The Fall of Elias Larson

The clock on the wall behind Dr. Wentworth read 3:50, and in that moment Elias Larson knew that he was not going to pass. Nothing had been said, but he read it all the same in the body language of his doctoral committee like a farmer reads the weather in the sky – a drop in air pressure rather than by anything stated. Dr. Okonkwo’s pen had stopped moving twenty minutes ago and had not moved since. Dr. Hendricks kept folding and unfolding the corner of a page as though it personally disappointed her. And Dr. Wentworth, who had guided Elias’ life for the past four years, bore the warmth of a man approving expense reports. He had removed his glasses, which was the gesture he made every time he was preparing to deliver words of disappointment.

“Mr. Larson.” Not Doctor. Not yet, and now the not-yet had a permanence to it. “Your command of the material is not in question. What is in question is whether you have written a dissertation or a romance.”

Elias’ stood dumbfounded at the front of the room, light from the projector still casting his shadow against the backdrop of his PowerPoint. His hand found the hem of his shirt as it always did when he was anxious, and worked the fabric between two fingers. His mother used to slap his hand away when he did this, but it was a manner of self-soothing that always seemed to calm him down.

“The committee feels,” Wentworth went on, and Elias stopped hearing the individual words. Committee feels. Insufficient rigor. Sentiment in place of argument. Resubmission, with revisions, no sooner than the Spring term next year. Dr. Wentworth’s words arrived like stones dropped one at a time into a deep well, each one taking a long while to reach the bottom, each one landing with a sound smaller than would have been expected.

He had written about the crescent moon over Cordoba. The crescent on the caliphal standard, the lighting, the poets and scholars who brilliant stewarded Moorish culture and knowledge. He had believed it the truest sentence in three hundred and twelve pages. In spite of Elias’ work, Dr. Wentworth had called his work a romance.

“Thank you,” Elias said, when it was clear they were waiting for him to say something. “I appreciate the committee’s time.”

He gathered his notes that he would not need. He shook three hands. He walked out into a May afternoon so bright and ordinary it seemed to belong to someone else’s life. Students crossed the quad with their backpacks and their unfinished futures, and not one of them looked at the man who had just spent four years writing about a civilization that collapsed in the Reconquista but which was now nearly forgotten.

* * *

His phone buzzed on the drive home with a text message from Marcus.

“How’d it go??”

Elias didn’t answer.

The duplex on the west side smelled of dust and the cologne Marcus left behind on weekends, a department-store scent Elias had never liked and never mentioned, because to mention it would have required a conversation, and their conversations had a way of starting at cologne and arriving at compatibility.

Elias dropped his bag by the door. He ran cold water over his face in the bathroom and watched it drip from the emotionally disheveled face that looked back at him in the mirror; a face that belonged to someone else… someone whose dreams had just been shattered.

The screen door banged shut. Marcus had a key. Elias was still unsure if giving him a key had been the right move. After all, Marcus still hadn’t done the same. Not yet.

“Well?” Marcus filled the kitchen doorway, all shoulders and certainty, the same easy bulk that had filled the campus coffee shop the morning they met. “Don’t leave me hanging, El. Did you pass?”

“No.”

The word sat in the small kitchen. An awkward silence filled the air as Elias watched the word work on Marcus’ face, watched the grin falter and reassemble into something else.

“No?” Marcus snorted. “What do you mean, no? Four years. Four years of ’not now, I have to write,' four years of me eating dinner alone while you’re in there with your dead Arabs, and they just, what, said no?”

“They said resubmit. In the Spring of next year.”

“Next Spring.” Marcus dragged a hand down his face. “Do you hear yourself? Do you know what a normal person would be doing right now? Crying. Screaming. Throwing something. And you’re standing there rubbing your shirt.”

He stepped closer, but the kitchen wasn’t large enough for his frame standing over Elias. “This is what I’ve been telling you. You don’t feel anything, you just study it. You’d rather live in your little medieval fantasy than be here with an actual person who wants you. God,” Marcus looked up at the sky as if speaking directly to Him. “I have been so patient with you.”

“I never asked you to wait.”

It came out flatter than he meant, and truer, and it landed like the slap his mother used to give to his nervous hand. Marcus’ expression went from heat to a cold that was worse.

“No,” Marcus said quietly. “You didn’t. That’s the whole problem, isn’t it. You never asked me for anything. I was furniture you kept because the room looked empty without it.” He pulled the key from his pocket, and set it on the counter with a small precise click beside the ceramic rooster that had come with the place. “I’m not waiting until next Spring. I’m not waiting at all.”

He was gone before Elias assembled a reply, the screen door cracking shut, the engine turning over, the sound of it folding into the evening traffic until the kitchen held nothing but the tick of the clock and a single key on the counter catching the last of the evening light that pierced the windows.

Elias stood for a long while. Then he washed his face a third time, picked up his own keys, and drove to the Rusty Spoke, sealing his failures in the duplex so he could breathe a little.

* * *

The Rusty Spoke took graduate students and ranch hands without distinction and gave both the same sticky floor and the same jukebox that had stopped learning new songs around 1997. Elias had never been a drinker. The farm taught a person early what liquor and machinery did to each other. But he slid onto a stool and ordered a gin and tonic. The burn of it cut a clean line through the fog in his chest, then he ordered a second.

The gin didn’t fix anything. It merely rearranged the day into a shape he could better tolerate. Dr. Elias Larson, a title he would not be wearing as he had hoped. The dream was shattered in the length of a single committee meeting. He looked down into his glass and let out a melancholy chuckle.

“Rough one?” The bartender had tattooed sleeves and a ring through his septum and the practiced flatness of a man who could tell a celebration from a wake.

“I didn’t get my doctorate today,” Elias said. The sentence sounded absurd in the bar, too formal for the room, like reading a deposition at a tailgate.

“Damn.” The bartender poured the next one with the generosity people reserve for strangers whose particular grief they will never have to carry. “What was it in?”

“Medieval Spain. The Caliphate of Cordoba. Tenth century.”

“No kidding. My ex made chainmail for Renaissance fairs.” He offered it as people do in an effort to be relateable. Elias felt the corner of his mouth move for the first time since 3:50, a small involuntary offering to a stranger across a bar, which was, he supposed, the entire reason bars were permitted to exist.

Elias looked past the bartender to the mirror behind the bottles of alcohol.Once he made eye contact with himself, the smile died more quickly than it had been borne.

Three men at the far end of the bar were watching him. Broad through the shoulders, callused hands. They were the kinds of men Elias had grown up beside, the kind who traveled on Friday nights in a pack. The one in the middle, a redhead with a patchy beard and an SDSU jacket, leaned to the man beside him and said something low. They both laughed. Elias knew the laugh. He had heard it in locker rooms, in fairground parking lots, and once in the lot of the only gay bar in Sioux Falls. It was the laugh of men who had located something they disliked and were arriving, together, at a decision of what to do about it.

Elias raised a finger for his check.

“Leaving so soon?” The voice came from just behind him as a hand with hairy knuckles clamped down on his shoulder. Elias could smell close the man’s beer and chewing tobacco. The redhead had crossed the room without Elias noticing it. A second man set a hand on the back of the stool, boxing him against the bar, casual, almost friendly, which was the part that turned his stomach. “A pretty little stray like you shouldn’t be drinking alone.”

“I was just leaving.” Elias kept his voice level and laid a twenty on the bar. The redhead’s hand closed around his wrist before the bill had settled on the bar.

“What’s the rush, sweetheart? We’re friendly.”

Elias pulled free and came off the stool. He made it two steps toward the door before a hand caught his shoulder and turned him back around. The man was a respectable head taller and most of a hundred pounds heavier, and the fist already had a grip on his shirt.

“Faggots don’t come in here,” the redhead said, almost gently, and shoved away from the door.

Elias’ heel caught the leg of a stool. He went backward with his arms wheeling, and his body braced for the floor, for the boot that would come after he was on the ground. It had become the night every small-town queer kid rehearses.

But impact with the floor did not arrive.

The air beneath him crumpled like paper squeezed in a fist, and the bar’s long fluorescent tubes pulled into streaks of liquid light. The redhead’s snarl stretched and smeared and came apart into color without sound. Elias was not just falling. He was being folded along a seam in the world he had never known was there, and the gin and the grief and the whole gray weight of the worst day of his life went out of him all at once, like water through a broken floor.

* * *

Moments later, he landed on cold dry stone under a night sky so brilliant that he could see every star. The smell that reached him was not prairie and exhaust but jasmine, and the sound of a river moving somewhere close. He lay on his back and did not move, because moving would require believing what had happened, and he was not ready.

A crescent moon hung overhead, thin and exact. Around the edges of his vision rose the dark shapes of arches, a colonnade, the spill and trickle of a fountain feeding a long channel of water that caught the moon and broke it into pieces and carried the pieces away.

A courtyard. He was lying in a courtyard surrounded by architecture that did not belong to his own time and place. But the part of his mind trained for four years told him, with an academic’s terrible calm, where he was.

A footstep.

He turned his head.

A man, larger and broader than the men in the bar, stood at the edge of the colonnade where the shadow met the moonlight, and he had been there long enough to have watched Elias appear out of nothing. He was tall, dark, bearded, dressed in a way that belonged to the place and the hour, and he did not look afraid, and he did not look astonished with a complete and unhurried attention that took Elias in from his strange clothes to his stranger face and rested, at last, on his eyes.

Elias should have run. But there was nowhere to run to. There was no century to run to.

Instead he lay on the warm stone of a courtyard a thousand years from the bar, a thousand years from Marcus, a thousand years from the committee and the clock and the word romance, and he looked up at the man who was looking at him, and the man’s expression changed, by a fraction, into something Elias had no name for, but which he recognized anyway, like a word in a language he had only ever read, never once heard spoken aloud.

Neither of them moved. The fountain’s trickle the only sound between them.

Elias should have been afraid. The day had given him every reason to be. A stranger now stood over him in a century not his own, broad as a barn door, close enough to do whatever he liked. Fear was the sane response. But the day had wrung Elias dry of everything he had carried into that bar, and what filled the hollow was not fear. It was something closer to desire.

The man crossed the courtyard, moving more with curiosity than with hurry. He crouched beside Elias on the warm stone. The cedar and leather scent of him cut through the jasmine hanging in the air. His eyes traveled Elias' face and his strange clothes and the impossible fact of his presence, an appraisal without warmth or cruelty. It was just the flat assessing look of a man who had stumbled upon a treasure.

Then he spoke. The words were rough, clipped, shaped in the back of the throat, and Elias caught the bones of them through four years of coursework before he caught their sense. Latin. Not the polished Latin of Cicero or the Church, but a blunt frontier Latin built for truces and ransoms, every word filed down to its hard edge.

"Quid es tu?" What are you.

Not who. What. The question landed somewhere beneath Elias' ribs. He opened his mouth. No Latin came, no Arabic, none of the careful languages he had read and never spoken aloud to a living soul. Only his own voice, thin in the enormous night.

"I don't know," he said, in English. Elias looked up into the face above him, into a tenderness that was indistinguishable from hunger. He could not tell whether he had landed in a refuge or a snare, and he no longer cared to know the difference.