He spent as much time as possible, in the weeks to come, away from the apartment, filling his leather shoulder bag with what would keep him away, books and bananas and dense ziplocked joints he wrapped in paper towels and placed in the inner compartment. He smoked on roof gardens downtown, places flanked by withering topiary and empty save the occasional forlorn banker, or in the bathroom at work, sitting on the closed toilet with both feet flat on the wall. He got high on the backs of buses as they strained uphill and watched whatever was left behind on the seats roll with the snaking curves, stray chips, forgotten ChapSticks, ambitious threads of urine. He woke in ten different bedrooms, twenty, places whose windows only faced another building, some with ladders to the roof, and took photos of each, though never the people they belonged to. Fishbowls, waterbeds, overflowing closets. The men attached to these rooms hardly mattered, although he kissed them goodbye, their necks pale as milk or sandy with freckles, although he thanked them, the men he had slapped and pushed and choked. He asked to be spanked, for a fist inside of him, for a belt around his neck. He tried every fantasy, every exit. When he did have to come home, when he miscalculated, watched his target float out the door with somebody else, he made sure to piss and brush his teeth at whichever bar, minimizing the possibility of a bathroom run-in. He left nothing of his in the common area besides a check for the rent. He could not imagine how long this might go on, but he also could not imagine very long at all. The time in front of him was flat then sheer, something he would fall from soon.
That the rest of their friends felt the same about him he believed because he had not heard otherwise. Held up during the marches that had become as ubiquitous as any other type of traffic, there was a popular sign, in pink glitter, in gold, in plain black capitals, spelled out one letter at a time on T-shirts worn by a line of people: SILENCE = DEATH. The change in the city was so total that the color and pageantry of it before seemed like a false memory. It was in the way that people behaved in restaurants and movie theaters, older women opening doorknobs with handkerchiefs, families moving rows because of their proximity to a cough. Where there had been gaggles of boys on the sidewalks, knit together by conversation and moving like pool balls inside a wooden triangle, there were now single men. They had canes and plastic bags from the pharmacy, they wore sweaters and sunglasses and sheath-y coats, anything to make the membrane between life and body thicker. Conversations were quieter now, birthdays celebrated like unlikely successes. Wasn’t it enough, he asked, in his mind, to the sound and vision of Braden that never abated—a figure so real that he could almost get away without missing its corporeal counterpart—wasn’t it enough that he felt sorrow about it? That he had ordered so many meals he couldn’t finish. That he saw these men tapping down the street and wept.
No, Braden said in Wright’s mind. That will never be enough. The adjudicating hand in the air, the soft palm turning over.
AND THEN THERE WAS A day when three hundred people called to him. They were black and green-eyed and slack-jawed and thin, blond and hoarse from shouting, linked to the people they loved at the elbow. He was sitting at a sidewalk café with a novel and his camera and a dwindling pack of cigarettes when the march came through, heard long before it was seen, the diversity of voices flattened into one protracted roar. As it got closer his shame became acidic. The whole mechanism was a spectacle to him, the way a chant would begin at the front of the crowd and move back and be replaced, in a lightning minute, with the next set of words. “Won’t you join us!” they were yelling, the intonation spiking at won’t and join, four claps in between to mirror the sound and insistence, and it was such a direct plea, so literal, nothing else required but standing up, that he did.
He was amazed by how easy it was, to see a moment and step inside it. Once he was within the river of them it was hard to believe he had been without. A man on his right gave him a squeeze as he stepped in and forgot about him just as quickly. When Wright tried to find him minutes later, the gap-toothed smile, he was gone. The individual was interchangeable here, a body moving the same way and a voice saying the same thing, strange, he thought, given that what they were yelling about was the right of the individual to continue his small, specific life. Boys on fire escapes blew kisses and then descended to become part of it. Ancient Italian men, their ceramic espresso cups aloft, their enormous watches drooping on their disappearing wrists, stared as though all five hundred of them were one defective or unauthorized thing, a car spewing violet smoke, a zoo animal loping down a sidewalk. They were moving north, taking hills without slowing. There was light on the water, boats coming in, and in the windows of houses families passing plates across tables.
He’d been among them fifteen minutes when he realized that the moment he was waiting for, when he would open his mouth and become one of the voices, was not coming. In knowing it he stepped out, as easily as that, over a curb and onto a one-way side street, and he took the lens cap from his camera.
THAT AFTERNOON, FOR THE FIRST time in weeks, he faced his home in the daylight. He took his shoes off at the door and stepped hesitantly through the rooms like a museumgoer, waiting for the beauty or the lesson to occur to him. Three lone sequins winked on the coffee table, pale green flotsam from some made-up occasion. On a windowsill sat a nickel and a bookmark and an open matchbook with a phone number written in it. The photos of who they had been to each other still appeared under magnets on the refrigerator, hidden partially by new layers of life, receipts and to-do lists and a Polaroid of Jean and Braden sitting on the shoulders of men Wright didn’t recognize, holding up cardboard signs in capital letters. Left out on the counter was a watermelon, and he held it up and thumped it, something his mother had taught him, a revelation at the time—that you could listen to the insides of something. He opened cupboards and washed some silverware left in the sink and felt a loose knob on a drawer. He was fixing this, a tight twirl of finger and thumb, when Braden walked in.
“Thanks for doing that.” His speech was still xeroxed somehow, the execution like that of a distracted actor.
“My pleasure.”
He meant it. It was. Their life together, this apartment, had been the first occasion for Wright to stay with a problem, to understand and address it—a leak in the shower wall he caulked himself, a moth infestation they treated with sage and profanity. If you paid attention to the small, deepening dramas of the domestic, gave yourself to their remedy, you began to see yourself too as worthy of small attentions, as amenable to solutions.
He had learned to master problems around the house, perhaps knowing how ill equipped he was in others, those having to do with love, how it met respect. You need every person to love you, regardless of how you feel about them. It’s the same old show.
“Anything else that needs fixing?”
Braden was quiet, playing it carefully. He was weighing how much he needed help against the gratitude receiving it would entail.
“Well—”
“Just tell me what it is, bud.”
Bud, kiddo, champ: this avuncular way of talking had been new to both of them, something they stepped into together from a lifetime of looking out only for themselves. It had been a performance at first, then a familiar joke, then a tender necessity. If your private life had begun too early, you needed, in this life, someone who spoke to you like a child.
“The wiring on the chandelier in my room.”
In under a minute he was up a ladder, electrical tape around his wrist, the screwdriver down his front pocket. He was comfortable here, and he took his time. The view was the fire escape across the way, where two nudist lesbians kept forty plants that disguised them somewhat when they sat there, green on skin on green on skin, and the electric lines of the Muni, leaping when buses approached and sagging in their wake.
“Try it now,” he said, and Braden moved to the switch, submissive, tame. “Try it again.”
“Fixed! You did it. My handy dad.”
As he descended he caught Braden’s eye. It was quickly gone, his sight fallen back down on the floor, but Wright had seen an opening. Braden knew he’d cracked and was shifting a little in frustration, stuck on the far side of the room. When Wright grabbed for his right hand he spun around toward the window, threading Wright’s elbow under his armpit, balletic even in this. For sun-bent seconds Wright loomed in the half embrace, taller, understanding what he was about to do and wondering why, knowing how little it would solve, and then with the other hand he wide-palmed the back of Braden’s head and began to scratch it.
“You’re fucking insane,” Braden said, but he didn’t move. Wright brought the hand on Braden’s chest down so that it encircled his hips, and then he kissed him, once on the top notch of his spine. When their mouths joined it felt like an expert telling of a story, the time taken on all small and necessary parts. He crouched to meet each hipbone and bite at it once, something he knew Braden liked from confessions he had made as a friend. Wright was using private information in a way it had not been intended, leaping roles to steal back some intimacy that had been lost.
He knew that the important thing now was to not stop touching him, was for not a beat to register between the admission and the next handful of hair Wright took. What did he have that was not in thanks to Braden? The question was with him like another pulse point, a hammering behind his knees. He thought it like a mantra, what do I have that you didn’t give me, as he reached around to loosen the belt and bring down the zipper. The afternoon stretched the shadows of everything in the room, the tendrils of the plants on ladders showing up as smoky ribbons across the wall where Wright had pinned each of Braden’s hands. The bed in its range of navies looked deep and liquid, and they fell onto it without unplucking the hospital corners, a habit of Braden’s conservative boyhood that had never left him.
“A condom,” Braden said, “I think there’s one still,” and pointed to a drawer. He stayed the way Wright had arranged him, a knee drawn up by a hip and both wrists above his head.
It’s as if you need everyone to love you. He moved his hand over the private things kept there, some movie stubs and a jar of Vaseline and a velvet jewelry box.
“Don’t stop,” Braden said, and for an hour they didn’t.