Hey Handsome
by Patrick Dundon
Tyler leaned his forehead against the airplane window, letting the sun blind him. He closed his eyes and watched the shimmering afterimage burned into his retina shape-shift—an amoeba, a donut, a crown—until it broke apart into blackness. This was a game he used to play as a child, daring himself to look at the sun until he reeled in pain, steeped in kaleidoscopic visions. You’ll go blind if you do that, his mother had warned him, not with the anxious urgency of protectiveness, but in a cool, detached tone, barely lifting her head from her Star Magazine, as if to say, fine, go ahead, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. He’d wanted to tell her he didn’t care, that he’d seen enough anyway and so what if it was all gone. By the age of twelve, he noticed a small black dot etched into the center of his vision, like a dead fly that followed him wherever he went. Whenever he looked at someone’s face, the spot landed right at the center of the person’s forehead, a third eye that could see straight into him, past his physical self to a place not even he could access, bright and hollow and aching. He hardly noticed the spot anymore—over the years his mind had learned to mostly edit it out—though at times it re-appeared like a ghost from childhood, pointless and wordless, an apparition that could only subtract light and color and form, never replacing what it took.
He checked his phone, a nervous reflex, of course there was no service up here, but he needed something, anything to pull himself from his body, and the two bloody marys were starting to wear off. He opened his journal and returned to his sketch of a tarot card, the Ace of Swords, adding a little trickle of blood to a hand that sprouted from a cloud, clutching a blade. He didn’t know what the card meant or if he believed in Tarot at all, but he’d found a deck outside the university library, and, struck by the images, decided to recreate them, one card a day. The less he knew about the cards, the freer he felt to draw them however he pleased, so he refused to research their divinatory significance, instead seeing each as a scene from a fairy tale about anyone’s life but his. The tarot project was the first thing he and Jason—the man he was flying to meet in person for the first time—had chatted about on Scruff, a hookup app that allowed him to scroll profiles from all over the globe. Jason had his own deck, and one of the first things they planned to do when they met (besides, obviously, fuck) was for Jason to give him a reading.
The plane began to tilt on its downward descent, revealing a brown ribbon of river below him. He pressed his forehead against the seat in front of him which pulsated with the sudden thumps of an unruly child. With his eyes closed, he listened to the mother consoling her son--we’re almost there, why don’t you look at your book—which, after several shrill cries and a few more kicks, gave way to I need you to just be quiet and hold still. He didn’t know whether or not she restrained him, but soon the chair stopped vibrating, and he closed his eyes, allowing sleep to claim him.
“Tyler, right?”
Jason looked nothing like he’d expected, standing at baggage claim, a green ski cap pulled back to reveal a thinning line of black hair. While the images in his profile showed a stark jaw, glassy eyes, and a waifish frame, creating the image of an idiosyncratic angel, in person Jason was compact, earthly, straightforward, each feature unremarkable, neither offensive nor memorable. Jason rocked between the heel and ball of his feet, like a child waiting for a treat. Everything they had texted about for the past month—their favorite tarot images, memorable vacations, sexual fantasies—was suddenly irrelevant: Jason was just another anonymous figure draped in an ill-fitting black peacoat, staring at him with a wide-eyed, dumb affection, the seeming sincerity of which embarrassed Tyler.
“Hey, yeah, good to meet you.”
They chuckled uncomfortably, and leaned in to hug when Tyler spotted his bag. He pulled away and lurched toward the conveyor belt, leaving Jason with his arms outstretched. Tyler reached over the shoulder of a woman who was squatting next to the conveyor belt, hawkishly watching each bag that burst through the black rubber flaps. She looked up at him with bitter disgust, her penciled-in eyebrows knotted at the center of her head as if to accuse him of trampling her. He knew people like this (his mother first and foremost)—those for whom the world would always be their unfair abuser—and he responded with a quizzical shrugging of his shoulders. His bag hadn’t so much as grazed her knitted scarf, but he wasn’t about to pick a fight. With people like this it was always a losing battle. She cleared her throat, sighed, and fixed her gaze back on the conveyer belt. When he turned around, Jason was looking at his phone, his stance wide, wiping his nose with his sleeve. He moved with a lack of self consciousness that Tyler found equally endearing and repulsive. The woman at the conveyor belt coughed loudly and elbowed Tyler in the ribs, shoving him aside to fetch a red pleather duffel bag.
“That’s my only bag. Shall we?” Tyler forced a toothless smile, his eyes affixed to the base of Jason’s neck from which hung an amethyst on a silver chain.
“Let’s do it.”
Tyler was a linguistics grad student at MIT, a vocation that, to him, felt both arbitrary and irrelevant, yet bolstered his ego such that he had managed to convince himself, usually while in the budding euphoria of a dry martini, that his work was necessary to the intellectual scaffolding upon which society rested. While he was considered the star of his department, and was often invited to deliver his papers at respected conferences, it wasn’t a subject for which he possessed any particular passion. When he encountered a language, regardless of its origin, he could simply see through it, like a mechanical clock with the gears exposed. What others considered insight or genius, for him was merely observation. Consequently, he possessed a not-so-subtle loathing for those in his field. Their wide-eyed, jejune awe at his papers on lexeme-based morphology syntax irritated him. His life was a series of department luncheons, post-lecture happy hours, and conference soirées, all of which he glided through, semi-conscious, with a constant stream of vodka warming the back of his throat. It could be a worse life, really, he told himself: the work was easy, the praise was constant, the drinks were plentiful. And, while the PhD stipend was abysmal for now, there was the promise of a tenured professorship, which, as anyone in the field knew, he was basically guaranteed.
Tyler had never intended this career. He’d simply taken the path of least resistance. While other teenagers were skateboarding and anesthetizing themselves with Sega, he was scribbling in his journal in an unnamed language of his own invention. He’d started writing in this code simply as a way to ensure that his mother, who often rifled through his drawers while “cleaning” his room, wouldn’t be able to decipher his musings about which boys he thought were cute or why his mother was a narcissist. It wasn’t until his sophomore year of college that he was able to fully appreciate the intricacies of the language he’d invented—its irregular verb endings and inverted syntax. He recognized, not without a sense of irony, that what began as an attempt to safeguard himself from the intrusions of the outside world had paved his way for a career interfacing with it. Almost none of this had he shared with Jason, who now stood by a revolving glass door from which poured a steady stream of hurried strangers, his mouth slightly agape as if on the cusp of a thought he couldn’t bring himself to say.
Jason offered to carry Tyler’s smaller bag, but Tyler refused, throwing it over his shoulder in a gesture of defiance and performative strength, both of which were tinged with cautious flirtation. On the walk to the parking garage, Jason asked how the flight was (fine), if he’d eaten (he hadn’t), if this was Tyler’s first time in the pacific northwest (it was), and proceeded to launch into a nervous and somewhat rehearsed sounding monologue about the carpet of the Portland airport, how it was beloved by locals, and when, after twenty years, it needed to be replaced, there was public outcry. Tyler allowed Jason’s words to move around him like water around a stone as he tried to suss out an undercurrent, either sexual or emotional, but couldn’t. They tossed Tyler’s bags into the trunk of Jason’s nineties Honda Accord, got in the car, and sat in silence. Tyler twisted his seatbelt, unable to flatten it against his chest.
“Oh sorry, that thing never works” said Jason, who grabbed the belt and performed a quick acrobatic maneuver, unknotting it, and pressed it against Tyler’s chest. Jason’s hands were deeply calloused, and a shiny pink scar reached from the base of his thumb to his pinky. Splotches of partially removed tattoos rested upon each knuckle, and Tyler could only make out an E on his pinky finger. He imagined that it was once part of a word, and tried to think of what it could be—love, hate, bite, hide—until he looked up and saw that something had changed in Jason’s face. The eager naïveté had vanished and in its place was a simple lust, making his features sharper, more defined, as if lit from below. He clasped Jason’s hand that hadn’t moved from his chest and they began to kiss, Jason’s tongue gouging deep into his throat with a violence he found tolerable but not entirely pleasant. They fumbled to unbuckle each other’s belts, and Jason buried his head into Tyler’s crotch, swallowing the entirety of his erection, while Jason jerked off. He moved with swift mechanical efficiency, and it took only moments for each of them to come, neither restraining themselves to prolong a sense of desire. Besides, it wasn’t desire, per-se, that Tyler could feel pressing him forward, but instead a vague sense of retaliation, as if Jason were the ambassador for a world that had wronged him, and coming in his mouth were the only way to remedy the debt. Jason wiped the come from his stomach with a tissue he pulled from the glovebox and threw it onto the floor of the car.
“How about we go to my place and drop off your stuff?” Jason’s face had again changed. Instead of snapping back to the wide-eyed, childlike awe he’d exhibited at the baggage claim, it became suddenly impassive, blank, as if each facial muscle were paralyzed as his mind raced inward. He looked straight ahead, and began navigating the car out of the parking garage while Tyler tried, unsuccessfully, to roll down his window.
“Sorry, this car is a piece of shit.”
Jason’s voice sounded nothing like it had on the phone. It was higher, uncertain, each sentence trailing off as if it were an unruly animal that had escaped his grasp. On the phone, he’d seemed confident, embodied, his voice a simmering baritone that occasionally erupted in cackles of wry laughter, but maybe that was a fluke—they’d only spoken once, briefly, after both had been drinking, and most of the five minute conversation was dedicated to Jason’s attempts to extract his cat from his lap while Tyler giggled. The call ended abruptly when Jason said oh shit, after which he texted Tyler that he’d spilled his beer on his cat, who’d dug her claws into his thigh. Tyler responded with a laugh-cry emoji, a beer emoji and a broken heart emoji, and turned off his phone. The next morning Jason texted Tyler hey handsome, and both continued their text rapport without reference to the drunken call. Though neither would say it, Tyler knew that the call had been too much—each of them coming to life in horrifying real-time, every spoken syllable threatening to puncture the airtight fantasy they’d woven for weeks in text messages, heart emojis, and dick pics.
Tyler’s visit was never part of the plan. It began as an offer somewhere between a joke and a dare. What if you just came here? Jason had asked while both were masturbating, sending each other pictures of the pre-come stretching between their fingertips. Oh, I’ll come alright, Tyler replied, and come and come. Tyler bought the ticket while he was still hard, then came. In the days that followed, the impending visit folded neatly into their shared fantasy—Tyler detailing how he’d fuck Jason in the airport bathroom, Jason replying that he’d suck off Tyler on the drive to his house, and every conversation ending with can’t wait. It wasn’t until two days before the flight that their communication had waned—the regular stream of emojis were replaced with a few logistical texts. Flight gets in at 8. Meet at baggage claim? Sure. I’ll be the one in a green hat. k see u. It wasn’t doubt or self-protection that gave rise to Tyler’s reticence, but instead a cold hard calculus: the old Jason, neatly contained in his phone, would soon cease to exist, and he was now texting with someone else, a stranger meeting him at baggage claim in a green hat.
After coming, Tyler allowed his body to release its full weight into the passenger seat. Jason seemed uninterested in making conversation, much to Tyler’s relief. As they drove though an anonymous stretch of suburbia—fast food restaurants, strip malls, a Barnes & Noble—Tyler fell into a memory of waiting for his mom outside the dressing rooms at Ross when he was eleven. She’d been inside what seemed like a long time, and while he waited he stared at the the chiseled abs of the men on underwear packages. When she emerged from the changing room, he crouched to hide his erection. She misunderstood his posture for a stomach ache, and, despite his objections, insisted he go to bed as soon as they got home. Unable to think of an excuse, he acquiesced to her demands, and spent the rest of the afternoon in bed, fantasizing about the headless models. Jason’s profile picture on Scruff wasn’t so different—a headless torso torqued slightly to reveal his obliques. Tyler had messaged him with no intent beyond exchanging a few pictures of their erections, and maybe jerking off together, which they did. It wasn’t until after they’d both come and neither was eager to end the conversation that Tyler could tell something with Jason was different. Jason sent him a picture of his cat, Boyfriend, and Tyler found the name charmingly self-deprecatory. Tyler told Jason about the tarot card he’d illustrated that day, the ten of swords—a man laying face down in a desert landscape, ten swords planted in his back—and Jason said he’d pulled the very same card that morning. It was a sign. Of what, neither was sure. Jason told him the card symbolized a true spiritual death, the painful ending of one version of the self, clearing way for a new one. Tyler tried to think of what in his life was ending, if this text rapport with Jason was a new beginning, or if it was all meaningless—just a coincidence made resonant by the hormones coursing through his body in the aftermath of ejaculation. In any case, whatever spiritual death he might be experiencing, he’d steeled himself against it: from early in life, he’d developed a fragile pact with pain, like a disgruntled in-law he’d implicitly agreed never to speak to at family gatherings. As a child, regardless of his ailment—a cold, the flu, a sprained ankle—his mother refused to give him any medication for pain. It’s not good for you, she explained, only tricks you. And so, at the age of seven, he’d laid in bed with a broken wrist for days, facing off with a pain so immense, he hallucinated it was a purple dragon, come to take him away. Eventually the bruise turned from yellow to black and he was rushed to the emergency room where his mother blamed his wound on his carelessness climbing the neighbor’s apple tree. After tucking him into the hospital bed, pulling the wool blankets so tight he could barely move, she disappeared, leaving him for over a day with nothing to do but consume a stream of local news and daytime talk shows from the wall mounted television. I’m sure she’ll be back any minute honey, the nurse, a man with a bright yellow bandana wrapped around his head, had told him while wiping the sweat from his forehead. He knew the nurse had meant well, that he was saying the kind of things you say to children, and most of the time, it’s true. So he didn’t bother to argue, asked for more pills, and fell asleep.
His middle school counselor, whom he was forced to visit after filling out a school-mandated psychological profile test, had told him that pain was a natural part of life, one to embrace, and he’d need to grieve the disappearance of his father before he could reclaim his full breadth of feeling. But he knew that was bullshit. He was only a toddler thrashing in his crib when his dad gathered a duffel bag’s worth of belongings—a few changes of clothes, wallet and passport, Tyler’s baby book—and snuck out of the house, leaving an almost illegible note on the kitchen counter: sorry, I can’t anymore. He’d heard the story from his mother so many times that it felt like just another bedtime story, the big bad wolf blowing the house down, leaving the family knee deep in rubble. You were just a baby, and what was I supposed to do, the story always ended, her voice wavering between despair and self-pity as she plucked a fresh cigarette from the pack. Grieve, no. If anything, he felt jealous of his father, that he’d managed to free himself of his mother’s reign of tyranny: her controlling hyper-vigilance that gave way to cold dissociation. There were times he wondered if she’d always been that way, or if it was a result of his father’s leaving. Once, while rifling through his mother’s desk drawers, he’d found a picture of his parents together on their honeymoon, lounging on a blanket in the woods of Switzerland, a bottle of beer between them. He scanned the image for any sign of discord, but the scene oozed an unrehearsed joy: their socks scattered at the edge of the blanket, a few grapes on a paper plate, his mother grinning widely, her gaze slightly above the camera as if she’d spotted a bird. And his father stared straight into her chest as if he could see right through it to something secret and bright, his smile almost concealed by his beard. But photographs lie. Short of asking his father what she was like, he would never know. As a teenager, he’d tried to locate his father, but the phone number was out of service, and calls to neighbors revealed that he had decided to live “off the grid” somewhere in the foothills of the Sierras. That, to him, was as final as any death, and blame was most effective when placed on the living.
They pulled into a horseshoe-shaped apartment building that wrapped around a parking lot. With its exterior staircase and chipped yellowing paint, it looked to Tyler like a cheap motel. A few folding lawn chairs and potted plants on several of the balconies were the only evidence that people had established lives that they returned to day after day.
“Sorry for the mess,” Jason said as he unlocked the door. The apartment smelled vaguely of damp carpet, only sweeter, as if Jason had baked cookies earlier in the day. It was a small studio, and Jason busied himself at the kitchen counter, slipping a few anonymous objects from his pocket into a drawer. “You can put your stuff anywhere,” he said to Tyler who was standing by a glass coffee table, clutching his shoulder bag against his stomach. Tyler let his bag fall where he was standing, and picked up a small, egg-shaped orange stone that was sitting atop the coffee table. It conformed almost perfectly to his palm. Jason saw him from the kitchen and quickly approached, reaching out as if to stop him.
“Oh that’s my birthstone, yellow citrine. It was a gift from—”
He sidled up next to Tyler and plucked the stone from his hand, placing it exactly where it had been a few moments before. He twisted it a few times, as though he remembered the precise angle at which it had rested.
“Sorry, I didn’t know.”
“Oh no no, it’s totally fine. It’s nothing really. Hey do you want a drink?”
Jason poured them each a glass of wine, and as Tyler drew his finger around the rim of his wine glass, he thought kimla, an untranslatable word in his own language for a feeling that fell somewhere between boredom and anger. This thought led to a series of others in his private language—about the birthstone, the sickly-sweet smell in the apartment, the way Jason hunched over his wine glass—and with each new thought, he retreated further away, like a small point of light at the end of a tunnel. Akta-kai, he thought, What do I do now? He could always leave, get a hotel, slide into bed with a bottle of whiskey and scroll through the new offerings on Scruff and Grindr like he did when traveling to linguistics conferences. He took a gulp of wine, and let its familiar warmth shrink his thoughts until they were invisible, condensed, a molecule incapable of contaminating him.
Jason apologized for the mess. On the kitchen counter, a bowl of ripening bananas had attracted a fly that leapt from one piece of fruit to another, trying to find sustenance.
“This place has terrible Feng Shui.” Jason waved his hands haphazardly as if to fan away the entire apartment. “The energy bounces around at odd angles, when it should move in circles.”
Jason went on to explain that he’d just returned from a weekend meditation retreat during which he’d participated in a chakra cleansing workshop, a gemstone meditation seminar, and a course in the basics of Feng Shui. Ever since his ex, Aaron, a severe alcoholic who sold codeine on the black market, had kicked him out of a car at 2am, leaving him stranded in a far flung stretch of suburbia, he’d been on a new path, a path of healing. His therapist, Cindy, who he’d begun to see three months ago, had suggested the retreat, and though at first he wasn’t sure what to make of it, by the last day, it had turned his life inside out. It was as if he’d been living with a paper bag over his head, he explained, and suddenly, for the first time, he was breathing fresh air, his eyes blinded by the clarity of the world. He never thought he’d be into the God stuff, he continued, twisting a gemstone in his fingers, but when they say let go and let God, it wasn’t really about the old Christian god with the white beard, no, it’s a force of the universe: something so great, so powerful, but so intimately a part of us that it lives in every exhale, every small hair on the backs of our hands. At this point he lifted his own hand to his mouth and stared at it as if he could see this universal Godforce cascading off his skin. And the drugs he’d done with his ex—the painkillers, the cocaine, the meth—those were all vacuums for spirit, little black holes that gobbled up every last drop of real spiritual energy and held it hostage. Of course it didn’t feel like that when he was doing the drugs, no, doing them gave a glimpse of freedom, made him feel like he was the fucking buddha. At this point he re-arranged the gemstones on the coffee table, placing a periwinkle stone next to the yellow citrine.
“And these stones, they aren’t just stones. Each holds a specific frequency which can readjust energy, righting it so that it flows in proper harmony with the universal life force. This yellow citrine was a gift from Chance, my roommate at the retreat. God I thought my story was bad but you wouldn’t believe what that guy went through. And this one is chrysoprase,” he swiveled the periwinkle stone so it glinted under the florescent light, “which heals the inner child. We can’t make any real progress until we make friends with that kid in ourselves. I’m still working on that one. I think my kid self is still hiding under a table somewhere.”
As Jason spoke, Tyler could see the blind spot from his vision beginning to coalesce on the stone, then it hopped onto Jason’s face, a simmering black mole that migrated from his forehead down to his mouth. He wondered if he should feel somehow betrayed that Jason hadn’t shared any of this backstory with him while they were texting. Why conceal the drug addiction, the abusive ex, the newfound path to recovery for months only to reveal it now, before they’d even had dinner? But the truth was, Tyler felt nothing. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about Jason’s pain or his troubled childhood or his renewed enthusiasm for life, it was that he had no capacity to respond to Jason’s story in any genuine way. The blind spot began to grow wider, encompassing Jason’s entire face, until it became a mirror in which Tyler could see himself splayed on a hotel bed, getting a blowjob from some anonymous man. He could do that if he wanted, but that would require an intervention into this course of events demanding more effort than he was capable of offering. He leaned back into the white pleather sofa, took another sip of wine, and asked Jason about a polished black triangular stone tucked beneath the chrysoprase. Jason plucked it from the table, held it close to his chest, and Tyler’s blind spot landed squarely upon it, flickering in and out of existence.
They didn’t fuck that night. Whatever sexual energy had given rise to their encounter in the car had dissipated, an aftershock to the month long lead-in of dick pics and texted fantasies. Instead they lay a few inches from one another on Jason’s memory foam mattress, a sliver of light from the streetlamp outside slicing diagonally over their bodies. Tyler drifted in and out of feverish, technicolored dreams. In one, he was a bear roaming his childhood neighborhood, looking for anything to eat. People screamed from behind their picture-frame windows when they saw him, and he heard sirens in the distance coming to capture him. His hunger became immense, incalculable, such that he couldn’t discriminate between what was and was not edible. He approached his mother who was smoking on a street corner, leaning against a mailbox in her nightgown. Tyler, she scowled, why aren’t you in your room, it’s dangerous out here. Without hesitation, he ate her in one bloodless bite, like the wolf from Little Red Riding Hood. He could feel her thrashing in his stomach, her small palms pressing inside of him, the low vibrations of her screams rising through his spine. His hunger was unchanged. When he looked down at his paw, it was broken, though he felt no pain. An ice cream truck passed, and he considered chasing after it, but he knew it was useless, that nothing could satisfy him. This dream flickered away, replaced by a set of inchoate images that hovered somewhere between desire and violence, until he was in Jason’s living room, sitting across from Jason at the coffee table. Atop it were hundreds of stones, each seeming to emit its own light. Jason grabbed one of the stones and smashed it with his clenched fist until it disintegrated into a fine powder. He arranged the powder into two skinny lines with the backs of his hand, leaned forward, and inhaled one of the lines. You gotta try it, he said to Tyler, his eyes wide and opaque, the pupils reaching to their farthest edges. Instinctually, Tyler leaned in, but the powder smelled horrible, as if the damp, sweet smell that greeted him when he entered Jason’s apartment had been distilled to its most offensive components. But he didn’t care, decided to inhale anyway, at which point he woke to find that his arm had somehow migrated to drape itself around Jason’s neck. He pulled it off, and wiped the sweat from his wrist.
When he woke in the morning, he was alone. From the kitchen, he could hear the clanging of pots and pans, cupboards opening and closing. He smelled toast. The memory of his mother pressing against the inside of his stomach played in his mind uncontrollably, like a bad pop song, so he lurched out of bed and stumbled to the kitchen, hoping the waking world would dissolve it. Jason had arranged several triangular slices of toast onto a yellow plate, and placed a ramekin of jam beside it.
“Morning sunshine,” Jason said, his voice filled with a familiarity and kindness that made Tyler feel uneasy, unsure if he was expected to reciprocate its warmth.
“Thanks for breakfast. Just so you know, I might have to do some work today. I have a conference coming up next week.”
“No worries. Your flight back isn’t until tomorrow night, right? We have plenty of time. What kind of work do you do?”
Tyler gave his rote reply, that he was a graduate student in linguistics, focusing on the morphology of Old Norse. It occurred to him as he smeared a stripe of dark red jam on his toast that he was now on a first date, and Jason was finally asking the life-resume questions that they had postponed for months. He hated first dates.
“Hey, how about we do that tarot reading?” Tyler offered in an attempt to deflect Jason’s banal advances.
“Is it time for that already?” Jason winked and Tyler’s uneasy feeling became more pronounced, like his chest was a piece of soft ripe fruit, and Jason had plunged his finger into it.
“Yeah, why not.” Tyler had nibbled his toast around the edges until it became a shape resembling France.
“Okay, lemme grab my deck.” Jason vanished into the other room, and for the first time Tyler took in his surroundings in broad daylight. Aside from the coffee table, the couch, and the kitchen counter, the apartment was almost entirely empty: there was no other furniture, the walls were bare, and a sliding glass door opened onto a shared concrete patio on which rested a rusted folding lawn chair. He watched a few motes of dust drift through the air along a shaft of sunlight. This was an emptiness beyond a lack of interest in decoration—it seemed that Jason had either just moved in, was about to move out, or was squatting here. He popped the France-shaped piece of toast in his mouth.
“Got it. Okay, so what do you want to know about?” Jason fanned the cards onto the table in an arc like a shallow rainbow.
“Everything, I guess. Do I have to have a question?”
“Not really. Sometimes you just have a feeling in your gut, a feeling that there’s something you need to know about.”
Tyler again remembered his mother’s hands pressing along his stomach lining, eager for escape. The pain felt real, as though her nails were digging into him. No, he didn’t need to ask about that. He knew about that all too well. He stared down at the deck and again his blind spot emerged, jumping from card to card, as if it were trying to tell him which one to choose. He closed his eyes, attempting to eliminate the blind spot, and focused on the vague concept of happiness. He thought of holding hands with some anonymous, beautiful man; a day spent on a rugged coastline, looking out at the churning waves; an invitation to a prestigious conference to give a paper. All of these images felt contrived: flimsy dioramas of a life he was supposed to desire. Or maybe he really did desire them, and his disbelief in their validity was his problem. Either way, he told Jason he was ready.
“Okay, pick a card.”
Tyler opened his eyes and his blind spot landed on a card which he instinctually grabbed. He turned it over, and it revealed a horned, winged devil with goat’s legs sitting atop a throne. Two humans were tethered to the throne, chains shackling their throats.
“This is your present. The Devil.” Jason leaned forward and took a long, loud slurp of coffee. “The devil shows what you’re attached to, all the stuff you think is bringing you joy that’s actually holding you back. In my case it was the drugs, not sure what it is for you, but it could be anything: sex, money, validation, you name it. Anyway, let’s see what’s in the past.”
Again Tyler’s blind spot migrated to a card, and almost seemingly without his consent, his hand thrust forward and grabbed it.
“Huh. The six of cups. This is a card of childhood nostalgia, of playfulness, innocence.” Jason drew his finger over the image of two children smelling roses growing from golden cups. “It looks like you had a pretty nice childhood, lots of freedom to play.”
Tyler wanted to laugh, but didn’t. Sure, his childhood was an 80s suburban television fantasy on the surface—frisbee golf in the park, block parties and barbecues—but that wasn’t how he experienced it. The pain in his stomach became so acute, he wondered if it was more than just the memory of his mother’s hands. Maybe he was really sick.
“Alright, let’s see what you’ve got in the future.”
Again the blind spot landed squarely on a card, but this time Tyler resisted it. He forced his hand toward the opposite end of the deck, and grabbed the very bottom card. It showed a crumbling stone tower struck by lighting, two figures in mid air having jumped from it.
“No way to sugarcoat this one. It’s about a messy, chaotic ending. Everything you thought you knew is gonna be gone, kaput, and out of the rubble you’ll make something new of yourself. Maybe once you let go of all those attachments you’re holding onto, you’ll build a new life. But you’ve got a fresh start ahead of you, just looks like the path to getting there is gonna be messy.”
At this point Tyler knew what was going on. The reading wasn’t about him at all, it was about Jason. It was Jason’s pleasant childhood, his struggles with addiction, his new beginning. He could feel his stomach beginning to unclench, released from responsibility. Just the week before he’d illustrated The Tower, and, as a joke, had included his face and Jason’s as the two figures in mid air. He considered telling Jason this, but instead folded the thought back into his memories, and excused himself to use the bathroom.
He stared at his reflection in the mirror of the medicine cabinet, examining a small pimple at the tip of his nose as he allowed his thoughts to become distant, abstract, incapable of affecting him. He opened the medicine cabinet. Jason possessed an outstanding array of pills: lexapro, ambien, marplan, wellbutrin, valium, and those with names he’d never heard of. He opened the valium bottle, and inside was a twisted up plastic sandwich bag filled with white powder. It smelled of bleach. He sprinkled a bit at the edge of the sink, dabbed some onto his finger and pressed it against the tip of his tongue, which, after a tinge of bitterness, became numb. Cocaine, he was sure of it. He used the edge of the pill bottle to form the pile into a narrow line, and inhaled it with one sharp breath, replaced the bottle, closed the cabinet door and again examined his face in the mirror. His blind spot reappeared between his eyes, shimmering and pulsating until it suddenly possessed an infinite depth, as if it were a tunnel, a wormhole to some other world, a place in which his language was the only one spoken, in which he didn’t have to ever leave this bathroom, in which memory and thought had no valence, and he could stand here forever, suspended in the depthless present. The stomach pain returned, a dull ache expanding with impossible violence, and he kneeled over the toilet, saliva forming at the back of this throat. But whatever was inside him would not come out. He swallowed hard, hoping to force the ache downward into his core where it could calcify. It didn’t budge. He splashed water on his face, and re-emerged into the living room.
Jason was sitting on the couch, dreamily staring out the window, drawing his finger around the rim of his coffee cup.
“Hey thanks for the reading, man. Do you mind if I take a walk, I think I need some fresh air.” Tyler pulled at his shirtsleeve and looked desperately toward the sliding glass door.
Jason’s face contracted in a wince of pain, and he twisted his coffee cup as if to examine it from a new angle.
“Sure, sure, whatever you need. There’s a park down the street if you want someplace to hang for a bit.” Jason said the words flatly, without looking up, and Tyler knew he knew that Tyler would not be coming back. He stuffed his sweatshirt, the only item he’d unpacked, into his backpack, and tossed it over his shoulder. His suitcase lay on the floor like a zipped up coffin, and he considered what he would sacrifice by leaving it behind: two pairs of jeans, a sweater he’d found in a free box, a paper on old Icelandic he was supposed to edit, toothpaste. He mentally discarded its contents, envisioning it as a sacrifice, the husk of an old self he’d never return to. He thought of the tarot card that he’d drawn the first day he and Jason had talked, the ten of swords. It now seemed prescient, though he didn’t know if it was him or Jason with the swords in his back.
“See you in a bit” he said curtly to the air above Jason’s head as he slunk out the door, racing against the oncoming high of the cocaine. He walked in the opposite direction of the park, just in case Jason tried to find him. The sun was cloyingly bright, glinting off the parked cars in a shifting constellation. He stood on a random patch of sidewalk, looked up, and let it penetrate his eyes fully, just for a moment, holding his gaze a split second beyond the familiar sharp spike of pain. That was all he needed to alleviate the pressure in his stomach, like a see saw that had returned to equilibrium, one ache canceling out the other. He wasn’t sure what he’d do next, or even what he was capable of doing. But he wasn’t afraid, and he felt no pain.
He checked his phone, a nervous reflex, of course there was no service up here, but he needed something, anything to pull himself from his body, and the two bloody marys were starting to wear off. He opened his journal and returned to his sketch of a tarot card, the Ace of Swords, adding a little trickle of blood to a hand that sprouted from a cloud, clutching a blade. He didn’t know what the card meant or if he believed in Tarot at all, but he’d found a deck outside the university library, and, struck by the images, decided to recreate them, one card a day. The less he knew about the cards, the freer he felt to draw them however he pleased, so he refused to research their divinatory significance, instead seeing each as a scene from a fairy tale about anyone’s life but his. The tarot project was the first thing he and Jason—the man he was flying to meet in person for the first time—had chatted about on Scruff, a hookup app that allowed him to scroll profiles from all over the globe. Jason had his own deck, and one of the first things they planned to do when they met (besides, obviously, fuck) was for Jason to give him a reading.
The plane began to tilt on its downward descent, revealing a brown ribbon of river below him. He pressed his forehead against the seat in front of him which pulsated with the sudden thumps of an unruly child. With his eyes closed, he listened to the mother consoling her son--we’re almost there, why don’t you look at your book—which, after several shrill cries and a few more kicks, gave way to I need you to just be quiet and hold still. He didn’t know whether or not she restrained him, but soon the chair stopped vibrating, and he closed his eyes, allowing sleep to claim him.
“Tyler, right?”
Jason looked nothing like he’d expected, standing at baggage claim, a green ski cap pulled back to reveal a thinning line of black hair. While the images in his profile showed a stark jaw, glassy eyes, and a waifish frame, creating the image of an idiosyncratic angel, in person Jason was compact, earthly, straightforward, each feature unremarkable, neither offensive nor memorable. Jason rocked between the heel and ball of his feet, like a child waiting for a treat. Everything they had texted about for the past month—their favorite tarot images, memorable vacations, sexual fantasies—was suddenly irrelevant: Jason was just another anonymous figure draped in an ill-fitting black peacoat, staring at him with a wide-eyed, dumb affection, the seeming sincerity of which embarrassed Tyler.
“Hey, yeah, good to meet you.”
They chuckled uncomfortably, and leaned in to hug when Tyler spotted his bag. He pulled away and lurched toward the conveyor belt, leaving Jason with his arms outstretched. Tyler reached over the shoulder of a woman who was squatting next to the conveyor belt, hawkishly watching each bag that burst through the black rubber flaps. She looked up at him with bitter disgust, her penciled-in eyebrows knotted at the center of her head as if to accuse him of trampling her. He knew people like this (his mother first and foremost)—those for whom the world would always be their unfair abuser—and he responded with a quizzical shrugging of his shoulders. His bag hadn’t so much as grazed her knitted scarf, but he wasn’t about to pick a fight. With people like this it was always a losing battle. She cleared her throat, sighed, and fixed her gaze back on the conveyer belt. When he turned around, Jason was looking at his phone, his stance wide, wiping his nose with his sleeve. He moved with a lack of self consciousness that Tyler found equally endearing and repulsive. The woman at the conveyor belt coughed loudly and elbowed Tyler in the ribs, shoving him aside to fetch a red pleather duffel bag.
“That’s my only bag. Shall we?” Tyler forced a toothless smile, his eyes affixed to the base of Jason’s neck from which hung an amethyst on a silver chain.
“Let’s do it.”
Tyler was a linguistics grad student at MIT, a vocation that, to him, felt both arbitrary and irrelevant, yet bolstered his ego such that he had managed to convince himself, usually while in the budding euphoria of a dry martini, that his work was necessary to the intellectual scaffolding upon which society rested. While he was considered the star of his department, and was often invited to deliver his papers at respected conferences, it wasn’t a subject for which he possessed any particular passion. When he encountered a language, regardless of its origin, he could simply see through it, like a mechanical clock with the gears exposed. What others considered insight or genius, for him was merely observation. Consequently, he possessed a not-so-subtle loathing for those in his field. Their wide-eyed, jejune awe at his papers on lexeme-based morphology syntax irritated him. His life was a series of department luncheons, post-lecture happy hours, and conference soirées, all of which he glided through, semi-conscious, with a constant stream of vodka warming the back of his throat. It could be a worse life, really, he told himself: the work was easy, the praise was constant, the drinks were plentiful. And, while the PhD stipend was abysmal for now, there was the promise of a tenured professorship, which, as anyone in the field knew, he was basically guaranteed.
Tyler had never intended this career. He’d simply taken the path of least resistance. While other teenagers were skateboarding and anesthetizing themselves with Sega, he was scribbling in his journal in an unnamed language of his own invention. He’d started writing in this code simply as a way to ensure that his mother, who often rifled through his drawers while “cleaning” his room, wouldn’t be able to decipher his musings about which boys he thought were cute or why his mother was a narcissist. It wasn’t until his sophomore year of college that he was able to fully appreciate the intricacies of the language he’d invented—its irregular verb endings and inverted syntax. He recognized, not without a sense of irony, that what began as an attempt to safeguard himself from the intrusions of the outside world had paved his way for a career interfacing with it. Almost none of this had he shared with Jason, who now stood by a revolving glass door from which poured a steady stream of hurried strangers, his mouth slightly agape as if on the cusp of a thought he couldn’t bring himself to say.
Jason offered to carry Tyler’s smaller bag, but Tyler refused, throwing it over his shoulder in a gesture of defiance and performative strength, both of which were tinged with cautious flirtation. On the walk to the parking garage, Jason asked how the flight was (fine), if he’d eaten (he hadn’t), if this was Tyler’s first time in the pacific northwest (it was), and proceeded to launch into a nervous and somewhat rehearsed sounding monologue about the carpet of the Portland airport, how it was beloved by locals, and when, after twenty years, it needed to be replaced, there was public outcry. Tyler allowed Jason’s words to move around him like water around a stone as he tried to suss out an undercurrent, either sexual or emotional, but couldn’t. They tossed Tyler’s bags into the trunk of Jason’s nineties Honda Accord, got in the car, and sat in silence. Tyler twisted his seatbelt, unable to flatten it against his chest.
“Oh sorry, that thing never works” said Jason, who grabbed the belt and performed a quick acrobatic maneuver, unknotting it, and pressed it against Tyler’s chest. Jason’s hands were deeply calloused, and a shiny pink scar reached from the base of his thumb to his pinky. Splotches of partially removed tattoos rested upon each knuckle, and Tyler could only make out an E on his pinky finger. He imagined that it was once part of a word, and tried to think of what it could be—love, hate, bite, hide—until he looked up and saw that something had changed in Jason’s face. The eager naïveté had vanished and in its place was a simple lust, making his features sharper, more defined, as if lit from below. He clasped Jason’s hand that hadn’t moved from his chest and they began to kiss, Jason’s tongue gouging deep into his throat with a violence he found tolerable but not entirely pleasant. They fumbled to unbuckle each other’s belts, and Jason buried his head into Tyler’s crotch, swallowing the entirety of his erection, while Jason jerked off. He moved with swift mechanical efficiency, and it took only moments for each of them to come, neither restraining themselves to prolong a sense of desire. Besides, it wasn’t desire, per-se, that Tyler could feel pressing him forward, but instead a vague sense of retaliation, as if Jason were the ambassador for a world that had wronged him, and coming in his mouth were the only way to remedy the debt. Jason wiped the come from his stomach with a tissue he pulled from the glovebox and threw it onto the floor of the car.
“How about we go to my place and drop off your stuff?” Jason’s face had again changed. Instead of snapping back to the wide-eyed, childlike awe he’d exhibited at the baggage claim, it became suddenly impassive, blank, as if each facial muscle were paralyzed as his mind raced inward. He looked straight ahead, and began navigating the car out of the parking garage while Tyler tried, unsuccessfully, to roll down his window.
“Sorry, this car is a piece of shit.”
Jason’s voice sounded nothing like it had on the phone. It was higher, uncertain, each sentence trailing off as if it were an unruly animal that had escaped his grasp. On the phone, he’d seemed confident, embodied, his voice a simmering baritone that occasionally erupted in cackles of wry laughter, but maybe that was a fluke—they’d only spoken once, briefly, after both had been drinking, and most of the five minute conversation was dedicated to Jason’s attempts to extract his cat from his lap while Tyler giggled. The call ended abruptly when Jason said oh shit, after which he texted Tyler that he’d spilled his beer on his cat, who’d dug her claws into his thigh. Tyler responded with a laugh-cry emoji, a beer emoji and a broken heart emoji, and turned off his phone. The next morning Jason texted Tyler hey handsome, and both continued their text rapport without reference to the drunken call. Though neither would say it, Tyler knew that the call had been too much—each of them coming to life in horrifying real-time, every spoken syllable threatening to puncture the airtight fantasy they’d woven for weeks in text messages, heart emojis, and dick pics.
Tyler’s visit was never part of the plan. It began as an offer somewhere between a joke and a dare. What if you just came here? Jason had asked while both were masturbating, sending each other pictures of the pre-come stretching between their fingertips. Oh, I’ll come alright, Tyler replied, and come and come. Tyler bought the ticket while he was still hard, then came. In the days that followed, the impending visit folded neatly into their shared fantasy—Tyler detailing how he’d fuck Jason in the airport bathroom, Jason replying that he’d suck off Tyler on the drive to his house, and every conversation ending with can’t wait. It wasn’t until two days before the flight that their communication had waned—the regular stream of emojis were replaced with a few logistical texts. Flight gets in at 8. Meet at baggage claim? Sure. I’ll be the one in a green hat. k see u. It wasn’t doubt or self-protection that gave rise to Tyler’s reticence, but instead a cold hard calculus: the old Jason, neatly contained in his phone, would soon cease to exist, and he was now texting with someone else, a stranger meeting him at baggage claim in a green hat.
After coming, Tyler allowed his body to release its full weight into the passenger seat. Jason seemed uninterested in making conversation, much to Tyler’s relief. As they drove though an anonymous stretch of suburbia—fast food restaurants, strip malls, a Barnes & Noble—Tyler fell into a memory of waiting for his mom outside the dressing rooms at Ross when he was eleven. She’d been inside what seemed like a long time, and while he waited he stared at the the chiseled abs of the men on underwear packages. When she emerged from the changing room, he crouched to hide his erection. She misunderstood his posture for a stomach ache, and, despite his objections, insisted he go to bed as soon as they got home. Unable to think of an excuse, he acquiesced to her demands, and spent the rest of the afternoon in bed, fantasizing about the headless models. Jason’s profile picture on Scruff wasn’t so different—a headless torso torqued slightly to reveal his obliques. Tyler had messaged him with no intent beyond exchanging a few pictures of their erections, and maybe jerking off together, which they did. It wasn’t until after they’d both come and neither was eager to end the conversation that Tyler could tell something with Jason was different. Jason sent him a picture of his cat, Boyfriend, and Tyler found the name charmingly self-deprecatory. Tyler told Jason about the tarot card he’d illustrated that day, the ten of swords—a man laying face down in a desert landscape, ten swords planted in his back—and Jason said he’d pulled the very same card that morning. It was a sign. Of what, neither was sure. Jason told him the card symbolized a true spiritual death, the painful ending of one version of the self, clearing way for a new one. Tyler tried to think of what in his life was ending, if this text rapport with Jason was a new beginning, or if it was all meaningless—just a coincidence made resonant by the hormones coursing through his body in the aftermath of ejaculation. In any case, whatever spiritual death he might be experiencing, he’d steeled himself against it: from early in life, he’d developed a fragile pact with pain, like a disgruntled in-law he’d implicitly agreed never to speak to at family gatherings. As a child, regardless of his ailment—a cold, the flu, a sprained ankle—his mother refused to give him any medication for pain. It’s not good for you, she explained, only tricks you. And so, at the age of seven, he’d laid in bed with a broken wrist for days, facing off with a pain so immense, he hallucinated it was a purple dragon, come to take him away. Eventually the bruise turned from yellow to black and he was rushed to the emergency room where his mother blamed his wound on his carelessness climbing the neighbor’s apple tree. After tucking him into the hospital bed, pulling the wool blankets so tight he could barely move, she disappeared, leaving him for over a day with nothing to do but consume a stream of local news and daytime talk shows from the wall mounted television. I’m sure she’ll be back any minute honey, the nurse, a man with a bright yellow bandana wrapped around his head, had told him while wiping the sweat from his forehead. He knew the nurse had meant well, that he was saying the kind of things you say to children, and most of the time, it’s true. So he didn’t bother to argue, asked for more pills, and fell asleep.
His middle school counselor, whom he was forced to visit after filling out a school-mandated psychological profile test, had told him that pain was a natural part of life, one to embrace, and he’d need to grieve the disappearance of his father before he could reclaim his full breadth of feeling. But he knew that was bullshit. He was only a toddler thrashing in his crib when his dad gathered a duffel bag’s worth of belongings—a few changes of clothes, wallet and passport, Tyler’s baby book—and snuck out of the house, leaving an almost illegible note on the kitchen counter: sorry, I can’t anymore. He’d heard the story from his mother so many times that it felt like just another bedtime story, the big bad wolf blowing the house down, leaving the family knee deep in rubble. You were just a baby, and what was I supposed to do, the story always ended, her voice wavering between despair and self-pity as she plucked a fresh cigarette from the pack. Grieve, no. If anything, he felt jealous of his father, that he’d managed to free himself of his mother’s reign of tyranny: her controlling hyper-vigilance that gave way to cold dissociation. There were times he wondered if she’d always been that way, or if it was a result of his father’s leaving. Once, while rifling through his mother’s desk drawers, he’d found a picture of his parents together on their honeymoon, lounging on a blanket in the woods of Switzerland, a bottle of beer between them. He scanned the image for any sign of discord, but the scene oozed an unrehearsed joy: their socks scattered at the edge of the blanket, a few grapes on a paper plate, his mother grinning widely, her gaze slightly above the camera as if she’d spotted a bird. And his father stared straight into her chest as if he could see right through it to something secret and bright, his smile almost concealed by his beard. But photographs lie. Short of asking his father what she was like, he would never know. As a teenager, he’d tried to locate his father, but the phone number was out of service, and calls to neighbors revealed that he had decided to live “off the grid” somewhere in the foothills of the Sierras. That, to him, was as final as any death, and blame was most effective when placed on the living.
They pulled into a horseshoe-shaped apartment building that wrapped around a parking lot. With its exterior staircase and chipped yellowing paint, it looked to Tyler like a cheap motel. A few folding lawn chairs and potted plants on several of the balconies were the only evidence that people had established lives that they returned to day after day.
“Sorry for the mess,” Jason said as he unlocked the door. The apartment smelled vaguely of damp carpet, only sweeter, as if Jason had baked cookies earlier in the day. It was a small studio, and Jason busied himself at the kitchen counter, slipping a few anonymous objects from his pocket into a drawer. “You can put your stuff anywhere,” he said to Tyler who was standing by a glass coffee table, clutching his shoulder bag against his stomach. Tyler let his bag fall where he was standing, and picked up a small, egg-shaped orange stone that was sitting atop the coffee table. It conformed almost perfectly to his palm. Jason saw him from the kitchen and quickly approached, reaching out as if to stop him.
“Oh that’s my birthstone, yellow citrine. It was a gift from—”
He sidled up next to Tyler and plucked the stone from his hand, placing it exactly where it had been a few moments before. He twisted it a few times, as though he remembered the precise angle at which it had rested.
“Sorry, I didn’t know.”
“Oh no no, it’s totally fine. It’s nothing really. Hey do you want a drink?”
Jason poured them each a glass of wine, and as Tyler drew his finger around the rim of his wine glass, he thought kimla, an untranslatable word in his own language for a feeling that fell somewhere between boredom and anger. This thought led to a series of others in his private language—about the birthstone, the sickly-sweet smell in the apartment, the way Jason hunched over his wine glass—and with each new thought, he retreated further away, like a small point of light at the end of a tunnel. Akta-kai, he thought, What do I do now? He could always leave, get a hotel, slide into bed with a bottle of whiskey and scroll through the new offerings on Scruff and Grindr like he did when traveling to linguistics conferences. He took a gulp of wine, and let its familiar warmth shrink his thoughts until they were invisible, condensed, a molecule incapable of contaminating him.
Jason apologized for the mess. On the kitchen counter, a bowl of ripening bananas had attracted a fly that leapt from one piece of fruit to another, trying to find sustenance.
“This place has terrible Feng Shui.” Jason waved his hands haphazardly as if to fan away the entire apartment. “The energy bounces around at odd angles, when it should move in circles.”
Jason went on to explain that he’d just returned from a weekend meditation retreat during which he’d participated in a chakra cleansing workshop, a gemstone meditation seminar, and a course in the basics of Feng Shui. Ever since his ex, Aaron, a severe alcoholic who sold codeine on the black market, had kicked him out of a car at 2am, leaving him stranded in a far flung stretch of suburbia, he’d been on a new path, a path of healing. His therapist, Cindy, who he’d begun to see three months ago, had suggested the retreat, and though at first he wasn’t sure what to make of it, by the last day, it had turned his life inside out. It was as if he’d been living with a paper bag over his head, he explained, and suddenly, for the first time, he was breathing fresh air, his eyes blinded by the clarity of the world. He never thought he’d be into the God stuff, he continued, twisting a gemstone in his fingers, but when they say let go and let God, it wasn’t really about the old Christian god with the white beard, no, it’s a force of the universe: something so great, so powerful, but so intimately a part of us that it lives in every exhale, every small hair on the backs of our hands. At this point he lifted his own hand to his mouth and stared at it as if he could see this universal Godforce cascading off his skin. And the drugs he’d done with his ex—the painkillers, the cocaine, the meth—those were all vacuums for spirit, little black holes that gobbled up every last drop of real spiritual energy and held it hostage. Of course it didn’t feel like that when he was doing the drugs, no, doing them gave a glimpse of freedom, made him feel like he was the fucking buddha. At this point he re-arranged the gemstones on the coffee table, placing a periwinkle stone next to the yellow citrine.
“And these stones, they aren’t just stones. Each holds a specific frequency which can readjust energy, righting it so that it flows in proper harmony with the universal life force. This yellow citrine was a gift from Chance, my roommate at the retreat. God I thought my story was bad but you wouldn’t believe what that guy went through. And this one is chrysoprase,” he swiveled the periwinkle stone so it glinted under the florescent light, “which heals the inner child. We can’t make any real progress until we make friends with that kid in ourselves. I’m still working on that one. I think my kid self is still hiding under a table somewhere.”
As Jason spoke, Tyler could see the blind spot from his vision beginning to coalesce on the stone, then it hopped onto Jason’s face, a simmering black mole that migrated from his forehead down to his mouth. He wondered if he should feel somehow betrayed that Jason hadn’t shared any of this backstory with him while they were texting. Why conceal the drug addiction, the abusive ex, the newfound path to recovery for months only to reveal it now, before they’d even had dinner? But the truth was, Tyler felt nothing. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about Jason’s pain or his troubled childhood or his renewed enthusiasm for life, it was that he had no capacity to respond to Jason’s story in any genuine way. The blind spot began to grow wider, encompassing Jason’s entire face, until it became a mirror in which Tyler could see himself splayed on a hotel bed, getting a blowjob from some anonymous man. He could do that if he wanted, but that would require an intervention into this course of events demanding more effort than he was capable of offering. He leaned back into the white pleather sofa, took another sip of wine, and asked Jason about a polished black triangular stone tucked beneath the chrysoprase. Jason plucked it from the table, held it close to his chest, and Tyler’s blind spot landed squarely upon it, flickering in and out of existence.
They didn’t fuck that night. Whatever sexual energy had given rise to their encounter in the car had dissipated, an aftershock to the month long lead-in of dick pics and texted fantasies. Instead they lay a few inches from one another on Jason’s memory foam mattress, a sliver of light from the streetlamp outside slicing diagonally over their bodies. Tyler drifted in and out of feverish, technicolored dreams. In one, he was a bear roaming his childhood neighborhood, looking for anything to eat. People screamed from behind their picture-frame windows when they saw him, and he heard sirens in the distance coming to capture him. His hunger became immense, incalculable, such that he couldn’t discriminate between what was and was not edible. He approached his mother who was smoking on a street corner, leaning against a mailbox in her nightgown. Tyler, she scowled, why aren’t you in your room, it’s dangerous out here. Without hesitation, he ate her in one bloodless bite, like the wolf from Little Red Riding Hood. He could feel her thrashing in his stomach, her small palms pressing inside of him, the low vibrations of her screams rising through his spine. His hunger was unchanged. When he looked down at his paw, it was broken, though he felt no pain. An ice cream truck passed, and he considered chasing after it, but he knew it was useless, that nothing could satisfy him. This dream flickered away, replaced by a set of inchoate images that hovered somewhere between desire and violence, until he was in Jason’s living room, sitting across from Jason at the coffee table. Atop it were hundreds of stones, each seeming to emit its own light. Jason grabbed one of the stones and smashed it with his clenched fist until it disintegrated into a fine powder. He arranged the powder into two skinny lines with the backs of his hand, leaned forward, and inhaled one of the lines. You gotta try it, he said to Tyler, his eyes wide and opaque, the pupils reaching to their farthest edges. Instinctually, Tyler leaned in, but the powder smelled horrible, as if the damp, sweet smell that greeted him when he entered Jason’s apartment had been distilled to its most offensive components. But he didn’t care, decided to inhale anyway, at which point he woke to find that his arm had somehow migrated to drape itself around Jason’s neck. He pulled it off, and wiped the sweat from his wrist.
When he woke in the morning, he was alone. From the kitchen, he could hear the clanging of pots and pans, cupboards opening and closing. He smelled toast. The memory of his mother pressing against the inside of his stomach played in his mind uncontrollably, like a bad pop song, so he lurched out of bed and stumbled to the kitchen, hoping the waking world would dissolve it. Jason had arranged several triangular slices of toast onto a yellow plate, and placed a ramekin of jam beside it.
“Morning sunshine,” Jason said, his voice filled with a familiarity and kindness that made Tyler feel uneasy, unsure if he was expected to reciprocate its warmth.
“Thanks for breakfast. Just so you know, I might have to do some work today. I have a conference coming up next week.”
“No worries. Your flight back isn’t until tomorrow night, right? We have plenty of time. What kind of work do you do?”
Tyler gave his rote reply, that he was a graduate student in linguistics, focusing on the morphology of Old Norse. It occurred to him as he smeared a stripe of dark red jam on his toast that he was now on a first date, and Jason was finally asking the life-resume questions that they had postponed for months. He hated first dates.
“Hey, how about we do that tarot reading?” Tyler offered in an attempt to deflect Jason’s banal advances.
“Is it time for that already?” Jason winked and Tyler’s uneasy feeling became more pronounced, like his chest was a piece of soft ripe fruit, and Jason had plunged his finger into it.
“Yeah, why not.” Tyler had nibbled his toast around the edges until it became a shape resembling France.
“Okay, lemme grab my deck.” Jason vanished into the other room, and for the first time Tyler took in his surroundings in broad daylight. Aside from the coffee table, the couch, and the kitchen counter, the apartment was almost entirely empty: there was no other furniture, the walls were bare, and a sliding glass door opened onto a shared concrete patio on which rested a rusted folding lawn chair. He watched a few motes of dust drift through the air along a shaft of sunlight. This was an emptiness beyond a lack of interest in decoration—it seemed that Jason had either just moved in, was about to move out, or was squatting here. He popped the France-shaped piece of toast in his mouth.
“Got it. Okay, so what do you want to know about?” Jason fanned the cards onto the table in an arc like a shallow rainbow.
“Everything, I guess. Do I have to have a question?”
“Not really. Sometimes you just have a feeling in your gut, a feeling that there’s something you need to know about.”
Tyler again remembered his mother’s hands pressing along his stomach lining, eager for escape. The pain felt real, as though her nails were digging into him. No, he didn’t need to ask about that. He knew about that all too well. He stared down at the deck and again his blind spot emerged, jumping from card to card, as if it were trying to tell him which one to choose. He closed his eyes, attempting to eliminate the blind spot, and focused on the vague concept of happiness. He thought of holding hands with some anonymous, beautiful man; a day spent on a rugged coastline, looking out at the churning waves; an invitation to a prestigious conference to give a paper. All of these images felt contrived: flimsy dioramas of a life he was supposed to desire. Or maybe he really did desire them, and his disbelief in their validity was his problem. Either way, he told Jason he was ready.
“Okay, pick a card.”
Tyler opened his eyes and his blind spot landed on a card which he instinctually grabbed. He turned it over, and it revealed a horned, winged devil with goat’s legs sitting atop a throne. Two humans were tethered to the throne, chains shackling their throats.
“This is your present. The Devil.” Jason leaned forward and took a long, loud slurp of coffee. “The devil shows what you’re attached to, all the stuff you think is bringing you joy that’s actually holding you back. In my case it was the drugs, not sure what it is for you, but it could be anything: sex, money, validation, you name it. Anyway, let’s see what’s in the past.”
Again Tyler’s blind spot migrated to a card, and almost seemingly without his consent, his hand thrust forward and grabbed it.
“Huh. The six of cups. This is a card of childhood nostalgia, of playfulness, innocence.” Jason drew his finger over the image of two children smelling roses growing from golden cups. “It looks like you had a pretty nice childhood, lots of freedom to play.”
Tyler wanted to laugh, but didn’t. Sure, his childhood was an 80s suburban television fantasy on the surface—frisbee golf in the park, block parties and barbecues—but that wasn’t how he experienced it. The pain in his stomach became so acute, he wondered if it was more than just the memory of his mother’s hands. Maybe he was really sick.
“Alright, let’s see what you’ve got in the future.”
Again the blind spot landed squarely on a card, but this time Tyler resisted it. He forced his hand toward the opposite end of the deck, and grabbed the very bottom card. It showed a crumbling stone tower struck by lighting, two figures in mid air having jumped from it.
“No way to sugarcoat this one. It’s about a messy, chaotic ending. Everything you thought you knew is gonna be gone, kaput, and out of the rubble you’ll make something new of yourself. Maybe once you let go of all those attachments you’re holding onto, you’ll build a new life. But you’ve got a fresh start ahead of you, just looks like the path to getting there is gonna be messy.”
At this point Tyler knew what was going on. The reading wasn’t about him at all, it was about Jason. It was Jason’s pleasant childhood, his struggles with addiction, his new beginning. He could feel his stomach beginning to unclench, released from responsibility. Just the week before he’d illustrated The Tower, and, as a joke, had included his face and Jason’s as the two figures in mid air. He considered telling Jason this, but instead folded the thought back into his memories, and excused himself to use the bathroom.
He stared at his reflection in the mirror of the medicine cabinet, examining a small pimple at the tip of his nose as he allowed his thoughts to become distant, abstract, incapable of affecting him. He opened the medicine cabinet. Jason possessed an outstanding array of pills: lexapro, ambien, marplan, wellbutrin, valium, and those with names he’d never heard of. He opened the valium bottle, and inside was a twisted up plastic sandwich bag filled with white powder. It smelled of bleach. He sprinkled a bit at the edge of the sink, dabbed some onto his finger and pressed it against the tip of his tongue, which, after a tinge of bitterness, became numb. Cocaine, he was sure of it. He used the edge of the pill bottle to form the pile into a narrow line, and inhaled it with one sharp breath, replaced the bottle, closed the cabinet door and again examined his face in the mirror. His blind spot reappeared between his eyes, shimmering and pulsating until it suddenly possessed an infinite depth, as if it were a tunnel, a wormhole to some other world, a place in which his language was the only one spoken, in which he didn’t have to ever leave this bathroom, in which memory and thought had no valence, and he could stand here forever, suspended in the depthless present. The stomach pain returned, a dull ache expanding with impossible violence, and he kneeled over the toilet, saliva forming at the back of this throat. But whatever was inside him would not come out. He swallowed hard, hoping to force the ache downward into his core where it could calcify. It didn’t budge. He splashed water on his face, and re-emerged into the living room.
Jason was sitting on the couch, dreamily staring out the window, drawing his finger around the rim of his coffee cup.
“Hey thanks for the reading, man. Do you mind if I take a walk, I think I need some fresh air.” Tyler pulled at his shirtsleeve and looked desperately toward the sliding glass door.
Jason’s face contracted in a wince of pain, and he twisted his coffee cup as if to examine it from a new angle.
“Sure, sure, whatever you need. There’s a park down the street if you want someplace to hang for a bit.” Jason said the words flatly, without looking up, and Tyler knew he knew that Tyler would not be coming back. He stuffed his sweatshirt, the only item he’d unpacked, into his backpack, and tossed it over his shoulder. His suitcase lay on the floor like a zipped up coffin, and he considered what he would sacrifice by leaving it behind: two pairs of jeans, a sweater he’d found in a free box, a paper on old Icelandic he was supposed to edit, toothpaste. He mentally discarded its contents, envisioning it as a sacrifice, the husk of an old self he’d never return to. He thought of the tarot card that he’d drawn the first day he and Jason had talked, the ten of swords. It now seemed prescient, though he didn’t know if it was him or Jason with the swords in his back.
“See you in a bit” he said curtly to the air above Jason’s head as he slunk out the door, racing against the oncoming high of the cocaine. He walked in the opposite direction of the park, just in case Jason tried to find him. The sun was cloyingly bright, glinting off the parked cars in a shifting constellation. He stood on a random patch of sidewalk, looked up, and let it penetrate his eyes fully, just for a moment, holding his gaze a split second beyond the familiar sharp spike of pain. That was all he needed to alleviate the pressure in his stomach, like a see saw that had returned to equilibrium, one ache canceling out the other. He wasn’t sure what he’d do next, or even what he was capable of doing. But he wasn’t afraid, and he felt no pain.