Unyielding Competition

We had just had sex. It used to be that we made love. Or he made love not to me. I made love to him. It was so stupidly ironic—I couldn't stand him for a long time. He did not pursue me or even speak to me. But he did do that a hundred times over, by avoiding me, looking away from me when I accidentally looked at him.

We had had student housing at Traylor University. Now we live in a cruddy apartment where the roaches stay for free.

Wish I had a roach right now. We'd toke up and he'd cry and be sad and I'd pretend to comfort him. But the act was growing stale. The act was getting tiresome.

We were on the real world path now. Starting out. Starting now. And believe you me, nothing was coming up roses. And he did not love me. He said he did, for a while. He said the words, but his eyes were looking inside his dream. Perhaps he was trying to find me in there. Perhaps he was trying to cobble me into his long lost love. Perhaps he was trying to forgive me for not being the right person.

Which irritated me. Made me mad. He made sex to me like he was angry. And he was angry. Because I was not the high school boy he had sat next to in chemistry. With whom he had no chemistry. The boy he loved. And will love till he dies. Which may be damned soon if I don't get out of here.

We lie here on this blazing hot night. No air conditioner. Window fan. City noises. Bleak and desolate. He shot into me. I shot into him. We were like needles inoculating ourselves against each other. Oh, not junkies. I mean we shot each other with our penises. And it was as bald and base and as meaningless at that.

I felt like I had fur on my tongue. Naked with him was like being totally clothed. Why the hell would I have finally given him a chance? Sorry for him? Probably. A shoulder to cry on. That was rich. The psychological dichotomy of the thing. How he had to pretend with his true love. And how I had to be so damned understanding.

When he finished humping me, my legs round his shoulders; I really honestly did count the number of holes in the ceiling. I thought that only happened in Jim Thompson novels. Jim would have loved us. He really would have.

I want to tell him, it's over; it's enough. Sex like food for us makes us thinner. We eat all kinds of sugary and salty stuff and we can't gain weight. It's gotten worse the last year. Sex makes us un-sexed. I don't desire him anymore. I did once. I had to play the parameters of his game. Step delicately around the other one, the lost Lenore, ha.

I at least had the civility to pretend. He just came home from work one day, and the ice had broken. Very thin ice. Like what I had tried to build, like his pretending, all the little Legos I had assembled, came crashing down. We were different. He didn't think I knew him. That I had ever been touched by him. That he had never said he loved me. Well, he had. And he blew the whole thing one hundred and sixty degrees around.

We became brother and brother or brother and sister maybe. I don't know. I want a cigarette. He thinks a person can forget the past, like last Tuesday maybe. Like he's dropped into a new world and pulled me along, so I don't notice the difference.

But face it; it was phony to begin with. It was nothing really. He wanted so much. But he got me instead. There was no quiet softness. No kissing. No whispered pillow talk. No holding tight and crying for no apparent reason. There was no laughter. No confidences. No falling into bed and giggling and making love sweet and easy and hard and exciting.

We had not done that anyway. He was taking away my illusions of those things. That he had endured in order to make me feel better. I tried to talk to him about it, but he wouldn't. He would just clam up and make me feel like a fool. So we hardly spoke anymore. We had sex like machines.

I sat on the side of the bed. The mattress was killing my back. I stepped my bare left foot on a roach and sent it flying across the tiny room to carom off the wall and lie there on the filthy floor, with its back broken or something, with its legs tumbling and fighting and clawing in the air. I should go over there and kill it. But it's like a thousand miles of deep hot breathless desert to cross. They don't feel pain, do they?

God, I'm going out of my mind. Consideration for, and guilt because of, my almost but not quite killing it, for maiming it and making it suffer. It's us suffering. I get a cigarette from the table and light up.

"I'm going," I say, after the first cleansing puff. I can't believe I want him to ask me to stay. A tinge of don't go tossed as an unmeant aside would be something—in fact, the something I've come to live with, knowing it will just get worse. The iceberg that I am on is melting and soon will be the size of me and then less than and I will drown in the too deep, too warm water.

I remember how he loved the other one. I know how foolish I was to try to compete. He's just another man, this man beside me, probably asleep right now. I'm afraid to look. You set your sites low enough and you get what you deserve or something like that.

I look at my cock. Flaccid. I touch it and hold it. He was nice with my cock. He liked that part of me, pretending it wasn't me it was part of.

I wish it would turn cool. I wish summer was over, but we are still in the middle blaze of it.

"I love you," I say to no one in particular.

"I can't love you." I am shocked he's still awake. Usually I am his sleeping pill. I flinch.

One last ditch try. Maybe. One final shallow skim of the surface before I dress, pack, and catch the Greyhound to wherever Greyhounds go these days. I smell the diesel of them and the bus station already.

"I'm as good as." I flick my ashes on the floor. Urn ashes?

"No." He is a man of few words tonight. I miss the didacticism of him sometimes. From earlier on.

"I can compete."

"You aren't him. I saw something of him in you. I—thought I did. I was wrong."

Words are whip cracks sometimes. No matter how gently said.

I feel stupid sitting here naked, so I get up and pull on my jeans and socks. We are writhed with perspiration, the two of us and everything in this heat flash of a hovel.

"We could make love in the dark. We did that. I could pretend I was him."

"We aren't kids anymore." He paces with words. Parces them. He does this when he pretends he is thinking deeply. Who knows? Maybe he is.

I turn to him. He lies there, wan and thin and sad and naked and so vulnerable I want to protect him from the world. And I want to protect him from me and me from him and the boy he can't get over.

"So. I get out of your hair." Which I notice with some shameful happiness, is thinning on top. Mine is not. Has it come to this? Tadzio with the bad teeth, which makes Von Aschenbach happy because it is a sign the boy, will die young, which would mean then no one would have him, possess him?

"I love him so deeply."

I take that one hundred times a week it seems. I can't take it one more time. I shall carve him up and sell him for next winter's kindling if I hear it again.

I pack. He smokes a third cigarette. And now he is dressed too. There's little to pack.

I snap the suitcase closed. It was my mother's, so it is a very old and old-fashioned one. I put on my shirt and socks and shoes. I look at him as he is fixing bourbon by the sink.

"I shall miss you," I say. God, give me a better closing line than that.

He has his back to me.

I find my hand shaking as it moves to the doorknob. As I depart the premises that contained him and me and a ghost who was me as well.

"Goodbye, Barry."

He pours another drink in his jelly glass.

I have my suitcase in my left hand. I walk out into the hall that smells of tenements and death and loneliness and terminal lives and harsh smelly food and anger and poverty, as I close the door. Not surprise to hear the hard crash and smashing of the jelly glass against the door.

He wanted to throw it against me. I guess I wanted him to, as well. Some children are playing in the hall. I walk past them.

Their poor clothes and their dirty hair mix with their filthy hands and their hopeless slits of eyes, along with forced laughter, as though they are guessing at how to be children. As though they died inside a long time ago. And are just making it up as they go along. Hoping for the best. Flying blind.

Aren't we all?