Brave New Worlds

features in Ebony, and that was it. It got so bad, that whenever Cyndi meant white, she'd say ‘the half of me I hate. '"
    "What happened to her?"
    "I think she gave up and became white. She wanted to be a lawyer. I don't know what happened to her. She got caught in LA. "
    I flipped over the plastic. There was a photograph of a mother and a small child. "Who's that?"
    "My son," said Royce. "that's his mother. Now she thinks she's a witch. " An ordinary looking girl stared sullenly out at the camera. She had long frizzy hair and some sort of ethnic dress. "She'll go up to waiters she doesn't like in restaurants and whisper spells at them in their ears. "
    "How long ago was this?" I felt an ache, as if I'd lost him, as if I had ever had him.
    "Oh ten years ago, before I knew anything. I mean, I wouldn't do it now. I'd like any kid of mine to have me around, but his mother and I don't get on. She told my aunt that she'd turned me gay by magic to get revenge. "
    "Were they in LA too?"
    Royce went very still, and nodded yes.
    "I'm sorry," I said.
    He passed me back the wallet. "Here. That's all of them. Last time we got together. "
    There was a tiny photograph, full of people. The black half. On the far right was a very tall, gangling fifteen-year-old, looking bristly and unformed, shy and sweet. Three of the four people around him were looking at him, bursting with suppressed smiles. I wish I'd known him then, as well. I wanted to know him all his life.
    "I got a crazy, crazy family," he said, shaking his head with affection. "I hope they're all still OK. " It was best not to think about what was happening outside. Or inside, here.
    It was autumn, and the sun would come slanting through the leaves of the woods. It would make a kind of corona around them, especially if the Boys were burning garbage and there was smoke in the air. The light would come in shafts, like God was hiding behind the leaves. The leaves were dropping one by one.
    There was nothing in the Station that was anything to do with Royce. Everything that made him Royce, that made him interesting, is separate. It is the small real things that get obliterated in a holocaust, forgotten. The horrors are distinct and do not connect with the people, but it is the horrors that get remembered in history.
    When it got dark, we would go back down, and I hated it because each day it was getting dark earlier and earlier. We'd get back and find that there had been—oh—a macaroni fight over lunch, great handprints of it over the windows and on the beds, that had been left to dry. Once we got back to the waiting room, and there had been a fight, a real one. Lou had given one of the Boys a bloody nose, to stop it. There was blood on the floor. Lou lectured us all about male violence, saying anyone who used violence in the Station would get violence back.
    He took away all of Tom's clothes. Tom was beautiful, and very quiet, but sometimes he got mad. Lou kicked him out of the building in punishment. It was going to be a cold night. Long after the Grils had turned out the lights, we could hear Tom whimpering, just outside the door. "Please, Lou. It's cold. Lou, I'm sorry. Lou? I just got carried away. Please?"
    I felt Royce jump up and throw the blanket aside. Oh God, I thought, don't get Lou mad at us. Royce padded across the dark room, and I heard the door open, and I heard him say, "OK, come in. "
    "Sorry, Lou," Royce said. "But we all need to get to sleep. " Lou only grunted. "OK," he said, in a voice that was biding its time.
    And Royce came back to my bed.
    I would hold him, and he would hold me, but only, I think, to stop falling out of the bed. It was so narrow and cold. Royce's body was always taut, like each individual strand of muscle had been pulled back, tightly, from the shoulder. It was as tense through the night as if it were carrying something, and nothing I could do would soothe it. What I am trying to say, and I have to say it, is that Royce was impotent, at least with me, at least in the Station. "As long as I can't do it," he told me once on the mound, "I know I haven't forgotten where I am. " Maybe that was just an excuse. The Boys knew about it, of course. They listened in the dark and knew what was and was not happening.
    And the day would begin at dawn. The little automatic car, the porridge and the bread, the icy showers, and the wait for the first train. James the Tape Head, Harry with his constant grin, Gary who was tall and ropey, and who