Rough Trade (35 page)

Do not forget me.

Much closer now, lit windows seared the cold blue eyes masking Michael’s own. The Blueboy’s rough hands pulled both their bodies through one blinding laceration. On the other side, wind-snapped curtains revealed a new perspective: a dark room where walls shrank toward familiar vanishing points. Where a messy bed floated in the chilled blue air. And atop a damp mattress lay the rafted figure of a dreaming man.

Michael woke, somehow finding the strength to shut his window. Then he searched the bathroom for extra medicine Keith might have squirreled away. No luck. He fished the empty pill bottles from his wastebasket and set out to refill them at the 24-hour CVS drugstore.

The clock by the phone glowed 12:15 a.m. as Michael fled his apartment. Coatless, he stumbled through Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square, past a dry fountain and beneath bare branches silvered with snow. Flakes swirled around him as he reached out toward passersby, groping for handholds among the living. But strangers recoiled.

Still he managed to make it to the store at Nineteenth and Chestnut where he scattered the bottles on the counter in front of the Asian pharmacist. Her almond eyes narrowed with a mixture of pity and apprehension as she filled each prescription. Somehow Michael managed to pay with a credit card not yet maxed out. The pharmacist slid the bagged order toward his wax-paper palm, their hands never once touching.

Outside again, Michael found no comfort in the night air as he choked down his pills. Snow thickened on sidewalks and streets. He hobbled home, as graceless as in drunken days. Nearing his corner, he again wished his limbs would unlock what last bit of life they held and let him lay down in the steep snowdrifts beneath the neon blink of the E-Z Lot sign. But a silent message called out to him.

Do not forget me.

He struggled to see its source. Nothing. No one. All the lost boys had yet to climb out of the holes they crawled into.

Blood throbbed beneath Michael’s blistering skin. The grim evening was cast in a shadowed blue as cold and complete as air itself. As Michael neared his door, something in the glow of a street lamp swirled and caught his attention. By the payphone, air and light cemented into form. First, eyes glinting like glass. Then nose, brow and chin, their snowy softness packed by rough hands into accidental beauty. Michael, frightened, turned away, crossed the street’s shifting drifts, key in hand, its silver point carving a path toward his door.

Behind him,
It’s me.

Could it be? Michael glanced back, turned his key, and let the blue light in the shape of a boy follow him up three flights of stairs to his cramped apartment. There, Michael sat down on his bed, and the boy of light sat down beside him. Moved closer. Blew cool breath over Michael’s flushed face as he leaned in to kiss.

*

Michael woke alone, fever broken. The Blueboy was gone, if indeed he had ever been there.

Michael felt revitalized. Could the medicine have really worked so quickly? Or was it the Blueboy’s ghost, whose tongue and mouth had cooled Michael’s body? Not with a graveyard chill but with something brought from another world—lifetimes left unused. Lost time conspired into an antidote; Michael could feel it. The Blueboy’s ghost an incubus in reverse, a life-giver.

But that was impossible. The Blueboy was obviously still alive, nothing supernatural about it. Someone else must have drowned. Yet Michael could find no evidence that anyone had truly been there the night before; when he rose from bed, his apartment was still locked from inside, the air around him still vibrating with the texture of a dream. In the bathroom, he splashed cold water on his face. Despite his body’s sudden invigoration, Michael feared his mind had pitched forward into dementia. But when he looked in the bathroom mirror, his eyes looked more lucid than in weeks.

Cleaning up his place, he called Keith, told him he had not gone to Florida after all, but wanted to meet for a walk. Keith enthusiastically agreed to the unexpected invitation.

Hanging up, Michael spied the number he had written on the wall above the nightstand—the corner payphone. He considered dialing it, but the idea seemed crazy.

When Keith came, they walked uptown, Michael secretly searching for the Blueboy among the winter-wrapped pedestrians. But the young man was not to be found panhandling among shoppers or bumming smokes from office workers on breaks.

As they traipsed down to South Street, Keith complimented Michael’s newfound energy. Michael said nothing as he led them along the northern edge of Gray’s Ferry. Still no sign of the Blueboy.

Soon they came to the South Street Bridge, where the kid had jumped. Hadn’t he? Michael stopped halfway across, ignoring Keith’s puzzled expression as he scanned the river winding southward. In the distance behind scraggly trees, refinery smokestacks trailed charcoal wisps. Michael studied the riverside, trying to X-ray with his eyes the abandoned Navy Home in a vain effort to spy the house in Devil’s Pocket where the Blueboy had grown up. Where his brother had beaten him. Where he had become convinced life wasn’t worth living.

Your spirits are certainly up today,
Keith remarked.

Michael snapped around. Behind his companion, the spires of the city rose up—all glass and metallic blue in the afternoon light. The river ran alongside, flashing bright slivers against murky indigo. The colors hurt Michael’s eyes. The wind blew sudden cold back into his bones and he found himself shivering.

*

A few days later, Michael’s phone rang in the middle of the night as it had long ago. At first he couldn’t believe the faint whisper of the voice in his ear. He crossed to the window and looked down at the street corner. The Blueboy stood by the payphone, face upturned toward Michael’s window.

Soon the boy was at his door. Ushered in, cold and damp, his skin so pale it showed the lace of blue veins beneath.

You’re frozen,
Michael said, removing their clothes until his naked form lay atop the Blueboy’s goose-bumped skin. Michael tried to warm the Blueboy with hands and mouth. He drew the kid’s cock past his lips, glanced up, saw the Blueboy’s eyes roll back and shudder in their sockets.

So much coldness to fire, Michael thought. He reached to the nightstand for a condom, started to roll it on when he felt the chill of the Blueboy’s hand close around him.
That’s not needed anymore,
he said, guiding Michael in.

Inside his chest, Michael felt a silken skein unwind as if the Blueboy still held the psychic cord that had linked them the night of Michael’s fever. Michael let the Blueboy reel him in, rocking against the young man’s body, feeling a long-feared part of himself build toward release. Soon his warm cum filled the boy’s coldness.

Morning came, and Michael awoke alone, door once more locked from inside. When Keith came to walk Michael to his doctor’s appointment, Michael fought the urge to divulge everything, knowing Keith would only roll his eyes. At the hospital, Michael remained moody and silent as the doctor poked and prodded, only the faintest of smiles coloring his lips when he learned his T-cells were up, his physician impressed by his speedy turnaround.

The weather broke. No calls from the Blueboy came. Michael’s good health became a trophy Keith showed to his volunteer pals. Michael began to work out with them, meet them for herbal tea, attend their potluck dinners of tofu and tahini. He was glad for company if it meant taking his mind off the Blueboy for a while. And it had been years since he found himself welcomed by a group, though in the back of his mind he thought their chatter rang hollow; their friendship—even Keith’s—seemed forced, mere proof of the charity of the unafflicted.

Still he gratefully accepted when Keith arranged part-time work for him at the AIDS Fund, where Michael now spent mornings organizing bingo benefits hosted by drag queens and stuffing envelopes with brochures. Afternoons, Michael climbed the Stairmaster at the gym, sometimes glancing down at his chest, straining to glimpse the silken cord that might at any moment be tugged by an invisible hand. It never was. Evenings, he walked the streets a hustler might haunt, up and down Thirteenth past skinny black drag queens who called out
hey white rooster.
But the Blueboy was never among them, nor inside the bars that Michael checked each night. Spring was in the air and the Blueboy’s ghost had been sucked back into the dark.

One afternoon Michael entered St. John’s, though he hadn’t been to church since his father’s funeral. Out of habit he genuflected and crossed himself, then took a seat in back. An old woman crept past to the confessional. When she shut the wooden door, Michael raised his eyes to the vaulted ceiling, its filigreed firmament hazy and oiled behind a veneer of candle soot. Michael sighed and scanned the painted saints. What good would it do to take the old woman’s place when she left? The bearded carvings offered no answer. Michael rose, lit a candle before leaving, recalling the distant lights from his dream, how hard it had been to reach them.

And now when night comes, Michael stays up late, dials the number written on the wall above his nightstand. He carries the old black rotary to the window and looks down at the corner where the lost boys gather. Regulars ignore the ringing payphone as they place their palms on open car windows. Occasionally a curious new boy picks up the payphone receiver, and Michael listens in silence as a naïve
hello
threads through wires to reach his ear.

Fingers point to Michael’s window as the newcomer learns who the caller is. A peal of laughter rises. Michael shrinks from the lost boys’ sight. He sinks to the floor, hears the payphone receiver drop and clatter, yanking against its cord. He shuts his eyes, wondering how can he help himself when each upturned face might be the Blueboy’s come again—his hand lifting the fallen receiver, his voice whispering
It’s me.
Snowflakes fall on the Blueboy’s cheeks, collect on his lashes. Michael can feel them melting.

Contributors

J
ONATHAN
A
SCHE’
S
work has appeared in numerous magazines, including
Playguy, Inches, Torso, Honcho, and In Touch for Men,
as well as the anthologies
Friction 3, Three the Hard Way, Manhandled, Buttmen 2
and 3,
Best Gay Erotica 2004
and
2005,
and
Hot Gay Erotica.
He is also the author of the erotic novels
Mindjacker
and
Moneyshots.
He lives in Atlanta with his husband, Tomé, and their neurotic pets.

D
AN
B
OYLE
is a Los Angeles–based writer. His first novel,
Huddle,
published in 2003, is about nine gay men whose team vies for the championship of the West Los Angeles Flag Football League. His second novel,
Housecleaning,
published in 2007, is about a gay Caltech physicist trying to find a unified principle of the universe who returns to Seattle to care for his mother who is dying of a strange form of dementia in which she falls back in time. A former newspaper reporter, Dan currently works for a large public relations agency covering healthcare.

B
ILL
B
RENT
knows you aren’t reading this book for the authors’ bios. Follow Bill’s antics at www.LitBoy.com.

D
ALE
C
HASE
has been writing gay erotica for eight years with over 100 stories published in various anthologies and magazines including translation into German. His first literary effort recently appeared in the
Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction Quarterly.

M.
C
HRISTIAN
is the author of the critically acclaimed and best-selling collections
Dirty Words, Speaking Parts, The Bachelor Machine,
and
Filthy;
and the novels
Running Dry
and
The Very Bloody Marys.
He is the editor of
Confessions, Amazons,
and
Garden of Perverse
(with Sage Vivant),
The Mammoth Book of Future Cops
and
The Mammoth Book of Tales of the Road
(with Maxim Jakubowski), and over 18 other anthologies. His short fiction has appeared in over 200 books and magazines including
Best American Erotica, Best Gay Erotica, Best Lesbian Erotica, Best Transgendered Erotica, Best Fetish Erotica, Best Bondage Erotica
and—well, you get the idea. He lives in San Francisco and is only some of what that implies.

T
ODD
G
REGORY
is a New Orleans native and pornographer who has published many stories in a varied and eclectic selection of Web sites and anthologies. He has also edited the anthologies
His Underwear
and
Blood Lust
(with M. Christian). His first novel,
Every Frat Boy Wants It,
was published by Kensington in 2007; they are also publishing his vampire novella
Bloodon the Moon.
He is currently working on his next novel, about a gay gym, tentatively titled
Muscles.