The Universe Was Made | (basil)

At first, he prays for him to come home.

It’s futile, probably, and also maybe a little bit naive. And Henry Holloway is not a naive man - but, then again, he also isn’t a man of faith. After all, what the hell was Destiny to him? Nothing but a seven-lettered word to throw around during dinner parties or art galas or between him and some clients, who would gobble up his honeyed words about as fast as they’d wave their wallets at him. Destiny meant nothing to him. He was never destined to become a patron of the arts, he was never destined to outlive his wife, he was never destined to bump into a boy on the corner of some street and care so much about a son that wasn’t his.

The thing about artists, though, is that they make each other believe in things they never did. Henry’s beginning to believe in this, about as much as he believed that his surrogate son/the painter he’s patroning/whatever the hell this boy is to him - he’s destined to come home.

Every night, his knees groan and crack when he kneels at the foot of his bed, and his fingers intertwine with each other clumsily, as though they’ve forgotten how to hold hands. But, holding hands is better than holding knives or spears, and Henry must remind himself of this every night, every time he feels foolish for speaking to thin air, every time he loses hope for begging for mercy that isn’t even his to beg for. The fury in his prayers surprise him. Bring him home, Henry asks, his voice fervent and quaking even if it is only in his head. Bring him back.

Then, Basil Anatola gets his foot chopped off and all that Henry prays for next is a quick end.

And the end does come. Eventually. It happens on a day when the world is cold and angry, and Henry imagines that the inside of his head looks the same way. His television set unravels the scene before him, the pixelized images flickering in and out of existence, in a stuttering synchronization with the storm that swells outside of the house. Thunder shatters the atmosphere and Basil strikes the girl in front of him. Lightning cracks the sky in halves and fire dances across the skin on his stomach. The air pauses to take a breath and

and, then, Basil falls. The end comes for him like a storm, and Henry cannot help but think that he was never destined to outlive this boy, too.

“Keep fighting,” the girl begs as the camera closes in on her red, tear-stained face. Henry cries with her. For her. For the dead boy in her arms. For the life that he would never live, and for the life that he’s already lost. She clutches him close to her heart and begs him to stay. “Remember? You’ve just gotta keep fighting, okay?”

Henry watches Basil smile at her words, in the same way he’s watched Basil fall for the entirety of the past week - in more ways than one. In a fair universe, Basil’s smiles would not be collected like rare stones or seashells, pocketed like secrets or promises or things even more fragile than that. They would be as plentiful as the raindrops outside. As loud as the thunder shaking the windows. As easy as it was for Basil to fall for the girl. In a fair universe, Basil’s smiles would not be reserved for the end. Whatever universe that is, Henry is so sorry that he doesn’t live in it.

The girl (Danny, that’s her name) fumbles on, her voice a thicket of tears clawing through her throat. She clutches him like he’s a lifeline, but, in the end, she isn’t the one to let go.

Basil shudders and the world goes dark. Outside, the starless sky mourns for him, crying thunder-filled tears at an earth-shaking velocity. Flashes of light fill the sky like bombs, and when one particularly close bolt shakes the very ground Henry stands upon, the T.V. screen goes blank. The room goes dark. Rain floods the house unabashedly, and Henry lets it. He lets the rain spread like a wildfire over his opulent carpet and his marble countertops and his leather shoes. When it reaches him, it swallows him, filling him to the brim with the kind of mad misery that can make even the proudest of men beg for death and mercy. He is brought a breath away from the end just to be drawn back out again, like the always-swinging pendulum of a clock, tick-tick-ticking away the seconds until Henry gives in to his own misery. The proud man doesn’t crack, but he is washed away.

It’s all he can do to close the curtains to keep the storm at bay.





Gravity doesn’t give a damn about me here.

Gravity pushes, pulls, drags, and drowns. Relentless. Merciless. The girl with platinum hair drives her dagger through my leg and gravity morphs into a shackle around my ankle. I fall backwards, knowing that hitting the ground after a fall is the only constant thing I’ve ever come to rely on in this life.

To make matters worse, I’m not even half as buoyant as I used to be. No, buoyancy and resilience and anything else that’s bouncy belongs to the spirits of those who have lived untarnished and uncorrupted lives. To those who sing in the shower and smile at strangers and skip down the street - partly for the hell of it and partly because walking is just too damn slow. I, for one, like slow. I want slow. I want this moment to go as slow as possible, to stretch out the last few minutes of my stupid life for as long as it’ll stretch without snapping. But, gravity doesn’t give a damn about me (it never has). It pushes me down, then begs me to get up, to live, to remember what I’m fighting for.

I stay down.

In a world where ‘gutter’ and ‘home’ is synonymous, you learn to grow accustomed to many things. Example A: the smell. Hold your breath while turning that corner, kids, and, after a while, both your lungs and your desire to live will stop burning! Example B: the minefields. Yes, minefields. You learn how to easily and automatically navigate your way around hot spots just as if you were born knowing which ones are waiting to blow up on you. But, even so, boys like me can spend their whole lives tiptoeing around the block and still manage to bring an entire city to its knees.

Boom, I hear, and fear grips my heart in its furious hand. Boom. Boom. Boom. Its grip lessens. The sound is not that of a cannon, but just my stubborn pulse. The city that is my building blocks of bones, intersecting roads of veins, and rivers of blood trembles anyway, bracing itself for what it knows must come next.

Example C: the inevitability of death. The tragic, evergreen awareness of our own mortality. Like dominoes, we’ll fall. One by one by one by one -

Danny catches me when I fall.

By the time she does, Gravity takes on Holloway’s voice. It’s a saying of his, you know. Because wise and whimsical sayings are just side effects, like wrinkles and bad eyesight and arthritis, of growing old. Her arms scoop around my shuddering body, and Holloway says “The best artists are the ones who fall down.”

“Piss off,” I say, but it comes out under my breath as a slur, a sound so disenchanting that it meshes with the rest of the bloody and violent noises wreaking havoc around me. No one hears it.

Danny turns to me - her eyes damp and soggy and a mirror of everything we’ve both seen for the past four days. Skin caked in dried mud. Tar lacing a silver dagger. A sky lit up with faces. Kite’s smile. Delta’s body. I wonder if, when she looks at me, she can see what I see. Tombstones coated in spray paint. Holloway’s polished wooden banisters. A fist swinging towards me. Roland’s breath, white and nebulous in the wintry air. She runs her hands over my face and through my hair, her palms catching fire at the points where they smear across my blood. My last view of this world is full of red - red, and Danny. It’s not such a bad way to go.

“You puppets,” she snarls at people beyond my current line of sight, like a wolf growling at her own shadows. “You little capitol playthings. You are nothing compared to him. Who the hell do you think you are?”

Well, there’s not much to say to that. Lines wrinkle her face, making her anguished expression look like canyons cut from rivers that have been dried out for centuries. She crumbles at the edges. I lift my hand weakly, wanting to smooth it all out, but my hand hardly makes it to the hollow of her throat, grasping at sallow flesh. Reveling in the sensation that is touching her without any inhibitions. It’s enough to bring her gaze back down to me.

I like slow. I want slow. I want this moment to slow down, so that it may seem as if the air has stilled and we have frozen. Earth can stop spinning. I can study the way her eyes glisten, or the way the light trickles down her cheeks. And, maybe, she can see me before I go. Not as a dying boy, because she’s seen enough of that, but as someone she might’ve known in a different life. I’m not asking for much, am I?

But, the Universe hates me.

Of course, everything shatters and splinters into a million pieces around us, and the process of me going away (dying, dying, dying, but I can’t swallow it yet, not yet -) happens all too quick. As if someone had been praying for my quick demise.

She holds me in her arms like I’m a lullaby and she wants so badly to sleep. Or, maybe it’s the other way around. Whichever way, being held in her arms like this is such a bittersweet compromise - all blue skies and sunshine with the background promise of a storm. Does she know it’s coming? That I’ve weathered storms before, but that they never made me stronger? That they’ve only eroded me into the person she’s holding in her arms right now? Nothing but a boy with a flickering pulse and a lot of anger? Her grasp on me tightens, and I think, maybe, that this won’t be her first storm either.

“Keep fighting,” she suddenly says, her voice sounding wobbly and afraid, like it’s the last thing she wants me to hear. Her words are an echo of my earlier words to her from this morning, when I begged her to stay alive out of selfish reasons I’ll never have time to fathom. “Remember?”

My head jerks a little, a pathetic attempt at a nod. All I can manage is a smile that’s not even big enough to bare my teeth, never mind the heavy words dissolving on the tip of my tongue. My eyes burn with the effort to stay open, to look at her and communicate something that my tongue can’t. Yes, I hope they tell her, I do remember. Even if this morning feels like a million years ago, I remember. And I’ll remember you, too.

My crutch. My girl. My peace of mind. And pieces of me were - are - hers, too. Her reminder to keep fighting. Her burden. Her trouble.

(When the end comes, it taps me on the shoulder. Cordial and polite. I tell him to wait, and he tells me he’s ready. I tell him that this shouldn’t be happening, that this shouldn’t have been how we’d meet. He tells me he knows. He tells me in any other universe, I’m luckier. And older. He tells me he wants to show me. I tell him to wait.)

My voice, when I finally speak, sounds like defeat and resignation. Like a white flag holding its weight through the winds of a storm. It comes in ragged, raspy puffs - all fractured consonants, fleeting vowels, syllables ground as finely as dust.

“Keep causing trouble for me, will you?” I ask Danny.

When the end comes again, it doesn’t ask. It takes.









“Don’t move!”

He pauses in his ascent. Or descent. He can’t really tell which way is up or down, anymore.

The crying voice that calls to him is the last of his tether to this universe. Death is patient, though. Patient and curious. They stop, together, both wanting to know what she’ll do next.

“You so much as take a step and I swear to Ripred I’ll kill him!”

She dangles the edge of her blade over the throat of a boy on the ground - a boy so close to the end, too, that Basil can see his soul wisping in and out of the borders of his body. It looks like the surface of a soup threatening to spill over the edges of a bowl. Danny’s blade hangs above her hostage like a pendulum, and the world is silent as it watches. She hypnotizes everyone into obeying her. Ezero. His murderers. Even Death itself.

With one hand threatening to take a life, she uses her other to pull out a silver can of spray paint. There’s a hiss as it escapes the nozzle, as bright paint kisses the blood-slicked grass. A last tribute to him.

Keep fighting, it says, like a halo around his head.

She literally graffitis him his own tombstone - an ironic act if she’d known who he was. What he did to graveyards when he was younger and oblivious and alive. He laughs - a sharp staccato laugh, all rough and rugged at the edges, the only way he’s ever known how. It gets lost in the wind, and drowned out in the echo of a cannon’s boom.









I see him at the border.

Blue mountains ring around me like shadows, green grass ripples in the wind like ribbons, sunlight hits the top of my head like a kiss. No one is there to tell me, but I know it like I know I’m dead. It’s a promise. This world is a promise of something more. Compensation for the tragedies endured. Reparations for a life unlived.

And he’s here, too.

Because, yes, of course Roland-motherfucking-King would be here. A real king now - to romp his own grounds, tread his own paths, march over lands that have never been marched on before. He’s lying on his back in the middle of it all, with one knee propped up and his hands behind his head. A dent of leisure in these endless asphodel fields, bathing in the light and air and relief that is the afterlife. He’s here. And - no one is there to tell me, either - but I know it like I know him.

He’s been waiting for me.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” I say, and it’s only a whisper under my breath. But the afterlife works differently, I guess, because my words travel to him as soon as they leave my lips. Immediately, his head whisks in my direction, his eyes wide and asking a question that his lips haven’t formed yet.

I see him at the border. Where I stand, there is a line drawn. No one is there to tell me, but I know that crossing that line means to never come back. That this border is representative of the world I’ll leave forever. That, if I cross it, I won’t see mom or Sage or Holloway ever again. That you can’t haunt the world if you are no longer a part of it.

Roland and I were never a part of the world. At least, not that one. We were a part of something bigger, something that neither of us could ever fathom. Something that we’d have to die to figure out.

“You’re here early,” he shouts to me from across the border. He’s scrambled up from his leisurely position on the grass, and this disheveled and surprised version of Roland is the closest thing to the one I knew when we were alive. Disheveled and surprised, yet happy. Undeniably. Unashamedly. Un-Rolandy. His body sways with the wind, as if restraining itself from breaking out into a run and diving straight into a body of cold water. Instead, he gauges for the temperature. He toes himself in. He says, “I wasn’t expecting you this early.”

“It’s a long story,” I say. He looks incredulous, but, then, he does something even more incredulous than that. He laughs. Sweetly and genuinely, and, soon, so am I. It’s a body-quaking kind of laugh, the kind we’ve forgotten that we’re still capable of. Our world becomes nothing but sunlight and laughter and us and forgiveness. For what he’s done. For what I could never understand. Forgiveness washes over us in waves, filling the valley with its presence. It sweeps the border away. It makes the distance between us almost nothing.

“Well,” he says, diving in, “come on, then! You’ve got the time to tell it.”





It took him a while to realize it, but during the first four hours of the road trip, Basil Anatola finally notices that his father’s got gentle hands. Not once in those four hours did those hands stop gripping the steering wheel (in perfect 2 o’clock, 10 o’clock formation, too). Not once did they lighten their grip, either. His father’s got gentle, tired hands, and Basil thinks that just may be where he got it from.

“We can switch for a while, dad. Let me drive,” he offers once they hit the 5-hour mark and his dad’s droopy eyes and nodding head can’t help but indicate the gas station’s lackluster quality of coffee.

The road is empty and dark ahead of them. Blank desert borders them in, makes them feel small and tiny and foreign, like astronauts walking along the plains of the moon. At his words, his father straightens up immediately and shakes his head stiffly. Stubborn old man. The moon seems to sigh at his response and hang lower in the sky.

A twelve-hour road trip to the apartment where he’d be spending the next four years of his life spent with no one else but his father was not exactly Basil’s idea of a perfect road trip. If it was gonna be anyone, it would’ve been Sage, probably. Or Danny, if she wasn’t busy moving into her own dorm. Or Holloway, if he wasn’t so damn old and bad with a GPS. Or Roland, especially, but that was out of the question for obvious reasons.

Basil sighs along with the moon and turns his head towards the window. He inherited his father’s gentle hands and stubborn pride, and he’s thankful and peeved for both.

When morning comes, it’s a quiet and violent realization. Basil’s jolted from his sleep by the abrupt stillness of the car and the silence suddenly hanging between him and his father. The radio is clicked off, the windows rolled up, the engine drowned out from a soft roar to nothing at all. At first, he stays still. Like a corpse. Arms folded over his chest, neck bent at that irregular and uncomfortable angle that inevitably occurs when one falls asleep in the car. He opens his eyes, though, and feels sleep still crusted around them. The sunlight is a ghost through the misted windshield. Morning knocks on his door.

“We’re here,” his father, a man of not-very-many words, finally says, with a voice croaky after hours of disuse.

“We’re here,” Basil affirms, with a voice rumpled after hours of sleeping in an upright position. He straightens up in his seat; cracks his weary, sleep-sodden bones; feels his stiff spine stretch in that satisfying, accordion-opening-kind-of way. His father gets out of the car.

Unloading the boxes and duffel bags and easels isn’t so much unloading as it is playing a game of tetris. They - as they have their whole lives together thus far - find a way to meld into each other. It’s a rhythmic routine that they’ve practiced before and perfected by now: sidestepping to make room for the other, coming a hair’s line away from bumping shoulders, figuring out how such different and jagged pieces of themselves still fit together, even when it seems like - in another universe - the pieces wouldn’t have fit at all.

Sometimes, the pieces still don’t fit.

By the time they finish unloading, it’s the crack of dawn’s ass and they’ve created a tower of cardboard boxes and art supplies. A true castle for a future graduate of an art institute, if Basil’s father had any say in the matter. Except, he doesn’t, and he knows he doesn’t, just like how he knows his son is an artist and like he knows that he wishes he were anything but.

He’s past that now, though.

His son is an artist, but there are worst things that sons could be.

“Look,” he starts, when there’s no more boxes to unload and nothing else to be said, but he can’t seem to finish the sentence. I’m here, is what he tries to stutter, after years and years of doing the exact opposite of that, but his mouth is a cemetery of fallen words and killed speeches. He was never a poetic man.

But, artists, as he’s come to realize, are very good at filling in the blanks. So Basil nods, like he knows (and maybe he does) and like he’s thanking him (and maybe he is).

It’s enough. His father gets back into the car and drives away.

It marks the end of a long and wearying chapter in Basil’s life, but the thing about this story, in this particular universe, is that it is a long one. And when a chapter in a story this long ends, another chapter is bound to roll right along after it.

And, so, it does. Basil weaves his way through the sullen brick building by himself. Empty hallways make good mazes (especially at six o’clock in the morning, where every living or sane soul is still sound asleep in their beds) and he winds up and down staircases, drifts through and back hallways. He’s a ghost, in his own right, here. An artist in his element, revelling in his soon-to-end solitude. He finds the right floor, eventually. The room numbers tick backwards: 75, 74, 73…

72. He knocks on the door, and a familiar face answers.

“You’re here early,” Roland says, and suddenly it’s like someone dipped his spine in ice water. Basil’s head spins, as if his world has been tipped on its axis. An astronaut coming to terms, again, with gravity.

Time slows, funnily enough, and Basil drifts until Roland’s voice tethers him, thrown out like a life saver meant to reel him back in. “Basil,” he says, and, at first, it sounds soft. Hardly there. Roland repeats himself. “Basil. What’s wrong?”

Time restarts itself.

Basil shakes his head out of the fog - out of the weird pang he suddenly felt etched into his leg - and the world goes back into focus. A crystallized, kaleidoscopic focus, and Roland King is at the centre of it all. “Nothing, sorry, I just . . . nothing.”

Roland raises an eyebrow, like he isn’t convinced.

“It felt,” Basil tries again, trying to find words that made his feelings make sense. He wasn’t nearly as talented with language as he was with a paint brush. He thought of the weird sensations, the sudden coldness, the almost-memories a phantom in his mind. Everything a forgotten word on the tip of his tongue. “It just suddenly felt like someone was stepping on my grave.”

“The drive with your dad that bad, huh?”

Basil breathed out an easy, rounded laugh.

The castle of cardboard boxes and art supplies outside is dismantled by the boys. Brick by brick, box by box, the new roommates worked to load contents of Basil’s old life into a place where he’d spend his new one. They’d be kings here, in this dingy studio apartment that was littered with sandy ashtrays and oily pizza boxes and plastic red cups filled with dirty paint water. A single mattress with its bedsheets barely clinging onto it sat in a sad corner of the room, while a new mattress still dressed in its delivery packaging plastic sat in the opposite side. Water stains hugged the yellowed wallpaper. A strange odor of paint and mothballs drifted through the air. Underneath a window, a large canvas stood propped up against the wall, still slick and wet with paint, and Basil figures that’s what Roland must’ve been doing before he arrived.

It’s a self-portrait.

Roland, from the chest up, slouches in front of a dark and shadowy backdrop, his head tilted to the side and his eyes downcast. A hazy light from an unseen source trickles through from the top right corner, igniting the sullen Roland’s face with an unexpected glow. Half a smile finds it way to Basil’s lips, for he had not seen such a sad Roland for years now.

They would be kings here, rulers together in their land of hope and potential and tomorrows, because how could they not? How could they not when it seems as though the Universe itself had crowned them, had even preordained it?

“Well, this is it,” Roland announces once they finished bringing in all the boxes and bags through the door, promptly discarding the contents onto whatever spare space they could find in Roland’s already cramped studio apartment. “You know what they say, mi casa es su casa or whatever. Did I mention that I’m failing Spanish?”

“Como cualquier verdadero estudiante de arte haría.”

“What? It’s too early for you to be showing off, you shit.”

“Te cagas,” Basil corrects.

“Don’t be a smartass. Shit, wait!” Roland suddenly exclaims, grabbing Basil by the arm. “I haven’t even showed you the best part, yet.”

He pulls him towards the fire escape perched outside of one of the windows, then tells him to climb the ladder. Basil flies up and up and up until there’s no more ladder to climb up to and an empty, peeling rooftop greets him instead. The city’s skyline, silent and tall and proud against the morning’s pink hued sky, immediately fills his vision. Something in his gut pulls him toward it. He doesn’t even realize he’s sitting on the ledge of the building, absentmindedly staring out into the view, until Roland swings his legs over and sits down next to him.

“Voilà.”

“Don’t tell me you’re failing French, too.”

“I excel at the kissing, but the telling part is not particularly my forté.” From the corner of his eye, Basil sees Roland glance towards him. “Be honest,” he says. “Are you nervous?”

“A little. But, I think that’s good.”

“It’s not that bad, really. I mean, other than Spanish, of course, but the school has its perks.” Roland raises his arm and points towards some obscure target in the distance, his index finger pinpointing some herculean-looking brick building amongst a forest of other herculean-looking brick buildings. “That’s it, right over there.” Basil nods, not really pretending to see which building Roland’s pointing out so much as just wanting to see. The mere notion of ‘wanting to see’ was enough. Roland let his arm fall back into his lap.

“How’s Holloway?”

“Old.”

“Danny?”

“Healthy,” Basil says, smiling. He turns his gaze away from the silent city to look at his best friend. “What about you?”

Roland returns his gaze, long enough for Basil to see the clarity in his eyes. Gone is the boy who saw the world through a murky and shattered lens, who let misgivings and misfortunes numb him until there was nothing left to numb, who crept recklessly on the border split between life and death as if it were just a tight rope fastened between two cities he never thought of as home.

Twilight passes. Shadows fade. Gravity makes us fall, but it also pulls us back to where we should be.

Sitting next to Basil now is a boy who believes that the world is more than its sins and shortcomings. It’s a world where a guy can attend one of the finest art schools in the nation with his best friend. It’s about believing that tomorrow will come and come and come again even if yesterday was drenched in obscurity. It’s about falling off onto the right side of the tight rope. It’s about staying - it was always about staying.

Roland nods, the faintest hint of a smile on his lips. Basil watches as he turns his eyes back towards the city, stretching his arms over his head then behind his back to lean onto his elbows, then follows suit. Finally, Roland says, “I’m good.”

In this universe, they both always would be.