Disrobing in his bedroom before the open blinds, Victor recalled his idea that Sievert was a hot name. It wasn’t. Nor was it a fat name. Names, like most things, were far more complicated than that. He’d been correct to deem the world half beautiful and half ugly, but he’d been wrong to seek a clear dividing line. The correct line split past from future. His task as a curator of aesthetic pleasure was to locate ugliness in the future, and sequester it in the past. He’d done as much with Albert and Sievert, and now he would do it with Mississippi, too. To tidy the world in this way gratified him. Buzzing with expectancy, he knelt. As he touched himself in sight of the Alfssons’ family room, he allowed himself one last image of his old friend in his defaced cot at military school, weeping poignantly for Victor, unaware of falling into the past.
Victor’s cocaine habit began the night he arrived in New Orleans, when he asked an upperclassman in the dorm to point him toward the gay bars. A cab took him to Bourbon Street, where a spot called Oz swarmed with celebrants of something called Southern Decadence. Victor wound up on a balcony among men thrice his age. “Looks like trouble,” said one. “Truckload,” said another, bringing Victor’s rigid childhood mind clamping down on him. But before he could explore his panic’s source, someone bought him a whiskey. His need to demand that these drunks be annihilated along with their gaudy city vanished like any flash of déjà vu. Where had he been all their lives? Did he want to come into the bathroom? Yes, he replied, and yes to all that was asked on every sultry evening from there on out. The flirters would muss his hair, smiling at their sly prowess as if he might ever tell anyone no. He didn’t.
Years passed. He liked how New Orleans had so few unsightly buildings. The ones that did exist never had him gasping for breath. He considered structural design often enough that he wound up majoring in it, then entering the master’s program. He thought too about the design of his face. Men were asking if he’d considered modeling. No, he replied coyly each time, as if he had no idea of his effect on people. He’d been drinking enough to rarely eat. Was it conceited to believe the svelte angles of his jaw derived from his state of mind? With his clutter of tics, he’d been an ugly child. These days he barely had to slouch against a bar before someone touched him.
During hangovers a memory would surface of his writing I don’t miss you, I never loved you, and he would bury his face in his hands. Mostly, though, he was drunk and high.
In his second year of grad school he never got around to applying for internships, but it didn’t matter, a partner at a prestigious firm fell for him at a bar. Victor had been staring at this silver fox’s wing-tipped shoes when the man said, “Salvatore Ferragamo.”
At first that seemed to be Gary’s name. “I’m Victor,” he replied.
“You’re the sort of boy folks like to take advantage of.”
“What do you mean?” he said, sensing already the pheromones Gary was exuding as he fell in love. The capture was as easy as that. A string of endless hot days followed, during which Victor seemed to have stumbled into his own dream-life. Gary lived in a mansion full of mirrors and varnished wood, where old-guard fetishists whiled away their dissolute days in high abandon. Bolted to the bedroom wall was a barred-top pup cage Gary would padlock him inside of. I’ve arrived, thought Victor, soaking naked with the guys in a backyard pool, nursing hangovers with mint juleps. Reasoning that Gary would give him a job whenever he asked, he felt no urgency to start work. Soon a dozen coke dealers knew his name, which filled him with well-being akin to professional pride. He would emerge from blackouts inhaling powder off Gary’s house key. “Boys have committed suicide over me,” he told the barflies who had become his friends. “I was fourteen when I got one sent off to military school.”
“You must have been a hot fourteen-year-old.”
“Albert thought so,” he said with a curt laugh. “When I arrived to bust him out, he’d already slit his wrists.”
“Did you love him?”
“I lived to see another day.”
Chuckling again, Victor wondered if his letter might really have pushed Albert over the edge. Later, alone, he searched online for his old friend. None of the Albert Alfssons he found was the one he’d known. A quest for Sievert led him to a blog about the complexity of God, with no photograph or mention of family. If he phoned home to Mississippi, his mother would inquire about his work. He’d lie and tell her he had a job. Best not to call again until it became true.
One evening in January Gary kicked him out. In a near blackout Victor walked to the antique shop run by a man who winked at him in bars. His name was Ernest, and he moonlighted as a fashion photographer. “Of course I want you,” he said, so Victor spent the next days modeling for Ernest under vaulted ceilings replete with metal leaf. Ernest’s lurid stories of the merchant marine took place in every port from Manila to Marseilles. Victor listened carefully, planning to retell them as if they were his. For months, whenever he finished a bottle of scotch, Ernest would replace it. One humid day he overheard Ernest telling the phone, “Keep your hands off him if you know what’s good,” so it came as a surprise when he too banished Victor, kicking him out into the Marigny. But there were plenty of antique shops a boy like Victor could choose from.
Victor lived with James. He lived with Phillip. He lived with Ian and Timothy and Rufus. For short stints he worked as a waiter at high-end restaurants, intending to begin real work when he felt like it. He lived with Leroy, Bruce, Sebastian. Two bars banned him in one night. He developed prediabetes. He got his own apartment. The more fun he had, the more he blacked out. His cheeks grew gin blossoms. Hours after his aunt phoned to say his mother had died of ovarian cancer, he awoke without memory of that conversation. Sure, a foreboding anxiety gripped him, but that was typical of the hours prior to a first drink. He went to the Eagle and got wasted on hurricanes. In the darkroom he met a Cajun named Thierry and rode with him out to a fishing cabin on Bayou Dupont. That was where he smoked crystal for the first time. Time increased to lightning speed under phase after phase of the moon. At some point, convinced the pelicans floating on black water were spy cameras, he left for home, and crossed into the Sprint service area to discover the voicemails.
Soaking in a hot bath, Victor steeled himself to explain that he’d been away on an architectural commission in Central America. He was already so sober that he could hardly imagine speaking at all, let alone telling and then maintaining a complex lie. He’d missed the funeral anyway. Why bother, he thought as the water grew cold. He pulled up his aunt in his phone contacts and deleted the number. Then he collected the liquor bottles from every room and poured them out in the sink.
Late on that first sober day the liquid in him began trickling into his fingers to evaporate into the stale air. That was why his hands quivered the way they did. Soon his head throbbed, too, because his brain was bouncing around in the newly desiccated space. By sunset he was hallucinating that his couch was an exam table. On a nearby table lay his cancerous mother, awaiting news of who would live and who would not. He clenched his fists and kicked and turned, the ringing phone pitching him into further visions where Mary hung shackled to that wall he’d dreamt. Her presence there rendered the place horrific, a torture chamber, which he supposed it had always been. Desperate to be helped, he gripped the phone, but everyone fell into three untenable categories: alcoholics, relatives, and ex-boyfriends. He powered it off and watched a spy movie. After that one, another. During a commercial for beds, his shakes gave way to something worse.