The scream is low-pitched and full throated. More an utterance, animal, of the kind a mother cow emits as she’s slaughtered in the cell-phone footage shown by an evangelist vegan. What are you going to do about this, they always ask, and my answer’s always nothing. Whatever agony he’s in, he asked for. Them’s the rules. I only get involved if and when there’s blood, a real bitch to clean, and even then, my effort only extends to calling the owner’s cousins, two troglodyte twins, down from Midtown to stand in as security. 

And after a moment, it’s quiet. I return to my magazine and look up only when a white-haired gentleman in a soiled towel arrives at my window to inform me that the toilet’s overflowed. His slack skin spilleth over, a clock by Dali, and I assure him I’ll “look into it” as soon as he leaves me alone. Which he doesn’t, so I stand and unlock my office – a triangular glass box with its own air supply – and enter the pungent dark. Before me, behind him, is a shuttered steam room, a dingy tiled space whose white walls have worn gray from decades of disuse. The old owner, I heard, had mafia ties, so ignored the city’s ordinance, forbidding gay saunas, through the ‘90s and early 2000’s, when Bloomberg and his legion of morality police began to crack down on the five families, and the owner was forced to sell what few on-the-books assets he owned. I never saw it in its heyday and frankly doubt there was one. As AIDS panic paraded without pause into puritanical revolt, these sorts of spaces became tacky and antique, all before the baby-blue salvation of PrEP, by which point it had been purchased by Farhad, whose negligence forbids anything requiring costly cleanup. 

Not that he would do it. I am one of three “full time” employees. It’s me at the front desk, Mikey at the bar, and Carlos patrolling the hallways to make sure no one OD’s, gets raped, dies. Sometimes, on Pride or Halloween, Farhad throws a couple hundred bucks at boys, barely eighteen, to go-go on a small wooden platform by the bar – their rangy bodies, minnows in the liquid disco light. My job figures mostly in admin. I am, by title, the Floor Manager, which means that I check people in, hand over their keys, towels, bins; I watch the news on my phone, I read. And when the club closes, which it only does after 

another interminable night, I patrol the floors and lock up. I also deal with shit like this: following a prehistoric homo-erectus as he shuffles toward the bathrooms, which smell as much like piss as anywhere, and after eyeing the gurgling toilet producing the slime at our feet, cut the water off at its source, then use my keys to condemn the space, assuring him I’ll call a plumber at close. He lingers, and I wonder why he’s being such a busy body tonight – he’s a regular, comes every week – until I realize that he probably has to take a shit and now will have to hold it. In fact, I can see the slight clench of his faded abdominals in the dulled neon light from the bar, where a sign reads: 

boys, boys, boys. 

“If you wanna go to the McDonalds across the street, I can let you back in,” I tell him, and he nods appreciatively, then disappears to the changing room to fetch his houndstooth trousers. It’s an hour to close. Which, though I’ll be glad to leave, always triggers a sense of panic. Kicking them out is the worst. Sunday evening, after dark, the only ones left have been at it for days, drifting aimless amid the slow burn of Tina and acrid poppers residue. They are crude, they are ugly, they are old. They are unloved and unlovable and all that is left of another weekend Nowhere — which is what I call this place, where time for me drags but for everyone else seems eclipsed in an orgy of hours, an aching libidinal fugue. And all across the city, people loved are splayed out on couches, cooking pesto pasta and watching HBO. They complain of Sunday Scaries, by which they mean the aggregate remorse of their lives, everything ignored or delayed by weekend distractions returning with a crystalline clarity, a brief reprieve in their satiate performance as they gaze into the abyssal maw, then turn away before it takes them. How I envy their restraint. 

*

Midnight, I send Mikey and Carlos home, then wait for the stragglers to stagger out into the light. I’m not sure how he does it, Carlos: sees everything he must and still emerges with a smile, as he parks his wringer near the doors and heads home to his wife and kid. But I guess, he escaped a lawless regime that shoots people in the street without trial, so what’s a little butt sex, really? Farhad pays him marginally more than a fry cook or a day hand, and he’s home in time to kiss his girl goodnight. Mikey’s tweaky and might be called a twunk, so this place suits him, no offense. Once, he got drunk during his shift and came onto me, and I couldn’t help but laugh at his pawing approach because it was so inelegant – the bang on my office door, his hot-breathed insistence that I join him by the bar. It was his thirtieth birthday, either that night or some time that season, and when I refused, claiming I couldn’t abandon my post, he got the look of a kicked chihuahua and has refused to speak to me since. 

Beyond the steam room, and the sad little bar with its tattered couches, its sorrowfully spinning disco, is Nowhere’s main attraction: a sprawling lightless maze that extends for some time and into which one must wade blindly, guided only by intuition, into rooms and cubbies, gloryholes, sex swings, chains and musk and men. By the entrance, I listen carefully. I don’t like surprises, much less jump-scares, so when I wade into the labyrinth, I want to know what to expect. Once, a man emerged bat-like from his sodden cove and nearly shivved me with a stretch of gnarled plastic, which I wrenched from his grasp and used to knee him into keening submission. I called for help that didn’t come, and when I finally managed to get in touch with Farhad, he refused to even ban him. Long time customer, he said. Plus anyone could make that mistake. Most nights are less dramatic. I travel room to room, telling those still on their knees that we are closing, like any shop attendant anywhere. Still, you wouldn’t believe the shit I’ve seen — though I don’t know you, so perhaps you would. Some are asleep, so I wake them, shaking their legs to alert them we’ve closed. It’s after midnight, technically Monday, and they are expected at their jobs – if indeed they have jobs – in hours. Their eyes are often glazed, despondent with dope or disappointment of a depth so total it will haunt me for days: to think that I, too, am capable of that desperation. 

Tonight, as I close, I find: two crumpled euro notes, a vial of unidentified powder, seventeen empty poppers, twelve discarded condoms, and a baggie of butterscotch candy. With my teeth, I rip them open, tonguing one sweet after the next as I make my way through. I listen to thrash on an iPhone without service, unreachable to my few friends and to my sister, who worries in the suburban way of those long settled into their own mediocrity – in her case, a shotgun stucco in our native Arizona, where she raises her kids, my niece and nephew, to believe without irony that all will be forgiven in the bosom of Christ. All will not be forgiven, of that I am sure, as I round a corner and finally find a live one, crouched in a metal cage, a leather balaclava pulled over his eyes, revealing only a mouth, wide open. 

* 

Here is how my next days pass. I go home and sleep ‘til 5pm, just as Monday is bruising violet, then walk to Borinquen park and eat a deli sandwich as a brash of Puerto Rican boys are wrapping up a ball game, calling one another pussy and faggot but with a kind of fraternal sweetness that rather pains me, so I limp home in the afterlight and watch an old sitcom for hours, then take a weed gummy I found weeks ago in the locker of a tanned gentleman, visibly visiting from Los Angeles. With ease, I drift through the black lake of sleep and wake at a reasonable hour, at which point I hear children from the public school across the road. I dress and make myself a filter coffee, and no sooner do I sit than a ringing erupts in the room. 

Without checking, I know that it’s John. He calls me weekly because, like my sister, he feels guilty. Guilty for how my life ended up. Guilty, because, at art school, I was the star and he was the hack, a quality he’s since managed to rebrand as brilliance on towards a career that I imagine and am sometimes reminded, on the occasions I accept his invitations, amounts to a constant drum of praise as he jaunts through the white-cube halls of Chelsea galleries, art fairs, or Venice, fucking Venice, which I once heard him describe as the city of his one true heart. The fucking hack. I’m not speaking in metaphor or hyperbole when I say he paints lizards, taxidermied and made to hold obtuse positions. Perched upright or knotted – their matte black skin, an ode to coal-country – but he’s the child of Appalachian poverty, so apparently it’s some profound critique: the opiate gut of our country, made to walk on all fours. I’m from something less baroque, more mundane and far less saleable: the American middle class. And besides, I was figurative mostly, passé in the days when I showed promise, back before I mostly gave up on the idea that anyone would want to hear what it was I wished to say, which was this: only the most mundane faces can be rendered in symmetry. Most are scarred, swollen. Their jowls hang loose. And to exaggerate the particular is to tell the truth about what happened, the strung-together experience that some would call a life. 

Anyway, no one cared. After one moderately well attended show in the store room of a dive on Avenue A, my progress languished. I was represented, briefly, by a hot young downtown gallerist, some mustachioed faggot of affected Euro-Aristocracy who failed to sell a single painting, then held them hostage at his loft until I showed with a stretch of steel pipe, ready to break his knees. Then, nothing for a while. I tried painting friends as they battled, then died from AIDS. I tried performance, the “happenings” still happening downtown, where acquaintances writhed in untinned tuna for Congolese Liberation. I tried sculpture and stencils and stalking Mary Boone to her acupuncturist on the Upper East Side. All manner of heinous, pathetic acts that went basically unnoticed, and only after years of this did I submit to the hideous fact of my own mediocrity, the unbearable weight of which bore down on me like a fallen oak, and which bears down on me still. 

A More Or Less Exact Transcript of My Conversation with John: 

Him: Hey, how are ya bud? 

Me: I’m fine. I’m, uhm, I just woke up. 

Him: [Pauses, patronizingly, as he calculates my local time in relation to his own, wherever he is – LA, or Japan, or the city of his one true heart – and with this information confirms all of his suspicions about me, my wanting work ethic and general piece of shit condition.] Him: Little late to be starting the day, don’t you think?

Then silence. 

Me: So what’s up John? 

Him: Oh, not too much, just checking in. I’m actually in Mexico City for a few days and was thinking of you because … [He then proceeds to tell a story that has so little to do with me, such a tenuous conceivable connection, a street bum having reminded him of a Sparklehorse song I love, that I almost interrupt to ask if he thinks I’m stupid. If he wants to make sure I haven’t offed myself just yet, he can do so over email. Though, yes, I’m lapsed on mine and could probably find a plug-in, somewhere on the net, to automatically reply: “I’m doing well, thanks for asking.” It’d parrot that for weeks, the same response, and he wouldn’t notice because he doesn’t really listen – it’d continue long after I died and began to reek with an intensity that sickened the halls and soured the play outside – I find myself laughing at the image, him on a gondola, checking his phone to find a somber voice note from my sister and a chipper new message from beyond. I’m doing well, thanks for asking.] 

Me: Well, that’s nice. How’s the weather in Miami? 

Him: Mexico. It’s hot here, you know. Kind of stifling. You’ll have to come with next time. Silence. 

Him: By the way, did you get that Artforum piece I sent on the resurgence of figurative painting? There’s a whole group of young, queer painters reinvigorating interest in the form, Salmon Something-or-another, and that other one. Folks are calling them the future – 

I don’t bother cutting him off to tell him I haven’t picked up a brush in six years, which he knows, and that even then I wasn’t young, because he is the same age, forty-six, and still thinks of himself as such. To be fair, he looks pretty good now that he can afford designer suits and serums to soften his once-acne scarred skin. He is probably in the best days of his life and yet insists on wasting them, calling upon the hopeless to relieve him of his guilt. I get him off the phone with a mention of the toilet, and he returns to his dinner while I emerge into the mum afternoon, then walk until my legs ache and I’m lost in a dusk of strange streets. 

* 

It was a shock to everyone, eight years ago, when I took the job at Nowhere. I was able to sell it as a gig that, given we’re only open on weekends, would free up my time for painting, but nonetheless it struck people as strange. Among my gay friends, when I used to have them, I was always considered the prude. Though, perhaps that’s not right. Never, not once, was I scandalized by the escapades of my more adventurous friends, who cruised parks or bus stops or went ass-up in dark rooms for legions of faceless men. It was more that I was too proud to ever submit myself to my desire. And they pitied me for that. And they were right to. 

But the fact is, I’m better at this job than any other. The particularities of my mental illness – my ability to stay up for days and dissociate from unpleasant and meaningless tasks – here make me a star employee. After my first year, during which I routinely covered days, after working all night, for the coke-addled twink who split shifts, Farhad offered me triple to stay, and I accepted without hesitation. Even then, I knew the offer was Faustian – the sacrifice of a normal life, any vestige of my dwindling social sphere. But I had never wanted to be normal, I had wanted to be great, and it seemed like an aptly mythic end: an eternity in Stygian darkness. 

Friday, I use my master key to enter, then lock the door behind me. We don’t open for an hour, and I don’t want anyone wandering in. I power the lights in front and wait for a text from Carlos, right on time as always, then a bang from Mikey, who today seems chuffed in a contemptuous way, as if daring me to ask what happened, which of course I do not. We open, and it’s so dead for two hours that I warn the first suit who shows on his lunch break that he’ll be in there alone, knowing full well that Farhad would can me if he heard, but the suit is so appreciative he tips me ten and says he’ll be back this evening. Whatever. Time, impatient with itself, knots the empty hours. I swipe cards and scan IDs and hand them freshly-laundered towels. I read the Russians and make a game of not checking the time, so that when I finally do, it’s after dusk, and the suit from earlier is leaving, hat askew, though I can’t recall him coming in. I take advantage of the lull to rest my eyes, until a knock comes at my window, some chummy smiling bear, and now it’s 1 am, rush hour, when a steady stream spills in from the bars at which they’ve failed to find whatever it is they’re after. They are desperate on arrival, pill-eyed hosts of demons they can’t show to light. When finally they’ve finished, it will be after noon and, at the top of the stairs, the midtown haze will blind them. 

Sunday, I come to with the departure of a man whose square jaw reminds me of a moose, then that same beaming bear, two-back-to-otters – it’s a fucking zoo in there – then no one for a while, as I sip my redbull and calculate how many more must leave before I sleep. When I used to paint, my dreams were fretful things. I had visions and ideas, hallucinogenic interventions in which I’d gaze upon the moss of my mother’s aging face, how quickly it succumbed to lupus – or sometimes someone beautiful, my first boyfriend at fifteen, who was faggy and picked on relentlessly in school but after mere months in Seattle came back with skin so ravaged by ink and metal he looked impossible to kill. Now I sleep in credit sequence. 

By my count, there are still eight in the Labyrinth. It’s 9pm, 3 hours 'till close, so they’ve got time. I listen to the lazy hook of a pop song that falls fifth in Mikey’s playlist and make a game of estimating the times it must have played throughout the weekend – one of fifty songs, three minutes apiece. Kate Bush and Kylie Minogue, Cher and Celine and a few of the younger girls, whose names I can’t recall, though their inner lives, the undying urgency of a single kiss, are my nightly benediction. 

My musing’s interrupted by an arrival, unannounced by a knock or hello, even a declarative cough to alert me to his presence, so that when I finally see him, I suspect he’s been there for some time.

“Hello,” I say, inflected as a question. He is watching me strangely. And as he steps into the light, I see his face. He is not like the others because, fuck, he is handsome. And I feel a slight pang I forgot. After a lifetime of gay, I only recently began to think myself asexual. It’s not that I don’t experience desire, as that it has become so ambient it is easily ignored. When I was young, I wanted things so bad I could burst: art, fame, music all the way loud. I wanted my pain permanent in a way that makes these men my kin, but that want was a constant humiliation. This occurs to me now, as I realize I’ve been staring glass-eyed at this stranger, and he lifts a threaded brow to question why. “Cash or card,” I murmur. 

Probably he thinks I’m on dope, downers – his smirk has a hint of mocking, as he digs one hand, the bones of which are distinctly pronounced, into the breast pocket of his woolen coat. He is the kind of black that white folks, myself included, find difficult to describe without resorting to animal imagery. A black described, at times, as “night” or “blue,” but which resembles something far more rich and textured. It doesn’t swallow his features so much as pronounce them: the wide amusement of his eyes, the bulge of his overdrawn lips, the teeth that peek – like a knife’s elegant edge – from just beyond them. And while I’m aware of the vaguely Dahmerian implications of this statement, I can’t help but think that his is a skin I could live inside. 

“Thank you,” he says, as he takes his card and swiftly deposits it into a billfold, which disappears into his pocket. He is impeccably dressed. The casual, clean lines of a chic that is intuitive, interior, and I note the faint lilt of his accent – some colonial melange of West African roots and English education. He is only a visitor. 

“First time?” I say. And he looks startled by my question, startled that I’m still speaking, now that I have fulfilled my function. “I don’t see too many new faces, especially Sundays,” I explain. And it’s true. Sundays after six, and now it’s almost ten pm, are almost exclusively reserved for regulars: gargoyles with frown lines and liver spots who only fall to their knees with effort (and oftentimes need helping up) or the tweakers who’ve been in there for days. The few ordinary men clear out before this desolate scene sets in. 

“No,” he replies coolly. “But I haven’t come in a while.” 

The double-entendre sifts through the thin pane of polycarbonate between us. I smile, and because I cannot speak, buzz him through. 

Otherwise, it’s a quiet night. Two of the now nine leave together, I presume to continue the party, though I wonder if their romance is merely chemical or maybe more. A regular who always has me store his wedding ring at the front desk smiles, and as usual, tips me twenty. One by one they trickle out. It’s nearing close. Carlos, I notice, is lingering near the doors, so I send him home, promising I’ll make sure everything’s good before I go, and he replies with outsized gratitude, which Mikey takes as an invitation to leave as well, so then it’s just me and the labyrinth. 

For a while, I linger at its shadowy edge, so overcome with fear that I flee to my office and lock the door. They’ll come out on their own, I reason. And it takes a while, but they do. A rat-tailed stranger, then a minute before midnight, that sleek Black man from before, who leaves without a glance in my direction. For ten minutes I wonder if my count was off and the labyrinth’s empty. Then out of the shadows comes Stan, a regular, his halting gait like a garbage bin being rolled out to the curb. I know, for reasons I’d prefer not to mention, that he is into fisting. And although he always drags, as a result of the aforementioned at his geriatric age, I notice that tonight he is limping – each step labored – and as he glances up, I move away from the glass out of instinct. Because his face, or his right eye in particular, looks diseased. The oozing pink of a sent-home child, though on closer view, it’s really red. A vessel burst, a gunshot felling a bird. I wonder if he felt it open, if he yet knows how grotesque he'll look for days, the children he’ll spook on his train-ride home. I don’t ask and he doesn’t answer, as I buzz the front door open and he rearranges his scarf to reveal, I believe by accident, a dimming bruise on his neck. A kill wound, the shape and size of a grown man’s hand. 

* 

I think about it for days. It isn’t that the image ranks among those most shocking. Rather, it is the silence of it. The question: what constitutes play, and what goes beyond it, into urges cruel and insatiate? 

John calls Tuesday and leaves a message. Thinking of you, he says, then there’s something about a party in Sienna, hosted in the gutted palazzo of an aristocrat who rents it out to brands, whoring himself to maintain an illusion. I eat plain rice for dinner and sit in my darkened room, where I picture being nothing, a puppet perched, a man’s forearm inside me, unconcerned with the scatalogical threat or disease or the news, existing only at the whim of another. 

* 

Sunday evening, when that sleek Black man returns in the same tailored suit, he strikes me as an apparition. A harbinger of something, doom seems far too easy. “You again,” I say in salutation, and he examines my face as if trying to place me, though this is the same location, context, and time where he saw me last. He nods and hands over his card, and I allow my eyes to scan the name: an intrusion of vowels I know I’ll never pronounce correctly. Again, his bearing is politely impatient – to him, I am a turnstile – but I derive some pleasure from his indifference, a tingling effect not unlike the heat rub on my skin every day after high school track, when I’d pretend to ignore the mushroom caps peeking out of my teammates’ shorts during stretches. Their careless command of my desire, that memory floods back in an instant: the cocks and the burn and the Bengay scent in the scorched Arizonian summer. 

I buzz him in, and the next hours move slow. A chatty regular named Leroy, a middle aged Black man from the American South, pauses as he’s about to exit to ask me if I work, weekdays, at the Bank of America on East 83rd, because he “think” he saw me there once, and I say no, no, must’ve been a mirage. And as he keeps talking, about what I’m not sure, I consider my place in their lives: how for some, I am a sign of secret shame, watchful eyes, priest-like but unfit for absolution. While others, like Leroy, see me as a confidante, having long accepted that they have descended, or perhaps have always been, to a place on the sexual totem where they can only get fucked in the dark. 

At midnight, there are four of them left. I hold my phone to my chest and step in slowly, inching forward through the first three rooms, where I find nothing. In the fourth – a glory hole that is more a 

glory window, lit by a single bulb so you can see where to stick it in – I find no bodies but the odor of excrement, which I mark on a log for the cleaners. Rounding the corner, I hear a throat clear and find the door before me locked. I knock, then bang, and when it eventually opens, the groggy man behind it says sorry, I fell asleep. I choose not to remind him that we are not a shelter, but simply state that we are closed. He is to grab his things and go. 

I stumble onward, tripping over a tangled towel, and following the rattle of chains, find two men in a vigorous coitus that does not pause on my command. I raise my voice and come closer to the sling, but it is only after I shine a light in their eyes and the top falls back as if blinded that I am able to get their attention. Quickly, angrily, they leave. And then there is one. 

Though I’ve studied the blueprint of this space, though I’ve walked it repeatedly with all the lights on, I am still capable of getting lost. Darkness, paired with the panic I always feel, deranges my senses. Shapes rise from the shadows, hallucinations that sometimes yield to groping hands and acrid breath. So I wield my phone like a weapon, its light leading me through every room. I check the crevices where folded bodies sometimes fit, and standing up, nearly scream but catch it, because there he is, aglow. “We’re, uhm, we’re closing,” I stutter, studying his sculpted chest, pristine but for a keloid that extends from one collarbone several inches in a downwards diagonal, like a piece of corrupted plastic. “We’re closed already actually.” 

He takes a moment to process, inhaling my unease as I take in his scent, cologne ebbed just enough to betray the human animal. And what I want is to kiss him. But he leaves, and I’m left in the dark. I knock twice on the door from which he came, then enter to find it empty, filled only with the ghost of his scent, and in the corner opposite, a shallow liquid pool – too large to be cum, lube, and I don’t smell urine. And as if my body is possessed by someone else, someone brave and far more stupid, I come close enough to crouch and dip a finger in the viscous pool, then confirm its crimson color. 

* 

The next three Sundays, he comes at 10pm, dressed always in that sleek black suit, the same gym bag slung over his arm. I find myself dismissing Carlos earlier, telling myself that this is a kindness, returning him to his wife and kid, though I’m also aware that I am guarding the secret of the increasingly ominous items left behind. One week it is a spiked dildo made of steel; the next, a cage key coated in cum. I find a ziplock filled – at first, I think it is filled with gummy candy – until I bring it to the light and see that the viscids are, in fact, the bodies of infant mice. And because none of these are the kind of thing one simply leaves behind, I realize he is leaving them on purpose, breadcrumbs leading me to strange conclusions – lock-cocked subs swallowing rodents on command – and, indeed, back to him. 

It works. I cannot shake him. He is a pop refrain, half-heard on summer streets; the words are not yet mine. And yet, he is not that refrain at all, because thinking of him as I move through the stifled city is not a breath but something dense and laced with fear. At night, he comes to me in violent visions. I am the neck, he is the noose. I am the vein, he is the needle. I am the deer and the moon and the field through which it sprints. I sleep through Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday night without sedation, and when I wake on Thursday morning, I greet the day, startled by peace. The kids are being dropped at school by curt, harried parents and Jamaican nannies in soiled coveralls. I meet their eyes and try to say, with a smile, that this will pass as I sidle through them, then spend the next hours adrift on a tide of sudden clarity, stroking inexorably toward something true. 

I am nothing special. And I will die in anonymity in the next half century, then be grieved for a while by a relative few, who themselves will die, and that will be that. I, probably, will never make something great, something that prompts people to reroute their lives just from looking, or says one bright true thing about the world, what it was to look upon it from the murk of my own troubled mind. And it is such a relief, this knowing, that I succumb to a fit of tears by the time I reach the river, where the sun is collapsing on another nothing day, resigned to its own eternal role and rhythm. 

I get to work at noon the next day, more keen than I’ve ever been. But I have to be patient, this is what he demands: that I pant like a dog at the door for his arrival. Days of pert anticipation, in which I don’t sleep and startle at every entry. I swipe cards and collect towels; say hello, goodbye. And when my phone alarm rings Sunday at 9pm, I take a break to brush my teeth, wash my face, and change into the shirt and slacks I’ve kept hanging in the office, dressed now for a date at a five star restaurant. Tenderly, 10pm beckons. And it occurs to me he might not come – after all, he is only a visitor – but then he arrives, and I am relieved in a shade I can’t describe. We do not speak, but I can feel the charge between us, even after he enters the labyrinth, his rage and capacity for violence. Our wordless intuition as he moves through walls and into rooms, leaving men in the searing pain they so desire. They exit invisibly altered, blue beneath their winter coats. Carlos leaves, then Mikey, and by ten until close, we are the only ones left. 

I leave my phone at the desk, I won’t need it, and spray a spritz of cologne on my neck, then begin shutting things down in reverse – the lights by the lockers, the bar, the neon boys boys boys – so that the impenetrable black seems to stretch out forever. I’m guided only by scent, hands tracking the oil-slick walls, and as I near him, the sound of his even breath. And I do not feel fear or indifference but the relief of my fate in his hands, mere inches between us, close enough now to feel heat bounding off his waiting body and to submit to what I’m not sure I’d call sex, something that obliterates and makes you new. Into what I’m not sure – a tool. Finally of use, if only to him.