Michael Pearson
I lived in a small town and attended a small school, in a suburb west of Sheffield, a place where people didn’t much care for novelty. My best friend was Marcus, the name I also hold. Having the same name was a curiosity at first and then a complication. A friendship so close can be like a stain smudged too far in the wrong direction. At least until that stain disappears.
“Two sides of the same coin,” Mum would say, serving us chips, peas, and gravy too many times each week. “They’re the same damn person,” Dad would scoff from the other side of the dining table, with grease filled fingernails. But I knew the truth. Marcus was far more than I could be on my own. He had a way about him, too much for most, dramatic, teetering on the edge of something, dragging me into realms I refused to explore.
He was also brave.
King Edward’s Secondary was a brown-brick construction with a concrete extension, the latter failing to imitate its former, and simultaneously dragging it unwillingly into a modernising present. The expansion accommodated the growth of social housing in its once electrically green vicinity. The rapidity of growth, like slow-freezing cells, degraded the quality of teaching provided; inimical to the regions education system.
The immutability of our connection began in physics class, where Marcus acted differently, and I felt unsettled, like the oddity of a sweater worn backwards. I knew how to dull my presence, whereas he became energised like excitable electrons.
On the last day I saw Marcus, I remember the painful scrapes of stool against scarred resin and crowds of Bunsen burners lining the desks like torch-bearing mobs. Lino print art spilled over from next door, their half-formed depictions like old scars.
Marcus watched Mr. Watson: the angle of Mr. Watson’s jaw as he asked questions, the shadow of a smile as he called our name.
We sat together, staring as Mr. Watson entered the room in those tight trousers and unbuttoned henley, pulled flat against his chest by braces. The top two buttons undone, the third straining alone to conceal him. I felt embarrassed for what I thought and what I expected others to know, as if my skin and skull had become translucent.
Mr. Watson was young and handsome, as I used to be, the kind of teacher girls whispered about and boys admired. He drowned in rumours of dates and sex; Miss. Blacklock, Miss. Dent and even Mrs. Pearce. Rumours and jealousy faded like entropy, before igniting anew with the next possibility, because possibility was yearning and everyone wanted to be Miss. Blacklock, Miss. Dent and even Mrs. Pearce.
I looked down at the metal desk, catching my scratched reflection: red cheeks and green eyes judging me. A stranger I would become accustomed to. Tapping my thigh in equidistant patterns of four helped in moments like these; the belief that I could control the molecules inside and around me. And still, I tap and try.
As I blushed, the energy in the classroom transformed; students simmering above flame, inevitable scalding.
“Today we’re learning about the basics of quantum physics,” Mr. Watson said. “No matter how strange, these are rules we all have to submit to.”
He explained entanglement, the inextricable links between one thing and a distant other, through skeletal sketches; two stick figures, blue dots, joined by arrows depicting connection, encased in oblongs pulled taught like elastic. He taught us about the devastation of quantum weapons. The impossibility of quantum conveyancing. Quantum tunnelling. “The space between our molecules is relative,” he beautifully elaborated. With infinity, anything is possible. Atoms aligned in perfection can slip through the earth like a ghost marrying purgatory.
Lingering at the back, James Pratt writhed with ravenous intensity, seeking his mark. James was as tragic as he was vicious, his atrocious beliefs inherited from his father, and likely his father before that. His uniform tired and stained around the collar, hair in hopeless clumps, slicked with grease older than him.
I caught his glance, but had learned to look away. Marcus sat upright, proud, distracted by attraction.
Whilst I hid my face, I glimpsed Marcus pursuing Mr. Watson’s eye, attempting to entangle him. And all Mr. Watson offered in return was a nod and a semi-concerned look, like any good, attentive teacher. But Marcus, he held his hand up. He wanted more.
Mr. Watson approached with his earthy scent, like petrichor and static.
He rolled a marker in his large, veiny hand, black hair coaxing the edge of his sleeve and ran his finger across our answers. The page lifted with his humid skin and each time he gently patted it back down.
Marcus’ answers were correct, they always were, but he waited, his affable grin poised to receive a smile, a nod, a well done. It went unnoticed, or unwanted, to Mr. Watson. But not to James. No longer able to curb his enmity, James shouted.
“Faggot!” The word clogged my throat with its vitriolic intent. A word that wants to wound and sever.
Marcus withered, I hid behind him, smaller and stiller. My care to behave normally, not to exchange energy with James, extinguished me. Marcus was already embroiled.
“Fag!” James called again with that suffocating tone, as though battling excesses of saliva in his eager mouth.
“James! That is enough. Outside, now!” Mr. Watson, polite Mr. Watson, gentle and accommodating, his voice punched against his insides.
As James left the classroom, he seemed to drag the charged air with him, remnants caustic against our skin. Waiting for Mr. Watson to turn away, he subtly mouthed curses through the gap in the swing doors, always present.
“Are you all right?” Mr. Watson asked.
“Yes,” I said, speaking for Marcus.
As Mr. Watson walked away, I beckoned him with a stare, a twitching finger. No, I wasn’t ok, we were not ok. So, I tapped. One two three four.
“I hate James,” Marcus said, into workbook. “Why does he hate us?” He felt too close in that moment, emotion that exposed my own. An atomic bond between us. I wanted to escape.
“You’re too much sometimes,” I blushed again, the abhorrent sensation of desperate truths through my skin.
Tears, whose I do not know, dampened the books below us, blurring the edges of Marcus’ perfect answers until his quantum calculations dissolved. I promise, I wanted to hold him, to say it would be ok.
But I did not put my arm around him, I did not rub his back, or dry his tears, defend him or expose myself. I let the uncertainty seethe. Our knotted loss.
***
That afternoon, after school, we walked home together. Just like every other day, we left quickly, avoiding James and anyone like him.
Our pace was slower than usual. Marcus walked in strangely predictable lines, while I stared at the ground. My too-much Marcus did not speak and for a fleeting, awful moment, I hoped he’d vanished.
The regret of desiring ill for others only ravages when it transpires.
To soothe my guilt, I spoke, “So, that quantum stuff…” Shifting awkwardly along the path. “The way we’re barely made up of anything.” And Marcus just ummed. I looked up and saw the brittleness of his expression.
“Do you think it’s possible? To slip away, like Mr. Watson was saying?” He finally said.
I could only shrug for the melancholy in his voice and answer with something extraneous. “Let’s hope it happens to James.” I said, trying to laugh, spitting air through my nostrils.
I nudged him, a sudden point of connection, and he nudged me back, a clunky, fleshless bond like two stickmen trying to hold hands.
We arrived at my home; row after row of red bricks, each one conforming to the next, discerned only by their faults. The terracotta roof limp, wounded by shots of piebald moss. Suicidal clumps polluted the gravel below, bird-pecked, shrivelling in view of their mourning brethren. The house repeated shoulder to shoulder, an oblivious row of copies, wanting nothing more than anonymity.
I opened the front door, started for the stairs, Marcus followed, and shouted something mundane to Mum, the words rote and ritual, as we ran upstairs.
My room documented the creation of me, slices of existence moulded through intention or reaction. Posters of He-Man, Thundercats peeling and torn at the corners, framed by browning tape and ghosts of banned blue tack. The cartoons maturing in unheard whispers, becoming boy groups, rock bands, films I was too young to watch.
“Do you really think I’m too much?” Marcus said.
Already reclusive at my desk, manoeuvring school books to suggest business, I silently urged him not to ask me again, to avoid the anguish of answering. I remembered Mr. Watson’s words on quantum entanglement and foolishly tried to coerce Marcus’ atoms, to stop the conversation.
“Marcus, do you?” he said, as I opened my notepad to Mr. Watson’s homework, Marcus asking again, his voice paling with my rejection as I tried to read the title. Explain the key components of, Marcus called repeatedly, explain the key components of quantum, Marcus, Marcus he said over and over, components of quantum conveyancing, as I began to scrawl sketched oblongs and circles, and stickmen.
“Marcus?!”
“They’d leave you alone if you weren’t so obvious!” I snapped, justifying my own painful quest to hide and initiating the degradation of our impermanent bond.
How could I say that to him? My Marcus?
At the edge of my view, I saw half of Marcus approach the far wall. I turned, walked over and sat on the rug to face him, like I knew this was it.
“Marcus?” I said.
“I wonder…” His voice muffled, forehead pressed against the wallpaper and hands hidden in his pockets. “If I push hard enough, do you think I’d make it through to the other side?”
“You’d slip straight into rock.” I said, after deliberating his intent. My voice sounded off, I remember that, it sounded wrong, deep and stern. “That wall is built into the cliff.”
“So, I’d be buried in rock?” he said.
I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to. I imagined him there, disconnected, me protected by the veil of inconspicuous movements, no longer a target.
“Do you ever…” I started and then paused when he turned and looked my way. “Do you ever want to just be the same as everyone else?” An odd expression transformed his face. Not quite a frown. Not exactly censure. But something his muscles lacked the experience to form. An expression I honed in years to come. In that moment, he was no longer my too-entangled Marcus.
“Do you?” I was too young, imagining that we would be ok, that we would remain. He just nodded. “Sometimes I want to be like the rest of them,” I said, forcing myself to go on. “It would be easier.”
Marcus remained silent, though his expression resolute.
“Sometimes I pray when I go to bed that I’ll wake up and be the same as everybody else. I’ve been practicing. Sitting like them, talking the same. And I’m getting better at it.”
His aspect so serious, carved from rock, not Marcus-like at all, but he didn’t disagree. Of course, he knew.
“Maybe that’s best, right? Being normal?”
We trembled. Oscillating particles working toward separation.
His face was already blurring, a smudge, as he turned away. Once again, he leaned his forehead against the wall, as he pushed hard and harder still.
“What are you doing?” I asked, though I knew, wishing in some way this would all stop. He tilted forward, leveraging his weight, held his hands to his side, his head bearing the increased pressure.
“Stop it,” I said, though I did not move to impede him. “Please.” Too quietly to be heard.
Marcus, the novelty, the complication. A stain smudged too far in the wrong direction. Inseparable. Until he disappeared.
His body convulsed. Shivered. I felt a wave reverberating, like stools scraping the floor, atoms resonating through bone, muscle, and sinew, like snapping cartilage.
His arms dangled as I manoeuvred to his side. And his face. God, his face. What could he see, smell? Half-submerged into the wall from his crown to the tip of his chin. I heaved, hesitated, scared that touching him would infect me, pull me in too.
Inflating and emptying, his chest and lungs seemed to still function. Initially a comfort, he was breathing, it made sense. This was okay. Must be okay. But no, dreadful anticipation seared my skin. He was suffocating.
This was my best friend. I grabbed his left arm and pulled. Young and weak. I wanted more than some quantum connection. I wanted Marcus back.
His body swung mournfully towards me, neck bending, his face trapped. Until he almost snapped. His limbs writhed, shoes squeaking against the wooden floor, running frantically. One arm clawed at the posters, whilst I pulled and realigned his spine. Frenzied sounds left my mouth, a jumble of harsh eruptions absent of consonants, trying to cry, panic, lost in swallows of guilt and yearning, filled with the dread of what I had summoned.
As he flailed his arms and legs, I had to try something. So I pushed.
The soft spot of messy hair on the back of his head flattened like cool moss. His head slipped effortlessly into the wall, not with the resistance I had expected. Then his shoulders. His back. Hips. Thighs. Mollifying my dread, like every touch freed him, until only his feet were visible. Our feet, the same size. He was wearing my shoes. So, I pushed them too, my palms on his dirty soles.
The last of his molecules slipped through the wall, I whispered goodbye and the chill and autonomy of loneliness inhaled me.
***
The wall stood empty, stripped of colour. Haunted. Shredded posters lay on the floor, in pieces; a face, a thigh, dismembered. I thought I saw his outline, a blemish in the wallpaper, like a lightbulb glimpsed for too long. But as my eyes adjusted, it dissipated. He was gone.
Tapping my thighs in equidistant patterns of four, I stared at the wall, waiting for isolation to speak, to feel difference and integration, but it never came.
Entanglement doesn’t require proximity. The space between our molecules is relative, Mr. Watson had explained. With infinity, a vitriolic word, desire, energy is only transformed and never destroyed.
And then there was him, every day since thinking about him–
Into the Earth. Endlessly falling. Still breathing. God, I hope still breathing.
Now, here I am, still connected, but always rejecting.
Amongst these rows of faulty red bricks, unseen.
He is there. And only I remain.
#
Michael Pearson is an emerging author of absurdist fiction featured as one of the most influential LGBTQ+ people in 2023s Bristol, UK’s Pink List. He is a mental health professional, with publications in academic magazines, and fiction publications including the BBC, Hungry Shadow Press, The London Independent Short Story Prize, The Other Stories, and long/shortlists including the Retreat West Novel Competition, the South Warwickshire Literary Festival, the Hastings Literary Festival, the Exeter Short Story Competition, the Wells Literary Festival, two Writer’s Digest honorable mentions, and the Uncharted Cinematic Short Story Competition, with more publications to be announced soon.