New to the story or need a refresher? Begin with the prologue:
When Apollo slipped out of bed in the early morning hours to chauffer the sun, Jaden couldn’t go back to sleep. “Don’t leave.” He reached for Apollo’s velvety, toasty skin.
But Jaden could already feel the smoldering warmth dissipating as Apollo crossed the hall.
“I have to,” Apollo said. “Even us gods have responsibilities.”
Jaden watched Apollo reach for something in his bookcase, except his hand slid into a seam between two books. A space between the space. Before Jaden could see what Apollo pulled out, a flare of light caused Jaden to shield his eyes.
“What was that?” Jaden asked after the intensity stopped pressing on his vision.
“Nothing you have to worry about.” Apollo returned to the bed to give Jaden a kiss.
Sensual. Lingering.
The meeting of the lips reminded Jaden of all the pleasures he had enjoyed with Apollo the night before: warmth, skin, the kind of ecstasy that blurred everything else.
“What you can worry about is enjoying this B-side.” Apollo walked over to his instruments and snapped his fingers. Music permeated the room as they played him a song on their own accord.
Then in a swirl of light, Apollo disappeared.
Jaden lay awake and thought about him constantly, feeling like he was thirteen again. He had never been in such an all-consuming dynamic with anyone. He usually forged out into the world independently, pushing himself to move forward. He had no time for friends, as his assignments for the magazine demanded relentless travel. No time for love, as he was too busy positioning others before his lens to let anyone come close. And no time for family, he noted, as he stared at the black snap lid of the plastic urn nestled beside his suitcase.
He did warn himself that he was getting in too deep, too fast, but the way he felt around Apollo felt so damn good. After all, Jaden liked him a lot.
I think a little more than a lot. You would think Jaden would have employed that mortal trick of counting days. He was only supposed to spend seven of them in Amsterdam. His initial plan was to continue and take the train to Paris, practically floating into the French borders, high, after tossing back a space cake before boarding at Amsterdam Centraal. While not in France two weeks later, he was still high, although, as we both know, from a different drug.
Ironic that I should know his schedule. Usually, it is us gods who get lost in the passage of time, our days feeling both fleeting and endless: the world transforming around us while we remain fixed, seasons falling away like water over a cataract.
For Jaden, the days became a fluid, slippery thing, and he lost hold of its strings. His time spent with the god was filled with sex and music.
As Jaden listened to the song Apollo left him, “Still Water (Peace)” by the Four Tops, he was brought back to his childhood. His father always had a song playing when Jaden was a little kid. Jaden remembered crates of records on the floor and a bunch of big speakers set up everywhere. While his father was doing, Jaden was listening. Sometimes, music felt like the only way Jaden could remember his father, and hearing certain songs, especially anything from Motown, made him slip back to those days with his dad as if music was some sort of time-weaving spell.
As the early daylight painted dull breakfast colors on the sky, Jaden got out of bed, drawn to the large windows overlooking the canal in the back garden. From his vantage point, he watched the city slowly come alive—the rare boat with its early risers and the rhythmic dance of stand-up paddleboarders who punctuated the tranquil water; they paddled, rested, paddled, rested. Eventually, they slipped out of sight, leaving Jaden to focus on the static objects in his view.
Uniform red brick buildings on the opposite bank peered through Weeping Willows, whose dangling limbs looked as if they were dipping their fingers in the water for a temperature check.
A sudden thought jarred him: he could just scatter his mother’s ashes in this canal and end this prolonged farewell. For years, Jaden had managed to postpone seeing her, always promising himself he’d visit once his work was done. But there was always another assignment, another excuse not to visit. He just couldn’t deal with his mom right then. And it became easier to work and avoid contact with her than to show up and battle with someone who lacquered deep-brooding anger over everything she interacted with. When the hospital called, Jaden didn’t have an excuse anymore not to visit because the nurse on the line had told him his mother had died.
She died. Just like that.
He ran his fingers along the plate engraved with her name on the container’s side. This was all that he had left of her. Her remains in a temporary urn while he was left to sift through all that was left in her wake. There was so much unresolved between them, yet she had exited. Just up and got off the ride. How was that fair?
“Would it be fair,” Jaden asked her ashes, “if I shook you out in the canal? Would you care?”
The truth of her departure revealed that the problem with death was the problem of the living. Perhaps it was the bumpiness of anger he felt about how things ended that he decided to pick up her remains and dump them outside.
Only then did it dawn on him that there was no exit. Jaden hadn’t left the house since he had arrived. When he thought about when he had woken up in Apollo’s bed for the first time, that memory felt like mere minutes ago yet also stretched back for days.
Every time he thought about the door, picturing where the threshold was, it slipped away from his thoughts as if he were waterproof to his own senses.
Of course, Jaden realized as he set down the ashes and traded them for his camera. He shifted the camera to look around the room, but everything in the viewfinder looked as it did to his naked eye.
No door. No way out.