books & boys (they bring me so much joy)

The girl dies; the faithless hero’s lover is betrayed; the wife suffers; the widow is brought low.

Or: the girl lives; the faithless hero’s lover finds a bridegroom who will set her in the stars; the wife endures; the widow remembers.

Achilles is the lover, and Patroclus is his beloved. Patroclus is the lover, and it is Achilles he loves. Either one stands, either one has been written, either one is true. There’s always a war. When and where depends on what you read. There’s rarely peace, but if there were, what would be left to tell a story about?

***

There’s never been a year since junior high where they haven’t shared everything they could – matching maroon sweaters and ugly navy polos, matching grins and matching broken legs in tenth grade despite the fact that Patroclus only threw discus that year, matching duffel bags of smelly sports shorts. For six months they shared an ID card before campus security caught on, and Patroclus is five inches taller with curly dark hair – they’ve stolen and reclaimed one another’s personal possessions so often that they can’t tell whose textbooks are whose. Together they are mutually complementary forces for evil.

Students here tend to emerge after a six-month incubation period as individuals falling on either side of a roughly-drawn binary. Type One, stick-and-pokes, rolling papers, and reusable glass water bottles, versus Type Two: sweaters, trust funds, and cocaine. Achilles doesn’t have the trust fund and he doesn’t have the cocaine (talk to Paris on the other side of the water and bring cash) but he does have the monumental attitude problem, relentless in pursuit of truth and unbearable in pursuit of anything else. He looks the part, too – a stocky blond with an affinity for sport coats. Patroclus is roughly in the other camp – thoughtful, yielding, rambling. Seperately, they do all right. Together – together is best for everybody. To Achilles’ father, this place is still what it was in the late seventies – a bastion of strong opinions and strong self-esteem and good clean fun, for a measure thereof that includes liquor bottles hidden in the ceiling tiles. To Patroclus’ mother and to most of their prospective employers, this is a college best known for its rowing team and its annoyingly archaic system of majors.

The school across the water still stands, as stolidly STEM-focused as the day it was founded. It’s all glass and tile and its student body according to its reputation is composed entirely of stuck-up assholes, former cult members, and serial fuckers of other people’s girlfriends – all of them highly employable. Despicable as rivals, boast-worthy as conquests, and just not quite as good in every other way. But in the right light, the silhouetted buildings look almost the same.

They haven’t been on campus a week, and most of Patroclus’ stuff (with the exception of all his books) is still in boxes. They are sharing a lukewarm cider and watching the sun go down, spilling its weird light over the treetops and against the windows.

The paint on the side door is peeling off in big flakes. It’s noticeably worn around the door handles, where people jimmy the lock with their ID cards or with pocket knives (favorite personal item of the testosterone-poisoned philosophy major) more often than they walk 20 feet around to the front. Patroclus takes a swig out of his bottle and clambers up higher on the hood of the car, surveying it all. It’s been years since fundraising projects scraped enough together from whimsical tee shirts or clandestine money-laundering via kegs to cover that kind of volunteer project, repainting the parts of campus nobody cares about or installing an actual fire pit in place of that patch of scorched earth and beer bottles by the creek or anything semi-useful – and yet every sporting event that can be made competitive (as puny and weird as they all are) has its full budget bankrolled. Hell, Marching Band Club could probably get off the ground this year if they turned it into a matter of honor.

“Look at this shithole!” Achilles isn’t shy about raising his voice in exultation, and it scares some finches.

“Yeah, but it’s home, right?” (Patroclus fumbles with his lighter, cider bottle balanced between his knees.)

“Did you ever think about going somewhere else? If you’d be better off going to state college and studying business, or going into the army, or – anywhere.”

“Not really. It feels like I was raised for this, you know? It’s been years since I was in a normal classroom, it’s not like I can do anything else, and I happen to kill at this.”

(He’s talking about this with Achilles, who had only gone to private school because no public school would have him any more and had learned to channel that wiry aggression into incredible debate skills and nothing else. Patroclus never had any other choice, too-sensitive and too shy and perilously near something unspeakable, and within four years he had become a force to be reckoned with, only second to his co-captain in all conceivable forms of mischief. He tries to picture the both of them somewhere else, together, and can’t. It’d just been luck.)

“Yeah, well. Me neither.”

***

Briseis is a sophomore, a volunteer in the music library, and one of the only sopranos in the school chorus – a soaring, clear, pious voice. But right now Briseis has some kind of horrifying lung plague that Achilles can’t actually be blamed for this time, but the fact that his idea of a good time involves getting trash-wasted and pillaging the tonsils of anything standing upright isn’t doing anything for this girl’s health. Actual medical attention might be in order, and the least it’ll do is get her out of the dorm for an hour.

The sun’s high over the creek behind them, cutting out long shadows. Some mornings on the other side you can see Helen, doing yoga on the grass, but not this morning.

The walk to the health center stretches out before them both like a death march, and Briseis hugs his arm so tightly she could probably take her feet off the ground and hang there. She looks good, considering the circumstances and the fact that she’s been throwing up at intervals all night, but she’s into the performing arts, so maybe this is performing. Her breath steams even without the smoke, and her cheeks are prickled with burst blood vessels. Everybody knows whose girl she is. Nobody would touch her, hassle her outright. But it doesn’t mean they won’t say anything. This shouldn’t be happening in their own camp; it shouldn’t be happening anywhere.

Patroclus huddles deeper into Achilles’ borrowed sweatshirt. Nobody’s going to say shit to this girl. No catcalls, no passive-aggressive clutching of beer cans, no edging her off the sidewalk and looking her up and down to scrutinize Achilles’ prize of war. What war is this? They pick their way through last fall’s wet dry leaves, resurfacing from the snow.

“You know he graduates next year, right?”

“Oh yeah?” She sniffles a little and rubs at her face with the heel of her hand. “He’s a senior? I used to not think he’d ever leave. Guys who are that level of asshole are all immortal.”

“Yeah, he’s like that. But he’s gonna graduate, and you’re gonna have pick of the litter, right? You’re gonna date a nice theater kid. No more bros for you.”

(Achilles is only a pale shadow of fraternity boys a world over, harder and crueler boys, but that’s cold comfort for someone he’s happy to use up and wring out anyway. Maybe that’s what they tell themselves here, that they’re shrewder, wiser, more sensitive or more worldly than their peers at other schools when all they have in their favor is some names and some pretenses.)

Her head is on his shoulder, her braids falling against his sweatshirt, her cigarette smoke rising in his eyes.

“Nobody else would walk with me.”

“I’ll walk with you wherever you need to go”

***

Achilles’ room is at the top of the block and it’s a wasteland of blue painter’s tape and dirty socks. Who knows who he had to fistfight to get that spot in the housing lottery, but it’s his sanctuary, and that makes the actual enforcement of college policy here even more stinging. People know where to find him – know where to find all three of them, most of the time – and they know not to come in without knocking.

Patroclus is balancing on the edge of Achilles’ awful rickety dorm bed, trying to dislodge a pair of underwear from on the overhead light fixture with a yellow plastic broom, when Achilles comes tearing back in like a whirlwind. He doesn’t have to say it. He’s in full fume.

“Motherfucker!”

“Good morning to you too, sunshine.”

Achilles throws his Thermos down on the bed with violent abandon and dumps out his bookbag. “Not you, asshole. The administration ruled against us. Briseis goes back to her old room in Scott Hall or they’re going to fine her.”

“That’s $400 at the end of the year, though.”

“$400 she doesn’t have,” Achilles says grimly. It’s not like Achilles to be anything in the general ballpark of conscientious about finances, but Briseis is a long way from home and a long way from loaded. “They’re talking to her dad about it.”

“Yeah, well, who talked her into that.” There’s no blame there – it would have gone off without a hitch if Agamemnon wasn’t trying to flex his R.A. muscles so fucking hard. He’d had his own little PK girlfriend on board via some elaborate scheme with switching roommates, until that rapidly went south and she transferred out. The bitterness was palpable, not least because she took their only lamp and their only rug.

“Yeah, and now Agamemnon is not-so-subtly hinting they’re going to sic security on her if she doesn’t get back on his floor posthaste so he can keep scamming on her at 7 AM in the coed bathroom. You think I’m going to let him talk to her like that?”

“The person who gets it hardest if you keep shit-stirring is her. She didn’t ask for this, and if she’s ready to go, she can go. You’re welcome to start shit and drag me into it whenever you want, but leave her out of this. She’s got a lot more time in front of her than you do. Take it up with the assistant dean if you really want to start a housing throwdown.”

Achilles’ face splits in a terrible smile.

“Yeah. Yeah, you’re probably right.”

 

Achilles holes up in there like an asshole Boo Radley and the whole building shivers with the reverb from his shitty electric guitar. He smokes a lot of weed, and he calls his mom.

***

From the kitchen rises the sound of someone rummaging in the shared refrigerator (which is helpfully labeled The State Of Warre in permanent marker) overlaid with the sounds of Odysseus phoning his long-distance girlfriend. Odysseus is the representative of the weird emotionally incestuous cult that lives in the basement, a sort of mirror to the weird emotionally incestuous cult that lives on the third floor, only with worse heating in the winter and more straight people.

After some time, Patroclus hobbles up with a plastic bag of frozen peas clamped to his right wrist. It doesn’t look particularly comfortable, or effective, and before Achilles can even get up to accommodate him on their much-abused tan couch, Patroclus is lowering himself down on his lap like the saddest most bruised ton of bricks.

“Hey, can you give me a hand?” He holds up his free hand, with its busted fingers, and gestures with his head at the wad of Ace bandages currently held clamped under his armpit for transport. Achilles shifts a little to accommodate Patroclus squarely on his long thighs; his copy of Das Kapital falls to the carpet with a satisfactory thump, but he doesn’t really care.

“Did you really punch a pool table?”

“The wrist part came first,” Patroclus mutters. “I was trying to prove a point.”

“Was it at least our pool table? Did you get into a brawl in the Epstein sex basement?” (Which is a basement, in a dorm, frequently used for the purposes of illicit inter-dormitory love. The problem with a small campus is that there’s basically nowhere on campus that hasn’t been used as a trysting place and it makes places like the showers even grosser than usual.)

Patroclus’ brow furrows, though whether from discomfort or the effort to peer through hangover fog to recall previous events is unclear. Actually, what’s worse is he might have been sober – like Achilles, and surely many others of their calling, he’s capable of getting worked up about very little very fast. He’s just in denial about it.

“My point was about hard-body collisions. It got away from me really fast, okay.”

Achilles has bandaged a couple busted wrists before, but they were usually his own, and mapping the method of it onto someone else’s limbs is throwing him off. He bites his lip and gets a-winding, carefully, carefully. Making sure by feel that the bones and tendons all lie right, that he’s not wrapping too closely or too tightly. The hairs on the back of Pat’s wrist prickle at him, and the proximity of his body is too much; he smells like spilled drink mixers, cut through with the plasticky smell of bandage and the dull animal saltiness of his skin.

This is not new. He has done this before. Achilles just doesn’t know when. Patroclus smiles at him crookedly, daringly.

“Hard bodies, huh?”

“Rigid.”

***

The semester descends into the usual collegiate hell: protracted discussions about truth and utility, wave after wave of pestilence leaving everyone with permanently runny noses, dozens and dozens of papers to write, hard drive failures, odd shows of grace from hated instructors and more commentators to despise every day. Essays are proposed and duly shot down. Interpersonal conflicts come to a head – the quarrel with the school across the water is threatening to really boil over, ostensibly about who gets to use the water and when but in reality about something a lot more teen-drama. Everyone’s sick of it, and everyone’s over-committed; at a place like this everyone has an opinion, and the never-ending stream of inflammatory just-sayin’ editorials to the student paper, penned by someone who is definitely not Thersites, of course, are doing nothing to cool things down.

It would be all very exciting, if the days didn’t drag on like years, and if the sky wasn’t so gray more often than not. Forget hell; it’s more like limbo.

“When’s the last time you went to delegate council?” Patroclus pokes his head out from behind a thicket of annotations on Post-Its; he is wearing Achilles’ socks.

“Like I have time for that, when I could be bunking down with you and Hegel here?” Achilles peels off his raincoat and finds a place to sit among the boxes, which have still not been unpacked. His Greek notebook has mysteriously disappeared, so he has a shitload of transcription to do, but that’s not really a problem as much as an amazing excuse not to go to class.

“There are people counting on you, you know. You’re a politician now, you have certain obligations. Welcome to community life, pal.”

Achilles leans back amid the mess, contemplating an unlit cigarette. “Lies and falsehoods. What are you doing about dinner? Dining hall?”

***

Ajax drags them both up north for long weekend, ostensibly for a music festival but more likely to beat the heat he’s getting on campus – thank God they don’t get pulled over, because there is definitely more than one open container in that car, and more liberal arts students gagging from carsickness than there are seat belts. Patroclus brings along an iPad full of Arthur C. Clarke and Rilke; Achilles brings the copy of The Fountainhead his dad got him for Christmas to use as fire starters.

Camped out in a muddy field, surrounded by every luxury that the modern camping store can provide on a student budget, with the sharply-felt exception of any kind of mattress – Achilles can feel every rock and twig and and weird half-dug-up stump that lies within the perimeter as clearly as if there was no cover down at all. Some time in the night it happens; they must be on a slope, because Patroclus manages to roll over like a log down into Achilles’ side to both crush him and collapse against the propane stove. Achilles shouldn’t actually be complaining about the additional insulation, which is not to say he doesn’t – but it is hilarious in the morning when he wakes up (to the sound of Ajax trying to cook) with the R.E.I. logo embossed on his face.

His friend is lit from behind with the dawn, in profile – Achilles knows he has been here before. He has seen this, his dark hair falling in clusters over his forehead, the lines of Patroclus’ brow and nose and cheeks with the light catching and pooling.

***

A fall, a particularly rough impromptu rugby match or the aftermath of a freerunning session spent scaling the library building. Or another stupid drunken tangle with some equally drunk guy who might not even have been from the wrong school, he could have been one of theirs, he might have been a townie – it didn’t matter. Achilles is unusually pugnacious for someone who is, definitionally, a nerd. Two years ago, Patroclus would have been right there with him, but he’s tired now, tired of this. Action, reaction; this is how it goes, Achilles makes a terrible choice and he cleans up the mess, despite his own choices only being marginally less terrible. At least Patroclus tries; Achilles is too hard-headed and maddeningly damaged to care. First-aid between classes in a red brick building the color of the scrapes on Achilles’ hands. Girls in fur coats pass them by.

Patroclus can feel blood slipping against his palm, but when he looks down there’s nothing in his grip but clean white tee shirt. Achilles says nothing, and leans in to stop his friend’s scarcely-breathed complaint with the touch of his mouth.

***

(At his request, Patroclus gives him a wobbly stick-and-poke tattoo of a winecup. It’s better than one of a piece of pizza, and Achilles only whines for four whole hours.)

***

Their first time is after some awful themey party; there’s still the thud of merriment in progress coming up the stairs from the floor below, the endless rotation of tangentially space-themed pop music continues on unabated, and Patroclus is peeling off his coat and ironic flannel shirt. They have become a tangle of legs and scratchy near-beard and extra-long twin bed sheets as they wind up on the floor. Fingers, palms, twisting Achilles’ fly undone and pressing hotly against his belly like they should leave marks. His hands are on Patroclus’ broad brown back and his mouth is on his mouth.

They end up using a mint-flavored condom that has an astronaut sticker on the package. Surprisingly, that does very little to dampen the mood.

***

Student delegate council meets at 5:30, Wednesdays, and is currently working over the mystery of how Achilles has gotten so many votes for two years running when the only representative functions he performs are loudly complaining about the housing policies for upperclassmen and a regular patrol of the territory between his dorm, the gym facilities, and the liquor store. Somebody needs to intervene in his favor.

“If you’re not going to go, I will,” Patroclus calls over his shoulder as he pads down the stairs that are sticky with spilled beer. Achilles doesn’t even lift his head to watch him go. “It looks bad.”

And this has happened before, too.

***

From there on out, it feels alright. It feels simple. Not what to call it – thank God you could deflect any serious questions around campus by furrowing your brow and asking what sexual identity is, really, before going to roll a cigarette – but why it feels the way it does, like they’ve been doing it a lot longer than they’ve realized, why every touch and look sends off little echoes of some precedent. It’s like reading a library book with somebody else’s footnotes in the margin. There’s one thing in knowing other people have gone down this path, and another to feel it as keenly and closely as if those other people were standing right behind you in the dark.

What they’re doing is incredibly scary, but not really all that new. Not for them, here and now, but also – generally. The liberal arts are all about that shit – living other lives, reading other people’s words and and scrutinizing them for the sheer joy of it, without the barrier of intermittent years between their experiences and yours. It isn’t usually quite so literal.

If they have been before – if they have bled in the mud as cousins, however many times before, and only now know a relative peace – who would be surprised? In the night Patroclus holds on to him, tight, and he knows on a level below language how this story goes.

***

Patroclus looks out for him, and all he gets for it is hurt.

There’s no battle, and no god to contend with. There’s black ice and blind turns and bad roads. A solitary cyclist in the dark, perfectly conscientious and swooping in for a rescue. They’re both making good decisions, and it still happens because Patroclus is too responsible to leave him there. And it isn’t fair. Patroclus never makes it over the bridge. Achilles gets the message when he’s sober in the morning, plastered to somebody’s couch on the wrong side of the creek, and his stomach drops. That night, he misses evening seminar for the first time in four years.

Neither of them dies, but it’s a near thing.

Achilles’ world shutters closed like an eye, it shrinks to a pinprick, to a single point of wild impotent self-affronted anger. He has known this fury before, and its full strength strains against him, worse still because it has no focus and no object. He wants to break dishes, anybody’s dishes. He wants to catch the guy and kick his face in. He wants to pound on every door in this hellhole and scream bloody murder until somebody, somebody can give him a satisfactory account for why this is possible, why this is right. He wants to drag himself into the one bathtub on this hall and cry like a girl. He does none of these things. He slumps to the kitchen floor with his arms around his knees, and shakes. Why not him? Or somebody else – anybody else. This is more than he can bear.

Whatever the next few hours are, it’s not a blur, exactly – he must be doing something, something gets read or something gets written, but it’s all too-light and too-fast and he remembers it in parts, remembers sitting with his back to the wall and his cheek sweat-stuck to his cell phone screen. He remembers Briseis needing to pull him by hand into the bathroom to shower and shave. Afterward she holds him close and he blinks away tears against her shoulder, fallen drops on her blue dress.

Some part of him knows tears cannot fix this, but he breaks anyway. In sophomore year, he had bullshitted at great length a persuasive argument about grief, and now he’s living every way he’s been wrong – wrong about pleasure, wrong about glory, wrong about friendship, wrong about pain. None of it fits, none of it’s right.

Between classes, Achilles shaves his head, and the cut locks fall thick and fast into the sink. The sight of them there, twisting like a heap of commas and parentheses, shakes up an afterimage that rises. Achilles smells smoke, he smells cut wood and salt water and he buckles against the sink crying like a child, guts twisting.

***

(“Do you want to go and see him?”

Achilles has seen ghosts. He goes.)

***

“So how’s my bike doing?” Patroclus calls out when he enters, after the nurse leaves. It’s Saturday morning, and they are both alive.

Sun slants in through the blinds. There’s a stack of books next to Patroclus’ hospital bed about a foot high, and some part of Achilles is all primed to make jokes about whether he’d rather be reading Nietzsche or having a catheter put in right now, but he’s too worn out to joke and everything that’s said sounds like nonsense. Achilles is on his knees before him, and he doesn’t care who sees.

“I think it’s safe to assume, pretty bad,” Achilles says. Thank fuck the other vehicle hadn’t been pushing the speed limit or anything – not that there’s any ideal speed at which to be struck by a moving car, but a banged-up head (that has been officially ruled non-concussed) and some bruised innards beat out being a red smear on the asphalt any day. “Not as bad as you, though. Jesus Christ, I thought you died–”

“I’m not gonna die,” Patroclus says, tired eyes creasing when he smiles. He still has bruises, and Achilles can’t bear to interpret them for the particulars of his accident, but there’s color in his cheeks and he already looks more like himself than imagined. “In fact, if this is how you act when I’m not around, I plan on living forever.”

“Me too. Christ, you’re such an asshole, I don’t know what I’d do–”

“You planning on that too? On me living forever?”

Achilles kisses his scraped-up hands; Patroclus rubs his fingers against the sandy stubble of Achilles’ jaw, up his cheek to the side of his shorn head. He feels bare that way, nakeder than naked, and doesn’t care. He could lay down his head here on paper and flannel sheets and never go back again.

There is the sound of weak snickering from somewhere above him. “Why the fuck did you cut your hair? You look like you ought to be in the hospital. Your head’s huge.”

“It just felt right,” Achilles mumbles sheepishly into the meat of his palm. He doesn’t shrug off the touch of his hands – Patroclus is fully substantial, fully real, no ghost and no vision. Part of him is wondering why – why he could have thought it at all, when there was never really any danger. He could never really have lost him. “I’m sorry, okay? I really am. I’m sorry you got hurt, and it could have been so much worse.”

“Don’t apologize, not right now. Later you can grovel and fix my damn bike, but I don’t care, I’m glad you’re here and we’re going to be all right, yeah? Well, I am. You’re a wreck.”

“God, I love you.”

“Yeah, well.” He leans down, despite the bruises, to try and lift Achilles up. “You love a lot of things. Danish philosophers and beer, mostly. Thanks for coming to see me, though.”

“You can’t get rid of me that easily. I’m going to camp out in here until they let you out of here, and then I’m going to go with.”

They’re both young and bright and on fire. They’re never going to die.