“I can't stop,” he says. He is so afraid. His leg is burning. Burn radiates from bite. He thinks he can feel thick blood running from the crusted wound, winding down his leg. There is a wet gathering between her legs, sticking to him, clinging.
“Don't. Don't stop.” Her face wreathed in pain, or something like pain.
The sound of the fireworks obliterates everything. He sees her groan and cry but hears nothing. He moves with panicked effort. The light blossoms hot in the sky. He works desperately. Outside it is like the end of the world. His father's station wagon glows under the eerie flash. He buries his face in her hair.
And then the show is over. The last echo rumbles away way across the lake. Faint smoke over the water. A smattering of cheers, of applause. A silence that shows all the dreadful noise lurking beneath. The whir of insects. The rocking of the springs. The lap of water. The moist violence of his penis sliding into her vagina, a sucking squelching sound. Her soft exhaled breath, her little cries. His grunting, his heavy breathing. Under the silence there is so much sound.
She clutches him tight. Everything in him is building towards something terrible and beautiful. He cannot stop it. He cannot turn back. A shudder moves through his body. The glow of the fireworks is still in his eyes. He goes stiff and tight all over and
He can feel himself letting go. He feels it pouring out of him, flowing into her. He is spilling life, and a feeling like death fills him. Weak in the limbs, shuddering, lips open but unable to form words. The bite across his leg throbs wickedly.
All that he is flows into her.
July 30
She coughs. Deep hacking cough from way down, from the innermost self. She can't shake it. Two weeks now. Like her lungs are decaying, tearing away through the throat. A weight in her chest.
They lay on their backs around her as in an immense morgue. They could be the dead after a natural disaster or a war. Hanging from metal trees over them are slow-filling blood bags. The needle goes in at the arm. They stare at ceilings while their blood pumps out.
Men and women in blue paper facemasks move slowly among the beds, checking needles, feeling arms, feeling veins, plunging the needle in, taking it out.
She stares at the clipboard in her hands. The words elude her, flitting in and out of focus. Now a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph, and then a squiggle. No meaning. She puts the pen against the paper, puts it to the center of the little box. Tick. Next box, another tick. Counting down all the reasons. Purity of the body and spirit. Healthy vessel. She feels like she is bursting at the seams with blood. She want to have it out, give it away, smear it on the walls if she has to.
An empathetic girl, they called her. Selfless. An angel.
She is no angel, no girl, no child. There is a deep well of selfishness inside, she can feel it. A need for pleasure, a need for admiration. She gives because it makes her feel. Take from me, take take. Strip me bare if you would. All I am is yours. Take. Make me alive.
The words swim into focus, out again.
Unprotected Sex?
She hesitates, pen in the box. She withdraws. Does not make a tick. A little ink-mark remains, the faintest smudge. She puts her thumb to it, to wipe away. It will not come. The merest touch of the pen. It does not come off. She bites her lip. Nobody will notice.
She can't tell them. It's been two weeks, more. She feels fine. A little sick is all, but that's just a cold probably. She'll be better soon. Anyway, there's no reason for them to know. She feels an angry determination over it. By what right can such a question be asked of her? Is she impure? Despoiled? All those things her mother would say. Ruined, a ruined woman.
She does not feel ruined. She is whole and right in the world. He loves her, she is sure of it. And she, she loves. He loves her, that's important. She can still feel him, still call up the memory clear and perfect as anything. They are still in the backseat of his father's car. Still touching. She didn't do anything wrong. She is not ruined.
She feels grown. This body is too young for her. She would step out of it if she could, leave it behind without a backward glance. Let them take from it what they will, she has no need of it.
She signs her name at the bottom of the questionnaire. Here am I.
The doctor – a man with graying hair and a stooped back and wide wrinkled hands – sits down across from her. He looks over the lists of questions. Points to one, asks her a question. She shakes her head. He nods, makes a note. I see. She looks away.
She has so much she wants to give.
She saw a man bleed once, bleed to the point of death. Laying on the side of the road in a pool of light. The lamppost stretching up toward the night sky. Her brother running for the nearest house to call an ambulance. Her father kneeling beside the man, trying to stop the blood. She was standing by the car, watching. The man's truck was on fire. The light of it flickered and writhed in the darkness. The blood flowed out, filling in the cracks in the pavement, spreading. So much blood. She had not thought a man could hold so much blood inside him. Her mother held her around the shoulders. Don't look. She couldn't not look. She had to look. The man was gray and shaking when the ambulance came, his limbs quivering. Death spasms. There was so much blood on the road.
She gave blood every year since. She has this to give.
The nurse leads her to the closest empty bed. The sheets are faintly discolored, a yellowish stain of sweat, now dried. She lays down there, her skin prickling. The nurse talks idly with the doctor as she assembles her needle. They talk about a break in, or a break out, she isn't sure. She doesn't pay attention. They're talking about an animal testing facility, about the CDC, about containment specialists, about no need to panic anybody. She doesn't listen.
She coughs. The nurse holds her arm. Pushes the needle in. A moment of pain, like a bite. She shakes, like she did when he put himself inside her. Her mouth open, her eyes shut. And now it is beneath her skin. She stares up at the ceiling. She can feel the blood drawn out, like bearing snake venom from a wound.
What would her mother do if she knew? It's only sex, mother!
Would she be cast out? Abandoned to the world? One of the world's children now, not mine, not my little girl.
She hates her mother, and is afraid of losing her. Of being lost herself.
She is late. A week late. She worries, cannot sleep for fear. A week late. She has never been that late. She hasn't yet told anybody. It will come, please god let it come. Please god.
She is afraid. Is there something inside me? Something growing? Some malignant being wanting to stretch out little fingers to choke out her life.
Please god, I'm still a child. Let me be empty.
She lays back. She can feel the blood running out of her. Just let it all drain away. Let it all be gone from her.
August 18
It hurts to breath. Hurts even to be.
He cannot see.
Purple-red darkness, a throbbing primordial blindness like a cotton gauze in his mind. He feels the swollen flesh around his eye. Christ, will he ever see again? He cannot bear the thought of going blind. He thinks he will kill himself rather than go on like that. He remembers the boot-heel striking his face. Remembers a shooting pain through his skull.
He cannot hear.
Something rings in the distance. High painful timbre like a tiny bell shaking, frozen mid-chime. The sound pierces his mind. He feels like a child, like he is again in the womb. Hands striking the sides of his head. God, the hurt of it! He remembers the face, the beloved's face pressed against the sidewalk concrete. He remembers the high cawing laughter of the men circling round. Blood and broken teeth.
He drifts off. Sleeps awhile. His dreams are terrible. He cannot wake from them, cannot escape them. Waking and dreaming twined together. He drifts in fear like cloud on water. He longs to be free. Morphine dreams murmuring beyond. The beloved's eye wide with terror, ringed blood red. Stares into him. He cannot see but into that eye. He falls through the iris. He wonders if his belove
d died looking at him.
Where does this hate come from? Who made this world?
He wakes and he can see a little, hear a little, feel a little. The steady blip of the heart-rate monitor. The soft cotton sheets. The clean-rot hospital smell. A faint light. Voices over him. They seem so very far away. Bodies on a distant planet, murmurs from another world. He strains to hear, to hear if they know anything of his beloved. His everything.
He tries to open his mouth. Tongue stuck, dry and thick and useless. He feels cracked teeth in his mouth. Tastes the blood of little cuts opening again. Pain and anesthetic all in a whorl and his eyes roll over into sleep.
Later, hours later, he looks up. The television is playing, too distant to focus on. He see a plastic bag full of blood hanging over him. Drip drip. He see the clear tube filled with red fluid, traces it down to where it enters his body. Through the arm. He'd tried to give blood before. They turned him away when they knew who he was. What he was.
“I'm sorry,” she'd said, “we just can't.” The shrug of the shoulders, the shift of curling blonde hair. He remembers leaving that room with his cheeks burning, a shame growing inside. Here is the proof. He is less than. Unwanted.
His own mother told him that AIDS was a plague sent from god to turn people like him back to Jesus. “It's not too late,” she told him, “not to late to come home.” It was the last time they'd spoken. He missed her sometimes, down below the anger and disappointment. Maybe one day they could know each other again. Like it had once been. A good child, the sweet boy. Mother's child.
Voices enter the room, low and static from the television. How many dead? He can't focus on it, it seems to far away, seems to swim just outside the range of his vision. Something about a disease. How many dead? They're speaking of symptoms, about a boy killed by a dog bite.
His father died when he was a boy. An accident at the factory. He did not know even now what was the cause of death. Many nights he had been kept up by it. A child still, waiting with his covers pulled up under the chin and fear pouring in from every direction. What if this... or that? Kneeling at the side of the bed, hands pressed together as he had been shown. Tears in his eyes: Please god bring him home, bring my daddy home please. He feels his lips move, forming those same words again. Would god hear him now, after all this? He despises himself and his weakness. He had been so weak, so useless.
He is sure now that his beloved is dead.
He stares up at the blood; watches it drip in the bag. It is all coming inside him, filling him with life. The hospital room takes shape through his heavily swollen eyelids.
This is my blood, given for you. The words thunder in his mind. He tries to recall when he first heard them. Some Sunday School bullshit, he supposes.
God, but he feels lonely here.
That day is in his mind, the moment of change captured clear and undiluted. Their hands together, fingers wrapped over fingers. The obscene sunshine. Their lips together. The first calls of the men. Rowdy tough men with flat features and bruised hands. Hairy knuckles and flat noses. He remembers laughing at them, taunting them. He remembers waving in their direction and kissing his beloved. He remembers defying them there on the sidewalk in the white heat of the day.
And then they came close, their disgust turning to anger. The anger turning to pleasure. Fist strikes gut. You like that, don't you? Come here, faggot. Heel pressed down on knuckles. Bones crack, break. Bet you candy-ass faggots never met seen a real man before. Nose crushed against pavement. Belt rattled. Pants yanked down. Held down. Stabbing pain. This how you like it, faggot?
He was ashamed to cry, ashamed of what they'd made of him. He remembers crawling, mouth full of blood, fingers curled in a wretched tangle. Leave us alone, just leave us alone. And the sun showed all this. He remembers raising his head and seeing a man walking down the sidewalk. Going the other direction, looking, walking on. Help us. Don't leave me here. The man walked on, hardly even broke his stride.
He sleeps in the hospital. Borrowed blood seeps through his veins. The blood is everything. Pure blood into an impure vessel. He is ashamed of what he is. He wants to die. He wants to die and be again with his beloved.
He shuts his eyes. Sleeps. Blood drips down.
September 3
The young man leans against the dumpster. A cigarette dangles between his fingers, worn and burnt out. The frail glow is like a beacon in the evening dark. He lets it sway, losing ash over damp asphalt. There's a clean cool scent in the air, the aftermath of a summer rainstorm. His shoes squelch in the layer of garbage strewn about the dumpster. There are cars pulling up to the gas station. Fat men and fat women standing listless and slack jawed at the pumps. He watches the numbers roll over higher and higher and feels a growing jealousy. Of course what does it matter now? They're all going to die someday.
The headlights sweep through the glassy-wet city streets, reflecting on every surface, diffused in puddles and gloss. Taillights a burning-out red thrown recklessly behind. Cars coming, cars going. He has not moved for two hours almost. His fingers are cold. His lips cold. He shivers. The nights are turning cold. Summer is coming towards its end, he feels it in his bones. His jacket is soaked through.
He lights another cigarette – the last in the pack – and lifts it to his mouth.
One might wonder how a person ends up in his position. He has never wondered, never given any thought to his situation. Life is a force which draws him along, takes him motionless through time. He does not question.
He crumples the empty pack and tosses it towards the great steel bulk of the dumpster.
The car sweeps up out of the gathering night. A wet churn of tire on road, a splash of weight through water gathered in reflective pools. The car idles there, just across from the dumpster.
He rises, stands lithe as if weightless. Rocks on his heels and takes a long drag. Eyes the car. Sometimes you run into undercover cops. But he's got a good eye for them. Never been caught yet, not really.
The window rolls down. A face pale from inside, thrust out fearful into the night. Looking around, looking at him. He sidles closer, shoulders rolling. He leans down, blows smoke. The guy coughs, puts the back of his hand against his mouth.
It's the typical sort. Average-looking fag. Round face, sad nervous eyes. He knows those eyes. Eyes that live in fear. Mouth opens, hangs there a moment before: “I'm looking for uh... for directions?” The usual line.
He taps ash. “I know what you're looking for.”
“Can you, uh, can you show me?”
“I'll take you there.” Like actors in a play, reciting the lines night after night. The scenes replay until he knows them backwards, knows them through his skin. Only the face of his partner changes.
“Alright...” a hesitation. Then: click, door unlocked.
He goes around to the passenger side and slips into the car.
The guy's got bruises all over his face. Black swollen eye, capped teeth, fingers in splints, busted lip. Looks like he got worked over pretty seriously not so long ago.
The young man's cigarette twitches in his skinny fingers. “You mind?”
The guy shakes his head. “No. No, that's fine.” The first-timers never object. Do whatever you want, whatever, just don't judge me, don't revile me. Please don't let me be found here! Shame is thick in the air, almost tangible. A person would have to be desperate to do this now that everybody has started dying. His business is vanishing, everybody's dead or gone.
He leans back and points this way. The guy drives. Wipers flick, sweep away drops of water. Point this way, down that street, around that corner. And they're here.
The ruin of the fire-gutted apartment complex staggers up toward the sky. Ambition paid in blood. Wipe this all clean. The street is empty and dull. He flicks his cigarette out the window and rolls it up against the night.
The guy's looking around, all nervous and twitchy. “Are you sure this is safe? Won't somebody see us?”
He touches the guy. Hand
on skin. Guy goes stiff, then relaxes. A kind of pleasure. The need of another human's touch. “It'll be fine,” he says, and leans over to unzip the guy's pants. He withdraws the flaccid cock. Takes it in his mouth. It takes a minute for the pleasure to overtake the fear. The guy gets firm in his mouth, gets hard. The taste of him is musty and sweaty, a biting taste. His head bobs up and down, throat working. The soft wet sounds of this.
The guy puts his hands onto his head, holds him there and strokes his hair. Finding the shape of his skull. Breath in short inhalations, like there was something sitting on his chest.
And then the release. The hot salt taste fills his mouth. Thick liquid silky and slick. Slides down his throat.
The guy starts crying. Weeps like a baby. Face down in his hands, body convulsing with the shock of grief.
He waits. He sees this a lot. Bunch of drama queens. Most of the people who come find him are coming off a death or a break-up. He worries sometimes about this new thing, like he worried sometimes about HIV, but it's not a significant concern. Whatever happens will happen. Life will carry him on.
The guy is shaking, half-phrases spilling out: “I never... I don't... I'm not that kind of...” Confession and denial and regret. He's used to it.
He waits for the guy to pull himself together before collecting his forty bucks. The guy hands it over rather sheepishly. Two crisp twenties. What's the fucker's name? Jackson? He looks at the face and it means nothing to him. History is a distant thing, and irrelevant. He leaves the car and walks back down the streets, long legs carrying him towards the dumpster once more.
He lays down against a pile of old newspapers and touches his lips. The papers speak of death in running black letters. He flicks his fingers through the pages, dances through speculation and desperation. The disease is running through us all. Nobody's sure where it came from, how it started, everybody's got an idea but nobody knows. And nobody knows how to stop it. It's a purge. This great city is emptying itself.
He can feel the taste of the man's semen still in his mouth, all that encoded mucus, the whole of the man's life inscribed on the genetic level. He can feel it inside.