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February 14, Dečín, Czech Republic
There’s the scrape of the door sliding, the cold rushing in like a mouthful of knives. After that, only fragments: graffiti under the bridge arches, bright and swollen like bruises. Cobblestones slick with frost shining like wet scales. He drinks water until his teeth ache and watches a stray dog lift its leg against the bronze calf of a statue. He closes his eyes but the darkness doesn’t help.
The whole scene feels both grotesque and ordinary. Absence itself disguised as daily life. Viktor doesn’t say goodbye. Would he, if Jayce had forced himself to look, to watch him step off? Jayce sees it behind his eyelids anyway: a coat disappearing into the crowd, shoulders folding into the winter air. He tells himself he imagined it. He tells himself that not looking is a kind of mercy. But the bruise is already forming.
February 13, 1995
Maybe the cruelest thing about leaving is how ordinary it looks. A platform, a suitcase, your mother worrying because you’re too far away. You think you’re boarding a train but really you’re stepping into a bruise that hasn’t formed yet. I tell myself I’m prepared for absence but it keeps finding new ways to open. One day it is silence, the next it is coal dust in my mouth. It spreads like frost across glass, thin at first and then opaque until all you see is myself staring back.
February 13, Brussels, Belgium
This is where it begins. How it begins.
Jayce’s throat tastes like metal. Maybe he’s swallowed the day whole and it’s fighting back. His suitcase knocks bone against bone as he drags it through the station, wheels catching on every seam of tile. For a moment he wonders if Marx was secretly pissed about cobblestones, all that uneven labor underfoot. A woman curses behind him in Dutch. He mumbles sorry. His phone is hot against his ear.
“Jayce? Are you listening?”
He isn’t, not really. His reflection streaks across a hundred glass panes, splitting and rejoining, a funhouse version of himself. Too many mouths, all of them silent. “Yeah, Mom, I heard you,” he lies.
Her voice keeps cutting like static: don’t forget to eat, you should rest properly, where does this train even end. He shoulders past a man carrying too many bags. “Prague,” Jayce says. “I’ll call from there.” He tells her I love you and hangs up.
The crowd shoves him into a corridor where the doors spit cold air. He slams his suitcase against the floor to make it move. When he finally finds the right number etched above the cabin door, he feels emptied out, skin buzzing as though someone has wrung him through. He slides it open. The glass muffles the station’s chaos. He’s barely unwrapped his scarf when the door clicks again.
A man fills the frame, pale face, dark hair in a ragged sweep, a black overcoat sloping from his shoulders. His body slants into a cane.
Jayce’s own reflection stares back at him in the glass as the stranger steps inside. When the man stoops to shove a battered bag beneath the berth across from him, Jayce jerks upright, trying to clear space, and immediately snags the scarf on the corner of the seat.
“Shit, s-sorry.” He tries to patch it with a mangled apology in Dutch that dies in his throat.
“That sounded painful. You speak English?” The man’s voice is thinner than Jayce expected.
“Yeah,” Jayce says. “Yeah, I do.”
There’s a pause long enough for Jayce to notice how his knuckles have gone white around the scarf. The man exhales, the relief catching in the cold air like smoke. “Good. I’m too tired for French today. Or Dutch.” His accent drags the words sideways.
Jayce tries on a smile, feels it crooked. Their hands meet, warm against cold. “Jayce.”
“Viktor.” The smile that follows barely lifts one side of his mouth.
The coat slips off Viktor’s shoulders and puddles against the seat, revealing a sweater vest with threads loosening like veins. His shirt hangs untucked, body more structure than flesh. He sits carefully. The cane leans in the corner. He coughs and clears his nose.
“How far are you going?”
“Prague,” Jayce answers. “And you?”
“Děčín.” Viktor’s gaze drags across the empty seats, the half table bolted between them, the sliding door. “Six spaces and only two fools. Fortunate, no?”
Jayce tries to grin back but it’s brittle. The train jolts and shudders like a body waking up. He watches Viktor’s hand curl loose in his lap, pale against corduroy, holding on to nothing at all.
February 13, 1995
I am scared of what people see when they look at me. I can’t tell if I’m breathing in or out. My mother's voice still undoes me. I’ve broken more promises to myself than anyone else ever could. Is persistence healthy or is it just another form of self-destruction? Where does endurance end and damage begins? Staying too long in rooms where I don’t belong. Holding on until my hands blister. I think of absence as a shape: the negative space of voice.
February 13, Antwerpen, Belgium
In less than an hour Jayce has a whole pocketful of Viktor.
Viktor tells Jayce he prefers trains to planes. He tells Jayce he is Czech, that his mouth holds enough languages to order coffee in any station. He says he tried to quit smoking once and lasted four days. Jayce watches him tear open a sugar packet and empty it onto his tongue. Viktor tells Jayce he studied quantum mechanics. Sometimes words catch in his throat, almost a cough. He doesn’t believe in God, he says, but he believes in collapse, in the beauty of things that fail.
“I was getting fitted for a spine brace,” Viktor says. “There’s this doctor in Belgium who specialises in cases like mine. He measured every angle of me. Said I’m leaning more each year. Maybe I should move to Pisa. At least there I’d blend in.”
Jayce chokes on a laugh that tastes guilty. He asks if it helps.
“Eh, will help me look straighter.” His mouth twitches in amusement. “And walk a little longer before I start dragging. But it doesn’t fix anything. Nothing to fix.”
He tells Jayce that his lungs have been weak since childhood. He tells Jayce he was born with a leg deformity. He tells Jayce every winter he gets pneumonia and has just crawled out of one. He tells Jayce that travelling is his rebellion, a middle finger raised to frailty. Normally he doesn’t share this much, he tells Jayce, but that’s what trains are for: you speak like you’ll never see the other passenger again.
The train rocks left, right. Jayce watches Viktor’s fingers ghost up and down the ridges of his corduroy.
“But enough about me,” Viktor says. “Please tell me about you. What do you do?”
Jayce feels akin to a fox in a trap, the metal already in the bone. He clears his throat. Thinks absurdly of sugar, how he should carry it, pocketfuls of it.
“Uh… I’m a Geologist,” he says.
“Ah. That I wasn’t expecting.”
Jayce laughs under his breath. “Why do you say that? Did I just admit something indecent?”
“In my experience, most passions are indecent, that’s the beauty of it.” He waves Jayce on to continue.
“There’s not much to it. My specialty is mostly minerals, rocks. How they break, the patterns they leave behind. Tiny fault lines you’d never notice with the naked eye. Like, for example, they found dropstones in the tropics a few years back, which only happen in glacier regions, and…” He’s off before he can stop himself, spilling into a tangent about Snowball Earth until the words run out and he resurfaces, sheepish. “I’m probably boring you to death.” He glances up, rubbing the back of his neck. “It even sounds boring when I say it out loud.”
“I disagree,” Viktor says.
Jayce chews at his lower lip. “Anyway, it keeps me moving around. Was just in London for a symposium. Terrible food, you could pave a tarmac with that gravy. They probably do. Then went to Belgium for another one, and now Prague. I spend more time chasing conferences than sleeping in my own bed.”
“So what I am hearing is you get to travel while doing what you like and get to meet likeminded people? What is it you like, exactly?”
“Yeah, pretty much. And I don’t know– well, I do know, it’s just hard to explain without sounding like a total nerd.”
“Jayce, my field of study is notorious for being incomprehensible even for those who made it their life’s work.”
Jayce laughs. “That’s a dangerous thing to say to me. You don’t know how deep the rabbit hole goes.”
“I have endured four-hour lectures on fluid dynamics delivered by a man who coughed blood into a handkerchief between sentences,” Viktor says. “Trust me, I can survive you.”
Jayce laughs. “Okay, yeah, I definitely won’t be doing that.” He hesitates. “Uh…where do I even start? I guess…what I like most is how minerals all break differently. Fractures, cleavage, conchoidal lines, like each one’s got its own fingerprint. If you know how to look, you can tell how old the rock is, what kind of pressure it’s been under, even the crap it’s survived. The breaks aren’t just damage, they’re…records, I guess. And that’s what gets me, how much history is hiding in something you’d just step over.”
Viktor studies him as though he’s waiting for Jayce to peel back another layer.
“It’s not glamorous,” Jayce says. “Most of the time it’s dirt so deep under your nails it looks permanent. Hours bent over slices of rock until your eyes blur. Counting, cataloguing, filling notebooks, research stacked on research. But– ” his voice softens, “--if you’re lucky, you get to hold something that’s been in the earth longer than language. Older than us. Older than everything we’ve built. Or it could be something that wasn’t meant to be here at all and just dropped down here from an actual outer space. That part makes the rest worth it. Even the waiting. And there’s always waiting. Waiting for samples, waiting for the dig to stop flooding, waiting for funding that never shows. All of it depends.”
“How very interesting, Jayce. Truly.”
He catches the faint twist of Viktor’s mouth before the train barrels into a tunnel, their reflections briefly superimposed in the dark glass, ghostly and doubled. Just then Viktor leans forward, rifling through the bag beneath his seat. When he straightens, there’s a flask, metal glinting as it catches the overhead light. He unscrews the cap with one hand. “Vodka. You drink, yes?”
February 13, Rotterdam, Netherlands
Viktor, as it turns out, talks even more when tipsy. He tells Jayce about stars that collapse under the weight of their own light, about particles that can exist in two places at once until you dare to look, and how bonded particles can be instantly aware of each other even eons apart, about how most of the universe is built from dark matter that refuses to show itself and refuses to be touched.
“There is this thought experiment,” he says. “Quantum suicide. Quantum immortality. You put yourself in front of the gun, and in one branch of the multiverse you are dead, but in another, you are still alive to hear the click. And the version that survives keeps surviving. Again and again. You never stop. Everyone else dies, but you…you are trapped in the long tail of survival.”
Jayce laughs uneasily, but Viktor doesn’t. He leans forward, elbow on the table, eyes dark in the dim light. “I don’t mean to sound morbid, but sometimes I think that is what life already is. A quantum death. We fall through the trapdoors of chance until we can’t anymore. And when the universe finally reaches heat death, when even movement forgets itself…” He shrugs. “Perhaps the last observer will still be there. Alone, immortal, wishing the gun had gone off.”
Outside, Rotterdam flickers past the window: white fields, roofs hunched like old men, streets flashing and vanishing as if pulled through a trick mirror. The bottle of vodka juts from Viktor’s bag, a glass fang in the dark.
“Every station looks the same,” Viktor says. “You could wake me up anywhere and I wouldn’t know the difference.”
“I don’t know. Feels the opposite to me.”
Viktor drags his thumb across his mouth, chases nothing. “When you travel too fast, your eyes start lying to you.” He pauses. “It’s physics, in a way. Perception breaking down. Your brain can’t keep pace with velocity, so it fills in gaps with ghosts.”
“Ghosts?”
“Shadows of what you saw a second ago, leaking into now. That’s all memory is, really. An echo layered over an echo. You start mistaking the residue for the thing itself. The faster we go, the more we live among the ruins of what we just passed.”
Jayce studies his own hands, veins rising like rivers, running up into his arms. “Sounds lonely.”
“I don’t think so. It just means you’re never really in one place at all. Closer to the truth, that the body is always slipping out of itself. Call it semantics if you like.”
Jayce wants to laugh it off, make some joke about Viktor scaring him out of train travel, but suddenly he feels too close to the thought, the way Viktor lays it down flat like inevitable gravity.
“I think I like the lying,” Jayce hears himself say.
“The lying?”
“The…uh, the ghosts. The way the brain fills the gaps. I think I like it. How it makes things softer. Less, you know, brutal than the real version. I don’t know. Maybe I’d rather live in the mistake than in the truth.”
“So you prefer the echo to the sound itself.”
“Plato’s cave. I know, I know.”
“You said it, not me.”
Viktor’s gaze drifts to the dark pane of the window. “Interesting,” he says. “Most people resent being lied to. But you want the lie. Do you often tell lies, Jayce?”
Jayce chuckles. “I try not to, no. Why?”
“Because people who say they like lies are either liars themselves or very lonely. Sometimes both.” His eyes return to Jayce. “So which are you?”
“I lied about London,” Jayce says. “I said I went for the symposium. And I did, technically. But that wasn’t why I stayed so long.” He runs a nail over the fabric of his pants. He hates the sound but can’t stop. “I was just really lonely. I thought maybe a city that big and that loud would swallow it. But it didn’t. It just made me smaller.”
“You? Smaller?”
Jayce laughs. “Metaphorically, of course. Everyone feels that way sometimes, right?”
“No, not everyone. Some people are too distracted to notice. Or too lucky.”
Jayce feels heat crawl up his neck. “Which one are you?”
Viktor exhales a wry sound. “Eh, I like my barrel” His mouth tilts as he scans Jayce’s shoulders, his chest. “Where did you find that thing?”
“What?” Jayce glances down at himself.
“Your coat.”
“Second-hand shop in London. Why?”
Viktor shakes his head, a cough caught in the gesture. “It suits you. The colour. Looks like you belong to some other decade.” He scrubs a hand over his face, then through his hair, and catches his reflection in the glass. A ghost staring back, paler than the moon, edges smudged by frost. His shoes fall to the floor with a flat thud. The socks left behind are thin, grey, stretched out at the heels, more thread than fabric.
“I snore when I drink,” Viktor says, tugging his pillow into place. “So, sorry in advance.”
“Should I turn off the light?”
“No, leave it on.”
“Okay.”
February 13, Amsterdam, Netherlands
The window is cracked just enough to let in a draft that struts in. It snakes up Jayce’s nose. He scrunches his face, trying to push it aside. His notebook is balanced on his knees. Across from him, Viktor has a book in one hand while the other idly sketches circles against the rim of his cup. Jayce briefly envies him for being desensitised to smells.
“What are you writing?” Viktor asks.
“Uh, notes, kind of,” Jayce says. “I don’t know. Maybe a diary. It just makes things easier to remember. Like, I’ll remember sitting here, scribbling, gagging on this awful air, no matter what I put down.”
He is rewarded with a barking startled laugh. “Why would you want to remember that?”
Jayce shrugs, sheepish. “I don’t know. I just…like remembering. It’s mostly nonsense. ”
Viktor hums, eyes back on his book. “The only way you know someone is through their nonsense.”
Jayce laughs and stares at his own scrawl, half-drawn diagrams, lists with no order and feels strangely naked. “And what about you? What are you reading?”
Viktor tilts the book so Jayce can see the spine, though the title is half-worn away. “The Geometry of Death. Have you heard of it?”
Jayce shakes his head.
“In quantum mechanics, we call it ‘entanglement sudden death'. When two systems bound together lose their link and just--” he snaps his fingers softly-- “cease to exist for each other. The collapse has a geometry. You can chart it, like a body falling through space.”
Jayce lets out a short laugh. “That’s somewhat bleak.”
“Eh, there’s beauty in it too. Even endings have their mathematics.”
“What do you mean?”
“It isn’t only physics, is it? That’s just the language they use. It is also about people. About how ties can end without warning. About how something once inseparable can disappear into nothing.”
Jayce sits with that, his hands restless against his knees. “So are you saying everything is just… doomed to fail. Entanglement, collapse, death, like the whole point is waiting for the cord to snap?”
“Is it not?”
“My point still stands. That sounds depressing.”
“Eh, I wouldn’t say so. Maybe that’s what we all are. Entanglements waiting for collapse. Death isn’t the mystery, it’s the math. People are terrified of it because they want it to mean more than it does. But death, technically, is nothing.”
“Okay, but if you can map the collapse, then you can map the connection too, right? Doesn’t that count for something? Doesn’t that mean the being-together part is just as real as the breaking-apart part?”
For a moment, Viktor studies him. “Maybe,” he says. “So tell me, if that’s your ideology, what would your geometry look like?”
“Sorry, my what?”
“Your collapse,” Viktor says. He taps the cover of the book, closed now, thumb resting on the bent spine. “If someone mapped you, the way you fracture, the way you come apart, what shape would it make?”
Jayce sits back. For a bit, he stares at the window, at the dark blur of trees rushing past. He feels his pulse in his neck. “I don’t know,” he says eventually. “It’d probably look more like a fault line. Like the ones you see in thin slices of granite. Pressure lines, fractures. They look like damage, but really they’re the only reason you know what the rock’s been through. You can read its whole life from the way it broke.”
He glances at Viktor, almost apologetic. “So yeah. My geometry would be a fracture map.”
“So you would be…legible,” Viktor says. “Break you open and all your secrets are there, written in stone.”
Jayce laughs, but it comes out thin. “That makes me sound embarrassingly pathetic.”
“Actually, it makes me think, your thing with rocks, and this entanglement, both are the same impulse, no? To understand how things survive their own breaking…or don’t. We’re not that different. We both stare at different ruins.”
“What– what about you. What would your collapse look like? Your geometry.”
“Oh, I’ll just hop universes until I finally cease to exist for good.”
Jayce snorts. “No, come on, you don’t get to do that. I just laid myself bare for you.” His ears burn. “Figuratively speaking.”
Viktor laughs quietly. “Sorry. This is me being pessimistic. One of my great flaws.”
He falls silent. A cloud of smoke staggers past, stomping and muttering in Dutch. Jayce’s head tilts when Viktor speaks again, eyes still fixed on the commotion.
“My geometry wouldn’t have symmetry,” he says. “It would be more like a house eaten hollow by termites. Still standing until it isn’t. And when it goes down, it will be ugly. Dust everywhere.”
“And why’s that?”
“Because I have so much ambition it makes me sick. It gnaws at me from the inside out, and still I feed it.” His nail scrapes absently against the metal band on his wrist. “I never had the luxury of time other people take for granted. My health has never been good. Hospitals ate years from me. And what’s left is this hunger that scares even me. Which makes me sound pitiful. Sorry if I’m too negative for your liking.”
Instead of telling Viktor that it’s okay, that there’s no need to apologise, he scratches at the corner of the page until the paper pills beneath his nail, and finds himself saying, “I ruin myself by clinging too hard. On one goal, one hope, one person, whatever it is, I focus so much on it that I burn holes in everything else. That’s my collapse.”
The faint smile on Viktor’s lips lingers longer than it should. “Don’t worry. I’m not a sadist. I won’t exploit your weakness. Unless you forget to buy snacks at the next stop, then I might.”
Jayce tries to laugh but it snags in his throat. “I get what you meant now. About people confessing to strangers. You’ll never see them again, so you can drop the ugliest thing about yourself and walk away before it sticks.”
“Or,” Viktor says, “because strangers don’t know enough to argue. They take you at your word. Which makes lying easier too.”
That makes Jayce snort. “Are you saying you’re lying to me?”
A sideways smile cuts across Viktor’s mouth. “Maybe I am. Or maybe I’m telling the truth in a way that only sounds like lying. That’s the better disguise, isn’t it?”
Jayce huffs. He presses his pen flat against the page but doesn’t write. “You’re not making this sound any easier.”
“And why is it my job to make anything easy? I let you drink from my flask, that almost makes you a family in some countries.”
Jayce startles himself with the laugh that bursts out of him that he has to hide behind his hands. “Hey. You practically forced me. I couldn’t say no!”
“You could, actually.” Viktor seems to weigh something, then adds, “Are you dating anyone?”
Jayce smiles faintly, shaking his head. He flounders at the abrupt shift. “Where did that– oh right, transitory confessions. No. I’m not. Not anymore.”
The table groans as Viktor leans his elbows onto it. “Tell me about it.”
Jayce stares, caught off guard. “He was…” He glances at Viktor, who gives nothing away, just tips his chin slightly as if urging him on. Jayce exhales. “He was, well, still is a scientist. I…” He rubs at his eyebrow, nervous. “It just didn’t align with his career views.” The words fall flat. He drops his hand and straightens, trying to shake it off. “So what about you? Why are you unattached?”
Viktor’s mouth tilts. The cane twirls under his long fingers. “I did sound bitter earlier, didn’t I?” He lets out a chalky huff. “I don’t exactly have a wealth of time. Or health, for that matter. This”--he gestures over himself–“is not going to improve. And there’s still too much I want to do. It wouldn’t be fair.”
Jayce studies him. “But…that’s not for you to decide, is it? What’s fair. What someone else thinks is worth it, what their idea of a relationship should look like. You don’t get to choose that for them, before they’ve even had a chance to think about it.”
Viktor stills, pupils glassy, the light snagged in them like a hook in flesh. His expression doesn’t change much, just the smallest twitch at the corner of his mouth, as if Jayce has said something reckless and he doesn’t know whether to dismiss it or take it seriously.
February 13, 1995
Who are you? Your English bends like refracted light. You tell me time is your most violent enemy and that you race it every day. Am I also your enemy? You tell me in the end we have no one but ourselves to save. The frost on the glass splits you in two and I keep staring as if one of you might stay when the other leaves. I find myself envying the paper cup you guard. I don’t have much to offer you, just bad jokes, my clumsy American accent, names of rocks. I’ve given your eyes the name Tellurides of Gold. Sometimes you cough until the air shakes. Children run the aisle shouting in languages I can’t catch. Time isn’t my enemy, but I do think of it as not being a straight line, that it’s more like a circle, or maybe a double sided mirror. Memory cheats, but if I’m honest, you remind me of a drawer full of broken watches. When I was little, I thought magic was just another word for things we couldn’t throw away. When I was little, I buried rocks in the backyard because I thought they might grow. What does that say about who I am?
February 14, Between Netherlands and Berlin
Viktor slept while Jayce drifted, half under. When he blinks awake, Viktor is unpacking his bag onto the narrow table.
There is a Zenit camera, its leather strap fraying. There are pill bottles, plastic white with labels rubbed pale. A pocketknife, another book folded in half at the spine, a sweater rolled so tightly it looks strangled. A scarf knotted into itself. A pack of gum with only one stick left. A photograph folded into eighths, so worn it looks soft as fabric. Glasses. A pen. A passport. Old train stubs.
Jayce feels intrusive, like he’s watching a stranger strip in front of him, except the nakedness is worse, this is the inside of a life, the bones of it laid bare. He wonders, briefly, of all the steps Viktor’s taken, all the cities he’s been to, all the countries, how his voice sounds in all of them. Does it warp itself to fit the walls? Does it bend under the weight of other people’s languages? He imagines the vowels wearing thin like coins passed through too many hands, consonants chipped down to their stubs. He wants to know what remains after so much use, what sound belongs to Viktor alone when no one is listening, the secret shape of him when he is no one’s passenger.
“That’s a nice camera,” Jayce tells him.
“It was my father’s, back in the Soviet era. The film sticks now and then.”
“Can I see it?"
Jayce takes it gingerly. It’s heavier than it looks. He lifts it, peering through the viewfinder, and the compartment shifts into frame: Viktor, the window behind him smearing and sharpening him with every lurch of the train, his body breaking and reforming in rhythm with the tracks. The frost makes him ghostly, half-vanishing, like he could dissolve at any stop.
“You take a lot of pictures?”
“Sometimes.”
“Of what?”
“Whatever catches me. Things I think deserve remembering. Beauty, ugliness, all of it. Life as it is.”
Through the lens Viktor’s eyes look like olives sunk in brine, dark and glistening, holding more salt than light. He lets himself fall back against the seat, his body folding into slack angles. When he rubs at his eyes with the heel of his hand, the shadows there darken, purple blooming wider.
February 14, 1995
You sleep and I keep thinking how brave it is to tell a stranger your name. How violent it feels to want to hold it. Like always, I write so I don’t lie to myself later. I think honesty might be the hardest thing to survive. I want to say I’ve been waiting for someone to speak the word aloud, to let me stand inside it. Five years from now, where will you be? Where will I be? Life is unfair, that much I’ve learned. But unfairness is a kind of potential. A door that swings open and closes without warning. Sometimes you’re on the right side of it, sometimes not. I want to believe in the accident of us, that it’s not meaningless just because it’s brief. I’m drawing lines on the page. The lines come to an end. Eleven hours from now I will have to say goodbye to you and there will be a hollow the size of your outline pressed into my chest. I did not come here to find you. I did not even believe there was anything left to find. Are you real, or am I dreaming you in some airless hotel room back in London? Tell me about Prague. Tell me what you know about it. Tell me something to believe in. Do you know what happens when a rock breaks under too much pressure? It sings. Ultrasonic. You can’t hear it with your ears but machines do. A sound that comes before collapse. I wonder if you sing like that. I wonder if I envy you or if I’m horrified by you.
In the morning, Berlin is a spill of orange and white and gossamer blue. The platform breathes cold into their compartment when the door slides open.
There’s a delay, something to do with the heavy snow and problems with the overhead electrical lines. They get off with the small crowd. The air is raw with diesel and snow as Jayce follows Viktor through the station. They find a café on a corner, windows fogged, chairs stacked unevenly on the other side of the glass. Inside it is warm, smells of yeast and burnt coffee grounds. Viktor claims a table near the radiator, peels his gloves off finger by finger. Jayce fumbles with the coins in his pocket and, after a brief currency argument in broken German, the stern counter lady takes pity on him and awards him with two cups of watered down coffee and a plate of sausage rolls.
“Your accent is terrible,” Viktor says as soon as Jayce drops the tray onto the table.
Jayce laughs, unwrapping his scarf. “You should’ve heard me try to order water in Paris last year.”
Viktor unwraps the paper sleeve from the pair of sausage rolls, the grease already seeping through. He takes a bite, chews slowly, washes it down with the coffee. Crumbs scatter across the table, some sticking to his fingers.
“I lived here once,” he says. “A year. Worked under some quack professor. He believed in good, but none of his ideas were good. He just wanted someone who kept their mouth shut to type his bad papers.”
“And you? You believed in him?”
“I believed in rent money. It was a lonely year. I learned how long days can stretch when you hate every hour inside them.”
“So why stay?”
“Because leaving felt like failure. And because I was too tired to fight. It’s easier to let the world stand still when you can barely stand yourself, no?” He brushes crumbs from his vest, exhales. “But I did leave. Nothing worse than being young and already old.”
Jayce glances toward the fogged window, then back at Viktor. “Did you come here a lot back then? To this café? You said”
Viktor finally meets his eyes. “This place is better with company. Most things are.”
“And now you have company. Is it helping?”
“I haven’t decided yet. But you’ll have to earn your half.
Jayce laughs softly, rubbing the rim of his mug until it squeaks. “How do I do that?”
“Tell me something true,” Viktor says. “About you.”
What if he deflects, jokes, will Viktor’s gaze let him? Will it stop feeling like a gentle hand pressing between his shoulder blades?
“I’ve already told you many things. All of them true.”
“Tell me more,” Viktor says, a little smile.
Jayce mirrors it. “Okay. When I was a kid, I used to be afraid of snow.”
“Afraid?”
Jayce nods. “My mom lost two fingers to frostbite when our car got stranded in a snowstorm. I saw how fast the cold can take you. After that I couldn’t look at snow without thinking it was alive. Like it was waiting for me to step outside so it could eat me piece by piece. Even now, sometimes, the sound of it crunching under my boots makes me tense.”
“So you drown it out,” Viktor says.
“Pretty much.” Jayce says. “You’d hate living with me.”
“Why?”
“I leave the TV on at night, or music. Something to cover the silence. Otherwise my brain just…spirals. It’s stupid, I know. As much as I want to, I can’t help it.”
“Well, I must be stupid, too. I sleep with the light on,” Viktor says.
“Oh yeah? Afraid of the dark?”
“Afraid I won’t wake up,” Viktor says. “The light convinces me I still belong to the world. If I open my eyes and see it, then I know I am not gone yet.” For a moment, he looks older than he is, worn down to the angles of his bones. “The body teaches you what to fear,” he says. “It brands you with it. For me, it is not death. It is the possibility of absence. Of opening my eyes and finding nothing.”
Jayce presses his hands flat against his knees as if the floor might tilt and send him sliding. He wants to tell Viktor he understands. He wants to tell him that he, too, has lived with fear sunk deep into the marrow, that it shaped him before language could. But the words calcify in his throat.
Maybe there are a million ways to tell a stranger how much their honesty matters. Maybe you do it with silence, with the set of your shoulders, with the way you don’t look away. He thinks of all the sentences that might open the door and how useless they suddenly feel.
He stays silent in the strange fever of Viktor’s confession. It feels a lot like standing too close to a fire in a skin that isn’t his but burning him anyway. He wonders if this is how intimacy works, arriving sudden and uninvited, flooding the room like water through a crack, and all you can do is let it touch you.
He loses track of the silence stares so long his eyes dry, his pulse chewing at itself, until he blinks and Viktor is there, close, a wrecked napkin falling from his hand onto the plate. He tilts his head toward the door.
“Come on. Let’s walk a little.”
Outside, the Berlin cold ingests them whole. Their breath ghosts in front of them, pale and vanishing. Temporary lungs, Jayce thinks. Ghostly ones, he thinks. He shoves his hands deep into his coat pockets, half to keep warm, half to keep from reaching sideways, closing the gap between them.
The thought of it, of touching Viktor’s hand here, strikes him as absurd. Like asking the moon to lower itself for a kiss. Like daring to press his palm against fire just to see if it burns. It sits clumsy in his and restless in his fingers.
They move past taxis idling at the curb, past a vendor stacking crates of fruit already stiffening in the frost. The lamps cast long yellow bruises over the snow. A dog barks and the sound ricochets off brick, sharp as glass. Viktor hunches into the wind. His hair whips across his face, snags in messy tangles. His leg dents inward when he walks, the line of it buckled and uneven. Jayce falls into step beside him anyway, tuning himself to the rhythm of Viktor’s cane against the pavement, the small flare of red at his knuckles each time it strikes.
They reach a cement bridge over the Spree. The river runs black under the winter sky, pigeons crowding along the railing, feathers ruffled against the cold. Viktor leans his weight into the stone, shakes a cigarette free from a crumpled pack, tucks it between his lips.
“Want one?” he asks, already reaching for the lighter.
Jayce shakes his head. “No, thanks.”
The flame flares and snaps and then disappears. Smoke coils with the fog of Viktor’s breath, white tangled with grey until it’s impossible to separate the two. The city stirs awake around them, children with red cheeks stumbling toward school, buses coughing exhaust so thick it paints the air. Pigeons startle at something, wings clapping, then settle again on the railing as though nothing happened.
“Do you ever miss it here?” Jayce asks.
Viktor exhales. His eyes are fixed on the shivering skin of the cold river. “I miss the person I thought I was when I lived here,” he says. “Which is not the same as missing the city. And Prague feels no different. Every place peels off another version of me, and I keep mistaking the husk for home.”
Jayce thinks he gets it, in his own crooked way. Missing a version of yourself more than the place. Being swallowed whole and spit you out half-sized, smaller than you remember being. He’s felt that same alienation even in places that should have been his, feels it even in his birth city, in the house that still smells like the inside of his mother’s hands. There’s betrayal so much in it, in how a place that raised you could turn cold on you overnight. How sidewalks you’d run barefoot as a kid could one day feel like someone else’s territory. How his reflection in shop windows always startles him, his own face looking like it doesn’t belong to the landscape behind it.
He wonders if it’s possible to be homesick for a place that doesn’t welcome you anymore. He wonders if maybe homesickness isn’t about place at all. If it’s about the version of yourself that lived there, and the fact that he’s gone.
When he looks up again, Viktor has shifted, cigarette tucked between two fingers, the other hand rummaging in his bag. The battered camera appears, and Viktor squints through the viewfinder, the lens settling on Jayce.
“What are you doing?”
“Don’t move. You look very… Berlin.”
Jayce blinks, half a laugh escaping him. “Is that supposed to be a compliment?”
The click of the shutter answers him. The pigeons scatter at the sound, clapping wings into the grey air. Viktor lowers the camera.
“Sorry. It might not have been authentic if I’d warned you.”
Jayce laughs, tugging his scarf higher up his chin. “I probably came out looking like a startled otter.”
Viktor’s smoke-roughened laugh slips out. “I think you underestimate your face.”
Jayce kicks at a patch of snow clinging to the bridge. “Yeah, well, I think you overestimate my photogenic abilities.”
Viktor adjusts the strap of the camera, lets it dangle against his chest. “You can judge later. If I get the opportunity to send it to you.”
“Send it?”
“Why not? It would be a shame to trap it here.”
Jayce feels his pulse thrum. “Okay.”
Viktor turns to him, light snagged in his eyes. “Okay?”
“Yeah.” Jayce laughs, but it drowns quick in the heat rising up his neck. He feels pinned, as if the camera lens had never lowered, as if he’s still caught inside it, framed and exposed.
They walk back. The sidewalk narrows, giving Jayce an excuse to shift a little closer. Viktor doesn’t move away. He stubs the cigarette out and tips his chin upward, eyes catching on the pale glow of something in the sky, satellite, a leftover star, doesn’t matter. His mouth quirks like he knows it’s irrelevant, like the point is simply in the looking.
They pause at a stone relic with a plaque Jayce can’t read. Viktor’s eyes skim it before flicking back up, and suddenly he’s face to face with Jayce, close enough that Jayce nearly goes cross-eyed trying to keep him in focus. The cold has painted Viktor’s cheekbones a raw pink, boyish in colour against the severity of his stare, which is anything but soft.
He tugs once on the lapel of Jayce’s coat, testing the fabric, or maybe testing Jayce himself. “Tell me if I’m reading this wrong,” he says, and his breath is warm against the space between them, breaking the frozen air.
Jayce’s pulse stumbles. “You’re not,” he says. “Not at all,” he says.
Viktor hums low. There’s approval folded into the sound. His hand slides up, gloved fingers skating Jayce’s neck, pausing at the line of his jaw before cupping his face.
“Good,” he says, soft soft soft. “Because I like you more than I probably should.”
Jayce swallows until it hurts and the whole city rots out of view. Only the raw scrape of Viktor’s words remains, frost hissing off his lips. He breathes the wool-smoke of gloves, feels the threads snag in his skin, imagines the meat of veins pumping and the red churn against blue and the chalky bones underneath. Death and life tangled, gnawing at each other, stitched together at the edge of the cosmos.
Viktor is beautiful. Viktor is so beautiful Jayce feels skinned, feels flayed down to cartilage, feels like he has nowhere to put the ache of it.
The sigh slips ragged through his teeth, and his face knots. “Sorry. I forget myself sometimes.” His words scrape out thinner than before, and his hand falls to his wristwatch. “We should probably get going.”
Jayce opens his mouth but there’s only breath fogging in front of him. He laughs once without sound. His boots scrape against the cement. For no reason he can name, Viktor is going out of focus, his edges running, dripping like paint in rain. Jayce blinks hard, but it doesn’t clear. His tongue presses to his teeth, and all at once his mouth tastes of salt.
February 14, 1995
I keep thinking of the word bruise, how it’s just blood trapped under skin, waiting to be reabsorbed. I wonder if that’s what we are. Waiting to be reabsorbed. I lied when I said I didn’t know how to answer what I see when I look at you. I know exactly what I see. I see myself being seventeen again, which is a curse. I see myself in the yellowed light of your eyes, and suddenly I’m a coward again, choking on words that won’t cross my teeth. I see your eyes and I see a whole geography: a sunset, a coastline burning, the end of the world. I see me and I see you, and then I see nothing at all. I once read about a man who imagined an entire life for himself. A wife, children, a house with green shutters. Imagined it so well he could feel the weight of a child on his shoulders, hear the slam of the door when she came home late, smell her hair after rain. He convinced himself so fully that when he finally tried to step inside it, he found nothing there. Just absence and air. That’s what I’m afraid of. That I will imagine you too fully, and when I reach for you it will be like pressing my hands into fog. I don’t know what to do with that. It terrifies me. It makes me want to kneel down and study you the way I study the earth, trace the fracture lines, memorise how the pressure shows itself. It makes me want to press my thumb against your sharpest edge, just to know you’re real. If I drowned myself in every bottle of vodka on this continent, would you steady the room when it spins?
February 14, Dresden, Germany
Jayce pulls his notebook into his lap, tears a page from the back, scribbles an address. He folds the paper once, twice, and slides it across the table.
“Here,” he says. “In case you really do want to send me that otter picture.”
Viktor laughs and takes the page and tucks it into the breast pocket of his vest, then turns his face back to the glass. The fields outside are endless, snow flaring up pale each time the train cuts through a lamp.
For a long stretch, Jayce thinks that’s it, that Viktor will leave like this. That there’ll be silence from the remainder of the trip and that Jayce will suffocate in it. Then Viktor speaks, voice so quiet that Jayce almost misses it under the hum of the rails.
“There are so many things I want to learn about you, Jayce.”
“Like what?”
“Everything. Nothing. I don’t know where to start.”
Jayce bites at the inside of his cheek. “That’s a lot of things.”
“Yes,” Viktor says.
February 14, 1995
The cold here doesn’t end, it just shifts shape. In London it was rain in my shoes, here it’s knives down the sleeves. I keep watching you smoke and thinking the smoke belongs to me too, because I breathe it in, because it sticks. You said you like me. The words are still hanging in the air like birds refusing to land. I don’t know what to do with them. Sometimes I think a person can be more frightening than a city. At least cities don’t look you in the eye when they undo you. Are we ghosts? I keep thinking about home, what a fraudulent word. Tell me we aren’t ghosts. I am afraid of silence. You are afraid of the dark. What happens if both arrive at once? I don’t want us to be ghosts.
February 14, Bad Schandau, Germany
“Listen,” Jayce says. “Prague is only three days for me. Then a flight back to London. I’ve got…things to sort.”
Viktor smiles. “You don’t owe me an alibi, Jayce.”
Jayce stares at the window, their reflections blurred by speed and light. Three days feel like less than hours, and the math of it collapses the longer he thinks, and the thought of leaving already feels like absence gnawing at his chest. He bites his tongue to the back of his teeth until it hurts.
He thinks of the beauty of strangers. How you can sit across from someone for less than an hour and already know the way their face will haunt you when you’re alone again. How absurd it is, to memorise the slope of a mouth you have no right to keep, to carry someone else’s voice inside your ribs. Beauty that doesn’t belong to you but lives in you anyway, as if you stole it by looking too long.
February 27, 1995
I told you I was a geologist. A lonely scientist. A collector of broken things. Every word was true, especially the parts I didn’t say, that I wanted to catalog you too, that I wanted to map the fracture lines running through your body, press my thumb to the sharpest one just to prove you were real. If you asked me what beauty is, I would say it is you lighting a cigarette over the Spree. It is you laughing smoke out through your nose. It is you telling me ambition is the rot eating you hollow, and me wanting to touch the hollow. I think about your hands, cold, shaking a sugar packet into your mouth, the sweetness dissolving on your tongue. I have dreams where you are still on the train with me, your reflection beside mine in the glass. In the dream, I don’t shake my head and stay silent. I speak. I tell you: I don’t want to wait for absence. I don’t want to write history in rocks when I could write it in you. Let me stay. Let me follow. I will bring myself to you, the way thirst brings itself to a glass. Don’t make me spend the rest of my life writing field notes about missing you.
March 15, London, United Kingdom
It takes a month, thirty-something days where the postbox stays empty but for bills and advertisements, and during all of it, he feels foolish and humiliated by his own exposed hunger every time he lifts the cold metal flap.
It’s always when you least expect it, isn’t it? One morning, the envelope is there and Jayce is standing with it in the hall longer than he should, pulse hammering against the paper. He imagines it travelling folded in coat pockets, slipping between books, setting down on tables sticky with alcohol rings before finally finding its way into the machinery of the world, through hands and bins and sorting rooms, until it lands here, in his.
Inside there are two photographs. A science magazine cutout of an otter. And him, caught in black and white, scarf crooked, mouth half-open in a shape he doesn’t remember making, surrounded by a flurry blur of spooked pigeons. He looks ridiculous. He loves it. He stares at it until the edges blur, until his own face looks like a stranger’s and he realises that’s exactly what he is, someone else’s stranger, pinned to film, made permanent.
On the back, scrawled in black ink, Viktor’s hand is thin and serrated:
Proof that you existed here. Proof that I did too. I don't believe in permanence, but I wanted this moment to last longer than the train doors allowed. -February 14, 1995- Viktor
Jayce sends his proof in return. He tears out every page of his notes, his fossils of Viktor, his fingerprints of memory, and shoves them into an envelope. The post is slow. Three weeks of waiting before another letter arrives.
Jayce, you are much stranger than I thought. My barrel looks great. In summer I will return to Belgium. Tell me what absurd thing must I do to make you meet me there?