"Now you might feel a pinch," the nurse said, and the machines got louder.
Wyatt made a noise, small at first, and then louder until it hurt my ears, the terrified sounds of a wounded animal, and I closed my eyes, wanting it to stop.
Afterward, he just sat there, staring at the wall behind me, and his eyes were empty. There was nothing there.
I went out into the hallway with his mom, but I could still see him in the hospital gown, sitting on the examining table.
"I think twice a week would help," the doctor said, and his mom, she just nodded.
I thought of all the stars outside. It must be nice to be so far away.
"I have to work a double this Thursday, but Tuesdays and Thursdays are usually clear," she told him, and I closed my eyes and thought of a truck stop far away where Wyatt and I had spent our first night on the road together. I wished for a box to put myself in.
*
I remember Wyatt with his cheesecake, sitting there like everything was okay; such a kidder. That cafeteria was a morgue; he just didn't know it yet.
"I'll have all the cheesecake I want when I come back," he said to me.
I played with my plastic fork, unable to eat anything. I just kept thinking of him on that table in so much pain, and it made my stomach turn.
“You’re not hungry?” he asked, and I shook my head.
He laughed, and I looked out the windows at the courtyard.
"I dig this cheesecake," he told me. He took a big drink of juice and sat back in his chair. "It's the coolest."
"But you're coming back," I said, out of nowhere.
He stared at me for a minute. "I'm coming back for you, and then we're going away. Who needs this town?"
I smiled at him, and he took my hand across the table with his free hand, the hospital bracelet still clinging to the hairs on his arm.
"I won't know, though, will I? I have no proof you’re coming back," I said.
"Don't say that. You'll know when I come back. We'll have a code or something." His face was all shadow.
"You gonna knock on the table or what?" I asked.
"I’ll be a regular guy, like I am now."
"You really are dumb," I mumbled, trying not to cry.
*
We didn't talk about the hospital visits after the first one. We hardly talked about it then. I remember Wyatt and I standing in the back parking lot of the grocery store, connected by nerves dripping red across the asphalt, suspended like a tightrope between us. He was weaker than he had been before the treatments, but practice continued.
"I don't know how to make it go back in," he said to me.
"It's a fine time to tell me that now," I said.
After a minute, he said to me, "Just trust me, this is how it works."
*
Wyatt went away slowly, one treatment at a time, with dark circles under his eyes and red gums bleeding into the sink. I watched him go. Once, a couple of his teeth fell out when I was eating dinner at his house, and he just sat there, bleeding from his mouth. He got smaller every time, until he fit neatly into a wheelchair.
"I always thought I'd get hit by a train or something exciting like that," he said on the last day before he left.
"I wish you'd shut up, just once," I said with my eyes wet.
Twenty-four hours later, he was in cold storage, then in a dark wood box in the back of a car. If a black hole were a person, it would have been me at that moment, watching Wyatt go into the ground.
He never made it to college, but I still saw him there, as a face in every crowd. The dorm rooms and lecture halls closed over me like water.
I found a boy who looked like Wyatt and went out to the woods with him once in a while. He didn’t smell like him or taste like him, but it didn’t matter until I went back up to my room to cry. He took me to alcoholic bonfires and gatherings in small houses stuffed with too many people, and if we found a quiet corner, it was almost okay. He wasn’t Wyatt, though. He was a stranger with Wyatt’s face. After a while, being around him made me sick, so I started to avoid him, the poor kid. He left school after freshman year and never came back.
I started seeing Wyatt in different places after college, after I had stopped pretending to be an adult. I saw him once in a while at a bus stop, sad eyes gazing out at the stars. I wanted to ask him when he was coming back, but as soon as the thought came into my head, he was gone, vanished behind a passing bus.
Another time, I passed a ringing pay phone. I wondered if it was Wyatt on the other end waiting for me to pick up, but I just kept walking.
*
I was twenty-four and living in a small town the next time I saw him. There he was one night, still a teenager on the side of the road. The first couple times I saw him I went right past. I floored it all the way home and started avoiding that road. But then he started showing up on every road, watching me pass. So one day, I stopped the car. We stared at each other for a long minute, and then he opened the door.
"I thought you were just going to keep driving again," Wyatt said.
"I almost did."
He got in and shut the door. "Drive."
"Where?"
He sighed and leaned back in the seat. "You know where."
So I drove.
"I was starting to wonder if you'd ever come back," I said.
"I'm only visiting," he told me, and when I looked over at him, he wouldn't look at me.
"What do you mean, visiting?"
"Things are more complicated than I realized," he said. "I'm working on it."
We got some burgers at a diner in the middle of nowhere, and he watched the cars passing on the freeway outside. "I'm like those cars, you know," he told me.
"Shut up."
"I am," Wyatt said, looking right into my eyes.
"Then why are you still wearing that hospital bracelet?"
We both looked down at the printed white plastic bracelet sticking to the hairs on his arm. He twisted it around and around, chuckling. "This is nothing," he told me me. He looked up; his eyes were deep, rotating star fields far away, pools of water so deep I’d never fully know them. "You recognize the song on the juke box?"
"Deana Durbin," I said.
"Right. I'm driving away in a black car," he told me, and I remembered the flowers and his mom's face at the funeral. "Come on," he said, getting up from the booth. "Let's make a phone call."
Out at the pay phone, he punched a number I didn’t recognize into the keypad. I watched him stand there, looking out toward the horizon as it rang on the other end.
“Who are you calling?”
“Shh,” he said, and he turned away from me.
“Someone from the back of a stall door?”
But he said nothing. After a minute, he hung up and said, “No answer.” There was no further explanation.
Wyatt stayed for a while. I didn't question it. We got an apartment and a cat and bought some food to eat, but he never ate after the truck stop. He told me his stomach was a void; there was no point in filling it. Somehow, he got a job, and we had a normal life for a few months.
"What do you love about me?" he asked me one night before we went to sleep. Our small bedroom was dark and hot around us, with the sound of sirens wailing far beyond the window in some distant alley.
"Oh, come on. Not this," I said.
"Tell me."
I thought for a minute, staring at the wall over the radio. The radio people told us the news and sang songs from their buzzing, tin-can world.
"I love your eyes, I guess."
"What nonsense," he said.
"You asked me, and I answered," I told him. Then I added, "Your belly button, too."
He laughed a little, taking my hand. "My belly button is a scar," he said quietly.
"I know," I said. I looked over at the window, at the moon outside, the tree branches. "Your turn. What do you love about me?"
"You have to work in the morning."
"No, I'm serious."
/>
He propped his head up on the pillow, smiling in the dark and said, "I'll show you."
His hand reached out across the distance between us, landing over my heart, warming and glowing in the dark. Color flowed over me, red and orange and blue and white, down between my skin cells, saturating my veins, beating and beating. My blood ran rainbow in the dark, illuminating his face. The room faded black, then, and the stars were all that was left. I opened my eyes and saw Andromeda, spinning and turning overhead. I heard Wyatt’s voice in the night, echoing in a soundless world.
"I love you. I love your memories, your blood; I love everything." Radio waves echoed out into space, undoing the ends of my fingers and toes, peeling tissue back to expose the red light highways, a fine human mist coming undone in the dark.
"I love you, too."
*
A few weeks later, Wyatt tried to throw himself onto the tracks in front of a train at Terminal Tower. It was the only sane moment he ever had. His knuckles were just beginning to turn black. I caught him before he went over the edge and I held him to me with the train going by, clacking past and blowing our coats open. "God damn it," he sobbed into my ear. "God damn it, I just want to leave."
That was the last time we left the apartment. From then on, we stayed home. Wyatt kept looking up subways and trains in the encyclopedias that we had bought when we moved in so we could feel like real adults. That set of encyclopedias was the only nice thing we owned. "One second and it's over," he said to me. "That's all it takes."
One night, I came home from work to an empty apartment with Billie Holiday serenading the living room wall. I knew where he was, and I thought of that damned tower with its rails, sending his bones into the gravel.
I didn't see him again for a long time.
*
I still remember his hand in my underwear, his voice in my ear in the dark, telling me goodnight. I remember his smile under the buzzing kitchen lights. His fingers on the banister on the way upstairs every night.
*
I went back to the old motel and sat in the room where we used to sleep and I thought about all the times I should have let him go. I wrapped myself in the dirty bedspread and cried myself to sleep.
The first time I woke up, it was because the phone rang. It rang and rang, and I looked over at it in the dark, and then I snatched the receiver off the cradle, sending it crashing to the floor. I scrambled to pick up the receiver again, pulling it up to my ear and saying, “Hello? Who is this?”
I knew who it was, though. “Everything’s going to be okay,” he said in my ear, and then he hung up. I hit star-69 and tried to call back a few times, each time getting a busy signal until once it rang through. “Hello?” I didn’t recognize the voice at first. I sat there listening for more, but that was all.
I woke up sometime later to the sound of a TV buzzing at low volume, and I didn't open my eyes, because I didn't want it to go away.
"You know, I always thought I'd live forever," I heard Wyatt say over the TV, just loud enough for the two of us to hear. My stomach was lead, a lump stuck in my throat and pulsing, salt and saline washing over me on the bed. My god, I just wanted to die right then.
"You mean you're not immortal, eh?" I asked, and he laughed a little.
The tears came then, silent and hot, soaking my pillow, and I pulled my knees up to my chest under the covers, not looking.
"There's never anything on," he said over the sound of the TV clicker.
After a few minutes, I asked. "Are you back?"
He sighed and turned the TV off. "You know the answer to that."
On the backs of my eyelids, silent dramas unfolded, sound coming in on a wave of static. Sunlit beaches, fingers tangled in the dark. Wyatt, smiling at the ocean. Wyatt, laughing in the moonlit motel room. Wyatt, above me in the dark, shuddering inside me with my name on his lips. The sound of his voice, talking about toast and coffee, and always freeways; I remembered all our favorite movies, skin touching in the dark car, smiling at the stars, Deana Durbin's voice fading into silence.
"What does any of it mean anymore, Wyatt?"
I felt the bed springs release, and he was gone.
*
About a week after that, a phone call came. It was late, probably about midnight, and when I answered, Wyatt said, “Did you keep breathing? Are you still alive?” In the background, I could hear the sound of subway trains clattering down the tracks, and then he hung up.
I knew where he was. The place I've avoided all along, that's where.
*
I went to Terminal Tower a sad husk, trailing my half-dead shell behind me. I went down to the platform, and there was one other person there, an old man. I thought for a minute I might know the guy.
At first, there was nothing. It was a set of dead tracks and an abandoned station. The newspapers whispered headlines to the magazines. The toilets in the restrooms waited, filmed over water trapped in the bowls. The old man paced the platform, and I wanted to run away, go home, bury myself in the dark of my bed and let the life drain out in red ribbons across the mattress.
"The train's coming," the old man called from across the platform.
At first, I didn't hear anything, but slowly, I started to hear the sounds of the rails groaning and distant wheels thundering over uneven parts of the track, squealing around a curve. The tunnel lit up at the end the way near death survivors always talk about.
"That's the train, alright," the old man said, and he laughed.
I left my heart at Terminal tower, and here comes the train, I thought to myself.
"One second," said the old man, his voice further away. "One second, that's all it takes.”
I watched the train fly past, clacking and clacking, a world of color and neon and metal posters. I put a hand out to feel the air rushing past. I thought of all the times I breathed the air he exhaled and all the times I sat with him on the balcony outside that little apartment.
All it takes is a second, after all.
He told me to transform, and so I did. I became a satellite burning up in the atmosphere. Even when we were apart, I left my lungs in his room so I could smell him. Never mind all that.
I listened to the sounds of the train, passing and passing, my skin cells dividing, peeling back in the dark, balls of white hot gas and debris, veins unwinding and untangling into a single line, leading from me to Wyatt, red light fibers connecting his aorta to my superior vena cava.
We rotated, umbilical tether twisting in the vacuum of space, tumbling toward each other in the dark with the stars around us already dead.
Table of Contents
About the Author
I was born in the wastelands of the American Midwest, and I still live there, much to everyone's regret. I started writing as a teenager as a side effect of what psychologists refer to as the "personal fable." I believed that I was unique, that my personal life story impacted the world, and that the world revolves around me. In my mid-twenties, I picked up writing again because I was sick of reading slosh and tired of having to go back fifty years to find books I actually want to read. I was especially over the only gay literature available in 2008 being soft core porn romance bullshit with jacked, oiled-up porn stars on the covers. I decided that if I wanted to read something that wasn't 500 pages of comma abuse and boners, I'd have to write it myself.
And so I did. It may not be the best, but it's what I want to read. Thank you for the support, and I hope my writing means something to you as well.
Visit my Goodreads page, where you can further abuse me by leaving me comments and questions and rating my worth as an author by a vague five-star scale! Click click! Do it!
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Thanks for the continued support and thanks for reading.
Table of Contents
Dedication
This story is dedicated to my partners in writing, a very select group of people who are
also writers. They are all extremely talented and they write things that I look forward to reading (a rare thing these days because, in my opinion, there's a lot of literary slosh in the world right now) and they have all at one point or another helped me shape one of my typo-riddled landmines into a finished book. Without the guidance of these awesome folks, I wouldn't have the courage to publish anything I've written. I'd like to say that I do everything myself, but without the help of these people and being constantly inspired by their ability to keep writing and creating new works, I'd have given up long ago. I am inspired almost every day by you guys, even by things so mundane and inconsequential as status updates on social media, so thank you.
Gypsy Snow
Chelsey Barker
Brianne Chason
Joe Egly-Shaneyfelt
Elizabeth Verger
If I forgot anyone, I'm sorry. I blame my advanced age.
I want to extend a very special thank you to all of my readers for your support and encouragement during the 2013-2014 and now the 2015 season, as there are only two months left. I'd like to extend it like the neck of a giraffe, but alas. I have no god-like abilities. You'll have to accept some kind of mechanized extension.
Table of Contents
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