false taste of paradise

Sunday morning, they meet up in the hotel lobby, and Cirk is wearing the shirt that Bill met him in, at the law enforcement conference in Atlantic City— the long-sleeved black tee shirt with the ray gun on it and tactical sprawled across the chest. Bill stiffens.

“You’re not wearing that out of here. Go back to your room and get changed.”

“You know, they gave it to me for free.” He’s pleased with himself about that, tugging at the hem to better show the logo. “It looks official, right?”

All of it is just merchandise: product that’s been packaged, branded, and shipped by the case. All of it is fucking tactical. Tactical knives, tactical water bottles, tactical cargo shorts. Everybody wants to be a soldier or a cop. He wants to hit him, to land a blow right in the middle of his chest where that printed logo sits, and knock him down. Bill holds out his hand: no.

“I don’t want to see you in that shirt again.”

People take photos. Photos have logos, patterns, brand names, name tags. All it would take would be somebody with their phone out, and there they are: PFC Tillich and unidentified white male.

The kid has a look on his face like he’s been scolded. “I don’t have any other clean clothes.”

“And whose fault is that?”

If he didn’t live like a sixteen-year-old, he’d have planned for it better. He should be back home with his mother — smoke bad weed, play some video games, take some classes. Learn to do laundry, learn to keep his room clean. Learn to make a bed.

Cirk makes a dismissive noise and moves to shoulder past him. Bill hooks him by the bend of his elbow, pressing with his thumb into the soft place of the joint there, and makes the kid look him in the eye.

“Go and get changed,” Bill says. His voice is low and controlled. “You can get some more clothes later.”

“It’s just a shirt. Why do you even care?”

Cirk couldn’t be more fucking petulant — the twist of his mouth, the way he holds himself, the way he lets his shoulders drop back to make himself feel taller. Young, and stupid, and arrogant, and careless. Careless from start to finish, undisciplined. He wants to hate him for it

Bill drives him to the outlets and watches him shop — watches him turn over cotton tee shirts in his hands like he doesn’t know what he’s looking for. In the end, he buys him six shirts, six pairs of underwear, two pairs of jeans, and he doesn’t think too hard about the money. He watches Cirk count bills at the register, watches the bent nape of his neck and the soft curls hanging against his jacket collar.

There’s no good reason to be lugging him around like this, and the array of bad reasons that come to mind aren’t easy to push away. Bill has money and he doesn’t need it. Cirk has a grudge but it isn’t even his. Maybe he can take it off him. They’re both flirting with the prospect of something else in life, but the reality is something else beyond either of their reach.

Sunday night, they eat together at the hotel restaurant; Cirk hands the server his ID, and they both watch her look at the picture. She looks at William too, and for a fraction of a second something in her face slips. It looks like recognition.

*

Bill plays some blackjack, waiting for his nerves to settle, and sends the kid to make football bets. Whatever kind of bandwidth a normal teenage boy dedicates to professional sports has been eaten up by something else, and the space devoted to wartime bullshit, some puerile idea of violent justice. If he wasn’t here with Bill he’d be God knows where, doing something a lot worse — stockpiling guns, building homemade bombs. Watching him lope off with that loose-jointed gait, Bill can see those alternate possibilities all too clearly.

He doesn’t think any more about what he could have done differently; that well ran dry long ago, and he’s reached a kind of gray resignation that is rooted in the present. Knowing what happened, knowing what might come next: he can hold that in his mind. He can work with that.

When Tell finds him again, Cirk is drunk. It’s not hard to find someone to over-serve you at most casinos outside of Vegas, and the liquor has made him flushed and sullen, spoiling for an argument that Bill won’t give him. He gets mouthy with a younger couple on their way back from the poker table — the woman’s got her hands full of plastic chips and as Cirk steps closer to her the man is bristling, squaring up for a physical fight.

Bill sweeps him up before a security guard can, grabbing him with an arm across the shoulders and feeling him go slack like a scruffed kitten. “Cirk, that’s enough. Come on.”

He takes the plastic key card from Cirk’s pocket and takes him back to the fifth floor. Bill thinks of walking into a Motel 6 with the kid in tow and telling them he wants one room, king bed, one night, cash. There’s no way to go back to that. He needs to send Cirk home to his mother. He needs to make La Linda some money. He needs to bring this whole thing to some kind of reasonable end.

Tell deposits the kid in his hotel room, sitting his drunk ass down on the bed where the plastic bags full of folded shirts and folded underwear are sitting there on the TV console, untouched. He should turn around and leave right then; he should go back downstairs and play some cards, then go back to his own hotel room with its white shrouds and write until he falls asleep. But he fucks up, he makes a bad judgment call. He stays.

*

“You know what I think about doing? I want to take Gordo, sit him down in front of a mirror, and make him take pictures of himself. I want him to see it all, 360, and take notes on what he sees. I really want to rub it in.”

Cirk is waxing poetic to himself, there on the bed. Bill doesn’t say anything; he’s just sitting there in the dark with his legs crossed and his hands gripping the padded armrests of the hotel chair. He’s not being let in on this because Cirk wants advice. Cirk wants license; he wants a blank check to do every awful thing his daddy did for a good cause this time, once and for all. Cirk wants someone who understands — understands how much hate is in his heart, and what it does to him to have such longings go unsatisfied. Thoughts like these come easy, their baroque perversity ballooning, and they never meet the mark. How could they? If you were going to do to John Gordo a fraction of a percent of what he did to everyone else, first there’d have to be a war.

Cirk says, “Do you think he would ever admit it? We could make him admit to shit he didn’t even do. Even more fucked up shit. Use his own methods against him and see what he says.” He’s been talking like this for a half-hour and it never gets more illuminating than this. The kid is just spinning his wheels. “Sometimes I think about my dad, and where he thought he was going to be in twenty years. But I don’t think he really thought that far.

Tell doesn’t say anything. The kid’s voice is a little muzzy from liquor still; he’s lying on his side, and in the reflection from the TV screen, he’s hugging himself.

“What did you want to do when you joined up?” For the first time, Cirk is asking him a question.

When he was twenty years old, he’d have said, kill terrorists. People liked hearing that. It was the right answer. It beat pay for college. Walking around with his chin stuck out trying to look like somebody you didn’t want to fuck with. He wouldn’t have said, military police, and he wouldn’t have said: Prison guard. Convict. Card player. Gambler.

From the chair by the window, Bill says, “I don’t know. Something else.”

He sits there awake and watching until Cirk stops talking to him, until his body lies still and his breaths come slow and steady, until Bill is satisfied against the irrational certainty that the boy is dead. Here they are surrounded by unnecessary things — takeout containers and paper bags, a folder full of brochures for tourist attractions, a stack of paper cups. All of it itches. What he wants is sterility and uniformity. The predictability of it is an anchor.

*

It’s still dark out when Bill wakes again – one of those nights where he sleeps without dreaming, but where registering that fact as soon as he wakes up brings it all to mind again anyway.

In the dark he counts things he can feel — first the spine of the chair against his back, then the pressure of his waistband, the upholstery under his fingertips. He isn’t in a prison cell at Leavenworth and he isn’t back in Iraq, about to go scurry through mortar fire just to take a shower and jack off. Then it’s things he can hear — the thrum of the air conditioning unit in the wall, the rattle of blinds, the muted rumble of distant traffic. He is where he is, and nowhere else. Only then, eyes closed, does it register what he doesn’t hear: no close sound of breathing other than his own, and something far away like the cry of a human voice.

Bill opens his eyes. Cirk is gone. There’s a light on in the bathroom and an open door.

What he’s feeling doesn’t register as fear anymore, only dull awareness. William rises stiffly from his chair and takes slow, careful steps. Nudging the door open with one foot, he blinks away pain in the white light of the overhead bulbs. His eyes come into focus, and he registers the sight of another human body.

The kid is curled up in the shower with his pants down, no socks on his long narrow feet. Cirk’s hand moves convulsively in his lap — his eyes are shut, and his lips are parted, the light catches on the wetness on his front teeth and makes them shine. His soft belly hitches with every breath and the early traces of come dampen his gray underwear darker. There are fine dark hairs along the tops of his thighs, where the muscles of his legs are taut and trembling; the skin there must be soft as a girl’s.

William Tell stops and catches his breath. You don’t have to move too fast. You don’t have to do anything right away. The dull prickle of blood is starting in the pit of him but his jaw is tight and his mouth is dry and he doesn’t need to do anything at all.

The kid’s hand slicks up and down, finding a shivering rhythm he can keep — pitiful there on the fucking tile, cradled in bleach sterility. He lifts his head and looks Bill in the face, eyes locking to eyes, and he doesn’t stop. He’s looking for absolution and he isn’t going to get it.

“I just want to do this,” Cirk says, voice insistent and low. “Just let me do this.”

It doesn’t mean anything. Young men do this shit and it doesn’t mean anything at all. But Bill was never as soft as this, not a soft sullen boy with the baby fat still on his bones —

Bill withdraws, with his hand on the doorframe. “Would you like me to go now, Cirk?”

“I’m sorry. I’m fucked up.”

“Then come back to bed.”

*

People talk about smell being one of the things that don’t leave you. They talk about your mother’s perfume, or the cigarettes somebody who hurt you used to smoke— body rot, dead dog. Once, Bill could have told you where you were in Leavenworth blindfolded, he could tell you with his eyes closed what floor and which pod. Maybe he still could. In Abu Ghraib, there had been no difference and no way to tell — the stink of human misery was in every room, and the only difference was its intensity. People had been suffering there for a long time.

Cirk lies down next to him and William tries to forget. There’s the sweat of his skin, sharp and animal; the cotton of his undershirt where it sticks to the hollow of his chest, the bleach-smell of come. He presses his face to Bill’s shoulder, and he can feel the damp of his breath through his undershirt, like he’s been crying. The kid is curled up in an awkward position, like he’s suddenly shy about his erection, but Bill slides his leg between those soft thighs and presses them apart.

Bill’s done what he’s done for himself for a long time now, and it’s served him just fine — meeting his own needs without inflicting himself on anybody else. Cirk’s young. Guys do fucked-up things at that age, and they mess with one another. They play with knives, they jack each other off, they choke each other out. He doesn’t know any better yet, and Bill is going to show him.

His cock is half-hard in Bill’s hand, and it stirs — Cirk is trembling, and that excites him even as it nauseates him. It excites him, feeling his weight rock against Bill’s thigh, feeling the mattress yield beneath both of them as his palm grows slicker with each stroke, even the bleach-smell of come makes him dizzy.

Just some stupid kid. William jerks him off slow. He holds him by the back of the neck, and talks into his ear, voice low and tight:

“You’re not going to make this a habit, all right? You don’t know anything about me. I could do whatever I wanted to you like this.”

He doesn’t say it to turn him on, but Cirk makes an awful little gasping sound, and his hips hitch up against his hand. Bill rubs his wet thumb over the head of the kid’s cock, to make it hurt a little. To make him remember.

If it wasn’t Bill it would be someone else, somebody ready to roll the kid over and fuck him. How can he do this when he’s seen those fucking pictures? No one who’s seen those fucking pictures should be able to look at him. Grinning, head thrown back, flashing a thumbs-up with an insolence that had become a reflex — standing astride the body of a dead man and grabbing his balls with a big smile on his face. He’s willing to bet that Cirk’s seen every one of those pictures.

William Tillich has never given an interview and he has never made a formal apology. He has never said anything he wasn’t bound by oath to say; he has never been humanized in the pages of the New Yorker, he has never been more than a red link on a Wikipedia page. There’s nothing to say who he was, except what’s in those pictures — a monster, all smiles.

There were things that weren’t in the pictures. Faces that never appeared, rooms that never got photographed, men and women like John Gordo. There were kids there — young ones, crammed in with the women, and older boys full of numbed sullenness, faces bewildered by pain and anger. He’d wanted to say, hey, man, we’re trapped in here too, we don’t want to be here either, but it wasn’t true, you couldn’t look them in the face and say that to yourself any longer. Those boys would be grown men now, the ones who lived, walking around with all that suffering still in their heads. Husbands, fathers. They’d want a piece of John Gordo too if they could get it.

Pulling him off like that, face to face and belly to belly, Bill doesn’t have to work on him for long. Cirk comes crying, with his wet face buried against Bill’s neck.

Bill wipes his hands off on his undershirt and stares up at the ceiling. The air conditioner is still running, the night traffic off the highway is still grinding away at a distance outside, other people on their way someplace insignificant. Bill wonders if Roger Baufort knew about his son, if that was part of it all with the Oxy and the beatings or if that piece of information was irrelevant. William Tillich knew Roger Baufort once, but after more than fifteen years he doesn’t remember him exactly, and the edges of his likeness have gotten blunter.

In his memory now Baufort is just one of the crowd: drinking cough syrup and dancing badly with each other, doing stupid shit to get the attention of women, standing in the face of human suffering and laughing about it. Maybe he was better than the average person there and maybe he was worse. It doesn’t matter.

“At least let me suck your cock.” Cirk palms at him through his pants. Either he thinks this is an apology or he thinks this is the right thing to do; his mouth is licked-wet and flushed. In the low light the kid’s eyes are shining like glass.

“Cirk, stop. It’s fine. I don’t want that. It’s over.”

“I think I love you, man.”

His hands are fumbling, looking for a sign of reciprocation that isn’t there. Bill takes him by the wrist and bends his arm back up against his chest.

“No, you don’t.”

None of this is the same as love. Bill holds him on the bed, then, and neither of them sleeps.