Текст книги "Rough Trade "

Автор книги: Todd Gregory

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

Blueboy

Kelly McQuain

Sometimes he thinks the ringing exists in his ears—a lingering symptom. But shrill waves of sound rise above engines idling outside. The noise billows yellowed curtains and cracks the plaster walls of this third-story walk-up. As the pay phone rings on the street corner below, Michael cradles his own phone against his ear and knows he is haunted.

The old rotary receiver in his hand is heavy and hard enough to crack a skull. Once, years ago, Michael considered using it for that purpose. A trick from the Bike Stop had gotten too rough—biting Michael’s back, drawing blood. Michael lay pressed face-down against the mattress, hands pinned hard against his spine, helpless beneath the weight from above. As the trick rode him harder, Michael fought to free himself. He wanted to grab the phone off the nightstand and clobber the creep. Wanted to smash the son-of-a-bitch’s brains, kick him out the door and down the stairs till his sorry ass spilled into the street.

But Michael’s wrists were locked; he couldn’t. Compliance lay embedded deep inside him, a wanting to let go that he muffled like a scream. His struggling slackened. As the trick bit flesh, Michael bit his own tongue, and pictured his father standing in the room watching with disgust.

Later, it grew hard for Michael to pick up tricks from bars, even second-choice psychos, so he invited home hustlers from the corner. Never mind that sex was no longer transformative—a means of forgetting himself, and existing only as a body. Each tryst ground him down like a face ground into a mattress. Still the urge remained.

When a hustler tried to make off with his weed and rent money, Michael lashed out with rage long-held, his fists as fierce as any man-made weapon. For days he nursed bloody knuckles, fantasized about knocking the hustler’s teeth in with the phone receiver, twisting the cord around the guy’s neck and teaching him a lesson—until the fantasy produced such a hard-on that Michael grew sick of himself.

At least the Blueboy had never ripped him off. The Blueboy, with his chipped front tooth and stained T-shirt—a cornflower hue matching his eyes, fabric loose on a frame not yet full. The boy was slim-shouldered but large-footed, his body unsure what part should surge first to adulthood. He stood nervous and shivering beneath a white-blue circle of streetlight, kicking the curb in a pair of dirty Air Jordans that Michael would have thought stolen had the kid been any other hustler. But this one hadn’t been on the street long enough for his home clothes to wear out—just long enough for the Indian summer to turn, and him without a coat.

Michael had been walking home from a twenty-four-hour convenience store that October night. Across from his building at Seventeenth and Pine, traffic slowed past a parking lot where hustlers gathered, their lean forms illuminated by the red blink of the E-Z Lot sign flashing overhead. Michael watched the young men preen, teasing the cars that circled the asphalt island. Middle-aged men sizing up aging kids. Lost boys leaning toward open windows. Sharks and prey, but which was which?

As the hustlers bartered feigned innocence, the new kid standing off a ways had caught Michael’s eye. The boy studied the stance of the regulars, trying to figure out what to do, looking as scared of the cars as in need of them.

Michael shifted the bag of groceries in his arms and passed the young man slowly. The kid latched on to Michael’s unsubtle once-over, returned it. Asked to bum a smoke, his voice straining to produce a huskiness Michael knew wouldn’t last into the next sentence.

A long time ago Michael had quit taking offense at hustlers’ assumption he needed to pay for sex. Now, with his recent layoff, it pleased him to look like he could still afford to. He stood up straighter, wedged his groceries under one arm, and gave the kid a cigarette. He set his bag at his feet and lit one for himself, cupped his hand around the flame as the kid leaned in close for a light, the match illuminating the near colorlessness of the boy’s hair and the clear skin of his features. Michael studied him—mouse-eared but sweet-lipped, nose a blunt, boyish wreck. The kind of face that would always look young, and for all the wrong reasons.

The boy drew hard, his cigarette finally catching as the match burned low against Michael’s fingertips. Michael quickly tossed the match away and blew a mouthful of air on his singed skin, feeling stupid.

Want to party? The boy’s voice cracked.

Michael nearly laughed. But he had struck out earlier at two separate bars and wasn’t in the mood for any more bullshit. He sighed and confessed the truth. I’m broke. His gin-and-tonic grin did the apologizing for him. He shrugged and pointed across the street. Live over there. Got a couple joints upstairs. Half a bottle of gin. He picked up his groceries again. Eggs, doughnuts, juice. Want to party? Be my guest.

Without waiting for an answer, Michael stepped into the street, his path a slanting beeline toward his door. A car honked, and Michael flicked his half-finished cigarette at the guy’s windshield. His key was in his lock when the Blueboy called out from behind.

Okay.

*

Unlike others, the Blueboy let Michael fuck him. That the kid went for that, even for no money, proved he wasn’t a typical hustler. Just a lonely gay kid like Michael had been years ago. Or maybe, thought Michael, he simply enjoyed charity work. Who cared, though, about what lay inside a hustler’s heart? The part Michael was interested in lay a few organs lower.

Michael knew to be careful, ever since the day the woman at the clinic confirmed his worst fear. The bad news had coiled in his gut, snaking up to bite his heart. The same mix of fear and helplessness he had known as a child when a bird had fallen from a tree into the sandbox where he drove his Matchbox cars. Creature’s wings gray and molting, eyes a milky white. Michael threw down his toys, gathered the trembling thing in cupped hands, ran for his mother. His mind already bedding a shoebox with soft cotton, seizing the tiny dropper used for his baby sister’s medicine, wondering what to fill it with to save so tiny a life. Hopes of rescue dashed when Michael’s mother knocked the bird from his hands, its hollow bones colliding against the porch steps. She shook Michael by the shoulders. Look at your hands. Crawling with tiny orange spiders from the diseased bird, the insects’ legs prickling pinpoints that moved over Michael’s skin. Inside, the water scalded as she made him scrub flesh pink then pinker. She pinned his wrists against the white porcelain and poured rubbing alcohol across the rawness, reddening fingers and palms to flames. Her worry his now. All afternoon, all evening, Michael afraid to touch his face, his hair, lest contamination creep into the parts of him he knew not how to protect.

But now, alone with the Blueboy, Michael pushed the memory away, rolled on a condom then rolled on top, letting his weight sink the kid’s shoulders deep into the bed. The Blueboy lifted his feet and locked them behind Michael’s head.

Michael tried to lose himself in their closeness. Inside the Blueboy, he felt powerful and sure. His hands skimmed the subtle scallop of the boy’s ribs, skin cool to the touch but warming as blood moved fast beneath. Michael liked the feel of the boy below, the tickle of leg hair along his sides, its silken floss. Michael pushed harder.

When Michael woke the next morning, the Blueboy was gone. Michael rose and latched his door, walked to the kitchen. An empty container of orange juice sat on the counter. A faint sprinkling of confectioner sugar snowflaked the cutting board by the sink. Michael opened his fridge to find his box of Pepperidge Farm donuts half empty. Eggs untouched, Stroehmann loaf twist-tied tight. Michael looked in his cookie jar for the last of his cash and his stash. Both still there.

*

A month later, Michael saw the Blueboy again. The kid had shown up hours early for the night trade, and sat smoking cigarettes atop the low brick ledge that walled in the E-Z Lot across from Michael’s building. Michael was coming back from the pharmacy, a bag full of pills and herbal tea tucked into the pocket of his jacket. The headlights of a Saturn leaving the lot flickered across the kid’s features, leaving them aglow in the fading autumn light. The black and Blueboy this time—the kid’s left eye a swollen shiner that made Michael wince in sympathy.

What the hell happened? he asked.

The kid shrugged.

Michael sat down beside him. I never got your name last time.

The kid twisted his mouth into a sneer. What do you want it to be? All pretense, though; tears welling up in his mismatched eyes.

Michael sighed. Want some tea?

Michael got the kid’s story that night, though never his name. He remained the Blueboy, though with a few details sketched in: Since the death of his parents in an expressway car crash, he had lived with his older brother and sister-in-law in the family house in Devil’s Pocket, a rough ramshackle neighborhood in south Philadelphia tucked along the Schuylkill River. The kid had become homeless, however, at the end of summer when his brother found his journal. A guidance counselor had urged the Blueboy to use it to write out his feelings about his parents’ accident. But soon the journal became a reservoir for other things—drawings of a boy in English class, experimental sonnets. Each entry grew bolder than the last as plural pronouns gave way to “he’s” and “him’s,” incriminating words that signified a handsome jock the Blueboy had a crush on. The journal was the Blueboy’s soul until his brother discovered it, screaming how it pissed on the memory of their mother and father, a point he drummed in with fists.

He had no choice but to run away. For a while after the weather got cold, the Blueboy’s sister-in-law slipped him in the back door come nightfall, let him hide in the cellar behind the water heater. But two days ago the Blueboy’s brother had found out, gave them both a beating they wouldn’t soon forget.

Some iced part inside Michael cracked and slid free upon hearing the story. The stranger’s words awakened images of his own father. The last time Michael had seen him alive was the summer following his sophomore year of college. An older man Michael had met at a Jersey mall kept calling the house, prompting Michael’s father to ask point blank whether his only son was a faggot. Michael had snapped yes, the word blade-sharp on his tongue. The only thing that saved Michael from a trip to the emergency room that day was the sudden wail of his mother standing in his open bedroom door. Both Michael and his father froze as the small woman jerked her head forward then flung it back again and again against the wooden doorjamb in a vain effort to beat her son’s confession from her brain.

Now Michael’s father had lain dead two years from a burst coronary. At his sister’s request, Michael had gone to the funeral, held at the old Catholic church where he had once been an altar boy. He felt underdressed in his jeans and wool blazer, his general lack of sympathy. He was shocked to see how old his mother had grown since he walked out of her life, no light in her eyes as she stiffened inside his hug. When Michael’s sister invited him home after the service, Michael had nodded, Sure. But he had come by train and felt awkward asking relatives he hadn’t seen in years for a lift. No one offered. In the end he walked the half-mile back to the station alone and returned to the city without telling his mother and sister good-bye. In the month that followed, Michael’s sister called three times, offering Pollyanna clichés: Time to heal, make a fresh start, let bygones be bygones. But she and her husband now lived in Florida; what good would any truce do?

Michael pushed his family from his head, concentrated on the boy sitting on his bed blowing steam off his second cup of whiskeyed chamomile. Lamplight from the nightstand colored the boy’s bruised eye deep violet. Beautiful, Michael thought. He reached out, ran his finger across the wound. The boy flinched at the contact. Blue eyes skirted Michael’s own, tight black pupils dazed by clear sky, darkening to iced ultramarine.

The Blueboy exhaled slowly, fear of violence passing. He rubbed a drop of tea spilled on his denims. Michael sat down on the bed, fingertips brushing the hair above the kid’s ear. The bruise was a continent Michael could lose himself in, the boy a body welcoming comfort.

Michael wanted to weigh their needs against each other’s, but no scale existed for such things. Senses took over, bending him forward, brushing his lips over the boy’s smoother set. No need to explain himself, his father, the virus in his blood. His body its own obvious motive.

Michael pulled back to steady his senses. In the brief moment it took to set their tea cups by the phone, words pushed up inside him. He wanted to tell the Blueboy he was sick inside, perhaps always so. But when he turned back, the Blueboy was already pulling his shirt over his head, dropping it to the floor, a mixture of desire and resignation on his face.

The sight of the boy bare-chested and blooming stole the breath from Michael’s lungs, drowned confession’s slim second chance. Michael shoved the Blueboy down, worked his fingers into the grooves of the boy’s ribs, clutching smooth skin. The kid’s eyes glazed over then flickered shut, arms reaching for the headboard.

The boy’s flawed beauty astounded Michael. Something tight loosened inside him, but it wasn’t love, Michael wouldn’t let it be. The thought saddened him. He drew a slow breath, amazed that his body was capable of even deeper vulnerabilities than illness. He swallowed hard and shivered.

Inside Michael’s gut, desire curled—a ball of cottonmouths. He pulled off their clothes, hooked the Blueboy’s legs over his shoulders. A part of him wanted to slide red and raw into the boy’s ass, shoot those cottonmouths deep. But blood and sperm, especially his, couldn’t offer such communion. He rolled on a condom, and again, another.

Less resistance this time. The Blueboy bit his lip, scrunched his eyes in his damaged face, his body not yet fully broken in. His ass, rhythmic and ringed, clenched the shaft of Michael’s cock. Perhaps if Michael fucked the Blueboy hard enough, he could lose himself inside the kid. He didn’t want to think his own thoughts anymore. He wanted to rip off layered latex and feel his body let go, regardless of the consequence. The boy bucked, like he wanted to come but couldn’t. Michael’s fingers squeezed the kid’s shoulders hard enough to leave marks. He hunched forward, found the head of the kid’s dick and tongued it to his mouth. The Blueboy gasped, body convulsing. Michael pushed harder and felt tension in his gut uncoil, shooting up and out.

Michael swallowed the last of the Blueboy’s cum, then let the still-hard cock fall from his mouth. He pulled out, gently lowering the boy’s legs to the bed, then removed sodden condoms and tossed them into a waste basket. He settled his head on the Blueboy’s stomach. The kid’s breathing slowed; his legs trembled.

Michael felt the boy’s hand run over the crown of his head where his hair was thin. Awesome, the Blueboy whispered.

Michael wanted to laugh but couldn’t. He rolled over and swallowed the Blueboy’s cock again, sending an electric jolt through the boy’s spent nerves. The Blueboy said nothing as Michael lay there, tongue circling the sensitive shrinking head.

The next morning, Michael cooked them eggs. His new AIDS Buddy, Keith, had taken it upon himself to keep Michael’s refrigerator well stocked. Michael was glad for the healthy appetite of company. The Blueboy ate greedily, his hair wet from the shower, his bruise a green copper-stain in the morning light, his young body fast to heal. Michael’s own food grew cold on his plate, appetite only for the pleasure his eyes drank in. He tore an ATM receipt in half and wrote his phone number on the part not showing his deficit, then handed it over. Come see me again.

The Blueboy shrugged and put on his coat.

*

When the first call came at 3 a.m., Michael stirred from sleep and groggily pressed the cold phone to his ear. It took a long moment to decode the “It’s me” at the other end. More words, a whisper, a bare exhale of breath. Look outside.

Michael gathered an extra handful of cord and pulled the phone to the window. He squinted down at the snow-slushed street. In the watery light of the street lamp, a figure stood by the payphone. Slowly a face turned up toward Michael’s window like a swimmer surfacing for air. The Blueboy. Michael breathed in deep at the sight.

While the Blueboy choked through another fight with his brother, Michael kept the receiver tucked against his ear and scrambled to find clean clothes. It had been days since he’d last been out of his robe. Quickly he pulled on jeans and slipped on a shirt. Before the kid’s quarter ran out, Michael took down his number, scribbling it on the wall above his nightstand. He ran a washcloth over his face and called right back.

Even with his window closed, Michael heard a faint ring from the street below before the kid picked up the phone. As the Blueboy confessed he had nowhere else to go, Michael walked to the window again and saw the kid’s face still tilted up toward his window. Michael told him he’d throw down his keys.

Soon, any late hour “It’s me” was all it took for Michael to let the Blueboy in. No sad tale of brother and fists required. Few words at all, the language of bodies simply enough.

With Keith’s help Michael kept his apartment cleaner—clothes put away, papers off the couch—as if expecting company. When Keith asked why, Michael revealed nothing. The Blueboy had to be kept secret, the one thing Michael could look forward to now when every doctor visit meant plummeting T-cells. Keith would ask too many questions—were they having safe sex, did they know the risks involved? Though Michael was careful, he knew Keith would consider skirting the issue a sin of omission. But surely the Blueboy knew, didn’t he? Surely he noticed Michael’s sallow cheeks, the skin growing thin on his frame.

In shame, Michael waited for nights of freezing rain or heavy snowfall. Always the Blueboy called from the payphone on the street below, always after Michael had gone to bed, the sharp ring of the old black rotary jarring away dreams unremembered.

But most nights Michael lay alone, listening to his body: neck vertebrae clicking against a pillow’s imperfect comfort. Blood pulsing in his ears. If he slept at all, it was only to dream about rising to go to the bathroom, on his way looking out his window at the corner below, the snow-sludged street empty of all but the lost boys and the lost men who fed them.

When the Blueboy came again, Michael didn’t want to undress. He didn’t want the Blueboy to see his mongrel-thin frame, elbows and ribs ready to tear through faint skin. The wind raged outside as the Blueboy insisted; he lay already naked, erect, wanting the heat of skin to warm him. But when he tugged off Michael’s shirt, the blue sky in his eyes clouded over.

Words had gotten bigger the longer left unsaid. Michael watched the Blueboy slowly roll to the side, making room for him on the bed. Michael climbed in, sagging into the mattress, reached out and cupped shrunken fingers around the boy’s crotch. He lowered his head and leaned in openmouthed. The Blueboy’s hand stopped him. You don’t have to. The kid’s erection already flagging. Let’s just hold each other.

Michael turned from the pity in the boy’s eyes. The Blueboy tried to spoon around him but Michael shrugged him off. He couldn’t stand the feel of the kid’s stare lasering his back. Michael clenched his teeth and focused his eyes on his nightstand, on the phone heavy enough to kill someone, its black plastic lipped with moonlight, the silence of the room looming louder than any bell.

*

Michael grew to hate the Blueboy, his good looks and health, the pity and shame in the boy’s blue eyes. Rage circulated through Michael’s system. It stooped his shoulders, gnawed his gut, leeched oxygen from his blood. It consumed the meat of cell after cell as it shrank his body and the size of his heart.

Keep your spirits up, Keith said every visit, bringing prepared food from an AIDS organization now. Michael ate a few mouthfuls while Keith offered health tips Michael would never heed—his pretense of hospitality wearing threadbare. After Keith left, Michael flushed the rest of his meal down the toilet, watched it swirl away with the water.

When the Blueboy called again, Michael said he was too sick to see him. It was true; he lay curled in the mess of his bed, the phone receiver a black dumbbell crushing his ear. Couldn’t even beat off anymore to the other Blueboys, dog-eared magazines stacked inside Michael’s steamer trunk. Forget someone real. No rallying himself for a kid who was only a hustler, who asked for more than money or marijuana, asked on a cold winter night to steal through walls better left in place.

On the phone, the Blueboy’s voice choked through tears. It’s snowing. I’m cold. She snuck me in the basement again, but he heard us. I think my nose got broke.

Sickness puddled in Michael’s bed, assaulting his senses. He couldn’t even walk to the window now. I can’t help you, he rasped.

You’re just like him!

The Blueboy’s words felt like blows inside Michael’s brain. With great effort Michael carefully returned the receiver to its cradle.

Outside, snow howled.

*

Keith came the following morning, cleaned the bed’s caked filth, and taxied Michael to Graduate Hospital. There, doctors probed Michael’s stick-figure frame, pumped his veins full of drugs and fluid, snaked tubes down his throat to ease air into lungs. They started him on a new combination therapy they called a cocktail, as if such a name could invent for Michael pleasant memories of Boatslip tea dances and Fire Island free-for-alls.

That week in the hospital, Keith brought Michael piles of magazines and newspapers to read to “keep his spirits up.” Michael grew sick of Keith’s good intentions and had no choice but to rally. By Friday he was cleared to go home.

Waiting for Michael’s release forms, Keith read aloud week-old headlines. SPACE SHUTTLE SNAFU, MAIN LINE MURDER STUMPS DA, TEENAGER’S BODY WASHES UP BY SCHUYLKILL REFINERY. The last sent a chill down Michael’s spine.

The details Keith offered were imprecise: Runaway from Webster and Bambrey found drowned the morning of January second, discovered by a Blackmoore Chemicals employee. Police believed the seventeen-year-old jumped or fell from either the South Street or Walnut Street Bridge. Relatives reported no note or precipitating factor other than depression following the recent loss of close family members. The body had been lodged in the chemical company’s filtering system among plowed snow and ice dumped into the river following recent storms. The name of the minor was not released.

The Blueboy, Michael was sure. He wanted to crawl back in his hospital bed, have the nurse kick Keith out and nail shut the door, let him die in peace. The Blueboy’s face floated before him: pale hair falling across forehead, icy depths of his eyes, the kissable crook of his nose. Heart full of as much tragedy as any Michael had ever endured. And now lost. Now dead.

Back home, Michael listened patiently to Keith’s schedule of when to take what medication. Keith taped a reminder to Michael’s refrigerator, and before leaving went over the instructions for working the electronic alarm on Michael’s new pocket pillcase. When he was finally alone, Michael flushed his medicine away, dropped the plastic case in the trash, then opened every window in the house to the cold outside.

Let the grave take him. He phoned Keith’s answering machine and told his AIDS Buddy not to bother delivering meals anymore; he was feeling so well he had decided to visit his sister in Tampa, would stay through winter if the sun proved kind. Michael didn’t mention that he hadn’t spoken to his sister since his father’s funeral, that he was merely trying to buy enough time to die quietly. Hanging up, he looked around his room at all the things he wouldn’t miss and imagined Keith or the landlord finally finding him, his thin carcass beached on a tangle of bedcovers.

Fever retook him. Michael lay swirled in sweaty sheets. Half dead in dreams, he felt himself slip free of his body. All around him darkness stretched, as vast and black as space. Glints of light flickered high above like stars. But Michael was far away from them and any warmth they possessed. He felt something cold and awful clamp tight around him, surrounding him in a second skin. Michael knew it was the Blueboy’s corpse, still wet from the river, sealing over him like a wound closing.

They were together now.

Michael stared out through the boy’s dead eyes, and watched powerless as the Blueboy’s stiff limbs, now his own, stumbled against the engulfing dark. His arms and legs tried to climb to the stars, but they lay out of reach across an impossible distance. Could angels even scale such heights, wondered Michael, surrounded by the dead boy’s wet decay, feeling the leaden hope in the Blueboy’s heart.

From distant rifts light bled down. The faint penumbra illuminated faces Michael had known in life. Men who had died of the same disease from which he was dying. Their deathbeds had left them with scarecrow limbs and bodies shrunken to bone-bag forms, stretched skin a gray afterthought. Their funeral-stitched lips did not move, yet Michael heard their soft susurrant chorus building inside his head, their yearning for life and light.

With great effort, these bodies slowly pulled themselves heavenward. But such fear among them. Trembling fingers found desperate purchase in nooks willed from nothing. The stars of life shone sweet and distracting as each body struggled higher. Do not forget me, minds called. Michael felt their silent yearning seek him out. Could the Blueboy hear it too?

With sudden strain the Blueboy joined the ascent, up past starlit windows that revealed a brick row home, snowy streets, car doors opening to strangers. A flash of fists, a rush of water. Who would want to go back to that?

Hand over hand the Blueboy climbed, up a faint thread heretofore invisible. It dangled from a rift in the firmament. It disappeared inside the Blueboy’s chest. Michael felt it, silky and gossamer thin, snaking around his essence, drawing tight.

Do not forget me.

Much closer now, lit windows seared the cold blue eyes masking Michael’s own. The Blueboy’s rough hands pulled both their bodies through one blinding laceration. On the other side, wind-snapped curtains revealed a new perspective: a dark room where walls shrank toward familiar vanishing points. Where a messy bed floated in the chilled blue air. And atop a damp mattress lay the rafted figure of a dreaming man.

Michael woke, somehow finding the strength to shut his window. Then he searched the bathroom for extra medicine Keith might have squirreled away. No luck. He fished the empty pill bottles from his wastebasket and set out to refill them at the 24-hour CVS drugstore.

The clock by the phone glowed 12:15 a.m. as Michael fled his apartment. Coatless, he stumbled through Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square, past a dry fountain and beneath bare branches silvered with snow. Flakes swirled around him as he reached out toward passersby, groping for handholds among the living. But strangers recoiled.

Still he managed to make it to the store at Nineteenth and Chestnut where he scattered the bottles on the counter in front of the Asian pharmacist. Her almond eyes narrowed with a mixture of pity and apprehension as she filled each prescription. Somehow Michael managed to pay with a credit card not yet maxed out. The pharmacist slid the bagged order toward his wax-paper palm, their hands never once touching.

Outside again, Michael found no comfort in the night air as he choked down his pills. Snow thickened on sidewalks and streets. He hobbled home, as graceless as in drunken days. Nearing his corner, he again wished his limbs would unlock what last bit of life they held and let him lay down in the steep snowdrifts beneath the neon blink of the E-Z Lot sign. But a silent message called out to him.

Do not forget me.

He struggled to see its source. Nothing. No one. All the lost boys had yet to climb out of the holes they crawled into.

Blood throbbed beneath Michael’s blistering skin. The grim evening was cast in a shadowed blue as cold and complete as air itself. As Michael neared his door, something in the glow of a street lamp swirled and caught his attention. By the payphone, air and light cemented into form. First, eyes glinting like glass. Then nose, brow and chin, their snowy softness packed by rough hands into accidental beauty. Michael, frightened, turned away, crossed the street’s shifting drifts, key in hand, its silver point carving a path toward his door.

Behind him, It’s me.

Could it be? Michael glanced back, turned his key, and let the blue light in the shape of a boy follow him up three flights of stairs to his cramped apartment. There, Michael sat down on his bed, and the boy of light sat down beside him. Moved closer. Blew cool breath over Michael’s flushed face as he leaned in to kiss.

*

Michael woke alone, fever broken. The Blueboy was gone, if indeed he had ever been there.

Michael felt revitalized. Could the medicine have really worked so quickly? Or was it the Blueboy’s ghost, whose tongue and mouth had cooled Michael’s body? Not with a graveyard chill but with something brought from another world—lifetimes left unused. Lost time conspired into an antidote; Michael could feel it. The Blueboy’s ghost an incubus in reverse, a life-giver.

But that was impossible. The Blueboy was obviously still alive, nothing supernatural about it. Someone else must have drowned. Yet Michael could find no evidence that anyone had truly been there the night before; when he rose from bed, his apartment was still locked from inside, the air around him still vibrating with the texture of a dream. In the bathroom, he splashed cold water on his face. Despite his body’s sudden invigoration, Michael feared his mind had pitched forward into dementia. But when he looked in the bathroom mirror, his eyes looked more lucid than in weeks.