Rough Trade (34 page)

Michael pulled back to steady his senses. In the brief moment it took to set their tea cups by the phone, words pushed up inside him. He wanted to tell the Blueboy he was sick inside, perhaps always so. But when he turned back, the Blueboy was already pulling his shirt over his head, dropping it to the floor, a mixture of desire and resignation on his face.

The sight of the boy bare-chested and blooming stole the breath from Michael’s lungs, drowned confession’s slim second chance. Michael shoved the Blueboy down, worked his fingers into the grooves of the boy’s ribs, clutching smooth skin. The kid’s eyes glazed over then flickered shut, arms reaching for the headboard.

The boy’s flawed beauty astounded Michael. Something tight loosened inside him, but it wasn’t love, Michael wouldn’t let it be. The thought saddened him. He drew a slow breath, amazed that his body was capable of even deeper vulnerabilities than illness. He swallowed hard and shivered.

Inside Michael’s gut, desire curled—a ball of cottonmouths. He pulled off their clothes, hooked the Blueboy’s legs over his shoulders. A part of him wanted to slide red and raw into the boy’s ass, shoot those cottonmouths deep. But blood and sperm, especially his, couldn’t offer such communion. He rolled on a condom, and again, another.

Less resistance this time. The Blueboy bit his lip, scrunched his eyes in his damaged face, his body not yet fully broken in. His ass, rhythmic and ringed, clenched the shaft of Michael’s cock. Perhaps if Michael fucked the Blueboy hard enough, he could lose himself inside the kid. He didn’t want to think his own thoughts anymore. He wanted to rip off layered latex and feel his body let go, regardless of the consequence. The boy bucked, like he wanted to come but couldn’t. Michael’s fingers squeezed the kid’s shoulders hard enough to leave marks. He hunched forward, found the head of the kid’s dick and tongued it to his mouth. The Blueboy gasped, body convulsing. Michael pushed harder and felt tension in his gut uncoil, shooting up and out.

Michael swallowed the last of the Blueboy’s cum, then let the still-hard cock fall from his mouth. He pulled out, gently lowering the boy’s legs to the bed, then removed sodden condoms and tossed them into a waste basket. He settled his head on the Blueboy’s stomach. The kid’s breathing slowed; his legs trembled.

Michael felt the boy’s hand run over the crown of his head where his hair was thin.
Awesome,
the Blueboy whispered.

Michael wanted to laugh but couldn’t. He rolled over and swallowed the Blueboy’s cock again, sending an electric jolt through the boy’s spent nerves. The Blueboy said nothing as Michael lay there, tongue circling the sensitive shrinking head.

The next morning, Michael cooked them eggs. His new AIDS Buddy, Keith, had taken it upon himself to keep Michael’s refrigerator well stocked. Michael was glad for the healthy appetite of company. The Blueboy ate greedily, his hair wet from the shower, his bruise a green copper-stain in the morning light, his young body fast to heal. Michael’s own food grew cold on his plate, appetite only for the pleasure his eyes drank in. He tore an ATM receipt in half and wrote his phone number on the part not showing his deficit, then handed it over.
Come see me again.

The Blueboy shrugged and put on his coat.

*

When the first call came at 3 a.m., Michael stirred from sleep and groggily pressed the cold phone to his ear. It took a long moment to decode the
“It’s me”
at the other end. More words, a whisper, a bare exhale of breath.
Look outside.

Michael gathered an extra handful of cord and pulled the phone to the window. He squinted down at the snow-slushed street. In the watery light of the street lamp, a figure stood by the payphone. Slowly a face turned up toward Michael’s window like a swimmer surfacing for air. The Blueboy. Michael breathed in deep at the sight.

While the Blueboy choked through another fight with his brother, Michael kept the receiver tucked against his ear and scrambled to find clean clothes. It had been days since he’d last been out of his robe. Quickly he pulled on jeans and slipped on a shirt. Before the kid’s quarter ran out, Michael took down his number, scribbling it on the wall above his nightstand. He ran a washcloth over his face and called right back.

Even with his window closed, Michael heard a faint ring from the street below before the kid picked up the phone. As the Blueboy confessed he had nowhere else to go, Michael walked to the window again and saw the kid’s face still tilted up toward his window. Michael told him he’d throw down his keys.

Soon, any late hour “
It’s me”
was all it took for Michael to let the Blueboy in. No sad tale of brother and fists required. Few words at all, the language of bodies simply enough.

With Keith’s help Michael kept his apartment cleaner—clothes put away, papers off the couch—as if expecting company. When Keith asked why, Michael revealed nothing. The Blueboy had to be kept secret, the one thing Michael could look forward to now when every doctor visit meant plummeting T-cells. Keith would ask too many questions—were they having safe sex, did they know the risks involved? Though Michael was careful, he knew Keith would consider skirting the issue a sin of omission. But surely the Blueboy knew, didn’t he? Surely he noticed Michael’s sallow cheeks, the skin growing thin on his frame.

In shame, Michael waited for nights of freezing rain or heavy snowfall. Always the Blueboy called from the payphone on the street below, always after Michael had gone to bed, the sharp ring of the old black rotary jarring away dreams unremembered.

But most nights Michael lay alone, listening to his body: neck vertebrae clicking against a pillow’s imperfect comfort. Blood pulsing in his ears. If he slept at all, it was only to dream about rising to go to the bathroom, on his way looking out his window at the corner below, the snow-sludged street empty of all but the lost boys and the lost men who fed them.

When the Blueboy came again, Michael didn’t want to undress. He didn’t want the Blueboy to see his mongrel-thin frame, elbows and ribs ready to tear through faint skin. The wind raged outside as the Blueboy insisted; he lay already naked, erect, wanting the heat of skin to warm him. But when he tugged off Michael’s shirt, the blue sky in his eyes clouded over.

Words had gotten bigger the longer left unsaid. Michael watched the Blueboy slowly roll to the side, making room for him on the bed. Michael climbed in, sagging into the mattress, reached out and cupped shrunken fingers around the boy’s crotch. He lowered his head and leaned in openmouthed. The Blueboy’s hand stopped him.
You don’t have to.
The kid’s erection already flagging.
Let’s just hold each other.

Michael turned from the pity in the boy’s eyes. The Blueboy tried to spoon around him but Michael shrugged him off. He couldn’t stand the feel of the kid’s stare lasering his back. Michael clenched his teeth and focused his eyes on his nightstand, on the phone heavy enough to kill someone, its black plastic lipped with moonlight, the silence of the room looming louder than any bell.

*

Michael grew to hate the Blueboy, his good looks and health, the pity and shame in the boy’s blue eyes. Rage circulated through Michael’s system. It stooped his shoulders, gnawed his gut, leeched oxygen from his blood. It consumed the meat of cell after cell as it shrank his body and the size of his heart.

Keep your spirits up,
Keith said every visit, bringing prepared food from an AIDS organization now. Michael ate a few mouthfuls while Keith offered health tips Michael would never heed—his pretense of hospitality wearing threadbare. After Keith left, Michael flushed the rest of his meal down the toilet, watched it swirl away with the water.

When the Blueboy called again, Michael said he was too sick to see him. It was true; he lay curled in the mess of his bed, the phone receiver a black dumbbell crushing his ear. Couldn’t even beat off anymore to the other
Blueboys,
dog-eared magazines stacked inside Michael’s steamer trunk. Forget someone real. No rallying himself for a kid who was only a hustler, who asked for more than money or marijuana, asked on a cold winter night to steal through walls better left in place.

On the phone, the Blueboy’s voice choked through tears.
It’s snowing. I’m cold. She snuck me in the basement again, but he heard us. I think my nose got broke.

Sickness puddled in Michael’s bed, assaulting his senses. He couldn’t even walk to the window now.
I can’t help you,
he rasped.

You’re just like him!

The Blueboy’s words felt like blows inside Michael’s brain. With great effort Michael carefully returned the receiver to its cradle.

Outside, snow howled.

*

Keith came the following morning, cleaned the bed’s caked filth, and taxied Michael to Graduate Hospital. There, doctors probed Michael’s stick-figure frame, pumped his veins full of drugs and fluid, snaked tubes down his throat to ease air into lungs. They started him on a new combination therapy they called a cocktail, as if such a name could invent for Michael pleasant memories of Boatslip tea dances and Fire Island free-for-alls.

That week in the hospital, Keith brought Michael piles of magazines and newspapers to read to “keep his spirits up.” Michael grew sick of Keith’s good intentions and had no choice but to rally. By Friday he was cleared to go home.

Waiting for Michael’s release forms, Keith read aloud week-old headlines.
S
PACE SHUTTLE SNAFU, MAIN LINE MURDER STUMPS DA, TEENAGER’S BODY WASHES UP BY SCHUYLKILL REFINERY.
The last sent a chill down Michael’s spine.

The details Keith offered were imprecise: Runaway from Webster and Bambrey found drowned the morning of January second, discovered by a Blackmoore Chemicals employee. Police believed the seventeen-year-old jumped or fell from either the South Street or Walnut Street Bridge. Relatives reported no note or precipitating factor other than depression following the recent loss of close family members. The body had been lodged in the chemical company’s filtering system among plowed snow and ice dumped into the river following recent storms. The name of the minor was not released.

The Blueboy, Michael was sure. He wanted to crawl back in his hospital bed, have the nurse kick Keith out and nail shut the door, let him die in peace. The Blueboy’s face floated before him: pale hair falling across forehead, icy depths of his eyes, the kissable crook of his nose. Heart full of as much tragedy as any Michael had ever endured. And now lost. Now dead.

Back home, Michael listened patiently to Keith’s schedule of when to take what medication. Keith taped a reminder to Michael’s refrigerator, and before leaving went over the instructions for working the electronic alarm on Michael’s new pocket pillcase. When he was finally alone, Michael flushed his medicine away, dropped the plastic case in the trash, then opened every window in the house to the cold outside.

Let the grave take him. He phoned Keith’s answering machine and told his AIDS Buddy not to bother delivering meals anymore; he was feeling so well he had decided to visit his sister in Tampa, would stay through winter if the sun proved kind. Michael didn’t mention that he hadn’t spoken to his sister since his father’s funeral, that he was merely trying to buy enough time to die quietly. Hanging up, he looked around his room at all the things he wouldn’t miss and imagined Keith or the landlord finally finding him, his thin carcass beached on a tangle of bedcovers.

Fever retook him. Michael lay swirled in sweaty sheets. Half dead in dreams, he felt himself slip free of his body. All around him darkness stretched, as vast and black as space. Glints of light flickered high above like stars. But Michael was far away from them and any warmth they possessed. He felt something cold and awful clamp tight around him, surrounding him in a second skin. Michael knew it was the Blueboy’s corpse, still wet from the river, sealing over him like a wound closing.

They were together now.

Michael stared out through the boy’s dead eyes, and watched powerless as the Blueboy’s stiff limbs, now his own, stumbled against the engulfing dark. His arms and legs tried to climb to the stars, but they lay out of reach across an impossible distance. Could angels even scale such heights, wondered Michael, surrounded by the dead boy’s wet decay, feeling the leaden hope in the Blueboy’s heart.

From distant rifts light bled down. The faint penumbra illuminated faces Michael had known in life. Men who had died of the same disease from which he was dying. Their deathbeds had left them with scarecrow limbs and bodies shrunken to bone-bag forms, stretched skin a gray afterthought. Their funeral-stitched lips did not move, yet Michael heard their soft susurrant chorus building inside his head, their yearning for life and light.

With great effort, these bodies slowly pulled themselves heavenward. But such fear among them. Trembling fingers found desperate purchase in nooks willed from nothing. The stars of life shone sweet and distracting as each body struggled higher.
Do not forget me,
minds called. Michael felt their silent yearning seek him out. Could the Blueboy hear it too?

With sudden strain the Blueboy joined the ascent, up past starlit windows that revealed a brick row home, snowy streets, car doors opening to strangers. A flash of fists, a rush of water. Who would want to go back to that?

Hand over hand the Blueboy climbed, up a faint thread heretofore invisible. It dangled from a rift in the firmament. It disappeared inside the Blueboy’s chest. Michael felt it, silky and gossamer thin, snaking around his essence, drawing tight.