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The last time Roman walked home alone he was a kid. 16, 17—the summers run together in his head. Adolescent rebellion: fuck you, sending me to boarding school. I’ll walk my own way.
He was a fucking dipshit. His heels blistered penance and he squinted when the sun came up.
Not tonight.
Tonight he’s on a fucking victory march. Tonight he’s the conquering army wearing Tom fucking Ford and his feet are a thousand miles away from his head. Tonight he’s his father’s son.
He’s pleasantly drunk—the kind of drunk where his head is washed clean, floating, his body loose but his limbs still obedient to his will. He walks strong, his eyes flicking over his reflection in shop windows and the shiny sides of cars. His stomach makes one smooth line down from his chest, flat. Like maybe one day it won’t even be there anymore.
The truth about drinking on an empty stomach is that it feels good. The truth about shaking Matsson’s hand in the bathroom at his brother’s Freudian nightmare of a birthday party is that it felt fucking good.
Fucking tripped-out tech prick asshole.
The truth about Roman is that he’s better than any of them—better than Matsson, better than Kendall and his junkie girlfriend, better than Shiv with her pathetic little daddy’s girl act falling apart at her feet. He’s better than Tabitha, who hasn’t called him since their shitty last date. He’s better than Connor, not that anyone ever thought any different.
He can taste it, how fucking good he is.
He passes the Vessel, hangs left at a Whole Foods, and heads down Tenth Avenue. Everyone here is so fucking pedestrian, it almost makes him laugh. He can see the way they’re all tethered to something: phones, cars, paper cups over-full with gelato. They laugh, hand-in-hand, standing in the middle of the sidewalk or stumbling at the curb.
It’s disgusting. Roman winds his way between them and he doesn’t touch a thing.
***
There’s been an ache in his jaw, these past few months. It throbs when he’s least expecting it, a soft flush of pain that intensifies until it’s white-hot to the touch. Eventually it always recedes.
He never used to think that much about having teeth—it’s like they’re begging for his attention. He has 28 of them: a standard set, minus the premolar he lost at Argestes. But he makes up for it because he still has one wisdom tooth, nestled up high on the left side of his mouth.
He thought the pain was radiating off the wisdom tooth at first. He saw three different oral surgeons, got five X-rays, and submitted to a humiliating round of exams and bite tests. All of his results came back normal, whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean.
Normal normal normal. Fuck off now, please, Mr. Roy.
He thought about suing the guy who put in the falsie on his left side. He could swear it’s never been the exact right color, anyway. The guy probably did a shitty half-ass job, and now Roman’s stuck with this fucking pain in the shape of an open palm.
His lawyer said a damages case would involve at least three more people prodding around inside his mouth. Roman hasn’t called her back to confirm.
***
He’s drunker than he thought. Gin sloshing in his belly, hot and sour. He’s sleepy and stupid, his mouth going slack and his shoulders slumping even as he walks. In the nighttime, the city all runs together: streetlights washing out the stars, scaffolding indistinguishable from the buildings it’s holding up.
Roman looks around himself and sees the truth of it: none of this is real. The street is charcoal, the storefronts painted façades. The people around him are plastic dolls walking on squeaky hinges. Roman’s a tin man, shiny with his joints all greased smooth.
He checks in another store window. Jarring: he’s still not metal, but flesh. It’s all warm and pink, his cheeks drunk-flushed, sweat pearling on his forehead.
He keeps walking, his legs tiring, going more and more numb with each step. One foot leading the other, this body he carries with him through the world. It’s an old fruit, a peach fallen in an orchard. He’s gone bruised and mushy. He stinks of sweat and rot.
Something catches his eye: a flicker of motion, way down below him on the dirty ground.
A rat. Its fat furry body is crouched against the outer wall of a restaurant, naked tail trailing behind it. Roman stops walking, staring at the thing, his throat working as he tries not to gag. The rat is sniffing around, slinking over the cracks in the sidewalk and the dark splotches of fossilized chewing gum that a thousand shoes have beaten into the cement.
He can smell it. The thing stinks like piss, like desperation, like weakness. It stinks like a filthy animal that shits where it eats and can’t wipe its own ass. It’s all crusty unwashed fur, dipped in some sewer and left out to air-dry. It’s probably got at least three different liver diseases, drinking the water in a place like this. A denizen of the underworld, emerged just to check out the sights in front of this shitty chain pizza place. The world’s ugliest fucking staycation.
As though it’s heard his thoughts, the rat makes a sudden turn. It tips up its head, its twitching nose and beady liquid eyes and pale cupped ears.
Roman goes stock-still and the two of them stare at each other. Then the rat moves toward him, tentative, fur glinting in the city’s sickly artificial light. It’s slow at first and then faster—sniffing Roman out, seeking him.
He responds without thinking, one leg swinging out behind him and then forward to catch the foul creature square in its chubby side. It’s soft, like kicking a toy. Roman feels the give of its body even through the patent leather of his shoe. He shudders.
The body goes flinging out in front of him, a squeaking noise when its feet catch on the pavement and it rights itself. Roman clamps a hand tight over his mouth, his stomach churning. The rat scurries down the sidewalk, disappearing into a crevice between two storefronts, not even sparing a look back over its shoulder.
Roman stays rooted to the spot for a moment.
He’s always fucking hated rodents. This city is crawling with them—bleeding-heart liberal fucks won’t use the good poison, or maybe the whole place is just rotted out underneath. Climb up high enough and you hardly see them, but down here, on foot, they’re fucking everywhere. Every shadowy corner is a potential hiding place, every movement in the corner of his eye a foul truth he doesn’t want to investigate.
He gets moving again, jaw clenched. He glances over when he passes the place where the rat vanished, but he can’t see it any longer. A pathetic tiny thing gone forever, vermin that someone should have crushed or exterminated before it was even born.
He despises it.
***
Roman’s name is myriad: Rome, Romey, Ro-Ro, Romulus. A city, a diminutive, a brother-killer. He’s a phalanx, made up of the citizens of a fallen empire. He’s a butterfly no one can ever quite pin to the cork-board. He sticks himself and the sharp end won’t pierce through the mess of guts coiled up in his stomach.
He’s all shiny exterior, with suits and button-downs and combed hair, but inside him there are lesions he can’t scrub out. His limbs are heavy and his feet are calloused where they touch the rough ground. His guts are slick with dark blood and bile and his last meal transmutating into shit.
He’s swollen up with how much fucking grime he contains. How many different wretched people he has to be, how much room each organ takes up inside his chest and the heat that expands between his muscle fibers. It’s a wonder his insides haven’t come bursting out of him by now.
Roman is a hydra, a chimera, a freak of nature holding up Waystar on his shoulders. He’s a body and his body is a warning. He’s blood and his blood is ichor. He’s bone and his bones are wrought-iron, twisting up out of his mouth. He’s a son and a sign and salvation.
Let his brother wear the crown of thorns. Where Roman’s going, he won’t need the damn thing anyway.
***
He’s still picturing the rat when he steps inside a 24-hour bodega with a rusting coffee machine and entire aisles of junk food swathed in neon cellophane packaging. He could swear there are little rat whiskers brushing his ankles, tails trailing over his fingertips. He hears a squeak and whirls around, but it’s just some junkie’s half-shredded tennis shoe scuffing on the cracked tile floor.
He’s so fucking drunk. He can hold his liquor like a pro, but it’s hitting him in waves, seeping out of his deflated balloon stomach and into the sludgy subway network of veins studding his flesh. He can’t remember how many drinks he had, which means it was a lot, which means he was pissed about something.
What was he pissed about?
Kendall. Right. Patricide Ken Doll with his high-rise blowout party and his blue-blood coke-rat Barbie girlfriend. A toothless wolf howling into a storm, choking on a bowl of kibble.
Or maybe he was more pissed at Shiv. Shiv’s the runt, not Roman, and she’s been nipping at his heels since the day Kendall moved out for college and left his kid siblings behind. So now she wants to sit at the big-boy table too, as though it’s something she gets by virtue of her name and not something Roman earned by purging every last inch of his body of all the vile rot inside it.
He can’t fucking stand his siblings right now.
He’s in the middle of the bodega, holding a candy bar in one hand and a bag of chips in the other. He looks at the pair of pale hands floating in front of him, and the veins run blue-green under the flickering fluorescent lights. The store is spinning at the edges, and his stomach is so fucked right now, it’s burning. He shuts his eyes and the dizziness gets worse. He feels scooped-out.
He takes more and more food off the shelves: crackers, M&M’s, a jar of peanut butter, a juice-box—like he’s some kind of little kid. He looks at it all in his arms and wants to hurl.
His head snaps up at the sound of a throat clearing. It’s the owner, standing at the end of the aisle, arms crossed, glaring over at Roman and his cheap shitty snacks and his body swaying under the weight of it all.
Roman glares back, bleary. He tries to say something snappy but it’s like his tongue has calcified inside his mouth. He feels disgusting.
This is what he always does: he takes and takes and takes. Eats up the entire world on a dime, drinks it in so it gets past his soft achey teeth and into his stomach, and even then he’s never full. He could metabolize this whole bodega: turn it into more of himself, curdling inside his guts, miles of mountains of dense-packed dirt. A micro-universe of Roman Roy, and even then he would feel the hollowness of himself with each heartbeat.
He puts it all back, the crinkling chip bags and the juice and the candy, and leaves with an apple instead. The fruit is a dark crimson red, encased in a thick layer of gleaming wax, slippery in his fingers. It smells like the tobacco-and-chewing-gum miasma of the bodega. He’s never seen something so unappetizing in his life.
***
Tabitha’s place is somewhere around here. Roman’s not exactly sure where, because when they were together he’d just let his driver take care of the details. He’s still on Tenth, and these buildings look familiar, but they’re also blurring in front of him, splitting into two and three and then merging back together, and Tabitha doesn’t want to hear from him right now anyway.
Last time they had dinner together, she asked him what exactly he liked about her.
He told her about when he was a kid: the summer when New York City was overrun with cicadas, their buzzing wings and bulging red eyes and the crunchy exoskeletons they shed all over the bushes on the street where he grew up. They came from the ground, clawing out of the dirt, leaving little holes behind that showed where they’d been buried for the last however-many years. They blotted out the foliage and clustered on people’s cars and windowsills.
He told her about their screams, ceaseless tiny sirens coming from every direction, this underground city-state emerged only to fuck each other and then die. It was a noise so loud that Roman thought it would bore into his consciousness forever. It was the only thing the nasty fuckers cared about—this rabid need to get their little insect dicks wet. Crying out for each other night and day.
He told her about the stench they left behind after they died: putrefying insect flesh piled up on every street, their silenced bodies burrowing stink into his nostrils and the fabric of his clothes. He was soaked in sex and death for months: his first funeral, the end-of-the-world rager that a bunch of wailing, horny, doomed pests threw for themselves.
He pulled the wings off one of the cicadas that summer. He still squirms when he thinks too hard about it, the soft ripping sound as each iridescent sheath peeled off the hard black body, the bug wriggling helplessly in his fingers. Cicadas bleed a dark thin liquid, he learned. Their eyes stay the same when they bleed but their bodies feel different.
He remembers dropping the bug onto the ground, shocked, watching it crawl away. A dying thing he left even more dead than before. A corpse with a heartbeat. His fingers felt sticky all the way home.
He tried to explain the bugs to Tabitha the way they made sense in his head. She just tilted her head and he knew the words weren’t coming out right.
***
He’s been walking for about a fucking year. There are still people around him, but not as many as when he started. He can’t feel the sting where his shoes have blistered the delicate skin around his ankles. He can’t look up at into the night sky: he’s busy focusing on the sidewalk in front of him.
It’s a church that finally breaks his reverie. Big Gothic-style building, ugly as sin, lights blazing inside.
Roman fucking hates churches. They’re like hotel lobbies: places where he only hangs around if he’s at fucking gunpoint. A confessional booth or a café meal in public, it’s all the same to him.
The church is catty-corner to him. He stands there on the sidewalk, watching the church from across the intersection. A homeless woman ducks inside the place and Roman snorts. He’d rather sleep on a street grate than in a pew.
When the double doors open he catches a glimpse of the huge wooden Jesus hanging over the altar, candles illuminating him from below. Jesus is a body unlike any body Roman’s ever seen: long limbs, fingers draped gracefully against the crucifix, the curves of his hips meeting with the carved loincloth covering his dick. He’s not really a body because he’s the son of God: if anyone’s got a legitimate claim to the afterlife, it’s him.
The guy is tethered to this cross forever, in a shitty ugly New York City church. A human fate if ever Roman’s seen one, a pain he can never flee.
But then there are those stigmata, the blood pouring from his wrists, the grimace on his wooden face, and these are the things that make Jesus into something besides his body. It’s idol-worship, stringing him up like this, because what makes him real is the way he’s not really a body. The people who come here to pray are looking up at an abomination, a desecration, a hideous muscle-bound person, and they’ll never understand that it’s only his suffering they’re really after.
Here’s the problem: Jesus can only suffer because he’s in a body. So they’ve put him here, carved, a dead tree mimicking a living person, and he’ll bleed out until this church goes out of business, and he’ll never be able to save himself after all. He’s stuck, a solid hard thing indelibly existing, a corpse capable of feeling.
Roman’s gone way too far down this street, he realizes. He’s past Central Park, past wherever the fuck he thought he was going, and he’s still holding his apple and he’s still fucking wasted. He takes a right turn, away from the church, and then he heels off his shoes and the night air rushes in at the spots where the leather has shredded his skin and his socks are crusted with blood.
He takes a bite of the apple and the flesh gives way easy, mealy, the under-sweet ripeness of a Red Delicious. It’s still too much: he becomes instantly aware of that ache in his teeth again. The feeling radiates out from his bottom jaw, a sharp stab that jolts back to his ear and then down his spine.
He swallows a single mouthful of fruit-flesh and tosses the rest of the apple to the curb. He doesn’t need it anyway.
He eats fruit like they eat communion wafers back in the church. Something to clean out his insides, to make them so light and empty that one day he can leave them behind altogether. But tonight he’s already triumphant, and he’s coasting on booze and power, and if he eats he’ll shit it out later and he’ll know that it was lodged inside his intestines this whole time.
***
He walks more and then suddenly he knows where he’s been going this whole time, and he hates himself for it. He takes a few more turns and the street opens wide before him, towering trees planted at regular intervals, and there are no cicadas perched in their branches now. He stops in front of the brownstone and looks at the dark windows where someone else sleeps, and he can still taste the apple in between his teeth and feel the burn of ghost shoes against his heels.
Whoever lives here now, in this building with its restoration trim and the flowers on the stairs—whoever lives here probably has no idea that 20 years ago the place belonged to an asshole with three kids who would go on to rule the world. Roman’s not a king to these people. He’s nothing, an absence they don’t even think about.
His dress socks are sticking to the raw-rubbed spots on his heels. He peels them off and stands in the tiny yard, his bare toes in the grass, blood and pus dribbling from his ankles into the dirt. He’s sweating, dirty, drunk, wincing every time he tries to take another step.
If he stands here long enough and hurts bad enough, eventually it’ll stop. Eventually he won’t need this body anymore and his feet will hurt so much it’ll be like they don’t hurt at all.
Eventually he’ll learn how good this pain feels, and when he understands that, he’ll know he’s escaped the whole bind for good. Eventually he’ll be empty and he won’t be hungry but he won’t be full, either.
Eventually he’ll win it all for real, and then everyone will see him for what he really is.
There’s a fly nibbling at the open wounds on his ankles. It tickles and he twitches. Somewhere in the dark he hears the rustle of a creature he can’t see.
He’s not a creature because he’s standing here, tall. He’s not Jesus because he’s stuck here in this body, and he’s dirty, and his insides are diseased and he needs to pull them out and let them fester somewhere else. He’s not his father and he’s not anything special yet, but he will be. He spits into the dirt and clears the rest of the apple from his mouth. His teeth are painful and the fly is still eating him, gorging on his blood like he’s a dead thing already.
Let it, then. Let one dirty thing eat another.
His phone is still in his pocket. He calls his driver and goes home and showers the whole walk off his skin.
His father still hasn’t returned the voicemail Roman left him.