Spark

Samuel Lansey

It was September, the first time you kissed me. The first time anyone kissed me, I guess, excluding a few tentative pecks in clandestine games of spin-the-bottle and the lithe blond boy from Texas that past summer, but his caresses were halfhearted, devoid of your intensity. You had dyed your hair maroon, left the bathroom sink rimmed with red like an underslept eye, and as you leaned in and I felt your hot breath on my face I saw the smudges of color across your plain, thin long-sleeved ex-white t-shirt and I was ashamed of you. You were all appendages then, only a whisper of pasty abdomen that would induce me to lift up your shirt and expose the impasse of gooseflesh that so contradicted your swollen red lips and sunburned legs. Predictably, you would pull at your polo, bat your eyes coquettishly, and I could almost hear the clicking of imaginary paparazzi underwriting your existence. I was just happy to slink into your shadow as you smeared your face with eyeliner and usurped center stage. Except when you pushed me up against the brick wall behind the school and clasped my wrists with your spindly hands. With the security camera swiveling in a mechanic waltz above us, I was as much the star as you were. All I could see was the tooth that you had chipped on a bottle of wine when you were twelve, its jagged edge displaced in your sheepish smile. And you kissed me and I kept my eyes open and stared at your ear like they always made me do at the optometrist when I put my chin on the cold metal and the man would say Look at my ear while they shined a light over my frantic iris and tried to fix my deteriorating vision. I looked down at my hands. They were groping at the air in senseless cartwheels, trying to grab on to something that wasnt there. I was twelve, almost thirteen. I didnt know my adverbs from my nouns. I held your hand sometimes, when nobody could see us: on the bus, our fingers intertwined underneath my backpack, or in a darkened movie theater, your palm chilly from clutching the cup of soda. I thought privately that you looked like Jesus with that strange lucent skin and those almond eyes, those darling-how-could-you-do-this-to-me eyes that brimmed with tragedy at the end of every sad film. And I would look at you and stick my tongue out, say, Sink or swim, faggot. I bet you were sickened by my pretense of apathy. I bet you never knew that after you fell asleep I tried to memorize your freckles and hairs so I could map the constellations all over your forearms and calves like glow-in-the-dark stars on childhood wallpaper. Like when that grubby, bearded man on the corner of Fourth and Main asked us, once, if we could spare a little change. I sneered, True change comes from within, the same way I always did, but you reached into your pocket, fished out a handful of pennies and nickels. Your pockets were always full of change no bills, just coins. I remember how your mother had glued strips of cardboard to your shoes so your socks wouldnt collide with the dirty ground, how shed promised the check was coming soon, the check from the car accident that left your taupe two-door sedan abandoned and bruised, gazing with demure shame from two shattered headlights. And one night we took I-5 heading north, intersecting the dilapidated houses, the car corkscrewing past the drunks who ambled away into the night. When you stepped outside, it looked like you were walking on water as you floated toward the peeling paint, steady to the cadence of the power plants electric hum. All of the rooms had doorways but no doors. Your little brother whooped and shook the furniture, a grimy smudge of grease smeared across his face like war paint. I wanted to see your bedroom. The ceiling was low, with one round hole above your bed, through which I could see your mothers bedroom and the rafters above, insulation the color of exposed gums at the dentist. A small clump of cigarette ash sailed through the hole in the ceiling, like a firefighter cruising down an imaginary pole, and sizzled as it landed on the sagging mattress. Surrounding the circumference of the gap, cracks had formed in thin, haphazard veins. You carefully squeezed a thread of goo from a fading tube of Preparation H t rubbed it onto the purple bags under your eyes. You told me how it makes them fade. I looked into the mirror at my own face, still tan from summer, unpocked by pubescent maculae. And you lay on top of me with your head on my heart and I inhaled that familiar organic smell of skin and Dial

antibacterial soap. I could still hear the traffic on I-5 over the heartbeat in my ears. Your kisses were sloppy and I taught myself to breathe through my nose, suffocated by the weight of your tongue. With the curiosity of an arachnid, your long fingers explored my skin, waiting to pounce. Going outdoors on summer afternoons as a child, I had to douse myself in insect repellant, lest I return home swollen with mosquito bites. My mother would smile and squat down to my level, dusting the wounds with a cotton ball soaked in aloe vera. They love you, Sam, she said, her touch soothing the circular red lumps. When you and I were middle aged, I wondered, would we apply our own remedies to the abrasions of our own children, to each other? Then, whispering to myself the stream-of-consciousness poetry I doodled during algebra class: It would be iniquitous to wear the scent of you to adhere to your skin like dust to the sunlight or to fear the discovery of this sacred love like a lost continent sinking to the depths of some unforeseen blue-black ocean only a whisper of myth but still we are glowing, yearning, and spinning like papyrus and glass. For years I had fantasized about strange lovers, fey boys who twirled in an endless ethereal ballet, but you choked the life from their lungs with your intoxicating, listless warmth. The night I brought you home, I took the two stolen glasses from the shoebox in the back of my closet and poured cheap red wine into them and then I spilled it across the carpet, left a stain that looked like a fermented nosebleed. I never cleaned it out all the way. We sat motionless on my bed and I asked you about your father and you hunched over a little, told me in trembling words that he was a race car driver and you didnt see him much. I remember how your fingers looked so adult, even though you shook as you lit that blue candle: the satisfying click-and-fizzle of my lighter, the smell of rosemary and bergamot, and light. I couldnt find the right music to play, so I didnt play anything at all. Your hands penetrated every molecule of flesh and sinew and muscle, but it didnt hurt. And my heart, the oft-personified thing that when stripped of context and symbolism is nothing more than an organ, did something different. It didnt race or stop or slow or beat, at all. It fluttered. Like lashes surrounding a blinking eye. And then we were Vishnu, deified in the endless splay of our limbs. And it hurt. I hid my teddy bear and security blanket in the closet before you came, convinced that the evidence would give me away and you would realize how clueless I was. But your own inexperience was endearing, when you leaned in and said something so fucking stupid like: You have no idea how lucky we are to have found each other. It was poetry, wasnt it, two boys together clinging, coiled in between my sheets vibrating to the hiss of the space heater on that autumn night. I turned the heat down a notch and slithered beneath the duvet, all flushed and grateful for that twin bed that was too short for your feet, which poked mournfully out of the covers. And the wind played with the papers on my desk and your hands tiptoed across my eyelids and my nerve endings were honored that they were gracing my cheek. Transfixed in that moment, I felt myself whirling away from construction paper and night-lights, losing grasp on the peppermint candy promise of an impending Christmas. And I saw my skinned knees and bitten nails and stubbed toes but I didnt care because our love was made, and so quietly that when you left in the morning I doubt I stirred. When my parents came back from Washington all I could think was that while they had been pleasantly laughing at stupid jokes at their stupid banquet dinner I had submerged my body in the sweat and spit of a waitresss bastard son who I loved with earnest desperation. I had never realized that time doesnt knock on the bathroom door, that it could just pass us by in a haze, second hands and minute hands exhausted in their indiscrimination. Like when we were glued to the wall of that stall in the boys bathroom and I was tracing the ellipse of your mouth with the hand that wasnt shaping it, and the door creaked as someone stepped inside. Your eyes flashed, darting around in firecracker glances catapulting into the vibrant skies on the Fourth of July. And I thought, where will I will that place, when the sparks were all gone? But short gushes of water erupted from the broken tap and the boy left, and I released a sigh of relief and said, We almost got busted and you kissed me on the mouth and aid, Were lucky. When I said love was an incongruous rose in a field of clover, you said that love was like bumper cars. And when I said that you were the punch line to a joke that had already made me laugh, you said that love was like swimming, that it was better if you werent afraid to get wet. So we jumped all the fences just to make sure we were cool but when I caught myself on the tangle of rusty wire, you stayed with me. And when you took your clothes off and huddled so vulnerable in uncompromised nudity, for the first time I

understood the significance of your body, every muscle and pore working in unison. Your neck was burr-prickled and your back curved but I wanted to walk forever down the winding road of your spine. And your abdomen gravitated toward the sky like there was something, some insatiable hunger, something within you clawing its way into the world. And then it was over. And it was your fault. It happened on Friday night and I heard on Saturday morning and the house was empty and I ran a bath and scrubbed my body with a bristled brush until the skin was raw and I started to bleed, but still I sat there with the telephone precarious along the thin ridge of tile surrounding the tub. And the only words I spoke to you were on the telephone that night and I picked up and said You broke me and I hung up the phone and you never called back and I was glad, because there was nothing more to say, and I realized that those words I had thought I knew, the words that I believed could capture some iota of a moment or feeling, were empty vessels, silently bobbing at sea. You taught me that words float. In January, you threw yourself down the stairs and lay at the bottom on the cold, glossy linoleum while the teachers rushed to check your pulse, and the school hummed with scandal. I started taking those pills, the ones that made me real sick, and you sat next to the other boy in class every day and I saw that familiar hunger on your face when he would flick his mahogany hair out of his eyes and lick his lips. He still had a girlfriend, a bony little blond with a papery complexion, and she cornered me in the locker aisle and asked me everything I knew, and I told her how her boyfriend had ground his chiseled hips into those of my boyfriends some Friday night, showed her the apology you wrote me in scrawled loopy cursive. She put her hand to her mouth, made a little gasping noise, and wept. The school counselor called me to her office where you sat, head down, wringing your hands, and she asked me to sit down and I tried but I couldnt, standing inches from you quivering with ire spilling from me in tidal waves, screaming what the fuck did it mean to you, you cruel selfish faggot, what did it mean to you. And I remember how I never recovered from the infinite destruction of the night before we left for Connecticut two years earlier when I crumpled to the kitchen floor and my mother towered above me saying shut up shut up youre not allowed to speak. The way I felt at that moment; thats how I wanted you to feel. And the counselor kept saying sit down sit down but I whirled around hating and shouting do you know how I loved the little hairs on your arms, do you know how I loved the way you would lie between my sheets naked and electric with one hand idly skimming your nipple and the other hooked around my stomach, do you know that the French call the act of love l e petit mort because in the stark beauty of that instant your soul is battling against the flesh in which it is imprisoned and in the act of pulling from a lover you relinquish your grasp on the illusion of being complete and part of you dies a little bit every time, do you know I know the boots you say your father gave you were bought at a vintage store because you dont even know your fathers name and are your tear ducts really obstructed because it sure seems like they are and maybe thats the problem, maybe the lifetime of unshed tears is eating away at your insides, is that it, well everybodys got their breaking point and I dont believe it for one fucking second, cry you white trash piece of shit, cry cry cry I know you have it in you, I know you have it in you. And you sobbed in dry, choking gasps, coughing up snot, and I thought your eyes looking so red and scaly would pop out of their sockets and I was nauseated by your dry cheeks silently flouting my sole request, so I got up and left you there with the counselor stunned, frozen mid-action as she was rising from her desk chair, arm muscles contracting, her identical balled fists pressed against the desk in perfect inefficacy. And I thought about the cathartic nature of repetition, like when I sat on my balcony at night smoking a lot of cigarettes and said the word lonely over and over again until it ceased to become a word because it was just a noise, an arbitrary construction of letters that didnt mean anything at all. The happenstance of semantics. I tried twice. I never told you because I wanted you to think I was strong. The first time was violent, blunt. I woke up in the hallway with vomit crusted on my neck. The second time was a symphony; as I felt the curtains begin to close in on my vision and the gradual dulling of my senses, I gently set the letter on my bedside table, lit the blue candle that had coagulated into ugly hunks of wax all winter, and scattered more pills across the bed, collapsing onto the mess of pillows in my silk smokinggown, my right arm triumphantly resigned in an upside-down L above my head. In the morning I stood still as the sun rose. I thought maybe I was dead until my mother knocked on the door at seven oclock in the morning, and I was disappointed. Nobody noticed my suicide note. I burned it on the way to school, stomped out the ashes with my sneaker, and spat on them. The sun that April was false and near to the ground. I sat alone on the blacktop that stretched from the ragged hoop where you had first kissed me in beams of festival light to the playground where I kicked off from a lonely swing set and my sneakers dragged in the beaten sawdust to the field where I tripped and fell like a coward and inhaled the smell of hay and spring rain. My hands were eerie, swathed in a dusting of fluorescent pink chalk, and the sunlight wouldnt stop painting pictures on my cracked raw palms, so I wiped them on my jeans, leaving ghostly handprints, like the last footsteps of an acrobat trailing across my thighs.

And I cornered you by the monkey bars, behind the portables adjacent to the chipped clay tennis courts that hadnt been us ed in years. I stuck my hands in the back pockets of your low-slung jeans, grabbed your hips, and purred, God fucking dammit I miss having sex with you. You touched my shoulder with that look of condescension, and in that spring cold, my cheeks pinched raw, I wanted to burn down every teenage dream that I was ever naive enough to let blossom. I was overwhelmed by the hypocritical, inevitable desire to perpetuate the cycle of injury and bruise something. I wanted to take you to New Mexico, sit with you under leafless trees drinking lemonade and painting pictures of the copper red bluffs that squatted, all jagged edges and geometry, overlooking patches of desert like a rash on bronzed skin so you might understand the hollow magnitude of the world. I didnt want to say anything more. My thumb grazed your waist. And you said, You always said I was your angel but now Im sorry, Sam, in those same clipped breaths as though you had dandelion wishes wadded in your throat. I just dont love you anymore. And I pulled closer and tried to kiss you because I wanted to punish you, I wanted to grab that full lower lip and sever it from your face with my teeth. But you pushed me away and then you ran across the blacktop to the field in the glare of the sun and for an instant you were pulled into the give of a ray of sunlight. I heard the thump-thump-thump of a basketball dribbling across the cement. I crumpled. An airy swish and all was silent. Two years later, in the summer, I was at that club with the drag show, the place I never went because it smelled like sex and apple juice and everyone in there looked cold and sad, but it was two A.M. and I was cold and sad, too. The clarity of the blood and cocaine coursing through my head made me dance funny, like a marionette. And that boy with the red hair whose name I could never remember was leading me by the hand past the stage, out the door to his car, and I saw your smiling face, caked in makeup, and you, skinnier than you had ever been. Your clavicle protruded above a corset and your bow-legged thighs and calves were miles long underneath a pink tutu. I broke away from the boy with the red hair whose name I could never remember and waited for you. We made eye contact as you came down the stairs, stood before me. I caressed your grotesque androgyny, the thin hairs along your neck and the pinkness of your lipstick and, God, your Adams apple, when did that emerge? But I touched that unfamiliar lump of cartilage with the same tenderness that I had touched you two years before, and I could smell that you-smell that made my knuckles clench and throat close, hating myself for having forgotten it. And I was wondering if you remembered the same little things I did after such a long time. I was thinking that I never wanted to see you again but I needed so badly to be there and feel it, I needed to understand. I was thinking, who are you now? Who are you now? Who are you now? So I smiled that familiar twisted-up smirk and said, You look like shit. And you said, Some things never change.