Archive of Our Own

     The truth of the story returns us to the hard-blowing icy wind of the middle of January. The New Year had turned over and drifted into a few sodden weeks as I struggled heartily to return to the East; I had only the money from Jay’s wallet, still in my coat, and whatever little I had brought with me. I’d made the mistake of forgetting how poor I would be in the absence of Father’s and Jay’s money.

     I had only managed to grab a few of my things from Father’s house before the hideous enclosure of its walls threatened to ensnare me yet again. Then it was off to the only hotel I could afford as Jordan had already gone to sleep in my cousin’s room.

     I passed one hellish night in frigid, uncomfortable accommodations before attempting to return to my father’s house with as little disruption as possible in order to get Jordan’s attention. I had, after all, promised her a rousing holiday in my home town and at the very least I hoped to let her know what had occurred the night previous.

     I came to a stop across the road from my childhood home that next morning with every intention of grabbing Jordan’s attention. Only once I had caught a glimpse of her yellow hair through the window of my cousin’s room--spinning round and round with Maggie, laughing in a way I’d never seen--did it occur to me that she would have no trouble entertaining herself without me. I considered briefly that she was clever enough to get home on her own, and then I was gone.

     I wish I could say I felt nothing but happiness for my friend as she carried on without me. As everyone did, actually--as I shuffled back through the greying slush of my former neighborhood I witnessed many displays of familiarity among red-cheeked people and all those that they loved. No one seemed to stand alone. Except for me and, as I trekked deeper into the metropolis, a ragged old beggar.

     “Sir,” he called out as I passed. His voice flew like an arrow through the icy air, in total contrast with his haggard, rough appearance. 

     “I have no money,” I told him, though at that point the statement was untrue. I had found Jay’s wallet in my jacket pocket and now planned to use that money to get myself as far east as I could manage. 

    “Not even on Christmas?” he continued, softer now, and stumbled over what I supposed must have been his poor snowed-in little lean-to. For a moment I felt sick with guilt as I remembered the luxury awaiting me whenever I managed to get home. But then the all too familiar clink of glass bottles arose from the remains of the bum’s tent and all that guilt turned to shame. I hurried away without a response. 

     Had everything gone as expected, I would’ve made it back to Jay within the week. Instead I spent three weeks riding, then working, then walking, then begging until I found my way back to New York. I thought to call Jay but apprehension pitted me against the very idea. I was left to drift through the days alone.

     Every day in between Jay leaving and my own return to New York bled into one from there, giving me a warped, forgiving view of how much time had gone by, and when I slogged down the road to West Egg sometime after midnight, I almost thought I had made great time. 

     The gentle, slushy call of the Sound ahead welcomed me back to mine and Jay’s fraction of West Egg, which was as dark and still as I could imagine it had been hundreds of years before foreign ships ever crested the horizon. I stumbled toward the familiar sight of my homey little cottage and fought against frozen fingers in my attempt to wrangle my front door key from my coat pocket.

      I didn’t dare cast a glance over my shoulder at the frosted palace behind me. If I had, I surely would’ve turned tail and torn my way through those darkened halls to crash into bed with Jay. At least, I hoped he slept on at that time of night.

     Had I glanced back then, when all of my precious restraint prevented it, I might not be where I am today. I would not have written all of this down, either, and I never would have revised it as I have thus far. Jay Gatsby may have never lived outside of fiction, but he might have just survived outside the immortality of literature. 

      But I did not look back. I dragged myself over the threshold and into my frigid little cottage, the air eerily still with weeks of having gone undisturbed. The light flickered on with one switch but a whole host of shadows remained in the faint light of the one living bulb, all ghosts of the many nights I’d spent here alone without realizing just how lonely I was. 

     As alone as I could have ever felt then, however, that loneliness escaped me. Even with the knowledge that my only friend remained in Minnesota and my family had forsaken me, I could hardly feel alone with the massive shadow of Jay’s dark cathedral taking up much of the space in my handkerchief-sized sitting room. I stood there for a moment in the faint yellow light of that one flickering bulb and watched the shadows of dead ivy creep across the massive stones of Jay’s walls. 

     The light in Jay’s office had come on. Or, perhaps, it had been on and I had simply missed it. Either way, I rushed to change out of my sodden clothes and without even giving myself time to bathe I dragged myself back out into the slush and across the now-blurred line between my property and Jay’s. Of course I supposed it was all ours by then. If I chose to accept such a fate.

     Jay’s palace had always seemed so open to the world, with light and sound pouring from every window and door as if to place lures to any passersby and draw them deep into the inescapable grandeur Jay fought so hard to represent. But within the month since I’d last seen it, the whole charade had fallen. Lit by nothing but moonlight it seemed as though I traversed through some three-dimensional photograph, a diorama of a place frozen in time instead of a place where someone lived. 

     Silence rang in my ears and it took until I reached the stairs to realize that even the sound of servants had disappeared. Even at this hour, there had always been someone working to keep Jay’s absolute monstrosity of a house in working order: keeping fires stoked, beginning the work for breakfast--even the security officer Jay had hired after his brush with death ought to be up at this hour. Especially him. But I could hear nothing aside from the gentle shush, shush of the wind outside. 

    Light slipped out from the crack under Jay’s office door and cast uneven shadows across the rug before it, blurring what had once been finely hand-woven lines in the intricate woolwork. The light and shadows both shivered when I placed my hand on the doorknob, then shifted entirely as the door swung open.

     There Jay sat at his desk. Or, well, a man that looked like Jay; never, not even when the loss of Daisy had threatened to so wholly consume him, had I ever seen such a hopeless look on that man’s face. This man, this fantastical figure shaped by hope alone, seemed entirely devoid of that which had formed him. He sat back in his chair with his hands folded on his chest and his red-rimmed eyes staring straight through me.

     He didn’t say a word, so I did.

     “...are you alright?”

     “Swell, old sport.”

     The phrase struck me through--the tone twisted within me. I ducked my head and approached his desk with more shame than even my own father’s revulsion had drawn from me. I would’ve given anything for Jay to have been disgusted in that moment, though; at least then he would’ve expressed anything at all. Something other than exhaustion. 

     All that brilliant gold had not only dulled from his voice but it seemed as though it had disappeared entirely. As though he’d been robbed of any sort of will to treat this life as charmed. 

     Who had been the thief? How long could the two of us blind ourselves to our intertwined truths?

     I settled uneasily down in the chair opposite Jay’s with the desk between us. The desk, at least, was familiar with its unglamorous mess of papers. Only now the frames that had once held half a dozen photographs of the two of us all lay face down, their shattered glass sparkling across the desktop. 

     “Took me longer to get home than I expected,” I stated rather obviously. Anything to break this crypt-like silence.

     “I know.”

     “Three whole weeks--”

     “Twenty-four days, actually, since we’ve seen each other.” Jay’s eyes slid sluggishly to his watch. “And eight hours.”

     I couldn’t quite look away from his watch after that. The hands ticked along in a silent fight to beat their way through every coming second of the future. 

     “I tried to get home sooner, Jay. I really did.” My voice came out as a rasp. I cleared my throat. “I shouldn’t have cut you off like that, but--”

     “But you did,” Jay reminded me. His eyes remained trained on me, dull as stone. “You did. You took one look at all I’d done for you and..and you dismissed me. Why? Why did you do that, Nick? Please, help me understand.”

     “You told my father we were together. You exposed me as a homosexual.” I struggled then to keep my voice from rising, to keep the venom from my words. All I could do was sit there and speak as plainly as I could because I knew that even if I understood that the venom and the shouting could still never be truly aimed at Jay, he would take it as such. I couldn’t bear to spread my hurt from him like some hateful miasma on the air. This hateful reality I’d inoculated myself against might kill him.    

     But still, it had to be said. “That wasn’t your secret to tell.”

     Jay finally seemed to wake up a bit at this. His brow furrowed slightly and he leaned back in his chair. “Are you genuinely upset over that, Nick? I mean, honestly. How else are you supposed to have me and your family at the same time if they don’t know about us? Are we just supposed to live the rest of our lives lying to everyone around us?”

     I was taken aback. How could I not be? The most obvious liar I’d ever known and he still couldn’t conceptualize the gravity of our situation. “Jay, do you really think other men go around parading their--their deviance? Think. Really think on it. Have you ever, even once, looked up and seen two men walking along hand in hand down the street? Kissing, God forbid?”

     “I don’t look at other men,” he replied almost before I had finished speaking. “I only have eyes for you.”

     “That’s not what I meant and you know it.”

     The silence that followed chilled deeper than any snow blustering past the office window. I stared Jay down until he was forced to turn away, shame morphing into his face from the insistent passion that had been there before. It made me sick to even think about breaking this man’s heart but he had to see the reality of this situation--I’d give it to him in as small doses as I could manage but I could feel my own emotions wearing down at my resolve.

     “Jay…you can’t go on pretending that just because we love each other, everyone will excuse our behavior. They’ll never accept us the way we accept each other. We just have to live with that. People like us have been doing it for centuries.”

     That seemed to reach him. Or so I thought. Jay let his head fall to the side as the spark of energy I had witnessed only moments before died out into nothing once more. He took a deep breath and let it out before replying.

     “We can’t just live with that, Nick.” He leaned forward and let his golden head fall into his hands for a moment before he looked back up at me again, his brow heavy over tired blue eyes. “Life isn’t something you just have to suffer through. Do you think I would have made it this far if I had simply chosen to live with how the world viewed me?”

     But even as he said it, we both knew the irony of that statement. Yes, he might have played the game with the cards he’d been dealt and come out financially on top but it really didn’t better the opinion of everyone around him. As a matter of fact, the silence of this cavernous mansion around us betrayed that he really might have been better off if he’d stayed a poor boy. Poor boys didn’t tend to fall into the sort of trouble that stacked in black folders on his desk. 

     I thought then that futility began its hideous hiss at the back of our minds but no, it had always been there. It had been the first and final guest at every party and even now lurking in Gatsby’s abandoned halls. 

     I thought that now, maybe Jay would understand. He could accept that some things about the world could not be changed by one hungry little boy, or even two. And it would break him, sure, but what else could be done at this point? How long could I let this man live in delusion? If I ever planned to be with him, then I simply could not allow him to live on in this fog of denial for the rest of our lives. It would kill us both.

     “You made it far,” I agreed softly. “But you’ve got to learn from this, Jay. You can’t just keep going up and expect that nothing will take you down.”

     Jay stared at me for a moment, that blue gaze as inescapable as always, before nodding slowly. “Yes…yes,” he said at length. “I’ve been going up, up, up--and now I suppose that I must come down.” His eyes glazed over slightly as if he’d let the world around him fall out of focus. “I am coming down.”

     I shifted in my seat to sit up straighter and lean toward him. “Well, that’s where I am, Jay. On the ground. Waiting for you.”

     “And I am waiting for the ground.”

     That thousand-yard stare drifted sightlessly down to the cluttered surface of his desk while we both sat there in silence for a good while. Not too long, however, as I seemingly hadn’t enough time to convince myself that it was a bad idea to reach out and place my hand on his desk. There it lay, facing expectantly upward and waiting for the familiar weight of Jay’s touch even as the edges of broken glass dug into scarred knuckles.

     His eyes focused on my hand and then flitted away once more. I withdrew my hand and stood.

     “Jay, this doesn’t have to mean that we’re over and done. Just because we have to walk a few inches apart in the city doesn’t lessen the fact that we love each other. I wish you could see that. You won’t be alone. I’ll stay close. I promise.”

     He didn’t say a word. I began the task of picking up some of the files that had fallen from his desk and onto the floor. The whole office looked as though a tornado had come through. 

     “Where are your servants, Jay?” I asked as I placed a stack of files on his desk. The typed edge of a paper peeked out from the opening of one. I discreetly tapped it back into place with the tip of my finger. “The whole house seemed abandoned when I got here.”

     “I wanted to be as alone as I felt,” he admitted softly, in as quiet a voice as I had ever heard him use. “So I sent the whole of them away. I think they were relieved.”

     “You sent them away?” I asked. “Who’s been taking care of you, then?”

     Because though Jay Gatsby was a man, for all his once unbreakable mettle, I knew him enough to know that there always had to be someone there for him. A caring hand in the darkness to pull him from stagnation. Wolfsheim, currently. And he’d wandered for years before Dan Cody found him, put himself toward death in the war when Dan Cody left him. I’d seen how desperate he was for even a hint of a possibility that Daisy’s hand might return to lead him onward into that promised land of a future he’d spent so long dreaming of--and I’d seen what it had done to him when that hand fully and finally withdrew. 

     If I hadn’t been there to catch him, I have no doubt he would have shot past that stagnation he’d escaped via the now-lost prospect of that imagined future. He would have fallen happily to Wilson’s gun and finally, finally met the stars himself. 

     “No one,” Jay finally said. “There’s no one left and perhaps that’s for the best, then, isn’t it, old sport?”

     “No, Jay, I don’t think so,” I replied, more exasperated now than anything else. Jay didn’t seem to have the wits about him in the moment to respond, so I drove forward. “Do you really want to be alone?”

     He shook his head before I even finished. His voice was raw and low as he said, “No, no, Nick. No one ever really wants to be alone. I’ve said it, yes. We’ve all said it at some point. But can’t you see? I’ve spent my life trying to avoid suffering the indignity of…of alienation, just as you have, ducking the suspicion of your father and your--whatever, whoever held your heart before you passed it to me.”

     “Whoever--” I fumbled. “Jay, no one else has mattered to me in the way you do. And always will.”

     “So why does this feel like good-bye, then?” He blinked up at me, shame and hurt striking into his eyes where emptiness had dulled them moments before. “Why are you already on your feet? You just got home.”

     “I’m cleaning up after you,” I told him. I came to a still in front of his desk, clutching another short stack of folders to my chest as if to protect my heart from whatever came next. “Didn’t I tell you that’s what people do when they care about each other? They help clean up. I’m trying to help you, Jay.” I held his gaze in this last insistent little push toward rationality. “That’s all I’ve ever tried to do.” 

     I passed the folders back to him as I spoke. “But there comes a point where I have to hand it over to you, Jay. You’ve got to be able to live without me. If even just for a minute. An hour. A day.” He wouldn’t take the folders from my grip. I repeated softly, “You’ve got to be able to live without me.”

     “So you’re going, then?” 

     I wish it had been an accusation. I wished more than ever that he would get angry at me, rage with as much blindness as he hoped. Anything but this immeasurable desolation. 

     I had been a fool to think he might take this easily. Jay was not a man to take feelings bit by bit and mull them over the way I had done up until recently; every emotion to him was a great tidal wave, threatening to drown him with every pass. Be it negative or positive. The terror of poverty had driven him to his maximalist nightmare of an unmaintainable fantasy; the horror of being alone now drove him to reach shakily into a drawer while I watched.

     “I’ll really be alone, then, if you leave,” he said, eyes still on me. A new sort of frenzy had sparked up in those dulled blue depths. “You know that, don’t you? You’re all I’ve got left. Sent--” He tore his eyes away from me long enough that his trembling hand could settle on what he’d been searching for in that drawer. “--all the servants away. But I kept this.”

     He withdrew a handgun from the drawer and let it drop almost carelessly to the desktop. It landed with a heavy thud on the crushed glass and layers of paperwork.

     “Christ, Jay! Is that thing loaded?” I reached out for the gun but he grabbed my hand.

     “I don’t know,” he said. “I’d hoped I wouldn’t have to find out.”

     “You don’t need to.”

     “So you’re staying?”

     I stared at him, the corners of my lips straining downward as my heartbeat thundered in my ears. “What are you trying to say, Jay? That you’ll--” My words stopped dead in my throat. The image of that gun anywhere near his precious head turned my stomach inside out.

     “I suppose so,” he replied with all the grim politeness of funeral small talk. “Because there’s nothing left in this world for me without you, Nick. And you don’t seem to understand that. All this…talk about leaving me, living without you--I couldn’t do it, Nick. Not even for a minute more. These days without you have nearly done me in as it is.”

     He let go of my hand and for a brief moment of terror I thought he might reach for the gun, but instead, he brushed away some glass and plucked one of the many photographs of the two of us from his desktop. 

     “I can’t imagine another day without you, my dearest boy.” He rubbed his thumb over my face in the photograph, where it was already worn enough to suggest weeks of having been rubbed in such a manner, as if my smiling face were some lucky stone. Only instead of having been shined, I had faded away to where only those who knew me well would know the man standing next to Jay in that photograph.

     I watched him mull it all over, too terrified myself to speak up and risk disturbing him closer to what felt like an inevitability. His thumb traced slowly over the picture and it occurred to me, that fatal rent in our relationship: he would run into a fire to save a photograph of me; I would run in the other direction with his obituary already in mind.

      Had I given up? Really and truly, had I let Jay Gatsby go? After all we had been through, after all we’d weathered together and for each other, could I shut myself off yet again and drift away from this oversaturation of beauty sitting miserably before me? I should have known it would be too much. If loving Jay was too much for an overindulgent, spoiled rich girl like Daisy, then how could I, having previously allowed myself just the barest allowances of indulgence, ever withstand the full, glorious light of his love?

     …but even then, even as I accepted the fact that I had perhaps forayed too deeply into debauchery, I could not admit to being over and done with my infatuation with Jay Gatsby. Even as he sat there, threatening suicide, I felt that inescapable ache of adoration. 

     And guilt. And guilt. And guilt. It reared its ugly head right there next to all the love stored within me, because I knew I shouldn’t allow us both to live like this. Love should not be a chokehold, or a hostage situation. And that gun felt as though it would press to my head in the same moment it met Jay’s.

     “Why me?”

     Jay seemed taken aback, ever so slightly. “What do you mean?” He laid the photograph down.

     “Why me?” I repeated. Softly, tenderly. I feared raising my voice might excite him further. But I had to know before I walked out that door. “What about me could possibly drive you to this point? Especially with how I treated you at my father’s house.” I beat back memories of that night like wild dogs. “And that night after Myrtle. You were so invested in Daisy but you so easily turned that love on me. How could you do something like that?”

     “Because you needed me like I needed you,” he responded readily. “Until you didn’t.”

     I held his gaze for as long as I could stand it. It wasn’t very long before my eyes landed on the gun again.

     Jay continued, “That’s all I ever really wanted. Was for you to need me like I needed you.” His hand remained on the desk next to the gun, twitching in a way I knew stemmed from exhaustion. I would bet money he hadn’t slept in days. He always got twitchy after the longest stretches without sleep. 

     “You did, I think,” he kept on, “for a long while. And I know, Nicky, I know I shouldn’t feel threatened by your friendship with Jordan, but--”

     I put my hand up to stop him. My blood had gone cold.

     “Nicky?”

     Jay blinked. “Yes.”

     “There’s only one woman in the world who calls me that, Jay.”

     As if on cue, our eyes both slid to the silent telephone on his desk. Brand new and gleaming on its perch, it gallantly mocked any sincerity I had perceived from Jay tonight. Sullied every damn word with that one god-awful name.

     “She only calls out of concern for you,” Jay began as I stood there, aghast. “Really, Nick, you’re all we talk about. She’s--she’s come to terms with some of what she knows you consider wrongdoings and you might really be well suited to give her a fair chance--”

     I turned from him and began my sluggish shuffle toward the door. Shock still dulled my already exhausted body and weighed me down to the point where Jay had time to stand from his desk chair and speak again. I could feel his uncharacteristic stillness in the air, and his voice held an unnerving level of acceptance when he next spoke.

     “Where are you going?” he asked just above the force of a whisper. 

     “Home.”

     My hand met the doorknob. I turned it slowly, deliberately, and began the pull to open the door. Its quiet creaking couldn’t hide the clink of broken glass on Jay’s desk.

     His voice rose soft and tremulous over the dull roar of the frigid Long Island Sound as I stepped from the room without looking back.

     “Goodbye, darling.”

     I shut the door just as the gun fired.

     And I waited.

     I should have run. I should have run off the end of Jay’s dock and let my winter clothes drag me down into the slushy tide, where I would remain until the water ate my bones away to dust. After all, I remained in just a similar state as Jay if he were gone--who was left for me without him? Jordan? After I’d abandoned her back home?

     No, just like he seemed to have wanted, he’d prevented me from exploring any other avenues for companionship, and now without my family I would live as empty a life as I had always anticipated.

     Only I had never anticipated meeting Jay Gatsby. I had never considered that I might one day bear the weight of one man’s unprecedented hope for the future--though not entirely bulletproof, as I’d discovered. I suppose one man could only have taken so much.

     How could I live without that, now that I’d known it? My life would forever bear a sun-sized void, devoid of light itself if I went on without doing Jay this one last decency. Who else would bury him if I didn’t? I was all he had.

     For just a sliver of a second I considered running still--this time forward, onward into a desolate future as a faceless, nameless fugitive. The only man with any answers as to the death of the great Gatsby--the man in countless photographs at the scene of the crime. I would be the only lead if the authorities pursued what would make such a promising figure end his life.

     I could not find the will in me to do that. I’d run most of my life. Exhaustion in every form prevented me from doing so any further. 

     The death of the love of my life sat like a stone in the gears of my will, preventing me from moving forward and obstructing me from turning back. So, as Jay always had, I supposed I would simply stay here. In this moment. Never leave it.

     I opened the door to Jay’s office. 

     Suffice it to say, that simple stone of shock holding me back from emotion cracked almost immediately under the pressure of seeing Jay’s wall splattered in gore. I stumbled back from the scene twice as fast as I’d reentered it, and for a moment I felt more than fortunate I’d starved these past few weeks, as when I retched into his wastebasket, nothing came up but tears to my eyes.

     “Jay--oh, God! Jay!” I blubbered as I stumbled forward. “Please, oh, God, why?”

     The gunshot hadn’t been enough to jerk me back into the reality of the situation, but the blood pooling on the floor beyond his desk certainly was. I’d caused this. I might as well have pulled that trigger myself.  

     I gripped the front edge of Jay’s desk to steel myself before working my way around, through clouds of dreadful silence and the odor of gunsmoke. My eyes ended up on the ceiling before I got halfway there. I shut them and beat back another round of nausea before forcing my gaze downward to where Jay lay so utterly still.

     I froze there, stock still and struck stupid by the sight of his face. Oh, dear God. His beautiful face. Gone.

     That was as much as I could stand before I stepped over his splayed arm and into the space between his body and the desk.

     I wasn’t sure what I was looking for in those next few desperate moments, but I figured in my wild search I would find something of use. Mostly, I found falsehoods--or, worse, truths. Names. There were letters on that desk scribed to names I’d never heard: Robert Kerr, Cushman Rice, F.E. Lewis, and most often, Max von Gerlach. Jay had been receiving letters addressed to these names.

     I swallowed down any uncomfortable realizations that arose in the wake of such a discovery and instead pushed the papers around in increasing panic to find anything that might actually help me--us--out here. I couldn’t exactly phone the police and risk becoming irrevocably twisted up in this whole mess. As it stood, I felt remarkably guilty even remaining there.

     It took a few moments of blurry scrambling to discover Jay’s black book, beaten half to death in a drawer he didn’t typically leave unlocked. I ripped the leather open with trembling fingers and scanned the lists until I saw one that might prove useful. I pressed the book spine-first onto the desktop until it stayed flat and then dialed in the telephone number.

     It rang for an ungodly long time before a taut woman’s voice answered. “Swastika Holding Company.”

     “I need to speak with Mr. Wolfsheim,” I said, marveling for a moment at my collected tone. I felt as though my body might rattle apart at the joints. “It’s an--well, it’s an urgent matter. Can’t wait.”

     Silence. I thought I heard the faint sound of speaking somewhere in the background but with all the crackle of the connection it rapidly became difficult to place any words being spoken. Finally, the woman returned to the call and said, “He’s not in right now.”

     I glanced at the clock on Jay’s desk and realized that yes, it would be foolish of me to assume that he’d be in the office at this late an hour. But then, this woman ought not to have been, either. I lashed out on the wild hope that this ‘holding company’ might’ve been more than it seemed.

     “I know he’s there, miss,” I said, even though I had not a clue. “Tell him it’s a--f-friend of Mr. Gatsby’s.” I prayed she hadn’t noticed my painful little stutter.

     More silence followed and for a moment I considered that she might just hang up on me. However, after a moment, she heaved a long-suffering sigh and said, “I’ll patch you in, sir.”

     She was gone before I could thank her.

     The moment of silence that echoed there haunted me with a vengeance as I stood there and waited. Jay lay on the floor behind me. I couldn’t bear to cast my eyes upon him now as I panicked in his final moment of need.

     After all, where could I possibly go with this? Why bother calling Wolfsheim? To get rid of Jay? I couldn’t have been so callous as to not even check for a pulse before I made the burial plans. But there could have been no way he survived a direct shot to the temple, not someone as dedicated a soldier as he had been. Half his face was gone. No man could survive that. Not even Jay Gatsby.

     The silence droned on. I dragged the base of the telephone as far forward as it would go on the desk and sunk slowly down next to Jay’s still form, ever so careful to avoid the cooling puddle of blood surrounding his head like some hellish halo of demonic red light. The telephone stayed flush to my ear, propped up by my shoulder as I reached down to Jay’s scarlet-spattered neck.

     This was just a formality. A final shock to my system to really set it in stone that the only man I’d ever really loved and would ever love had ended his life. No man could have survived a shot like that, as far as I could tell. But I’d done just about everything in my power to revisit the sight of his ruined face.

     I almost didn’t answer when Meyer spoke on the other end of the line. The whole world had gone downy-deaf around me, all my attention focused on the sensation of a faint beat underneath my frigid fingertips. Fluttering and uneven and despairingly weak, Jay’s pulse beat inconceivably onward under his now pallid skin.

     “Jay--Jay, my boy, are you there?” I finally heard on the other end of the line.

    I sat back hard against the drawers of Jay’s desk and let my head fall back hard against the fine wood. “...n-no, Mr. Wolfsheim. It’s Nick here.” He’d know me by name. He had to by now. “Jay…” My mouth spoke before my brain could think. “Jay’s been shot.”

     More of that dreaded silence. I swallowed hard in the face of it and readied myself to speak again when Meyer beat me to it.

     “Mr. Carraway--Nick,” he amended. An apology leaked into his tone. “I cannot help you. I--”

     I cut him off before I could consider the consequences. “What am I supposed to do, then? Call an ambulance?” I stood up as fire chased away some of my shock. “He’s here in his office, Wolfsheim. Surrounded by your dirty business. He’s already been in enough trouble without law enforcement getting involved again.”

     I heard him take a breath. When he spoke, it was with a softness I hadn’t thought him capable of. “I cannot help…much. The risk--it is too great, you see. Too risky to throw myself into whatever he’s done to himself but…you are right, too risky to keep out, too.” And this came from the man who’d fixed the World Series. The idea of him considering mere involvement almost too major a risk should’ve scared me more, but I’d accepted Jay’s choice in career when I’d become involved with him. That had to include the danger.

     Wolfsheim continued, “I can send a car. Get you to somewhere we can put him, and then--”

     “He’s alive.” Venom blackened my tone. I hunkered down over Jay’s body as if Meyer might reach through the phone and snatch him away. 

     “Oh!” I couldn’t tell if he was relieved or fearful. “Good, good. Very good. I can send a car for the both of you. Get you to the hospital. And we’ll take care of the house. But then I can do no more, Mr. Carraway.” Genuine sorrow seeped into his tone but I found myself immune to it even as he said, “I can’t even be there for my best boy. I suppose that makes me out to be the hardened criminal, then, ah.”

     I didn’t dignify that with a response. The handle of the telephone slammed into its cradle harder than I had intended. I took a moment to shut my eyes and get a hold of myself before carefully working Jay’s upper body into my lap.

     All I could do for him now was wait. Wait, and hold him. When I looked down to attempt a better review of his injuries, his eyeless skull greeted me and I found myself unable to look down at him again. He’d be blind if he survived this. 

     My own eyes landed upon the phone again and in the absence of the rage-fire Wolfsheim had momentarily stoked within me, I supposed I ought to begin covering our tracks. That unbearable resignation fought to take hold of me again but I knew I couldn’t let it win me over. Not now. Now, Jay needed me.

     I dialed one of the few telephone numbers I knew by heart. She had to be home from the middle west by now, and I had no doubt in my mind that if she happened to be at home, she would be awake. If she weren’t at some grand party, that was. But it seemed as though luck for once shifted in my favor.

     “Baker.”

     “Hi, Jordan.”

     More unbearable silence. Then, “Hello, Nick. I believe this call is a bit late.”

     She didn’t sound too horribly upset, but it was often hard to tell with her. “I know, I know. Usually I’d be in bed by this hour, but--”

     “As in, you ought to have placed a call to your father’s house about a month ago. That was an awfully rotten thing to do to a girl, you know. If it weren’t for Maggie I might’ve met my untimely end in your family home. They’re not horribly exciting folk in St. Paul.”

     I shut my eyes and let a breath drift through my nose before attempting a response. “I know, Jordan.” I wasn’t sure of how much of the truth I ought to bother her with, so I simply said, “Jay and I got…carried away. Never quite made it back to you. I’m…” My words stumbled. “I’m sorry.”

     Either she didn’t pick up on my dire sincerity, or she didn’t care enough to bother with it. “Oh, well. I’m sure I could forgive you, of all people.”

     Something twisted inside me. “Thank you, Jordan,” I managed.

     She hummed on the other end of the line and asked lightly, “Everything jake over there?”

     “Yes, yes,” I answered as quickly as I could manage. And from there the lies simply continued. “Jay’s surprised me with two steamer tickets. We’re--we’re off to Paris first thing in the morning.”

     “To Paris.”

     “Yes. To Paris.”

     Anything either of us could’ve said then would have been insignificant in the face of the silence that followed. It threatened to swallow me whole until finally, Jordan spoke up again, her tone dry as ever.

     “Well, do kiss a mime for me, why don’t you?”

     I managed the slightest sickly smile. “It’s not as if he’ll tell.”

     A short laugh followed on Jordan’s end of the call. Before she could speak, though I knew it was untrue, I inserted gently, “I’ll send post just as soon as I’m able. I think Jay wants us both to spend a good time out there and you’ll need my address, I’m sure--”

     “Oh, don’t worry about it, Nick.”

     “Pardon?”

     “Don’t bother.”

     I bit down on my tongue to stop the flow of any sort of response until I could get a handle on what I wanted to say. “Alright. Goodnight, Jordan.”

     “Goodbye.”

     We hung up at the same time.

     Jay lay there still in my lap, but a quick touch to his throat reassured me that he still lived. That and his labored breathing. I watched it for a moment in bitter silence as tears once again threatened to overtake me. Only now was not the time for tears; I could not bear to grieve him before I really, truly lost him.

     With even more care than when I’d pulled him close, I gently lowered Jay back to the ground, but not before sticking my coat under his head in an uneven lump of fabric. I noticed with a grave sense of irony that it was the same jacket he’d had repaired for me: hardly enough for this weather but it had been the easiest one to grab in my cottage in the dark.

     I left Jay there on the floor and stumbled from the office. 

     Life cost much more than I was willing to admit, and while I felt halfway committed to the guilt of thievery, I knew Jay’s money would be stolen by Wolfsheim’s people the second we left the house anyhow. So for a moment I allowed myself to play the widow. I stumbled my way through every little hidey-hole where Jay had stashed away emergency money, stuffing thick rolls of cash into every single available pocket as I went. Once I ran out of pocket space I made my sluggish, miserable way back to the office and settled heavily back down into the spot I had left minutes before. 

     Jay hadn’t moved, of course. Had he any forehead left I would have leaned down and kissed it.

     In retrospect, I probably should have had something to say to him in those moments. An apology. A reassurance. Something. Anything. I doubt he could have heard it, but I could at least say I’d tried. But I had indeed tried. For months before tonight I had tried with every fiber in my being to pretend that our relationship couldn’t have fallen apart like this at any time. We both just had to reach our own private boiling points, the fever pitch of our own dogged fixations. I couldn’t give myself to him fully, and he couldn’t do anything but.

     It wasn’t long before footsteps stormed down the hallway, a short enough time that I almost supposed it might have been intruders rather than men come to secret us away to the hospital. Fortunately, they proved the latter, and two strong men were more than enough to carry Jay’s limp form from his office to the back of a dark car. I followed like their shadow and slipped into the backseat so I could cradle Jay’s broken head in my bloodstained lap.

     The men Wolfsheim had sent stayed silent for the whole ride, and so did I. I supposed I ought to have used this time again to comfort the man fading away in my embrace, but I found nothing I could ever say would ever be enough to make up for everything that had gone down.

      So I merely took his hand in mine. Squeezed it to where I hoped, however far into the ether he’d been sent, he would be able to feel it. He would know I had stayed. 

     In the light of a passing streetlamp, I caught the glint of something rolling around on the floorboard of the car. I reached down to grasp it only to find that it was my ring. Or, rather, the ring Jay had given me. The one I’d thrown at him on that bitter December night. 

     He must have been carrying it in his pocket. I glanced down at the gruesome shine of his ruined face. My eyes burned until I blinked and forced my gaze back to where his hand lay loose against the bloodied seat of the car.

     It wasn’t really a conscious thought to rob him in that moment. But in the dark of the car, I worked with one shaky hand to press the ring onto any one of his fingers only to find that it would only fit his smallest finger, where his signet ring already sat tarnished and cold. I worked it off his finger and replaced it with the ring he’d given me. His Daisy ring slipped right onto my ring finger with a sickening ease.

     We got to the hospital with even greater swiftness than I had dared hope for. I gave my quiet gratitude to the driver and his faceless companion as they worked in smooth synchronicity to lift Jay off my lap and into the warmth waiting beyond the hospital doors. I worked my trembling way out of the car and into the frigid night after them.

     It was as if we’d planned this whole affair before we entered the hospital doors. The waiting room stood empty save for one petite young woman at the front desk, bored and poring over the newspaper until all four of us had entered, and Meyer’s minions stepped to the side with Jay’s limp form in their arms while I jolted back into enough of a functioning state to speak to the woman. 

     She’d already jumped from her seat and flown into action, ringing a bell on the desk to alert any other available staff of the emergency. I had no time to explain the situation before she commanded, “Sit, sir!” 

     I picked the nearest chair in the waiting area and simply folded in on myself like a lawn chair. 

     A minute or an hour might’ve passed in between sitting down and looking up to find that nurse standing before me. One glance at the clock on the wall assured me that it had indeed been at least several minutes since I had arrived, and this was confirmed when the nurse spoke.

     “I hate to wake you, sir, but we really need to know what happened,” she said in a tone as soft as the puff of a winter coat as she settled down next to me. I rubbed my eyes and sat up as best I could under the weight of today’s events.

     “What do you need to know?” My brain felt as though every thought had to meander its way through fog in order to reach speech. “I…I don’t know much,” I admitted, and it sickened me exactly how true that statement had become. I felt knew less about Jay now than I had at the beginning of the summer. I ached for a drink.

     The woman’s tan hand found my forearm. “That’s all right, sir. Can you tell me how he sustained the injury?” Her other hand clutched a pen with white knuckles. The ink from the tip bled a small dot onto the intake form she’d brought with her.

     My dull eyes moved to stare at the cracked tile beneath our feet. I wondered how many grieving tears had fallen to this floor. Would I be able to cry for Jay?

     “I heard a gunshot. Came…came running,” I told her. “I didn’t find a gun, so I imagine someone awful must’ve done this to him and then…took off.” My remaining loyalty forbade me from admitting that he’d done this to himself--or, rather, I couldn’t bear to face that my beacon of unbreakable hope had broken and gone out like a light. Worse, that I’d broken him myself.

      I heard her scribble that down on the form. “Yes, sir.” For her sympathetic tone, she sounded as exhausted as I felt. I wondered how Jay’s case compared to what horrors I was sure she’d seen in her line of work. A glance in her direction placed her at an age where she might’ve been too young to have served as a nurse in the Great War, fortunately. 

     A moment passed in blissful silence while she recorded my statement, and then it was back to the questioning. “And what’s your relation?”

     My heart twisted like a dying creature, secreted away in its private little apartment behind my ribcage. It would die alone there. I swallowed hard and barely managed, “Neighbor.”

     “Of course, of course.” I thought I detected a note of disappointment in her voice. If she were looking for Jay’s family members, she’d have trouble finding anyone now. “And one last question, sir. This is an easy one, all right?” She squeezed my arm and for a moment I considered the kindness of the world and how little of it was expensed to those deserving of it.

     “All right.”

     “Can you give me his name?”

     I turned to meet her gaze. Looked away. Down, back to the floor, where it was safe.

     “Gatz. James Gatz.”

     I left the hospital before dawn. Without a second thought I’d given the nurse a roll of the money I’d taken from Jay’s house in order to pay for his care, and then I was gone. Before he’d even left surgery, before I could know if he’d actually survived it all or not, I stumbled my way through the swinging glass doors of the hospital and out onto the frigid street. 

     I must have wandered for quite some time, as the sun began to rise and soon people flooded the streets, all watching me pass by in no coat while fresh snow floated down between us. I could not know where my feet would take me, nor that they would take me to a place so foul as to harbor Tom Buchanan himself.

     I met him on the sidewalk outside of my and Jay’s favorite speakeasy. His hair looked freshly cut and for a moment I considered that he might have come to the barber on truly innocent terms but the reek of alcohol hit me as he called out in greeting.

     “Shakespeare!” he slurred out, one burly arm wrapped over the shoulder of some other rich man’s son, but I noticed a new softness to his form that suggested he too had fallen into an ungentlemanly drinking habit since I'd seen him last. That, and we were both getting older. But his body still hulked over mine as if he intended to crash over me as a tidal wave of manhood.

     I said not a word and considered fleeing as he struck his hand out to me. It didn’t even occur to me that he intended for us to shake. I did not take his hand.

     “What?” he spat, his buzz seeming to still within him. “You won’t even shake my hand?” He cast his reddened eyes over to the friend at his side for support and I saw that same look of old-money social upheaval hardening their hearts against me. I hadn’t been so much of an outsider to Tom as I had suspected--not, at least, until I so firmly placed myself in opposition to him and all the social graces he supposedly upheld. 

     “You know how I feel about you,” I told him, all the bitterness of poison seeping into my voice. 

     This seemed to rattle his system ever so slightly. He had not expected me to press this point. “About…me?” He returned his focus to his friend only long enough to cast him away like a servant. And his friend did indeed hurry off like a trained dog. “Nick, you’ve got to let all that go.” He glanced around at the barbershop clientele, offered a weak smile, and grabbed my arm in an attempt to wrestle me out the front door. I yanked my arm from his grip.

     “Let it all go? You want me to let it all go? You and Daisy both were willing to ruin Jay’s life over something we both know you both hold the blame for--”

     We’d stopped just outside the barber shop. The snow had stopped for the time being and now the sickly grey light cast dark shadows across Tom’s face. He looked as though he hadn’t been sleeping. “How could that matter now, Nick? Daisy and I have moved on. And it doesn’t seem like Gatsby’s really suffering, now is he? I heard just this morning, the two of you were Paris-bound.” A sneer twisted his lip. “Europe ought to suit you both.”

     I had nothing to say to that. If I had spoken, I might have vomited over his shoes. Not that anything would have come up with it.  

     He left me on the sidewalk without another word, heading back into the company he’d left behind and back to graces he claimed a right to. I remained there in the cold until the barber chased me away.

     My life would stay cold like this for quite some time. I went back to the cottage and puttered about for the next several days in an impenetrable fog, knowing that if I stepped outside of this dull, empty feeling, the grief would hit me, and I would never recover.

     I remained in the dark for much of that time. There was no light left in this world--no light on my cottage, and no light in Jay's palace. It went from Jay's house to that old Gatsby place to a house for sale and I stayed in bed, watching it all again from the sidelines. 

     I lay there in an endless haze, my time only marked by brief, aborted flashes of guilt as it occurred to me just how I had taken knowing Jay for granted. No one left alive knew what had become of him. No one knew what it was to have known his ineffable warmth. To truly love him. To truly grieve him. To watch every dawn with the hope that it was his return even in spite of every rational assurance that it would never be. That choiceless hope was contagious and Jay had passed it to me; and perhaps I would die from it, too. 

     I haven’t yet, in spite of urging myself into an early grave. I hardly took care of myself for those next few months, mostly leaving my room only to pay the grocery boy for his surreptitious delivery of alcohol and twice to pay rent with the money I’d taken from Jay. Nothing could move me until I awoke one morning to the realization that March had come and gone and spring ought to have opened its loving palm once more to the dead earth. 

     I arose from my bed and stumbled through a haze of cheap gin to the front door, out of which I stumbled to finally face Jay’s palace once more in broad daylight. The sound of birdsong accompanied my teetering stroll over what little remained of my unmaintained grass.

     Spring again, and colder than I'd ever known. 

     I would not make it to Jay’s lawn. While I’d been indisposed, someone had erected a shining metal fence topped with spikes the length of my forearm. One look told me I was no longer welcome on that land. Life itself didn’t seem to be, either, as from where I stood, Jay’s once immaculate garden had browned and withered away, as if poisoned itself.

     Jay’s house stood before me grey and cold, a hollowed shell of the light and life with which it had once pulsed like a heart. That heart had now stopped and it really and fully hit me then, like a bullet to the back: James Gatz may have survived, but Jay Gatsby was well and truly dead.

     It was as if the earth knew what I wanted from it. Frigid gusts swept over my failing form as damp earth cradled me close—closer, closer, but never quite enough. I wanted to be underneath it. Right next to Jay in that horrible, callous palace once full of people who never knew him and hadn’t deserved to at the time.

     And all at once it hit me: they'd know him. And they'd love him, too.

     There wasn’t much I could do for Jay now, not after I had ripped him up and abandoned him as I had. But I could do this for him, do this one great kindness, with the only talent I’d ever been assumed to have. 

          If you’ve read this far, then I must surely be dead.

     I’ve written up an account of the year of 1922 with every intention of recording it as it was, even at the risk of causing trouble for myself, but what you must have read previously is not entirely accurate, at least up to a certain point. The last hundred pages or so of my work remain untouched. And so you must have found them now, and I must be dead, as I hope to die with that remanufactured version of that summer as my only legacy to this earth. 

     Drenched in the shame that tainted the very best of us but knowing I could never be any better than Jay I cut my shame, and my culpability, out from this story with as much cowardice as I cast on anyone else.

     And in writing this I had hoped to excise my own, private love for Jay from any recounting of our few brilliant months. But that hidden facet of myself shines through every word, reflecting the light Jay cast over everything around him. My love for him is stitched into the very fiber of my being to this day and no amount of manufactured disapproval I can add in retrospect will change that I was in love with that man. No matter what language I use or how dark an ink I smear to blur the truth it will always shine through. That elusive glow will draw me back eternally into the past and I too will never reach the light I had been so foolish to reach for.

     That light is warming and hopeful, yes, but it also bares things I would rather keep in the dark. My cowardice. My prejudice. My hypocrisy. I don’t know where the story you know will end--before I really drove myself into Jay’s heart, certainly. Back when he was still just Gatsby. When he was only a man so deeply, foolishly in love so as to excuse every fault my cousin had presented him. When summer was all we had. 

     In reading what remains of that summer you will have joined me there. I can only hope that in the finished product, the man you perceive is less of a coward, less judgemental, more morally correct: the man I wish I had always been. The man I had thought I was always meant to be. 

     But I know even now that will likely not be the case. Whoever reads this book--if anyone does--will have little work to do in order to see the effect Jay had on me. He’ll never know, but perhaps you, reader, will love him, too. That’s the very least I can do for him: give him that loving future he nearly killed himself to attain. The one I held out toward him then yanked so cruelly away. The future that was never meant to be his.