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No body found.
The words taunt me on the screen, revealing me for the fool of the story plucking at unwoven threads, when so desperately do I wish to be the hero stumbling upon a postscript, a spin, a twist. Any stage direction or improvisation that I could possibly find to fully believe that yes, life does have the capacity to possess a flair as dramatic as a misdirected drowning. A fake, now parallel with the almost of Halloween and the was of Caesar. The rule of threes is devilish indeed, another page of text in the narrative of my life.
To think that something as simple as water, that from whence we came yet so easily can be that which takes away, is proven to be yet another curtain. I dare not believe. I stare, unblinking at the words and I simply can not believe them, but I remain too afraid to look away and find that they are not actually so. Prove them for the practical joke they must be because I can not, in any sense of the word, fathom to possess hope.
“When do you leave?”
Strands of red hair enter my peripheral vision, Meredith staring at me from the room’s edge. So transfixed was I on the revelation that sears itself on my mind in only the most shallow of ways, I failed to hear her up the stairs.
Less than one month out of prison and the survival instincts I had picked up escape me, gone and ignored when faced with even the most brittle of possibilities.
Outside, the sky is a muddy charcoal grey, the sun a barely-there source of light on the horizon like a fire on its last embers, unable to break through a cloud of smoke. The city is covered in shadow and the office is no different, half of Meredith’s face obscured by my own stubborn refusal to look away from the screen and the truth it contains.
When I fail to answer, she speaks again. “I read the letter you left on the coffee table. Pericles. James is many things, but subtle is not one.”
James.
Just his name makes the pulse in my chest quicken like a newborn hummingbird, so fragile yet so desperate to feel free. Hearing it spoken so normally could let me almost believe he was still here, awaiting us in the refractory or in the tower, curves visible under sheets where he lay asleep.
An image that since I had learned of his fate, I could only picture under the water. Unconscious, next to Richard’s body, hopes and dreams…but, how much weight to put in such tumultuous truth?
“Where would I leave to?” I ask her, the chasm of delay between the words as they leave her lips and enter my ears grows wider, deeper, and more terrifying by the second. One more question out of her mouth and it may take me up to a month to understand and reply, because still ringing in my head remains the words on the screen.
No body found.
“To find him.” She said.
I won’t is what I wish to say, but the words stubbornly refuse to rise and so much as meet my tongue. Meredith’s face on my vision’s edge is unchanging, expecting this reaction as if it was a book she had returned to a second time, narrative having exhausted its surprise. Given our history, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s how she saw it.
“This was temporary,” Meredith said. “We both knew it would be, that this was all it was going to be.”
“I didn’t.”
“We have enough phantoms haunting us, Oliver. Richard’s is now just whispers in the wind but the less ghosts we let in, the more we find a semblance of whatever life has left to offer.”
“But, you and I-”
“Heal in whatever ways we can. I thought seeing you again, free, would make it easier. It…it’s not. For me.”
“Had I not stumbled on this, would you have told me to leave?”
“Eventually, most like.”
She speaks, but stubbornly I ignore her gaze. Rather, I remain staring at the screen unflinchingly.
No body found.
Quietly, barely enough above a whisper to be considered anything but, I speak. “Not a soul but felt a fever of the mad, and played some tricks of desperation. All but mariners plunged in the foaming brine and quit the vessel, then all afire with me. The King’s son, Ferdinand, with hair up-staring—then like reeds, not hair—was the first man that leaped; cried Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.”
Nails scratch at my scalp and I lean into the touch. With her affirmation, the words on the screen finally sink into my heart, welcome, and I keep them there with a lock and key so they can not possibly escape.
Finally, I turn and find Meredith wearing a mirthless smile. Forced, pitiful, and worn-out with more exhaustion and years than any mortal dare live to see.
“What about us?” I ask.
“What about it?”
“More than anything, I fear you thinking that I-”
“Spent years in prison because of your own impulsivity…but also of my own foolishness. Giving you a roof over your head even temporarily was the least I could do after a decade, but consider my debt paid off.”
“Is that what I was? A debt to repay?”
“As if I were anything to you but a liminal state. An in-between that you could fool yourself into thinking was your present, but we both know better. I never was, and never would be. Phantoms, and all that.”
“Phantoms, and all that,” I repeat.
I get up and quietly start packing what meager belongings I still find in my possession. When I have it all, I stop in the study to find Meredith looking as she was, staring at me from the room’s edge, no visible emotion on her face. Through the window, I could see the barest ombre of night starting to appear among the tearing clouds, like a dress ripped to shreds leaving nothing but the skin’s expanse, few stars visible and if so they were strewn about as if needing to be coaxed out.
Closing the distance by a step, I can almost feel Meredith’s hand still weaving through my hair.
“I have too grieved a heart to take a tedious leave.” I plead. Beg. As much as I can’t deny what she’s said, it disregards the affection I do hold for her. Always have, and truly always will.
She closes the distance by another step, arms crossed around her chest forcing my eyes to take her in, all of her. The way she’s grown and the way she’s filled into herself. A natural progression, while here I stay a collection of remnants that don’t fit together well, but how could I when one of the biggest pieces of me was said to have killed itself from guilt? How is that to make me feel other than a collapsing star?
No, I force that thought away. I am not self-defeating, nor is James. Perhaps together, we can… if he is alive that is, we could…
Meredith examines me knowingly, almost as if she could read my thoughts. The corner of her mouth turns up giving the barest hint of a smile, “And whether we shall meet again, I know not. Therefore our everlasting farewell take. Forever and forever farewell, Cassius. If we do meet again, why we shall smile; If not, why then this parting was well made.”
The familiar taste of salt hits my lips, but only a single one as the tear falls and stains the hardwood, so small and unnoticeable among the collection of dust coating the rest of the floor despite the volume of emotion it contains. Meredith mirrors it, the uncertainty of what’s next weighing down like the phantoms she speaks of so menacingly.
The goodbye is not one that I dare wish to remember, but as I close her front door behind me I know it’s one I won’t long soon forget.
The train ride is unremarkable. Despite being labeled as the most beautiful route in the country, the California Zephyr is not anything I can openly admit to caring about. The fields of Iowa, mountains of Colorado, desert of Arizona, all nothing against the way the hummingbird in my chest grows up, leaves the nest, and becomes a veritable storm. A boulder rolling down a hill at such a fierce velocity that even Sisyphus would find it difficult to stop.
Sleep barely came to me, and when it did it taunted me with visions of Richard, of James, of Meredith, of prison. Of all at once, of the admitted kiss that Meredith had with James after the King Lear rehearsal, of him kissing me on stage, of the constant guilt in his eyes that I shrugged off, never realizing how much my own martyrdom could doom him.
It’s that epiphany that makes me doubt my own intentions. Do I want to see James alive because it’s as simple as me wanting to be with him again? Feel the breath from his lips once more and his skin on my own? Older, frailer, but somehow more rehearsed? Or, does it stem from a more selfish desire to rid my hands of his own death? Of the what-ifs that haunted me every night before reading the letter, wondering what would have happened had I not taken the fall? Would James had made it through prison, a man atoned, and felt himself with a freedom I so cruelly denied him?
What fools these mortals be, I think. Such a pedestrian Shakespeare quote but so fitting to the depths of my own ignorance.
I rest my head against the window, chilled from the altitude as my destination remains a mere hours away. Closing my eyes in an attempt to have even one more minute of rest amongst the voices surrounding me of families going to reunite with loved ones, I quietly recite the words that rise unbidden to my lips, “ The undiscovered country from whose bourn, no traveler returns… ”
The rain makes it impossible to tell who’s crying more. Me, or the heavens.
Del Norte is not as I remember, the current state reflecting my own tempestual state. Clouds covering every inch of sky, an unending torrent striking the sea, ripples blooming across the crashing waves. The sand, what once felt so fine underneath my bare skin feels rocky, like a million daggers stabbing into me. I’m barely on my feet for a minute before I collapse on my knees and then onto my back.
James isn’t here, but why would he be? In my heart of hearts did I hope to find him here, the sun above as endless as our lives would begin to feel once reunited. He’d see me, smile, and simply say “I’ve been waiting” before I…well, that’s what I could never figure out.
What came after?
Well, here, alone, it seems that it’s a question I’ll never truly need to answer.
I close my eyes and feel the rain wash over me, each drop bringing another memory to the forefront of my mind of that cloudless day, blue above us so vast it was easy to get lost in, but we didn’t. At least, I didn’t, not with James laying next to me. I snuck glances at him, for reasons then I couldn’t quite grasp. The shape of his body conforming with the sand beneath, grains stuck to him as if he himself was my own personal spirit, but in our relationship I was the one who did his bidding. If one of us was to be Ariel, it was always to be me and him Prospero, but in that moment it didn’t feel it.
Here he was, the best actor I’d ever known, and while I’d seen him naked before given our living situation, never before had he appeared so vulnerable. So earthly yet unattainable, but still did one simple word float in my mind.
Mine.
In that moment, he was mine, mine, all mine. He, his time, his life. To admire, to witness, and as I now know, to love.
But younger as we were, and oh so foolish, I mistook the feelings for something else entirely. Admiration…or maybe, that’s all it was. Maybe it wasn’t love to begin with, just admiration that evolved as that final year warped and twisted our own emotions until we no longer could tell fact from fiction, and would be willing to accept anything that could provide even a modicum of explanation.
Thunder roared above and my mind ceased to think and question. To what end continue down that train of thought, truly? James isn’t here, the only place he could possibly be. Meredith, my hopes, perhaps even Filippa who knew everything, all wrong.
I could feel the wave rolling up to my ankles where I lay on the sand but I made no move to get up. If the waves swallowed me whole, I don’t think I would have minded. Joining Richard and James, seeing the futility of every action and of my own life, no longer felt unappealing.
“Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; to lie in cold obstruction and to rot,” I whisper. To who, I can no longer tell.
Exhaustion took me as the thunder clapped once more.
For but a second when consciousness came back to me, I could pretend it was a decade prior. That when I opened my eyes, I’d find James naked and not yet knowing of the situation we would soon find ourselves, clothes stolen forcing us to get back naked as the day we were born.
It made me not want to open my eyes so I could stay in that fantasy, in that memory, forever…but open them I did. The rain has ceased and in a complete affront to the paroxysm raging within me, I’ve been blessed with a beautiful day. There’s the blue, once so lost but now boundless. There’s the sun, not unlike Medusa in how it demands attention but spurns all who give it what it craves. The ocean’s waters are crystal all the way up to the horizon, waves calmer. The back of my body, completely soaked and sticking to the sand.
I groaned and got up using energy I didn’t know I possessed. Motivation I thought myself no longer capable of without James to-
James.
In the distance, so far one might mistake him as a trick of the light, a blur stands staring at the sea. Even from here, even after all these years, I can recognize him but…he does not seem to notice me. He stares out like answers to questions long pondered would come to him, but just as soon, he starts walking away.
Whatever answers he was looking for it’s clear that Poseidon has not the answers, but perhaps…
Maybe he could be…
If I…
I run. I don’t even remember getting back on my legs, and I stumble. And I fall. And sand covers my front just as much as my back but I get back up and I run, and I want to scream I want to yell but I don’t the more distance he puts between himself and the shore. The closer I get the more sure that I am it’s him, it must be. The way his hair is longer, the way he has shadows of stubble I can notice even from a distance, the way his back arches in bad posture like a man who has lived a lifetime and carries the weight of the world.
I close the distance faster than thought possible. He’s twenty feet out, then he’s fifteen feet out, then he’s ten feet out, then five, then four, then three, then two, then-
He stares back at me, shocked from the hand gripping his wrist and stopping him in his tracks but if he has any protestations they die the second his eyes land on me. His pulse flickers underneath my touch and it's all I can do not to burst into tears at the confirmation that he's alive.
“...Oliver?” He says, so quietly. So fragile, as if this moment is a conjuration he’s been trapped in, one that could easily be broken by even speaking too loud. If a curse, it would be one his voice tells me he would never want to break.
I swallow, my throat as dry as the sand that covers me.
“James.” I reply, unable to say more as I take him in. The way his eyes are the same, his face too. Even with the years, the feel of his hand too remains transcribed to my memory.
“You’re filthy,” He says.
“It’s been a long ten years.” I say. “What are you doing here?”
“Waiting for you. As I have been, every day since Filippa told me you had been released.”
So she did know. Of course. Foolish of me to think otherwise.
“You’re supposed to be dead,” I say, the only words that I can get out amidst the thick affection starting to coat my insides.
“I am,” He admits. “James Farrow did die. Ten years ago, during a performance of King Lear.”
Confusion courses through me, “I saw you for six years. Even with the guilt, you were-”
“Whole. When I was with you, I felt whole. I was. Without you, I was not. I left pieces of myself with you, and with you locked away how could I ever really be me again?”
James always was so intrinsically tied to me in ways I could not comprehend, but hearing him say words aloud that match my own thoughts and feelings…is so…
It makes a decade of pain feel as light as a feather.
“Would you believe me if I felt the same?” I say, and a laugh works itself out of me. So delirious, so happy, a feeling I had long since forgotten. A tear falls from James’s face and he smiles and it’s the most radiant sight I’ve ever seen.
I take a step forward and daring to be brave, I cup his face, wiping his tear away with my thumb. He leans into the touch, kissing my palm. It makes a whole family of hummingbirds in my chest take flight. If this is how I should go, this moment too much for my long forgotten and abandoned heart to handle, I don’t think I’d be upset. I’d find it quite a lovely way to go, personally, holding the face of the man that I…
That I…
Well, that answers the question of what comes after.
“Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, but bears it out even to the edge of doom.” I say, feeling the way James stutters a breath. “Well, I’m here again, and if I may be so bold, maybe James can be brought back to life. James, and Oliver too.”
“Quite the roles to play,” He says, laughing. It’s such a beautiful sound I think I could listen to it forever. A melody to grow old to. “I think I’d like to try my hand at it.”
“Is that so?”
He answers by meeting my lips with his own, the taste just as I remember from that one other night I’d tasted them. Still, rather than a frantic goodbye, this one feels like a hello. Like a first act right after the close of another story.
But life isn’t one single story, is it? Just a collection of such. So here on this beach ends the tale of James and Oliver as individuals, and so begins what’s next as described by the feeling of James’s lips on my own.
James, and Oliver, together.
“Your present kindness makes my past miseries sports,” He says. “You shall do well that on the touching of her lips I may melt and no more be seen.—O, come, be buried a second time within these arms! ”
What next I speak is something I never thought I’d say.
“No Shakespeare,” I say. "Not now. Just us, you and me, and none of him.”
He pulls away for but a second and there’s that refulgent smile once more. “I love you. I never stopped.”
“I love you, and I never will stop.” I say, meeting his lips again with more ferocity, one that knocks us both to the ground. If he minds, he doesn’t show it. I can feel his smile beneath my touch, the rigid and hard lines of his body as his hands grasp me and the moans that work itself out of him, involuntary but reflective of pure happiness.
And to think that it’s me who can do that. Who has that effect.
“I love you,” He says between kisses. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”
Like a whispered prayer he continues repeating it for hours and hours and I reciprocate with touches and kisses more so than words until the night falls and we finally leave. To his home, he tells me. To our home, he repeats to me more giddy than I am, most likely.
And so ends the prologue, and begins Act 1. Never before have I been more excited to read a story.