Chapter Forty-Four Love: Part One: Survival 4 страница

“After about three years of almost constant abuse, Keith was caught,” Gerard explained, the somber attitude lifting for a second. A mere second, at best. “There was never enough evidence to support anything, especially since Mikey was convinced nothing had gone wrong. He was happy to be with Keith and despite the doctors insisting something was wrong, Mikey insisted he was fine. There were no rape kits back then, and nothing could ever be proved.”

Not that much else could be proved with them today, I thought bleakly in my head, thinking of all those kits rotting away in freezers, probably next to my own.

Gerard drew in a deep breath, his arm gripping me tightly at the mere mention of the dreaded kit. I squeezed him back, his hurt from before making sense; too much fucking sense. Gerard had taken the lead talking again, sitting up against the headboard slightly. I had crawled into my spot below his underarm, draping myself across from him as his memories draped and blurred across his vision.

“For a long, long time after Mikey still thought everything was fine and okay. Keith was forbidden to see him, but Mikey even snuck out to see him one night.” Gerard paused, almost waiting to see if I could understand the similarities yet. I did, but I didn’t want to. I just wanted to hear the rest of the story, despite the brutal end I knew was coming. “Keith raped him again, obviously. And my father blamed me for it.”

“Why?”

“Because I was supposed to be looking after Mikey,” he explained, resentment clear in his voice. “I was supposed to be watching him. He was supposed to be in my room. I thought he was old enough to be on his own, and he wanted to be on his own. I just didn’t think he’d actually sneak out to go see Keith. I was also blamed because I was the gay son. These activities were brought on by having the fag child. I hadn’t come out yet, I was still debating things myself. But I still got blamed. And fuck, that hurt more than anything.”

He grew silent again, and I needed to stop this, even if it wasn’t over yet. I wrapped my arms around him even tighter, willing all the bad things away. I knew he was trying to get me to see a parallel between myself and Mikey, but I refused to see it. It wasn’t like that with Gerard. It was never like that with him. I wanted to be there, and I knew it wasn’t rape. It couldn’t be rape. And surely Gerard didn’t think it was rape either. He had to know how much our sex – our sex, not his, or mine, or anything singular – mattered. Sex was never between one person, he had told me. It was intimate. If one person didn’t want it, neither did the other one. He had told me this so long ago, and I had merely taken it as simple, yet cliché, advice that somehow managed to sound beautiful coming out of him. It was suddenly not so cliché and an element of tragedy was added on to it.

Everything about Gerard was tragic, I began to realize. His family life had been dark and depressing, even before I knew this detail about Mikey. He had lived through friends’ deaths, lovers’ deaths, a family torn apart by hate, and dreams of Paris shattered before his eyes. Even in the darkest pits of despair though, he managed to turn it into something beautiful. That was why he painted, I conceived. He wanted to give color to the things that would never be able to acquire a hue all by themselves. He was going to save lives that way. If he could show people how to see the beauty in the darkness around them, show them colors and hues they had never seen before, he gave them a reason to live. He had given me so many reasons to live, so many colors and spectrums to choose from. He was saving my life as he held me in his arms. He began to recount to me the night he saved Mikey’s, though he didn’t glorify his mission the way I did in my mind.

“I knew their relationship wasn’t healthy,” Gerard stated tactfully. “I saw the way they acted. Keith ordered him around. Whatever Keith said, it was a fact. And without this shit of a person, Mikey was lost. He didn’t know what to do; more importantly, he didn’t know what he wanted to do.

“Keith moved away when Mikey was fourteen, two years full of denial after the abuse had been put to an end. The first week he was gone had been hell, when we all should have been rejoicing. Mikey never left his room. He was acting the way he should have been acting when he was raped, not when his rapist was finally out of his life. But if rape was all you knew, then you missed it just the same.”

Gerard shifted his weight suddenly, and it seemed to shift his mindset. He looked down at me, and for what felt like the first time in ages, he smiled.

“Then one day, Mikey couldn’t take it anymore. He saw his blood stained clothing and snapped. He walked around the house all night – luckily our parents were gone – just fucking smashing things. He found a dish, he smashed it. He found a lamp, he smashed it. He even got a hold of one of my canvases I had been working on and smashed it. I let him. I encouraged him and told him he should have done this ages ago. I had always been close to him, but even since Keith had been found out, I felt like I had failed him. I should have seen it coming. I should have stopped it.” He sighed, then recuperated quick from his lapse of sadness, and back to the triumphant state of his brother. “But right then, it was like we were kids again, bitching and moaning over how our parents would never let us be what we wanted to be, hovering around comic books. Mikey was finally free from Keith. It had taken fucking years, but fuck, it had been worth the wait. His eyes that night… they finally had color in them again.”

The way he had said the word free made my heart skip a beat. I wondered what that felt like; the warm elatedness that you were no longer tied down by something so harsh and malignant. I wanted the euphoria Gerard was describing to course through my veins like no other. I wanted that sense of pride, which Gerard displayed on his face with a large smile. I felt my heart swell – not with hurt for a helpless and guilty Gerard and his abused brother, but with happiness, sheer and utter happiness. Gerard had set his brother free and saved his life. Gave him color again. It was a path he had been doing with me for ages, whether he fully intended to or not.

His full intention of this story however, no matter how beautiful, was not his brother’s triumph. It was the parallel between him and I, which I still didn’t want to see.

“You know where I’m going with this…” Gerard trailed off, looking down at me briefly, then away again. He loosened the hand that was on my waist, and ran his other through his hair. Even though Gerard was still wearing his shirt and pants, I felt his body grow colder, and I did my best attempts at warmth, letting my voice speak about the forbidden action.

“Gerard,” I started slowly, placing my hand on his clothed chest. He let it stay there, though I could feel his rhythm changing. I noticed that though he was nervous when I did touch him, he let me. But he needed consent if he wanted to do the same to me. It was clear he wanted to do it; he just had this thick mental block I was trying to clear.

“We’re not like they were. I want to be with you.” I rubbed my hand on his chest, slipping a finger inside one of the slits between buttons. Even his skin felt cold.

“Mikey said he wanted to be with Keith, too…”

“But you said their relationship wasn’t healthy,” I countered, rubbing my hand on his chest more. “We are.”

“How do you know that?” he argued, his voice pained and stressed. He thought for a moment, recalling something with a scoff. “Your opinion of something you have is subjective. We may think this is healthy, but everyone else’s interpretations vary…”

I crushed my eyes shut, recognizing the words. This was the exact same argument he had used when talking about my guitar playing. I said it sucked, but my opinion didn’t matter because I was subjective. But fuck, that was a guitar. Not love. We could be subjective here because the objective personality would not understand. We saw examples of that when we were placed outside this contained environment, though masked, in mere minutes. People didn’t want us to be together. But we did. Wasn’t that all that mattered?

I explained this to him, as best I could without sounding like a bumbling fool, and also without spewing my feelings on love too often. I didn’t want to scare him again. I knew he felt it, but I didn’t have to run my mouth off. I needed him to be okay touching me, before he was okay loving me. One step at a time.

He grew silent for a long time, hearing my arguments which I had lined up in order, even gotten a professional opinion about. “I’ve been to a shrink, Gerard,” I stated weakly. “They made me go to make sure nothing bad had happened to me.”

He perked up hearing this, asking a strong, “And?”

“I’m fine,” I breathed. I saw his face drop still, conflicted with what he was feeling inside, what I was telling him, and the legal technicalities we had narrowly avoided. He was thinking harder than I had ever seen him, and he was always thinking. He never had this blank look to his face that a lot of people I knew had. When he wasn’t talking to someone, he was staring off into space, his lips usually pursed in a soulful glare. Gerard needed to think to be alive, it was how he knew his brain was working, how he knew he was still working. But he was working on overdrive just then, and I reached out my hand from his chest, running it along his jaw line gingerly to slow him down. It stirred something within him, and he gazed down at me, almost forgetting that one of the opposing forces was in the room. He looked away again, once more with an overflowing sigh.

“I don’t want to hurt you…”

“You won’t,” I said strongly, still clutching at him. I knew that no matter how hard I clutched, this would be going around and around in circles all night. I could see that, and I couldn’t argue with him anymore. All he wanted was something everyone should feel for people. He didn’t want to hurt me. He didn’t want me to feel like Mikey, having everything disappear and then be left alone, but with nothing to smash. I had done a lot of smashing already. I had obliterated my dad’s guitar. And I fucking felt exhilarated after that. I was fine. I had a new passion in life – the camera.

And that was when it hit me.

The camera shows the truth that people distort, I told myself slowly inside my head. This was the truth I wanted then, and the camera was the answer. The truth that even Gerard, the usual voice of reason, couldn’t see. We were not like Mikey and Keith, and he was not to be blamed in this situation all over again. The camera could show him that, release him from the shackles of confinement he had put on himself. The entire time I had been with him, he was all about freedom. You needed art and creativity in your life to be free. He had stopped painting. He was no longer free, while I was just testing my wings. My freedom would lead to his freedom, I knew it. I could feel it. It would be the first thing I could do for him, after taking and taking so much. It was the fucking least I could do.

“Gerard,” I called, my voice simple and light, instead of the deep somber qualities it had possessed before. He glanced down at me, his expressed still pained, but curious. I smiled, trying to spread the light into the room before I shuffled out of his grip with a quick, “I have something to show you.”

Gerard didn’t follow, which had been my goal all along. I need him to wait for me in bed, in his room that had always been the black abyss before, while I got the object that would essentially save our souls. Together.

When I climbed back onto the covers, Gerard was sitting upright, his full back against the headboard, and he had done up the few buttons I had undone while I was gone. I ignored it, and instead placed the camera in the center of the bed in between our two bodies. I let my hand fall away from it, leaving it like a spectacle we could admire. He looked at me, then down at the object and back at me again, before cocking an eyebrow.

“Frank…?”

“It’s a camera,” I started right away, after waiting for his cue to continue. I wanted him to build up that curiosity he had – he always did the same with me. “But it’s more than that, like a painting is more that just brush strokes on a canvas.” I smiled, moving my head and my hands as I talked smugly. I could see Gerard’s grin peak up at my words, and he knew I had been learning well from him.

“What is it, then?” He played along, and leaned in more.

“A camera sees the truth,” I stated bluntly. “When people see a painting, or make a painting, they make it whatever they want. Red clouds, blue grass, underwater sky.” I smiled at him, and he smiled right back, recognizing his own words. I never knew the joy of having myself quoted, but I could only hope I would as I kept going on. “But with a camera, it is the decider in the matter. You take the picture, but – like you said – it’s subjective. You may think you’re taking a picture of a door, but it could be something else entirely. You may see the cracks and holes of the wall instead. You don’t see what you initially saw when you first wanted to take the picture. The camera develops that image, and all you’re left with is the true meaning. You see the truth, Gerard.”

I stopped, using his name like he did mine many times before, to get attention. He was already full alert, following along, his eyebrows raised curiously. I still didn’t think he knew exactly where I was headed, but as I grabbed the camera in the center of the bed and held it up to my face, smiling and looking hard at him, I was pretty sure he understood it all.

“This can tell our story, Gerard. This can show everyone – or even just us - what this all really means. What we really feel in this moment. No present or past or future. Just us. Just now. Just the truth.”

I took a breath, adding effect and helping me deliver everything exactly the way I wanted to. I had mused so much inside my head, I wasn’t sure if I could get it all out in a few small statements. I didn’t know how Gerard could do this with such little effort some days. It took a lot to think on his plane, and I felt like I was constantly slipping. The way his eyes lit up though, and danced around as he followed my lips, made everything seem worth it. And I have to admit, it felt really good being the teacher. I realized why Gerard had always invited me back. I liked the look of light in his eyes, the way he smiled when he understood, and the fact that I had made him understand.

But we weren’t done yet. Once you learn something, you have to put it into play.
I moved the camera from the side of my head where I had it on display to in front of us, and then pushed it gingerly into his arms.

“Take our picture.” I dropped the heavy object into his palm. He let it rest there for a while, looking down at it, twisting it in between his fingers, before he comprehended everything completely.

“I’ve never taken a good picture,” he stated, his sly smile coming back to his face. There was pain in his words even still, but from a different origin. Something much deeper than just taking a bad picture.

“I’ll be the judge of that,” I informed him, then paused and caught my mistake. “ The camera will be the judge of that.”

I crawled across the bed to him, my face getting closer and closer to his own. I kept my eyes open as I descended upon his lips, watching his anxiety at first. He clutched the camera between his fingers, giving him the strength and security to meet our lips together. I heard a click and a sudden flash hit the room, flooding from Gerard’s lap and up onto our faces as we met briefly in our embrace. It was now caught on film and forever in our memories. I broke the kiss temporarily to look down at him, seeing the sheer delight on his face. This was my passion, but like his painting, we were sharing our passions with each other, having them blend into on entity. Into everything.

“I think you’re getting the hang of this,” I said, just as Gerard snapped another one of our feet tangled together in front of us. I had moved to sit beside him rather than hovering over him like before, giving him more freedom to handle the object I had been accustomed to for the past few weeks. I smiled and placed my head on his shoulder, my hand finding his arm and gradually slinking its way up to his palm as he took his finger away from the button.

“I think you’ve found your way to change the world,” he stated delicately. He squeezed my hand, giving me the most important validation he ever could. I could change the world with this. But at that moment, I was only concerned with the world we had created inside this dirty old apartment building. I turned my head to meet his lips again, and there was no hesitation this time. He brought his pink ones to my own, and our tongues slipped together easily and fit together again. There was no awkward wording or positioning, and things flowed. His hands found my pants again, done up again before our discussion – but there was nothing to discuss now. We would get the truth from the pictures, which he and I were occasionally still snapping, and I would know if I changed the world in years to come. At that moment in time, saving Gerard’s world was my best accomplishment to date. And something I never thought was possible.

This world of saving lives, though sometimes dangerous and vindictive, was beautiful as we both held it in our hands. He pushed me down onto the bed gracefully, and it felt as if he was shedding honor onto my shoulders. I was out to save the world, and despite the strain I could still witness etched across his green eyes, I knew I was up for it. Once I had been welcomed inside, it was hard to come out.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14