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The summer after graduation, Peter dreams of the dead. Nikolai's bulging eyes and blue lips. Not that he ever saw the body. But he dreams of him. He dreams that Nikolai is hanging from the ceiling of his dorm, his feet are six feet off the ground, like an immortal, because immortals' feet do not touch the earth, and he is swinging gently with the rope around his neck. His hair falls over his eyes. Peter knows that this is the way it was. The cleaner found him. She said he was hanging and Peter said, Christ, not as a curse but in reverence. Christ, he was nailed to the cross. Christ, he rose from the dead. Nikolai, you are a God. Nikolai, you are Christ. The cleaner came screaming into the hall and Nikolai's body was hanging. It was swinging gently back and forth. His hair had fallen over his eyes. Peter never saw the body but he knew. He knows.
Yes, Nikolai hangs and Peter graduates and later he'll say he never saw it coming, but the truth is Nikolai carried his doom with him the same way some people carry heirlooms, in small boxes they take with them across decades and apartments and cities. He supposes it's for this reason that he never cried over him, over Nikolai. He knew it was coming like an addict's weary wife.
In Spain that summer, Peter runs into a little sophomore named Erkel who had lived down the hall from him in the dorms. The boy's lips are wet and he's lean, slightly brown from the Mediterranean sun, all bronzed youth. He idolizes Peter. He wants to be Peter. Peter lets him fuck him in a hostel in Barcelona and whimpers Nikolai's name into the moldy pillow, while the guy in the next room over punches the wall and tells Erkel to bang his girlfriend a little quieter, for chrissake. Erkel cries. Peter stubs his cigarette out on Erkel's smooth neck. Do it enough times, it'll look like the red bruises of a rope. Shut up, he says, I hate crying, it makes me feel sick. Erkel shuts up. Peter dreams of Nikolai. He dreams of the dead.
They'd kissed, once. Not tenderly. Nikolai wasn't tender. Neither was Peter. But they'd kissed and he knew Nikolai had done it to hurt him. To make fun of him. Oh, he hadn't minded. Nikolai had kissed him and scraped his teeth and drawn blood on his lower lip that trickled down his chin and left a cold taste of iron behind, and Peter had shivered, boneless. Nikolai loved pain.
In their junior year, Peter stopped eating. He doesn't remember the reason why, except that everything always comes back to Nikolai in the end. All roads lead to Rome, after all.
Nikolai had watched Peter's disintegration calmly, with indifference where Peter wanted mockery. Instead, he had wrapped his hands around Peter's hip bones and said, very quietly: "This is self-destruction, Petrusha," and Peter had laughed because that had been the point all along. Nikolai was very careful with him in those days. When they had sex, he was slow and gentle. He did not leave marks. Peter slapped him and told him to do it right, or to get out of his bed. Nikolai told him that he tasted like coffee and mint chewing gum when they kissed. It was a strange observation, an attention to detail that didn't suit him. Sometimes Peter still thinks of Nikolai kissing him and tasting him and for some inexplicable reason, remembering that half-second for a long time afterwards, long enough to tell Peter about it one night many months later when Peter was almost admitted to a ward because of his eating. Peter hadn't known how to answer him then. Even now when he replays the conversation in his mind, he is always speechless to Nikolai telling him you taste like coffee and mint gum , and Peter is never speechless. He tries to think of the way Nikolai's eyes looked when he said it, how his voice sounded. But he can't remember.
He stopped eating in junior year and by senior year, the year that Nikolai would hang, he was 100 pounds and five foot ten and Nikolai repeated his bored admonishment: "This is self-destruction, Petrusha." It doesn't matter anymore, though. Nikolai is hanging and his lips are blue and Peter is cold, he tastes stomach acid and coffee on his own tongue. He has dreams of following the dead. He will. He means to. He lets Erkel fuck him and cries out Nikolai's name in the dark. Christ rose from the dead. Christ came back on the third day. When are you coming back, Nikolai? He is always dreaming of the dead. He supposes he’ll never understand the real reason he stopped eating.
Maybe it was so Nikolai would look at him gently and tell him it was self-destruction, and remember the way he tasted when they kissed. Maybe it was so he wouldn’t be there when Nikolai hung. Or maybe Nikolai had never had anything to do with it at all, maybe it was something inside of Peter that was hungry and hateful and raw. Some innate part of himself. He liked that idea. He liked the idea of being intrinsically horrific. It suited him. It suited how he had crafted himself to be.
Well, the long summer after graduation, Peter dreams of the dead. Europe is melancholy and fading and sometimes feels like the end of a very long, very tragic novel. He rides a train across France. There are mountains in the distance with snow on their peaks. They’d spent a winter break in the Swiss mountains once, he and Nikolai. A girl had been there too, one of Nikolai’s many flings -- Liza -- but god, it’s all so irrelevant now. The jealousy Peter had felt then feels sweet and faraway. He would like to feel it again. There’s lots of things he’d like to feel again. Nikolai hangs and his hair falls over his eyes, soft and dark, and Peter goes up to the cleaner who is screaming in the hall and whispers: “I ran my hands through his hair, I touched his lips, I touched his throat. It’s because of me that he hung himself.” Nikolai floats now instead of walks and he is a saint. His feet cannot touch the ground. Peter closes his eyes and leans against the cold window which leads to the snow-capped mountains.
He is going to follow Nikolai. He is dreaming of the dead.