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.
M said "achingly real" in his comment here. Good description. I was mesmerized. Thanks for sharing Lawrence. Can't wait for more !
This is great! Definitely not my usual genre, but I liked it!