Chapter 24

Julian and Charles are back at Long Street. Julian is trying to trace the sales of the bugging devices, but he’s having no luck. Charles tracks down the publisher offering Lu the book deal and leaves them a message. Julian keeps tapping his fingers on his desk; Charles can hear it from the front room.

Then Julian appears in the doorway of his office. “This isn’t how it usually goes,” he says abruptly. “Missing persons. This isn’t how it works.”

“How does it work?” Charles asks. 

“You look for them. Find out where they were last seen, who they last called, track down phone calls and credit card receipts. There’s almost always a clear reason they’ve left, and some sense of who or where they’d have gone to. Before this, my longest missing person case lasted six days. She’d left her husband because he was cheating on her with a dental hygienist from her place of work and she’d taken a cross-country trip to go stay with her sister. I talked to the husband, the dental hygienist he was cheating with, another dental hygienist who was the woman’s best friend, found out that she’d always wanted to visit Miami, checked with gas stations and motels, realized she was headed toward the sister, and there she was, at a hotel in Miami, doing charcoal face masks and sitting in the sauna. She hadn’t even meant to go ‘missing.’ She just wanted some time to herself before confronting the husband.”

Julian’s brow is furrowed. His gaze is focused ahead of him, fixed on empty air, but every now and then his eyes flick to Charles.

“We did go to the airport,” he offers. It seems like a long time ago, though. He remembers, with a little shock, the feeling of Julian’s hand slipping into his. A facade that turned real. Or sort of real.

Julian gives a grimace of acknowledgment.

“We know she didn’t get on that flight to London, at least.”

“But we don’t know why. If she was threatened, why didn’t she use the plane ticket and get as far away as possible? Why misdirect instead of just leaving the country for real?”

“Too expensive?” Charles ventures doubtfully.

“Maybe, but then why not save the money she used for the ticket?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why the orange seeds? It seems so unnecessary. Just send the threatening note.”

“It’s directed at Lu,” Charles says. “Whoever it was knows she likes Sherlock Holmes.”

“And Jack,” says Julian slowly. “Did he?”

“He studied the Victorian period. Maybe that was close enough.”

Suddenly, Julian whacks himself on the forehead. “Idiot,” he mutters. “His dissertation title. What was it?”

“Something about disability and masculinity—”

“‘Crooked Men: Disabling Masculinity in Victorian Britain.’ Crooked men.”

“It’s a Conan Doyle reference,” Charles realizes. “The Adventure of the Crooked Man. But what…”

Julian shakes his head. “It’s personal. The orange seeds, it’s…a reference to their work. To the things they cared about most.”

“Personal,” Charles says slowly.

“Cruel, even. Malicious. A mean little…jab.”

“Huh.” Charles considers. “So, who would be most likely to do that?”

Julian exhales irritably. “Any of them, surely. Isabel Ortiz, angry that Lu wanted to take that book deal. Or any of the others in her camp—Professors Jordan James, Sarah Rasmussen, and Fatima Amir, or the graduate students, Katie, Antonio, and Phoebe. Or, on the other hand, Francis Pace, still upset that Lu left his side years ago and wanting to sabotage the presentists.”

“Or any of his people. Marco Spina, Arla Catlin. Kevin or Karen.”

“Dean Hanley, even,” Julian says. “He’s at the end of his rope with the department, from what it sounds like. Or what’s-his-name, Dr. Maynard, who hates everything his colleagues do.”

Charles sighs. “Well. Yeah, I guess so. And there’s Piper’s friend Tyler, too—jealousy, maybe?”

Julian nods slowly. There’s a long silence.

“You know the problem with all of that, though,” he says.

“It doesn’t account for Jack.”

“It doesn’t account for Jack.”

“Could it?” Charles asks. “I mean, say Jack was…defecting. Or Lu was. If Jack was defecting, Pace and his crew could have targeted both him and Lu for being on the opposite side. If Lu was defecting, Isabel and her crew might have, for the same reason.”

“Why now, though? They weren’t threatening and murdering before. What changed?”

“I don’t know.”

Julian sighs impatiently. “All we’ve been doing,” he says, “is getting stuck in the weeds. We ought to be accessing cell records, not getting mired in a debate between two approaches towards reading literature that frankly don’t seem all that incompatible in the first place.”

Charles lets out a startled laugh.

Julian, frustrated, paces to the tiny window. He peers through the blinds, as if outside might be the correct path towards finding Lu.

“I really have lost my touch,” Julian mutters, almost too quietly for Charles to hear. Charles isn’t sure he meant to say it aloud at all.

No! Charles wants to protest. You’re as brilliant as you ever were!

He doesn’t know if it’s true, but he believes it anyway.

Piper hasn’t had time for a real conversation with Tyler since the Romeo and Juliet cast party the previous Friday. They haven’t addressed the conversation they had on the porch at the cast party, in which Tyler told Piper that they didn’t have to be melancholy all the time and then kissed them as gently as he ever had before, but it’s been on Piper’s mind. Piper isn’t sure how they feel about it. Melancholy, probably.

But the two of them don’t get a chance to discuss it when they meet up for lunch on Craig Street, because Piper tells Tyler about Lu’s connection to Jack’s murder and about the bugs planted in the presentists’ offices, and Tyler flips out.

“What the fuck?” he hisses, grabbing onto the edges of the table and leaning over the plates of falafel and baba ghanoush. “Are you telling me that Lu and Jack received threatening notes from the same person?”

Piper flinches at the intensity of Tyler’s reaction. They nod. “It looks like it.”

“Okay,” says Tyler. “Okay. And—and someone has been illegally recording you.”

“All of us.”

“Fine. All of you. And are you telling me—are you honestly telling me—that no one has gone to the police about this?”

Piper blinks. “No. We haven’t.”

Tyler exhales and slumps back in his chair, putting his hand on his forehead. As with many of Tyler’s gestures, it appears equally melodramatic and genuine.

“Piper,” he says. “You’re in danger.”

Piper’s stomach twists uneasily. “No,” they say. “I don’t think so.”

“Are you kidding me?” Tyler says loudly, and Piper gestures for him to keep his voice down. Tyler glares at them but speaks more quietly. “Your best friend is missing. Your classmate is dead. Someone has been electronically surveilling you and your colleagues. And you’re keeping all this information within the English department because—because I don’t even know why!”

“Well,” Piper responds, a little piqued, “everyone knows that Jack is dead. And I have told someone about the rest, and he’s looking into it.”

Tyler narrows his eyes and then, a look of realization dawning, rolls them. “That detective? Seriously?”

“He’s very good.”

“Is he? What has he actually found out?”

“He’s the one who found the threatening letters that proved Lu and Jack are linked.”

Tyler huffs impatiently. “If Lu is connected to a murder, the police need to know.”

“The police!” Piper has to work to keep their voice lowered now. “Are you really serious?”

“Yeah. I am.”

“The police are—do you know how fucked up the police are?”

Tyler raises his eyebrows. “I’m a Black man. What do you think?”

Piper deflates a little. But still, they think. “Then why would you suggest getting them involved?”

Tyler gives an aggrieved sigh. “Because this is murder, Piper, and in our, yes, extremely fucked-up society, the police are the only ones with the resources to handle it. I’d love to use some other process to deal with this, but what would that be? You think a private detective is a good alternative, but how do you know he’s not just going to hand this all over to the police in the end anyway? And—and Jesus, Piper, if someone really did send Jack a threatening note, the police are looking for the wrong person! A man who’s currently homeless and mentally unstable—does that not bother you?”

A guilty squirm wriggles its way up Pipers’ intestines. “Yes,” they say. “Of course it does.”

“And Lu,” Tyler persists. “If Lu was threatened by the same person who killed Jack…”

“Don’t,” Piper says abruptly. “Please.”

Tyler softens. “I’m not saying anything has happened to her. I’m just saying that she’s in danger, Piper, and I think you are too.”

Piper just can’t quite believe that.

“Look,” says Tyler, “if you don’t care about yourself, I know you care about her, at least. Do it for her.”

Piper looks down. “I don’t not care about myself.”

Tyler shrugs. “Sometimes I wonder.”

Piper doesn’t know what to say to that. Of course they care about their own safety. They don’t ignore their own well-being. Do they?

They shake their head. “I don’t want to call the police,” they say softly.

Tyler surveys them for a long moment, disappointment and frustration writ clear in the lines creasing his forehead. “I care about you,” he says after a moment. “I care about your safety. I don’t want anything bad to happen to you.”

Piper feels a rush of shame. “Please,” they say, “don’t worry about me, I don’t want you to worry—”

“Well, I want to worry.” Tyler’s voice is somehow sharp and tender all at once. “I’ve—Piper, I’ve been trying to tell you that.”

Piper bites their lip. Their eyes burn, and they will them to stay dry. Tyler’s words root their way into Piper’s body, turning their cheeks pink and the top of their head oddly cold.

“Why?” Tyler asks. “Why won’t you be reasonable about this, Piper? It just seems so obvious what the right thing to do is. Why won’t you do it?”

Piper can only shake their head. Obvious. How could it be obvious? There’s so much at stake, and so much that’s complicated, that Tyler can’t really understand. He’s outside of this thing. Outside of the writhing, twisted departmental conflict that’s been growing larger and more tangled each year. He can’t tell which tugs on which threads will send it all unraveling. He doesn’t know Lu like Piper does, doesn’t know what she would want, what she’d want held back or kept quiet even if it did mean she was in more danger. 

And he doesn’t understand that Piper…Piper can’t be in danger. Piper isn’t the person who gets hurt, who disappears, whom everyone is obsessed with saving or avenging. They are the person left behind to sort it all out. However they try, they can’t feel that sense of danger closing in around them, can’t hear the drumbeats or the warning sirens. Not for them.

They’re not the center of this story.

Suddenly, their phone buzzes. They glance at it and their eyes widen.

“I need to go,” they say.

“Now?”

“Yeah, sorry, something’s happened.”

“With Lu?”

“With Isabel. She needs us all to come for an emergency meeting, I don’t know why yet—”

“Don’t go.”

Piper looks up from their phone, which has been buzzing with confirmations and On my ways. “What?”

Tyler says again, “Don’t go.”

Piper blinks at him, uncomprehending.

“You’re not finished with your lunch. I’m sure whatever it is can wait for another half an hour—”

“It really can’t.” Piper’s already shoving their arms into their coat sleeves. “Sorry, I don’t mean to rush out, I’ll pay next time—”

“Piper,” Tyler interrupts.

“I can’t. I’m already keeping so much from them, I can’t let them down.”

Their last glimpse of Tyler before hurrying out of the restaurant is of Tyler’s face crossed with disappointment and hurt; but more than that, Piper realizes, unease bubbling up inside them, it’s full of concern.

Two hours later, Piper shows up at Long Street out of breath and agitated. Their usually neat hair is windswept and collar of their impeccable coat is askew.

“I have so much to tell you,” they say, and Charles immediately closes his laptop and walks with them into Julian’s office.

Charles listens with bated breath as Piper describes the disastrous job talk of the day before. He’s not entirely sure it’s relevant to Lu, except insofar as the entire mess of a department is relevant to Lu. Piper also reveals that they heard Kevin Ng and Karen Gavras, the two most senior historicist grad students, whispering about something—something they “shouldn’t have” done.

“And there’s more,” Piper says. They pull a flash drive out of their pocket and put it on Julian’s desk.

“What’s on it?” Charles asks.

“A recording,” says Piper. They swallow hard. “The dean. I just found out. He called Isabel into his office this morning. She had the feeling something was going to happen that she’d want a record of. So she, uh. She recorded their conversation on her phone.”

Charles and Julian exchange glances.

“I know,” says Piper hurriedly. “It’s a little, well, questionable, ethically, but…after what happened to us…”

Julian nods. “Can we listen, please?”

“Yes.”

Julian inserts the flash drive into his laptop. Charles reaches over without thinking and turns the volume up, hand brushing Julian’s.

There’s just empty air at first, and then hellos and the scraping of chair legs. The audio quality isn’t great—Isabel probably had her phone in her pocket—but there’s no background noise and the words are clear enough.

A man’s voice that must be Dean Hanley’s says, “Hi, Isabel, thanks for seeing me. I’ll just get straight to it: I need to talk to you about one of your graduate students.”

Isabel’s voice comes back, cool and steady. “Which student would that be?”

“Lucretia Fairchild.”

Charles and Julian’s eyes meet for a split second. There is a slight pause on the recording.

“Lu is…on a leave of absence at the moment.”

“That’s fine. What I want to discuss is the work she has done with you so far. Work that you and your colleagues have been advising her on.”

“Why, exactly?” Isabel’s voice has put up defenses, walls and moats; Charles can almost hear the sound of cannons being aimed straight out from the fortress walls.

There’s a rustle of paper. “Would you read this aloud, please?”

A slight pause. “Are these excerpts of Lu’s last dissertation draft?”

“Yes.”     

“Where did you get these?” Daggers and swords in every consonant.

“Please read them, Dr. Ortiz.”

For a moment it seems like Isabel will not comply. But she clears her throat and begins to read.

“‘Without making too-broad generalizations about what characterizes slash fanfiction—which can also include coffee shop meet-cutes and sleepy snuggling—a good portion of it deals with precisely the erotics I described previously: the suppression and revelation of intense feelings, the power dynamics this epistemological process produces, and a complicated mapping of exhibitionism and watching, controlling and submitting, and reading and being read. And, I want to argue, in slash fic these erotics become intensely localized around the asshole. Anal sex often works in them as a fantasy about interiority—about the rupture, in fact, of the self-constrained selfhood I’ve just described.’”

There’s a pause. “What am I supposed to be getting from this, exactly?” asks Isabel, voice sharp.

The Dean’s voice: “Read the next excerpt, please.”

Another pause. Charles can imagine Isabel’s eyes narrowing as she considers whether or not to object. Then she clears her throat and continues. 

“‘But in this fic, Sherlock Holmes has dangerously overtaxed himself, and, exhausted and weak, he’s incapable of maintaining his usual self-control. Watson, once he realizes this, puts him on the floor and ties his hands and fucks him. He compels Holmes, through the medium of consensual but forceful anal sex, to open up, to allow him inside, literally and figuratively—to let Watson break down his self-control and see him as vulnerable and open. This is a fantasy of desired forceful penetration into what has been kept, through great self-restraint, within the prison of the self.’”

That seems to be the end of the second excerpt. Isabel’s voice has not faltered, but Charles does think it grew flatter, more toneless, on the phrase fucks him, and then again on forceful anal sex.

“I don’t see what this is supposed to do,” Isabel says. “Frankly, I’m a little concerned that—”

“Read,” says the dean. His tone brooks no argument. Charles remembers him from the vigil, a gray-bearded man with an official-sounding voice. At that time, it had occupied the register of “administrator offers support in moment of grief”; now, on the recording, it has slipped into “administrator about to issue a reprimand for behavior that goes Against The School’s Values.”

There is another pause. Isabel, perhaps, is looking down and what she is supposed to read.

“Now,” says the dean.

Isabel starts in, her tone now growing defiant. She speaks loudly and clearly, hitting each word, especially the sexual ones, with razor sharp precision.

“‘Anal sex in slash fic often begins with fingering, one character opening up the anus of the other to prepare them for further penetration. The asshole is usually figured as arousingly, riskily tight and thus in need of diligent, finger-by-finger attention. In “Kiss with a Fist” by h_w_22, Holmes coaxes a reluctant Watson to acknowledge his sexual attraction to men one finger at a time: “Watson was whimpering, face hidden in the cushions. He had told Holmes he did not want him, that he was sexually normal, but he had not resisted when Holmes pulled him onto his lap, facedown, and slipped a hand down the back of his trousers. Holmes pressed gently but steadily at Watson’s impossibly tight hole. It would take a long time to open him up. Luckily, Holmes was patient.” Later, Holmes has managed to insert two oil-slicked fingers, and Watson is weeping: “mewls of pain like he was being prized open, but his arsehole had sucked in Holmes’ fingers and was holding them tight, as if refusing to let them go.” Finally, Holmes puts his entire fist inside Watson. h_w_22 writes, “It was absurd, foolish, dangerous even—Holmes’ whole hand inside that tight tiny space that had never before been breached. But Watson was crying great gasping cracked-open sobs that sounded to Holmes like a confession. His asshole was red and swollen, slicked with oil and puffy around Holmes’ wrist, and Holmes bent to kiss it, to run his tongue around the stretched-out rim. He wanted to taste the truth of Watson’s desire.” We see here the fantasy of penetration as a prying open of the self that has been carefully guarded. It is painful but desired—desired, perhaps, because painful.’”

A silence. Charles’ face is quite warm. He hopes, though it seems unlikely, that he does not appear flushed. He is very determinedly not looking at Julian. Piper, though, is glaring at the computer as the pause stretches on.

Finally, the dean clears his throat. Charles supposes that he was waiting for Isabel to speak, but her stony silence remains unbroken for so long that he can only imagine that the discomfort in the room must have been palpable.

“Can you explain where, precisely, is the scholarly value in this?”

“Certainly,” says Isabel crisply. “It is a theorization of the construction of feminized selfhood via erotic writing about men.”

“Could you put that in clearer terms, please?” The dean’s voice is dry.

“The technical language is important and field-specific,” Isabel says, a note of warning in her voice, “but, basically, the argument is that women are taught to keep their desires hidden, and therefore we can read their writing about anal fingering as an expression of longing for someone to pry open their sense of self.”

“Hm.” A rustling noise. Charles guesses the dean is looking through the papers again. There’s another pause. Isabel still doesn’t break it.

“Frankly,” says the dean, “I’m a little concerned about the quality of this work. And that makes me concerned about the quality of all your students’ work.”

Now Isabel doesn’t manage to keep silent. “Excuse me?”

“Isabel, this is pornography, not scholarship.”

There’s a harsh noise that Charles does not immediately recognize as Isabel laughing. “Are you serious?” she asks.

“I am.”

More rustling, and footfalls; Isabel standing and pacing, Charles guesses. “Incredible,” she says. “The extent to which squeamishness about sex dictates what is ‘appropriate’ for scholars to write—”

“For goodness’ sake, no one is squeamish about sex. It’s just that we do expect, at this institution, for scholarship to be more than simply pornography veiled in so-called critical language—”

“That’s extremely homophobic,” Isabel’s voice says sharply. “And misogynistic.”

“Stop right there,” says the dean heatedly. “I will not have you using identity politics to accuse me of—to derail this conversation—”

“Who put you up to this?” Isabel demands. “Who told you to say this?”

“Excuse me, I am perfectly capable of—you are making some extremely offensive statements, Dr. Ortiz—”

“Offensive! Me! Dismissing my student’s scholarship through the same language that’s always used to diminish women’s articulation of the erotic—women and their perverted desires, queers and their obsession with sex, why can’t they just shut up and write about—about Charles Dickens or someone, some nice safe neutered historical figure, Virginia Woolf at the very outside but certainly no queerer than her—”

“Dr. Ortiz!” The dean’s voice explodes, cutting through Isabel’s intensifying rant. “Please get yourself under control. I am merely expressing a concern that some of the scholarship produced by your department is not the kind of thing that will best represent Schenley. And I bring up this particular student because it has come to my attention that she has been offered a book contract by a commercial publishing company, and I do not want Schenley University’s name on a book of thinly veiled pornography. Of course she can do whatever she wants on her own time, but—”

“Where did you hear about that?” Isabel’s voice is sharp and low.

“I…that is beside the point.” An irritated intake of breath. “Your department has caused an extraordinary amount of headache. You can barely keep yourselves from each other’s throats. Your retention rate is appalling. I understand that several of your graduate student admits have already declined admission for next year. And now I am reading so-called scholarship that is frankly inappropriate drivel and that is going to be broadcast to the wider world as the kind of work we do at Schenley. This is your last warning, Dr. Ortiz, and I suggest you pass that on to your colleagues, even the ones you don’t like. At the end of this semester, I will be doing a serious reevaluation of your department. I would advise you to make changes now, or I will make them for you later.”

The recording cuts off. 

“If anything was inappropriate,” Piper says heatedly, “it was Hanley making Isabel read those excerpts aloud to him.”

There is a pause.

“He knew about her book offer,” Julian says.

Piper’s face darkens. “They told him. Pace told him. That’s why he bugged our offices, to find some leverage, something to manipulate Hanley with.”

“Has he admitted that?”

“Of course not. But Isabel hasn’t talked to him yet. She’s still recovering.”

Charles is listening to Piper. Of course he is. He’s paying attention. But it’s a bit difficult to focus when his head is still ringing with the words from the recording. A fantasy of the prying open of the self. He makes himself look dutifully at Julian with an expression of professional absorption arranging his features as best as he can muster; but then Julian’s eyes meet his and his breath catches in his throat. His eyes flick quickly away.

“Can the dean—” Charles clears his throat. “Can the dean really make that kind of judgment call? About a student’s writing? I mean, I could see Lu being vulnerable—she’s just a student—but Hanley is threatening the entire department, and Isabel and Pace and the others—they’re tenured, right? They’ve got job security.”

Piper nods. “Right—although Fatima’s not tenured yet, Dr. Amir—but even given that…I mean, Hanley could block all hiring requests, drain funding, make it difficult to get approval for new courses…”

“But it’s—” Charles shakes his head. “I mean, can he really say that? That Lu’s writing doesn’t have scholarly merit?”

Piper’s face darkens. “It’s bullshit, obviously,” they say, “but it’s not exactly a surprise. Conservative academics have considered queer theory basically just pornography for a long time. Stuff about sex and sex writing in particular.”

Charles frowns. “But…there is plenty of high-profile stuff out there like it, right? I mean, it would be possible to make a case for the scholarly merit of Lu’s work.”

“Oh,” says Piper. “Yeah. I mean, for sure. It’s just…”

“The department is in shambles,” Julian cuts in. “A controversial publication on its own would be one thing, but given what else is happening…it’s more fuel for the fire.”

Piper nods unhappily. “My guess is any excuse the dean has to take control of the department, he’ll use it.”

A silence.

“Can you explain,” Julian says finally, “why exactly it’s so important that he doesn’t?”

“What—” Piper blinks. “I—I mean—you heard him! He’s—he’s using an old homophobic argument to devalue the work of a queer scholar—”

Julian puts up a hand. Charles looks at him, out of the periphery of his vision. His eyes are blinking a little too rapidly—a sign of nerves, Charles thinks—but his hand is steady.

“Yes,” he says. “You’re right. That’s not what I meant, I’m sorry. Um…why is it so important to stop someone, anyone—someone better, of course—from coming in and trying to solve the problems in the department? Everyone seems to know the situation has become untenable.”

“Because—” Piper begins heatedly, “well, because—”

A pause.

“Because,” they try again, “unless that person really understood the field, really understood what’s been happening, they wouldn’t get it. Or, I mean, they might, and they’d side with the historicists—they might think that what we do, what the presentists do, isn’t really right for an English department. I mean, there’s a good chance they’ll see us as disruptive or not academically rigorous. And if they don’t really have the background to understand what’s happening, they’ll just...I don’t know, try to mediate? Maybe? And I mean…it’s not…this isn’t just some personal grudge. There’s a reason we can’t just, like, agree to disagree.”

“What is it?” Julian presses. “What is that reason?”

“It’s…” Piper shakes their head. “It’s everything. It’s that there’s no room in so many English departments—and in so many conferences and publications and hiring lines—for work that pushes disciplinary boundaries. That melds creative writing and personal reflection with critical theorizing and abstract, complex analysis. That acknowledges desire as at the heart of scholarship. That…that’s really, truly queer. A strict historicist view of literature boils everything down to, like, the minutiae of whatever period the text is from, it…it assumes that our goal should be to figure out how people would have understood the text at the time, as if that’s possible! As if history is some sort of stable collection of facts, as if it’s not some weird complicated amalgam of all our desires and fears and needs and ideas, as if we can see it through a lens untainted by the contemporary moment. It’s so teleological, too, like, how did we get from here to there? As if here is knowable, as if here was inevitable. And it doesn’t leave room for all the failures, the aborted paths history might have taken, or the ones it did take and no one noticed—we have to ask, ‘what if things had been different?’ or we just get stuck with the inevitability of colonialism and heteropatriarchy and—and it matters, it matters how we think of these things. It matters.”

Charles feels it. Some electric urgency is pushing through Piper, from Piper, and Charles feels it coursing in the air around them, feels it prickling up the hairs on his arms. Piper’s dark wide eyes are shining. Charles recognizes the expression on their face, that gleam, that glow—recognizes it from Renaissance portraits of religious acolytes and from the spiritual rapture of his late grandmother listening to Mozart on her old cassette player. What if things had been different? A world-splitting question, Charles thinks, for those inclined to wish for impossible multiplicity. Charles wants things to be different, to be multiple; he knows that well. All his desires for the not-real. He doesn’t turn to scholarship to fulfill that longing, though; he’s given his desires the shape of secret doors leading into magical realms, of keys turned in wardrobes and of attics and ancient basements. For him those desires have honed in on the tilt of the universe when he slips briefly sideways into the slenderest space of possibility, and for half a minute half believes himself to be elsewhere. Because Charles as a child had loved fantasy and fairy stories, which by their nature were about adventures hidden from most of the world and yet were understood to be make-believe, he had believed that the stories he wanted to be part of were impossible. And even if they weren’t, he knew he would not be one of the chosen few granted access to those hidden worlds. Enchanted doors did not exist—and if they did, he’d never find one. And so when he had graduated to more grown-up stories—detectives, he thinks, the prosaic version of uncovering secret worlds beneath the mundanity of life—he had transferred to them the same sheen of impossibility. If there were people in the world who got to experience the things he read about in books, Charles would never be one of them. What he wanted, he had decided after his graduate school fantasies had come crashing down, was the impossible itself. And that was a longing definitionally unable to be fulfilled.

Now, listening to Piper, he feels peculiarly unbalanced. Piper speaks in words new to Charles, but the desire and devotion running through them is so familiar. So much like his own.

Or is it? Charles is prone to misrecognition. It seems to him as though Piper is peering into the yawning mouth of possibility that Charles knows so well; but maybe that’s a trick of the moment.

“I don’t understand,” says Julian, and Charles’ wonder shatters like glass around him. Julian doesn’t understand. Julian can’t feel it, the prickling urgency in the air, the need, the yearning, the pull from something more, something beyond—and so Julian wouldn’t understand Charles, not one bit, if Charles tried to articulate what it was, what it is, that makes Julian feel to him like a bridge to somewhere else.

Julian, he thinks with a dawning dismay, should feel like the destination.

“You’re both trying to uncover what you call a queer past,” Julian says, unaware of Charles’ inner turmoil. “And in your own ways, you both care about creating a queer present. Compared to most of the world, surely you’re more aligned with each other than against each other.”

Piper blinks. “Well,” they say slowly, “that’s true enough. But—but we understand queerness, and therefore our goals, so differently.”

“Neither of you think of it in mainstream terms, though, do you?” Julian presses. “Neither of you thinks that making a better queer present is just about gay marriage and cultural assimilation.”

Charles looks at him, startled. Piper looks a little startled, too. Charles realizes that he has never heard Julian talk about his sexuality. He has no idea whether Julian identifies as gay or bi or something else, or whether he has queer friends, or what his political goals are. Somehow he hasn’t spent much time wondering about these things. But he should have. It’s Charles’ first time kissing a man, but that doesn’t mean it’s Julian’s.

“No,” admits Piper. “No, we don’t. But their version, the way they view the world, is much more likely to end up at cultural assimilation and normativity despite itself. It’s a much neater version of history. It—there are so many ways people have experienced sexuality, in different times and places, and it’s so important that we don’t just act like it was one straight line from the past to the present, no confusion, no overlaps, no variations, no what-ifs that almost were. That sort of thinking doesn’t account for differences in class and race and region, and for—for all those weird queer slips. Moments and people that seem to come together across time. Or for how our desires in the present affect how we understand the past. It’s just so...” Piper searches for the word, brow furrowed. “It’s just so limiting. So literal.”

Julian’s pale face is inscrutable. His eyes are thoughtful, but Charles can’t guess what those thoughts are.

“So you really believe Francis Pace would go to the dean about Lu’s work in order to sabotage Isabel,” says Julian. “Even though that’s going to cast a bad light on the department as a whole.”

 “Yes,” Piper says. “Yes, I do.”