“Amy,” Becca said, obviously embarrassed. “You can’t just—”
Surprisingly, it was Rodney who spoke. “It’s fine. I don’t… I’m sorry for that.”
Amy blinked. “For what?”
“That you’ll never know what it’s like to grow old. While it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be, I guess it’s not all bad.”
“Not bad at all,” Don said. He looked at Rodney, and Rodney looked at him. “I think of it this way: Every wrinkle on Rodney’s face is a memory. We’ve been together so long I know those lines as well as I know my own. I remember how it was when we first met. Smooth skin, sometimes rough with stubble. Good jawline. Eyes crinkling when he smiled. And it just got better and better as the years went on. Lines around the mouth, the eyes, lines across the forehead. A mapto our lives. You can see everything we’ve been through, all the highs and lows. It’s etched into his face and mine.”
Rodney smiled. A small thing, a quick upward tug of the lips, only for Don. He was like that. Not with everyone, but it could take time for him to warm up to people. And yet, here, so far from home and among strangers, that little smile. Their secret language.
Rodney looked at the young women and seemed to see a genuine willingness to listen. They didn’t find that a lot these days, at least before the black hole came.How like the youth, Don thought to himself.We were the exact same way.
Rodney spoke about history. Not just his and Don’s, but their community history. How many people thought the Stonewall riots were the start of the gay rights movement. Not so, he said. That was earlier in Silver Lake, California. A bar called the Black Cat. Still there, he said. Still has the same sign. Police raided the bar, as they did others. Queer people of all stripes were pissed, not wanting to take it anymore. They fought back. They were the first. He talked about how they went to Tucson, once. Just happened to be there for Pride. Did Becca and Amy know why Pride started in Tucson? No, they’d said, tell us. It was because a gay man named Richard Heakin—visiting from out of state—was murdered after he left a local gay bar. The culprits? Teenagers. Their punishment? Probation. Gays and lesbians said no, no, no. He told them of Matthew Shepherd, the young queer man left to die by people who hated his light. Amy had seen a play about him. He was the one they tied to a fence, she told Becca in a hushed voice. Did they know the harm Reagan caused? Did they have any idea of the effects that trickle-down economics had? Or how the Great Actor’s war on drugs decimated Black communities without a care for the destruction left in the wake? Surely, Rodney said, they had to know about HIV, about AIDS, how Ol’ Ronny ignored the cries, ignored people begging for help. Oh, and don’t forget about Ms.Nancy. Two poisoned people, he said. There’s a reason Amy and Becca didn’t see many people of old age in the queer community. So many were left to die, to be confined to a hospital, not allowed to be touched by anyone, lesions forming, skin stretching, stretching until they were pale skeletons. And still the Man in Charge did nothing. He didnothing. He refused to even acknowledge it.
Rodney said, “If there’s a Hell, I know Ron and Nance are there. They are burning. They are suffering. They’ll do so for eternity, and it still won’t be enough. I don’t care if everything goes with the eventual heat death of the entire universe, I hope they will still burn.”
It wasn’t a one-way conversation. Though they seemed to be hanging on Rodney’s every word, Becca and Amy dotted his stories with little bursts of “Holy shit, that’s crazy” and “Honestly, fuck all those people” and “Go, gays!”—that last shocking Rodney and Don into surprised laughter. Because they were young, they looked as if they wanted to roll their eyes every now and then, like when Rodney asked if they knew about HIV and AIDS, but they listened all the same.
Rodney said he might have been lost. Might have gone the way so many of their friends did. But he met Don. He met Don and knew that was it. But that didn’t stop it from happening to people they knew, people they loved. Men like Nick, the first of their friend group to go. It was not slow. It was not easy. He screamed. No one could stop him from screaming. And then he died. The first, but not the last. Greg was next. Then Michael. Then Bobby and Ricky D and Joseph and the other Joseph and Miguel and Dwayne and Jerome and Paul and Timothy and Alan and Lonnie. He told them of the reason why it’s LGBT when it used to be GLBT. It was an honor bestowed upon lesbians, who were some of the only people to stay with the dying men. They filled the hospitals, the streets, they cried out in horror at the treatment of the dying. “Weput them first,” Rodney said, “because they put us first. Never forget that. When we were abandoned by the world, it was the women from our community who held our hands as we passed.”
Becca told them of a friend of theirs, a trans woman who had been physically and psychologically abused as a child, their gender in flux, yearning for their insides to match their outsides, her name—herrealname—whispered under the blankets at night like a prayer. Simple, really: Anne. She loved the name Anne. Not Annie, not Ann with noe. Anne. And when she escaped, when she found freedom, she spoke the name aloud and that was who she was. That was who she’d always been. Then they’d watched as the courts had upheld bans on gender-affirming care, and wondered why so many people gave a shit about things that didn’t affect them. “Like, who cares?” Amy groused. “A trans person living their true lives causes people thousands of miles away to melt down? It’s crazy that we have to die the same waytheydo.”
Rodney continued into the nineties, the Clintons. Don’t ask, don’t tell. Keep it a secret, they said. Stay hidden in the shadows. See all those straight couples? You don’t get to be like them. You have to skulk around. You don’t get to walk down the street in broad daylight holding hands. Straight couples? Sure, sure. But when it was same-sex? No, that was quite a step too far. But they didn’t stay hidden. They didn’t let people forget how many had died, how many were still dying. People were paying attention now. Not, of course, with enough time to save those lost. No. Besides, so many people thought, didn’t they kind of deserve it? After all, maybe if they were normal like everyone else, it wouldn’t have happened. Oh, what do you mean straight people can get it? Drug users. Yes, that’s what it is. Gays and druggies. They should have made better choices.
Men in Charge, Rodney said, all of them, no matter what side of the aisle they’re on, are all criminals. Every single one of them.In a just world, anyone who was elected president would do so knowing that once their term was over, they’d go directly to prison for war crimes, no ifs, ands, or buts. Every single one of them. See how many Men in Charge would be keen on harming others if that were the case.
What made all of this so funny, Rodney said, was that he used to be conservative, at least fiscally. It took his people dying for him to see no one in power cared about anything other than themselves. After that, he washed his hands of all of it. He didn’t give two shits about any of them. Some, he acknowledged, were worse than others, but in the end, liars and criminals, all.
They listened, Becca and Amy. When Don looked at them, they were enraptured by the low cadence of Rodney’s voice. Some of his words were a bit more forceful, but overall, a calm, even tempo. He talked and talked, and they listened. And when they told him about what they’d seen, what they’d lived through, Rodney listened too. Stories of their history, of their community. Don wasn’t sure when he’d last heard Rodney talk so much at once.
He wasn’t surprised when a single tear fell from his eye. A thought had struck him dumb—profound in ways he didn’t quite understand and might never have time to. How long had humans been gathering around a fire and sharing stories? Since the beginning, Don suspected. Since language was formed. Since words could be spoken. Sharing thoughts formed in the mind. Was it humankind’s most singular achievement? Don thought it might be.
When Rodney finished, Amy and Becca both rose silently, almost as if they shared the same brain. They leaned over Rodney, Amy to his left, Becca to his right. They kissed his cheeks, once, Amy leaving a small imprint in pink.
“Thank you,” Amy said. “Thank you for sharing yourself with us. I’ll never forget it for as long as I live.”
Becca sighed. “Amy, what the fuck.”
Amy turned to her, eyes wide. “They should go with us.”
Don startled. “Oh, hey, no, we have somewhere we need to—”
Becca shook her head. “She didn’t mean it like that. We’re staying here until it happens. No better place to be. We’re going swimming. A night swim. Most of the people here go. We’ve done it every night over the past week.”
“Isn’t it cold?” Don asked with a frown. “That’s melted glacier water.”
“Cold as a witch’s tit,” Becca agreed cheerfully. “I would say you get used to it, but no, you really don’t. I made it eight minutes last night. That’s the longest I’ve gotten. Amy’s gone ten. Some guy from Canada—name’s… Dale? Dustin?—can stay out for hours. Don’t know how he does it. Said it’s because he’s full of Tim Hortons.”
“We don’t have swimwear,” Rodney said, and Don relaxed a little.
Until Becca and Amy exchanged a look. Amy smiled and said, “Yeah, see, that’s the other thing.”
The other thing, as it turned out, was that no one wore swimsuits. In fact, no one wore anything at all. Every person going into the water began to disrobe right there on the beach, leaving their clothes and undergarments folded in neat piles on the rocks and sand. Didn’t matter the age; everyone who participated understood one had to be fully nude. The few who didn’t swim stayed around a large bonfire, keeping it blazing for those fleeing frigid waters.
Don didn’t think he’d seen so many exposed genitals since his days in New York in the early seventies. Back rooms, bathhouses, theaters that showed porn where the floor was sticky more often than not. The difference being that here, now, it felt strangely asexual. There was nothing erotic about the exposed flesh. There wasn’t meant to be.
“They’ve lost their minds,” Rodney said as the first people began to splash in the water, shrieking about how cold it was. The night above: few stars in a sky the color of old wood, the moon fat and bright orange as if on fire.