Bloodstream

Dafydd McVeigh

Diego was dating an older guy who had a car and everything. I rode in the back like a kid, the two of them up front like my parents. Diego had ostensible control of the music, but Brett— the older guy, Brett— kept asking him to queue up songs. I held an iced coffee in one hand, and passed it to the other whenever it got too cold. Each time the rattling ice gave my restlessness away, I feared that Brett might judge me because of it.

Brett said, whipping down a narrow side street, “So, Elis — what do you do for work again?” Everything in that moment, from Brett’s wraparound sunglasses to the bland suburban foliage to the Sports Utility Vehicle I was riding in, reminded me of being in high school. A friend’s dad, driving me home from debate practice because I didn’t have a car then either.

“I don’t know,” I said on reflex, and it struck me, even as the words left my mouth, as a very odd thing to be saying.

“You don’t know?”

“No, I mean. I just meant it’s not very interesting. It’s consulting, sort of.”

“Sort of?”

“Sorry. It’s consulting. I don’t know why I said sort of.”

 Diego said, “He never likes to talk about his job. He gets embarrassed.”

“Sure,” Brett replied charitably.

Diego leaned over and pecked Brett on the cheek, a gesture so chaste and affectionate I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to watch it. But there I was anyway, watching it, having watched it, transferring the coffee to my left hand. I was in love with Diego but I was neither possessive nor delusional. It occurred to me that I was either supposed to ask Brett something in turn, or volunteer some alternative ice-breaking information about myself. “How many cities have you lived in?” I asked him.

Diego burst out laughing. A strand of hair fell over his eye and he brushed it away; it fell back over his eye in the exact same place and he left it there.

Brett said, “Hm. Seven? Or no, eight. I was in Albuquerque for a year. Oh, hey. Look where we are—” He made the slow, exaggerated turn into the Ikea parking lot.

Diego touched the handle of every single pot, the back of every chair, and the hard surface of every wooden structure in the store. I was there to buy a little shelf. Something I could assemble myself, use for a year or two, then dispose of unceremoniously. I was planning to buy online, but Diego had insisted that Brett would drive me, and that we’d make a day of it. I figured Diego wanted to guarantee that his new boyfriend made a good first impression on me, and assumed the way to do this was to flaunt his usefulness. The blunt, raw kind of utility that middle-aged men can have. A hand whisk, a machete, a stethoscope.

“Have you ever thought about going back to school?” Brett asked me, standing between shelf models. “An MBA did wonders for me. I went when I was twenty-four, too. I was making six figures right out of school.”

“I make enough,” I told him. All those shelves, so flimsy. They cut down old-growth forests to make flimsy shelves like those, and I knew that, and I was going to buy one anyway. “What were you doing in Albuquerque?”

Brett’s lip twisted into a half-smile. He had thin, serious lips. “Odd jobs. Just needed to go somewhere new after my divorce, you know?” Brett was one of those older gay guys who had been married to a woman. And this, too, drew Diego to Brett. He liked the idea of being the fresh start, he liked the idea of being Albuquerque to someone.

“And did you find anything new there?”

“Sure,” he said again, this time with a snort. He slammed his palm down on a shelf that was no different from any of the rest of them and said, “This one looks nice.”

“Yeah. I’ll get this one. I don’t know where to — or how to—”

Diego came up behind us then, and drummed his fingers on a different shelf. I knew that his fingertips were numb and callused from years of playing classical guitar, and I wondered if that was why he felt the need to put them on everything. The first few weeks after I got top surgery I touched my chest incessantly, in utter disbelief that there was a part of my body where physical sensation could be so dull and noiseless.

Diego said, “You write down the number and pick it up downstairs in the warehouse. They don’t keep their stock up here in the display rooms.” He drummed out a rhythm then that I recognized as a waltz.

In the basement, I sliced my middle finger open on a loose nail sticking out of a box. The injury neither surprised nor concerned me. I could never help but take pleasure in minor, self-contained mutilations like pulsing hangnails and acne scars. I liked the novelty of feeling my heartbeat in my fingertip and watching myself overflow.

Brett looked over and said, “Jesus Christ, are you bleeding?”

“Yes,” I said, “and I think it might be fatal. Do you know a priest?”

Diego came over to us, still tapping his fingers on everything and not cutting himself on anything. He said, “Well, don’t just stare at it. Put pressure on it.” To Brett, then, warmly: “Honey, you have Band-Aids in your car, right?”

Brett stared at me for another second and replied, “Yeah. I think so.” When Brett finally looked away, I felt like I had won a game that only I was playing.

The next week, Diego insisted on going for a walk before we were supposed to meet Brett for dinner, despite the weather. Chicago used to be a swamp, and I felt like the late August heat that afternoon was going to drown me. Heat always pooled in my fingers first and most severely. The way they would bloat, as if waterlogged. Swollen and ready to burst open, pink with blotches of white and red like uncooked sausages.

We walked along the lakeshore trail, ravenous for the occasional gusts of wind that came to us. I wanted to open my mouth and swallow them. Diego’s veins looked like they were embossed on his skin.

“Just so you know, I really actually like him,” Diego said, sweat glazing his entire face. He shimmered.

“Yeah, I know,” I said, because I did know, and I didn’t want to hear about it again and again.

“Did you like him? At Ikea?”

“He was fine,” I said, and I meant it. I was not being a saboteur, only honest. Brett was fine and I had absolutely no other thoughts about him.

Diego pressed his lips into a thin line. “I think you’ll like him. You just need to get to know him better.” Diego sent a text to both of us then — in a group chat, for some asinine reason — saying that we were going to head over soon.  

Their obscene age gap would’ve been an obvious, understandable reason for me to dislike Brett, but Diego and I were well past that. Sure, Brett was the oldest, but Diego always dated older guys, even back in college. It’s just how he was. Sometimes I got the sense that Diego wanted to be attracted to me, had tried in the past to be attracted to me, and he just wasn’t. It’s not the kind of thing you can force for yourself. I didn’t lose sleep over it. I tried not to lose sleep over it.

Diego said to me, “You’re still my favorite though, don’t worry,” and his sincerity moved me as it always did. But I was tired of being moved by love in the metaphorical sense. I wanted something so embodied that it moved me like a muscle, a joint, a ligament. I wanted feeling that didn’t merely graze my skin, but flowed through me.

We did not meet Brett at a restaurant, as I assumed would be the case, but at his condo where he, himself, had cooked us a full meal. When we entered the front hall (Diego had a key), Brett was in the kitchen, stirring something with an apron on and a black towel slung over his shoulder. In the living room, where the warm air from the stove met the cold air from the air conditioning, I was afraid clouds might form. I was afraid it would rain over his couch and shag carpet.

“Hello!” Brett called.

“Smells good,” Diego said back to him. “What are you making?”

“Curry,” he said. “Thai, green. But come in! I set out wine and cheese. Elis, I hope you like a Gewürztraminer. They’re very floral, not to everyone’s taste.”

“He likes anything.”

“That’s not true,” I said. I was looking at Brett’s library of vinyls, something I always wanted to collect for myself, but hadn’t. In fact, the whole apartment painted Brett as someone who had both the time and money to curate his possessions and to cultivate taste. The place was decked in cool, coherent grays and blues. My life, in contrast, was still Ikea shelves and ripped posters. “I only drink bottom-shelf gold tequila.”

“Check the bar cart then. Feel free to make yourself anything,” Brett said, and I realized he had a bar cart, that he had met and then effortlessly one-upped my game of detached irony.  Diego went to the kitchen and wrapped his arms around Brett’s waist from behind. I flipped through Brett’s coffee table book — a Robert Maplethrope collection — and I understood Diego’s interest in him for a second entirely. It was all so secure and intentional.

Brett, true to his word, had made the curry hot. I was not sweating though, only burning.

Brett said, “They eat spicy food on warm days in most hot countries. They say it really cools the body down.”

Diego, who was born in Mexico, seemed to accept Brett’s positioning of himself as the resident expert of most hot countries without issue. But I knew that he found comfort in relationships like this, where he could abdicate claims to any and all authority. He spooned tofu and basil into his mouth mindlessly.

“Right,” I said, after it was clear that Diego wasn’t bothered. I knew for certain then, listening to Brett’s jaw click as he chewed, that I wouldn’t ever like him much. I could tolerate him, yes, and maybe even bask in his usefulness and stability from time to time as Diego did. But I would never regard him with any fondness or intimacy.

We drained the wine bottle, and then Brett made us cocktails — the kind of cocktails that use bitters, and have notes. The different colors of tequila, Brett informed me, actually come from the aging process.

At ten-thirty I made a show of yawning, an attempt to go home. Diego lay his head on Brett’s shoulder and wrapped his hands around his bicep. The tenderness he showed Brett then bordered on obscene.

“I should check the bus times,” I said.

“Oh, don’t even bother with the bus,” Brett replied. “You can sleep here. I’ll drive you home tomorrow.”

“You don’t need to do that.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he insisted, waving his hand. “I’ll set out the air mattress for you. It’s no trouble.” I couldn’t tell if he was doing it out of kindness or spite. I would’ve preferred spite, but his blank, vacant expression told me it was more likely kindness.

Brett’s condo had central cooling and heating unlike my apartment, where I had been subsisting off an army of fans and a dinky window unit all summer. He kept his apartment almost too cold, though, and I did not feel like I was allowed to touch the thermostat and therefore had no real recourse against it. I slept with a heavy, woven blanket on an air mattress in his living room and labored through surreal dreams in a cold sweat. I woke up at five-thirty in the morning in a mess of tangled sheets and realized at some point during the night, I had peeled my shirt off and thrown it on the floor next to the bed. When I picked it up, I realized it was still damp. I left it there and went to the bathroom to wash the night off me.

His bathroom was bright, with both yellow light overhead and white lights over the mirror. There were twenty different skin care products on the counter, some in plastic bottles, some in glass. Some small, meant for dispersing conservative dollops and others large, simple, and meant for slathering. Oils, liquids, lotions. Brett’s skin was clear, I thought, and not especially wrinkled or saggy, but he was still forty-eight and looked it. I, too, had some minor wrinkles forming around my mouth, but I felt no solidarity with him in his quest to stall aging. The bottles signified nothing to me but a bit of disposable wealth and delusion. I wondered briefly about Brett’s ex-wife, if he had been kind to her.

I went through the skin products one by one and smeared them all on my face without reading the labels. My face was moist and heavy by the end of it. I wiped myself down with a washcloth and cold water because using his shower felt too familiar. I went through his medicine cabinet and found aspirin, eye drops, Finasteride, Minoxidil, Prozac, and Viagra. I shook an antidepressant into my palm and mimicked the act of popping it into my mouth before putting it back in the pill bottle.

When I finally left his bathroom I saw him standing in the living room, still raw and disheveled from sleep. I met his eyes and felt like I had just wandered into his dream.

“Morning,” he said after a few seconds. He softened, as if remembering that I was supposed to be there, that he had invited me to be there. “I thought I heard someone in the bathroom.”

It was still strange to me that he said someone, not you, like he was unwilling to acknowledge the specificity of my presence. I only nodded.

“You’re an early riser, then?”

“Not usually.”

“Only in strange places, then.”

“Air mattresses.”

He examined my body, lingering in odd places for odd amounts of time. “They’re sweat traps, aren’t they? I try to keep it cool in here, but I’m afraid there’s nothing that would make them very comfortable.”

I looked at his overhead lighting fixture, which flickered. Mine did that too in the summer, in time with the cycles of the A/C unit. Those goliaths of power usage, making every other electronic bow to them. “Yeah,” I said.

His eyes stopped at my chest then, knowingly. “What happened there?”

“Oh, that. A heart transplant. Severe. They had to replace it on both sides.”

“Ha,” he said. He knew I was trying to be funny, but was disarmed by it regardless. “But a mastectomy, right?”

“Sure. If you want to call it that.”

Brett said, then affecting a polite but nervous laugh, “You know, I would’ve never been able to tell.”

I said, “Thank you,” because it was clear he thought he was complimenting me. But it was neither a compliment nor an insult, it was a banal remark on my appearance. As if I’m supposed to act grateful for comments like your eyes are brown, you are five foot seven, you are a resident of planet Earth.

He said after another few seconds, “And I know you’re joking around, but it really is refreshing to see someone living so… authentically. Not everyone has the bravery for it.” But I am not authentic, and I am not brave, and I don’t know why I have to bear the burden of either. This blinding, predatory light. I had the urge to bite through the skin on his arm until I met bone, just to see his face completely unguarded.

I asked him instead, “Are there any parts of your body you can’t feel?”

He contemplated the question with bemusement. “My hands, sometimes. In my thirties I developed awful carpal tunnel and it still haunts me.” After a second, he added, “Forget what I said to you before about the MBA. Don’t get another office job. Go out. See the world if you can. Don’t use your hands too much. They weren’t meant for that.”

“I’m not sure my hands were meant for anything,” I said. Because I was resentful of that sort of thing, that any part of the body was specifically meant for anything.

He replied thoughtlessly, crossing into the kitchen to begin making a pot of coffee, “Oh, sure they are.”

I got a text from Brett at eight-thirty PM on Wednesday, three days after his dinner party. It read simply: Hey.

hey, I wrote back. I looked at his message alone, sitting on a thrifted couch in my sparsely decorated apartment. I had no bar cart or photography collections, and I had made myself plain chicken and rice for dinner.

He replied: You’re very funny. Do you do it on purpose?

nothing i do is purposeful

You know, I’ve always been curious for FTMs.

So he knew the old-fashioned clinical term, then, which was also not infrequently the porn term. His use of it wasn’t an indictment but at the very least indicated some history.

your curiosity doesn’t have much to do with me

It could if you wanted it to.

And he added, when I didn’t respond: Would you like me to show you?

He sent me a video of himself stroking his cock then, which was wide and average length and, insultingly, only half-erect. It didn’t register to me at first as genitalia, only some truncated, discolored limb. I watched it a second time with passive disinterest, and then a third. His dick turned abruptly from beige to pink in the middle, as if adhering to an arbitrary national border.

I imagined Brett thinking about me as he filmed, turning me around in his mind. How I would have loved to have a conversation with the version of myself he was fucking in his head. I felt so inside myself that I became dizzy.

Diego’s apartment was chaotically decorated and infinitely more charming than mine. He and his roommate both had a knack for thrifting and had managed to cover their walls with things that were at least interesting to look at, if not beautiful. They had one shelf I was particularly fond of filled with different salt and pepper shaker sets.

I said, while he scrolled through a list of movies we might watch, “So your old-man boyfriend sent me a video of himself jacking off last night.” The shaking in my voice first surprised me, then it unsettled me. I hated that there were parts of myself I was unable to control. I imagined the feeling of someone stroking the inside of my lungs, my larynx, in between my vocal folds. If it would feel like fingers on skin or something else, entirely foreign.

Diego paused his scrolling and took a second to process what I had said. He didn’t look away from the screen. “Oh, um. Well, I mean. We’re open. You knew we were.”

“Still. I just thought it was a little inappropriate. Shouldn’t I be off-limits?”

Diego fidgeted with his fingers nervously. “I don’t like to be controlling.”

“How is that controlling? I’m your best friend.”

“Just… either of you. I don’t want to be the person who says who you can and can’t have sex with.”

I stared at the window behind him. Diego lived in a second-story apartment right next to an L station. The biggest rat I’d ever seen ran along the tracks and I wondered why the rats never got shocked by the third rail. I would say I was afraid for them, but that wasn’t it. In fact, I was hoping to witness an electrocution. “Right, yeah.”

Diego fidgeted. He put down the remote and swiped his calluses against one another. “He was actually asking me the other night if I thought you’d be down to have a threesome. Or something.”

Sometimes when I masturbate I don’t actually think about sex, but about moments of drastic, unbearable intimacy just like this one. Diego caught my eye then looked away, and I knew that he was not really propositioning me in a meaningful way, but asking for a favor. And for him, I had only ever been able to acquiesce. I was capable of nothing else.

 I called myself bisexual for many years, even though I was not interested in women. This, principally, was because the word gay scared me. Once I said it, I was afraid there was no coming back from it. Or even worse. I was afraid that once I claimed it, someone might try to take it away from me. Some days I feel like my whole body still has claw marks. But I’ve learned this much, since my identity, like any, is primarily a reckoning: men are not always kind.

Every aspect of the occasion was unserious. It was not a threesome in any true sense. Brett fucked me while Diego watched. In this way he felt to me more like a chaperone than a participant. He only made an effort to look like he was into it when Brett was looking back at him.

I took advantage of Diego’s inattention to examine him. The thin trail of hair down the middle of his chest, the puckered scar on his left shoulder, the tan lines on his thighs and biceps. The slight divot on his waist, where I imagined my hand would fit perfectly. I imagined how warm his skin would have felt then, and I think I will imagine it for the rest of my life. Diego did not do the same to me. He found my body then as uninteresting as he always had. Sometimes, I used to wish he was disgusted by me — revulsion, at the very least, commands attention.

Brett ran his hand across my chest, where I still had very little sensation, only the outline of it. His hands in that moment seemed particularly selfish to me, almost irredeemably so.

I reached down with two fingers and listened to his pulse. It was so quick I thought his head might burst, and as soon as I thought that, I began wanting it earnestly. I wanted to watch his brain, sticky and wet, sliding down the off-white wall of his condominium. This type of release seemed as urgent and inevitable to me as his impending orgasm; in fact, the two became inextricably linked in my mind.

“Choke me,” he said, while my fingers were still lingering.

“What,” I said, training my eyes back on his face. He insisted, then, and finally engaged Diego’s attention as well. “Choke me, fucking choke me.”

I squeezed the sides of his throat with my right hand. I did it lightly at first, getting to know which parts of him were soft, which were taut, which would give and which wouldn’t.

“Harder,” he said, and I did it harder. And I did it harder, and then as hard as I could with one hand.

His eyes bulged for a second, once he realized that my pleasure lay not in the innocent thrill of mild kink, but in the proximity to true brutality. I wanted to exert myself onto him exactly in the way he’d done to me.

“Take your hand off him,” Diego said nervously after about thirty seconds of it, and I did. I’m glad it was him who asked. If it were Brett, I don’t think I could’ve.

When it was over I lay on my side and thought about mollusks and reptiles, and how they could molt. I wanted to take myself off and leave it behind.

It was another week before I answered Diego’s texts. I told him he could come over if he wanted, and that I wouldn’t stop him or anything. He stood in my narrow doorway and I left him there. I took a wet rag and began cleaning grime off my blank white walls just to look busy.

“Listen. I shouldn’t have asked that of you, okay? I know I made things weird.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but it’s okay.” It always amazed me how walls could get dirty, it’s not like I was constantly touching my walls or anything. But I knew, too, that sometimes mere existence could wear a thing down.

“Is it? You’re not acting like it is.”

“No, it’s fine.” I added, after a pause, “Just don’t make me hang out with him again. I mean it.”

Diego let out a long sigh, and finally came into my apartment. It was sizable for a studio, but still a studio. He looked at my bed, then sat on my couch. “You know,” Diego said, “sometimes I feel like I just want to empty myself out.” And what a tantalizing, impossible desire: to be vacant and adored. He wanted both Brett’s love and my friendship, blamelessly. I turned off my A/C unit because I was upset by the droning sound and the arid chill.

“It wouldn’t make you happy.”

He replied quickly, stepping over the end of my sentence, “Then I never want to want anything at all.”

“But you’ll always want something. That’s just being human.”

“I know,” he said, and he was exhausted. “I know.”

“All I said is I don’t want to see him again. I’m not upset with you. I’m not even upset with him.”

“You are, though. You’re just trying to spare my feelings.”

I put the rag down on my half-built shelf and sat next to him on the couch. I had seen him completely naked and yet I could barely handle our knees touching on the loveseat. The cushions were so old we were sinking into them. How small and insignificant our bodies really must have been, that they could fit on that tiny couch in that tiny apartment on that tiny street. How gigantic it all felt to me, regardless. “I’m not sure what you want me to say to that. I already told you how I feel.”

He shook his head and began shuffling his body forward. “Sorry. I should go. This isn’t helping, I’m just being weird. I shouldn’t have come over.”

I called his name and grabbed his wrist. When I pulled him back, he came crashing into me hard, his chin against my nose. It was a sharp, concentrated pain that grounded me. I was astounded by my body as a blunt instrument.

“It was an accident,” I said after a moment, but Diego already knew that and it made no difference to him. It was just something to say out loud. He pulled himself off me; my forehead was damp and I wasn’t sure if it was with my sweat or his. I hoped that it was both.

He brought his hand up to his lip and swished his tongue around in his mouth, before looking at me. “You’re bleeding,” he said quietly.

“No I’m not,” I said. Again, just to say something — I already felt the hot trickle of it seeping out of my nose and beginning to pool above my lip. The flow was languid and warm, like wax melting.

“You are,” he said, and he wiped it away with his sleeve before he could think better of it. It was a comfort to me though, imagining how the stain would never wash out of his t-shirt.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. It was an accident.” Diego got up then, unfolding himself. He crossed the room and opened my window, filling my apartment with the dead weight of late summer. In that moment I found the wet, heavy heat calming, like a blanket. Diego lay his arms on the windowsill and leaned his head outside. He played music quietly from his phone. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t muster up the feeling. I sat cross-legged by my coffee table and began rolling a joint.

When I was finished rolling, he lit the joint and took the first hit before passing it back to me. The smoke curled into evening air and I realized the blood had dried above my upper lip. It was starting to itch, but I felt like I wasn’t allowed to wash it off, yet, or that I couldn’t. Like I would be prematurely exiting a moment I hadn’t yet reconciled. There was the distant sound of cars and people talking, but I was always surprised by how quiet of a place Chicago could really be. The thrum of cicadas overpowered the city-sounds like traffic and street conversations.

Diego said, with an air of complete resignation that I’d never heard from him before, “Elis, do you think you’re capable of taking care of other people?”

“I don’t know,” I replied honestly.

Diego took another hit and said, “I don’t know if I am.”

“Some people aren’t. It’s fine.”

He rolled the joint around in his fingers and hacked up an ugly, phlegmy cough. I imagined running my fingers down the slope of his jawline.

“And I’m sorry for asking all that of you, with Brett. I am.”

“I know.” Sometimes, Diego would put out candles with his fingertips. It always struck me as something so fearless of him. It wasn’t fearless though, it was just something his calloused fingers were able to do. I thought he was about to do it with the joint, but he just looked at it for another few seconds and passed it back to me.

“But I’m so sorry.”

“It’s alright. It’s fine.”

“I wish it was.”

I thought, maybe, that was supposed to be the part where I kissed him. There were no parts, though. There was no anything. I listened to the blood pounding through my ears. Gushing.