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i.
Day eleven of Theo’s detox happens to fall on his birthday. He doesn’t know this because he particularly cares about his birthday, but because he is sung the birthday song.
Sung isn’t quite it—he’s serenaded by a raucous and drunken rendering of the birthday song by one Boris Pavlikovsky at two in the morning.
“Potter? Is me!” he hears Boris call from the other side of the apartment door when he’s finished singing. He squeezes his eyes shut, willing himself to stay quiet even though to see Boris right now would be sheer relief, like gulping down ice water after running a marathon in hundred-degree heat, like the lights clicking on after a week-long blackout, second best, maybe, to taking a pill before his timer goes off.
“You’re home, I know. I have present for you!” he calls out.
But Boris can’t see him like this. Not again. Not anymore he thinks stubbornly as Boris begins to pound on the door, thump thump, thump thump, like a telltale heart. And anyway, seeing Boris right now would ruin everything, because he cannot say no to Boris. Boris, who flashes little baggies of cocaine between his fingers every time he reaches into his coat pockets. Boris, who would sit in the school cafeteria and use a pencil to scrape out holes in apples, smoke weed out of them, then eat them soon after.
So Theo stays like that, curled up on his scratchy couch, glasses cutting into the side of his face because he hasn’t had the strength to move in over three hours.
When he wakes up, it’s still dark out, and half-asleep, he lurches up, fumbling for the doorknob. He flings the door open and there is no Boris, only a few errant newspapers that have been lying in the hallway for weeks, still in their plastic wrappers. He looks down at his feet and sees a small box wrapped in brown paper that says POTTER in black marker. Drugs, he thinks instantly, wondering how high Boris had to be to leave them in out like this, gingerly picking the box up and opening it.
But inside is only an unassuming clothbound book with brown pages. There’s nothing on the front, plain gray cover, something in gold on the spine, the whole thing wrapped in a film of tissue paper. The paper crinkles as Theo inspects it, instantly seeing that it gives off the same energy that Hobie’s most beloved furniture does—a soft glow, like a heat, edges blurry like ink against water. It is clearly something that is quite old, used by others before him, perhaps even beloved.
A little piece of paper flutters out and he picks it up, pinching the corner, holding it up to the light. First Edition, certified it says. He turns the book over to inspect the spine. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, it reads, and he laughs, the first real sound he’s made in days, the sound echoing out into the hall.
ii.
Theo sleeps through the cab ride, stumbles through security, keeps his sunglasses on, watching the planes touch down and lift off the runway, sun drizzling light on everything, feeling hungover even though he hasn’t had a drink in thirteen months, one week, and two days.
Every minute in Las Vegas has been strange and feverish, like a bad dream. It is the first time he’s been back since he was fifteen (or fourteen, or sixteen, or whatever, he could never keep track of the slurry of time between leaving New York and coming back to it). He never thought he would return, but of course luck would have it that he would end up here on behalf of Hobart and Blackwell after a misleadingly pleasant trip to Paris wherein he had quickly repurchased a set of four Chippendale chairs that had originally come to Hobie as a single recliner in pieces.
It had rained the entire time he was in Paris, but this turned out to be more overwhelming than he had expected. He had walked around in a jetlagged daze, openly staring at the way everything glowed when wet, the color of silver that infused the city, smatterings of black umbrellas stark like inkblots amidst the creamy Beaux-Arts buildings, sheen on the shop windows like gunmetal. And then there was the Eiffel Tower. He had thought he would be too cool for it, just something he would see from a cab window, maybe snap a photo with his phone to send to Hobie. But then he was walking to his hotel and the giant thing lit up right in front of him. He sat down on a park bench and found that his teeth were chattering even though he was hot under his jacket. The lights sparkled some more, taunting. He felt as though his heart would drop right out of him.
Devastating.
But in Vegas, the mere act of breathing in the arid desert air makes him feel like a child again, a regression, and every time he gets into a car he half expects too see someone he went to middle school with at the wheel, or one of his father’s old drinking buddies, or, God, even Xandra.
And he is thinking this, thankful that he has made it through the trip without seeing anyone, when he spots Xandra near the duty-free perfumes, her streaky hair giving her away. Theo freezes, catching sight of himself in the reflection of the glass window nearest to him. He looks like a startled creature stuck in the rain, sweat making some of his hair stick to his forehead, the glow on his sunglasses making him look bug-eyed and cartoonish.
Xandra plunges a hand into her purse, a red satchel with rubbery leather, and takes out her phone. She types something in and lifts it to her ear, and this is when she looks straight at Theo with alarming precision. She has more wrinkles around her eyes, her hair has thinned in places. The crease in the middle of her forehead that used to only appear when she was upset or morose has darkened, present on her expression at all times. His phone buzzes and he jolts.
happy birthday potter
It is not Xandra. It is a text from Boris. Is it his birthday? He looks at the date on his boarding pass. Indeed, it is. He looks up. Xandra is talking rapidly on the phone, then she is turning away from him, her back to him. A horde of high schoolers in matching t-shirts wipe her out of view, and when the crowd clears, she’s gone.
His phone buzzes a second time. Boris again. On his screen, the photo of the mashed up birthday cake Hagrid makes Harry in the first movie. He snorts. What an oddly sentimental thing for Boris to send. He remembers one summer when Boris had insisted they watch the entire series and drink every time Harry “said something poncy”, and then he fell asleep for half of it, head swimming and mouth sticky from the hard lemonade they had stolen from a neighbor’s cooler, waking up and rolling over every so often to see Boris awash in the screen light. “Wizards should have guns. No problems after that,” he said once, as though he were a sage.
His phone pinged with another text, dashing any nostalgia away: so how did hagrids dad fuck his mum do u think????????
iii.
“Hobie?” Theo calls out, suitcase in hand, the apartment strangely quiet. Most mornings when he goes over to Hobie’s, he can find him tinkering around in the kitchen over a pan, same concentrated look on his face as when he’s carving something into wood, smell of coffee in the air.
In his sobriety he has found that he is a morning person. But was there ever a time where he would have known such a thing about himself? When he lived with his father, he remembers tripping into school after taking a few long drags on a bony joint pulled from the detritus of the bottom of his book bag, dozing in the halls despite the fluorescent lights, arm numb where he had fallen asleep on it in the back of class. And then there was a whole swath of his twenties where he would simply go to bed when most people were waking up, lurch himself out of a tangle of sheets around three or four in the afternoon, then do it all over again.
But then again, there were some weekends when he was very little, when his mother would coax him out of bed as dawn broke, and they would walk around the block to buy fresh chocolate croissants at the edge of the park. He remembered being tired then, but never for long. Sweet taste of butter and sugar on his tongue, the cool still air of the apartment since his father, on the rare weekends when he wasn’t out already drinking and bouncing around the casinos in Atlantic City, would sleep until noon.
“Theo, morning,” Hobie comes into the kitchen, a paper bag in his arms. He hadn’t heard the door open. “How was your flight?”
He had just gotten off a flight from Chicago, a storm delaying his departure. “Fine,” he sits at the table (walnut wood, starting as a rotting Queen Anne desk that Hobie had transformed into an elegant Shaker piece). “I’m sorry I missed dinner,” he says, and though this is true, he’s a little glad that he had been unable to come to the Italian restaurant Hobie had relegated to special occasions for the two of them. It was a nice restaurant, but the tables were so close together and the ceiling so low and echoey that it always made Theo feel like he was eating dinner with a group of strangers, the claustrophobia still getting to him after all these years, his eyes swiveling to the exit every few minutes.
Hobie sets the bag in front of Theo, a tumble of bagels, cream cheese poking out of the top. “Happy belated birthday,” Hobie says quietly, clapping a hand on his shoulder. “Many happy returns,” he raises his coffee cup to him.
“Thank you,” Theo says, meaning it, but feeling embarrassed. He busies himself with choosing a bagel and smearing cream cheese on it.
“Any plans today?” Hobie asks.
The truth is that Theo only bothered to swing by because Boris had told him he would be there. But Boris has not responded to any of his texts or calls since last night. Theo looks around the kitchen, as if Boris is only hiding, waiting for the right moment to jump out. “My flight is in the afternoon, otherwise I’d stay.”
“That’s right. Where?”
“Miami,” he says, making a mental note to swap out the clothes in his suitcase. There was a time last year when he was traveling so much he would forget where he was going next—settling down in his hotel room, heaving his luggage open only to find swimming trunks in the dead of winter in Montreal, fur-trimmed gloves in the blazing Los Angeles sun, or brown suede loafers during five straight days of rain in London.
He scratches at a rash on his palm, a souvenir after going on too many flights in the past month. His skin doesn’t like the dry air on the airplanes. It reminds him of being itchy in Vegas, the sand whipping past his bedroom window, the pool’s dancing reflection on the glass.
Boris never shows. He texts him half a dozen more times that day, and when the cab comes to collect him for his next flight, he lingers at the curb, as if he’ll show up unexpectedly, just like before, but in the heightened way that his dreams replay it on nights when he’s lucky: Boris’s black coat like a swirling mantle around him, face starting to smile, hand out, and a twitch of a finger as if to say here.
iv.
Boris is half an hour late, and Theo is minutes away from leaving when he sees a black car slide up to the curb and deposit Boris onto the sidewalk. He spots him and walks purposefully to Theo.
“Potter!” Boris grabs the back of his neck, pulls him into a hug. “Big day for you.”
“Nice of you to show,” Theo mumbles, a little annoyed, still thinking of his last birthday.
Boris tilts his head, looking amused. “You will not be mad at me for long,” he says, as if that settles it.
“Your hair,” Theo says. Boris looks nearly the same, same rapscallion grin, same shifting eyes. But there’s a twist of white hair hanging over his eyes, the rest of his curls also infiltrated with a few strands of silver. “You look like an X-Men character.”
Boris tosses his hair back. “You don’t like it? Is very sexy like this.”
Theo snorts.
“Women love it,” he says.
They linger on the Upper West Side over coffee. He hasn’t seen Boris in over a year, the second longest amount of time they’ve gone without seeing each other since they first met, and at first, he thinks something must be wrong with him when he sits down, because they are sitting outside and the sunlight is so ghastly on his pale skin it makes him look like an overexposed photograph.
But he realizes it’s just that they haven’t seen each other in so long, and the time of day makes everything Boris does seem new to Theo—from the way he squints up at the sky, skeptical, when the waitress seats them in the outdoor section, to the way he regards a baby in its stroller as it sidles up to their table, its nearby parents none the wiser as Boris sticks out his tongue to make the child laugh.
The last time they had hung out, Boris had taken Theo’s request for “no bars” very seriously, though Boris still drank, did coke “when the mood strikes”, and smoked weed to “get funny”. The two of them had snuck into the movie theater near Union Square for no reason at all, their hands sticky with popcorn by the end of the trailers.
Today, after coffee (a latte for Theo, Boris ordered something dark with two shots of espresso and dumped several spoonfuls of sugar into the cup), they decide to walk to their next destination.
“Where are we going, Boris?”
“Do you trust me?” he says with a smirk, which makes Theo roll his eyes.
“Obviously,” he retorts.
“Is a surprise. No more questions.”
They wind through Central Park, past clusters of people in downward dog, children running with kites tied with fine plastic string that disappear and reappear in snatches of silvery sunlight, tourists cradling hotdogs and ambling down the paths.
“Boris, seriously, where are we going?” he says as they continue to head east, the roof of the Met visible from the hill they’re on. He’s never returned to the museum since he went with his mother, and for a moment he can’t believe that Boris is leading him this way at all.
“This way,” he says, turning at last, and much to Theo’s relief they begin heading south, past the 80s, then to the 70s.
They are outside the Frick. Theo sees a sign for a traveling collection from Germany and Boris directs him toward it. They buy tickets at the front desk and Theo looks at Boris, who has a sparkle in his eye and a curious expression on his face that he’s only ever seen under the sunset in Vegas when he first offered him acid or at his engagement party to Kitsey (God, Kitsey! He hadn’t thought of her in years. Last he had heard, she had broken it off with Cable and was now with some investment banker). On Boris, it is an expression that precedes some wild suggestion or a revelation. He wonders which one he is getting.
They weave past portraits of nobility, centuries-old silver goblets in glass cases, rococo chaises with plush silken seats. He keeps walking, since he has no idea where he’s going, until Boris grabs him by the shoulders and spins him towards a wall.
“Boris—“
“Here. It’s your man,” he gestures at a painting.
A painting full of light and dark, all at once familiar and unfamiliar, like meeting the sibling of someone you’ve known your whole life. His eyes drift across the canvas. The man sitting on the low bench in the painting. The waiting, attentive little black dog at the bottom, pillar at attention dead center. Anthony the Great carved into the arch. The white wall like soft smoke, and finally, the thumbswiped shine of the silver helmet, the shadows of the man’s clothes looking so deftly rendered that it seems as though he is alive, it’s so modern, even the way he’s hunched over and his legs are going in different directions—realistic, nothing like the stiff portraits that pepper the rest of the room, shoulders squared off to the viewer.
He knew all about this painting. “The Sentry,” he says hoarsely, turning in disbelief to Boris, who looks pleased. “I didn’t know it had come to New York.”
“I read news, what can I tell you? Well, Gyuri gets New Yorker,” he shrugs.
Theo stares at the painting for a long while, the feeling so similar to the one that he used to have when he would take The Goldfinch out of its pillowcase in Vegas. “A mystery, for a long time.”
“Not so mysterious to me,” Boris says. “He is asleep.”
“It was taken by Napoleon and exhibited in Paris for a time, and nobody knew who had painted it really,” he babbles, glad Boris is there so he isn’t talking to himself. “That was when Fabritius’s signature was discovered on it.”
“Who is the man?”
“That’s the other mystery, isn’t it?” Theo says, excitedly. “Is he a friend, or is he an enemy?”
Boris takes all this in. “I like the other one better,” he says, and Theo knows without asking that he’s talking about The Goldfinch. “What do you say, I distract and you grab?” he raises an eyebrow, nodding at the painting. Theo laughs. They stand like that for a while, and at one point Boris says happy birthday and it’s the only thing that makes Theo look away from the painting, back to Boris.