wasn’t squeezing but I couldn’t breathe. I imagined falling, hurtling toward the ground so fast I couldn’t take in air. Would I ejaculate upon impact?
He collapsed onto me as he finished. I breathed. Raising myself up on one elbow, I tried to get up. He wrapped his arms around me.
“Please. Don’t go.”
I tried to get up again, he wouldn’t let me, he said, “I’m sorry”; he said, “I didn’t mean to hurt you.” He pulled me back, gently, but against my will. He said, “I’m dying. I’m dying. I’m dying. I wanted you to care, okay?”
I didn’t answer. His whole body trembled, and I trembled with him.
He said, “I love you.”
He said, “I’ll do you again, yeah?”
I felt numb; I felt like I might wink out.
He said, “I’m going to blow you, yeah?” but I couldn’t get hard. He kept saying he was sorry, he cried into my peeling, disappearing shoulder. He mumbled words into the side of my neck. I waited for him to fall asleep, and then I left.
I never saw him again.
COSMIC SKITTLES ATOP SUNSET HILL
The week after the play’s premiere and Juan’s curtain call, Marty dragged me to Sunset Hill at 2 a.m. to see a meteor shower. His attempt at cheering me up. I couldn’t say no. We’d been drinking heavily in preparation, while listening to an audiobook on AwayWeRead, in which the main character, Leanna, discovers that she is a robotic surrogate child, and that all her memories are those of the dead daughter she was custom-built to replace. On our way out of Clover House I asked Marty, “How do you know you’re real? Or if your love is real?” I leaned into him and he leaned into me. I wrapped my arms around him and let him carry me forward until he said, “Christ, Noah, do some shuffling.”
“What?”
“Shuffle.”
“That’s not the answer I was looking for, Marty.”
“Oh,” he said, a note of despair in his voice. “I know.”
We paused by the Wellness Center, the parking lot empty except for the handful of cars belonging to Westing’s overnight personnel. I’d misplaced our bottle of scotch somewhere—this upset me so much I’d kicked Clover. Now I was walking with a slight limp.
“Wellness,” I said. “What a joke.”
“You don’t love Alice, do you?”
I looked at him with wide eyes.
“You don’t, do you?”
“I love you, Marty-guy,” I said. “I’m going to ride you around our room like I’m Teddy Roosevelt in the Spanish-American War and you’re the horse that got shot out from under me, but from before you got shot out from under me, which is why I’m riding you like yippee-ka-yay!”
“Noah.”
“Yes.”
He didn’t continue, so I nudged him in the shoulder. “Don’t go all silent on me, not after all we’ve been through. Those damn Spaniards, messing with our Cuba.”
“Their Cuba.”
“Messing with their Cuba.”
“It’s—” He went quiet. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but that was the worst sexual innuendo I ever heard.”
“Says the guy who tried to get in my pants by complimenting my nose.”
Marty laughed.
It proved surprisingly difficult to get up Sunset Hill when your BAC caused the ground to lurch beneath your feet. Marty stumbled, fell. Before I quite knew what I was doing, I had reached down and picked him up, was carrying him up the hill, step by step, screaming, “Never leave a man behind!”
Marty laughed again and held on to me.
I almost didn’t make it to the top. Several times I lost my balance. He didn’t tell me to stop, to put him down. He understood I needed to do this for him. I wanted him to know that if he’d been born a slave in the City of Light, I would’ve carried him out of the darkness, no matter what the Elders did, no matter how many Peacekeepers stood in my way. But there were no great battles at Westing. We had security clacking in the night, long lamp-lit walls equipped with flashing-red cameras, going away silently and appearing as a name under TODAY’S DEPARTEES. We had The Great Cliché with its one-in-ten-thousand chance of impacting Earth on September 26th at 11:37 p.m. We were left to drunkenly climb a hill in the predawn hours with a friend in our arms for no other reason than we felt like picking him up.
“I never thanked you for your play,” I said. “Your words,” I corrected. “For letting me borrow them.”
“I’m waiting.”
“That was it, Marty-guy.”
“Noah, you don’t thank someone by pointing out the fact that you haven’t thanked them. That’s