Andy’s surprised that the hotel is intact. Most multilevel structures have been decimated, and still-standing buildings are only distant spots on the horizon, mirages of how things should have been. Inside the lobby, Tilley lamps glow on their lowest setting. It’s a fire hazard, using those indoors. An Indian man rises off the floor to greet them. He picks up a nearby lamp, which casts a brief light on his family in the corner. His wife, fully dressed, curls around a young child. They sleep on a thin sheet. Even through his boots, Andy feels the cold marble.
Other families are clustered across the floor. The room wheezes, moans. The man leads them through, Andy’s boots making a terrible thump as he walks. He’s disturbing the dead. The man goes into a dark stairwell, and Andy looks for cracks, structural deficiencies. There are so many ways to get trapped. He wonders if he’s heading into one now.
All men want something. His body, his good looks, his vitality — from the bottomlessness of youth, he can provide these things. They run their hands over his skin and say, So hot. So fucking lovely. For a few minutes, he is everything to them. They are a cup, and he is a well. They are hungry, and he is flesh.
The Indian man leads them to a room and places the lantern on the ground, where it casts a buttery circle of light.
“Must be nice,” Andy says. “Scoring a hotel room.”
“It’s not mine,” Ted replies. “It’s a… friend’s.”
“A friend—” Andy says, sotto voce.
“Get undressed,” Ted says.
This is a familiar ritual. Andy knows the fasteners of his turnout trousers like he knows his own skin: the metal clip at his hip, the interior and exterior sockets for suspenders. He leaves the trousers bunched around his boots like he does at the station, ready to be jumped in and pulled up. He’s imagined having sex with Ted since they met, the way he imagines himself having sex with all the men he meets. He pulls off his shirt, steps out of his underwear. The easy part.
Ted takes the lantern to the bathroom and calls, “Come on in.” His voice diffracts, beckoning the entire room. He sits in the shower stall on a child-size plastic stool. He’s rolled up his shirtsleeves. He holds out a hand.
Andy steps onto the tiles. It’s like stepping onto an ice sheet. Ted dips a sponge into a bucket near the drain and squeezes it out. He brings it up to Andy’s chest and hesitates, as if hitting an invisible barrier, before touching it to Andy’s skin.
“That’s cold,” Andy says, flinching. Andy’s nipples are so swollen they feel like they could burst, and Ted spins him around to scrub his back. Andy smells the layers of sweat dissolving, scales of dirt and grime falling away. Droplets lance down his body, and each hair pricks up in response. The sponge squishes like wet footsteps. The lamplight catches different pieces of Ted’s face: the flat plain of his cheek, a glow at the tip of his nose, a shimmer of his eye. But Andy can’t put them together.
Andy asks, “What do you want?”
Ted doesn’t respond. He wipes Andy’s face, runs his wet, withered fingers through Andy’s hair. Andy knows that Ted wants him. The weight of that want suffocates the room. But Ted continues to bathe him. Andy can’t stand the silence. He arches his feet against the pooling water. If Ted were to say something, Andy would have some confirmation of desire, confirmation that this bath isn’t just a duty. Ted has to be the one to say it. That something lies beyond this moment that they can look forward to.
Ted wraps Andy in a towel. The towel doesn’t have a smell — not the overpowering florals of his mum’s detergent or the bleach and industrial chemicals of cheap hotels. It smells neutral, the smell that’s the absence of smell, as if it’s waiting to absorb his smell like so much water.
He should get dressed and leave, find his way back to camp. Reg will have reported him; Colin’s probably writing up a penalization form. What a palaver. He should tell Ted thanks and push on. Andy’s skin is damp, mottled with goose pimples. He pulls on the clean T-shirt, a fresh pair of boxers. It seems foolish, considering that in a moment he’ll hop into his grotty turnout trousers. But right now—
Ted says, “Stay with me. Just for a little.”
Ted leaves the lantern in the bathroom, where it glows like a lost ghost. Andy can’t see Ted’s face. The bed sighs as Ted lies on it. “I understand if you can’t.” And it’s true; he can’t. Roll call will come at six sharp. This room is a hole, so deep, so far down that they’ll never be discovered, and Andy crawls onto the bed, where he lies, legs bent, back hunched. Ted sidles against him. They sink into each other. Ted’s warmth is like a blanket, and Andy pulls Ted’s arm across his body as if covering up. Ted’s breath on his neck, their heartbeats, the friction on Andy’s skin as they shift incrementally: Would anyone hear these tiny things? Does anyone know they’re alive?
Andy doesn’t remember falling asleep. Exhaustion overtakes him softly and violently, like a cannon filled with feathers. It’s a shock when he opens his eyes to an Indian gentleman in a medical jacket, arms crossed, staring. Ted is still wrapped around him. It’s still dark, but Andy knows he’s in a shit-ton of trouble.
The Indian fellow leans down and whispers, “It’s time for you to go.”
Andy doesn’t head back right away, though he should. He stays in the shadows, where he’s less likely to get nabbed by a patrol. He looks behind at the medical camps, the only source of electric light in the city. A beacon, sort of. In the opposite direction, the sky seems indistinguishable from the ground, a single expanse, and the stars have come to earth in the form of fires.
He sits, knees drawn up to his chest. He’s royally fucked things up. He squeezes his arms tight around his legs, making himself as small as possible. Maybe he can disappear into himself. It was nice to melt into Ted, to not worry for a while. But that probably made things worse. The pendulum at camp has probably swung from anger to worry and all the way back to anger. In his immediate future: reprimands, disciplinary actions, first for attacking Reg and second for going AWOL. There’s a reckoning coming.
But he can put it off a little while longer. This is the last time he’s going to be here. This place should mean something more than his fight with Reg. More than the woman he saved. More than Ted, even.
But as he waits, he becomes aware of the silence once again, how it stretches so far that he can hear how everything is connected. For instance, when he shifts his weight from one foot to the other, the dirt grinds underneath his ass, his clothes rustle, and items in his pack shift and clang. And sounds from far away become acute: from a temple in the distance, lit with torches, people chant, a mysterious susurrus, punctuated with a sharp, tinny sound. A bell. Someone’s ringing a bell in the middle of the night. A prayer to silence. The temple sends forth such a tiny light, such a tiny sound, that it may as well be a firefly cupped in a divine hand.
Yeah, I hear you.
He dusts himself off. There are people in real pain, and here he is, acting mopey dopey. He’s been gone for too long, and he’s got to collect his equipment, prepare his reports, take his lumps. No more wasting time. His father used to say daylight’s burning at night, trying to be funny, but he tried being a lot of things. Now the phrase is stuck in Andy’s head. It’s nearing daybreak: the sky has taken on a blue tinge, a blue that’s almost black. Near the horizon, stars extinguish themselves. If daylight burns, then the fuse is blue. The sky waits to catch fire.