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FOREVER AND EVER AND EVER AND EVER
"Love makes you want to be a better man—right, right. But maybe love, real love, also gives you permission to just be the man you are."
(Gillian Flynn, "Gone Girl")
I. Red Pyramid
From his shadowy spot nestled between two walls, he watches Billy bloodied, his skin glowing with vermilion like a barbaric phoenix, and with the contemplation come the same questions as before, the ones Stuart sees germinating in the heads and eyes of others as well when they first set eyes on Billy, and more often than not at every opportunity they get to cross paths with him, down a hallway or a street, during a fortuitous encounter, by accident. He felt them being born and growing in sinuous roots in his own corners, those towards which one should never venture too much, because they are so dark, chasms like a bottomless pit from which a muddy creature dripping with putrid water would slowly emerge, a creeping abomination formed of those words you don't want to hear, to recognize.
"Who is Billy?" they ask, eager to know, enraged for understanding, a small French revolution and a verbal storming of the Bastille, the blade of a guillotine falling on the rest of the thoughts and splashing a trail of fresh blood on their hesitant steps.
Who is Billy?
What is Billy?
Where is Billy?
How is Billy?
(why Billy)
And all these questions are of the worst effect, viscerally stupid and useless, because none of them can be answered.
They are wonderfully rhetorical. It's about the same as asking why that guy writes with his left hand instead of his right, or why you fall in love with someone. There can be no reason about love, no logical, sensible explanation. Love is one of those phenomena that must remain a mystery, a permanent source of questions the existence of which produces amazement. From the moment you understand what attracts and pleases you in the other person, the charm gradually unravels like a spider's web being torn apart to better clean the house, in shreds of delicate and cloudy filaments.
Love does not have to be understood, to be deciphered, clarified, elucidated. It is an enigma the status of which must remain unchanged, unresolved for life, a language that must never be translated, at the risk of becoming a dead one. Finding the element in the other that captivates immediately invalidates it, for then it can be dismantled, deconstructed, defused. This is the beginning of the end of the bomb, a three hundred and sixty degree reversed explosion. It ruins everything. It's the equivalent of finding out who the killer is in a horror movie before the end.
Tatum is cute, Tatum is pretty, sweet, funny, she has beautiful thighs and a body that would drive a priest crazy, lips fuller and more tender than an early summer, a great sense of humor. In Stuart's mind, these characteristics are listed, carefully catalogued, almost coldly, like a directory of names or an inventory in a warehouse. Deep down, he knows, the comparison isn't so wrong that he absolutely must reject it. Everything attractive he knows about Tatum he has in his head and in detail, has become familiar with like one reads the report of the month's sales numbers in a company.
But Billy is a question mark, an interrogation raised in the void, meeting silence, and therefore Billy is something else, Billy is the enigma, the rebus, the word impossible to discover (Billy is love love love madness love the reaper).
Things we don't understand hold that irresistible power of a good fire we wish we could gather around on a cold winter's day, of a beautiful house the real estate agent offers you at an unbeatable price, of the opportunity to push your worst enemy down as he or she stands on the edge of a precipice. Here comes fear, but also a violent desire, an earthquake in the belly, a furious palpitation of the heart against which it is hard, oh so hard to fight. Stuart has never been the fighting type, and even less so from a moral standpoint.
Peer pressure, all that.
He can't help it, honestly. The modern world is a plague, a volcano of nervousness and anxiety.
Still, he looks at Billy in the middle of the living room, wrapped up in his bloody blanket, the knife still in his hand and his eyes lowered to the dead woman, the white fabric of his t-shirt rising with his breathing, and with this vision the volcano becomes dormant, as the calm and quiet that follows the murder slowly settles over the room, over them, over this idiot lying on the floor.
II. Windmills
Her legs are twisted into an awkward position, as if she had just slipped off the couch, and her knees form sharp angles, while the silk stockings she wears show signs of tearing, resulting from her meager struggle for survival. Obviously, she lost it. In the poker game of existence, she got the shittiest hand in the world, and her cards couldn't save her. It's silly, but that's how it is. There are those who win, who live, and those who lose, who die. Therein lies one of the few human certainties, one of the only things you can count on, besides taxes and injustice.
Death is always there for you. It will always wait for you. Death is more reliable than insurance, or banks, or the love of your partner. Do you have trust issues? No worries. Death will come for you no matter what.
And the thought makes him laugh inwardly, a cheap joke with no taste except for the slightly coppery one of blood gushing from a vein.
No, really, how abominably unfortunate that people don't get his jokes. Stuart has plenty of them, but he can tell when the others don't want to listen, and most people give off these negative vibes towards his witticisms. So he shuts up, keeps them to himself, and unrolls them in the corner of his head in a farandole while Billy stabs and slaughters, and vice versa. His best puns usually come while he's plowing through intestines with knives, or slitting quivering throats. No doubt there is something tragic about his satires being the children of gut-wrenching, yet he fails to stem the tide, just as he fails to explain Billy.
The phone was his idea, courtesy of Stuart Macher.
He has others, shining in the back of his mind.
He remembers the look on Billy's face then, the smile that lifted the charming corners of his mouth, the gleam in his eyes, the little chuckle that rose from his white, beautifully sculpted throat.
Billy likes his jokes, no matter what he says. Stuart can read it in his reactions, in the roll of his eyes feigning exasperation, when in truth they are gloating with macabre satisfaction. Each time Stuart cracks a joke, he is quick to admire the way his lips curl over his teeth, how his eyes sparkle and dance, half mad, half feverish, like the ravenous flames of a forest fire.
No, the chick definitely doesn't look good, and besides, she's horribly dressed. Her black pencil skirt lacks imagination, her pumps with small heels are a deadly bore (haha that's a good one), and her flowered blouse is so ugly and clumsy it would make the official representatives of good taste in clothing weep. Stuart isn't sure if such a congregation exists, but he enjoys dreaming it does, and stages their interventions. Really, this is a disgrace, she is the worst-dressed dead woman in my entire career, here, I quit, I cannot stand such an insult, one of them would say, the leader, whom Stuart imagines wearing an impeccably tailored suit from Armani and patent shoes, with huge sunglasses he would wear even indoors, looking like a fly.
A fly for a corpse.
Wonderful.
He would circle her and instead of sniffing her rotten scent, he would breathe in the infamy of her attire. Laughter escapes him and Billy twists towards him, turning his big doe eyes in his direction, but a doe hiding as a lioness, that would have snorted a little too much coke before going on the hunt.
"What are you laughing at?" he inquires abruptly.
Stuart can't quite determine whether his tone of voice is threatening or genuinely curious (probably a little of both).
He readjusts himself against the wall he's been leaning on, shrugs his shoulders and feels his eyebrows rise up to his hairline, to better express his lack of mockery and his innocence (with a dead girl on the carpet).
"Nothing," he answers. "That girl's clothes."
"What, her clothes?"
Billy won't let go. He likes to know, where Stuart doesn't mind a little bit of uncertainty in the equation.
By nature, Billy is in control. He's the one who came up with the mask and costume ideas. He chooses the victims, in most cases. Once or twice Stuart has made a suggestion, but usually he offers the decision to Billy without hesitation.
Perhaps this is why Stuart follows him rather than leads, and perhaps it is not just a matter of peer pressure, but simply a desire to go with the flow, to be swept along in the hurricane, and to watch rather than do. Thus, in most scenarios, he is the one who calls, while Billy plays with the knives, and Stuart remains in the background, just in case, should the situation get out of hand, watching the show unfold like the leaves of a fan, listening to the screams, the cries, Billy's voice and the thump of the blade as it penetrates the flesh and stabs it, making it bleed.
Billy usually wears dark colors on their little tête-à-tête evenings, but tonight he's in white, his shirt as milky as the surface of the moon, clouds in an all-blue sky, or the dress of a bride whose supposedly happiest day of her life would have been slightly disrupted by general carnage.
(Carrie at her ball)
The t-shirt is stained red, repainted in slaughterhouse fashion, Michael Myers' style, two large M entwined in a rococo loop, a bit too flashy.
The chick bled like a pig, profusely. Stuart always marvels at the amount of blood released from stabbed bodies. They bleed and bleed and bleed, for hours, flooding the floor and the furniture, a gloomy tidal wave he and Billy contemplate before proceeding with the big clean-up operation, or almost. They are more meticulous with the corpses than with their respective bedrooms.
But now Billy is getting impatient, left unanswered for too long, boiling inside like a timb bomb. He calls out to him with a hint of anger:
"Hey! You're dreaming or what?"
(yes)
Stuart feels the danger sliding against his skin, the foolishness of his own attitude and of his lack of explanation. Again, removing his shoulder from the wall against which it leans, and nonchalantly pointing to the dead woman on the carpet with aspasmodic movement of his chin, he declares:
"They're hideous. Hurts me just to look at them."
One of Billy's eyebrows arches elegantly, as his eyes widen at his accomplice's remark.
Billy doesn't give a shit about clothes, and he's certainly not going to hold back from telling Stuart so. He's expecting it the way one prepares to hit the water of a pool after jumping off the highest diving board.
It's going to happen. He knows it. He smells it, a scent of irritation and weariness, of astonishment and anger, the smell of Billy after a murder, the smell which always precedes his fury.
The fatal blow will come in three, two, one...
"Why the fuck should I care?"
Zero.
Now that they've known each other for several years and are relatively familiar with their routines, Suart has developed a particularly keen sense of the timings to which Billy is committed, both in terms of verbal and physical reactions. Tatum and Sydney have their sleepovers, they have their homicide dates. Everyone has their hobbies. The girls gorge on ice cream and pizza while he and Billy devour fear and horror. Pizza comes next. So goes their usual little ritual, the one they've built up since that first, eye-opening, apotheosis murder of Sydney's mother, who fell into their hands like an unfortunate toy under the eyes of a particularly careless toddler. The thing is not so different from sex, in the end. First comes the foreplay, the phone call, the game, the "stop your bullshit" and "who is that?" they never answer to. Next, the chase, the action, the screams and fright, the feel of the knife handle in their gloved hands, their breaths bouncing against the mask. Lastly, the enjoyment of the killing, the blood flowing like water, the grunts and moans of pain, while they are generally sweating under the large black outfit, and their breathing slowly calms down, their heartbeat resuming its quiet regularity.
III. Crimson Columns
Billy is always hungry after a murder.
Chances are he will be hungry after the one they just committed.
Stuart is unable to remember the girl's name. All his interest seems to be focused on her clothes, a kind of attempt to distance himself, a needed withdrawal which annihilates all compassion and identification. He thinks about what he could find to satisfy Billy's appetite.
Their first murder had a strangely intimate conclusion, with the two of them gathered on the couch of Stuart's parents' house, stripped of their bloody clothes, and surrounded by popcorn and potato chips as an old horror classic, Dracula's Nightmare, played on the television screen and Christopher Lee curled a sardonic smile on his sharp, reddish canines.
Stuart's parents were out of town. They had the advantage of being away very frequently for personal as well as professional reasons, leaving their son in charge of the house and his extracurricular activities. Sometimes Stuart feels like they are trying to run away from him, because they have developed a mistrust and fear of him they cannot explain, since they know nothing, and must never learn what their only son does in his spare time. As for Billy, his father is too wrapped up in his financial troubles to pay much attention to his son's many late nights out. I'm going to Stuart's, Billy always says, and he tells Stuart his father barely nods his head and advises him to be careful.
It's the old saying: loneliness attracts loneliness.
Stuart remembers that first night, the first death, the exhilaration and the panic, the calm that had preceded Billy's brutal lacerations of Sydney's mother, what they had done before, the taut wrists in Stuart's hands. She had struggled, but Stuart had not released his grip one inch. He seemed to remember Billy watching him as he stabbed inside her, while she cried and whimpered, her screams muffled by a makeshift gag.
He remembers the aftermath, back home, Billy on the couch, picking up a popcorn here, a chip there, anything he could get his hands on. Stuart was sleepy. Killing inevitably makes him want to sleep, without him being able to understand exactly where the mechanism comes from.
They had laid there, on the sofa, not even trying to reach the comfort of the two beds waiting for them upstairs, in Stuart's room.
Early the next morning, the pale light of the sun hesitating to come in and lighten the interior of the house had woken him up. Billy was lying against him, his back pressed to his chest.
More than a year later, Stuart still wondered how they had ended up embracing on that damn couch. He kept on the other hand a vivid memory of the bones of Billy's spine rolling against his belly, of the arm he had, probably out of reflex, believing himself at Casey's who was to dump him some weeks later, wrapped around Billy's waist. He still had in mind, down there, in the dark, the sensation of Billy's throat against his cheek, the smell of his skin washed after the shower they had taken to erase the traces of the murder, but above all this impression of being elsewhere, of having landed on another planet.
The television had stayed on all night, broadcasting its images, its noise, offering them a weak sound and visual distraction. When Stuart woke up, the screen displayed the morning edition of the news.
The world appeared to him, however, very far away, very blurry. Over him and Billy had been draped a grey fake fur blanket. He didn't know which of them had undertaken to deploy it that way (why the fuck should I care). He had tried in vain to take stock of the evening, to understand by what means it had ended like this, with Billy in his embrace, sleeping the sleep of the just and long after Stuart had left the couch, trying his best not to wake him, but full of confusion as to his closeness.
IV. Red Sandstorm
In the living room of the heretically dressed girl they killed, Stuart shakes his head, answering Billy's rhetorical question in an equally eloquent manner.
The hand Billy then runs through his hair colors it a deep, almost royal red.
(crown of blood)
He and Billy are friends, the fact is there, barely warm, out of the oven a while ago. The detail is no longer a news flash. They've grown up together, lived and shared experiences, the latest in the form of the cold, stiff chick on the carpet of this house with furnishings as placid as a cow grazing in a meadow. Stuart has no illusions about Billy's dominance over him. He's not so stupid as to deny Billy is the one in charge, that if they were to be cast in the great movie of Life with a capital L, Billy would be the master and Stuart the dog.
Perhaps a labrador, or rather a poodle, most often attached by the magic of language to the phenomenon of submission to the yoke of men.
As a result of the same observation, Stuart retains some of his power and independence, a vague reminder of his wild instinct, his fangs outside the muzzle, at least enough not to feel wronged and still be able to bite a little. However, he doesn't question his domestication in the sense that the terms suit him. Much of this acceptance comes from the fact that he and Billy share a taste for slaughter, for instilling terror in others, for watching them despair and weep, returning to the state of vulnerable children, small helpless creatures in the midst of the infinity of giant stars, galaxies and all the monstrosity they contain.
Their shared passion, the existence of which must be concealed from all others, keeps them both in a pair of handcuffs on the edge of a sheer cliff. Should one of them try to speak, the other would find himself irremediably dragged down in his fall.
They are stuck together, blood brothers, so to speak, partners in the same crime.
Their dynamic in Stuart's eyes should have stopped there.
So he finds it all the more difficult to understand why Billy ended up curled up against him on his couch, as if he were suddenly possessed by the spirit of Casey, who was sleeping at home in her flowery sheets, unaware of the whole thing and yet already on their list. Thus the question returns, nagging, persistent.
A knife blade sinking, foraging, exploring.
(why why why)
(the motive)
Start is certain to have fallen asleep during the movie that night, exhausted by the physical effort of the murder and the associated emotions, a weariness even sweeter and fonder than that of love.
Billy is therefore, in all likelihood, the one who moved to the couch, where they were each at one end, to join Stuart and lie down beside him. He sees no other possible explanation, no other viable option in which he could have intervened and initiated the whole thing. He would never have allowed himself. Touching Billy seems at times like putting his hand in a hot oven: Sidney doesn't see it, because she doesn't know, poor darling, but he, Stuart, is not yet suicidal enough to try, although he feels some of the pulses of it, every time they kill together, set up their strategy, build the crime and plunge headlong into it.
Billy is in control, Billy decides.
It cannot be otherwise.
Therefore, Stuart can only see him having created such an outcome on his couch, and yet he does not understand the origin of it, does not manage to grasp the reasons for it.
All this is a cosmic puzzle to him. He doesn't have the energy to break his nerves on it, but they, a bit revolutionary on the edges, with a penchant for the guillotine, frequently come back to the question and orbit around it.
One year later, the answer remains lost in the distance, a strange quasar illuminating the celestial vault, a black hole at the bottom of which one would have to dive and accept to be torn apart to discover the singularity.
So goes Billy.
So goes everything that goes with him for Stuart, and the love, and the murders, and his inability to look away when Billy makes the knife dance and murders, dressing in blood from head to toe. It's Footloose to the rhythm of decapitation and evisceration. Put on your dancing shoes, and slide down the crimson drags that decorate the room.
V. Anger Temple
From the girl's radio come the words of a summer hit that has not yet reached the peak of its fame and, therefore, worn out the patience of the listeners. Stuart knows the lyrics, which he hums silently in his head. Tatum usually sings them at the top of her lungs.
Soon he will have to help Billy to move the body, to put it in a more advantageous position, more suitable for their work. Perhaps they will install her on a chair, legs falsely crossed in an attitude of superiority, and arms gently folded on her thighs, neck straight. They will need ropes, or perhaps wires. No rigor-mortis on which they can expect to rest to hold their dead sculpture still.
The macabre painting comes to life in Stuart's mind. He suspects it is building in Billy's mind as well, as he looks at his current composition, a cataclysm on the verge of ordering itself, and revels in it.
A brushstroke over here, a Caravaggio emerges.
Another one there, a Bosh takes shape.
In other places, it looks like a Goya, or a Guéricault.
A Sickert, or a Spilliaert.
Long live dark art, the age of night terrors and abominations on the painters' stretched canvas. Stuart's parents once took him to see an exhibition on the subject, imagining the child would draw some benefit from it and not a more unbridled and morbid imagination, perhaps a form of trauma, he cannot say, and pays only limited attention to it to be honest. There was a time when women were accused of witchcraft and of fraternizing with demons, but the greatest illustrative atrocities came from the minds of men.
Why, then, were they not pointed at, burned at the stake, feared and shunned?
Stuart's questions allow themselves to be overtaken, overwhelmed, sunk, with a cheerfulness too excessive to be natural. He has to take them in hand before they completely deviate from their initial course, and get lost in the middle of a nightmare, in the lands of Mordor and Hell, where all the Jack the Ripper, the Hannibal Lecter, the Norman Bates, the Ted Bundy, the Jeffrey Dahmer, the John Wayne Gacy live, a gloomy lullaby in which the names evoke crazy teeth and eyes, abysses of disasters even Lucifer would not want to encounter.
Less than five minutes have passed since Stuart uttered that uncontrollable burst of laughter.
Time seems ever longer, ever more stretched during these post-homicide moments, when silence and lull resurface, as if carried by the waters of an old sewer (do you want a balloon Georgie).
Billy's fingers play with the ugly fabric of the girl's shirt, wiggle through the gaps made by the knife blade, and smear with blood. The color is beautiful on his skin, more so than on Stuart's, probably because he sees it from a distance and not directly running down his cheeks, his knuckles, in the hollows of his neck. Some people are more admirable and attractive in bloodshed. Without a doubt, Billy is a member of this very private club. After a murder, his movements are smoother, more languid, more elegant in a way.
Stuart likes to compare him to a lion who has been brought the evening's fare, a massive carcass dripping with flesh, guts and blood, and fed on it to the point of ultimate satiation. He looks like a monarch whose army would have defeated the enemy, a mother who would have given birth to a forbidden, strange child, fascinating of shadows and yellow eyes, a snake having swallowed a poor animal lying there, unaware of the danger. A wild beast, snout plunged into the meat of its meal. He purrs and roars at the same time, all gentle for his prey after ripping it to pieces.
Say meow, Stuart remembers almost begging Tatum one night, nudging her without malice, grabbing her by the waist, and if at any point Billy's face substituted for his girlfriend's, if her hair turned short and brown instead of red and long, if the sultry chest flattened, and if he imagined Billy's low voice responding to his request, he didn't give anything away. Tatum has a pretty good intuition.
"Why do you stand up for him all the time?" she had once exclaimed, half-serious, half-scandalized. "You have a crush or something?"
(oh honey if only you knew)
Of course.
No way.
Deep down, there is still a huge uncertainty in him regarding this issue.
What is a crush, after all? How to define a crush, on what foundations to build the term and characterize the concept?
A word is never anything more than that: a word. It is encrusted with limitations of meaning, of representations, of emotions, which it will never be able to grasp with sufficient accuracy. The notion of crush is as much a part of it as the rest of the universal vocabulary, whatever the language. Words remain an invention of man, produced by his ideas and affections, but like everything else that mankind composes and develops, they are restricted to this envelope of personal thoughts and individual visions.
Everyone associates what they want with words. Beyond the recognized languages, there is therefore also a personal, private vocabulary, meanings belonging only to a specific individual, in given contexts, situations, and this for all of us. One language per human being, and as many definitions for a word as there are people living on Earth.
Stuart feels this chaos of meaning, this infinite disorder of terms, and appreciates it all the more because it legitimizes his own theory of what a crush can be.
The dictionary, which Stuart has consulted intermittently since he learned how to read, gives a very precise, very cold meaning: "being in love with someone but not in a relationship". It offers synonyms, such as fling, implying a vulgar, derisory feeling, or even a fleeting romance, an almost childish term which holds a sense of mockery. Stuart does not recognize himself in any of these labels. All of them would imply him knowing how to define love, and here the old problem of the relevance of a word and its meaning comes back to full force.
In all honesty, Stuart tends to avoid letting his thoughts stray over this kind of gulf. Psychotic, perhaps, but masochistic, no. Or at least not that much, thank you.
VI. Hear the Bells
Hence Billy remains a question mark, a doubt, a misunderstanding.
Stuart only admits the facts, but curtly sends the hypotheses back into the closet. Agreed, he has sometimes (often) imagined Billy in Tatum's place. Agreed, he prefers Billy's company to Tatum's, despite the sex and all that. Agreed, seeing him always does something to him, he doesn't know what, but something. That same something swells like a hot air balloon during the murders, and agreed, he likes to see Billy covered in blood, stabbing their victim, he likes to see him hatching plans and schemes, he likes the idea of the two of them, in the same room, surrounding a corpse that belongs to them, sharing this weird, unhealthily sweet electricity, like molasses in which you get progressively stuck. It never misses the appointment, and always rises like a misty cloud after a killing, while they catch their breath and admire the result of their work, think about what they have to do for the staging.
They are just beginning, experimenting, trying out styles and genres.
But in a few years, oh, in a few years, Stuart thinks of their names in the papers, under an alias more striking than "Ghostface," the fear of people reading about their misdeeds, their escapes on the highways of the country, moving from state to state, from environment to environment, killing freely and without a thought as to why or how. No one would find them, no one would know their true identity.
And maybe, on another couch, in another place, Billy would come back against him, let his cheek rest against his.
Crush-loyalty, crush-madness, crush-love.
Does a crush imply being able to kill for the other, and form a complicit alliance with that same other to orchestrate murders all around? Can love be in murders, in blood, in carnage and anarchy?
Don't tell anyone about it, a part of him whispered, intelligent, furtive, wearing Billy's languid smile, they'll put you in a madhouse, they'll lock you up, they won't understand, they'll only see the murders.
But in the murders, more than in anything else, more than in the movie nights, the private jokes, the discussions with philosophical overtones, is drawn this line which creates the crush. Which creates, still according to the official definition, love.
(don't tell anyone)
(they won't understand)
Stuart becomes a poet in his spare time, composes threatening alexandrines, like electrified fences.
He looks at Billy, his bloody clothes, his unraveled hair, the gleam in his beautiful eyes, the glow on his lovely face with its hollowed cheeks, its refined, aristocratic lips, even more so than Stuart is, even though he is the wealthier of the two. There are written feverish, sickly verses, an ode to psychosis and rage.
Only Billy understands, only Billy has seen who Stuart was underneath his gilding, underneath his parents' money, underneath the colorful attitude and nervous energy. Billy has seen him, at his best and at his worst, and has hardly formalised or resented his sinister tastes, instead combining them with his own. Today they are a mass, a "something", an abstraction, intertwined with Tatum's question (you have a crush or what), a vine around an old-fashioned red brick wall that is gradually covering it. Smothers it, embraces it.
Maybe, after all.
Without doubt.
Most certainly, after careful consideration.
It is too late to wonder about this, and to complicate the task by backing up the murder with a thorough analysis of this kind of violent tenderness that the image of Billy buds in him after having killed, knife in hand, mask removed, delightful smile on his lips (predator's lips).
VII. Blood Trees
He must have had an absence, as he sometimes does, following a killing, in response to exhaustion after the effort and the adrenaline rush, during which he follows the current of a thought without really settling down, and dives lower and lower, imitating those swimmers descending into the depths of the training tanks in public swimming pools.
When he looks up, he sees Billy walking towards him, having long since stepped over the girl's body. Stuart instinctively searches for the knife on him, and worries about not seeing it, about not distinguishing the reflection of its blade in one of Billy's hands.
"In my pocket," Billy then says, in a slightly disconcerting way.
At first, Stuart doesn't understand.
"What?"
The corner of Billy's lips lifts, exquisite, captivating.
Ripples before the tide, reddish reverberations in the hollow of a volcano before eruption.
Fascination, disgust.
Oh, the question, always there, ever talkative, ever noisy.
"The knife," he goes on, while still coming closer, vermilion blood on the white of his shirt, a strangely pleasing contrast to Stuart's eye (red is a king's color). "It's in my pocket."
Yes, that's what's scary sometimes too, this way that Billy has of understanding his glances, his conduct, his gestures, and with an accuracy friendship alone cannot entirely explain. It has to be the result of an intangible empathy, of a knowledge acquired about the other under particular, almost exceptional, and highly intimate conditions, of a long and careful observation. The same is true of the other, since Stuart knows how to detect Billy's moods, his questions and silent remarks, simply by a look or a hand gesture.
In a magazine, or a discussion, he can't remember for sure, Stuart remembers that statement about sex being the ultimate intimacy, and laughs about it as hard as he can, having realized that anything can be intimate, provided you want it to be.
The murders with Billy are intimate, perhaps the most intimate thing Stuart has ever experienced with anyone, in the sense that they are each time a time of exploration of himself and who they both are, in a way he never has the opportunity to do in other encounters, where the rest of them, Tatum, Sydney, Randy, always serve as a barrier that only comes down once blood has been spilled and a corpse left behind.
That night was no exception. The next ones will surely follow.
"Stu," he hears.
Billy is very close, a blink of an eye away from a kiss.
He has narrowed the physical gap between them to the point where their torsos almost touch, and their size difference, absent during the slaughter, then causes powerful stirrings in Stuart's heart of which he does not quite discern the meaning, except that they then seem to take up all the space, to envelop him like that corridor of the Overlook Hotel in Kubrick's Shining (forever and ever and ever).
Billy is smaller than he is, a characteristic he tends to forget when they kill together, because in those moments Billy always seems bigger, more imposing, more in control. His composure and cleverness give him height. These are the heels of the mind.
Stuart's neck has to bend down so he can meet Billy's beautiful dark eyes, and he feels the crack of bone at the back of his skull, a vibrant, abrupt thing the existence of which takes him fully back to that bloody, devastated living room, the scene of their crime, of their courtship.
Billy's hands, knife-free, but stained with blood, run up Stuart's abdomen, come to rest against his chest, against his heart. There is something deeply elusive here for Stuart, similar to that night when he found Billy beside him on the couch, but like then, he feels no desire to end it, no desire to explain it further. Billy raises towards him deep, dilated eyes, superb in what they conceal of insanity and control of this same madness, responding to the incessant and frenetic flow of Stuart's thoughts, and Stuart is swallowed up, as if by the bottom of a well, a nightmare, the abominable and sublime vision of a whole other universe, of a gigantic black hole.
Beauty, madness, annihilation, horror. Stuart knows everything is mixed up inside his already damaged head, that his world is reduced to Billy close to him, hands pressed against his chest, eyes in his, knife in his pocket, skin and clothes smeared (crowned) with blood. This physical closeness, of which Billy is aware and which he initiates, is a novelty, but also a form of routine, like a mechanism already set in motion a long time before, and which in the end is only the extension of a larger and more complex system.
Stuart does not move, does not dare.
He fears the slightest movement will break the spell, or the curse, and make Billy run away as fast as a wild animal fleeing from a hunter.
The corpse is still there, motionless, stupid, gutted, dressed in her sacrilegious clothes, and on some of the furniture, the back of an armchair, the edge of a pedestal table, can be seen a few drops of blood already darkened by time. The murder took place maybe an hour ago. The relativity of time, all that stuff.
Stuart is having increasing difficulty thinking logically, with concrete words and coherent reasoning, while Billy stands so close, his hands touching him with an indolence that would border on insolence, were it not for Stuart. He asked him nothing, said nothing. He simply acted as he wished, and Stuart followed him in his line of conduct as he had become accustomed to do. Moreover, there was no desire to reject him, to resist this prolonged contact.
He could kill you, says the part of him that before urged him to conceal his appreciation of Billy's actions, to keep it carefully to himself, deep down, where no one could judge or disapprove of it as an insanity, a disease, he could get rid of you as easily as a fly, he doesn't give a shit, you don't matter.
In his head, Stuart turns to this down-to-earth version of himself and thumbs his nose at it. Guess what, I know all that, jackass, he exclaims, sticking out his tongue, in a parody of the snake in the Garden of Eden, I know it, and I don't care I don't care I don't care.
He feels Billy's hands, or rather his palms beyond the fabric of his shirt, feels them hot and cold and knows they are spilling blood on him, sharing the murder, marking him.
(accomplice, they say)
(forever and ever and ever)
The "forever" extends, expands, and who can fight that after all, a force of that nature, its overflow? Stuart has more than once demonstrated his clumsiness when it comes to fighting by putting on the Ghostface costume. But if his body is clumsy, his mind at least is agile, and sufficiently so to inform him that no fight can take place, that it would be like launching himself completely alone against a whole army of soldiers with firepower and swords. Oh no. There are some wars you don't fight because you know you'll lose them instinctively.
Stuart may not have the stature of an athlete, but that doesn't stop him from having survival deeply ingrained in him. He knows when to back off, and when to strike.
Here, there, now, it's imperative that he stand still, wait, and not try anything too dangerous. Billy leads the way, especially on this type of ground. Everything related to the murders is under his rule: it is therefore logical for him to also have control over what follows them, what happens between him and Stuart once the victim is cut open.
Around them there is an intimidating, yet reassuring silence. There is nothing else but them, except for this living room repainted in incarnate, flushed as if it were in the middle of a tryst, and feeling shy.
The world is elsewhere, absent.
Away are Stuart's parents, the high school, the classes, Sydney, Tatum, all the things that make up their daily lives. On the nights of the murders, each of these things disappear, gulped down by the question, by the well, the black hole.
It is in Billy's eyes as Billy looks at him, chin held slightly up, his hair pushed back. Stuart is moved to look at him, smaller than he is, with his hands against his heart, and his tenderness swells with each residue of blood he sees on Billy's skin and clothes.
An idea comes to him, the birth of which dates back to that night on the couch, an absurd idea, drama-queen-like, excessive as possible, but no less sincere and convulsive, a fever the appearance of which he cannot contain.
(my sanity for you my blood for you my world for you)
The inclination becomes adoration, passion, idolatry.
Stuart has never been a believer, except in the persistence of death and injustice, perhaps also of taxes, nevertheless a feeling so lively of piety and veneration expands in his chest that he worries about it, not about its emergence, but about its intensity. It seems to take flight, a kind of firebird that blazes up all at once, with the magnificent savagery of a wildfire, and in the heat of the beginning summer, still quivering with sleep after two seasons before it, Stuart watches almost from the outside as the blast occurs in his chest, right where one of Billy's hands rests, and then voraciously consumes the blood that runs through his veins, similar to the one Billy wears as an ornament. I'd give you rubies, Stuart thinks, caught in the flames, stones of fire by hundreds, I'd make you a house out of them.
"Stu," Billy said, softly, very gently, a whisper.
(mermaid song)
The killers of the oceans.
Stuart bows his head at the sound of his voice, and his forehead bumps gently against Billy's, pressing their heads together. Billy's skin is covered with a thin film of sweat, which Stuart could lick off if he wanted to. He answers "yes," but nothing else, because he can't think of any additional words to say.
If this were a prom, they might as well be slow dancing.
But this is better than a prom, better than a slow dance, better than a kiss, better than languid words whispered in each other's ear.
This is them, the murder, the blood, the worship, the inferno, the beauty of violence and rampage.
This is what they are.
This is the answer to the question.
Stuart places a hand on the back of Billy's neck, slides his cheek against his, and kisses the skin of his throat, just below his jawbone. He can sense Billy's smile.
"Stu," he repeats, gently, tenderly.
He lets himself be kissed, and Stuart tastes the blood on his lips.
Then, as naturally as he came closer, Billy takes a step back, escapes, and declares as if nothing had happened:
"Help me with the body."
Stuart complies without a word, but never ceases to stare at the spot where he placed the kiss on the back of Billy's neck, just as he later refuses to throw away the blood-stained T-shirt where Billy's hands rested.
