The party had been going on for a while when Truett went upstairs to be alone. He would sleep off the foggiest part of the drunk and wake up with the world sharper and clearer, leaving only the deeply saturated feeling he liked so much. His friend Anton was renting the house with a couple students from cinema studies. He lay down on Anton’s bed and pulled the blanket over himself. The music downstairs was bass-heavy, and so he could feel it in his gums and his eyelids, but he could not make out the actual music, the lyrics, the chords. It lay below him, shifting and firm like the ocean beneath a boat.

He dipped into sleep, and then awoke in what felt like the next moment, but time had passed and carried him off with it, and he saw that they had entered that phase of late night where the sky went gray. There was snow now, and he wondered if that had come before or after he closed his eyes. But he lay under Anton’s blanket staring out of Anton’s window, watching the snow blow toward and away from the glass. It tumbled down through the angled net of light cast from the lightposts by the road, and it spun through itself like a curtain caught in the wind. He closed his eyes again.

In the morning, Anton was butted up against him. It was impossibly bright from all of the snow in the yard. The room was cold and stiff, and it smelled sweet like overripe fruit. Anton grunted when Truett sat up. He recoiled from the cold, and Truett tossed the blanket back over him. 

“Don’t whine,” Truett said, but Anton just groaned in deep agony. Truett left him there, hiding under his blanket like a child.

The house was incredibly neat, neater than it had any right to be. The party had gone on for hours. They drank both cheap beer and not cheap wine from plastic cups all night. Someone brought a box of still warm cheeseburgers from the bar downtown where the poets went. They watched Fellini and Bergman and Cukor movies on a screen and projector that belonged to the film nerds. Whole movies played in the background while people shouted and laughed and walked in front of the screen while others at on the couch, rapt, staring with concentration that seemed entirely out of scope with their drunkenness, but it seemed that the drunker people got, the more they focused on the movies and less on each other. The party itself raged on, and eventually someone put on the radio, and the films fell silent but went just the same, every so often, someone getting up to change the Blu-ray. 

But now, all of the cups were gone. The projector and screen were folded and hidden back in the closet. The house smelled like lemon cleaner and something more bitter. The floors weren’t sticky or dimpled with moisture. No food or crumbs or bowls left around. The wrappers for the cheeseburgers were gone. Even the trashcans in the kitchen were empty. It was as if no party at all had happened. The record had been wiped clean, expunged. There was nothing that he could point to in order to say definitively that a party had happened. Those hours of his life were locked only in his memory, and it was a moment of disorientation, a sudden realization that he had grown accustomed to using the world as a repository for memory. He had been carelessly going through his life thinking that there would always be a record to which he could refer in moments of confusion, that the world always had a way of keeping score even when he did not. Life, to Truett, had always been a matter of inescapable context. The infallible living record of his existence. But here, in this kitchen, there was no record. There was nothing to account for those hours. It was like he’d gone upstairs in one time and had come down in another that was disconnected from the previous one and could have been simultaneously before and after. He was out of time. 

He made coffee in Anton’s kitchen. The French press had a stiff plunger that made Truett wonder if it was new or seldom used or both. Part of a care package sent by someone’s parents. Or something left behind by the previous tenants. It was possible that all of those things were true about the French press, which right that moment also seemed outside of history. Lacking a context. The same was true the kettle. The chair. The table. Everything had a stiff, formal quality to it. A lack of wear. All of the cups and glasses on the shelves likewise had a faintly chemical smell to them. Like they’d only recently been taken out of cardboard boxes into which they had been packaged at a factory. None of the cups matched any of the other cups. But among their disharmony, there was such a sense of newness that they seemed unified somehow. It was this unity that rejected him. Like a membrane, tough and flexible. 

He drank the coffee while sitting on the countertop, looking out into the sideyard. Someone was out scraping the sidewalks. He could hear the sound of the shovel gliding and hitting against the concrete. It was a bright, windless morning, and Truett had nowhere to be. This fact deepened his sense of being out of time, of time having somehow come unjointed. But in truth, it was just that on weekends, he didn’t have anywhere to be. He spent most Saturdays reading in the bookstore downtown. He couldn’t really afford books, but the owner would pick out poems for him and send him upstairs to read in the cafe. And later, they’d have talks about the poems he had read. It was in this way that he had read Merrill and Tate and Mead and Galvin, all those white poets of the midcentury who had not interested him because he was not interested in form. But he found, in a way that embarrassed him greatly, that he liked the poems. There was something running through the formal poetry that felt real and hard, like the poems were made of a solid substance. When he read his own poems back, they felt diffuse, atomized. Lyrical in a way that suggested a lack of moral certitude, a thing that he typically shrugged off when pointed out to him by saying that his work was associative, by its very nature ambivalent to the idea of connection. I’m trying to catalog the spontaneous and instantaneously destructive nature of human thought and feeling, he said at parties. On Sundays, he bought cigarettes and smoked them with Anton outside on the porch, even when it was cold. 

Truett studied poetry at the university, and Anton was a painter. Anton came from an old Baltimore family, at least on his father’s side. His mother was from Belarus. She died rather tragically when Anton was young, around five, in a swimming accident at their lake house. Anton had told Truett this the first time they slept together, before they found out that they were sexually incompatible. Which was to say that Anton wanted to be loved and held, and Truett found loving and holding antithetical to good sex. But they stayed friends. Partly because Anton had told Truett about the most awful thing to have happened to him, and Truett had never seen a person make themselves so vulnerable, so available to pain, to rejection, as in that moment when Anton had looked up at him, his eyes wet, his mouth parted just so, a wry, sad smile, an expression of tender hope. Truett was from a small town on the Alabama/Georgia border, on the Alabama side. His family had lived on the edge of a pine forest, a small shack of a house built by his great grandfather. He had no money and as a poet, no expectations of getting any. Money was a thing that happened to other people. Their undergraduate studies took them out of the South and to the Northeast, Anton to Yale and Truett to Amherst. But here they were out in the Midwest in their mid-twenties, pretending at adulthood, at artistry, at life.

Upstairs, he heard footsteps. Movement, signs that other people were awake now. Or getting there. He did not have his phone, and so he did not know what time it was, if it was late or early. The brightness out the window made it seem quite late in the day, but that could have been a mere artifact of the snow. The streets were empty of cars. Which suggested that it was early. He looked to the stove which had a small digital clock, but it flashed: 00:00. The microwave was blank and impassive. There was no analog clock he could look to. He hopped down from the counter and went in search of his jacket and his phone, and finding neither, thought that it was likely they were in Anton’s room.

He climbed the stairs quietly, listening on his way up for the sounds he had heard before of people stirring. He heard the shower running and found Anton’s room empty. The other doors were mute. His jacket lay on the floor next to the bed, and there his phone was, inert resting on top of it like a glassy black egg. It would not power on, so he looked around Anton’s room for a cable. 

Anton was neat in his work and messy in every other aspect of life. He had an architect’s table in one corner and a long skinny table against the far wall on which sat his computer and scanner and an array of pencils and pens, reams of paper. A bookcase with reference books. But on the floor were scattered his clothes and towels. There was no cable lying around, no way for him to charge his phone. But Anton’s phone lay on the bedside table. He checked it and saw that it was just after 9:30am. The shower in the other room stopped. Truett sat with his legs crossed and waited for Anton to come into the room, but he did not. There was only a deep, cool silence settling in the upstairs.

After a few minutes, Truett went to the bathroom door and knocked on it. Said, “Anton. You in there?” But there was no reply inside. He pulled the door open and saw that it was empty. There was condensation on the mirror. The room was humid and warm. When he pressed his fingers to the shower curtain, it was limp and heavy. Someone had showered here, but now no one was present. He looped back through to Anton’s room, but it was still empty. The bed, he saw, was made. But he couldn’t remember if it had been made when he sat on it just moments before or if it had been messy. He went downstairs, but it was empty still. Only his cup sat on the counter. The French press sat still half-full.

Truett pulled on his coat and found his shoes under the sofa. He went out into the cold and had to squint through all of the light. He would go home. He would charge his phone. He would text Anton that the joke, whatever joke Anton was playing, was not funny in anyway. He would go to the bookstore and read for a while, and then his life would smooth itself out again.

The sidewalks were cleared. It was one of those miraculous mornings when, after a thick snow, you woke and found dark gray channels cut through the mass of white. The sidewalks free of ice and sand and salt. So clean that you almost wanted to touch them. And the snow, already softening, melting down into itself under its own weight. And the trees dripping, the soft patter of snowmelt striking the fragile crust of the snow below. Truett pulled his coat tighter around himself as he walked the three blocks to his own house, near the grocery store.

He lived alone on the first floor of an old house, but he had upstairs neighbors who sometimes argued and who owned a loud dog. In the house, it sounded sometimes like people knocked on his door or were in the room next to him, but it was really just the sounds of other lives traveling down to him. 

In his own house, he drank cold tapwater and got under his blanket. He charged his phone and felt, when the logo flashed on the screen, a feeling like great relief. Like he was being stitched back into the fabric of the world, connected to everything. His apartment was cold, but he didn’t get up to turn the heat on. He could see his breath in the gray light slanting through the curtains. The dog upstairs was running back and forth, which caused his ceiling fan to shake slightly, its chain tinkling. He drowsed for a couple of hours, both cold and warm beneath the blanket, sometimes getting up to drink more water or to piss. He scraped some butter onto some toast and ate it. 

He browsed the internet and read a longish article on ArtForum about New Figurative Painting by a critic he liked because they were irreverent but not in a blandly socialist way. Truett thought that the socialists had become so mainstream that they were essentially as tedious as conservatives. Sometimes, at bars and at parties, conversations turned to politics, and he found with alarming regularity that the very people who loved to quote Marx and Deleuze and Hegel were also deeply homophobic and said racist things under the pretext of shattering the old social order. Truett found it all really boring, but he had no choice in finding it boring because he had grown up in a poor family in a poor part of the country where people had no use of socialism which was, at its very heart, an attitude more than anything else. At least in the hands of people his own age who grew up in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and went to French day school as children. Socialism in their hands was tantamount to a lined shearling coat.

 But this critic was interesting to Truett partly because on Twitter, the critic made fun of leftists and liberals and progressives. The critic’s attitude about politics and about art was that analytic socialism was tedious and boring, but it was the one framework they had with which to confront the moral quandaries of the world. Art as a virtual space in which to process things as they happened, a place to run simulations, to ask difficult questions. It was not a new idea. It was so old that it was fundamentally conservative, but because conservatives didn’t read or think anymore, their ideas could be claimed by a New Left. One capable of finding everything, including the socialists, dull. Tired. A series of scripts. Truett didn’t care much about New Figurative Painting. But the article was long, and it gave his mind something to do, like filling a balloon with water. He relished as the shape of his thoughts plumped and grew heavy. Engorged with feeling. 

But as he read, the sensation of being out of time returned. It spread out below the pleasure of reading in bed, until it was the totality of the feeling, like it soaked through from below. He checked his phone for the time and saw that he had been in bed for three or four hours. He sent a text to Anton: where are you? where did you go?

He got dressed and went back out into the cold. He went up the street to the bookstore. There were cars in the street now, a comfort to him. They glided along the wet streets, shedding cuboids of snow into the road that melted almost the moment they landed. The wind was sharp, piercing, but there was something briny, wet in it. He closed his eyes. Tears welled there. If someone saw him, they might think he was crying, and they would have no proof that he was not and would likely just assume that he was. He blotted the moisture from his eyes and crossed against the light because no cars were oncoming. It was a bad habit of his, not waiting for the light. 

At the bookstore, people, at last. It was the first time he had seen other people all day, and here they were, milling around, looking at books and magazines, pulling things off the shelves, trying to look interested even though they were not. He went to the poetry section in the back which was smaller than it should have been but larger than it could have been and so all told, it was not a bad section. He looked for a volume that had recently come out from Norton by a Virginia poet he knew from a summer intensive. But it was not on the shelves. He browsed for other books he knew or had wanted to look for the next time he was in the store. He read their titles from a list he kept on his phone, but none of them were there. 

While he browsed, he kept looking up and out at the other people moving around. He was deep in the store, near the mysteries section when he saw a tall, bearded man in a flannel shirt and a tan coat. He held the coat in his hands and was looking intently at a row of novels with dark covers and wispy, bright fonts. He wore tortoiseshell glasses and a green baseball cap. The man stood out to Truett because he was the sort of man Truett normally slept with—compact, generically and nominally masculine, average and balding, shot through with an intense frustration that felt like a heat source. They were the kind of men capable of great harm if provoked but who ultimately lacked any kind of initiative in that regard. Such men could be coaxed into choking or into slapping or rough language, but they were so uneasy in it that the illusion fell away. What Truett wanted was real proximity to danger, but he had learned to make do. 

The man looked at him once and then twice. Their eyes kept meeting and veering away again. Truett was inspecting George Eliot by then, and the man had shifted to look at the art books at the end of the center table where the new books were kept. The two of them were in a diagonal. The man’s flannel had a hole in it, and Truett could see his white shirt peeking through the shoulder. Truett saw that the man wore boots, stained in copper-brown color like dried blood. The other patrons of the bookstore occasionally passed near the two of them, and the tension between them would lie down like lowering a rope into the grass to hide it, but the moment the other party was gone, the line grew taut again. 

Truett passed the man, his hands brushing near the back of the man’s coat, and they looked quite frankly at one another then. The man’s eyes were dark brown, and he had thick eyebrows. He had a mole near the corner of his nose. Truett smiled because he couldn’t help it, and he rounded the corner and pressed the button for the elevator. The man joined him in the cool, dark corner near the stairs. The elevator hummed. The man stood close to Truett. The air between them grew hot. Tight. The man stepped through the elevator door, and Truett followed. The door clanged behind them, and they were sealed in a compartment together. Alone. Separate from the rest of the world. The man looked at Truett. Turned to him to stare full on as the elevator rose. There was something about the fact that the ride would be over before either of them could really do anything that made Truett want to do something. The ride was only half a minute, and yet it seemed to go on and on, and it was the exact nature of their privacy, the temporary duration of it, that made doing anything impossible. They both realized it at the same moment, and they smiled helplessly. The man’s stance shifted a little wider, and Truett felt proud of himself somehow.

On the second floor, they went into the cafe together and ordered coffees and sat near the window. The man put his coat on the back of Truett’s chair. He was elegant in a way that Truett did not expect. He crossed his legs like an academic. He scratched his head through his cap.

“You cruise bookstores often?” the man asked.

“Often? No. I prefer truckstops, you know. Parks. That sort of thing.”

“Ah yes, traditional values.”

The man did not offer his name and so neither did Truett. The cafe was filled with undergraduates bent over their laptops and notebooks, writing furiously, drawing arteries and vessels. One group, near to Truett and the man, had propped up a plastic heart and were taking turns poking their pencils and pens into its various openings, saying to one another What’s this one?  and No that can’t be right, that’s over there. and Oh my God, we’re all going to fucking fail. It was easy to tell when the pre-meds had an exam coming on. They flooded all the cafes and coffeeshops. They took all of the tables nearest the outlets and they camped there for hours at a time in their sweatshirts and jeans and boots, sometimes dripping snow onto the floors. For days, there were powdery white streaks from the snow and the salt that had mixed with the snow. Dried like ancient rivers beneath their tables. It wasn’t noisy, no more than on an airplane or any other place where people gathered under the assumption that you were supposed to whisper or at least speak quietly. 

Again, between the two of them, something grew tense and hot. The air crackled. Every time their eyes met, Truett laughed a little, but in truth, he wasn’t laughing out of shyness or desire, so much as he was laughing out of nervous anticipation at what might come, even in the very next moment. The man’s eyelashes were thick and dark. His eyes were slightly enlarged in his glasses, and he occasionally lifted the frames to rub at his nose. 

“They’re new,” he said after the third time in as many minutes. “I don’t really know what to do with them.”

“Your first pair?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m getting old.”

“How old?” Truett asked. The man’s face grew a little red, a little serious, and Truett felt himself swell with pride, a little luminescent flicker deep inside him. 

“Old enough,” was the man’s curt reply.

“I didn’t mean to strike a nerve.”

“You did,” the man said.

“Do you mean that I did mean to or that I did strike it?”

“Both,” the man said. 

Truett laughed, caught out at his own little game. The barista banged the espresso out on the counter behind them, a loud clanging sound that for a moment made talking impossible, and it was like in the elevator again. They were locked by circumstances in a kind of stance of opposition, and there was nothing they could do to escape it. Nothing to do but wait for the banging to die down. But with each strike, the waiting grew more intolerable, until at last the barista stopped, and Truett felt that he could breathe again.

“Do you?” Truett asked.

“What?”

“Cruise bookstores often?”

“Oh no,” the man said. “Never. I’m not like that.”

“Not like what?”

“Gay. I wasn’t cruising. I was browsing.”

“Really?” Truett asked. “That’s interesting. And yet, here we are.”

“We’re having coffee,” the man.

Truett put his palm over the mouth of his cup, sealing the heat in. He hummed and thought of his walk, the way moisture had swelled in his eyes, the lack of proof that he hadn’t been crying. It was like that. Here the two of them were, two strangers, having coffee. And Truett wondered if they had been cruising. He wondered if he misread things again. It was a day for misreading.

“So we are,” Truett said. “So we are.”

“You look disappointed.”

“I’m not.”

“You look it.”

“Appearances can be deceiving,” Truett said. 

“Well. Yes,” the man said. “Yes, that’s true.”

“So what do you do?”

The man hesitated. Thought it over. Truett saw his mind working. He lifted his cap back a bit, scratched at the damp, thinning hair, sighed.

“I, uh,” he started to say. “I’m a filmmaker.”

“God, how pretentious.”

“I make films. Documentaries.”

“You make them or you want to make them?”

“What do you mean?”

“This place,” Truett said, waving his hand at the cafe, but meaning more broadly, the town, the region, the world, their generation, “is full of people who want to make things. Very few are in the position to actually make them. So what are you?”

“I’m not a student, if that’s what you’re asking,” the man said. “I’m an adult.”

“So you live in LA?”

“Now who’s pretentious?”

“It was an honest question.”

“Sure,” the man said. He drank his coffee. The pre-med students were still bent over their textbooks. Truett looked at the row journals and magazines on the shelves above where the cream and condiments and utensils were kept. Recently, a small journal in New England had published one of his poems, his first publication. And he felt proud of it and also ashamed of it and also ashamed of the pride he felt and also ashamed of the shame he felt. It was unfortunate that to make art one had to partake in the capitalist machinery of the world, and there was something so nakedly ambitious about wanting to be published. There were times when Truett wished he was the sort of person who could be content with writing poems and sharing them with friends over homemade food in their little apartments in the cold American Midwest. But it was also true that the poets he had met who felt the most strongly that publication was an erosion of the soul were also wealthy or came from money and so could afford to not seek publication because they had enough money already, and besides, they would end up writing novels about their slightly eccentric white families that would be turned into movies and then they’d get a Guggenheim or a MacArthur and everyone would say that they were the voice of their generation. For Truett, there was no such possibility unless he were to write an elegant, elegiac novel about police brutality or the harrowing coffin of slavery. Dreary business. The journal was not there anyway.

“I live in Colorado,” the man.

“Oh. Why?”

“That’s kind of rude, isn’t it?”

“I just mean, why do you live there?”

“Well. I work on a ranch part of the year. And the rest of the year, I spend making documentaries.”

“Oh,” Truett said. “Well. Alright then.”

“But I’m here visiting some friends.”

“Film friends,” Truett said.

“Oh. Yeah, sort of.”

“And definitely not cruising in a bookstore.”

“Browsing,” the man said firmly. But there was a smile, however brief.

“What is your documentary about?”

“That’s boring stuff,” the man said.

“A straight man unwilling to hold forth about his very boring creative project? Wow, a revolution is afoot.”

“It’s about hydroelectric power.”

“I’m asleep already.”

“No, it’s really not like that. I know, I know. You watched a really bad doc in eighth grade about the Hoover Dam. I know. We’ve all seen it. But this is not that. It’s. Hydroelectric power is so critical to this country, especially out in the west. It’s so important. And, alternative power, in general, is the next big human rights crisis, for sure. But there’s something so...I don’t know. Hydroelectric is really beautiful to me. The rivers. And science involved is so basic but so elegant in its simplicity. It’s amazing.”

“I’m snoring,” Truett said, but the man had become animated. He leaned over the table and gripped Truett’s wrist. His touch was rough and dry. He held on tight.

“I promise you. It’s the least boring thing in the world. And I bet you didn’t even know there’s a hydroelectric planet right here, basically downtown, on the river, right now. It’s old, it’s shitty, but it’s there. And the people who work that plant. It’s amazing. You should go over there sometime.”

“So it’s a work trip,” Truett said.

The man let go and retreated and Truett again felt proud of himself. He had made the man eager. His eyes were bright. 

“You’re impossible,” the man said.

“Among other things.”

“What do you do? You’re a writer I suppose.”

“What makes you suppose that.”

“You were browsing poetry.”

“Other people read poetry.”

“Do they?”

Truett grunted in disgust. “They do.”

“So you must be a poet.”

“I am.”

“Fascinating,” the man said dryly. “How interesting. How novel.”

“What is your documentary about exactly? Is it one of those narrative ones? Or do you do like, those little mini-docs they show on websites.”

“It’s not a feature, no. But it’s pretty substantial, I think. It’s for a state agency in Colorado.”

“So it’s an ad.”

The man flushed again, then drew up straight. “I don’t do commercial documentaries. That’s not what I do. This is a commission for the state of Colorado. Its goal is to—”

“Yes, PBS. I get it.”

“Fuck you,” the man said.

Truett laughed. “Well, not with that attitude.”

“I’m trying to be real here.”

“None of us are real.”

“A cynical poet. How groundbreaking.”

“It’s not cynicism. It’s nihilism, which in its way, is actually kind of optimistic, but I wouldn’t expect a documentarian to know the difference.”

The man’s eyes narrowed behind his frames, and he leaned forward again. A divot in the noise of the cave opened beneath them, and they were deposited into a pocket of silence.

“Do you have a condom?” the man asked.

“I do,” Truett said.

“Okay,” the man said, leaning back. “Good.”

*

There were two bathrooms upstairs near the cafe, and both were empty. They chose the one on the right for no particular reason except it was slightly smaller and the water was never warm, which meant that people were less likely to desire it. Altruism, Truett thought to himself, and almost said it to the man, thinking that it was a sign that he was not cynical and therefore not a cliché as had been implied by the man’s earlier remark.

The bathroom had a loud vent triggered by the light switch. The tiles were wet and gray, but the wall was patched with other tile that looked like pink insulation or the inside of a seashell. Over all, the bathroom looked as though it hadn’t been made over since the 90s. It was not his home, obviously, but Truett did feel a bit of embarrassment over how tacky the bathroom was, like he was welcoming a houseguest. But it dropped away when the man locked the door behind them and kissed Truett hard. They didn’t get their clothes all the way off, before the man was inside of him. Truett gripped the railing near the toilet to steady himself. The man also gripped the bar and also gripped Truett’s hip. The fucking went smoothly, and just when Truett thought that it would go on that way, a little furtive if unsatisfying, the man’s hand rose swiftly along Truett’s body and latched hard at his throat.

Truett gasped, but because of the hold on his throat, he couldn’t breathe exactly. The air caught in him. His vision grew red and dim, and he closed his eyes as the man’s fingers gripped and released and gripped and released, growing fractionally tighter each time, searching for purchase. And the man began to chant under his breath, in a low, dark groan You’re my little bitch, aren’t you? You’re such a good little slut. Truett sighed and the man released the bar and used his hand to pivot Truett so that he fell briefly and had to stretch out his arms to the wall to catch himself. 

The man dug his knees into the back of Truett’s thighs and Truett sank lower, his hands slipped on the wall tile and then he understood what was happening. The man wanted him in a posture of perfect vulnerability. Bent entirely over like a child about to be punished. Each time the man thrust into him, Truett gasped. His head was down. His shoulders burned holding himself up as much as he could, but the man would not stop. His own grunts were brief, repressed, and then Truett felt the first sharp slap of the man’s fingers on his back and his thighs. The man began to slap him, his fingers like a braided cord, each strike painful but brief, burning. 

It was what he wanted, Truett thought. He had asked for this. An eradication of his body. A debasement of the self. A giving over to pleasure and oblivion. The man’s body smelled clean. He had a faint odor that was like cologne. He would have welts, he knew. From the man hitting him. Bruises. Each time the man struck him, Truett felt himself leave his body just a little bit, and it was the next strike that returned him to himself, the immediacy of the contact, the sting in his hip or his thigh or his back. It was a trick Truett had learned in other years, worse than this one.

Years when his mother and father did not want to feed him and so did not feed him. Years when he begged his aunts and uncles for food and for water. Years when he was told that the pain in his stomach was for his own good. When they prayed over him and tried to make him less than what he was. When they all circled around him in the dark basement of the church and laid hands on him and when he struggled began to slap and hit and beat. Years when they told him that God would set him right if only he would let Him. That God was hunger and pain and a cleansing fire. Years when he laid alone on the twin bed near the woods and tried to hold himself perfectly still because then he might die. Then he might fall easily out of life like a coin through a pocket. Years worse than this one. Years when there was no way out and nothing to be done. Years and years of waiting. Years before the end of those years. When he was free at last. Those years when everyone who loved him hurt him and said that it was because they loved him that they must hurt him. It was no wonder. In other years, worse than this one, Truett had learned how to exit his body. 

The man withdrew and he peeled the condom off, and Truett thought that he was done. Truett was hard and damp between his legs. He could feel his pulse in his cock, the weight, and could hear his own breathing hollow and fast. But the man slid back into Truett and Truett turned at the waist, looking back and up at him.

“No, no, no, not like that,” he said.

But the man just dug his nails into Truett’s lower back to brace himself and pushed all of the way in, and Truett gasped and said, “No, you have to stop now, please.”

“Shut up,” the man. “You wanted it. Now shut up.”

The man’s voice was different. It was altered, seeming to come from some other place. Truett pushed up and tried to push the man back, but slapped Truett across the mouth and told him to shut up and to stay still, and it was almost over and what was the difference, they’d come this far already. The man kept saying I’m clean, I’m clean, I’m clean.

Truett closed his eyes, and when the man did finish inside him, the quick-slow spasm of his orgasm, Truett pulled away. The man ran the cold tap water into the sink and cleaned himself up and then, zipping, smiled at Truett and said, “Thanks. That was something.”

When he was alone to himself, Truett cleaned himself up. Slowly. Trying to make his breathing level and good. Trying to put himself back in his body. He had come untethered from himself. He had floated back and above them watching the man take the condom off and put himself back inside, watching the man slap and push and take what he wanted.

He cleaned and waited and he breathed. The bathroom smelled like oranges. The vent went rattling on. There was a knock at the door, but then the person went away. Truett was in another of those bright, isolated moments, as when his mother had first begun to hold a pillow over his head until he relented and said that he was good that he believed in and loved God. When she’d lift the pillow, and the whole world grew bright and vivid and seemed totally unlike itself. Another of those moments when it seemed possible that he might have changed. That in the airless dark, feeling his mother’s weight on the other side of the pillow, some strange and curious magic might have been worked.

But it never took long before the world dimmed and returned to itself, and he knew that it hadn’t worked after all and he was still himself. The drone of the vent. The dullness of the overhead lights. The persistent drip in the sink, and the wet coolness of his drying hands. He was still himself.

*

The man was not there when Truett returned. His coat was gone. The cafe went on as if nothing had happened. He sat down and texted Anton: it’s not funny anymore, where are you?

He waited for the reply. He waited. His coffee developed a skin. It grew cold. The cafe grew loud and then quiet. Nothing happened. There was no reply. Truett held his phone tight in his hand. 

Finally, Anton replied: Studio. Come on by. 

Anton rented a studio downtown. It was a creative coworking space. Truett found him there sitting on a stool near the window. He was drinking coffee, looking down into the Ped Mall, at the children playing. Truett dragged a chair over and sat on it backwards. Tilted the chair forward.

“Where have you been all day?” Truett asked. 

“Here, there, everywhere,” Anton said with a little laugh. Truett sighed. The studio had an impossibly high ceiling and tall windows. The light was soft now. All the sharpness had gone out of the day. The trees were dark and still. They could see out over the buildings nearby. The streetlamps were going on. The days were so short. “It’s almost not worth getting out of bed on days like this. The light’s gone almost before it starts.”

“There’s electricity,” Truett said, but he flinched because it made him think of the man from the bookstore. The hydroelectric powerplant. Electricity carried over miles and miles, stored and dispensed into their little lives. His vision swam. A flock of crows stirred in the tops of the trees, the dying ginkgo trees.

“It’s not the same. It’s not pure. And besides, shadows, life, lines, you know. It all gets bleached out. You know that.” Anton smiled and looked from the window to Truett. In the window, faint shadows of themselves swam. In another hour or two, the window would be a mirror. But for now, he could make out their vague outlines.

“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

“You’ve been in such a mood lately,” Anton said. “Is that what happens when you get published?”

Truett let the chair legs back on the ground. Anton got up and went to the messy long table along the side wall. He picked up from a stack of magazines the journal in which Truett had been published.

“Ta-da!” Anton said. “I got it this morning. Will you sign it?”

Truett felt sick. And dizzy. He shook his head. “No, it’s stupid. Don’t read it.”

Anton held the slim, well-made volume out to him. His expression was soft and tender. “It’s really good. I liked it. What do you mean?”

“It’s false,” Truett said. “Everything is false.”

“Don’t be such a poet. This isn’t a Turgenev story,” Anton said. He pulled a pen from his apron pocket and held both out to Truett. “Sign! I’m your biggest fan.”

There might have been a time when Truett was able to rise to the game and play it. There might have been a time when he was able to give Anton the laugh he wanted. There might have been a time when it was possible for them to have this conversation and laugh and joke and play. There might have been a time.

Truett stood up from the chair. He took the volume from Anton’s hands and the pen and dropped the both to the floor. Anton gave a small shout and reached for them, but Truett gripped his wrists and drew him upright. Then he walked Anton to the wall and pinned his hands above his head. Anton frowned and tried to laugh and get free, but Truett would not let him. Truett would not let him free.

Anton kissed him at first, thinking it was what Truett wanted. A brief kiss, wet and fast, but no, Truett was not satisfied. He held Anton’s chin and with a motion that was so easy it made Truett’s stomach turn, he snapped Anton’s head back against the wall with a dull thwack. Anton flinched, groaned, but Truett did it again and again and again, and it was then that Anton began to fight, to push, but Truett held him back. Held him against the wall. Anton went limp as if in the jaws of something terrible, and when he was perfectly still, Truett began to take his clothes off. Anton let himself be stripped. And then they were both naked in the cold studio. Shivering. They embraced.

The sex with Anton was not really sex. They sank to the floor and pressed their bruised, naked bodies together. They rubbed their thighs and knees together. They grew hard, but went soft almost immediately. Anton’s eyes were glassy and dim. Truett felt queasy every time their eyes met. He had done this. He had drawn the two of them into this volatile geometry. And for what? For what reason?

The window did become a mirror. Gone were the trees and the sky and the children shouting below. Gone were the buildings. When Truett looked up, all he saw was their bodies tumbling through each other, shadows over shadows.

When they were done. Anton pulled on his clothes and stood stiffly near the door.

“I’m sorry,” Truett said. “I’m so sorry.”

Anton only shrugged. “It’s life.”

“I’m so sorry,” he said, but then he thought that this was another of the unmarked moments. That when he left, it would drop down and out of his life, and he’d have no way of knowing if it had actually happened. That life was a series of such moments. That there was never any proof that anything followed anything else. Anton’s eyes were red-rimmed and veined. Anton’s skin was flushed and warm. But it might have been that he had just rushed up the stairs. It might have been anything. And it was the undistinguishable quality of one moment from another that made him want to throw up. Nothing ever had anything to do with anything else. Everything was just grass caught in the wind. Blame. Hurt. Loss. Pain. None of it was real.

“No need to be sorry,” Anton said, kissing him. “Sometimes we take things out on each other.”

Truett went out into the cold. Out into the dark. Rows of illuminated lamps greeted him.

He was another of the lonely people in the world. He was another person passing through the great channel that extended between life and death. He was just another person in another year which might have been any other.

He looked back and up and saw that the light in Anton’s studio was off. He had the idea of waiting by one of the feeder boxes for Anton to emerge. He’d throw his arm around Anton’s shoulders and would laugh and nudge him and buy him dinner. He’d make it right between them. He’d do everything he could to set it straight. He did wait. He did linger in the cold. He watched the dark window for some sign of movement, for some sign that Anton was on his way down. But no sign came, and Anton did not leave the door. It grew cold. It began to snow again.

Time passed. How much, he wasn’t sure.