"What did you do?" I ask. "When the articles were wrong about you?"
"I let Mik read them first. Mik has a threshold. He reads until the threshold is reached and then he closes the laptop and makes tea and the tea means: the reading is done, the world has spoken, the world is wrong, and the wrong is not ours to carry."
"And the comments?"
"The comments are the comments. The comments are strangers performing certainty about a life they do not live. The comments have no authority over the life. The authority is yours. The word is yours."
The word is yours. Ava's sentence. Cole's sentence. The sentence that keeps arriving from different mouths and that keeps meaning the same thing: the word belongs to you and the belonging does not require the world's approval.
"The grin is back up," Cole says. Not a question.
"Yeah."
"Take it down. Not for me. For the person who's going to go home tonight and see the grin and know it's the wrong grin and who is going to worry about you in the specific, Russian, T-shirt-folding way that Sokolov worries."
I drive home. The apartment. Nikolai is on the couch. The reading glasses are off. The phone is in his hand. He has been reading.
He looks at me. The look is the comprehensive look, the look that reads everything, the look that has been reading me since the corridor. The look sees the grin. The look sees through the grin. The look sees the wall.
"You read it," I say.
"I read it."
"And the comments."
"I read three comments. The third comment was sufficient to form a conclusion about the intelligence of the commenting population."
"What was the conclusion?"
"Insufficient."
I sit next to him. His arm does not go around me. This is notable because the arm has been automatic for weeks. The arm not going around me means the arm is waiting. The arm is assessing. The arm is reading the grin and the wall and theperformance and deciding that the automatic gesture might not be what I need right now.
What I need is for the grin to come down. What I need is for the wall to come down. What I need is to sit on this couch and let the sting be the sting without performing the handling of the sting.
"The headline erases people," I say. The grin is on. "The article substitutes queer for bisexual. The comments say I'm confused."
"You are not confused."
"I know."
"The word you chose is the correct word."
"I know."
"The article is wrong and the comments are wrong and the headline is wrong and the wrongness is not your responsibility."
"I know." The grin is on and the knowing is in my mouth and the sting is behind the grin and the grin is failing because Nikolai is looking at me with the look that sees the wall and the look does not accept the wall. The look has never accepted the wall.
"Come here," he says.
The arm opens. The arm that was waiting. The arm that assessed and decided that the automatic was not enough and that the invitation was necessary.
I fall into him. The falling is not graceful. The falling is the collapse of the grin, the wall, the performance, the bright electric untouchable Eli Mercer who handled the article and the headline and the comments with humor and speed and the grin. The falling is the underneath arriving, and the underneath is tired, and the tired is the cost of the performing, and the cost is higher today than it has been in months because the performing was supposed to be over and the over was premature.
He holds me. The holding is not the couch-holding or the bed-holding or the public-holding. The holding is the I-see-the-wall-and-I-am-holding-you-until-it-comes-down holding. The holding is Nikolai's care language applied to the specific crisis of a man whose word was taken and reshaped by strangers.
"The word is mine," I say into his chest.
