left side, which was peculiar since I’d known him always to sleep facing up. He was in his underwear. It was true he was bigger since I’d seen him last, but his weight was decisive, controlled. Once Rob told me and Lorraine that when Rourke hit fighting weight, he had to maintain it to the quarter pound. Rob had said, “He sucks the water out of lettuce and spits green.”
It was awful to see him drunk, to see him give up. Gently I journeyed like a pilgrim to the wall of his back, close enough without touching to reclaim some of the life of which I had been dispossessed. I kept watch over him through the night. I could be forgiven for seeking out memories of Montauk—of being sunburned, of being in love. After passing one last time through these halls of memory, I sealed them off like rooms locked from the inside. I would not go back. I would ask no more of life than that it allow me in all fairness to hold the perfect knowledge of perfect things. I told myself maybe love can be love regardless of the absence of its object—and devotion, devotion—so long as you are willing to be captive to it, and you stow it secretly, like a mad relative in the attic. Maybe there was an invisible way to love him, like a radio frequency. Maybe if I listened at night, I could draw it.
He stirred, raising himself onto one elbow, the muscles of his infolding abdomen making a miniature city, and he drank from the glass of water I’d set by the bed. He was not surprised to see me, which was bittersweet. It was as though I had infringed upon his nights as often as he had upon mine. His arms went around my hips and his fingers slipped through the empty belt loops of my jeans, and I drew my fingertips across his jaw, and he breathed softly, coming closer.
From where I sat, I could see the bathroom door. Once we showered there, and I had cried, and he’d been good about that, not asking questions. Next to the bathroom was another door to an interior staircase, leading to the first floor, and the second, and at the very top, the indigo room. If I climbed those stairs, I would find her, still awake, reading in her robe. Mothers who wait up read and wear robes; I knew because I’d never had such a mother, so she existed perfectly in my imagination. If I went to her, would she be the sort to solve everything, or possibly the sort to say nothing—to let you make your own mistakes and to hope for the best.
I wondered when as a man Rourke had been proved. After the fight over his father, the one that had given him his scar? I wondered would we die without meeting again, or would we meet and smile in the slightly embarrassed manner of former lovers, with all the intervening seasons of regret coming to life in our eyes. And if I died, would he come to my funeral, and who would call to notify him, and would he grieve—yes, he would grieve; but would he know that if I could be given one day, one hour, one minute more to live, that I would accept only if I could spend that time with him? I thought how a baby conceived in July would have been born in April. That would have been a biological coincidence, to have been brought together for conception and then again for the delivery. People like to say babies come for a reason. If so, was ours taken away for one?
As I watched the ascension of day, with every ripple of light coming like drops to fill a bucket, I held him, and I persuaded myself to come to terms. How strange that I felt most gloriously alive just as I prepared to withdraw from the hazards of sensation. Like some animal gazing into the wondrous world through the door of its dank cave before bowing off to voluntary sleep, I breathed greedily as if each trapped ounce of his vitality could be called upon to sustain me through hibernation. And I became seized by a whole new sorrow, a loving sorrow. Although once again it was Rourke who was leaving me, this time I knew I would bear the burden of the sacrifice. I was turning him over—to soul corruption,