Blackouts

by Justin Torres

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...