How To Be Gay At The End Of The World

It was a fluke that I found Charlie when I did. We’ve got a big enough city that people don’t usually run into each other unplanned. I’d taken an early lunch break from the center where I taught English to refugees on my days off. A pair of students had given me some cookies after my morning class, so I carried them with the bread and dried fruit I bought at the bakery. It was chilly outside, but compared to the musty classroom, the fresh air nourished me almost as much as the food.

I ate quickly, and as I chucked the paper bag into the trash I noticed a man with sunglasses sitting meditatively at the other end of the pond. He sat in front of the peace bell, his hands outstretched as if welcoming people to a commune. People turned around when they saw him. As I walked closer to him, I noticed a long beard, scraggly hair and then his plaid overcoat. He’d done a good job ruining it; nobody would have known it was Burberry, that it cost more than my first car. Charlie bought it when his company entered the stock market, which may as well have been a hundred years ago, considering everything that’s happened since then.

I walked up and cleared my throat, but he didn’t open his eyes. “Want something to eat?” I asked. He glared at me. I must have roused him from something warm, a graceful memory perhaps, or a glorious vision of the future. 

“Well,” he said, “you found me.” 

“You smell like a wet dog.”

I sat down next to him and gave him a hug. He’d filled his coat with crumpled newspaper, and his fingernails were black, splitting from the skin. He looked at me and gave a laugh that turned into a cough from the depths of his lungs. He always had trouble saying when he needed help. When we were kids, it was always him playing the savior—now it was on me. In a few weeks it would be peak winter. I needed to get him off the street. 

He’d called me in late August saying that he was going to leave his house. He didn’t know where he was going, but he couldn’t stay at home. Whenever he walked into the foyer, a pressure would slowly build in his chest and he felt as if everything were collapsing around him, his body, the walls, space. I said that he needed to talk with a counselor, but he knew the best solution for him was simply to get out. He told me not to worry, that the best thing I could do as his friend would be to leave him alone. 

He coughed again and fished a bottle from his pocket. I held one of the cookies in my hand, trying to warm it so he wouldn’t crack his teeth, because who knew when he’d last brushed them. I needed to see him eat something. He accepted my gift and stared at the sky as he chewed, swallowing the clumps like they were hardened bits of castor oil. A squirrel crept near us. Charlie tore off a little piece and threw it, but he ended up hitting the animal in the face. It stared at us, snatched the crumb, and stalked off.

“Just trying to be nice.” He shook his head, as if he were trying to force himself from a daze, and put the rest of the cookie in his pocket. I tried to hand him the others but he pushed me back.

“You need to eat,” I said.

“I’m doing all right. There are worse things than hunger. I used to give money to folks like me, street people. I didn’t know how hard it is, swallowing people’s pity.”

“I don’t pity you.”

“Sure, Noah.”

“But I do pity that god-awful smell. Have you not showered since August?”

“Probably,” he said. I made a funny face at him, but then it was all just sad.

Charlie always had a way of getting under my skin with his genuineness, this way of forgiving me for things I hadn’t even done yet. When we were kids, I idolized him. He could always do more than me. He won our snack-eating contests, he skipped stones farther across the river. But he never flaunted his victories, and he kept encouraging me to do things I was good at. Running, writing, archiving important things. He cheered for me at my school track meets; I returned the favor at his wrestling matches. When we were college classmates we drifted apart, as people are apt to do, but always managed to keep up with each other for birthdays, spring breaks, the odd free weekend. 

When Charlie and I became two survivors of a global catastrophe, even though we started to spend more time together than we had in a decade, I wasn’t sure what we were. I thought we might go back to the patterns we had when we were kids, but every time I tried to get us to do something fun, something we used to do, he’d say it wasn’t the same. Such a derivative life would never replace the real thing. We couldn’t pretend nothing was wrong. 

*

My professional life, I’m ashamed to admit, flourished after the New York Event. As the government decentralized and news became harder and harder to find, people gradually began paying for it again. And when national newspapers grew impossible to maintain and had to shut down, the windfall trickled locally. At first we wrote our stories out by hand and sold those copies on the street. Then when the electricity came back, we printed copies newsletter-style. Now that we’ve got a functional lithograph again, the paper looks nearly the same as before. My editor was thrilled. He told me over drinks that he’d been planning mass layoffs. Now the paper was relevant again. We all were.

I’d recently been assigned a feature story about sex and love at the end of the world, an overview of how people were faring under their postapocalyptic sheets. I’d gathered all sorts of random information. For example, divorce rates had plummeted. If people were lucky enough to survive together, they held on tighter than before. The city wills office told me they got twelve divorce filings last year. Even with the reduced population, that’s a magnificent decline.

I found a support group for people who’d developed impotence. The group leader kept reiterating that it had only been two years since this global trauma. Most people just needed time to recover. The attendees looked at him skeptically; I don’t blame them. The real issue, I thought, was that at most pharmaceuticals no longer existed. After the meeting, I interviewed a group of transgender refugees at the abandoned airport. They seemed happier than the other people I spoke with, and they nonchalantly said that not much had changed in their sex lives. I told them they were probably better at adapting than most people, that all queer people were. I wondered if that’s why I’d fared better than Charlie. 

In the interest of research, I also conducted my own study. The guy was in his thirties, a native of East Falls, like me. I met him at the butcher shop. He was a civil engineer, and he was helping to rebuild the city’s water supply to suit the shrunken demand. We went to my apartment, and when we finished I asked him how his sex life had been like after the bombings. He told me that it was way better, that people were much less discriminating with their lovers. That made me smile. In the history of humanity, talking about sex had never been so easy. It was as if people had forgotten their shame. My twelve-year-old self would have been so confused. Even when Charlie and I were kids and unbothered by nakedness, we never talked about our bodies in that way. Stripping down was something you did to keep your nice clothes unsoiled. 

I had boyfriends in college. I married a man right after I graduated. Lincoln. He said he was my soul mate, that he would do anything for me; and I said the same, though it was more of an instinctive reaction, a young person’s catch and release. We got an apartment near my childhood house and we were both content; we turned our nose at the big city gays and vowed never to leave East Falls. I didn’t tell him about my feelings for Charlie, even though we said we’d forgive each other for anything. 

Four years was not enough time. The week after my twenty-eighth birthday, Lincoln took a business trip to Houston. City number six. In the early days, the rival countries were going in order of GDP; that’s why, even though dozens of cities in all regions were hit those first few days, the whole period became known as the New York Event. It was pointless to search for Lincoln. There was nothing left of Houston’s downtown.

 Charlie was a great comfort to me then. He stayed with me on nights I didn’t want to be alone. Amid my grief, I was also glad that he’d never married, that he’d be spared from such a loss as mine. I envied him for that. And when he disappeared, even though his absence made me lonely, I envied him still.

*

As we sat in the park together, a piece of trash blew up into Charlie’s hair. I plucked it out and spotted something curious on his eyelid. A wart, a pimple, the aftermath of shingles or a burn. He kept poking it after touching all manner of things, the ground, his ears, his beard.

“You need to get that looked at,” I said.

“This? It’s fine. It doesn’t hurt as much lately. I’m on the mend, can’t you see?” He fluttered his eyelashes as if he could blink away everything that had happened the past two years.

“Come home with me, Charlie. Just for the night. Or let me rent you a room somewhere. You need to rest indoors.”

“I told you, I’m not going back.”

 “How about going to the old Big Value store?” I asked him. “It’s a shelter now. I visited it last week for a story. They’ve got beds there, and the people running it are kind. It’s going to drop into the 20s this week. Or I could sneak you into the newsroom. The supply closet’s pretty big.”

“No. I don’t need handouts.” He pulled out a wad of cash. He had the foresight, even before the New York Event, to keep a sizable amount of his assets in cash and store them in a fireproof case in his basement. “I told you I’m fine. If I wanted to be indoors, I’d be indoors.”

“Come to my apartment. You can stay in my bed and I’ll take the floor.”

He shook his head. “Not going to steal your bed, Noah.”

“Okay, fine, you take the floor. I’ll pull up the carpet and leave the window open. We’ll bring some charred newspaper and half-filled bottles of pee. It’ll look and feel exactly like this. You won’t even know you’ve left.”

“No thanks. You’re always the problem-solver. But some things don’t have a solution.”

“Well, how about going to prison?” I asked, not sure where I was going but sticking with the impulse. “You’d have a real bed. And you would still be homeless, sort of. And you wouldn’t have a choice, you’d have to be indoors, so you wouldn’t be going against your principles or whatever the fuck is possessing you to be out here.” In true American fashion, the prison system, at least where we’re from, had remained relatively the same post-fallout. I’d heard from my colleagues that some people actually wanted to be imprisoned for the guaranteed daily meal, for the place to sleep. Others thought that the facilities were better protected against the radiation, that the thick concrete provided the best insulation. 

“In any case,” Charlie said, “My record’s clean, go figure.”

“You could always do something.”

“What, something illegal?”

“That’s usually the only way to get put in jail, yes. But I’m sure it wouldn’t be hard to come up with something.”

He stroked his beard, taking a few hairs in his fingers and twirling them into a spiral. As unkempt as it was, at least it helped keep his face warm. He looked at his reflection in the frozen pond. 

“There’s a thought. Just sit in a box all day, time to think. Like being in a monastery. You know I thought of doing that right after college? Going to Nepal, sleeping on a straw mat, not talking to anyone.” He brushed some leaves off his jacket and looked at me. “But then I realized I could do the same thing right here. You know I’ve always hated flying.”

I put my hand on his shoulder. “Just so you know, there are no women in prison. Hope that’s all right.”

“You would like that, you queen.” He laughed and coughed again.

“We need to get out of here. Let me take you somewhere.”

“I’m used to this. If I get warm it’ll be worse when I head back out.”

“Fine, but I’m not letting this go,” I said. “We’ll get you on Iowa’s Most Wanted yet.” When he said nothing, I kept going as if he’d said yes.

We brainstormed about the crime he might commit. Most business owners would no longer prosecute for theft, the requisite time and energy not worth the potential recovery of property. Luxury goods, obviously, weren’t valuable anymore; people would pay more for a bar of chocolate than a diamond ring. He didn’t want to destroy communications equipment; he didn’t want to set fire to anything. He could yell at a cop, but that would only give him a night’s reprieve in a cell not much warmer than the underside of the Three Rivers Bridge. 

“How about this,” he said. “I run naked around City Hall, then spray paint a giant biohazard symbol on the door?”

“You don’t want to get even more frostbitten.”

“What’s one more finger or toe?”

“And how about your cock?”

He paused for a moment. “Hmm…yeah, good point. I’m depressed, but not that depressed.” He smiled. He’d lost a tooth in the front.

“How about this,” I said. “You can beat me up.”

“I said I wouldn’t harm anyone.” 

It’s true that Charlie would never hurt another person, not when we were kids and not now. He could handle himself—he’d always been stocky since we were little—but hadn’t a single aggressive bone in his body.

“No,” I said, “just hear me out. I’ll draw a pint of blood from myself beforehand, we can spread it around a bit, I’ll roll around in the mud and give you my wallet. You got a big one there, assault, or even attempted murder, and you can even call me a faggot if you want, add a little hate crime to top it off.”

“I would never call you that.” He closed his eyes. 

The wind picked up. Charlie offered me his coat, but I suggested we should walk a little bit, past the pond and up towards the highway. We stumbled on another homeless man who he recognized. The two of them chatted about the impending winter. The man did not look at me. I wondered if he even knew I was there. 

“That’s Wendell. You and him are the only people I’ve talked to all week. The lucky few.”

A spray of cold air swept through and Charlie winced and reached for his thumb. He huffed a warm breath on it. I had to turn away when I saw how fetid and blue it looked. Now that I’d been near him a while, I could smell him more fully, and it was gross, worse than any of the animal carcasses he’d poked at when we were kids, or the time he fell into the sulfur stream by the playground.

“Charlie...”

“Okay, okay,” he said. “If it’ll help you stop worrying about me, fine. As long as I don’t have to hurt you. And I’m not calling you that name.”

“Done deal. I have a deadline at four tomorrow. I’ll come here after.”

“Has anyone called you that before?”

“What, a faggot? Of course. It’s happened to everyone.”

“Who? Who was it?”

When we were in high school, another boy had gotten wind of my infatuation with Charlie. He pulled me by my jacket into a hallway corner and asked if I wanted to suck Charlie off, if I liked doing that to guys. I shook my head. He said he knew I was lying. He would tell our classmates, he would tell Charlie. I couldn’t stand the thought of that. I met him in his car behind the parade field. I wanted Charlie to be my first, but if I had embarrassed him, if those at school had found out and he never spoke to me again, I would have never recovered.

 It was necessary, that boy down my throat. When he finished, he took the sleeve of my shirt and wiped himself off. I sat up. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do. 

Get out of the car, f—.

“Noah?” Charlie waved his hand in front of me. “Who called you that?” He was angry. The anger was for me, a gift that I savored. I tried my best to look sad, to let the moment linger. It’s true that I avoided the boy for a while, but after a few weeks everything went back to the way it was before, and whenever I saw him I felt a queer satisfaction over the secret we shared.

“Peter,” I said.

“Baseball Peter? Why would he say that to you?”

“Charlie, I have no idea. It was a long time ago.”

“How come you never told me?”

“It was just a word. He didn’t spit on me. He didn’t beat me up.” How odd that in thirty years I’d not once received nor thrown a punch, never taken that adolescent right of passage. I wondered if that made me less of a person.

“I would have kicked the shit out of him if he did,” Charlie said. “I’ll still knock him out, if I ever see him again.”

“So, problem solved, then. I’ll bring Peter here, you’ll punch him in the face and get sentenced to at least six months, probably more, because he’s surely some bigwig with money and lawyers and an infantile temper.”

“If he survived.”

Out of everyone I knew before the New York Event, not many people were left. I considered myself lucky, perhaps the luckiest, that Charlie was still here. Most people didn’t get one out of a hundred. If they made it through, most people emerged with nothing.

“Promise you’ll be here tomorrow?” I wanted to make sure he agreed fully.

He took a long breath, steeled himself, and agreed. It’s not easy to be homeless in this city. The panhandling laws aren’t strict, and people aren’t averse to putting change in cups, but mutual aid is rare and there simply aren’t many good places to sleep. There are no warm subway grates, and the places for people to go are unregulated. The government can’t be everywhere at once. Charlie should have opened a shelter with his money and reserved a bed for himself. That seemed more logical than sleeping in the dirt.

“I’ll bring the supplies,” I said. “Take care of yourself until then. Find some undergrowth or something to curl up in. Get some sleep.”

*

After the initial bombings in the big metro areas, people in small cities felt emboldened, especially those near fertile land. They looked down on the urban refugees. It was easy to spot those who’d spent their whole lives here and those who recently arrived. Of course everyone was welcomed, as long as they could contribute in some way, but outsiders were always viewed with suspicion. But I didn’t think anybody had room to discriminate. We needed all the help we could get. There was no room to toss anyone aside. I felt like I’d survived a plague, and all of my friends but Charlie were gone. Our newsroom went from 100 people to 12. The first two floors of my apartment building were converted into indoor farms. Some things—coffee, tampons, sponges—were just gone. 

Between the two of us, I always thought Charlie would be the one to cope better, because of how resilient he was as a kid. But I suppose when you grow up being the best at everything, it’s a steeper drop when the playing field levels off. He didn’t lose a spouse or a child. His house was fine; he had plenty of currency saved. And yet he was emptier than all of us. Among the hopeless, he stood at the very front.

*

The next morning, after a fitful few hours sleep, I drew six vials of blood to ensure we had enough. Too much, I knew, but I’d be fine after my pinto bean salad for lunch. A heartier protein would have been better to replenish my lost iron, but I hadn’t seen red meat or chicken at the butcher shop in almost a year. Despite the necessity, I simply could not bring myself to eat pigeon or insect protein. I didn’t care that mealworms were just as nutritious as soy. Thank god beans were so easy to grow. I honestly might not have survived otherwise.

Work came easy to me, knowing I would soon help my friend. In the afternoon I submitted my finished story, which I titled “Sex At The End Of The World,” and walked to the park. I brought the vials with me in a cloth bag. Charlie would have to dispose of the contents somehow. Burying them would be simplest. 

He was sitting by the bell, as promised, and we lucked out that the sky was overcast and the city a bit sleepy. Nobody would care about what we were doing. They’d probably assume it all performance art, that Charlie was dressing my face with corn syrup or cherry puree. I looked up the prison where they’d send him, a pitiful place forty miles north, right on the edge of the Denver restricted zone. It would take me three hours on the bus to visit him, two on a sunny day. I could make the trip once a week, if he wanted.

“Look at you,” he said to me as I approached. “All dressed up and fancy.”

I wore my suit, the one I used for interviews with the City Council and other bigwigs who still cared about pretense. “I’ll seem more sympathetic if I look distinguished. Who would want to punch a man in a tie, right? Has there ever been a more trustworthy face than this? Of course not.”

We walked deeper into the park and found a flat area to sit under some entwined branches. I showed him the bag of vials. He took one of the tubes and turned it in his fingers, watching the blood coat every inch of the glass.

“Haven’t seen one of these in a while.”

It made the most sense, I said, to smear it all around my neck and down my shirt. I didn’t tell him that I’d have to cut myself on my chin, that there had to be a wound somewhere on my face or else the cops would think I was the one who did the pummeling. I had an exacto knife in my jacket. I bought it years ago, when the officials weren’t sure if the electricity would come back and I felt an urgent need to scrapbook my life before the New York Event.

You never heard birds anymore. They were still there, the droppings, the fluttering, the random specs moving across the sky, but they didn’t chirp. Or maybe it’s that we just didn’t hear them. Maybe they didn’t need to be as loud because the world was so much quieter. It only disoriented me sitting in parks, when I wondered if I was losing my senses.

I took Charlie’s hand. It was shockingly soft. I figured that his skin would have hardened from the cold, the winter weather prompting his body’s defense mechanisms to kick in. But his fingertips felt as if nothing had happened, like we were kids again, playing in our tree fort by the river.

I opened the first vial and poured the blood gently across his knuckles, down the side of his pinky to his wrist.

“Now, like I said.”

He wouldn’t look at me. He made a fist and dragged it gently across the side of my jaw, down the collar of my white shirt. He brought his thumb across my neck, over my tie, pressed it against my chest. I smoothed another layer of blood atop his hand, unbuttoned my shirt, and from my shoulder past my ribs I traced a line that he followed, leaving red streaks like the first coating of a vase. It tickled a little. If I was eighteen and a man had touched me how Charlie did, I would have gotten aroused just from sitting there. At thirty it didn’t cause as much of a stirring, but I still didn’t want him to stop. 

“Now the other side,” I said, opening another vial. “Let’s be real, who would assault only the right side of a person?”

“A leftie,” he said.

“Touché.”

He looked down on me, running his fingers over my face, and in that moment I saw Charlie as he was when we were kids, twenty years before the New York Event, splashing around in the pool, or trying to stick our drippy popsicles on each other, or rolling down the grassy hill just off the playground. In all my good memories of the world, he was always there. 

His fingertips stopped at my Adam’s apple. Not good enough. I made a choking motion, fingers across my windpipe. 

“I can’t, Noah. I can’t look at you like this. I don’t care that it’s fake.” He started to wipe the blood off my face, but I grabbed his hand.

“You want me to put up a fight, do you?”

I pulled him to the ground and jumped on top, tugging at his hair, the dry skin and dander flying in all directions. I pinned his arms down and put my face an inch from his. He resisted none of it, and that annoyed me even more.

“Come on, just one good shot across the brow,” I said.

“Did you really think this would work?” he asked. “You think things’ll magically be okay again because I rubbed some blood on your face?”

“If you got off the street and got help. You’re not of sound mind, Charlie. That’s the truth.”

“Fuck you, Noah.” He pushed me off and got up. “The only truth in this is that you’re a crappy friend.”

He’d nursed a wicked temper his whole life, though I’d never seen him lose it. He said that of course he got angry—I heard stories of him raging on his parents, his brother, other classmates—but he would never get that mad in front of me. I wondered what made the others so special.

He walked away. I followed him like a stringed-up tin can, clomping my feet, clearing my throat as loudly as I could so he’d know I was behind him. “Come on, wait for me,” I said into the wind. I jogged after him. The sweat and the blood made my body itch. I kept searching for a trigger that would get him to try again, to make a convincing victim out of me. Just once, I wanted to be the one who protected him.

“Please, Charlie. Just let me help you.”

“Don’t follow me.”

I could never stand up to him. Even now, when we were full grown, I couldn’t command his respect. I watched him walk down the path. After a while, I couldn’t hear his footsteps anymore. 

*

The park was pitch black. The streetlamps were busted; no cracks of moonlight ripped through the cloud cover; only a handful of high-rise windows were lit. I took the exacto knife from my pocket, flipped down the safety switch, and touched my neck. I felt for my pulse, for the patch of hair that I never seemed to catch when I shaved. I made a nick with the blade and felt warmth trickle down, falling over the dried muck of Charlie’s fingerprints. It was deep enough for what I needed. It didn’t hurt very much. I could have forced it in more, but I would never do something like that. When you witness so many people die on TV, hear their gurgles on the radio, it makes death scary again. I thought of suicide often when I was a kid, like most closeted guys. If not for Charlie, I might have done it then. But now suicide felt like such a waste of energy, too simple, too quick. In the post-New York age it was easy to find a purpose. We all had something to prove. We were still here.

I circled the pond. When I was satisfied with the spot, I put the knife and blood vials in the bag, filled it with dirt, and dropped the whole thing in the water. It sank quickly. In a hundred years the tubes would probably still be there, resting on the bottom. Unlike us, glass can last forever. By the time I got to the police station to report what happened to me, I was woozy. I’d tried to staunch the gash with my tie, wrapping it around my head as if I were a mangled Christmas gift, but it didn’t help. Some chimes rang as I entered. It was like magic, except nothing good appeared.

“Jesus Christ,” the man at the front desk said.

“Sadly not,” I said. “Just a mere mortal here.”

I felt a chill on my leg. My pants had ripped down the side. The guy got a first aid kit from a cabinet and taped a bandage to my neck, but soon the whole thing was wet. He put another bandage over that one, and he sat with me and pressed his palm over the cut, and he kept saying shit, shit, shit. He didn’t sound at all like Charlie.

“I’m fine, really,” I told the man. It had started to snow outside.

The first winter after the New York Event, people wondered if the clouds had turned acidic, if they’d dissolve into teeth and fingernails when they walked outside during a flurry. Even after the scientists said everything was safe, that the Rocky mountains and wind currents were shield enough, people still stayed inside when things fell from the sky. A lot of them thought the air was toxic. But they’ve come around now. People walk outside as if nothing is wrong. Nature is good at revising itself, at fooling its parts into forgetting what happened. 

The chimes sounded from the door. Charlie stood there, his hands and beard still red. Wherever he’d gone off to, it must not have been far. Maybe he was following me the whole time, making sure I was all right. He knelt in front of me.

“What did you do, Noah? God, what did you do?” 

My neck didn’t hurt at all, but I couldn’t keep my eyes open. The officer told him to sit with me while he went for help. Charlie was yelling. I lay down on the bench. At some point I felt his hand on the back of my head. He told me to open my eyes, to look at him, but there was no need. I knew he was there, telling me that everything would be all right. In this world we live in, that’s the single greatest gift one can give another person. I couldn’t ask for anything more.