We can’t avoid life forever.
It began with conversations on the phone. Hours and hours and hours of them. And deep ones, too — as deep as the ocean we hadn’t seen in, who knows, since whenever they closed California’s beaches and shut off the valves to our hearts.
But now…
Now we are turtles emerging from our shells after weeks on end, poking out from all those gloomy grey skies, after the string of days we spent indoors anyway because of the rain and cold, as the confinement of thoughts entangled with the walls closing in on all sides.
Now, suddenly, we are reaching out — across the city that usually divides us with traffic and smog and distractions and obligations and respites we grab alone whenever the chance arises — or used to.
Now there is nothing between us, not even space.
At last, we have what we were every one of us dreaming about, without even knowing.
We have nothing but time.
*
Twilight clung to the Software Engineer’s bushy black eyebrows and curly burly beard. Periodically his eyeballs rolled up from their gaze trained on our feet, which dangled over the edge of the little wall where we sat, and lolled up to my gaze, where I held those dark glistening marbles of his for a second before I looked away.
Each word he mumbled came twirling through the air at me, coated in a Venezuelan accent that tickled me in between the legs — especially the phrase “…because you’re very attractive.”
I’d almost forgotten.
How proximity feels.
Behind us, the sculpted bushes of rosemary that wall off the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit from everyone else, the rest of the world, sent their aroma wafting through the air between us: a wall of its own.
Teeming with the virus, I wondered?
I could not help it when we said Goodbye. Because I could not wait any longer. It’s just that the loneliness and isolation and torment of being so far away from everyone for so long and also torn apart from so many things I love and ripped asunder myself, tremoring as these forgotten illusions rocketed up and through me and tore a hole in my throat, I blurted: Will you hug me?
Those black marbles of his singe and — without missing a beat — he does.
He encircles me with his arms and pulls me close.
Right there, in the middle of the street.
He holds me, for a moment, against the cosmos.
And instantly my bones and their marrow thaw, and, for the first time since it all started, whisked willingly from the clutches of despair into my first touch in the pandemic, the first time another human being has touched me in as long as I can remember, I feel undead.
I angle my head slightly up and away from his mouth and nose.
In search of a clear breath.
The aroma of rosemary, perhaps.
Perhaps we meet again.
Perhaps we go on another walk, this one in the other direction, down toward the mansions that resemble castles, the constant daily upkeep of which I guess qualifies as an “essential service,” and under or perhaps over a bridge and maybe another. Maybe so many turns that we lose track of where we are, out here on the edges of things, reaching out for one another from a distance as the great big trees are, the great big trees rooted across the vast streets from one another, yet stretching their branches, inch by inch, like sturdy arms raised toward the peak of this cathedral they’ve grown into overhead.
And perhaps I see him for a third date, perhaps even at his house.
And perhaps he serves pumpkin soup he prepared the night before, and perhaps it tastes like heaven.
And perhaps I’m desperately hungry for the salmon he’s made as well, but maybe we don’t get to that course because by then I’m feeling overwhelmed: maybe being inside with someone is too much just yet and those walls we’ve retreated back inside are closing in on me like they do when I’m alone and maybe I start fumbling anxiously for my breath and consciousness and balance because I’m convinced, suddenly convinced, that he put something in the soup and I’m sure he couldn’t have, really couldn’t have because wasn’t I watching the whole time, except what if he did?
*
The Stuntman showed up with quite a score from Trader Joe’s: veggies, more veggies, veggie-based pasta, salmon (salmon again!) and lactose-free cheese made from… almonds? Los Angeles men — even when they hail from Texas — are something else.
You know the type. Stocky. Could use some leg days, probably a stream of them, but who gives a shit because those deltoids. Those biceps and forearms. That neck. And his chest, my god, imagine that light Spiderman t-shirt coming off to reveal: his pecs. And just, you know, the pulse of each piece of him together. The clean and vibrant beat of his energy. His unadulterated presence.
It’s our second date — after meeting a few days ago at a park I’m not going to tell you about, where apparently a few roads remain open to walk along. Hours and hours and hours vanished into the sunshine as we kept ambling around aimlessly and defenselessly talking and oversharing tidbits of ourselves that we probably never would have revealed if the world as we knew it hadn’t ended.
He couldn’t wait to see me again, he said.
And, sure enough, the minutes — or were they days? — in between my well-timed response and our next encounter stretched as endlessly as time does now that the hours and hours and hours are all the same.
By the time we reached the lemon tree in the backyard to pick some fresh lemons for the fish and our glasses of water, we could no longer help ourselves.
There we were, beneath the lemons.
Lemons everywhere: their scent in the air.
Glistening in the twilight.
Orbiting us, caressing us, pushing us toward the center with the closeness of our foreheads pressing against one another. Into one another. The grip of our hands on the back of each other’s skulls. The faint layer of sweat across our skin. The trembling orb of two human bodies alone together in a universe trying to kill them.
Hurling them together.
This time.
This time I yield my lips.
He kisses me and kisses me and kisses me. Down here under the lemon tree and on the way back into the house and as we stumble up the stairs and while we’re making dinner and afterward and when we’re lying on the couch together and talking and sharing some more and telling one another even vaster things strangers otherwise probably wouldn’t if they weren’t facing what we are, right now.
And he keeps kissing me even after I tell him about being born as a boy. He doesn’t care, in this moment. Because nothing matters. Not as we swirl down into this void the pandemic has cratered life with.
Not ever, not now.
Nothing matters as he takes my face in his hands and arrests me with those nakedly powerful Native American eyes and massages my smile and I think about how we’re not even supposed to touch our own faces with our hands, let alone invite someone to tickle our cheeks with their fingers and rub our jawbones up toward our temples, as their thumbs press up against our lips and venture into our mouths.
Nothing matters as I succumb to my first kiss in the pandemic, or is it our thousandth and first already, I’ve lost count.
Nothing matters.
Until tomorrow.
*
You couldn’t help but notice as you walked in.
Pumpkins.
The First Responder’s house almost slugged you lovingly with the aroma of pumpkin-scented candles at the doorstep. Pumpkin. And more pumpkin. And pumpkin spice and some pumpkin floral elements and maybe something-pumpkin else.
These Los Angeles men…
A couple slices of salmon in the pan — salmon! — and me watching him move around the kitchen and walk around on those legs lightly dusted with hair, the light jet-black Mexican type, musing, as I steal glances at his arms and his hands and the back of his neck, all those forbidden aspects of other people six feet away: there is nothing sexier, absolutely nothing sexier on this earth, never has been and never will be, than a man cooking dinner, we could just stop everything right here and that would be enough to live on, for a very long time.
Except that, of course, it isn’t.
We keep talking, just like we did on the phone, only now it all mixes together, rendering the disparate details murkier than before, fuck, I have to pause and remember what I’ve already told him versus the Software Engineer and the Stuntman and the others I didn’t tell you about and oh shit I’ve forgotten, I can’t keep it straight, this expanse of what I’ve remained awake for or seen in my sleep.
So I say nothing and instead simply listen, offering him the impression I’m hanging on his every word, which maybe I am, because, in fact, men have never had this much to share, at least not with me, not in the twenty-seven years I’ve been sleeping with them. And, you know, I guess it’s true “we are all in this together” and we have become trench buddies in this war we’re fighting, one we’re destined to lose, reaching out for one another, groping across the timeless non-space for some proximity, like the tress, or wait did I already say that, I’ve forgotten, I’ll just stop talking and smile.
And let him put his arm around my waist.
Because you see.
Because I don’t want to go without a man’s touch anymore, I just can’t, I just won’t, they forgot about us when they isolated everyone, okay, yes, I will stay away from gatherings and pretty much all other people basically and I will limit and consolidate my errands and I will distance myself when I go to the grocery store and I will wear my N95 mask whenever necessary so as to avoid infecting anyone else if I ever carry the goddamn thing or already am —
But I will not throw away time I cannot waste…
I will not, absolutely will not, accept the possibility of leaving this life without a few final…
And he — kneading my calf with one hand and pummeling my thigh with the other, with a force that increases in intensity the more I say, every slippery word greasing the wheels beneath the headlights racing toward us, careening, sensing, prodding, intuiting, knowing there’s stuff I’m not telling him because I’ve decided to stop risking a chance to slip into someone else’s arms, anyone’s, especially his, each time maybe for the last time ever — he nods.
And urges me to keep talking.
Keep talking against the horror of it all, keep talking into the void in between us, filling it up with unvarnished intimacy and the rush of being with someone, anyone, him, right here and right now, despite who you are or were, perhaps in spite of it, just keep going, don’t stop, keep talking and talking and touching and flirting with dirty air, we’ll have to stop soon enough, in the end, when we’re no longer here together.
Just keep talking.
Keep talking and kneading.
Come very close.
Breathe each other’s toxic life-giving, life-taking air.
Your lips close enough to taste.
Wait.
Hold on.
Didn’t I try to leave a minute or two ago?
Or was it five or ten?
Well.
Perhaps he and the pumpkin aroma have lured me back and perhaps we’ve kept going and our mouths have come way too close for comfort and maybe I’ve ended up on top and I’m dripping wet and he’s sitting on this chair we’ve stumbled into and maybe, yes, maybe a man is feeling me for the first time in the pandemic and it’s fire.
Doesn’t heat kill it?
Nothing can extinguish this desire.
*
Except tomorrow.
You know.
When you wake up and wonder: what was real and what was just another sequence in this never-ending fever dream?
*
I’m a lawyer and writer. This piece is from the Closer to God project, of which my most recent book — Jump: from Suicidal Depression to Skydiving and Reality’s Edge — is the first installment.
