Cubism (Ed)

The following fictitious events take place in Reality R (Red)

  In the days before everything fell apart, people talked about the apocalypse in catastrophic terms: no food, every man for himself, ashes and chaos and survival of the fittest.

  In truth, the apocalypse was a slow motion train wreck, the unique agony of pretending to thrive in picturesque decay.

  Edvard had lost his son and wife to the plague. He lived with his former lover and best friend, who was happily married in the most demonstrative way, and he spent his days painting beside open windows, watching the world as it failed to turn.

  Today, he painted a still of the garden, in an impressionist style with everything blurred so that up close it looked like nothing and from a distance it seemed smudged by rain.

  No one else was in the house. Viggo and Giana and their small horde of children (mostly adopted) ran through the gardens in some elaborate spy game invented by Viggo. Normally, Edvard would have played too, but today carried heavy memories of his son’s ultrasound nearly twenty years ago, at his wife’s joy at carrying their son.

  So much had fallen.

  Edvard focused his brush on browns and greens and grays, on the darkness at the base of the garden, on the shadows of the painting.

  He heard a sound, a shuffling of feet, and looked up from his work in time to see an extremely pale man glide past the door with the gait of a ballerina and the purpose of a man in a music store.

  The man crossed the doorway and vanished further into the room next door, so Edvard called out, “Can I help you?”

  His voice carried echoically in the hollow room.

  The man reappeared in the doorway. He was younger than Edvard, his pale hair a chaos of intention that swirled in some places and spiked in others. “Hello,” he said in a rich voice. “I was looking…for.” He hesitated, eyes transfixed on Edvard. He took a step into the room. “I’m Meldrick.”

  “Edvard. How did you get in?” He cleaned his brush against a towel and set it in the paint thinner. He couldn’t shake the man’s hand and get paint on him. Besides which, he wasn’t sure whether the man had quarantined, or what he was doing here.

  He might have brought the plague into the house.

  Edvard took a step back.

  “I was let in,” Meldrick said. “Are you Viggo’s husband?”

  That question stirred an old ache, but Edvard managed to suppress it for now. It would come out later, wend its way through the brush and onto the canvas in a collection of strokes that changed the feel of whatever he painted.

  He funneled his emotions into a small but expressive laugh: No that will never happen. “No. I live here, but Viggo is happily married. Have you quarantined?”

  “To whom?” Meldrick pressed. To him, it seemed, the question was urgent.

  It was none of his business. “I’m still not sure who you are. What do you want with Viggo?” Why had he not spoken to Viggo in the garden before coming into the house?

  “Nothing,” Meldrick murmured. His eyes traced over Edvard’s body like he could touch him just by looking. It was unexpected and intimate. “I may have the wrong home.”

  “This is Viggo’s home,” Edvard assured him. “Should I tell him you’re here?”

  “What of Giana?” Meldrick asked. Here, his voice caressed the name. He wasn’t here for Viggo; he wanted Giana. Perhaps they dated in school and Meldrick hoped to spend the pandemic with her.

  “Viggo’s wife,” Edvard said, a touch protectively. Viggo deserved what happiness he had made for himself in these times.

  “I see,” Meldrick said. He assessed Edvard more clinically. “What is a quarantine? Like for animals?”

  Edvard’s breath hitched in surprise. Where was Meldrick from? Had he spent the last two decades under a rock? “It’s when I don’t want to get anyone sick so I avoid them if I’ve gone anywhere.” Clearly Meldrick had not quarantined, if he had to ask what it meant.

  “I thought your virus wasn’t airborne,” Meldrick countered.

  Edvard moved slowly back through the conversation in his mind. What in the world did…what virus? He puzzled over how the conversation could have gone wrong.

  “My virus?” he questioned, since retracing the conversation had done nothing to clarify. “No, the Kyev Pandemic.”

  “Are you ill?” Meldrick said. To Edvard’s horror, he stepped closer, concern written across his brow. “I’m immune. I’ve gained immunity.” He looked around the room with a helpless expression. “I had thought Giana would be here alone.” He stepped still closer. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  Edvard stared at him. What, precisely, did he mean by pleasure? “Who are you?”

  “Meldrick Alandrial,” Meldrick said. He rested a warm palm on Edvard’s shoulder, and inexplicably they stood in a stone room. Somewhere in the distance, a waterfall crashed against rocks, but it was blocked by the walls around them. 

  Edvard felt his eyes widen, his heart race.

  “I’m a fairy,” Meldrick said, as if it explained everything. 

  Either Edvard was ill and hallucinating, or he’d stumbled on a miracle. “And immune? You don’t have the pandemic here?”

  “We do not.” Meldrick held his hand out, palm up, and grew a substantial fireball there. “It wouldn’t survive.”

  Edvard blinked. The fire was still there, still in Meldrick’s hand. He blinked harder. The fire remained.

  “Can you define fairy?” he asked.

  The fire vanished and, oddly, Meldrick touched his right ear. “A magical being with pointed ears.”

  So, not a fairy in the sense that Edvard hoped, but still a mirakel. 

  “Would you like a tour?” Meldrick offered.

  “Please, yes.” Edvard whipped his head around, determined to focus on the setting and not on the man beside him, not on the way their feet fell into step as if they had always walked together. “Are you secret? Am I allowed to paint this? To paint you?”

  Ahh, the painting he would do of Meldrick, that understated fire that burned in him…

  “Yes, to secret,” Meldrick said. “Yes, to painting. You believe this?”

  “I can’t deny experience,” Edvard said, “However surreal it may seem.” Besides which, if he were hallucinating, Meldrick would already be in his bed. The fact that he wasn’t, was all the proof Edvard needed that this was real.

  Meldrick pressed his lips together and considered Edvard. “Is Giana truly happy?”

  Edvard loved Giana, in the way he would have loved his own sister if he had one, but he could not see why it was that every man he felt any interest in always wanted her. He sighed. “I’m happy they’re so in love, but I wouldn’t be devastated if they weren’t.”

  “You still love Viggo?” Meldrick guessed.

  If Meldrick had come to seal Giana from Viggo, then Edvard could have Viggo all to himself, and…

  And Viggo would be devastated. No matter what he wished for himself, he could not desire Viggo’s misery. He studied Meldrick. “How do you know this?”

  “I’m not from here.” He studied Edvard with equal interest. “What of your wife?”

  “Gone. Many years gone.” The pandemic claimed and spared seemingly at random. “What of yours?”

  “Gone,” Meldrick said, with intent. He brushed his arm against Edvard’s.

  Perhaps he was not here for Giana, after all. Edvard glanced at him. “It’s more of a wistful love for Viggo, at this point.”

  A faint smile graced Meldrick’s face. “Would you talk about the world as you know it over dinner?”

  He absolutely would. He could trade information for information, learn what he could about fairies and about Meldrick. “At your place?” he pressed, just in case he had read the arm brush correctly.

  Meldrick hesitated. “I’m afraid I don’t have a place.”

  Edvard wasn’t sure what to make of that: Was it genuine, or a means of avoiding aloneness together? “Could we go back to mine?”

  “Is there somewhere private there? Just us?”

  It was a bedroom. Nothing was more private than that. Although there was always the chance that Meldrick was genuinely hungry for dinner. He would need to investigate.

  “How do I get us there?” he asked. He envisioned a tour of Falkhus, which of course would include both the kitchen and bedrooms so that he could be direct but also subtle.

  Meldrick pressed a mesh fabric bag about the size of a large coin into his hand. “Imagine the space very clearly, and drop this.”

  He held onto Edvard’s hand. 

  Edvard smiled, and dropped the item while he imagined his bedroom, the open space of carpet just between his bed and the windows that looked down onto the expansive lawn of the estate. 

  He took it in as though seeing it for the first time, trying to perceive what Meldrick saw. It was tidy enough, regal in the way of old estates, filled with finished paintings and untouched canvases waiting their turn.

  “You paint a lot,” Meldrick observed.

  It was too intimate: Edvard was used to Viggo and Giana. He was not used to meeting anyone else during a pandemic, or to having someone notice private things about him. He ducked his head. “We’re trapped most of the time. There isn’t a lot to do.”

  Meldrick nodded. “What would you do if you weren’t trapped?”

  Edvard blushed. “Paint.”

  That at least earned him a laugh, and Meldrick’s skin glowed from a fire he produced himself. “Why do you live here?”

  It was a simple enough question, but Edvard’s answers were complex and too many of them involved Viggo. He dug for an honest one that left Viggo out of the equation. “We lost our sons together. That forges a special bond, if an awful one.” Meldrick still held his hand, so he squeezed it as a test. Meldrick did not pull away. He did not squeeze back, either, but neutrality was preferable to revulsion so Edvard asked, “Are you actually hungry for food?”

  “No,” Meldrick said. He moved, Edvard with him, to browse through Edvard’s art. “Which sons?”

  “Edvard — mine — and Niels, who was theirs.”

  “Hmmm,” Meldrick said, the same way Viggo would tease the children when he had a surprise for him.

  Edvard regarded Meldrick in a different light: He had magic. Did he know things? Have access to technology or magic-ology that could do something about baby Edvard and baby Niels? What if they could be brought back?

  Something stirred inside Edvard. It fell somewhere between hope and dread: The idea, the possibility, the curiosity…all could be nothing.

  Meldrick bumped into him and a flare of fire lit the room enough to make Edvard’s eyes close briefly. Meldrick’s voice was unexpectedly soft. “I never thought I was interested in men before today.”

  Edvard opened his eyes and looked into Meldrick’s eyes, which were so pale they were pinkish-red in the right lighting. “I never thought I would see anyone besides Viggo, before today.”

  Meldrick stepped closer and kissed him lightly, experimentally. 

  Edvard was having none of that. He’d been too long without companionship; he was too curious about this man and his body and what secrets his mind held. He pulled their bodies flush together and kissed Meldrick with the desperation of a man who had not taken anyone to bed in over a decade.

  Then he hesitated. What if Meldrick needed to be careful, more than Edvard needed to feel this connection? “Tell me if…”

  “If?” Meldrick’s lips hovered above Edvard’s.

  “This is new to you,” Edvard explained. “Tell me if it’s too much?”

  Meldrick leaned into him, an embrace. “I have a magical attachment to you that demands permanence and loyalty. I wouldn’t know if it were too much.”

  They kissed again, and Edvard’s mind swirled with hope and possibility that ignited along with his body as he came alive to Meldrick’s touch.

  He had endless questions, but for now, permanence and loyalty danced in his mind. Both were a song he had never experienced. He smiled at Meldrick, eyes alight with the hope he felt. “Welcome to Denmark.”