du fremde (The Chromatic Remix)
1. "graying purple darkness outside"
Ephram ached and aches. Shoulders, wrists, hands. Waist, pit of his stomach, asshole. Bruises fading.
Chords that united things, Matt's mouth on his, hands entwined together, weight of his body on top of Ephram's, have snapped apart. Chords that he thought were cords, heavy as velvet and just as indestructible, unravelled so fast they might as well as have been light or music or desire. Insubstantial things you can't weigh, only sense.
Ephram's senses are dulled. He needs to dull them all the way down, until they vanish, leave, abandon him. The sunset is gray like flannel. Good flannel from a small store, charcoal pants for formal occasions. New York flannel, not the garish Colorado plaids and checks, full of red, orange, gold, chromium yellow.
Nature makes his eyes hurt.
He stays inside, stays at the piano, masters the range of keys.
Already mastered it, years ago, lifetimes ago. Amid concrete and exhaust fumes. Over the GWB, down the Jersey turnpike past acres of grown-over dumps. At home, real home, New York, where people wear harsh, mean lines instead of smiles. Not here, trees and mountains, where people smile like it means something, like they actually care.
How are you feeling? is as common as Hello here, and he cannot answer either. He will not.
He'll wait until his face is gray as the sky, as his hair, until his knuckles creak and his body barely recalls what it felt like to sing.
2. "the creeping dark warmth of winter sunsets"
He's always cold now. Wants the dark to come, hurries it along, urges it, but the sun hovers, cold and orange. Paints purple shadows, dirty-dark like old bruises, down the hills, reduces nearly-dead trees to calligraphy.
No depth any longer.
When Matt held him, shoved inside him, Ephram expanded. Skin flushed and tingled and he inflated. He can't think of music the way other people do, poets and amateurs and his dad, who think music's the same as anything else in the world. Just another thing to borrow and use metaphorically, to decorate their stupid thoughts.
But he thought of music then with Matt moving on top of him like a dog.
Opening notes creeping and swelling through the hush of a concert hall. Real one, Carnegie or Lincoln Center, not the converted high-school auditorium. Notes drawn quivering and alive, spreading through the quiet, displacing the dark, growing and multiplying. Waves through the air, banging hard and lustily against human ears too crude and thick to capture the brilliance.
Inside him, Matt was music and Ephram the hall. Nothing at first, just dark and quiet, but Matt's cock started drawing out pale, shimmering sensation amidst the pain, changing discomfort into something new. Different, and unknown. Wisps of candle smoke rolling up his spine and chest, filling his skin, pulsing and pushing him out into three dimensions.
Matt groaned like an old man, like a dying person, but Ephram bit his lip, felt his throat fill with gold and sliding amber, hot and thick. Blood and music, real things.
Not metaphors.
3. "he knows nothing, absolutely nothing."
He hates school, hates homework, hates how brains are just lumps of gray jelly and bodies sacks of water and salt. How his father believes that you can do anything with the body, help it and heal it, ease pain and medicate. Get better.
You can't get better, you just persist, and you just have to drag this disgusting sack of flesh around until you die.
That knowledge is just an electrical connection that happens to occur over the surface of something, the brain, that looks more like some deepsea monster than a seat of intelligence - that gets him confused and upset. Makes his stomach hurt.
He tries not to think, tries to keep the electrical activity down to a minimum. He's heard that the more you view a memory, the deeper it gets carved into your gray matter and he doesn't want Matt to live in his brain any longer than he has to. Any longer than he was in this town.
Just needs to rewire the connections, change some memories, strengthen ones of his mom, maybe of Delia's third birthday (lavender dress, chocolate icing in her hair) to overlay the memories.
Chockfull of memories and he knows shit. Nothing. Knows how to play the piano, but that's not knowledge, not like school, not like knowing the names of the major arteries and veins, or the number of hits that Pettite gave up last season, or the causes of the Civil War.
Or how Matt could talk about beauty to more than one person and mean it.
Ephram moves his body and music happens. Just like Matt fucked him, slow and intense, and for fifteen minutes there were scarlet notes trembling and stemming off from each other under his skin and it was symphonic. More than a chord, an entire orchestration.
He thought then it was the two of them, fingers knotted and bodies moving together, that made it happen, that it was his hole and Matt's dick and they were knit together into something new.
He's flat, though.
It was all Matt, multiple down to his bones, talking about beauty and touching different faces, it was Matt who made all the noise and orchestrated all the color. Took the color with him when he went.
Matt insisted and argued and never said a word, just showed him that no one person's important, it's just what you want and what you take and how you feel. How neurons spark and sound disperses.
He hates this.
4. "a stranger who can tell a boy he is beautiful and a girl he loves her in the same week"
Love is the corners of dark rooms and the shadow of your hair on someone else's face, everything dim and private and full of secrets.
Beauty is what you see, what you make happen, what you say to get what you want. It is gray and orange, smoke and fire, the twist of hips and grunt of breath in the haze of sunset. It passes. Goes away.
Ephram is not loved. Nor is he beautiful. Ephram is alone and he wants to stop feeling. Stuff his ears with beeswax and cotton balls, burn his fingertips with acid, scrub the nerve-endings off his skin and shut his brain down.
Lose it all. Bleed it back down to black and white.