The woman eyed him the way anyone would eye the brusque unknown—her wariness felt modern and familiar. There was a nervousness in her voice, but a determination to snap back, her eyes were calculating for a moment, then decisive. “I’m just here with my four boys”—she gestured to four children sat around her—“showing support for their father who’s in Wales as we speak, making sure you’ve got bread to eat and a roof over your head.” The oldest of the boys glared at us and the old man, who continued barking his rant.
“You know King Arthur was Welsh, right?” he said. “You lot love to ride into London for the day and have fun at the games and all this blasphemy, but he was a Welshman through and through and you and your boys can rest assured that when he comes again he’ll rip up all the castles your daddy and king—”
“Oh, so he’s still on his way then?” The woman broke into sharp laughter. “Anytime now, right? We’re all waiting! Typical for a Welshman to be snoozing while his country’s being conquered. The lazy bastard couldn’t even show up for Caerphilly.”
“No lazier than an army-pension-sucking pig—that’s what you are, aren’t you? Showing up to the trough?”
And with that the oldest of the children sprang up from his seat. He couldn’t be any older than ten, but his hand was on his belt, on the hilt of a small dagger. The old man got up as well, shaky but determined and seething.
Simon pulled my arm. “Let’s go.” He didn’t want us becoming part of a scene. We ducked away just as the child lunged at the old man. Commotion rippled through the surrounding crowd, whichwe pushed our way through, making our way to a side street. Only a piercing, sudden yelp broke through the jeers, and whether it was the old man or the child, I didn’t want to know.
The commotion made me nervous. If the lord of the manor at Greenwich came looking for us—and surely he would—there were few places he’d need to go and few people he’d need to ask. London felt, aside from its anthill-like density, like a small room. The anonymity it would one day afford its residents didn’t exist yet. We couldn’t stay, I decided.
“Of course we can,” said Simon, and maybe he took my worry to mean monetarily because he patted his newly filled coin purse, then patted my back. And again here was the whiplash sensibility of Simon—of caution in the crowd, but oh look, another open market at the end of the side street, another extension of the festival, another rowdy party, and it was all too easy for me to be charmed and give way because this newfound freedom was just as sweet for me as it was for him. We bought apples cooked in butter, a venison leg, two silly hats. We watched a stage performance of King Arthur saving Guinevere from an evil knight. We linked arms and drank grassy, murky ale and wandered the streets, the clustered shops, ruddy pubs, the afternoon turning orange and blue. We bought beer after beer. We shat side by side into a communal midden. We danced together and with strangers. My head became overstuffed with circumstance and celebration, and where in my modern life we had the internet and texting and breaking news, here there was nothing but our own brains and what stimulations we chose or had foisted upon them—the music, the smells, the touching, the echoes of shouts and screams and songs.
The touching was strange. Maybe not strange, but I made note of it. I was comfortable with it because I was comfortable with Simon after our escape together and, before that, our months of waning interaction, but still I noticed the touching—his hand on my chest when we were talking about jousting earlier, the two of us drunkenly linking arms, his hand lingering warmly on my shoulder blade throughout the day and into the evening, sharing food and drink. It was friendship and trust between us, that was all, but my ever-drunkening brain granted more dominance to old paranoias and complication and while a greedy part of me didn’t mind the extended touching—because Simon was physically attractive, I could admit—I couldn’t help but read into it more than just anthropologically.
Simply put, I didn’t know what Simon’s intentions were. I didn’t know him really, at all, I had to admit. There was a barrier. And the drunker I got, those differences and that gulf became more apparent instead of dulled. The natural affability in his eyes misdirected me, daring me to come closer but inching steadily backward at the same time—a clear strategy. I felt frustrated and stubborn, only plodding along because what was my plan anyway? As we cheered in crowds and danced and sang, I began to feel an unmistakable sense of alienation—a distinctly modern feeling—and though alcohol eased the harshness of this world, it gave way to a melancholic egoism, my modern-brain telling me that the miscommunication inherent to my existence here was a result of something everyone else lacked, that I was worth more than this. These are barbarians, I thought to myself. I’m in the midst of a musty group of bodies that are all technically dead. Simon is handsome and fun but not alive. These arethe dark ages. I’m surrounded by dead, foolish ghosts and I don’t belong here. My cheeks flushed red and furious. Still, I let Simon force me to dance.
I’ve always felt alienated, but it’s not like that’s an uncommon feeling. I grew up in the classically homophobic 1990s and early 2000s and this had throttled me in all the ways that are too commonly detailed now—the bullying, the name-calling, the lost friendships—so common it’s almost embarrassing to give them credit for their formativeness, but I suppose multiplying layers of shame is what makes the injury so effective. It scars you and then you’re embarrassed of the scars.
I remember when I was around eleven years old, I lost all my friends. I don’t remember the details, but I remember having friends one day and then the next day not having a single one. I remember the frost-covered grass at the playground at school, how much of an expanse it was, and not having anywhere to go. I was shunned and I was devastated and this happened more than once as I grew up. I’m sure it was something effeminate in me that I could never quite taper to anyone’s liking, or the best friendships that would turn too-best, or football—just everything about it.
Of course later I learned that the depression and anxiety disorders gleaned from those early years were universal, shared by a generation of millennials who all more or less went through the same ringer of gay-bashing and unrequited crushes, leading to pop culture hyperfixations as coping mechanism, sexual disfunction as trauma response, good relationships, bad relationships, no relationships. As I came into adulthood, cameout, gained friends, finally gained a few gay friends—ones who shared a similar degree of malaise—I always felt like they had really made something of their childhood injury and I had not. They had overachieved in education, landed six-figure salaries in media, finance, tech; had bodies of the kinds of gods they were bullied by as children; were savvier and quicker than me. My success had been marginal: mid-five-figure salary, wobbly relationships with fitness and boyfriends, perpetually renting everything. I was still so unconfident, and this matured form of alienation was almost more dangerous because it was directed inward, it was a threat against my own core, as if my childhood loneliness hadn’t been a result of my gayness at all, but that there was something intrinsically wrong with me that peeled me apart from even the other outcasts. I still so desperately wanted to fit in and I feared I wouldn’t recognize the feeling if I ever finally did.
I met my boyfriend through an app, and maybe that was the first mistake because I’ve never believed in the idea of a chosen family. The definition of choice negates the nature of family (and also because there never seemed to be one that chose me). Yet, for three years I was welcomed into my boyfriend’s fold of successful, curated men and I felt truly welcomed. My calendar became pockmarked with birthdays, weddings, Pride events, gallery openings, West End shows, and Sundays spent shirtless in parks, selfies, Frisbees, brunches, gossip, bad TV, and the denial of any sort of aging at all. Any suggestion that these “mannerisms” (I’ll call them that) were becoming gauche as we all entered our mid-thirties had to be dismissed as one’s own internalized homophobia. Ourinner childswere wounded, so these raves, these vanity fitness regimes and drug dalliances were only our stunted rebirths. We were actually only teenagers, one couldargue, rocking back and forth on whatever queer god’s timeline we were on, delirious to see which age fit best, and so we had to dress up in our Hockney/Haring sludge merch and go to that concert, that club, that dinner party, that half-marathon.
I didn’t feel attractive, I didn’t feel reckless. My impressive job at the hedge fund helped, but I felt attractive only in the sense that I felt pulled along by someone else. I dressed up, I dressed down, I always seemed to be teetering and maybe that was what the banker bros at work sniffed out when they came calling. They knew simple brotherly camaraderie was easier for me to obsess over than the complicated mind games of my boyfriend and his ilk who were actually gay. It was easier to fantasize about enjoying football than about whatever I would look like in a swimsuit on a beach in Spain.
And I ended up looking good. One September we all went to Sitges. (I told the boys at work just Barcelona.) Ten of us—but it felt like ten thousand—rented a house on the beach and spent a week under the scorching sun. The sea was as purifying as old bathwater. The men that frolicked in it were skeletons plagued with varying degrees of bloat. My boyfriend had adopted a sneering fitness and fasting routine that had rendered him childlike and hairless, freakishly lithe in bed like an eel, but with a body that lay over me like a sentient pile of bone spurs. I struggled to come.
Every couple in our group seemed unbalanced in their wariness, one partner always sheepish about how they knew someone else in the group, every connection’s origin story kept intentionally vague. I constantly felt like I was being roped into something, and anytime I got a grasp on what exactly it was—a nefarious tango, a curiosity flirt—I was roped into somethingelse, my read on everyone completely thrown. But of course everyone made a grand show of stability. I missed my boys at the office.
These undercurrents flowed throughout the whole week, poisoning our days in the sea, haunting our nightly drunkenness at clubs. We’d stand in circles and bob up and down, drink and smoke, take cheap drugs, look at phones, look at strippers going about their lazy routines.
One night I became hyperaware of how surrounded by men I was and had some kind of allergic reaction. It wasn’t a headache or the flu, but it was a kind of paralysis, a muteness. The way I had been acting was starting to piss everyone off. I was being too standoffish. I kept thinking about how I hadn’t seen a single woman all week. It was as if women had been irradicated from the entire town and all that was left were these roving bands of gassy, balding men who prowled, searching only for one another, snowballing into pulsating swarms, and myself lost among them, smelling all this beefy red. There’s nothing liberating about this, I thought, nothing revolutionary. At most, I could force myself to feel the same rotten glee I used to feel as a teenager when I’d bring a male friend (when I had one) home from school and my mum would be gone, my sister would be away, and there would be a chance—just a chance—that our video game playing might evolve, a sock-clad foot might slip into a lap, a loss might lead to a wrestle, a dare, a playful, beguiling begging at the knees. It was embarrassing, contrived, and vapid. It was titillating and I was dizzy, losing grip.
Amid the undulating sea of men at the club there were the nightly strippers, who performed on small raised platforms like brawny, naked lighthouses. The night wore off their clothes untilthey danced completely nude, with pharmaceutically assisted full erections, and as they gyrated, a chemical filled the air—their bodies emitted it and so did mine, intermixing against my will. These emissions hung low in the air and I began to struggle to breathe. I backed away from the crush, moving to the side of one of the platforms, but I found myself only inches away from one dancer who was slowly jerking himself off. His body was bathed in purple and red. Suddenly the inertia of the club zeroed in on him, sensing a hidden synthesis. I tried to get away, but the crowds were gawking around him. In fact I was gawking. The veins of his penis rippled and stretched with the rhythmic motion of his hand. A man next to me reached, grabbed, and felt. Others had their phones out. The cogs of power wheeled in everyone’s eyes, pointing at the one single thing in the dancer’s hand and I felt the gravity of a thousand white and red eyeballs watching, pupils dilated, irises black. I couldn’t catch my breath. I couldn’t stop smelling that musty smell. It was as if every boy was here, every childhood bully, menace, crush, office boy, beach boy, boyfriend had been secreted into the air and was wholly unfit to breathe.
The unthinkable everyone was thinking happened and the dancer in front of me ejaculated thick, splattering gobs into the air. He twitched and broke rhythm, suddenly afraid and off beat. The crowd cheered and filmed. I stared motionless at his hand unclenching, the mess on the floor, his eyes looking down and then up. We locked eyes. And that was the moment. That was the only other time in my life where I feel like I could have time traveled, like the fabric of the universe had been ripped open because the next thing I knew I was outside on the empty beach, alone. I was snatched from the static present and thrown into thedarkness of a new void, a new timeless silence, an empty plane without men, without women, onto which only the afterburn of the dancer’s eyes remained and the fear in them, the fear in mine.
The fear in that memory latched on to me now as I lumbered along the streets of an ancient London and I shuddered deep within myself. The unsexiness of it, the perversion, when people can be so organic and odorous, single-mindedly fixated on one modicum of honey. I vomited into a stone pit I didn’t realize was a well. A man shouted at me and shoved me aside. I fell to the ground. Everyone seemed to want to fall to the ground. A man on horseback plowed through us with a stick, bashing our heads, clearing the way. A bell rang in the distance.
“All right get to bed, you bastards. All you lot. Make way, get lost!”
I rolled out of the way, narrowly avoided being trampled. A pile of us were on the cobblestones, men and women giggling, struggling to stand, another vomited, and I realized I was clutching Simon to my chest, my arms around him.
“Oh George,” he said, laughing and turning. We pulled each other up and down, tripping. To feel his body against mine was to feel softness and safety after my days of endless brutality. We toddled to an inn. Flickering torches brought darkness, lightness, darkness. Gates shut, merchants packed up, long shadows enrobed streets, and a candle was a floodlight. A candle was a blaring diode. A candle was only needed in one place downstairs and one place upstairs above the pub, under the beam roof, where we lay down in a darkness that heaved with bodies. The world spun and I used that inertia to push aside the memory of my life before, the nastiness of it. This isn’t what that was, I thought to myself. Here there was nastiness but no mind games, no greedylusts, no rat race, or strategic ambiguity. Even as drunk as I was, there was a reasonable density to it, a heartiness that set it apart from the chemical tides of Sitges. Here we were children. Here our touch was of joy sparking between us. Holding hands up the dark stairs. Lying down on the shared cot, straw poking through fabric, cold feet under warm legs, curling into each other.
We were children, me and Simon. Me and twenty others, me and a thousand others. And we all shared this joyful single breath, this creaky floor, this October chill that lay softly alongside us like time itself, the calendar my only old friend amid a thousand new ones and suddenly I was no longer alone.
Interstitial
FIRST EPISTLE, concerning the wards and liveries of the city of London
Written by the hand of EDWARD by the grace of God King of England, Lord of Ireland, Duke of Aquitaine, Conqueror of Wales
The ninth annual Round Table tournament held at the Guildhall in the city of London successfully concluded with the appointment of eighteen new recruits into the Royal Levy. They were to be outfitted, solemnly committed, and sent to the battalion at Westminster, then to Wales the next morning after a sunrise consecration ceremony at Parliament restricted to immediate family members only. Meanwhile back in London the bone marrow fritters sold out and the chilled strawberry soup proved a sensation. There were no riots, no fires, but one mare broke loose, one protestor was hung, three assaults, seven thefts, one murder, but again no fires, no misadventure, two maimings, five assaults of vicious battery. Of note was a child who suffered a fit and died in the queue to view Arthur’s chalice, whose parents considered it an act of God but the ward constable insisting on charges of woeful negligence and a jailing. Another constable reported acts of calamitous misadventure near that same queue, of an elderly man stabbed in a brawl outside the jousting, whose body was discovered later that evening in theThames. In brief: three horses died of exertion, two knights suffered bleeding head wounds, the wool exchange reported record losses, seven Welshmen were beheaded at the Tower, public works were completed on Cornhill Road, unsold meat spoiled, and everyone commented on the purple pansies that bloomed, so strangely out of season, in the churchyard at St. Paul’s and how what a shame it would be in two weeks’ time, when the first chill of November would clench its jaw tightly and not let off until it had bled dry the melt.
