Ruins, 2005
By: Little Fiction
Tags: LGBTQ, Short Story, London, Fiction, Education

The Whispering Gallery is the first of three to the top of the dome, and no one’s there when I finally reach the stone circle of a walkway. Without the frenetic hush of other people’s voices, the idle silence is almost disappointing, the walls close to ordinary.

I’m halfway around the gallery when I hear someone spit out my name. I know it’s Walt before I turn around. He’s leaning against the tendriled iron railing, his elbow dangling ten stories above the checkerboard marble floor below.

Hey Mischa, he says, and it hums around the hall, violent and flickering. There’s a deliberate half-grin on his face, a rehearsed casualness from a bad high school play. I take a step back, the sound amplified and mortifying. We’re both too old for this.

Hey, I say, is there something you need?

Just saying hello. He keeps his hand on the railing as he starts to come closer, with his math book in the other. Nothing against saying hey, like he’s resuming an old debate.

Yeah, sure, Walt, I tell him. That’s a thing you can do, I guess. Our words echo around us in the empty hall, exhaling and breathless.

I saw it earlier today, you know, Walt says when he’s close enough for normal conversation.

I don’t know what you’re talking about? I reply with enough of a question to make it seem like Walt is seeing things and should be contrite for even mentioning them, for making shit up. But inside panic stuffs my throat and I’m thinking of Cassie, of my careful constructions and hesitations. If this is how little it takes for the empire of myself to begin its tumble into ruins.

Come on, says Walt, sing-songing with the upper hand. Are you really going to pretend like I didn’t see it? Seriously?

I tell him I don’t know what he’s talking about — at least I think that’s what I say, the words too thin to recall. His hand is still on the rail, almost touching my arm.

It’s obvious, he goes on. With you and that girl. The one in our group. Did you think you were hiding something?

What? Are you calling me a dyke? When I blink, there’s Ellie in my bed, staring anywhere but at me. Her voice. So stupid, so stupid.

Walt shrugs. You said it, not me. I haven’t noticed it until now, his hand, how he’s holding onto me in a way I can’t quite call grabbing. There’s an inscrutable purpose to him, the way his knuckles cleft under his skin. Walt doesn’t have to say anything for me to know what I’m supposed to do next. The hall murmurs, susurrus. Prove it.

I’m not in the mood for whatever the fuck, Walt, I tell him, shaking him off. It’s only now that I begin to wonder if the neo-Nazi thing is actually true, if he wants whatever he wants from me.

A lesson: this is how easy it is to forget that history happens all at once.

Too bad. Walt seizes my arm again, and I don’t realize he’s knocked me back-first into the wall until I my knees buckle. He’s all sweat and bleach and hunger, with the look someone gets before they want to break through a door.

A beat after he’s pinned me, the look on his face thaws into something like shock. It’s the look of a dark fantasy hidden in your journal being recited by a popular kid at a school assembly. Walt doesn’t let go but doesn’t go further. This, I think, is where terror lives.

We’re almost nose-to-nose, and still, the world doesn’t shake.

What are you doing, I say. My voice rises, circles us. From every corner, it gathers in our ears.

Years later, I will remember looking to Walt’s eyes, and I will know what the feeling is. It’s not forgiveness or sympathy or empathy, but something closest to the idea of forbearing, of understanding without absolution. I’ll think of Walt and the men who brought bombs with them below where a city breathes, and I will wonder what it’s like to love and to hate so much that you can’t stand to stay inside of your skin. To be so torn and incomplete that it can only be assuaged by obliterating every brick before you on the sidewalk, making the heart chambers of others implode.

Walt doesn’t answer, so I say it again. What are you doing, Walt?

What I’m really saying: This is where we are, and here is what made us. Now what do we do?

I’m scared, says Walt, his breath gutting him from the inside out. Are you?

He backs away, letting me go, his hands shaking. They’ve been shaking for some time. He picks up his math book, walking fast to the exit. It’s only after I hear the faint call of Cindy gathering our group that I begin to move, my wrists throbbing. When I start to walk down the stairs, it will be as if nothing happened at all.