"What's that?" asks the man with the painted face.
They’re sitting at the table where the hanging lamp casts a yellow glow between them. But the man with the painted face is still vivid and bright, as if lit by the sun.
"It's a brain," Arthur says, turning his journal for a moment so the man with the painted face can see. "I had an appointment with Dr. Kane today and there was a new poster on the wall - a diagram of a brain inside a skull. And all around it was water, like a goldfish in a bowl." He cups his hands like he's holding out a bowl for the man with the painted face to take. "It reminded me of something, so I explained it to her."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah," Arthur says, returning to his drawing. "But she didn't understand so maybe it's stupid. Or crazy."
"I wanna hear it," the man with the painted face insists. "I keep telling you I'm smarter than her. I'll get it."
"Fine. Okay." Arthur sets his pen down and allows himself to drift two decades back, when he was still young - overburdened but freer than he'd come to be.
"When I was a kid there was a carnival that'd set up on the pier every summer. And when I was fourteen I went and asked for a job so I'd have an excuse to be away. I told them I was older and I know they didn't believe me but they let me work there anyway. I ran the game where people throw ping pong balls at rows of glass bowls with goldfish inside. A tent was set up that shaded me and maybe half the fish, but the ones in front were swimming in the sun."
He flips to a fresh page in his journal. Across its laddered lines he draws a row of frowning goldfish trapped in tiny bowls.
"It was so hot that summer and the poor little fish would boil in their water all day. Whenever one died I had to scoop it out and throw it away. By nighttime there’d be a hill of bodies piled up in the trash. I was really upset about those fish for a long time. I felt like I'd failed them and it was my fault they'd died. But eventually I understood that they would've died no matter what I did. It was the environment they were in that had killed them."
He remembers the graveyard of fish floating belly up, glinting orange in the sun. The sharp sound of plastic bouncing off glass. The laughter of strangers who never seemed to understand how cruel they were being. The rancid smell of rotting fish.
"Life's kinda like that, you know? Our brains are swimming in hot water and we're getting stuff thrown at us. Some people have an easier time because they're in the shade, or they're farther back and don't get hit as much. Even people right up front in the sun can survive. But some just...don't." He runs his eyes down the sad line of fish penned in his journal.
The man with the painted face rises and moves to stand behind him, trailing his fingers along the table's edge. As he bends to take Arthur's hand in his he can feel paint brush across his bare cheek. Together, at the end of the line, they draw a smiling goldfish floating upside down inside its tiny bowl - shaky and strange.
"This is what you mean." The man with the painted face tells him.
They're standing together in the bathroom, in front of the broken mirror with its pieces carefully glued back into place.
"Let me see you," Arthur asks, quiet and undemanding, "I don't understand why you won't let me look."
"I want you to listen to me first, Arthur," Lou tells him.
Arthur nods, still anxious that Lou might walk away or change his mind.
Lou stares beyond him for a moment, through the door that opens into the living room. "There are certain conversations that I find tedious. They're cyclical and designed to soothe misplaced discomfort, or to provoke insecurities that I don't have. There's an assumption that something can be said that hasn't been said before. I don't like when people try to have these conversations with me."
"What -" Arthur begins, and Lou stops him with a raised hand.
He pulls his shirt over his head and the rise of his arms sucks his skin between his ribs. Arthur can see faint scars, shiny and white under the fluorescent light. They're purposeful, following the curve where his pectorals would be if they weren't flattened against bone. Then he unbuttons his trousers and they slide easily down his skinny hips to pool around his ankles. And finally Lou is standing nude and vulnerable, hands at his sides.
And Arthur does understand what he was trying to say, and he also understands, innately, the tediousness of every conversation he's ever had before.
Arthur looks at him, at his face, at his expression - forever impassive. "Okay," he says.
Arthur's hand is still in Lou's trousers, his palm curled around him in a way that makes it feel as if he's holding all of him. The sweat on Lou's body glistens in the dim light of the apartment and the spaces between his ribs empty and fill with shadow as he pulls air into his lungs. He clings to Arthur's forearm with a grip so loose he may as well not be clutching him at all.
There were many long minutes before where Arthur’s fingers moved softly under layers of dark cotton, circling a spot that made Lou tense and shift urgently beneath him. There's something about the way Lou directs him - with a press of his hand or a breathy request - that makes it all so comfortable and simple. Arthur likes the quiet, shivering moan Lou makes when he cums, the delicate arch of his body, how his eyes close in a way they rarely do when he's awake.
Lou's breathing slows and Arthur slips his hand out and trails it up and over the shallow slope of his stomach. The grip on his forearm tightens before finally dropping away, and they lay side by side, entwined, and close enough to be on top of one another. It's intimate; the sated kind of quiet that envelops them after sex.
"I don't like to look either," Arthur admits with shy hesitancy, "You know... at myself."
"I know," Lou says. It's an embarrassing reminder that he's read and re-read every page of every journal Arthur has ever filled; and Arthur wonders, idly, how many times he'd mentioned his own genitals and how many times he'd put down in writing how much he wished they were different. "But that's not a problem I have."
Silence stretches between them and Arthur knows that Lou could abandon the conversation like he's abandoned so many others, that he will look away or change the subject and it will be one more thing that lingers - purposefully forgotten. But he continues.
"When you're touched, something has been given to you. Whether you're hit or kissed or fucked, someone has left something behind for you to own. But when you're seen something has been taken from you that you can never get back."
This makes sense, in a way. Arthur looks across the room, at the little plant beside the television, and thinks about how Lou lets him touch but not see, how he's felt Lou shudder against his palm but has never watched him cum against his hand. There is a voraciousness to sight that he's always understood, how being looked at feels like a part of you is being chewed and swallowed. And throughout his life people have consumed him the way they might consume shards of glass - as if he's a form of torture to endure. But Lou stares at him with a hunger that makes him crave being seen. He's never looking past him, toward some stranger he imagines him to be, or that he wishes he would become; Lou simply loves the feeling of glass in his mouth.
There were times, long ago, when Arthur felt a desire so delirious and frantic that he knew it would kill him. And in those times he would see a man who looked the way a paintbrush stroking over his lips felt. Everything they shared was tethered to love like a raft attached to a ship by a miles-long stretch of thread - the same thread Arthur feels the tug of when Lou looks at him. And he knows that if that thread pulls taut enough, Lou will let him break apart the glass of his body and eat it shard by shard.
The afternoon air is heavy and sweltering and the sun cuts a rectangle of white onto the cool kitchen floor. Arthur is curled on the linoleum with his bare back pressed against the naked chest of the man with the painted face. The desperate way they're wrapped around each other makes them look more like two men in a snowstorm than two men in a heatwave.
"Tell me about someone else you've loved," says the man with the painted face. His voice is only slightly thicker than the summer heat and it melts into the hum of the fan coming from Arthur's mother's room. It's an abrupt question - a snare that catches something fleeting in Arthur's mind that he hasn't thought about in years. For a moment he considers saying nothing. A bead of sweat drips down his forehead and he wipes it away with the heel of his hand.
"When I was fifteen or so there was a kid at school... A boy. I liked girls too, but I only ever loved this one boy." He shifts, trying to find a position where his bones aren't grinding into the floor, and the man with the painted face shifts with him. "We lived in a different apartment complex back then, and one summer I was walking down the hall and I saw him sitting beside a door. Inside I could hear two people fighting. He was waiting for it to be over so he could go back inside."
When he was young he thought that fighting was something all adults did when they were alone. That they all screamed and threatened and broke things. And when they got tired of fighting each other they'd find a kid to fight because fighting a kid was easier. When adults fought it was a good idea to hide and an even better idea to leave.
"He looked so small sitting there alone. At school he had a lot of friends but at home he was just as alone as I was. So I took his hand and walked with him back to my apartment."
He doesn't talk about the understanding between them when he’d put his finger to his lips before unlocking the door. He doesn't talk about the state of the apartment - the holes in the wall, the garbage on the floor, the way every ugly trinket and picture frame had been cracked and broken and glued back together. He’d watched the boy run his fingers over a deep tear in the wallpaper and it was like he was touching his own scars.
"We laid in my bed and I held him. It was the first time I'd seen a boy besides me cry. And then, for some reason, he kissed me. All summer it was like that. He wouldn't let me touch him much but I let him touch me as much as he wanted."
Arthur remembers the pleasant buzz in his head when he’d laid pliant and let himself be handled. It was rough and fumbling and all he had to do was move his mouth when he was kissed or his hand when it was put somewhere. The room was a dark cocoon of summer heat and his mind was even warmer. It was so simple to turn his brain off and float in the haze inside himself, feeling himself be touched and listening to his own breathing.
"Did he love you back?" The question pulls Arthur out of a deep pit, back onto the sticky linoleum floor with the sun at his back and the fan droning in a distant room.
"No," Arthur admits. "I think he was just lonely. When the summer ended he pretended not to know me. I tried everything to get him to talk to me again. I put notes in his locker, I followed him home... I did a lot of things. He ended up punching me in the face and telling me to fuck off." A harsh cackle tears out of his throat and he wraps his hand around his neck, trying to squeeze the laughter back inside himself. The man with the painted face puts his palm over Arthur's heaving chest, over his racing heart, and Arthur sucks in a few breaths of humid air and is quiet again.
"Do you wish he'd loved you?"
Arthur stares at the patterned linoleum - cream-white hexagons slotted together in neat little rows. He wonders where he'd be now, two decades later, if he'd been loved at fifteen. "It doesn't matter," he says.
Content: Arthur/Louis Bloom, NSFW, Dissociative sex, Clothed sex
Lou is fully clothed and rutting against Arthur's naked body. He has one hand braced against the wall over the bed, where his spread fingers look like pale paint splashed over blue. The other is on Arthur's stomach, hooked between his ribs, wrapped around his neck.
His shirt has ridden up, exposing the soft skin of his back, and Arthur struggles to touch him. He feels vacant, warm; curled up in some mossy hollow deep inside himself. Lou's desperate touch and feral panting seem distant; in a different room, or a different time. And when Lou shudders against him as he climaxes, it reverberates through him, deep enough into his body that he can feel it where he's gone away to hide. It's almost better than being present, more intimate. Like he's sharing Lou's orgasm instead of chasing his own.
And afterward Lou strips down and they lie together, skin against skin, one draped over the other. Arthur is limp, floating in a void reminiscent of the one that had engulfed him in death. Beneath him Lou gently slips into the shallow waters of sleep. His breathing slows and he disappears inside himself, to the place where Arthur has gone.
Lou poses Arthur out on the floor, arranging his limbs with gentle precision while Arthur lies limp and unquestioning. He rests his hand on Arthur's chest and bends down - his breath is hot on Arthur's neck and Arthur wants to reach up and touch him but knows he needs to stay where he's been placed, sprawled out in an awkward tangle. "I'm going to show you something, Arthur," Lou says, his voice even and calm, "It's extremely important that you don't move."
He pulls away and disappears from Arthur's line of sight. Arthur hears the tap of his fingers on a keyboard and watches his shadow curl across the blank square of the ceiling - leaving, then returning. Lou places his laptop on the floor and turns Arthur's head to face it. In the frame of the playback window he can see the empty eyes of a broken corpse. Blood pooled on dry asphalt reflects the halo of the camera's light and the dark outline of Lou coiled behind it. The position of it is familiar, and as the Lou holding the camera circles around it he realizes, dully, that he is lying in the same position.
"He jumped from a building in a highly trafficked area," Lou explains. His hand is on Arthur's chest again. "Did you ever think about that, Arthur? Jumping? Hitting the ground? The finality of the impact?"
Arthur shivers under the weight of Lou's stare, heavier than the press of his fingers between his ribs. "Everyone thinks about that," he says.
"Do they?”
"That's what I used to think. That it was a secret everyone shared deep inside. But I'm always wrong about the way people are."
Lou touches Arthur's neck, then his cheek, gently tilting Arthur's head to face him. "You're right that everyone shares an obsession with death. You're only mistaken about the way they process and express it."
Arthur untagles himself and turns. The glow of the laptop illuminates his back and is reflected in tiny squares of light in Lou's eyes. "I think if I had known someone who was the same as me, at least a little, things wouldn't have turned out the way they did."
"I think you're right about that, too," Lou says. He brushes Arthur's hair from his face, clearing away the barrier that hides his expression from him. "But the trajectory of your life has brought us both together."
"Arthur, please come here and look at this," Lou asks.
Arthur is in the kitchen, standing in front of the open refrigerator. He closes it and moves between rooms - into the wide blue space where Lou is sitting at his desk. He has a thick stack of papers in front of him and as Arthur approaches he realizes, with creeping embarrassment, that they're printed copies of each page of his journal.
"I've never been able to read this," Lou tells him, sliding the stack to the edge of the desk, "I assume you'll be able to. It's your handwriting after all."
As Arthur skims the page he sees that it isn't his handwriting - it's sloppier, shakier, angrier - but it belongs to someone so dear to him that he can easily decipher it.
"This is about - there was a store I was very familiar with. I went in almost every day. And one day I walked inside and everything had shifted a tiny bit to the left." He raises one open hand and slides it slightly to one side.
"It made me angry that they'd done that, like they were trying to trick me as a joke so they could laugh at me. And I got... I had to be physically removed from the store. I was banned from it. I learned later - after this was written - that they hadn't done that at all. I was seeing things, or my brain was making something up to be scared about."
"Delusions. Paranoia," Lou interjects.
"Yeah. But no one will forgive a crazy person for being crazy. They'll just think you're even worse. So although I had a reason for what I'd done I could never apologize." He flips to the next page, where a yawning black void has been gouged into the paper. "When you're like that -"
"In a state of psychosis."
Arthur nods. "When you're like that, everything you do makes perfect sense. It makes even more sense than things do when you're sane. And when you stop feeling that way it still makes sense but in a far off way, like you're looking at yourself from the other side of a big canyon. And because of that it's hard to really grasp it." He makes a loose fist, as if he's just caught something out of the air. "And it's hard to put into words. And those words won't make anyone understand because no one but you has felt the exact same thing."
He looks at Lou, hoping for a sign that he's explained things well, and he sees, for the first time, something close to shame in his expression.
"I appreciate your explanation," Lou says, "it was very helpful."
But deep inside he knows that Arthur is right. He's studied psychology, ravenously absorbing everything he could. And when he was satisfied he moved on to neurology, then neurophilosophy. A spiderweb of knowledge glues Arthur to himself. But as much as he dissects him, as tightly as he holds him, he will never be able to understand. If there are two Arthurs staring at each other from opposite sides of a canyon, then he may as well be perched atop a mountain staring down at them.
Arthur lies still, pinned to the floor. He's sweating and the man with the painted face has his hand on the back of his neck like he's a scruffed dog. It feels good.
"Are you done?"
Arthur squirms, just a little, and breathes a quiet "Fuck" when he's pressed harder into the carpet, his cheek rubbing against its thorny fibers. Above him the man with the painted face shushes him and the gentleness of it makes Arthur relax.
"There we go."
Arthur's brain feels hot, overworked, like his skull is full of steam, and when the man with the painted face lets go of him he curls up and wraps his arms around himself.
"I want to be the floor," Arthur says. His voice is slurred and every word sounds strange. He realizes that he's crying and can't remember when he started. "If I was the floor then I'd be useful. You could set a couch on me. Or a table... People could walk on me and it wouldn't hurt at all."
The man with the painted face laughs like he does when he hears a good joke. "How do you know that the floor doesn't hurt when you walk on it?"
Arthur cries harder, thinking of all the floors he's walked on, and the man with the painted face settles one hand atop the heaving slope of his ribcage.
Content: Arthur/TMWTPF, Allusions to domestic violence
"Are we boyfriends?" The man with the painted face has his mouth on Arthur's stomach, tonguing sweetly at his skin. It's carnivorous, cannibalistic, feral, how he tries to consume the emptiness inside him.
"I dunno," Arthur breathes. He thinks about his mother's magazines. What boyfriends are supposed to do. Dates, flowers, kissing... sex. He thinks about his mother's boyfriends. What boyfriends are like when they're not still and smiling in gaudy photographs. "I don't think I like that word. I think we're something else."
"Are we lovers?" His hand replaces his tongue, nails digging in just enough to make Arthur desperate to feel him claw into his body. Arthur's head falls back. The word and it's hissing cadance makes him shiver.
"I..." Arthur swallows and digs his thoughts out of the sand inside his head. "Sometimes it feels like we're the same person. And I don't love myself."
The man with the painted face crawls up his body, illuminating him in scarlet brighter than the setting sun. "But you love me?"
Arthur touches the white of his cheek, traces the knife-sharp edge of his painted smile. "Yes."
Content: Arthur/TMWTPF, Suicide, Eroticization of suicide, Shame and guilt over suicidal thoughts, Descriptions of suicide
It's late and Arthur has turned all the pictures to face the wall.
The man with the painted face sits at the end of the couch, languid and calm. He stares through the open V of Arthur's drawn up legs and Arthur looks away. ”You thinking about killing yourself?" he asks. "I can tell 'cause of the way you twitch when I look at you."
Arthur rolls his eyes over his sickle grin and flicks them away again. "Why are you asking me if you know the answer? Do you get off on me saying yes? Or describing how I'd do it?"
"Would it make you mad if I did?"
"...No," Arthur admits.
"Would it make you horny?"
This time Arthur feels himself twitch, feels blue diamonds glued to the pull of sinew and bone under his skin. He rolls over just enough to tap his fading cigarette over the ashtray on the coffee table. "Something like that, I guess."
The man with the painted face pauses to let Arthur wade into the mire of his admission. "Are you ashamed?"
Arthur sighs, a tinge of anger passing through him. "You know the answer to that, too. Yeah I'm ashamed. It's weird. It's just one more way that I'm a freak." He stubs out his cigarette before adding, "If my dick worked I'd have my hand around it every time I laid in front of you and described how I'd kill myself."
The man with the painted face tilts his head. "That's the only reason you're ashamed?" He's needling, prodding, digging his nails into Arthur's brain.
Arthur presses the heels of his hands into the valleys of his eye sockets and watches color bloom against the dark. ”When the man next door shot himself it was a huge inconvenience to everyone. The cops, the guys who wheeled his body out, the landlord, everyone in the building. They had to clean up the mess. They tore up the floor and ripped down the wallpaper. It was so loud." In the pressured blackness he sees blood sprayed over plaid. "It's the same whether you live or die. You're just an inconvenience. That's what I'm ashamed of."
The man with the painted face crawls up Arthur's body and hovers over him with his lips to his ear. "You ever think it's your fault he's dead? That you fantasize about killing yourself all day and all night and you've filled every room in this place with your thoughts? That they seep out of you and get sucked into the mouth of everyone around you?"
"Yes..." Arthur whispers. On his worst days, when he's on the brink of snapping in two, he opens the door to his apartment and there's a sea of dark mist on the floor. As he passes over the threshold it envelops his feet and breathes out into the hall. He can never seal himself off fast enough, can never keep it all inside.
The man with the painted face keeps going, burying himself deeper. "Your misery is contagious. I wanna drill a hole in your skull and suck it out of you."
Arthur rolls his head to the side and finds soft lips, tacky with paint. They slot their bodies together and Arthur wraps every limb he can reach around himself, tight vines of heat and pressure. Fingers press between the notches of his spine, climbing up until they're closed around the back of his neck.
"I want the tar of you in my lungs," the man with the painted face says, and he's so close that every word bites into Arthur's lips and teeth catch his tongue. He moves down to Arthur's neck, wraps his mouth around the tendon there, pulling Arthur's skin into his mouth.
"Tell me you'll be there when I die." Arthur's desperate, panting. "And you'll hold me like this when it's over."
"Yeah. I'll be there," He promises, his voice vibrating over pulsing blood.
It's late and all the pictures are turned to face the wall. In the dark they are alone.
"I think I might be going crazy." Arthur is sitting on the floor beneath the open window. Warm air from the summer rain drifts in and blue curls of smoke drift out to be extinguished by the humid drizzle. Two lit cigarettes are slotted between the fingers of one hand. Placing the first between his lips had left his hands bewilderingly empty and he'd lit the second in a mindless haze.
"What makes you say that?" The man with the painted face is draped over the back of the couch and the way his arms dangle lazily makes him look like a corpse.
"I think of it like... like there's sand in my head, all the time," Arthur's knees are drawn up to his chest and he knocks them together restlessly. "When I'm not crazy it's like this," he holds his hand out, palm down, flat and still, "but when I start going crazy," he tilts his hand slowly, "my head gets unbalanced, like all my thoughts are on one side. And then when I'm crazy," he flips his hand over and his palm presses against an imaginary wall, "it's all upside down. And right now it's like this," he holds his hand at a slight angle, crudely precise.
"Sounds like something a crazy person would say."
"I know." Arthur stands and closes the window, opens it again and tosses both cigarettes out, watching them streak orange into the dark. His back is wet from where the rain had blown in and dripped off the sill. It rolls down his skin in gentle drags. "You like it when I'm crazy."
"Yeah." His pride is thick and obvious and Arthur breathes it in. "When you're crazy you want me so bad. Like you can't get close enough."
Arthur stares at his reflection in the window's glass, a colorless shadow sliced through with rain. "I keep having to choose between being crazy with you or being sane alone."
There's the dry rustle of fabric as the man with the painted face stretches out on the couch. "So pick one."