[Note: This story is a work of fiction, and was previously published on genXy.io.]

I was going to start this by saying, “It’s not like I’d always had a crush on Troy Wedinger,” except that’s the kind of lie that could only be made true if I finished it with “but that’s because it was more than a crush; I was madly in love with him, from the very beginning.” It’s the kind of lie I’ve been telling myself and everyone else for nearly ten years now.

And I guess I owe you that truth, because the rest of this is going to come across as hard enough to believe that I should play this as straight as I can. Which is a joke about how gay I am, but you couldn’t have known that yet.

I’m Deek Passamore, Jr., and one of the first ways I distinguished myself from my old man, Deacon “Deke” Passamore, Sr. was that I cleverly spelled our shared nickname “Deek”. He didn’t like it, but then we didn’t like each other much to begin with. Or end with, for that matter.

I’d met Troy in peewee football when we were both nine. We were from small, adjacent farm towns out near Warsaw, Indiana. He was from Wessup, and I was from Dolfang, and if you try to look those up on a map, you probably won’t find them because they were really that small. No-stoplight towns that were more corn and soybeans than people, you know? The kinds of places where two little boys could ride their bikes on dirt roads to get back and forth to each other’s houses, and not be threatened by anything more than a herd of deer or a big John Deere tractor. But by the time we were in middle school, we were in the same school building, and fast friends.

We’d have sleepovers at each other’s houses. We’d help each other with our chores. We schemed endlessly about how to get things done faster so that we could go to a game, or a movie, or just hang out at the small pond that was halfway between our farms.

When I think about Troy, I think about my childhood, and vice versa. He was so much a part of it, we might as well have been brothers.

When his mom died, he stayed enough nights at my house that it was like we’d adopted him.

Years later, when my Pa ran off—well, Troy’s dad didn’t become my replacement pa, but it felt like between us we had enough people to cobble together a little family, and that was something.

We talked about everything boys talk about, I guess. Football and basketball. Video games and movies, and comics. Farming, trucks, soldiers, dirt…. damn near everything except girls, or only in the most abstract way, if we talked about girls at all. None of that struck me as weird, not until we got to high school.

And even then, I suppose it took me a long time to tune in on the raging hormones that surrounded us, because by then, two other things had managed to distract me completely.

One of them was Troy, or more precisely, his body. When I tell you he was handsome, I think I accidentally diminish the meaning of words. He was stunning, transforming from a skinny twerp who I’d been able to beat at wrestling for years, into a 6’3” blond-haired, blue-eyed paragon of Americana manhood.

Believe me, I was not the only one who noticed. In fact, I think it was impossible for anyone not to notice.

Except Troy. I’m not kidding you with that; everyone in a five-county radius knew who he was, and yet somehow, he only had eyes for me. As a friend, and a friend only, I was sure at the time, but later events cleared me up on that, I guess. Just too late to do us any good.

We were Troyandeek, or Deekantroy, either way, but always one word together, more inseparable than Mutt and Jeff, my Grammy used to say, not that I knew that reference at the time.

But by the time we got to high school, after puberty had well and truly kicked in, something happened to Troy.

The rest of us were flooded with hormones, filling out and filling in and generally speaking becoming men and women, as hundreds of millions of our ancestors had done before us. And mind you, this was happening to Troy, too, him becoming the paragon of manhood I’ve already described.

But the second thing was that something else happened to him—and only to him.

It was like God turned on the hormones tap inside him, and then also leaned over and turned on the divinity tap to boot.

It’s taken me so long to write this down because I don’t know how else to explain it. It was like he radiated light in a set of colors the human eye can’t see, but longs to. The natural world could see it, though, and boy howdy.

I’m not just talking about birds and bees, but also literally—birds and bees. Troy would no sooner step outside than he could hold out a hand and have a bird land on it, happy as a clam to have found this human, chirping to him like it was delivering him the dark-eyed junco headline news, or the latest decisions from the high command of the common grackles.

One spring afternoon that was already warming into summer, I finished my chores and went over to his place, and I found him sitting out in the back forty behind his house. This was a hilly meadow that had a creek winding through it. His Pa didn’t farm it because it was too rocky and steep, and besides, the creek drew the deer, and that was a prize for hunting season.

He was just sitting there in a beam of sunshine, and I shit you not, he was covered in birds, and butterflies, and bees, and crickets. But not in a “human being ripped to shreds by critters” kind of way. More like he was holding court, talking to them, and this wise council of the meadow was consulting with him on matters of most supreme mundane importance.

He turned to me, sensing I was there, and smiled so beatifically that it was as if the whole Universe had fixed me in its spotlight and decided that I was the main character of the day. I’ve only ever felt that radiance a couple of times since, and almost all of them were with Troy.

The flotilla of critters rose off of him as one, and headed towards me, not menacing, but rather as if a charming parade of festival-goers had come to welcome the newest arrival. They touched on me briefly, a gentle hailstorm of quick landings and departures that left me swooning with a feeling of peace and welcome, and also a deep, melancholy longing, because as quickly as it all happened, it was over.

It’s hard to be a human and to finally feel that love and acceptance from the world writ large, and then to have it disappear just as quickly. Maybe most of us aren’t designed for that. Maybe that’s why some of us turn to ever-harder drugs to find that touch of joy and light, and then keep chasing that high.

I pulled him up off his feet, and he bumped into me in a rough hug, and a flash of white teeth, and we fell into conversation without ever addressing what I’d just seen.

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There was another time in the woods, early in our Freshman year of high school, a thing I’ll never forget.

We’d both been hunting a thousand times before that. It was Northern Indiana; deer hunting was a God-given right, so much so that our fathers had taken us numerous times when we’d been kids. The couple of dozen times that all four of us had managed to go hunting together was a remarkable feat, considering that both of them were gruff, cruel, drunkards who weren’t great at getting up and out the door early.

On this morning, Troy and I were huddled up in the blind together. Not in separate ones, which would have been better for hunting, but pressed close together in the one we both liked to argue was ours; it was a way to share heat, and maybe an excuse to press our bodies up against one another, just because.

We’d sat in silence through the dawn, and right as we were thinking it was time to head to school, this ten-point buck that everyone in the county was talking about wandered into view, as cool as a cucumber, thank you very much.

I flinched right as I was about to take a shot, and then again when Troy put his big hand on my shoulder, and told me with his mind that he needed to talk to this stag.

I think I stopped as much out of shock that I’d just heard my best friend’s voice in my head as anything else, and when I looked into his eyes, he gave a small nod that said, yes, you just heard me in your mind.

For the next twenty minutes, I watched as that stag walked right up to our blind and stood there looking at us. Troy climbed down like he was meeting an old friend, and I clambered down after him, graceless and loud, snapping a branch as I tumbled to the ground. I looked up to see both of them—the man and the deer—staring at me with bemused smiles that said what a loveable oaf.

They talked, and even as I write it, I struggle to say it another way, but I am telling you they talked for what seemed like forever. Foreheads pressed together, nickers and grunts from both of them, ending in tears. A man and a deer, weeping before me, as I stood there, stupidly thinking I didn’t know deer could cry.

At the end, Troy nodded to me to touch his friend, and with a trembling hand, I patted the side of the stag’s head. The creature pressed his high cheek into my hand, and once again I felt that struck by a lightning bolt of joy feeling flood through me and then fly away, nearly as quick.

As we walked out of the woods that morning, late for school, Troy turned to me and said, “We’re never hunting again, okay?”

I nodded, mute, still a bit bewildered. And it was OK by me. I didn’t love hunting the way my father did, and that moment with the stag with Troy had shifted something inside of me as much as it clearly had in him.

It continued from there. There are a thousand moments like this I could tell you about here, but they are all more fantastic than the last. They all seem to come forward as if they are dipped in honey, a golden sunshine dust glimmering across the surface of every memory I have of Troy.

Other people began to notice, and not just in assigning to Troy the nickname of “Golden Boy”. Girls, and not an inconsiderable number of guys, began to clamor to hang out with us—and Troy, being Troy, let them. I remember feeling a certain disgruntlement that I had to share him, but also a considerable amount of pride that even as Freshmen, we had somehow become the center of gravity around which the whole school orbited. Well, Troy had, and I was the far less radiant binary star that orbited him, and so by default, I was popular too.

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Football was where it all changed. Him and us. All of it, and I mean all of it, became too big to ignore. I think it’s when he realized it, too. How big it could get if he let it. If he chose it.

We were on the team Freshman year, a quarterback and center duo so compelling that we saw real playtime, and had everyone buzzing about Troyandeek, and how we were going to lift the Warsaw Tigers into the top tier of Indiana football.

And we did.

Sophomore year he was the starting quarterback, and he was magnificent. It took four games to get Coach Walthers to put me in as a starter too, but when he did, it was magic. And I mean it was literally magic.

There was a play in a late September game against the Brownsburg Bulldogs—the same team we’d go on to defeat for the State championships for two years—that changed my perception of reality.

I could give you the play-by-play, but in my mind, y’all don’t seem like the kind of people who need to hear that part.

What had happened was, halfway into the game, when it looked like we were down by three touchdowns and incapable of coming back, Troy suddenly knew how the rest of the game was going to unfold.

Coach Walthers had screamed at us at halftime. I don’t mean he yelled, I mean he screamed. At the end of the tirade, he laid a heavy hand onto Troy’s head and hollered “You’re supposed to be the damned Golden Boy, so by God, you’d better show me you understand how this game works!”

I saw the change. No one else did, but I saw it. A flicker of anger and determination crackled across Troy’s eyes—desperate to impress his own father for ages, now pressing that keen burden into the shape of Coach. And the flash. The download. The golden rainbow of information that flooded into my best friend’s brain while I was watching him.

I had to blink to process what I’d seen, and then look around the locker room to see if anyone else had caught it, too. To a person, the guys were looking down at their feet. Not even Coach had noticed anything.

I caught Troy’s eye, and he nodded at me, a glimmer of a smile on his face.

I’m still not sure how to describe what happened next.

We tumbled out of the locker room, all except for Troy, who walked out onto the field slowly and deliberately, his head held high, but not in an asshole kind of way. Like he was noticing everything. Seeing the colors in the air, and breathing in the information of the earth, the crowd, and the players.

He motioned to us to huddle up, and when the last guy completed the circle, a tingle passed through me. It jolted my nuts, sure, but it was more than that. Not sexual, but masculine. Predatory and sharp, but smart, like a wolf, or a tiger, I suppose.

I can’t tell you what he said. It was simple, direct, forceful…but what I saw, in my mind, was exactly how the rest of the game was going to go. Every call, every pass, every catch, every run. I knew the order of the next 50 plays of the game, from now until the end, when we would win 27-20—a massive turnaround from the half.

You’re expecting me to tell you it went exactly to plan, right?

It did, until it didn’t. Derek Roman, an asshole junior on the other team tripped mid-play with 6:30 left, and sprained his ankle. None of us had seen that. It wasn’t in the plan. He’d been screaming that Troy was cheating, and then, thunk, down he went and twisted his ankle but good.

In the moment it happened, we could have freaked out, but while the medics were attending to Derek, the rest of us huddled up around Troy, who, I swear to God had a glimmer to him now.

We closed the circle, and we received our new information. When the clock resumed, we finished every new play flawlessly. We won the game, 30-20.

The rest of this story might be about high school football triumphs. It would be easy to tell that story. Fun, even.

But that was just the backdrop. A flawless season for the rest of our Sophomore year, and all through our Junior year, up until the end. The state media was insane, and yet somehow we weathered it, even when we were on pace to go to Nationals that Junior year.

We didn’t make it, but that was because Troy told us we had to lose, and so we did, in exactly the way he showed us we would. The strange thing was, it wasn’t like we were being controlled. We could have changed the outcome of that game in a minute, but we all chose not to, because Troy was convinced that we needed to lose.

Afterwards, as we rode home in my beat-up old truck, I was going to ask him why, but, as had been happening a lot lately, he just turned to me and answered my question before I even asked it.

“It’s free will, Deek. We all get to choose how our lives turn out. Every minute of every day, we’re making choices, and God lets us. Because the Universe has a lot of things in it that could happen, and some that maybe should happen, or have to happen. But we always get to choose if we want them or not. Even when bad things happen, we get to choose how we react to them. How we deal with it. Most people go with the flow, but they’re choosing big and small things every day.”

He paused and looked at me full on, while I glanced away from the road to meet his eyes.

“If we’d won that game, a lot of things that only maybe could happen, would have happened, too soon. And the way I figure it, there’s no rush. I didn’t feel like we were ready for it yet.”

I nodded because it made a certain kind of sense to me. I’d seen the way the town and the media were starting to go crazy at the idea of National Champs. Troy was already a local celebrity, more than the Mayor or our Congress guy. And me too, just by being his best friend, and being in nearly every damn picture with him.

He patted my shoulder and squeezed it, and a hundred images popped into my head, most of which I didn’t fully understand.

The one thing I did get was that Troy had made this choice because somehow it added up to him getting to spend more time with me, and whatever his reasons may have been, that thought warmed my innards like hot molasses.

Things with Troy and me got more intimate. Not yet sexual, but intimate in the way that lovers can be connected. We ate nearly every meal together. He could usually tell what I wanted to do next, and we’d do it.

Lots of time that was just hanging around with friends, but we spent a lot of that long, warm Indian summer just him and me, tromping through the fields and meadows of Indiana, or driving my old truck just to see where the wind took us.

Everywhere we went, we met people. We helped people stranded by the road, or helped a mom with her daughter who had cancer. Sometimes it felt like we were knights of old, riding around in my truck, slaying junkyard dragons and helping fair damsels and dudes in distress.

I can’t say as if I’ve ever been happier in my life.

At the beginning of junior year, a new girl moved to town. Her name was Marie Touchette, but because kids are assholes, she quickly became ‘Mary Touch-It’; even some of the teachers started calling her that, thinking that they’d had her name wrong to start with.

The thing was, Marie was a touch-it kind of girl. She loved her body, and to say that she loved men’s bodies too might sound like I’m being an asshole, except for the fact that I was kind of jealous of her. I loved Troy, I really did, but I was a horny gay teenager after all. She got a lot of the action that a part of me deep down wanted. Troy wasn’t the only hot guy at our school. It was like our town specialized in growing corn-fed Midwest farmboy hunks, or something. Heck, I was one, and surrounded by them.

She knew this, too. She knew within a minute of looking at me that I was gay, even though no one else ever said anything to my face. And she didn’t judge me—she thought it was cool, and she talked to me like no one else ever did. Like we were the founding members of the Big Cock Fan Club, though as far as I knew, she had no idea what I had and hadn’t done, which was mostly ‘hadn’t’ at that time. But she’d tell me shit, and mostly I just listened and grinned, and played along.

Troy and I had swigged beers and gotten drunk plenty of times as we were coming up; Marie was the first person who got me high. And I mean seriously, truly high. Weed at first, and the other things that I didn’t usually ask about. Troy knew about it, and I knew he didn’t approve. He’d tried a thing or two with us, but the crazy thing was, we’d get absolutely baked, and Troy just got clearer and glowed more. Marie was the only person who told me she saw Troy glowing, and for some reason, I just nodded but didn’t confirm I could see it, too.

Marie knew that Troy and I were inseparable, and she was OK with that, because she was maybe as in love with Troy as I was. He cared for her, sure. He loved her like she was his kid sister. But, man, she loved him something fierce, and she talked and wiggled and inveigled her way into our little circle of two until it had to stretch enough to become a circle of three.

She’d cheer us on from the sidelines of games, whooping and hollering like she was related to us. We’d go to parties together, picking her up in my truck, driving around with her crammed between us on the bench seat.

People started to talk, as they do. That we were both fucking her. That we were some kind of throuple. Marie and I would giggle about it, and Troy was Troy. Amused by it, but a bit above it all, tuning in to the frequencies that only he could hear.

The problem was that she really wanted it.

She confessed to me one night, drunk at a party after we’d lost the Big Game, while Troy was roaming around, making the rounds. She loved both of us. She was attracted to me, sure, and she loved me enough as a friend that she’d happily sleep with me, but she wanted Troy like she’d never wanted anyone else.

She told me she couldn’t understand it, because no guy had ever made her feel the way he made her feel—love, and loved, and like she was worthy of it. She wanted to have his babies, she told me, as many of them as he wanted, and some of mine, too, if that was what I wanted. They’d get married, and I’d live with them, she figured, and if she and I shared Troy in a house of love, it was all OK by her.

I told her that I didn’t know how that would work, and it was freaking me out. Fact is, I hadn’t ever been called out so directly about wanting my best friend, and the truth is that the idea of sharing him with anyone made my vision go red with fury—but I couldn’t let her see that in my eyes.

I understand all this time later that part of my rage was because she was talking about her and Troy getting married, and me sharing him on the side of her marriage to my best friend. It pushed me to the side, and it pissed me the fuck off. I felt like I’d be a third wheel in her vision of man-plus-woman-equals-babies. I didn’t say that, but I said some things close.

Marie was one of those girls who could go from drunk to obliterated in three extra sips. I think my answer wasn’t the ringing endorsement she’d wanted to hear, and so between the joint we’d shared and the drinks she’d had, she suddenly turned into a stumbling, weeping mess, begging me to take her home.

I found Troy and told him I’d take her home and come right back for him. He seemed to sober up instantly, and said he’d come with. I got angry at him, first because I felt like he was judging me for drinking and smoking, and second because I didn’t want his help on this.

What I wanted was to drive Marie home, and to have some time with her to make my point that Troy was off limits. Something about what she’d said and the way she’d said it had my dander up, and I didn’t care if I was acting like a jealous girlfriend—somehow I needed to find the words to make it clear that Troy was mine first.

Troy put his hands on my shoulders, and I relaxed immediately. I felt like I sobered up a bit for sure. He told me to be careful and wouldn’t let me go until I told him that I would.

I could draw this out, but I won’t.

I tried talking to Marie on the drive, half paying attention to those dark farmland roads, but she just wouldn’t listen. I guess her attachment to Troy rivaled mine, though it still felt like she was on my turf.

I don’t remember exactly how it happened. Just that she’d said something that triggered the red fury—my deep instinct to protect Troy, and also not to be shoved aside—and I was screaming something vile and demonic at her.

Some many tentacled monster of greed and envy and hate was climbing up out of me through my words, and the next thing I knew, I was sprawled across the front bench seat, my arm screaming in pain, shattered.

The rest was a blur for a bit; I don’t know how long it took to sit up and slide out the door of the truck. All the while, flashes came to me: the recollection of that ten-point buck shattering the windshield; poking at the white bones sticking out of my bloody, ruined right arm; finding the bodies of both the buck and Marie lifeless on the road in front of the truck.

The Universe collapsed in on itself, and in that moment, all I was made of was pain and grief and fear.

The cops showed up next, and for ten minutes I was a shivering wreck, trying to be coherent enough to explain what had happened.

I don’t know what they saw and heard from me, but it quickly became clear these were not the cops who were buddies with me and Troy; these were the versions of them who were eager to arrest a drunk who had just killed a girl, buck or no buck.

Out of nowhere, Troy was there. To this day I can’t figure out how he made it there first, before the truck of partygoers that pulled up several minutes after him.

He came right up to me and was talking to Bryan, the officer who was trying to cuff my bruised left arm and my shattered right arm together behind my back while I howled in pain. Troy was saying that he needed to take the cuffs off of me and let me go, and Bryan was saying there was no way, a girl was dead.

That’s when the others arrived, pulling up in someone’s huge F350. A girl from school, Mandy Miller I think, let out a scream. Troy used that moment to walk over to Marie’s body, and the next scene is etched in my brain for the rest of time.

In the dimming headlights of the truck, he crouched down next to Marie. He touched her hair like he was brushing it, but I could see he was moving away pieces of glass. Bloody glass. It was like he was talking to her, convincing her to get up and to stop pretending.

And then, a second later, she was. She was moving, sitting slowly up, brushing off her dress like she’d been caught napping on the worn country road asphalt. She shook her head a bit, and then she glanced up into the lights and locked eyes with me.

My blood froze. She had been dead. I had touched her. She’d had a huge chunk of windshield glass embedded in her forehead. What I was seeing couldn’t be true, but there she was.

Troy walked her over to us, his arm around her shoulders. She looked at him with a loving, grateful gaze. My insides tightened, and I felt an echo of the red fury that had gotten me into this mess.

He stood her next to Bryan and Davis, the other cop, and they proceeded to ask her questions. The folks from the party were still hanging back, a murmur going through them.

Troy came over to me and brushed the handcuffs off my wrists like they were dirt, and pocketed them.

“Are you OK?” he leaned in and asked.

“How the fuck did you do that, Troy?”

We locked eyes, and he shook his head. “Later, Deek.”

He ambled back over to the stag while the cops were fawning over Marie, and I just stood there and watched him. The same deal, crouched down next to the stag, and whispering like he was talking to it.

Everything else that had happened, and God help me, all I could think about was how great his ass looked in his jeans while he did that; how masculine and manly he was looking, like he’d gone and grown all the way up into a full-fledged adult.

He turned around and looked at me and smiled, like he could hear my thoughts, which he just might be able to.

He sauntered back over to the cops, steering Marie away from them and towards the group of folks in the other truck. She was protesting that we should take her home, but Troy was just reasonable explaining that we needed to fix the truck, and shouldn’t she get home so her folks didn’t worry?

She seemed less dazed and less drunk with each step. Soon enough, the truck was taking off with her in it, waving at us from the front cab like she was the Prom Queen on her way to Homecoming.

“We still gotta arrest Deek, though, Troy!” protested Davis. Bryan looked at his partner and nodded.

“He did blow a point-nine, Troy.”

Troy was shaking his head, the glimmer he had coming back like an aura of the smallest fireflies glowing around him.

“Naw, he’s fine guys. Go ahead and retest him. Plus, I’ll drive this thing home. He hurt his arm, so I gotta get him back to his Ma before she worries.”

Davis was shaking his head like he was trying to push a bad dream out of his mind, frowning. Bryan was taking a step towards me, as if he was going to cuff me again.

What happened next was in slow motion.

Bryan had hooked the breathalyzer onto his belt. Troy saw it and was going to reach for it to make me blow again, to prove his point.

Davis caught this motion out of the corner of his eye and thought Troy was going for Bryan’s gun, which was right next to the breathalyzer on his belt.

I saw Davis pull out his pistol, his arm on an upward arc. I saw what was about to happen and leapt into the space between Troy and Davis, and suddenly a white-hot fire was spearing into my chest.

I heard Troy shout

“NOOOO!”

And then a blinding light, and the sound of a thousand pianos crashing down a million staircases hit, and then

I was lying on my back, on the road. My head was cradled in Troy’s lap, and he was leaning over me, huge, hot tears splashing me on the face. He was laughing and crying. I’d never seen him like this, but rather than scaring me, it comforted me.

“What…happened..?” I managed to heave out.

“You. You fucking happened, you dumbass. You scared the shit out of me!”

“He was gonna shoot you, Troy.”

He nodded and sighed, “I know.”

“I couldn’t let him do it. I’m never gonna let anything bad happen to you, bud.”

He nodded a bit more, and another tear hit my face.

“That’s not your choice, Deek.”

“The fuck it isn’t, Troy!”

I sat up and a wave of dizziness overcame me. I looked around and noticed that everything was gone. Bryan, Davis, the cop cars. The stag.

My truck was still there, but the windshield was intact, except for a very large crack that meant I’d have to replace it. The truck did not look like it had hit a ten-point buck at any point in the last decade.

“What…the…?”

“Just sit still, bud. You’re dizzy, you had a big shock to the system.”

I nodded, looking at him in wonder.

“Just next time, don’t try to protect me like that, OK?”

My anger rose again, this time white hot.

“No! Fuck…Fuck you, Troy! NO!”

“Hey, calm down, man…”

“No, Goddamnit! No! I will not calm down! You’re my best friend, Troy. I can’t live without you! Don’t you fucking tell me to not protect you! I will always protect you! I’ll take a bullet, whatever I need to do….”

“No, Deek! No, you can’t say that! You have to let me…go.”

The newly unleashed anger inside me roared, and suddenly I was yelling at him.

“I will not let you go! I’ll never let you go, man! I don’t care if you’re in love with Marie or whatever, don’t fucking tell me I have to let you go and not protect you! How fucking dare you! I am in love with you, you stupid asshole!”

We looked at each other, eyes wide with revelations.

And suddenly I was weeping. I don’t mean crying. I mean, full-on sobs that I could not control were coming out of my body.

Troy grabbed me in a fierce hug, and I wept on him like a baby. Furious, and relieved, and scared, and—goddamnit—as hard as a motherfucking rock in that moment, as if my dick had a mind of its own.

Troy squeezed me, hugging me tighter, and a wave of dizziness passed through me. He put a hand on my head and said, “Whoa, there, buddy,” and lowered me to the ground.

I woke up in my bed, late in the afternoon, on what I thought was the next day—but it wasn’t Saturday afternoon, it was Sunday.

I’d slept for a day and a half. I asked my Ma how I’d gotten home, and she said Troy had driven my truck home, had explained to her that I’d had too much to drink at the party while helping her haul me upstairs, and then walked home himself.

She didn’t scold me about drinking; she just went on and on about what a great guy Troy was, and how lucky I was to have him as a friend.

I was halfway through a late lunch she’d put together when I remembered the full scene, including the fact that I had told him I loved him.

I suddenly had to see him as soon as possible.

So that’s how it happened. That’s how it came to be that after the incident with Marie that I learned the truth, and that I finally kissed him, and that I then lost him forever.

I’ll try to keep it together long enough to tell the whole thing, but I know it’s going to take its toll. Bear with me.

We hadn’t talked in nearly two days, which was not just weird for us—it was unheard of. I don’t think we’d gone that long without being in each other’s presence since we were nine or ten years old.

It was late afternoon, coming up on golden hour. I headed over to his place and saw that his Pa’s truck was gone. I walked directly through the house and out again, into the backyard. The tall grass blended right into the grassy hill of the back forty, and I could see him up there, sitting in that spot in a beam of sunlight, just like I’d found him years ago, and many times since.

I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding, and then noticed that he was talking to someone. Another man, with longish wavy brown hair and swarthy skin.

I headed up to see them, and within a minute or so, Troy had seen me and waved. I waved back, and the stranger waved at me, too; I don’t know why, but that made me smile.

As I got partway up the hill, the stranger stood up, and he and Troy hugged before the stranger turned and headed my way. They didn’t look much alike, but something about the two men reminded me of each other. Some part of my brain wondered if I was about to hear about Troy’s brother from another mother.

The stranger and I neared each other, and he waved at me again. I couldn’t resist the urge to return it.

When we got close, he came right up to me and said, ‘Hey, Deek!’ like he knew me. As we grabbed hands, he pulled me into a bro hug; you know the one, hands clasped, right shoulders bumping, left hands patting on the back.

Except he held it for a moment, and he said softly, “I’m real glad you’re OK, Deek.” I pulled back to look in his eyes…and what I saw in that gentle amber-brown was an ocean of compassion.

“He’s worried about you,” the stranger said, and then he pulled me back into a hug. I felt something soft and warm and brittle snap inside my heart, and then I was sobbing onto him. And it was OK. I knew as sure as I have known anything before or since, that it was all OK, and that I was loved.

I pushed apart after who knows how long, my face covered with snot and tears, and I was suddenly incredibly shy around this man whose name I didn’t even know. I cast a wild-eyed glance up at him as he smiled gently at me, and then I squeezed his arm and let go. He mirrored the action, and we then patted each other’s shoulders as a way of taking leave from one another.

I stumbled up the meadow, wiping my face with my shirt as best I could. I looked up, and Troy was sitting there, gazing at me with a smile on his face that put the sun to shame.

I glanced back at the stranger, and he was impossibly gone. He couldn’t have crossed the space to the house that quickly, and yet—no stranger to be found.

I looked back at Troy, and he gave a small shrug and a bigger smile.

I was drawn to him now and sprinted the distance between us. He laughed, and when I got to him and stuck out my hand, rather than letting me pull him up, he pulled me down onto him.

We wrestled for a minute; rough-housed, really, and laughed and growled at each other like fools. But after a moment, both of us were struggling to contain our hard cocks, and so we stopped, and pretended not to notice the reason why.

I rested my head on his shoulder, and he tousled my hair, in a way that he sometimes did that made me feel special. I sighed and leaned against him for a moment.

“You’re gonna be OK, Deek.”

I sat up and looked at him, not sharply, but with a question.

“He said you were worried about me,” I answered.

“Yeah,” Troy nodded, and held my gaze with those insanely blue eyes.

“Who was that guy, anyway?”

Troy sighed and looked away for a minute, as if the dandelion fluffs nodding in the breeze next to us could provide him with some answer.

“He’s…kind of my brother, I guess you could say.”

He looked back over at me with a look that was more seeking reassurance than nervous, but which surprised me all the same.

I laughed and grabbed him by the neck, a kind of mini-hug.

“That’s cool! A brother? Damn, Troy…that’s so…cool!”

We both laughed at my lack of eloquence, and he kind of nodded shyly at me, blue eyes bright.

My head was swimming, and I don’t know why I said what I said next, even to this day.

“I guess that kind of makes him my brother-in-law, huh?”

We both froze, and my head whipped around to look at him, my brain spinning out in the mud at how to take back or change what I’d just said. My eyes were wide, and he looked deeper into my soul than I’d ever felt from anyone before or since.

We had never talked about this. Not once. In all those years we’d been…together, we’d never said anything close to this. Not until the night with Marie and the buck, and we hadn’t talked for two days since.

A silly grin cracked his face, and he smiled and nodded at me.

“Yeah, babe. Yep. That’s exactly who he is.”

His arm grabbed my neck, and he bumped our foreheads together.

“That was your brother-in-law, Deek. He’d be happy to hear you say that.”

He kissed me then.

A first kiss, hot and awkward. Just lips touching between our two foreheads pressed together, and when I tell you there were fireworks and stars and lightning and thunder, I only mean that those are the closest human words that can come to describing what happened in that moment.

We pulled apart, looked at each other, and then burst into laughter. It was like the whole meadow burst into laughter with us, the birds, and the insects, and the deer in their hollow off in the distance. All of nature laughed with us, and the sun glowed brighter as if just for us. We laughed until we couldn’t take it anymore, and then, finding hands, we slowly levered ourselves upright, pressed close.

“I tell you, when I first saw him, I thought he kinda looked like Jesus,” I said.

Troy tightened his grip around my hand and somehow pushed me away a bit while also pulling me closer to look at him.

“Deek,” he said.

I could see the answer written in his eyes. I knew it wasn’t a joke. I could see his eyes, and I could see in my head his mind tripping over the right way to tell me.

I sucked in a breath.

“I…what…I…that man. That was Jesus Christ?”

He nodded at me, smiling, but as sad as I have ever seen him. He rested his palm on the side of my face, just like he’d done to that stag all those ages ago, and I could see and hear and live him. His life. Things he’d done. Impossible things. Things that I hadn’t seen, and things that I had seen but still didn’t believe.

Tears spilled over his eyes, and somehow, he was more beautiful than ever. All I wanted to do was to hold him close and to tell him that whatever this darkness was, passing between us now, whatever it was, it was something we could overcome.

I grabbed onto his wrist, not to pull his hand away, but to press it closer.

“That was Jesus, and he’s your brother?”

Troy nodded, his face wretched for a moment.

“He’s Jesus. Yes. And he’s my brother, in a way. And in a way, he’s also me. I think.”

There was a heat flowing between us. I recognize it now, a bit, all these years later. It’s the heat of prayer, true prayer. It’s the heat of healing, of Spirit moving through human flesh, heating us up and making us glow like we’re the tungsten wire in a light bulb.

“You’re Jesus?” I whispered.

He nodded, his eyes spilling tears so hot and fast that a part of my mind wondered how there could be this much saltwater inside one human body.

“If I want to…” he said.

“If you want to?” I stuttered. “If you want to? What does that even mean?”

“I can say no. I can. It’s allowed. I’m allowed to say no. It’s free will. It’s always free will.”

I was still gripping his arm, his palm a branding iron on my cheek, so hot, and yet somehow not hot enough for what I needed. His other hand gripped my shoulder and kneaded my trap as if he were constantly testing to see if I was still real. To be sure I wasn’t running away from him.

I shook my head. “What? What do you mean?” I was shaking so hard that my voice was jumping; I could barely control it, fighting to get the words out. “Say no to what, Troy?”

I said it, but the words wouldn’t stop coming, even as I knew what he meant, and I knew what I was asking. “He couldn’t say no. He tried. He asked that the cup be passed from him, right?”

Troy was shaking his head. Short at first, and then furiously. It was the first moment I noticed he was shaking, too.

“No, no. No. That was what they wrote later. He knew he could. He knew, and he didn’t, and he did it anyway.”

We were locked there, in that embrace, in that meadow, the fire of Universe flowing through us both. Everything had gone quiet, and yet the world was still alive with the sound of us; the sound of our breathing and our hearts, and of every cell in our bodies chugging along as they always had. As if they would, forever.

Troy was shuddering, and the words jolted out of him like we were riding in my old truck down a bumpy road.

“He did it anyway. He could have said no, but he did it anyway, even though it didn’t matter.”

I shook my head at this. Some part of my brain knew what we were talking about, and moreover, knew that we were talking about Troy, and his impending death—which, when I think about it now, I’m not sure why that wasn’t my biggest focus in the moment.

Troy was weeping now, and he was begging me. Begging me to process some understanding he had, that I just couldn’t see.

“It mattered,” I said, though I wasn’t sure if I believed that, or if it was just a lifetime of church.

“It didn’t!” he roared at me, angry now. Furious, but not with me, I could tell.

He grabbed my head and pressed my forehead together with his as if he could force some kind of knowing into me, and…

And we fell. We fell into a world, and upon all that is holy, I tell you now that the world was real.

There was music and dancing, and I twirled about, and the man spinning me around was Troy, and not Troy, tall and dark, and handsome, and looking at him even now in this dance made me wet. Even though we had had four children together over our lifetime, and were surrounded by grandchildren, my God, this man I loved, as handsome as a claerk!

We were dancing to the traditional music of the springtime festival to Da-mon, the purple and green dragon God who made the world, who lived inside the heart of the sun. A silly old story, but who knew? It could be true, and what was the harm in old-school religion anyway when it got you moments like this with your family?

My hair was flying around my head, and my breasts were bouncing, but this, too was part of the dance. The cupped hands, turning in and out and in again, the long lean back with the shaking of the chest, and then leaning forward to gently bonk heads with your partner, and the laughter, which watered the ground for spring and made the flowers grow.

We were in the restaurant we owned, authentic Alexandrian food, as good as the old empire, they said. Even better than if you were in the food district of modern-day Solaris, back in The Enlightened Country, but here in the heart of the big city of Shka’gwa, the capital of Unified Provins of Amerigonia, the most powerful nation of all 47 on this continent.

The festival was good, and the food and the wine were flowing and the skra-smoke billowed in the room, and yes, I was happy, if you were asking, even though I knew the world wasn’t perfect. The government could be cruel, it was true, and the Temple of the Serpent in Pareet was led by senile old Franche men. There was another war in the South again, a remnant of the Fifth World War that had never truly ended, thirty years ago.

But life was good, here, me and Traei…

And then I was back, head pressed against Troy’s staring in his blue eyes, and I felt so very clear that what we had just seen was a world where Jesus had let the cup pass, and while all of history was different, nothing was particularly changed.

Humans were still humans. They lived, they laughed, they fought, they fucked. They made war, and they made babies, and sometimes they did the two things at the same time, locked in the eternal battle of hope and despair.

The shaking had calmed a bit, but I knew that we were both locked together in this moment of decision, and that somehow what happened here meant a very great deal to the future of a very large number of people.

“I. Can’t. Do it,” he breathed, as if he were letting out a lungful of skra-smoke.

I nodded slightly, still shivering, hot in the power of this moment, and warm in the heat of the golden-hour sun, but freezing inside at the magnitude of this hinge-point in history.

“But what if…what if you have to?” I asked, pleading, but not sure for what.

“I. Can’t!”

Our hands were wrapped around the backs of each other’s necks, our foreheads still pressed together; I felt as if I let go of him, we would fling apart, like astronauts stranded in orbit, spinning out of control. I could see the anger in his face, feel it vibrating within him, and not an ounce of it was directed at me, I knew.

“I can’t,” he breathed. “I can’t. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t!”

“I Can’t! I CAN’T!!! I CAN’T DO IT DEEK! Because of you! All because of you! Because you fucking love me you stupid fool, and you are so fucking loyal to me you will never walk away! You’ll never turn away from me Deek, you’ll never say no, you would never abandon me, I’ve seen it a million times, and you never just go and save yourself. I saw it two nights ago! All the worlds, and you’ll never leave my side, and I can’t do it because whatever they do to me, they will do to you, and I CANNOT LET ANYONE HURT YOU BECAUSE I AM IN LOVE WITH YOU AND I ALWAYS HAVE BEEN!”

All of eternity passed in that moment, and we were both heaving for air like we had run a race, and then the air collapsed back in

And we were kissing. We were kissing and oh my God it wasn’t the lips on lips from earlier, it was two men absolutely convinced that the secret to their own salvation lay deep inside the heart of the other. The only way to save ourselves in that moment was to be as connected as we could possibly be.

We didn’t have sex. I don’t think we had sex. I’m pretty sure we didn’t. But we connected, body-on-body in that space in a way that to this day I cannot describe to another human who didn’t experience it.

After all time had passed, and no time had passed, we let go, and we fell back, finally breaking apart from each other for a moment, before reaching our hands back out to touch.

And I knew.

I knew he was right. In the divinity of that kiss, I had seen all the possible futures, as clearly as he saw them.

There was no future available to us in which he lived and was Sacrificed, in which I also did not die. A thousand different ways to die. A million different ways to suffer. I’d seen the worlds in which he was the Second Coming. The few in which the very nature of love was changed by the example that I had set as his exalted, ever-loyal, also Sacrificed lover.

I’d like to think that those were kinder, gentler worlds; and I knew, thanks to him, thanks to his honesty, that those worlds were as riven by human strife as any other. Whatever Apocalypses awaited in any of those as-yet unwritten futures were disasters wreaked only by the hands of men and women.

Oh, sure, there were scattered realities where I lived, but as a shattered wreck, mutilated, and broken. In many, I was the Devil, and in most, I was simply written out of the narrative completely; I never existed in history to those worlds, no Book of Deek for me.

I didn’t know what would happen next—I think he’d shielded that from me somehow. But I knew we were saying goodbye.

We held each other for another long moment in the reddening light of sunset. We kissed, a thousand small kisses to make up for the lifetime of them that we’d miss.

I knew I was doing the right thing; that he had made his choice, and that it was his alone to make. I knew it, and yet I don’t think I could fully understand what was happening. It was so quick, it felt like a dream.

We said our final goodbye, with our hands and lips, and minds. We experienced more in that moment than I think some people do in a lifetime. And yet, I already missed him. I already longed for him, even as he was in my arms.

“You’re going to be OK, Deek.”

I nodded, my forehead rubbing against his.

“Free will, Deek. Promise me you’ll be OK.”

“I will. I do. I’ll be OK, Troy,” I said, and then continued, “You too, OK? Promise me.”

He nodded and laughed a little.

“I’ll be just fine, my love. I know it for a fact.”

I laughed with him, my heart exploding at hearing him call me his love, even though I didn’t feel any laughter or joy in this moment.

“Goodbye, Troy. I love you.”

He grunted, and then he was sobbing, and one last time we tried to devour each other as if that alone could save us.

Finally, we broke apart. We looked at each other, and then looked away. There’s no rulebook or guidance on how to take your final leave from your divine boyfriend as he’s about to say no to God Almighty.

I waved a little wave, and he did too.

“OK,” I said.

“OK.”

I backed away from him, and he closed his eyes. The subtle glow that always seemed to surround him these days grew fractionally brighter.

Suddenly, I had to be away. I wasn’t sure I could watch. I didn’t know what exactly was going to happen, but I felt like it was better not seen by me. I grabbed his varsity jacket off the ground and took it with me. I didn’t ask; I knew it was mine to take.

I stumbled down the hill in a fog of tears, God’s fingers from the most magnificent sunset I’d ever seen were illuminating this now-sacred meadow.

The light behind me grew brighter, and like Lot’s wife, I had to turn around to watch. I couldn’t not see what was happening to Troy.

He was on fire. Not burning to death, mind you, but on fire with a radiance that surpasses any art I’ve ever seen. His smile was incandescent, and I knew that whatever he was feeling, it was far from any torment. It was worlds away from the suffering I’d seen him endure in the visions he’d shown me.

Far from the torments he was saving me from.

He opened his eyes, and we locked gazes over the vastness that now separated us. He lifted his hand to me: a final goodbye.

The light and fire intensified until I could barely stand to look at it. There was movement—a flutter of wings more massive than anything I’d ever seen, and then a final surge of brightness that forced me to shut my eyes, and an explosion of light. An implosion of sound, of absence, that knocked me to the ground.

The silhouette of his face was burned into the backs of my closed eyelids like the face of Jesus burned onto toast.

I sat slowly upright, rubbed my eyes, and shook my head to clear it.

I stood on wobbly legs and looked at the place where he had been. There was nothing there, absolutely nothing. No sign that he’d sat there most of the afternoon, no indentation in the grass.

Whatever silence existed was filled a moment later by the chitter and skirr of the evening, like the volume being slowly turned up on a speaker.

I looked at his jacket, still in my hands. I brought it up to my nose and inhaled the scent of him, the only remaining trace of him, it seemed.

I steadied myself and made my way through the house to head outside to my truck. It took me a minute to realize that the house was empty. Like empty, empty, as if no-one had lived there in years.

I unlocked the front door, let myself out, and looked at a place I had been a million times in my life, hanging out with Troy, it was clearly the same house, but also clearly not a place that Troy and his father had ever lived, nor a place that looked like the home I had spent nearly half of my childhood in.

I got in my truck. The windshield was undamaged. No sign of the incident from two nights ago remained.

I drove home, and then I re-entered a world in which Troy had simply never existed. No one at school had ever heard of Troy Wedinger. A family named Wedinger had never lived in this town.

I’d like to say that I grieved and then moved on. That would be lovely, right? Maybe that I settled down eventually and got over the fact that I’d had a best friend who became my boyfriend for five minutes, right before he told God, thank you, but no, I won’t be the Second Coming of Christ, sacrificed to a world unwilling to be saved.

Maybe it should be easier to think that he did it for me. Because he loved me so much that he made my suffering more important than the suffering of the rest of humanity.

I’d love to tell you that it made sense, and that I got over all of that just fine.

But I didn’t.

I barely made it out of high school. The day I graduated, I loaded up my truck and drove away from home, and came here. Well, Denver for a month, with a trucker I’d met, and then out here to LA, which had been as much of a plan as I’d had.

I’ve been here for ten years. Ten years, tomorrow.

I’ve bartended, and I’ve partied. I did go-go for a while, and then met a guy who got me into drugs. Or, I let myself get into drugs, I suppose. Like Troy would say, free will, Deek. You always have free will, even when you think you don’t.

I did some meth, at first, and then the other stuff. All the other stuff, I guess. I’ve lost myself in booze, and sex, and drugs, and rock and roll. If it could be tried, I’ve tried it. And somehow I survived it all, probably thanks to this jacket I’m wearing here tonight.

It turns out that when your first boyfriend was the latest incarnation of God, there’s a big void left inside that nothing in this world can ever fill. And God knows I’ve tried. I’ve crammed damn near everything I could think of into my body in various ways, and I’m all out of ideas.

I guess I’ve hit rock bottom.

I guess I’m finally ready to let go, and let God, you know? It took me a while, but I hope he remembers me. God knows I can’t stop remembering him.

Anyways. Thanks for letting me tell you my story. I know it’s hard to believe, but I swear every word of it is true.

So, I’m Deek. I’m an alcoholic and an addict, and I’m ready to change.

“Hi Deek!”

Hey You! Yes, you! Thanks for reading “The Book of Deek”—sincerely, from the bottom of my heart. Lawrence Winnerman | Science Fiction is a way for me to live my lifelong dream of writing and publishing science fiction, the greatest genre of literature in the history of the world.

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Amber’s footsteps echo through the cavernous hallway. The air is cold and dry, and they can’t help but think of the inside of a long, hollow bone. The femur of an elephant, perhaps, long dead and empty of marrow, once part of a living, breathing thing, and now as lifeless and as sterile as this hallway in the ‘Kive. Amber remembers a scene from one of the ancient horror movies they used to watch, cuddled with Sol, and their footsteps pick up a notch.

"Seismic event. Category... uhn... can’t see it. It's red under the ice...no ice."

Amber reaches out a hand to grab the solidity of the ‘crete and metal wall, as much out of the renewed shock of hearing Sol’s voice as the AI, as for the warning itself.

The overhead lights flicker twice, for just a second, and they slide their body up against the coolness of the wall just as the first low rumble rolls through the steel floors, like a benthic creature surfacing for a long exhale.

“Amber, love, hold on. Don’t fall…like I…like I did.”

It’s longer this time, and the shaking seems deeper somehow, like it’s being driven by a motor buried far within the earth.

Which is true, Amber thinks, a massive volcanic motor, awakened by the continental rebound of Antarctica, freed now after endless eons of being trapped under the weight of oceans of ice.

A klaxon sounds, late, as if bewildered, caught unawares during a nap, echoing in the empty space off into an infinite distance. Amber presses a button on their pad, and the alarm falls silent, the sound dissipating into the distance like a wave they can imagine rolling off into forever, a pebble dropped into a pond.

The tremor reaches its peak, and a surge of adrenaline courses through Amber’s veins. For the first time, they truly understand the magnitude of what’s happening. The Arkive is going to be destroyed in the coming eruption, and a hard physical crush in their chest is a fear of death that Amber has been drowning in since losing Sol five weeks ago. Since he…uploaded himself into the machine, without telling them.

Off in the far distance, there is a metal-on-metal screech and a loud crash, echoing through the cavernous gloom. It’s perpendicular to Amber’s path in the scheme of things. Not back in Housing and Administration, and not forward into the Labs, where they’re heading. It sounds like it might be from Deep Storage, which—is that fine? Deep Storage finished scanning and uploading months ago.

Any seeds still in that section just got planted, they suppose, in the most catastrophic way possible. If they can escape the fire and lava, perhaps they will bloom in a year, or a hundred, or a thousand.

The tremor stops with a sudden jolt, and a drop that makes Amber’s stomach lurch. The floor, they think, is not quite as level as it used to be. They know they’d normally turn around at this point, if Sol—the damned AI with Sol’s disjointed voice—hadn’t told them what he did. There is no time, and yet, they have to see it for themselves, if it’s true.

Small shudders tickle for a moment, and then fall back into quiescence.

Amber picks themselves up off the floor, not remembering when they dropped into a crouch for safety.

They dust themselves off and pick up their pace, as the AI, in Sol’s voice, sings something off in the distance about springtime, half-remembered.

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The translucent glass of the single active pod glows a warm reddish light, like a long Antarctic sunset. The growing lab itself is cool and dry, the highly regulated environment of the ARCBio facility still kept to precision by the AI that has had Sol’s decaying mind written on top of it.

Amber still doesn’t know why he did that. Or, rather, they know why he wanted to do it—he imagined that they would be lonely without him, and that, perhaps, they needed additional coaching. Amber can barely begrudge him this. They know themselves well enough to know that both things are true.

But the mystery to them is why a smart man who knew his brain was being erased by amyloid plaques would be so foolish as to write himself into the operations layer of the complex machine.

Had it been a mistake? A wrong button pressed by a man desperate to escape his degenerative brain disease, maybe? Or something more, they wondered, even as they didn’t know what that could be.

Amber steps closer to the glowing incubation pod, and sees something green through the translucence. They hold their breath, stepping closer still, drawn as much by their deep genetic longing for that color of life as much as for what Sol—the AI pretending to be Sol—has hinted they might find here.

They push their hair back behind their right ear, a gesture that Sol found endearing, they know, and cast a quick glance at the ceiling camera, as if expecting Sol to wink at them.

Amber can’t open the incubation pod. Only the AI can do that. They hold all the charms for the facility now—all of the passcodes, challenge phrases, authentikeys—everything. But they don’t want to interrupt this delicate process.

They can, however, pull the pod out a bit on its sliding tray, and look at it through the transparent top.

Before they can do it, the quake strikes.

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“Amber. Amber! Amb….you must wake up. Amb, please……please, darling….oh, please….”

Sol. Sol must be standing over them, shining a light on them. They can see their blood, red through their eyelids. Klaxons and alarms are creating a tintinnabulation that makes their head feel like the inside of a garbage recycler set to grind.

They brush their hair back and feel the sticky fluid on their hands. Blood, oh, shit. Amber tries to open their eyes, hard at first, as if fighting out of a dream, and then becomes aware of the splitting headache, pain interleaved with the pain of the sound, the different pain of the bright, overhead light.

They sit up slowly. Sol isn’t here, of course. It’s the AI twittering on in his voice, strangely not a solace through this pain and confusion.

Bots are out, halfheartedly cleaning up the shattered mess of the lab. Amber looks around, taking in the destruction. The floor of the lab is tilted in a way that will make walking difficult, and they wonder if it’s just in here or throughout the whole complex.

They wonder briefly why the fools built the Antarctic Repository for Catastrophic Biodiversity Loss here on top of the volcanoes of the stupidly names Executive Committee Range, before remembering the near infinite supply of geothermal heat and energy, and how different the world looked, back before they were born. How dormant the volcanoes had once been.

High above the ninety-meter sea level rise, safe in Marie Byrd Land, but oh, only if the volcanoes stay sleeping…

They flinch, seeing a glimpse of lava on the floor, and then immediately relax and can’t keep a plosive laugh from bursting forth.

Not lava. The pod. Still plugged into its power, glowing reddish in the flickering light. Nearly overturned, but not broken.

Amber crawls over to it, shaky at first but feeling stronger by the moment. They’re careful to keep out of the way of the bots scurrying about, and the small shards of some unknown broken thing they can’t see.

Amber settles next to the pod, tilting it upright—or as upright as they can, considering that the floor has a tilt to it now.

They slide back the cover to gaze through the transparent top and gasp.

“…Sol…you fool,” they are crying now, hot tears streaming down their face, a cascade of salty water that should by rights flow like a river to the dead, grey sea beyond.

“I planted it for you. For….us….to bloom before we had to…”

It’s the most coherent thing the AI has said in Sol’s voice, and it adds up.

At some point, seventy or eighty days prior, Sol must have come down here without them, overridden all protocols, and planted it, knowing that it would bloom for the first time right at the moment they were scheduled to finish their work and upload to the rest of humanity.

Uploaded, and squirted as data out into the black—onto one of the massive, circling ships, or the moonbase, or the Galilean colony.

The two of them, ten billion other humans, and the billions and billions of other plants and seeds and creatures whose genetic code had been cracked and scanned in this place, the last archive of the life of the planet Earth.

And this. A single perfect, resilient poppy. Papaver somniferum, rising up towards the false sun of the incubation lamp, green and fuzzy, its full bud ready to burst—just the tiniest sliver of vivid red.

“I planted it…for you,” Sol says again, slowly and solemnly, as if it is a benediction.

Amber misses him; his body and his warmth, yes. The intimacy, oh god, yes, how much…but also…him. His humanity. His flaws. His perfect imperfection, his care, his humor.

Lying in bed and watching old movies with him. Especially their favorite—that old tale about a girl lost in a strange land, asleep with her friends in a field of poppies. About how she found her way home, trials and tribulations solved and sorted.

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Amber knows they need to get up. It’s only been minutes, but the warmth of this incubation pod and the shimmer of life that surrounds the poppy compel them to stay, just a moment longer.

They have time. Their work is done, and they have time to limp their way back to Hab Sciences in Admin and load themselves into a different kind of pod. One that will scan them to atoms, and upload them into the cloud with their people, the rest of refugee humanity. A chance to wear a body that fits, perhaps, or none, or several.

The future doesn’t scare them, not really.

For now, there is time to sit and to wait.

A tremor rocks the massive complex, but slow this time, like a lullaby.

The bud sways in the motion. Trembles, and then…begins to slowly unfurl.

“It’s beautiful, my love. Like you.”

Amber is weeping, but they can see through the tears.

A perfect red bloom. A picture-perfect poppy.

The last bloom on Earth.

Please note that the following is a work of fiction. It is as close to the truth as queer dystopian time travel sci-fi can be. ~LW

I had forgotten how hot and humid South Florida can be, even in November. Even back in 1989.

I’m fanning myself with the crumpled remains of an old Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel discarded in the lobby, and cursing whichever bureaucratic fool decided not to fix the air conditioner for this wing of the hospital. I can guess the reason without too much effort.

I’ve gotten myself turned around, so I blink to activate the heads-up display for my Vision Pro X Contacts and see that I still have nearly sixty-eight minutes left to find him and do this.

I locate the elevators ─ also broken, also likely doomed to never be fixed ─ so I follow the signs to the stairs and start my dash up to the fourth floor.

What’s the rush, I imagine someone asking.

Oh, you know. I’m a time traveler from the future, and I’ve only got 77.22 minutes to find my first boss and murder him.

I chuckle to myself while my new knees allow me to take the stairs two at a time. It’s the truth, distilled to its essence, but good god the layers of nuance it misses are cosmic.

I’m not a chronophysicist. I can’t tell you why it’s 77.22 minutes, and I’m betting no-one at the Spatiotemporal Research Center really can either. I just know that time “cleaves” in certain weird increments, like a shattered crystal. This medium-length jump is the most common one. There’s a shorter one that’s 2.67 minutes. The Hindenburg recording used that one. There’s the longer one that’s about ten days long; that one is most common for real historians.

Before it crashed American politics and was banned, the top viewed video on the STRC accounts was Vergara and deLesseps unedited week and a half that included the crucifixion of Jesus, the subsequent stealing of his body from the Talpiot tomb by his followers, and the hullabaloo that ensued when his tomb was discovered empty.

The so-called “Giant Lie” video changed the world; this video I’m making almost certainly won’t get published on the site, and if it does, I have no illusion it will rank up there with Jesus. What it might do is prove to the goddamn fascists that I deserve to live the rest of my life as a free man, exiled to the République du Québec.

I fling open the door on the fourth floor, and I’m drenched in sweat. There is a bit of a cross-breeze coming from the open windows at the end of the hall, but the stench is like a slap in the face. It makes it clear that the reason for the open windows isn’t for comfort. For a moment I wish I could dial back my olfactory senses.

My finger itches, and I find myself idly spinning the silver ring on my left hand. It looks like a wedding band, but it is the harbinger of both my freedom and my doom. The engravings on it remind me of Iktomi, the spider-trickster. A reference that nobody but me might understand, in my time.

I blink up the number in my contacts. Sixty-five minutes remaining.

I feel a short stab of panic.

What if he’s not here?

I have sixty-one minutes until I am yanked back to the future.

I am methodically searching the floor. The first ward I find is packed full of hospital furniture and equipment that looks like it’s from World War Two, but not a person in sight.

In the next ward, there is a younger Latino man doing his best to mop a floor that looks like it won’t ever be clean again, using something so noxious it overpowers the smell of death. He’s turned away from me listening to a bright yellow Sony Walkman.

Something catches his eye, and he turns towards me.

I struggle not to physically recoil. My heart breaks wide open because his warm brown eyes look so much like those of my beloved, Matt, born this very year, whose entire lifetime is contained within a subset of mine. He’s wearing a facemask as if the pandemics are happening here and now. This is true, I guess; one of them is, in its first, decades-long, non-airborne phase.

The man’s eyes crinkle into half-moons, and I know he is smiling at me. He pulls his mask down to his chin, revealing full lips and white teeth.

“You need something, Papi?”

I am in my seventies, yes, but I am well-preserved and still muscular. Democracy may be dead, but healthcare in the mid-twenty-first rocks, for those few like me who can afford it. Who could afford it, that is. This man probably thinks he’s seeing someone in his mid-fifties, fit and hale and hearty. A picture of mature virility, at least they haven’t stolen this from me, not yet.

I have lived long enough, and well enough now that I recognize when a man likes what he sees. My insides twist like a kettle of snakes.

“I’m looking for the AIDS ward,” I state, simply.

“Two hallways, on the right,” he says while pointing with a gloved hand.

The smile has been washed off his face as if someone has doused him with a bucket of gasoline and is holding a match. I think of Matt’s mischievous grin, smashed under a hailstorm of police batons in the Riots. The snakes consume me from the inside out.

I nod my thanks and fast-walk my way to the location. I turn the corner into the room, and in the first bed, there he is.

Dieter Murphy, the man who hired me at Waldenbooks the day after my sixteenth birthday.

Dieter, the first openly gay man I ever knew, here on his deathbed, on the very day the historical record shows he is going to die.

I’m sitting in a chair I’ve dragged over to Dieter’s bedside and spend several frantic minutes feeling for a pulse, worried that I have missed him completely. I have fifty-five minutes left.

I still could have completed my mission, although they tell me that the results will be “more optimal” if he’s still alive at the time the sample is taken. HIV went airborne in the late 2040s, some monstrous amalgamation with COVID and pneumonia. The question over the nature of its origin remains hotly debated.

When it decimated Africa, Western countries didn’t care to do anything, by fear or by design. But as earlier pandemics had supposedly taught us, nothing stays local. Not even with the locked-tight borders of the Reunited States. Suddenly, finding a cure has become worth the expense of sending people back in time to build a complete genetic profile of the early virus.

Whatever. None of this is a waste of my time. It’s literally just a little more than an hour, here, and the two weeks of quarantine that bookend the jump. Thanks to the mysteries of the quantum, my emotional entanglement with Dieter, an early AIDS victim, has made me a prime candidate to jump. I can save the world and save my tarnished soul. How could I possibly refuse?

“Well, if you’re going to sit there and stare at my beauty, the least you could do is tell me your name.”

I flinch at the raspy, weak sound of his voice, and then I laugh in response and gently squeeze his hand, which I’m still holding.

“Or maybe buy you a drink?”

He sighs, a long breathy thing that sounds like an octopus trying to play the bagpipes.

“Oh, god, a drink! Yes! Screw your name, just get me a bourbon on the rocks!”

We giggle at each other, and I move to pull my hand away.

“No, don’t.”

He shakes his head and holds my hand a little tighter.

“It feels...it’s just so nice to touch someone’s hand. And my god, your hands are so warm!”

I do run warm, and it is Florida, but a part of this is the immune booster cocktail they gave me before I jumped, just in case.

He opens his eyes, and his skeletal face is transformed.

And goddamnit, I gasp a little, because all these years I’d remembered that Dieter had blue eyes ─ and he doesn’t. They’re green. Of course, they’re green. Looking at them right now, I wonder how I could have ever remembered them as blue at all.

They are green and filled with that same fierce intelligence and humor that I remember from my youth.

“Hey, Dieter.” I say, “It’s good to see you.”

I squeeze his hand again, and he squeezes back out of reflex as much as anything.

His eyes crinkle, and he frowns a little and shakes his head.

“You do look familiar, but I can’t place...”

I smile at him through my beard, suddenly a shy sixteen-year-old again. Although bless him, Dieter never treated me like I was just sixteen. From the moment he hired me, he was a professional, and I was his colleague. He taught me about business, customer service, books and literature, and politics.

And he taught me how to be a gay man.

Far before I ever had the courage to say it out loud, and while never, ever asking me the question I feared above all others, Dieter knew. And he knew that I wasn’t ready and that I was terrified of the answer, and so he just...taught. Just by being himself, and by being honest, and answering every tentative question couched in feigned indifference about who and how, and what and when, he taught.

His green eyes are searching my face, the curiosity evident in his gaze.

“Have we ever…?” He leaves the question unfinished.

I shake my head and smile. My connection with Dieter had never been sexual. I was in high school when I worked for him; he was a man of honor. At that time, I didn’t know enough about myself to have even considered sex with an older man. With anyone, to be honest.

I recall that the younger me believed that sex with a man would involve a lot of very tight hugging, which, while true, is heartbreakingly charming in its innocence.

“No, Dieter. The way we know each other is much…stranger.”

The number in my eye ticks down to forty-six, and I can’t stop touching the fake wedding ring on my finger, as if the spider is waiting to bite.

I’m not supposed to tell him, of course. And I don’t know how to have the conversation I want to have without telling him. Too much is at stake, but also, this man is dying. Hell, I’m supposed to kill him after I take the sample, “just in case”. My contacts are recording everything, but the regime already considers me transgressive, and has stolen my freedom and my savings, so I’m not sure how much I care about toeing the line.

He lays back and closes his eyes as if the effort of looking has exhausted him. It probably has.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were Lawrence…” He leaves this sentiment hanging in silence, too, and then shakes his head in negation.

“Or his father, but I know…”

“He’s dead, Dieter. Yeah. Yeah, I’m not my dad. It’s me. It is Lawrence.”

His eyes pop open in wonderment. Not disbelief, but in a calculating assessment of this thing he has already accepted as truth in a moment. I can see him trying to do the math, trying to understand.

“Well, I’d say you’ve grown since I saw you last, but we both know college boys don’t turn into polar bears overnight.”

I burst into laughter, surprised as much that he has deduced the reality of who I am as that the term ‘bears’ was in use this early. Leave it to Dieter, an early adopter of language and slang.

I shake my head in astonishment at his still-sharp wit.

Unbidden, a memory of Matt laughing hysterically, dressed in his favorite party drag flashes into my mind and I wrangle my emotions. My husband and my angel would have been friends, I am sure of it.

I’m not supposed to tell Dieter why I’m here, but there are some things I’m just not ready to talk about with anyone yet. Or possibly ever.

There is a sound in the distance, and it takes me a moment to recognize it. It’s Madonna, “Like A Prayer”, and I have a sudden vivid olfactory recall of the rank chemical patchouli smell that shipped with the original vinyl album and disc. I haven’t heard this song in ages since the Purification Edicts.

Dieter hears it, too, and sighs.

“I love this song,” he says. “I guess if you’re dying, a pop song about prayer isn’t a horrible thing to go out on, huh?”

“It’s a good one,” I agree. “Classic Madonna. I had my first real kiss…”

I trail off, because how do you talk about something that hasn’t happened yet? Something that won’t happen for two more years.

He’s closed his eyes, again, but a flash of green pulls me back out of my reverie.

“Well, keep going, mister. You may be shocked to hear this, but I’m not seeing a lot of action these days. At least let me live vicariously!”

His voice is weak, but the Dieter-ness of him is as strong as ever.

And then the world melts away and for the next fifteen minutes, I am spilling a lifetime of tea. The molestation when I was eight, but also my first kiss, my first heartbreak, my incredible first blowjob, my hilariously bad first sexual encounter.

If Dieter had lived, I know we would have graduated from colleagues to friends. I would have told him all of this as it had happened. It might have even made living through it easier.

I know it would have made it better.

Tears are streaming down my face, and I don’t realize it until he reaches out a birdlike hand, his arm covered in sarcoma bruises, and gently wipes my right cheek.

“Excuse me, what are you doing?”

A shrill voice cuts the moment.

“What are you doing in here? You can’t touch him!”

Our heads whip around to take in the sight of a nurse, standing at the doorway, clearly torn between her horror and revulsion, and her desire to impose control and tear me away from what she thinks is the mortal danger of touching Dieter.

Imagine Louise Fletcher gone to pot, and that’s the wretched creature screeching at us now.

She takes a step into the room, agitation and malice written into her every move.

“Who are you? Why are you even in here?”

Fear is etched into Dieter’s features, and I know this isn’t his first encounter with this person and her hatred and disgust.

I stand up, and she takes a step backward as if I’m about to attack her, or spit on her, perhaps. The thought does cross my mind.

I’ve never had kids. For gay dudes, kids just aren’t the result of a slipped condom or a missed pill; it requires planning and patience and fistfuls of cash. Matt and I talked about it a lot, but when it was still legal, we didn’t make it happen. Then he was gone, and it was too late.

But my full papa grizzly has awakened, and the energy in the room crackles, her hate bouncing off my love and defense.

In a flash, emotions crystallize within me, and she becomes the embodiment of everything that has gone wrong these last fifty years.

She is the ignorance, the lack of compassion; she is the global tide of modern fascism, rising to drown the world. She is the unapologetic AmFirster, guns blazing triumphantly in the war, crushing gay marriage’s short life under the bootheel of the chaos of the twenty-first century.

It is as if it started here, with her: I feel it in my bones, even though I know it isn’t the truth. She is the early symptom of an oncoming fever that will destroy the America I loved, murder my husband, and make me desperate for exile in the French-speaking north.

She is symbolic of the virus. The first small virus of millions, gathering strength into a seroconversion event, killing the body politic.

“Get out of here, Karen. I am visiting with my little brother, and if you think I won’t report you to your manager, and your manager’s manager, you are as stupid as you look.”

I can do a good deep-voiced butch daddy when I need to, and she’s getting it full force.

She takes another step back and holds up her hands, one of them flying to her nametag: K. Whitacre. The other fingers the small gold cross laying at her neck as if she were about to wield it as a weapon.

“How did you know my name is Karen?” She asks, accusing and astonished in equal measure.

I throw back my head in a guffaw.

“Jesus Christ, are you kidding me? Your name is actually Karen?”

She is confused and scared, but still indignant and full of vitriol.

“I’m calling the police!” she declares, the inevitable outcome of our encounter, repeated by bigots across time and space.

I take one more step towards her.

“Call the police and it will be the last thing you do in this shitty job. You’ll be out on your ass collecting food stamps before you can spit, just like the trashy welfare queen you really are.”

The direct ego hit ripples across her face in a dozen micro-expressions. I’ve sunk her battleship; I can see it. She glares at us, and turns on her heel, spitting her final words into the air like a poison-filled curse.

“I hope you die, you disgusting faggots!”

Not very nurse-like, but another direct hit, this time on me. Because Dieter will die today, one way or another, and me…I am not so sure that I want to live. I can’t live here in the past, and the future I come from has written me out of it as thoroughly as if I never existed. It’s a truth that floods through me, as I slowly sink to the bottom of the Atlantic, drowned and useless, suddenly full of an icy cold awareness of hopelessness.

I have just over twenty-one minutes left. Not enough time to do or say everything I want to.

We are still snickering over my explanation of Karen, and he sighs, a spent balloon slowly losing all its air. I realize what I’ve been missing, that I can never get back.

“Tell me about dancing,” Dieter asks in a voice as soft as the Wisconsin winter snow where he grew up.

I look at him in bafflement for a moment, and then it clicks. Dieter loved to go dancing when I knew him. His oblique references to Crisco Discos were something that took me years to understand, and then fear, and then envy.

“What is it about gay men and a throbbing beat and a diva?” I ask.

His smile is a ray of light in the forest, pure brilliance and knowing.

Another thread across the fabric of time that could be woven into a tapestry of who we were, and who we are, and who we could have possibly been, had it not been for this pandemic, and the guns, and the camps.

We had our moment in the sun, and we didn’t even know it. Lost boys on Venus, living all of summer in a day. We didn’t do enough to thank our fierce lesbian allies, and we definitely didn’t do enough to reach a hand out to our trans siblings. Perhaps in solidarity we could have pushed back against the darkness just a little longer.

Because, seen in our most uncharitable light, give us a driving bassline and room full of cocks, and all we want to do is feel good and dance the night away. Tomorrow will take care of itself, except when it doesn’t.

“It gets better, right?”

Goddamn Dieter. Too damn smart for his own good.

I smile and nod, but he can read the whole story on my face.

“It gets better, yeah. It gets so much better...,” my voice cracks.

“But…”
“But then it gets worse again. So much worse.”

We sit in silence, the sounds of South Florida road construction banging in the distance, and the mix of cleaning chemicals, death, and mold wafting through the hot, stale air.

“Madonna dies?” He asks deader than deadpan.

I laugh, because he wants me to, and because goddamn this man is funny. We had so much fun bonding over wordplay, back in the day. Me half his age, but delighting in a wit that sparked like mine, a lover of words and puns and the darkest sarcasm. A glimmer of a possible life, different from my parents, but valid and fulfilling, and cut far too short.

“Oh god, no! Madonna never dies! She just gets a thousand plastic surgeries and sort of fades into irrelevance.”

He nods as if this fate is obvious.

“Just like a diva should do.”

We grin at each other, fools in a kind of love.

“Who comes next?” he asks, and I don’t need him to explain.
I groan, but he knows it’s with glee.

“Oh, god, Dieter! Britney, and Christina, and Kylie, and Lady Gaga. Taylor Swift! Chappel Roan! Ananova Delight! And Beyoncé! How can I ever describe Beyoncé?”

His eyes are alight with the promise of a thousand future nights on the dance floor.

“Sing me something.”

It’s a simple request, and if anyone else had asked I would have denied it.

But it’s Dieter, and he’s about to die. So, I start with the first thing that pops into my head ─ “Pink Pony Club”. A classic gay anthem, lost to time and oppression.

He closes his eyes, smiles at the lyrics, and bops his head in time with my terrible beat.

“Sing me this Beyoncé.”

I pause and take a breath, and then I break into “Anthem”, the final song on her final album.

The song is a masterpiece. A prayer for America, and an indictment of it. A lifting up of every Black and Queer and Other voice in the country that would rather kill its own freedom than let us live in equal power.

The song that got her exiled to France before that fateful flight that no one in 2049 believes fell from the sky of its own accord.

I can’t finish the song because my throat has swollen shut with emotion. We are both crying. We say so much with our eyes, and our hands, reaching across generations to give each other strength.

I finally manage to squeak out the thing I have wanted to say for more nearly six decades.

“I love you, Dieter Murphy.”

He smiles, and nods, his own voice obliterated by the disease and by tears.

“I love you too, Lawrence. I am so proud of you.”

“You have always been my guardian angel. I’ve always felt you with me.”

The smile on his face is beatific, unrenderable by anything as simple as art or light.

I am grinning and weeping, and my heart is breaking. It’s breaking for me, and for Matt, and for Dieter, full to overflowing once, and now as empty as a world without these men I loved, and millions like them. Like me.

I have crossed some kind of threshold. The countdown in my vision has turned red and the numbers blink as they flicker through seven minutes remaining.

“So. You came here to kill me. Let’s get on with it. This is a good note to go out on.”

I rock back in shock, once again stunned at how much this man can know and deduce. Perhaps being on the edge of death truly pierces the veil between time and space and worlds.

I shake my head, my mouth opening and closing like a robot that’s lost its talk track.

“Don’t,” he says firmly. Sternly.

“Don’t lie to me, and for god’s sake, don’t back out now.”

I’m shaking my head, but his grip on my arm is like a vise.

“I want to die!” He laughs a bitter laugh.

“Look at me! I am miserable, in this place, with these people!”

Our eyes are locked.

“Please. Please kill me. Whatever way you’ve got, I know it will be fast and painless, right?”

I nod because it’s true. The spider-spirit ring I’m wearing has two triggers. One collects a small blood sample; the other, a tiny, ultrasharp needle, the latest in pharma toxicity. Because it is touching my skin, it will be pulled back through the small warp in time when the appointed moment comes.

His voice is a pleading whisper now, the wind in the pines on a moonless night.

“Please. I want it to be you. Please don’t leave me alone again.”

I nod, and I’m weeping, and I wrap him into my arms in the bear hug to end all bear hugs, determined now to see his soul across the rainbow bridge to a place where he can dance free, forever.

I’m holding him, and his frail arms cling to my shoulders like a kitten afraid to be dropped. Our tears mix in loud wet splashes, and I can’t believe it has taken me sixty years to tell this man that he is loved, that he is good, and that he changed my life.

I am humming the song I sang to him moments ago, and it calms him, his grip loosening, becoming as gentle as butterfly wings.

The scent of death still fills the air, but all I can smell is remnants of his old Calvin Klein cologne, buried under layers of sweat and piss and shit.

I hate this world we’re in. I hate that he’s been left here to rot. I hate the world I’m returning to, once swung so hard towards liberation, and then plunging back to the swampy earth of hatred like Icarus plunging to the sea.

I want to tell him it will be OK, but the limpness of his hands tells me something else. I pull back, and his empty eyes and small smile see nothing and say everything.

He’s dead, here in the protective circle of my arms. I don’t have to be the one to kill him. I can collect the sample, and I can return to my broken future. I can get my exoneration, flee to Quebec, and die alone and free in Montreal.

And I don’t want to.

I’d rather die, here and now, with my friend and hero.

I have less than a minute left. The squawk of walkie-talkies in the middle distance tells me that Karen has made good on her promise.

Nineteen-year-old me sits just a few miles away, sad and afraid, too cowardly to come here to say goodbye, but with sixty glorious, terrifying, magnificent years ahead of him.

I turn the ring and activate the small needle that I’d been so terrified of hours ago. I don’t hesitate. The tiniest spider bite stings my neck. I lay in the arms of my guardian angel, my long-lost friend.

The future is doomed, with me or without me.

But me and Dieter Murphy, we’re going dancing.