Cruiser

When Dr. Kim called me in, I feared she would reprimand me for not taking care of my anal fistula. This time, though, her demeanor was different. Lighter. It freaked me out, honestly.
            “I have good news.” She directed me, as usual, to the scale.
            I stepped on it. The poise bar slammed left. Dr. Kim slid the larger weight over, to five hundred pounds. The bar tipped ever so slightly right. With the end of her pen, she tapped the upper weight. Ten, twenty, thirty. At forty-one, the scale zeroed out.
            “Five-forty-one.” Dr. Kim scribbled the reading into my file. Higher than last time. She led us to the private examination room. Her heels clicked sharply on the floor.
            The fistula made sitting painful, and standing stressed my knees and ankles. I leaned against the examination table and braced for Dr. Kim’s good news, words I’d yet to hear in the year since I began seeing her.
            Dr. Kim explained. She’d gone to medical school with someone who now served on the national board of pediatric medicine. The board had recently announced findings that would alter the national conversation about treatment for obesity.
            “It boils down to this,” she said. Genetics play a much larger role in appetite, cravings, and satiety than previously thought. Meaning, diet and exercise can take you only so far. Now doctors would be much quicker to recommend bariatric surgery for young adults like me.
            “Surgery?” I repeated, as if acquiring new vocabulary. Most of my life I’d been ashamed of my weight. As a child I’d given in to one too many impulses, conditioning my body to cave to every craving. School was hell, so I finished early online. Then, the body-positivity movement gained traction. I enrolled in pricey seminars, subscribed to podcasts, and told myself that if I radiated self-love, someone was bound to be caught in the orbit. Although Dr. Kim’s news might have seemed welcoming to her, I couldn’t help but feel invalidated. If I wasn’t responsible for my size, would that strip me of my hard-won comfort in my own skin? I didn’t know.
            “Surgery alone won’t fix it,” she continued. “There’ll be medications to help manage cravings. And, of course, diet and exercise.”
            The more Dr. Kim talked, the more I wondered how Julian might react to this news. Would he support it? Or would he laugh, change the subject, call my attention elsewhere?
            “Either way,” Dr. Kim said, angling like a pilot to a fast-approaching runway, “we have to take care of that fistula first.”
            I always dreaded this part of our sessions. It was, to borrow Dad’s word, undignified. I stripped to my socks while Dr. Kim assessed my body for pathology. She tested skin elasticity, reflexes, circulation, making quiet sucking noises as she worked. Next, I turned and faced the wall while she inspected my fistula. For a long time I had struggled to accept it as part of my topography. Like a terminally ill patient, I had thought if I rejected it—calling it the fistula, not my fistula—that the internal tunnel from my bowels to this superfluous opening in the crack of my ass would seal up and disappear forever. Not so. I was learning firsthand the limits of the self-acceptance and self-actualization the seminars had preached.
            “It looks . . . inflamed,” Dr. Kim said. “Have you been using your bidet?”
            “Yes,” I said. She craned her neck so I could see her dubious expression. “Sporadically.”
            “You’re two weeks out from the procedure. Use it every day. Every time you use the bathroom.” She stood and removed her gloves.
            “Yes, ma’am.”
           “I’m serious. What about physical activity? Have you been overexerting yourself?”
            My thoughts flashed to Julian. “I’ve been . . . active.”
            She screwed her mouth to the side. “Mind that.”

Dr. Kim handed me a thick medical packet and concluded our appointment. I hung back in the examination room and flipped through its catalog of horrors. The health issues I was at risk for seemed endless: hypertension, diabetes, stroke, gallbladder disease, coronary heart disease, osteoarthritis, and, my personal favorite, “death.” To remedy that: diets and drug therapies, counseling and consultations, various versions of bariatric surgery and projections for recovery. In the coming weeks I’d learn which might be available to me.
            Ping! went my phone.
            Hey, beautiful, Julian texted.
            Hey, handsome.
            I won’t be able to sleep tonight, he said. Got an exam coming up.
            I thought about how I’d reply. The Before and After page of the medical packet stared me down. The Before model, frowning, trapped, burdened. The After model, smiling, liberated, light. Would Julian want me After? Either I could keep on as I was until my body deteriorated, or exchange the body I knew for a chance at prolonged life.
            I’ll make it fun 😉
            Fine, I said. What time?

Hard as it may be to believe, I was a type. Julian’s type, at least. My type was anyone into me. So far, only Julian had been. If only there were more Julians in the world, I thought, or at least more in town. Leaving the only home I’d ever known on the off chance of finding more guys into me felt absurd, so I decided to take my chances here before making any drastic life decisions.
            At home I’d set aside a special dresser drawer for my rendezvous with Julian. From it I removed my bespoke Nasty Pig jockstrap and harness and lay them on my bed. The jockstrap was a tangle of elastic bands, candy apple red, with a cotton pouch for my dick. A snout-shaped logo adorned the waistband. The harness, with its complex arrangement of metal rings and straps, looked as though it had been designed for a gorilla. It took a few tries to get the ensemble on right. The elastic cut into my thighs, chest, shoulders and back. I checked myself out in the mirror. I looked ridiculous, squeezed into provocative lobes of flesh like a trussed roast. Rather than torture myself with vanity, I deferred to Julian’s preferences. I dressed over the harness and jockstrap, dropped a Cruiser pin at my address, and told Julian I was ready.
            While I waited for him to arrive, I surveyed the backyard. The lawn was overgrown, uneven, ravaged by snakes and moles—if I wasn’t careful, it could easily take me down. Since Dad’s passing I thought about touching things up—the flagstone steps, the bird bath, the barbecue—but lacked the energy. Yet, my attention inevitably wandered to the decrepit shed against the cinder block wall. It had become a monument to Dad’s death, a white trash mausoleum of cheap, untreated pinewood. The manufacturing numbers stamped on the wood resembled a ciphered inscription. In its dilapidation I hoped to discover some feeling for Dad that was positive and authentic. It hadn’t materialized yet, but that never stopped me from looking.
            Dad had died two years ago, and I began seeing Dr. Kim a year after that. That I continued living with Dad after he and Mom split had been a mystery to me, but my appointments with Dr. Kim gradually revealed the truth: I could put up with anything, even Dad’s insecurity, so long as I got to satisfy my cravings. With Dad, I never heard No. But when I tried to imagine my future, one beyond Dad’s house, one in which I was partnered and happy, that No was all I heard, booming and final.

The first time I downloaded Cruiser I deleted it immediately, with a surge of hormones and shame. I sought out Dad. He was building the storage shed in our backyard. I offered to help, if only to briefly possess that integration of strength and intention I’d always lacked.
            I stood around after Dad declined my offer, huffing and tinkering away with his toolkit. In his day he’d been a linebacker on his high school football team, though by the end you’d never know it. Still, when he put his mind to something, he was capable of truly impressive feats. According to town legend, he had saved a woman trapped in her car after it had flipped into a ditch and caught fire. His hands bore terrific scarring from it, yet he treated them disdainfully, as though they hadn’t suffered grievous injury under his command. The limited strength and mobility that resulted from the injury contributed to his massive weight gain. Such tales instilled in me an enduring belief that, no matter what life brought, there would inevitably be some aspect of our nature we couldn’t change, even to our own detriment.

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s being responsible for someone else’s happiness. I mean happiness as distinct from pleasure; most people mistakenly believe happiness can be perpetuated, whereas only a child would expect pleasure to last. That pleasure lacks such an expectation may be its most gratifying aspect, and what made Cruiser such a popular platform among its clientele. Like its other users, I’d downloaded Cruiser to avoid attachments.
            Around the time I started seeing Dr. Kim, I downloaded Cruiser again. This time, I was determined to follow through. I drove to the park and found a hiding place near a trailhead parking lot. I opened the app, dropped a signpost pin somewhere up the trail, put away my phone, and waited. From my vantage I could see whoever came and went, sorting them into more and less likely candidates for anonymous trail sex. I wasn’t in any condition to hike myself, which was fine with my aching knees and ankles. Besides, I wanted to watch.
            Of course, life interfered. The weather turned, my fistula flared up, the earth softened to mud beneath me. As confusion and embarrassment took hold, a young man around my age happened upon me and offered shelter in his van. I say happened upon me because it sounds better than saying Julian crept out of the bushes behind me. Besides, I didn’t like not knowing who was ever really watching whom.
            After, life continued as before, but with one significant exception: I was beautiful. That’s the word Julian had used to describe me. I hadn’t felt beautiful wriggling out of my rain-tightened shirt and shorts in front of him while the van’s suspension creaked beneath me, but his look of admiration, of hunger, assuaged my concerns. Julian parted the red crushed velvet curtain that partitioned the back of his van into a bedroom. On either side stood shelves lined with books on local flora and fauna, along with gear for hiking and rock climbing, and, in the corner, a cheap guitar with nylon strings. Occupying the entire floor was a double mattress, a bedsheet twisted across it. No pillows in sight.
            He pulled off his shirt, revealing his toned chest and abs, abundant copper hair near his waistline. A crescent-shaped birthmark sliced across his throat.
            “What’s that look for?” he laughed.
            “It’s just . . . you’re really hot.”
            He leaned over me, knuckling into the mattress. A hairless, sinewy ape. “You’re beautiful,” he said, his voice husky.
            Then he kissed me.
            I savored that kiss. His muscular, slippery, probing tongue. The prickling of an incipient mustache. I worried that at any moment I’d wake up, and the whole moment would evaporate into a dream. Yet, improbably, it hadn’t. I replayed that scene in my mind, returning often to that kiss. That kiss made life bearable.

My thing with Julian went like this. He’d ask me to help him study for his ranger exams as a pretext to fuck. I’d debate going, and inevitably concede. He’d pull up to Dad’s (I still thought about my house as Dad’s and felt having him over would violate Dad’s values), and we’d ride to a spot Julian had picked out in the park. He played classic rock CDs while I read aloud from a book of his, reconstructing the sentences into questions he might encounter on an exam. Tonight, it was all about the park’s petrified forest.
            Julian was an eager but poor student, either by nature or by choice—I could never tell which. The former endeared him to me, while the latter enraged me. These clandestine meetings felt like something straight teens with strict parents would do for a thrill. It was, to borrow Dad’s word, undignified. I wished I could throw the book out the window and say, “Can’t we drop the bullshit and fuck?” But I knew Julian enjoyed taking me to the park. It was his way of showing off. And who was I to deny him that, especially when he had so little to be proud of otherwise? He didn’t know I knew this, but his current job was to clean the park’s toilets.
            “Why do you want to be a ranger?” I asked, barely concealing my impatience.
            “No way it says that.” Julian strummed his cheap guitar along to the stereo.
            I closed the book. “Imagine you pass the written exam, and you get called in for an interview. They ask you, ‘Why range with us?’ What do you say?”
            “I love nature,” Julian said quickly. “My parents were geologists, they raised me on the road. Though I lived in the city, I practically grew up in the parks.”
            “Take your parents out of the picture. ‘Why do you want this unglamorous, high-effort, low-paying job in a state park few people visit?’”
            Julian set down his guitar. The strings thrummed dissonantly. “You know, I’m really happy I left LA.” He was no longer addressing some hypothetical employer.
            “Why?”
            “Because now I get to meet guys like you.”
            Guys-like-me meant, of course, not-Me. I was reminded of my typeness. To an extent, we are all subordinate to our attractions. Does it matter what they are, if the why boils down to genetic or environmental influence? Although, maybe that’s not quite what I meant. Regardless, there are benefits to being a type. Admirers submit to their attractions, which grants you power over them. This power is more intoxicating if that power is absent in ordinary life. When you get used to working so hard for so little in return, it’s nice to command someone’s attention for just being, well, you. But therein lies the danger of being a type. I was never entirely sure how Julian sees me. I wasn’t even sure how I saw myself. After the prostate contractions were over, was I just another warm, velvety orifice without its own needs? Of course, giving pleasure can be its own reward—or was I fooling myself?
            Undeterred by my silence, Julian continued. “Everyone in LA’s so concerned about their appearance, their diet, how fuckable they are in their narrow range of what’s fuckable. You have to get out and see the country to let go of all that. I mean, what’s the point of living in a major city if you can’t find a decent gloryhole?”
            As the point of Julian’s speech became muddled, I grew annoyed. “Cruiser is useful, but don’t you think we’re missing something? Like spontaneity, or community?”
            I couldn’t imagine a community that would want me. Maybe to Julian I was a half-measure, a community of one. Would he exchange me for another as soon as he had the chance?
            “Speaking of spontaneity,” he kissed me again, “I can’t wait to fuck you.”
            Right then, when he dodged my question, I decided to commit to Dr. Kim’s suggestion: I would take the chance at prolonged life. Did I want to prove something to myself, or to Julian? I figured I would find out After.
            I pulled off my shirt. My tits bounced in the harness. I tried not to picture how I looked, or how Julian felt about the grand reveal. Instead, I focused on the task at hand. The button on my shorts waistband hanging by a thread. The shorts sliding down my thighs. The rush of air on my bare ass. The warm fluid running down the backs of my legs. Fuck! I thought. The fistula.
            “I’m the luckiest guy in the world,” he sighed.
            He crawled to me. He ran his hungry, calloused hands up my belly, my tits. He couldn’t wrap his arms around me, so he left my ass alone. I was grateful. I was scared he’d run his hands right through the fistula secretions. How had we made it this far without noticing the smell?
            “Whoa there, cowboy,” he laughed.
            “What?” I resisted the urge to cover myself.
            “Nothing. You’re hung as fuck tonight.”
            I looked down, then back at him. The cobalt sky through the van window contrasted with his tan skin. Hellenist nose, high cheek bones, remote pale eyes.
            “Is that a problem?” I asked.
            “Not yet it’s not,” he said. He grabbed the lube. “Roll over.”
            I complied. The old van’s suspension creaked beneath me as I settled on his mattress. Laying on my stomach relieved the pressure on my ass. The van was humid with excitement. I was entering the territory where reality and fantasy merge.
            The lube bottle sputtered. Sounds of application. More sputtering. I felt a shocking wetness on my ass. I tensed.
            “Cold, right?” Julian laughed. “Open up, beautiful.”
            He pressed against me. Hard, hot pressure. His dick searched for an opening as though it possessed its own will, separate from Julian. It found something. It paused. It teased. It pressed.
            Suddenly, my ass and back lit up as though set on fire. I gasped and jerked away. In a moment of horror, I recalled Dr. Kim’s words. It looks . . . inflamed.
            “What’s wrong?”
            “I’m fine. Try lower.”
            Julian readjusted. I felt him go lower, past the burning fistula. He found what he wanted. He pressed in. He sighed. I pictured his face as he closed his eyes and smiled.

The fistula operation turned out to be no big deal. Afterward, Dr. Kim set a date for the bariatric surgery. They were going to slice my stomach in half, suture it together, remove and rearrange a non-trivial portion of my bowels. For a couple months, I resumed a version of daily life not too dissimilar from what had preceded it. Then, she informed me I’d entered what she called the “prebariatric zone.” For the next three weeks, I would maintain a diet of clear liquids. Nutrition shakes and water. If I ate solid food twenty-four hours before surgery, the anesthetic chemicals and breathing tube would make me puke up the food, calling off the surgery and costing me thousands of dollars. If I ate solid food within the weeks leading up to the surgery, however, that was less likely to happen. But it was possible that during surgery a small piece of food could escape my intestines and enter my body, causing sepsis. Possibly, nothing would happen at all.
            To distract myself from visions of disaster, I decided to finish Dad’s shed. I’m not the handiest person, but in an inspired moment I used the manufacturing numbers stamped on the shed to track down a digital construction manual. Coasting on this victory, I trekked to a local home improvement store for supplies. Carting around materials all day made my back and knees ache, but I urged myself to be like Dad. Push through, no matter what.

            The first obstacle was ascertaining where Dad had left off in the process. He didn’t follow instructions—asking for help of any kind was undignified—so I quickly deduced that the shed was far less along than it had initially appeared. It took an entire afternoon to take it apart, and afterward I was in so much pain I could hardly move.
            “What happened?” Dr. Kim asked. We were one week into the prebariatric zone.
            “I’m rebuilding Dad’s shed,” I said. She gave me a confused look, so I explained the story to her. “I thought you’d be proud.”
            She was enraged. “You could set back your surgery for months. You don’t have months.”
            “I wanted to take care of it sooner than later.”
            “Take care of it after,” she said. “It’ll give you something to look forward to.”
            As promised, I kept up the all-liquid diet but continued working on the shed in secret. Since I had to take it slow, I projected the date of completion for after the surgery. At the time, I believed my sudden interest in this project represented several things. A way of rebuilding my relationship with Dad. Or creating space for new beginnings. I didn’t know what I’d do with it once I finished. I figured I’d toss Dad’s old stuff in there, lock it up and throw away the key. It wasn’t until the week of the procedure that I realized, simply, I was scared.

My fistula healed, and Julian passed his ranger exam. Lots to celebrate. I treated myself to a new jockstrap and harness, though in a few months’ time I’d probably fit both my legs through just one of the elastic loops. Julian and I were still talking, but I figured our days together were numbered. Might as well make the most of them.
            “Hey, beautiful,” Julian grinned as he pulled up to my place that night. He patted something inside his van. “I got a surprise for you.”
            The van’s suspension groaned as I got in. “So, what should I call you? Ranger Julian? Julian-of-the-Woods?”
            He reached behind my seat and, like an uncle snatching a coin from behind a child’s ear, pulled out a cakebox. I looked at it, dumbfounded, as he handed it to me. It tipped heavily to one side. I felt like I’d walked into some sort of hidden camera prank.
            We pulled out of the neighborhood. Classic rock crackled out of Julian’s speakers. “First thing I’ll do with my paycheck is buy a new van,” he said. “It’s falling apart.” I hummed tunelessly to distract myself from the cakebox pressing into my thighs. The fragrance of sugar and buttercream filled the van. Town receded into the distance behind us.
            As usual, we went to the park. It unrolled in front of my eyes as Julian described the natural history to me with the newfound confidence that attended his position.
            The cake turned cloying. I set it among the ropes and Nalgenes and other odds and ends littering the floor. Julian turned off the engine and faced me. We took each other in.
            “God, you’re so sexy,” he said. “You know that, right?”
            I sat with this. “Are you asking if I know I’m sexy, or if I know you think I’m sexy?”
            Julian seemed confused, like a student who’d given the correct answer to an advanced problem but was now being asked to show his work. “I want to know what you think.”
            I thought about that. The seminars had provided advice, like formulas, for self-acceptance. I tried to recall them, but with time the speeches had slurred together monotonously.
            “I think I feel sexy when I’m with you,” I replied.
            “Open your gift.”
            I picked up the cakebox and opened it. Inside was a sheet cake with white frosting and chocolate cake and filling. Printed on it in edible sugar was a photo of Julian as a young boy, grinning under a ranger’s hat, ready to save the world. “Congratulations, Julian!” was written beneath it in black icing.
            “I had it made for us.” Julian dragged his forefingers through the cake and raised them as though they’d been anointed with oil. I didn’t move. He inserted his fingers into his mouth and absorbed them with his lips. His fingers came away clean. “It’s good!”
            Begrudgingly, I did the same. The cheap icing coated my tongue, and the cake tasted only vaguely of chocolate. I opened the passenger’s side door and spat it out onto the dirt.
            “It’s fine,” I said, “but not really my thing.”
            “Try this. It’s better.”
            He scooped again, but this time he held his fingers out to me. I hesitated. With the surgery so close, I didn’t want to chance it. I pictured the bacteria on Julian’s ruggedly unwashed fingers wriggling into the cake, infesting it, biding their time until they could flourish within the new microbiome of my inflamed intestines. And yet, there was the question of After. This might be the last time Julian and I would meet. If I didn’t indulge him now, wouldn’t I regret it for the rest of my life? I took him in my mouth. There was the familiar rush of sugar and diluted chocolate, accompanied by the sweaty salt and tang of Julian’s fingers. Julian withdrew them and leaned in to kiss me. I parted my lips. His tongue searched my mouth greedily for cake, making a paste of it with our saliva. I didn’t mind the cake so much this way. I swallowed. I scooped another piece and let him suck it off my fingers. We kissed, and again I swallowed. Soon the cake was gone, and the sun had set.
            While I tried to compose myself externally, internally I was corroding. If there was any time in my life to exercise self-control, this had been it. I’d failed. Whatever punishment happened as a result, I knew, would be deserved. My heart raced with sugar and hormones and pure, mounting, amygdalan panic cresting over me in a sun-annihilating wave. Finally, I spoke, raising my words like a shield. “That was the best cake I ever had.”
            “That’s what I’ve been saying about you,” Julian said.

The night before the surgery, I read the medical packet while I used my bidet. Its water supply had been augmented with cleaning solution to prevent infection. A jet of scalding antiseptic water powerwashed my balls, ass, and crack. “If it hurts, that means you’re doing it right,” Dr. Kim had said, “but not too much.” An indescribable smell gathered in the toilet, vivid and putrefied, and mapped itself onto my sinuses, an olfactory scar.
            I came to the Before and After page. Had I made the right choice?
            Earlier that day, the shed’s structure had come into place. It looked like a miniature barn, with a peaked frame, rafters, and tie beams, sealed with sidewall and shingle. With a bit of insulation, it could be good enough to use as a workspace. I silently congratulated myself. I’d diverted my dread of the After—of the surgery, of my future with Julian—into something tangible.
            I stepped inside. It was tight, hardly enough room to sit. Then, I realized: it was a tight fit only for now. But it wouldn’t be, After. In fact—I spread my arms—it might be spacious.
            My longing for Julian had only grown, the opposite of what I wanted. Maybe I didn’t long for Julian himself but for the reassurance of his company. As long as he’d make himself available to me, I could keep my picture of myself as I had been: someone worthy of desire. After all, my whole life I’d been fat in a culture that demonizes being fat. In that light, the most I could aspire to was being a tolerable presence: jolly, acquiescing, encouraging. Otherwise, I was a punching bag at best, invisible at worst.
            I wished I could convert the experience of learning to accept myself into something I could take with me, into the After, a gift. Had my dependence on Julian slowly eroded my sense of self? I pictured him as a mouse sniffing out his prize, wriggling into my protective box, nibbling away at me. I pictured him in his new ranger uniform, opening up Cruiser, hiking up trail after trail to sign after sign, in search of guys to fuck.
            I opened my phone and deleted his number. He was free to reach out if he wanted, but I had to end things with him before he could end things with me.

The day of the surgery came. It felt absurd that a few hours under the knife, some pills, and moderate diet and exercise could change my essential quality. Part of me feared I’d awaken to a different version of myself, someone neither I nor anyone else recognized, much less cared for.
            I had prepared for a long recovery. I stocked liquid food and drink at home. I splurged on wedge-shaped therapeutic pillows. There was, also, the question of the ride home from the hospital. While I thought Julian might be open to it, I didn’t want to ask that of him. It felt safer to depend on myself. I arranged for a car service to pick me up, and added that expense to the list of questions I hoped would dissolve in the After.
            Dad never got this far, even after Mom’s ultimatum. He’d taken one look at Dr. Kim’s clinic—the cutesy motivational posters, the all-female staff and clientele—and refused to go any further. “It’s undignified,” he reported. Mom left him, and he kept the house. He was big to begin with, but after she left he became gigantic. It gave me some satisfaction to know I was going someplace Dad hadn’t dared, and yet I wondered if there was something he knew about this, some crucial bit of knowledge he hadn’t shared with me. I imagined it floating around in my body like an undigested granule of icing sugar.
            A nurse entered the room for preliminary examination. Everything looked good, except one thing. “We can’t let a car service pick you up from the hospital. You’ll need an alternative.”
            “Can’t the hospital take care of that?” I asked.
            “Afraid not.” Insurance liabilities, he explained. Is there someone who can help you?
            I thought about it. “Yes,” I said. The nurse gave me my phone. I searched through it and dug up a number I was fairly certain was Julian’s. It had an LA area code.
            Hey, handsome, I texted. Can you do me a huge favor?
            He responded right away. Anything for you, beautiful.
            I told him I needed a ride. I said where I was, what I was there for, and when the surgery would conclude. For some reason, I didn’t think of recovery time. The facts of my circumstances weren’t yet real to me; I could float freely among them.
            A few moments passed. I’ll be there, he said.
            I turned off my phone. Was he disappointed with my choice to go through with the surgery? To calm myself while the pre-anesthesia nurses took my vitals, I tried to picture Dad’s face. Navigating memory, however, is like navigating a screen: without a clear subject to follow, it’s impossible to track smoothly. All I have are fragments suspended in time. His kind eyes. His skin creased with laughter. His gigantic hands that clapped me on the back whenever I did something that pleased him. I imagined those hands as I had seen them in the old tapes from his high school football games. They scoop up a fumbled football as if it were fragile as a butterfly and tuck it under an arm. He lumbers upright, the spikes of his cleats dig into the earth, and he staggers across the field. The opposing players leap toward him, grabbing uselessly at his jersey and sliding off like water, as he powers to the end zone. Mom, a clarinetist in the marching band, leaps with so much excitement she forgets to play the touchdown tune.
            Eventually, all I’d have left of Dad was the last day we spent together, building that shed. The soda I brought him, ice cold against the heat, spilling onto the lawn. His face a bizarre shade of purple and gray. His mouth gasping for air. His eyes filled with confusion. It took more strength than I thought I had to roll him over onto his side, to relieve the pressure on his chest. I managed it, though by then it was too late. His heart had given out.
            “How are you feeling?” the doctor asked me once my vitals were taken.
            “Good enough, I think.”
            The doctor chuckled. “Listen, you’ll do great. We’re going to get you set up here. Want some television? We have all the channels.”
            I spoke without thinking. “You have football?”

They don’t prepare you for so much blue. The blue examination table’s antimicrobial upholstery. The blue paper they cover you with like a winding sheet. The blue scrubs the doctors and nurses wear, pressing up against you, cycling around you, testing equipment. The blue gloves as they test your skin for hydration, hunting for a vein for the IV. The metal tools they use to cut into you, cobalt-silver, reflecting more hard blue. Blue as the blue sky you hope to see again.

I didn’t so much awake from surgery as stumble through heavy fog. Everything hurt. My tongue a wad of toilet paper in my mouth, pulpy and deteriorating. Speech was impossible. I moaned, gaining a nurse’s attention.
            “You’re awake,” she said, as if reading a script. “The procedure went perfectly.”
            Her tone struck me as odd. I tried to listen more closely to what she was saying, but exhaustion overwhelmed me, and I fell back asleep.

The next time I opened my eyes, Dr. Kim appeared at my bedside like a hallucination, all trembling lines and a contorted smile.
            “Everyone here says you’re doing great,” she began. What she was saying felt odd, like part of the same script the nurse had read from.
            “Good,” I replied cautiously. My portion of the script hovered in the air before me. “How much longer do I have to be here?”
            “Another day or so.”
            “Can you make sure Julian knows?”
            Dr. Kim hesitated, her eyes drifted briefly to a machine and back to me. “We’ll talk about that later. Rest for now.”

Julian had arrived early at the hospital and checked in with reception. The staff informed him he’d come far too early to be of any use to me. They told him to return the next day, and he left. It was night, a few minutes after ten. The sky was clear, the stars unusually bright.
            He wrecked a couple miles down the highway. According to police, his old van’s suspension gave way, and he lost control. His van swung toward the passenger side, spinning him around, when he was broadsided by a firetruck returning from dispatch. Julian was pronounced dead at the scene. Now his remains were en route to LA, where his relatives waited, somewhere, to receive them.
            As I lay in the hospital bed, I pictured his body as cargo on a plane. It descended from a hard blue sky to a landscape resembling endless computer chips, where it made its way through endless traffic to people who made endless plans they never followed through on. I couldn’t help thinking Julian would have much preferred to rest here, in his beloved but finite park, content with its beauty. But who was I to Julian’s family? Who was I to say they should hold that plane? How could I say they should know their own son well enough to know that?

For a long time after, I believed I deserved to die instead of Julian. That the surgery should have failed due to some complication. Hemorrhaging after an inaccurate pass with a scalpel. Turning septic from some miniscule morsel of chocolate cake lingering in my intestines. Someone would have picked up a phone and called Julian, told him the news, canceled his arrival. After that, he would have been free to pursue whatever he wanted, even if that wasn’t something I would ever know. And, lastly, selfishly, I would have been released from the question: what comes after the After?
            The guilt and shame still cripples me. I feel like a greedy child who wants everything, confronted with No. No after No. The final No.
            During our recent appointment, Dr. Kim holds my hand while I cry. She tells me she’s concerned about my resilience, but there’s little comfort in food. My stomach is less than half its former size, all wound. Nutritional shakes and water extend into the horizon, as far as I can see.

Slowly, I’m easing back into life. Work distracts me, but if I pause what I’m doing, however briefly, the emptiness of it all comes howling back. One night I wake up with a bloody fist and a hole in my bedroom wall. I stare at it with detached curiosity. When Dad died, there were no holes in walls, no bloody fists, no hollow scraping inside me. At the bottom of everything there was only the hole, without a wall to burst through.

Eventually, with Dr. Kim’s permission, I’m at work on another project. She doesn’t know the details; she wouldn’t want to. But I’ve been feeling inspired, and she agrees that’s good. Soon our visits will taper off, and it’ll just be me. Plus the diet we agreed to. Plus the medications. Plus the counseling. After the After, plus after plus.
            The only thing left to install in the shed is the partition. I bring it out from the house to the shed. Before, there was hardly room enough in there for me. I used to fear all that absence, but now—I don’t know. I’m not so afraid anymore. I have enough room to keep a piece of Julian with me, however small.
            The partition is lighter than it seemed. Using the hole in its center, I easily slide it into the grooves that bisect the length of the shed. I lean my weight against it, and it feels secure. There’s a chair on my side, and a door on the side opposite. The cinder block wall outside the shed should provide privacy from prying eyes, not that I care much. I’m just thinking about the guests: dozens of anonymous Julians, like I’d always wanted. I want all these Julians to feel comfortable as they follow the Cruiser pin to my house, as they park their cars on the street, come down the drive, follow the steps to the backyard. There they will find the shed. They’ll see the “No Kissing” inscription—the final No—and open the door. They’ll see the pinewood partition, the black duct tape around the gloryhole. Maybe they’ll look on this place I made with gratitude. They’ll unzip their pants, pull themselves out, and sigh. I think I hear him now.