a perfectly blank space

There, with a little privacy — how could you ever have privacy in New York, with those panorama windows, all those sheep-faced passers-by? It’s so much more genteel than a long drive, and the pair of them have plenty of time to themselves. The length of rope is in his coat pocket like a totem — just an ordinary household object, one of those odds and ends that always ends up in the pockets of traveling coats, like handkerchiefs and lapel pins and ticket stubs. Phillip can trace the loops of it between his fingers. Just a coarse thing. You can’t arrest a person for carrying around something so unimportant. There’s no law against carrying around a souvenir.

Brandon had the damned foolish idea of sending it home with Mr. Kentley — Brandon thinks perverse things are funny, and Phillip doesn’t. Reluctantly, he withdraws his hand and picks up his book instead. A little unimportant book with an important-looking front cover. His appetite for big ideas has left him.

Brandon’s head is in his lap — Phillip’s hand rests against his dark hair. He could study him, in repose. Handsome like always and next-to-impossible to interpret. It’s easier to make sense of him part by part, less daunting maybe — forehead and brow, his long face, his crooked nose and perpetually sneering mouth. He’ll make a great rake when he reaches old age, if either of them reach old age. He won’t wither up and get brittle, he’ll just get riper and riper.

The two of them could be brothers; Brandon’s mother certainly thought so once. They aren’t. He’d thought of him as a brother once, the older brother he hadn’t had — athletic, vigorous, always enthusiastic to insert himself into other people’s affairs. Brandon is not so vigorous now — he’s tired out, maybe, or just resting.

A little like the train they’re riding on, shining and hard, the decorative exterior slipped like a skin over the same old diesel interior — all of his attractive qualities are just a slipcover on what’s inside, concealing something heavy and ugly. This is the man he’s cast in his lot with.

Brandon looks up at him with drowsy eyes.

The only other passenger in their compartment is fast asleep — likely drunk, and badly dressed, slumped with his hat over his face and one wingtip shoe fallen to the floor. Just a stupefied stranger with more money than taste. Phillip only wishes he were drunk, but he doesn’t dare leave their compartment — seized in the unshakeable dread of being apprehended. Once it was dread over nothing — the knowing he was different, maybe, in ways men like Brandon could see — and now it’s dread over something.

The stink of the incinerator is still hanging on him, it catches him at the oddest moments — they’d burned David’s clothes and that had been tidy enough but what had they done with the rest of him? He’s resting too, where the silt will settle on him and the little fishes will carry parts of him away, piece by piece. In a year or so, they’ll have to go back — they hadn’t thought of that then, that ponds and man-made lakes are dredged and refilled from time to time and there’s things they can do with bones these days and David never was a heavy sleeper. Phillip wakes in the night some nights from dreams of David Kentley’s bones — or Brandon’s bones, all jumbled up together.

Brandon is watching him now.

“What are you stewing about? I can always tell when you’re trying to think.”

“I was thinking,” Phillip proceeds delicately, “that all this feels just like our school days.”

“How’s that?” Brandon reaches up, still drowsy but with great deliberation, and holds on to his wrist.

“Like we’re getting away with something.”

Brandon plays with Phillip’s fingers. They’re pianist’s hands, flat and white and horrible. Phillip has played enough for a lifetime, he’s positively sick of music and playing and of Town Hall, he’ll go to hell before he performs again like a trained monkey, hammering out tunes in front of stultified crowds. He’d made his debut and Brandon had been leering in the front row all the while, with that insolent look digging into him at a distance like a strong man’s grip — making him sweat. Afterward they’d made love in Brandon’s mother’s old bedroom, in with all the dime novels and medicine bottles and stale pillowcases. It had been sickening, and exciting.

Maybe he should switch to composing. He won’t have to be watched while he does it. There have been other murderous composers. He’ll be in good company.

Brandon kisses the palm of his hand, the pads of his fingers — down to his wrist where his cuff doesn’t quite cover the jutting bone. Phillip starts upright, and shuts his book.

“Brandon, we can’t—”

From above, Brandon’s look is lazily wicked.

“Who says we can’t?”

America’s homosexuals must travel by rail from time to time. It just stands to reason. Some of them must slip on board undetected. And some of them must travel with their lovers — furtive degenerates in dirty overcoats transporting minors across state lines for immoral purposes or whatever the rest of them are like. Brandon’s purposes are not especially moral any day of the week. Phillip draws him upright.

Brandon leans in against him with teasing force — almost a struggle, Phillip grabbing at him and Brandon pushing him back into the creaking upholstery, knocking his book to the floor, the one he hadn’t actually been reading.

Brandon’s mouth crushes against his, and Phillip digs his hands into fistfuls of Brandon’s shirt. The train car rattles and thrums beneath them, and eases them both — a comforting roar traveling from body to body as a vibration, a distraction from the possibility of discovery.

He loves him, he loves him, he loves him, and this is absolute madness. He thrusts one of his hands between Brandon’s long legs, a directionless fumble, and the muscles of Brandon’s thighs clamp him there, where the blood is hammering and where his friend’s urgency is immediately made known. If Brandon had his way he’d have him on his back, just now.

Brandon’s hands slip from his face to his throat and for a single sublime moment Phillip’s pulse has leapt, his eyes have flickered shut and his whole body is answering the threat, there’s no third passenger in their compartment, there’s nothing — the pair of them are nowhere.

Brandon’s hands are not an artist’s hands. They’re strong and square and too-hot to the touch.

“Brandon,” he begins, voice cracking from a sudden disarming dryness of the throat, “I think we’d better not.”

Brandon makes a face, and ruefully climbs out of his lap. Anyone could see them here — anyone at all. It gives Phillip a small sneaking thrill — the thrill of guilt, that really all their trysts are only so far from exposure — but that’s nothing compared to the kick it gets out of Brandon. He may be his only friend, but sometimes it seems like he’d be a happier man caught. Rupert knew, or at least suspected, and had the gall to keep it to himself instead of giving Brandon what he plainly wanted.

In his corner, the tipsy sleeper still sleeps.

The compartment falls quiet, then, as the pair of them put themselves to rights. The rattle and thrum of the rails provides a little backdrop. Phillip straightens out his collar, and tries not to look out at the view. Every minute and every hour carries them further away from the penthouse in New York, and from the farm in Connecticut with its walking paths and bedrooms and ancestral trout ponds.

“Getting awful gray out there, isn’t it? Like something terrible’s about to happen.” Brandon glances out the broad windows, smoothing his clothes and affecting disinterest. “That newspaper of yours didn’t say anything about lightning storms. But there’s such a thing as freak occurrences, isn’t there.”

“The sun’s setting, that’s all.” All the darkness and none of the postcard colors. “We ought to go to bed.”

“In our separate berths, of course.”

It isn’t that much like school, and they’re too old to roughhouse over nothing. Phillip assents without saying anything.

Every minute here on this train, the pair of them are older than David Kentley will ever be. They’ve done more than Phillip would ever have thought possible. The difficult part isn’t getting away with it. It’s having gotten away with it — knowing that Brandon’s the kind of man who, having killed once, will kill again. Maybe they’ll pay Mr. Cadell a visit and teach him a little about what they’ve learned.

Or Brandon will do away with Phillip and be free to turn that awful shining smile of his on whomever he pleases. There have always been others between them — Janet, for instance, more than a pretense, but everything is a game to Brandon and there’s no reason he shouldn’t quit this one and shuffle the deck again to start over. There are plenty of men like Phillip — weak men — and not very many like Brandon.

Rupert had always liked Brandon more, and with several excellent reasons. He’d clearly known what they’d done that night — or Brandon swears he does, Phillip had been certain everyone knew, starting with Janet — but he’d left them to it, and that’s as good as top marks.

It’s him who’s the millstone around Brandon’s neck. He’d nearly cracked, that night after the party, and if Rupert had cornered him on the spot he’d have told him everything — everything, all of it, how it felt. Brandon would have cut him loose for it — Phillip the neurotic artist, always getting wrapped up in these perverse fantasies. He’ll take Brandon down with him — a sudden drop from a high place, a bullet, a supper of oysters sauced with arsenic.

Brandon will be sick of him too, eventually. He’ll have to make sure he takes care of him first.