed walked. I was brought to a magnificent palace, where my name and age were recorded for census purposes, and then released back to the public. Pterodactyls flew through the air, and mammoths stormed outside the city center. There were abandoned pyramids all around the great city that I found myself in, from former pharaohs who insisted on re-building the great temples they had commissioned for themselves during their time on earth. In the center of this great city was a humble structure, built out of flat slabs of stone and covered in living grass. When one descended down the hall, inside this tiny earthen abode, one entered an enormous hall in its bowels. The walls were smooth, natural marble, lit by electric lights stabilized for the sacred purpose of pilgrimage to that spiritual center. Here there remained the original stations of the house of the dead, the valley of ashes within the throat of Mot. Here I saw Ereshkigal’s throne, and the space at her feet reserved for Nergal, her royal concubine. The pile of crowns collected in dust were displayed as a reminder of the finality of death, and all around me were the faithful engaged in contemplation.”
The priest hadn’t recorded a single word. With tangible fury, he managed to choke out; “Nergal was not a concubine.”
“That’s not what he said,” Willie answered.
After that there was a different priest to inform him of his legal position. Because of the precautions his wife had taken to ensure his continued existence, his lawyer was engaged in re-affirming his right to life. He had recently won an appeal that the remainder of his sentence would be commuted, in light of suffering excessive punishment outweighing the magnitude of his crimes. Naturally, he was still barred from representing the Church of the Eternal Mysteries, or participating in any of their rites. He was still barred from seeing his wife or children. He did not know where he was supposed to go when he was finally released.
He amused himself for a while by enjoying the ridiculous display of hostility in his continued incarceration. The many-chambered lock set in the enormous, heavy door was like chaining and bolting a dandelion. He could not imagine what it was like to pass in solemn dignity through the security chambers to the bars of his cell, where he sat perched in eager anticipation for his reprieve. He wondered if he looked like a credible threat. He wondered if he was, in fact, a credible threat. He wondered if he could make a priest treat him like a threat, but then decided that he wouldn’t risk the tiny allowances he was given just to make a neophyte jump. Because he was not actually a threat, the guards chatted with him freely. One brought tea and homemade biscuits to share with Willie during his break. Another gave him the newspaper when he was done with it. He was sure that whoever was in charge of his confinement was fully aware of these little treats, and let them sneak past without complaint. Perhaps, if it was decided that he had committed a new sin to be persecuted for, he would lose his luxuries, but that was only a further excuse to enjoy them.
Unfortunately, with the possibility of escape on the horizon, tea, biscuits and a newspaper were losing their novelty. The articles in the newspaper could be hit or miss, and the good ones left him feeling eager and restless. He was not even allowed an hour in the yard like he was in prison. Days passed without any natural light to indicate the passing of time. He found it more and more difficult to gauge when he was tired. No one seemed to know how long he had to wait.
This was torture.
Finally, at some indeterminate point in his long, unending day, all the doors on the chambers leading to his cell were unlocked, including the bars that separated him from the viewing room. A guard brought him out of the cell without handcuffing him. At the end of the hall, in the final chamber leading to the central building, was Iram Zmarai, carrying a suit of Willie’s clothes over his shoulder. His hair was longer, parted to the side in a poetic sweep. He'd grown a mustache, but Willie found that didn't dampen the brightness in his large black eyes. Willie embraced him without restraint, holding him to his chest as tightly as he could manage. He could feel tears springing to his eyes, but he checked himself, far more eager to get dressed than to weep. There was a screen for him to dress behind. He did so quickly, and with minimal attention to the suit itself. It was only when the final button was popped into place did he recognize it as one of the finer suits he kept for public engagements. It was green to the point of black, and Iram made sure to include one of Willie’s silk scarves to use as a pocket square; blue, with red cranes flying over a stylized landscape.
“Where did you get this?” he asked, straightening the sleeves as he stepped out from behind the screen. “More importantly, where is the rest of my wardrobe? If it’s still at home, Sakina and I will have to set up a schedule to avoid each other whenever I want to change.”
“I have it. I’m your agent, and your wardrobe counts as part of your estate,” Iram said, reaching out to fix his collar. “Of course, most of your belongings are still with her, since I have limited space at home,”
He produced a sprig of bay leaf and pushed it through an empty buttonhole.
“What’s this? I don’t need gifts. I’m already coming with you,”
“Orphic symbolism. Welcome home.”
“Death is home, life is recess.”
“Oh, shut up, you’re not a priest anymore,”
"Does this mean I'm free?"
"For a while. There are some other legal matters that need to be explored--"
"But you found someone else to take care of them," Willie extrapolated, slipping his arm in Iram’s. "Clever man. Well, what's next? I traversed the void and returned to the land of the living. What do you do after that? Did you make any plans?"
"No, I cleared my whole schedule to come pick you up. I had no idea how long this would take."
"Iram, you're a genius. I've always said that about you." Willie said. Iram smiled and gently led him down a different path, guiding them toward a destination rather than the companionable ambling Willie had fallen into. "Let’s go to a park. Or a museum. I want to walk, and talk, and look at things. Then I want to have dinner with our friends until dawn and roam the streets until daybreak like a resurrected jailbird."
"I almost forgot just how much attention you need," Iram said.
"Insatiable. Where are we going?"
"To sign your release forms."
Iram led him through a series of offices to sign paperwork, take it to another room, leave it with one clerk and take up another form. Willie was nearly restless enough to throw himself out a window, but finally Iram took him down an elevator into the magnificent lobby of the central office of the Church of Eternal Mysteries, where the goddesses of death and rebirth strained to touch each other over the spinning doors at the entrance. Just as Willie was about to waltz through and embrace his new life, Iram steered him once again on a detour to a phone booth.
"You said you wanted dinner with friends," Iram reminded him, feeding coins into the machine. "I have to call friends, first."
"You can't stop me in sight of the doors. That's cruel. Give me a cigarette and I'll wait outside for you,"
Iram gave him the whole pack.
He stepped out into the clean air of spring, stretched out his arms, and inhaled deeply. The smells of the city embraced him fully. The burning gasoline of car exhaust, the charcoal smoke of food vendors, and the unique smell that only came from the sun hitting the concrete in the downtown area of town. The smell was probably the accumulated build up of years cooking oil from the food carts that dumped their used oil down the gutters at the end of the day. Nowhere else smelled quite like it.
He took out a cigarette and discovered that Iram forgot to give him a match to light it with. Out of habit, he checked the pockets of his suit. He found them completely empty except for a cold, metal ring. He wondered with a tremor if Iram-- or perhaps Sakina-- was cruel enough to leave him with his wedding ring. He found instead his faience ring with Jupiter's sigil carved on the face of it. He bought it when his first son was born, as an ironic nod to his new role. As strange as it was to assume the mantle, it was stranger still to give up. He was no longer the father, arbiter of justice and ruler of his tiny kingdom, but his hands were naked without rings, so he slipped it on anyway. He flexed and clenched his hand. He supposed he could swap it later if Iram had the rest of his jewelry, or he would keep it and find new meaning in the symbol. Jupiter's rune was similar to Ma'at's feather, another symbol of justice and order associated with the fifth planetary body in the solar system. There was something anti-authoritarian in finding the hidden feminine core underneath the blustering male facade.
He traced a memetic sign in the air that corresponded to a theurgic formula, and a hot little flame ignited between his fingers. He lit the cigarette and blew out the flame before it could blister his skin. The very first pull made him light-headed, and his chest heavy. He was giddy and oversmoked before the cigarette was finished. He hadn't had so much satisfaction from a single cigarette since he was twelve years old. Rebirth must have reduced his former tolerance, which made him wonder if his body was different. He knew there were reports of men who lived well into their hundreds after a single resurrection, but not all.
From the sidewalk of the central office, shaded by upper floors, Willie looked down winding streets into the wide boulevards beyond. To call one side modern and the other ancient was technically correct, but it lost the nuance of the truth. The port at the northern point of the city was one of the oldest still standing in the world. It was built at the dawn of sailing, when crossing the calm, warm Basin Sea was more realistic than the cold ocean to the west. These streets were widened as the centuries brought more trade, which caused more traffic, which produced a greater demand for wider streets. The Grunwydlanns took responsibility for several of the boulevards that cut through the heart of the town, but in the hundred years they'd occupied the country they found that most of the roads built in the 12th century still worked perfectly fine.
Bicycles and cars were a much more permanent change to the face of the city. Because this was such an ancient port thousands of years of paving stones, tar and cement blanketed the face of the city. The roads were so thick they could be mined like a quarry, and that made horses more expensive than they would be in the country. A horses' knees crumbled like chalk on the hard streets. Folk stories delighted in spinning rumors that someone once saw a hoof split like a dry fingernail, or watched bones punch through their skin. Bicycles were so much cheaper, and that same wide, flat earth that could kill a working horse made the city the perfect landscape for a cyclist.
When Iram finally returned he took Willie to the museum, as requested. They spent an afternoon looking at old paintings and old sculptures, competing to see who could make the other laugh louder, and scolding each other when they did. After a few hours Willie was starving, but Iram refused to buy a whole meal.
"You wanted to have dinner with friends," he reminded Willie. "Unfortunately for you, I took you at your word. We'll have tea."
Willie complained for appearance's sake but followed Iram to the museum's cafe for a light snack, bread and butter and tea. They returned to Iram's house to freshen up before dinner. Most of Willie's clothes were there, but the winter clothes were still out while his spring clothes were packed up. When he took them out they were stiff from being folded up for so long, and try as he might, he could not air them out before dinner. He wore his evening clothes anyway, but sulked over an uneven crease in the left pant leg
"No one will notice," Iram groaned.
"But I'll know."
"Do you want to cancel our plans?"
"Of course not, I didn't come back from the dead to stay at home and read."
They went to Willie’s favorite restaurant where Iram reserved a room. The owner came to join them, to shake Willie’s hand and congratulate him on his resurrection. They’d arrived twenty minutes after the appointed time to meet, so naturally they were there first to greet the guests. The inner circle was first to arrive– with more bay leaves, and jokes, and newspaper clippings reporting Willie’s resurrection. They brought friends, and those friends invited their friends, and after the acquaintances arrived strangers started pouring in. Marcel snuck two journalists in, one with a notepad and one with a camera. Willie only noticed them as they were running out of film, but he made a show of scolding them anyway. They put down their work and took up drinks obediently. When the women took off their scarves to reveal that their dresses plunged deep below the ribs, people in the main dining room left in disgust.
“What was death like?” a young man asked Willie.
Willie was trying to pace his alcohol intake, but he wanted another drink as soon as his first drink got warm. He’d obeyed the impulse before and made himself violently sick juggling multiple drinks, so he tried to ignore it.
“I was killed by a large man with a scar running from the top of his head, through his eye and down to his jaw. They shaved our hair in prison, of course. His eye wasn’t blind, but each lid was slightly deformed by the scar. He grabbed me by the throat and squeezed until I lost consciousness, but in my senselessness I was aware of a sharp snap of pain when he broke my neck. I felt myself fall, and when I next opened my eyes the last spot of sunlight was reduced to a pinprick ringed with teeth. Then I knew I was in the throat of Mot. Eventually I landed on a flat plain of pale dirt, dotted with smooth pebbles. The single pinprick of light that I had seen above me was lost in a sea of thousands of other pinpricks of light. A thousand other mouths exposing just the smallest sliver of light from the world above. I walked for days without seeing anyone, but I knew there were others in the land with me. I found tarnished crowns, the bent shields of knights, broken swords and the abandoned texts of a thousand faiths. Not just religious faiths, but those of philosophers and poets, as well. The further I walked the thicker the debris grew, until I was kicking my way through a mountain of garbage. At the top of the mountain I found the Devil.
‘What do you want?’ the Devil asked me. ‘Did you come here to abandon your burdens, as well? Not what you expected? Wanted a holy choir of angels? What’s the matter with all of you? We all have to live here, you know. I’m sick to death of you people coming here with baggage and then abandoning it when it’s too heavy to carry.’
I asked him what he was doing on the mountain, rather than in the valley.
‘I am making a pile of kindling,’ the Devil said. ‘In a few minutes, I will set all this garbage on fire. Then, perhaps, I’ll have a little more space to move around,’
‘Do you need a match?’ I asked, and in that moment I was brought back to the world of the living,”
“How did you have a match?” the young man cried, laughing. “Where were you keeping it? In a pocket? Did you get to keep your clothes?”
“I was stark naked. It was behind my ear.”
Later, a group of young people approached him with a dead fly on a napkin.
"Can you bring it back to life?" They asked.
"Surely you've seen a priest re-animate the dead for educational purposes," he said. Two of the young people shook their heads. A waiter paused to watch, as well.
"I've never seen a body animated before. My mother thinks the Eternal Mysteries are morbid." The waiter said.
"She’s not wrong," Willie admitted. The rites of animation were different for each instance. For complete, independent resuscitation, as Sakina performed on Willie, the rite required days of preparation. The complete resuscitation of a squashed fly could take all night, and even that would rely on assuming no one would mind if the fly came back wrong. It was much simpler to return the spark of life to the mechanical joints of the body. Once the physical husk was animated by the necromancer's will, gravity and physics could be leaned on for support, but he needed skill to fish around within the fly and find enough tissue to animate. Like a surgeon, Willie used the threads of animating force to poke blindly inside the crushed remains. Through them the fly felt equal in scale to him. Each limb was heavy with the weight of death. The destroyed thorax broke the line of communication between front and forelegs, and the joints that rotated the wings were shattered, but he made do. There were no nerves to react to pain as the fly stood on broken legs. Chitin sloughed off the creature's back, but if the young people who watched it wobble upright noticed that it left flakes on the napkin, or that the bulbous rear end was deflated, they didn't say so.
"Make it fly!" Cried a pretty young woman with traditional jewelry and a foreign dress. Willie concentrated. There was just enough of the wing left to beat the air, but when he tried to lift it through purely mechanical means, the broken pieces of chitin rattled apart. He briefly lost count of how many parts were at the base of the left wing and caught himself in time to sense chunks flying off. He managed to keep the wings moving as he relocated his attention to the fly's belly and summoned up enough force to hold it in midair. The illusion held. The young people were enthralled. Willie toyed briefly with holding back the beautiful woman with her old fashioned jewelry to talk further, but when something else took his attention, he let it.
The party reached it’s peak just as the restaurant was shutting down. The maitre’d was waving the bill in Willie’s face and begging to be heard over the crush of people. Iram took over the negotiations, freeing up Willie to return to his public. He felt a touch on his arm and turned to find Dr. Saladin Tharwat finishing a drink.
“Brilliant party. Welcome back to life,”
“Sal!” Willie cried, and gave him a hug. “Good to see you! Enjoying yourself?”
“Of course I am. You recovered amazingly fast. You’ve got the luck of the Devil, as always, I don’t even see a hint of regret on your face,”
“No time. I could go back to being dead tomorrow; I could choke on an olive pit right here in front of you,”
“Oh, yes, death is eternal, death is inevitable, Saint William Savage meditates on eternity night and day, in isolation and in a crowd. You’re excommunicated, you pious son of a bitch,”
“If you can withhold a truth, is it still true?”
Dr. Tharwat answered with a guttural laugh that communicated a lack of interest in solid answers. Switching gears, he added; “I saw your wife last week. In court, on trial, for bringing you back to life,”
“How is she?” Willie asked.
Dr. Tharwat paused to chew on a cocktail onion. “Hard to say. Not well, I don’t think. Or, at least, I struggle to imagine her well, given the circumstances. She was dressed in late mourning, but she was wearing bright blue,”
“On trial? In court? In front of a judge and a handful of priests?” Willie asked, beaming at the image of Sakina intentionally dressed to confuse a bunch of stubborn old men. “That’s my girl.”
The swell of pride brought him another bout of heartache at the thought of Sakina. He missed her, and he felt like a hypocrite for missing her. He’d hurt her so badly that she spent their last few nights together screaming at him through tears, listing every action he’d done to her and their household that caused lasting damage. He’d been obstinate at the time and defended himself reflexively, but the same pit below his sternum where he felt the ache of loss told him then that he was wrong. He’d put off his conscience for years, knowing there would be consequences and waiting to deal with them later. There’d even been an element of fun in ignoring the inevitable, as if he was playing the role of a careless bastard for an audience. In some ways he supposed that was exactly what he was doing, and the audience he kept at the time cheered him on the whole way.
“Have you seen her?” Tharwat asked.
“No; she’s banned me from seeing her or the children.”
Tharwat looked surprised. “Can she do that?”
“She certainly can, it was part of our settlement.”
Tharwat stared into the bottom of his glass and shrugged. “There’s something romantic about that. As if she’s afraid she’ll take you back if you two ever met again,”
“Maybe she will,”
“Hmm,” Tharwat said. He drained his glass and wagged his finger at Willie, the change of tone indicating another change of topic. “Did you know, there are some members of the clergy who are convinced that they always knew you were a bad fit for the church? Matthias de Salvo, who I’m sure wrote an article about the enrapturing power of religion when you first joined, has written a new one warning against allowing men of the world to enter the fold. He’s advocating for a sort of personality test to weed out bad apples before they spoil the bushel.”
Willie laughed. “Can you send me a copy of both?”
"I'll see if I can find it. So, what now? What will you do?"
"Oh, write and lecture, if they'll let me. If they don't, I think I will become a wizard, like the excommunicated men of old. I'll do parlor tricks for money, buy a cheap plot of land in the country, build a tower, cure blighted crops, predict the weather, and brew poisons for women in unhappy marriages,"
Iram appeared at his elbow, folding the bill into his wallet. "They really want us to leave,"
"We'll have to do that, then," Willie said. "Sal, you'll help us round up the stragglers, won't you?"
It was late enough that the crowd dispersed easily. They walked through the restaurant as the staff swept up, still talking. The tables were cleared, the cloths in the laundry, the chairs stacked. Waiters swept the floor in the soft silence of the night, while the manager counted up their total on a back table. He paused to say goodnight as they left. Once outside, the party dispersed like fallen leaves, wandering off in all directions to catch a train, a cab, or to go for a stroll in the moonlight.
Willie, Tharwat and Iram collected a small group of companions who were too awake to go to bed and discussed next moves.
"Just one song," said a very drunk young man. "One song and I will go to bed. One song or I will die,"
"That's a lot of pressure to put on one song," Iram muttered.
"I could go for a nightcap," Willie added.
"The restaurateur Ahmed Savaghnani opened a new club last night called Viola, we could go there," a young woman said eagerly. Willie glanced over at Iram and saw a tightening of his expression that said they had run up enough high bills for one night.
"Too much activity for a nightcap. I want a dark, quiet place, with brick walls. A nook that draws the late hour into itself, somewhere we could find Night herself collapsed at a table."
"Somewhere we could get stabbed." the incredibly drunk young man said. The eager young woman looked thrilled.
Iram looked at Willie as if he could read his mind. "Do you want to go to that place by the shore we used to go with Hakan?"
He had, in fact, thought about re-visiting the small, unnamed bar at the edge of the dock as a free man. He used to visit it to hide. It was a perfect bar for hiding in, exactly the kind of place where the last patch of nighttime might slink down to hide in during the day. He imagined the night as more of a large cat than a human woman, making biscuits while the owner locked it in.
"I wonder if I’ll recognize it without wondering if Sakina could find me there," he muttered. He noticed a stillness fall on Tharwat.
Iram, on the other hand, only laughed. "Do you think it'll have lost all its charm without your wife to think about? Oh, well, let's have one last drink there, to say goodbye to the old place."
"Are you really going to a bar at the river in the foreign quarter the same day you were released from prison? After your divorce was finalized?" Tharwat asked. He pressed his palms together. "Willie. Come onDon't make the same mistakes twice."
"They're not mistakes anymore, they're just my life," Willie said.
"Everything ends," Tharwat answered, as more of a warning than an affirmation. "I'm not coming. Don't bring Sakina more grief then you already have."
"It was good to see you, Sal. Don't forget to send me those two articles by de Salvo."
"De Salvo? He's a prig." Iram said.
The incredibly drunk young man choked twice and released a stream of vomit on his shoes. He straightened up, red faced and glistening with sweat. "I think I need to go home."
***
The bar at the edge of the shore wasn't far from the central office for the Church of Eternal Mysteries where Willie was held that morning. Sailors needed to drink and sleep just as much as wealthy merchants, bankers and priests, and the oldest quarter of the city wasn't divided into neat slices of rich or poor. There were ribbons of wealth, like the central banking office sitting next to high-end stores, and cafes where rich men could take their wives and clients. Squeezed between these shops were the occasional lunch counter, where bikes were piled in knots out front during the day as messengers and delivery people ate their meals. There was a large depot where cabbies kept their carts and truckers parked their trucks, as well as the country's first private parking garage where recreational vehicles were stored. There were still stables in the area, and tiny, pristine mud houses that were built thousands of years ago, preserved each decade by a committee and decorated with a commemorative plaque. A little farther west was an area designated for unpacking livestock. Sailors could walk their animals right into the slaughterhouse, where they could be kept alive for a day or two until it was time to kill them. On busy weeks before major holidays they spilled so much blood that the smell wafted east to the banking district and left an oily sheen on streets nearly a mile away.
The strange effect, which Willie loved, pushed two completely different worlds right next to each other. The bankers, merchants, their clients and wives travelled to and from the area without ever thinking about the lunch stands where the cabbies ate, or the bars where the sailors drank. When asked, they didn't even believe they existed. The smell of blood from the slaughterhouse was a symptom of city living, which they reasoned was a sign that their restaurants served them freshly butchered meat. The sour smell of beer fermenting in its pots was a symptom of having it freshly brewed.
Both sides worked side by side during the day, but when the bankers went home after drinking in the cafes or smoking in the lounges, the poor were still there. They walked up and down long, empty avenues, singing and dancing. Women came to sell them comfort, and the bars were open all week long.
Willie's favorite served a mixed clientele of sailors, merchants, dock workers, and others who came to the bar as soon as their shift was over. The ones who had a home to go to in town went there before it got too late. Sex workers came in off the pier to drink, eat, and relax before dawn came. It was not a bar they came to for clients.
The real body of clientele couldn't be summed up in a word. Indeed, sometimes it was difficult to divide them up by sex. Men and women alike came in traditional clothing, foreign dress, and even disguises. There were rumors that aristocrats from all over the world came to that bar, though it could never be proven.
Iram and Willie lost more companions as they made their way towards the river. Members of their party peeled away, sick or exhausted from the long night. When they arrived they were only a group of five, and one succumbed to the bleary disassociation of exhaustion there at the table. He did not collapse, but sat upright in total silence with his mouth open.
The bar was full and loud. Someone was still at the piano, playing a popular tune while a group of sailors sang along. Only the pianist seemed to know the words.
Their party disintegrated at last, pushed too far for the sake of keeping the night going. People left. Iram was too drunk to keep track of them. He found himself by the piano when the player was too tired. As the sounds of conversation rushed in to fill the lull, he ran his hands over the scarred back of the old, flaky wood. It was a surprisingly well-made instrument of dense wood with brass fixtures and a strong, round body. He pressed one key experimentally and felt rather than heard the thrumming of the strings inside it. The high notes all appeared to have their strings broken, as evidenced by the thumping of the felted hammers against the lid of the piano. He set his drink on the floor and took a seat, feeling out a few chords experimentally and tripping over missing keys.
People watched as he ran a few experimental scales, and some approached to ask if he could play.
"No," he said automatically, then felt stupid for it. The others didn't seem to care, and began requesting songs with jaunty names like the Cat's Belly, or Mary on the Old High Seas. He didn't know any of those songs.
Someone offered to hum a tune for him, but the drone was lost beneath the roar of talking. At their insistence Iram struck up a hesitant gallop, tripping up where he encountered a broken or missing key. His audience swelled into a slurred chorus of voices, apparently in agreement on which song he was playing. When the first song was over they asked for a second, and paid him in a round of drinks. He played the same gallop as before, and they broke into a new song. When the crowd grew melancholy he played a waltz, and slowed it down at the end when they were all intoning deeply with sad voices. For fun he played a little Raubert, but the bar didn't like it because there were no words to sing along to. He played an opera aria and was almost blown out of his seat by the answering call of a man in the corner who was unconscious until that moment. His high notes were strained, and his mid-voice was weak, but his chest voice was deep, rich and strong. He sang with his body still crumpled up on the floor, with his back only straight enough to fill his belly with air. His arms and legs were tangled bonelessly in front of him. If he hadn't started singing, he could have passed for a corpse.
When the man lapsed back into sleeping Iram decided that was enough of the piano, and enough of drinking. He asked the bartender for a cup of tea, juice, water– anything. The bartender poured him a large glass of tonic water to get rid of him. He tried to find their table again, but it was too dark and everywhere he turned he found a new structure to slam into. He worried dimly about getting home, but first he had to find a bench, drink his tonic water, and try to sober up. He accomplished the first two, and began to focus on the third. After some time, he found an empty table with a familiar spread of glasses. There was a toothpick chewed to pieces that had to be Willie's, but the man himself was nowhere in sight. He pushed his way through the crowd of singers and found a back room he hadn't been in before. Inside, he found Willie nibbling on the throat of someone in a cummerbund with his hands busy in their trousers.
"Close the door." They ordered, so Iram did. He worked himself down from embarrassment and was settling on a course of action when Willie returned, cleaning his hands on his handkerchief. He scooted close to Iram, grabbed him by the waist and kissed him. He tasted like pomade and someone else's cologne, but that disappeared the longer they kissed.
Iram pulled them apart. "Let’s go home."
"Can we walk?" Willie begged, his expression puppyish. "Please? I haven't walked through the city in months. I want to see the sun rise."
"Yes, yes, fine." Iram grumbled.
Willie led him by the elbow back into the center of town. They were almost alone on the street. When they did pass another late-night walker, they felt a sort of kinship with them, as if they were all awake together.
Traffic was slow in those early hours. They walked in the middle of thoroughfares that would be teaming with traffic in the morning, passing slowly out of the way of headlights as they approached. They watched the shops getting ready to open along the sidewalk. Bakers ended their night, fishermen brought in the catch, florists returned from the market. A whole network of business that was only conducted at night, because those were the hours best suited to their task. Iram kissed Willie again, not only out in the open but in the middle of the highway.
The sky was overwhelmingly blue and quickly brightening. The streetlights began to fade, but the streets were still dark enough that when they passed a window it looked like a portal back to nighttime. They passed a homeless man washing himself outside, singing in the early light, construction workers meeting on the corner before work, office workers juggling coffee and keys. Then the sun rose higher, giving the sky a pink wash before returning to an even brighter blue than before, and then it was as if a switch flipped that began the day. The heat came down and settled on them, whisking off the last of the cool night air. Traffic moved, people came out of their houses, the shops unlocked and everyone surged into activity. They couldn’t walk in the middle of the road anymore.
They reached Iram’s front door at seven in the morning. His mouth was dry as dust, and he could feel a pounding headache slowly climb from the sockets of his eyes to the back on his scalp. His girl of all work met them at the door with a surprised expression.
“Leave us something that’s just as good hot or cold in the main room, and keep the blinds covered.” Willie said with a smile, and brought Iram into his own bedroom. When the door was closed he helped Iram undress, and Iram pushed off Willie’s shirt and jacket in turn. Without his clothes he looked the way he had before the resurrection, though he’d lost weight after six months in jail. Iram missed Willie’s gut, the broad, warm reassuring sturdiness of him, big, strong and so much more masculine than his mannerisms suggested. He was such a large man, with such a paradoxically finicky nature, vain and prim as a teenage girl.
“I don’t think I’m up for much.” Iram muttered.
“Just lie down and stay awake a little longer,” Willie insisted. They spread out on the bed and Willie took Iram’s thighs in the crooks of his arm, nibbling the delicate, sensitive skin where his joints met. Iram twitched and jumped under him with each bite. As he hardened, Willie ran his tongue over him, swallowed him down and sucked. His mouth was hot and wet, and Iram’s hips pumped unconsciously.
“Sorry.” he gasped.
Willie let the cock flop out of his mouth. “I don’t mind. I like it when you choke me.”
Iram took hold of Willie’s hair and watched as he went down to meet the floor of Iram’s groin. His nerves tingled with fire that built as Willie sucked, his nose coming in and out of view. Iram could feel Willie’s breath coming quicker on his skin, the eager shifting underneath him.
Willie’s tongue swirled against him as he peaked, tension coming undone from his body in waves. Willie held him through it, and pulled up beside him as the final thread on Iram’s consciousness came undone and he went quietly into sleep.