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What time is it?
The hour is late.
Hannibal tastes like honeydew confit. Hannibal tastes like braised lamb. Will’s back aches from the knock of his spine, shoulder blades, and hips against the dinner table. Hannibal’s kitchen is where roses grow from the bowls of wine glasses and apple skins are bruised by the teeth of dead pigs. Hannibal tastes like salt. Hannibal is the possibility of not remembering; Hannibal is Lethe. Will has so many headaches it’s like he lives inside an anvil and Hannibal, Hannibal who is oblivion, is the hammer that might split him for good.
Where am I?
My dining room, Hannibal says.
The wallpaper is the color of an underground river. Will endeavors to drown, but Hannibal tastes like rosé.
Why are you kissing me?
A change of pace. Or of taste, rather.
How long have I been missing?
Who says you are missing? Hannibal asks without missing a beat. It’s ten seventeen PM and you’re in my dining room. Your name is Will Graham. You’re not missing, Will, you’re found. You are—discovered.
I feel lost, he says.
You know you cannot trust your feelings. What do you feel from me?
There are no words for what he feels from Hannibal, so he doesn’t say them. He bites Hannibal’s lips until blood comes and the wine darkens: Will has always preferred reds. The stag breathes out against his hands, its very air damp. Will lets Hannibal eclipse the light. He cannot trust his own feelings. There are eleven bruises on his body and two of his fingernails are broken.
He does not remember reaching to touch Hannibal and having his fingers slip, as though Hannibal was encased in glass; he does not remember that because he does not remember anything. The glass was stained.
Hannibal draws lines on his neck and shows him drawings of church collapses.
Did God feel good about that? he asks. He may have asked that before.
Hannibal asks him how he feels.
His head is cloven in two, like a hoof.
I can’t find my phone, he says.
Who do you need to call? Hannibal asks, reasonably enough.
Beverly. Jack. Alana. You, when you’re not here. Why am I here? Why am I here when you’re not?
I’ll take time off from my patients, Hannibal says.
Will tears the house apart but doesn’t find his phone. He finds no dust curled in wait against the floorboards and no tufts of lint beneath the sofa cushions. Everything Hannibal owns is scrupulously clean. Everything but him.
Abigail visits. Her hair is paler in this light. Braided, it looks like sticks of cinnamon. She holds his hand and her fingers are as slim and white as candlesticks (the butcher, Will thinks, the baker, the candlestick-maker, an idiot’s chant that continues its drumbeat against the anvil, against the skins of his head, metaphorically speaking. THE BUTCHER. THE BAKER. And Abigail Hobbs, the candlestick-maker, or at any rate the candlestick-maker’s daughter. Everything honored, nothing wasted: Will does not burn wax and tallow in memoriam and in vigil for lost girls who supply their own thousand points of light. Whose hair is braided into wicks.)
You’re sick, she says. He’s making you better.
You’re a child.
Thirteen bruises. Is he missing if he knows where he is? Is he lost if it’s four-thirty PM and he’s in Hannibal Lecter’s house, in the guest bedroom for the sake of propriety? (Though his lips are two of the thirteen bruises.) His name is Will Graham and he tastes like someone else’s mouth. (Honeydew, lamb, salt, plaster dust from collapsed sanctuaries. And he would cry out for sanctuary.) He’s not sure what he has said yes to.
I’m not a child, she says.
You don’t know who I am.
Abigail holds the teacup.
None of us know anyone else.
Hannibal tells him to smile.
You tell me that again and I’ll tear out your throat.
Hannibal tastes like blood. It isn’t Will’s. He looks for broken skin. His eyes have stopped focusing properly.
I want to go.
Who would stop you, if that was what you really wanted?
Will doesn’t know what he really wants. He remembers certainty, and he remembers it being stripped from him, like paint off a wall. You took everything from me.
You offered.
You made me offer—as absurd as saying that the serpent beguiled Eve. You made me, you made me, as if he is clay, or so unbelievably fucking petulant, a boy with a scraped knee, or worse: you made me hit you. Will is an expert at defraying responsibility. He waits for Hannibal to reply. It is true, though. He is only the anvil. He cannot crash, he can only be crashed against, and reverberate with the clang of the hammer.
It is ridiculous that he is still listening to that ringing inside himself.
You understand why I did it, Hannibal says.
He does: why, this is hell, nor is he out of it.
Anything that can be understood can be forgiven, Hannibal says. Empathy is like standing on a mountaintop. Doesn’t God forgive?
It’s always God with you, he says irritably. I’m not Him. Not to mention lately Will’s image is shaky, blurred, as though inexpertly crafted: he begins to disbelieve Hannibal’s theology. Understanding is understanding, forgiveness is forgiveness. If it’s necessary, if that’s your worldview, it’s superior, more difficult, it’s not equal, it’s not even similar, let alone identical—my head hurts. You understand everyone. Did you forgive Tobias Budge? Did you forgive Miriam Lass?
Hannibal’s smile is as closed and polite as the lines of a sealed envelope. You’re raving, Will. Perhaps you should lie down, and he does, and the sheets nip at his ankles with their clean white teeth. He isn’t missing if he is with Hannibal. Anyone can only be missing while they are alone, and if Hannibal and Abigail both know where he is, he is rooted, he is tied. He presses his antlers into the ground.
I’m sorry, he says. You didn’t take anything. I gave it all away. I came to you.
The hot china burns his lips.
You came for me, Hannibal says.
I don’t remember.
Isn’t that what you wanted?
There is a bite-mark on the inside of his left arm.
I don’t know what I wanted. I don’t know what I want.
Trust me to tell you, Hannibal says.
Hannibal Lecter tastes like death. He doesn’t know why it took him so long to understand that. (The butcher, the baker.) Will plants juniper trees. His tongue tastes the slight incense-flavored dust on the pages of King James psalms, his chest is a forest of blades, he sits across from himself on a bus and does not meet his own eyes. He prickles with insults, like his skin is made of ground glass. Understanding is a mountaintop and the air is very thin. It tears his lungs out. He tears his lungs out.
He is not missing. He knows exactly where he is.
What is my design?
Don’t you know?
What time is it?
(The hour is late.)
I’m dying, he says. I’m burning alive. You’re letting me burn alive, aren’t you? (Hannibal tastes like clover honey.) You don’t have to answer. (Seventeen bruises and three suck-marks, dimpled dark at their centers. It isn't love. It's iron that Hannibal wants to suck out of his skin. He is heady from the loss of blood.) You pinned me, you suffocate—you suffocated your prey. I’m not the first, I’m not even the fucking last. Why do you keep kissing me? Is that a favor? I never felt that way about you.
An apology. An appreciation, if you will. It isn't ordinarily my taste, either, but: a shared taste. Our shared tastes.
Aren’t you sentimental, he almost snarls. I can’t breathe, you put an ocean in my veins, but you think you can play Prince Charming. He doesn’t know how much of this he’s saying. He doesn’t know how much of this he’s dreamed. Oh, fuck, oh, hell, he is the king of infinite space. It is two minutes past midnight and he is bound in a nutshell and pressed with his cheek flat against the anvil and the hammer ringing in his head and his name is Hannibal Lecter? is the Chesapeake Ripper? is Garrett Jacob Hobbs? (Have another cup of tea.) He plays his throat like a violin and oh, the sounds he makes. (No, that’s wrong.) It is, all right, he comes to it: it is the eleventh hour and the apple hurts his teeth.
He is—
(I want someone who can assume my point of view.)
I don’t know who I am.
Hannibal brushes a kiss against his lips, delicate like snowfall.
You’re myself. It’s six twenty-two AM, you’re in Baltimore, Maryland, and you are whatever I want you to be.