Ab Absurdo

[Dorian M. Black]

He welcomed the offered flask.

"What if it's unconditional, but they still... use it strategically? Is that still love then?"

He snorted softly at the unintended pun, before deciding better of the movement.

"They died," Dorian answered, after a moment. Didn't have to simulate the drop in tone, either. In fact it gave him an aliveness he'd not felt for weeks, as if he'd suddenly been lifted a thousand feet in the air, and Dorian found himself rushing to lighten the topic. "It's a tired franchise, of course. Exhaustion everywhere, for everyone, some of it manic, some of it urbane, some of it brutish, but all nausea at the prospect of Carrying On despite our losses. I suppose I'm too far gone from the world to check."

"So... on the previous?"

[Revd Tweedy]

"'Is it still love?' - I'd say so, yea. Hold on."

The priest bent quickly to pull open a carpet-bag. A wooden cross lay atop the contents; but it wasn't that he was after. He pulled out a dark woolen blanket, draping it carefully around the other's shoulders.

"Think there are some surplices over yonder," he said, nodding into the darkness. "Shirt's done for, I'm afraid, so you'll be dressed like the ghost of a choirboy for now. I'll find you some clean clothes. We should get some of the muck off."

He moved the enameled bowl closer, filled from a large chipped pitcher. He ripped up another length of linen, wadding it and soaking it in the water.

"Ain't got no mirror," he said, batting the other's hand away. "Let me do it."

His hands looked strong enough to crush a man's head: such an incongruity as he wiped the filth from Black's face.

"What we feel, what we do about it, those are two different things," he continued. "We all fall short, sometimes. An' if you're being ill-used, don't mean what you feel is any less real, wouldn't you say? But we've be'n given brains, too, and a conscience with 'em, and so we might make a choice. A body finds hi'sel usin' one they love -

"Well," he said. "They got a choice too, right? Feelin' bad about it, that's one thing. Doing something about that, that's another. It ain't ever simple, 'cause people aren't. An they were, they'd be angels."

[Dorian M. Black]

The lights in his dark eyes were steady; they watched Tweedy's hand, as it rose, followed the damp cloth before Dorian felt its heat against his jaw.

He felt quite ill. Not least because it was clear the reverend was mad. Dorian had never understood the deeply religious. Their inner universe was impenetrable. Tweedy might be telling the truth. He might also be suffering protracted hallucination. The fundamental reference points and parameters weren't there. You had to make a decision whether to take him at face value. Easy enough, since the alternative was a void where another explanation should be.

But then the man had to go and put a ruddy blanket over his shoulders and Dorian's heart had leaped into his throat and he'd no longer been in the Abbey but instead a study that smelt of books and wood-polish as a thin ray of sunshine streamed through the gold gap in the curtains. Dust motes glittered in the beam.

His shoulders tightened into high stocks.

He was glad when the reverend lapsed into silence. Memory's dissemble took time, and his hands and feet and face felt hot with discrete little fevers.

"Not an angel," Dorian agreed eventually, his voice sounding a little dead.

"This particular not-angel went for the wrong men, always and deliberately the wrong men."

"I treated this behaviour quite brutally, not least because it was deviant - 'it' being this deep reassurance they gained from another's contempt. You like that, don't you? Tell me you like it, you little bitch. I like it. Easier to say the more it was a lie. A pure inversion they held onto like a talisman. To willingly abide that another depreciate you, I have never known this desire. I wanted nothing to do with them. So I ignored them. They wouldn't dare bring bedwarmers home, so instead left at unusual hours, back by morning."

"If ever I would court a lover, laughable a concept as it may seem, my respect of what qualities draw me to one in the first place demand they have of themselves at least a passing appreciation - if not respect. This individual, instead, successfully exercised such severe self-devaluation that they had gotten it down to an annihilating art-form."

But the destruction wasn't complete. There were bright fragments. Dorian had bumped into them on winter mornings standing alone on the edge of the wood in the falling snow, the idiot's face upturned for the sacramental flakes. Later: sitting alone in Dorian's study, the mongrel, hands wrapped around a mug of hot tea, at something like peace, maybe just a break in their identity, an accidental transcendence. They were the type of person to open the front door and suddenly and unintentionally give the postman a tremendous fright, before laughing together. Laughter was so absent from his own life that it would make Dorian physically startle.

"I'd had to lance an infected foot that year, a man during a sojourn in Africa. Monsoon season. With the first expression of sepsis the man wept. The joy of passing from pain to relief. He'd held my hands and kissed them and - I - couldn't bring myself to shake him off. It felt wrong to. When I came back I'd entertained this brief and surreal tolerance of the quisby I shared my house with. Enough so to respond to their inane mutterings. I'd been ignoring them for the better part of two years now, so it gave them quite a shock. They'd gotten used to their one-way conversations."

"This time, obviously, I replied. They'd looked so surprised - and I'd only returned a greeting, you must realise, nothing else. I had time to notice a torn sheet of hurrying cloud just below the moon (while the moon reminded me I'd not eaten on the train back), and, glancing down, time to pick out the upturned face. They were looking up in just the way you might see a child looking up - freckled, wide-eyed - at a spectacular firework. It was unbearable, just then. It brought the reality of their life too close. Very few people had ever shown them kindness. What a sadistic thrill fate entertained to house them with me."

[Revd Tweedy]

The young man was choosing his pronouns carefully. It wasn't wholly surprising; maybe he thought Tweedy would mind. Maybe Black himself minded: his manners pushed at an envelope with a carefully-honed disregard; but the envelope was still there, and not of his making.

"So they - craved kindness. An' gettin' none, shewed then'sel the same lack. Aye, I've heard that tale many times." The priest's low rumble softened. "Until it's there, we don't know we missed the lack of it. And when it's found... It happens, Dorian. No way back through that door once it's be'n opened, is there?

"Did you two find any happiness?"

[Dorian M. Black]

It happens, Dorian. No way back through that door once it's be'n opened, is there?

He wanted - you've no idea how much - to be able to say he loved this person, instantly. He wanted to be able to say the miracle happened just like that, as it was supposed to, a door opening, that their life took immediate priority over everything. He wanted to say that as soon as he did feel this that the paradigm shifted, that the rubbish clutter of Dorian's old self fell away, that the contract was rewritten, that he'd come out of it dragging half his soul behind him like a blanket, that he was now - with molecular certainty and before he was anything else - in love.

Dorian swallowed heavily, fixed his gaze somewhere on the floor.

"Yes. We were happy."

Shock mixed with the anger in Dorian's face. For once, it seemed as though he had nothing to say. In fact, Dorian seemed to be struck rather speechless. Anton never raised his voice.

“My sister’s being taken away and I don’t know if – if I’ll ever even meet her again, if she can even make it out of this asylum and I can’t – I don’t know what to do, I don’t know how to protect her, I feel like I can’t do anything, and I just —”

The tension of what is-isn't-may-might-be about to happen snaps whipcord against Dorian. His heart gives a painful leap and the voice inside his head just screamed Not like this Not like this Not like this -

"Please, I can't – to be with you but not be known by you. What are we if not? I can't bear it. With all that is to transpire who cares what society thinks of us? Society won't even have to know. I want you. If ever there was time I would say I need this contact then it is now. Please, God, Dorian I can't - not without - this is turning me insane.”

Anton was suddenly there, sob-screaming into his mouth and bruising his shoulders with the force and - pushing him back - but Dorian felt like fighting so hissed between his teeth and flung an arm out, separating the two of them.

Dorian was angry and he didn't even know why. He was furious as Anton staggered back and his own body went still, his breathing heaving and eyes shadowed above the flush high on his pale skin.

And Anton was snarling. He could almost imagine his friend’s energy snapping around them in hot agitated lines.

"Do you think I would not stop?" Anton growled. "Christ, Dorian. Do you truly think so of me? Think me so unstable?"

"I am frightened!" Dorian choked, finally – and Anton started, as if burned – and Anton doesn't speak and Dorian couldn't breathe for the thickness in his throat and the shaking in his legs and the dark-haired idiot just stood there, expression startled and he just didn't seem to understand -

"Well, as happy as anyone else, I'm sure."

Dorian felt empty. The pain in its reduction had left something hollow in his chest.

[Revd Tweedy]

"Hn."

The priest ceased his ministrations; they'd more-or-less come to their end anyway. He leant against the table next to Dorian, arms folded over his chest, staring into darkness.

"Tennyson said a thing about that," he rumbled; thinking out loud, really. "Better to a' loved an' lost. Not always sure it's true."

It was a line that Milton might have thought fitting for Lucifer, he thought.

"I'll find that surplice," he said.