Your organs have been donated. At least that’s my understanding. I looked up the form and the questions they ask. Sexual history. Do you think your parents knew how to accurately answer? I don’t. I think they lied. Isn’t that the way? They won’t take our blood, but they’ll take our organs! This fucking world. I’ve about had it with straight people. Although I suppose they’d take our blood if we lied on those forms, too.
I am less me. I left part of myself with you. I don’t know what it was, but I felt it leave my body the last time I held your hand. It was incinerated with you, with that cheap suit from Macy’s and, I assume, scattered with you. Wherever that may be.
I will continue. I’m told repeatedly I have to. Greg threatened me not to do anything stupid. (Although, what recourse he would have if I did, I don’t know.) Sara is flying here to be with me. She’s arriving tomorrow. I was supposed to pick her up, but I told her that cars were traumatic and she said, “Of course, I’ll take a cab.” If I play this hand correctly I may never have to drive again. Certainly not to LAX. I will grow old and you won’t ever have to. You will always be perfectly Joe. With your skin and your hair and your teeth and your ability to do three sit-ups and somehow see results.
My life will be different. For a bright, shining moment I was part of a team. I thought we would see the future together and be—oh god, writing it like this sounds so maudlin—A FAMILY. Now I don’t know. I don’t even know what family means. I’m adrift in black space like an untethered astronaut, each star I float past a shining memory reminding me that I don’t live that life anymore.
Yours in science,
Patrick
PS This is dumb. I’m not going back to this therapist.
TWENTY-ONE
The visitors’ lounge at the Coachella Sober Living Facility smelled familiar—eerily recognizable; Patrick couldn’t quite place it and it was driving him mad. The walls were painted concrete brick, like an elementary school classroom, the furniture equally unimpressive. Not in a donated way: there was no sagging, puffy sofa one might find in an old church basement, batting spilling out of a tear in the arm. But certainly nothing high-end or evocative of the clientele this place seemed so desperate (according to their literature and pricing structure) to attract. Patrick took a seat on a chair that was as uncomfortable as its spare design suggested and inventoried the other furnishings. The lines were clean, the design Swedish, Danish perhaps, but everything looked disagreeable and had an air of mass production. Restless, he stood and paced the room in a hyped-up panic, like a dog whose owner promised to be right back.
The door to the hall was closed and Patrick was alone, trapped. The whole place was unsettling and still, there was an eerie quietude—like a reading room, in a nunnery, on a mountaintop, on Mars. Patrick’s mind raced. He imagined residents tiptoeing around in paper slippers while adhering to vows of silence. The temperature was cool, but air didn’t seem to be circulating from the vent. He had been offered a cup of coffee by someone with crooked teeth named Kevin, which he regretfully accepted; the coffee was weak, stale, bland—much like the first impression Kevin himself put forth. Patrick clung to the cardboard cup tightly, both as something to do with his hands and because there was nowhere to throw it away. The corner offered a lone plant; he considered dumping the coffee in the wicker basket that housed it, but the plant was fake and the basket contained craft foam, not soil, and he didn’t want the coffee running through the loosely-woven reeds and across the tile floor, pooling like evidence in a grisly crime.
That fucking letter. Rereading his letter to Joe had kept him from sleep for the second night in a row. If he didn’t take this next step quickly, sleep might never come again.
Sara arrived in a taxi that night. She used the key Patrick hid on top of the light fixture outside his apartment door; he heard her fumble with it in the lock. She came in and sat next to him, pulling him into her chest, kissing the top of his head. There were wooden blinds covering the windows, blocking out most of the light; the thin slats of sun that made it through fell across Patrick’s face like prison bars.
Joe had been dead for less than a week.
“I got here as fast as I could.”
Patrick nodded, his chin hitting the top of her breast. “They wouldn’t let me see him.”
“I know.”
Patrick gulped for air. “He must have been so scared.”
“They’re monsters.”
That’s all it took—acknowledgment—and Patrick broke down in ugly heaving sobs. She held him until he was empty of tears.
“Let’s get drunk.”
Patrick laughed, not a lot but a little, and nuzzled his face in the scoop of her T-shirt. Her chest was soft, welcome. Is this why straight men obsessed over breasts? It seemed wrong to sexualize something this comforting. Grotesque, even. He squeezed her tightly. They would get drunk. Was it possible relief was that easy? What was it Evelyn Waugh had written in Brideshead Revisited? “Ought we to be drunk every night?” It was Sebastian. Yes. Yes, I think so. In college, it was his and Sara’s solution to everything. Difficult test, bad grade, hard day, awful date: get drunk. And off they went to Richard’s, a neighborhood bar with bottomless pitchers and a popcorn machine. And it actually, usually, momentarily helped. Patrick just wasn’t sure what witchcraft alcohol could conjure
