When you left the beach you came through the park, and after you came through the park you crossed a bridge over the river that led to the marina, and on either side of the bridge were townhouses. To your right were the merry sails of the marina. But if you walked on a little bit, past a turn, things became desolate. Even the streets were dry and desolate, their asphalt so grey it was white, and at this time of year blank lots and empty fields were browned with weeds. Michael cut a staff from the wood he’d collected along the shore, and handed it to Jay and then cut another one for himself and they moved on. It was, despite the desolation, a beautiful day. The large old houses were beautiful even when you looked close and saw sinking porches, chipping paint, cardboarded windows and rotting eaves.
“This must have been one hell of a city,” Michael murmured “It’s a little ruined, now. That’s a shame. So much in this world gets ruined and forgotten, but it’s still lovely. It’s still worthwhile.”
“I’m seeing that a lot lately,” Jay said.
“Hum?”
Jay pointed his little finger quickly and then away from a woman who was walking down the street carrying the luggage of her life behind her. When she saw them, she bowed her head proudly, and Jay bowed back. Before the synagogue, on the bright green lawn of the empty brick building there slept fitful and twitching under a blanket, a homeless man. Well, he must have been homeless.
“Is that tent city still up?” Jay asked. “You know? Back home?”
“The one near the old church that everyone was complaining about? Yeah.”
“Does it seem?” Jay asked, “like people are gathered to do battle on the weak things of this world?”
When Michael didn’t answer, but only looked serious as they kept walking, Jay continued, “It feels like everyone in America hates the homeless and hates the poor, and everything in this country hates the oppressed. But everything in this country works to make the poor and makes us homeless and oppress us every day, and no one sees it.”
“I see it,” Michael said. “When we were at the abbey we were so safe and so away from all of that. But we had to get back to it. We were away from the ugliness of the world but we knew it was there, and maybe I’m an idiot because I feel like somehow living in the ugliness of the world is doing something. Is that crazy?”
“It’s all crazy,” Jay said as a man who looked like he might have been drunk or touched, rode by on a wobbly old bicycle with no seat. A Confederate flag was tied around his neck and billowed orange and blue and soiled behind him. As it whipped past Jay he tugged and heard the man crash to the sidewalk, but kept walking as if nothing had ever happened.
“Perhaps,” he said, as the man murmured, “Oh shit, goddamn,” behind them the only way to answer the crazy we’ve gotten used to and learned to despair over is with a hopeful crazy we’ve never seen.”
They walked two more dry, hot blocks without talking, and they could see Twelfth Street coming up with the little bus shelter that was not a bus shelter, but what passed for the train station here.
“You know,” Michael said. “It’s the maddest thing. But I am hopeful. I am full of hope. It’s not like that hope I had the first time when I went into teaching and tried to do everything and almost lost my mind. It’s this hope that says that right now, even if I lose everything, even if I lose my life it’s all going to be alright. And I don’t even know what that means, but I feel it, and I’ve never felt that way before. And now I’m not afraid, Jay. I’m not afraid of anything.”
Jay knew why he had chosen Michael for his best friend, and then for his boyfriend and now for his husband, which is what he was even if they were never properly married. Most people married, he knew, and learned to live with not being understood until they just grew used to it and forgot they had anything to say. As long as Michael was around though, he was the cave, and if Jay shouted across it, an answer always came back matching him. With Michael he never looked into the abyss alone, and with Michael he reached into the abyss and pulled up… glory.
The train came through the center of the street, the rails were in the asphalt so that it didn’t even seem as if a real train could ever show up in this place. When the claxon sounded it was a surprise, and when the train, large and silver, orange striped, rolled onto the street and stood by the bus shelter, ti was a wonder. Jay and Michael climbed on board and went looking for their seats. They sat down in them as the locomotive began to roll and the houses of the weary beach town rolled by. Soon houses gave way to trees and rivulets, then reservoirs. Now there were the green trees again, the sights of deep forest paths and now farm fields. As the train gathered up speed, Jay sighed and leaned against Michael’s shoulder.
Finally, they were going back home.
Jay
I heard somewhere that speech came late to human beings that for hundreds of thousands of years, like all the other animals, we communicated without words and at first there was only song and gesture. Our first speech was art. Our first talking was song and so we had myth and legend and wonder and story and only after that, much later, did we have reason and rationality. This makes sense to me, explains why me and him have such small need for words. We will be on this train for the rest of the day and into the night and not come home till morning. Now and again we will roll through a city, but mostly we will ride past it in the distance and see trees and farm fields, hills rolling up over us, rivers passing under.
“When you go far, far out west it’s so much more dramatic,” I heard some white woman say. “It’s all of these mountains and sometimes you see nothing for days and days.”
We’ve been a little out west and it was plenty dramatic.
Michael says nothing. He sits beside me for a while and then across from me, and then we doze, and then I wake up and he’s looking out of the window, chomping on a piece of gum. I’ve always loved his hair, but there’s just too much of it now. Why haven’t I attended to that? There are certain ways in which lovers are supposed to look after each other.
After about three hours of our mutual silence he turns to me, and grins, still chomping his gum. That is it, and then he turns around. I stretch out and yawn. Words have an end.
That Christmas when he came back to me, or really I came to him, there wasn’t much to be said, and that was the failure of our words. What could he say? “I’m sorry that you love me. I’m sorry that I’m crazy. I’m sorry that we’re both crazy. I’m sorry for the things I put you through that I could not help but put you through? I’m so glad you came for me. Aren’t you glad I’m alive? What can I say but, I’m so glad you’re here. I rejoice that you’re alive. I’m so angry at the pain I’ve been through.
When he comes to me in the dark, and I’ve thought about this many times since, I am angry because I know I cannot ignore him. I don’t want to say “resist him” because he is not opposing me. Since I’d left Ohio in pursuit of him, I had longed only to touch him and now here was all of him. Kissing is touching, all of it’s touching and I needed to touch and be touched by all of him.
He kneels over me, and I take the lube I brought to masturbate with. I rub it over his cock and we both marvel at how a cock can swell. He shudders as I stroke him bigger and bigger. Like a fruit growing toward the sun he curves, arches and blooms.
In the living room the Christmas music is playing, the droning Little Drummer Boy, and the dim light of the Christmas tree shines. In this room there is only darkness, and our bodies move, pushing the covers away until I lie on my back and open for him, until running my hands up and down his goose pimpled skin, I draw him between my legs. Neither one of us makes a sound as he enters me. We savor it. How long he has been gone from me, how much I felt like he’d never be here again, but here he is, deep inside of me. Here his arms are over me, here is his face, his curly hair, his back, his ass his long thighs. I thrust up for him and he thrust down into me and we move together silently, and the bed creaks a little, I run my fingers, then my nails up and down him and pull him deeper in.
“Fuck me,” are the first word I whisper.
“Fuck me.”
Our bodies move faster. There is the satisfying slap of his body against mine. We both thrust together, and in the dark Michael growls, “Fuck… Fuck… Fuck.” It is the only word we say over and over again. He marvels, gasping, “You make me get bigger. I get bigger and bigger when I’m with you...”
We fuck in the dark. Until he makes a strangled noise and comes, half in me, half out of me making a trail across my stomach and the bed sheets.
We lie there in the dark. Time passes in silence and then, with the ministrations of an old lover he wakes my body and at last strokes my cock. I understand what he meant now. My dick is never this swollen, never this big, never feels so much as when I am with him. He lies on his stomach while I fuck everything out of me into him. We grunt. We groan We curse. We swear. We bite, we kiss, we scratch. We fuck. We fuck. The orgasm startles me and I scream a little, flying out of my body. We buckle together as my insides fold and the world tilts. Our hands fly up in hallelujah as so much seed, lust like a river, pumps out of me.
We are exhausted and hot. My balls throb and we curl together like commas.
In the after sex we say nothing.
There is no need.
Why do the nations rage
and the peoples plot in vain?
The kings of the earth set themselves,
and the rulers take counsel together,
against the Lord and against his Anointed, saying,
“Let us burst their bonds apart
and cast away their cords from us.”
He who sits in the heavens laughs;
the Lord holds them in derision.
Then he will speak to them in his wrath,
and terrify them in his fury, saying,
“As for me, I have set my King
on Zion, my holy hill.”
The next morning we go to Christmas Day Mass. The monks rejoice over us in a way that tells me they weren’t exactly sure any of us would see Michael again. Brother Mario ruffles Michael’s hair and says, “He’s a good boy. He needed to be found.”
Brother Romuald says, “I knew. I knew, and look at you all. Full of the light of God.”
I was practical. In the morning, before we left for church, I called Kate and told her I had found her son. I left it at that. I called Dalton.
“You got him.”
“Yes.”
“Do you need me to come and get you guys?”
It seemed like too much to ask one lover who there was little chance of me staying with to come and get me and the love of my life and bring us back to Ohio.
“Are you in North Dakota?” I said.
“No,” Dalton said.
“Then I’m going to say no.”
“How are you getting back?”
“I imagine the same way I got here.”
I added, “I will call you when I’m home.”
“Please do,” said Dalton.
