The Shrine 2

Jack,

I fell asleep, and I missed the timed jump to avoid spattering into bonemeal at the bottom of this elevator.  I missed the turn of the kaleidoscope.  I missed the moment we were all waiting for, and missing it is what makes this fucking place a meat-grinder and not a home.

You and Rosie saved Ian.  Instead of The Idiot, you played Leslie Gore and he ran from the house yelling her name, knowing it was you.  The house, which for the moment was 77 Barton street, was lifted, and in the chaos of it's lifting into the merry old land of Oz, Adam put Benadryl in my coffee and took me to this hotel.  It might be sunshine and lollipops and rainbows out there, Jack, but I don't have a window.  And Oz isn't such a wonderful place, from what I remember.  It's the stuff of dreams mechanized and brought to life.

The insides of this hotel room groan and collapse under the weight of all the rooms which preceded it.  The walls vacillate from rough stone to the wide logs of the first cabin he built which couldn't contain me, to the plaster of the Riverdale apartment he meant to mock home.  My blood thickens in this place, and slows to something which pounds sluggish in my chest, exhausting my heart.  The molasses adrenaline of confinement which I remember from every fever delirium I've suffered in my past.

The door opens, and Adam comes in, switching the padlock to the inside of the room, the cold air a frozen breath from another world.  He fumbles with the key he wears on a chain around his neck, vanishing it beneath the fleece collar of his jacket.  The smell of the street follows him; car exhaust, sweat soaked into denim, discarded cooking oil, and frost.

The door has opened for centuries, and it has been Adam coming through it, on the breath of the winter.  The broken silence of birdsong beyond the cabin door gave way to the smell of industry and smoke - the occasional train whistle - and sturdy beams placed across the threshold of the house faded in time to metal locks and keys.  The animals he brought for the fire transformed into baskets from the village and now he tucks takeout Chinese in a paper bag under his arm.

I wait uncertain by the bed, watching him.  He doesn't look up to meet my eyes, his heavy brow down-turned with the business of locking us both back in this room.  It's the jacket which catches my attention first.

Pip, 

The armor of modern man is modest and shields only the gentlest blows of nature, for hardly the hands of another man, and certainly never the razored maws of wolves.

In the bedroom of the men who raised me were hung flannel jackets with lamb's wool linings for their stiff plaid patterns.  One blue, one red, and one green.  Though worn by extensively different personages, they each hung from similar hooks, in similarly unassuming corners, and that all smelled of the same pinecone and rust.  

I own one of these, as well.  It's, particular, plaid is yellow and black, in color, and was a Christmas presesnt, from my mother.  The gift, it seemed to me at the time, was ill-conceived for its failure to match the sleek style of dressing I'd adopted years prior.  Odd, of course, given the close attention her other gifts had paid to my personality.  But, considering what I knew of the items I'd known like it, this fact taught me she was passing down to me a tradition of warmth and protection; a legacy.

I imagined the corner of my own house, where I would need to hang it, the legacy, and what it meant for me, and all men unto whom their mothers had bestowed a rite, of sorts, a rite backed by the truth of the conditions out lives would see.  The smell of what woods my father figures had traveled that I must, now.  What travel through what woods, what path I would dull my blade by carving.  The excruciating cold of what time into which I would be made to prove my convictions.  What love I would relent in the warmth of your blood.  What snow I would lose from my heart by melting.  

My house had no such corner, that winter, or the next.  It wasn't until...

We must weather, I thought.  We're to weather and we may not hang our jackets, until...

Until we possess as humble a corner as one flanked by the cluttered vanities of our long-time wives and an unmade bed of our safest dreams.  Until we can give ourselves to the women, the homes they make with us, which we have weathered to do just so.  We may we hang these flimsy shields, having saved us for these lives, when we are permitted, so finally, and so very gratefully, to come home.

Love,
Adam

The jacket is how I have come to know him in the last century or so.  His shoulders slump against the weight of all that which he carries; the food, yes, but also certainly his ax, carried at his hip, under the jacket.  Adam, I see, has peeled the usual skin of his tailored suits off and comes in through the door of the hotel in his brown boots and the jacket which I will know him by.

We ignore one another, here again, in this room again, with the same smells and for the same reasons.  His cologne and my hair, his uncertainty and my fear.  I press my back against the wall and wait for him to look up at me, already knowing his expression will be wistful, crestfallen, and possibly apologetic.  He sets the food down on the table and produces each folding box one at a time, unwraps chopsticks, portions out food, before he lifts his eyes at all.

When he finally straightens the line of his back and looks at me, his dark eyes are proud, and almost cold.  He sets his arm on the table and considers me with a cruel smile.

"No threats this winter, Epiphany?" he asks me.  "You don't hate me?  No um... no china to throw, I see."

I touch the wood paneling behind me with the pads of my fingers.

"You said the wolf was loose in Manchester.  No, I'm not angry with you."

"Glad to see me, then?" he dares me, raising his eyebrows, which cast shadows down over his eyes in the overhead light.

The questions he has are all about times past, and the differences of time and space which allow for us to vary this ritual in the confines of it's steps in order to bury ourselves inside one another, as if we were hibernating each winter.  Yes, I've thrown things at him.  We've fought, and not fought.  Each winter, and even each encounter with Adam is an opportunity to don another aspect of ourselves in order to push against the other in our expression of what it means to be counterparts.  And now he has come into our room (despite the cosmetic changes, it is the same room), and he is cold and cruel and daring.

The softness of Annik that I've lived in for months is what has driven him to all these hard edges, which we need now to use to define ourselves.  I've become a soul without form, and left him skeletal and sharp enough to razor off the excess I've collected of myself and can no longer distinguish from Matthew.

I begin first by taking his armor.  He lets it fall to the floor, proud against the sickly carpet.  A relic trampled in the true fashion of Gray House; Adam and I in time will abdicate all idols but one another.

He chokes on a growl when I climb in his lap, some frustrated sound from the back of his throat, and I see his eyes are glassy when I pull away from kissing him.

"Your hair is too dark, and your writing is breaking everyone's hearts," he hisses, as if I've committed another mortal sin.  "Say that you love me."

It's possible that he missed me, or that he's jealous of Matthew and where I've been for the last year.  It's possible that this is simply a play to get my attentions back.  It's possible that there was no wolf that night in Manchester.

"I love you, Adam," I tell him, and everything changes.