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Erik sleeps on Charles' sofa, and soon in Charles' bed. This is what happens when someone saves you from drowning. He hasn't anywhere to go, any life to return to. "Erik, what on earth did you do before I found you?" Charles says.
He finds it difficult to explain, not least of all in a foreign language. He wasn't Erik. He was an arrow then. Do you ask an arrow where it's going, what it's doing? You can't. Nothing is under its skin. It is all one stick: sleek, swift, and crafted. An arrow is a purpose. It has no purpose. It will not be; it has not been. It is: and—
That is the next part.
He wakes with his face pressed against the bed. He sleeps now in huge, exhausting sessions. Long sleep that leaves the folds of pillowslips etched into the flesh over his cheekbones. The imprint disturbs him, but it is impermanent. He dreams now, although he didn't used to. "I don't like this," he says to Charles. What he means is: everything, Charles' soft white mortal body, the lace edging on the pillows, the sirenous weight of the sleep that lengthens till gold light spills through the casement windows and the shadows of birds make garden shapes upon the bed. How can you live like this? he thinks. In hotel rooms, he used to sleep on the bare carpet: no pillow, just the set sure hardness under his head. Night pressed him down like the force of gravity, full of grim comfort.
Now he is buoyed upwards, airsick, disjointed. He wants to run. He thinks: I want to run.
But Charles says, "Rest."
Charles dreams Erik’s dreams with him. At first he doesn't mean to. This is what happens when you share a bed with a telepath. Then, after the third time that all the locks in the house melt, dribbling down to cool pools at the base of the door frames, and coins in coat pockets, trousers, purses hurtle at such a pace towards Erik that they embed themselves within the bedroom door, and even the little brass weathervane at the top of the house becomes a crumpled, huddled mass— after that, Charles does it intentionally.
"I don't want you in my head," Erik tells him vehemently.
"You can't be allowed to go on this way. How did you manage before?"
"I didn't dream before."
"What, never? You never dreamed?"
Erik cannot say so much, only: "Not that I remember." He used to think of sleep as a thin ice sheet keeping the blackness in, something to pen up the cold, unstoppable waters. His head ached, sometimes, in the mornings, but he did not think too much about it. He has trouble now remembering those days. Whole years slip from him.
In contrast: the other memories come back stronger, so rich in their manifest that, bewilderingly, he can walk through them and marvel at the features of their landscape. This is the landscape of his new dreams. It encompasses everything from Dusseldorf onwards. The snow that fell on a certain day, blindering the city, so thick that it seemed God was burying the corpse of this world clumsily and fast. Snow melts on his scalp and makes him shudder. The train's steam whistle sets his flesh creeping. Panic takes him by the scruff of the neck and shakes him. His mother, his grey mother, is weeping, and when he looks at her she is as gaunt as she was in the camp. The flesh has fled her bones; death is creeping towards her like something stalking prey in the forest. Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland sein Auge ist blau er trifft dich mit bleierner Kugel er trifft dich genau—
"But you didn't know that poem when you were a boy," Charles tells him. He is standing on the platform for the train. His lips are pink; his hands are in his pockets. "You couldn't have done; it hadn't been written yet." He smiles, large-eyed and solemn and gentle.
The train is just a train. Its bright doors hiss and open. Snow fronds the painted car roofs and the wide windowpanes. Inside: a wet wool smell, and warm chatter in English. "I’ve always loved New York at Christmas," Charles says, disingenuous.
Or: he dreams of hunger, the centre axis of his world, and of the boot-tramp of American soldiers breaking through the odd flat ambience of hunger. The soldiers are like Martians, like alien creatures with their wide arms and their huge hands. You can hear them coming a mile off: their heavy rising voices, their round fat laughs. They say, “You can stop marching now. The war is over.” Erik looks at them with a grave and level suspicion. He has walked across half of Poland. He no longer thinks very much about walking. He thinks: hunger. He has vivid, waking hallucinations of blood on his hands, of buried corpses that scrabble and claw at the ground.
A soldier says, “Jesus H. Christ. Is that one human?”
Erik is unsure how to answer this question. He focuses on a point to the left of the man’s head, where the sun splits the sky in the shape of a coin.
“Yes,” says Charles. His voice cracks like the clouds. He puts his hands on Erik’s shoulders. He keeps saying it, over and over, till the hunger has dissolved into a kind of restfulness. The sea of grey earth, the blackened trees become Aegean: a postcard-view expanse of blue without depth, and white stone warms the soles of their feet. Charles’ fingertips dig into Erik’s flesh.
“You’re hurting me,” Erik says. He’s disoriented by the scene change, by the hibiscus colour of the sudden, foreign sunset. It feels like another hallucination.
Charles doesn’t let go, at least for a moment. “This is a dream,” he says. “I came here on holiday, when I was a very small child. Before the war. I used to look for coins in the sand, and smuggle them home. Little remnants of lost civilizations.”
As he speaks, the world firms up around them. Walls, windows, seabirds, the smell of coffee, boats out on the harbour casting their nets. Charles’ smile is soft. He touches Erik’s face.
“A dream,” Erik says.
It does get better. He doesn’t lash out in his nightmares as much as he did. He wakes sometimes to find Charles gazing at him, grazing careful fingers over his skin. It’s neither pleasant nor unpleasant. Erik lies still under the touch. It reminds him of the silhouettes of gulls on the horizon, the New York train’s innocuous chatter, the excessive orange of the Greek sunset: items that don’t require a reaction, that are idle and aesthetic. He is unused to the idea of the idle.
Charles likes to lie in bed and ask him questions. Charles is a well of questions that don’t have answers: “Pancakes or waffles? Chocolate or vanilla ice cream? Milkshakes or malteds? Elvis Presley or Buddy Holly?” Erik’s ignorance on the last count subjects him to Charles’ impressions of both these singers.
Charles is like a kid, Erik thinks, like a clever teenager. Lonely and longing to be human. He is eminently woundable in these moments. Erik could draw a map of targets on him. He does it out of habit: cataloguing the soft spots, the weak points. It’s the first thing you should know about a so-called friend, about anyone close enough to be in range.
More of Charles’ questions: “What’s your favourite food? Have you ever been to England? How many languages do you speak? How do you say ‘I love you’ in German?”
The answers: Food is food; that’s all there is to it. You have it or you don’t. Erik has been to England, but the green of it disturbed him. He speaks English, French, and German, some Spanish, a little bit of Russian and Polish. He doesn’t speak German anymore, if he can help it. Everything he has to say, he says in English. He made the decision a long time ago. English is like a second layer of skin, separating him from the force of the words. When he says, “I love you,” in that language, he doesn’t feel like the subject of the sentence.
He senses the effort in the questions. Charles could have read his mind: has done, did, knows, more than the answers, that these questions are wildflowers growing in the shadow of mountains. “How many men have you killed?” Charles could ask. “How many of them did you kill with your own hands? How many deserved it? How many more do you intend to kill? Do you remember what happiness feels like? When you laugh, is it in your heart or in your head?”
He didn’t laugh, but sometimes he does. It breaks out of him. It’s little bursts that crack through the glass holding him in. He feels fragile, turns to see if someone’s watching, tracking his weakness. Always there’s only Charles, his light eyes over-bright, shining and childish.
Charles says, “Why do you never ask me any questions?”
“Is that how it’s supposed to work?”
“No—I mean, yes, but that doesn’t matter to me, you know.”
“Then why ask?”
Charles regards him with a careful, closed expression. He is not good at turning his face to a mask. Emotion blurs the outlines of his features. “Don’t you want to know anything about me?”
“I know what I need to know about you. I don’t need to ask.”
He tries to turn away; they are lying in bed. Charles catches him by the wrist. “Erik. There’s a difference between needing and wanting. Sometimes I wonder if you know that.”
Charles is a heavy sleeper. Charles has recurring nightmares about failing an unspecified set of exams. He likes chocolate, and cricket, and rock’n’roll music. He has never killed a man. Erik learns this, asking him questions.
Charles once vomited on the doors of the Bodleian Library after a late night out. As a child, he slept with a photograph of Einstein by his bed. He prefers whiskey to gin. He is not religious, but interested in Christianity’s ethical teachings. He doesn’t believe in killing men. He considers himself a pacifist. He misses England. He imports Marmite and tea. Asking, Erik learns all of this: the rest.
He looks at Charles’ drowsy, sated body. Lamplight turns his skin to gold, makes the dark lines of his hair glint. Awake, Charles can talk for hours about his interests, skipping from one thread of thought to another, laughing, careless, fluent. It turns Erik’s heart, makes him uneasy. He feels hollow and defenseless. He does not need anything in this moment. In a half-buried language, he forms a sentence.
He dreams of the schoolroom in the Litzmannstadt ghetto. He is seated on a wooden bench, drawing diligently: the structure of a flower for his class in natural science. He bows his head, ignores the hunger in his belly. His pen drips ink. The single flower in its dirty jar droops and withers, and he knows that he is dreaming, for there was no flower, not that winter: only a page in a book. Not this careful rose, summer-coloured, furled and tawny. He does not want to fold back the petals to glimpse what’s underneath, but how else can he complete his drawing? He cannot see the heart of the rose otherwise, its innards and organs, the parts of it that allow it to flower. Soon it will be gone. Ash in the rubble. The Germans will leave nothing. Only if he annotates it will some part of it survive: a sketch, a ghost, skeletal presence.
So he pulls it apart, petal by petal, the petals like skin. He tastes tears. He sets his teeth. This dream goes on for what seems like hours. The petals reveal more petals beneath, and under that: layer after layer of petals. He ought to feel relief, but instead dread runs fine and hot through his bloodstream.
I will never be done, never finish with you, he thinks.