confession to daniel based in 1970s, san francisco. continued.
“ sure, ” he says. “ if you are having one. ” i pour whisky. one glass. he doesn’t notice. his shoulders relax. he starts talking again ——— about the castro, about a man he met once who promised him a job, about sleeping on a couch that isn’t his anymore. his voice has that desperate tremor of someone trying to stay alive through storytelling. i listen. always do. the stories keep them still. when i touch his hand, he flinches, then doesn’t. the warmth surprises me. his pulse, rapid, foolish. he smells of laundry soap and beer, of iron and sugar. of youth bruising itself against the world.
“ you live here alone? ” he asks.
“ yes. ” a lie, my long term partner is the owner.
“ doesn’t it get lonely ? ”
“ frequently. ” not a lie. he looks at me then, really looks. the kind of gaze that asks for something he can’t name. “ i could stay, ” he offers. i get closer, and he lets me. his heartbeat climbs. i could count the seconds in it. the room shrinks, all air swallowed by the sound of it. “ don’t be afraid, ” i whisper. the human instinct of knowing when you are trapped. he exhales, soft, surrendering. i can feel the tremor in his throat before my lips find it. his skin tastes of whisky and city sweat. then salt. the pulse breaks under my mouth. he shudders once. hands grasp, then fall. his blood blooms slow, thick with youth and disappointment. i drink until mercy finds me. when i pull away, his head tilts gently against the couch, eyes half—open as if he’s only fallen asleep. i wipe his mouth, mine. straighten his collar. in the window’s reflection, the city keeps pulsing. i light a cigarette, sit beside the body, and let the smoke fill the room. then i wait for house—keeping to arrive.
confession to daniel based in 1970s, san francisco.
the bar hums low, full of cigarette fog and cheap disco. mirrors on every wall multiply the loneliness, glinting with the movement of boys who all look like they’ve been waiting too long to be seen. he sits at the far end of the counter. thin, a little desperate. hair slicked back with too much pomade, collar too wide, sleeves too tight. his hand trembles when he lifts his drink. i can smell the gin before i see the glass. he glances up, notices me watching. looks away too quickly. i wait. they always come back to the gaze that doesn’t flinch. when he does, i smile just enough to soften it. he takes the bait. “ can i buy you something ? ” he asks, voice hoarse from smoke and nerves. “ you already did, ” i say, sliding his untouched drink toward me. he laughs ——— surprised, relieved. i listen to him talk. about moving here from fresno, about looking for something better. about how expensive rent is, how his boss at the diner keeps staring too long when he bends over the counter. every word a small confession dressed up as conversation. his loneliness is loud. my hunger is louder. i tell him he has kind eyes. he doesn’t. i hate them. they remind me of something from my past and they’re frightened, but i say it anyway. when he asks where i live, i tell him nob hill. when he says he’s never been, i offer to show him the view. outside, the fog has swallowed the city whole. streetlamps burn. he walks beside me, his jacket too thin for the cold. “ do you do this often ? ” he asks. i ignore it, then i think about telling him the truth. that i pick up ghosts, not strangers. that i feed on men who won’t be missed even in the morning. instead, i say, “ only when I’m lonely. ” he nods like he understands. i suppose he might. vampiric hunger as a metaphor for queerness, etc. the fog follows us home. it curls at my ankles as i open the door, licks the marble threshold before slipping back into the night. he hesitates in the doorway ——— the way they all do. the hallway’s too clean, the air too still. my apartment smells faintly of old smoke, a mix of past lives and perfume. he doesn’t know what to do with quiet that doesn’t hum. “ nice place, ” he says. “ it’s rented, ” i lie. he sets his jacket on the arm of the couch. the lining is torn, the color worn out —— a thrift store relic trying to pass as suede. he smooths his hair in the reflection of the window. the city lights behind him shimmer in the glass, haloing him in sodium gold. “ you want another drink ? ” i ask.
wind cut through canal st, and the city howled like an organ with all its pipes ripped out. believe me, i would know. charity hospital was a dark cathedral that week. a place to serve the poor, as you would think all hospitals would be —— non, america, the land of the greedy. the corridors were hot, stairwells sticky with condensation, generators and the ill creating a cacophony of coughs within the silence that very few experience in modern times. i was used to the lack of power, the silence that swallows you when there is nothing to break it. iv bags swung like votives, orderlies fanned patients with clipboards. an air of desperation clung to the humidity. helicopters slashed through the sky, landing exclusively at the hospital next door, lifting the fortunate ones, leaving charity’s patients to rot ‘neath dead fluorescents and dwindling air. the unfairness was palpable, bitter as pennies.
felix was there with his mother. a dedicated charge nurse. the type of woman who could command a room by lowering her voice rather than raising. she shoved a bottle of water to him, gaze flicking down to reassure herself that he had his security issued gun. “ i have to make another round. go. find your brother and sister while it’s light.” it’s a bitter request, but it must be done. the stairwell swallowed her back into triage chants and the tinny scrape of battery radios. there were rumors that evacuations had been paused after reports of gunfire in the neighborhood, and everyone had started speaking in whispers, as if noise could draw catastrophe closer.
outside, the city had drowned and gone still. the water on conti street lapped at the porches and windows, urging debris along with every surge. the air smelled of river and rot, maybe something electrical. my beloved city was shorting out like a bad electronic. i was heartbroken. the sun had set and i crawled up and out onto the roof of a house two blocks from my own. it floated away. i listened to everything. i could not stop it. the slosh of the overwhleming amount of water, the wails from somewhere unseen, the last breaths of others, gunshots, radios crackling as they were re—adjusted, the low groan of the wind carving itself through the holes in the city. the city was dying right under me. her bones, veins, breath . . . and i, with all of my centuries, with all of my prowess, could do very little. a particular agony to live so long you learn the boundaries of your reach. i wanted to leap from window to window, swallow every one i could with my arms. mon dieu, i would’ve swallowed all of the water if i thought i could’ve. i just listened to it all. the music of my city’s undoing. i swore to myself, and to the night, that she would rise again and i alongside her.
i began to hear a specific beat —— a heart too determined to slow. from this beat, i could visualize something. my interest piqued, and i leapt from the roof. i started following it once it was closer, off of burgundy street. that is my curse. the ones who walk into dangerous storms glow to me like moths to flame. he was in his mid—twenties, rain cutting clean lines into the grime that covered him, hands raw from carrying supplies. he called their names. one soft, one hoarse. i assumed he was making his way to a house on the street to rescue the two young children that i was in his mind. i was positively enamored. he was pale from exhaustion, his eyes flickered to every sound like a scared animal. when he saw me, he flinched —— i must have looked like the storm itself had sent me. “ i can help, ” my voice cut through the howl of the wind. “ come. ” and he did, out into the black water, toward whatever help i could offer. he didn’t question that i knew which house, or how i could move a refrigerator with one arm to release his siblings from their hiding place, or how i could hold both and help us all through the water. his relief felt like heaven to me, and i yearned for more of it. he mentioned that they had relatives whose home would be above the floodline, that they’d be safe there, and i made it my mission to get them there. i cleared their path —— clearing obstacles, pushing doors, threatening whoever approached us. i felt like a mother again. once the siblings were tucked away and safe, i left cash with them and a promise that i would return. i expected felix to stay, but he wanted to go back to charity. of course. the hospital needed bodies to carry bodies; water for the ward; ice that no longer existed. but by then the city’s pulse was erratic. evacuations lurched and stuttered, and the heat inside the hospitals cooked time until hours stretched thin and strange. decisions turned moral and terrible in places where power and water had gone, where triage became a new and brutal language.
“ come with me, ” i told him finally, when the sun started to threaten the sky and the birdsong began its earliest rendition. “ just for a few hours. you need sleep, and so do i. ” we took to a dry floor in a building off of dumaine. candles, bottled water, and a pallet. he didn’t mind the coffin. it made sense to him at the time. i told him stories to distract him from the sounds of generators that would not start —— of wolves, winter, stages, paris in burning velvet, and new orleans in sopping silk. the more i spoke, the more he began to see what i was. he did not care.
he asked nothing out loud. he just watched me through the curls of candlelight and tried to reconcile how the woman before him who lifted a refrigerator one—handed was the same who tucked a blanket around him and smoothed his hair.
days spooled into weeks. we carried supplies, we stood on the roofs at night and counted the helicopters, cursed when they veered away.
when the streets finally stopped steaming and the smell of the river loosened its grip, he came with me to the same quiet room where i’d first laid him down. i did not make a grand speech. I told him what it meant: the end of hunger, and the beginning of other hungers; a life without storms, and a life inside them forever. he thought of his mother’s hands steadying a syringe by flashlight. he thought of the iv bags swinging like votives, the dead fluorescent lights, the smell of decay, the bodies in the chapel of charity. he thought of his brother asleep under a stranger’s quilt. he thought of the way the city’s heart had stuttered and how he had kept moving anyway.
he nodded.
the dark gift is never merciful, but it can be tender. i made it so. his last human breath left him like a secret. his first immortal breath came back like a vow. and the city —— ruined, radiant, unforgivable —— sounded again like music, because he was there to hear it with me.
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