(no subject)
the slow pace of the body that skin is
House/Wilson: the lone and level sands.
1.
A boy kneels in the desert and brushes sand away from a skull picked clean by the sun. The city moves in the distance behind him, pushing nervously against its ill-defined boundaries. He picks up the skull (a camel, most likely, though without skin and animating muscle the bones look almost mechanical), holds it under his arm as he runs stumbling back to the road, losing purchase with each step. There is no solid ground beneath the sand.
He hides it under his bed, and the next night at dinner his father asks him if he'd discovered anything yet, anything out there in the valley: No, he says. It's the first lie he's ever told.
And each night for a week after he dreams of tombs, a cool darkness beneath heavy stone and hot wind, his bleached-white bones slipping under the encroaching sand.
2.
A fixed point:
Wilson on his stomach, on the bed, his spine still and ragged. House sits beside him, one hand on his cane and one on the soft skin behind Wilson's knee, slowly rubbing in circles.
Skin lies, and muscle lies, and blood lies. Lovers lie. He smiles, and leans over to kiss the small of Wilson's back.
3.
There's something here, they say, something else: he scrambles through the tourists and guards and presses a hand to the warm, rough edge of Kaufre's pyramid. He imagines he hears something, feels something, a rattling energy spreading into him.
But there's theory and there's conspiracy and there's just plain insanity - he puts his hand back in his pocket and walks away, studying a dog-eared postcard of hieroglyphs like Champollion studied the Rosetta stone.
4.
He finds facial cream in the cabinet above the sink in his bathroom, hair gel and tiny scissors and nail clippers and shampoo that smells like flowers.
"You moisturize," he says as soon as Wilson comes home, before he's even taken his coat off.
"You read teen girl magazines," Wilson says. He lets his briefcase slip from his hand to the floor. "I'm not cooking tonight, nor am I calling for take-out. It's your turn to pretend to be a normal human being."
"Vogue is not a teen girl magazine," House says, but Wilson's already shut the bathroom door behind him.
5.
The sand, the sun: the Sphinx rising from the ground: Borges' map disintegrating as the nation falls. He has nightmares for weeks.
6.
The fixed point beneath the pendulum that's swinging, swinging away from him: He pulls the skull from beneath his bed and hangs it on the wall.
Wilson's mouth is wet and pink when they kiss. Shifting nervously in bed, sheets tangling and slipping away - they lose purchase with each out-flung hand - the center here has moved. Drugs lie, muscles lie, lovers lie: so easily changed, his body so quickly falling away. The ground shifting under him, and nothing beneath that but the old familiar ache.
He strokes the edge of Wilson's jaw, feeling the skull beneath the soft skin, looking for tombs. Looking for the death in this, all these catalogued frailties and failures writhing beneath him, the division that's metastasized through them both. This valley, this useless empty valley, the sun outside rising hot and unrelenting.
"Do you want me to stay?" Wilson asks quietly.
"No," he says, and turns away.