PSL: Quentin's Funeral

[whatisay]

Capitol funerals are oleaginous with wealth. Today they assemble to commemorate Quentin Compson not just with tears, but with commissioned oil paintings, fireworks, an orchestra playing some lugubrious dirge, with wines ages two hundred years and flowers genetically engineered to have the deceased's initials appearing naturally on each petal. The young man's body is no longer a matter of sodden, lifeless flesh but ash compressed into a shimmering jewel, set at the middle of a wreath of designer oleander at the base of a portrait picturing him more present than any who knew him ever saw him. The painted eyes look aware, like they're taking in every detail around them, while in life Quentin always seemed a step out of time, thinking of something else, half-listening to the conversation.

Jason, fifteen years old, hasn't seen his father sober since the older Jason went to identify the wax-white, water-bloated corpse in the mortuary. This Jason, in a new suit with a tag on the back of his shirt that itches his neck, had stayed home with his mother, listening to her mewl about how could this happen to her, how could Quentin have done this to her. He'd expected to feel something when his father came home, either relief or grief, because everyone was supposed to feel something when a sibling died, but the only emotion that had surfaced was a strange sort of unease that he'd quickly choked off with disgust that his father didn't even bother to come straight home, and instead arrived drunk.

"Did you drive like that?" Caroline had asked. "Did you want me to have to identify a body today too?"

The older Jason's drunk at the funeral, too, trying his best to stand still and not sway next to his black-clad wife and eight-months-pregnant daughter and her new husband. Benjamin's been left home; his crying would be "upsetting". Uncle Maury's had a few too; Jason's starting to suspect that maybe he's the only sober one, sharing company with Caddy's fetus. When the eulogy ends, having described a person Jason's certain never actually existed, there's a reception with pay-per-plate seating and photographers and fireworks in the background.

His mother pretends to faint from crying, although her face is dry, and calls for Jason, her 'last remaining son', to come help her. Jason slips outside just out of her eyesight, not wanting to engage, hoping she just assumes he didn't see or hear her while Maury props her back up. He heads round the back, slouching on a bench in sight of the parking lot, reconnoitering every half hour or so to see if things have died down. His nose, fresh from a rhinoplasty, is straight now, but there are fading bruises under each eye, covered by slight makeup. He undoes his tie and unbuttons his jacket, then finally just flings the latter off onto the lawn somewhere.

At some point his father goes to a microphone and starts rambling about the nature of time and his daughter's wedding and then Jason's just done, incapable of anything but disgust with everything here.

He heads back to the bench and picks up some pebbles, chucking them at the pigeons just to see if the birds will fly away.

Comments

[currupted]

He steps closer and sits down, one shoulder turned a little away from Jason. It makes his pants hike up a little further. Great.

He hesitates before he replies-- not because he's afraid he might be not be allowed to smoke, but because he can't decide what answer Jason's looking for, and he wants to say the right thing. (On most teenagers his age, it would be out of a simple desire to fit in; Cyrus Reagan grew up under cameras and in front of microphones, and there is an instinctive consideration of his actions in his every movement that most teenagers do not have.)

"...No," he allows. "But if you're going to..." A shrug. I guess I could. If that's what Jason's asking.

He doesn't know what to do with He probably had the right idea.

Maybe that's what bothers him so much about it. That they're without Quentin now. Forever. They are so infrequently without anything - they are all used to things immediately replaceable, servants all silent and interchangeable, possessions that can be lost or broken and put back in place as though they were never gone. He didn't know a thing about Quentin except that he was Jason's weird, distant older brother, but something in him feels-- frustrated? angry? indignant, maybe-- that he could take himself away from them just like that, and have the gall not to be so easy to replace.

Cyrus doesn't have these thoughts in exactly this way. But he thinks of what it would be like to be without an entire person-- without one of his friends, or his mother, or his father, or Stephen. He imagines Stephen as a very small jewel, glittering in the middle of a bouquet of flowers, and has to swallow hard around the sudden sharp, bitter taste in his mouth.

"I hate it too," he says. Not just to agree, but because it's true. "I didn't even want to come." (Like it was just another party their parents dragged them along to.)

[whatisay]

"Oh. So you didn't bring your own," Jason says, having invited to commiserate but not to share. He has a vaporizer he got from Maury, snuck under his mother's nose and hidden in the lining of his vest. He glances over each shoulder and pulls it out, lights it up. It smells strong, and it'll cling to his clothes, but at this point he doesn't care if his parents notice - maybe it'll be better if they do. "I guess you can have a hit off mine, but don't put your mouth on it. I don't want to catch your zits if they're contagious."

There's no request there, just the command of a kid who's bigger than Cyrus and has, at times, backed up his preferences to the younger kids with hitting or kicking, or with petty little vengeances later. If Cyrus puts his lips on the vaporizer he'll be walking away with a fat one, Jason's saying.

He nods a little bit as Cyrus says that, almost saying think of how much I didn't want to come but not, because what's the use of saying it? It's evident. Then he drags, and it's clearly the unpracticed breath of a child because he coughs hard on it and barely takes any in, but stubbornly he takes two and then hands it to Cyrus.

When he talks again his voice is a little rougher. Unlike Cyrus', his has already changed. In ten years people will look back and consider his rhinoplasty the last transformation from ugly duckling to acceptable adult, while he'll look back at this summer as an entirely different kind of bend in the road.

"I don't think I'd come if it was your brother's funeral. I don't think anyone could make me come to another funeral."

[currupted]

It's a one-two hit of making him feel self-conscious - You didn't bring your own and I don't want to catch your zits. Those are relatively new, maybe half a year old at this point, and he hates them every bit as much as they seem to hate him. He wishes they were as easy to fix as Jason's nose. But he knows how stupid They're not contagious, stupid would sound, and so he lets that go past him with just a clenched jaw and a sidelong glare.

But, well. At least it's just a hit to his ego. He's seen Jason exerting his will over the younger kids before (has spent enough time making sure Stephen's on the other side of him from Jason). He'll accept that small generosity, and listen to what he says. He reaches for the vaporizer, the motion pulling back his sleeve to show too much skinny wrist.

He smokes while Jason talks - it's not easy to use a vaporizer without putting your mouth on it, but he ends up with some smoke in his mouth, anyway, and the burning in his throat tells him he inhaled something. He coughs once, with his face in his sleeve, and hands it back. Jason can't give him shit, right. He coughed, too.

"Well, lucky for you," he says, "My brother isn't going to kill himself."

(God. It feels unlucky, somehow, to talk about that in earshot of Quentin's remains. He feels like he's declaring it to the universe and not just to Jason-- like the future is an Avox with no choice but to listen to him.)

The look he gives him, sharp and demanding, will be impressive someday, leveled across a conference table or over a desk. It isn't impressive now, but it is heartfelt. "...Anyway," he goes on. "You'd come. Your mother would make you come."

[whatisay]

Jason doesn't even have it in him to be offended on Quentin's behalf. He no longer feels that numbness he did upon receiving the news weeks ago, just a sort of swollen, palpated resentment towards the brother who disappeared from the very mess he made. He isn't sure whether he hates Quentin more for causing the mess or for avoiding the consequences, he just knows that he can never say out loud that "hatred" is what that emotion is.

Let smartass kids like Cyrus do it for him, by saying things that someone who loved their sibling would stand up and fight against. Jason reaches over and takes the vaporizer back, taking a pull and fighting so hard not to cough that his eyes water, almost as if he's about to cry. But he doesn't cough. He exhales.

The look he gives Cyrus back is, unwittingly to them both, one they'll share many times in the future, one where Cyrus is straightbacked and confident, used to being obeyed without question, one where Jason looks calculatedly indifferent and insolent, like he'll cooperate but he'll drag his feet every step of the way, that the more respect the other demands the less he'll get.

"My mother can't make me do anything." Jason laughs, but it's a strangely hollow sound like the flapping of wings, more air than throat, more wish than reality. He kids himself sometimes into thinking the noose she has around his neck isn't obvious. "She can't even make me go inside right now."

There's a pause while he picks up another pebble, flicks it at another bird. "So I guess you won't be seeing me around much anymore."

[currupted]

Cyrus knows well what bullshit that is. Your mother could make you do anything. She made you come here. But even did he not know Jason, even had he not watched the Compsons interact with each other before, rebellion is not in Cyrus Reagan. He would always do what his mother says - not out of any conscious love for her, but because the Reagans, unlike the Compsons, are all on the same side, and at thirteen Cyrus already has an instinct to keep that side visibly strong.

He follows the pebble with his eyes. Stephen or some other little kid might have told Jason to stop, but Cyrus already knows what a losing battle looks like. Anyway-- who cares? It's a stupid pigeon. If they actually wanted people to stop throwing things at them, they'd leave. They could leave any time they wanted to.

A disbelieving huff. "What? Are you moving to the Districts or something?" The Capitol doesn't feel nearly big enough to lose someone in - not the part of it that Cyrus has always occupied, anyway.

There's an element of denial, too, buried under the words. Quentin's gone already. That's enough. They don't get to lose all the Compsons over this. No one gets to take that many familiar things away from him at once.

[whatisay]

That makes Jason laugh too. "Hell no. You couldn't pay me to live in a District. We went to District Four on vacation once and I say that's enough of that, because it smelled like a cellar and there was nothing to do."

But it's more than that, because Jason's face pales a little bit with honest insecurity. He doesn't know that they won't move to the Districts. They've already sold the pasture they used to have. And fear, insecurity, they all make Jason meaner, and so he sounds impatient and sharp with Cyrus.

"You really don't understand how this all works, do you?" He takes another drag and holds it in his mouth instead of his lungs so he doesn't cough. "You're not going to see any of us around anymore. I mean, maybe a few times a year, if your parents are feeling sorry for us, but even if they want to send us a pity casserole they'll get their Avoxes to do it."

He sounds like he hates the Reagans right now, like he hates his own family. And he does. And he latches onto Cyrus' denial as a foothold to hit Cyrus over the head with it, to take some sick delight in the fact that they'll be removed from Cyrus' life. Let Cyrus feel powerless and disoriented as Jason feels; it's a relief to drag someone down into the mud with him, even a pizzafaced prepubescent acquaintance.

[currupted]

Cyrus can sympathize with this first part. They'd taken him and Stephen camping once, because there was a whole year where that was the popular thing to do - the whole cabinet, Julius complained, had been chattering about what an amazing time they'd had out in the woods in Seven, up in the hills in Two, and so he had to do it too, and he'd taken the whole family and two Avoxes with them, and it had been miserable. Julius had to pretend it hadn't been, to save face, but the rest of them still complain about it, when there's nothing else around to bother them.

He scowls, though, as Jason goes on-- this is starting to feel like a scolding. Jason's older, but not that much older. And he sure as hell doesn't get to decide what the Reagans are and aren't going to do. It makes Cyrus want to fight back out of spite - to do the opposite of what Jason's expecting. Teach him to decide how Cyrus' family feels about anything.

"What, you're not allowed outside anymore because Quentin's dead?" Cyrus is skeptical, derisive even. "We never saw him much anyway. Why would you go anywhere just because he's not around anymore?"

[whatisay]

Jason nearly stands up to lord his six inches of extra height over Cyrus, but thinks better of it, and outright slouches to show how much he doesn't care, how little it riles him up that Cyrus is talking back.

"We're not going anywhere. That's the problem." Jason pauses, trying to find the words to explain it, and then decides instead on the words that'll best put Cyrus down. He turns his nose up (septum newly undeviated) and exhales vapor (which stings like a bitch and makes his eyes water again).

"You wouldn't understand."

[currupted]

"I can't understand if you don't tell me." Damn Jason Compson, Cyrus is actively curious now - that, and feeling slighted by having the answer withheld. He scoots half an inch closer on the bench, turning so there's not his indifferent shoulder between them anymore.

He hates feeling out of the loop. He hates not knowing exactly what's going on. He'd felt he had something, with the knowledge of Quentin's suicide - something most of the others in their age group didn't, something only a few of their parents even had, maybe. (The concept of an "open secret" is not one Cyrus completely understands yet.) To have that, and not to have this-- to be, still, just as ignorant as everybody else-- it makes him feel impatient, frustrated, thwarted.

(Jason has almost always been able to get a rise out of Cyrus, if he puts a little effort into it. This is something else that neither of them can know is never going to change.)

"I know you're not going anywhere. You're not that easy to get rid of." A peevish, passive-aggressive jab back at that aloofness. "So tell me."

[whatisay]

For a moment, it pleases Jason to feel important for something, to be the gatekeeper for the horrible knowledge that he's carrying around like a weight in his chest. And then that pleasure goes sour and curdled because Jason doesn't want to be important right now, he wants to continue being the middle child.

"Your family's not going to want mine around any more because we're embarrassing now." As if to emphasize that point, he can hear his father wrestle the microphone back into his possession for yet another pseudo-eulogy at the dinner. "They're going to be polite and show up to the funeral and then watch, no one's going to talk about us anymore, no one's going to ask us to go places or show up if we ask them to things. I guarantee. You'll pretend we won't exist, and we won't even get the benefit of getting to have that be true."

He snorts, and it hurts his new nose, and then he turns the cigarette off and hides it in the covert pocket in his pants. He used to sew those pockets in by hand to smuggle candy or playing cards or razors or condoms or whatever else he could barter with the other kids in their little collective.

"Maybe our bad luck's as contagious as your pizzaface."

[currupted]

The sounds Jason's father makes fill up the silences between words and hang in the air through every pause. It makes Cyrus feel uncomfortable - not even on Jason's behalf, but in a pitying, secondhand way. He can't imagine his father behaving that way.

Julius Reagan pretends to drink more at parties than he actually does. Jason Compson pretends nothing when he's this way, and in the Capitol, eschewing pretense is the quickest way to get your audience to avert their eyes, embarrassed by messy, uncontrolled honesty.

But pity evaporates at pizzaface. Cyrus scowls, and he can feel his neck flushing red, and he hates Jason for it, hates him for making him show how much it bothers him.

"You're wrong," he says, and he resists the urge to touch his own face, forces his hand back into his lap, balled into a fist. He thinks of something sharper, and corrects himself-- "You're full of shit." Not a word he often dares to say around the Reagan manor, but here, there are only the pigeons to hear and Jason. Not like Quentin's going to mind anyone swearing at his funeral. "You were already embarrassing. My family didn't even want to come here."

He doesn't actually know his parents' honest opinions on the funeral. That's not something either of them would ever share with him. But he's willing to fabricate in the name of the Reagans to lash back against the insult.

[whatisay]

Maybe, if Jason didn't feel as if his brain were a living bruise right now, pulverized from each side by his parents and his parasite uncle and bitch sister and the looks, all the looks people give him barraging him ever since Caddy got pregnant - it doesn't even have to be judgment, because with his paranoia he's certain every glance is an accusation or worse, a bullet of pity - maybe he would be able to shrug off Cyrus' attack. But he can't.

"Shut the fuck up, Cy. Don't be such a baby about your pimples."

Unlike Cyrus, swearing comes easily to Jason now, and he's had a few years to perfect it. He was probably the one who introduced the terms to the Reagans, honestly - back in the day, when he was eleven and Swann and Stephen were six and five, it had been to the great amusement of the entire group to teach them both various curse words and watch them parrot it, excited to please their older peers only to get in trouble with their parents later.

"Your family came anyway. It's not about what your family wants, it's about what they have to do to keep their standing. And we're not part of that anymore. That's all."

Jason wants to think that maybe that's a good thing, that he won't have to deal with anyone, that he's going to be all but locked up in his house and away from all these people he hates, but at fifteen his mind is already turned in on itself and ossifying into something that looks inwards, unable to let anything good in, feasting on its own poisons.

[currupted]

They pass down bad habits like old clothes, the children of the Capitol (or would, if any of them had known in all their lives what it was to own things secondhand). They're born into power but too young still to wield it, and so they practice lording things over each other, and they can't know that the hierarchy they're unconsciously constructing will follow most of them through adulthood and beyond.

Cyrus certainly isn't thinking of it. What Jason's talking about is already further into the future than he's in the habit of looking.

He can hear Portia again in his mind-- Think of the family. He has a distant, instinctive understanding already that a family is nothing more than the sum of its parts, and he thinks of the parts of the Compson family, each an imperfectly-turning cog in a broken machine. He knows little more than he's been told about their various disgraces, of course, but he doesn't need specifics to know that the Compsons are different from the Reagans, about whom no one whispers, and whose secrets do not come up around other people's dinner tables.

He'd always assumed that that was how it would always be. That that was simply the inherent nature of the greater idea that was Compson, and that they would always have the same place at the fringes of their many interlocking social circles, just as the Reagans would always occupy the same place at the center. This is upheaval that no one consulted him about, and that makes him want to dig his heels in, to hold on to how it was out of spite.

"Whatever," he says, with a shrug that doesn't look remotely casual. That much future rests too heavy on him, makes him want to squirm out from under it. "I'll still invite you places. It's not your fault your family's--" Fucking crazy. "...Lost its standing."

It's an evening of new discoveries: He doesn't recognize what he feels as pity, not when it's wearing the face of spiteful indignation, but he will know it for what it is later, when he looks back on this. (Long after he has been taught that you always, no matter what, reap what your family sowed, whatever you did or didn't do to deserve it.)

[whatisay]

Jason snorts, almost nickers like a cooped up animal, a sound pantomiming humor. "I'm going to hold you to that."

Twenty years from now, that promise will hang between them, the opportunity on it rotten and congealed and inedible, and they'll both remember it and not speak of it. Jason will hold onto it even though he can't say it aloud, the childish you promised that he could apply not just to Cyrus but to the world, a world that told him that he would always be cared for and respected and meaningful. Cyrus will try to forget it and hope, vainly and knowing it to be so, that Jason has done the same.

Both will acknowledge it without letting the other see that that's what they've done, and then rather than cast it aside they'll tuck it into the pockets of suits of vastly difference cost.

Mr. Compson's slurs and meanderings trail through the air again like the ribbons of a kite. Jason's face burns (that same flush he'll carry into adulthood, a red undertint to his skin flashing like a warning light to the people around him, or the tip of a thermometer swollen with heat) and he jams his hands into his pockets harder and kicks a pebble towards the birds again.

"I don't know what we did to deserve this."

[currupted]

He might keep the promise. For a few weeks, or a few months. Jason might manage to cling to the edges of their nebulous social group for a year or two, even, before they finally let him go, before the internal alliances shift and a couple new hangers-on come and go and there is no longer a critical mass of people to give a shit whether or not Jason is there. The promise will decay, and Cyrus will turn his attention to brighter, less sentimental things, and for some years he will forget.

He can't know this now, of course. He believes, blindly and stupidly, that he will hold to this. That he will get to prove Jason and all his pessimism wrong. Maybe there's even something like heroism in it - an off-balance attempt to save Jason from his family. (Because even now, even at thirteen, Cyrus sees himself, instinctively, as leaning down to pull Jason up from a position of greater height.)

"It's not your fault." Your singular, or plural? He decides to leave it ambiguous, to let Jason make it about himself or his family as he sees fit. "It's Quentin's. You didn't ask him to die. No one did." He scuffs his shoe in the dirt (mentally daring his mother to comment), finds a pebble near his foot and kicks it as well; it goes wide, and the birds take no notice of it.

[whatisay]

"Don't I know it." Jason internalizes that 'you' into a word that can hold only him, because he can't and won't extend that shield from fault to anyone else. That 'you', that 'not your fault' becomes a lifeboat as he untethers himself from a sinking name, soul only because his body will never leave this place. Not Compson, not Bascomb, but adrift in their wreckage eternally and regardless.

It would be better to be nameless, but he can't even have that, can't have a word for himself that isn't laden with the baggage of his parents mother father uncle sister brothers. He has nothing to himself, not even a name, just a number appended to the end like an afterthought or a seal on a stamp. I. I say. Me.

And he sees without knowing that he's seeing it Cyrus' name floating forward on the sea, through the jetsam of the families like Jason's that have been dashed on the rocks, nudging debris out of the way of the prow absentmindedly. The Reagans. The Reagans might make it to shore yet.

"I would, if he were here now. I'm livid enough to. Better off dead than dealing with how angry we all are, what I say. It looks like grief but I tell you it's anger." He turns and looks at Cyrus again, eyes hard and sharp. "You would too, if it was your brother, if he did something to you that shows he doesn't regard you or the family worth a damn."

[currupted]

Cyrus feels that look in his gut - or, maybe it's not the look but the words it comes with, your brother as the focal point of that sentence (which is how Cyrus takes it, whether or not Jason means it that way).

"He wouldn't, though," Cyrus says, more hotly than he means to. "That's the difference. He wouldn't." Why is he defending Stephen? He's not even here, is off playing Tributes and Peacekeepers on the lawn (or Tributes and Tributes, which is just as popular and requires less arguing over who gets to die dramatically, fall over in the grass clutching invisible wounds). He wouldn't get what Jason was saying even if he were here, because he's eight and is still surprised when people say things because they know they'll sting.

It's only half about Stephen, though. It's also about the family, the coda and the theme of the whole statement. Stephen's not just Stephen-- He's a Reagan. And Reagans aren't like you.

[whatisay]

"He's eight. Who knows what he's going to do when he gets older." Jason gets up and paces around the bench, anxious about something more existential than he can wrap his head around, kicking at the grass and the curb. "You're what, thirteen? Who even knows what you're going to do when you're older?"

Jason, on the other hand, feels as if somehow all his life has been culminating into this expanse of responsibility he's about to step into as the oldest son, that it's been leading here inexorably but not in a way that's prepared him. The best years of his life are already over, he thinks, and he doesn't find that they were that good to start with. It settles; he fossilizes; something inside him stunts here, never to grow or expand again.

He jams his hands deeper into his pockets and sighs. "Do you think they'll notice if I don't go back in?"