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I’ve gotten so good about not flinching at the sound of your name that people don’t know I’d still throw myself mouth-open into the ocean for the chance to drown somewhere you might see it.
Trista Mateer, Honeybee
The first thing Vox knows, he’s sinking.
Because it’s so, so easy, to become a shipwreck, a debris, a nothing, a ghost next to Ike Eveland. There’s no love story that starts in the playground, yet theirs does. Ike’s English is broken, squeaky, with too much accent and too much awkwardness, his face flushing each time he gestures at something around him, not remembering a word for it. Vox traces the itinerary of his movements with his alert, careful gaze; that’s a tree, that’s a bush, that’s a bench, that’s a pond, that’s a child, that’s a man, that’s a woman. Ike starts taking a small pocket notebook and a pencil with him, putting down each word and trying to pronounce it in a whisper, to stomach it, and to finally imprint it into his memory. His parents, when they take him home, are speaking in Swedish, and Ike’s face brightens at the sound of his home. Vox can’t understand a word but from the sound of their voices and their smiles, he deciphers the content, peels its skin off carefully, not a scratch on the softest parts: home, lunch, nap time, tea time, reading time, English lesson time…
As he already walks away, guided by two careful hands holding his, Ike turns his head to catch Vox’s gaze.
“Thanks,” he says, and the first thing Vox knows, he’s sinking.
Later, they go to the same school. They share a desk, their textbooks, notes, pens and pencils, breaks and lunchtime. Ike starts wearing glasses at eleven, his big golden eyes studying everything around him with a curiosity that never looks feigned. Vox envies him, for he’s never tired of learning new things, discovering words and their meanings like sacred relics, asking questions, and taking on additional tasks. During breaks, he reads in English, but in classes, he seems to be falling back compared to others. Vox is concerned. He doesn’t need Ike to speak perfect English for them to understand each other. If anything, Vox’s been hiding an old Swedish textbook he sneaked from the school library for almost two weeks now.
Yet, when he overhears that Ike’s parents are looking for a new English tutor for him, something in his chest stiffens. Obviously, though he is intelligent and witty, and fed with books on a regular basis, someone like Vox cannot be qualified enough to teach someone else; not him, not at barely thirteen.
By the age of sixteen, Ike gets visibly better. He can keep up conversations on elaborate subjects, defend his research and write the best essays in the entire class. Vox is proud of him, even though he never lets it show. And then, when Ike says that he thinks about getting a major in English language studies and literature, a spark of hope sets something in Vox’s chest aflame.
Ike’s parents love Vox, a lot. They invite him over for tea and readings, reciting poems in English in the living room, Vox sitting in the armchair next to the fireplace, a little bit awkwardly, hiding his hands between his thighs, while Ike’s lying with his head on his mom’s lap. His mom has a book covering her face, a beautiful face indeed, Ike’s face.
Fall passes by like this, fall that feels and tastes like three winters in a row, one for each month. Vox opens his eyes, and he’s in the same chair again, leaning against it, a warm woollen blanket on his shoulders, the smell of tea filling the room, and the sound of a crackling fire right next to him. Ike’s house, by now, has become more of a home to him than his own. At his own, each time he returns, Vox finds only debris. The remnants of another family fight, shattered dishes all over the floor, and a still stinging slap across his mother’s reddened face. Vox’s home is a mortuary. All dead love and burnt hopes. Ike’s home is a temple. And when Vox comes there to pray, not only god listens to him but the devil.
Ike’s mom reaches to ruffle his hair as he lies in her lap, arms crossed over his chest, gaze on the ceiling. “Is it better to speak or to die?”
Vox holds his breath, his eyes slowly travelling to Ike, and looking at him feels safe because he knows that Ike never looks at him back.
“What does she say?” Asks Ike, meaning the princess.
His mom smiles and takes another breath. “To speak,” she reads. “As there are few words that cannot be mended, but life once lost can never be regained.”
As time passes, Vox realizes, he gets more and more reluctant to speak. Not because of the language barrier, obviously, but because all of the words seem to be fading in the back of his mind once they are face to face. There is no proper vocabulary to talk to someone like Ike, no specific syntactic structures, hell, Vox even forgets the grammar as he speaks and starts babbling like a fool. Ike always laughs it off, his hand on Vox’s shoulder – almost a squeeze but never really one. Relax.
He tries speaking in Swedish to him once. It results in Ike almost spilling his orange juice all over the kitchen floor in a moment of stupefied silence.
“Where did you learn that?”
Vox tries putting on a smug face. “It wasn’t that difficult.”
Your language is not difficult, he means to say. You are.
Barely a year before graduation, Ike asks Vox to help him with the preparation for their English final. It would be useful for both of us, he says. Vox thinks it’s capital punishment but shows up at his doorstep with a tall pile of books anyway. This is how they spend day after day: at Ike’s desk, shoulder to shoulder, or on the sofa in his living room, having snacks while dismantling the sentences one by one, analysing each part of them carefully, like cutting a ripe orange in two. Vox’s fingers travel over and across the lines in the books. They learn tropes: metaphors, allusions, similes, and how a combination of words can mean something completely different once you put a single comma somewhere in the middle of it. How the verb to love is always transitive. How you cannot love without an object attached to it. Although, if he’s completely fair, Vox has to admit that sometimes, he wants to change his “I love you” to “I love, you?”.
Vox believes that Ike doesn’t deserve his love because there will always be people who will love him better, gentler, with more strings attached, more words spoken. Still, while his feelings for Ike transfer from language to language, they remain completely unchanged no matter which means of expressing them he picks. Every evening, after they are finished, Ike makes them both dinner and they watch some show in Swedish, with Ike doing parallel translations of dialogues into English and Vox absorbing every word as if he’ll ever need Swedish for something else other than speaking to him.
To his feelings, Ike remains completely oblivious. Perhaps he’s doing it on purpose, which would be more painful than if he actually had no clue. Either way, when he starts going out with a girl from the parallel class, Vox marks this story as finished. But can they really finish something that never started in the first place?
Ike seems to become a little happier each time he returns from another date. In their joint PE classes, he helps his new girlfriend with lifting stuff and backs her up during their volleyball matches even if it means going against his own team. Vox cannot get mad at him for this because he knows, love makes people do illogical things sometimes, even wretched ones, it has a mastered skill of destruction, both mental and physical sometimes. But Ike is happier now and this is the only thing that matters. Vox puts a period at the end of his final essay and turns the paper in. When he looks back, Ike flashes him a glance over his glasses and an approving smile. Thanks, Vox wants to fire back, even though there’s nothing he should thank him for.
On his seventeenth birthday, Vox gets shamelessly drunk. He invites some people from school over; even though there’s nothing in common between all of them anymore, he does so anyway because, at some point, he realizes that he’s never even had real friends other than Ike. They rob his parents’ liquor cabinet together, mix various types of alcohol with juice and soda for disguise and drink until they get sick. His house has never seemed so full of life before, even though this is not the life he really wants for himself. But Ike has other plans and it’s decided now. The finals are over and Vox’s brilliant mind is not of use anymore. He laughs to himself as he downs another glass of whiskey mixed with coke. Then, he kisses a random guy in the empty kitchen, pressing him against the counter in a desperate attempt to make himself seen at least by anyone who’s not Ike Eveland. The guy looks him in the eye, licks his lips, drunk and stupefied, and Vox wants to wash his own mouth with soap. He shouldn’t have wasted his first kiss like that, even though his first love probably spent his own a long time ago.
The next thing that makes Vox feel something is a burning slap across the face from his father the morning after his birthday. We raised a drunkard, he says, I knew that your bitch of a mother couldn’t make a decent human being out of you. When he slams the door behind his back, Vox hides his face in his hands and starts laughing, hysterically, almost on the verge of tears. So this is who he is, right? A son of a bitch. A bastard. A drunkard. So let that be. The words don’t matter to him anymore as there’s no language yet invented to explain the scale of grief he lives through when everyone around seems happy but him.
He steals his first camera soon after that. A cheap one from the local flea market, yet good enough to start capturing anything he considers important: streets, houses, roads, faces. He doesn’t go to college. He goes on wasting his potential like that, sitting on the ground in random places somewhere in the city and looking at the world through a lens. Everything is prettier like this. The little sequences of events he makes he keeps rewatching as he gets home, lying in his bed and pretending to live every life he gets on film himself. His hair grows longer now, almost long enough to cover his shoulder blades, and he doesn’t care about getting it cut short again. If anything, he combs it into a ponytail every morning before leaving the house, nothing but a camera in his hands. He lives through months like this, through summers and winters, through another year of his life without Ike Eveland by his side. He forgets Swedish. Almost forgets English, even, as he doesn’t really talk to anyone unless forced to. The film becomes his language, his only tool of self-expression, but the only house in his street that he never dares perpetuate on camera is Ike’s. Vox doesn’t know and doesn’t want to try and ask if he still lives there. It would be too painful to bear: knowing that something you once wanted more than anything in your life is still where you left it but you’ll never be able to catch it again. Vox looks for roundabout ways so he doesn’t have to pass by Ike’s house every morning he leaves his own. He almost forgets the road leading there. He hopes it won’t ever be captured on any film in the world; because if it is, he’ll have to refuse the only thing he loves, again.
Yet, the more he tries to lose Ike Eveland, the more it approximates Ike Eveland’s finding him, which sounds like a big stupid joke because Ike actually does. And when they meet again, randomly in the middle of a busy street, Vox has to choose between two evils: looking at his face or his hands; the face turns out to be the lesser evil, since it’s unchanged, while if Vox looks at his hands holding a grocery bag and finds a ring on his finger, he might snap.
The grocery bag turns out overloaded, ripped at the bottom, and before Ike gets to notice, a lonely orange falls out of it, rolling over right to Vox’s feet on the heat-warmed asphalt. An orange. A sentence that will never be dismantled. Though if they try, will they find another “I love, you?” inside of it? Vox bends over and picks it up, looking at it for barely a second before handing it over to Ike.
“Thanks,” he says, his other hand covering the bottom of the bag so nothing else falls out of it. Please, don’t say anything else, Vox begs in his mind. “How are you doing, by the way? Haven’t heard from you for a long time.”
“I thought you went to college,” Vox leaps, ignoring his questions, still looking him right in the eye.
“I took a gap year,” says Ike, perhaps a little bit confused by his straightforwardness. “I thought you went to college.”
At this, Vox almost laughs. Old ripped jeans, loose shirt, nothing in his pockets but several crumpled cash bills and a broken phone, what is there in his entire look that might hint at him being a student? If only an incredibly lame one.
“I have more important business to attend to,” he says and he can’t help but notice how Ike’s English has become gentler, more polished at the edges, without weird syntactical combinations and semantically unfitting words. Seems like he doesn’t need Vox for this after all. He never did. “You’ve got a family?”
Ike raises an eyebrow. “I’m nineteen.”
“You look like,” Vox almost stutters. He doesn’t really know where he’s going with this. He just wants a strict confirmation – have you settled down with someone you love or not – but he’s too much of a coward to ask even for this simple truth. You look like you have your shit together. He shakes his head. “Never mind. I don’t know what I was trying to say.”
A couple more encounters here and there: they bump into each other in the local flea market, where Vox is trying to sell the old shit from his house to scrap some pocket money and Ike’s looking for any antique pieces for his grandma’s birthday. Another day, in the park: Vox is filming random people walking back and forth along the pond, talking, laughing and holding hands, and Ike’s sitting on a bench, a book in his hands. At the doctor’s: Vox waits for a new medication prescription for his mother, while Ike’s worsening seasonal allergy won’t let him sleep at night. It becomes even funny at this point: no matter where in this city Vox goes, he comes across Ike sooner or later. As if everything here was about him: his grey head in every crowd, his golden eyes looking into his from across the street, his voice on the radio, his touch on Vox’s shoulder in a long line to the ice-cream truck, his name in the pure blue skies. Each time Vox returns home after another encounter, he feels physically sick. And suddenly, the entire picture flashes in front of his eyes as if it happened just yesterday: the playground, Ike’s parents, his smooth and beautiful Swedish, his crooked and unsure English, their evenings side-by-side at his place, their dinners and tea breaks, their syntax and vocabulary, their metaphors, allusions, and similes; a ripe orange at Vox’s feet and the quick brush of their fingers as he passes it back to Ike.
Why, why in the world, after all this time, after kissing the wrong person once, after getting so shit-faced his father almost beat him up after this, after cursing Ike’s name his every second on earth and promising himself to forget him for good, why can’t he accept the fact that he will never get a chance to do everything right?
Ike turns out to be single, which is the worst part. He still lives with his parents, who love and cherish him, as well as accept his decision to take a gap year and get proficient in English. Ike doesn’t think about girls and dating anymore. He buries himself in books, he’s getting better and better every single day, while Vox keeps looking at the world through his camera and wishing it could always be like this. Clear and simple, without any sorrow bestowed upon him, because in this reality, he can create whatever he wants; he can get rid of all the pain as well, which is a misfire because he still can’t get rid of the main source of it.
Is it better to speak or to die?
Ike shows up at his doorstep the evening before his college entrance exam, trembling like a wet dog. His eyes are big and scared and for a moment, Vox just wants to hug him and squeeze him in his arms so tightly that all his fear vanishes as if it was never there. He can’t. He shouldn’t.
“I’m afraid I can’t speak,” says Ike, voice dry. “I’ve revised everything so many times I got tongue-tied. I open my mouth and nothing comes out but Swedish,” he lets out a trembling breath and closes his eyes, all at once. When he looks at Vox again, he’s changed. “Help me.”
Is it better to speak or to die?
“Alright,” Vox holds the door open. “Come in.”
They brush up on everything from the very beginning. Vox keeps stacking books and dictionaries, one after another, reading from the pages he miraculously remembers by heart. Ike stains his hands with ink but keeps making notes, writing and writing until his fingers hurt so bad he can’t hold the pen anymore. And that’s when Vox stops him with a gentle touch of his hand over Ike’s.
“That’s enough,” he says, closing another book. “You’re ready.”
“How can you tell?”
Vox smiles. “You don’t look as you write anymore.”
Ike glances at his notebook, then at him again, and drops the pen. “You are right. But what if they ask me something I don’t know?”
“There’s nothing you don’t know,” Vox shakes his head. Then, suppressing a shiver, he reaches to touch Ike’s temple with his bare fingertips, feeling his pulse on his own skin. “When we talk about language, a part of it is here,” then, his hand slides lower until it stops where Ike’s heart is, brushing over the fabric of his shirt gently, almost a suggestion of touch but not quite. “And then there’s also a part which is here,” Vox smiles. “There’s no purpose in drumming into your head the things that don’t belong there. Some of them are better off being felt, not understood.”
He tries to take his hand away but Ike doesn’t let him, catching it by the wrist instead. His gaze is almost hateful when he speaks. “Why didn’t you ever tell me that you loved me?”
And once again, Vox is sinking.
His entire world is turned upside down just by one phrase – this time in beautiful, clear English. He doesn’t dare take his hand away. He looks Ike in the eye and draws in a deep breath. “You never seemed to need it.”
Ike scoffs. “Was I this unapproachable?”
“No,” Vox shakes his head. “It’s me who was too indecisive.”
Because between speaking and dying, he chose to keep living in silence, which was never an option.
Ike sighs and closes his eyes, thinking something over. When he opens them again, he reaches to take his glasses off. Vox thinks he knows where this is going and he doesn’t like it. He wants to run away, to hide, to shrink into the tiniest version of himself, to look at the man in front of himself through the camera and see Ike Eveland who still doesn’t love him back. Because there’s no reason for it to be the other way around. Vox has never done anything to deserve his love. And there’s definitely no option in which real love is like the verb: it always needs a person to exist. Maybe Ike loved someone once, but it was never him. Maybe love doesn’t have its own syntax, after all. Maybe it’s ripped, wrong, non-linear. Maybe Vox is not the smartest guy in the world but one thing he knows for sure: it’s too late now.
But when Ike reaches forward to touch his lips with his own, Vox almost gasps. He doesn’t even get to close his eyes when Ike leans back, looking at his reaction carefully, trying to study him, to dismantle, to take his soft part out of him and squeeze it in his hand to the sweetest juice. Vox draws in a shivering breath. “You shouldn’t… we shouldn’t.”
Ike interlocks their fingers and squeezes his hand firmly in his own. “To speak or to die, Vox?”
Vox isn’t thinking when he leaps forward to kiss him again, this time like he always wanted: deep, breathless, with the intention of making this kiss erase his first one as if it never happened. He can’t. His past overlaps his present all at once, the memories burdening him with a crushing force. He breaks the kiss, shudders, and hides his face in his hands in an attempt to make himself smaller and therefore less responsible for any mistake he could’ve just made. But Ike touches his shoulder, again, with his ink-stained fingers.
“Hey,” he says, and a smile touches his lips just for a second. “Thanks.”
If to speak is the lesser evil for the two of them in the long run, then there’s only one word they can possibly say to each other. Thanks. Thanks for helping me with English. Thanks for telling me about verbs and adverbs, articles and prepositions. Thanks for making me the person I am. Thanks for being my first love and my last choice. Thanks for kissing me like you mean it. Thanks, thanks, thanks.
When Vox closes the door behind Ike, he presses his back against it for a long minute, keeping his eyes shut and just taking deep, shivering breaths. His heart is beating all over his body, in his stomach, his chest, his arms, his temples but most importantly, his throat – the birthplace of every word he could’ve said but never did.
For the first time ever after an encounter with Ike Eveland, he’s not sinking.
He’s a land.