a small live letter that says only Stay

Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at https://archiveofourown.org/works/35755456.
Fandom: Greater Boston
Relationship: Leon & Michael
Rating: Teen and up
Warnings: some sidelong discussions of alcoholism.
Published 2021-12-17 for the 2021 Yuletide exchange
Words: 3,182

Dear Leon: I have long been a passionate runner, but my knees are starting to fail me. My doctor recommends switching to a less strenuous form of exercise. I can’t abide the thought of being an old lady in a pool aerobics class. What physical activity can I use to channel my physical, spiritual, and erotic energy that won’t disrupt my chakras?

Michael squeezed his stress ball. A lot of his letters were like this: the writers asked him questions about quotidian topics, sometimes even topics on which they’d already consulted an expert, and then they dressed the question up with some allusions to spiritual matters. ThirdSight didn’t really offer much to help—nobody here was trained in psychology, or in any kind of counseling with more rigorous professional standards than tarot reading. Dipshit probably knew something about chakras, but Michael didn’t want to talk to him, and anyway it wasn’t really important to the question. What the letter-writer was worried about, obviously, was getting old.

“Dear Aching in Arizona,” he tried. “Your chakras are going to be fine.”

“Dear Aching. Some anthropologists theorize that humans evolved to be long-distance runners. If you’re a fan of This American Life, you might be familiar with the piece they ran called ‘Running After Antelope.’ The journalist who reported it published a book by the same name. He traveled to Africa—” Michael thought for a moment, almost opened a browser window to look something up, and caught himself at the last minute to put [find out where in Africa] in brackets in his draft. “The point is, what have you been running after? Is it possible you’ve caught it, and that’s why it’s time to stop running?”

Michael stopped for a while to admire that insight, and then he selected the whole paragraph and deleted it. Nobody wanted to read his rehash of a story he heard on a podcast, and anyway, it was an answer to a different question from the one he was asked.

“Dear Aching,” he tried again. “Was running good for your chakras in the first place? You say your knees are starting to fail you, but that ‘failure’ sounds like a euphemism. I’m guessing that you’re in pain, and that it’s worse pain than you already knew from having been a runner for many years. Maybe you should listen to what your knees are trying to tell you.”

That seemed like a potentially valid line of analysis, and it framed the question in a way that he could put to the I Ching. Michael tossed the coins a few times and looked up the resulting characters. It wasn’t an obviously helpful reading, yet, but he’d figure out how to apply it, and then he’d go back over the whole response with a fine-toothed comb to make it sound like Leon.

Leon had always given such clear, concise advice. Michael could never tell how much time he spent coming up with it, but by the time Leon offered help, it was thought-out, personalized, and a few sentences long at most.

Michael wasn’t like that. Michael was too sententious, too up in his head, too distractible. He went into editing and publishing because he liked writing; control was something he had to learn. Leon had been the only person Michael knew in the publishing industry who showed basically no ambition to write his own work. He didn’t talk about having a novel draft in his desk drawer or under his childhood bed. He had loved editing down.

Leon was happy when Michael landed his first editorial job, mostly because it was what he wanted and he was visibly proud of himself. But within months, Leon could tell that Malatesta’s Mystery Magazine wasn’t all that Michael had hoped. He spent most of his workday managing picayune aspects of the publication that were too small for the managing editor to deal with—correspondence about republication rights, wrangling the layout software so the page numbers aligned correctly, updating the master list of which authors they had published and when—and evenings and weekends reading the slush pile. All of that would have been fine, but the stories that the magazine published were so pedestrian, a revolving door of the same three basic plots by authors who’d been rejected at the bigger publications. (Michael was conscious enough of company loyalty that he didn’t openly call them better.)

Leon made a small listening sound and rooted around in his French fries. He liked eating the longest ones first, but he didn’t go quite so far as to sort them. He would have, if they came in a container better suited for it. Leon knew where he could go for fries in tidy containers. But that was less important than being there for Michael, so instead they came here, a diner with late hours and no liquor license where they could linger for a long time over a couple orders of fries and Diet Cokes.

The two of them probably would have been in touch with more of their college friends if they were willing to go to bars, but Michael wasn’t, so they didn’t, and they weren’t.

Leon paused to let Michael say more if he wanted to, but when the silence lasted for a few moments he asked, “When’s the last time you put out an issue you were proud of?”

Michael was out of Diet Coke. He sucked up some pebble ice through his straw and thought about it. “A couple months ago we ran a good one. I think the author could have gotten more money for it somewhere else, but it was one of her first publications so maybe she didn’t think she had a shot at the bigger places.”

“It sounds like the problem isn’t the work,” Leon said. “It’s that you can’t convince yourself the work has value.”

Michael raised his eyebrows. “So, what, publishing mystery fiction isn’t worthwhile, but Trucker Monthly is?”

Leon didn’t rise to the bait. “Publishing mystery fiction you care about is very worthwhile. Publishing anything you can’t respect is just sad.”

Leon wasn’t sure what that meant, but it was the kind of statement he generally didn’t try to argue with. When Malatesta’s eventually announced their closing, Michael announced that it just went to prove he wasn’t doing anything worthwhile, and he hadn’t been for years. Leon was right, as usual.

Leon tried to explain that his own rightness had nothing to do with it: Michael had been right about the magazine, and he deserved a better place to apply his talents. But that message, or the idea that he had any talents to speak of, was something Michael never seemed to believe.

Everybody from the Emerson master’s program in publishing eventually faced the question of whether they were going to move to New York.

“There’s publishing in Boston,” Leon always said, when Michael asked him if he was going to move. “I see no need.”

“There’s some publishing in Boston,” Michael said peevishly. He had come by Leon’s place for lunch and found himself once again complaining about work, his love life, and his parents’ expectations. As per usual, it all circled back around to his indecision about what he was doing with his life. Leon was enrolled in the master’s program because he thought it would increase his chances of a good job, but Michael had jumped right into the job market after undergrad and was having a rough time with it. He was now lying on his back on Leon’s rug, because Leon, unlike every other guy in his early twenties that Michael knew, both owned a vacuum and used it. Leon was sitting in his chair with his arms folded on his desk, looking down at Michael like a therapist might look at a difficult patient. At least, that was the impression that Michael got. He had only seen therapists on TV. “But there’s a limit on how far you can go. Do you really want to put a ceiling on your career by staying here?”

“The book industry,” Leon said, “is in a constant state of crisis, and popular print magazines keep closing. I’m not particularly interested in a career of chasing highs that can quickly become crashes.”

Michael huffed out a frustrated breath. He liked Leon a lot, but sometimes, when they talked about important things, he couldn’t shake the feeling that Leon was sure he knew the answers already and was just waiting for everybody else to catch up. “What are you doing in this program, then? Why didn’t you study something safe like engineering or medicine or law?”

Michael craned his neck and tried to examine Leon’s face. “What makes you so sure? I think you could have been an excellent lawyer. Analyze the rules, explain how they work. And there are lawyers literally everywhere, so we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“Leon, Leon, Leon.” Michael sat up and waved his hands in the air. “You’re the smartest person I know. If you don’t think you should be a lawyer, then don’t.”

“There’s so much more to it than enacting rules. And people always thought I belonged in the sciences, because they think everything is certain there, but it’s not really like that, and for those careers you have to be willing to move—” Leon seemed way more defensive than was warranted by anything Michael had said. Michael scrambled to his feet and put his hands on Leon’s shoulders, thinking, not for the first time, that he should learn the correct thing to do for someone on the verge of panic.

What could he say? “You don’t have to do anything,” he said, a bit desperately. Leon closed his eyes. “You can work in whatever industry you want. Doing whatever you put your mind to. You can change careers later, if you want. You can try the publishing thing. I might just stay here, and we’ll still hang out, and we’ll be so good at our jobs that they’ll move the center of the publishing industry to Boston anyway. And you can be near your family, I know that’s important—”

Leon exhaled shakily and opened his eyes, looking embarrassed. “You can stop. I’m fine, stop, stop.”

“In Boston? I mean, maybe. Probably. New York is so expensive, anyway, and if you’re staying here then who would I get an apartment with there? Plus—”

“Okay.” Leon was so smart, even when he was on the verge of falling apart. “I’ll try to be more concise next time.”

“That’s not…” Leon looked like he wanted to say something else, but it wasn’t forthcoming.

Michael felt awkward now that he was standing over Leon, and impulsively he took Leon’s hand and hauled him to his feet. If Leon needed him to be concise, he could be concise. So far that was the only guidance he had about how to help at times like this. “Yes,” he said. “I’ll stay.”

The thing about Michael was, he was there when you needed him. Leon had more interests in common with other people in their freshman class, shared more classes with other people, lived closer to other people. But a lot of them didn’t even seem to notice that Leon was trying to be friends.

Michael missed their only shared class sometimes because it was at 9 a.m. and he’d been out too late the previous night. His personal grooming was negligible even by college standards. When he talked about himself he had the habit of punctuating whatever he said with a high, nervous laugh like he was just guessing, and pretty sure he was guessing wrong, even if all he was talking about was the kind of pizza he liked. He seldom talked about himself at a deeper level than that. He could hold forth on other topics with a shocking degree of eloquence—he was the first person Leon had met at college who had not only read Crime and Punishment but formed a bunch of passionate and strikingly non-obnoxious opinions about Raskolnikov’s philosophy. But Leon had no idea what Michael’s family was like and wasn’t even sure where he was from.

Nevertheless, there were days Leon was overcome with loneliness, and too embarrassed to call home and admit as much to his family—when he knew Nica would ask for something exciting that had happened to him in college, and he wouldn’t have a single answer. On those days he could call Michael. And Michael, who didn’t have a cell phone yet, and who seemed like an alarmingly disorganized person in general, nevertheless checked the voicemail on his dorm room phone every time he returned home, and he always called Leon back. Michael kept a whiteboard on his door as if he were an RA or something. The other residents of his floor often covered it with dick jokes, but when he went out he left a note on the board to say where he was going. A few weeks into the semester, he’d started explicitly addressing these notes to Leon. Leon: Went for sushi round the corner. Join us if you’re free. Leon usually didn’t go looking for him; he was afraid that if he tried to show up unannounced for sushi, the group would be done eating by the time he got there, and possibly would have moved on to sake for the table (Michael had a friend who always sprang for that kind of thing) or, worse, they all would have moved on to a bar. Leon didn’t really want to look in on that part of Michael’s life. He didn’t know how he would handle a drink more substantial than the small glass of wine he sometimes got slipped at family Christmas. It was enough to know that Michael wanted to notify him of where he had gone. It was enough to have a little bit of evidence of where he went, when everybody else, including Leon’s roommate, seemed to evaporate out of existence at unpredictable intervals.

So when he couldn’t find Michael, it was a problem. When Leon’s voicemails went unanswered, and the whiteboard didn’t get updated, and Leon knocked and knocked on Michael’s door and got nothing in response, he felt his social life for the rest of college zeroing itself out, a lonely three and a half years with nothing but classes and studying in abandoned corners of the library. The end of the brief era when it seemed like anybody voluntarily wanted Leon around.

Leon kept trying anyway, kept going around to knock on Michael’s door and check for whiteboard updates. He even looked Michael up on the university telnet system to see when and where he’d last logged in, but it had been days. Leon was so worried that he started setting aside time to worry; otherwise he didn’t know how to fit it into his academic schedule. When, on a pre-scheduled worry break, he looked Michael up on telnet one more time and saw that he’d logged in from his dorm ten minutes ago, Leon abandoned his schedule and raced downstairs to knock on his door.

Michael opened it, looking sleepy and surprised but not, somehow, as obviously drunk or hungover or otherwise ruined as Leon had imagined he would. Come to think of it, Leon didn’t know what that would look like.

“Hey,” Michael said, a little sheepish. It was mid-morning but it could have been 3 a.m. for the way he blinked and rubbed his eyes.

Michael yawned. “I went out, and things got crazy, and I ended up crashing at Alex’s place—have you met Alex? And then there was a party the next night so I just stayed, and one thing kinda led to another.”

Leon had no idea who Alex was, and it shouldn’t have mattered. But: “I didn’t know how to—look, Michael, I know we don’t know each other all that well, and I probably don’t have the right, but you’re the only—I find, in life, you have to determine—”

Over the last couple days he’d thought of a speech, multiple speeches, eloquent lines to explain what Michael meant to him, that Leon protected the people close to him in whatever way was needed, that almost nothing in college was reliable and even deadlines seemed negotiable in a way they never were in high school, that Michael’s slipshod reliability was nearly the only thing Leon had found to even try to depend upon, that he was willing to adopt Michael into the golden circle of people Leon cared for if only Michael would take any steps toward caring for himself first. It was all perfectly clear in his mind, but now that he was trying to say it out loud the words crashed together and sunk into the muck, an indeterminate mass of worry and horrible vulnerability.

Michael squinted at him and didn’t seem to understand what was happening. After listening to Leon floundering for a few small eternities, he reached out and grabbed his hand. Leon abruptly stopped talking. Michael peered into his face with an intensity that might have been chemically induced, or maybe not; Leon didn’t know how to tell. “Leon,” he said. “You’re going a mile a minute. Can you, like…say it in a short sentence?”

Once Leon had enough of his wits about him to look back on this moment, he concluded that it was when he learned the first, most important thing about being friends with Michael: boil your advice down to something simple. Be clear, unequivocal, direct, and your friend might be convinced to value his own wellbeing. Do all of that and you might get to keep your port in the storm.

Notes

The title is from Ada Limón’s poem “The Saving Tree,” from Bright Dead Things. Many thanks to my extremely helpful beta readers, caminante and snickfic, for helping to make this story make sense!