1. The Kid
Starving, freezing to death, and alone - Belfast thought to himself how ridiculous it was that his final thoughts would be about fucking. At the core of his humanity, at the base of his brainstem, where the last thickened blood warmed the final functions of his life, he thought about her. Through his shivering, he felt the warmth in his chest drain further and further down as he remembered their first night together.
"Ava", he said out loud - for nobody else but himself. It couldn't be for her.
They'd tried everything not to sleep together the first night.
"Everybody knows only sluts fuck on the first date," Ava told him between the kisses on her neck, as he took off her jacket. He pushed her against the wall of her apartment. She smiled a wicked smile, and raised her arms above her head. He slipped her shirt off. Her hair still wet from the rain outside. Her hands cold as they reached under his shirt. Down they went. To his belt, the buttons popping open. He was already hard.
"Goddamn," he said, biting her ear.
"Then maybe I'm a slut," she said, and dropped to her knees...
His name wasn't really Belfast. He was only called that at his posh English boarding school because he was always causing trouble. His name wouldn't matter anymore, he thought to himself, because these would be his final moments. And he was content spending them thinking of her. Of Ava.
They'd met when he was in university, she'd had a boyfriend then, but that only added to the thrill of the chase. She was tall and slender, well dressed and well groomed. A New England family with sailboats and gabled roofs and athletically puritan children. Well raised.
Belfast wasn't. His parents despised him and got rid of him as soon as they could. The only fond memories of home were those of leaving. He ran away as much as possible, into the forestland nearby, to be alone in nature. Nature was quiet. Unlike his father. His father was loud. His father exuded control. His father was violent. A veteran of the Gulf Wars and the kind of drinker who woke up at 5 am as if to enjoy the hangover. Belfast spent as much time in the woods as he could. He laid cairns, little rocks stacked on top of each other, along his paths of discovery, so he could always find his places of solace. Nature was chaos. Home was control. His mother was a frigid woman. Obsessed with magazines and fashion and wealth. His father provided these, and she provided her womb for but one destructive, disappointing, and pestilent child.
All young men like to imagine that their parents only fucked once, just to conceive them. But Belfast knew for a fact, because his mother had told him. When he was but 6 years old, he was sent off to Yardley School for Boys in the Lakes District in England. Considering the circumstances, it actually became a blessing for young Belfast. He was one of the only kids who chose to stay, rather than go home, and often joined the biology teacher, Dr. Richardson, on his personal travels. Dr. Richardson was a leading expert in forensic pathology at Oxford in his younger years, and when he retired from an esteemed government position after a long and successful career, he decided to return to his alma mater, Yardley, to spend his retirement enriching young minds.
Belfast called him Big Dick. Or Doctor Dick. Or Doctor Son of a Dick. Or Big Dick Richard. Due to the fact that some of the teaching staff at Yardley did actually innocuously refer to Dr. Richardson as Big Dick and/or Dr. Dick, he was unable to quell this habit. Belfast quickly became something of a school mascot. He was a very small boy at first, and Dr. Richardson took particular care in looking after him - making sure he ate, discouraging bullies, and ensuring proper hygiene was taught to the boy. Manners, on the other hand, were impossible. Belfast was good natured, but serially absent. His mind, and subsequently his body, would wander. He was not a child made for the indoors. He craved the freedom and chaos of the great outdoors. The Lakes District was a wonderful place to explore, with its infinite caverns and cliffs, hills and dales, puddles and lochs. The local search and rescue became so used to Yardley's calls and his parents' chronic disinterest that they simply gave the boy a GPS Satellite Phone at the age of 12. He became good friends with the locals and something of a local legend. The Boy in the Hills. While hundreds of experienced hikers and travelers have gone missing never to be found over the centuries, Belfast always returned to Yardley or a friendly local's farmhouse for a cup of tea. Many to this day still believe that he assumed the souls of all those who disappeared, with carnal knowledge of their trials and tribulations. Grieving mothers would call Yardley and beg for the location of their deceased loved ones. Dr. Richardson did his best to keep the boy less than wise.
What Dr. Richardson did do, however, was train the boy in the annals of microbiology, botany, biochemistry, zoology, and anatomy from a young age. The child was a sponge, and quickly became one of yardley's strongest students in the scientific fields. He was an excellent sketcher, and wrote at length about his journeys and experiences, but showed little to no interest in mathematics, Latin, or Shakespeare. When pried by his peers to encourage the boy in other facets of school, Dr. Richardson explained that the boy was truly a child of mother earth, and to excise the innate desire to understand the world around him and replace it with dense physics and formulas would only be a waste of a pure scientific mind.
Over the holidays, when the rest of the school went home to London or Amsterdam or Moscow or New York, Dr. Richardson took Belfast to the wildest parts of the globe. The doctor had built relationships across the world over the decades, and Belfast became used to the bear hug greetings and late night, candlelit conversations about geopolitics, biotechnology, and the latest archaeological finds. Once, during a trip through the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, their van was stopped by men with AK-47's and machetes. They were blindfolded and taken to an adobe house surrounded by corrugated iron gates and barbed wire.
"Big Dick, we're in trouble now," Belfast had said.
"Fear not, dear boy," the doctor replied with worldly calm.
An elderly man speaking in Arabic, tanned like a cowhide, with one glossy eye, nearly lost it when the blindfolds were removed. He clasped his calloused hands around the doctor's ears.
"Doctor, Doctor! To think this is how we should meet again!"
The man had been Dr. Richardson's guide during a UNESCO trip to North Africa combating dengue and malaria decades before. The doctor had saved the lives of his ailing son and daughter. The ancient man embraced him as a long lost friend. He apologized profusely, and provided mint tea and lamb tagine.
"What on earth are you doing driving around my hashish fields?" the man inquired.
"I hadn't known you changed professions, Eddy, but I'm glad to see business is booming." The doctor laughed. "There is a particular strain of cannabinoid I'm in search of. It may be of use in treating nausea in cancer patients. But it only grows in certain arid, mountainous regions. Could you perhaps be of assistance, old friend?"
As they laughed and laughed and ate their fill, Belfast, aged fourteen, became a man that evening. As he slipped outside to wander the hills, he happened upon a truck running, in its headlights the two young men who had taken he and the doctor hostage. This time they wore the blindfolds. He heard quiet prayers in Arabic as the machetes they once wielded struck the back of their necks.
Belfast met Ava at Oxford, where he ended up thanks to Dr. Richardson's virulent appeals and extensive connections. When he delivered the news to his parents, they concluded that they were proud but could not pay. His father had gambled most of his small fortune away. This wasn't an issue. He was to be on scientific scholarship. He shook his father's hand, and that would be the last he ever saw them.
Ava Godfrey was a prophecy for Belfast. She had an ability to inhabit complete stillness which had eluded Belfast his entire life. When she entered a room, the temperature cooled. Many of the romantics tried to failed to illicit the emotional connection they so desired from such a mystery. She broke hearts without as much as a glance. Her calm beauty drove men crazy. Belfast was one of them. Like an addict, he needed to be near her, and felt physically ill when she was away. They lived nearby, and he would drop by unannounced to try and catch her breaking character. But every time she answered the door, it was the same. Her head tilted slightly, a soft, recognizing smile.
"Well, look who it is..."
At first she set ground rules. There had to be a distance between them. A space held in limbo by a man named Greg hundreds of miles away studying finance in some middling European university. Warsaw or somewhere bleak. Belfast was enraged by the thought of Greg wasting her physical space and intimacy from afar. She was one year older than Belfast, and would mother him, reducing the late night rampages and tantrums he didn't understand - about women, about growing up, about the complexities of life in a crumbling world.
This was around the time the war began. Ukraine, Russia, Taiwan, China, the US, and NATO.
"Predictable," Dr. Richardson said, smoking a rare cigarette in his study with Belfast, "history doesn't always repeat itself, but it often rhymes."
Belfast by now was nearing the end of his undergraduate degree, and Dr. Richardson was encouraging postgraduate in climatology or glaciology, both fields in which Belfast excelled, and Dr. Richardson held great interest.
"With the war on, Doc, what's the use of a bloody glaciologist? They'll melt the poles in a day's work," Belfast concluded.
"Men may die, but the quest for knowledge does not, Belfast," Dr. Richardson quipped in his stereotypically obtuse fashion.
"How profound, Dick," Belfast replied.
This was the very same evening that when Belfast dropped by Ava's to deliver the news of his postgraduate placement, he actually caught her off guard. She didn't open the door all the way, but a crack.
"What's going on?" he said quietly.
The lights were dim, and she sat alone on the floor, legs crossed. She had no makeup on, dressed in only a sweater and jeans. Barefoot. He'd never seen her bare feet before, Belfast noted.
"I've just got off the phone with Greg," she said.
Belfast could barely contain his joy. He knew it wasn't the time for celebration, but he'd been waiting for this moment for years.
"Well, what happened? Are you ok?" Belfast asked.
"No, Belfast. I'm not ok." She buried her head in her knees.
He sat next to her. He wrapped his arms around her shoulder. He implored her to speak with him. He could feel an energy within her he had never experienced. It was a form of passion, of caring, that he didn't know. She wouldn't talk. So they just sat.
For over an hour. He made them tea. She didn't drink it. He poured them wine. She drank it all. Eventually, she looked up and spoke.
"I told him I needed to move on, that I couldn't do it anymore. Long distance, and our lives diverging," she said.
"You did the right thing, you said how you felt. If that's how you really feel, that nagging feeling won't go away. It will only get worse and worse. Better to be up front about it,"
"I know," she said. But then she broke down. "It's not just that, Belfast."
"I don't get it. I can't guess what's upsetting you - you have to tell me, Ava, so I can help you. If that's what you want," he begged.
"He's - he's sick, Belfast. He's very ill. And they don't know what it is."
His heart sank.
"I'm a horrible person," she cried.
"No, you aren't. There's no way you could have known that. How long has he been...", Belfast trailed off, unsure what to say.
"He said he was keeping it from me, so I wouldn't worry. I felt him getting further and further away. Drifting. I could tell something was wrong - I just didn't think - I just..."
Belfast spent that night there, Ava curled up on the floor covered in blankets, Belfast passed out on the couch. The next day, they woke up and drove to the Lakes District, back to the hills and lakes where Belfast grew up. As the wind whipped through their hair, Ava was silent, deep in thought. Belfast stared at her like the impossible puzzle she was. Even if he couldn't understand her, in this moment he began to feel that he would spend his whole life trying to.
