The Playing Field

Soldier and Boy Under a Tree

On the willow oak under which Mikkel and Magnus were lying one summer afternoon there rained down every second on every square centimeter of long sunlit leaf a quintillion photons.
—A thousand quadrillion photons.
—What's it look like as a number? Mikkel asked. And what are those midges doing, bouncing up and down in the air and turning like a wheel?
—They're happy, Magnus said in a drowsy voice. You write quintillion with a one and eighteen zeros. That's nothing compared to the neutrinos falling through the leaves rather than onto them, through us too, and the dithering gnats. They are so little that to them the spaces between the leaf's atoms is like from here to the moon.
—Midges. Gnats are bigger. You think they're happy, like us?
—They have minds. They're frolicking in existential ecstasy, dancing and spiralling. The old Greeks put mind everywhere, as things have to know how to be. This tree knows how to be a tree. It eats light and drinks water. It breathes out what we breathe in.
—And breathes in what we breathe out.
—It makes seed. It has gender. Like a boy I know. We need to give you a haircut. A corporal asked me who the pretty girl is in such short pants who waits for me when I go off duty.
—The green-eyed corporal with carroty hair? He winks at me.

Room with Afternoon Light

Magnus was talking about fields of greengold algae in western Australia three million five hundred thousand years ago and meadows of cyanobacteria in Cuba, Siberias of bluegreen organisms neither plants nor animals, hating oxygen, alive to carbon monoxide and the archaic light that sifted through white mist, tundras of red bacterial gulfs of sulfur and mud, silent as time.
—Golly, Mikkel said from his pallet on the floor, around which his comicbooks were spread, and elementary botany text, sneakers and jeans.
—This was the old life that gave, still gives, all other life its being, for these animal plants or vegetable animals, learned how to eat light and by photosynthesis convert themselves into carbohydrates exhaling oxygen. They were there for a million years, alone, the only beings in the whole of creation.
—Breathing oxygen into the air.
—What we call disease may be this old anaerobic order of things, on which we will be dependent forever.
—How can you stand me, moving in, sort of, like this, with my pallet and my corner, my place, which I keep neat, don't I? What kind of god would create this purplesilver gunk and lay it down for a foundation, one million years, to get things ready for Silurian catfish the size of submarines, the silly dinosaurs, and us? You can throw me out, you know.
—The kind of god who did. I don't want to throw you out.

Sleet Against the Windowpane

The first night Mikkel slept on his pallet in Magnus's room he rolled himself naked in two blankets and was sleeping soundly at six the next morning. Magnus put a hand on his forehead to see if he had a fever. Mikkel opened his eyes and smiled.
—Why would you think I had a fever?
—I don't know. It's a thing you do with children. They seem to get every disease in the book, whooping cough, measles, mumps, asthma. Nature trying to see if you're tough enough to make it. Are you used to sleeping on hard floors? And where are the pyjamas we bought you?
—I didn't want to wrinkle them.
—Winter's here. Sleet. Ice mush. Tonight you sleep in the bed with me. In your pyjamas.
—Something, Mikkel said with his raisin roll and coffee, to think about all day.

Elbow and Knees

Magnus's experience of sleeping with friends was of two hot naked bodies in a sleeping bag designed for one, comfortable because companionable, tolerable because sensual, delightful because naughty, and sleep was not why they were there.
—We're strangers, you know, he said to Mikkel bathed and in his pyjamas. That is, though we're making friends fast, we know very little about each other. I don't see why you should spend the night on the hard floor when there's the bed.
—I squirm, Mikkel said. Do I have to keep away from you?
Magnus, sitting by the last of the fire, still dressed in fatigues and heavy military socks, patted the hearth rug for Mikkel to sit beside him.
—You've run away from wherever you belong, right?
—I thought you said you weren't going to ask questions.
—No questions. You don't know who I am, either.
—You're a soldier and my friend, and last summer you were some kind of scoutmaster who was not like our keeper. You were different.
—I'm a soldier doing my national service for a year, out at the Fort. I'm also at the university, where I'm going back when I've served the Queen. These quarters, officers' housing back a century or so, are for married personnel, though nobody likes them, they're too much like a movie set for Napoleonic times, with their old fireplaces and archaic plumbing. This big room is actually not part of a unit, and was being used for storage when I asked to have it. So here we are.
—Ha! Mikkel said, putting a finger to Magnus's cheek.
—You look great in your pyjamas, and with a haircut. And smell like a bar of soap. I'll find a clean T-shirt, which is what I sleep in. Is that OK with you by way of protocol?
—What's that, protocol?
—The way things are done. The way two people, or lots of people, agree on how to act toward each other, speak, dress.
—Protocol, protocol. It sounds like a medicine. And protocol is what you wear to bed. Your underpants are littler than mine, I mean for somebody your size. I don't know what I mean.
—Buy you Mikkel-sized underpants tomorrow.
Mikkel ran his hands along the clean sheets and felt his pillow, furtively watching Magnus taking off his briefs and pulling on a T-shirt.
—I almost got up last night to pick you up off the hard floor and stick you in the bed, but thought it might scare you. I also figured you were proving something, and that you needed to prove it. And now we have to learn to sleep together. We can't be in the same bed without rolling against each other, so let's get used to being close, to be comfortable about it.
Mikkel wriggled closer, feeling Magnus's legs with a foot, putting splayed fingers out to explore. Magnus put an arm around his shoulders and a hand on his small butt. Mikkel snuggled tighter, nudging Magnus's chest.
—You're not edgy that we're being puppies in a basket?
—Not me.
—What are you doing, scamp?
—Taking off my pyjama pants, to be like you. Magnus with a long reach turned on the table lamp.
—What kind of knot is this you tied in the string?
—Pull both ends and watch it fall apart. I'll teach you lots of knots. And the protocol of shed clothes is that you fold them, like this, and put them where you can find them. Not wad them up and throw them on the floor. We're soldiers.
—I'm a goof.

Peapods

Magnus and Mikkel eating peapods from a paper bag.
—The animals, where are they?
Mikkel thought about this, rubbing his nose with a knuckle.
—No polar bears on the equator, no giraffes in the Faeroes, is that it?
—Tigers in New Zealand?
—Where's New Zealand?
—Maoris, mountains, one island north, one south. The atlas we bought is, I know, terrific for keeping your drawings in, but it also has maps.
—Can we go and stand on the Arctic Circle? There's a picture of that, scouts who look like Swedes, camping on the Arctic circle.
—Tomorrow. Today we're doing laundry, buying groceries, looking in at a bookstore, maybe a good long walk out to Ordrupsgaard.

Sunday in the Park

—With friends, real friends, Magnus said, the space they fill belongs to them both, as at home in the other's space as in their own. I don't think you got a burn. You're going to radiate heat for awhile, but this lotion should soothe the more scorched parts. Do I include your piddler, or is that reserved space?
Grin and unbelieving look.
—Smear me everywhere. I'm cooked. I get to do you next, right?
—When I was a Scout shining with industrial-strength testosterone and full of sperm, we explored each other in honest Danish ways, wore our buddy's underpants, sniffed, licked, and hugged. We were companionable animals.
—Your briefs would fit me like socks on a rooster. I can wear your sweatshirt. It smells like you.
—You didn't get on with that bunch you were with last summer, did you?
—They picked on me. I heard what their teacher said. He said they had to make allowances for me as I'm lower class.
—Yes, but does this paragon of the consuming classes have a handsome soldier smoothing cucumber almond salve on his legs and bottom, and has he spent all day with his best friend, and has he eaten a banana split and a sausage and pepperoni pizza at Mama Gina's?
—Nah. And neither are the snot-nosed sissies I was with. I quit talking to them after awhile. They said back to me whatever I said.
—Other people, Magnus said. That says it all, other. We have to look around and find the people we're really kin to. They're only rarely our family.
Mikkel looked at Magnus out of the side of his eyes.
—Leonardo da Vinci, Magnus said, the painter and inventor and the most intelligent man in all history, owned and operated a boy your age, and liked him so much he made him a bicycle three hundred and ninety-eight years before the next boy had one.

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