for
Loren
Grayson
responds to the photograph like most men do
at first. They're typically gay as well, so
my holding Brent's head close to my chest,
next to my heart, isn't what draws their
attention - or keeps it. Perhaps it's the
silvers and late-winter grays, the naughty
suggestion of men like us existing even back
in the days of Old Hollywood, our faces a
bright, hard sheen and our bodies trim and
together. What finally catches his eye,
whoever he is at the moment, is Brent's hand
reaching from behind me between my legs and
cupping my crotch as I stand next to him, my
arm wrapped around his head, my fingers lost
in his curls. Brent sits at the table, his
head against my heart, his pencil against the
lined page ripped from his journal as he
pauses from writing me a quote about the
difference between need and desire as
articulated by Louis I. Kahn, his head
against my heart, both of us looking into the
camera, both smiling with the satisfaction -
what the man who photographed us rightly
called aggressive afterglow - and the
arrogance of two men who for the moment
believe their intellectual infatuation and
self-feeding desire will obviously bloom into
a love free of the drugs, free of the
meat-market websites, free of the other men
who can only look at this photograph and
realize Brent and I would rather be nowhere
than with each other, in this moment, his
hand poised to finish transcribing for me the
division between need and desire, his head
against my heart, my heart a marching toy
escaped from its birthday wrapping.
"He's
dead," Grayson says.
"What?"
"The
spirits are telling me he's dead." I
preferred Grayson when he was performing card
tricks for me even after I had told him I had
no money left to buy him a drink. Magic as
flirtation, illusion as foreplay.
"How?"
Brent
and I had met nearly two years ago through
one of those awful sites with pictures of
stiff cocks and spread ass cheeks, him in
Fort Worth and me lost in the anorexic pines
of the four-lane minor towns a hundred miles
northeast. But we kept in touch, a modem
connecting us in a way our fingertips could
not. We kept in touch even while I dated a
boy named Toby and tried to convince myself
his youth represented a possibility, a future
Brent and I had abandoned when instead it
simply masked indifference and
self-preservation, just as it had for Brent
and I. We kept in touch, finally speaking on
the phone a year and half after first
contact, and I listened as the cell signal
wavered and his voice hobbled from elation to
irritation and he refused my offers to go to
him and he could not come to me, too afraid
his high would bottom out along the lonely,
dark I-35 corridor. And we did not keep in
touch afterwards, but we did meet, by
coincidence, half a year ago. We took each
other in, in the apartment of a man unknown
to me and moments later I held his head
against my heart.
Grayson
closes his eyes and lifts his head
heavenward, the direction in which all gods
and available foresight reside. His lips
flatten and his eyelids crease into
themselves. I look down at my photograph of
Brent and myself. He holds the pencil erect
in his hand, as if I were a fan and he the
celebrity whose autograph I would pin to my
wall below my first rose and over the
Christmas card of the boy whose youth curdled
into rage. "Something - something in his
brain. Some kind of.... Did he have a
disease?"
"No,"
I say, and I remember us so high, so wired,
so ravenous, so exhausted from fucking he
began to hyperventilate, straddling me on the
plastic-covered couch and I held him to my
hips wanting to be the one man who threw him
from the cusp, watched him plummet into me
and never break my surface. "Nothing
like that."
"December?"
"Show
me another trick."
Grayson
looks down at me, his eyes open again.
"What do you want to see?"
"I
don't know shit about magic. Pick
something."
He fans
the cards before me, a flat staircase of
red-backed possibilities. "Any
card."
Jack of
spades.
"Close
your eyes."
In my
own darkness, I listen as Grayson explains
what he's going to do.
He was
right, he was right about December. The last
I spoke to Brent, over the phone, the signal
clear. I could hear each word as precise and
indelible as his last spasms atop me half a
year ago: why do you want to hurt me?
Because
now I know I can, I wanted to say. Because
this is the only way I can know without
feeling your head against my heart and my
body against yours and your words in my hand.
Because
that's all you allowed me.
I open
my eyes and the card I never released has
changed in my grip. "You turned a jack
into a queen," I say. "Not too
impressive in this crowd."
Grayson
laughs, the tension falling away from him as
he rocks his head back and lets his hands,
still swollen with cards, plop down knocking
my bottle to the bar with a sharp slap.
"Fuck!"
The
pale brown liquid belched from the bottleneck
washes over my photo of Brent and me like a
bored tide. I grab a napkin from the top of
the bar and quickly blot the photo, but
already the ink is running, Brent and I
melting, swirling into black-and- white
watercolors, a puddle of smoke and regret.
"I'm
so sorry," Grayson says, his hands now
up in surrender, afraid to help, afraid to
move. He backs away, offering a vague promise
of paper towels from the men's room even
though the bartender, patch over her eye, has
more in her hand.
I tell
him it's fine, but already he's out the
swinging doors, into the foyer, his head
bouncing in and out of sight before the door
windows as they whisper closer, closer
together.
The
bartender looks at the buckling photo paper
and whirlpool inks of my photo with Brent. I
blot the last of the beer from it and the bar
top. I'm wiping the ruin away. I can't stop.
I'm wiping slick white paper blank save for
the last dark streaks striped and wide across
what was Brent and me, my fingers lost in his
curls, his head against my heart, both of us
lost, lost under my grasp. The bartender
holds a wad of towels out to me.
I can't
stop wiping, even now, even after we both are
white and clean and gone.
