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Boris didn’t like Portland but Theo seemed not to either. And it was Theo who had decided to live there; Boris had only come because he had had to after things had gone south again in Rotterdam, and he had gone first to Hobie’s at the very beginning of the withdrawal only to find that Theo wasn’t there anymore. In what seemed a very Theo sort of methodology for dealing with his problems he had moved across the continent and away from all his debtors in order to work at an artisan furniture shop in the Pearl District. Which was where Boris showed up on a Tuesday morning straight off the airplane and decidedly no longer at the beginning of the withdrawal.
There was a squalid toilet in the back and Theo dragged him in there and sat him down on the chipped and uneven tile floor slick with dust and the northwest’s irrepressible condensate. There was a cherry-colored varnish dried and matted in the fine hairs up his arms and a little on his nose where he had pushed his glasses up and there was sawdust in his hair. Boris looked at him for a while — at the wilted collar of his black flannel shirt; he had a cold or something and sniffled a little and breathed through his bright parted lips and the skin around his nose was a little raw — and subsequently vomited.
“What the fuck are you doing here? What happened?”
“What the fuck are you doing,” Boris asked him, coughing a little into the toilet, “varnishing armoires like you are a novice in this business.”
Theo sighed long-sufferingly (his stuffy nose whistled) and pressed his hand between Boris’s shoulderblades in a gesture at once sympathetic and patronizing.
“I remember you telling me that aestheticism for aestheticism’s sake was pointless and now you are living in this absurd city — ”
“It’s not so bad. You’ve been here twenty minutes.”
“I’ve seen enough.”
“You’ve seen — ” Theo sneezed. “The inside of the toilet.”
He left Boris in there and went back out to work and Boris listened to the white-noise hum of the sander and the insistent rain against the filthy window and filtering under the door the sound of whatever psychedelic rock music they were listening to out in the shop. It had been a couple hours and he thought maybe he had fallen asleep when Theo came back in again. There was more varnish up his arms and more sawdust in his hair and it made him look like an old man, or like he had gone out in the snow. “We’re going home,” he said.
“Is it still raining?”
“Of fucking course it is.” He helped Boris up with a hand under his arm and grabbed his duffel in the other hand. His brow was furrowed tightly and he smelled like dust inasmuch as he had always sort of smelled like dust, or like ash; he was a burnt-over kind of man; nothing was living on the surface of him. “I’ve called an Uber,” he said. “It’s waiting outside.”
If he noticed Boris had sweat through his white shirt and sport coat and there was puke flecked on his collar he didn’t say anything. In the Uber Boris pressed his forehead against the cool window.
“I have always wondered why,” Boris tried, “why this is called Uber,” but then he had to open the car door at the next stoplight and vomit again. The driver was looking at them in the rearview mirror. Theo touched his back again between the shoulderblades.
“Close your eyes while we’re in the car.”
“I want to see this ridiculous place you live.”
“I thought you said you’d seen enough. Besides there isn’t much — it’ll all look the same today, you know, because of the rain. When it’s clear you can see Mt. Saint Helens and Mt. Hood.”
He lived so far on the edge of town that the forest seemed to be eating up the road and the houses. It was thick and heavy and it loomed and it was so dark and wet and fragrant it made Boris think of sex, except it was cold and dizzying to look at. This chill and humid sort of breath came out of it extending a thick moss which covered the roof and the flagstone pathway and the lawn of the house in which Theo lived.
“This is a shithole, Potter,” Boris said.
“It had been foreclosed upon. It cost six thousand dollars.”
Inside was not much. The carpet was a hideous ‘80s orange but somehow also appeared mossy and rotting and there were dishes piled in the sink. Some mismatched furniture far below the caliber Theo worked with.
“People never should have settled in this place,” Boris said. He sat on the couch and then lay down. He closed his eyes and covered them with his hand to keep from looking out through the sliding glass door at the wreckage of the backyard and beyond it the encroachment of the woods. “This place probably makes people murder each other.”
“All those folks are out on the coast,” Theo said. Boris could tell from the sound of it he’d put a cigarette in his mouth. “This city is the only bastion of the civilized world between Seattle and San Francisco.”
“I don’t suppose you have oxys or something.”
“No, I quit.”
“What about grass or something, you know, anything.”
He pressed the cigarette in his fingers to Boris’s mouth. Boris had not realized he was so close. He didn’t uncover his eyes but when he inhaled he could tell actually it was a joint.
“What happened,” Theo said.
“What ever happens.”
--
Several days later Boris was feeling better and Theo came home early with takeout pizza. “We have to do something,” Boris said. They were watching the news, which was dire. American news had always seemed to Boris particularly dire and usually entirely without reason. After all murder and authoritarianism were facts of life for most of the people who lived on earth. Perhaps what it truly challenged was Americans’ unabashed and unrelenting sense of exceptionalism. Really, said this dire news, you are just as fucked and screwed as anyone from anywhere else. “There has to be something to do in this city.”
“We could go to a show, or go to a bar. Or we could go to Powell’s.”
“Aren’t strip clubs legal here?”
“Well yes, but — ”
“You prudish little fuck. What about the wilderness.”
“You said, in this city.”
“Well evidently there’s nothing here but pretension and topless bars.”
Theo sighed. He thunked his head against the high back of the couch.
“You are no stranger to wilderness though you have not touched it in a while I think,” Boris said. He himself had had enough of the damp and ominous hell that was Portland, and of sitting on the decaying mossy patio in an itchy lawn chair drinking sour and twitchy coldbrew coffee and listening to the woods and Theo’s neighbor mowing in a gesture which seemed to Boris nothing less than Sisyphean as most was mud and moss and pine litter like an arena for spellcasting.
“That’s why I came here,” Theo said. “For the woods and the fresh air.”
“You came here to metaphorically beat yourself with a braided rope like an ascetic monk.”
“For the woods,” Theo tried again. “And the fresh air.”
It seemed to Boris he talked a lot less now that he had quit drugs, for better or worse. In a long-suffering sort of way he must have inherited from his mother he texted a friend from the shop who offered to lend them for the weekend his keys to his family’s cottage on the coast between Newport and Lincoln City.
--
They rented a ZipCar and drove out of the city to the West toward the edge of the continent. The day was overcast and cool and smelled like a healthy rot and Boris realized with a twinge of dread he was getting accustomed to it. This place grew on you like a fungus or so it seemed. Theo already had the kind of machinery to accept it because he was easily influenced. This Boris knew.
“Here or in Seattle you can drive an hour out of the city in any direction and be in the wilderness,” Theo said. He was wearing large trendy sunglasses and jeans and a plaid flannel shirt, muted and grayish in color in a way which seemed endemic to men in the Northwest. It was stained with paint and varnish and he had turned up the sleeves to show the freckles and the veins in his forearms. There was sawdust in the cuffs of the jeans it seemed he hadn’t noticed and his fine boots were scuffed at the toes of them. He had found a harmless-feeling indie rock station which he kept on a low volume as though he were embarrassed. “People live off the grid and shit.”
Boris was no stranger to emptiness and space nor off-the-gridders though most of those he had known had done it out of necessity — whether poverty or secrecy — rather than that sort of self-righteousness and/or capitalist guilt with which Americans seemed to do it. Boris’s father had talked extensively about some third cousin who had lived in the boreal of Arctic Siberia and hadn’t known who Stalin was.
The grassland was flat and strange into the hills which were blanketed in textured green pines except where they had been clear-cut. “The sun comes out,” Theo said. “Out here, sometimes.”
“How long has it — ”
“I came in January.”
Nine months ago. “For the job?”
“Not really.”
“Right,” Boris remembered, “for the woods and the fresh air.”
They stopped for burgers and fried asparagus and then they moved on again.
--
This coast seemed to Boris like much of beautiful rural America in his experience. It was warm enough to put the windows down and smoke a joint and let the weed and the sea air calm his roiling nausea. Every few miles was a beautiful hotel decorated with a beguiling number of totem pole motifs like a lost Twin Peaks set. Theo had had to change the radio in Rose Lodge and since then it had been playing ‘90s rock of varying palatability.
Everything including the music seemed about twenty years or so past its prime and hurting. Too fucked on the opiate of nostalgia to meaningfully comprehend where it had all gone wrong. Portland and Seattle’s middle class had quit coming out here on vacation (they had mostly quit existing) in favor of exotic international locales and/or Alaskan cruises. And so the entire cultural infrastructure that had birthed this place had begun as all things to dissolve into the primordial murk.
“What are you thinking about?” Theo asked. “You look disgusted.”
“About how there is nothing to do out here either but grow marijuana and plot secession.”
“And commit murder. Remember?” Theo put his hand out to gesture for the joint. “You and I have come up with things to do in worse circumstances.”
“Not so much anymore now that you are fucking sober.”
“I don’t — we’re smoking pot right now.”
“This is like medicine; it is not fun. I am taking it for withdrawal and you are taking it for — ”
He stopped, not sure where to go from there. Obviously Theo had only ever used any number of drugs including alcohol as anesthetics or antidepressants — as a kind of medicine for burying or concealing instead of for healing. Certainly this was the same. He would never be able to eschew vice completely because in abusing various chemicals since he was twelve or so he had effectively never learned to compartmentalize without outside assistance. His brow was tightly furrowed under the trendy sunglasses and he passed the joint back to Boris.
--
The house was up a hill on the furthest ridge of a bluff overlooking the crashing screaming sea. Though there were other bed and breakfasts and cottages about this one had a bit of an illusion of solitude to it because it was nestled in a copse of tall pines. Boris hadn’t so much as seen the Pacific Ocean since living in Alaska and so whilst Theo took the car into town for food and supplies he stayed behind and sat out on the bluff, watching the sea, smoking another joint, and drinking cranberry juice out of the bottle. When you stood carefully at the slippery edge of the bluff you could feel the sea spray on your face. Below the water moved with a violence around stacks and boulders and tugged seaweed in the sucking currents and tossed against the rock sunbleached and weather-beaten logs that had fallen from some distant ship in the night.
It was so loud and repetitive he thought he could have gone into a trance. Perhaps it was the pot. The other houses were empty; there were no cars in the driveway. Perhaps in the night they would be brutally murdered or something worse would happen. Perhaps Theo would finally have his vengeance for Boris’s theft of the painting in one way or another. It gave Boris pause to think about what this might be. He had never known Theo to get all that violent with anyone but himself.
When he went inside — the house was still but for the sound of the sea, and smelled like all the months it had been closed up — Theo had come back from the grocery store and seemingly auspiciously had left on the table a brown paper bag which Boris found contained a large plastic bottle of Canadian Club.
“You’re right that there’s not much else to do,” said Theo, not really looking at him.
--
When they were young he hadn't really thought much about it. Everyone he had ever known very well had had troubles and had sought to pretend they didn't exist. You could tell Theo had problems just looking at him. He was like one of those pictures of puppies in war zones. Boris sometimes thought of everything he had ever felt about Theo chief among those was a novelist’s breed of anthropological fascination. Maybe fixation. It was psychoanalytic but sometimes unkind and he knew sometimes he fed the worst things in Theo and didn’t care, though this was probably because of all the drugs and alcohol and severe malnutrition.
They walked together in the desert sharing a fifth of vodka from the gas station in a paper bag and more than once he dragged Theo by his wrists in the sand or half-carried him back to the house and put him in the bed or the bathtub and talked to him in Ukranian. Theo would be asleep or passed out or otherwise just staring and then reality would seize him and he would weep for a while. Sometimes Boris woke up at dawn piled under all the blankets damp with fearful boozy night sweat clutching Theo like a child. It mystified him mostly because in his conscious mind he was rationalizing himself as the stronger, or the protector, even after he took the painting. The skin just under Theo’s eyes was violet-red and damp and thin and perfectly soft and his dark lashes fluttered against it and Boris watched him dreaming for a while until inevitably he had to get up to puke and immediately thereafter Theo also got up to puke.
There was a girl Boris had been trying to sleep with who had dropped out of their high school who sold him coke and molly and other pills of uncertain provenance and he and Theo skipped school and sat out by the scummy pool with the dog trying them chased with Theo’s dad’s piss-tasting beer. Theo said he wished he was dead so much Boris didn’t really believe him anymore. The sun had this horrible violent vengeance about it thanks to the drugs so they went inside and laid in the bed and he was holding Theo’s face, holding him; outside maybe it was three in the afternoon and the light on the desert was golden and so still he thought maybe time wasn’t moving and nothing mattered.
It was just the same as anything else. In those days they both would rather have been anywhere other than there, even nowhere.
--
Theo made a frittata for dinner with kale and caramelized onions and mushrooms. “Were those picked in the magical Northwestern forest,” Boris asked, “like by virgins or something with rustic knives made of reindeer bone.”
He was filtering through the coworker’s record collection in the living room by the wide windows that opened on the pines and the bluff and the sea. Theo had given him a pathetic ration of Canadian Club in a colorful plastic cup with a square ice cube in what seemed to Boris an unholy melange of pretentious aestheticism and hyper-nostalgic kitsch.
“No. They’re just from the supermarket. Why do you fucking hate it here so much?”
Boris turned to Theo. He had also allowed himself a ration of whiskey and there was a little color in his high cheekbones.
“I’m just — ”
“You mock every single thing. It’s a waste of time. You think anywhere in America is uncontaminated by hipster fuckery?”
“This is why I prefer you when you drink, Potter, I hate to say it, but you are so much feistier.”
“Fuck off,” Theo said, turning back to the frittata. But he was smiling a little. Boris put the Velvet Underground on the turntable and Theo groaned. “Fuck off,” he said again.
“I thought you loved this record.”
“I haven’t heard it in years and years.”
Boris had to turn it up loudly over the sound of the waves on the bluff. The sky had seemed to be clearing when they’d arrived at the cottage but as the afternoon unfolded the clouds and the fog had blown in again and through the window Theo had opened above the stove it smelled like rain.
--
Theo was very stingy with the whiskey until he got drunk, which didn’t take him very long, because he hadn’t had anything to drink since he had moved to Portland in January. They ate the whole frittata, and smoked a joint, and when Theo got up clumsily to bring the plates to the kitchen sink Boris noticed they had made it halfway through the Canadian Club and outside it was nearly dark. The vibrant grey-violet sky against the stacks and the bluffs and the endless sea caught an artful swath of orange glow where the sun was disappearing.
He poured himself another liberal glass of whiskey. Thankfully because when Theo came back from the kitchen (hair disheveled, collar rumpled, eyes red and heavy) he asked, “How’s your withdrawal.”
“It’s fine. You know.”
“Yes.”
“You do know if you don’t have oxys around anymore. It is not so much different withdrawing from classy bourgeois pills as it is from straight fucking heroin after all they are made of the same stuff.”
Theo studied him across the table and then he watched over Boris’s shoulder as the sun disappeared. He had rested his temple in his palm on the table and he skated one finger around the rim of his glass of whiskey and Boris noticed he had picked at the skin around his fingernails leaving wells of bright blood. “I quit when I came here,” he said. “It was fucking hard.”
“It is like — you are punished horribly for trying to live a normal boring life just without dependencies. So why would you try.”
It was a rhetorical question but Theo said, “I had — some debts.”
“To a dealer?”
“Yes. On top of the furniture on top of the rest of it.”
“How much?”
Theo looked up at him then looked down again into his whiskey.
“So a lot then.”
“Yes. Thousands.”
“You do know every problem you run away from is going to come back to bite you in the ass.”
“You’re one to talk,” Theo said.
“How so do you mean?”
“Why did you come here,” he asked, “what happened?”
“It isn’t just enough to want to see my dear friend of my childhood — ”
“No,” Theo said. He turned a little in his chair and rested his temple against the opposite palm. He was such a tired person, Boris had always thought. Most of his energy was caught up in some violent internal grief and everything else he could manage as a living human on earth was a little stunted. “You never have done that without some other reason.”
Boris sighed. “Fine, yes. There was an accident in Rotterdam. Someone was killed who should not have been killed. It was the business partner of someone with whom I have been trying to make inroads. I went to the airport and bought a plane ticket straight off. Otherwise probably by now I would be dead.”
“Every problem you run away from is going to come back to bite you in the ass, Boris,” Theo said. Something not quite a smile in his teeth.
“For God’s sake I know that, Potter.”
“Well so do I.”
“If you do know it is strange how you keep doing it over and over. They will not just erase those debts if they cannot find you. Neither your drug dealer nor all your saps with the fake furniture.”
“Well I can’t pay them. So I don’t know what else there is.”
He had a way of seeing himself as abominably persecuted through absolutely no fault of his own. It was exhausting; it was exhausting to be his friend. It had always been. But he had done it anyway.
--
Hours later upstairs in the uncomfortable bed in the guest room Boris lay awake staring at the window. The pines moved against the screen and out in the moon-blue evening the tide attempted again and again as it did every night, as it would every night, to tear the bluff down. He sat up in the bed and took the last joint out from his wallet and lit it. He’d been saving it for the drive home the day following but now that he was drunk that seemed unnecessary and anyway like it might never happen.
He hadn’t taken three drags when Theo knocked on the door and swung it open with a drunken grace. “Are you smoking pot in there?”
“Why yes, do come in — ”
He had already taken three big long-legged steps toward Boris in the bed and sat on the end of it and reached for the joint. Boris had rolled it too tightly and the ember had fluttered out; Theo had a hard time lighting it again, because he was drunk, and because of the breeze through the window, so Boris leant forward and cupped his hands around the lighter.
“I couldn’t sleep,” Theo said. He exhaled an opaque white cloud toward the open window. “The ocean is so loud.”
“You grew up in New York City.”
He flinched, almost, a little, at that. “It’s a different — a different kind of loud. And I could feel you in this room.” A strange thrill like watching lightning strike far away. Theo took another hit and passed the joint back to Boris. “It feels, I don’t know, doesn’t it?”
“You are talking nonsense.”
“I feel possessed. I can’t sleep.”
“You’re drunk and you haven’t been drunk in months.”
“Being sober makes it worse. You know this. You’re alone with everything. It’s just you and all that inside your mind.”
“I know that.”
“I know you know that. I do. You and I are the same.”
So help him that was horrifying. “No we’re not.”
“We are — we have been. That’s what I mean. Since we — ”
He covered his mouth with his hand. Boris pulled it away by his wrist and kissed him.
--
The light through the pines and the window was soft and thin and the clouds moved along it against it shadowing the walls and the floor. He was realizing he had never seen Theo naked before. Or maybe he had when they were young and he had forgotten. There wasn’t much of him. Logically it was just another body but something was miraculous. His hollow flat belly was miraculous and his ribs and his neck and his spine and the calluses on his hands and his ragged fingernails were miraculous and his breath and heartbeat and the sound of the sea roaring and roaring against the bluff and in that room… It had always sort of been like this, Boris supposed; it had started just because they were drunk and bored, and they had only one another left to each other in the world, and he knew he loved Theo in a greater-than-normal sort of way, out of a kind of feral necessity, but then it seemed sometimes the love caught some flint to tinder and burned everything inside him into molten glass.
They didn’t speak at all. He remembered he used to say, It’s only me…
--
In the morning he woke hungover looking at Theo who was looking at the ceiling. He had put his glasses back on (behind them his eyes seemed overlarge) and folded his hands over his chest as though he were lying in state. When he sat up the buttons of his spine pressed just so against his skin (freckles, a scar, a bruise) and it made Boris shiver. Then he got up and dressed without speaking and went out the door. A few minutes later Boris heard the unmistakable and nostalgically familiar sound of him retching in the bathroom.
They cleaned up the house and left before eleven. They took the coastal highway down to Newport and then Route 20 inland toward Corvallis. In the middle of nowhere they stopped for coffee and slices of homemade pumpkin bread at a roadside stand and Boris walked into the woods to pee abstractly hoping it might swallow him up. It was warm and damp and heavy and the light filtered prismatically through the tree canopy catching dust and spores in it, thick living light, and there was a poem by Richard Brautigan stuck in his head he didn’t really remember. He wanted, desperately, a cigarette, but he didn’t have any.
Theo was in the car watching when he came up from the woods but at the sight of him looked away out the front window again. He had found a radio station which played dismal and haunting post-rock intercut with swarming static. Inside his collar in the shadow was a little red mark and there were dark sleepless circles under his eyes which moved quickly.
Don’t you understand there’s nothing else, he wanted to say. There’s no one else. This is the only way it could ever be — the silence and all of it. Long ago we consigned our souls to one another but perhaps you were too drunk to remember it…
“What in God’s name are we listening to,” he said instead.
“I don’t know. Mogwai or something.”
“It is like, transmissions from the forest.”
Theo made a sound like a laugh or a huh. Then he bit his lower lip.
The trees were thin here. On the ridges above they had been cut in strange and gestural patterns like communications to visiting spacecraft and the light came through them with an uncanny brightness. The sky above was clear but would darken the closer they came to Portland. After a while he leant his aching forehead against the cool window.