HIS EYES ARE FARAWAY

BY CHAZ BRENCHLEY


"Rain is coming," he says, though the sky in daylight is baked almost to white. "Rain after drought, so long a drought; and oh! so welcome the rain."
His hands caress me, but not his eyes. His eyes are faraway.
"We are a people without a land," he says, "drained by history, made pale by loss."
Even his fingers drumming like rain on my skin seem dislocated, as though they bent in other ways than mine. I bleed for him; but not he bleeds, no. He is too careful.

"Listen," he says, and I lay my head on his chest. His skin is white and young, though his bones are old.
I cannot hear the rhythm of his heart. Its beating throbs in my blood, but mine cannot match it. The measure eludes me: too complex, too alien, disordered.
"Which came first," he asks when I complain, "the blood or the circulation?"
And laughs, and thinks himself answered either by his own laughing or else by my tongue, silent in the salt on his breastbone.

Some things are not meant for sharing; I would not want his dreams. I lie awake and watch him while he sleeps, and this is as close as ever I want to be. All his skin dances with surprise, and his breath is fearful. I cannot imagine what he should be scared of. He has seen too much of death to dread that darkness; and what else is there? But yet he is afraid. He is afraid now of sleeping; and when he sleeps, he is very afraid.

I wish I could give him comfort, but all my body's stretch cannot still his skin, nor my whispers touch the movement of his eyes behind their lids. All I can do is wake him, and he needs the benison of sleep.

Waking of his own will, or else driven out too soon by dreaming, he groans at the touch of my fingers. There are livid red marks under his skin where the blood is rising, hungry, desperate. This hurts him; but his hands on me are hard, demanding, distancing. He will not kiss me now.

When the night shines, he leaves me tumbled in stains and dampness. I sleep then, restless and resentful without him in the heat, when I want him most; and wake to eat, to watch for his returning.

"Listen," he says, naked and filthy in the bathroom; but what's to hear, between the hissing of the shower and the gurgle of the drain? Somewhere there must be rain, but it has not found us yet.

"Listen," he says. "Can't you hear the singing?"

All I can hear is the rush of tainted water, sluiced across his skin. Hurry, hurry. He has only time to waste now; all else he has wasted already.

"The front is narrow," he says, "but the line is long. If we must climb on the bodies of the fallen," he says, "what of that? It's inherent," he says. "By definition." And grins, showing me blood on his teeth. Deeply sentimental, he is wholly without mercy; that also is inherent. Death is the only constant, he says that constantly. I tell him no, not so, I too am constant, but he only laughs at me, again showing his teeth. And his eyes are faraway, and oh! but his teeth are sharp.