The Death of Picasso Page 3

  —Pukey, Adam said, but maybe not. The green out all our windows! And the light through the door, forest light, no, woods light, as we’re in second-growth trees and underbrush, on a spit of land. Does Asgar’s sister kiss him too?

  —She’s the one who thought it up. He can play with himself all he wants to, and does, without his sister snitching. Do we have everything in?

  —Underpants still drying. Bedroom’s damp and the mattress is whiffy. But we’re here, Sholto Tvemunding.

  They walked around the rooms, looking out each of the windows in turn, staying away from each other, arms out for balance, as if they were on the deck of a rolling boat, gazing at each other from time to time, grinning. They walked quietly, one foot before the other, Iroquois fashion. Sholto stopped, listening.

  He tiptoed to the door, beckoning Adam to follow.

  —What’s up? Adam whispered.

  —I thought I heard something. Somebody, maybe.

  —A badger looking for grubs.

  —They’re nocturnal.

  Sholto’s hand on Adam’s nape slid its way, halting in hesitation, down his back to his butt. Adam snuggled his chin onto Sholto’s shoulder.

  —Feels neat, he said. There are too many trees out there for their own good, I mean. They’re all in each other’s way.

  —Making us a house all to ourselves.

  They nudged noses. They rubbed cheeks, like horses and cats, mute. Sholto smoothed his foot along Adam’s calf. Adam squeezed Sholto’s shoulder.

  —Golly, Adam said.

  Sholto swiped the tip of his tongue across Adam’s lips.

  —Friendly numbers crunching in, Adam said.

  Sholto kissed Adam’s left ear, then his right.

  —What we do, he said, is head for the lake, feeling like billy goats. We’ve got all night. You know Ejnar Kolderup? His big brother with balls like a grapefruit jacks to within a half stroke of coming, does his math homework gritting his teeth and feeling wonderful, returns to his dick, which is happier than a Lutheran marching band, up to a quarter pull of splatting the ceiling. Then he carefully eases on shorts and mows the lawn. Cold shower, a brilliant conversation with his father about politics and whichwhat, kicks a soccer ball around with Ejnar, and then back to his dick.

  —We don’t have a lawn mower, Adam said, or math homework, and our fathers are miles away.

  Halfway to the lake, walking sideways in tall weeds, checking to see how their underpants were drying on their bush, batting away gnats, Adam pushed Sholto’s nose, hugged him, and kissed both ears. They waded into the lake, arms over each other’s shoulders, and watched their penises wilt.

  —Sven Kolderup’s cold shower, Adam said.

  He swam a few meters out, dove under, bobbed up sputtering, and crawled slowly back, passing Sholto on the way out.

  —Square root of ten!

  —Sum of the first nine primes!

  —Oof! Sholto, said, trolling the water with his hands, we’ve stirred up enough leaf trash from the bottom to need a bath. Where did those clouds come from?

  —Norway, Adam said. Lakes are middens of muck. Hundreds of autumns. Here, I’ll get some of it off you.

  —Best of friends, Adam Rasmussen, is what you are.

  —I like immorality. It’s neat.

  —We haven’t even begun. Right now we’re as wet as rats and it’s clouding over. Let’s find dry sticks before the rain starts so’s we can have a fire. And bring in our underpants. I’m going to wear yours if we ever put on clothes again. I suppose they’d send the police looking for us if we spend the next ten days out here.

  —All for it. Living on what?

  —Hugo says that German scouts jack off into a pan, scramble it into an omelette, and eat it with blueberries.

  Adam crossed his eyes and grabbed his crotch.

  —The world’s a wonderful place, Sholto said. Get sticks like this, easy to snap.

  —Do we have matches?

  —Does a scout forget matches? You have beautiful eyes, you know, Adam Rasmussen? Your butt is as cute as they come, your hangdown that’s now lifting its head is eye-catching, and you’re not ribby.

  —What the fuck’s not ribby?

  —Not bony-backed or all ribs in front. You’re smooth, hard meat all over. And the eye-catcher has stuck its head out like a turtle looking around.

  —With good reason. Two armloads apiece by the fireplace ought to do it.

  The firewood stashed, they stood looking at each other. Sholto pushed Adam’s nose, both nipples.

  —Foreplay, he said.

  They shrugged, laughed, and fell into a hug.

  —Let’s start our fire, and think supper, as when twilight sets in we’re in the dark.

  —And in bed. We could do bed first, and eat by firelight, listening to the owls.

  —What I really want is to jack off for the rest of my life, goofy and happy, fed by social workers, and with a like-minded friend.

  —Who’s right here, name of Sholto. You’re a devil, you know?

  —Bed, then.

  —Right. But it’s getting dusk. Bring in our underpants off the bush. More sticks would be a good idea. I’ll secure the back. Do we close the shutters?

  —To keep out mosquitoes, bears, and bats.

  They brought in dry underpants, more firewood.

  —Plops of rain beginning.

  —Another wall against the world outside. Wind getting up, too.

  Rain beat on the roof. Wind rattled the shutters. They heard neither.

  The night was deep dark when they got up to pee out the front door, side by side. Adam blew his breath into Sholto’s face, Sholto his in Adam’s. They rubbed noses, breathing together.

  —There’s a flashlight in my backpack against the far wall, if I can get to it without barking a shin. It’s as dark as inside a cow in here. I’m happy, I’m cold, I’m hungry, and we’re friends like no others, ever. And it’s the middle of the night. Did you bring a flashlight, too?

  —Here’s matches. The sandwich papers will do to start the fire. Hey! Mom snuck in a can of Vienna sausages. And three almond-chocolate bars.

  —Moms worry a lot about their children starving.

  —Small sticks at the bottom. It’s going to smoke a bugger before it catches good.

  —Who cares? With you, Sholto Tvemunding, to look at, bare-assed and nifty, to smell and taste, I’m in love something awesome, the fire can act up all it wants to, the roof can leak, the shutters rattle, Denmark can declare war on Sweden, Russia can nuke America.

  —My dick smells like seaweed and is only half down. It thinks we’re still in bed. The fire’s trying.

  —Blow on it. It’s midnight, do you know?

  —Golly it’s wonderful in here, out here, whooshing wind and rain. Sandwiches, apple juice, Vienna sausages in a pull-tab can. Do you want your shirt and socks? I do. Why is half dressed, cocks wagging and lolling, sexier than naked?

  —It teases. You’re scrumptious by firelight.

  —The wind’s scary. Makes it cozier. Scary things have their uses. An owl hooting most mournfully got a spadger into my sleeping bag one night out camping. Scouts. He had no more underpants on than a dog.

  —Paper napkins. Mom put in paper napkins. A spadger in your bedroll.

  —I was sharing a tent with Tom Nielssen. We’d just jacked off before calling it a day, the kind scouts recognize, he in his sleeping bag, I in mine, without taking any notice of what we each knew the other was doing. Grunts of pleasure in our talk from time to time. We’d come, sighed boastfully, said good night, and were asleep when the owl started in. Good sandwiches, aren’t they? Finger me out another Vienna sausage.

  —Starved is what I am. The owl hooted.

  —And here, from nowhere, was Pascal, our understudy mascot, butting into our tent, saying he was scared shitless.

  —Understudy mascot?

  —Billy, who’d been our mascot for two years, was growing hair in his britches and talking lik
e a frog. So Hugo recruited this tadpole Pascal, whose folks are some kind of Green Party radicals. Tom told him to fuck off, but I, without giving it a thought, welcomed him into my bedroll and hugged him.

  —I told him the owl was advertising for a wife, singing a love song. Mooses do a trombone aria, birds play the flute and whistle, cats do an automobile trying to start when you’ve flooded the carburetor, elephants trumpet, whales bellow. None of which impressed Pascal in the least. So I hugged him and may even have kissed him. His mama would have. His hair smelled like tar soap, and his T-shirt unaccountably of vanilla. I patted his pert little behind. It was when I felt his miniature erection prodding my stomach that I knew for a fact that boys are my flavor.

  —Like that, huh?

  —Like that. He asked me if he could stay. I said sure, and he gave me a hug. I could just see his eyes by starlight, his jug ears and gopher teeth. He was up against me like wallpaper.

  —Golly. Put some more sticks on the fire. What did you do?

  —We whispered directly into each other’s ear, driving me crazy. I said we mustn’t wake Tom. He whispered that I was a real pal to save him from the owl. I ran a hand around on what I could reach of him, and tweaked his nose, what a grin I got, and asked him why he had a boner. He said he just did. I said that a hard-on meant either that he had to pee or to masturbate. He said he didn’t have to pee.

  —Rain’s coming down harder. I’m jealous of Pascal.

  —We made friends, learning about his school, folks, about whom he had only the scantiest information. His father was his father and his mother was his mother, and what they were otherwise he hadn’t the first clue. He kept nudging my chin with his noggin, explored around, found what interested him, said it was awesome big. So I felt his, casually inquisitive. This met with his full approval.

  —I’ll bet. Where is he now, this Pascal?

  —Moved away, I think. He followed me around like a puppy that summer, year before you joined the troop and became the apple of my eye, when you turned up in the world’s shortest denim pants. We’ve eaten everything we brought, haven’t we?

  —All but the oranges. They’re breakfast.

  THE PLAYING FIELD

  SOLDIER AND BOY UNDER A TREE

  On the willow oak under which Mikkel and Magnus were lying one summer afternoon there rained down every second on every square centimeter of long sunlit leaf a quintillion photons.

  —A thousand quadrillion photons.

  —What’s it look like as a number? Mikkel asked. And what are those midges doing, bouncing up and down in the air and turning like a wheel?

  —They’re happy, Magnus said in a drowsy voice. You write quintillion with a one and eighteen zeros. That’s nothing compared to the neutrinos falling through the leaves rather than onto them, through us too, and the dithering gnats. They are so little that to them the spaces between the leaf’s atoms is like from here to the moon.

  —Midges. Gnats are bigger. You think they’re happy, like us?

  —They have minds. They’re frolicking in existential ecstasy, dancing and spiralling. The old Greeks put mind everywhere, as things have to know how to be. This tree knows how to be a tree. It eats light and drinks water. It breathes out what we breathe in.

  —And breathes in what we breathe out.

  —It makes seed. It has gender. Like a boy I know. We need to give you a haircut. A corporal asked me who the pretty girl is in such short pants who waits for me when I go off duty.

  —The green-eyed corporal with carroty hair? He winks at me.

  ROOM WITH AFTERNOON LIGHT

  Magnus was talking about fields of greengold algae in western Australia three million five hundred thousand years ago and meadows of cyanobacteria in Cuba, Siberias of bluegreen organisms neither plants nor animals, hating oxygen, alive to carbon monoxide and the archaic light that sifted through white mist, tundras of red bacterial gulfs of sulfur and mud, silent as time.

  —Golly, Mikkel said from his pallet on the floor, around which his comic-books were spread, and elementary botany text, sneakers and jeans.

  —This was the old life that gave, still gives, all other life its being, for these animal plants, or vegetable animals, learned how to eat light and by photosynthesis convert themselves into carbohydrates exhaling oxygen. They were there for a million years, alone, the only beings in the whole of creation.

  —Breathing oxygen into the air.

  —What we call disease may be this old anaerobic order of things, on which we will be dependent forever.

  —How can you stand me, moving in, sort of, like this, with my pallet and my corner, my place, which I keep neat, don’t I? What kind of god would create this purplesilver gunk and lay it down for a foundation, one million years, to get things ready for Silurian catfish the size of submarines, the silly dinosaurs, and us? You can throw me out, you know.

  —The kind of god who did. I don’t want to throw you out.

  SLEET AGAINST THE WINDOWPANE

  The first night Mikkel slept on his pallet in Magnus’s room he rolled himself naked in two blankets and was sleeping soundly at six the next morning. Magnus put a hand on his forehead to see if he had a fever. Mikkel opened his eyes and smiled.

  —Why would you think I had a fever?

  —I don’t know. It’s a thing you do with children. They seem to get every disease in the book, whooping cough, measles, mumps, asthma. Nature trying to see if you’re tough enough to make it. Are you used to sleeping on hard floors? And where are the pyjamas we bought you?

  —I didn’t want to wrinkle them.

  —Winter’s here. Sleet. Ice mush. Tonight you sleep in the bed with me. In your pyjamas.

  —Something, Mikkel said with his raisin roll and coffee, to think about all day.

  ELBOWS AND KNEES

  Magnus’s experience of sleeping with friends was of two hot naked bodies in a sleeping bag designed for one, comfortable because companionable, tolerable because sensual, delightful because naughty, and sleep was not why they were there.

  —We’re strangers, you know, he said to Mikkel bathed and in his pyjamas. That is, though we’re making friends fast, we know very little about each other. I don’t see why you should spend the night on the hard floor when there’s the bed.

  —I squirm, Mikkel said. Do I have to keep away from you?

  Magnus, sitting by the last of the fire, still dressed in fatigues and heavy military socks, patted the hearth rug for Mikkel to sit beside him.

  —You’ve run away from wherever you belong, right?

  —I thought you said you weren’t going to ask questions.

  —No questions. You don’t know who I am, either.

  —You’re a soldier and my friend, and last summer you were some kind of scoutmaster who was not like our keeper. You were different.

  —I’m a soldier doing my national service for a year, out at the Fort. I’m also at the university, where I’m going back when I’ve served the Queen. These quarters, officers’ housing back a century or so, are for married personnel, though nobody likes them, they’re too much like a movie set for Napoleonic times, with their old fireplaces and archaic plumbing. This big room is actually not part of a unit, and was being used for storage when I asked to have it. So here we are.

  —Ha! Mikkel said, putting a finger to Magnus’s cheek.

  —You look great in your pyjamas, and with a haircut. And smell like a bar of soap. I’ll find a clean T-shirt, which is what I sleep in. Is that OK with you by way of protocol?

  —What’s that, protocol?

  —The way things are done. The way two people, or lots of people, agree on how to act toward each other, speak, dress.

  —Protocol, protocol. It sounds like cough medicine. And protocol is what you wear to bed. Your underpants are littler than mine, I mean for somebody your size. I don’t know what I mean.

  —Buy you Mikkel-sized underpants tomorrow.

  Mikkel ran his hands along the clean sheets and fe
lt his pillow, furtively watching Magnus taking off his briefs and pulling on a T-shirt.

  —I almost got up last night to pick you up off the hard floor and stick you in the bed, but thought it might scare you. I also figured you were proving something, and that you needed to prove it. And now we have to learn to sleep together. We can’t be in the same bed without rolling against each other, so let’s get used to being close, to be comfortable about it.

  Mikkel wriggled closer, feeling Magnus’s legs with a foot, putting splayed fingers out to explore. Magnus put an arm around his shoulders and a hand on his small butt. Mikkel snuggled tighter, nudging Magnus’s chest.

  —You’re not edgy that we’re being puppies in a basket?

  —Not me.

  —What are you doing, scamp?

  —Taking off my pyjama pants, to be like you.

  Magnus with a long reach turned on the table lamp.

  —What kind of knot is this you tied in the string?

  —Pull both ends and watch it fall apart. I’ll teach you lots of knots. And the protocol of shed clothes is that you fold them, like this, and put them where you can find them. Not wad them up and throw them on the floor. We’re soldiers.

  —I’m a goof.

  PEAPODS

  Magnus and Mikkel eating peapods from a paper bag.

  —The animals, where are they?

  Mikkel thought about this, rubbing his nose with a knuckle.

  —No polar bears on the equator, no giraffes in the Faeroes, is that it?

  —Tigers in New Zealand?

  —Where’s New Zealand?

  —Maoris, mountains, one island north, one south. The atlas we bought is, I know, terrific for keeping your drawings in, but it also has maps.

  —Can we go and stand on the Arctic Circle? There’s a picture of that, scouts who look like Swedes, camping on the Arctic Circle.

  —Tomorrow. Today we’re doing laundry, buying groceries, looking in at a bookstore, maybe a good long walk out to Ordrupsgaard.

  SUNDAY IN THE PARK

  —With friends, real friends, Magnus said, the space they fill belongs to them both, as at home in the other’s space as in their own. I don’t think you got a burn. You’re going to radiate heat for awhile, but this lotion should soothe the more scorched parts. Do I include your piddler, or is that reserved space?