Jessica N. A. Berger
1.
The Body had been bruised for weeks, spotted in curious ways that didn't heal, marked with wine-stain clusters chained around the circumference of its neck, a thick red indentation on one wrist, a host of other small contusions Meghan and Miles knew no one would see. They tried to cover the bruises with sleeves and turtlenecks and light coats of patchy foundation before the Body left its room each day, worried what people would think when they saw the Body, though it was clear enough the Body could no longer be bothered to care. The Body didn't fret about comments people might make, the Body did little more than twitch when he heard them, but Meghan and Miles worried still. Questions were being asked by classmates, by faculty and neighbors and resident advisors about what—exactly—was going on with the Body, about whether he had something he wanted to talk about, if everything was alright academically, or, you know, back at home, or if the Body had displayed any depressed tendencies, suicidal ideation; but the Body did not, or could not answer them, and how, Meghan and Miles had to wonder, would it look if—no, when—they couldn't answer either? How would it look when they had to admit they'd watched the patterns evolve, the bracelets of bruises, strange lacerations, that they knew where some of the wounds had come from? How would they explain when they were able to suspect, correctly, that a coroner would find similar marks on the Body's ankles, scattered like Mongolian marks over his ass and upper thighs, and yeah, probably also there was some weird stuff on his back, and, you have to understand, they would say, their role was way more innocent than it looks and everyone was cool with it at the time and there was never anything that couldn't be counted as overtly consensual, but the Body had stopped playing with them long ago, and, well, the neck? That stuff around the neck? That definitely wasn't them. They know nothing about that. They were, after all, just the Body's friends, its keepers, the people closest to what the Body had been, those who knew the Body—that is, Henry—better than anyone from the outside possibly could.
There was a strange way the Body's absent presence already hurt them, and that morning when they'd looked at its stupid half grin, when Miles had stared into the Body's eyes for four solid minutes waiting for it to blink, when he'd stood up and suggested that Henry wasn't any more present than he'd been when he'd shit himself last night, well, that was worrisome. That was the death of something. Whether it was Henry's death or simply the death of their game was surprisingly unclear. What they knew was Henry was there, but also wasn't. He reacted, but also didn't. He moved, but, differently, labored, as though he had all the time in the world or had suffered some kind of stroke or had never actually seen another human being make use of their limbs. Meghan was especially concerned. This was, she'd expressed, not unlike how her Aunt Tally had behaved on that terrible day she'd had to drive her, suddenly, to the hospital. Aunt Tally had been there one minute, helping her mom clean out boxes of old coats and wedding china in the attic and then she was just gone, just a vacant stare. "She came back though," Meghan said, which was true even though she didn't add the "not quite in the same way." Aunt Tally was beside the point. The Body, Henry, didn't even seem confused by his place in the world. He was just . . . slower. Just not quite there.
They'd asked Henry's body if he was ok, they'd asked, at least, if he wanted to go to the emergency room or to the campus clinic. Health services was really only a short drive away, Meghan reasoned, and if he was worried about insurance he had to understand—she insisted—some problems are far graver than money. To all of this the Body in front of them indicated that no, it did not want to go to the emergency room. No, not the campus clinic. No, it waved its hand in a slow-motion gesture indicating insurance was not an issue. The Body said no, turned its head first one way and then painfully shifted it back in the other direction, with one, long blink along the way. This was something Meghan had never seen in people before, the stuff of broken baby dolls, shitty creep-show horror movies. "Well," Miles said, "he doesn't want to go. We can't make him." Still, they would check in each day, talk about the Body in hushed tones when he silently insisted, once again, he didn't want to go to the campus clinic. They were uncertain what the Body understood he was refusing to do and, because of that, they were uncertain as to what would be a betrayal, uncertain what would incriminate them and what would be responsible in the given situation, whether they had assumed the role of caretakers. "This is getting to be too much," Meghan told Miles one day when the Body stood up and left the room mid-conversation, though, of course, the Body himself had said nothing.
Miles had nodded solemnly, "He's taking it too far, yes. He should really see someone."
"He's not taking it anywhere, Miles. He's just dead. Or dying. I don't know."
Miles had scrolled through Twitter, through WhatsApp, had idly highlighted blocks of text and moved the block of color up and down. He had clicked over to order a pizza, this though there were leftovers from two nights ago that Henry had not eaten. "It really isn't funny anymore," he said, "but when I told him that he didn't listen."
There should have been some question, a loose debate as to whether it had ever actually been funny, but Meghan didn't bother.
"He's dead. Or dying," Meghan said again, said every time.
"I think he may be genuinely depressed," Miles had said. "I asked him if he wanted to play the game the other day and he just stared at me in this way like, I don't know, like what it's doing now." And they both stood up to watch from the window as the Body sat very still on a bench at the edge of the quad. Unblinking. Waiting, presumably, for someone to stop by and guide him to where he needed to be.
Meghan and Miles felt a responsibility in their interactions with the Body. He was their friend, after all. Or, it was their friend? They weren't sure how best to refer to Henry in his current state. They felt sure they were partially to blame for this change, whatever it was. On the fifteenth day of his desiccation, they held a meeting with the Body to discuss how far they were willing to go and what needed to be done. Miles had suggested a laying down of terms was required and introduced it as a motion in a two-person caucus, just post-ethics class. Meghan had readily agreed. Their game had lacked a negotiation of limits, she had noted, it couldn't hurt to attempt to retroactively instate something now, to—at least—explain to the Body how it was trespassing.
"You don't smell good, Henry," Meghan had told the Body, later that evening after waiting, so very long, for Miles and the Body to arrive in her dorm room. "Miles thought it would mean more to hear this from me, but, you know, it's not like I'm the only one. He doesn't think you smell good either."
The Body sat. The Body twitched just a little bit around the mouth, almost apologetically. The Body listened patiently, twitched more as Meghan explained that, well, her roommate Stefanie believed the same thing, that it took more than a little convincing for Stefanie to even agree to let Meghan invite the Body over.
"We're not sure whether you can wash yourself, Henry, or if a shower will even help."
Because they aren't sure what putting a maybe-dead body under water will lead to, because they have had long discussions on gangrene and black mold, because Miles has clumsily compared the Body's skin to a soft cheese or a waxy fruit, has pushed his thumbs into a place on the Body's arm and recoiled—they decide water will not help, that the Body cannot wash itself, that hosing the Body down on the quad would be both suspect and risky. One of the Body's eyelids fluttered just enough to be considered a wink. The wink causes Meghan to feel a curious sensation, that thing people call spine-tingling, a contained shiver.
Meghan and Miles look at Reddit forums about mortuary questions and try to determine whether or not to wash the Body's hair, the Body's person. The answers were mostly on the side of speculation, so to be safe, they wipe the Body down with disinfectant, perfume it with Henry's own small collection of overpowering cologne, dry shampoo it while wearing their winter wear—the best option they have. They discuss the possibility of stockpiling latex gloves, of trying to slowly steal formaldehyde from the science labs, just in case, to have some options if real preservation became a necessity. They research what would be involved in funerary procedures, theoretical postings about living with infected loved ones in the wake of a zombie apocalypse, AMAs hosted by trendy, lady-blogging morticians.
"He's not a zombie, I don't think," Meghan argued, though when Miles responded that the Body wasn't not a zombie she had to admit this was also a fair point. Whatever it was, the Body really did not smell good, and if he was going to insist on going places and following them, his stench needed to be dealt with. The Body had his own unique perfume, a florid bouquet with a death note that became simply too unbearable when mixed with the sensory overload of the campus cafeteria, the splashes of CK One. Meghan suggested to Miles that the Body's habit of ladling out his own soup of the day was now becoming a health hazard, and added, really, the combination of his presence and her lettuce wrap put her off her own appetite, spoiled all that was good in the world. It was a problem, too, Meghan thought, that they had stopped calling the Body by his given name, that he had become a mass, a thing without personality, gender, without identity, without voice, something moving beyond the place they thought they'd been, the strange utopia they'd set up within the confines of their assigned cloisters. They tried to bring the name back, but when they did there was something to its emphasis that felt like a cruelty. Adding "Henry" made them spit their responses as they would have during the Game. "You're disgusting, Henry," Miles said from his desk, "I can't believe I ever let something like you touch me." And Henry would sit, silently taunting, because, well, it had been more than touching, hadn't it?
Henry had always been quiet, the sort of guy who could fly under the radar when seated in a classroom and who knew to find a place on a futon or against a wall at a house party. Around campus, though, he was recognizable for being just a little too tall, the sort of tall that meant he'd learned to hunch and had developed a loping, long-legged stride he tried awkwardly to shorten, tripping over himself when he slowed down to walk alongside Meghan or Miles in days past. His height made him a curiosity, visible at a distance as he'd sped along paths or waited in line for coffee. At the beginning of their freshman year he'd told Meghan and Miles too much on their first night drinking together, three beers in and it came out that Henry had been taunted mercilessly, not by the school bully, but by the class comedian, an otherwise sensitive character who for some reason couldn't stop bothering Henry with repeat questions as to whether—with his height and his walk and his big-eyes—he was the monster himself or the Igor collecting parts, and if it was the latter, when would he get around to building himself a boyfriend? Frankenfag, they'd called him, and it was so catchy, Henry admitted, it stuck.
Now, of course, Henry was becoming all the more like the monster; the bruises a purpled collar, every misstep or bump into a corner bursting new capillaries, taking on unexpected blooming gradients. As the Body, Henry was more noticeable than ever before, yet, finally, less bothered by it. The Body didn't try to shrink away, didn't make himself smaller. The Body walked freely, held his head high, took his time, kept to his class schedule. The Body made marks in his textbooks, would sit for long periods in the café near the library, ogling in a way that made the baristas uncomfortable. The Body would meander the middle of the quad unperturbed, would attend parties where he held a solo cup of jungle juice and sipped from it slowly, dribbling most of what he consumed. Parties where he danced a sort of bob at the center of someone's flimsy IKEA rug. The Body answered phone calls from his mother and listened to her quietly, solemnly, with his eyes finally closed, occasionally muttering single words Miles and Meghan assumed were repetitions from the one-sided conversation: "Safe," the Body would say. "Study," the Body would say. "Good work," the Body would say. "Love," the Body would say, and Meghan had to admit this was a little heartbreaking.
Still, the more Meghan and Miles talked about what to do, the more they couldn't escape the idea that, in a way, the Body had freed something in Henry. There were things about him that could be acknowledged, facts without the baggage of overthinking, of self-doubt. The Body didn't seem to care that people openly stared at him when he entered the cafeteria. He didn't hide, didn't hunch, stood straight and tall and rigid. He didn't seem to miss or want to play The Game, possibly because he really couldn't do so, or maybe because he no longer needed to feel whatever want for shame or validation had driven those early runs. Miles, especially, missed what The Game had offered, missed the strange tension of their triangulation, missed the free spaces that had been replaced, now, with a kind of nagging self-doubt. Meghan missed The Game for other reasons; entertainment value, the strange liberation of being an inactive presence, dominant in a safe space, the bottles they'd emptied, the way Henry had been so alive on those nights, so generous, so beautifully desperately open—
When they'd tried—just once—to play The Game now, it was out of a sense of obligation, of trying to lure back the playful teasing Henry trapped somewhere in the Body. "We're not doing this for us," Miles had felt the need to say, anxious and sweating as he swallowed shot after shot of rotgut vodka, more than he'd ever needed to perform his act, his role of lion-tamer before. "We don't need this. We don't fucking want this, Henry, it's fucking weird." And what he meant, really, was something he couldn't actually find words for perhaps because to do so would articulate his own reasons too clearly. So, what Meghan had said had been clinical, a cover-up, the "this is for your own good" reasoning of a parent walking a child through a booster shot. "We're going to try to do what we did before, Henry," she'd said, "our game. Because we know that in cases like yours it can be good to try to continue with familiar activities, so we're going to just do some, like, generalized humiliation. Light, generalized humiliation. Stuff like the first versions, the beginning of the semester."
Miles had slurred his way through a script reconstructed by Meghan, notes pulled from past roles she'd found funny in the moment, or which had seemed particularly thrilling to Henry on those nights Miles commanded so much, received such an effortless response. As the Body, though, Henry seemed unmoved. There was nothing nagging the Body to respond, nothing driving him to ask for an enactment of some deeper pain, nothing he felt shamed by or seemed to take joy in anymore. The post-Body iteration of The Game had been a tragic affair, a sloppy blend of a different type of guilt, a creeping humiliation Miles couldn't enjoy played out as he squeezed a spray bottle of Febreze over the half-dressed, bruised flesh of his roommate, a corpse he couldn't bring himself to whip with the cheap, sex-shop toys more than lightly, couldn't get too close to, didn't want to ask favors of. "Stay down," Miles had barked at one point, though the Body hadn't seemed to be trying to do anything other than to exist, four-legged, cat-cowing lightly almost as if trying to breathe. Meghan had lounged on the upper bunk—as she sometimes did—had egged Miles on. "Do it," she'd said, from exhaustion, from frustration, though she couldn't bring herself to watch the display either, "just hit him with something. We told him we would, he's on the floor. Maybe it will help." And Miles had exchanged the faux-leather of the riding crop for the easy to clean stretch of a yardstick. And Miles had vomited twice into an empty Styrofoam takeout box. And Miles had not been able to decide whether it was the vodka or his own guilt or the sight of Henry's decay that did it. And the opening it made was a dark L on the Body's flesh, an initial, a branding belonging to no one.
They gave up. Times had changed, their game could not exist anymore, for their own shame, for the Body's surprising lack. When the Body knocked something over in their shared living space, he carried on. When the Body didn't do well on an assignment—all the time now—he often didn't even pick up the returned paper, simply left the pages on the desk. Because he barely spoke, the Body was no longer threatened by the idea of having to participate in conversations he would overthink to the point of anxious embarrassment later. The Body didn't soak through his shirts with perspiration, he didn't worry about not being able to produce a respectable amount of facial hair, about the political issues everyone else seemed to obsess over, about nuclear war or the doomsday clock or the protests so many of their classmates attended after classes; he stopped taking his various pills because he had no allergies, no anxiety, no moderate depression, no certain feeling he didn't belong, no aches and pains to speak of. The Body simply existed, smiled more, didn't spend money, didn't exercise, didn't procrastinate, didn't work, and had stopped shitting weeks ago now. Everything about the Body was more at peace with himself, with the way he was and the fleeting acknowledgement of the way he wanted to be. The Body was without preference, Meghan and Miles decided, and though it could have been that this was a lie they told themselves to curb some of their own worries, Meghan justified it by asking Henry—routinely—if he felt like he was better off. When he only smiled, she had to wonder if it really mattered that much if he fell apart in front of their eyes, that there had been a toe sitting beneath the Body's desk chair the day before last, that Henry was shedding pieces of his former self.
2.
Occasionally, the Body would disappear. He would stand from the desk and leave the room, sometimes shutting the door behind him, never locking it. The first time, three weeks into the desiccation, Miles had opted to follow the Body. He had trailed him, keeping 20 paces back as the Body shuffled to the north side of campus, never looking over his shoulder, never bothering to turn in response to greetings or passing bicycles. When the Body had stopped, he had done so to stand patiently by the door to the all-girl's dorm, waiting for someone to open it. The Body took the steps up slowly, passed by any number of backpack-toting women who gave the side-eye first to the Body and then, Miles reported, to him, the creeper slowly winding a suspicious distance behind his monster of a friend. The Body's destination had been Meghan's door, a thirty minute journey to thud a limp fist against the mounted dry-erase board, smearing messages left by neighbors across his knuckles.
When no one answered, the Body waited for several minutes too long, standing very still and much, much too close to the door itself. If you didn't know better, you might get the sense the Body was trying to hide his face from the world as he voyeuristically listened to events on the other side, as he checked for breathing, the heartbeat of some hiding prey, as he tried to will the door to open or mutter sweet nothings to someone on the other side. The reality was almost worse, Miles supposed, but innocuous enough. Still, there was a strangeness to it, a pointlessness that revealed itself when, after nearly ten minutes of standing in the same position, the Body began his long journey back from whence he came.
When they had both returned to their room, Miles had performed a makeshift monologue on seasonal preparation as he forced the Body's old jacket over his shoulders and switched out his boat shoes for more weather appropriate lace-ups. He didn't say he had followed the Body, he didn't think the Body would care. Instead, he simply gave the Body practical advice: "If you look like you're aware of your surroundings," Miles had said, "no one will care how you act." His logic for this was a homeless man he had always noticed wandering the downtown streets of his affluent suburb, a guy who was young enough and decent looking enough that he would blend in, no problem, if he wasn't wearing a black, oversized puffer coat and a knit hat when the temperature hit a humid 93 degrees. "People don't see things that look normal, even if they're not."
Whether it was the jacket or the advice, Miles couldn't say, but the Body left more and more frequently after that exchange. When they tracked him he seemed to veer onto the main road off campus, stopping as a small, forest green dot on the horizon before he could complete a path back to Meghan's, to the library, to the student center or any of the buildings on either side of their divide. Meghan and Miles became like children with binoculars and walkie talkies, literally on the first one, as they had a single pair found for $4 at a church rummage sale. He's leaving, Miles would message, headed your way, and some five or ten minutes later—allowing for the Body's snail pace—Meghan would resume her post at the window, binoculars up and phone in hand. If Meghan's roommate, Stefanie, thought this was strange she did little more than grimace about it. When Stefanie had asked about the presence of the binoculars on the bedside mini-fridge Meghan used as a nightstand, Meghan had muttered something about her liberal arts science requirement, owls, and turkey vultures. This was enough for Stefanie, it seemed.
Whatever the case was, the Body's departures occurred more and more frequently, and the log Miles had taken to keeping revealed little consistency in the time or pattern. Mid-afternoon, 7:22, 10:57, 1 AM. Perhaps the Body enjoyed the late autumn air. Perhaps it had taken to slow walks towards the beach or into town. Perhaps he was welcomed at one of the dive bars on campus row or maybe it sat at the 24-hour truck stop on the edge of the highway, drinking endless coffee refills with no effect. Perhaps the Body simply appreciated the extra layer, the camouflage of being normal, and so decided to step out among people. Soon, it became almost more surprising to find the Body sitting around their dorm room than to return to an empty space. Miles couldn't complain, for all the efforts they'd made to mask the Body's scent, he was only getting worse, and perhaps the Body knew this. Perhaps the Body left as a courtesy, left so Meghan could throw on her own coat and puff across the quad, barreling up the stairs to Miles' already open door, almost too eager to spend time researching and conspiring. The nights became longer, the sudden calls to action more extreme. A 3 AM trek down the empty path on a Tuesday, more and more nights spent passed out on Miles' futon, next to him in front of an open laptop, curled, still clothed, in bedsheets that hadn't been laundered since Henry stopped cleaning, and it wasn't so bad, this thing that was happening, the quiet of the room, the way they fueled each other with this terrible secret.
Still, the secret was terrible, and the prolonged absences worrisome. It wasn't until the Body returned to his room with a thud against their door early one morning, sporting very obviously disheveled clothing, tousled hair, and a chunk gone missing from its neck, however, that Meghan and Miles agreed it was time to change methods. The Body had been absent for over 24-hours, unseen, unspotted, not present in the Music Theory course he diligently attended. When they'd asked neighbors and classmates if they'd seen him lately, the answer was some combination of the following "on the road headed into town a couple days back" or "no" or "I could have sworn I saw him in the café yesterday" until, of course, Stefanie's friend Hailee—a flighty design student with a penchant for "hitchhiking" with affluent neighborhood men—insisted she'd seen him climbing into the passenger seat of a car that Meghan and Miles felt they'd found any kind of concrete answer. "It was him, I'm sure," the girl had said as she painted her nails at Stefanie's desk, "lanky, strange, a real heroin-chic vibe lately? I'd know him anywhere, though, like, I've never talked to him. He's gay, right? I mean, apologies if that's presumptuous, of course. I just always figured you two were together," she said this with a quick gesture towards Miles, who blushed, who did not confirm or deny, "but, anyway, it was a Benz. An S-Class. A white one."
"What?" Meghan had responded, because, really, what else was there to say?
"An S-Class. A white one," Hailee had said, blowing on her nails, "I wouldn't worry. That's a really nice car. Nothing bad can happen to you in an S-Class. Trust me, I'd know. Your friend is probably really living."
She emphasized living in a way that broke it into two words, that meant more than simply alive, that meant Henry was not only out there, but existing in his best state. The wording, though, bothered Meghan who asked, repeatedly, why someone like Hailee would say that of all things. Living. Your friend is living.
"He's not though," Meghan had said, "I'm more certain every day."
"We weren't together," Miles had said, sputtering, "I don't know why she would add that to the conversation. We weren't actually together."
The only thing they could agree upon was the conviction that Hailee was almost certainly performing sexual acts in the grocery store parking lot or, at least, keeping up some kind of sugar baby relationship with the men who picked her up. Hailee was the type of student most likely to be cheekily referred to as a co-ed in a campus novel; a confident girl who wore—at all times—knee high socks and form fitting little 60s dresses she'd stitched herself. Hailee was her own type of predator if campus lore held, and if she said nothing bad could happen in an S-Class, the whole thing was suspicious. Besides, Meghan and Miles reasoned it made sense for a rich, unhappily married midlife crisis to pick up a Hailee, but why pick up a rotting corpse? Why invite something, someone who smelled like Henry into the passenger seat of a luxury automobile? How could they be sure that Henry wasn't actually up to something dangerous? It was unclear, by the end of the conversation, whether they were more worried something had happened to Henry or that Henry himself could be guilty of something terrible, some consumption of the flesh, some harvesting of blood.
Meghan had shrugged, "Miles," she'd said, "he can barely move."
They determined they would need to follow the Body the next time he went out. Something was happening on the evenings Henry disappeared. The Body had to have shaken up his routine, had to be up to something. Had to be going somewhere, with or without the aid of mystery figures in S-classes.
Meghan suggested the Body had stumbled into the ravine that snaked his way around the north side of campus, but Miles protested. His shoes were never muddy. They were always, actually, immaculately clean. He hadn't come back with any burrs or leaves hitched on his corduroys, all of which were almost impossible to avoid even for those with a less restricted range of motion. Meghan tried again. Perhaps the Body was actually going to the library, which was 24-hours and frequently inhabited for long stretches by overachieving students or those in need of sanctuary from oversexed roommates. This was possible, but didn't explain the turns he made at each outing towards the main road, the campus gates. Miles remained suspicious. Something was happening to the Body wherever it was going. Something that left him without a chunk of neck, that changed him slightly every time. They imagined the Body sitting for long periods on a park bench or in the center of town. The most innocent version of Henry's mutilation was the fairy tale one, the one where he served himself up as food for little scavengers. Shameless, carrion-eating omnivores. Stray dogs, foxes, pecking birds bold enough to land on something passingly human.
But it wasn't even that, Miles told her, it couldn't be that. Animals didn't take special notice of him just as people seemed to both see the Body without acknowledging it. The whole thing felt odd, really, a folie a deux, some shared paranoia that went without remark. Their classmates still brought him coffee. Stefanie still said "hi" to him when they ran into her in the cafeteria as though, somehow, nothing seemed askew. If the administration was concerned, they weren't making any moves. Fuck, Miles had thought, even their next door neighbor hadn't bothered to say a damn thing. Because this was college, perhaps, a time when so many of them had already changed, nobody noticed. Miles had turned to Meghan, explained it was their responsibility to continue looking out for the Body, for Henry. And besides, if no one cared, maybe they cared for all the wrong reasons. Maybe they should be angry, not sad, not guilty.
"We need to know he isn't still playing the game with someone new," Miles had said.
"Miles," Meghan said, "I still don't think he can hurt anymore."
"The game, though," he had paused, "it's not his to keep."
And Meghan had nodded, because this—at least—was true.
3.
If you tried to philosophize the game, as Meghan had, it was essentially an extension of make believe and was only really weird when you considered the participants were all much older than what was typically considered appropriate. She'd participated in all kinds of vaguely sexual games when she and the other players were too young to know better. She remembered friends who stuffed their shirts with bunched up towels to create the illusion of cartoonishly proportioned breasts, who then invented whole, vaguely porno situations through which the other kids would grab or smoosh them: a trip to a doctor, a bikini on the beach, an exaggerated series of perversely intentioned falls. They would laugh through these, shrieking about boobies as if they were something, always, to be put on and taken off. She remembered other kids who would attempt to reenact what they thought was happening between shots in a PG-13 strip club sequence, who spent time explaining the logic of strange sitcom jokes or a twitterpation in Bambi or Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. There were the friends who delighted in playing weird variations of truth or dare, and the neighborhood preschoolers who delighted in stripping off their swimsuits to run gleefully through the sprinkler as their parents chased them in horror, ashamed and amused at their children's strong desire to simply be. She remembered, too, whole whisper-giggled games at middle school parties in which certain of her friends tried to provoke a public boner from several boys at the end of the school trip to the local water park. Never mind the question of what sadist would bring a bunch of hormone-high pubescent freaks to a water park. Never mind the question of just what they were laughing about: the boy's lack of control? The powers they wielded? The way that, on the bus home, anyone who had been successful became a point of strange jealousy, a slut without doing anything, a slut who had merely brushed up against someone or who, in one case, simply whispered to a boy that she could see the outline of his junk in his swim trunks, and the mere idea was enough to cause a problem. There was all of this and so many other memories better left repressed, unacknowledged. Many of her childhood friendships, she thought, had been deviant in the name of what, growing up? Learning? It was difficult to imagine that others didn't carry these same ghosts, these stories no one dared discuss.
Yet, discuss she did. She'd used a long-distance friend as an excuse, a vessel, a confidant. She'd called her to catch-up, to wish her a happy birthday nearly a week after the fact, and she'd watched herself say the words, stood and performed her narration of events in front of the cheap mirror Stefanie had mounted between their closets. One hand clutched the phone, the other kept vigil for her pulse, stayed still at the base of her neck as a tumult of confessions came out. She'd met these boys, these boys who lived, for whatever reason, in the campus's International house. She'd met these boys and they'd asked if she wanted to hang out and watch a movie, a French film, if she drank, and she had wanted to drink. A lot. Constantly. For reasons of not liking her roommate, of having no other real friends, of finding herself detached from the interests that seemed to consume so many of the women on her floor. She'd met these boys and they started a routine: they drank too much, cheap shit, they consumed other things, smoked weed, experimented with mushrooms as they'd watched weird videos they found on the internet, celebrity sex tapes, late night cartoons. The boys had brought her into their circle, introduced the idea that she was one of them, that she was now allowed to see what they'd kept hidden, a game they'd accidentally started playing and found they both enjoyed. She played it, too, but her part of the game was mostly to observe, to suggest new complications or permutations, to sit at the top of the pyramid and be the woman in the room, the person they were performing for, the vague presence that squared their actions, canceled out their blatant homoeroticism. She was their distant third, in the room to watch Miles riding on top of Henry as though he was a horse, all of them laughing until they couldn't breathe, Miles using belts to attach Henry to the base of the desk, to strap him by the wrists, the legs, to stand above him and make fun of the length of his limbs, the stupid, stodgy way he dressed, like an accountant, like his father. Henry was instructed to refer to Miles as master, as his lord, as his king, as a name that belonged to nobody. Meghan, suggesting Henry remove his t-shirt, that he arch his back or sink to the floor like a slug, his neck uncomfortably tilted. Meghan, suggesting Henry would like to be hit, would love, actually, to be struck with various objects, that he use a permanent marker as a bit between his teeth. Here is the flat side of a hairbrush, a lint roller, one of the binding belts. Here is a twisted-up wet towel, a stolen fraternity paddle, a pillow made for a short smothering, a biting, a deep inhalation as the humiliation grows, as Henry seemed to like it too much. Here is the moment Miles called her a queen and demanded she take the game further, the way she'd suggested that Henry kiss Miles, first the ground before him, before them, then higher, his mouth, lower, his hands, an imagined royal ring, then a dare of somewhere else, something forbidden, and again, Henry had liked it too much, but Miles had liked it, too. There was the truth of it, the way they all got off on whatever it was they were up to, the way Miles could instruct Henry to do something obscene to a piece of fruit, to call him words they would never use outside their locked door. There was something to the way Miles said "faggot" to Henry, the way Henry would pantomime it back, the way they switched clothes and played "opposite day" and renamed each other as one swam in the other's t-shirts, as, again, they laughed hysterically. It was performance and also, so clearly, the start of some other thread of possibility. She was part of it and not, in it from the outside, an instigator, a voyeur, but she could run through whole philosophy 101 dialogues of why she both was and wasn't present, talk about it abstractly, make it something she both did and didn't do, was and was not a part of, tell you it was innocent. A game of make believe. A weird next level of pretend, like manipulating the relationships of simulated characters. Like building a house and instructing your avatar to flirt, to explore, to invite a visiting neighbor into their bedroom. To watch that avatar unzip the neighbor's jeans, take its cock in his hand, bring it to his lips.
Her friend had listened on the other end, small pops and rustlings indicating she was still there, still working on something, getting herself dressed, ready, opening small jars and tubes of makeup products and lotions. When Meghan finished, there had been a silence on the other end of the line.
Meghan had pulled her phone away from her ear, had looked down at the screen to see a flurry of missed messages from Miles. She'd heard the friend trying anxiously to cover up what she'd just heard, struggle to define this in line with kinks she'd learned about in her Human Sexualities class, breathlessly stuttering and backtracking through sentences that included the phrase "sex positive" and reassurances of a spectrum, a normalcy. Meghan had listened again, not sure she wanted the Game to be thought of as normal, wanting, suddenly, a punishment of her own, someone to humiliate her, to shame her for what she'd participated in, she waited, breathed, unsure of how many minutes had gone by. A sick guilt rose in her gut, a queasy sense of her own lost innocence, of the way the game was not pretend at all, of all the things it implicated her in.
"Meg," her friend had said from so many miles away, "did I lose you? Are you still there? You should talk to someone, Meg, someone else. You should get back together with ---" and it was there that Meghan had hung up. Because that wasn't the right answer. Because it wasn't clear from the outside. And all she could think was that she didn't know what the right answer would be, but she wanted someone to tell her what the Body needed. If it needed. She wanted someone to tell her what it is she needs from the Body.
4.
Hailee was the one who brought them the first hook-up profile. She'd stopped Meghan in the mailroom with a flicker of sudden, manic recognition, as if she'd been struggling to match a face to a concept, a name, for years. Hailee had fussed until she located a set of screenshots saved into an album on her phone, thrusting the device too close to Meghan's nose, showing her image after image of Henry: a Henry of the past, a Henry smiling out from the deck of a boat, the image all high-contrast white and blue horizon and the orange-gold of his glowing tan, a Henry holding a fish he'd caught. Proud. Though his eyes are obscured by tortoiseshell Ray-Bans, it is unmistakably him. Here is the Body so alive, so different that when Meghan sees him she feels choked, that she swallows a heartbeat, that a thrum of anxiety numbs the fingers reaching for the device in Hailee's hands, scared to flip through to the next image.
"That's your friend, right?" Hailee leans in too close to her, her bracelets jangling, shaking up a musk of bergamot and patchouli that fills the room, sudden and oppressive. Meghan nods, Hailee zooms rapidly in on the images, moves to the next one, she doesn't have time to catch the snippets of text. "I guess he's not really with your other friend anymore, then, is he?"
"They weren't romantically together," Meghan had explained, remembering Miles' outrage, "it's cool. They're just roommates."
Hailee had looked at her, "Sure. I'd just assumed you were their friend, but I see now, which one was it that needed you?"
"I am their friend," Meghan had said, closing the conversation, aware of Hailee's understanding, "I'm only their friend." She was used to reading the knowingly cryptic ways girls like Hailee spoke. Something in it made her realize the trivial nature of her role, now more than ever, that it had never included her, "It's more complicated than that," is what she told Hailee, this though the answer she suppresses is don't. She knew, suddenly, definitely the right answer was don't. Or. The right answer was you're wrong. Or, the right answer was neither. All that stopped her from saying so was the ticking, an anxious hurt, a jealousy, her own certainty that any answer is a betrayal to their bond and an acknowledgment of a truth she had long known. With them, she had been a presence. A spectator. A voyeur. A set of eyes. A body.
"Don't ask how I found this," Hailee had instructed, launching into her own convoluted tale of frustration and curiosity, of wanting to know what men posted to lure other men, of what she wasn't finding, of flirty catfishing and yes, maybe, a perverted curiosity, an interest in seeing just who else on campus was poking around in which categories, who was trying to hook up in ways just like her, "I stumbled into this K-hole," she explained. "Now I know too much."
When she brings the evidence to Miles, it's clear the answers had always been there. They registered for every service, narrowed their search options, found him again and again, on multiple platforms, with multiple interests, categorized in places that spoke to an agency they hadn't imagined he actually had. Tinder. Grindr, OkCupid, FetLife, a strange, typo-laced write-up on Craigslist that spoke to his silence, his discretion, his interest in unconventional types of play, phrasing Meghan and Miles had never thought to use. Sub. Kink. A preference for a "You" described as brawny, bear-like, respectful only to the point of a safety word they couldn't imagine. On Grindr, Miles and Meghan invented a man named Jamie. A young, prematurely wealthy stockbroker who lived in the fancy brownstone townhouses closest to the city. On FetLife, they called themselves HeadMaster, cribbed passages from the profiles of others.
YOU: A dead-boy. A willing victim. Someone with a surplus of shame and a high threshold for pain. A fuckhole.
YOU: Livestock. A man who would be pony. A curly-haired, downy creature who looks more innocent than you might be. A greedy, baby, bottom bitch.
YOU: Quiet. Nervous and clever and playful and looking for something no frills, no hang-ups, no questions, in the vicinity of campus.
It was a different kind of game. A way of pretending that felt like cheating, that had exposed them in ways their own game had left unnamed. As they waited word by word in a slow exchange with Henry, they had matched with so many others. Other bodies and deadboys and deadgirls, walking corpses too willing to send them a snapshot of a lone appendage, a collar around their neck, a ball gag or a hooded secret. They argued about which ones to respond to and who to ignore, and in secret they struggled to keep pets. Meghan had liked a man with kind eyes, a man who had expressed to them uncertainty, doubt that had seemed so familiar. Meghan had identified with the man, with his clumsy selfie, with the filter he'd chosen to mask the imperfections of his skin. Miles had wanted to lure out characters he said he didn't like, men with something shifty about them, men he suspected Henry might be interested in. The men were proxies of Miles, Meghan had noticed. Every one of them was objectionable for a reason which left them too close to him. One man expressed an interest in riding his sub like a horse. One quoted from the book Miles kept always on his desk. One simply looked like he might be part Asian. All of them were unacceptable, singled out for distraction, for eradication though there was nothing Miles could do, nothing that would ensure they weren't meeting with Henry. Meghan kept her pets as curiosities, as men she tried to message with about inane topics, flirting gently as she tried to keep up the ruse, play her role as HeadMaster, as nearby alpha. Miles obsessed over his pets, his proxies, worked himself into a frenzy of image searches trying to find the right dick pic, the right believable alternate version of himself to send to them, to lead them further towards a meeting that would never happen. Their time becomes his time. Moments consumed by a search for the right word, the right fake image, the right cultural reference, the right demand. Miles got better at it by the day and Meghan soon found that the inbox of their account had been filled with back and forth messages, dozens of conversations beyond Henry, beyond the proxies, beyond the threats. On another afternoon she'd sat, half stoned, while Miles searched for another nude, another post-workout selfie, another erect penis shot at just the right angle, enough, he explains, to be "impressive but believably poor" as a photograph, as he discussed aloud just using his own, as he pulled it from his pants as though she hadn't been there and snapped image after image, robotically, fluffing in fits and starts, and Meghan hadn't known whether or not to look, whether or not to leave, whether or not this was just another version of the same role she had always played in this cinderblock room, and so she had stood up, disrupted, pulled a chair up next to him.
"I can help," she had said. And he had stared at her, not in a way that was permission or rejection, but in a way that suggested he had forgotten she was there, a look she felt betrayed by. "I can play this game, too, Miles. Let me. We can still play a Game. This Game," she had said, "it can be me you shame. I have so much shame, Miles, and it's ok. I don't know what to do about it. We can play without him. I can do that for you," she had gestured at his penis, at the way it crumpled sadly, believably poor, in his lap, "I know I'm not him. I'll never be him. He's gone."
Miles had looked at her as though he had forgotten she was there, as though she'd violated a rule they'd never spoken. He had looked at her, and that was all the shame Meghan felt she could actually stomach, yet she didn't move.
Meghan and Miles sit and it is impossible to know for how long. They sit and neither makes any move to touch the other, to acknowledge what they have struggled with or against, to comfort or to humor, to please or to maim. They sit with Miles' genitals still exposed to the stale dorm air, still dormant, still just there, believably sad. They are there when The Body returns with a large cup of coffee and there when he manages, finally, to finish it all the way down to its cold dregs. They are there when The Body leaves. When he is gone for so long. When it returns again with an added shuffle to its limp they hear instead of see. They sit until the batteries on their phones have long died and Stefanie has come pounding on the door in search of her missing roommate. They sit as Stefanie and Miles' next door neighbor try to reason with them and place a folded bath towel over Miles' exposed genitals. They sit until they have acquired their own smells, their own stains. Until they feel that they have atrophied or that their bodies have sprouted sores. They sit until they should collapse and then, still, they are there. And finally, eventually, Miles and Meghan rehearse what it would mean to walk away.
"When they ask me about you and Henry," Meghan says before she moves, "I'll answer with honesty. I hardly knew you. Before a jury, if I have to, I'll answer: I hardly knew myself. I hardly know myself. To every single one of their faces, I'll say it to them, just like I'm saying it to you now. Clear-eyed. Awake from a long slumber. I hardly knew you. I hardly know you."
When she stands up, Miles changes all of the passwords on their shared accounts.
When she stands up, she discovers the Body returned. Another cup of coffee in hand.
5.
In the spring, Meghan and Miles learned the next steps in what would become their annual routine. A slow boxing up, a selling of barely cracked textbooks, a sorting of clothes needed for their return home and the winter wear that could be packed away, stowed in a storage unit until their return that autumn. They turned in final papers and spent long nights cramming for exams under the dim lamps of library carrels. Miles was shown how to snort Adderall, how to track down the philosophy major who sold off his prescription. Meghan went to parties for graduating seniors she'd spoken to only in class. The campus seemed finally to exist at a stabilized hum, the dull level of panic and submission they'd become so used to living with. People moved as if their fates were predestined, resigned or wary, breaking down over the reveal of the inevitable, of a truth they'd kept secret for months on end.
The Body moved among them. More invisible than ever before. Weary, tired, just like everyone else. Dark circles around its eyes. Just like everyone else. Moving, a zombie. Just like everyone else. When they said goodbye to him they did it quickly, saying little, just stopping by while their parents loaded the trunk with bags and boxes. "I'll see you in the fall," they said, like a question, knowing that they might not, hoping that they might not.