Blackouts

by Justin Torres

“Take courage. Think of Lot’s wife, leaving Sodom. How she dared to turned back.” “Wasn’t she turned into a pillar of salt?” “You don’t think she knew that would happen? She’d heard God’s warning. Nene, she looked anyway.” “Why?” “Well, what do you think she saw?” “Suffering? The fires. The wrath of angels.” “And how awesome the destruction. No? From a certain distance, the catastrophic must be indistinguishable from the sublime.”

Everywhere in our apartment are plants, thriving. This, too, infuriates me—and when Liam instructs me not to come home that night, when he tells me to come by the next day, while he’s at work, and remove all my shit and never come home again, I think of those plants, of a space in the world without them. But the truth is there was a time when we both believed in the sunny rehabilitative force of his goodness.

The sensation of my hand in another man’s sends me down, and I drift, recalling flashes of desperate groping, straddling, an older man who took my cock into his mouth in the back of an empty bus, a man who fucked me on the floor of his closet—but I feel certain that, outside of Liam, I’ve never held any other grown man’s hand. At least not since I was a child, with my father, and then comes the image that begins the dream memory: a carnival, only on the ocean floor. I swim down through the dark water to reach it. A Ferris wheel turns in the night, rim and spokes lined with glowing bulbs, red and yellow and blue, and there at the base stand child and father, bathed in the softly pulsing colors. The father pulls the child through the crowd; the state fair. The air smells of burnt sugar; faces press in from all sides; the jangle of ragtime blares out from the rides. The child squeezes his father’s hand a little tighter, and the father automatically turns back and looks down, as if the child had tapped him on the shoulder, or as if the father were a puppet and the boy pulled his string. For some reason, the discovery of this form of silent communication between himself and his father delights him, and so he begins playing a little experiment, every now and then giving a little squeeze, as if he were startled and in search of comfort, and sure enough, each time the father turns his face, looks down at the boy with slight concern, until finally he snaps, What is it? What’s the p...