"Yield" by David Emeka
I lay on my bed, fiddling with the ropes of my shorts and thinking aimlessly, a little anxiously…
I was considering jerking off when Stainless came into my room. I did not think it was weird, many other students came asking for all sorts of ordinary stuff like a lighter or toothpaste or bleach. I was soon standing to shake his hand, ready to obtain whatever he desired, but Stainless slithered past me and fell onto my bed.
A few weeks back, I wandered into a party where Stainless had offered me a joint and I had accepted. This was our first interaction, but I had taken notice of his shirtless body, strong and slick and undulating amidst falling blades of grass, his voice thunderous in lodge meetings, his ass full and tight in the nylon of his basketball shorts. We had spent that night together talking about many subjects, chief of which was the (bleak) future of the Nigerian youth; and when I started to get high, I told him, I described the sensations of lightness I had heard of and anticipated, and the terrifying flirtation of this pleasant lightness with unreality. He had laughed at me. When he laughed, a heady, pure aroma wafted from his throat, and I wanted to kiss him and fuck him. People said he was dangerous, rumored to be in a cult, and I did not know how much homosexuality repulsed him, yet I entertained the thought, accepting the joint from him without thinking about it because I had wanted to fuck him from the start.
And now there he was, lying on my bed. I locked the door. I thought of closing the windows and climbing him, nuzzling his neck, fondling him; I thought these things as merely a cinematic possibility, but they soon crowded my head, a black mist of desire, and my boner throbbed.
“Hey,” I said. “Do you want me to get you something?”
When he did not respond, I tried a more intimate tone, “Tiring night, right?”
Again Stainless did not respond. His face was buried in my duvet, his wrists bent so that his palms faced the ceiling.
I could hear the boom from the party upstairs, and if I focused, I could picture the dancing people. I wondered if he had been at the party, why he had left, and if he had come here, away from his habitat, to seek me out; what did this mean?
He began to quake then, a thick, failing attempt to quell emotion, and confusion froze me.
Wetin happen? I thought to ask him.
Wetin sup?
But even more than my inadequacies with pidgin was the fact that Stainless had disrupted all language. He offered me no known means of navigation. I understood that a crying man was not a gay man, and Stainless and I were not friends. This was his first time in my room since I moved to the lodge two years ago. I wondered if he had lost his mother and, hearing I’d lost mine too, wanted someone who would understand. Was that it? Sobbing into my bed, he seemed so helpless, so elemental that his accrued character of ruggedness fell away, and he was reborn in my eyes. Perhaps he knew I would not make mockery of his crying and whatever led to it. Perhaps he saw in me someone with whom he could forge a relationship devoid of deceit and fat with redemptive sincerities. I did not have any friends and briefly I imagined happy quotidian walks, chaste embraces; but it frightened me to think that someone could be drawn towards me without desiring me – there could be no ruin, no treachery, if we were both implicated.
I wanted him to leave. I disliked how he made me feel, how much of his persona constituted this situation in which he held all the power. Then a memory of quick furious slaps stunned me. I had not thought of it in years, and the person who doled them, a classmate in secondary school who hung out with me when few would, and who I believed loved me. It was a lesson, a violent education in my propensity for failure, my poor discernment; and here I was again. All these years I had revealed nothing, given nothing up – or given so much up. I’d spent so much time imagining textures and threads and music—like the fucking explosive possibilities of future joy— and why not fucking now? Why always maintain a perfect wavelength, to straddle the cruel world everyone touched and the bliss that was always just beyond if I could hold on just a little longer? Why not simply triumph, and an end to all misery? This wretched life, this bitter and unending solitude. What could I obtain from this encounter that would redeem me? I lacked a true self. I lacked a true self. And I was a horrible older brother, negligent, detached, I could not bear to satisfy any cravings for brotherly affection Ikenna had, none of which had been vocal but implied in his faded hesitations, his don’t-worry’s. When we spoke on the phone I adopted a playful accent with him, an almost loving one, but I never asked for the particulars of his life, and never offered useful insight the few times he shared things with me, so that I long feared—without any attempts to dispute this fear—he believed I disliked him and now I was sure he believed this, it seemed grossly evident; I trembled. I wanted to call him, I wanted to fix things, I wanted to show him; but he was too old, for most of our lives he had interacted with my most false and despised self—heterosexual Christian son—so that of course, my reluctance for intimacy with my father had transferred to him, another male borne of my father; they were both bound up in my discomfort with hugs, with unveilings of sorrow.
I looked at Stainless, his groaning self on my mattress. He might have been cradled in my cum had he come twenty minutes later, but this did not arouse or amuse or make me any less ruffled. I did not ask Stainless what was wrong, did not attempt to hold him. I sat still by his side, placing the softest pressure on the bed. I did not know why he had come to me; if he wouldn’t say I was not going to probe. I had a sudden vision into the inner lives of men, and there was something rotten there. Perhaps I should make a sexual move. Perhaps in understanding the full consequence of my erring I could make a claim to something whole and unspoiled… Stainless’s quaking eased, he quietened. He stood up then, cleaning his eyes away from me, and left as quietly as he had come.
There was some power to be gained from this, I thought. A transference of street cred. But all I felt was tired.
After Stainless left, I lay back down, looking at the ceiling, wishing I could sleep but knowing it wouldn’t come, willing my ordinary night’s return, instead old dissatisfactions stirred up. I swatted them back down —but they arose unbidden, treacherous— I wanted my mother, my innocence, my adolescent’s chirruping wonder; all I had lost, the absences of which had rendered me a shell, a hollow conch of a human. I was twenty-two now and, while an element of destitution, a touch of dissatisfaction I associated with the romance of adulthood, I could not shake away the conviction that I was empty—empty! I recalled the textures of a memory of the most profound poignancy, but I could not remember the core of the memory itself, and enraged by this, wracked by that feeling of helplessness which I loathed so much, I wanted my father. I wanted him now to tell me a joke even though whenever I spent too much time with him I began to long to be very far away. I liked the man. I did not want one of those cap-wearing-hooting-from-the-audience type of dads – this one would do. But I could not touch the man! Even the briefest brushing of fingers an intimacy too brutal. And by whose failing? And yet, “I want us to have a relationship” he’d say, his eyes crinkling with despair and desire whenever he betrayed this frailty, this late realization that his first son is half or > .5 of all he has; and feeling inundated by guilt and rage, wanting always to scream “I’m gay, I’m gay!” just so I could see reproduced that monster that was insistent on burying itself. He was better than me in so many ways, so ordinarily generous, genuinely interested in the lives and dissatisfactions of others. And it was perhaps because he was straight—
But I understood, I knew, without all the noise, that he was a more excellent human, and when he would say something hateful, I would think, Aha! Now I can grow and cut him off and not feel bad, but a sincere apology would follow, no malice at all – it was exhausting. And if I fortified myself, in expectation of the worst, and my father said, I don’t understand this, but I accept you, because you’re my son, I love you,”—how then would I feel? Would I take it?
Yes! Yes!
I punched my head. Why did I keep doing this to myself? I had a sudden feeling to chase after Stainless, but, instead, I let it whisper out into the air; but what about a willingness to converse, not even necessarily agree, just converse openly without fear or reproach, just a soulful intimate conversation between father and son where I could cry and scream and plead, tell all the truth. Was that what Stainless had wanted in crying here?
Fuck the man! Fuck them all! Fuck everything! None of them were here now. None of them could see. And I was expected to be just as kind as they were? I was to present a collected front? This would pass, I told myself, this would pass, this was only a momentary disruption, it would pass, it would pass, it would –
I wanted to jerk off. I wanted to hurt someone. I thought of hardening. Of not caring. But if I hardened it would not be as a snail or a tortoise, but a rock through and through. And then what was the point, of firmness without feeling? Of vengeance without rejoicing? Survival.
Survival is the point.
Survival. Merely my continuous breathing? Was outing myself to Stainless now—now!—without thought, without contemplation, survival? Was it survival to not risk it, was I dying if I withheld?
I banged, banged my head against the pillow. I was doing it again. Had Stainless come to me, offered me his tears as the only move he could make towards truth? And I was to make up the rest in words, in deed? Should I simply have asked what was wrong, to genuinely have inquired about his well-being? Was there hope still?
I staggered to my reading table, tears sparkling in my lashes, my heart exploding into dark stars. I removed the razor’s covering.
I tasted the cold metal, it sang. I orchestrated a symphony.
David Emeka is a writer whose work explores themes of loneliness, mental health, family, morality, queer community and joy. He is of many passions and curiosities. His fiction has appeared in Brittle Paper, The Kalahari Review, and The Adroit Journal. He is working on a coming-of-age novel.
