Oliver Kraus, D9 [done]

My little darling, my boy, my dear.

His penitent breath still echoes in Oliver’s ears. All of the words come out like lungs choking on water. He could barely break a whisper, weak as he was. It would’ve been easy to have taken a pillow and stopped the last breaths. But Arthur still held shades of a boy that Oliver had loved. Even in the alabaster of his skin, or the pock marks on his arms, he was Artie. A boy that had lost a fight that he never meant to win, in a world that would’ve much rather seen him forgotten.

They had passed long days together on the factory line. Canning goods, checking pressure on machines, enduring heat of twelve hour shifts, Arthur had been the one squawking during break about how bullshit all of it was. The same every day, one day it’ll be just for me—painting, singing—somewhere far from here. Oliver liked the way the smoke curled around the boy’s lips.

He came from a home with a father that ran out on his mother and a mother who worked herself into a mindless oblivion. I’m a lucky one, he would say, watching the sky. I don’t have anyone else to look after, and no one to look after me.

Oliver’s father was long gone, too. His mother was a drinker but she still loved him and his sister (when she could remember to cook breakfast or toss a blanket over them at night). Anger had come and gone, Oliver reasoned, swallowed up to ash for loneliness to remain. The sadness stunk worst of all, a quiet sort of lovelessness that was made no better the more he retreated behind a curtain of sarcasm. His sister played pretend, thinking that they could imagine themselves into a better life. But what better life could they have, walking the lines into the factory, watching the machines until at last, the bell sounded?

Where would you go if you weren’t here? Oliver would ask him questions while they smoked along the brick of the factory, just after the whistle had blown. Night hid them away from the rest of the world, with only the burning fluorescents high above casting shadows on their worn faces. He couldn’t imagine much of a world beyond his grubby little apartment, or the slog through the grey city streets to a dust filled factory. But with Arthur—

Away from here. Where there’s wind and sun, or an ocean. Trees with green. And mountains. Arthur would take a long drag and he would smile, closing his eyes. Anywhere but here, anywhere. And it felt like a whole different world, just between the shadows. Listening to Arthur imagine had him smile, and picture a place where maybe, they could see together.

He kissed him for the first time when he was fifteen, and Arthur seventeen. He remembers the bitter cold of a November evening, the two walking hand and hand across ice so as not to fall. They inched along in their boots, shivering even under their wool coats. There was nothing special about the night, but—he never imagined much of anything to be special. Just Arthur, and his hand, holding him so he wouldn’t fall. And when they rounded a corner, not more than five minutes from his apartment, Arthur stopped.

Do you trust me? He said. His eyes were a grayish blue. They always seemed grayer in his coat.

I guess I have to. Oliver smiled, and looked up. Arthur had at least four inches on him, just enough. They were both blond, both pale. Hungry looking boys that feasted on the approval of one another.

It was the start of a quiet longing—his little pain, Arthur would say—a love that they kept secret not because they had to but because they wanted to. He would long for the days when they could hide in his family’s apartment, out of the cold, wrapped underneath a blanket and grumbling about all the idiots at the factory. To hate the same people wrapped them closer together—gave them strength, somehow. Someday they would run off to those mountains, away from all of this. Someday, they wouldn’t have to deal with dust or heat, or drunkards wasting away. They were made for more than that—

Arthur passed his last reaping like a man celebrating the end of the world.

He wasn’t the same boy to hold hands, or have quiet whispers in the shadows. This was a man that found whiskey to drink and cards to play, older men, real men that knew the truth of the world. They knew how to live, and to get what they wanted. They worked long years and had earned their place. Their wisdom was etched in lines on their faces and up and down their arms. But what about anywhere? Oliver would ask, and Arthur would look with a squint, as though it had dimmed. Oh, anywhere.

The months drifted back and forth, the two a hurricane of voices and fury, but then again sweetness. They had started staying at Arthur’s, who spent four, then five, then six nights out and away. Oliver’s mother knew no better, his sister was finding her own way out of the cold little brick apartment. Into the darkness, he would say, and I’ll come back just another man. But Oliver wasn’t tempted by the lights—not so much as he had been by the imaginings. Where had they gone, he wondered? Where had Arthur gone?

The morphling was just a taste at first, just something to give him a feeling as though the world he’d once seen was real. I can see what I want with this, he said, as though the drug was a supernatural gateway. But when Arthur took it, he mostly lay around on the floor, his head staring at the ceiling, muttering how much he wanted to be like the rest of them. I’m too fucked up, aren’t I? He would ask, underneath a blanket that Oliver would lay across him. I’m always going to be fucked up, aren’t I?
Days bled together.

He had never been a large boy, but Arthur grew thin—pallid, wiry. Oliver watched, and listened. He kept the same hope he’d always had, the same love, the same heart. He endured the fits and the bruises, the whimpering and tears. He watched him sell what wasn’t his for what he needed. He apologized when it hadn’t been his fault. And he endured Arthur, because to be alone was worse than any of the pain that Arthur could give him.

And what did he know of life?

There were plenty worse than Arthur, plenty worse than he. His mother hadn’t much better sense; his sister had left the moment she could say goodbye. At least Arthur stayed—he still loved him, a part of him, at least. They would soldier through and they would climb that mountain, somewhere.
He was alone when he died.

It wasn’t so much that he hadn’t known, or come home to find him underneath the blanket as he’d been a thousand times before. But that the pale little creature had no one by his side when the world had had enough, that was what hit Oliver most. There was no mercy, no imaginings, no truth.

Only a life that would continue on, without him.

But maybe that was the lesson in all of this, one that he’d grow past and learn from. Life had no happy endings—though that seemed too trite. Life had no such thing as loneliness, only the feeling that one day it might be ended. And so they were all trying to fill a hole that couldn’t be. It hasn’t stopped the anger. It doesn’t come close to shutting away the truth, that he wanted to believe in something greater, something they had imagined together.