by P. J. Vernon
I massage my throat.
“Oliver, is that…are those bruises?”
“Yeah.” My eyes dampen. “Yes.”
“What the hell happened?” Nathan’s voice climbs an octave. It does the same when he becomes accusatory, though this is not his intention now.
I’m on the brink of pushing an enormous bomb out an airplane’s bay doors.
“I was robbed.” There. I’ve said it. The bomb detonates with a concussive blast. I’m no longer in control of the damage it does. Nature and chance will determine what its fires burn and consume and destroy.
“Oh my god.” Nathan brings a hand to his mouth. His words, his actions hold sympathy. I’m relieved because I’m a victim. I’ve done nothing wrong. The world is chaotic, and I’ve been struck by the evil that stalks it. “Jesus Christ! He hurt you?”
A second nod. “I went for a run last night, around ten.” I maintain truth’s timeline. My golden rule for lying. “On the way home, somebody jumped—”
Nathan interrupts: “Somebody? One person? Or more?”
His analytical mind, clinical and often cold, turns. I almost see his neurons synapsing, hear the pop and crackle as they fire. He won’t make this easy, and I don’t resent him for it. I’d do the same were our roles reversed.
“One person,” I answer before qualifying. “I think one person.” Nathan won’t make this easy, but I can still muddy the waters at every bend. Every chance I get, I’m determined to obfuscate. To confuse and daze both of us.
“And he choked you?” Nathan decides my attacker’s male.
“He straddled me. On the sidewalk. He choked me, but when I threw my hands up, he stopped. I told him my wallet was in my back pocket. Said I had cash and cards, so he took it and bolted.”
“He didn’t speak, did he? To you? Did you hear his voice?”
“No.” I get ahead of Nathan’s line of questioning. “He wore a gray ski mask. I didn’t see any features. No identifiable marks. Nothing. Long sleeves, long pants, sweats.” I’m providing too many details. The color of the mask. The make of his pants. My voice stutters. The swelling sadness is very real. I’m reacting to actual events. They depart from my words in meaning, but they hurt as deeply.
“Oh my god,” Nathan repeats. “Shit. I’m so glad you’re okay.” He exhales as he says this, and he is glad. He’s thinking of all the ways this could’ve turned out. I could’ve died. He’s thinking he could’ve lost me—that upon his return to DC, he’d be identifying my body atop the sterile steel of an autopsy table. Instead, I’ll greet him, happily, from the curb at arrivals.
“Oliver, you need to see a doctor. Did you call the cops yet?”
“No.”
He raises an eyebrow. “No, you don’t want to see a doctor, or no, you haven’t phoned the police?” Nathan’s parenting me now. He’s ten years my senior, for one. And it’s in his nature. It serves him well in the operating room, but I resent it.
“I didn’t report it. There’s nothing to say to police. I can’t even give a description. I’ve called the bank. The cards are all canceled.” How much cash did I carry last night? I started with eighty dollars. Four twenties. The membership for Haus set me back forty, but I need to account for the entire amount withdrawn from the ATM. “Eighty bucks was taken. I know it’s not pocket change, but it’s not enough to warrant—”
“You could be seriously injured, Oliver. You need to be examined. And you need—”
“I need you home,” I say. “What I need is to not be alone.”
“I’m back soon.” He softens his tone. “It’s going to be okay. Everything’s gonna be okay.”
I permit myself to believe him, ignoring the fact that I’ve lied. His conclusion that everything’s gonna be okay rests on a foundation of untruth, and therefore, he cannot know this.
“Someone should come by. I’ll have Tom over to—”
“No,” I cut him off. “No, please. I don’t want company. I’ll be fine until you’re back.”
An uneasy silence settles between us.
“There’s something else,” I add. “Our bathroom. When I got home, I just wanted a shower. I needed to wash off from the pavement. I was upset and not thinking and I undressed in the tub. My clothes blocked the drain. I left it running. It flooded a bit.”
I brace again, body rigid as though this were a second bomb equal to my first in magnitude. From Nathan’s perspective, they couldn’t possibly be equated. A tiny voice needles: Or could they?
“That’s fine.” He smiles, and I rush to say I’ve already phoned Darryl, had him to the house, but Nathan interrupts. “It’s okay. We’ll fix it. Things are things. You’re okay and that’s what matters.”
You’re okay. Another conclusion drawn from lies. I’m the furthest thing from it. The raw self-awareness burns.
“Speaking of things,” Nathan starts, half his smile vanishing. “Funny, huh?”
“What?”
“Your phone,” he says, but I don’t follow at first. “He didn’t take your phone.”
My heart rate spikes. My phone. Fuck. Another mistake. I bottle my reaction, but my face has already changed. My jawline, tensed and betraying.
“Just thought he would’ve taken it.”
“It happened fast. I don’t know he had time to think. When he got the wallet, it was over for him. These guys are opportunists.” I make this last observation with a hint of authority. The fact is, I should know. We’re both aware I’ve stolen before. Before Nathan. When the man in my life was named Hector.
Nathan agrees. He tells me he loves me, and he couldn’t be happier I’m safe. He calls me a survivor, even. He has no idea how much so, but I must say the words now. They still taste like hot vinegar. “I love you too.”
“I’ll see you in the morning.” A quick grin and the call’s over. My screen, black.
I fall back onto a plush cushion. Our coffered ceiling, the object of my blank gaze. I exhale and knead my sternum as though digging inside myself to massage my heart. But there’s no denying it: I’m relieved. A sudden weight vanishes. I’ve accomplished no small feat, speaking to Nathan just now.
My phone. It’s not the implausibility of an attacker not taking it, it’s the oversight. The fact that I didn’t think of it beforehand. I’m capable of glaring mistakes, and what else haven’t I considered?
MeetLockr. I need to delete the app.
Last night at Haus was an escalation, the culmination of many building moments. Boundaries broken, lines scuttled, thresholds crossed. I’d started weeks ago, growing more brazen, thirstier with each passing day.
Nathan was on call at the hospital. Friday night, and the house was all mine. I ambled down to the cellar and plucked a cobwebbed bottle of red. A pinot noir ironically labeled “Mephistopheles.” If Nathan blunts the edge of his days with four pours of smooth bourbon, no reason I couldn’t indulge. He’s the one separating flesh by scalpel, not me. There’s a world of difference between my reception desk and his OR.
Besides, wine’s not trouble for me. Though I worry about Nathan occasionally, and more so recently, alcohol’s never been my problem.
Halfway through the bottle—Phil Collins’s “Another Day in Paradise” on the record player, laptop open on the dining room table—I simply looked. No harm in that, I told myself. The hundred-billionth human to ever say such a thing.
I logged on to Casual Encounters. M4M. Men for men.
Next, I scrolled through them. Read them. NSA; no strings attached. Permitted my mind to devour sentences and posted photos. A menagerie of butterflies teemed in my stomach. My breathing, heavy.
Masc Jock Seeks Power Bottom. Clean. DDF.
Masc meaning masculine. An alpha-male type. Not discernably gay. Power bottom: a receiving partner able to take control. DDF: drug- and disease-free. No STIs. No meth or Mol
ly.
Smooth Bottom Twink for PnP. Hung white guys to the front of the line. Must be cut.
PnP: party and play. Nearly the opposite of DDF. I’ve never met this guy, but I already know him. I’ve encountered countless iterations of him in the past. He’s a twink, meaning hairless and young. A gay wide-eyed deer or lamb, though judging by his post, the image of innocence is deceptive. He’s a bottom, as he indicated. Casually racist. A size queen with strict specifications.
Pig Hosting at Airport Marriott. Bare Only. Dump Load and Leave.
Self-explanatory.
JPEGs accompanied most of the posts. Hard dicks. Backsides. Boys bent over. Rarely faces, and I never engaged anyone. Never replied. In the beginning, it was enough to simply look. I’d masturbate and promptly shut my computer. My interest, significantly waned.
Thumbing through my phone now, I find the next rung in my escalation. A gay hookup app. MeetLockr. It allows a single profile pic, and GPS tracking shares the physical distance between two users. A surrogate measure of the ease with which sex between them is possible. Unlike the Casual Encounters site, I had conversations here.
I downloaded a separate app to hide it from Nathan, who knows all my passwords and frequently uses my phone when his is charging or out of reach. The app disguised a folder with the icon of something innocuous—a calculator. The idea came from a New York Times piece on teens hiding sexts from Mom the same way. Open the PIN-protected “calculator” and there’s MeetLockr.
Hidden apps within hidden folders or not, I must delete it. All of it. And not just to cover my tracks should Nathan grow suspicious, but for my own sanity. I’ve endured terror, panic, guilt, sadness. Kristian’s long fingers in my tumbler, ice cracking between his sharp teeth. But stringing all these feelings together in a single, sinewy thread? Shame.
I’ve already cleared my browser history, but now I’ll delete both this app and the one that conceals it.
I open the false calculator, hover over MeetLockr, hesitate.
I need only to press my thumb and swipe all this bullshit into oblivion. To excise it from my life like a malignancy. But I don’t. The cogs in my brain turn. Steam gathers in vats inside my mind. Pressure builds, begs for release. Maybe even on its hands and knees.
One look. I’ll have one look; I’ll masturbate and forget everything during those precious few seconds when I’m done. A last go before it’s over. Done with forever.
MeetLockr takes longer than usual to load, and my cheeks flush. My right hand trembles. I slip it beneath the elastic waist of my sweats. Feet on the coffee table, I spread my legs. Inside my underwear, I take hold of myself and tug.
My left hand scrolls through my message in-box, searching. Smearing my screen with sweat. Countless exchanges with countless men, none of whom I’ve met or seen in real life—I think. I search for a meaty thread. One where we’d talked at length. Exchanged dick pics. Admitted to long-buried fantasies only anonymity can surface. Fetishes that persist deep beneath the psyche like fungus in damp soil.
I open one such exchange and carefully search each pic the man sent. I’m getting closer. Edging toward orgasm.
A noise springs from my phone, and I jolt. A startling that almost makes me cum. The chime’s familiar. It has spurred exhilaration many times in recent days. A new message.
I open it. The account displays ! instead of an alphanumeric username. The avatar is a headless torso. Trim and muscular. The picture ends at the man’s neck. Adonis’s, fresh from a visit to the Gay Guillotine. A blue text bubble appears.
Hi.
Impulse sends my thumbs typing, but I stop myself from answering. This isn’t why I’m here. That feeling, the shame, this is over. Whatever this was. Whatever’s wrong with my life, with Nathan specifically, it no longer justifies this.
I’m about to delete this message—and all the others. My erection has vanished along with any swollen desire. Another bubble appears. The bouncing ellipsis of a forthcoming reply.
It’s a photo.
A knowing smile. Ice-blue eyes as deep as the angry slash in his cheek.
Hi Oliver.
II. Dyspnea
Breath is held involuntarily, blood pressure spikes, and pupils dilate.
7
NATHAN
When I close my eyes, Oliver’s throat is all I see. The violent bruises circling his neck like a garrote. He could’ve died. He says some son-of-a-bitch tweaker stole his wallet, but what he meant was some son-of-a-bitch tweaker nearly stole him from me. Irrevocably.
I’d hung up, half stumbled from my room, and beelined for the bar where Mother had rendered unsolicited judgment barely twenty-four hours ago. In this new light, her “advice” seemed even crueler, and I was palpably angry. Two double bourbons smoothed the edges but, given my present task, they may have been overkill.
Oliver lived. Oliver is fine. The only fallout is hard lessons, learned hard.
From the back of Lecture Hall E, I both scroll through my slide deck and quadruple-guess the stiff drinks. Colleagues trickle in for the day’s final talk. The presentation—“Tough Choices in Trauma”—is mine, and fuck if I can concentrate. It’s a case study with a laughable title, but I’ve added thorough notes to each and every slide. These bullets are even more important because I’ve taken creative liberties with small details.
Not lies. Omissions. Mostly.
You’ve only got to read them, Nathan. No one expects anything performative. Get through it. Get home. Get Oliver’s injuries examined by someone besides Oliver.
“Dr. Klein, hello.” A mousy young woman in an NYU blazer taps my shoulder. Second year at best, no makeup, eye bags so large an airline would make her check them. “I’ve got iced water already onstage.”
Neat bourbon would be grand.
“Did you bring a flash drive?”
And why would Oliver not go straight to an ER? Or the police station?
“A what? Sorry. What did you say?”
“A flash drive?” She gestures to an AV setup at the front, and I wonder how keen this mouse’s nose is when it comes to alcohol. “To load your presentation?”
“Yes, I did. Here.” I shut my laptop and fish through the bespoke bag by my feet.
“Thank you, sir.” She hesitates when I surrender the drive. Perhaps she’s caught a note of liquor after all. And sir? How old does she think I am?
“Is there something else?”
“Uh,” she stutters. “It’s three till. Shouldn’t you take the podium?”
I check my watch for no good reason and make for the stage. Just get through it, I repeat over and over and over. It’s a room full of trauma surgeons. All a particular breed of distilled narcissist. Of the general US population, sociopathy occurs at an estimated frequency of 1 percent. Among incarcerated males? Twenty-five. And in this particular room at this particular time?
You don’t want to know.
I could strip naked and slur the whole goddamn thing—slides in Comic Sans—and not a single, self-involved claimant of the esteemed title of Fellow, American College of Surgeons, would raise an eyebrow. Not while quietly memorizing their own presentation notes. Or choosing cherry-red paint for the BMW they’re ordering online like DoorDash. Or perusing Tinder or Grindr or Bumble or MeetLockr for that last, tepid hotel fuck before flying home to wives with saline breasts or husbands with spray-tanned obliques.
“All set?” Needy Mouse has followed me to the front. Breathing down my own neck while Oliver’s finger-shaped bruises flicker behind my eyelids.
“I am.”
“How about warnings? I can signal when you’re running out of time—”
“Fifteen minutes.” I smile, and before she can ask another goddamn question: “For Q and A. And then five to wrap up.”
“Sure thing, Dr. Klein.” She scampers off as the lights draw low
on a full house of white coats. Deep breath in. Forget Oliver. You can forget Oliver. One hour, and that’s it. I adjust the skinny mic, and here we go.
“Good evening. I’m Dr. Nathan Klein. Combat Casualty Care. Walter Reed hospital.” Cue obligatory conference joke: “I’m today’s last talk, so I’ll keep it short. I just ask that you do the same. Keep pontificating to a minimum.”
Obligatory laughter and electric-blue light beams from a one-story screen to my right.
“This is an early career case study from my residency in South Bend, Indiana. OR management—the nuances, the communication, the order—it’s all on-the-job training, and this was mine.” I strike the space bar too hard, and a ten-foot photo of mangled human materializes onscreen. A black bar across his eyes for privacy. Though I recall them having rolled so far back into his skull, the censorship is a formality at best.
“Caucasian male. Twenty-two years old. Rural Indiana kid.” It occurs to me I could also be describing Oliver and my voice breaks. “Polytrauma stemming from an agricultural accident.”
I move to the next slide, but what if things hadn’t stopped where Oliver said? What if he’d been killed and a decade later some Dr. Jackass paints a black bar over his shredded face?
“Injuries included—”
“What was the accident?” A man interrupts, his face masked by hot projector bulbs.
“I said agricultural.”
“No shit. It’s Indiana.” Man was generous. Asshole is more accurate. “But what specifically? Combine? Farm structure collapse?”
“Tractor overturn,” I snap, and hope he reads it for irritation. “By far the most common rural trauma beyond vehicular. Hemothorax, spleen laceration, left femur fracture, and, this is important”—I take a sip of water and hope no one notices my tremor—“a severed thumb.”
A breeze of chuckles from the featureless crowd.
“During resuscitation, the thumb arrived onsite. Patient’s friend dropped it off in a cooler full of ice. Bagged between cans of Busch Light.”
More snickering and the low hum of useless AC. I tug my wet collar.