This is a big improvement on the previous system because Mordred does not want to make Lev miserable and also Lev gets to be happy about movies and being read anthropology books, which are much easier to be happy about than Southern Baptist church services and baseball.

Time passes. 

Lev's life falls into a sort of routine. He spends his days with Oswald, who panics when he feels like he is restrained in any way, and figures out how to hold him so as not to panic him. They listen to jazz on the radio, and Oswald tells him all about the jazz that has come out in the past decade. He talks to Oswald about anthropology. Sometimes he reads, with his arm around Oswald's shoulders. And sometimes they talk, elliptically and not very coherently, about the people they love who are part of the cult, and about their shared experience of Samson. Oswald can't say very many complete sentences about what happened but it's obvious they experienced the same things. 

Oswald is... handsome, and it would be a lie to say that Lev hadn't noticed that, but he doesn't know at all what he wants to do with it. And perhaps more importantly Oswald is the only person in the world who can really understand what it's like-- to be part of the cult and sort of know what is going on and not be as good at lying to yourself as you'd want to be, to be in Samson Trammel's power, to know exactly how bad a person you are, to love someone who loves a God. 

In the evening, Lev returns to an apartment with Agravaine and Mordred, or a bit later to a hotel room with just Mordred. Mordred continues to be wonderful. Lev knew he was kind and gentle and patient and willing to rescue him from mental asylums. To this he adds intelligent and insatiably curious and good with languages and an excellent writer. He's a good liar, which is a trait Lev both appreciates and shares, and a good person, which is not a trait Lev has at all but still one he admires.

At night Mordred reads to him and he sits at Mordred's feet not close enough to touch. 

And Lev... watches. Notices how good Mordred is at picking up new phonemes. His carefully dropped r's, too-consciously distinguished 'lot' and 'thought', the conscientious way he pronounces 'voice' and 'verse' the same; the loudness, Lev thinks, is natural, Mordred always talked loud and fast like a New Yorker. Agravaine's prep-school vowels and elocution-class consonants, the kind of accent no one has unless they're taught it. Mordred mentions going to college and... it's not just rich people who went to college, Lev went to college... but Mordred has a job and a tiny apartment of the sort a journalist in New York City has and he could probably afford to buy Lev's entire tenement growing up. 

He watches Mordred and Gale. He watches the way they almost-not-quite touch; he watches the way Mordred's face lights up when someone mentions Gale, and how happy Gale seems when they're together; he watches the feelings that flash across Mordred's face too quickly for Mordred to even notice them. He knows Mordred and Gale love each other. He does not know if they know. To both of them he drops hairpins: says gay in the right tone of voice, expresses an interest in red ties, suggests visiting a teahouse; the only thing he gets out of it is a red tie and a box of quite bad black tea. But perhaps the words have changed; everything else has.

(The Slide has closed, and there are no more balls, and his favorite cafeteria doesn't have a single fairy there anymore, and in the Lower East Side he cannot find a single man in makeup, and the bathhouses are open but he's never been the sort of fairy who goes to bathhouses, and they won, the purity crusaders won while he was gone, you can drink again but there is not a single place he can go if he wants to meet people like him for anything other than a quick fuck.)  

It's been a matter of safety that he track the things he's tracking about Mordred, what does this person want from me and is he in a bad mood today and what can I do to keep the peace. Lev is conscious that if Mordred stops paying for his food he would be selling apples on the street until he starves. Perhaps ten years ago he could have gotten factory work, but he is clumsy and slow and has never worked with his hands and there are dozens of men for every job; perhaps ten years ago he could have sucked dick for money, but he is fifteen years too old to be a punk however babyfaced he is, and the Slide is closed and he doesn't want to try until he knows exactly how likely it is he'd wind up in Riker's. Now he has one hope, a queer who may or may not know he's queer and old money who desperately wants everyone to think he's not, and all he seems to want is for Lev to be happy and Lev knows how unlikely that is.

On Fridays he lights the candles and sings and prays.  

Hugging is good but being hugged is bad. Leaning is okay except when it's not. Sometimes the weight of someone slightly on top of him is comfortingly real and sometimes it gives him a panic attack and then sometimes it's both and he sits very still and lets all of it flow over him.

Oswald mostly knows about classical music, though you wouldn't guess it from his tastes. It's been getting excitingly modern lately, there's improvisation and atonality and he even heard a sound montage once, literally just a bunch of recorded sounds strung together. Jazz is the good stuff, though. There's a reason jazz is the part of all this you can tune into on the radio.

Music is easy. When words fail him all he has to do is turn a knob and demonstrate. He doesn't have that, for anything else. There's no radio station that will get across an emotion he can't describe, no quick notation for the twisted knot his understanding of what he can and cannot think has become, no book he can hand Lev to do the work of picking apart what Samson Trammel did to him. It is perhaps the worst field to have to pioneer.

But Lev is right there with him. Lev who has seen his breakdowns and understood them, Lev whose hands are gentle and warm to the touch, Lev who talks about love and knowledge and the whole world and glows with it, glows so the world feels not just colorful again but radiant--

Oswald does not make commitments easily. He has spent his life caring for exactly one person, very deeply and to no small sacrifice, and in the end he couldn't even keep his promises to her. But there is something very desperately lonely inside him, grieving and lonely and in need of something to protect, and he wants--

He has never been good with words.

"The natural history museum has a temporary exhibit that looks interesting, do you want to see it?"

"Yes." Mordred's so good! His expectations are so easy to fulfill.

"I haven't been since I was a kid. Did you go?" Lev says, which is not not calling Mordred on his accent.

"It's been a while but not as long as it's been for you."

Then they can go!

The museum has interesting rocks and fossils and dioramas of Primitive Tribes Of The World. Lev reads about the fossils and rocks with great interest and has STRONG opinions about the dioramas, mostly about how the arrows come from a completely different pygmy tribe than the loincloths do and WHO does this museum think they are fooling. NOT LEV.

"Ugh, they're talking about primitive African tribes. I would like to see how well the curators of this museum survive on the Serengeti."

Oh no Lev is very good.

"The thing is that it doesn't even make sense to say one culture is better than another culture. It's like saying that one kind of animal is better than another kind. They're all adapted for their particular environments and technological levels and staple crops and all the rest of it. Biologists don't try to rank animals from Most Developed to Least Developed. They don't say snakes are superior to lizards, which are a primitive species. And yet when we talk about humans suddenly it's all primitive tribes this and superior Western civilization that. It's profoundly unscientific. Darwin has taught us that there is no Great Chain of Being which ranks whites higher than Asiatics higher than Negroes."

Lev is very good.

"And even if we are going to judge cultures morally-- which is terrible scientific practice-- I feel like leaving eighteen-year-old boys to choke to death on mustard gas is far worse than anything any so-called primitive tribe got up to."

He says this with venom.

Mordred remembers Lev's sailor and does some mental math and thinks: ah.

What he says is, "Can't say I disagree."

Does Mordred want to hear ALL ABOUT the customs of this tribe in Papua New Guinea because he is going to hear about it WHETHER HE LIKES IT OR NOT.

He does.

(Lev is so good??)

"Did you know the Inuit are one of the few societies that are both polygynous and polyandrous? en who are terrible hunters share one wife and men who are good hunters have many wives."

"I did not know that."

"Yeah!!! It makes a ton of sense because you don't wind up with excess men, which tends to lead to cultural instability."

He is bouncing.

Oh no he's so good.........

Some time later--

"You know what is terrible about these people talking about 'civilization'?" His tone suggests his skepticism about this concept. "Farming is actually worse than being a hunter-gatherer. Look at their bodies. A first-year undergraduate can tell."

"Oh?"

"Farmers are six inches shorter than hunter gatherers. Their teeth show signs of malnourishment, their bones show signs of disease. Bone lesions, porotic hyperostosis, enamel defects... Farmers are sick."

"Huh."

"And if you study current hunter gatherers they work far less than farmers at a similar tech level. Less disease because they're not crowded together, less starvation because if one plant encounters a blight they can just eat a different plant. No parasitic kings and priests eating up your food without doing anything. Everyone works. Hunter gatherers have fewer kids, the one advantage of farming is that you can pump out the babies and crush the hunter gatherer tribes. Assuming you don't have a potato blight and starve."

Mordred nods.

"White people kidnapped by Indians mostly went native, and Indians kidnapped by white people constantly tried to go home. But farming lets you have babies and specialization and that lets you have armies, so..." He trails off.