A Queer Encounter - 1. A Queer Encounter

I met Griffin under the sycamores behind the library, where the lamps don’t quite reach and the light breaks into gauze at the edges. He was all shoulders and easy grins, the kind of upperclassman who made freshmen feel seen. He caught my eye after Intro to Folklore and, as if the campus itself had steered him, found me that night.

“You’re Jonah, right?” he said, low, like we were already sharing a secret.

I was eighteen, new enough to college that I still got lost between the old brick halls and the glassy new ones. My roommate had taped a map to our wall. The routes I took around campus left faint impressions, as if I moved by a memory I couldn’t possibly own. In the evenings I wandered until the oaks thinned and the ground sloped into a stand of pines like black needles. This wooded area bordered a massive fraternity house, the oldest standing structure on campus.

The students called it the “Needle woods”. They told stories about the tall man in the trees: a threadbare robe, a face so smooth it refused to hold a feature, arms that reached a few joints too far. They said you never saw him looking at you—only the suggestion of attention, the way the wind hushes when someone important enters a room.

I listened to the stories and acted the way they expected me to be: afraid. It was a useful expression, but I felt no fear.

“Big party tomorrow,” Griffin told me, shifting his backpack to one arm so the other could settle, companionable, against my shoulder. The touch traveled in arcs through my body—quiet and electric. “Phi Theta’s Midnight Halloween Formal. It’s a black tie, cheap champagne, fake fog kind of party. You should come with me.”

He was handsome in the old way—the slant of a cheekbone, thick lashes, a mouth that had learned, impossibly early, how to sell a promise. People watched him when he crossed the quad; he arranged his life in audiences. It should have made me wary. However, I wanted to believe him as I felt something familiar emanating from him.

“I don’t own a tie,” I told him apologetically.

“I’ll bring you one,” he said, smiling like a knife catching a dim light.

The party sat on the far slope behind the fraternity house, a square-shouldered relic with white columns and a porch that croaked underfoot. Color-splotched flyers and string lights lined the clapboard. Music hammered through the boards. Brothers in tuxedo shirts and loosened bowties moved like minor gods through the crowd, laughing with the kind of laughter that expects to be joined. Griffin found me before I found him and lifted a hand as if to claim me out of the noise.

The tie he draped around my neck was a little too tight, it was also thicker than I expected with runes and script. He touched the notch of my throat as he straightened it, his thumb pausing for the length of a breath. “There,” he said. “Perfect.”

Around us, girls in sequins and boys in dark suits blurred into streaks of motion when they crossed certain patches of smoke and light. Over the mantel in the parlor hung a grid of old composite photos—fraternity men in rows, each year the same arrangements of hair and jaw. They looked eerily similar to the current residence of the fraternity. In some frames the faces smudged at the edges like wet ink. I stared too long at one image, and the room let out soft feedback, the face in the image vanishing like it was just airbrushed. My teeth hummed with surprise. I stepped back and Griffin’s hand settled on my shoulder, steadying me.

“Awesome isn’t it. I’ll show you an even cooler spot,” he murmured.

We moved past the kitchen, where a brother in an apron was burying his face in a refrigerator like it contained absolution. We passed through a back hallway where framed awards repeated the same crest in different fonts. At the end, there was a door. Beyond it, lay a second porch with steps that led down towards the dark woods that border the fraternity house.

“You’ve heard about the Needle wood stories, yeah?” Griffin asked, guiding me further.

“Who hasn’t?”

He laughed. “We dress it up every year. Some fake Latin, a bonfire. It’s hazing if you’re a pledge, but you’re with me. You’ll be fine.” The last two words were rehearsed, the cadence of someone repeating a certain lie without changing his face.

The path into the trees was trampled into permanence. Candles glinted the path ahead, and scraps of animal skin fluttered from branches. Someone had hung a string of bones that were pale islands on the pine trunks. We came to a clearing where stones ringed a patch of earth scored by many fires. Bodies moved there—shadows draped over shoulders, faces white with paint or blood. The crowd parted for Griffin, and I realized he was more than popular here. He was priestly.

“Brothers,” he said, raising his hands. The word rolled around us—plural and possessive: brothers. “Tonight, as we have done, and as those before us have done, we keep the line.”

A chorus of voices answered—in Latin. The eyes of the crowd fell on me.

I was used to being a curiosity. My smallness, my too-still posture, the way cameras blurred when they aimed at me for more than a second—it all marked me as slightly out of phase. I had learned how to stand in a room without being seen.

Griffin turned back to me. He wore his charm like a shawl. Up close, his pupils were wider than the dark justified.

“There’s a story about the tall faceless man in the Needle wood,” he spoke softly, pitching the intimacy like a lure. “He’s the guardian of this place, as you know. He favors certain people with gifts such as eternal youth if they give him what he wants, such as a face to keep. They bring someone worthy—pretty, and unlikely to be missed. He likes the young ones, the naive ones, and most of all…”

His hand traced my jaw, his thumb feathering the corner of my lip. “He enjoys the virginal ones, untouched for his pleasure.”

The brothers closed the circle. In the trees, shadows pressed forward, curious. The air prickled like the hum of transformer boxes ran through it. Words began to gather on my tongue, but Griffin stepped back and shed the last of his humor.

“Kneel,” he ordered me.

It should have been ridiculous in the twenty-first century—a boy in a thrift-store tux telling another boy in a collar-like tie to kneel on cold ground—but everyone was arranged for a ritual. The “tie” around my neck glowed red with arcane power from some ancient source. It rang in my mind to obey and allow myself to be used and consumed by whatever entity these boys seek to bargain with.

However, I did not kneel.

I tilted my head as if I was listening for something late in arriving. I was listening, in a way: to the pattern behind the wind, to the run of shadow between the trunks, to the clean, blank anticipation in the clearing. It rose in me like the warmth of the first sip of liquor, like hunger uncoiling its spine.

Griffin frowned. It was as if he had dropped a line into still water and felt it hit something with a different density than fish. He looked past me into the trees, expecting his patron. The brothers began to chant, frantically. Their cadence was a scansion of ancient vows and forbidden curses. I tasted their fear the way one tastes iron when blood touches the tongue.

Something tall did step from between the pines then—familiar only in the way a recurring dream is familiar. A black robe that reminded of ancient temples, an empty space where a human face should be, arms long like tree limbs. The trees seemed to draw themselves straighter out of some old reflex around it. The chant broke into breathy awe.

“Hic, dominus meus est quod tibi damus!” (Here, my patron is what we give you!) Griffin cried out, triumphant.

This is where he should shove me forward, the tall man leans to inspect, and my essence is consumed. Griffin had wanted a sacrifice to be soft enough to arouse his patron’s interest. He had flirted with me, because he wanted to test me.

Instead, I smiled at the being in the robe, like an old acquaintance and a potential lover.

Humans do not know, it is labor to carry a face. It is labor to hold the angles right and feel the air where a mouth should be and articulate vowel and consonant through equipment that has never known language. I had spent weeks on campus practicing that labor. Now I can stop laboring.

My face unstitched like a seam. It was not gore, not anything that could be televised—just the quiet, devastating correction of a mask laid aside. The air cooled against the absence. My arms lengthened into their true memory of reach, fingers unpetaled into more fingers, joints uncounted. My body refilled into something approximating clothing, then I decided against it as it would be too similar to the being in front of me. Uniqueness is an admirable trait in a potential mate after all.

I did not grow taller but my dimensions distorted in all directions. My edges became the suggestion of edges, the reality of me revised as the trees revised their shadows around me. Breath escaped the fraternity brothers in one soft, communal animal sound as something far beyond them has appeared.

Griffin stepped back, then another step, until his shoulders met the warm press of his crowd. I watched his eyes try to translate what belief looks like when belief finally arrives. He had expected hunger to be coming toward me. He had not expected me to turn, see him, and choose to smile.

Behind me, the other tall one drew closer, startled into a kind of elegance. He tilted the blank of his head. Up close, his featureless front was not featureless at all; it flickered with billions of suggestions, mirrors of faces held for a heartbeat, reflections of reflections. He reached out with his arms—many segments, many decisions—and brushed the air near me, as if greeting a life-long mate. We had begun our cosmic dance of courtship.

The fraternity men saw two impossibilities recognize each other. They saw us grin without mouths. They saw the air warp slightly between us, like heat. I could have been cruel. I could have turned to the boys and fed on their neatly groomed terror. But that was never why I had come.

Why come to a college campus at all? To be young where the young are, to try on the clothes of yearning, to walk under electric lights in cold air and share conversation, to live among faces and wonder if, this time, one of them would find a reply? No, I am not human, and I do not seek such limited connections as they do. I came for this moment.

I reached, and the tall one reached. Our hands were not hands. Our touch made a sound like chalk scraping against glass, musical to us. The pines shivered, showering us in dry scent. On the ground between us, someone’s orifices had released their waste, causing a unique foul odor for humans, but meaningless to us.

Griffin screamed, “No,” but it came out like something caught in his throat. Perhaps he understood, in that moment, how small their bargain had always been, how he had courted a creature that never truly needed him, unlike me. Perhaps his human arrogance believed he could still exude some measure of power even in front of his betters.

The union of our kind is not the same as their union. It is not soft skin and practiced breath and the choreography written in dorm beds. It is the overlay of geometries; it is angles kneeling until they make a new shape; it is a corridor folding through another corridor until the distinction between them becomes praise. We do not kiss so much as press the idea of mouth into the idea of answer and let the distance between definitions collapse. I felt him like an echo finally locating the room it belongs to. I felt myself widen into relief.

The brothers watched. They saw us reach, then blur. They saw the clearing tilt infinitesimally, as if the world had been on a hinge the whole time. They heard singing—no, not singing; a long vowel that had wanted to be sung since language learned its first steps. Their minds, built with grace for the human proportions of awe, met a scale that did not care to be translated. Their awe corroded their minds as they witnessed our consummation. The first to fall was a pledge with a crooked smile on his face. He made a sound like laughter bent into a new use. Then he went still, eyes open, mouth soft, the straw of his breath gone loose in his chest.

Griffin backed into his circle of brothers, and the circle broke around him, pulling him along. However, they could not run. They had to watch, as if the scene had not yet reached the point where they could be allowed to leave. They watched our arms pass through one another beyond their Euclidian understanding, the trees in turn drew unfamiliar shapes with our shadows, and the bones strung on the branches crackled to a tune like a metronome.

Some of them tried, bravely or stupidly, to speak a chant again, to nail the world back into the shape it had held at the start of the night. Words fell visibly at their feet, piling up as indictments to their foolishness. One boy put his hands over his ears and found that he could hear us better for doing so, finding our pleasure too frightening to endure living any longer. Another blinked and his eyes kept blinking, unable to agree on when images should begin and end. He witnessed our coupling, his entry into the woods, and even his own birth, until he saw the nothingness before existence. They were simply present for something the malleable awareness of humans cannot absorb without inflicting harm.

We joined in the only way we know joining. We moved like the answer to a question asked long before this language, long before men in cheap suits invented rituals in the dark to make themselves feel companioned by power. The joining passed through us and remade us briefly into a shape too right to survive by those around us intact.

Griffin saw me in our heat, and his face erased its practiced arrangements. His grin, his priestly duties, his soft cruelty to innocent human youths for centuries: all of it fell. Underneath was a boy who had once wanted, so badly, to be chosen, to be powerful, to have all the potential of youth forever. If I had been generous to the human, I might have granted him a gift in exchange, too. But, I do not need new faces.

When it was done, the clearing relaxed in small, audible sighs: tension leaving pine needles, bones stilling without rhythm, shadows deciding to be simply shadows again. We stepped apart, the tall one and I, the way you step back from a painting you are too close to see the whole. He turned the white of his head toward the sky and then toward the house and then toward me, as if to ask, “As ever?” I answered without words: As ever. We would meet again where the wind could find us first. We would find each other’s edges and test them and press, making room.

The brothers were quiet. Most were not dead. Most remained standing the way abandoned mannequins stand, with a gentleness in the limbs that comes of forgetting your own bones. One sat in the dirt and ran his fingertips over the instant where pine needle becomes air, again and again, with care that suggested prayer. Another leaned against a tree and stared past it, as if watching a train, he could not name continue forever.

Griffin’s eyes were open. Bloody tears left neat, bright trails on his cheeks. He had bitten the inside of his mouth hard enough to color his lip, but even that small pain seemed irrelevant now. The pretense that he had orchestrated anything had burned away, leaving something almost tender: a boy emptied of performance. He looked at me as if I were the last thing that would ever make sense and waited, patient as a shore.

I stepped up to him. He flinched. I did not touch him. I did not need to. I reshaped myself around a face because it would make him comfortable. Human understanding is a corridor with handrails, and I wanted him to have them. I wore the smile he liked. I made my voice gentle.

“You wanted to give me away,” I said.

His mouth tried to work, but his mind was too far gone to form more than one word. “You?” he asked, perhaps the last words he will ever utter out to the world.

“A freshman,” I said, and I almost laughed, because that was, in its small, wrong way, true. Then I let the smile go. “I am what waits in the places you decide are yours. I am what grows in the sentence you leave unfinished. I am that instinct when you feel watched and doubt yourself. I am what he is, and he is what I am, and we are the old way for shape, observer, and answer. You thought you were arranging a bargain. You were arranging a meeting.”

Griffin’s body folded. He did not collapse; he folded, careful and neat. He sat with his back against the earth, hands on his knees, and stared at the place where we had been largest in reverence. His jaw slackened. The intelligence that had animated his performance stepped back a pace, dazed. He was gone.

I left him there among his brothers to be found in the light of day, to be deemed mad by human authorities. Perhaps, I will see Griffin again as I wander through his broken dreamscape to reminisce this queer encounter with the tall one.