And then suddenly, just when I was about to throw him into the street or to have him institutionalized (such things are not as difficult as one might think if one knows the right people), he would improve, become compliant and almost meek, would seem once again to recede. But I soon grew to fear and mistrust these periods of fake calm most of all, for it meant that he was conjuring something particularly nasty; he would wait for me to be soothed into complacence and then, when I was fat and sleepy and unaware, would come flying at me, his inexplicable rage as sharp and dangerous as talons. At these times I wondered if he might be ill in some way, although really Victor’s fury was too purposeful, too controlled, to be attributable to mental disease; rather, it was part of a concerted campaign to make me — what? Kill him? Kill myself? Even today I am not sure what it was he was hoping to make me do. Perhaps it was merely a game for him, a series of feints and withdrawals, each time more serious and potentially dangerous than the previous one. Naturally, I was able to dispense with him rather quickly; after all, I was the adult, and smarter and stronger besides, and he the child. But he was also a boy, and indefatigable, and had hours and hours in which to perfect his cunning, in which to sharpen his mischief as cleanly and carefully as another would whittle a blade.
One night I came home late from the lab and found on the floor of my study a neat little hill of shards. Stepping closer, I found it to be the ruins of a large crystal bowl that Owen had given me when I had won the Nobel. The crystal had been heavy and as pure as water, saturated with color, liquid lozenges of aqua and green the color of serpents. The bowl was one of the few gifts Owen had given me, and one of the most meaningful, for it had originally been his. Seeing it one day at his apartment, I had exclaimed over it and held it wonderingly to the light, watching the reflections of color it made slide around the room in circles. Owen had snatched it out of my hands, screeching that I would break it, and an argument had begun. But then that year a package, huge and bulky and wrapped in layers of brown butcher paper, had arrived, and inside, wrapped in cloth and tied with waxed red twine inside a wooden crate, was the bowl, as perfect and weighty and jewel-bright as I remembered it.
And now it had been destroyed. Victor — for I knew it was he — had pounded its lovely fluted base to smithereens, so all that remained was a fine pile of sharply glinting dust. The sides of the bowl had been broken into large, uneven pieces, and each had been scratched (with a stone, perhaps) so deeply that the lines seemed like decorations, inexpertly rendered etchings in glass. Underneath the remains of the bowl was a note, printed awkwardly on my stationery: “Oops.”
I stood with some difficulty and stared at the bowl for many long minutes, listening to the clock ticking its uncaring tock. And then I turned and walked down the hallway to the staircase, where I paused again, waiting for nothing, and up to his room. At the doorway, which was ajar, I stopped and watched him breathing. William was spending the weekend at a friend’s house, and Victor was sleeping in his bed (he had always been convinced that William had the better bed). I watched him breathe for what seemed like a very long time. He was sleeping on his back, his arms above his head, and his pajama top was unbuttoned at the bottom, so I could see a band of his dark, satiny skin, the sad protruding whorl of his navel. Oh, Victor, I thought, what am I to do with you?
I took a step into the room and closed the door behind me. The shutters were open, and I could see an edge of the moon framed in the corner of the window, its sallow light filtered by the curtains. Many thoughts spun through my mind, one following another, as I sat down on William’s bed next to Victor’s feet, but I do not think I would be able to articulate them now. Or perhaps even then; it was a torrent, a dark tumult of arms and legs of thoughts, a hideous, sticky confusion of fused body parts and howls, something one finds only in nightmares.
I stood and picked the pillow off Victor’s bed and sat back down again. For minutes — I’m not sure how long — I held the pillow in my lap and watched him breathe in and out, in and out. I remembered again how I had found him at the field, how his body had been covered with oozing sores, how he had been too weak and exhausted to cry. I noticed a faint sickle-shaped scar just above the bone of his ankle. It glowed there, white against the wood of his skin, like a cartoonish smile, and I all at once felt very sad for him and overcome with emotion. I began to rub his ankle softly, caressing it with my thumb and index finger, and in his sleep he moved and smiled and gave a little sigh.
And then I was climbing on top of him and pressing the pillow against his mouth. His eyes, when he opened them and saw me above him, were bright and clear with fury, and then, as I pulled down his pants, with confusion and fright. I felt him begin to shout, although the pillow muffled the noise, and his voice sounded very far away, like a faint, fading echo.
“Shh,” I told him. “It’s all right.” And then I was stroking his face with my other hand, cooing to him as I sometimes did with the babies. He struggled beneath me, tried to scratch my face, but I was stronger and heavier than he and was able to force his legs apart with my knee even as I caught his arms with my free hand, pressed down hard against the inside of his elbows.
As I forced myself into him — such a feeling: of relief, of hunger, of such a pure simple joy that I cannot adequately describe it — I felt once again that delicious flood of anger. “You broke my bowl,” I whispered, absurdly, into his ear. “The bowl that my brother gave me. You beast. You little monster. You animal.” Faintly I could hear his moans, and then, as I pushed harder, his sharp little yelps. I wondered if he felt as I did, as if my very insides were being scooped out and held aloft, the harsh, cold wind rushing through the cavity of my poor, filthy body, cleansing it and carrying away its impurities, scattering them to the night air.
I had been with many boys over the years, a few of them, I am not ashamed to admit, my own: beautiful Guy, with his long eyelashes and curls the exact shade of copper of his skin; Terrence, with his eloquent arms and legs and ink-drop spatterings of moles; Muiva, my first and in many ways favorite child. I had loved those boys, loved their beauty, their dreamy, resigned compliance. They were lovely, and I was a man who appreciated their loveliness, who taught them that it was their gift, their gift to bestow upon others. But I had never come to one with the same sort of anger, of rage, of terrible love and hate, with which I came to Victor. And he, for his part, never stopped struggling, even when I came to him the next night, and then the night after that, and many more nights after, whispering that I would punish him, that I would break him, that I would force him to behave. And then after, when I lay exhausted atop him, I would find myself uttering words of love and longing and making him promises I had never made before, my voice sloppy with tears. Later, when he accused me, I was shocked. For I loved him, you see, loved him despite everything. At the trial I would say that I had given him exactly what I gave my other children — money, a home, an education. But really what I thought was, I have given him more than I have given anyone else. I have given him what I always yearned to give. That moonlit night in William’s bed, with him squirming under me, I knew what he had been trying to provoke from me, and that night I gave it to him, gave it to him without hesitation. For this is what I whispered to him before I left the room, as the sky outside began to lighten. “Vi,” I told him, the pillow still over his mouth so he would have to listen to me, “I love you. I give you my heart.”