Against the World - 10. Chapter 10

CHAPTER TEN

“You have to do it,” Ben scolded me, as he stirred his vodka-soda ferociously with the straw. “Here I was, thinking we’d fuck tonight, but you haven’t even told your boyfriend it’s over.”

I’d made the mistake of getting drunk the other day and telling Ben Farber that I was planning to end things with Becker before I went to Paris.
In the clear light of (relative) sobriety, it seemed like a mistake.

And yes, there was so much about Becker that drove me insane, but there was so much of me that didn’t want to let him go. That didn’t want to throw him away and leave him behind and not feel his body against mine, his lips against mine, his voice, his fingers, his rectum.

But if Becker knew where I was right now...

We were meeting some of our band friends later, but first, Ben had brought me to Phillips’ Bar on Maple Street for Friday gay happy hour.

“Part of your welcome package into being out,” Ben had told me. “Your fruit basket is in the mail.”

And it was so. Normal.

Being here.

Sitting at a table with Ben, shooting the shit and getting drunk, like we always did, except we were surrounded by smoke and men. Who knew we were gay.
Becker was in the Quarter for some sorority girl’s birthday party, and the contrast wasn’t lost on me.

“Who said we can’t fuck anyway?”

“Don’t be a tease,” Ben replied, lazily. “I know you. You won’t cheat on your boyfriend even if you know it’s over, and don’t pretend like you’re even entertaining the possibility. It’s fine. I’ll just tie some meth to a string and drag it down St. Ann Street. See what I catch.”

I had to smile at that.

It was surreal, in a sense, almost powerful, to already know the relationship was over, when the other person didn’t. Not that Becker was the kind of guy to imagine a future with me, or a future with any man, but I still felt guilty to be hoarding this bombshell.

I should have done it when I picked him up at the airport last Sunday: in the car, without distractions, some captivity.

Instead, I let it linger all week, but finals were starting soon, so I was running out of runway.

Maybe the smallest part of me was waiting on Becker.

To see if he could make some declaration to me.

“I know you’re going to Paris, and I know you’re going to come out, and I don’t care about any of that. I want you, and I want you no matter what.”

I have you, and you have me.

That part of me got bigger and bolder the drunker I got.

Wouldn’t happen. Not Becker.

I took another big swig of my drink.

“Let me see your new necklace,” Ben said. “I’m curious. I thought I’d have your shirt off by now.”

It wasn’t a necklace: it was my dad’s dog tags, that I found when I was cleaning out my room in Colton for the last time, after Becker headed back to Vegas.

I didn’t have much, and I didn’t keep much of that, but the dog tags were in a box in my dresser drawer and I tried them on, and just didn’t take them off.

He never took them off either. I liked having him close to my heart.

Malley, Michael T. O Positive. Catholic.

All that really mattered: your name, your blood, your beliefs.

“Your dad’s?” Ben asked, holding them in his hands.

I nodded. I’d been wearing them for a week; I already felt naked without them.

“Cool,” Ben approved, absently handing them back. “I think we should ditch the band guys and go downtown by ourselves. Micah wants to go to Friar Tuck’s, and it’s like, hasn’t anyone told him we don’t go to Loyola?”

“You want to come to a Tri-Gamma birthday party with me and Becker?”

“Absolutely not,” he said. “I figured we could get an hour or two in at Oz, at least. Let me undress you piece by piece on the dance floor, and then bring you to the handicap stall and have you ravage me with that horse cock of yours.”

There were more than a few men that lurched their eyes suddenly in our direction, and it was slightly uncomfortable but also.

I did want this.

I did want to come into a bar like this, and swill a drink, and talk openly and frankly about how I wanted to fuck some guy in the ass.

But I still thought: if Becker were here next to me.

My hand on his thigh. Could lean over and give him just a brief peck on the cheek, like we were one of his Iota Chi brothers with a girl.

And maybe Becker wouldn’t be comfortable just yet, but maybe he would be.

Maybe he’d come out with me, and we’d tell everyone, and we’d make it work, and when I got back from Paris, he’d be comfortable in his own skin.

Comfortable enough to hold my hand and kiss me and not care about the tyranny of public opinion.

“See, you’re a big old tease,” Ben said, relaxing into his drink.

 

I’d never broken up with someone before. Things always just disintegrated when you moved away.

So I decided to go with that. So Becker could think that it wasn’t him, that it wasn’t me. That we could both flip the page, and that would be that.

I had scripted it all out, and vowed to commit as much of it to memory as possible:

Becker, I know we said we would try long-distance but I think neither of us really thought through what that was going to be like. Six months is a long time, and it’s going to be so different than what we have now. It’ll be so hard to have me there, and you here, when we’re both still trying to figure out everything we want.

He would understand. Maybe he’d even agree.

And make it clear it had nothing to do with him:

I was so lucky to have had your love. You’re smart, you’re funny, you’re adorable. You were often my first thought in the morning and my last thought before going to bed. But I know this is the best for both of us.

And when the spotlight came on, I could only remember bits and pieces, like a story I’d heard from someone else.

“We never talked about long distance. Two continents. We won’t see each other for eight months, and I know I can’t be the boyfriend you deserve. It’s always been so light and fun with us, and I care too much to put you through that.”

He winced at “light and fun” which was not the words I meant to use, and not the words I wanted to use, and not even necessarily accurate words.

I couldn’t meet Becker’s glance.

He’d been punched. Eyes glossy and shocked, and I couldn’t bear to think that Becker--the Becker who always kept me just outside of his reach--was being gutted by this as much as he was.

I lost the script entirely, and I finally just looked up at him. “Are you okay?”

“Spring break,” he choked out. “What about spring break?”

Which was classic Becker.

Acting like he’d bought and paid for some vacation that we both knew he was never going to actually take, lest people know he cared about me.

Maybe it would’ve been easier to give him an ultimatum. To force him to choose me or the closet, but I didn’t want to drag someone kicking and screaming into a relationship with me.

And. I didn’t know what his answer would be. Inaction.

“I’m going to be different when I’m over there,” I told him, “and things are going to be different here, and I don’t think I can be the kind of boyfriend you need. You don’t deserve it.”

“Kevin,” Becker whispered. Remains of a voice.

It didn’t shake my confidence though. In knowing I had done the right thing.

And that certainty scared me, a little bit, but emboldened me too.

The script was rushing back into my head.

I sat down next to him on the bed, and took his hand. The way I imagined I would.

“I was so lucky,” I told him. “To have had your love. I've never met anyone like you. You're smart and you're funny and classy and you're so, so adorable. You were often my first thought in the morning and my last thought before going to bed, and I couldn’t even believe how lucky I was that you could fall for someone like me. And I mean that, Becker. But this is best for both of us, and I know that, in your heart, you know it too.”

Becker’s voice had given up on him entirely. He just shook his head.

“I’m going to come out, is the other thing,” I told him. “Everyone’s going to know. Tulane people, classmates. And you know, I’m not scared of that. It’s time they know.”

It was all over.

And I couldn’t help but well up with tears when I thought of how it was all over.

Not me and Becker being over, though we were. But all of this.

Lying to everyone, and sneaking around, and pretending to be someone that I never was and never wanted to be, and it was. All so much.

There would be no more Lena Taylors, and no more Matt Barbers, and no more Adam Beckers. No one would be hurt, or betrayed, or lonely.

And it was just such a relief. To know.

Becker leaned in to me. To kiss the stubble on my cheek, and I fell into his scent, his warmth, as he whispered, “I want you to fuck me.”

And I knew that was a bad idea. Eurydice in the backwards glance.

But I gave in.

Kissed him.

Fucked him.

Like I’d done a million times, but never like this before, because this time I didn’t feel.

Anything.

Except a hollowness. A very conspicuous and inescapable hollowness.

Because Becker had already been lost to me. I knew what this was: that ethereal swirl, the agony and the relief, of one chapter closing and another starting.

And I knew even then I had made the right choice.

 

“I can’t believe I’m paying Tulane tuition for UT Dallas,” Chris told me, via AIM.

“I’m paying Tulane tuition for COMMUNITY COLLEGE,” I sent back.

I was on a full ride, so that was a lie. But Chris’s parents were the ones paying his tuition anyway.

I fought running away every single day. It was like an addiction, like my mom in soberer times had told my dad once: not a day goes by where you don’t just think about how much easier it would all be if you just gave in.

That I’d get in the Tercel and I’d drive.

Denver or Chicago or Dallas, and just.

Well. I didn’t think that far.

But I could get a job.

I didn’t mind being broke, not for a little while. Everything was transient.

Except Chris Baker was not transient. Not at all.

He was the one who messaged me, every single morning before I woke up, a puppy scraping at the door.

Just for conversation. To commiserate, to remind me of what was to come if--not if; when--the city of New Orleans reopened itself to the world.

I doubted he knew how much he was keeping me tethered. I certainly wasn’t going to admit that.

“It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed,” said Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-Hell), last week, or so I read in the avalanche of New Orleans news I had consumed over the last few weeks. “Rebuilding doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.”

Maybe it would be just as well.

I didn’t know if Chris knew that he was one thing keeping me tethered to a world that had so much promise, that I hadn’t ever really experienced yet.

Why would I ever ask you to move out? Chris had said.

“I’m actually on a full ride to Tulane,” I told him. “I don’t know why I said I was paying.”

“Lol, lucky SOB,” he told me, quickly and without judgment. “Charlie’s being such a little shit now that I’m home. He’s saying MY car technically started being HIS car the day

I went to Tulane, and I don’t get it back just because I’m stuck here for the semester.”

There was so much of Chris and Charlie Baker that reminded me of Matt and Brig Barber--the petty suburban pseudocrises that plagued their lives and stunted their relationship.

Nick was one misstep away from juvie or getting expelled from high school, running with gangbangers from Colton.

I wished I could fight with Nick over who got to drive a silver 2003 Volkswagen Jetta.

“What’d your parents say?”

“They said we have to work it out ourselves,” he replied. “It feels like I’m in high school again. It sucks.” Maybe realizing the gloom was coming through even in text, Chris hopped topics again: “So how’s the talent at community college?”

Chris couldn’t really pull off a word like “talent,” but that was beside the point.

There was something about lying to Chris Baker that seemed especially cruel, because he was this fluffy golden retriever of a man.

And I suspected he didn’t care much about the “talent” at San Bernardino Valley College, so much as he was just trying to approximate a conversation between two bros.

With the finesse of a newly-landed Martian.

Which somehow made him even more endearing.

“Cave canem,” I replied.

“?”

“‘Beware of dog.’”

“LOL,” Chris typed back. “Harsh.”

The hardest part of community college was the fact that I knew Matt Barber was there.

I’d heard he’d gotten off the waitlist for Berkeley, but only for spring admittance, so he was doing his first semester at community college to transfer.

Maybe he thought I was still going to UCLA, or maybe he just thought he couldn’t stare at an empty bed in his dorm and not be constantly thinking of me.

Or maybe his parents weren’t quite ready to let him fly away. Considering all that happened.

I took great pains to not see him. I left class immediately, didn’t hang out in the commuter lounge or the cafeteria, just went straight home to Colton or to the public library.

And I never did see him. Though part of me hoped, darkly, that I would.

What would I even have said—what would he even had said? I’d been operating as if I was the one who cut him off, as if I got to be the one to let him back in, but that actually wasn’t true at all.

I missed him. I missed Matt. I missed his smile and his laugh. The way he knew what I was thinking before I’d even say it.

The fooling around had been great, certainly, but that wasn’t what I missed most.

 

When I finally got to see Chris Baker again, January 2006, no time had passed.

Our posters were still tacked to the walls, our boxes and bags still half-unpacked in the middle of the floor. Like we’d taken a short break for lunch instead of evacuating for four brutal months.

And it was surreal. To step back in time like this.

To think you could finish folding the shirt you started folding four months ago, listening to Chris Baker keep talking about girls he had no shot with.

Time had passed but also no time had passed. Far from moving to a new chapter, you could flip unstuck through the entire book as long as you kept the close people close.

“I’m lousy at keeping in touch,” I warned Chris, the last time I saw him before I went to Paris. “But I promise I’m going to try.”

“Oh, you’ll never escape me,” he replied, lazily, and I knew he meant it. “I’ll find you either way.”

 

Aaron’s a morning person. I’d never been around him this early in the morning.

But here we are, 7:45am in the lobby of our Berlin hostel.

“More time to sightsee,” Aaron tells me, with an almost sadistic glee, after the front desk told us that we wouldn’t be able to check-in until after 3pm.

So we leave our bags. Trudge out into the pale drizzle.

And as cloying as Morning Aaron is, it’s better than Standoffish Aaron, Pissed Aaron, Aaron-Who-Hates-Kevin.

Which is what he’s been in the past two weeks, since we’ve fucked.

But now, suddenly lighter between us. The cleansing power of a new location.

“I figured we’d walk to Brandenburg Gate first,” he says, tracing the road on his paper map with his index finger. “Through the Tiergarten, and then through Charlottenburg to see the palace. We’ll take the S-Bahn back.”

“How far is all that?”

Aaron doesn’t say anything as he folds the map back up. Not a great sign.

“That’ll put us back at the hostel at four to check in,” he continued, authoritatively, slipping the map back in the pocket of his raincoat. “We can recharge a bit, and since my memory card will be nice and full by then, I can upload photos to my laptop.”

“Oh, yes, can’t be caught with a full memory card,” I tell him, “just in case the Pope wanders by, wanting his picture with you.”

“He should be so lucky.” He smiles. “Anyway, everyone else’s train from Vienna should be getting in at 4:30, so that’s perfect timing.”

So, no nap. Is what he’s saying.

The rain picks up a little bit, just as we cross the Spree River near the cathedral--the weather, the time of day: the street is deserted.

“This is Berliner Dom,” he says, raising the hood on his kelly green rain coat, “and the Lustgarden.”

“There’s a gay sex joke in there somewhere.”

He hands me his digital camera. “Take a picture of me.”

“What, in the rain?”

Aaron grins. “Yes, in the rain, you big baby. Go over there. Wait until my hood’s off, try to center me with the main dome, and don’t cut off any of the towers.”

“Any other requests, Ansel?”

He pats me on the shoulder. “Go get ‘em, tiger.”

I slush across the empty, wet lawn, until I’m far enough away to frame Aaron. A vivid slash of color, kelly green coat and red hair, against the muted gray sky, tan church, patinated domes.

He rips down his hood, and I mash the button like I’m playing MarioKart, until he throws his hood back up.

“Done?” I call. “Can we go?”

He starts walking back towards me, smile on his rain-streaked face. “‘Don’t stomp your little last-season Prada shoes at me, honey.’”

The rain is still coming down, but Aaron’s still buoyant, impervious to something as facile as rain.

“A bottom with a Dom in the Lustgarden,” I tell him, handing back his digital camera.

“Aw, you finally found your joke, yay,” he deadpans.

He takes his camera and I thought, with all his specific requests, he was going to look through the photos but doesn’t. Just puts it back in his pocket.

Then he holds out his hand, and I genuinely don’t know what he wants, so I theatrically low-five him.

Aaron rolls his eyes. “No, give me your camera, I’ll get some of you.”

“I don’t have a camera.”

I say it, and it suddenly sounds so stupid: that I’d be on a trip to Berlin, that I’d be studying abroad, with no camera.

But a camera always seems like an extravagance, and I know I’d remember the parts I wanted to remember.

Becker, if he were here, would do that thing where pretends he doesn’t understand that being poor means you don’t have everything. Where he pretends I’m the one who is woefully out-of-touch.

My mother has an eight thousand dollar camera she’s used once.

He would say.

Aaron is not Becker, though. He fishes his camera out of his pocket and says, “Go stand where I was standing.”

“I’m all set.”

“Go.”

“It’s raining!”

“So go fast!”

“What about your limited memory card storage?!”

“You’ll have to explain it to the Pope yourself,” he says. “I’m not going to let you go to Berlin and have zero pictures of yourself. Start moving, I’m getting wet.”

He holds the camera in front of his face, firmly and menacingly like a weapon, until I finally just give up and head back across the lawn.

In the rain. My sneakers beginning to get soaked through, squishing in the muddy grass.

“Hood down!” he shouts, and I do it, and he snaps a few. My hair’s about soaked by the time my hood comes on ten seconds later.

Aaron’s giggling, but at least the rain’s beginning to let up.

“How bad do I look?” I ask him.

“You couldn’t take a bad picture and you know it,” he says, putting the camera back in his pocket. “Let’s go inside. We can dry off by the fire and brimstone.”

It’s been a while since I’ve been in a church.

My dad’s funeral. Probably.

I still haven’t been to Notre-Dame or Sacre-Coeur. Bad little study abroad student.

But it’s impressive, Berliner Dom. The ornate walls and the gold dome, the preternatural majesty. I assume this is why you become religious.

Nothing like Our Lady of Good Counsel, Colton, California, established 1971.

Aaron disappears behind his camera, begins circulating around the perimeter of the church, taking picture of every inch of everything he can see.

Pope be damned.

I’m left staring at the bank of votive candles near the entrance, thinking of my dad, who was a big candle lighter.

50 euro cent each.

Seems a little steep, but there can’t be any good that comes from cheating a church.

Put in two bucks, count out four matches.

And light the candles: for my dad, and Laura, and Leo, and my mom.

It’s a solemn moment. I do whatever the non-religious do instead of praying: silently wait for ten or fifteen seconds to pass to confirm the transactional miracle. “Two bucks worth of special treatment for these four--capiche, Goddy Old Pal?”

In nomina patris, filii, et spiritus sancti.

“You’re about to light this church on fire, bug.”

“Shouldn’t have died then,” I reply. “Tell God he better put you courtside, I just spent two bucks.”

Dad would not have found that funny. I fiddle with his dog tags.

As the four flames flicker, flat and dead in their box.

I don’t know what I was expecting: fireworks? A lightning strike?

The Ghost of Leo Cardenas popping out from behind a pew to run over to me?

He couldn’t even run. When he died. He had just started crawling.

Young enough to vaguely know my face, but not much else. He’d be three now.

“Get a good look?” Aaron says, and I jump because I wasn’t expecting him.

“Ready to go when you are,” I tell him, and I quickly do the sign of the cross, the old “over and out.”

“Look at you, all pray-y,” he says, with a smirk. He mimics a sign of the cross, backwards.

The four candles continue to blink.

“I wasn’t!” I tell him, maybe too defensively. “Just lighting some candles for aesthetic purposes.”

“What are the candles for?” he asked. “I’ve always wondered. Dead people?”

“People you want to pray for,” I reply. “Theoretically. Again, these are only for aesthetics.”

“Fine, don’t tell me,” he tells me. “You don’t have to tell me. Even though I’m curious. Even though I’d like it if you opened up your locked vault just the teensiest bit. But you don’t have to tell me. Wouldn’t dream of asking.”

“Wonderful, thanks.”

He says nothing further as we head out of the church, the candles left behind, because of course you don’t take them with you.

It’s still raining outside, steadily and indifferently, and Aaron puts his hood back up.

“It’s about a twenty minute walk to Brandenburg Gate, straight down the street,” he says, pointing into the gray distance. “Want to run it? I don’t need to order you a wheelchair or anything, do I?”

“Best shape of my life,” I tell him, jogging in place.

“I was on JV cross-country.”

“I’ve been chased by the cops.”

Aaron gives a polite and disarming laugh, and then holy shit, rips across the Lustgarden like a stray bullet, turning back just once to cackle madly at me, as he disappears into the fog.

And the little fucker is pretty fast.

My wet sneakers clop on the wet pavement; I watch his bright green coat and bright red hair just slightly out of reach, as the rain starts to fade away.

He beats me to Pariser Platz. Not by too much, but it’d been a while since I ran a mile.

“The champion!” he yells at me, and then he looks up as the sun starts to peek through the clouds, Brandenburg Arch framed in the imber.

Aaron absently hands me his camera. “Make sure you--”

“Yeah, yeah, I won’t chop the little horseys off the top, I promise.”

“The horseys?” Aaron giggles.

I grin. “I’m sure they have some fancy, terrifying German name.”

“Oh, fuck if I know, I’m going to call them ‘the horseys’ forever.” He waves me back. “Alright, twenty paces, cowpoke. But then I want one of the two of us."

 

The weather holds out for the next hour or so as we walk through the Tiergarten, but starts picking up again by the time we get to the Charlottenburg Palace.

So we hurry inside.

Where Aaron’s first stop is the gift shop, the postcard rack.

“You know they’re going to overcharge you here.”

“Hush, you. I didn’t want to waste any time when it wasn’t raining, and now it’s our last stop. I’ll only be a minute."

He begins to take cards off the rack. One, then two, then a third.

“Send a lot of postcards?”

“Not really. To my mom, to my dad, to my grandparents, to a couple of my friends at Tulane,” and I wait for a punchline, but he doesn’t seem to actually consider it all that many people.

Instead, he smiles. “Something about your overt lack of sentiment about the past tells me you’re not a big postcard person.”

“I’m very sentimental.”

He pulls out a fourth postcard, Brandenburg Gate, sunnier days. “For Bubbe Rosenbaum, what do you think? Her parents escaped the Bolsheviks.”

I don’t say anything, and he tightens his smile, hands me the postcard. “Here, you can send it to someone.”

“What’s Bubbe Rosenbaum’s address?”

“She’s been a widow for fifteen years, don’t think she wouldn’t write back to a sexy goy like you.”

He goes back to spinning the postcard rack. I look down at the Brandenburg Gate.

The funny thing about shedding lives: there isn’t anyone to send mail to.

Except J.C.

Who would want mail, and of course I’ve never sent him anything.

I don’t like to think about where he is. Not that I’ve been. I imagine San Quentin is a cold and permanent place, lifeless and joyless. Like all of the jails I’d visited.

He can see a sliver of San Francisco Bay. So Google told me.

I don’t want to end up in jail.

Though that always seemed like the obvious end result of doing what I do.

Not that I did that anymore, but I do think about what happens when I go back to New Orleans.

No money, bad habits.

Iota Chi and Tri-Gamma lighting up my phone for their next fix, and it’d be so easy. To just go back to the way things were, but you couldn’t go back to how things were: that was entirely the point.

I’d never gone back. Not to how things were.

When I went back to Colton, for Katrina semester, it was a purple haze—no Matt, no Lena, no Las Palomas, no Harry or Hiroshi or Tucker. No Pabs and Bobs or kisses in the lake or Latin jokes or Dodgers games with the Barbers. No Son Number Three.

Just the crippling agony of life alone after the apocalypse.

And a very small part of me thought that I wouldn’t actually wind up back at Tulane for that exact reason, no matter how impractical.

Because what was I supposed to do, for a whole year? Avoid Becker in the quad? Respond to every Iota Chi and Tri-Gamma text with, “I’m actually not dealing anymore,” and watch them all lose interest in me, one by one?

It's always better to leave on your own terms than try to go back to the way things used to be, to the person you used to be, after you moved on.

I pay for the postcard and a stamp, and I take the cashier’s pen and try to think of something encouraging to say to J.C.

Which I can’t.

Not because I’m not sentimental, but because what do you say to someone when they’re going to spend the rest of their life in one four-by-ten cage?

So I just move to the address side, hurriedly print from memory, because I’ve never mailed but I’ve written the address on a thousand envelopes:

John Christopher Cardenas, Inmate #4265460
Death Row, San Quentin State Prison
San Quentin, CA, USA 94974

Aaron is reading after all: “Wait, who do you know on Death Row?” He gives me an awkward smile. “Not to pry.”

“‘Who do you know on Death Row?’ is not prying?”

“I,” he stumbles, and he really does look embarrassed. “Sorry. You don’t have to tell me.”

So I don’t.

Though it takes him a second to realize I’m actually not going to.

But he doesn’t say anything; he hands the cashier a few euro, and then takes my discarded pen to fill them out.

“‘Dear Mom,’” I read, mockingly, reading over his shoulder.

“‘Rebecca Ackerman Levy, Death Row, Prison,’” he finishes, singsong.

Fuck you, I told my mother, and I think about what Nicky said about Mom, about Dad.

I scratch the back of my neck, I feel the chain from Dad’s dog tags.

“Your mom’s remarried?”

Aaron looks at me strangely. “Yeah, she’s remarried.”

“Do you like your stepdad?”

“Yeah, I do. Joel’s not my dad, and he gets that, but he tries to be there for me. We have nothing in common but I guess I’ve always appreciated that he keeps trying.” He smiles. “Why, is your mom getting remarried?”

She’s not getting remarried, because she’s dead, and the last thing I told her was fuck you.

But I don’t say that. I just say, “I don’t think I’d be able to forgive her for doing that to my dad.”

“Well, it’s tough sometimes,” he says, “to think about how things used to be.” He gives me a faint and faraway smile. “Like, I remember our last family vacation, a couple months before my parents split. It was my eighth birthday; we drove to Disney World for the weekend. And my mom tripped getting out of the car and broke her ankle and we missed our whole day at Epcot because we were in the emergency room. My dad was so worried but I just remember being so angry at her.”

His smile creeps back, his slow, broad grin that always betrays the coming punchline, and continues: “But the next day, we got her a wheelchair and got to cut every single line at the Magic Kingdom, so we rode everything. And my dad pushed her around all day, and waited on her hand and foot, and was actually happy to do it. I remember them laughing and everything was perfect for this one last weekend. And that’s the part that’s a little bit painful. Because that’s the last time they were ever happy together and I still remember every second of it like it was yesterday.”

“My parents were never happy together,” I tell him. “It’s not good to dwell on the past. Trust me.”

“It’s not dwelling,” he says. “I have more good memories of my parents than bad ones, but the past makes us who we are. Even when it sucks.”

How could you let this happen, you warped-fucking-lunatic?

Fuck you.

“My mom died, actually,” I tell him, finally. “Week before last.”

Aaron’s mouth gapes. “What?!”

“Yeah. March 4th. I found out last Saturday.”

“Holy fuck,” Aaron says. “The night of Sebastien’s thing? Now I feel like a huge asshole for letting you fuck me when you were grieving your mom, holy fuck.”

“I wasn’t grieving,” I tell him. “I don’t really have a family anymore. Not since I came out.”

Aaron doesn’t know what to say, because how would he know what to say, armed with postcards for Bubbe Rosenbaum and Bubbe Ackerman and Rebecca Ackerman Levy and the rest of the population of Jerusalem.

“You’ll always have a family,” he says, quietly. “I’m so sorry, Kevin.” He thinks for a moment. “You know what Jews say when someone dies? ‘Baruch Dayan Ha’Emet: Blessed is the True Judge.’ It means we can’t ever understand why something so painful happens, but we just have to trust that it happens for a good reason.” And he looks a little embarrassed. “I don’t know. If that helps.”

I don’t say anything. Aaron doesn’t expect me to.

He silently finishes filling out his stack of postcards, then brings them up to the cashier to mail, and picks up one of the free guidebooks.

“Ihre Karte des Schlossgarten Charlottenburg, Schloss Charlottenburg, Neuer Pavillon, Belvedere, und Mausoleum,” he reads, as we head back to the lobby.

“If you turn it upside down, it’s in English too.”

“I’m practicing my German.”

“Do you... speak German?”

“Not at all,” and he smiles and I laugh.

“I wish I spoke a language. Like, a useful one.”

“We’ll go to the Vatican on our next trip,” he reasons. “You can teach me Latin.”

“Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo.”

“Guessing I shouldn’t say that to the Pope when I run into him later today with a memory card full of pictures of you.”

“Probably not,” I tell him. “It’s, ‘I will sodomize and facefuck you.’”

He giggles. “Play your cards right.”

And that hangs. For just a moment.

Until Aaron looks down, suddenly awkward, absently flipping through the booklet on the castle, the English side. “How do you feel about, um, porcelain and china? Fancy-ass gold cups that fancy-ass kings sipped their tea out of?”

“Lead the way.”

And he does: to a winding room, with gold cabinets of teacups and teapots and candlesticks, and it’s amazing. How many dishes a person could have, even a king.

I assume this is what Becker means when he talks about his “butler’s pantry.”

But, of course, Becker would actually wrinkle his nose at a place like this--maybe good enough for a Hohenzollern but certainly not for a Becker, because real money is “understated” when you’re a member of the Washington aristocracy.

The little alligator on his polo, never the big Abercrombie moose.

My mother wears eight thousand dollar dresses once.

Understated.

“I think I’m going to start serving drinks in gold teacups,” I tell Aaron, as he snaps a photo. “‘Oh yes, the rum and coke is the one with the Virgin Mary handpainted on the side.’”

Aaron grins. “Just have to sell about twenty million more eighths of weed to the Tri-Gamma girls and it’s yours.”

And he doesn’t mean it to be weird, but it’s weird.

Because Aaron goes to Tulane: he knows what I do, what I did.

But he’s almost never mentioned it.

“Well, if I did that anymore, but I don’t. Now I’m just waiting for them to strike oil in my backyard.”

Aaron’s smile falters, just slightly. “Well, maybe they’ll give one away for General Mills box-tops.” he says. He points at himself, and hitches back on his grin. “I sound like my mother.”

And money’s funny, because it’s never just about having it.

It’s about playing the game, and I’ve never been very good at games.

I’ve been poor and I’ve been rich and I’ve been at Las Palomas and Tulane and Smith Barney in the Financial District and no matter what happened, I’ve never been anything other than Kevin Malley.

It’s a cold thing. To think that you’re just always going to be yourself.

My middle name is Qantas. I would say, but that didn’t make it true.

“The guy on Death Row,” I tell Aaron.

Aaron lowers his camera, stares at me a little strangely. “I told you, it’s none of my business. You don’t have to tell me.”

And I don’t know why I’m telling Aaron, but.

“I want to tell you.” Though I don’t know how to start it. “He was the guy I got my pot from back in California, but he was a really, really good guy. And he had a baby. A baby and a wife, and then this kid in a Suburban was drunk and crossed a double-yellow and killed both of them. And J.C. found out where the kid lived, and…”

You don’t understand. He took my family away.

He told me.

His eyes cold and cruel, like I'd never seen them before.

Before the police came and took him away.

Bullets in three people. The seventeen-year-old kid and his two parents.

“Well, maybe it was a favor,” J.C. said, flatly. On the other side of the glass at San Bernardino County Jail. “Who would want to live without their kid?”

On the last and only time I visited him, a couple weeks before I went to New Orleans the first time.

It was one of those pointless things: everything was.

Mistakes, and death, and grief.

Begetting more mistakes, and death, and grief.

Maybe punctuated by fleeting moments of joy, of the hope that something better lay just ahead, before that evaporated into mistakes, and death, and grief.

Aaron’s silent, as I tell him this.

In the porcelain room of the Charlottenburg Palace.

He’s not Becker, but it’s still beyond his middle-class sensibilities. Why I never tell people.

“And you write to him?” he asks, softly, dropping his camera back in his coat pocket.

“No. Not as much as I should. I was talking to my brother the other day, and he put the idea back in my head. I told you: I don’t like to think about how things were.”

“Send him that postcard. Write, ‘When you get out, we’ll come here together,’ or something.”

“You don’t get out when it’s Death Row.”

“Well, okay, but he’s got to keep hope alive somehow.”

“There’s no hope in a place like that. He’ll be in the same box until he runs out of appeals.” I shake my head. I’m not crying, but this is more emotionally taxing than I’d thought when I started down this path. “It’s fine. I don’t like talking about it.”

We continue to circle through the porcelain room. The endless parade of gilded teacups, passed down from royal to royal, preserved motionless behind glass for all eternity.

And at the end of the porcelain room is a small, dark, red-wallpapered chapel. A tiny room dominated by a big pipe organ, which takes up an entire wall.

“This organ was saved from a church that was bombed in World War II,” Aaron says, reading from the placard. “And I guess they brought it here because why not put a huge fucking organ within shattering distance of all of this priceless glassware.”

“Something tells me you’re not supposed to play it.”

He makes a face. “Chickenshit.”

I smile. “Sorry—are you calling me a chickenshit because I don’t want to play the thousand-year-old Prussian pipe organ?”

He smirks. “Was that not clear?”

“Well, I only know trumpet,” I told him. “They didn’t teach pipe organ in the hood.”

He clicks his tongue disapprovingly. “Hoods these days. I did piano lessons as a kid but all I can do now is plunk out Biz Markie’s ‘Just a Friend’ and ‘Walking on Broken Glass’ with one hand.”

“I’d go for some Annie Lennox right now.”

“No thanks. I’ve seen what they do to Jews in German prisons.”

“Chickenshit.”

Aaron gives this devilish smile, glances around the empty room, and lifts the velvet rope.

“Okay, I was kidding,” I tell him, as he ducks underneath.

Aaron cracks his fingers theatrically. “Bail me out.”

“Absolutely not.”

Aaron’s hand hovers over the keys. He glances back at me, back at the door to see if there’s anyone nearby, face gone sly.

“Don’t.”

I’m pretty sure he’s just playing schtick. Don’t think he’d actually do it.

Except, the way he looks at me--he knows I don't think he's going to do it.

So he does.

One key, and the pipes screech volume.

Aaron and I lock eyes again. Slightly deranged smile on his face.

And both just start running—back out through the rows of porcelain, and we don’t stop until we’re grabbing onto the railings outside the front of palace.

“I can’t believe that old thing actually worked,” he spits out, finally.

I’m eyeing for guards, but there aren’t any outside. I look out at the soggy green grounds, out to the long street ahead of us. “We should probably get out of here.”

“Oh, you fucking think?”

And so we hustle away from the scene of the crime, as fast as we can without looking suspicious. Saw none of the palace except the gift shop and the porcelain room and the ancient pipe organ.

But we keep walking, silently. Back down Schlossstrasse.

“You’re wild,” I tell him, finally, when we’ve put enough distance. “You’re truly insane.”

“You called me chickenshit, what was I supposed to do?”

“You called me chickenshit first!”

He glances up at the palace, lets out a breathy giggle. “Walk faster. I’m a little scared they’re going to come chasing after us.”

“You should be scared, you fucking vandal. Where are we going?”

“Quick pit stop, then a bar,” he says, smile falling from his face. “43 Schustehrusstrasse--should only be around the corner.”

“BDSM club?”

Faint smile returns to his face. “It’s the house where Grandpa Ackerman grew up.”

“Oh. I didn’t know you were German.”

“I’m not,” he replies, stiffly. “I’m Ashkenazi, but we come from all over. Dad’s side is from Germany and Poland, Mom’s side from Russia and Lithuania.”

“That’s amazing.”

“What’s amazing?”

“That you, like,” I say, “know where your family came from.”

“Don’t you?” he asks. “I always thought everyone did.”

“My parents were from Chicago.”

“Really tracing it back far there.”

We get to Schustehrusstrasse, a little street tucked on the edge of a park.

And to Number 43: a five-story Tudor apartment building.

One of the only original buildings still standing in the neighborhood that survived World War II. Even the palace is a reconstruction.

Aaron reaches into the breast pocket of his green raincoat, and unfolds a computer-printed photo: the same building in black-and-white. Trees shorter, the street cobblestone instead of asphalt.

And a family, out front. About where we’re standing.

Dad with a big mustache and a short, freckle-faced mom holding a baby. Four older kids, varying heights, hanging on them, goofy smiles like Aaron’s family at the Magic Kingdom, like the Barbers at a baseball game.

“They took it when they moved into this building in 1932,” he says. “Fifth floor, windows overlooking the park.” He pointed at the tallest of the sons. “This one’s Grandpa Ackerman. He was the second-oldest of five—he passed away last year but he would’ve been about seven when this photo was taken.”

Aaron looks a lot like his grandpa. Same cheekbones, bright and quick eyes, punchline smile.

“I was always so jealous of people who grew up with big families,” I told him. “I always thought it looked fun.”

“Well,” he says, and he catches himself for a moment. “None of them made it, actually. You know: in the camps. Except for my grandpa.”

“What? No.”

“Yeah,” he says, quietly. “He was younger than me when he got liberated, can you imagine that? Hopped a ship to New Orleans. No money, no family, no nothing.”

“Maybe it’s easier when you have nothing. To just move on, leave no loose ends, be free of everything that happened to you.”

“You don’t move on from something like Auschwitz,” he says. “It’s a tattoo, literally and figuratively. You just move forward.”

Tears are beginning to fill his eyes, as he looks resolutely up at the apartment building.

“And look, he had a great life,” he continues. “He met Bubbe Ackerman at Temple Sinai, and they built a business, a house in Mid-City. Three kids, six grandkids. And he always said that even if he had to do it all over again, he would, because it brought him to the right place.”

He chokes, like he’s gasping for air, tears pouring down his cheeks.

“I’m so sorry,” are the first words he managed, as he dabs at his face with his raincoat sleeve. “I don’t know why I’m crying.”

“Baruch dah… sorry, I don’t remember.”

Aaron smiles at me, through his tears. He falls against my shoulder and wipes his eyes again. “Baruch dayan ha'emet, yeah.”

I put my arm around him, and we stand there for a few more minutes. Aaron staring up still at Number 43, Schustehrusstrasse.

And the rain begins to pick up again, though neither of us move.

“Are you okay?” I ask him, finally.

“I’m okay,” he says. “Are you okay?”

“Why wouldn’t I be okay?”

“Well, you know.”

I don’t say anything else.

I just pull him even closer.

Into me.

And we kiss on Schustehrusstrasse in the rain.