These Violent Delights

by Micah Nemerever

Paul hated the look of his own bare wrists, with their shining blue veins and the skin stretched too thin to hold them in place. They reminded him that his body was a thing that could be taken apart.

He looked meticulously cared for, like a rare plant in a conservatory; Paul felt abruptly shabby beside him in his anorak and snow boots, too careworn and practical to be worthy of attention.

He remembered Julian’s faint smile, the slight rise of his left eyebrow. That eyebrow was sliced through by a thin scar near its outer edge, an incongruous imperfection Paul had noticed with sudden ardor and then stowed away.

he wrote every day, even when all he could do was pick fights with a dead man.

The day after he first spoke to Julian Fromme, he took his journal out of the locked paint box he kept under his bed and opened it to a fresh white page. January 17, 1973, he wrote, more neatly than usual because he pictured the biographer making a note of it. Yesterday I met someone I believe will prove very important.

Pablo rang like a harp string. Julian said it warmly, but it was an imperious kind of affection. It was as if this were the name he’d given a favorite belonging.

Paul wasn’t sure he would ever grow used to it—this precipitous thrill of being seen and known and understood.

The rest of the world might not be ready for you, but I don’t know how I ever got on without you.

Watching Julian’s performance, Paul realized he had been wrong all along to imagine his family wanted him to metamorphose into something softer and kinder and more docile. It was much simpler than that. All they actually wanted him to do was lie.

We’ll both be happier if I can find you as fascinating as you ought to be.” Paul was almost relieved to feel the sting. It meant Julian saw every weakness in him and still thought he was worth the effort of hurting.

“I don’t understand why you haven’t tried it yet,” Julian said carelessly. He glanced at Paul’s mouth, so fleetingly that he might have imagined it. “I wouldn’t stop you, if that’s what you’re worried about. You could do anything to me and I’d let you.”

Gasp

“Crying crocodile tears afterwards about the atrocities you commit isn’t morally exculpatory.” Red flooded the edges of Paul’s vision. He could feel his pulse in his teeth. “Tell me what makes them different from every Nazi who ‘just followed orders’ and only felt bad about it after the fact. Don’t you dare ask me to fucking pity them.”

Perioddddd

Julian considered this around a mouthful of alcohol. Then he swallowed hard and shrugged. It was a superficially careless gesture, but Paul recognized it as the first gust at the head of a hurricane—Julian’s face was the mask of vibrant serenity that always marked his cruelest whims.

Paul could never decide if Julian was borrowing mannerisms from the movies or if it was the other way around—that the movies were trying to synthesize an image that came to Julian naturally.

The air splintered in his chest, and what was left of his father lay in a box in the frozen earth with a tunnel through his skull, and for all that he raged against it, nothing had changed.

When he arrived uninvited at Julian’s door the next day, it wasn’t the unblemished immortal idol that had brought him there. Instead he came for the boy who had tried in vain to comfort him, whose kiss at his forehead had felt like an uncertain imitation of something he’d only ever seen in the movies. He came because that kiss was as vulnerable in its way as Paul’s own unhappiness.

“It’s that what we call ‘love’ is actually letting your identity fill in around the shape of the other person—you love someone by defining yourself against them. It says loss hurts because there’s nothing holding that part of you in place anymore. But your outline still holds, and it keeps holding. The thing you shaped yourself into by loving them, you never stop being that. The marks are permanent, so the idea of the person you loved is permanent, too.”

Julian had fallen quiet. He gave the impression of being serenely unguarded. Paul lingered in the doorway to observe him, trying to decide whether he was looking at the machinery or at the ghost that turned its gears.

He would notice the angle of Julian’s wrist as he turned a doorknob and remember twisting that wrist behind his back—letting his teeth cut a slim black bruise into the flesh of Julian’s shoulder, only hours before, a wound so fresh that Julian must still feel it sting. Now and then there was a stray note in Julian’s laugh that rhymed with the way the right touch could make his voice break. The familiarity drew an uncanny bright line between two moments that should never have been able to reach each other.

when they were alone, he could promise himself that he and Julian were each other’s birthright, and that the only unnatural thing was the fact that their blood was divided between two bodies. He could believe that even calling it “sex” was incorrect, because it wasn’t about anything so shallow as physical desire. They wanted each other in the way of flesh wanting to knit itself together over a wound.

Stillness and vulnerability were so foreign to Julian’s body that sleep looked unnatural on him. Awake, he was all edges, from the aristocratic line of his nose to the stark, eerie contrast between black eyelashes and light green iris. It was only when he was sleeping that Paul could tell how much of the sharpness was a performance.

He wanted to tear through Julian’s skin and map the shapes of liver and lungs, to memorize the path of every artery with his fingertips. He wanted to break Julian’s body open and move inside it alongside him, rib cages interlaced around a single heart.

He wanted to forget he’d ever yielded to the weakness of wanting anything. He wanted to scrub away any evidence that he existed outside his own head at all—that he was a visible object that anyone else could see and mock and judge.

What a lonely, dreary thing it is to know the truth. What a relief it is that now neither of us has to be alone in knowing.

“Can I tell you something,” said Julian after a pause, “that I’m all but certain you won’t believe?” “Try me.” It was a peace offering, tentatively teasing. The barest pause. “I never lie to you, but sometimes I wish I could.” He sounded surprised, even frightened. “You never let me pretend the truth is all right when it isn’t.” “You’re right, I don’t believe you.” He was trying to joke, but Julian didn’t laugh. “I know,” he said. “You never do.”

He was sick of doubting that their hold on each other was unbreakable.

You are only the weapon of choice.”

You have fallen for the same lie he always uses—that you’re the only thing in the world he will still love once its novelty has worn off.”

Ragged but steady, still in control. It had been disrespectful of Paul to doubt that he would be, and worse that he still wished Julian would fall apart for him.

The fantasy of the house fire had brought them to an impossible truth. They could only stitch themselves back together if they did something irreversible.

if she had simply chosen to feel better without showing him how to do the same, he would never forgive her.

Paul nearly hated himself enough to oblige him.

Paul hates himself enough for the both of them

I can’t be him right now

Acknowledging his persona as a performance

“I could have decided I could get by without you. It would’ve been easy. I could have stayed with them and gone to goddamn Georgetown, I could’ve done everything they wanted, and I would’ve been fine, mostly—and I didn’t. I chose you. But that can’t possibly mean anything, can it? Because you don’t matter.”

if Julian couldn’t hide his feelings, at least he could weaponize them.

“Julian, I’m not angry at you.” It wasn’t quite true, but it should have been. “It isn’t about what you do or don’t give me, it’s about everything I take, I don’t need you to give me anything else when I know I don’t even des—” “If you say the word ‘deserve’ one more time I’m driving us off a bridge.”

It was a relief and a horror to be known so perfectly.

Before the shutter clicked, they locked eyes and couldn’t keep from smiling. As if they couldn’t see anything beyond each other; as if they couldn’t believe their luck.)

Here was the truth: it was the happiest they had ever been.

No longer was there any danger in being gentle with each other. It was a relief to be able to trust, and the relief made everything else simple. Love was so easy they could take it for granted, so transcendental that they would never dare. They talked on the phone late into the night and hid notes in each other’s pockets like lovesick children; whenever they reached an empty stretch of sidewalk they drew together to hold hands, reflexively synchronized. Of course they would promise each other everything. Of course eternity would yield to them once they’d earned it.

They were happy, and the plan was inextricable from their happiness, and he would never be able to forget that both things were true.

They barely slept, and when they did, they didn’t dream. Instead they told each other the things they dreamed when they were awake. How they would never be apart, how they would take care of one another. How they would seal themselves off from everything outside and distill themselves to such purity that no one else could ever touch them. How this, in the end, was the only thing they wanted.

Between gray earth and low sky, he was the only thing that shone.

Their bodies belonged to each other because they were the same body. They had been just one person, long ago, but had been cut from one another before they were born.

“I love you.” Julian’s mouth was snow-soft against the side of his neck; he spoke nearly too quietly to be heard. “I mean it. Like crazy.” Paul believed him. He couldn’t remember ever doubting.

He still looked like his father’s son. Worse, he looked like his mother’s.

“You’re okay.” Julian held him close and pressed a soft kiss to his hair. It was the first time all day he’d been calm. “You can trust me now. You’re safe, I’ll take care of you. I don’t need you to be brave.”

Moments of tenderness in contrast with cruelty

How Julian had looked at the wounded fox, as if it forced him to remember something he wanted to forget.

Parallels between charlie and the fox... Fox as foreshdowing?

“It always makes me a little sad when you laugh,” Julian went on. “The way it sort of takes you by surprise. I love it, it has that sweet sincerity that’s the best part of you, but it still kills me how you never seem to expect it. All I want to do is make you happy, and you’re the unhappiest person I’ve ever met.”

“I love you,” said Julian—uneasy, distant, as if he were reminding himself. “By now you ought to be able to let me fucking tell you.”