by Amelia Blevins
After sitting in the waiting room for over an hour and a half, Jules wanted to strangle the nurses, who stood in a clump around their station, clucking to each other and casting him wary and curious glances every few minutes. They were all a bunch of gossipy busybodies and Jules shot them snide glares whenever he could work up the effort. Twenty minutes before, when the shifts had changed, a new cadre had taken turns sifting through charts. Their eyes stuttered and stopped on one in particular – white male, 23 years old, admitted with superficial injuries brought on by mental illness. Then they would light up in recognition at the notes from Dr. Maddie Lane, ticking off the symptoms: delusions of grandeur, paranoia, impulsive actions, violence, irrational thought. Schizophrenia. Finally their curious eyes would land on Jules, running through all the possibilities: father, uncle, much older brother? How was he related to the crazy boy down the hall? It was positively infuriating. In a hospital full of ailing people, he would have thought they’d have something more productive to do.
When another twenty minutes passed, and Jules remained a pattern in the wallpaper, he stood and began to pace. Placing one foot in front of the other led him from a moldering armchair with dubious stains along one side to a television set screwed into the ceiling and dangling precariously in a metal sling. After one turn about the room, he realized he must look desperate, which would do nothing to stop the stares. He slumped back down into the sofa cushions and took up a magazine from last autumn, pretending to read. The words ran together and all Jules could see was the page, vaguely yellowish like the whites of Kieran’s eyes as he’d held the knife to Jules’s throat mere hours ago. It felt like years.
***
Two years earlier, when Jules first met Kieran, all he’d seen was yet another disinterested student sitting at the back of his class, praying not to be called on. He didn’t let it bother him; Jules was more apt to simply ignore those sorts during discussion and quietly rip them apart via red pen in the comfort of his office. After a week’s worth of classes, though, something stood out in what Jules mentally deemed the “lackadaisical student” routine. Kieran alternately slumped forward to pore over the text and sat ramrod straight in his seat, staring intently at Jules. His gaze was more than a little disconcerting for someone whose interest in the course was little more than perfunctory.
A particularly dreadful batch of essays on Joyce’s Dubliners had put Jules in a foul mood, and upon reading Kieran’s garbled paragraphs he was tempted to email him for a private conference. Jules hadn’t had to do that, however, because the next day Kieran hung back in class, staring at his feet like a recalcitrant child until Jules cleared his throat. The boy’s head had immediately whipped up, as if startled by the sudden noise, and Jules was once more met by startlingly wide eyes that stared at him with trepidation.
“Can I help you with something, Mr. Landis?” Jules asked, half-expecting him to flee the room.
“Oh, yes! Yes, well…” Kieran stuttered, letting his gaze wander to the white board over Jules’s shoulder. He seemed to lose his train of thought, mouth moving rapidly in silent syllables. It was a habit Jules would come to know intimately months down the road, to both his frustration and fascination. He cleared his throat again and the boy actually jumped. “Right, yes. I wanted to apologize for my essay, Professor Whit. It was awful to read, I imagine.”
Jules’s eyebrows shot up in surprise to hear a student admit so fully to poor quality work and idly nodded his head in agreement before realizing it would not be best form to embarrass a student to his face. “What makes you say that?” he asked instead.
“Well, it was awful to write. I had no idea what I was going on about – so I thought you might, you know, realize that.”
Jules held back a smile at the blunt honesty and looked closer at the young man standing before him looking quite mournful. Perhaps he had been too quick to place him in among the lackadaisicals. “Why don’t we discuss it in my office?” he asked, and gestured out the door, where Kieran stumbled like a lamb to slaughter.
After that first encounter, Jules had sent Kieran on his way with some relatively standard advice for revision. Yet he found himself seeing the boy everywhere. In class, it was a given that he would run into him, and even in the hallways in the humanities faculty building it was no surprise to see him sitting in the lobby or hovering outside a professor’s office door. But he found himself seeing Kieran at the oddest of moments: among the waiting crowds at the lightrail station or reflected in the glass when he ordered a sandwich at the Jewish deli two blocks from the university proper. He thought at first that it was merely a coincidence. There was that common notion that once one noticed a person, one saw him everywhere. And each time Jules caught a glance of Kieran, he was gone before he could properly turn to greet him.
Jules only knew that his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him when he entered the corner coffee shop one snowy morning and saw Kieran splayed across a wing chair in the back with a book in one hand and a large mug in the other. He seemed to be struggling to balance the book between his fingers while sipping his drink at the same time. Twice within the span of thirty seconds he almost sent both toppling to the floor. Each time he would turn his head from side to side with darting eyes, hoping that no one had paid him any mind.
Jules took up a small table at the other end of the shop and pulled a stack of ungraded papers from his bag to be marked. After a few moments of relative silence the sound of broken china turned every patron’s head in Kieran’s direction. Jules looked up in time to see the young man gingerly picking up wet shards of coffee mug as an employee bustled over with a broom and dust pan.
“I’m sorry,” Jules could hear him mumbling to the clerk, a girl he vaguely recognized as having taken his Shakespeare course last semester. She had always seemed timid, and now she looked positively wary as Kieran knelt down next to her and made a further mess of the floor. She gently pushed him aside and he watched her sweep up the broken mug in one swift motion.
Kieran gathered his book and his messenger bag and watched her walk back behind to the front of the shop and behind the counter. He then stumbled away from the scene of the crime, glancing back over his shoulder at his abandoned chair, as if he’d forgotten something. Before Jules could say anything, the boy was bumping into his own small table and barely missing sending his coffee and papers to the floor in a wet heap.
“Oh, sorry professor,” Kieran said. “I didn’t see you there.”
Jules nodded hello and waved slightly in hopes that the boy would continue on his way, off somewhere with open spaces where he would not be the bull in the china (or rather, coffee) shop. Instead, though, he sat down in the empty chair across from Jules.
“You didn’t happen to miss that big scene I just caused, did you?” he asked, a smile tugging at his lips in a way that Jules would later come to think of as his “egging you on” smile, a self-indulgent expression that infuriated Jules as often as it endeared Kieran to him. Jules found himself allowing a small smile of his own.
“I’m afraid I did see it,” Jules said, and before he could stop himself he asked, “Would you like something else to drink?” That was the moment, Jules thought, that he first threw caution to the wind. He’d never offered to buy a student coffee before; in fact, it was absurd and inappropriate and by the look on Kieran’s face he thought so, too.
“Really?” That damned mouth quirked again, looking almost triumphant. “If you’re offering, then sure. I’ll have what you’re having.”
“You can get whatever you like.” Jules was partial to an Americano. He liked the bitter jolt of caffeine, but it wasn’t likely that Kieran would choose it over one of the sugary, milk-sodden drinks most of the students were partial to. “I’m sure you don’t want an – ”
“Americano? No, I like them alright.”
And that moment, so close to the other groundbreaking one, was when Jules should have stopped and stood and left that coffee shop. He would later find out that the reason Kieran knew he drank Americanos was because he’d spent the last week practically haunting Jules’s footsteps, from campus to the coffee shop and even on the light rail a few times. The oddity hadn’t been Jules’s imagination, and he would soon discover that when it came to Kieran, the only person’s imagination that was at play was his own, and it was often less than innocent. It would go far beyond dogging Jules’s commute with paranoid abandon and eventually to Saint Sebastian Memorial Hospital where Jules found himself countless times.
***
Jules blinked slowly, thinking he had imagined hearing a voice. For a moment he thought he was back in his office, waiting for Kieran to knock on his door. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday of that semester Kieran would come by his office at four o’clock on the dot and wait for him to finish up his markings before getting on the train home. At the rate this evening was going, tomorrow – Monday – would not be met with their usual routine.
“Sir?”
There was the voice again, but it was not Kieran. Instead, Jules’s eyes twitched up to see a tidy, round nurse standing over him and wearing a sympathetic smile.
“You’re here to see Kieran Landis, correct?”
Jules sat up straighter and tossed the magazine aside, where it crumpled in a dejected heap. “Yes, that’s correct.”
She stared down at him, bouncing nervously from one foot to the other. “Well, the thing is,” she began, looking far too eager for working the graveyard shift. “He’s barely lucid and we’re only allowing immediate family in at the moment.”
Jules knew what was coming. No matter how many times Kieran landed himself in a hospital or doctor’s office, Jules’s presence would always be called into question.
The first time had happened not long after the encounter at the coffee shop. Kieran had come to Jules’s office to discuss yet another incomprehensible paper. He had sat down on the other side of the desk and began shuffling through papers in his backpack, when suddenly he’d froze and began muttering quickly under his breath. Jules couldn’t make out any of the words, but when he asked Kieran what was wrong, the boy ignored him. Though he had been tempted to call someone to help the boy – perhaps the health center was still open – Jules hadn’t wanted to embarrass the boy. He’d walked around his desk and put a hand on Kieran’s shoulder. Immediately, he shot up out of his chair, wide-eyed as he lost his balance and toppled backwards onto the floor at the base of a bookshelf. Jules stood, shocked, and before he could prompt himself into action, a few heavy tomes had fallen from a precarious stack to collide with Kieran’s head.
He’d only needed a few stitches and at the time Jules had not needed to fumble or lie about his relationship to the boy. He was Kieran’s professor – no more and no less. The next time hadn’t been so simple, nor the time after that, when Jules finally learned the nature of Kieran’s illness.
Rather than try to defend himself now, Jules simply waited for the nurse to flounder and flush in embarrassment. Surely she was smart enough to have connected the dots by now.
She took a deep breath and smiled at him, before reciting off of her clipboard, “What is your relationship to Mr. Landis?”
Jules’s mouth twitched at the moniker Mr. Landis; it was hardly appropriate. Kieran was barely twenty-three and still formed mountains out of his mashed potatoes and slept until noon when the mood struck him, which was often enough. Regardless of their age disparity, Jules couldn’t ever imagine Kieran as the sort to be called Mr. Landis.
“I am his friend and partner,” he told the nurse, watching her face carefully for the faint moue of disgust that often flitted over the faces of those who asked. “We live together. I think that should give me the right to see him.” He could have also said former professor, unhealthy obsession, and de facto babysitter, but Jules was not one to divulge unnecessary details about his private life.
The nurse was already nodding her head before Jules finished speaking. He was pleased to see that her face never shifted from the placid professionalism she was meant to display; it was a small mercy. She turned her head from side to side, glancing down both ends of the corridor. “Things are calming down around here,” she whispered conspiratorially. “They should be like this for a bit, unless we get any emergencies.” She jerked her head and winked at him. “Follow me and don’t look conspicuous.”
Jules stared after her, momentarily stunned, as she tottered down the hall. It had never been that easy before. He stood, brushed the wrinkles out of his sweater, and followed her as she rounded the corner toward the psych ward. It was almost three in the morning and he’d waited long enough to see the outcome of his disastrous evening.
***
Jules had spent the evening at the Dean of the Humanities’ monthly faculty wine and dine. He’d never quite understood the purpose of gathering a bunch of misanthropic shut-in literary types in one room and forcing them to interact with one another. The alcohol helped, if only slightly, and he spent the evening in a stuffy parlor in an uncomfortable chair with a glass of wine in hand, discussing possible course additions and making notes to lend books to people. By the end of the night, he was more than ready to head home, where he would likely find Kieran conducting an experiment at the kitchen table. Most nights when the young man was left to his own devices, he would raid the corner shop – or more often simply the fridge – and concoct all manner of questionably edible fare. Jules would roll his eyes and complain about his hard earned money being wasted before watching Kieran taste his creation. If it was edible, Jules would try it as well, and if they were lucky enough to have come across a masterpiece (which came few and far between) then Kieran would deem it a success.
When Jules came home that night, though, the apartment was dark. He fumbled for the kitchen light and when he turned it on he jumped. Kieran was sitting at the table with a cigarette in hand. The window was open behind him and a gust of cool air lifted his hair. It resettled in disarray around his face, but he didn’t move a muscle.
Alarms were jangling in Jules’s mind and he tried his best to act casual and undisturbed. He walked over to the kitchen counter, set down his keys and began shedding his coat. All the while, Kieran’s eyes watched him, tracing every move he made. Every twitch of his muscles, every breath in and out of his lungs was accounted for. As he laid his coat over his arm, Jules noticed an orange plastic prescription bottle next to the stove, unopened. He remembered the email from Dr. Lane about Kieran’s new dosage and the call from the pharmacist on the answering machine on Friday. Before Jules could register the new pills’ presence or even lift his eyes from the bottle, Kieran was out of his chair and in front of him.
“What are you doing here?” Kieran asked, voice rough. His breath reeked of cigarette smoke as he leaned in toward Jules, watching his face closely.
“The party ended on time, for once, so I thought I’d come home and see what you were up to,” Jules said, damning the slight quaver in his voice. “What have you been up to?”
“Nothing.”
Jules stepped around Kieran and slowly moved to the hall closet to hang his coat. He made sure his cell phone was in his trouser pocket, easily accessible should Kieran’s mood turn for the worse. “Have you eaten?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Kieran stood at the counter with his back to Jules. He could hear the pill bottle rattling in Kieran’s hand and he decided to keep his distance, leaning against the far wall next to the refrigerator.
“Why don’t we – ” Jules began to speak again, anything to break Kieran’s stifling silence, but as soon as the words left his mouth Kieran whipped around with a carving knife in his hand.
Jules held his breath, was proud of the gasp that he had been able to swallow. Any sudden movement or sound on his part would only send Kieran over the edge more quickly and more erratically.
“Where’s Jules?” Kieran asked. His eyes were narrowed in suspicion and he tightened his grip on the knife.
Jules remained silent and felt his heart sink at the words. They had gone four months without incident and he should have seen it coming. The new medication must have triggered it and surely, if he thought back, Dr. Lane’s email had warned him to stay on alert. He had let his guard down, if only for a few hours, but it was enough.
“Kieran, it’s me. It’s Jules.” His voice was steady and slow and hopefully calming. But Kieran wasn’t soothed or calmed. He stepped forward in two purposeful strides and, like a surgeon with a scalpel, held the knife beneath Jules’s chin.
Jules could practically feel the blood rushing through his veins, pulsing along his jugular, inches from the blade.
“Jules wouldn’t make me take these,” Kieran said, rattling the pill bottle in front of Jules’s face. “These aren’t my pills. I know what mine look like, what they smell like, what they taste like, and these aren’t them.”
“Did you take one?” Jules whispered. He tried to reach for his phone in his pocket, but Kieran pressed the blade further against his skin, enough to draw a thin line of blood.
“No,” Kieran gritted, teeth bared. His eyes bored into Jules’s, as if trying to see who it was that stood in front of him, who it was whose life he held in his hand. “I won’t take them.”
The sound of the land line ringing broke through Kieran’s heavy breathing and the young man jumped back, startled by the noise. Jules took the chance and swiftly grabbed Kieran’s wrist, pulling it behind his back and up between his shoulder blades. He pulled the knife from his limp hand and muscled him against the counter. Kieran shrieked and bucked back against Jules’s chest, but Jules was larger than him and could hold his own against him.
Jules worked his cell phone out of his pocket with his free hand and dialed, shouting at the operator over the sound of the other phone’s piercing trill and Kieran’s wounded howls.
***
“You’ll have to be discreet,” said the nurse, as they walked down a hallway and through a set of double doors that led to the psych ward. “I can only give you ten minutes, Mr…?”
“Whit,” Jules said. “My name is Jules Whit, and thank you.”
She turned to him and smiled, visibly perking up. “Well, Mr. Whit, I’ll be back to collect you shortly.”
Jules watched as she wandered back the way they had come. His hand latched onto the cold metal doorknob to Kieran’s room. It felt lifeless and hard beneath his fingers. When he turned it and stepped inside, he saw Kieran laid wan beneath the standard issue, scratchy blue hospital blanket. His arm was in a sling and his shoulder and face were mottled with bruises where Jules had pressed his struggling form against the countertop, and later the tile floor as he waited for the ambulance to arrive with a sedative.
The adrenaline of the night had long faded and Jules sank, utterly exhausted, into the chair beside Kieran’s bed. The innocent, fragile form asleep before him bore little resemblance to the man in their apartment who had held a knife to Jules’s throat. He could still feel the ghostly chill of the blade as Kieran had run the tip beneath the curve of his jaw and dangerously close to his jugular. In the confines of the small white hospital room, the sounds of his cries echoed in Jules’s skull, rattling around between his ears, enough to make his molars ache.
The guilt that welled up in his chest was not unfamiliar, but it had remained buried enough for the months that Kieran had remained incident-free. In that time, those one-hundred and twenty-odd days, it manifested regularly in myriad forms; from drink to sleep to insomnia to sex, Jules’s was a walking incarnation of the deadly sins, giving him little room to ease his conscience.
In the wake of an incident, one look at his partner could send Jules into a fury. Their bedroom, which was disheveled enough with Kieran’s juvenile habits, would look as though an earthquake had sent its contents trembling to the ground to be churned and whipped across the floor. When his anger subsided, the broken look in Kieran’s eyes would seize Jules’s chest and his mind would war between lust and envy. Surely this young man, fit in body if not mind, had his choice of endless partners, all of them his own age and capable of keeping up with his madcap, idyllic notions of the future. When his jealousy did not fully consume him, Jules would look at the fit body before him and take what was freely offered. He would take it again and again, in fear of letting it slip through his fingers before he had another chance to do it better.
In the aftermath, Kieran was a grinning Cheshire cat, sated and sickeningly sappy. He would kiss Jules at the corner of his jaw, where he’d inevitably missed shaving, and rise from the bed toward the kitchen. In a matter of minutes the clanging of metal on metal would ease into a comfortable quiet accompanied by the smell of cooking food. During these times Jules would eat every bite of Kieran’s concoctions, even when he couldn’t decipher the ingredients. It was an effort in stuffing himself sick, where he could allow the pleased smile on Kieran’s face to ease his shame, to perhaps let the boy forget that even while Jules was old enough to be his father, he’d never quite managed to treat him as he deserved.
On nights when Kieran went out with his friends, walking the dark Baltimore streets until all hours, dancing, drinking, and simply acting his own age, Jules would take a cab to the harbor, to one of his favorite restaurants on the water. It was always five-star, fancy-dress; a place Kieran wouldn’t be caught dead in, on principle. There, Jules would order the lobster and the best bottle of wine they offered, basking in the wealth, in the sheer excess of his spending and proud that he could afford to do so when the desire struck his fancy. When he finished he would go home, swallow a pair of sleeping pills, and fall comatose. If Kieran came home while he slept, he would not hear a thing. Nothing would wake him for hours, usually long into the next day. Some afternoons he would wake to find Kieran laying down next to him, sometimes asleep but more often simply watching him, relieved that he woke at all.
But after tonight’s events, Jules’s guilt was only accompanied by an overwhelming sense of sorrow and self-loathing. As he watched the steady rise and fall of Kieran’s chest beneath his hospital gown, Jules wondered if it would be better for the both of them if the boy woke up alone. He had considered calling Kieran’s mother countless times. She owned a farm up in Pennsylvania – some tiny little town whose name Jules could never remember – Galburg? Or was it Gallinsbury? He’d taken Kieran there once after a particularly nasty incident when he simply needed a break from everything. To Kieran’s anger, he had not stayed to meet his mother.
A month after Kieran’s trip home, Jules had received a few phone calls from the woman, asking if there was anything she could do to help. Jules had given her Dr. Lane’s information and told her that she was probably the best source of information on Kieran’s condition. She had stayed on the line, struggling to come up with the right words, but eventually she asked him, “And what about you, Mr. Whit? Don’t you need any help?” Jules hadn’t known what to say, hadn’t known what she wanted from him. So he’d simply said goodbye.
Mrs. Landis would surely come and collect him if Jules called her now. She would take him home with her where he could be properly tended to, where he wasn’t dependent on a man old enough to be his father, but who had never wanted children, especially one as dependent as Kieran. Perhaps she could convince her son to stay there. If Jules thought about it objectively, their living arrangement – their entire relationship – was too great a risk. If Jules thought about it objectively, he’d tell himself that always would be too great a risk. Kieran could not be held accountable. Jules had only himself to blame.
***
“Where’s Jules,” said a voice. Jules jerked involuntarily at the sound and the echoed words from earlier in the night. Kieran’s eyes were still closed but he groped blindly toward Jules’s hand.
“It’s me, K. I’m here,” Jules said softly.
Kieran slowly opened his eyes and peered at him through a drug-addled fog as he tried to sit up. His gaze was that of a frightened, lost child rather than the confused and violent man from earlier in the night. Jules took Kieran’s hand gently and helped prop him up against the lumpy hospital pillows.
“How are you feeling?” Jules looked at him closely. His face was so pale that his fair hair looked almost brown in comparison. The hollows under his eyes were grey and his eyes were ringed with red.
Kieran shook his head slowly, returning Jules’s gaze with an openmouthed stare. He said, “Jules? It’s you?”
Jules reached for Kieran’s hand again, but he snatched it away, wide-eyed, like a wounded animal. In a moment, though, the boy relented and held his hand out where Jules could take it. Kieran reversed their grip and held Jules’s hand close to his face to examine his fingers. He inspected each cuticle and each ragged end where Jules had bitten anxiously at his nails in the waiting room. He turned the hand over and traced a finger over the life line, the heart line, and one that Jules had heard was called the Girdle of Venus that ran beneath his middle and ring fingers.
Kieran nodded as if confirming something he’d found in his close inspection. “You look real, and you feel real, and you smell real,” he whispered, eyes still transfixed by Jules’s hand.
“It’s me.”
Kieran began to nod again, but shifted to a steady shake of his head. He breathed heavily and squeezed his eyes closed tightly. Jules reached out to him again, but when he touched Kieran’s arm, the boy flailed violently, shaking him off.
“We shouldn’t have started the new medication tonight,” Jules asked eventually, after letting Kieran calm down slightly. Kieran began to shake his head again, so Jules soothed him, “Sorry, I . . . I shouldn’t have said anything.”
Slow minutes passed and Jules vaguely wondered if the nurse would really be back to kick him out. Kieran sat looking idly around, fiddling with the blanket and scratching at the IV taped to the back of his hand. Eventually he looked up at Jules with tired eyes. Beneath the exhaustion, though, Jules could see a trace of chronic panic; it seemed to race through his veins and settle in his shaky breaths and trembling hands.
“What is this?” Kieran asked, poking at the IV.
“It’s just a sedative,” Jules told him. “Are you feeling alright?”
“I want to go home, Jules,” Kieran mumbled, hiding his face in his shoulder as best he could, looking for all the world like a scared child. But it wasn’t for all the world; it was simply for Jules. “Can we just go home?”
Jules couldn’t speak. He wanted to sink down in his chair at the defeat in Kieran’s voice. Where was the hope? The incessant optimism that had attracted Jules to him in the first place? Jules sat up straight and looked Kieran in the eye.
“I was thinking, actually. Maybe we should go see your mother…”
“You hate my mother.”
“I’ve never met your mother.”
“She thinks you hate her,” Kieran said, eyes still tired, but Jules could see a ghost of a smile forming on his lips. “I know she’s called you.”
Jules wanted to smile back and say that, of course they would go see Kieran’s mother, that he would love to meet the woman, that it would be the perfect chance for a vacation together. “Maybe you should stay with her again. You know she liked that.”
Kieran looked at him and Jules knew that he understood what he was trying to say. But the boy just shook his head again, stubborn. “I want to go home,” he repeated. “With you. Can’t we just do that?”
Jules let his gaze linger on the off-white hospital wall over Kieran’s shoulder. He was a selfish, weak old man, he thought. He couldn’t bear the thought of sending Kieran away, back to the quiet isolation he had fled in favor of the city. He couldn’t bear to return home to the desolate emptiness that their apartment would become if it were no longer theirs, if Kieran were no longer there.
“Yes,” Jules said in a voice that cracked. “We can go home.” And it was true. He would make it true – his truth – for as long as he could. Jules rested his elbows on the bed, where they cradled his head. The warmth from Kieran’s body spread across the blanket and Jules’s aching muscles began to relax. As he tilted his head to the side and peered up at Kieran’s relieved face, Jules could feel the stretch of tender skin on his own neck where the knife had grazed it. It had crusted over, ugly and in need of tending, but beneath it he could feel his steady pulse flowing through his veins.
