Their apartment filled with poster board, thick markers and glitter glue and stencil templates. That Wright was unmoved by them, the things used in the service of shouting and marching—that he goose-stepped over them where they lay in the hall and pushed them aside to make room on the coffee table—became like a quality of the air, something both of them woke to and were relieved to forget once they left the house. In the beginning Braden had been tender about it, brotherly. A group of us, he would say, are going door-to-door to get signatures, are meeting to write postcards to congressmen. Wright would nod and say Today isn’t but, would say Definitely next time, and after a few months Braden stopped asking. They never shared shifts anymore. At home and work they were circling each other, confronted with reminders but never voice or touch. Envelopes of tips with a name scrawled in capitals, a still-wet toothbrush left out on the sink, smudged water glasses baking in the kitchen sun. On the television Madonna danced backward through Venice, far from virginal, and a news anchor declared, one shoulder dug slightly forward, that under the current administration the NASA budget was projected to double.
Wright was out every night again, his hair long enough that someone was always moved to pull at it. As he was standing in the shower one Tuesday a condom he could not remember losing appeared by the drain.
There was a morning when it turned. The boy Wright had brought home, too young and with eyes the color of cactus, was slipping out when Braden emerged from his room. From the kitchen Wright heard the greeting, flat and vicious. He was sitting in the bay window with a bowl of cereal, a foot hooked around the opposite ankle, when Braden appeared.
“Where’d you find him?”
“Oh, him? He was doing my taxes.”
“Are you protecting yourself?”
Wright kept his mouth on the spoon so that he could shape his lips around it, register no reaction to Braden’s voice. He said it again.
“Are you protecting yourself?”
“Yes, okay? Now can I enjoy my breakfast?”
“Sure. You can enjoy your breakfast, and you can enjoy your walk to work, and you can enjoy your favorite jeans, and later you can enjoy knowing your friends were dying and you did nothing about it. But I want to know why.”
He made an exasperated gesture with his spoon, a vague lift, as if indicating some structural deficit that couldn’t be helped, a crack in the wall that let in a draft. There was no way to begin talking about it, he thought, to begin explaining, because he suspected if he did he would never stop. It would have to be a part of anything he ever said. He did not believe that there was enough of him that he could add his voice to an angry cause and not give himself over to it, not become that sound. What he wanted was to transplant into Braden certain memories of his mother, wait for his friend to understand how she had taken on injustice after injustice until there was nothing else on her face, no bending for love or memory. He wanted to give Braden the smell of that brownstone in the Village, sweat and mold at war, in the days before the bomb went off and killed the sleeping neighbor, or the way his mother had moved the last few years, always with her chin clipped to a shoulder, always with the curtain of hair pushed too far into the lines of her eyes. How for the rest of her short life she lived as though entitled to pure silence, insulted and undone by the slightest sound. He remembered his mother, of whom there had been so much before Shelter absorbed her—well-tooled anecdotes and geometric neck scarves and a way of silencing a foolish comment with just a look—and what followed was that he, comparatively so little, so malleable and unformed, a person made only by the people around him, would vanish completely under any act of resistance. He couldn’t go with Braden to the protest. There would be no way back to any normal life, grapefruit for breakfast or the click of a camera or the small, sharp possibility of love in any room he entered.
“You know, don’t you, how many are dead at this point? Should I remind you?”
The spoon was still now where it lay across his limp hand; there was cereal in his mouth he couldn’t bother to chew. He still smelled of and felt like the sex he’d had, a second time in the morning, his hair staticky and his skin flushed, and he believed this was something Braden could see, a crime as visible as an ill-conceived tattoo.
“Tell me,” he said, the words coming from a numb mouth and sounding, he knew, teenage and insolent.
“Sixteen thousand one hundred two, two thousand sixty one in this country alone. But like, how were the baths, babe?”
“I wasn’t at the baths. I don’t need to go to the baths to find—”
“Oh yeah? What’s his name? How about the one yesterday?”
“Peggy Sue, both of them.”
The moment he could have apologized was gone, the light opening with the fog burning off, and then Braden turned to leave.
“Who your mother was doesn’t give you a pass,” he said, speaking in the direction of the hallway from the kitchen. “You don’t get credit for what your parents thought. Some people are meeting downtown tonight to march on city hall. I’m walking over after my lunch shift. Eight.”
“Okay,” he said, the word sounding like an apology and a defense both. “I’ll be there.”
HE LOOKED OUT AT THE rest of the day from inside a haze, walking without a destination in mind, stopping at one point in a kitchen supply store for reasons unclear, skulking even there, darting out when a salesman asked him if there was something he’d like to see. Back at home he finally showered, something he always put off after sex. He liked smelling foreign, liked the idea that his body had become partially the province of someone else. Sex with men was the only place in his life free of interpretation, his mind relieved of its obsession to comment and criticize. Now it too was politicized, a comment on who he was and who he failed to be.
Naked in his room after, pushing his shoulder sockets far across his chest, rocking back on his tailbone to see the skin between his legs, he looked for the change that half of him believed he deserved, a small purple spot that would signal the proliferation of all other symptoms. It would be the beginning of a new season in his life, the last. Paper gowns, lines at the pharmacy. It wasn’t there. He got into bed, his face in a rectangle of sun that was two degrees warmer, and told himself he would close his eyes for a brief, quiet moment, just until his skin was dry, just until he felt warm enough. He woke at 6:50 and at 7:10 and at 8:05, each time to the sound of a kneeling bus exhaling, each time telling himself that there was enough time, small and gentle lies that were obliterated when he finally woke. He waited for Braden to come home, the apology lachrymose in his mouth, an insistence on next time, a reference to a fatigue he couldn’t shake. A certain way he would touch him, a hug from behind with one hand slipped up to cradle his friend’s face. They had their cycles, he told himself, movements in which it was up to one of them to make declarations, to cook dinner unprompted or knock another time on the locked bedroom door. It was only a matter of focused generosity, and then they’d be back in their deep circuitry, a system of rapid-fire references no one else could parse, foreheads glued on a couch in the corner of some party, the annoyance and envy of anyone who tried to enter the conversation.
Wright spent three days waiting, leaving notes even when he stepped out for the smallest of errands, I’ve missed you and I hope you’ll let me make it up to you, What do you say to a bike ride to Baker Beach this weekend, but they remained untouched where he’d left them, propped up by a vase of peonies or balanced on Braden’s doorknob. He was sleeping somewhere else. When he did come home, it was difficult at first to name the difference, because much of how Braden behaved was the same, substituting lyrics of pop songs to denigrate their landlord, answering Wright’s questions where he stood tweezing in the bathroom mirror with the poise and wit of a winning game show contestant.
It was not incremental—Wright didn’t understand it, and then he did. It was his eyes: Braden wouldn’t look at him.
On an evening hemmed in by rain, Braden was at the kitchen counter, dicing small dark mushrooms, a cookbook propped open by a wooden spoon along its length, the Supremes on the turntable. Wright sat smoking on a stool near the open back door that led to an exposed stairwell, a drafty clapboard pathway from which a neighbor’s head might occasionally pop in. He could feel the weather that way, the small changes in intensity, and he knew it bothered Braden, the Midwesterner in him that believed a house should be what kept you from the disorder of the world.
“What’s for dinner? Need me to do anything?”
“Chicken marsala. I need you to keep breathing.”
It was his standard response, worn and familiar. They settled into a comfortable conversation, talk of Judy, calling her Mother, calling her Little Miss Middle Age. “How was she today,” Wright had said.
“Besides the picture of health and beauty?”
“Yes, a given.”
“Well, during a tasting before the rush she blew her ass like a trombone—”
“Like seventy-six of them—”
“Yes,” Braden said, “she was absolutely leading the big parade. But so she blew her ass as she was pouring us this chenin blanc, it sounded like a two-hundred-year-old wedding dress being ripped in half by the angry hand of god, and then pretended to be frightened. ‘Something fell, something big.’ She made Shelly run down to the cellar and check.”
The story brought a happy tear to Braden’s eye and then, as he went to wipe it, he gasped like a moviegoer and started to swear. Wright rushed to his bent shape, spreading a hand on each shoulder, saying let me see, let me see you. The mushrooms in the saucepan continued to simmer, popping and hissing, and Diana Ross still came upset and proud from the speaker. Braden was screaming and whimpering and would not turn his face.
“It’s the chili from the salad,” he said, finally. “Right in my eye. Don’t touch me, don’t touch me, don’t touch me.” The insistence on this seemed outsized, as though it were his whole body exposed and injured.
“You need cream,” Wright said. “An acid as an antidote.” It was a piece of information coming to him from he didn’t know where, a part of him that sounded like his mother, and then he was pulling some yogurt from the fridge and spreading it on a clean napkin he had worked into a kind of blindfold.
“I can’t believe how badly it hurts,” Braden said, in the dark of his bedroom, on top of the perfectly made bed where Wright spread the poultice over his face. “I know,” Wright answered, believing Braden was speaking to him, but when he returned to the kitchen to finish dinner, he could hear him still repeating this to himself, murmuring like a kid who believes his thoughts don’t exist unless they are spoken aloud. By the time the food was ready and Wright stood at the door frame with a plate, Braden was asleep, exhausted by the shock.
“How’s the eye,” he said, the next day, catching Braden in the hall when he came in drunk and late, taking his chin with two fingers to try to tilt it up. The looseness of his entry, the freedom of his body, was gone immediately. He locked his jaw and swiveled around toward his room, but Wright caught his shoulder, more violently than he wanted to, his advantage of height and weight suddenly clear. Little Bullet, people called Braden behind his back, or Naps, short for Napoléon.
“Look at me.”
“No.”
“Look at me.”
Wright had his legs in a V now, either foot parallel to the baseboards, blocking Braden from the path to his room. A bottomless minute opened around them.
“Fine.”
And then Braden did. Wright regretted the command immediately, for he understood that in refusing to look at him, Braden had, in some way, been protecting him. There was nothing in his look of who they were to each other, no depth or light to the glance. His face, regarding Wright’s, was of someone in a busy crosswalk, staring ahead only for the sake of safety. In the twenty seconds that he stood there taking this in, Wright replayed every remark Braden had made that referenced this part of him. Talking about an ex whose name he had firmly vowed never to say again, about his bigoted mother whose birthday cards he marked, every year, Return to Sender. He had seemed so brave to Wright in these conversations, so in command of his life and what love or cruelty he allowed into it. It had never occurred to Wright he might pass to the other side of Braden’s life.
“What is this? Why are you acting like I’m anybody else?”
“It’s not even a feeling I want to have,” Braden said, back to looking down now, picking something out from under his thumbnail, pushing his hair behind his ear. “I didn’t even realize I was doing it, not looking at you, until the little habañero incident. Do you want me to apologize for something as crude as instinct?”
“I’m going to bed.”
“Sleep well, sugar,” Braden said, in the plastic chirp he used when taking complicated orders from entitled customers at the restaurant. Wright spent the whole night awake, one knee cocked way up by his hip and then the other, adjusting to the news that the life that had come so rapidly to him had run just as swiftly away. We are, Braden had said to the group of boys gathered in the living room, some months before, the wooden spatula in his hand a baton, in a very real sense of the word, at risk for extinction.