“Zal, you don’t,” she whimpered.
“Willa, I do. You don’t know me,” he insisted. “What did she call us again?”
“Who?”
“Your sister. Fucks? Fugs? No, freaks! Yes, we’re both freaks. .”
“Stop,” she said, inching her head away. “You smell so boozy.”
“I’m sorry, baby, I’m sorry, baby Willa,” he said, cursing the Ginkgo or whatever it was that made him suddenly unappealing in this magic moment that he had so long awaited.
“You really want to kiss me?”
“I do.”
“You know I’ve never—”
“I hadn’t until recently.”
“And my sister—”
“I won’t tell her.”
“But—”
“I know it’s wrong, Willa, I know it’s wrong. But what can we do? No one will know.”
She suddenly broke into a sob, the sweetest sob he’d ever heard, so different from Asiya’s violent heaving gasps. She looked so little, even in all that largeness, that he hushed her, held her face with both hands, and went for it, much slower, with more tenderness than he had ever approached her sister with. Willa’s tears somehow made the whole thing sweeter.
She responded well. She did fine.
And so, slowly, like a starving worm atop his dream apple, he inched his body onto hers and found himself in that position he had dreamed of, over and over, on and off, curled up perfectly atop the mountain of her now rapidly heaving breast. She smelled like sour milk and water crackers and wet towels, but in that moment, it was the best combination of smells in the world. She felt like a type of home he had never imagined for himself.
He stopped kissing her altogether and just let himself lie in that easy curl on top of her, listening to the sound of her chaotically drumming heart eventually smooth itself out.
He fell asleep.
When he finally woke up, it was as violent as the sleep had been comforting; when he came to, it was to Willa’s scream and someone else’s fist in his face, someone with flashing eyes he knew well — and should have known to expect.
“I’m going to fucking kill you, motherfucker!” Zachary was screaming, in a way that it was safe to say Zal had never heard anyone, in real life, scream.
He was going to kill him, there was no doubt about that. Zal suddenly felt horribly hungover, although the digital clock seemed to imply he had been asleep for less than an hour. He had been mostly unlucky, but one small part lucky; he did a quick thanking of higher powers that Asiya’s brother had caught him in a moment of more or less genuine innocence — a mere baby asleep at the breast of a mother, almost — rather than in a more suspect-looking posture, in the less honorable state he had envisioned when he first set his eyes on her that evening.
He was, as the saying went, dead meat.
And he was afraid: check. Of death, truly death: check. And he did not want to die: check.
But the blows were unstoppable. They were mostly to his face, but also his chest, his gut, his limbs, and soon he was on the floor, being kicked in all the same places, as if punches were just the first course. Zal screamed and squealed and shrieked, and when he could he tried to apologize, beg, barter, find some way out with words, but Zachary refused to respond, all sense transforming into animal warbles and wails, and soon even Willa’s pleas faded into blue muted bays in the background.
It was no use: he was being beaten in a way he’d never experienced — his body was being shattered. He felt everything and nothing, so fast that he couldn’t even register pain from no-pain. His body felt foreign to him like all the events of that day, like Willa even, like that Upper East Side townhouse, and how the hell he had gotten there — not then, but in the first place. He tried to steady his mind, to tell himself soon it would be over, and he tried to imagine other types of overs — better ones, worse ones — and eventually his mind focused on falling, the earth coming up at him, faster and bigger and harder, and he accepted it and promised himself: soon, sooner, soonest, it would all be over.
“Fuck, man, he’s had enough — you don’t want to go to jail!” came another voice, another male one, finally breaking Zachary’s singular focus.
Zal, with his face now jammed under Zachary’s suddenly frozen Air Maxes, thought he recognized the voice, so he peeked up. There, under a cap like Zachary’s, in the same big clothes, was Connor, a boy he had known mostly in skin and boxers and tongue.
“Homo say what?!” Zachary was shouting — at him or Connor, who knew — while laughing an awful, homicidal laugh that was not a good sign.
“Seriously, bro! I mean, I don’t give a shit, but especially if he’s retarded or slow or some shit—”
“Not too slow to come and fucking rape my whole world, the motherfucker!” Zachary’s shoe lifted and quickly came back down hard on Zal’s jaw. Zal tried to vocally gargle his blood, so he could know how far the beating had gone.
Eventually — long after he heard Connor leave, after a few more whimpers from Willa, who put up as much of a fight as a tiny scared child — Zachary stopped. Not without a few final words, however: “Now get the fuck up. You don’t get to say bye to my sister. And you don’t get to say hi to my other sister. And you don’t get to fuck my friends. You don’t get shit, you get it? You don’t fucking get to come here anymore, do you get that, faggot?”
Zal nodded, his everything, it seemed, gushing with blood. He noticed his briefs were wet — either with blood or, more likely, he had peed himself in all that horror. He was a mess of blood and urine, tears and alcohol sweat, something he realized even Death must have found unworthy.
“I didn’t kill you, but I will next time, got it?”
Zal nodded.
Zachary spit on him and Zal nodded again, as if it was the right thing to do.
“Here,” Zal said, removing the keys to the house from his pocket.
Zachary grabbed them without touching his hand, spit on him again, and disappeared into his own room.
Zal left the house, without even looking back to say goodbye to Willa.
He regretted everything that night, absolutely everything. Pain made you feel regret. That was human.
He went to the hospital and got treated, went home and fell asleep, a long sleep that he woke from with alarm, panicked that he had died in it. Instead he had dreamt long bad nightmares that had nothing to do with anything. In one, the sky was filled with horrible pterodactyl-looking storks delivering bundles of blood and bones and dismembered rotting flesh they insisted belonged to somebody.
He was failing, somehow, and he knew this was what people did, all the time. In some way, human life could be seen as one big long fail. But his failure was starting to bother him, starting to get in the way of his doing things, things that were sometimes as elemental as getting up to see the light of day.
It was getting so bad that one day when Hendricks called as usual to check on him, Zal could not pretend anymore. He told Hendricks everything that he had ever left out, which he realized had really added up.
Hendricks basically only knew a Zal of the twentieth century, Zal realized.
“Zal, why didn’t you tell me this when it was happening? I thought Asiya was in Europe, that her show had gone well, that everything was fine. . But that boy at the show, the beating — my God, Zal! How long had you and Asiya been. . you know, intimate?”
“Father, please,” he snapped.
“Okay, Zal, okay, I appreciate your honesty, even if a bit late, and the boundaries that come with honesty. But you’ve been through so much, my boy — I want to help. How much does Rhodes know?”
Rhodes, always Rhodes. “He knows enough,” Zal said, testily. “I didn’t call you for help. I just somehow wanted it. . out there.”