A 1923 that just wouldn’t stay put
It was the wig that did it. The wig and the eyes: that was what Nicolas, née Nikolaus, decedée Nico, remembered: the eyes beneath wigs, and the one handed to him.
It was bad. Not just ordinary bad, not just early-seasons-of-drag-race bad, but bad-bad, like something that would have been used for a child’s Halloween costume if the child were dressing as a down-on-their-luck prostitute. And they were all looking at him with such joy: all five of them with such unfettered radiance beneath a radiant night sky by the pool, by the immaculate pine box of a house by the ocean, by the great and terrible city lights now glowing in the just-visible distance.
“I’m gonna sit this one out,” he said finally, and waited for someone to ask why—Daniel at minimum to accuse—but they were all too distracted by their own joy to care. And so he took his escape while they attached terrible skirts to themselves and, in heels, pranced back and forth beneath the lights that one of them had strung into a catwalk as a surprise, one that he was forbidden to question because that was the whole point of this place and it was 1923 and that was just what you did.
Nicolas went up to the roof. It was unbearably beautiful, so beautiful that he was almost scared, and it was several moments before he realized that that was also probably because of the remnants of acid still trickling its way through his system. Was that why he reacted to the wig the way that he did? No. Nicolas could answer that question quite clearly, the word bubbling up from the same visceral part of him that was now set in overdrive: that flinch came from within, even if the sensation were acid-intensified. Acid was the wrong word: he looked out at the moon-ridden sky glowing from behind soft and sparse clouds, the sounds of other idylls or orgies from this pine box metropolis weaving their way through the air, the breeze which brushed against his skin like a trick; and more than any of that, the trees, their green reduced by darkness and then reduced again and again until it was merely the residue left after the color had been boiled away in the heat of the day, more tree-like than trees; not acid but salt, Nicolas thought; that was the right name.
Someone once told him that that was what salt did: made things taste more like themselves. That was the world right now: more itself than it had been ever before.
Something caught his eye from another roof. A palm, a waving hand connected to an arm, a face shrouded in shadow; but the body was not. The smooth chest beneath bare, the flat stomach leading down, dick already out and in the non-waving hand. As Nicolas watched, the other hand joined it, stroking, and Nicolas could feel it on him as though it were his; and he was not at all sure that the other man was real but he took off his shirt anyways because it was 1823 and that was just what you did.
Still, even as the feeling from his own body took him up and became so great that he at last forgot about his frantic discomfort from before, a discomfort born not from his distaste at adorning himself in the attributes of femininity but in doing so poorly, like it was making a cruel mockery of some version of himself yet to come, he couldn’t help but wonder, like some terrible, third-rate fin-de-siècle Carrie Bradshaw—but more longing than her, more full of a painful, exquisite need entirely indiscernible from the pleasure now cresting within—that if acid could be added to the world to make it more like itself, what, oh god what could be added to him to make him more like him?
One or more hundred years before
“I want you to fuck me,” the other guy said.
Ryan, Alex—Josh?—anyway, whatever the guy’s name was, his face was so small and so ordinary: that was what went through Nicolas’ head when he heard what he heard. That and the size of the apartment, the absent roommates: it was arid and airless, copacetic in the extreme, at once signaling nothing of the disaster currently unfolding within and entirely telling as to how Nicolas had let himself be cajoled by this unremarkable, unexceptional man from the street where they had been walking side by side after leaving the party, not because Nicolas was so terribly interested in seeing what the third floor of Broome and Mott had to offer, but because saying yes had seemed like the right thing to do for the kind of New Yorker he was trying to be.
Nicolas didn’t want to. He knew that much, it just wasn’t something he felt like doing with this particular man on this particular night; but he wasn’t quite sure how to justify that feeling and so as soon as he opened his mouth to try and say—or not say but ask, that distinction seems important—I’d rather not do that tonight if that’s alright; he caught sight of the responsive shift on Ryan Alex’s face and he knew, knew with an almost religious certainty that Ryan Alex had anticipated this no and had a response fully loaded; it had been loaded since he had seen Nicolas at the party and recognized him as a mark, as someone who couldn’t say no, who could be pressured, and Nicolas already knew how the whole conversation would play out, his own protestations that he just didn’t feel like it, the accusations that he was just leading poor Ryan Alex on, that Nicolas had fucked Daniel and so why not him, did he not think that Ryan Alex was hot enough, he was making Ryan Alex feel pretty shitty about himself, Nicolas was cruel and unkind, just a real fucking faggot; and that while that all happened, Nicolas would be undergoing his own internal battening down, a chorus of deeply familiar It won’t be that bads, Maybe he’s rights, Can there even be a consent issue when I’m the one topping, eventually building up to the inevitable fact that he had to, yes, not wanted to but had to, it was the right thing to do, and even if there were consequences for Nicolas or his body, a kind of dissociation or self-alienation that was very hard to undo, well, it was 1623 and that was just what you did.
“Okay,” Nicolas said.
Okay now we’re really trucking
Then it was 1123: green green nothing but green, not water not life not green unfurled, green is good, revenge is a dish best served green, the future is green, chlorophyll ping, the greenest eye, ton sur ton, green is your color my friend, fried green tomatoes, not those but the other; neon green, bunker hill green, nottingham green, cat’s eye, fresh scent green, sullivan green, paradise green, neon lime, celtic folklore, pleasant grove, apple froth, neon celery, baby fern, rosemary green thumb, potpourri green, sweet vibrations baby, citrus burst, riverdale green, exotic bloom, lime tart, oh lime tart, sounds of nature, honeydew, parkside dunes, green essence, calming aloe, garland green, country green, tint of mint, daiquiri ice and in the end green just green. Green unadorned. After all that.
Slipping backwards in time: 823 AD now, already, always has been, October verging on August, medieval shit—coarse, medieval shit, gross bodies shitting out shit and sharing effulgence. That’s right, effulgence not effluence, maybe started out latter but ended up former, gut biome time traveler, sinks full of vomit and toilets with piss, blood, muck, dripping down cold backs in the shower, whatever oh what can the body ingest and excrete again? Slick trickling out assholes, Nicolas oh Nicolas, oh future Nicolas acolyte, Nicolyte, whatever may have you, coming back from the party, warm home and wine, no, that was 1823; this was too early and wine still just invented.
223: soft. Disguised in a life.
23 AD, no more and no less: ten seconds from now. You have integrated, Nicolas, you two have slipped into each other like a skin made of skin; stay there, absence-coded when gone, the wisdom of resource redistribution, by which I mean pooling, the fear-soaked divine creeping down every breath’s throat and there sinking, curling up like a feline, a furball, it is becoming quite difficult to breathe on your own. Is that what is meant by symbiosis, you wonder? You don’t; you wonder less than you ever did before, you shed doubts like disease, like disease you can shed, and whatever happened after 1000 AD is such a distant memory that you can barely believe, you man hidden inside of a man.
Just a matter of seconds. 23 seconds; the shadow of absence approaches. The absence of what? The absence of absence: the threshold of a place before death, before the loss ever occurred: before the shattering of the world was ever an object you could hold in your hands. Nicolas, listen to me, I need you to listen: do not question. Do not question the joy that you find, and if you do, feed it back into the joy, make an ouroboros of pleasure. You will remain you, do you hear? No matter what abuses you shed, lovers on whom you rely, whatever is left will be lighter than ever before. Nicolas, do you hear me?
Do you hear?!
After the stories we tell have all ended
Then we are at the beginning: but something always has to end for something else to begin; because otherwise how would we know it began? Think about that, Nicolas-observer, as you watch him approach where you are: think about what he is sacrificing by leaving behind all the things that hurt him, the big and the small. That great angel of personal history hurling him forward and heedless, that momentum built of satisfaction deferred and interred: as he crosses the threshold of zero he must leave that all behind and make his way through a place where he is devoid of any purpose at all.
There is, quite simply put, nothing more he must prove.
He realizes this quite acutely, one morning in the near past, several minutes after he wakes up. He putters around his apartment that was just invented a few years ago, when they crossed over the 0; the world since that moment has been roughly the same; the Roman empire still exists out there, somewhere hurting somebody else, but he is not a part of it anymore. And he is no longer counting into the future, waiting for some utopia that never might come; what he is doing instead is counting into the past. Each second that rewinds, that replays for him, is a step forward for him into a new state of innocence. That should be silly, it should be impossible—clichés don’t exist—and yet somehow it happens. Somehow innocence still had access to him, even after all he has done to it and let it do to him (it is so hard to tell) and he can feel it descending.
You see, dear Nicolas-observer, Nicolas has a habit that he developed at some point in the course of this story, or maybe the many stories leading up to it, which this story’s existence necessarily implies, of ruminating endlessly on the things that might hurt him so that he might deprive them of their power through forced contemplation. This strategy worked decently when he was younger and its scope much more narrow, intrinsically restrained as it was by the paucity of his own experience; but as he grew into adulthood, and the fears and traumas continued to mount, as his determination that he could overcome everything through sheer force of will led him directly into the line of more and more of those blows, this childhood superpower turned into—well, not a crutch, exactly, but something like a shield in reverse, reflecting back at him everything he might throw at the world and keeping it sheltered from him.
And on this particular morning in the great BC, before (after) the great disaster that finally unearthed his pain, the one that pushed into him not just figuratively but literally, which should not matter but does—“should” being the great bane of his existence, the thing that more than anything else Nicolas has sought to shed, a terrible principle acquired from his continental origins and imported with him across the ocean when he went to the new world, one of those inherited phobias disguised as a strength which then becomes indistinguishable from the self until maybe, one day, there is an external rupture so great that a switch in the body just flips, and the body and mind align in a singular moment to emerge in a “no” in a hotel room that should never have been, with one or more people who should never have been, his protestations like petals adorning the bed, a strange semblance of romance, kink gone horribly wrong, and pain, a deep, literal pain in his gut like a tear or a slash, even though strangely that wasn’t what did it; it was what the guy said while the man he loved most watched, it was the, You like this don’t you—never mind, Nicolas says, that didn’t happen, that is exaggeration, it is hyperbole for storytelling effect—and it’s not like Nicolas hadn’t heard that before and felt the words skitter over him previously but this time was different, because where before he always thought that maybe he did, that maybe this was just what pleasure was supposed to feel like; he was never quite certain and so let it continue; somehow this time the answer was so clear, so resolute in this moment because no, as a matter of fact he did not; and the strangest, most difficult thing about this whole experience that he has never managed to explain to anyone, might never manage to explain the way he is grateful for that moment, for the clarity it forced into him physically, because otherwise he might have continued along moving backwards into the endless future forever until one day he would have only a few years left to live while he was still looking down the barrel of a life aimed at him, a life that was not his but not anyone else’s either, but rather some fictional person that he had accidentally pretended to be since he turned 23, and he would be left searching in vain through those strange facts of the life for something that felt like him and find nothing—he wakes up and reflexively goes to indulge in his childhood habit and realizes that there is nothing now close to him that causes him fear.
This is scary to him, deeply frightening, because pain provided purpose, it provided something to move away from; and now that it is gone there is just a vast undiscovered country and any direction to go; and none of the easy tautologies on which he had come to rely—just get through this, next time will be better, one day things will be different—are in the least true anymore; because now, in this moment, there is just him.
He spends a few days, a week or two, a month maybe, going through the motions and smiling, clocking in clocking out, meeting for drinks, reassuring the people who must be reassured that reassurance is okay, which is not a lie exactly—it is more the truth than he has managed to say in nearly two decades or two thousand years—and eventually the fear passes.
And when it does, what Nicolas is faced with at last is a nearly unreasonable amount of space.
And for some reason, it is easier for him to think not of moving forwards into this space, but backwards. The future for so long was the place where he stored all his hopes, and now it is so crowded with them; and besides, he does not want those hopes anymore; they were small and circumscribed by the kind of person that he is no longer determined to be. And so when he thinks of all the things that he has made happen or have happened to him—even now, it is so, so hard to tell which—he thinks of them not as things that have happened but as things that will. Because the future is cluttered; it always has been and it always will be.
But the past—the past is wide open.
