Watch It Burn

Miguel was leaving the supermarket parking lot with Victor in his new car: a white BMW, not black. White, because white showed dirt faster, and choosing the harder color to keep clean was its own little flex, proof he could afford the extra effort other people couldn’t. The car had every luxury money could buy: white leather on all seven seats he’d never fill with a single child, because children were a tax on people who hadn’t figured out how to be enough on their own; an immense glass sunroof he’d open only far from Happy Blue, so the wrong eyes wouldn’t get a free look at him; an AI system he’d named Rebecca, the same name as his bitchy half-sister; because ordering her around all day was cheaper than therapy and twice as satisfying. Miguel felt reassured by his own choice, the particular high of a man watching his own taste confirm itself back to him.

He loved the feel of driving it, the pedals, the machine, the music from his wasted years, back when Marina still wore her diamonds and he had nothing but the appetite. So satisfying, watching those years shrink in the mirror. Thank God. No! Not God: him! His own doing, and he’d take the credit alone, thank you. Driving it felt like the first days of medical school, like slamming a door on a life that had never once asked his permission to be lived. Being a great dermatologist this young made him feel free, made him feel beautiful: one of the winners, or at least of Happy Blue, a city that had learned to reward him for being exactly as sharp as he was. That had given him the great job, the great friends, especially the great lovers. Lovers who started as followers and ended up in bed as good boys.

Miguel was heading home, to the richest neighborhood, Waterfall Wind, full of babies and nannies who did the actual labor of parenthood so the parents didn’t have to smell like it, the most expensive buildings anywhere, a place only a few could afford and everyone else could only stand outside and resent. Nowhere else was as clean as Waterfall Wind, because cleanliness there was a policy, not an accident. As a child he’d come to that neighborhood once, dragged along to his mother’s dermatologist appointment, and that was where the whole dream had been born, ugly and small and already hungry. The man had looked bright, like an angel. His mother never went back. Too expensive. He’d hated her for that: for choosing to be poor about something that mattered, when everything else in her life she’d managed to make do without complaint. If only she had continued… There was Central Flower, a park nearby with its own private security, the only one in the city that bothered, keeping its Kennel Club Pomeranians and Labradors and Collies safe from whatever the rest of the city was made of. Miguel loved dogs in the abstract, the way he loved most things he had no intention of touching; but couldn’t picture himself actually bending down to pick up dog shit, a person like him doing something so mundane.

Simply put, Miguel’s dream had come true, and he was its sole author. His own causa sui, if Spinoza could be trusted, which Miguel mostly trusted as decoration. Victor had asked once what that meant and Miguel had let the silence answer for him, because some things lost their power the second you had to explain them to someone who’d never had to earn a single thing he owned. Well, that was what he liked to think, anyway, drawing on the little he actually knew about Spinoza. Victor had once asked what that meant, and Miguel barely knew how to explain it; it was easier just to feel it than to say it out loud. “...Are we the cause of our own being... somehow, through eternity?” “I don’t know. It seems a little too poetic for my taste, Miguel.”

He’d felt that fullness most on The River Islands, one of the most beautiful islands in the country, the one few could enter and fewer could afford, water so blue it looked edited. Heaven, if heaven had a velvet rope. That purity had rinsed something in him too, for a while, some residue of all the years he’d spent feeling like the world had its hand permanently in his pocket. That island’s purity had made him feel pure too, something he’d needed badly after so many years of feeling like everyone around him was trying to drain something out of him. There, he’d finally felt calm, at ease.

Miguel laughed there, floating in the water, his eyes looking at the sky, and he cried a little. His money was capable of so much. Not exactly his money, but he himself was capable of so much. So many rich, luxurious places to visit, and he wanted more every time. So many places, and never enough. Paris, Italy, now New York, with Victor, who’d already been and complained it wasn’t as beautiful as the photos, the particular ingratitude of someone born already having everything worth wanting. Standing in Central Park had become a small obsession. He’d already booked the tickets for their next trip, not far off now. It was only the beginning.

He was still admiring all of it, still congratulating himself in the dark little office behind his own eyes, when the red light stopped him and the opposite of everything walked into frame.

A homeless man. Hand out. The most ordinary interruption in the world. Not to Miguel.

Why now. Why this, why here, why did the universe insist on serving him a plate of exactly what he’d spent his whole life climbing out of, right as he was finally full. Miguel thought of the prince and the disease outside the palace walls, and thought, not for the first time, that Buddha had been a coward for letting it ruin him. Miguel looked at the dirt under those nails, at the crust of a life left completely unmanaged, and felt something closer to insult than pity: this man wasn’t even embarrassed to be seen like that, to point his failure at Miguel through the glass like it was Miguel’s problem to solve. Didn’t he have any self-respect left to spend? At least the decency to keep his rot off Miguel’s ten seconds of peace. This moment belonged to Miguel. He had paid for it, the way he paid for everything, with the years nobody saw. Some stranger off the street didn’t get to cash in on that for free.

Why at this moment... Why do I have to see this?

He thought about where he’d come from: a place where people like that man weren’t the exception, they were the whole neighborhood. And felt something old and razor-clean surface in him: Hell would have been a step up from that address. He didn’t believe in Hell. He believed in that street, because that street was real, and it had left marks on him that no dermatologist, not even a great one, could ever fully heal.

If there were no laws, he thought, I’d just accelerate.

Why not. No one would miss him. He was nothing, a decimal error in the city’s accounting, and those few coins in his cup couldn’t buy anything that actually mattered. Miguel’s foot found the pedal, just barely, just enough to feel the car agree with him. Then the light turned, and he let the car do the talking instead, sliding past close enough to make the point without leaving evidence. Relief, immediate and clean, the specific relief of getting an ugly thought out of the house before company arrived. His head was full of his father’s old poison, inherited the way a family recipe gets inherited, without anyone ever asking if you wanted the taste. He straightened his spine and did the small, private work of putting himself back together after the sight of that disgrace.

I’m what I did. Not what I didn’t.

He looked at the seat beside him. There he was, his best-reviewed accomplishment: not the car, not the address, Victor. His most valuable acquisition, still warm from the store.

Victor stared out the window, absorbed in nothing. What was going on in there, behind that face that had never once had to earn its own softness? Victor had no business feeling anything about that homeless man. To him a beggar was furniture, weather, a fact of the landscape he’d been born comfortably above. He’d never had to fight his way anywhere, and it showed in the ease with which he let strangers’ suffering pass through him without leaving a mark.

Miguel had clawed himself out of a house with nothing worth stealing in it, and there wasn’t a single door in that climb that had opened for softness. Humility hadn’t put him through medical school. Humility hadn’t buried his mother with any dignity or settled his father’s debts. Only will did that: the refusal, over and over, to stay the size he’d been assigned at birth. Miguel used the only tool he’d ever been issued: his own brain, sharpened against everyone who doubted it!

That man on the corner had made a choice, Miguel decided, the way he decided most things, quickly and for good. He’d chosen to be exactly that broken, consciously, and there was a kind of justice in watching what happens to a person who never bothered to build any self-respect to fall back on.

I came from nothing and I made it.

I don’t want to think about this anymore. Shit. Fuck off, all of it.

The good mood wouldn’t come back the way he wanted it to, not right away, and that irritated him more than the man himself had. He wanted the penthouse, the bath, Victor’s mouth, to feel his lips, to hear the sounds Victor made as Miguel fucked him...

Victor turned, caught the set of Miguel’s jaw, the total concentration aimed at nothing but the road. He found it strange, this habit Miguel had of going somewhere private even sitting an arm’s length away. But they had the car, the view, friends who could make a room laugh on command. There was nothing to worry about.

“Are you all right?”

“Of course.”

“You’re so quiet.”

“Just thinking about how many things I’ve made true.”

Victor kissed his forehead, called him poor boy, the way you’d pet something you’d decided was yours to worry about. Miguel let him. It was nothing.

He needed these small transactions, the sound of his own calm voice convincing someone else he was fine, almost as much as Victor needed to believe it. His voice was good at that. It always had been.

It was nothing.