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Tristan let out a breath. “Sorry,” he said. “I just… I spend my life trying very hard to not remember anything that happened when I was younger. So you can’t just put a pen in my hand and leave me to it. It’s not going to work that way.”
“Alright,” Mort said. “Then why don’t you tell me. We will sit, you will talk, and I will listen.”
“What. Like you’re my shrink or something?”
Mort leaned down and brushed a soft, but commanding kiss over Tristan’s lips, feeling the stubble of his mortal’s unshaven beard against his eternally smooth skin. “Like I am your immortal master who owns every bit of you, including your trauma, and your pain.”
“Fuck,” Tristan whimpered under his breath, his eyes lighting up with something like love and relief. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll tell you.”
Nobody usually wanted to listen to Tristan. He’d been jeered into silence his entire life. Tristan knew intellectually that Mort really wanted to know where the marking had come from, but he was prepared to listen to all of Tristan’s woes in order to learn that information.
He took a deep breath and started talking.
“I ran away.”
“Why?”
“I don’t remember.”
A lie. He hated lying, but he had to. Mort thought he was broken, but innocent. Tristan could not stand to see the realization in the darkness of Mort’s gaze when he realized he was more guilty than anybody else.
“Tom said it was because they sent people to take you away from your mother.”
“Oh. Yeah. They sent them all the time,” Tristan said. “Maybe that’s why. I don’t know. I was kind of a handful back then.”
“You are kind of a handful now,” Mort replied with more than a little fondness in his tone.
Tristan smiled, both at what he took to be a compliment, and also because the lie had now been covered with enough words to allow him to move past it like a shadow in the night.
“Did you plan to… survive?”
Mort was asking if he had tried to off himself in the desert as a ten year old, and the answer to that was no. Tristan had ironically always been a good survivor.
“I didn’t plan anything.” Now Tristan could be honest, now the lie was dead and buried. “That time I got really lost, I just ran. I ran until I couldn’t see anything or anyone and until nothing and nobody could see me.”
Mort watched emotions chase over Tristan’s face as he recounted the ordeal he’d suffered as a boy, one that had shaped him into the man Mort could not resist.
There were missing parts to the story. He could feel their absence, but he could also tell that Tristan was trying, making a genuine effort to tell him as much as he could stand to tell.
“And when you had run as far as you could?”
“I fell asleep,” Tristan said. He was keeping the story very simple, telling it in staccato sentences. But Mort could imagine how it must have been for a boy to run to the wilderness and wake up enveloped in scrubby tundra and rocky hillocks that all looked the same. It must have felt like waking up at the end of the world.
“And when you woke?”
“I was in the desert. I caught some bugs. And I found a stream. There was water to drink and stuff living in it. Toads and some fish and eels.”
A small smile flitted over Tristan’s face, and Mort built a new picture in his head, one of a boy living wild and free for the first time unburdened by the shame of his mother’s profession, or rather, the judgement that accompanied it from his peers.
“You enjoyed yourself.”
“I slept under the stars. It was cold, but I didn’t care. I had some… extra clothes.”
A flash of evasiveness went through his eyes when he said extra clothes.
“So you packed before you ran.”
“No.”
Mort decided not to ask where the extra clothes had come from, sensing he would force Tristan into a lie, and he did not want to do that. He wanted the truth, on Tristan’s terms.
“I would have stayed out there way longer than forty days,” Tristan said. “I would have lived a lifetime there. I could have survived. I was surviving.”
“Why didn’t you stay?”
Tristan took a deep breath. “I was worried about my mom. So I came home. And she was so happy to see me, she made me promise I’d never leave again.” He turned haunted eyes on Mort. “So I haven’t.”
Suddenly, it all made sense. That was why Tristan lived in this hopeless town, had not gone to college, or pursued any of the possibilities of the world. He was stuck.
“Your mother has passed. You’re not trapped here anymore.”
“Aren’t I? This is all I know now. And the house is mine. It’s not worth shit, but it’s mine. I couldn’t buy another house anywhere else. I don’t have any skills, or education. I scrape by here, because this is where I was made. And this is where I’ll stay.”
