IIH: Picture Perfect - Chapter 4 (part 1)

Took a tiny bit longer than I wanted, and the second half is still up on the chopping block being reworked to get it where I want it, but here's the first part of the next If I'm Honest Chapter. As I think I said, there's another chapter mostly written but in need of some hefty editting to get it to fit in place with the restructuring of things, so once the next few thousand words of this are done there should be two chapters ready back to back. Aim is to have them and a really nice chunk of some more QT for you all this month :)

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Santiago, Chile

If I wanted to understate things, I’d say that Chile was a bit of a blur.

Part of me had hoped to get a little further afield than backpacking in the Americas, but Lydia had loved what I’d sent back from Colombia and wanted more like it, so we arranged for me to spend most of February working around Santiago. Not that it took much for her to twist my arm into visiting a place I’d wanted to see since I was a kid, nursing a formative queer crush on my Chilean teacher in 8th grade Spanish class. And professionally it somehow managed to be more than I hoped, as I attempted to throw a spotlight on the city itself rather than the Andes and surrounding country - a riot of concrete and glass splintered up through the mountains, climbing over the old colonial. I took my time wandering the different barrios, from the towering edifices of wealthy El Golf, to the diversity of Patronato, and the hot swathes of colour painted across the city, through Bellavista and Yungay. I was managing to still insist to myself that whatever else was going on in my life, my photography wasn’t going to suffer and somehow I managed to stick to that, fighting the distractions to take photos that stand well enough alongside any others I’ve taken.

But god, did Harvey try and distract me and, by then, I was actually starting to enjoy it.

I slept with more women in my first week in the country than I’d done in my entire life up to that point, some better remembered than others; a succession of wet lips and warm, olive skinned bodies, sweltering beneath ceiling fans in the lurid summer heat.

There was the manager of my hotel; and the street artist, selling paintings a couple of blocks over, who practically needed to be dissuaded from burying her face between my legs right there on the sidewalk. The owner of the tiny bookshop tucked away in the quaint Barrio Italia, her curses as pretty as the district’s streets; and the shy girl on the bus who turned wild the moment she had her third glass of merlot. I was even brave enough to test out a yoga class at the recommendation of one of my hook ups. And, while I ended up sharing a bed with two of my fellow students in the following weeks, it was the teacher who cornered me after my first session, feeling like something teenage fantasy as she peeled the sports bra away from her dark chest and fucked me possessively on the mat until she gushed. I’m pretty sure I barely slept, and after a few days my time there began to feel like a fever dream of work and sex, blistered in patches across my memory.

There was one day in particular however, somewhere in the middle of it all, that stands out more than the others. Even if I didn’t quite understand the little ways it would come to shape me at the time, or how a single picture I took while lost that afternoon would change my life months later. But it started with me finally managing my voice call with Anton.

It’s odd which little things stick with you. I can barely remember the name of the girl who was still sleeping in the ‘modern,’ whitewashed bedroom of my Airbnb apartment, but I can vividly recall the taste of the Brazilian coffee that, in hindsight, was probably the one thing still keeping me on my feet. I’d taken my macbook out onto the balcony as I nursed the drink, enjoying the brief period where the sun was up but the breeze was still cool. And, with the Andes visible in the distance, through the gaps between the tower blocks, I listened to Anton’s voice through an earbud in one ear, and the sounds of the city with the other.

“Wait…hold on a second Riley, you’re making it sound like Harvey’s a ‘she.’” A boyish face filled my screen, a look of amusement quirking at the jawline he’d still not quite grown into.

“Sure, given everything, why is that the weird part?” I asked.

We’d only just started talking, and I’d made a point of trying to hint at my pronouns for Harvey almost as soon as the pleasantries were out of the way, hoping it would go some way to breaking the ice. I’d spent weeks putting all sorts of weight on the conversation and now it was here I was desperately attempting to make it feel as casual as humanly possible, the same reason why I’d pulled my bare feet up onto the seat alongside me, as if my body could be tricked into thinking it was relaxed. Anton gave a thoughtful look, framed in soft focus by Alice’s living room, the reminder of their relationship feeling both a world away and still bruising. I don’t do homesick, but it felt a little more loaded than I expect he had intended.

“I don’t suppose it is,” he said after considering his reply. “It’s just I spent months with him and hadn’t even thought about the idea that he might be able to change his voice.”

“Her voice. Sexist much?” I joked, perfectly deadpan, hoping that Alice’s claims about how similar our senses of humour could be weren’t over-exaggerated. It took him a moment to catch on, but when he did he gave one of the easy laughs that my best friend had fallen for. Or been made to fall for, I still wasn’t completely sure.

“It does make sense. He-”

“She.”

“He,” Anton emphasised, pushing back against my interruption with a small grin of his own, “did make a point of trying to explain to me once how a lot of what I was hearing was being manifested through my own subconscious. He insisted that he had his own personality, but I never did quite figure out how much was coming from the bracelet and how much was coming from me.”

The more he spoke the more I could see why Alice would like him. He looked every inch like a college sophomore, with dark features originating from the Caucasus that even I could tell were going to be objectively handsome the moment they stopped seeming youthfully ill at ease with themselves. But there was a quiet, intense maturity to how carefully spoken he was and even with Harvey’s help the intelligence behind his brown eyes came out with a shyness that made him seem warm rather than arrogant. Apparently he’d dropped out of law school shortly before meeting Alice and was going back to university in the fall to study nursing instead, and it was hard not to see the idealism in him.

My cynicism was one of the things we didn’t share it seemed.

“What does he sound like for you then,” Anton asked, with both of us seeming to accept that we were each going to refer to Harvey however felt natural and allow the size of the bracelet’s personality to do away with any ambiguity.

“A bit like Charlize Theron with a hint of Emily Haines from Metric,” I replied, doing my best not to roll my eyes when I saw his blank look and realised he was too young to know the act I’d spent my own college life obsessing over. “Seriously? They’re a band from Toronto. You?”

“Clooney.”

It was my turn to laugh at how obvious that sounded, of course that was how Harvey sounded to a kid like him, full of casual, hetero assurance. “Ok, yeah, I definitely got the better deal there.”

A sound from inside the apartment drew a flicker of my attention, my lover from the night before awake and moving. It wasn’t much, but it was enough for me to glance down at the silver looped around my wrist, reminding me of the half dozen questions I knew needed to be asked and that Harvey could doubtlessly hear intolerably loudly. I pretended to pluck at one at random, but knew it was the thing I’d wondered the most since this had started.

“Where did she come from anyway?”

“Originally?” Anton straightened up a touch, his voice turning with the interest of someone who was trying to underplay how much time they’d spent on this exact question. “I tried my best to research, but you can’t really find books on this sort of thing on Amazon. I did some digging though, contacted a handful of historians and antique dealers. There’s a couple of Byzantine mosaics and paintings from the Renaissance where you could convince yourself he’s been depicted. Likewise there are some obscure diaries by a Swedish Prince in the 17th century that seem to have been written off as fictitious but that are definitely talking about him. I think on the whole he’s done his best to keep unnoticed though. It’s either that or he spent a lot of time in the far east and I never got as far as trying to learn Mandarin to figure things out. My best guess is that he really has been around since the early Roman Empire. Which would make sense given the inscription and who he claims to be the servant of.”

I reached down and ran a finger across the silver plate, and the etched words, ‘Solam Veritatem.’ Something about the bracelet felt plausibly ancient, and it would certainly fit with my impression of Harvey to take great delight in disappearing in plain sight like that for centuries at a time. She radiated smugness beneath my touch, letting me know she was awake, and listening.

“And you think Roman gods actually exist?”

It surprised me to hear myself earnestly make a statement like that out loud, but even I had gotten as far as reading about Veritas, the goddess of truth who Harvey claimed had created them. Even so, I got the impression that keeping me with only the most superficial knowledge of classics was how she preferred things and so far I’d been happy to oblige, as if doing so let me refuse to humour what should have been fundamentally insane.

The appartment’s patchy wifi connection hung for a second as Anton shrugged, forcing it to keep up with the sudden movement. “I don’t know. If you’d asked me before last year I’d have told you magic bracelets didn’t either.”

“So, what,” I replied. “She’s just been passing from one person to the next ever since?”

“I think so. Bringing a little truth into the world one person at a time as he might put it. Honestly, I can’t really rule out that it’s not something else, but I don’t have many more answers either so I decided ultimately it wasn’t important.”

My gut disagreed immediately. Of course it was important. Given what I was experiencing I couldn’t avoid that magic was real, no matter how much I wanted to, but there were all sorts of metaphysical implications tied up in the idea that she was sent by an actual fucking deity that weren’t so easy to just accept. But more than that I hated the lack of control that answer gave me. How were you meant to compartmentalise and plan around what was happening to you without knowing for sure where she’d come from or why she was doing it. Harvey wasn’t about to let that one go without comment however.

‘And this is why he’s smarter than you.’

I might have snarked back, but she’d chosen her moment to coincide with my guest wandering out of the bedroom. From the other side of the open balcony doors, I watched as she made her way into the kitchen wearing nothing but a pair of white panties retrieved off the bedroom floor. Her name was Charlotte (or Colette, or something close to it) and she was a tiny thing. An exchange student from France abroad on her own for the first time, with creamy skin and the prettiest accent to her Spanish, as well as barely there tits and cute, pink nipples I’d spent the previous evening appreciating at length. I’d been sure I was just an experiment for her, something she’d confirmed with Harvey’s honesty and that would normally have been a deal breaker for me long before we made it to bed, but then I suppose my attempts at being open minded were a sort of experimentation too. And I knew from the start she wasn’t The One.

But that wasn’t what caused my embarrassment as I looked at her again in the pale light of day. Rather it was the realisation that the mess of red hair and the smattering of freckles on her shoulders had reminded me of Alice. She turned, realising I was on a call and flashed me a smile rather than risking interrupting, but it took me a second to give her a wave in return. Shame’s never been something I’ve been great with.

“Still got company?” Anton asked.

I looked back to the screen, finding an expression that could only have come from someone who’d been through this before me, and I couldn’t help but give a knowing smile back.

“What gave you that idea…”

“Do you need time to sort things out?”

“No,” I said, grinning a little wider. “She can wait. I want to hear how you ended up with Harvey.”

The question was enough to quickly focus him again. “He belonged to a man named Deke before me, before him was a man named Christian and before that a woman named Eline, although I’ve never managed to track her down. Deke was a friend of my dad’s who apparently heard my love life was…less than how I would have liked.”

“And this Deke just passed the bracelet to you to fix things?”

Anton gave a stuttering nod as the connection lagged again. “I’m sure you have an idea of how Harvey does things by now. And you’re stuck with him until you figure things out together."

Charlotte finished fixing her coffee and retreated back towards the bedroom, and I told myself I had more than an idea of how Harvey worked, conceited enough to not realise how clueless I still was. What I couldn’t work out even then however was why someone would send something like Harvey to someone they’d never met.

“I thought you’d keep something like this a little closer to home than that.”

“You would think so, but it doesn’t really work like that,” Anton agreed. “Once Harvey finds you the person you’re meant to be with, and he will find them for you, the bracelet comes off and the last trick he seems to pull is leaving you knowing who you’re meant to pass it to next, if you’re honest with yourself. I’d never met Deke before, but apparently he’d heard enough from my Dad for Harvey to give him that little push in my direction. A little later I got a package with the bracelet, and an audio recording telling the story of his time with it. From the moment my turn was over I knew, somehow, that it was only ever going to go to you.”

Clearly I was enough of a tragic mess that even a total stranger could sense it.

‘I prefer to think you’re just in need of a little work,” Harvey corrected, internally, picking up on my thoughts. Although her reassurance only lasted so long. ‘But it wasn’t exactly hard to notice you needed help either.’

‘Wow, thanks,’ I thought back sarcastically.

‘Hey, it might be painfully slow, but at least we’re heading in the right direction now. You’re getting there.’

Was I getting there? I glanced in the direction of the bedroom and felt something I couldn’t quite put words to, and turned my attention back to Anton as I quickly did my best to try and ignore it.

“You just decided I didn’t need to know anything straight away?”

“Alice insisted,” Anton said, carefully, and for the first time on the call, he looked contrite over the situation he’d put me in. “She said you’d have gotten unreasonable if we’d tried to explain it to you too early.”

I had to concede that he was probably right, and that as much as I’d acted out in New York I’d have been even more obnoxious if I’d realised just how much had been pushed on me without being asked. At least now I could see some of the humour in it. “Dude, I tried to hack the bracelet off with a kitchen knife.”

He gave another short laugh. “I bet Harvey loved that.”

“I’ve not entirely ruled out that she’s not still punishing me for it somehow.”

Anton shook his head. “I doubt it, if he’s punishing you, you’ll know about it. You can trust me on that one.”

I gave a mental glance towards where Harvey was lurking at the back of my thoughts, probing to see if she wanted to elaborate, but got the gesture-less impression of a shrug in reply. ‘You don’t want to go there.’

It was casual, but in a way that only seemed to underscore just how little of her power she’d been showing me and behind it I thought I caught a glimpse of something much deeper that I could barely see the surface of.

I did push Anton for a few more details and found that his own path to Alice was far from smooth, but it’s his story to tell, not mine. And you aren’t really here to hear about his awkward self discovery and how he had to stop worrying about other people’s expectations, any more than you’re here to hear how Deke before him needed to stop being defined by his past. What’s more important is to understand how I still wasn’t quite ready to notice the lessons I could have taken there - about what sort of honesty Harvey’s actually here to help with, but there were a couple of extra points Anton did lay out for me a little more plainly as we talked.

Some were obvious, but there were also things I might have missed, such as how no-one seems to come to serious harm while bearing Harvey, with circumstances always seeming to bend around her until the job is done. There were no more guarantees than anyone else had the moment the bracelet came off, and it sounded like there were a couple of stories she’d told about the matches she’d found being painfully fleeting, but she’d never failed to get someone to that point first.

I was also surprised to find out just how much of a person Harvey could see and understand, as she screened possible partners. Far more than I’d realised. For some reason I’d been working on the assumption that she’d been viewing much of the world through my eyes, but Anton made it clear she was able to pick out details with a potential partner’s personality or beneath their clothing that might be of interest (or prove an issue), as readily as she could judge their hair colour. I could have done without learning this by discovering that in addition to the tattoos I already knew about, Alice was sporting one just below her pantie line that had particularly appealled to Anton, giving me a mental image that was accompanied by an uncomfortable warm flush.

However, the more our conversation drew on the more I considered Harvey, not as the bracelet but as a trace of personality all of her own. If what Anton was saying was right, she’d been labouring at the same mission for millenia, and I could only begin to imagine what she’d seen in that time. How much she’d watched the world change, who she’d met, or what any of this was like for her. But there was another question in particular I found my mind dwelling on more loudly than the others.

‘Do you ever get tired of it?’

Get tired of us. All of us - small, fleeting and imperfect.

‘Now THAT is an interesting question.’ I could practically picture some sense of Harvey leaning back as she responded, considering my thought with the slow deliberation of a barfly pausing to spare words between the slow sips of whisky and smoke. But I could also feel the smile in her voice, as if I’d finally cared to find something worth saying. ‘No. I don’t think I do. You’re wondering how I could ever put up with more than one of you, but lucky for me there’s only one of you, Riley. There’s only one of any of you. And I get to see the real you, in a way you rarely see each other, there’s a charm to that. One or two of you even bother to surprise me now and then.’

‘You don’t mind helping me then,’ I thought back. I’d always done my best to keep my self-doubt below the surface, negative thoughts always better left unacknowledged until the problems they caused became too big to ignore; but in the moment that old painful doubt that there was something about me unfit to be inflicted on others exposed itself. ‘I know I can be-’

Harvey didn’t let me finish. ‘-far more endearing than you realise. I like you Riley, so don’t tempt me to see how many other ways I can end that sentence for you.’

Her honesty went a little way to placating me, but what actually stopped me from pushing harder the idea I was probably terrible to be stuck with was noticing that Anton had stopped talking, and was watching me with a soft but intent smile. I must have looked like I’d spaced out entirely as I stopped to talk with Harvey and gave a quick apology, but Anton wasn’t about to take it either.

“It’s fine,” he replied, and it was only as he spoke that I realised how wistful his expression was. “You’ll miss him when he’s gone.”

Would I? I didn’t know if I found that hard or easy to believe. Instead, it simply made me realise that I still couldn’t picture in my head as to what my life would even look like for Harvey to be able to move on, and the lack of vision frustrated me like a shot I couldn’t quite frame.

Back inside, Maybe-Charlotte had long since finished fixing herself coffee, and was perched patiently watching me, still topless but with a now empty mug. I caught her eye and saw an uncertainty behind the playfulness, wanting some sort of acknowledgement of her first encounter with another woman before she could bring herself to leave.

“Maybe it wouldn’t be terrible to just be stuck with Harvey forever,” I asked, without looking back at the screen, holding up a finger to gesture to her I’d only be a minute longer.

“Maybe,” was all Anton said in return, and he let the tone of his voice say what his words didn’t.

After that he understood enough not to keep me any longer than it took for us to say goodbye. Heading inside, I found my redheaded french girl waiting for me and the taste of roasted coffee somehow made her lips seem even more appetising to my sleep deprived self than they had the night before. There was no tug from the bracelet as I led her to the shower, to eat her delicate little pussy out below the spray. Neither of us needed its help, and I think by then we’d had enough of its honesty to understand that this was a last bit of fun and affirmation before we both stepped out of each other’s lives.

She wasn’t The One, but if anything knowing that made it easier, letting me pretend that I might be able to continue living my life like this, half in focus.