SideEffects stood alone in the twilight of the empty room in the empty house out on the western end of SinusoidDrive. It was fall and, though the day was unseasonably warm, the interior still retained an autumnal crispness from the recent cold spell whose effects had settled deep into the walls and the plumbing. Until today’s break in the weather, SideEffects had been considering firing up the furnace for the first time since last winter just to save the pipes. He was staring out the scenic living-room picture window at the sloping front lawn of dead brown grass and the clotted edge of the TemperedWoods, which ended in the undeveloped lot just across the street. This was “the sticks” of suburbia, where the distension of Randomburg pressed up against all that was not Randomburg, all the not-human mess needlessly occupying space outside the city line. Though the area wasn’t any more “elevated” than the surrounding land, this particular community had been dubbed, for marketing purposes, AspenHeights, even if there wasn’t a single aspen tree anywhere in sight. SideEffects himself had contributed the word aspen.
He liked empty houses, especially the new ones, the unlived-in ones. He liked being in them. He liked the feel of virginal space, the distinctively clean aroma of untouched product. And he above all liked fucking in them, on the bare boards before the furniture was put down, before outsider feet scratched and stained the fresh flooring. And he especially liked afterward rubbing his spent semen into the wood. His secret mark, his way of christening the house for the new owners, wishing it a safe journey on its harrowing voyage through the storms of domestication. Or, better yet, rubbing two sets of mixed semen into the polished grain, his and his partner’s, whoever that partner happened to be at the moment, concocting a whitish amalgam into which forefingers were sometimes solemnly dipped and solemnly tasted, two unrelated mates joining together as cumbrothers. He’d experienced the ritual several times with various partners in unoccupied houses all across the greater Randomburg metroplex. Often, as he tooled about town, he’d check off in his mind the houses that had been so blessed, sometimes recalling the particulars of each sexual adventure that had taken place within the walls. The house he was standing inside of now was still, unfortunately, a virgin. He had hoped to upgrade its condition last Wednesday—hump day, as a matter of fact—but he’d gotten into an excessive argument with WetCoasters earlier in the day over the previous evening’s bar tab at VinylColonial’s, and the mood, such as it was, had been broken beyond repair, as had, perhaps, the relationship with WetCoasters. Too bad, since he wouldn’t mind fucking him, either. Curious how many guys he passed in the course of a day he did want to fuck. The world was full of them. And his mind rolled on, as it often did, into a dreamy soft-focus erotic reverie in which his fantasy self went wandering through a fairy-tale forest of enchanted erections where he remained lost for several minutes until he was abruptly interrupted by his cell. He glanced at the screen. It was the SkinTags. Finally. He’d already called them twice. Left messages twice. They were an affably aging couple who had been seeking to downgrade from their monster trilevel to a more comfortable and manageable single-story ranch. SideEffects had waited an hour for them this afternoon and was already attempting to rein in his impatience when he heard that the reason for their no-show was a home invasion they had suffered that very morning, when a couple of armed gunmen of a distinctly minority ethnic persuasion had forced their way inside after posing as RabbitExpress deliverymen. The SkinTags had been tied up, beaten, locked in a closet, and robbed of jewelry and cash on hand totaling at least twenty grand. SideEffects offered his own outrage, his condolences, and hung up, slightly shaken. He’d always been quite sensitive to any violations of the sanctity of the home, particularly those owned by clients of his. Well, Roulette always said everything was steadily falling apart and had been since the last time the country won a war, which was now so long ago that no one currently alive, including himself, could even remember the damn thing. He opened his briefcase, rummaged around inside for the fifth of LaughFrogg he always liked to have on hand for just such moments as these. Found the whiskey, unscrewed the cap, and downed a couple of healthy slugs straight from the bottle. Then he took another gander at the label, which he’d already read numerous times, to appreciate again the long and storied lore of this restorative spirit. And it worked. His clouded mind began clearing almost immediately. Then his cell rang again to the catchy theme from Eschatology Force: Dander Zone, his favorite TV show when he was a kid even though it came on well past his prescribed bedtime. He checked the screen. It was HuggerMugger. He took the call.
“Whatcha doing?” HuggerMugger said.
“Standing alone in an empty property staring out the window at a dead lawn.”
“Need some company?”
“Naw. I’m cutting out of here in about half a sec. What’s up?”
“Nothing much. Got a friend who’s in the market for a house.”
“Okay.”
“The friend’s also got friends. There’s five of them. All good people, comprende?”
“Aren’t we all?”
“So they’re going in on this together. They need something roomy yet also cozy, but not too elaborate, you know. Price is highly flexible.”
“So am I. Listen, I happen to have for a moment just the place they’re looking for.”
“Yeah, where’s it at? Location, location, location.”
“Out on Mangosteen Drive. About five minutes from the reservoir, ten from the airport. It’s rustic with a quaint exterior. Probably needs some modest TLC, but what fine home doesn’t?”
“Don’t front me with your realtor bullshit. What is it, a broken-down shack not fit enough for a pack of stray dogs to roam through?”
“It’s got good bones.”
“When can we personally examine this buried treasure?”
“Next Saturday at ten.”
“Done.”
“The address is 1111 Mangosteen Drive.”
He’d no sooner gotten off the phone with HuggerMugger than his cell rattled immediately to life again. It was Farrago.
“She’s doing it again,” she said at once without any preamble.
“Doing what?”
“Breaking into my room. Going through my stuff.”
“I thought you changed the lock on the door.”
“I did.”
“Then how’d she get in?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know how she does anything.”
“You tell Dad?”
“Yeah.”
“What’d he say?”
“Nothing he can do. He doesn’t care anyway.”
“Anything missing?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t had time to check out everything.”
“Then how’d you know she got in?”
“Two of my all-time favorite T-shirts were wadded up and tossed on the bed. One of ’em was the one with the PromissoryTears on the front. You know, the one I wore to the MadeForYou rally and caught holy hell for. And both of ’em stunk of that shitty perfume she always wears.”
“You know what I think, Farrago?”
“No, what?”
“I think she’s jealous of you.”
“Yeah?”
“I think she wants to be you.”
“But I’m her fucking daughter.”
“All the more reason.”
“That’s insane.”
“Think about it.”
“I always knew this family was fucked up. I didn’t know it was that fucked up.”
“Shit happens. Don’t know what else you can do but change the lock again.”
“Last one cost me over fifty installed. I can’t afford that again.”
“Get a good one. I’ll pay for it.”
“Thanks. You’re the best, bro.”
“I try.”
They hung up. SideEffects unscrewed the cap on the LaughFrogg again, lifted the bottle to his lips, and drank deeply. Family. What’re you gonna do? As far as SideEffects was concerned, the whole arrangement, or whatever it was between his parents, had been, so he’d been told, pretty much of an ordeal from the start. A constant carnival of crises. Mismatched from the moment they met at the Shuttlecock Indian Casino and Hotel, over in WestGriddleCake, they celebrated their fortuitous collision by getting utterly shitfaced, losing every dime they had on them, trashing both their rooms, running up damages neither could afford to pay, and topping off the evening, or more likely the early morning, with a loud tussle both verbal and physical that ended with a nude swim in the Olympic-size indoor pool and then a vigorous boning in the kiddie wading pool that had supposedly resulted in Graveyard’s conception, or so the family legend went. They got married the next day, separated two weeks later, and then embarked on a maddening yo-yo relationship that was still yo-yoing along some forty-plus years later, to the amazement of family and friends alike. And for SideEffects, who had grown up, more or less, inside the show, on intimate terms with many of the particulars, the entire thing was still a mystery to this day. He couldn’t comprehend the relationship, if that’s what it was. He couldn’t even describe it adequately. Finally, he didn’t even really know who his parents actually were. Each one seemed as foreign and enigmatic to him as planets in a distant galaxy or examples of carved monuments left behind by a long-gone ancient civilization whose meaning or purpose remained frustratingly undecipherable. Still he had spent countless hours seated before these curious artifacts trying to read meaning into their overwhelming size and insistent presence. The code, even now, seemed impossible to break. They could have been casual strangers he met by chance on a stroll through Anytown, Mammoth Country, Inc. And then, of course, there were the products of this bizarre pairing, the siblings, each warped in his or her own specific way. Farrago already well embarked on the path to her ultimate Farragohood, whatever bizarre brew of sprite and witch that would turn out to be. And Graveyard, the mutant prince. How and why, against impossible odds, he should have won some preposterous sum in a public lottery was proof of an irreparable crack in the universe, a flaw in the design. What possible aberration could have permitted a chronic loser like Graveyard to stumble into such a monstrous change in fortune that such concepts as order, justice, fairness, and all that crap were rendered laughable? He couldn’t even think of his brother’s good luck without an accompanying feeling of bone-deep nausea. Why him? Why him? Why him? His brain rejected the very words themselves. He simply could not physically tolerate the truth of the event. It went round and round his mind in infinite closing circles until he felt, not for the first time in his life, dangerously near the outlying precincts of total cra-cra. Why did this have to happen to him? Why did anything have to happen to him? He unscrewed the cap again and he drank.
He was just locking the front door behind him when his cell began sputtering again. It was his father. Against his better judgment he took the call.
“Dad,” he said. “Wassup?”
“Before dinner, do I take the green capsule or the red tablet or both?”
“How should I know? I don’t have the info in front of me. Check the chart taped to the back of the medicine-cabinet door. Which is what you should have done before calling me.”
“I can’t read that thing without my glasses.”
“So? Put ’em on.”
“Haven’t been able to find ’em for three days.”
“How have you been getting to work?”
“I don’t have to read a mess of tiny print printed on the back of the road in order to drive a car.”
“Then take whatever pills you think you should take,” said SideEffects. “And find your damn glasses.” And he hung up.
Then, abruptly, he found himself in his own car, a sleek, high-powered late-model Boomerang, the wannabe ride favored by cash-strapped wannabe-ers who couldn’t quite manage the financials required to step behind the wheel of the sleeker, faster, ludicrously pricier Celeron3000, with no idea how he got there or even where he was going. It took only a moment for the proper day of the week to pop into his skull. It was Friday, folks, end-of-the-week Friday. That meant he would spend much of his night at either the Black Hole or the Dancing Baton. Or perhaps both. Why not? It was Friday.
Despite the recent cold it had been the warmest day in October in thirty years and the air-conditioning was on the blink at the Black Hole. Posted above the bar was a hand-lettered sign: FUCK CLIMATE CHANGE TONIGHT ONLY GOLDRESTITUTIONS AND SLURPERITAS HALF PRICE. The cramped bar was, for the evening, at least, little more than a miserable sweatbox. SideEffects knew most of the revelers packed into the place, had sold homes to about half of them, had had sex with about a third. He liked the subway-style crush of squirming bodies on the floor, the smell of intoxicated flesh, the oppressive sense of claustrophobia the bar induced. He even liked the heat, the fine sheen of sweat on his and everyone else’s face and arms. It reminded him of sex. It almost made him feel he was actually having sex. What he really needed right now, though, was a blow job from a stranger. It was one of those compelling impulses not worth questioning. He scanned the crowd, searching for a likely victim, found a couple of maybes but that was all. He was still distracted by the hunt when he realized the person standing in front of him was actually talking to him. He allowed his image to swim into view. It was DialTone. Once DialTone had been a pretty good-looking girl and was now, surprisingly enough, an even better-looking guy. SideEffects had first met him six years ago when his father had hired the female version to bartend weekends at The Crevice. In SideEffects’s refracted opinion, the revised DialTone had also turned out to be a better person. He tended to remain in focus no matter how fuzzy the situation. Sometimes SideEffects wondered if we couldn’t all be immeasurably improved by, after living our first twenty or thirty years as one sex, being magically transformed into our sexual opposites. Someone should one day make a sci-fi epic with such a miraculous reversal as the central plot device. Cosmic Cosplay or some such bullshit. He’d be there on opening day. SideEffects had sold a house to DialTone last winter over on Furrow Estates that DialTone had actually paid cash for. Rumor had it that DialTone was fronting the mob’s footing into Randomburg. Okay by SideEffects. Money was money.
“I’m sorry,” SideEffects said. “What were you saying?”
“I was just remarking how much I still like the house. Good space, good structure. And the flooring in the upstairs bedroom you warned us about, still holding up nicely. Not a single problem.” He inserted a significant pause. “So far.”
“Great. Always good to hear.”
“Was wondering, though, if you have any other similar properties in the area. Got a couple friends new to the market.”
“Certainly do, DialTone. Just give me a call whenever. Let me give you my card.” He pulled out his wallet and extracted one of his brand new embossed sky-blue business cards ($2,300 for the design, one dollar each for the printing). “Love to do business with you again or any of your friends.” And, surprising even himself, he leaned over and kissed DialTone on his amazingly soft cheek. He said goodbye to DialTone, gave the crowd one last cursory look-see, and headed off to the PurplePisser. He needed to take a leak real bad.
The men’s room, the site of every manner of wonderful depravity you could imagine and many you couldn’t, was illuminated by an overhead black light that gave everything inside a dark purple glow—except, of course, for the cum stains, the piss stains, and the bleached teeth, which all fluoresced a strikingly bright, vibrant white. And it was the teeth that drew him immediately to the young guy in front of the sinks who was receiving a thoroughly accomplished blow job from some old bald ugly guy SideEffects wouldn’t ordinarily have even glanced at. But it was the teeth he couldn’t take his eyes off of. The blowjobee had closed his eyes and was smiling so openly that his teeth were revealed in all their enameled glory. They were a complete set of perfect glowing choppers and SideEffects’s reaction to them was somewhat of a revelation to himself. He hadn’t ever been so attracted to someone’s dental gift, at least that he was aware of. The novelty alone intrigued him. He stepped over to the row of urinals, unzipped, and, proceeding to ignore what was happening right behind him, took a leak himself. When he finished, he left himself dangling outside his pants and sauntered over to a sink, where he pretended to wash his hands. His stuff, in repose, measured four inches or so, eight in full bloom, or so he liked to imagine, numbers rounded up as such measurements usually are. He liked how the free air felt on his pent-up pubes, so he left the whole package on public display. Besides, the exposure was a pretty effective way of saying hi. In fact, once the nearby scene had concluded the blowjobee sauntered over to the sink next to SideEffects and gave his hands a perfunctory soapless rinse.
“Hey, dude,” he said to SideEffects from the corner of his mouth. “Rare heirloom you got there. Does Daddy know it’s out taking a walk?”
“Junior’s old enough to make his own rules.” SideEffects grabbed a paper towel and began casually drying his hands.
His new friend gave the poor evicted chub a second-over. “Mind if I snag a pic?” he said.
“Be my guest.”
The man pulled his phone from his back pocket, took careful aim, and clicked. “One for my collection.”
“Too bad it’s only a photo.”
“You never know. It might be trending.”
An hour later they left together. It seemed a promising match. They liked the same music, anything by SalamanderRose, FriedWater, or DukeyButts, the same movies, the complete filmographies of both CastorBean and GallopingShoes, and the same TV shows, particularly that sensation of the viewing year, the old-timey twelve-part version of Musical Chairs.
SideEffects occupied a midrange apartment on a midlevel floor of The Aspiration Tower, the second-tallest building in Randomburg or anywhere else, for that matter, in the entire northern tier of the state. SideEffects had always wanted to live in a penthouse surrounded by penthouse trappings. Since he couldn’t afford such splendor he had gone in the opposite direction. He’d had his entire apartment designed by WrapAround of ContemporaryContemporaneity, master of the trending Penitence-A-Lot lifestyle. The original wooden floor had been sanded down and polished to a high sheen. There was no furniture. SideEffects and his guests sat on colorful bamboo mats. They ate and drank out of matching black enamel bowls. The walls had all been painted in a uniform soothing and gentle soft blue. No stray objects, no stray clothes. Everything was spare and clean. There were no decorative effects of any kind whatsoever. He couldn’t believe how much he’d had to pay to make the place look as though he owned nothing. What he did have was a glorious view of the reliably picturesque Bric-A-Brac Range. That was free and unfortunately only available during the day.
Once SideEffects and his new buddy arrived they headed straight to the cell-like bedroom, stripped off their street clothes, and proceed to test out the durability of the ten-inch CossetFoam futon (in SideEffects’s mind a justifiable indulgence) with the latest stylings in gay gymnastics. Which they did. There were plenty of body fluids and body exploratories. The other guy’s neck smelled of dick.
In the morning, when SideEffects was measuring out the grounds for his Hi-Testor Magna Dose Caffeine Delivery System, a luxury kept safely out of view in its own custom-made cabinet, he asked his guest his name.
“Loophole,” the other man said. At which point the sprung innards of SideEffects’s internal processing center creaked into motion like a broken windup toy with a click, a clack, a whir, and a wheeze, finally emitting a thin wisp of smoke to indicate the operation had been concluded.
“Acquainted at all with a girl named Farrago?” he said.
“Sure,” Loophole said. “She’s my girlfriend.”
“She also happens to be my sister,” SideEffects said.
“Well, what do you know? Small world, ain’t it? Thought you looked a mite familiar. You’ve got a good sister.”
“You’ve got a good girlfriend.”
“I know.” He laughed. “So what now? Is this the part where I’m supposed to offer an apology? Or the part where you hit me?”
SideEffects figured it was the part where it was his turn to laugh. So he did. Then both realized they had been staring into each other’s eyes for well past the prescribed socially acceptable limit. “I’ll beat you up later,” SideEffects said. They returned to the bedroom. They returned to their bodies.
Two months later they were still together. And everyone knew it. Or almost everyone. They were not exactly discreet in their distribution of PDAs about town and environs. Sometimes to an almost reckless degree, especially in SideEffects’s case. In a community not particularly known for an open-arms policy on minorities of any kind, certainly not sexual ones, he risked a potentially substantial business loss. But he didn’t seem to care. And it was common knowledge among social insiders that if you were interested in gay housing, SideEffects was the man to see. He probably figured whatever business he lost at one end by running with the “homo” crowd he made up for through the advertising at the other end. Or maybe he simply got exhausted with all the juggling of poses required to maintain good standing in the uptight look-at-me-I’m-a-running-hard-true-patriot-making-fistfuls-of-cash-and-you’re-not-kind-of-guy club.
He and Loophole began a game he’d played with other people in other times in which the object was to fuck in as many public spaces as possible and not get caught or get caught. Either way was a win. They fucked in many different cars, their own and total strangers’. They fucked on trains. They fucked in planes. They fucked on other people’s furniture and in other people’s beds. They fucked in SideEffects’s unoccupied properties, sold and unsold, territorial cumming on each separate site. They fucked in commercial stores—high end, discount, electronic, and grocery. They drove all the way to Whiteywhiteport and fucked on the white beach and in the blue water. They fucked in Loophole’s boyhood tree house. They fucked in Granddaddy Park on Founder’s Day.
They surrendered entirely to the seductive rom-com narrative tug, flowing dreamily through all the scenes couples in love or at least in high heat were supposed to enjoy. And enjoy them they did. They booked dinners at obscenely priced three- and four-star restaurants as far away as LogMinister, where they ordered exotic food they’d never even heard of and studied each other’s shining eyes through warm candlelight. They took day trips on a whim to locations they never would have even considered visiting when they were single and sane. And no matter where they went, Loophole seemed endearingly out of place. Which for SideEffects upped his cuteness quotient almost immeasurably. They bought gifts for each other Loophole couldn’t even begin to afford. They took to wearing each other’s clothes. They even began to finish each other’s sentences. Of course. Doesn’t everyone in glow space? SideEffects took Loophole on his first golf game. He lost his temper on the third hole and wrapped SideEffects’s five iron from his treasured SweetNutBlasterBlade set around a convenient tree neither of them knew the name of. Loophole kidconned SideEffects into buying the new upgraded version of meDepot5 “for your apartment,” of course, and introduced him to the revolving realm of MumboJumbodom, but the graphics were too speedy, the tasks too involving, and SideEffects was never able to get his avatar moving at a rate quicker than FeenyTurtle mode or even advance beyond EasyClap Level I. After thirty minutes of uncoordinated futility, SideEffects threw his controller on the floor and stomped out of the room. They never played that game or golf ever again.
Finally, after what SideEffects considered a ludicrous amount of pleading, Loophole admitted him to the inner sanctum of LoopholeWorld: his apartment. It was a two-room efficiency above the GrinAndBearIt Medical Supply Store in a sad strip mall out on 101 east of the CorrugatedDreams plant. Notoriously low-rent area. Inside, though it did smell predictably of stale gym socks, the place wasn’t as bad as SideEffects had imagined. It was cluttered but relatively clean and, amid numerous shelves stuffed with video-game cartridges, empty beer cans, and superhero action figures, there was even an actual book lying on its side in incongruous loneliness. SideEffects had to check the title. It was a copy of How to Become Rich in Five Easy Lessons. The bedroom was about the size of a good walk-in closet, the bed unmade, the white sheets gray. They immediately undressed and climbed aboard.
“This the bed you screwed Farrago in?” SideEffects said.
“The very same.”
They tore into one another with fierce abandon.
They went on a cool luxury cruise to hot islands with unpronounceable names. They danced in the foam. They baked in the sun. They met a pair of old queens in identical powder-blue jumpsuits who’d led fascinating lives as art dealers in the BooHoo district of Mammoth City. The couple had known PaperCut and ChinaTube and EverAfter when he was first making those clever little mad dogs out of pastel beanbags. They’d even had cameos in PaisleyButtercup’s epic farce Tonal Skies. They were quite wealthy and loved to play cards, though they weren’t particularly good at any game involving betting. Loophole financed the next year of his life playing Potter’sChoice against them. Neither seemed to mind very much. They held enough assets to buy the boat. After the cruise the two couples traded numbers. They promised to keep in touch. They never did.
Back home in good ol’ Randomburg, SideEffects and Loophole had just finished fucking behind the Dumpster back of the SlurpyCream when they ran into Farrago on line out front.
“Believe you two know each other,” SideEffects said.
Everyone pretended not to know what they all knew.
“What’s up?” Farrago said. She side-eyed her brother.
“I’m in the market for a new place,” Loophole said.
“Yeah?” She side-eyed Loophole.
“You know that apartment. It’s so small.”
“Seemed to fit you okay for ten years.”
“Ten years is a long time.”
“Listen. Where you been, anyway?”
“Around, okay? I got business, you know?”
“Yeah, I know your business. Listen, I want to see you. I’m coming over tonight.”
“Yeah, sure, that’d be great, that’s good. What time?”
“Seven?”
“Fine. Looking forward.”
Farrago turned to her brother. “Get him a fantastic place, okay?”
“I will certainly do that.”
She walked off to her car without looking back at either one of them.
“She forgot to get her cone,” Loophole said.
“She is my sister. Treat her right.”
“Always have.”
It took almost a full week, but at last Loophole told SideEffects at an exclusive PretzelClub dinner celebrating the anniversary of their first full year together what had happened the night Farrago came over. They’d chilled, crossfaded, kissyfaced, slapped uglies all night long, and now she was good. Loophole’s version. Which, as SideEffects had already begun to comprehend, was not necessarily of the real world. But of course SideEffects and Loophole were in the middle of their own translation and there was only so much energy available to devote to so much material. And besides, everything disintegrated anyway in the obsidian heart of each other’s pupils. They moved on.
For six charged months the relationship remained otherworldly. It wasn’t like a movie. It was the movie. They were stars and whoever was directing them deserved a Macadamia Award. The narrative glided professionally along through the warmth of a skillfully sustained dream, the spice of the expected crises arriving at precisely the perfect moments and resolving themselves after just the exactly proper amount of effort and suspense. They both knew as well as it was possible to know anything at all that they were being directed by fate or, more likely, something outside language toward the denouement they both desired, a place bursting with love and hope and redemption and all that good stuff no one ever really gets in real life. Things began to go bad in the cabin in the woods. They’d rented a place in the nearby Bric-A-Bracs for the summer, an exceptional’s idea of a rustic hideaway complete with every convenience and appliance known to a happening, on-the-go lifestyle but still retaining the look and damp, earthy appeal of old rugged wood. It started, of course, with sex. Their sexual engine had been running in a lower gear for some time before SideEffects even took notice. He didn’t say anything for fear of the potential shape of that conversation, so it wasn’t the total mindfuck it might have been when, one morning as he lay in bed admiring the outright majesty of Loophole’s sunlit erection, Loophole turned to him and proposed that the guest list for their next evening mattress party be expanded from none to who knew how many.
“No.”
“It’s a big bed.”
“I know where this road ends and it’s not a pretty spot.”
“I’ve never been there before.”
“You don’t want to visit, believe me.”
Loophole sulked the rest of the day. Dinner at PhineasPheasant that evening was ruined and the reservations had been just about impossible to get. So began the sad and prolonged Loophole subplot to SideEffects’s personal melodrama. If one day he could only find the time for that crackling memoir he knew he could write. The relationship entered its chronic phase. Everyone knew the end result, but that didn’t mean there weren’t small compensatory pleasures to be found along the way. He and Loophole still enjoyed much of the time they shared together. They were civil. They joked around. Sometimes they even fucked. They pretended everything was the same even if it wasn’t. And, after several months of this pantomime of indelible togetherness, they began to drift inevitably apart. Interestingly enough, it was SideEffects who first ended up falling into a stranger’s bed. Or so he liked to believe. The stranger’s name was FilmSprocket, or so he said. SideEffects met him online on SafetyCatch, a site he sometimes visited to scroll through the semicoherent advertisements that love-hungry looky-lous posted in the eternal quest for even the loosest of connections in a shoddily constructed world. He usually skimmed through the electronic pages, sneering internally at the sheer quantity of naked need on embarrassing display. What is wrong with these people? he’d say to himself. But then one especially energetic flag waver caught his roving eye. Read this or not, it said. I don’t care. Email me or not, up to you. I don’t like you anyway. I don’t want to meet you. I don’t want to have sex with you. So move on. You’ll probably find someone better. But if you’re tired of all this interminable shopping, flogging the infinite search, let me know. I am, too. SideEffects contacted him immediately. Unfortunately, FilmSprocket lived in CreosoteSprings, a small town just outside BigSack, home of ParleyMuffin bakeries, where all the flugelcremes in the world were manufactured. The following week he flew halfway across the country to BigSack—the air rich with the aroma of warm cinnamon bread—rented a car, and drove the thirty miles to CreosoteSprings. FilmSprocket lived in a bizarrely painted bungalow that reminded him instantly of his mother’s place. Its interior was crammed with thousands of miniature cartoon figurines drawn from the complete history of animation, a collection valued at, so FilmSprocket immediately informed him, a quarter of a bazillion dollars. FilmSprocket’s own valuation, as far as SideEffects was concerned, on the traditional ten-point scale, could be found more toward the low end. That night FilmSprocket took him out to the local hot spot, a depressing dive called TheTaperedEnd, where they had a couple of SpongeShots, and after a couple of hours FilmSprocket informed SideEffects that he didn’t like him, either. But they went back to FilmSprocket’s place and had sex anyway. Of the decidedly generic variety. SideEffects flew out early the next morning. On the flight he reassessed the Loophole concept. Maybe it was something about him (SideEffects). Maybe he was at fault. You never knew. Why not try on that consideration for a while? See if it fit? His head instantly felt clearer. So he was in a good mood on the cab ride from the airport to The Aspiration Tower. He was in a good mood on the elevator ride up to his floor. He was in a good mood entering his apartment, calling out for Loophole, walking through the rooms, satisfied by their familiar orderliness, still calling, and on into the bedroom, where at last he found Loophole, his boyfriend, his lover, sprawled on their private futon in the hairy arms of a hairy man. He couldn’t tell you what he screamed, but it was screaming and it was ugly and it went on for a long time. And from somewhere inside the screaming the strange man disappeared and maybe the cops were called. He seemed to have a memory of some imposingly stern people in uniforms trying to talk to him. But he wasn’t certain. He wasn’t certain where Loophole slept that night. He wasn’t certain where he slept. They couldn’t even sit down together, look each other in the face, and talk calmly and coherently for a couple of days.
“You weren’t supposed to be back until Thursday,” said Loophole.
“And that makes it better, that you could have gotten away with fucking someone else if only I hadn’t come back early? Is that what you’re saying? That it’s really my fault? Is that the issue here?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m sure you don’t.”
“Why’re you so flamed about this? It’s just sex.”
“What do I know? Maybe I’m crazy.”
“That’s what I always liked about you.”
And the halves of the piece inside SideEffects that had been broken began rubbing their jagged ends together. The mild discomfort actually felt good. And he was able to produce, for the first time since the lifequake, a replica of a smile, only half a one, of course, but still a passable facsimile. Then, without having planned it or considered the consequences, SideEffects revealed where he’d been the last two days and what he’d done. Loophole forgave him. What else could he do? So they declared a truce and entered into the third act of their relationship. It was the best period yet. They felt older, which they definitely were, and wiser, which they believed themselves to be. Each thought the other’s looks had improved immeasurably. And they had. They’d started going to the local MuscleBarn together and running cardio contests together and hefting weights together and sweating together. They ate only PurityBureau-approved farm products. They made smoothies from high-end roadside weeds. Sex became dynamic, more athletic, longer-lasting. Orgasms were like exploding galaxies. They treated each other as fellow humans, with courtesy and respect. They enjoyed each other’s company for unaccountable stretches of time. They each wanted to do the same things at the same time. They rarely argued, and when they did they were able to resolve the dispute in minutes. And for about a year and a half life went pretty well for both of them. Real estate in the area had never been better. Loophole got a job as assistant manager at PizzaMercy. Money was flowing through both their accounts and they were happy. And SideEffects had started Loophole on the journey to get his own realtor license. Aside from a substantial increase in Loophole’s income, neither could have asked for more. There were no dramatic emotional storms, hardly any minor complaints, but whatever fragile bond they had managed to cobble together for these months began to wither in tiny unnoticeable stages. Neither knew why or even bothered to memorialize the erosion with a passing comment. Both men started working more hours and were home less often. Then came the missing long weekend, the three end-of-the-week days when Loophole just disappeared. And he wasn’t at work when SideEffects called. He wasn’t with Farrago, either, because she was in Mammoth City for the entire month with her bestie, Anagram, doing God knew what. At first SideEffects was irritated, then slightly angry, then he realized that in fact he simply did not care all that much, and when Loophole finally showed up without offering even a flimsy excuse SideEffects let it go. He realized that internally he had already left. Eventually Loophole returned to the fancy new apartment SideEffects had gotten for him and they didn’t see each other all that much anymore. SideEffects did of course finally begin having sex with other people. There were other dicks, other holes. He found some. But some essential ingredient had gone missing from his life, something lighter than air that had helped elevate the leaden chain of days you drag behind you like an anchor.
Then for a while there was a pleasant bare patch, no fizzes, no splats, toothy civility and flashes of affection prevailed, while the last shred of whatever there had been between them seemed to have fallen into a crack and simply disappeared and walking away was practically painless. Eventually the time of Loophole twisted itself into a story SideEffects told to himself and others whenever it was time to tell those kinds of stories. And about life, he told himself, as do all patriotic Mammothonians, he had no regrets. He always did the right thing at the right time. Pretty much. And whatever happened to him happened for the best. Pretty much. But then he remembered, no, not true, it wasn’t he, it was his brother who had won that damn lottery, actually taken the whole megillah, all of it. Out of how many untold millions of ticket holders, his own crazy loser brother. What were the idiot odds? He had never won a fucking thing.