return

Here is how it was supposed to go with the fascinating boy. How it was never going to go. You were always going to ruin that one, like all the others. Like everything you've ever touched. But you were forgiven. Always forgiven, a black hole of grace or a radiant sun of it. And so you were given another.

This boy, the little spy, not so fascinating as the other, not at first. Keep your enemies closer, they say, and you have no friends, so you sign his paycheques. You invite him into your living room. Your kitchen, your bedroom, your—

—yes, even—

Betrayal is a kind of intimacy. Knowing what's coming and letting it come is a kind of love. The boy goes back to his masters in London and you try to figure out how to iron the collar of your shirt like he did. How to make things right like he did. He cannot make right what you have made wrong but when he finds you again he picks up the iron again and smooths it flat, makes the inevitable bearable and the unbearable inevitable. He hands you a book and the book is about you. It's the only copy, he says, I made sure. You believe him. He has never told you a lie. Not even then. I'm done, he says, I want to get out.

You took the other boy out. You set the other boy free, the one you loved, but it didn't take, your little son with the holes in his mind, circling around you just to trace the shapes of the craters. So when this boy says no thank you, you don't.

I think I'd like to marry her, he says one day on the phone. I'd like you to meet her. She came to meet mum today, but the nurses said she was sleeping. I wish. I'd like you to meet her.

She's a lovely girl. If you forget me now, it was enough. No, thank you.

Rashid. Rashid. He is. He never asks to stay, you never offer. The arrow of his life flies straight and true. He hurtles towards his return.

This is why we don't get attached to mortals. Why? There is nothing so very frightening about wrinkled skin. There is something frightening about hospital rooms. About the narrow passage out of this world, which he shows to you for the first time. The blood smells different here, heavy with possibility and inevitability. A new kind of fear, after so long. Another gift. Thank you.

One thing you didn't ruin. One you touched gently and didn't break. One you gave life instead of death. You can weep for him, Armand. You never harmed him.