He stood at the window afterward

The key to his cage lay in my palm, warm: I had been holding it in my fist since dinner. He saw it. He didn't ask. Three weeks is a long time even for us, and for the last two days he had moved around the flat as if the steel on him made a sound.

“Undress. On your back.”

He undressed fast and lay down. I sat beside him and opened the lock. The ring didn't come off at once — the skin under it had swollen, and I had to wait for him to breathe out. Then I set the cage on the bedside table, lock towards me, and looked at all of him. Slim, light, with red lines where the ring had pressed. He looked me in the face, the way I taught him, and waited.

I didn't draw it out. Not that evening. I straddled him, took him in and moved myself, slowly, one palm pinning his chest to the mattress. He held on as long as he could — about four minutes, I was counting by the clock above the door. Then he asked, I allowed it, and he came with his eyes shut, gripping my hand in his. I had come a little earlier, while he was still holding on. That is the order in our house: me first.

Usually after that he turns his back to me and offers the nape of his neck to be stroked. I'm used to it. That evening he lay for a minute, then sat up, then stood and went to the window. Naked, his back to me. He stood and looked down into the courtyard, where there was nothing to look at.

I lay and looked at his back. Thin shoulder blades, a thin neck, and the whole of that back shut like a door. Something old pricked inside, from the first year: he took what he wanted and turned away. I knew it wasn't true. Knowing and not feeling are two different things, and it took me a minute to get from one to the other.

The window

The first year, it hurt. For three weeks he follows me around the flat with the eyes of a dog by the dinner table, kisses my hand when I pass him a cup — and five minutes after I finally let him out, he stands at the window and says nothing, as though I'm not in the room. Once, back then, I asked what was wrong. He said: nothing. The second time I asked louder. He said: I don't know. The third time I understood that asking was useless, and I started watching instead.

Watching turned out to be more useful. It lasts anywhere from forty minutes to an hour and a half. He isn't angry and he isn't sad; he's simply empty, like after a long drive. He doesn't want to talk, doesn't want to be touched, doesn't want to lie next to me. He wants one thing: to be told what to do with his hands. He explained it to me himself, about three months after I stopped asking: “I don't feel anything then. Give me a job, it's easier that way.”

So that evening I didn't call him back to bed. I took the notebook from the bedside table — the one our rules are written in — opened a clean page and wrote three lines. Then I said, without raising my voice:

“Come here.”

He came. Stood in front of me, naked, with the red marks from the cage, looking not at me but at the notebook. I showed him.

“Towels from the drying rack — fold them. My black shoes — polish them. Wipe down the kitchen counter. Then come back.”

“Yes, Mistress.”

The same voice as the past three weeks: level and quiet. Only before, he would have kissed my hand as well. Now he just took the notebook and went out. I set a timer on my phone — not for him, for me. So I wouldn't count the minutes in my head and wait.

Three jobs

I read. From the bathroom I could hear him taking the towels off the rack: one at a time, a shake, then down onto the washing machine. Then he went to the hall and I heard the brush. He polishes my shoes slowly and always the same way: dust first, then cream, then the cloth until they shine. That evening he took longer than usual. I didn't hurry him.

Once, I did get up and look from the bedroom down the hall. He was sitting on the floor on his heels, a shoe on his left hand, the brush in his right, moving it so evenly he might have been counting. Naked, wearing nothing but the marks from the ring. He didn't raise his head. I went back to my book.

Last winter I got it wrong once. I wrote him eight jobs instead of three — decided that since he wanted to work anyway, he could work. He did all eight, silently, in two hours, and then sat down on the kitchen floor and stayed there until I came looking for him. Not crying. He simply couldn't get up. That was when I understood that this hour is not a reserve of his strength but the bottom of it. He works not because he can but because he doesn't know what else to do with himself. Since then it's three jobs, four at most. Short ones. The kind you can do without thinking.

The timer showed thirty-eight minutes when the drip of the cloth being wrung out in the kitchen stopped. Five more minutes of quiet. Then he came in, put the notebook on the bedside table, went down on the floor by the bed and pressed his forehead to my knee. Didn't say a word. I laid my hand on the back of his neck and felt that he was warm — not like before, at the window, when I had looked at his back and it had been a stranger's.

“Back?”

“Back.”

“Lie down.”

He lay down beside me, close, and reached to put his arm around me — and stopped halfway, because he knows: ask first.

“May I?”

“You may.”

The lock

I locked him back up before sleep, not in the morning. He asked for it himself. Said he sleeps worse without it — like a door left unlocked. I fitted the ring, slid in the lock, turned the key. He heard the click, breathed out, and was asleep within a minute, his face against my shoulder.

Over coffee in the morning I asked what had been at the window. He thought and said:

“Nothing. Like pulling on a rope for three weeks and then someone lets go of the other end. You stand there and don't know what to do with your hands.”

“That's why I give you the shoes.”

“That's why I polish them.”

I don't ask what's wrong any more. I look at the clock, write three lines and wait for him to come back on his own. He always does.

• Time it. Every man has his own hour; mine runs from forty minutes to an hour and a half.
• Don't ask what's wrong. Give him a job he can do in silence, with his hands.
• Three jobs, not eight. That hour is not his strength but his emptiness, and it fills up fast.
• Let him come back by himself. Your place is in bed with a book, not at the window beside him.
• Talk in the morning, when he can speak again.