by James, Ella
There’s such a thick sea of heads and shoulders, for a second I can’t fucking breathe. I start shoving through them and say “hello,” so he knows I’m here. Someone curses in my wake. Someone else shoves my arm. Fuck—I trip on someone’s foot, and some guy with a lip ring catches my elbow.
“Thanks, man.”
Then I’m at the door. I push through it—cold metal—and I’m on the wicked-windy street, curling my hand around the iPhone’s mouthpiece.
Don’t talk, I tell myself.
I realize I’m panting, and the wind is like a whip. Dammit, it’s a pretty narrow street, but there’s no shelter from the goddamn wind. I swallow hard and start to walk—east for a few strides before I double back and head toward my place.
Hey, Skywalker.
Jesus Christ, I want to talk, to hear his voice. I pull the phone away from my face to check; he’s still there. I try to hear his side of the line, but it’s completely quiet.
“Call me. If you really need me. We don’t have to talk if you don’t want to. I’ll just hang out on the line with you.”
It’s been more than a year…but I’m pulsing like a bolt of lightning. Luke needs me.
My mind spins, wanting details. Where is he? Despite the cold, my fingers on the phone are sweaty as I move it off my ear again and start toward Instagram. I stop because I’m scared I’ll hang up on him while I’m checking out who’s tagged him lately and where. He’s overseas a lot; I know that.
I hold the phone up to my ear again. I think I hear something—a little blup, like blankets or a hand over the phone. I inhale—through my nose, so he won’t hear.
Luke…
I turn the phone a little toward the street. A taxi’s rolling by. The wind is whipping into my phone’s mouthpiece.
Hey. I’m walking home. I’m in the city. He knows I was in a bar. I swallow hard. If he could see me dancing tonight…but he didn’t. Something crushing heavy moves through my chest.
I suck in another deep breath.
Please don’t hang up.
* * *
Luke
I drag my gaze around the capsule: curved white walls…the scent I think’s supposed to be vanilla…dimmed neon-pink light.
I clench my jaw and clutch the phone. Every part of me is shaking, so my breaths are coming kind of ragged, but I’ve got the phone pointed away from my lips.
I shut my eyes and listen to the noise on his end. Sounds like the city. New York, I assume. He was in a club. Maybe a concert. He left…and now he must be walking somewhere.
I picture him on a dark street. He’s sort of warm from drinking, wearing a nice, thick coat…but I bet his fingers are cold, if he’s holding the phone. I take a deep, slow breath. I hear a little static, and I’m pretty sure it’s windy there. I take another long breath…let it out. I make myself imagine something: a harbor. Some sidewalk by the river. He’s walking by park benches, little glow-wreathed streetlamps.
I hear a car horn and ditch the harbor scene. He’s in the thick of things. It smells like New York. Sort of stale and sort of oily…sort of like food and maybe old, wet brick. I’ve got a cold, so nothing smells like anything to me. Not even Tokyo.
I suck more air into my tight lungs, realizing that my shaking has let up a little since I called him. Then I think again of why—of what happened—and shut my eyes. They’re throbbing.
Focus on him. Listen.
Somehow I know he’ll stay with me. Knew before I called. Just as I knew after what happened, I would call him. Too much bad stuff…and no one I want to talk to.
You.
I want to talk to you.
I still hear his voice in my head. I can see his smile like I was with him yesterday. Thinking of yesterday sets me off again. Don’t think about that now. Focus on Vance.
I’ve been meditating lately, but I’m no good at it. Now I practice again, closing my eyes and setting my breaths up right before I drift along with the sounds on his end. I hear brakes squeal…the clack of something on asphalt. I hear something like his mouth brush the phone, then the sound of wind and his light breathing.
That’s him breathing.
Hot tears blur the pink light in the corners of my pod. They spill down my temples. He rubs the phone against his scruff, and in my head, I hear him talking.
Hey, Skywalker. How’s it going?
I squeeze my eyes shut, and more tears trek toward my ears. I want to talk to him. I take a few deep breaths and wipe my face.
A minute later, the traffic sounds fade, and I think I hear him climbing stairs. The jangle of keys is unmistakable, followed by the thump of a door opening. His breathing changes…maybe evens out. Now that he isn’t walking.
I smile as he opens the refrigerator. He pops open a can’s tab. Whatcha drinking, buddy?
He’s undressing. I can hear it. Just as I can hear when he gets into bed. The phone rubs over his scruff again. I bet you aren’t shaving. Maybe busy getting ready for that art show?
The lump in my throat is so hard, I can barely swallow. I pull the blankets over my shoulders and fix my eyes on the sign on my wall. In Japanese it reads: The Mask Room. Beside the text, there’s a picture of a Kitsune mask. The mask room. I move the phone off my ear…hold it near my chest.
* * *
Vance
I open my eyes to inky darkness. For a second, I don’t know what’s wrong. Then I’m jerking upright, my hands trembling as they search the covers. Fuck. It’s under my leg. It’s 5:03. The call is gone. A quick glance at my call log shows it ending at 4:13 AM.
“Fuck!”
I jump out of bed and pace the kitchen.
“FUCK!”
I lean against the counter, grip its cool edge with my fist. I squeeze my eyes shut. My throat’s a knot.
I hold the phone for fucking ever, hoping for a call-back. Then I check his Instagram. He was tagged four days ago at a panel on love at UCLA. I enlarge the picture. He’s standing with the woman who posted the shot…wearing gray dress pants, a pink shirt, and a warm smile—looking like a whole damn meal.
I blow a breath out, set the phone down, throw on work-out clothes. I scoop up the phone and jog down my apartment stairs and past the Donut King, into the biting cold, toward a track that’s six blocks up. Even as I run, I’ve got the phone pressed to my abs. I turn the volume up on my phone, press it to my stomach, and squeeze it like it’s the phone’s fault I fucked up. Fell asleep with him on the line.
God, I hate this. Hate that I can’t call him back. That I don’t know why he called me.
It’s been more than a year. I keep track of him as best I can on his church web site and the good ole gram, but I’d gotten all that shit with him down a simmer. Now I’m at a fucking boil again…
Friend of mine’s been bugging me to do this boxing thing with him. That night, I go do it—but I keep my phone tucked into my sock. The next day, I fuck up big-time on the cheekbone of a bust I’m doing for commission. Takes nine hours to fix, and by the time I’m done, my back and shoulders are on fire. By the time I’m done, I’m back in the wee hours, and he doesn’t call.
He’s not going to call back.
By the evening of the exhibition, he’s still weighing heavy on my mind. Sometimes I think about my work this way—obsessively—but that I can do something about. This is different. This is fucked.
I wear my long hair down the night of. It’s sort of wavy, but not frizzy—good hair to wear long, at least according to my friend Adam, who cuts it. It’s a multi-artist event, therefore packed. I look twice at every blond dude who strolls by me.
All my pieces sell. Before I glance over the buyer log, I send up something like a prayer that his name will be there.
It’s not. Of fucking course it’s not. I’ve gotta stop this shit.
I delete my Insta, and when my buddy Strauss invites me and some other friends to a lodge up in the Adirondacks for a few days, I haul ass into the snowy woods and paint in the glass “sunroom” when I�
�m not drowning in whiskey.
I go home and feel more level. I reload the gram. Homeboy’s doing events for a book tour. I see several pics of him smiling with strangers and delete the gram again. I can post pictures of my art to my website.
It’s all good.
His book is about forgiveness. I don’t read it, but I read reviews. I can sort of see why he does this shit. The book has 9,128 Amazon reviews, with an average rating of 4.6. My guy is a fucking star. One morning, I turn on the TV because my place feels too quiet; he’s right there on Good Morning America.
Shit. He looks good and happy. He looks like he’s in his element. I turn the TV off.
Days crawl into weeks, and New York gets its Christmas on. Almost everyone I know is making some sort of pilgrimage for the holidays. I bring roses to Mom’s grave and decline Xi’s last-minute invitation to a potluck at his boyfriend’s house.
It’s all right. I do Chinese Christmas Eve like Mom and I did when I was a kid. I get the moo goo gai pan like she used to—a great, heaping plate of it from the same place we used to in Brooklyn. I don’t live there anymore, but I can pay the twenty-four dollars for delivery.
As I’m eating, I realize something that makes me stop: the last year of Mom’s life, she got sesame chicken. The last year of Mom’s life, she was getting pension, and I sold my first batch of reprods for a new Manhattan hotel chain. She got my moo goo gai pan and got herself sesame chicken.
I get all fucking onion eyed thinking how moo goo gai pan is kid fare. I bet she didn’t even like it. It was something I liked that we could split…which saved money.
I watch all the Christmas shit on TV Christmas day, and fall asleep on the couch. Someone wakes me with a knock on my door, and I nearly have a heart attack. I check the peep hole, and my heart falls so hard, I can feel the fucker in my thighs.
It’s not him. It’s Davida, one of the other artists at the co-op where I started sculpting sometimes. She gives me rum and peppermint sticks, and that night I consume both while watching ET, which, for reasons I don’t understand, is playing before Home Alone and after National Lampoon’s.
A little after midnight, I tuck in and turn up the phone’s volume and set it by my ear. I fall asleep watching snow flakes drift down past my window, cast in green and red from streetlights, glowing blue-white from headlights.
Christmas.
New York.
I remember when I loved the winter.
Hardly anybody calls the next day. When people do, I make up excuses to stay in—like that I’m working.
I paint icebergs alla prima in the afternoon on my deck. The deep blue ocean, frozen white. My hands are painful red when I finish the last layer—despite my fingertip-hole gloves—but I think it’s a winner. I get my phone. Download Instagram again and post it to my stories on a whim.
Delete the app.
I go to his page. There’s a picture of him in a charcoal suit with a pale blue tie. He’s looking up a little, like there’s someone on a ladder just above him making him smile. I can tell he’s still doing his own Insta. The caption reads just, Merry, merry. Understated. Unassuming. Luke.
I zoom in on his face. Is he thinner? My conscience claps back: Do you want him to be?
I delete the app. By bedtime, I can tell I’m getting fucking sick. I was born a little early—32 weeks—and my lungs are shitbags. Always have been. Kind of glad for the distraction of it this time.
The next day, I get a holiday card from fucking Lana and her husband. Laughing makes me cough, but I do anyway. It’s so fucking funny, I pin it to the fridge.
There’s just a little whiskey left. I swallow all of it and lie on my bed till the popcorn ceiling starts to take form as shapes. It’s an artist thing, I think. I say thank you to my brain, because it’s sort of awesome getting entertainment from your ceiling.
The next few days smear into one another. My phone’s broken for a few of them; I’m too tired to take it to an Apple store. I work on the portrait bust that I call Vake. Luke and me…his eyes and brow and jaw, my mouth and cheeks and hair. Commissioned piece.
I work for five hours and have to lie down. Fireworks wake me. Has it really been that many days? It’s New Year’s Eve? I try my phone, and now it turns on. There are nineteen voicemails. Shit.
I sit up, sloughing off the covers. Something hot and thick rolls through me. It’s this prickling heat that makes my arm hairs stand on end—something I didn’t think could really happen outside badly written fiction or narcotics withdrawal.
Somehow, I just know. I lunge for the phone—still on my bookshelf where I left it. Nothing’s on my screen, but I check texts, and there it is. He’s at the top, and when I click his name, I see a blue box that says: Skywalker started sharing location with you. Would you like to share yours?
I know before I check. I fucking know—or maybe I just really want to. Either way, it’s true. Luke is at a hotel in Manhattan.
I share my location with him. Then I put my coat on.
* * *
Luke
I’m playing with fire, and I know that. Still, I walk down to the lobby in his hoodie and stand by the elevator bank. He knows where I am—or at least that I’m at this hotel. I shared my location with him: something I learned from Pearl, back when she was new and hell bent on letting me know where she was along her errand route.
I make a quick scan of the entry hall—more like a giant atrium, with three banks of elevators, pale gray marble floors, walls of windows, and a bunch of chandeliers that look vaguely spider-like. It’s just packed enough so I don’t feel like I stick out, but not so busy I’m too worried about drawing eyes.
I stuff my hands into the pockets of the hoodie, fix my gaze on the main doors. Revolving doors. I feel strangely still, almost apart from everything around me as I stand with my shoulder blades pressed to the wall behind me. For a second, my face does that thing where it goes burning hot—something that never happened until I met him. I pull my phone out for distraction.
I check my phone, and cold sweat prickles my skin. He’s shared location with me, too, and he’s close. I squint and make the map bigger. He’s a block or two away.
My heart is pounding as I watch the people coming through the doors. A girl with sequined antennae. A group of young guys wearing pale blue down jackets. Someone in a tan coat.
That’s him.
I can tell on the next stride. His height and lankiness, that certain square of his shoulders. The way he moves…this really easy sort of walk. He lifts his head and scans the room. I look right at him as my knees go weak. I take in his light beard and his long hair, pulled back. I look at his mouth and find he’s too far for me to see clearly.
I walk to the stairwell maybe twenty feet away on legs that quake. I take the stairs slowly. Then I run up. I stop at the fifth-floor door, praying that he saw me. Even harder that he didn’t.
My pulse roars between my ears, and louder as the silence settles around me. None of the doors open. I take the stairs two at a time to the tenth floor and look down between the rails.
My eyes are hot. I can smell the putty smell of that stairwell on that day.
“You’re not in trouble. I just want to have a brief word with your father.”
By the time I lie down on my hotel bed, my body’s numb and heavy. I take off my clothes, put on a robe, and wander onto my deck.
What did you think would happen, Luke?
I look over the rail…nudge some snow off with my finger. Watch it fall.
I keep the shared location on all night, but put the phone between two hardbacks on the bookshelf. So I can’t see his reply. If there is one.
The next morning, I get a new phone—and a new number.
Part III
One
June 1, 2001
Luke
“Oh merciful Father in Heaven. We are gathered here today to minister to your child, Luke Gabriel McDowell. Please lift up your holy messenger. Sharpen his focus and open his min
d to the truth of what it means to serve you as our great God. Help your humble servants, myself and Mr. Jay Barlean, to serve as conduits for your great Word and fulfill our promise to his father that we mentor Luke on his route to become a warrior for the faith. Until the hour he is ordained formally into your ministry, we know that his heart and mind are permeable. We know we can overcome temptations. We know we can conquer earthly desires for a taste of your glory. Help us overcome, Lord. Let this be a time of healing and refinement for our young friend Luke. In Christ’s name. Say it with me, men. Amen.”
I open my eyes and see the pink sunset between the evergreens around my family’s cabin at Lake Tahoe. Everything is lush and green. Nearby, I hear splashing—probably the kids I know from fourteen summers spent here cannonballing into the lake that forms our collective backyard. I inhale. Something good. Maybe Mrs. Ghiglione’s prosciutto.
I think of eating it around their table beside Peter Ghiglione last summer, and when I try to breathe again, it’s like my lungs are locked up. My head spins a little as I try two times to suck back air and finally get some.
Seth O’Grady, who just offered the prayer, puts his hand on my back. Jay Barlean pushes the screen door open.
“Let’s go inside and get started, guys. I think with any luck, we can get through all the steps by Sunday morning.”
“You know, Luke—we did this last summer with another warrior. We’ve kept in close contact, and that boy’s been temptation-free.”
I think of Josh Deegan and Dave Moore and Bobby Knightson—all the boys like me at Evermore. I wonder who. For months after, I think of Josh or Dave or Bobby in my mouth as I beat my erection.
Two
January 2019
Luke
Bernard arrives at six sharp. No surprise…and yet it feels like one. I feel like a stranger standing in my foyer, wearing my dark jeans/dark blazer/pale pink dress shirt combo. Like an imposter holding my phone, chewing my favorite Eclipse gum. It’s Tuesday night, the night I almost always do a business dinner. That’s where the black Escalade parked by my front walk will take me: down to the Mission District for dinner.
