It was not a joke. Robert had brought a picnic. He’d brought a blanket and forks and boxed water and containers of fruit salad and beet salad and couscous and two cookies. He’d also brought a rose, which he had told Dmitri was for him.
The two cookies would’ve been enough, Dmitri thought, to signal that something else was now going on, something that was not getting hot and getting hard and stars exploding. The two cookies really would have been sufficient. The rose made it ridiculous. The rose was a funeral offering. But he’s always known it couldn’t last. Ten visits to Robert’s dormitory. There was always going to be a reckoning.
“Hey, relax,” Robert says. “Just because we’re outside doesn’t mean we have to pretend like we don’t know each other.” Robert reaches across the lineup of picnic foods between them and puts his hand on Dmitri’s thigh. “Or do we?”
“No, it’s fine,” Dmitri says, but Robert takes his hand away and leans back on his elbows. Dmitri is not familiar with Robert’s body like this: clothed, closed.
Dmitri glances again at the threesome to their left. The woman seems to want to cuddle Oopsadaisy, who is kicking her in the face. The two guys are now talking to each other. Everyone appears to be living some kind of life.
“Okay, you do understand that it’s not illegal here, right?” Robert asks.
“What is not illegal?” Dmitri reminds himself that he can just get up and walk away, at any point. Ilya has a rehearsal at his dance school today, which means that Dmitri has four free hours in the city, instead of three. Thirty-eight minutes of this has already been wasted in getting to Central Park. If eating the food doesn’t take too long, they can still get back to Robert’s room and do some stuff before the four hours are up. He has told Robert that his cousin agreed to give him a little more time today.
“Being gay,” Robert says. “Nobody is going to be upset if we make out right now. Nobody cares about that. I mean, I understand if you’re not out in Russia.”
“People are out in Russia,” Dmitri says. “They’re just private. It’s not a big deal.” In fact, he knows almost nothing about gay life in Russia, except that he’d heard something about people pretending to be gay online so they could turn in real gays to the police. They were called Hunters.
“Okay,” Robert says. “Never mind.”
Dmitri knew this kind of thing was going to happen. In his English class last week, the teacher had made them read a poem. He can’t remember how it began but the last lines were about the world ending not with a bang but a whimper.
Robert takes two blocks from his bag and makes a space on the blanket, fits his latest instrument into the blocks. He hands two small hammers to Dmitri.
“It’s a medieval dulcimer,” he says. “With modifications. Try it out. I want to know how intuitive it is.”
Dmitri looks at the metal instrument. He taps a few disks on the top row. The sound is dull. He uses the head of the hammer to send a disk sliding down a rail, and the rest of the disks on the wire rattle in sympathy. The sound hurts his teeth a little.
“It’s kind of an awful sound,” Robert says. “Right? I sort of love it, though.”
“It makes teeth hurt. It is medieval dentist dulcimer.”
“Ha. Keep going. You get used to it.” Robert stretches out and puts his hands behind his head. Dmitri taps at the strings, feeling desperate. He is dying for Robert.
And he is tired. He feels like everyone is leaving him behind. Ilya doesn’t need his help. His mother is becoming involved in Alexander’s business. His father is going to go to Mars and doesn’t seem to notice that Dmitri’s letters to him are full of nothing.
“You can be ashamed of yourself even if nobody says what you do is shameful,” Dmitri says.
“That sounds like self-hatred,” Robert says.
Dmitri doesn’t reply. He swipes at disks randomly. There are five rows, he realizes, like a musical scale. And indeed, each row has a different tone, though they’re not arranged in the right order.
“What’s your father like?” Robert asks.
“He’s okay. He’s ordinary guy. He works for a shoe company.”
Robert nods. “He knows you’re gay?”
Dmitri says nothing.
“Or whatever you are.”
“This is not picnic,” Dmitri says. “This is something else.” He has to end things with Robert anyway. It’s all going to come out. Dmitri looks up from the instrument. Maybe it’s already out.
“This is chush’ sobach’ya,” Robert says. “It bothers me that you never kiss me. And I’d like you to stop with the fake cousin and, you know, actually talk to me. That’s what a relationship is.”
“Not everything has to be a relationship.” Dmitri says this quickly, and forgets to use his thicker accent and bad grammar. Soon it will be impossible to have secrets. His father has only three more months of the simulation, and then he will be out and Prime will probably announce the crew publicly. There are pictures of Dmitri out there. Standing next to his father at Baikonur, at Vostochny. There will be many more pictures, his whole life story. He hadn’t realized it, but this time had been his only freedom.
“Everything is in a relationship to something else,” Robert says. “So is every person.”
The trio with the baby call out, “Excuse me? Excuse me?” The woman who got kicked in the face by her baby is holding up her screen. She’s been recording Dmitri.
“What’re your handles?” she calls out. “That’s so cool, what you’re doing.”
“My handle is fuck you,” Dmitri says. “And I’m not doing anything. This isn’t anything. Leave me alone.” Dmitri drops the hammers and stands up.
“Hey, hey.” One of the guys stands up too. “What’s your problem?” He pulls out his screen.
“It’s okay, Oliver,” says the baby-woman. “It’s fine.”