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Raphael Meyer wasfour and a half years old when he took his first steps. It was one of the only early memories he retained with an almost vicious clarity. And try as he might, he couldn’t forget the way the handles of his crutches squished under his tight grip—or the way the cuffs dug into his skin so painful, it made his eyes water. He recalled the way he stared at his feet and waited for them to move, because he was so sure those crutches were magic.
His mother had said so. “These,” she said, strapping on his clunky metal braces to the outside of his boots, “are going to help your feet stay flat. And these,” she said, and pushed his little arm through the cuff and carefully loosened his tight fists with the tips of her fingers, “are magic, and they’re going to help you walk.”
“Just like you?” he asked.
She looked at him a very long time, and then she nodded. “Just like me.”
He was four and a half when he realized just how profoundly she was willing to lie to him. The braces on his feetdidkeep his feet flat, but they didn’t keep his boots from scraping along the ground, because the crutches had no magic. They didn’t make his spasming, stiff legs bend at the knees and turn at the ankle and carry him across the floor like all the other boys.
All they really did was hurt.
They hurt, and they made it so it took twice as long to get to his bedroom than he took before on his hands and knees. And damn it, he’d been good at that. He’d beengoodat crawling and climbing—even better than the other kids who came over to play.
He got a teddy bear for those first steps though. It was half his size, fluffy and white, and sat at the edge of his bed as a reminder that he’d done something to make his mother cry happy tears for the first time in his short life.
And it would be many, many years before Raphael understood the profound intensity of her joy at seeing him on his feet without someone at his side.
For him, standing was nothing more than a larger height for him to fall when a seizure struck. It was nothing more than extra strain to send his legs into terrible spasms, or leave his hands useless and curled into fists when he over-worked his muscles in the body that would never actually be just like everyone else—magic crutches or no.
But to the woman who had stared down at her small child and listened to a stoic-faced doctor tell her that he would never walk, never speak, and never feed himself—it was the greatest triumph he could have ever accomplished. Those six steps on his own had been everything to her.
As he aged, Raphael knew he would never be able to understand the passion behind her drive to have him fixed.
Fixed, which was the term she favored.
“I spoke with a doctor who thinks he canfixthat spasm in your left hand.”
“A specialist in Berlin has been able tofixthe legs of six children with palsy so they can walk unaided.”
“There’s a neurologist in Paris who has a medicine known tofixhow often the seizures happen.”
He developed a tic at the sound of that word, a little twitch in the corner of his right eye that would go off until he massaged it with tired fingers. He ached for her to love him in his own body—the one that trembled on good nights and sometimes fell unconscious with the bad ones. The body that didn’t allow him to run, but still got him from place to place. Raphael had been both cruelly mocked and gallantly defended by school children for most of his life, and never once had those jeers or praises stopped him from staring at himself in the mirror and trying to figure out what sort of person he was beyond that reflection.
In reality, he might never know. Not until he escaped the expectations of the people around him. Some teachers wrote him off, and others wanted him to climb mountains. His mother wanted him to metamorphize into a new being and ascend from the earthly prison created by one misplaced loop of umbilical cord around his neck as she was pushing him out.
Maybe, in reality, it was to alleviate her own guilt, but Raphael had stopped worrying about that by the time he was a teenager. The fact that he also liked boys became a lot more pressing, and for all that he had never hesitated to live as himself, it left him feeling cold and terrified. His life was already under a microscope simply by existing as a proud disabled person, and the world was hardly ready forthat, so adding more to who he was felt overwhelming.
It was likely why he had tripped head over heels for Chiara. Literally. A seizure had gripped him with not enough warning, and he fell into her arms before hitting the ground. Raphael’s epilepsy had been managed since he was a child, but they couldn’t erase the moments where he lost all control over his brain and body.
It felt pathetic at first, how he’d clung to her after, but the unrestrained goodness about her made the moment bearable. She’d laughed at his jokes, but not when he pissed his pants, and there was no pity in her eyes as she took the brunt of his post-seizure mood. He expected her to be kind, to help him clean up and get home, but when she showed up the next day with car keys dangling from her finger and the promise of adventure on her lips, he couldn’t say no.
His mother cried, and he laughed as he pulled away from their little apartment, and he had a feeling he wouldn’t see her much after that. He’d known Chiara seventy-two hours before she asked him to move in, and saying yes was the first time he leapt without considering the fall.
She was from Naples, but she’d been living in her apartment in Berlin, in Kreuzberg, for almost a year. Her neighbor was a small Turkish woman named Sima who adored Raphael beyond all reason and made sure his and Chiara’s little flat was always stocked with menemen, Sis Kebap, and Çig Köfte. The nights when Chiara wanted to run the streets, and Raphael couldn’t keep up with her, Sima sat with his head in her lap and stroked his hair and told him stories in her stuttered, broken German.
And he loved her.God, he loved her, like the mother who didn’t make him feel like he was choking on his own breath. He never wanted that to end, he wanted to live and die right there in that little flat feeling surrounded by warmth and acceptance that didn’t come with a price.
But he wasn’t foolish enough to think anything would last forever. Chiara came home that December and announced that her friend Anders had an apartment in Örebro for them. Just like the night she took him home, and the night she asked him to move in, he couldn’t tell her no. He had no attachments to Berlin, and he would miss his mother, but it was Sima who had given him a taste of what family was like beyond Chiara’s wild love for him, and losing her broke his heart.
The night before they left, he’d gone down to the florist in his wheelchair so he could save time, and he paid the owner’s grandson to fill her hallway with flowers and little cakes, and he didn’t say goodbye to her face because it would have been too hard. Escaping his mother’s love had already left vicious claw marks on parts of him no human could see, and he wasn’t sure he could bear more.
He knew he was starving for something, though. Familial connection and platonic love that most people were too afraid to give him because he was different. His body was his own, and he loved it, but he couldn’t change the way it held him at a distance. Chiara was one of the first that didn’t seem to mind him in spite of it. And he fucked her well enough that if she had doubted him at the start, he had long-since driven those fears off.
But there was an underlying current to their relationship, leaving spiderweb cracks in their love. He knew it would shatter. Quiet confessions deep in the night left behind a ticking clock, marking each second as the days raced toward their end.
“I want to ski,” she whispered in the dark as his fingers drew lines through the sweat pooled against the small of her back. He loved her clothed, but he adored her naked. She spread out on the sheets with her long limbs and thick dark hair, and she let his hands have access to the wide expanse of her warm skin. “I want to climb a mountain.”
