Stories From the Plague Years (21 page)

Stiff leather creaks. Booted feet step. Chains hung from jackets clank. Keys dangling from out of pockets jangle.

You are alone, surrounded by sound.

Trying to walk away from it.

The summer-heat falls on your back, your neck and your hands, which a moment before tingled with cold. You smell the scents of The City you left long ago. The humid, dirty air. The musk of leather and the skin of the men who wear it. Cigarettes and a blend of after-shaves sweetened by sweat. Under the brandy-light you feel, more than see, stars eclipsed by grey city sky.

Darkness huddles the street. Night folds upon night before you. The suburban street fades as the stars have faded—the brandy-light is gone. The shadows breathe. They mill and they whisper. You walk among them. They have no form.

Out of the ebony nothingness, from behind the curtain of night, Tony steps before you, as if he has stepped from around the corner of a building that is not there.

You stop, held by Tony’s stare. You knew he would come. But not as he has.

Tony is shrunken and ashen. No longer able to fill his leather jacket as he had in life. The weight of chains on the jacket make it hang slackly. Tight jeans that had once glorified his manhood sag loosely, as if worn by a boy who has yet to grow into them. Above his black T-shirt, his neck is thin as an old woman’s. Tendons show through the skin of his throat. His face is gaunt—skull-like as a death camp survivor's.

You see in Tony’s eyes an awful, lonely fear, a pleading that fixes your sight and settles in an icy pool near your heart.

He steps toward you. You feel the shadows behind you become heavier, many eyes on your back. The sounds of chains and keys and boots and heavy belt buckles grow louder, closer . . . more distinct. The shadows breathe. They mill and they whisper.

Tony reaches for you; his ill-fitting jacket falls from his shoulder. Part of you insists that this cannot be.

His hand is on your shoulder, cold through your wool coat in the midst of this invading heat. The cold of his hand walks through your flesh to the cold in your heart. The air is warm in your lungs. Tony’s lips move as a child’s move while reading. No words come. There is only the chorus of metal and leather as the shadows behind you shuffle.

You hear his distant voice as the lights of a passing car burn Tony out of the night.

The crunch of tires smothers the sounds around you. The shadows at your back become wind. You feel living eyes upon you. Two children stare from the car’s backseat window. As they pass, you realize you are cowering, your body hunched.

Stars fade into being. You feel them look down upon you, uncaring, as you straighten yourself.

Autumn wind comes, driving away the scents you have been breathing, replacing them with those of dead leaves, bitter smoke from fireplaces, the salt smell of the harbour.

Yet as you reach your apartment, you smell, just faintly, the scent of a leather jacket, of sweat tinged aftershave—as if you wear them yourself.

In darkness that is your own, sitting in a domicile that has never been a home to you, you think of Tony’s eyes, how you would have longed for them to have held anger, accusation, the righteous fury of betrayal.

Not the awful desperation they did hold.

Dawn finds you awake, still sitting as birds begin to sing. You become aware, as you never have been before, of the beat of your heart and the flow of blood in your veins.

Veins bulge under the rubber tube around your arm.

The woman wears surgical gloves. She looks at your forearm, not your face, as she tells you, “You might want to look away if you’re squeamish.”

(“
Bashful?
”)

You don’t look away as the needle goes in and blood arcs into the test tube. Someone once told you that blood is truly blue, and only turns red when exposed to air.

(
A clatter as jeans with a heavy belt buckle fall to the floor. “C’mon. Don’t be shy.
”)

The test tube fills. The blood looks black.

(
The Boy had been like Tony. A cocky, muscular, Italian kid who knew he was beautiful. You once knew the Boy’s name, but you cannot, or choose not, to remember it now.
)

The woman whispers, “Okay,” and pulls the needle out.

(
You had met The Boy in the park, which that night was so very much like the park in The City where men would walk together in pairs and threes to hidden places behind trees and bushes. Summer heat, summer sweat, summer air combining into an intoxicating liquor periodically spiked with amyl nitrate.
)

A warm red drop on your forearm, wiped away with cotton and cool alcohol. Rubber-gloved hands apply a bandage.

(
You had felt a longing when you saw The Boy, beyond the sexual. You had wanted to be near The Boy so that you could say good-bye to Tony through him. For Tony had simply left . . . gone back to his family in Buffalo to die among people he could not stand to be near while in the prime of his life.
)

The woman labels the test tube with a number and puts it in a rack of others like it. She takes off her gloves and puts them in a red plastic container marked “BIOHAZARD.”

(
At least you tell yourself that is why you let things go so fast with The Boy.
)

“We should have the results of your test in about six weeks,” she says. A testimonial to the shittiness of this town, that all such blood-work must be sent out-of-state in monthly batches.

(
Dangerously fast.
)

“And even if the initial results are positive, there is a possibility it could be a false positive.”

(
Foolishly fast.
)

She hands you a slip of piss-yellow paper. It is a carbon copy of the label on your sample. “This is your test number. Call at the end of next month and give the receptionist the number. He’ll tell you if the results are in, and you can come in for consultation.”

(
Had you wanted this?
)

You walk the ugly green tiles of the Health Department toward the faint daylight at the end of the hall. You are nameless here, a number. It is for your own protection, to be nameless. Your anonymity is a shield. You leave the Health Department through a soot-covered glass door.

(
Had you wanted to be reckless? Had you wanted this worry gnawing inside you?
)

The river, such as it is, flows by in an eroding canal of poured concrete. It is only a few feet deep, and you think of the college kid last year who had tried to commit suicide by jumping off the bridge you are now passing. He had landed in silt up to his knees, trapped, his upper chest and head above the water.

You hate this small and ugly city full of small and ugly-minded people. You hate the shitty suburb where your cheap apartment is. You came here to live this life because you were afraid to live a life that would kill you. You fled The City when you crossed off your fifth friend in as many weeks from your address book . . . when you looked through that cheap booklet of grey vinyl and saw listing after listing that you had blotted out with marker . . . when you realized that an inky smear in someone else’s address book could be your only epitaph.

You fled, because you knew the temptation to continue the life The City offered you would be too great if you had stayed.

(
Was The Boy an atonement? A punishment you inflicted on yourself so you could make amends for the life and the people you abandoned?
)

Faceless pedestrians shuffle past.

Part of you is aroused by memories of The Boy. Even now, as your arm throbs where your blood has been drawn, you long for that moment when, for the first time in years, you had enjoyed sex free of the constraints of latex.

Part of you whispers that it is worth dying for such sex . . . that the enjoyment of such sex is part of your identity. You have a right to what you enjoy, no matter the consequences.

Later, in the indigo and umber of autumn twilight, you are frightened that you are capable of such thoughts.

With night, come the sounds.

Of chains, boots, keys and buckles. You hear them in darkness.

You hear them in solitude.

Your radio, tuned to a banal talk show, fades to silence. Your drafty apartment becomes sweltering. Dusty air rising from the barely functional radiator is replaced by muggy summer air. You feel the calling of The City in your crotch. Just as long ago, in the life you abandoned, there had been the constant calling to the streets, to limbs and bodies, to thrusting hips and the taste of men.

Always, the calling.

You sit in darkness, trying to ignore the calling. Even as you remember, and as you feel again, what it had once done to you.

One late May, in your other life, you had worked in a bookstore near Columbia, taking second-hand text books from college brats eager to be rid of them. You felt the daylight fade, felt the coming of night like a rising fever. True summer had come early that year, announcing itself as an arousal spreading through you like the fire of cognac and the tingling thrill of poppers.

Working the late shift, which you had taken because it allowed you to sleep in, became intolerable.

A whiny Long Island girl, so much like your whiny sisters back home, demanded to know why she was not getting more money back for a book that was not on order for the next semester.

You stood from the counter and left, embracing the fever. Not caring that your fat and stupid boss saw you leave.

As you walked through the door, heat rose from your body to join the heat of the city. You felt yourself shimmer, felt the need to discharge the welcome fever with sex and the feel of hard-muscled flesh.

In the room you rented, you stripped off your ridiculous shirt with a collar, your narrow tie, your khakis. You clothed yourself in the identity you’d earned by coming to The City, pulling on the jeans and the black leather armour that kept at bay the life of sniveling mediocrity your parents had wanted you to embrace. Chains were your epaulets, a blue kerchief in your back pocket your standard.

You walked down the hall to Tony’s room. You didn’t knock—you never knocked.

Tony was lifting weights.

Sweat glistened on his body as he did military presses. He saw you in the mirror before him and smiled at your reflection, grunting as he pressed the barbell over his head.

He gave you that smart-assed Italian grin. Liking that you were watching, he did one more press, straining, the cords of his back and shoulders visible though his olive skin like cables.

He rested the barbell on his broad chest, then set it on the floor. He walked toward you, and pulled you close.

With the door still open, with Tony’s sweat-stained cut-offs filling the room with the musk of his crotch, the two of you fucked, not caring who passed in the hallway.

Afterward, you both went to the streets, to Washington Square, your steps falling in with the chimes of chains and the bass of heavy boot steps, to cruise for more bodies, more satisfaction.

The night made you both drunk.

Now, in this night.

Now, in the alone.

The sounds come, calling you to a night fifteen years gone in a City hundreds of miles away.

You feel the fever again. It pulls you to the window.

You pull the frayed curtains aside.

And see dead men cruising each other.

Two lines of men in jeans and leather jackets make an alley of themselves. Other men mill and pace within this alley. They are emaciated. Desiccated. Yet they move with swaggers, with cocky masculinity. One among them is not sick, but flushed with health. Glowing with sexuality and strength.

It is The Boy.

You grip the curtains. Your breath hits the glass, which is cold in the midst of this summer heat. The glass fogs over. You see The Boy through the glass as if the fog is not there. He grabs one of the walking dead men.

They embrace and kiss. The dead man’s leather jacket falls to the ground as they grope each other.

You wipe away the fog.

And wipe away the alley of dead men that has imposed itself over the street outside your door. It vanishes behind the trail of your hand.

Where men walked, now leaves move in scuttling streams, driven by cold winds off the harbour.