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They are creeping slowly through the afternoon. Stephen sits on his rattan chair reading the daily business news; he has his towel over his thinning hair and shallow cheeks. Everett asks him over his bowl of filipino adobo if he'd like a cigarette. Stephen tells him he has decided to quit mid-way through their petty little domestic -- the spice of their mundane life. Everett takes hits of his for Stephen, wondering if he'll take back on his vices mid-way through their next fight.
The washing machine is the great white noise of the house. It is old and yellowing; borderline illegal with the kilowatts it consumes through every wash. It is the only thing that lulls them to sleep aside from the words unspoken.
Victor, Stephen's brother, sits directly in front of Everett during the next dinner party. The Strange ancestral house is refurbished with the ugly arrays of art deco and contemporary paintings. They are all laughing in queues based on a joke being re-told for the hundredth time. These little inside jokes were always better when it was Stephen's father (god rest his soul) who told them. The help serves red wine - dry and Australian. It does not go well with the meat, just as well as Everett sat with Stephen's father approval.
They never hold hands under the dinner table, nor at all.
Lover loves blue and green. His sweaters are blue, light blue, dark blue, blue with holes in them, white with blue through mixed laundry and half-hearted love-making on top of the machines, blue from his other lover's threadbare scrubs. Everett will burn them all one day, and one day needs to come sooner because he is tired and weary of praying to god to help them find a different light.
Their waters never have lemons nor berries in them. They are plain and in glass pitchers or recycled plastic bottles. They sit in the fridge where cheese and wine and leftover weekday dinners used to be. The managers at the Chinese restaurant, the local fastfood joint, the one-star restaurant on the fourth floor of the hotel, the convenience store, the bankrupt coffee shop knows them now; calls them mr. and mr. even though they do not have the rings.
He knows that a few blocks away from their little take-aways, there are five-star restaurants with full length chandeliers and museums with wings named after people and tables full of academics who refer to his mr. and his colleague as mr. and soon-to-be-mrs.
The things that scare other people are like little scabs. It is hard to resist scratching and peeling them, make them bleed to clean them. Everett jests that it's about time Stephen calls his two sons who have two different mothers. Stephen calls him a motherfucker and slams the door without taking his keys.
Other lovers are so hard to find these days. They either wear black or dark red and have thick, thick hair, wearing watches that are not as shiny his own. They smell fresh and divine and crisp. Sometimes Everett wakes up with no knowledge of actually sleeping. He try to imagine what dreams it was he may have had -- steel, rain falling on green leaves, drowning in seawater he has never swam in. He imagines Stephen sleeping next to someone who has a kinder face and flatter stomach. It makes him stir in bed with a stranger who looks nothing like Stephen.
Everett falls back to sleep in near-content.
He sees Christine in the supermarket where he doesn't want to see her most. She neither smiles nor scowls at him and by god's name he feels small -- she does not know him. But Everett knows her: knows her perfume on their pillow, knows her hair on Stephen's coat, knows her steps in his lover's words. She is the uncomfortable silence in the car, the one-more-drink after a fight, the 'I've-already-had-dinner' at 2am Saturday nights. She is picking out expensive wine in an inexpensive store with her hair loose in a bun. He watches her through the cereal aisle and does not move until she has gone to check-out counter and leaves.
Lover comes home and smells clean - full of isopropyl alcohol and lemon-scented hand soap, but at least there are no splatters of blood on his pant legs nor under his shoes this time. The Persian rug gets its well-deserved rest from all the blood and promises spilled there, but the dog still pisses on the same patch on the carpet by the laundry room. He prays Stephen steps on it with his socked feet on a Wednesday morning.
They have an album full of home-printed picture of lighthouses and tree lines and coffee cups. It sits under their Ikea table that took them four hours to assemble. They have their own pictures there, of course: mid-turning, back facing the camera, hair wild with wind. Everett sees the help flip through them and does not falter; just greets her and asks if she'll be coming in next week too.
This is them treading through their imaginings and trying to squeeze through the keyhole of acceptance.
Stephen does not come home smelling of the expensive wine he saw her buy yet; so he knows Stephen is not coming home -- tonight even though he promises that he will: he will call once his talk is over, he will call once he decides it dinner is lobster or mutton, whatever -- and so he smokes.
T'Challa comes to him with a crisp newspaper still hot from the press, pristine. He lays it out on his desk and sits crossed-leg on his office sofa. He asks Everett if he knows the man in he headline; he answers yes and no. T'Challa is not amused and starts to reach for the whiskey at 4 in the morning.
"Yes, I know the man," he explains in his defense with his hands flat on his Stark(TM) laptop, "he's a very good neurosurgeon and I referred Lt. James Rhodey to his clinic just yesterday evening." He crosses the room and sits opposite to his friend, sinking, praying 'please god, let the ground open, god, please, please, please' -- "I didn't know he was in an accident, however."
T'Challa is sharp to answer that well, now he does; and he agrees to it in short calculated nods: "yes, now I do."
They sit through the rumbling of the city awakening, drinking sips of whiskey and ignoring phone calls that buzzed over the glass of the coffee table. When T'Challa leaves, he is heavy on his steps with his lips flat, whispering into the quiet: 'you are not paid to lie.'
Everett's suit jacket stays hanging on his coat rack and he finishes his paperwork, drinks an acceptable amount of coffee and eats his sandwich in peace. The phone calls die out with the hours and he likes to think that maybe it is his name Stephen asks for.
He goes home to his own apartment and sleeps in a bed so unused before.
He will not go where he is not needed, and he is needed here inside his own head.
Neighbour is a young homosexual he never carried out to find out who before. Neighbhour is all-smilling and all-feeling. He has warm hands and likes to keep his houseplants watered everyday. The residual excess drips over his balcony, and maybe neighbhour thinks it's al-fucking-right because Everett has never complained before -- hasn't been there to complain at all. When Everett knock on his door upstairs to tell him to mind the fucking gap, he gives Everett a dying bonsai and asks him to keep it.
'Since you're so good at trying to keep dead things alive anyway.'
Stephen breathes through a tube and has his eyes closed with all the blood pooling by his lids. He slumbers through Everett's watch and slumbers through Everett's absence; no difference made. Everett returns from his small cigarette break and finds Christine sitting on the chair he sat in, her hands petting his lover's cheeks and crying. When she sees him, she stands slowly and gestures for them to step outside; he doesn't. And so they stand by the window, back to Stephen sleeping and slipping.
"How long have you known him?" This is not how he imagined her voice would be. The monitor beeps in between their silence.
He keeps this one photo of Stephen when his hair was still almost brown and red. Stephen's father is in the photograph too, sitting on a rattan chair and nursing a drink. His own father is there with a laugh on his face. They were 12 and just learned how to ride a horse at the Strange house, smelling like ammonia and manure. Everett can still remember how weird the caviar tastes from Stephen's tongue.
"I've known him since we were in med school."
He has already won this round yet --
"Longer," he fights on, still.
Lover sometimes wakes up and forgets that he is no longer who he is, and all Everett could do is watch.
He wears bath robes to the take-aways, takes the subway and buys time with money he no longer has; but he has her there in his gradually sparse apartment, buying him cheese and expensive meats. Lover is drunk with wine and selling gifts he has given him; throwing memories into the fire to keep himself warm. This selfishness he has always known is something he has never foreseen -- hopeful, hopeful, hopeless. On the fifth week he terminates his connection to the CCTV he has planted in lover's apartment but still prays that lover steps on the patch of carpet the dog always pees on - despite the fact that he was sitting behind his desk, watching, as lover sold the dog.
And so when Stephen takes upon calling him after months and months of silence and lunacy, he does not answer because jealousy is for children, and he has since learned that indifference cuts deeper.
T'Challa becomes king before his own time and has yet to mourn his own father before putting Barnes back into the ice. Now he holds the world and its demise in his land.
Everett pays his respects to the great deceased king by standing right by T'Challa as his friend takes the crown and weighs in the burden he was never meant to carry.
The first time he gets a break from holding up his friend, he receives an email from Dr. Palmer.
How dare she.
"I think I would have liked to make money through poetry," Stephen tells him from his rattan chair, he nurses a glass but it is empty. Everett sits on the balustrade as all the other seats in the apartment are gone; the space lays out stark and flat with only their murmurs and the rattan as furniture. The city lights are ugly and noisy and full of neon and pink. They both hear a car engine revving too much over the 2 a.m. traffic of the avenue. It is coming towards them, towards them, towards Stephen, towards him, past them, beyond them.
"What an idiot," Stephen says. Everett agrees and keeps smoking in his behalf.