Writing Exercise 1
“Do you suppose you could get vertigo at the end of the world?” Josh asked as he looked out the tall, 8th floor window. It was one of those hotel-branded windows: a near wall of glass that gave the room an inflated sense of appearance. He took a sip from his thermos: cold, stale; the kind of aged coffee that forms crust in rings. He didn’t have much time to drink it last night, he thought. Between the strippers, the penis shaped cake, and the darkness, there was hardly enough time for memory let alone coffee. Slowly, he adjusted the pink hotel-provided towel, as if it was a cowboy belt.
The sunlight came through the window and flooded the room like a stage. The light on Josh's skin gave him the illusion that he had a dark cream tan in the shadowed parts. As he drank his coffee, he admired the skin on his forearm as it lifted the cup and turned, twisting the shadows: he preferred the darker skin. Sherry wasn't dark skinned though. His wife was an off-white, a European white, but not pale. Not sickly looking like royalty. Just white. A white that burns in the Sun and hides itself in the dark.
“What? What’s Vertigo?” Another man, Tom, answered from the bathroom. The door was half-open and the echoes of his words provided a solid contrast to the silence Josh imagined outside.
Tom stayed the night. He always stays the night. When they used to date, Josh purposely planned dates during the morning and early afternoon hours, so he could end up home alone. Of course those dates were few and far between, so Tom ended up staying with Josh all night long. But Sherry gave Josh excuses to spend nights alone. She was not nearly as forward as Tom, and when they went out Tom did end up back home alone; Tom knew about Sherry. He didn’t seem to mind because he probably dated others as well, Josh thought. But Sherry didn’t know. Sherry never knew they were together; she couldn’t. She wouldn’t.
“I mean,” he tried to rationalize, “if you don’t know where you can go, can you still fear it?” Do the clouds fear anything? He thought back to elementary school and to a girl named Maria. She had downed-syndrome, but she learned with the rest of the class. He was mean to her, he thought. Him and his friends even nicknamed her twisty-chair because she got a special desk to work on with a special chair that spun around like a barstool. But he wasn’t mean to her for long; she had spunk. Sure, she was retarded, but when he called her twisty-chair to her face, she knew exactly what he meant and called him an idiot for thinking of such a dumb name. He didn’t talk to her after that. And then she disappeared the next year: he never asked what happened to her. Josh glanced over to the bed and saw one of his black socks laid out across the white sheets. He must not forget that when he leaves; he’s lost enough already.
Tom walked out of the bathroom pulling over a navy blue t-shirt with the Yankees emblem branded just above his heart. He answered while trying to slide himself into an obviously smaller shirt than its owner, “People fear the unknown all the time.” He yanked his shirt down. “You know that,” Tom reassured as he made his way over the clothes, Josh’s duffel bag, and the wet spot on the carpet from this morning. Tom claimed the wet spot was from Josh; he said Josh slept walked and then starting peeing on the floor. He didn’t stop Josh because it was funny.
“No,” Josh insisted quietly as he took another sip—crust, fuck. He wiped his thin lips with his other hand and removed the deposits. He wished Sherry would wear lipstick more. Not to make herself look better to him, but so when they kissed he could feel her physical presence still lingering on him, as if something needed his lips. The towel loosened a bit on his hips. “People fear possibilities. I fear kissing you in public not because I don’t know what’s going to happen,” he felt Tom’s rough, strong hand rest above his hip bone, “but ‘cause of what can happen.” What has happened, he thought. You can’t be a queer and not be a victim.
Tom slid the tips of his fingers underneath the clasp of the towel; it loosened a bit more. “How can you never know what might happen?” Tom inquired, staring out the window with Josh, his hair still dripping from the bath. He probably didn't even completely dry his back or legs, Josh thought remembering what it used to be like living with Tom.
“I imagined myself at the end of the world.”
“What? Like in that pirates movie?”
Josh turned and tilted his head up to meet Tom’s eyes. He could see Tom's stubble already beginning to grow back around his neck, his rectangular jaw, his scar on the corner of his right eyebrow from when he used to have an ear piercing. Tom always wanted a piercing or a tattoo, but while they dated Josh never let him until Tom’s 28th birthday; the birthday before they broke up. The hole never completely disappeared. It was faint, fragile, and pink.
“No,” josh disagreed, “that wasn’t the end. There is nothing at the end. It’s everything.”
“You always have a way of distancing me, don’t you?” Tom challenged back. He put his damp arms around Josh and squeezed, as if bringing him closer. He smelled of hotel anti-deodorant.
Josh looked back out the window. There were some big, black birds perched on the electrical wires leading to the hotel. Or away. Down towards the town and over the trees. The electrical current had a straight road until just after the tree line--before the town—where it then collided with other wires at the steel skeleton tower. Josh thought the current untraceable after that collision.
“Look outside,” Josh insisted.
“I already am.”
“What do you see?”
“The same thing you see.” “Do you?” “Why wouldn’t I? Aren’t my eyes as good as yours?” He joked, as if playing this part before.
“Well, you do find me attractive,” Josh returned, smiling and half serious.
Tom kissed his ear. “You are beautiful. You know that.”
“Let me tell you what I see,” Josh continued, as if he didn’t feel Tom’s cool breath—he must’ve just brushed his teeth, Josh thought—flow down his ear, his neck, his spine. Is this what Sherry felt?
Tom turned his eyes back out the window, wanting.
Josh reached out gesturing as he described what he saw, as if he was painting the picture with his hand:
“I see clouds shifting off into the horizon, shrinking proportionally like in a perspective painting. I see trees, slender trees, the color of cracked dirt in the front line and then an endless row of heads, green spikes, that reach further and further down towards the town almost as if they get shorter the further back I look. As if they are all marching towards the same end--one end—to the town, and I see them meeting into a point well beyond my vision; a dot; a speck; an atom; a nothing. But an everything. I see all this, and I see none of it.” His hand motioned as if an unsatisfied artist tearing down the canvas. “There are no trees. There is no town. There are no shapes. There are no colors. There is no dot. Is that what you see?”
Josh could feel Tom’s fingers slide across the hair below his belly button underneath the clasp of his towel. His fingertips tickled a bit as they played with Josh’s hair. Such strong hands, he thought.
“You think too much,” Tom replied. “I see what you see and always will. You just like to cover it up.”
Josh half-smiled and put down his thermos on the windowsill. Tom pulled Josh in closer. Such strength. This is why, Josh thought, he had fallen in love with him: his cutting skin, his shaped muscles, his unmoving will. Would Sherry have fallen in love with Tom had they met? The towel fell.
“I wasn’t thinking at all.”
Tom’s lips pressed against his shoulders. So strong. He saw the birds fly past the window, cheering for their leader to keep up the pace, to keep up his strength. Where are they going?
“Tom,” Josh whispered as he leaned his head back to look at him in the eyes, “how much do you love me?”
“To nothing and back.”
“I'm serious,” he said after the kiss. “What would you do for me?”
“For you?” He paused. “Or to you?”
Josh sunk away from his response. Tom would never understand.
“Ahhh,” Tom reached to Josh's far, smooth cheek and gently pulled his face back to his, “don't be like that. I would do everything.”
“Would you die for me?”
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