the haunting of god

  The light in the main room is flickering.

  It has been since Friday morning, and Niles has been meaning to fix it, of course, but sulking got the best of him. Always has.

  That's probably one of the reasons she dumped him.

  The vicious yellowy light in the room is flickering, with hints that split his eyes, and just like he does his drink, Niles is starting to nurse a headache. 

  He and Lana had met through a colleague in common, Dean Archer. Back when he was still a brick agent at the force and he wore cheap ties and even cheaper suits. She was the boss’ new protégé, eager to prove herself and Niles could not have done anything to help feeling mirrored in her, top of her class in criminal psychology and as pretty as she was smart.  

  She had long hair and longer legs, but nothing was quite as stunning as her wit. She reacted empathically when he said he’d rather discuss Durkheim and the sociological aspects of criminology instead of that night’s topic in the news, and within the next week, they’d already interchanged both reading lists and numbers.

 "I don't get along with the blowout look," she would say, her hair in perfect shape. 

  Before he knew it, he was as hooked as one could be.

  The thing about Lana is, you don't get to tie her down. She is an independent person, but she also needs stability.

  The thing about Niles, he isn't very good at settling down. So he tries and tries, they fight and talk and kiss and make up, not always in that order. But then she told him she wanted him to want to try, and he realized his girlfriend of two years might have known him more than he’d known himself in twenty-eight. 

  So he didn’t answer the unasked question. And the next morning, he wasn’t surprised to see her gone. 

  The world keeps on spinning and life goes on, so Niles does too. At least, he tries. Tries to keep up, to occupy himself with reading, writing, working, going through the motions and burning up fumes. It works at first, what with his classes and seminaries, and the work he does for the Bureau, but he soon comes to the realization of how truly incomplete he feels. He avoids Lana behind strategically placed furniture at dinner parties, and he avoids his own thoughts by working his way up to a promotion. And when he gets transferred to Sacramento, he doesn’t say goodbye.

  No matter how much he wants to.  

   The first thing he does upon arriving in California is allowing his lungs to have their way with the chilly autumn crisp air, because for the last months it had felt as if they were trying to wrestle each other out of his body.

  Awareness is the first step to recovery, he’s told.

  He just wishes he had been told earlier, before he so carefully and thoroughly joined the fray to divest himself of any person remotely close to him.

  Niles wants, he knows as much. But in wanting he has come to know the true significance of fatigue; what felt before as an endless swift stream of energy, as if he could run loops around the world and never tire, is now covered by a veil of uncertainness. In wanting so badly, he has wrung himself dry.

  What is he to do, alone and captive of his trembling machinations? What is he going to do, tucked tightly into a life that he doesn’t want, a job that’s draining his youth and idealist naivety out of him? The answer lies within countless hours at the gym and all-nighters at the office; carrying on, no matter what, reading and watching TV and staring at a blank space in his even blanker apartment, alone. 

  And it's while one of these episodes is in session that he comes to the conclusion that, sooner rather than later, changes the path he had been pummeling down into. Changing channels and bored out of his mind, he realizes. He needs to get laid. 

  He doesn’t know his way around the town, but somehow he finds what he didn’t know he had been looking for all the same. Still, he could pretend he does for the sake of bluffing. 

  "Do you come here often?" Niles asks.

  The guy curls his lip into what Niles can only assume to be a smile, so he swallows up the snide remark he was about to make. Instead, he finds himself mirroring the gesture, his features almost rusty from disuse.

"What do you think, handsome?"

  Niles doesn't think. Niles has made a habit of not thinking, all these years. Because thinking gets you running when you’re barely ready to walk, it gets you trouble. It unwinds an uncharted territory of unsaid things and situations he has analyzed, again and again, emotions and sensations that he longs for, almost like that ardent glare of broken glass shining through candlelight. A scenery that he would like to see, taste, and hold, but which he can’t let himself ache for.

  So, of course, he teases instead. 

  “I think you look like you know your way around.”  

  That gets him the beginnings of a true, unmistakable smile. And it’s at that moment that it strikes him, quick and deadly as lighting itself, he’s in for the long ride. 

  "Special Agent Niles Stern."

  The words aren’t slurred but they sure feel like it, what with the gaze Dave throws his way. It’s probably due to the fact they’ve already introduced themselves, and he’s decided to add his title to the mix just now because it feels like the proper thing to do when someone mentions they’re a professor of Sociology in the midst of completing their Ph.D. 

"You don't say," Dave said. The lighting is dim, and he thanks not for the first time the pub's etiquette for it. Had the light suddenly grown in intensity, the newly acquired color upon his cheeks would make for an interesting sight. 

"I take it you'd noticed."

  Dave threw his hand back, making a business out of caressing a stray hair that had found sanctuary on his caramel-shaded cheekbone.

  "Honey, everyone here has noticed."

  They spend all night talking and it feels as if Niles throws his way every thought he’s ever held. He takes it a little bit too seriously when Dave asks him to talk about himself, explaining where he came from, where he studied, where he thought he wanted to go. And in return, Dave talks to him about his mom, back in Chicago. His younger brother, who’s studying Law at Stanford and is far too bright for his own good. 

  “Yeah; little kid’s going places, ” he says, and Niles encounters a warm emotion prickling at the seams of his skin at seeing just how much he means it.  

  Before he knows it, Niles is spouting about Lana, about how he has yet to reconcile what he felt about her with the end of their relationship. The contrived gazes she sent his way, those times he couldn’t hide fast enough in a mutual acquaintance’s event. 

  "I do miss her," he says, after a while. Then he cringes, but Dave hasn't stopped pretending to caress the table while softly nudging his hand, just merely looks up to him as if trying to convey his full attention, and isn't it so like him to sense he'll need some coaxing before fully opening up? He's genuinely wondering. He just met the guy.

 And it hits him from time to time, that notion. He just met the guy. And he’s sharing his deepest burdens over some bourbon as if they’ve known each other for far much longer. Something deep inside himself pushes him forward, out of that chair and out of that place where he’s found nourishment. A flight or fight instinct he’s dealt with his whole life.

  He guesses he inherited it from Mr. Stern himself. Silence during summertime, the house atypically cold after the scheduled Saturday outburst where awful things had been shouted and objects had been made sparse in the form of chaotic scattering upon the floor. He learned to shut up, to bury his feelings deep into the dust of his even dustier apartment, and to man up. 

  The glass would be swept away, the furniture repaired, the dents concealed and the suffering swept under the rug, but he would hold unto himself every night, begging to remember.

And remember he did.

  Not that many years later, an adult himself and after an entire longtime of suppressing his most intrinsic essence, spoon-feeding himself trauma as his daily source of protein and a personal array of communication problems, Niles can recognize his admiration towards his father as what it uniquely is: denial. 

"I don't know why they call it a closet," he confesses. "It feels more like a coffin, and I've spent the last ten years trying to bury myself in it."

  It isn't the only thing he denies fervently, that's for sure. He denies the problems he faces at work, the inadequacy he experiences. He denied the situation with Lana, even upon the last months where their relationship felt an ugly, mangled shadow of what it once had been, as is having being tossed through a shredding machine. He denied every Friday night, too, when his coworkers would invite him up for a couple of drinks, choosing instead to go back home where a bottle of whiskey expected impatiently his arrival, until the invitations stopped altogether.

  But it’s surreal, in spite of it; or perhaps because of it. The way he’s able to just confide in this guy he just met, who’s staring at him with questioning brown eyes and just the tiniest bit of something else, almost as if he’s summoned this entirely new person willing to try new things, to experiment, even to admit to himself that he has thought about it, perhaps not even for the first time. 

  He’ll take what he can get, he decides. And be thankful for it. That’s one of Mama’s teachings. 

  The first time they kiss isn't that special.

  Except. Well, it kind of is.

  They had just come back from watching a film in the local theater. It was exhilarating. He'd felt it in his bones, deep into the marrow that not that long ago was filled with enclosed captivity. He wanted to do something wild, something he wouldn’t normally do.

  Of course, Dave offered up weed: "You do know I’m in law enforcement, right?"; and even after being called a narc, he’d still been in the mood for socializing. It was an astounding occurrence. 

  Niles had something else rummaging his mind. So he suggested hanging around, watching TV. And at first, he felt a little out of place, suit and tie in the middle of a cozy suburban home that seemed to offer up life on every corner, with plants and frames and paintings, in contrast with his already assembled minimalistic studio apartment back in SoCal which only addition he himself had bought happened to be a black hanger. But then Dave threw his head back during a joke he thought particularly funny, and Niles found himself drawn to the subtle twinkle in his eye, the elegance of his posture, the tilt of his sensitive mouth. And then, as Dave turned around and offered him popcorn, he grabbed him by the collar of his Led Zeppelin t-shirt and kissed him.

  And well, he hasn't stopped ever since.

  Nowadays, he wakes up every morning and has an actual, balanced, healthy breakfast. He’d thought he’d miss the workload, but teaching has proved to be far more rewarding. And when he gets home every afternoon, paintings covering up most of the walls, plants at each window, and a kiss waiting for him at the door, he can’t help but feel like he’s finally figured out what he truly wants.  

  He guesses he’s armed himself with his very own carefully picked set of self-made recollections to review and commit to memory time and again. Dave’s voice meeting his ears: "Let’s go, Nil. I’m not getting any younger"; Niles deftly protecting himself from Dave’s tickling: "I was born with a condition! "; Dave trying to dodge being splashed upon a warm summer evening: "I'm carrying my ID, fella."

  And he can’t wait to make some more.