LITMIR.BIZ

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to die,” I said. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”

      I was crying again, the second time in two days. I remembered what Kilburg’s father had told him about shedding tears, and I felt silly and weak. Kilburg stared at his hands, his arms loose across his lap. His mother had left him without notice, and I wondered if he cried over her when no one was around.

      “I already heard,” he said, his voice trailing off. “My dad told me.”

      Between low clouds I could see the stars. They seemed to float through the sky like distant aircrafts, flashing in and out of sight, faint in the light of the moon. I thought of them falling in slow motion, all at once—a blizzard of stars—down through the universe and into the valley, filling it up before melting into the dry landscape. I assumed my mother had gone around telling everyone in the neighborhood about my father’s condition, looking for pity, or who knows what. For a couple of minutes, there was only the noise of katydids, a steady chirr that filled the air. As I watched what I thought might be cumulonimbus clouds—a term I had heard my father use when he read aloud from articles about the drought—a breeze picked up, stirring dirt around the fort. The clouds came swiftly together, dark and swollen, padding the sky. I thought of the smell of sagebrush when it rained—it was hard to forget, at once fragrant and repellent, something like the smell of your hand after you licked it. Kilburg nodded his head. He seemed to have calmed down. He bent forward and picked up a rock, chucking it into the night.

      “Why didn’t you help me this morning?” he said.

      I wiped tears from my face, looking him up and down.

      “I know you were there. I saw you.” He lifted his chin. “I saw you behind that car.”

      I tried to think of a lie—an excuse for why I hadn’t defended him, to make up for the ugly truth of my cowardice—but I didn’t want to hurt him any more than I already had. He pulled a flashlight from his pocket, switching it on and shining it at a yucca, a Joshua tree. Heads of sagebrush rose up among the catclaws and schist rocks. He pointed the flashlight at a small cluster of jimsonweed, swathed by little white flowers shaped like trumpets. He circled the weed with the beam, clicking his tongue.

      “If you wanted to hallucinate,” he said, “you could eat those flowers. Problem is, they might kill you.”

      “I’m sorry,” I told him.

      And I was. I owed him an explanation. But I was still thinking about my father. It would turn out that my father would suffer for seven more years, never undergoing a transplant yet slipping in and out of long, miraculous periods of remission, his lungs dissipating intermittently. He would die, with little warning, in a hospital room on a cold Las Vegas evening in November, a week before Thanksgiving—two years before my mother’s emotional constitution would begin to unravel in earnest. At that moment, however, sitting there with Kilburg, I had a sense of imminent tragedy. In my mind, as in my mother’s, my father was already dead. I pictured his last, gasping moments, then his wake: he lay in an open casket, done up with cosmetics to resemble the living, the way my grandfather had lain at his own wake two summers earlier. I saw Kilburg beside me at the burial, and afterward—days later, perhaps—I saw the two of us sneaking into the cemetery at night and, in my father’s memory, planting a sapling behind his headstone. I saw Travis Kilburg as an important part of my life, even though I felt that this would be our last time together at the fort—that we would never steal another sapling, that our relationship was more or less over. Indeed, we would never go back to the fort again. Kilburg would eventually move across town, and the last time I would run into him would be at a party the week before I would leave home for college, where he would tell me he dropped out of school and took an entry-level job his father got him at the Kerr-McGee plant. It would be an awkward conversation, but I would have no feelings for him—none at all.

      Now Kilburg was looking directly at me. The breeze that had picked up grew stronger, sending a tumbleweed bounding past the fort, lifting a plastic produce bag we had left in the dirt. A dust devil spun elegantly and died. I hadn’t stopped crying, but I tried not to show it, blinking away the tears. I told him again that I was sorry. One of the tears landed on my forearm, and even though I had felt it fall from my chin, I thought for an instant that after five long months it had begun to rain. But the clouds had already started to separate, exposing the moon and the stars, floating east toward Sunrise Mountain.

      Kilburg knuckled his shoulder. He set the flashlight in the dirt and reached for the prosthetic leg, scowling as he pulled the sleeve over his stump and tightened the laces. I’m not sure why, but it occurred to me, for the first time, that he had a potentially critical illness: if it had cost him his leg, I reasoned, it could just as easily cost him his life. I was suddenly convinced that, like my father, Kilburg wouldn’t live long.

      “I guess I thought we were friends,” he said, a note of fear in his voice.

      It was late, and I could feel that I was still pretty high. I didn’t know what to tell him. I was tired and I wanted to go home. Finally I stood, brushing dirt from my shorts, and offered Kilburg my hand.

      “We are,” I said, because a lie seemed less hurtful than the truth.

       Longing to Love You

      ALL AFTERNOON HE THOUGHT OF HER, EAGERLY IMAGINING the details of her body: her height, her weight, the color of her skin, the curves of her legs, hips, breasts. Now, as Nick walks west through the Tenderloin, nearing the corner of Taylor and Eddy, he feels a prick of anxiety at the back of his throat. Brief but dispiriting—always causing him to second-guess himself—it’s a familiar sign that he’s doing something he knows is questionable. A cool breeze picks up, heralding the coming autumn, but Nick feels sweat surface on his forehead. He’s unsure if he should turn back or carry on. Each building he passes is a liquor store or a laundromat or a bedraggled old flophouse with a neon Vacancy sign. He hurries by them, late to meet My-Duyen, the Vietnamese masseuse he telephoned by way of the yellow pages, a call girl who refers to herself as the “Asian Sensation.”

      The address is 155 Golden Gate Avenue, between Leavenworth and Jones. When he spoke to her earlier today, she told him to call her from the curbside pay phone at a quarter past eleven. “Generous men only,” she said, as if he weren’t aware that her repertoire extended beyond the domain of benign, legal massage. “Full service,” she added. He stared at her photoless ad in the fluorescent light of his kitchen. “I’m Jack,” he told her, giving her his father’s name, whispering into the receiver as though someone were around to hear him. “My-Duyen,” she replied. She mewled and moaned. When he asked her what her name meant, if anything at all, she paused before answering. “Beautiful,” she said, and Nick hoped the name was appropriate.

      At the pay phone, he digs a scrap of paper from his back pocket, dials the number he copied from the telephone book. The building is a handsome brick Edwardian with a big stone portico—the kind of building normally found in the Western Addition or Pacific Heights—out of place in the Tenderloin, as though it’s lost or slumming. The block is alive with people walking in twos and threes, loitering in doorways, slinking in and out of a corner bar down the street whose windows have been painted black. After several rings, My-Duyen picks up. “You’re late,” she says. It’s eleven-twenty-five. “Second floor, apartment seven. I’ll buzz you in.”

      Ascending the stairs, he finds it difficult to lift his feet, his legs solid with apprehension, and the climb to the second floor seems to take an eternity. For all his unease, Nick is shuddering with excitement, hardly able to believe that he’s finally going to lose his virginity. At twenty-three, he considers himself a misfit—an anomaly. Most people spend their college years partying, having sex. Nick spent his reading books in the university library, or else playing Tetris, or The Legend of Zelda, or Dragon Warrior, adrift in the fictive worlds of novels and video games. He reads less these days but plays Nintendo more than ever, an hour or two every night. Of his small group of friends, he’s the sole virgin, a word he repeats so often in his mind that it sometimes bears no meaning, the two syllables bouncing hollowly off the walls of his consciousness, morphing into other,

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