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A memory harvested from a dream: Roy young and reckless, Roy with ice in his hair and his crooked nose bruised in the pattern of someone else’s knuckles. Roy with the tooth that he spits into his palm, a trophy, a pearl tinged pink, rolling from his tongue. Roy and the way he says, Geez-us, don’t look at me like that, half-teasing, half-serious, all pleading. Roy and his battered, grown-up hands in the pockets of his lumpy snow jacket as if to conceal their shape, each fist the size of his heart, too big for his body to contain. His thin lips and thinner smile looking for trouble among the sagging crates, the pitted red brick. The boarded-up windows, the red flecks at his feet, the sneaker prints in the sludge.
Roy whose light, pointed gaze is almost physical, like phantom hands clutching your face.
That doesn’t mean don’t look at me at all, he says, laughing. Dick, c’mon.
You know, you know that. You wake up in your bedroom to a peculiar emptiness. You just don’t know what you’re doing wrong.
--
Define: an argument. Many ways to approach one, many ways to frame one, many justifications to provide, conclusions to draw, people to persuade, tempers to fan into flame.
It’s rare to obtain universal buy-in on any plan. But Roy remains undeterred, a persistent pursuant, hot on your heels down the hall and into the privacy of your room. How about this. Well what about that. But have you considered--
Have you considered what it would have been like, to feel the warmth of Roy’s breath visible in the air, Roy’s breath against your mouth, in a city of chain-link fences and abandoned gravel lots? On your skin, inside of you, like a billowing fog from the sea. Consider what it would have been like to walk into it and never come out: Roy, whose strong arms shaping circular, emphatic gestures could just as easily encompass your shoulders. Roy, who remembers to close the door behind him, to shuck off his shoes, to turn off the lights, because your head is beginning to ache. Roy, who lowers his voice and says, Robbie, listen. Roy who says, You know I’ve always got your back. Who says, You know I’m always on your side.
I know, I know that.
Roy’s breath, his mouth. How he stands so close to you, closer than you hold your own reflection.
Later, when you are alone, facing the bathroom mirror: fog, blooming on every exhale.
Consider it.
--
Bruised and gangly and defiant in the gray-yellow snow of the warehouse district, Roy. Familiar loiterer, darkening the alleyway behind an underground music venue, your forever foil, your keen and daredevil counterpart. Shifting his weight from foot to foot, balancing truth and dishonesty on a scale. Tooth clenched in a fist, concealed in a pocket.
Roy, in trouble. Roy, your secret.
Roy, what happened to you?
Mosh pit, he answers.
Does it hurt?
If I say yes, are you gonna kiss it better?
You’d have to tell me where, first.
Roy, laughing again in disbelief, an intriguing line nestled in the hollow of one cheek.
We could throw your tooth on the roof, you joke, uncertain, searching for secure footing.
What, for the big mean tooth fairy in black kevlar to pick up?
No, for Tinker Bell. Pause, let that sink in. For tradition, obviously.
The smothered night, the rime of frost, the far-out ribbon of tar: partitioned by the downward slash of Roy’s hand, livid bruises shining like crescents. Fuck tradition. Fuck orthodoxy! Down with the establishment!
That’s how you know Roy was raised by Oliver Queen. In your heart, tradition assumes different shapes: red, green, yellow. A reconstructed recipe for soup. Visitations to a pair of sleepy headstones, warm voices in the earth who once called you their little chiriklo.
You course-correct. Down with the dentists, hear, hear.
Roy’s sharp, clear-sighted gaze reads your intentions, skeptical and then not. Not quite like the loosing of an arrow, the relief after exertion, but the slackening of a string, the immediate absence of tension.
All right. Roy winds up like a pitcher on the mound, fist reared back. Down with the dentists. I can work with that. Even better--down with private sector healthcare!
Roy, wait--
--
Define: agreement. An accord, an arrangement. A meeting of two lines at a single point. Like converging with like. A river feeding into the bay, feeding into the sea.
So you agree to Roy’s substantial revisions to the plan of attack. You agree to keep the trouble between yourselves, closing ranks. You agree to not talk about it: how your calluses brushed against Roy’s scraped knuckles as you caught his hand, his tendons jumping beneath your fingers like the plucked, startled cords of an instrument. A wind from his lungs, expelled in surprise; the bright eyes, first encountering, then questioning.
Roy with his confidence and lopsided, cavalier smile, steadier than the rest of him, which this close you can feel. Roy unwilling to pull away, unwilling to stay.
Had you goin’ for a second there, Roy says, too loud in the silence. He wets his cracked lip. I’m gonna stick it back into my mouth later, you know.
Don’t look. I knew that.
Sure you did.
Consider the tableau.
Alone together, huddled in the shadows of an out-of-code wartime-era building that should be abandoned but instead houses music and nightlife and lost boys. Rattle of a hub cap. Here-and-gone headlights casting slanted, negative impressions of obstacles in its path. The proximity of Roy’s body, the snowflakes in the lining of his collar, where short copper hairs curl.
Anticipate the rise and fall of his chest. His arm, raised, and your hand closed over his fist, like a fermata: to hold, in musical notation. To linger.
You let go of him. Sorry. Did I hurt--
No.
Roy’s turn to catch you, now, stowing your hand in his pocket beside his. Warmth, skin. The impression of his belt through the fabric. Hey, he says, it’s only me, except the problem is that it is him. It is Roy. It is you.
You, who Roy interprets better than you can him, better than you can yourself. You used to be so assured of your place in the future, but now, you dread its immediacy, the way your hideyholes have become too small, your strongest relationships warped like dead wood exposed to winter.
Roy’s eyes the color of steel, steel in a rust belt town. They dart in rapid, searching micromovements. It speaks to the blood in your body, driven by a pulse.
What d’you want, Dick?
To be swallowed by what you don’t know.
To be vanished by the fog.
To be unafraid.
A synonym for agreement is consensus. From the Latin consentio: to feel, together.
Two breaths, merged, indistinguishable. Spilling as one over a city sinking inch by inch into the Atlantic.
No one, yourself included, has asked you what you want for a long time. No one except Roy, who wanders from place to place as if seeking somewhere to belong. Whom you wonder about, when he’s not haunting your steps, when he’s not watching you, when you can watch him instead.
When you don’t, can’t, won’t. Which is it?
Don’t look at me like that, you sigh, eyes squeezed shut.
You don’t know if Roy stops. You don’t know if you want him to.
You agree to not talk about it.
--
The doctors try to set Roy’s crooked nose, but the bump stays.
You, the only one who knows how Roy got it.
You, him, your secret.