Did you see me first? Did I see you? All I know is that I stopped. Then joined in your swaying: unusual movements, your shoulders mostly up around your ears as if your whole body could disappear, melt, and be sucked into a hole in the middle of your chest.

  “Well, aren’t you cute?” Your voice somehow clear above the music. You touch my arms above the elbows gently. A studded collar around your neck with spikes of fake danger, bare torso, shiny black pants that match your dark pupils. You lean in to kiss me and I fall and fall and fall.

  When I come to, we’re in another place in the dance hall.

  “I’d like to take you home with me.” Your voice has laughter in it. That and a melody, a tenor saxophone line in an upper octave, clear and precise, warm as coming on spring.

  Nodding is all I do.

  “But I want to tell you something first. I’m HIV positive. Have been for ten years, never been sick. I just wanted to make sure you’re OK with that. Some people have a problem with it.”

  Positive, I think. “No problem.” My blood is negative. My mind is positive. Yes. Yes. Yes. “Take me home.”

  We’re awake and weary and tired and buzzed up when we fall across your white sheets. “Turn over,” you command, and your hands are upon me, long and firm strokes of massage up and down the length of my back, shoulders and neck, scalp, and then lower, buttocks, thighs, calves, feet. “Now, the other side.” My nipples hardening under the circles of your palms, my cock lifting up to touch your thighs as you kneel over me.

  We’re stripped naked. You’re not a big man. You have a slim, sculpted muscularity and I would guess a fast metabolism. Also, the texture of an older man, skin moves easily below my fingers above a strength that has taken time to build.

  Size is a nice surprise, and I’m astonished. Your cock is enormous. Dark and round and thick. Ecstasy takes away my hunger, but this makes me famished. I want to eat and drink for days at a banquet table fit for the king and queen of all those old countries that still hang onto royalty.

  We make love for hours, and move between massage and long kisses and my mouth on your cock and yours on my anus. I want to do the same to you, but you say, no, it’s dangerous.

  Neither of us can come with the drugs still coursing through our systems. For what seems like hours, I go through a stage of having to leave the bed every few minutes to urinate. But in the end, side by side, my head on your chest, hands on that astonishing skin, we come to a natural finish.

  “It was amazing.”

  “I wanted to make sure that you felt you could do anything, and that we didn’t have to fuck if you didn’t want to.”

  “Well, maybe next time.”

  You look at me with a glint in your eyes.

  Positive. Words repeat in my mind. Yes. Yes. Yes.

  You become all of the positive lovers I have ever had and will ever have. What is unique to you, I revel in. I eroticize. I turn you into the letters of the word desire. I know it is perverse to do this. But is this not who we are, what we are, where our potential lies: the possibility of moving beyond borders, normality, the usual? Transcendence.

  In fact, it’s how we got here, crossing lines, sneaking past customs officers. Both of us countries on a map where the shorelines magically fit into each other, an isthmus into a bay.

  Though I remain negative, I am becoming positive all the time—not in the cells of my blood or the hidden recesses of my brain, but in the way magnets change each other, the way electrical charges alter and become the same.

  I celebrate masculinity. I saw a photo of your younger self and the face was round, like a boy’s: the shapes of sun and moon and celestial bodies. Soft forms. Now the drugs have made your face gaunt, your cheekbones have risen like mornings, and your cheeks have strong lines carved into them. I say this to you: You look like a man. Your profile is an exaggerated model, a cartoon superhero, sleek and virile. And strong like seaside cliffs that weather wind and salt night and day and all of the middle hours. A few of my body parts fit perfectly into those crevices.

  For a time, the Crixivan causes your stomach to protrude, and I know this makes you shy in public. Ignore the wondering eyes. I see a yin to the yang. The roundness here softens the angle in your face. Your belly protrudes and gives birth to new forms, to all of your hopes and fears, to petty victories and multiplying neuroses. I run my hands over it and it is the shape a belly should be, a shallow overturned bowl of the finest cracked porcelain, a dark shade of ivory, coveted by the museum that guards it.

  This month, I am fascinated by your veins, the way they stand out, the rivers and streams on your arms in shades of blue, the color of sensitivity and communication. I can see the way your blood reaches your fingers, which are warm when you touch me.

  When you changed the combination of therapy, you lost weight. Now, you worry how thin you have become, about taking on skeletal form. The drugs waste your muscles. Fat flies off of you. It hurts you to sit down for long periods because the bones in your buttocks are sharp. But look again in the mirror. Your body stretches up to the sky like a giraffe on the African plains, you are lean las a gazelle, this equatorial sun pleases you. Your flesh unencumbered is elegant, the body of dancers you have admired, and here you are free of practice and training and a hundred painful jetés.

  I hold you, you are light in my arms. Like cradling the skull of a newborn, a chick in the palm of my hand, a crystal glass between thumb and forefinger. You are so heady and soft that I drink you like champagne, or wine casked before the wars, so fine that it does not touch your throat on its way to your stomach.

  How could I not want to make love to you? Like when the old down comforter split open under the rips of our passion and we had sex amidst feathers, a ghostly flock of ducks glad to bequeath us a backdrop. Our sweat and cum made the down stick together in soft clumps. Listen: If you were heavier, I would not have you. I have gotten use to this lack of gravity.

  I love you for your vulnerability. Your body weak. From a cold made worse from a drug side effect, still the lingering cough? No, this time, it is the diarrhea, the river that doesn’t stop, all of the insides pouring out and the drugs making you unable to hold in liquid or food. Out, it says. Expel.

  I project a cradle around you to rock you into sleep, since I know you don’t like to be touched when you feel like this. When I see you fragile, I remember recovering from the flu, sitting on a high stool in my grandmother’s kitchen, sipping lemon and honey. I think of food that heals, and I want to dissolve into herbs for you to taste and be surprised that I am aphrodisiac as well as medicine. Savor me from head to toe and I will enter you. Spice of life.

  Sometimes, it is when you are weak that you are the hardest. Like the shell of an egg. We marvel at it, how thin yet tough, the sandpaper finish, how gently it carries its secret sun within. I would lift you into my jaw and carry you farther to a safer place. But you would not let me. Instead you are as hard and sharp as that shell.

  When you are that brutal, my cock strains against the inside fabric of my underwear, the outline appears through pants or trousers or shorts. Your bravado titillates me. Your knife-edge scares me. Shivers down my spine that reach down to the hairs between the cheeks of my buttocks.

  Everyone fantasizes. Gay men are the best at it. As children, as a way to escape to someplace else, as adolescents, as a way to lose oneself en route to orgasm, as adults, as a habit. Gay men often fantasize about danger. The themes are leather, military, policemen, rough trade, construction workers, men who are powerful, who could overpower. Highway workers who hold up fluorescent yellow signs that say hazardous, warning, harmful materials, slow down, stop. For years I envisioned binding, tying, overpowering those who taunted me, those I believed would taunt me. They would fall, simply, beneath my magic strength, and I would have my way with them. Before I knew what sex was, I would simply envision them straining and sweating, the muscles tensing in and out of sharp relief.

  We flirt with danger. Does it flirt back? Why not flirt with what is really dangerous? The disease. That which has destroyed, taken lives, ravaged nations. So strong and powerful. Sexier because we cannot see it, and must picture it in our minds. Everyone is talking about it these days. The ads on Internet chat lines: “barebacking,” “skin on skin flesh,” “no protection.”

  It is amazing the lengths to which we go. Bungee-jumping, hang-gliding, parachuting, roller coasters. The ground beneath us is gone, a sense of velocity that would usually equal injury or death but somehow, here and now, we escape it.

  So the ultimate turn-on is not skin and sweat or the symmetry of nipples. A physical touch that reminds you of the shock of how sweet and rich are the finest Belgian truffles and at the same time of that dizzy, sharp edge of not eating for a full day. How hard kissing can be. A duet of tongues. Or how soft.

  No, it’s in the mind. An entire national library of the erotic. Here’s the shelf on immortality, the invulnerability of the young or the want-to-be young. This is where you don’t care. Where you do something that might kill you because the moment, or your imagination, or your just-fuck-it philosophy, takes over. Indifference to consequence can be the sweetest part of the body.

  Some more shelves: suicidal tendencies. Here’s a book on how growing up in a disapproving society gives you low self-esteem, and how you might think you’re not worthy enough to protect yourself. Play with fire but get burned. We can have the most passionate of fuck-sessions and then feel wrong. So much unreconciled. Repression breeds heat, which may just explode into passion. Are the religious books here too, the ones that say joy must be paid for by penalty? It’s all the same category. How many of us negotiate disaster because we feel we deserve it? Put an end to our pale, dreary lives? Gay men have always had a flair for drama.

  The last stop on our tour, this section: sacrifice. The ultimate proof of love. I will do anything for you. There is nothing more powerful than to be inside you, for you to be inside me, to become each other. The model of twins rather than opposites attracting. I love you so much, I want you so much, I want to be you.

  Of course, it manifests in a physical form. A shudder and semen in its pearly white case of saltwater glue. You finger-paint with it until it dries. Dirty pictures on flesh. But it all starts somewhere else. From the electrical charges and bytes and synapses of the brain that let you know it’s in charge. The mind, not the body, creating sex, allowing it to happen, rigid, not flaccid.

  I’m safe. Always. According to my rules, which is condoms and lube for fucking and being fucked. Oral OK. Rimming too, though only with the right asshole. But sometimes, I fantasize about being as dangerous as other men. Fantasy is part of the fun.

  Listen, when it comes down to it, I desire you because you are dying. Men are taught to be protectors. No matter how much I have bucked the trends of what masculinity is supposed to be, I still picture myself on the white horse, I gallop past and sweep you into my arms, and you are no maiden, no lithe willow. You are a man. I picture fairy-tale sex, tragic romances, those trashy movies about people dying of terminal illnesses, and I’m the star, I’m the one left behind, but before the big death scene, the passion is incredible, it makes everyone in the movie-house cry out from each sweat gland, they look like they’re upset, but they’re starting to writhe in sexual discomfort, or comfort, and when they reach out for the tissues, it’s not just tears they’re wiping away. We are having cinematic sex in Dolby sound and a clearer picture with more frames per second than ever before. The violins rise, fabrics billow, they’ve lit us so that the room is dark but you can see each part of our excited bodies. Close-ups: my gasping, open mouth; your hand on my nipple; the crack of your ass; my collarbone; your back, which looks like wings. The music gets louder and louder. The woman who wrote it will win an Oscar. We’re approaching climax and in this film, the cameras don’t pan away.

  No, I lie. It is because you cheat death. Because you are stronger than me. Because these days, the drugs are working, the T-cell count is fine, thank-you-very-much, and the viral load is dropping, if you can count it at all. It’s because you returned from that place, and when I catch you sometimes and you don’t know I’m watching, you have this expression on your face that says you know a hell of a lot more than I do. You’ve glimpsed your own mortality and your eyes are lined, sometimes with dark patches beneath. Is this just some romance about those who have survived near-fatalities, not-so-terminal illnesses?

  It is fact. You have taken stock to depths I can only guess at. You have prepared the true farewell speech, not some tragic teenage imagining “what would they do without me if...?” I am in awe of this. That you didn’t turn to salt, or if you did, you became flesh again, pulled a few proteins and DNA out of thin air, and the blood started to flow once again. I desire you because you are surviving, you are proud, you are living with it and me, it’s a ménage à trois that works.

  No, I lie again. I rub my brass genie-in-a-bottle cock and grant myself not three wishes, but three untruths that when discarded and retrieved and pieced together and seen in a different light may just tell more truth than I want to be known. When it comes down to it, it is because of you, dangerous and beautiful, swelling to fill my mouth, pushing out against soft pink membranes and yellow-white enamel, the tiny slit at the end of your cock like an eye searching its way down my throat.

  I Can See for Miles

  Marshall Moore

  Amazing, what you can find in thrift shops. The ones in Berkeley and San Francisco can be disappointing, as thrift stores go, because the prices are high and everyone even halfway hip shops there. The ones down in Hayward have provided some of my best finds. I pick up half of my clothes and two-thirds of the shit in my apartment in places like this. People who live that deep in the suburbs demonstrate yet again their resounding lack of style and taste by getting rid of the good stuff (Martha, what’s a “Prada”? Why did Billy send us these things when he was on vacation in Italy? He should have sent us pasta instead. I know what that is. But I’m not wearing this shirt out of the house.)

  “Check this out,” Colin said. He’s the one who unearthed the thing first.

  My first reaction when he showed me the overhead projector was mild surprise. Schools don’t part with audio-visual equipment easily. Not even the semi-well-funded ones within commuting distance of Silicon Valley.

  “I doubt it works,” I said. “It can’t possibly.”

  “Plug it in,” said the clerk, eavesdropping.

  Colin and I exchanged our What an asshole look. I hoisted the overhead out of its bin and handed it over. The clerk, a swarthy, bearded man in a turban, surveyed us both for a second before undoing the rubber band around the power cord and stooping to find an electrical outlet. I turned away to avoid seeing a terrible case of plumber’s crack. A bright rhom-boid of light shone on the wall behind him.

  “Too cool,” Colin said. He looked as if he was about to dance a little jig or jump up in the air to kick his heels together. Colin is a seven-year-old hiding in a thirtyish body. Despite his age and the three years he’s lived in the States, he still sounds like a plummy-voiced British schoolboy. “You want it?”

  “What the hell am I going to do with an overhead projector?” I asked him.

  “You’re an intelligent lad, Jacob. You’ll think of something.”

  “Why don’t you buy it?”

  “There’s no room in my flat. If I buy one more gadget my roommate will call the building inspector and have the place condemned.”

  “Good reason. What the hell—I’ll do something with it.”

  We forked over cash for our purchases—some clothes, a few books, a small bookcase for the apartment I had just moved into—and left. Colin was driving today: fine with me, let him deal with the constipated traffic on 1-880. Once the bottleneck eased up, he punched the accelerator and swerved into the fast lane, his Audi accelerating effortlessly up to 85 mph.

  “Maniac,” I told him, turning down his loud hip-hop to make sure he’d hear me.

  “No, it’s just that we’d need another hour to get to Ikea at the rate we were going. I’d like to get back to the city before dinnertime. The Bay Bridge’ll be a bitch.”

  “It’s always a bitch.”

  Colin turned up Dr. Dre instead of replying.

  I just bought an overhead projector, I thought. How stupid is that?

  That’s how it started.

  Three weeks earlier, I had moved into a one-bedroom apartment in a mid-rise elevator building in lower Pacific Heights. Descriptions like that amuse the part of my mind that’s still anchored in eastern North Carolina, where the only buildings over six stories are some dormitories and the medical school tower over in Greenville, a college town forty-five minutes east of my hometown, Wilson. The descriptions contain more information that may be obvious to the uninitiated.

  For example: In San Francisco, one-bedroom apartments are a scarce and therefore expensive commodity. Your name can languish on a waiting list for months, and depending on the neighborhood, you can expect your monthly rent to be at least $2,000. It’s insane. If your credit isn’t immaculate, your job prospects gleaming, and your trust fund well-managed, forget it. That I can afford a place correctly suggests I’ve done well for myself.

  Saying I live in a mid-rise elevator building cracks me up because the part of me I call the secret hick still grooves on the idea of any residential structure too tall for stairs to be a comfortable means of getting to my apartment. I’m on the sixth floor and have a pretty good view of the Financial District high-rises. On clear days I can see a sliver of the East Bay between some of them. I grew up in a three-bedroom ranch house in a subdivision named Windermere Estates, and my parents had a big station wagon. Now I live in Babylon by the Bay in a still-mostly-unfurnished apartment with a decent view, and I drive an old T-top Porsche 911.

  And that view. But I’m getting to that.

  Saying I live in lower Pacific Heights gives folks from out of town the idea that my neighborhood is somewhat swankier than it is. I could also say I live in Japantown or the Western Addition, but Pacific Heights sounds better. I aspire; therefore, I am.

 

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