The River in Winter

by Matt Dean

I ignored the barking man, ignored his barking dog. I doddered, faltered, rushed.

  At last I came to the stairs. I plunged into the beach's narrow gullet. My footsteps thundered against the wood and steel in a fugal basso crescendo. At the bottom, I paused to catch my breath. In a grove of trees and bushes, off to my left, branches rattled. A twig snapped.

  A figure-broad and tall as a truck, indistinct but undeniably male-emerged from the shadows. His face was a pale blur. I sensed movement near what must be his beltline. I feared he might have a knife or a gun or a club. But then he moved aside his hand to reveal what appeared, in the dark, as a white smudge. With a gloved hand he pawed himself. The white smudge burgeoned into a column. A little way off the path, I sank my knees into the dirt and took him into my mouth.

  He was thick and meaty and tasted of wool and mint. I reached up to fondle his balls. He leapt back, tittering. "Cold hands," he said. For a man so large, his voice was astonishingly high in pitch. I muttered an apology, not caring if he heard or understood. I walked forward on my wet knees. I sucked.

  For many minutes, I worked him with my lips and tongue. He was not quick. I felt my own erection bulge uncomfortably against the fly of my jeans, and then soften. He moaned and placed his hands on my head. I grew hard again, and then soft, and then hard.

  I quickened my pace. The wet sound of my mouth on him seemed quite loud in my own ears. I feared my sucking might be heard up on the street. My tongue went numb. I gagged and choked. My jaw began to ache-his cock was very thick, and it seemed to be growing thicker-and after some time I could only suck him deeply and slowly and at as even a pace as I could manage.

  After a time, though my knees ached and my jaw ached and my hands were numb, I began to wish that the man would never come, that I could go on sucking him forever.

  My erection swelled, flagged, swelled again.

  At last the man sputtered a warning. "I'm coming." His gloved hands brushed my ears and came to rest on my shoulders. Again I quickened my pace, and I ignored the catch in my jaw. I didn't stop. I swallowed.

  He thanked me, buttoned his jeans. Whistling merrily, he mounted the stairs. I stood and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. I veered off the path, crashed into the thicket. There were no more men-no more black silhouettes-prowling through the bare branches.

  I wanted to be a mouth, an open channel, a gullet, a hole. I wanted to still my roiling thoughts, to kill my brain and its ceaseless churning. I wanted to be used, thrown away, used, thrown away, used again. I wanted to be wanted.

  Now I wished I'd turned the other way on the river road. I wished I'd started at the other end of the beach. Inch by inch, step by step, yard by yard, man by man, I could have made my way toward the boathouse-no, not the boathouse, the empty place where it had stood.

  For minutes or hours I waited in the thicket, wandering around in circles on its narrow paths. Time came to seem elastic, if not faintly ridiculous. I thought I heard footsteps in the brush, but it must have been a squirrel or a bird. I thought I heard footsteps on the stairs, but it must have been the wind shaking the steel frame. No one came.

  Leaves rustled and crunched under my feet. I was exhausted. My legs were sore and weak.

  Suddenly, I wanted to see the square patch of black earth where the boathouse had been. I returned to the paved path. I stumbled along, walking northward. I passed through a patch of black ground, the gelid shadow of the Franklin Avenue Bridge. The drone of traffic above me might have been hundreds of miles away. Somewhere above and behind was the pedestrian bridge. The cage had been open at the top. I could have climbed it. If only I'd climbed the fence, if only I'd sailed like a hawk into the open air, had fallen to the pavement, had shattered like a block of ice under the wheels of that rumbling semi.

  * * *

  When at last I sat on the dock, it might have been nine o'clock at night, or four in the morning.

  I sat cross-legged on the frosty planks. The river slid by beneath me. Ice chinked against the dock's iron piles. My thoughts, if they could be called thoughts, were chaotic, inchoate. My beautiful lost boat. Sam Stinson. Tom. Beethoven. Eliot. Charlie. Each seemed to be an avatar of something else, of an emotion I could not quite feel, an idea I could not quite articulate.

  Behind me I heard footsteps in the leaves. "Jonas?" someone said.

  I turned. At first I saw only the rosy light of streetlamps, glimmering through trees. "Jonas, is that you?"

  From the left, a man appeared, as broad and tall as the man I'd met along the path, so that I thought he had followed me or had found me again. I wondered how he'd learned even this approximation of my name. But I saw, then, that this was not the figure of a particularly tall man; rather, he stood a few feet above me, on a distant bank. And when he spoke again-"What are you doing here, buddy?"-I recognized his voice. Michael Walton.

  He stepped onto the dock. When he squatted beside me, I saw that sweat steamed off him, that damp strands of hair clung to his forehead. He was dressed for running, in gray Asics sneakers, a long-sleeved US Rowing T-shirt, and warm-ups of whispery black nylon. His face furrowed into such a deep frown that I wondered what I must look like. I turned away and chafed my cheeks against my knees.

  Michael took my chin in his hands, lifted my face toward him. "Are you okay?" He brushed something from the hollow beneath my left eye.

  All at once I understood: I had been-was still-weeping. I dabbed my tears with the sleeve of my jacket. The cold, stiff leather burned my skin.

  "You're not shivering," he said. "Were you shivering before? Did you stop shivering?"

  Hooking his fingers under my armpits, he lifted me to my feet. He took my hands, held them up to the light. "Are your fingers numb?" he asked me. "What about your toes? How long have you been out here?" He grasped the wrist of my right hand and held it for many minutes, it seemed, while he stared at his watch. He dropped my hand, then took it up again and held it in both of his hands, gently rubbing my fingers and palms.

  "Would you say something, please?" he said.

  "The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain."

  "I think you might be hypothermic."

  "In Hartford, Hereford, and Hampshire-." The words slurred on my tongue and lodged themselves at the back of my throat. I stopped.

  "How did you get here? Where's your car?"

  "In the shop," I said. "I was looking for a cab." That must sound ridiculous. Looking for a cab? Here? I had been looking for a cab much, much earlier, though, hadn't I? I couldn't quite think how to explain how I had gotten from that point to this.

  He aimed me toward land, toward light. He started walking, pulling me along. "My place is a few blocks from here. You can call a cab from there, after we get you warmed up."

  "You're all sweaty," I said. "You'll be hypo-hypo-hypodermic by the time we get there."

  "Fuck that," he said, and then, "Walk faster, please."

  As we crossed the scorched earth where the boathouse had been, I tripped on a charred chunk of wood. The choking smell of ash filled my nose. I fought a sneeze.

  Taking my hand, Michael hauled me up the bank and onto the broad paved path where he'd no doubt been running when he'd spotted me. I glanced back. How on earth had he spotted me, sitting way out there on the dock? It was inky black out there, no sign of the dock at all.

  Now that I thought about it, I suspected that perhaps I had for a time been bawling and shouting Tom's name. Maybe Michael had heard me.

  We walked north, away from the beach. Trees arched over the path. I trudged along beside him, insensible of nearly everything but the warmth and solidity of his body against me.

  A little way along we came to a stairway. Steep flights led up a steep bank. It was a tough climb. Ice, dirt, pebbles, cigarette butts, and sticks clogged the stairway's shallow concrete treads. Halfway up, a tree limb hung low over the handrail, and I hit my head. I slipped back, faltered on the gritty ice. Michael clutched my elbow, helped me up.

 
We emerged at last onto the campus. To our left lay a tall tower of red brick. The hospital. To the right there was a row of dormitories, also red brick.

  On the street I was dimly aware of people around us. Just behind us, someone said, quite sharply, "On your left." A bicyclist, bundled up in a parka and a scarf and gloves, riding fast. He jangled a tinny bell. Michael pulled me aside, onto the boulevard, to let the bike pass. I felt drunk and stupid.

  He led me through a gap between dormitory buildings, into an empty quad. Hundreds of bikes stood in sagging ranks, locked to steel racks. We passed an empty basketball court, an empty volleyball pit.

  We stopped at the front door of a squat brick building. The bricks had been painted yellow and tan. Michael propped me against the door and dug a key out of his shoe. "Roos," I said, and giggled.

  * * *

  His apartment was a single room with a row of cupboards along one side and a closet-sized bathroom in the opposite corner. The walls were concrete block, pale green. A wall of single-paned windows, though closed, poured icy air into the room. A bare queen mattress lay on the floor in a muddle of sheets and blankets. Near the head of the bed, four stacks of milk crates and an old hollow-core door served as a desk. Everywhere there were piles of books.

  Michael stripped naked. In a couple of deft moves he had me out of my jacket and sweater. It all happened so fast. I stood there like a dolt, blinking and dumb, certain that I had just witnessed some kind of magic trick.

  "What?" I said. I discovered that I was staring at his penis, pink and stout in a nest of curly black hair. My heart thumped.

  "You're hypothermic. More than a little. We need to get you warmed up." He fumbled with my belt buckle. "This is how it's done."

  "If you want me to suck your dick, you can just ask." I thought of the man I'd sucked along the path at the beach, and my cock stiffened.

  He took a step back. He looked at me. "Take your pants off," he said. "Underwear, too."

  While I obeyed him, he knelt on the floor and made the bed. Flat sheet, blanket, quilt. He smoothed the covers over the mattress. Standing, he led me to the bed.

  "I feel fine," I said.

  "You're disoriented. Your pupils are dilated. You're lethargic. You're ataxic, which is Greek for you're a clumsy fuck. Your speech is slurred and your breathing is rapid and you aren't shivering. You're hypothermic, in other words. Get into the fucking bed, please."

  He lifted the covers and I crawled underneath them. He rolled in after me. He lay facing me, pulled me toward him, wrapped his arms and legs around me. His skin was dry now, but as cool as marble. His body was dense with muscle. Against my leg his genitals were a packet of flame.

  "Well," I said, "this is awkward."

  "Shucks, buddy." he said. "Your effusive gratitude is making me blush. Be still, please."

  His hair smelled of apples and limes. I nuzzled the briny skin of his neck. I breathed him in. His warm, dry hands stroked my arms and back. I slept.

  * * *

  When I woke, I was alone in Michael's bed. The air smelled of cumin. Music played softly and at some distance, so that I heard it in scraps and snatches-a male voice, intricate percussion, a riff of syncopated chords on electric piano.

  I lay facing what at first appeared to be a vast sheet of duct tape. After a moment I realized that I was looking at a strange curtain of silver vinyl that Michael had drawn to stanch the hemorrhage of cold air into the room. He'd wrapped me in blankets and had placed a space heater near my feet.

  I'd been dreaming. I closed my eyes, trying to sink back into sleep, back into the fading dream, if only so that I could remember it before it slipped completely away. I had been doing something-had been standing, talking, drinking-with someone who had been Tom, but also Spike, but also Charlie. There had been colored lights, streamers, loud music. I half-remembered something about a wound on my face or neck, a marking of some kind that I could not properly cover.

  I turned over.

  Now wearing a navy-blue sweat suit, Michael sat at his makeshift desk, reading. My jacket hung over the back of his chair. With the fingers of his left hand he absently combed and stroked his long hair. It shone as silk. I wondered if he'd showered while I slept. How long had I slept?

  "How did you know all that?" I asked him. He didn't seem to hear me. Louder, I said, "About the hypothermia and all. How did you know about all that?"

  Without looking up, he said, "It's just the kind of thing you pick up in med school. One sec, buddy." He read for a while longer, then set a leather bookmark crosswise on the page. He turned to face me, leaned over, felt my forehead. "Much better. How do you feel?"

  "Embarrassed, but otherwise, surprisingly, as if nothing happened. You're in med school?"

  "Going on my seventeenth year."

  "Seventeenth-?" He rolled his eyes. "Oh. You mean it only seems like-."

  "Right. Give me your hand." I lifted my right hand, and he checked my pulse. As he counted, he wiggled his bare toes. Sprigs of black hair darkened the knuckles.

  "Your mother must be very proud," I said. "Her son the doctor."

  He cut his eyes at me. "Your pulse seems fine."

  "Thank you." I meant to thank him for finding me, for pulling me off the cold dock, for bringing me here and warming me. After a moment's thought, though, I feared it might seem that I meant to take unwarranted credit for my strong pulse. While I was still trying to think how to explain, he spoke again.

  "I'm not going to be that kind of doctor," he said. "I'm more interested in the research side. I'm getting an MD/PhD. Immunology. Molecular virology. Beating HIV, basically."

  "I think I need to use your bathroom," I said.

  "It's not hard to find."

  "Where are my clothes?"

  "I washed them. They were soaked and filthy." He cleared his throat. "Especially the knees of your jeans."

  To my relief, he returned to his reading. Although we had both been naked, although we had shared a bed and he had held me in his arms-or perhaps because of these things-I felt shy about showing myself to him.

  The bathroom door sounded hollow and fit poorly in the jamb. I jiggled it, jammed my shoulder against it. Leaning over the toilet, eye to eye with a poster of Jonas Salk, I peed.

  The painters had been sloppy. Where the frame of the medicine cabinet met the wall, streaks and drips of green and lavender and yellow paint overlapped. The cabinet door was ajar. I craned my neck to see in, but the overhead light was dim, and I could see only the blue edge of a box of Q-tip swabs.

  Stepping to the sink, I turned on the water. No soap. Perhaps in the medicine cabinet? I glanced around. There were no closets, no cupboards, no shelves, no baskets. The extra soap, if it existed, could only be in the medicine cabinet.

  I nudged the mirrored door, and it opened a few more inches. No soap. The Q-tips. Toothpaste, the crinkled tube squeezed in the middle. Two toothbrushes-why two?--lying bare on a water-spotted glass shelf. Nyquil. A bag of cotton balls, squeezed into a pudgy white lump and shoved into a corner. A razor. A can of shaving cream with a crust of white around its nozzle. A bottle of rubbing alcohol. Two amber bottles of prescription medications.

  One bottle sat with its label facing out. Tylenol III, long expired. It had been prescribed by a DMD. The name on the bottle read, "Michael Walrath."

  Walrath? Not Walton? Holy shit. Had I ever, in all the dozen or more times that I'd met Michael at rowing club meetings or at the Gay 90s, referred to him by the wrong name? I was sure that I had. Of course I had.

  I turned off the water. I eased the cabinet door shut, leaving it open a fraction of an inch. The bathroom door was more difficult to open than it had been to shut. I tugged, and it came free with a raw squeak.

  The room was empty. Michael had gone-to fetch my clothes?

  On a two-burner cooktop near the door, a pot of rice and black beans bubbled and simmered. Between the burners, a spoon lay in a puddle of purple muck. I leaned over the pot and whiffed the
haystack scent of cumin, the bite of chili powder, the bitter woody warmth of oregano.

  A boom-box sat on the counter, still softly pouring music into the room. The percussion grew more complex. The piano thrummed with deep rolling chords. The man's voice veered into a high falsetto.

  It was a beautiful voice-the tone clear and round and full, the intonation perfect-but in his upper range the singer's diction was slack and muddy. I rewound the cassette a couple of times and raised the boom-box's volume, but I couldn't make out the words. When the melody returned to earth, the man seemed to be singing, "It's always warmest where you are."

  Among the books and papers on Michael's desk I found a photograph in a silver frame. In the flicker of tiki torches, a sunset seascape behind them, Michael and one of his rowers leaned forward into the camera, their heads touching. What was the rower's name? John? Jake? Josh? Something with a J. He was almost preternaturally blond, his hair-even his eyebrows-nearly white. Across the bottom of the photo someone had written in silver ink:

  Though we may wander or get lost,

  I'll never feel the winter's killing frost

  It's always warmest where you are

  On the desk, underneath the frame, there was a letter on flimsy, powder-blue air mail stationery. I didn't dare move the photo, didn't dare touch anything, but I could read the last few lines. "I miss you so much it hurts," I read, and, "I couldn't wait to get to Paris, and yet now I'm counting the days until I can see you again, till I can lie in bed with you," and, "I'm sitting up in my bed as I write this, wishing you were next to me."

  Well. That explained the second toothbrush.

  A Day Runner lay open at the edge of the desk. The pages were filled with miniscule handwriting. Classes, labs, meetings with advisors, study groups. The evening slots were mostly blank, but on Wednesday, "Pink House" was written across a four-hour block.

  The textbook Michael had been reading lay open in the middle of the desk. The leather bookmark lay on the left-hand page, marking a section heading that read, "Acute HIV Syndrome." I lifted the bookmark.

  In a certain number of patients, an acute syndrome develops 2-4 weeks after initial HIV infection. This self-limited syndrome manifests through the appearance of symptoms including, but not limited to, rigor, lymphadenopathy, arthralgia, myalgia, weakness and fatigue, rashes, nausea, and diarrhea. Viremia often accompanies a precipitate drop in CD4+ T cells, followed by a rise to normal or near-normal levels.