I would like to make it known that I never languished around like some sort of woe-begotten damsel, desperately waiting for Ben to show up. In all the time we’d known each other, my life had been full. Too damn full, even. And while there’s no shame in having a quiet Saturday evening at home, even for a 26-year-old gay man, I’d generously offered to look after my nephew the night Ben arrived the final time. I told myself that I could have been out somewhere, doing something, if I’d really wanted.
Yet Ben always knew exactly where to find me.
For the better part of an hour, I’d been trying to coax Rory into playing catch with me on the small lawn in front of my apartment building. It was the kind of summer night that takes up a disproportionate amount of my childhood memories. Maybe those evenings become less luminous over time, or maybe I’d just turned into a miserable bastard. Either way, I wanted to make sure Rory got a few in before he started kindergarten in the fall and the machine swallowed him up.
Having given up on anything to do with the ball, he was rolling around on the grass in what looked to be nearly spiritual bliss. It seemed a shame to disturb his euphoria, even if it already felt I was running out of time to impart the life skills his father surely wasn’t.
I zoned out thinking of my brother, only coming back to reality when a distinctively naughty snickering caught my attention. “Argh, buddy,” I groaned, finding Rory with a huge worm draped over his nose. I picked him up and turned him over, shaking him gently so the worm fell to the ground. Rory shrieked delightedly, and I started spinning him around, only to discover mid-spin that Ben was standing on the sidewalk, modest suitcase in tow and taxi pulling away behind him.
“Very hands-on approach, Uncle Elijah,” said Ben, smirking.
“You’ll have to pretend you’ve never seen this.”
“I never forget any moment with you,” said Ben without a trace of self-consciousness. I felt like I should cover Rory’s eyes and ears.
“Also, I’m too young to be an uncle,” I said. “Rory just calls me Elijah.”
“Yeah, your nephew, Rory…”
“You know what I mean,” I said, grinning. “Anyways. I didn’t know you were coming. How long are you here for?”
Ben was backlit by the setting sun; a tall, sinewy shadow with tanned skin, hazel eyes, and a shirt that had clearly been slept in. “I’m hoping to stay a while,” he said, slowly.
Showing up completely unannounced was unusual for Ben. His visits were usually meticulously planned around his work schedule, his arrival only signalling a countdown until he would have to leave again. It had been that way for over two years, our non-relationship existing blissfully removed from expectation.
It had been, at least.
Before I could say anything, Rory wiggled out of my arms and ran to recover his worm. With evident pride, he presented it to Ben, who quickly pulled out his camera. He’d immediately seen the future memory in Rory’s worm I’d failed to.
The camera clicked, and I watched the two most disparate parts of my life come together.
A while?
◊ ◊ ◊
“Where did you come from?” Rory asked Ben as we walked up the stairs to my apartment. I wanted to thank Rory—when the questions I wanted to ask spilled from his brazen little mouth, they sounded much less intrusive.
“Bogota, Colombia.”
“Where’s that?”
“South America. Thousands of kilometres away.”
“Wow,” said Rory, conveying a surprising sense of gravity for someone with absolutely no sense of geography and distance. “What were you doing?”
“I’m a photographer. I take pictures for a magazine. Well…” Ben trailed off, and while Rory didn’t notice, I did.
“I can count to twenty!” Rory told Ben at a slightly delirious pitch, perhaps nervous that he was not equally impressive as a thirty-three-year-old man.
Sadly for Rory, and despite my best efforts, he was not yet able to confidently make it past fifteen. “Six-enteen… um… fourteen…”
Without a trace of embarrassment, he fell asleep shortly after. Minutes later, and with no respect for my burgeoning curiosity, Ben’s jet lag sank in and he fell asleep too.
I lay awake for hours, Ben in my bed next to me, Rory on his cot in my living room. Though I had never expected Ben to dart around the world taking pictures forever, it was difficult to comprehend him lying by my side for longer than a few days.
I had only ever known him one way.
◊ ◊ ◊
After my brother Kurt (morose yet punctual) picked up Rory the next morning, Ben and I went to the beach. We could’ve had sex as soon as we were alone, like usual, but “a while” gave me enough confidence to prolong the tension. It felt like a luxury, having time to watch Ben slowly peel off his shirt by the indigo waters of English Bay, watching his tight stomach clench as he sat down on my beach towel. His shorts rode up, and the gentle tangle of hairs along his upper thighs quivered ever so slightly when a strong breeze swooped in. I might have just stared at him the whole time had I not desperately needed an explanation.
Ben leaned back on the towel, accentuating the intoxicating curves of his arms. “I’m waiting for my cross-examination.”
“A cross-examination is done by the other side,” I said, turning on a portable speaker and starting a playlist I hoped he would find impressive.
“Is the young lawyer not about to put me on trial?”
“I haven’t passed the Bar yet,” I muttered. “Besides, I’m on your side. I just want to chat.”
Ben laughed. “You’re so bad at chats.”
“What?”
“Elijah, chats are light. Silly sometimes. You only talk like that after you’ve been railed.”
I gritted my teeth to avoid blushing, but it didn’t help. “I’m great at chats.”
“No, you’re great at discussions. At debates. At digging deep into information. You’d have made a good journalist. You’ll make an excellent lawyer, if that’s what you want.”
“You’re trying to avoid telling me that you lost your job,” I said, suddenly noticing how pale I was next to his tan, how sickly I must have looked—averse to the sun, just like Rory’s worm. The spring and early summer had been gloomy in Vancouver, and it was difficult to find time for the beach even when it finally did get warm. Evidently Colombia had been gorgeous.
He traced an arcane symbol in the sand. “I didn’t lose it,” he said. “I quit.”
I raised my eyebrows.
Ben smiled as a few wisps of cloud drifted away. Unrestrained sunlight collided with our skin and something made me reach out and grab his hand, to feel the warmth on him.
He let out a big sigh, his chest lowering. I noticed his nipples were slightly hard. “I can’t do it anymore,” he said. “Flying around all the time. I need a home. I need stability. I need what everyone else has.”
“And you came here,” I said slowly.
He turned to me. “I came here. Will you mind if I stay?”
“I won’t mind.”
“But…”
“There’s no ‘but,’” I said, and maybe there wasn’t at that point. “You sticking around—it’s just different.”
“Well, I’m still all about different,” Ben said, leaning towards me.
It only took five days before he started to disappear.
◊ ◊ ◊
Like so many things, the first time seemed hardly notable—waking up at two in the morning to an empty bed and apartment was so normal for me. I only really started to wonder where he had gone as I stumbled back from the bathroom. But I was asleep before my head hit the pillow and didn’t think about it in the morning.
◊ ◊ ◊
The following weekend, I found myself walking up to Kurt’s basement suite after work. I had already changed out of my suit to avoid my brother asking me, once again, whether my dress-up squeezed off circulation to my balls. Despite everything, despite (or perhaps because of) being the elder, Kurt found me the embarrassing one, even when I was saving his ass by taking care of Rory, even when I had been the most reliable person in his life since our parents died.
Kurt opened the door before I could even ring the bell. He was only wearing jeans, and his thick hair was sticking up in a way that gave the impression he had recently made a great advance in quantum mechanics.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” he said, positively vibrating. “Wait until you see what I’ve got cooking. I’m going to be rich.”
“That’s great,” I lied, knowing whatever scheme he had percolating was already doomed. “Is Rory ready?”
“He’s just in the bathroom. Anyways, my friend Jill and I have been talking about AI. You know AI?”
“I told you about ChatGPT like, months ago,” I said, despondency setting in immediately.
“Yeah, yeah,” Kurt said, nodding furiously. He was so catastrophically bad at living in the real world. “And we figure there’s this kinda untapped market with porn—”
“Jesus Christ,” I muttered.
“—because the possibilities are really kind of endless—”
Rory ran out, a bright red backpack nearly as large as he was bouncing up and down on his shoulders.
“Anyways, tell you more about it later!” Kurt half-shouted as he retreated inside, tapping furiously away on his phone.
“Tell you what?” Rory asked, always eager for answers to the questions I was least capable of explaining.
We met Ben met at an outdoor concert by Deer Lake Park. Rory danced ferally in front of us the entire time, though, truthfully, I kept forgetting he was there. Ben and I had never been to a concert together. The music seemed to fill me in a way it hadn’t for a long time.
Two nights later, Ben vanished again. Gone, in the middle of the night, returning sometime after I left for work. No note, no explanation later in the day.
We didn’t mention it at all.
◊ ◊ ◊
I began to notice funny little things about Ben, things I just never had time to look for. How he’d wait to the very end of the night to do the day’s dishes, how he wrote succinct texts to his Canadian-raised father but sent rambling voice messages to his Brazilian-raised mother, how a sticky film formed on his teeth overnight.
Tiny, mundane things.
I wondered what he noticed about me. That I worried too much about Kurt and Rory, probably. Though, with Ben around, their problems seemed less pressing than they had before.
I wasn’t sure if Ben knew that I knew he was going off into the night. After three disappearances, I was certainly aware of what was going on, but I was finishing articling and getting ready for the Bar and only seemed to be able to hold so many thoughts in my head.
“Doing something you’re not passionate about will catch up to you,” he told me the evening before he disappeared for the fifth time. We were sitting on a patio by Main Street, people buzzing around us as a cloudy afternoon gave way to a clear and glorious night.
“The reason you’re here is because doing what you’re passionate about caught up to you!”
“I’m not going to stop being a photographer, though,” Ben said, frowning. He turned to look out at the street, the sunset highlighting his prominent, and spectacular, nose. “It was the job, not the career. You’re getting into a career.”
“It’s a compromise,” I said, taking a break to suck up the melted ice at the bottom of my cocktail. “It’ll help me support Kurt and Rory when they need it.”
“If they need it.”
I laughed, a little coldly. “When Kurt and I split the money, we made selling our parents’ house after they died, I used it to buy my apartment and put myself through school, while Kurt snorted and gambled most of his portion away in Montreal before slinking back and unintentionally fathering a child.”
“Besides,” I continued. “I don’t have anything else. I was never more than okay at volleyball. I was pretty decent at piano, I suppose, and sure, I would have liked to study something with a bit of soul, but how long can you make a living off that?”
“I feel like you hide parts of yourself to rationalize your choices.”
“What’s the alternative? Let my family waste away?”
Ben sighed. “A couple hundred years ago we all would’ve been farmers.”
“Or been crushed to death in a factory.”
That made him laugh.
Later, as we lay in bed and my unconscious took over, I had visions of walking through some vast and mysterious desert. Sometimes it seemed like Ben was there with me. Sometimes it seemed like I was Ben.
Far, far away.
I woke up alone and ran into Ben returning from the ether on my way to work in the morning. I didn’t ask him any questions. I just smiled and walked down the hallway, like it was all normal. And why shouldn’t it have been normal? Our normal was that there was no normal. When I sat by my computer later in the day and absentmindedly thought I rather liked not knowing where Ben was, I got up and asked my boss for more work.
“You’re a good kid,” he said, untold quantities of my future billable hours flashing magnificently before his eyes.
◊ ◊ ◊
I never meant it to become a routine. I meant to ask Ben where he was going, what he was doing at night, especially when things started to become so brazen that he left a couple times before I was even fully asleep. That was one of the strangest things—he always pretended like he was going to bed with me, even if he was going to be out all night. He brushed his teeth and took off his clothes and got under the covers with me, even if I was too tired to fuck or even talk. He never seemed tired at night. As far as I could tell, all he did during the day was work on a collection of his photography, and cook, and eat, though he stayed as lithe as ever.
I stopped thinking as much about Kurt and Rory. I told myself, with Ben’s encouragement, that I would hear if something had happened.
“Couldn’t Rory live with his mom, you know—if Kurt couldn’t look after him?” Ben asked, sitting in my armchair by an open window that was not helping lessen the heat in my apartment.
“She’s living in Singapore with this guy now. They don’t talk at all, you know that.”
“Singapore’s not so far away,” he said dreamily, returning to the book he was reading.
When Kurt eventually called to tell me that AI was out and he wanted to get into house flipping, I told him I was going to be too busy to look after Rory for a while.
It was nice to have a break, to finally focus on myself, on a boyfriend, though Ben and I never called each other that. We never broached love, either, despite it starting to circle in the furthest reaches of my mind, not quite fully formulated but threatening to consolidate into a problem.
My saving grace from addressing the question were all the nights I slept alone, weeks of a perverse game of hide and no seek. In fact, our whole relationship began to seem like a kind of game, one of surprise, of playacting as the other person—Ben got a little stability, I got proximity to freedom.
Except now it was all colliding, the game becoming less clear. Ben had all the stability he needed, apparently, and was still able to bound out, untethered, into the night.
But I was still right where I had always been. Close to freedom, but not touching it.
◊ ◊ ◊
I ran into an old friend from high school at the grocery store late one evening, on the way home from a very long day of work.
“God, Elijah—it’s been what, eight years? No, I’m just visiting. My mom and dad just moved back a few months ago, they’re retiring out here. Your parents must—er, sorry—um, what are you up to? You never post anything. Didn’t you want to study music, did you do that? Oh, poli sci and now law, impressive! No, I never made it to university. Actually, I’ve been living in Berlin—I know, such a stereotype. My third album is coming out though next month, there’s a song I think you’ll like, it’s actually about this lawyer guy I dated, such a loser. Uh, not that you are. I’m sure you’ll be great. I know, third album, it’s insane. No, don’t worry about it, I’m sure you listen to much better music. Well, the second one did okay, actually, it got reviewed on Pitchfork and everything, and I’m touring the States this fall…”
◊ ◊ ◊
When I got to my apartment that night, I was relieved to find the apartment empty, relieved Ben hadn’t even bothered to come home at all; that I could crawl into bed alone after eating crackers for dinner and try to pretend I hadn’t just been haunted by the spectre of someone I’d wanted to be.
Sometime after midnight I went and stared at my naked body in my bathroom mirror. The subtle hints of aging beginning to emerge on my face popped out at me. I felt like I wore them worse than Ben—he was seven years older than me, but I found the lines forming around his eyes pleasant, sexy even.
I wondered how often he had fantasized about me, alone in a dark room or tent in some gorgeous and remote part of the world. Thinking of me, in my cushy little apartment, certain to always be there when domesticity called, because where would I go? Every choice I’d made for the past eight years was about stability, for me and for Kurt and, eventually, for Rory.
I stared at myself a little longer, suddenly feeling like I had wasted my twenties on a career I didn’t want and a family I hadn’t asked for. Why should I sacrifice anything else? Why couldn’t I run out of my apartment in the middle of the night, too?
Throwing on tiny shorts and a tank top, I grabbed my bike and rushed out into the indecent possibilities darkness provides. I was going to find Ben. And if I couldn’t, I was going to disappear, too.
◊ ◊ ◊
I’d forgotten how much I loved the freedom of night.
Cool air brushed my exposed shoulders as I flew down residential blocks. Now, I was in control. I was awake when nobody was meant to be awake. For the first time in months, in years, nobody knew where I was. It suddenly seemed so clear to me that I didn’t have to do anything—I didn’t have to go to work the next day, I didn’t have to patch up Kurt’s disasters.
I could ride forever.
Every street I turned down I looked for Ben, half-expecting, half-hoping to glimpse him in somebody’s window, naked and pressing someone up against the glass. Why wouldn’t he be? Why wouldn’t someone who was free be out fucking, be out living?
I rode around for hours. I never found Ben, but after a while it stopped feeling like I needed to.
◊ ◊ ◊
As dawn began to break, and exhaustion set in, I sat down on a bench with a view of the ocean. I started to wonder if I loved Ben. I wondered if I could leave everything I’d built. I thought about if I was a lucky or unlucky person.
I watched the sun rise.
◊ ◊ ◊
Four or five blocks from my apartment, back on the bike, my legs felt like they were about to give out. My eyes were heavy, the increasing traffic an assault on my freedom. Just hours ago, I had owned the city—who were they to intrude?
At a four way stop, I didn’t see the little blue Corolla speeding out into the intersection at the same time as me. Had I been one second later, the car would’ve collided directly with me. But it didn’t. It clipped my front wheel as it screeched to a stop, and I slammed into the driver’s door, slowly falling to the ground along with my bike.
My vision swam, and I lay there for what felt like hours. I heard another car screech to a stop somewhere nearby, and gradually determined that all my limbs seemed to be in working order, that I hadn’t actually hit my head in the impact.
Breathing deeply, I used the Corolla to drag myself into a standing position, making extremely hostile eye contact with the driver. As soon as I was up, they accelerated, whipping out from underneath my hands and driving over my bicycle.
“Elijah!” a voice called out behind me.
Still dazed, I slowly turned around.
It was Ben, clambering out of my car.
“The hell?” I managed to say.
“Are you okay?” he yelled. I’d never heard him yell before.
I paused, wiggling all my fingers and toes and examining myself for wounds. “Somehow, yes,” I said, though I was certain I was going to watch some spectacular bruises adorn my ass and legs over the coming days.
“I—wow, this is a lot,” Ben spluttered.
“What’s going on?”
“I was looking for you! I came back and you weren’t there, but your phone was ringing and ringing—Kurt—”
My stomach dropped as Ben handed my phone to me from his pocket. “What happened?”
“Apparently Kurt left Rory alone after Rory fell asleep—”
Seduced, too, by the night.
“—and he came home to find Rory missing and the kitchen on fire—”
“Motherfuck,” I yelled. “Jesus Christ, I knew it—” Knew it? What had I known, exactly? I didn’t know anything.
In the passenger seat of my own car, I spiralled. What if they hadn’t found Rory because there wasn’t anything to find? He was small, he would have gone up like dry tinder, children surely were extra flammable…
Kurt and a couple firefighters stood in front of the house. The upstairs tenants were sitting on ratty lawn chairs, glaring at everyone.
I leapt out of the car, ran up to Kurt, and slapped him across the face, much to the bemusement of everyone watching. Not very masculine—I was trying to punch him, but my fingers were too sore to comfortably ball.
“You left him alone?” I bellowed. “You stupid fucking idiot!”
“Well, you sure as hell weren’t going to help, were you?” Kurt yelled back, even louder than me. “Not now you have Ben—you don’t give a shit about us!”
“You could have called me!”
Kurt’s eyes widened in astonishment. “You didn’t answer your phone!”
Everything slowed down to a normal pace as I realized neither of us might win the argument. Kurt seemed to realize this too, so we appraised each other for a moment and then moved on cordially.
“Are you sure he’s not inside?” I asked.
“The fire department is doing another sweep but they’re like ninety-five percent sure he left when the fire started, the front door was open when they got here.”
I breathed in deeply. “Okay, you stay here, Ben and I will go look for him. Maybe he went to the park—”
I turned back towards to the car, when something caught my eye. A little flash of red between some bushes across the street. I walked over and knelt down to see Rory, unharmed, and his gigantic backpack nestled in the leaves. His eyes welled with tears when he saw me.
“It was an accident,” he whispered.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m here.”
◊ ◊ ◊
It was the next day before Ben and I had a chance to really speak. We went to a park near my apartment and sat in the grass for a while, drinking lukewarm beer. The ache along my side sharpened everything, from Ben’s brown eyes to the taste of aluminum along my lips.
We broke an agonizing silence at the same time.
“What were you doing on your bike—”
“Where have you been going every night—”
Silence again.
“Nothing bad,” he said finally. “No drugs. No sex.”
“Two credible explanations gone,” I said.
Ben smirked. “You wish I was out getting high and fucking?”
“Don’t do that with me right now.”
“Because you can’t resist?”
“Ben, I’m serious.”
He clenched his diamond jaw, stubble scrunching up on his chin. A group of guys with their shirts off started playing frisbee haphazardly nearby.
“At the start, I couldn’t sleep,” Ben said. “It’s not a very interesting explanation. I kept waking up in the middle of the night. I’m not used to being in the same bed for this long. One night, I just decided to go for a walk.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Ben shrugged. “Listen, for the last seven years, hardly anybody’s been keeping track of me beyond making sure my work is getting done. You know, I replaced four people when I got that job? They realized they could only afford one person and nobody else was willing to do it, but I needed to get the hell out of Toronto. My life has been crazy ever since, I think I was addicted to it. But then I met you a couple years ago, and I started to think about being… normal again.”
“But that was too boring?”
Ben grimaced. “I’m adjusting.”
“So, you…”
“All I’ve been doing is going on walks. Really long walks, around the city. It felt good to be out walking at night and have nobody know where I am. I’ve been missing that part of myself.”
“You can’t always be somewhere else,” I told him.
“But you can be sometimes,” he said.
We both took a sip of beer, and watched the guys play frisbee for a while. They were distinctly terrible, but being shirtless gave the impression they were accomplishing spectacular athletic feats.
“I have to tell you something else,” Ben said.
“Okay.”
“I got offered a job in New York.”
“Oh.”
“It’s very tempting.”
“Right.”
“And I hear you. I don’t always want to be… ‘somewhere else.’”
“Okay.”
“I want you to come with me. I—uh—I know someone who could get you a job. If you want.”
I pulled away from him. “You want me to move with you to New York…”
A glittering image of myself in a distant place danced before my eyes. An adventure where I could leave all the challenges and pain of my old life behind.
Freedom.
But then Rory’s face cut through the fantasy, bright and real. I thought about all the things we could do together. I thought about Kurt, and the possibility, however remote it was, that he might get his life together. I thought about everything here I’d worked so hard for.
Ben’s hand flinched, like he was about to reach out to me but couldn’t quite make it. “Yes, Elijah. I… I love you.”
My hand did not flinch back towards his.
◊ ◊ ◊
I stood outside my apartment, watching Ben’s taxi pull away from the curb, taking him to New York and all the mystery it held. In fantasizing about his life, I forgot mine was a mystery too, here, just as it was.
Rory was sitting at my feet, full of spaghetti, soft light from a dying summer’s sunset concealing the grass stains and dirt covering his body. I would have to wrangle him into the bath later—Kurt had started a new job, which meant I was looking after Rory a few evenings a week after work.
I didn’t mind. I had bought a keyboard and was looking forward to having Rory terrorize my neighbours as I taught him to play.
We watched the taxi round a corner.
Rory was counting grass blades as he pulled them out of my building’s lawn. “Sixteen, ei—seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty.”
We all could become anyone.
Jordan Johnston lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. He has had work published in Corvus Review, Whimsical Press, SAD Mag, and UBC Magazine.
