by Gregory Ashe
Tean nodded.
“Excuse me,” Jem said, and he hurried into the bathroom with stilted movements.
The water ran for a long time. Tean made sure Scipio had dinner, and then he lay down on the bed. It was like an airport, your flight delayed, he thought as his thoughts got looser, hazier. Everybody around you going somewhere fast, fast, fast, and all you could do was sit there and watch.
Only one time did Jem try sex; since coming back from Moab, they’d used the bed for sleeping and nothing else. He undressed Tean slowly, trailing kisses everywhere he could reach. His hands were like worn-out flint, raising tiny flashes of heat where they used to start fires. Or maybe Tean was the one who was worn-out. The kissing and the touching went on for a long time, through it all Jem murmuring, “I love you. God, you have no idea how much I love you.”
“I love you too,” Tean whispered, mussing Jem’s perfect hair with clumsy caresses.
The kissing and the touching went on too long. Jem settled back on his haunches, his well-developed chest and shoulders and arms on display, his dick hard and wet. “I want you to fuck me.”
“Jem—”
“Please. I’ve never—I mean, not since, you know. But I love you, and I trust you, and I want not to feel so fucked up about it.”
Propping himself on his elbows, Tean said, “Thank you. I know what that means for you. But—”
“Tean, I’m ready. I want this.”
Tean shook his head. “No, that’s not what I was going to say. I’m not—I don’t think I’m going to get hard.”
Jem bit his lip. The only light came from the moon, filtering through the window, and it made the tears shine in his eyes.
“I still want to . . . be with you tonight,” Tean said quietly. He touched Jem, and a noise caught in Jem’s throat. “Please?”
Jem nodded, and the movement made the tears spill over and leave platinum tracks down his cheeks. They went slowly, even at the end, Jem’s arms curled protectively around Tean as he finished. Then he put his face on Tean’s bare shoulder. He felt to Tean like he had a fever; the salt made his skin sticky.
“Please tell me what I can do,” Jem mumbled. “Please tell me how to make it better.”
“You don’t need to do anything,” Tean whispered, stroking the short blond hair at Jem’s nape, his fingers running lower into the beads of sweat along Jem’s upper back. “Everything’s fine.”
It was the Saturday before Thanksgiving when Jem came into the apartment apple-cheeked, wearing his winter coat: heavy, undyed wool with broad colored bands across the chest in red, yellow, blue, and green. He had on one of Tean’s old scarves, which he had declared retro as fuck when he’d found it in the closet. Tean and Scipio were on the couch—Tean reading, Scipio snoozing. Scipio jumped down, shook himself, and padded over to greet Jem. Jem kissed his muzzle, crossed the room, and kissed Tean’s muzzle too. Then he took the book.
“A History of Circus Fires?”
“Don’t worry,” Tean said. “None of the animals got hurt.”
With a small smile, Jem closed it and put it aside.
“I was reading that,” Tean said.
“Your sweatshirt is ok, but you need either jeans or tech pants with long underwear. Heavy socks, your Keens, and your winter coat. Like we’re going on a hike.”
“What’s happening?”
Jem grinned, exposing the crooked front teeth. “We’re going on a hike.”
“I’m not sure I’m up to—”
“We’re going on a hike, Tean.”
“No, I didn’t sleep much last night, so I’m going to lie down and—”
“Teancum Leon, either you get ready yourself, or I get you dressed, and the whole time I’ll be singing the full musical score from Man of La Mancha.”
Tean’s eyes narrowed.
“To dream—”
“You’re a monster.”
“I’m just getting warmed up. I memorized that whole one about Dulcinea.”
Twenty minutes later, they were in Tean’s new truck, Jem behind the wheel. Scipio was in the back seat, snuffling at Jem’s hair and occasionally licking it. Tean was worried that Jem didn’t even seem to notice. He was even more worried when he saw the cooler, tent, sleeping bags, and various other pieces of gear strapped down in the bed of the truck.
“Did you raid my storage unit?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m kidnapping you.”
Tean sighed and let his head fall against the window.
“We’re not going back until this is better. It doesn’t have to be a hundred percent better. It doesn’t even have to be one percent better. But I can’t do this, watch you die by inches. I’m not going to do it.”
“So, your plan is to kidnap me, hold me captive, and wait for me to somehow get better, even though there’s nothing wrong with me—”
“That, right there. That’s the first thing that’s going to stop.”
They were heading south, cutting through the Wasatch Mountains. The scrub oak on the slopes was an autumn blaze, rippling in the wind, the whole world come alive in one last gasp before winter.
“And we’re going to camp?”
“That’s right.”
“You’re going to camp?”
“I resent that tone. Well, only a little.”
“So I guess it’s safe to assume you packed the insulated sleeping mats because it’s so cold, and you got the mess kits, and the cookware, and you remembered vegetable oil for the cast iron, and you got extra fuel for the stove.”
“First of all, rude. Very rude. Your whole demeanor.”
“So you didn’t grab our pillows, the lantern, new mantles for the lantern, a multitool, my hatchet, biodegradable soap—”
“For your information,” Jem said, his chin coming up, “I got all of it. Including the manterns.”
“Mantles. And lanterns. Two separate things.”
“That’s not even what I was trying to say. I said manterns.”
“Right. You meant to say manterns.”
“It’s a lantern shaped like a man.”
“Uh huh.”
“It’s a sex thing. And before you get on your high horse again . . .” Jem drew a big breath. “I asked Maddie.”
It took Tean a moment. “Maddie Beck? My conservation officer?”
“Well, she’s not your property, but—ow! Don’t pinch me!”
Scipio barked a warning that was clearly directed at both of them.
Massaging his arm, Jem shot a glare at Tean and said, “She made a list.”
“You just happened to keep in touch with her?”
“No, dumdum. I went to your office to spy on you because I’ve been so scared, and I bumped into her.”
“Hold on. You’ve been spying on me?”
“Yes, obviously, because I love you.” Jem made a frustrated noise. “What are you not understanding about this?”
Tean honestly didn’t know what to say to any of that, so he settled for taking his boyfriend’s hand and lacing their fingers together.
The drive was easy. They stopped a few times for Scipio to stretch his legs. They left behind the mountains and the steppes and moved into the high desert: the rolling ground of bitterbrush and quinine, dockweed and ephedra, rabbitbrush with its tiny brown leaves. As they went south, prickly pear and barrel cactus began to appear, and yucca, and datura—the witch’s weed, the angel’s trumpet, its flower persisting until first frost, tiny white bells that opened the door to another world.
A part of Tean had known where they were going when Jem headed south out of Salt Lake. Now, as they turned onto a dirt BLM road and headed northeast into a canyon, he felt a fist close around his chest. Part of him knew he was holding Jem’s hand too tightly; he could see where the skin of Jem’s fingers whitened from the pressure. But Jem just looked over at him, expression steady, and Tean nodded and let ou
t a breath.
When they reached the end of the road, Tean got Scipio out of the back, fitted him with the harness, and took Jem’s hand again. They made their way down the switchbacks. Beneath them, the lower canyon was vibrant in a way it hadn’t been in the summer: the orange and red of the scrub oak; the white, rose-shaped autumn blossoms of Apache plumes, their lavender styles barely visible at a distance; the final blush of pink feathers that clung to the tamarisks—the last of the fall bloom. A dead place could come alive. Even at the end of the year, even with winter creeping closer, a dead place could come alive again.
When his gaze rested on the cabin, Tean took deep breaths to steady himself. Instead of gunpowder, he smelled sage and salt cedar and pinyon pine, the dust on the pepperwort. Instead of the clap of a shot, he heard the river’s song, the song it sang to itself. Instead of that terrible pounding of hate and fear, he felt something else. The echoes of that hate and fear, yes. But something else too. Something Tean couldn’t name yet.
They followed the switches to the canyon’s floor. Jem waited for Tean to take the lead, and after a full minute, Tean started walking. He kept his grip on Jem’s hand. The cabin loomed in his vision.
For Augustine, eternity was singular, not chronological: a single, perfect moment. For Bill Murray, hell was the same frozen day, again and again. Tean remembered the gun bucking in his hand, Tanner with the hole torn in his throat, still sitting up, his face confused like he didn’t understand.
The desert on the cusp of winter made something move inside Tean, something that came unmoored by the hard land around him. His mind searched for a reason, for an answer. How could a place be more than a place, inside you as well as outside? How could geography become a map for the soul, and the soul an index for the world? He knew some of it. He’d read. For the ancients, deserts had been the edge of the world, the limit of civilization. The end. To walk into the desert was to step outside the realm of men and enter the domain of owls and dragons, demons and angels. To walk into the desert was to find a god in a burning bush, to be tempted by a devil. In the desert, apocalypse. An end. An unveiling.
Beyond the rimrock, hoodoos and goblins and spires looked down into the canyon. Beyond them, the sky was purple, Tyrian and limitless. The last of the sun followed the striped sandstone; bands of peach and pink darkened to hematite red. Tean understood, as they walked deeper into the shadows, the desert’s claim on prophets and madmen: the alienness of stone, the vast, open spaces, life driven back to the cracks of existence but persisting, the bones of the world laid bare, tissue peeled back in a dissection of eternity.
At the cabin, Tean let go of Jem’s hand. He took the steps up to the porch, tested the handle, and found that it turned. He pushed it open. It was much as he remembered it: the old, ash-choked stove; the bunks with their bare slats; the ceramic basin. Different, too. The boards were darker now in places, and one of the bunks was gone—the one that Tanner had shot, damaging the frame. A ranger, or possibly a volunteer, had whitewashed the cabin’s interior walls, hiding the stains that must have marred the logs. He knew he was imagining it, but he thought he could smell the lime in the wash, mineral, not unpleasant. His steps clicked crisply against the boards as he crossed the cabin, and he opened the door and went out the back. He took the steps down and turned; Scipio scrambled past him.
Jem stood in the doorway. The last of the light picked out the gold and silver in his beard, and the hair, dirty blond, was in its usual part and fade. The collagen ripple of the scar on the side of his head was one more reminder. Tean waited for the declarations: if you hadn’t acted, on and on like that. Maybe the insistence: I’d be dead, do you understand that, dead, and he was a monster, and he deserved to die. If Jem said any of that, what would happen? Tean would wade into the river and let the Dolores drown him against the rocks. Or maybe he’d just climb up to the truck and ask to go home.
But all Jem said was, “Beep beep boop?”
Tean’s eyes stung with the rush of it all: Jem’s pillow hair, Jem’s crooked front teeth, the way Jem had spent hours untangling Christmas lights and insisting he could find the bad bulb, the way his beard tickled when they kissed, the shape of his shoulders when he curled up on the couch to watch TV with Scipio. What is the universe, he wanted to ask, except a desert? And what is a desert except a place where life holds on?
He played it out once more in his head: Jem broken, trying so hard to be good, and turning away from Tanner. Tanner lifting the gun.
Tean’s hand came up, floating the way the gun had floated, and he helped Jem down the steps. “Beep,” he said softly as Jem came to him. “And a little boop.”
They pushed through the brake of salt cedar. Dusty pink plumes tickled Tean’s neck, and he smelled the river, and then they were free, moving out into the canyon again. Something had relaxed inside him, a muscle contracted like a held breath. No, no, that wasn’t right. It was like stepping through a door, from one room to another. The same house of grief, but a different room. A little bigger, a little brighter, the sense of relief like he could stand a little straighter, ease cramped muscles. And there would be a room after that, and a room after that.
They climbed the switches, letting Scipio stop to mark the turns and sniff a clump of mule’s ears. The Lab sneezed, his whole body shaking with the force of it, and for some reason that made Jem laugh. Jem clapped a hand over his mouth, shooting a worried look at Tean, but Tean just smiled and squeezed his hand.
When they got to the top, Tean scouted the rim until he found a safe spot, and then they sat with their legs hanging out over empty air. Jem scooted closer, put his arm around Tean, and drew him against his shoulder.
“I don’t know if I can be who I was,” Tean said. “I’ll try, but I just don’t know.”
Jem pushed back his hair. “I don’t want you to be who you were. I just want you to get better. And I want to be with you.” He ran his hand through Tean’s hair again, and Tean wondered how it looked. Impossibly wild, he guessed, after the long day and the hike and Jem messing with it. Then Jem said, “Can I give you something?”
Tean nodded.
From a coat pocket, Jem withdrew an oblong black vinyl case. He opened it and withdrew a pair of glasses: simple black frames, slightly more fashionable than what Tean probably would have picked out for himself, although he couldn’t say how exactly they were different. The way Jem held the new glasses was a question.
Tean nodded, and Jem eased the taped, broken frames from his face and replaced them with the new glasses. Tean was surprised at the difference. The glasses didn’t just fit better; he could see much more clearly.
“I guess I didn’t know how badly scratched the old lenses were.”
“You like them?”
Tean tested the fit. “I love them.”
Jem kissed him, and then they sat, the sun burning out behind them.
“Is it weird that I might miss my old ones, though?” Tean asked after a while.
“We’ll keep them. They’ll be your backups.” Jem made a funny noise in his chest, and then he said, “I brought one other thing. I don’t—I don’t want to scare you, but I’ve thought about it a lot, and I figured if things went well today, if it felt right, maybe . . .”
Tean shifted around; he was surprised to see Jem’s face blotchy with color, Jem blinking rapidly as he drew something else from his pocket. A packet of papers, Tean realized when Jem pressed it into his hands. Tean unfolded it slowly, trying to make sense of the pictures and numbers. It was a real estate listing. A house. A brick bungalow in Federal Heights that had been on the market for months.
“We can afford it.” Jem cleared his throat. “Tinajas helped me run the numbers on it. And it has a yard for Scipio. It’s not far from your work.”
“It’s lovely. But I’m still saving up for a down payment, and—”
“Actually, you don’t need to. My mom, my birth mom, Brigitte, whatever I’m supposed to call her—she�
�s been sending me checks. I don’t want them, and I didn’t ask for them, but then I thought, fuck, I might as well use them.”
“A down payment for this house would be—”
“Tean, she’s been sending a lot of checks.”
Tean tried to choose his next words carefully. “I love you. A lot. So much, actually, that it scares me. And I want to say yes to this. But ending things with Ammon, Jem, it almost killed me. And I can’t help thinking that it might happen with you. You’ll get tired of how weird I am, or you’ll realize how much better you can do, or you’ll decide you need space, and if that happens, Jem, it really will kill me. And I don’t know how I can say yes when I’m so afraid of how things are going to end.”
A breeze ran through the canyon, stirring the dwarf junipers so that the branches creaked and the leaves rustled. Then the breeze died, and the canyon held its breath.
“You know how you told me that everything ends?” Jem said quietly. “How death is what gives life meaning, and how our anxiety over death, our fear of it, propels us to live life truly and authentically? How everything has to have an end, and how looking into the face of that reality is so terrifying that most people will choose something safer, something easier, rather than coexist with their fear?”
“You must have heard that on Darkwing Duck. Ow, ow, ow, jeez! You’re ripping my hair out.”
“Oops,” Jem said, smoothing the locks he had just pulled. “Did that jog your memory?”
“Yes,” Tean growled as he snuggled into Jem’s shoulder again. “I remember something that might have sounded something like that.”
The first nighthawk sped across the sky, and over the Dolores’s murmur, a coyote howled. The breeze lifted again, carrying the fragrance of wild sage. On the far rim of the canyon, a tumbleweed spun into the thickening shadows. As Tean watched, the last of the daylight thinned, limning the redrock walls in gold.
Jem tilted Tean’s head up. “Maybe you’re right about all that. Maybe everything does end. Maybe that’s the only way things have meaning.”
Tean swallowed against the knot in his throat.