Between Men

by Richard Canning

  But I did not see it as such. I saw it as water, oxygen, cells. In my vial, a substance not evil, but live.

  It’s OK, I would say. Talk about it. I’ve heard it all. I’ve been doing this for three years, and nothing surprises me anymore. I don’t think you’ve done anything wrong. I will be your tester. So rest easy.

  You will be, if you will, one of my testees. Something is rotten in the state of . . . well, not Denmark, exactly—everything’s great in Denmark. It’s a relative paradise. But here, something stinks. I’m not authorized to divulge our location. Or my name, for that matter—anonymity is a double-sided dildo. So we’ll use the old standbys. You can call me Average Joe. Here in Anytown, USA, it’s not too small or big, not too black or white, not too straight or gay. Just your average . . . rot.

  What brings you in today? Feel free to say.

  ’Cuz nobody’s ever fucked up here. Not in this office. Whatever people might think of you outside this office, whatever you might think of yourself in your most private moments, that doesn’t transmit here. Not in my book. You never fucked up in my book.

  You’re just human. And you did what you did for a reason. That thing you couldn’t tell your husband or wife or girlfriend or boyfriend or mom or dad or fuckbuddy or slumbergirl or hairdresser or priest or dominatrix. The shit you couldn’t tell the moralists at County Health or the worrywarts on the CDC hotline, that’s what you came here for.

  I’ve heard it all, I’d say. It’s OK. Nobody’s ever fucked up here.

  It usually worked. They usually talked. The slim young brunette, her hair a frazzled split-end mass, told me how she was raped in the car after a date. The married man cried as he recalled that day in the steam room where he sat on someone’s thumb and it went inside his ass. (What fortuitous circumstance befalls those least in need!) The spinster came every two weeks for a year after she serially accepted glasses of iced tea from a man whom she suspected was HIV positive. Her situation always involved “flecks” of blood from his mouth swirling into her Mandalay. “What should I do?” she asked the last time she came. “Stop drinking iced tea,” I suggested. “It’s very unhealthy.” The responsible bears who fucked around when their cubs were gone but came in every few months to make sure things were cool. The riot grrrls making statements: we take it up the ass, too! And the boys, always the boys, drinking and smoking and losing their teeth to crystal, wearing insouciance like cologne. “Cool, I’m not positive yet,” they’d say. Or, “Oh, well, guess I should see a doctor now?” I cried for them when they left because they could not cry for themselves, and the girl who was raped returned for results and gave me a trembling, feathery hug. It felt nice then, like I mattered, but later it just made it all worse. My skull stored all the suffering of this town, and not even Astrid knew any trepanists.

  “But if you want, I’ll give it a go,” she offered sweetly. “Just do your homework and get me the right kind of drill.”

  There are other ways in this modern world to approximate bloodletting. Astrid moonlighted as a piercer. She claimed to have pierced more dicks than I’d ever even seen. Piercing is a nicely impermanent way to let those evil spirits out—unless the piercer fucks you up, then it’s as permanent as scar tissue. She used to be a cutter; she would slash her forearms evenly with razor blades. She told me it felt better than screaming or puking or hurting someone else. Someday we will all be as brave as Astrid. We will sizzle our shoulders with cattle branders and roll around in the dirt and bubble forth keloids. We will let pain pass through us and out the other side. We will treasure its entry and celebrate its departure. We will not bottle it so long, so evilly, inside our bodies, our capsules, our vials. And maybe we will find a new ritual for that. But for now, HIV testing, due to its lethal implications, its linkage of sex and punishment, is the best thing we’ve got going.

  Ritual.

  In the fall, Carnie was fired for stealing six hundred donated trinkets from our Toys for Dying Tots campaign. Casper, my favorite client, died shortly thereafter. He’d had HIV since he was fourteen, traced to his hustler lover who ran away to California on him. Casper’s tiny tombstone read “GHOST, 1974—2000, RIP.” Among the mausolea, maple leaves turned the color of Carnie’s hair and bombed my face.

  Once I saw Casper’s most recent girlfriend, a sixteen-year-old silent albino, sitting solemnly on my bench—Jake’s bench, our bench. Casper had brought her in to see me once, and she’d tested negative. I didn’t think Casper could fuck by the time he’d gotten to her. He’d wasted into two dimensions, like a windowpane, and when I made him a long-simmering pho it went into his mouth and out his ass in two minutes flat. From then until he died, I made sure to serve him diapers with his soup. I didn’t say anything to his devoted waif. She stared fixedly at the ground. I guessed she had as much right to the seat as I did; we were both doing the same thing, being here with the ghosts, trying to summon them back.

  Two wayward Scots performed for me that midnight in the barren grove.

  “Will there be audience participation?” they asked.

  “Don’t know,” I replied. “Depends on the show?”

  The boy getting sucked had gelled hair that stuck to my fingers, and then, his left nipple. Patriotic spotlights plastered his penis, sliding out of his boyfriend’s mouth. One great view, then the squad car turned us into chipmunks. We live through somnambular law.

  That night I broke down and had six whiskeys and wrote Jake a letter.

  “Dreaming last night,” I wrote. “You were there (what hindered truth was clothing). Where are you next summer?”

  “Europe,” he answered, some weeks later.

  Was he accepting expatriates? He didn’t respond, all through winter and spring. Then he sent me a postcard one windy day in his limbo, back here on the way from Cali to Spain.

  “The cloud cover is settling. I look up and see that the blue doesn’t beckon me to reach up boundlessly. There is no blue to reach for. The white pushes back, asks me to stay down here, close to the ground. To stay inside of it. Inside the thick.”

  I’d turned thirty and moved into an apartment much closer to the cemetery, my eye on a fresh plot for myself. If you order early, the commercial said, you can save your family 50 percent! Another pleasant June night, a year after we’d first kissed, Jake called on me again. He fairly skipped along while I gimped on a busted ankle. We circumscribed huge echoing tombs and ghostly limestone pyramids and I saw him for a short dorky overanalyzed sweet and scared Jewish kid who’d just finished his first year of college. We lay on flat headstones from 1892 and stared at the scimitar moon, Venus in its sheath. The fireflies danced around us like sentient beings from another planet, and faraway porch lights flared through the curtains of the night.

  He came off in ten seconds, but it was a start. Then he said he needed to call his dad. Jake told him he was somewhere close to where we were, but not quite. Either Jake’s lies were getting closer to truth or I’d moved closer to the neighborhood he liked to lie about. In bed he quivered and stayed on after I limped off in the morning. When I got back from work, he was gone. He left me a note on the desk. It said, “Thank you for being patient with me for a few years and watching me grow up and not be as scared.”

  I didn’t wash my sheets for a month, until my scent had replaced his completely.

  I didn’t know I was the scared one, now.

  Two nights later, secretively, he met our friend Markos. Markos was sixteen and had been a prodigiously lyrical poet a few years before. We’d “met” in a local writers’ chat room, where he’d told me he was bisexual and sent me a poem about AIDS. It’s the only thing Markos ever sent me that I lost. He’d been incommunicado since his dad hired a private investigator after finding marijuana in Markos’s room a year before. The family was Greek Orthodox and his parents’ version of therapy was a series of consultations with the priest. Jake knew Markos through me: they both lived in half-ritzy, half-country, all-white, all-suburban Elk Abbey. I introduced them ele
ctronically soon after I first met Jake, before Markos’s shit hit the fan. I’d never seen Markos in person. To me he was an amalgamation of excited electrons that made my computer screen pulse.

  This time around, Jake met Markos at a public library at midnight. Jake drove them to Jake’s mom’s old house, empty since she’d moved to a new, smaller place. They stripped and took a shower. Then, a gap in Jake’s story: use your imagination.

  “If you don’t hear from me for a while,” said Jake’s voice on my machine, “it’s because while Markos and I were taking a shower at my mom’s old house, his dad called my cell, whose voice mail I check ten minutes later to realize such a thing, and I am listening to this man identify the color and make of my car and the license plate (incorrectly) and he begins to threaten me before I delete the damn message and don’t listen to it. I took Markos back to the high school, about a five- to eight-minute run from his house; I hope he is OK; his dad is fucking crazy. Finding my cell phone number in his son’s e-mails (maybe? somehow?). That he saw my car means he saw the two of us meet up at the library for all of sixty seconds. Probably a good idea that we left rather than undressing in the woods, with Greek daddy standing there. So I’m going to flee the country. Meet me later this summer. I’ll be somewhere in Holland.”

  Hmm, I wondered jealously, can you really take a shower in the woods?

  Jake tried me again from the airport.

  “That’s messed-up about Markos,” I said. Why was everyone I knew screwing a sixteen-year-old? “Not surprising, but still.” Was I missing something here?

  “Yeah,” Jake grunted. “Fucked.”

  “But I think you’re within the four-year gap of our consent statute.” I’d read up on this quick and pro bono. “Legally, you should be OK.”

  “Yeah, and what the fuck.” I could tell he was pissed. He didn’t normally swear. “I didn’t kidnap his son. He was just scared; if he were really after me he wouldn’t have said that ‘the police’ will come to get me.”

  Kidnap. Something about that got me thinking. I listened to the airport page run through its cycle, Anna Mata-Funk please meet your party at baggage carousel B, Anna Mata-Funk please meet your party . . .

  “I haven’t talked with him regularly in ages,” I told him. “I didn’t know you still were. His family’s deranged and I don’t want to get in the middle. I’m already nervous about giving you his info in the first place. He’s a cool kid, though.”

  “He is, and he’s grown up since I last saw him; he was talking about symbolism and poetry and beauty in the world . . . funny guy.”

  “Wait.” Since you last saw him? “His dad said the police would come for you, or Markos said that?”

  “His dad’s message said the police would be after me. If he really wanted to get me, and not just ‘get his son back,’ he would have told me that he would fucking beat me up himself.” His voice was shaking but he sounded resolved. “All right, I am going to appease my dad and play pinochle with him before I have to go to the gate. I’ll see you later,” Jake said, and hung up.

  “Good-bye,” I said, “I love you,” and he wasn’t there, and it was probably all for the best.

  There was no having with Jacob, only desire, but I guessed I wouldn’t have it any other way. One August night I soared over my mercurial valley and landed in drizzly Amsterdam the next morning. I spent the day there glad for the dope. I was suddenly too anxious to see Jake. What if I could have him, for instance? And for how long this time, before he vanished again? I stayed at a leatherman hotel in cheap dorm digs, cruised by a naked young Frenchman in states of dreaming but no desire for anyone but Jake.

  I couldn’t think. I’d lost Astrid for him and needed to be right. I wanted wedding soup when he wanted a pastry. The whole thing made me nauseous. His directions were as follows.

  Take the train from Centraal Station to Apeldoorn.

  Catch the 110 bus to Hoenderloo.

  Get off at the Apeldoornzweig stop after the first yellow bakery.

  Order something. The beignets are good, light and flaky.

  Take a left at the second yellow bakery.

  You will be at Hoge Veluwe National Park. Keep walking.

  Take a left at the first unmarked dirt road by the white house.

  Walk to the end.

  Find me.

  22/8. Early morning I left for Hoenderloo; short trip to Apeldoorn, then long wait for bus. Walked to the farm in the downpour. Jake was bearded and drenched. Helped him haul firewood, then walked alone to the national park in the deluge, biked along heath in forest and bog and over the shifting sands, amazed by putrescent, so-bright-they-make-you-puke rough neon strokes of museum’s Van Goghs and elegant skeletons of Fernand Léger’s soldiers playing cards, not human troops but death masks and machines made of bone saw. J again. Smiling, wet, got stuff ready, left swampy polders for sunnier German pastures. Train ride perfect, clear, expectant, ideal. Arrived in Hannover late. Novotel. I want what we started to happen, Jake smirked. You cocky little shit, I thought, and engulfed him.

  Where do you want to go? I asked before we slept.

  Don’t know, he murmured. Concentration camps? Art museums? Berlin?

  23/8. Hannover, Léger, Kandinsky, Sophie Calle loves James Turrell, calm lunch and warm sun, hand in hand in hand. Train to Berlin jangled, happy, dreamy, not a minute off. A lucky room at Pension Kreuzberg: dark, Gothic, huge, pleasant, sexy, hot late-night walk along Brandenburg Gate/Reichstag/Checkpoint Charlie construction zone, history’s occlusion by steel, glass, cranes, dust, spiderwebs on bicycles abandoned for months, wall remnants glued to postcards. Too late for Bergen-Belsen, no buses back from death.

  24/8. Drank fucked talked loved ate walked through Viktoria Park fucked slept loved ate sunburn.

  25/8. Breakfast at Obst und Omelette and Kaffee, the blond frau at the table across smiling for us, wistful love everywhere, angiosperms, postfuck in the air, then Brecht’s grave, Hegel’s headstone, Jake’s sore throat, husky philosophies, sexy, sick, sun in the meadow, blue wild-flowers after sex or sleep so hard to distinguish. Jake’s pillow over his head and he finally stops speaking languages when I straddle his furry blond ass: Shut up already shut up already shut up. Sweetly crazy, the smell of his armpits, he wants to buy deodorant, Shut up, I say, no way.

  26/8. S-Bahn fast to Wannsee beach. Deep in the FKK section the families diffuse, gay Aryans tall and fair, uncut, hairless. You can tell we’re the Jews, Jacob cracks, but in the Wannsee Villa conference room the framed Jewish boys are the shaven ones. Jake still sick and zitty in a cemetery near Hallesches Tor kissed me beautifully with chapped lips like crepe paper, erections touch through denim, then gone, Jake gone again on the evening train to the Netherlands. Alone again so soon I find a small dorm room in a hostel, sad grateful lonely e-mail Astrid, J, say, Love you always, and thanks. Then smoked silly with loose nicotine, missing Jake so terribly, only absinthe helps. Wormwood, sugar cube, slotted spoon, ice water, ritual of desire and pain and forgetting. Weaving back through the streets, ask all passersby, Do you have a Führer? My German’s not so great; all I need is a flame. Our love is a sunburn, quick and pink and taut and my nose is peeling already. The skin that touched Jake is sloughing off.

  27/8. Free Internet at Hostel Transit. “I’m in the yellow bakery,” Jake has written me. “It was so great to see you, if only for a bit. By the time I see you again I don’t know what will have transpired. Guess that’s something I keep open. But I think that I think of it as friendship right now rather than romance, if we’re working with categories. We’re always so far away.”

  28/8. On flight back I am stuck next to a lounge singer from Jersey who finally met a Dutchman she’d talked with on PalChat, some network where “you can see them and hear them.” They’d had an incredible two weeks together in Arnhem, she said, during which time she’d managed to get knocked up. This explained her intermittent bouts of happy sobbing. “He says he will stop drinking so much,” she blubbered, he
r nostalgia thick as snot. She blew her nose. “I guess I’ll have to take the kids to Holland!” she wailed, exultant. “And of course, I’ll need a divorce.” I gave her my pretzels, it only seemed fair, she was eating for two and I wasn’t at all.

  Wrap the tourniquet around the biceps with one hand, bite to keep it in place. It doesn’t need to be tight. The antecubital should pop up pretty well. It usually does.

  Arrange two cotton filters, small and dense like birdshot pellets; one metal cooker, an empty tea light candle; one red Bic lighter, the flame. One small baggie nicked from the County Health asphalt after the needle exchange; distilled water, straight from the pharmacy; two antimicrobial wipes from the office. An eyedropper from my medicine cabinet. A diabetic syringe, blue topped, we call it a pogo stick for inventory. They won’t miss this one.

  Tap the baggie so half the powder falls into the cooker. Let the eyedropper pipette tap the distilled water, pinch the bulbous rubber stopper. Squirt two drops onto the spoon. Light the flame underneath. Let the mixture boil until it turns to golden mud. Water droplets race away like the impure from the pure. Draw twenty cubic centimeters, a half inch, into the pogo, through the filter. Make a fist and, with the other hand, a forty-five-degree angle. Then, a smooth straight stroke, and we’re in. Watch the syringe for crimson. Let the blood’s flashback be a guide. Release the tourniquet with teeth. Relax the fist.

  Plunge.

  The world is so far away.

  Ritual.