People — lovers, especially — have a million ways of changing on you, most of them bad. Not inherently, maybe, but bad for you. Because you couldn’t or wouldn’t follow along.
You’ll hear people say that only the dead don’t change, but obviously they’ve never thought this through, because to the dead change comes naturally, as they seek their return to earth and air and water, while we survivors who loved them manage to forget all the flaws that kept things interesting. Remake them into idealized versions that we’d never be able to tolerate if they came walking back through the door this way, so perfect we’d eventually want to kill them all over again. You…you’ve changed, we’d accuse them, feeling somehow betrayed.
Terry had died at home — the virus, what else? — his current lover helping the nurses and hospice volunteers care for him. It’s where we gathered after the funeral, his brownstone apartment with vintage wood as solid as a bank vault and laid out shotgun-style, one long chain of rooms full of friends, acquaintances, strangers. Everybody was welcome, except for those righteous fuckers who’d showed up at the cemetery to gloat in the distance, toting picket signs.
SODOMITES REPENT, that was one of the gentler ones. Some of them got almost as ugly as the faces underneath, eyes frightened and angry, prissy mouths crinkled tight like drawstring purses.
“And those are the ones with the nerve to claim they’re made in God’s image?” Jared had whispered hoarsely in the cemetery.
“I’d always pictured God as better looking,” I said. “That doesn’t make much of a case for omnipotence, does it?”
He appeared not to have heard me, staring at this wretched Greek chorus. “But what if they are? What if they really are?”
At Terry’s apartment we threw our coats atop the pile already on the bed, Jared lingering over all the sleeves that seemed caught up in some pointless struggle for supremacy. I wondered if he was remembering being in this same bed three years earlier, maybe recalling a conversation or some good night’s love.
“Déjà vu?” I said.
Or maybe he was thinking that here was where Terry must have died. Jared pushed hair back from his eyes, saying, “It’s felt like déjà vu here all afternoon. I’m just getting way too familiar with days like this.”
“We’re here, we’re queer,” I murmured, “we’re dropping like flies.”
“And you’re not helping any, with your laughter from the gallows,” he said, so I just held him, limp and unresponsive even when I squeezed along the back of his neck, where he liked it, and would ordinarily flex back into my hand like Voodoo, our cat. “Was it this way for you when Serge died?”
I stiffened. “What way?”
“Remember that picture from Vietnam? Of that Buddhist monk? He’d set himself on fire in the middle of a street and just sat there burning. Didn’t move? Well… like I wish I had the kind of control he must’ve had, not to feel the flames,” Jared said into my neck. “That way.”
“Serge was different. You can’t compare the two.”
And Jared knew better. Serge and I weren’t broken up; not exactly. Serge hadn’t been sick. I felt something stir down deep, like the rusty scraping open of a hatch on a ship long sunk, and hurried to slam it shut again. In its saltwatery grave.
“Serge… Serge wasn’t the same at all.”
“This isn’t a good day to split hairs,” Jared said. “Not if they’re both dead when they shouldn’t be.”
We joined the others, who wandered from room to room in a kind of subdued humor, by turns warm, then mordant, everyone here instinctively craving each other’s company and heartbeats. I’d not known Terry, never even met him, and so spent awhile staring at a picture that Jared pointed out, contrasting the vibrant guy on Kodak paper with the one I’d first encountered in his coffin. Had I not had Jared’s word on it, I doubt I’d’ve made any connection.
An hour later I went looking for Jared after I hadn’t seen him for a while, and found him alone in the middle of the kitchen, the final link on the chain of rooms.
“You doing okay?” I said to his back.
When he finally turned, he had a look on his face I wasn’t braced for, a look that balled up its fist and sucker-punched me right in the heart. He pointed across the room, where he must’ve been staring for too long, toward the floor along the back wall, near the door, where you’d probably set something too large to fit in the trash can until you could run it out to the dumpster. It was an unused box of Depends. The way Jared pointed it out, looked at it, the box embodied all the loss and sorrow and indignity that had ever escaped Pandora’s.
“Diapers,” said Jared, like an accusation. Approaching tears. “That’s what it comes down to? Goddamn diapers.”
Whenever he came to the next town, the stout man in the soot-gray top hat spent a few days getting to know it from the inside out before plying his varied trades. By strolling its streets and alleyways, by poking amongst piles of rubble with his lacquered walking stick, by sniffing over puddles of spilt blood, both psychic and sanguine, he made of each town a lover from whom he could ferret out prizes most delicious. In tipping his nose to a breeze he might sort its complex mélange into component threads: here, garlic; there, despair; further along, mingled excrements of men and machines.
Such habits served sentiment more than utility now. The world held no more surprises for him, and frontiers were illusory. Cities all smelled the same, the populace of one burning and burying, pissing and shitting, in equal measures to those of the one before and the one to come. He could expect nothing else so long as they in their millions sucked from the same monstrous tit.
He missed the land’s Byzantine variety of the old days, or as he remembered them to be — time did possess a peculiar gilding. Three hundred years hence, he might very well look back on these present days with nothing but fond nostalgia. Great gods! he would marvel, but back then how they knew how to suffer!
And they did. Boom times, these, everywhere he went.
He’d trod here before, fuzzy on how many decades ago, but enough such that he scarcely recognized it now. How the city had grown; how the city continued to do so, beyond all sensibility, a body sprouting brick and iron tumors in frantic abundance, beyond the needs of healthy expansion. Arteries of thought and commerce met, only to choke one another. Idled factories sat scabbed with corrosion, dead hearts presiding over the decay of a system they’d once nourished, while tenements suppurated, spilling infections into the streets.
As they had sown, so would they reap, and reaping time had come.
The pack which set stealthily upon him one evening he likened to maggots squirming from the fetid cavity that had hatched them. He listened to them jeer him, his appearance, his obvious differences. It was English they spoke, but no English he’d heard the last time he’d walked these lands, a newer dialect sprung up that would set the Queen to spinning in her grave.
That they wanted his money became quite apparent, regardless.
“Don’t be absurd,” he told them. “I’ve very little use for the currency of the realm.”
They glanced at one another, translating.
“Dead man walking,” one decided. “Only he don’t know it yet.”
He counted two guns drawn and another displayed in the waist of one’s baggy trousers before he showed them an avuncular smile, gave his face a half-turn, and lifted his walking stick to tap its pewter head upon the ruddy padding over his cheekbone, below his widening eye.
“Now if you’d take a moment from your busy schedules to look in here, we can wrap this up in a trice.”