“So, whose body is it?” Jude asked one morning as they were sipping coffee.
“Um,” said Seb, unsure how to approach the question.
It was late summer, February, and the sky was already high and clear. They sat at Seb’s kitchen table, an old wooden thing covered in scratches and water marks, the window open, a light breeze tangling through the curtains, looking out on the garden which was, due in part to Seb’s negligence, due in part to Seb’s love for wild, untamed, unruly things, overgrown with vines and long grass and wildflowers. Already bees and other insects buzzed about. The day promised to be humid and sticky.
A plane droned past, high, as Seb tried to think of an answer. Jude watched his face patiently, intent.
“His name is—was...is Lorenzo,” said Seb.
Jude saw everything right away. “Ah. An old lover.” He leant back in his chair, an easy grin on his face, watching Seb.
Seb blushed. He hated how Jude could do this, pierce him with a gaze, make him feel like some butterfly pinned under an entomologist’s lamp, naked and nervous.
“Yeah,” said Seb, looking into his coffee. “Something like that.”
“You know it’s best to let these sorts of things go.” Jude said this with a kindness in his voice, no longer teasing.
“I know.”
Jude stopped swinging in his chair. Got up. Went around to Seb’s side of the table and sat next to him, placing a hand on his thigh. He kissed Seb on the cheek then leant his head on his shoulder. Jude’s hair smelled of lavender.
“Let me know if you ever need help—burying him.”
It was very light in the garden but the sun faced the other side of the house, so the inside of the kitchen was actually quite dark. It made it hard to look anywhere, Seb thought, as he smelled Jude’s lavender hair, the quality of that light made it hard to look anywhere. The world outside was too bright, hurt your eyes but the inside of the house was so dim and unwelcoming. All you could do, he supposed, was rest your gaze somewhere on the windowsill, on the halfway line, the liminal zone between dark and light, inside and out, rest your gaze and try not to think too hard about whether you were happy, in general, or in this moment, or if this strange neutrality you felt, delicately, imprecisely, was not happiness at all but a simple absence of feeling rather and not, for that reason, something to be cherished or held onto but simply observed and let go when something else came along.
“I will,” said Seb. “I want to. I think. I’m just not sure. When. Or how.”
“It’s okay. Bodies are heavy,” said Jude, kissing now at Seb’s neck in a comforting, almost maternal way.
“Take your time,” said Jude. “I’ll be here.”
He kissed Seb’s cheek once more and then, as if to erase this rare tenderness, stood and gathered up the coffee things and went to the sink and began washing them.
Seb kept looking at the windowsill. Some purple flowers were there in a glass jar, picked by Jude haphazardly the afternoon before from the side of the road. He listened to the sound of mugs being rinsed and scrubbed. Jude was humming under his breath. Hey Jude—a little joke. Seb liked that, even if he wasn’t sure what it represented. Self-awareness or a total lack of it. He wondered, in an abstract, unjealous way, what Jude’s previous lovers had thought about that habit.
It was strange, he thought, on the topic of ex-lovers, that there could be all these people, not only in the world but directly implicated in his life, that he was connected to in a long and ponderous series and that he could know nothing of them—not their shapes, not their faces or eyes, not their favourite foods, not their taste in music or the sounds they made in bed.
Although, he assumed, they might have been a little like him; they might have had aspects of their personality that were similar to his. Was there some core essence in each of them that, if you distilled and synthesised it and then grew into a whole person with the help of some esoteric magic, would explain everything? Would he be able to point at this golem and say, “Yes. That’s it, I am simply an imperfect copy of you.”?
Jude finished the dishes. The sudden quiet distracted Seb from his thoughts. Jude sat down at the table again.
Seb wondered if Jude would ask him what he was thinking about.
“So, do you want to come to my play in June?” asked Jude.
“Oh,” he said. “I thought it was assumed. That I was coming.”
“Kind of,” said Jude, swinging in his chair again. “But only—you know. If you want to.”
“Yeah. Okay. Like I said, I thought it was assumed. That I wanted to. But I guess I’ll think about it.”
After Jude left, Seb wandered around the house, going into his flatmates’ rooms and standing there, staring at walls or picking up and reading the back covers of textbooks and poetry collections, thinking about that. That Jude hadn’t assumed he would want to come to his play.
Lorenzo’s body lay at the bottom of the garden. Later that afternoon, Seb, still thinking about Jude’s play, wandered down to it, almost automatically. It had become a kind of ritual, this. When Jude confused him, he would do this.
He waded through the long grass, waving insects away from his face until he came to the body. Parts of Lorenzo could still be seen—a flash of thigh, a glimpse of chest, a hint of neck, porcelain and undecaying—but mostly his body was hidden from view by the various surrounding plants that had grown up from it, the green and white and yellow petals, blossoms, shoots, stems, branches, etc. all conspiring to make it possible to imagine only white rocks beneath the foliage.
Seb listened to the buzz of the insects in the grass.
Lorenzo had not been much like Jude at all. Seb had been with him for one year and seven days. It had been six or seven years since then, and Seb had had two or three “serious” partners in that time, as well as a number of short-lived flings and one-night stands.
So Seb wasn’t sure why, exactly, Lorenzo’s body had appeared in the garden so recently. When it first materialised, he had inspected it, looking for clues but it had been pristine, naked except for a classical looking loincloth and no sign of how he might have died.
Concerned by this intrusion of death into his garden, he had looked up Lorenzo on Instagram. There was nothing to suggest that he was dead.
They had met in Seb’s freshman year of university, introduced by a friend of a friend at a party thrown by film students. It had been rushed, heady, beautiful, one of those rare loves where it was impossible to tell who was taking the lead. It had also been quiet and intense, wordless.
When it ended they parted amicably enough but even after he had confirmed Lorenzo was alive, Seb continued to lie awake at night, scrolling through Lorenzo’s Instagram, feeling a familiar tightness in his chest every time he saw a new post featuring Lorenzo and his current partner.
Beyond Lorenzo’s body, a small stand of trees gathered, in which, in contrast to the sweaty brightness of the garden, the air was dark and cool. Seb went past the body and sat in the shade of the trees. Lorenzo had not been much like Jude at all. But Seb decided he would go to Jude’s play.
It was April and dark out and raining but only a light mist which collided gently with Seb’s upturned face, his closed eyelids.
His hand hung loosely in Jude’s. They were returning from the movie theatre, where they had seen a movie starring Tom Hanks about friendship and love and family and it had been funny but also quite sad and in the end, Seb had been surprised to turn to Jude and see him crying.
Seb opened his eyes and looked up at the empty office buildings. It always seemed a waste, that they would leave the lights on overnight, especially on weekends but he also liked that they did that, liked this sense of emptiness, the idea of these buildings, normally as swarming with bodies and heat and activity as beehives, instead hollow, the light echoey on the inside.
“I’m really happy,” he said, and the sound of his own voice disrupting the quiet of the street surprised him; the fact he had said this aloud surprised him, and he laughed.
“Oh, good,” said Jude, squeezing Seb’s hand.
They walked in silence a bit more. They were the only ones on the street. Occasionally a bus went past, loud, leviathan-like in the dark but otherwise it was just them and the sodium orange haze of the streetlights and the glistening of the concrete, slick with rain.
Seb said, “I liked the part where Tom Hanks said, ‘I didn’t think I knew what it was, to have a friend. But you have shown me, it can be as simple as this, as a sunset.’ I don’t know. That’s not quite it. It was in the middle, when they were at the beach. You know the part I mean.”
Jude was quiet but Seb was looking ahead, at the rain, the office buildings, the headlights of an oncoming car.
“I like it.” Seb continued. “When movies do that—make the actors talk in a literary way. You wouldn’t hear anyone you know in real life talking like that.”
Jude let go of Seb’s hand, wrapped his arm around his waist. Kissed him on top of his head.
“Oh, Seb,” he said. “I know people who would talk like that.”
“Oh,” said Seb. “I don’t.”
“It’s because they’re also actors. Like Tom Hanks.”
“But they say these kinds of things in real life.”
“Yes.”
Seb stopped and hugged Jude. “You’re an actor. Why don’t you talk like that?” His voice was muffled as he pressed his face into Jude’s shoulder.
Jude pushed him away, held his hand again. “Come on. It’s cold. Let’s get home.”
Where was the man who had cried after a Tom Hanks movie, thought Seb.
“Anyway, I do talk like that, just around them. You’ll see, at the play.”
“Oh.”
Jude laughed. “Don’t be upset by that. Sometimes it’s insufferable.”
“I think it would be nice. To be able to talk like you’re in a movie.”
Jude didn’t reply. He swung his arm loosely, carrying Seb’s with it. After some time, he said to Seb, “Are you still really happy?”
Seb didn’t know. He wasn’t sure he had been really happy earlier, when he had said that. It had just been a thing to say because they were holding hands, because it was raining, because the office buildings were empty with the lights on. He had surprised himself. He had surprised himself when he said it.
“I think I feel...About the same. As when I said that.”
“Good,” Jude said. “I’m glad.”
They kept walking. They passed a couple, a man and a woman laughing and talking. It stopped raining. They walked through a busier part of town with more people and music coming out of bars and more cars and the sound of their tires hissing over the still wet road and some neon lights.
When they got to Seb’s place it was dark, his flatmates asleep. They whispered in the kitchen as the jug boiled.
It was autumn. Outside, in the garden, the greenery that had surrounded Lorenzo’s body in summer had withered. In the dark, some drops of rain caught in the few remaining leaves glistened in the light from the house’s windows.
They drank some tea and talked a little more of the movie, then went to bed. After they turned the lights off, the raindrops stopped glistening.
As usual, Jude fell asleep right away, while Seb tossed and turned next to him. Eventually he sat up in bed and unlocked his phone and typed Lorenzo’s Instagram username into the search bar.
Lorenzo had always seemed whole to Seb. There had never been any parts of him that seemed hidden or held back—and likewise Seb had felt entirely himself, open, vulnerable and not, in the way he had been with his other lovers since, embarrassed or ashamed by this but happy, really genuinely happy (or at least he remembered it this way) to be seen wholly by another person and accepted for who he was, right down to the core.
Had he realised this at the time? He wasn’t sure. Sometimes it felt that this memory of genuine happiness had only come to him in bits and pieces over the intervening years, a singular truth constructed from choicely selected recollections—not unlike a model ship, it was something he would bring down from a shelf every now and again, examine, find and fix any imperfections, add new parts, take comfort from and cherish, before putting away again.
He looked through Lorenzo’s profile for a bit before putting his phone back down on the bedside table. As he nestled into Jude’s arms he worried, as usual, that he would never find a love like that again.
After he fell asleep, the clouds parted and the moon came out. The rain drops caught in the leaves growing from the body in the garden began glistening again.
In June, after the play they went to a restaurant to celebrate. It was loud and crowded. Like all the other Chinese restaurants in the city it had red walls with decorations of dragons and snakes in gold and also some traditional looking tapestries. Like the other restaurants, too, all the dishes were watered down, sweetened, altered versions of the originals designed to cater to a mostly white population. This didn’t stop Seb feeling guilty for not knowing how to pronounce their names. As if he had failed his grandparents, who he had known barely as a child before they died, and now existed in his memory, oddly enough, as the hazy scent of fresh bread; his parents, who had neglected to teach him Cantonese; and also his friends, who he sensed had expectations of him to fulfil a certain role in their group whenever they went somewhere East Asian for dinner.
People had brought their own wine. Seb was halfway through his bottle, feeling dizzy and slightly nauseous, anxious for the food to come so he could sober up a little.
Jude sat opposite him but turned to his side, in deep conversation with a woman whose name Seb thought was Violet, or Juniper, or some other plant-related thing. Their conversation was animated and he heard snatches across the table. As Jude had mentioned the night after the Tom Hanks film, their conversation sounded literary, poetic almost. He heard fragments such as “He begs us to consider the possibility of another mode of life, another way of not just living, but experiencing sense” and “I sat there, you know, not thinking, just breathing, listening to the ocean. In that moment I felt—”
Jude looked very handsome in profile. He and the plant-named woman touched each other a lot as they spoke. Every now and again, though, he turned to Seb, his eyes sparkling, flashing that ever-easy grin.
For his part, Seb was trying to operate a stilted conversation with someone named Andre.
“In Brazil, we have so many colours,” Andre was saying.
“Ah,” said Seb.
“So many, many, colours, like you wouldn’t believe it, man.”
“What do you. Um. What do you mean?” asked Seb.
Andre was an actor, he thought.
He unfocused his eyes and looked across the table a bit, willing Jude to give him another smile. Jude didn’t. Seb half listened to Andre describing the colours of Brazil, which were allegedly extant on some other, Latin American, colour spectrum, of which New Zealanders could have no clue, their country being mainly composed of greys and blues and other uninspiring colours. Seb studied the tapestries on the wall and wondered if anyone he was related to could tell him what they represented.
Earlier in the night, at Jude’s play, Seb had sat on the edge of a row of seats filled with Jude’s actor friends. Before the lights went down, he had felt awkward, perched there on the outskirts, silent and wary, an interloper. He had been grateful when it grew dark and the play began.
In the play three men (one being Jude) discussed what to do with a ship that had washed ashore in their village overnight. There were many lengthy monologues, as well as an extended period of silence when wave and seagull noises played over speakers. The men fought, made up, and in one scene that Seb thought was meant to be touching but fell short of that, even cried (real tears!) and embraced.
A large wooden box representing the ship stood at one corner of the stage throughout the play and at the end it was revealed a woman had been inside the whole time. She emerged and the three men fell to the ground, apparently dead. The stage lights went down and when the actors came back on stage to bow there was a standing ovation.
Afterward, standing in the foyer of the theatre with Jude’s friends, Seb had felt an interloper again. He felt stupid and disloyal for not having enjoyed the play.
He stood on the edge of the circle of people discussing how much they had loved it, feeling like some kind of fish, a surface dwelling one like a mackerel or a flounder, sucked down by some freak vortex into the black recesses of the deep ocean, struggling to make a home in this new and terrifying environment.
Then Jude had come out of the green room and flung a cheerful arm around his shoulders and he had felt better.
Andre was still talking about colour palettes.
“And if you think about, like, Gauguin—man, he had such a way with colours. You just don’t see that anymore.”
“Would you say there’s less colour...now?”
“Ah, man, less colour, more colour, it doesn’t matter, it’s just different colour, but worse colour, definitely worse colour.”
Jude hadn’t looked over at him for a while.
Later, as they walked home, both stumbling a little, drunk, their hands tucked in their pockets because it was snowing in the city for the first time in six years and for that reason too cold to hold hands, Seb asked, “What were you and Violet talking about?”
“Violet?” said Jude.
“The woman you were talking to all night. It sounded interesting.”
“Oh,” said Jude. “You mean Rosie.”
“Rosie.” Seb tensed up. He had heard that name before. One of Jude’s exes.
Even through the snow, through the winter coat, Jude saw. “Are you jealous? Don’t be jealous.”
“I’m not jealous. Why would I be jealous.”
“It was a long time ago,” said Jude. “When we were in theatre school.”
“Theatre school,” mused Seb. Snowflakes on his face. Bracing. He thought about the snatches of conversation he had overheard. “You don’t talk to me—that way.”
“Why would I want to?” Jude laughed.
It was true that he wasn’t jealous. Still, Seb felt bewildered because he’d now had a glimpse of that long series in which he was implicated and found it did not make sense as he had imagined it would. Rosie, he thought, I have nothing in common with Rosie. He pictured the golem again and it was no longer a whole person, rather, something more like Frankenstein’s monster, hideous and misshapen. He could no longer say of it, “I am a different version of you.” Instead, he was only a piece, a toe, a finger, an eye, appended and stitched on at random, simply because he happened to be there, to be available, and he found himself understanding less and less his position, there, next to Jude, in the snow, his hands tucked in his pockets, the cold air aching in his lungs.
“Did you like the play?” Jude finally asked.
“Not really,” said Seb. “I don’t think I got it.”
“That’s okay. I’m glad you came.”
Suddenly Jude sprinted ahead into the dark.
Seb ran after him, forgetting briefly his bewilderment, exhilarated now. He turned a corner, and Jude jumped out and tackled him into a snowdrift. They wrestled a bit, then started kissing, and Seb could hear the rustle of their jackets, the crunch of the snow under them, the blood pounding in his ears. Eventually they lay back, laughing, side by side, looking up at the night. He thought he could smell the snow. It smelled sweet.
In the morning, Seb went down to the bottom of the garden again. The foliage surrounding Lorenzo had died back completely. A touch of frost lined his eyes, mouth, and nose.
Without the plant life, Seb could see clearly Lorenzo’s posture. He was laid out supine, one arm spread out diagonally above his head, which was turned to the left; the other arm resting, hand palm up, on the side of his face.
Seb was wrapped up in a scarf and wearing a woollen hat, clutching a mug of coffee. Steam rose into the air. Jude had still been asleep when he crept out of bed.
He thought about his two lovers: one in bed, one in the garden. They seemed so dissimilar, even in the way they rested. Lorenzo had always slept just like that, how he was now, in the garden—on his back, gracefully. Jude slept face down, head turned to one side or the other, and sometimes snored, or drooled onto the pillow.
He heard a window open behind him.
“What are you doing?” shouted Jude, his voice startling in the snowy silence.
“Just getting some air.”
“I’m making pancakes. Do you want pancakes?”
Seb turned and grinned at Jude. “Okay.”
In October, Seb stood in a corner, his eyes roving about, unsure where to look, afraid to make eye contact in the dim purple light. Every now and then he sipped on an empty beer bottle.
He was feeling like an interloper again. It was Rosie’s birthday. Some of the faces were more familiar by now but he still lacked the confidence to go say hello.
Someone came up to him. It was Andre.
“Seb, right? How you doing man?”
“I’m alright.”
“What’s that?” Andre shouted over the music. It was very loud.
“I said, I’m alright.”
Andre asked him who he was here with.
“Oh. Yeah. I’m with—” and he scanned the room, looking for Jude to point him out.
Bodies were packed tight, people moving between groups, some dancing, some, like Seb, on the outskirts, checking their phones or looking about nervously. He couldn’t see Jude.
“You know Jude, right,” he finished.
Andre made a sort of face. “That’s right, I remember now.”
Seb wondered what the face meant and whether it would be rude to ask.
Andre leaned in and rubbed him on the shoulder. “Good luck, man.”
Then he went away, shouting to someone on the other side of the room.
Seb stood on the outskirts a little longer, his arms crossed about his waist, feeling sweaty and nauseous. There was condensation on the windows. The beat of the music, electronic and dusky and quick, seemed to match his heart rate.
He went outside for a cigarette. It was still warm, one of those spring nights when it never quite gets cold. He saw Jude, an arm around the shoulder of someone handsome. Jude waved and shouted, “Seb! How are you doing in there?”
“I’m alright,” he mumbled in response.
He went and stood down at the far end of the balcony by himself. He lit a cigarette and waited for Jude to come over. Jude didn’t come over. He was talking to a group of three or four people, his voice strong, the whole group laughing at something he had said every now and then.
Seb studied the view. The balcony looked out over the hillside. Directly below were studded lone orange lights, evidence of houses dotted in amongst the trees; then, where the hill gave way to the flat, the rushing twinkle of the city’s lights, the huge mass of them, of streetlights and offices and cars; and beyond that the harbour, guilty with moonlight.
Lorenzo had never dragged him to a party like this, he was sure of it. He went on his tip toes and leaned his waist over the balcony, feeling suddenly clear and light. You couldn’t look for patterns, he knew, even if often that was all he wanted to do. He thought some more about this, feeling it a revelation. You couldn’t look for patterns. Even the repetition of obvious things like the moon’s orbit or the seasons included so much variation. Even if the moon, he thought now, looking at the line of silver light spilt into the harbour, even if the moon occupied that same exact position in the sky again as it has done for billions of years and will continue to do for billions more, even if it occupies that exact position again, I will not be here, on this balcony, feeling a little sick, a little tired, smoking this cigarette. You couldn’t look for patterns.
It seemed a revelation to him.
He left the party. The whole walk home he kept looking up at the moon, even if there was a part of him which still expected to hear footsteps echoing down the road behind him.
In the morning he went down to the garden shed and took out the shears and the shovel. He walked through the long grass and crouched down next to the body and trimmed back the newly budding growths which had once more begun creeping around Lorenzo. Then quietly, efficiently, he started to dig a hole.