Jan was allowed to sleep in the bed that night. Naked, yes, and with the collar on, that was nonnegotiable. But in the bed all the same, curled around the warmth of Christopher. He was so used to the impact of Christopher’s body—mostly slaps, the occasional backhand, never anything that would leave a bruise, but enough for cherry red stripes and handprints. Nights in bed were a small luxury of Jan’s, one only afforded him when he made a particularly good dinner or got ahead on his chores. So that night, what was to be the last night of Christopher’s life, Jan enjoyed how Christopher’s muscles went soft in his sleep and how he snored in spite of himself.

Later, in a bony hospital chair and under those horrible lights, Jan tried to remember some portent of what was to come. In the hours he had to think it over—in the waiting room, in the cold taxi ride home, and finally in bed again, alone, wrong as it felt—he came up with nothing. There were no hitched breaths or shudders or stiffenings Jan could remember because the truth was as he told the first responders. He had a quiet night in, making dinner for his partner, and they went to sleep together. Then, around two-thirty in the morning, Jan awoke because of nothing, but with a feeling of something gone wrong.

Christopher had stopped breathing. Jan felt a rising cold come over him, like a draft from some forgotten open window. He called 911. In a level voice, he told the operator that his partner had stopped breathing and gave her their address. She said she would be sending an ambulance. She asked if he knew CPR. He said he did. She told him to begin CPR. He did, but when he felt Christopher’s ribs cracking during the first compression, as she told him he would, he cried out, an animal cry from deep in his throat, and stopped. He hung up. He was still naked and collared.

Without thinking, Jan took the collar off and dressed before the ambulance arrived. He also hid the leather and ropes in their appropriate false-bottomed drawers. For good measure, he locked the door to the room whose walls were studded with anchor points and paddles and that contained a large steel cage. Christopher had cultivated this reaction in Jan early on in their relationship; discretion was key. It was not so much a question of understanding—he knew they wouldn’t—as it was of complexity. Jan still had hope for Christopher then, before the ambulance, despite the cracked ribs and cooling body. Questions about their relationship would muddle and slow everything. He had to get Christopher in front of a doctor. He had to stay with him. The rest could come later, as he knew it would.

Of course, all of that and Christopher, his Christopher, cruel but soft-bodied Christopher, were gone now. Jan never even got to see him. The doctors and nurses forgot about the young, black-haired man in baggy clothes. He sat and sat in the bony chair and did not cry. After a couple hours, a nurse barely older than him, probably straight out of school, came to ask if there was anything she could do for him. Jan told her, and when she returned through the swinging double doors, she informed him that Christopher had been declared dead on arrival.

Jan wavered when he stood from the chair. He was bleary-eyed and woozy. He could hardly hear when the nurse asked if he was okay. He was not ready to concede to reality yet, so he nodded. The nurse asked his address. He had nowhere to go but Christopher’s home, where he had lived for the past year. He had no bed but Christopher’s. She called him a taxi. Jan barely registered the early morning ride to Christopher’s apartment except that it was cold. He went to sleep in bed without Christopher or permission for the first time. He did not undress or brush his teeth. He could not understand how his body felt numb but also pounded with the loss. He wailed through the sunrise.

Only a few hours later, Jan woke to keys jangling in the lock. Harsh light from the eastern window cut across his face. For a moment, caught between sleep and the glare, he forgot. He thought Christopher was coming home. Jan could not imagine why he had been so bold as to sleep in the bed and clothed and uncollared at that. Panic rose in him because he knew for such a breach Christopher would surely paddle him until dark red welts rose on his ass and the backs of his thighs.

Jan blinked through the fear. And he remembered. And the panic did not go away but rather changed form as he remembered.

He heard the front door open. Two sets of footsteps thudded on the hardwood. Jan got out of bed. The weight of it all, the logistics and sorting out, the talking to and explaining settled on him. He stood for a moment in front of the master bedroom door, waiting to go out and meet whoever had come. He wished so badly for Christopher then that it hurt. It wasn’t that Christopher would know what to say, more that with Christopher, Jan never had to say or explain or decide. That’s why he’d said yes to all this in the first place: to float along.

Jan pushed the door open. He saw them before they did him. They were a sharp faced man and woman, surely older than Jan. He had nondescript, feathered brown hair and wore a knee-length overcoat atop a mottled sweater and jeans. His boots were clearly expensive but wellworn. Pin straight hair brushed just above her shoulders. Her outfit mirrored his—overcoat, sweater, and in her case, wide-legged slacks that nearly hit the floor. With all its clean lines and neutral colors, Jan thought they fit in Christopher’s living room. They were chic and hard and cold.

Christopher had let slip only small details of his life to Jan, but Jan knew from anecdotes and photos in Christopher’s office that he’d had a set of twins. Jan had never met them, didn’t so much as know their names. But this must be them, he thought. So he’d learn now.

Jan walked to meet them, and his movement caught the man’s attention. He turned and raised an eyebrow at Jan. She followed his gaze and scowled. She called to Jan down the hall, “Who are you?”

“My name is Jan. I—” He walked toward them as he spoke.

“Why are you here? Do you know what happened?”

“I live here.” Jan flinched at the German clip to his voice that a year in New York had not smoothed.

“With our dad?” She began to twist a thin gold bracelet on her left wrist.

“You must be Christopher’s children. Your father and I, we were in a relationship.”

The woman took a half step toward Jan. Her brother didn’t react. He just eyed and eyed Jan.

Jan tried explaining. “Your father and I met at a bar a year ago. I was an exchange student at Columbia, and some friends and I went down one weekend to SoHo for drinks and he was there. I’m from Nürnberg; he asked if I could help him learn German. We began seeing each other, uh, not really for German lessons, and he invited me to move in after a month or so. I was with him last night when he—”

“Christ.”

“Go easy on him, Syd. Look at him. He looks too sad to be lying.” The brother spoke up, and Jan looked over at him and met his eyes because he was still looking at Jan. Neither looked away.

Syd glared at her brother.

“Let’s hear Jan out,” he said to Syd, still facing Jan.

Something of the man’s countenance, or just the eyes, resurfaced in Jan that first night with Chrstopher: Christopher’s asking, excitedly, in broken German where Jan was from, and Jan’s answering in German that he came from Nürnberg, and only because Christopher was looking at his lips with such intent, speaking for longer than he needed to about his walks along the Pegnitz when the weather was warm and when there were little ducks on the water. Yes, he realized, there was a certain resemblance around the eyes.

Syd ignored her brother, turned from him to Jan. “Dad just died. And you’re, well, you’re—” She gestured vaguely at the room, like it was all so obvious, like she could not imagine they would need the words for it. “Please,” she continued, and it was clear she was not asking, because the hard quality of Christopher’s voice came into hers. “Just go home.”

“I live here,” Jan repeated. His voice came out watery.

“Come back later if you need a place to sleep, it’s okay,” the unnamed son offered. “You have a key, yeah?” He sounded soft, like Christopher.

Hearing these two aspects of Chrostopher, hard- and soft-bodied, Jan envisioned Christopher as some cell that had split itself asunder. And though leaving these two more or less identical progeny, the original, in spite of its traces, could not be said to still exist, not really.

Jan turned from the two not-Christophers and didn’t respond. He left without grabbing his coat. Already, before he got to the door, he heard their voices behind him, Syd’s jewelry tinkling between the syllables from her wringing hands.

“He can’t be here.”

“I know.”

“And what will mom say?”

But Jan shut the door before he could hear the answer.

He ran into a neighbor and her toddler in the hallway. They took the elevator down with Jan. He remembered giving the little girl chocolate chips on Halloween because he and Christopher didn’t have any candy. She waved, tiny and pale, to him. Jan could hardly smile back, but he tried, and the little girl beamed.

Outside, Jan huddled against the February wind. The winter would last that year. Jan felt rubbed raw—Christopher had died barely twelve hours ago. And already here came his children, talking like him, making arrangements or whatever it is children do. He never even got to see the body. Would they let him? Tears bit at Jan’s eyes from the wind or the grief or the cold.

Still, Wooster Street bustled. Horns honked and crowds pushed past him. He was surrounded by small frustrations—slow walkers, lights not turning, and thick traffic. He wondered at the arithmetic of it all. Add all these small frustrations. How many did it take to equal his pain and his loss? Just Wooster Street? All of SoHo? It didn’t matter. Lights still turned, even if slowly. He still walked on, he didn’t know where. His neighbor still held her toddler’s hand to cross the street. And the going on. On and on. It just kept fucking going.

Jan spent the long and cold hours of the day in a coffee shop on Wooster Street, not even a block from Christopher’s apartment. Having taken to the American style of coffee, he ordered and nursed an iced latte, then another. He paid with the cash Christopher gave to him as an allowance.

He tried not to think of the wound of Christopher. He thought of his Oma instead, all little and bent, freezing in the winter but twice daily throwing open all the windows in the Lüften. He thought of the Pegnitz and wondered if it had frozen this year. He thought of the ducks and how they flew away in the winter because they needed the warmth, going god knows where, though he had surely learned it in Gymnasium.

Jan didn’t eat anything, but he wasn’t hungry. His chair, old and wooden, felt too much like the bony hospital chair. He couldn’t get up. He’d hardly slept the night before, god, it was only the night before, and he put his head down on the table, but the barista gently told him he was not allowed to sleep in the coffee shop.

Other patrons surely took notice of the young man who stayed so long, and who occasionally shook with a sob, and who kept his temple firmly against the cold glass window. But no one said anything. They just let him sit there. Jan couldn’t figure out how all those hours passed. All the minutes and coming and going. It didn’t comport. A little after dark, he rose from the chair in the coffee shop and returned home. The street was quieter and emptier. Coatless, he shivered.

Jan could tell the apartment was not empty when he walked in. He announced to the living room that he was back. Notes and official looking forms were scattered across the dining table and counter. Jan winced when he saw Christopher’s handwriting on them. Nothing else was different from when Jan left; everything else stayed where Christopher had left it. How cruel, Jan thought, that the space would take so long to learn Christopher had gone.

While Jan looked at but did not touch the papers, Christopher’s son came from down the hall to meet him.

“Hey,” the man started.

“Hi,” Jan responded. He had the impression the man had been alone a while in the apartment. He wondered if Syd had gone to tell their mom, who lived only a few blocks away. Christopher had never so much as showed Jan a picture of her, and he wondered, always, if any given woman he passed was her, and how one would never know the other.

“Are you hungry?” the man asked.

“I haven’t eaten,”

“Yeah, me neither.”

“I can make us something,” Jan offered. He decided he would play the host.

“Dad never was much of a cook. So you took care of all that?”

“More or less.”

The man just nodded.

Jan and Christopher had gone grocery shopping only the day before he’d died. It felt ridiculous now for Jan to be making sandwiches with the cheese and bread bought by the dead man. Jan laid out the bread and sandwich meat and lettuce. He sliced fresh tomatoes. Christopher bought organic, expensive groceries. Everything was still ripe and bursting.

The man sat at a barstool to eat. Jan stood across the kitchen island from him. Before, the man had done so much looking at Jan, aloof, yes, but probing. He never took his eyes off Jan during that morning conversation. Now, Jan looked at him, long and hard. He just ate his sandwich, hardly acted like Jan was there. Yes, Jan realized, there was a resemblance around the eyes, but more than that, it was the set of his shoulders, and the way he sagged in a foul mood. He was so much Christopher that it hurt.

“I never caught your name, by the way. And your dad never told me much about you two.”

The man looked up from his sandwich. “Samuel. It was my grandpa’s.”

Neither said anything for a moment.

“What was it like, living here with him? He never had me or Syd over.”

“It was nice. We mostly kept to ourselves. We went out some, but just us two. I never met any of his friends or family.”

“In an entire year. Wow. Well, that’s almost how long it had been since Syd or I had seen him.”

Jan thought of the locked room with the cage. “I guess Christopher liked to keep the different parts of his life separate.”

“I suppose so,” Samuel said.

Samuel got up and came across the island to wash his hands. Reflexively, Jan began cleaning up the kitchen, brushing crumbs from the countertop and putting up the condiments.

“Thanks for the sandwich, by the way.” Jan hadn’t noticed Samuel walking up to him. He turned from the fridge and there he was, hardly more than a few inches away. Jan almost bumped into him. Samuel was taller than his father, by several inches. Between the man and the fridge behind him, Jan had the distinct feeling of being caught. Jan recalled so many nights Christopher wanted him to feel that same way: caught. His stomach turned. “I can see why dad kept you around,” Samuel said, without moving.

Jan smiled and tried to slip by. He bumped into Samuel; Samuel didn’t respond, but he turned his body to follow Jan’s movement. Jan felt a ball, cold and hard, settling into his stomach. He couldn’t meet Samuel’s eyes.

“You look tired, Jan. I’m sorry, I can’t imagine what you’re feeling. This must be hard on you, too. I mean, for fuck’s sake, you were there.”

Jan reeled. “Thanks, Samuel, it—” his voice cracked “—yeah.”

“Could you show me around, Jan? I never saw Dad’s life here. All these pieces of him.”

It’s not like Jan could have said no.

Christopher had a corner unit. Two bedrooms, two and a half baths. Only one, Christopher’s, was really being used as a bedroom. Jan and Samuel stood in the living and dining area, nestled into the northwest corner of the building. There was no entryway; the front door opened into the living room. It was expensive, yes, thanks to the SoHo address and all, and Christopher could well afford it, but it wasn’t large. There was just one hall coming off the living room, to the right of the front door. First door on the left was the half bath. Then the bedroom. Bedrooms.

They left the kitchen together. Samuel made a show of looking at the art Christopher had amassed in the living room. He put a hand on Jan’s shoulder. Jan saw from where they were standing behind the couch that the room, the room with the cage, his bedroom, its door was ajar. Ah, so he had found it, of course he did. It was hardly hidden.

They walked to the hallway. Samuel eased the door open, and Jan stepped forward because Samuel stepped forward.

“You know, Jan,” Samuel said from behind him, a hand still on Jan’s shoulder. “I can help you. You seem like a nice kid, and, well, Syd, I’m not sure how sympathetic she is. Let me help you.” It sounded like he was smiling.

Samuel pressed down on Jan’s shoulder, just hard enough to tell Jan’s body to turn and face him. He was so much taller than Jan. If he looked, he would have to look up, but he didn’t.

“Let me help you,” Samuel repeated. He pulled his sweater over his head and had no shirt underneath. Muscle striated the man’s torso. Jan felt attraction and betrayal at the attraction. Still, Jan didn’t look up. He was too broad. Christopher wasn’t this broad.

Samuel walked Jan forward, past the cage, to the tall post in the middle of the room. Had he thought anything at all, Jan may have thought of the sad and painful irony that the post was where Christopher had disciplined Jan, for infractions or because he felt like it. How many times he’d been there with Christopher, hard and pleading with every part of him for more or less or both or nothing. Yes, punishment, that’s what it was.

Samuel kept talking. Jan registered none of it. Samuel lifted Jan’s pullover and Jan’s arms didn’t stop the motion. Jan stood cold but not shivering. He was so cold, so cold he couldn’t move under Samuel, so cold the ball in his stomach could have shattered. Why wasn’t Samuel cold?

Before taking his slacks off, Samuel pulled a pair of handcuffs from his back pocket. So he’d had them all along. So he’d known all along. When he stepped out of his pants he was already hard, and his cock glittered with precum. Yes, like he’d been waiting. The man handcuffed Jan, the boy, to the pole. With the rope scissors Christopher kept in the room in case he’d ever tied a knot too tight, Samuel cut Jan’s jeans and underwear from his body. He stood back for a minute, as if to admire the unbruised and pale ass. He left the tatters at Jan’s feet and went to grab a paddle.

And through the night Jan moaned in spite of himself. He was hard in spite of himself. In spite of the cold. Because with each lash, each strike, each knot tied and retied, that cold ball in Jan’s stomach that wasn’t grief took more and more heat from Jan’s limbs, until they were like lead or like nothing, and Jan knew it wasn’t because of loss of circulation, because Samuel seemed to make a point of using only the most silken rope and the most gentle knots that nevertheless stopped Jan’s running from the pain. So Jan took it. Until his ass bled because the lash broke the skin and purple bruises rose on his torso, back, and groin.

When Samuel finished for the night, he led Jan to the cage that dominated the room. He padlocked Jan inside and took Jan’s collar and locked it to one of the upper bars of the cage. Thus positioned, Jan couldn’t relax his body without the collar pressing on his airway, but he couldn’t sit up, either; the cage was too small. Sticky with piss and cum, Jan could arrive at no conclusion for the night. It meant nothing, or rather, it had no meaning. It was just cold.

Eventually, half tensed, Jan fell asleep. In his sleep, the beginnings of scabs tightened over his body. He dreamt of Christopher, but he did not remember the dream.

When Jan awoke, there were two keys slipped through the bars of the cage. He let himself out. A change of clothes was folded neatly on the floor. He dressed slowly. His body ached. He left the room to make himself breakfast and, and then he didn’t know what.

She was already in the kitchen.

Jan wanted to scream but swallowed it. A great tremor ran through his body.

“Oh, you’re up already. How’d you sleep?” She sounded almost chipper, like she was trying to make up for the day before.

“Alright,” Jan managed. It came out so quiet.

“That’s your room, right? Dad didn’t seem like the type to want to share his space.”

Another tremor.

“Do you want some tea?”

Nodding was easier than speaking.

“Uh, sorry, where is it at?”

Jan gestured to a cabinet next to the microwave.

She grabbed the tea and two mugs. When the kettle screamed, she set the tea to steep.

“Samuel has always wanted dad’s things, you know.” Jan flinched. He dug his thumbnail into his other palm until he was sure he would bleed. Even to himself, he couldn’t ask if she knew.

“He wanted this apartment very badly,” she continued. “He says it’s because he’s got clients in New York and it’s important for him to be close, but I’m not sure that’s true. I think he just wants it because dad spent so much time here. It doesn’t matter, I guess. Dad left it to me in the will.”

She pushed a mug over to Jan, and there went some small, secret hope. So he wouldn’t stay. He’d go home where it didn’t smell of Christopher.

“I’m sorry,” she seemed to notice, finally, that Jan wasn’t answering. “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. I was a dick to you yesterday, I’m sorry, I’m not your enemy here. I’m sure you were close to our dad, but, it’s all—” She trailed off.

“Yeah,” Jan croaked.

“Okay.”

“What will happen to me?” Jan thought he sounded like a child.

“Well, we found dad’s will yesterday. It was dated for two years ago, but there was a handwritten addendum. Don’t worry, we know it’s not your handwriting. He’s leaving you enough money to get home, along with a year’s worth of your salary as his executive assistant.”

“What?”

“Yeah, he’s taking care of you. The addendum is sad, though. He must have known somehow that something was coming.”

“No, I mean, I never worked for your father. I was here on a student visa. I overstayed it.”

“Oh.” She sounded genuinely confused. Her eyebrows furrowed like in a cartoon. “Maybe that’s how he kept you around. Put you down somewhere on paper.”

And because of that, that physical evidence of Jan or his mattering on some piece of paper he’d never see, Jan forgot about the bruises and piss and felt emboldened enough to ask.

“What about the funeral?”

Syd smiled. It wasn’t condescending. More like a primary school teacher getting ready to tell the class bad news.

“Jan, I appreciate that our father and you were involved. And you clearly meant a lot to him. I want to acknowledge that. But can you see it how we see it? We’d never known you existed until we found you here. How would it look at the funeral? What would we say?”

“I—”

“I know, Jan, it’s sad. It’s sad for us too. Sadder than we could ever imagine. I still want to help you. Samuel was right. You’re a nice kid. We’ll get you home. We’ll try to remember to write you after the funeral.”

Ah, there was Christopher, Jan thought. The Christopher who told him to hide the paddles and rope.

The conversation petered off after that. Jan still didn’t have an American bank account, so Syd bought him return tickets for Nürnberg on her phone. In her kind voice, she told Jan he was to leave in two days.

Jan didn’t have much to pack, and the apartment was too large without Christopher, so for hours he drank American coffee and crisscrossed SoHo. He bought several newspapers to see if anyone had published an obituary for Christopher, but it seemed Christopher wasn’t important enough for that, not really. Neither Syd nor Samuel returned to the apartment during those last two days in America. He wondered whether it was sympathy or indifference that kept them away.

He thought more of the dinners and nights together than he did the room with the cage, though he missed both deeply and bodily. The former, their feelings were just easier to parse.

And he cried a lot. And he didn’t think of the night with Samuel because he couldn’t. He never went back to that room. He wondered if the shreds of his clothes were still on the floor.

On the morning of his flight, after leaving a note with his German mailing address to which his inheritance—could he call it that?—would be sent, Jan decided to take the keys to the room with the cage, his room, his bedroom, that’s what Christopher had always called it, with him. It felt like some secret, final joke between him and Christopher.

Days later, when he was home and still jetlagged in Nürnberg, Jan left his Oma’s house, windows thrown open in the Lüften, for a walk on the Pegnitz. She couldn’t join him, not anymore. The air was brisk and cutting, so he bundled in layers of sweaters and coats. He carried the keys to his bedroom in his pocket like a fetish. He wondered if Christopher had been buried yet.

The Pegnitz had half-frozen that year. And on that frigid walk, he saw between the little ice floes a cold duck in deep winter floating on the water. He was sure it wasn’t a decoy. He was sure he saw its head move. He fingered the keys in his pocket. The metal was cold enough to burn.