I’m on the phone with the roommate who’s talking about my son, but nothing he says makes sense. What he’s telling me is shocking, though, and I interrupt him, asking him to repeat himself. In the background, a kettle screams—or is it a siren?

“Mr. Horvath, are you there?” he asks. 

But I'm sprawled on the grimy orange shag carpet, doing push-ups—my heart buzzing like a faulty socket. After twenty, I rise, trembling, and jog in place while he says, "Hello, hello. Are you there, Mr. Horvath?" 

I dash to the hall closet, grab the vacuum, and time myself: eleven seconds flat. Not bad. 

“Yeah, I’m here,” I say, but am I? 

I plug in the vacuum, and my thoughts drift to the new sander in the basement. I bought it yesterday at Home Depot, helped by a boy who looked a lot like Micah. I know I should ask the roommate how my son bled to death, but the question chokes on my lips, and I don’t. 

“I’ll book a flight," I say as I hang up, realizing I never got his name.

 

When Rita arrives with dinner—spinach lasagna, salad, and garlic bread—I'm curled up on the couch, half-asleep. 

"Jesus, David, I've been calling you all afternoon," she says from the kitchen. 

I don't move; my mind won't cooperate with my body. I feel like crying, but nothing comes out. I haven't cried in years—not for my parents' accident, my sister's death, or losing Micah's mother. The only tears I've shed were when I held Micah moments after his birth.

 

“David, are you okay?” Rita asks, her voice filled with familiar concern. 

Smoke from her menthol cigarette settles everywhere. I've told her not to smoke in the house, but I don't care now. Eventually, I awaken to find a plate of lasagna on the coffee table and a note asking if this is how the rest of her life with me will be. Starving, I devour the food, then rush to the bathroom to vomit—everything, including the toilet, needs a thorough scrubbing.

 

TRUST YOUR GUT.

IT’S THE ONLY GUT YOU GOT.

JOIN GOLIATH GYM—AND GUT IN SHAPE.

 

It’s one of the many billboards I notice on my drive to the airport. I own Goliath Gym in Columbus, Ohio, where I'm recognized thanks to frequent ads featuring my son, Micah, and me lifting weights. Once chubby, now lean and muscular, Micah credits the gym for his transformation. “And you, too, Dad,” he says, beaming at me. 

Creating that commercial was a financial stretch, but it significantly boosted membership. However, the business has struggled over the years against the encroachment of larger chains like Gold's and Crunch. I’m feeling the squeeze and being pushed out of a company that has seen me through good times and bad hurts my heart, but it hurts Micah’s even more. I don’t know what will save us. It’s as elusive as my son’s life. 

 

While I wait for Rita, I poke around the books and magazines in the airport's gift shop. And there is Micah on the cover of Playgirl, his hairless (hairless?) stomach muscles hard as enamel, his smiling face more handsome than mine ever was. He warned me about the spread, but warnings are nothing. I see his mother in his face, in the angles and fine indentations about his mouth: the thick, fluttering eyelashes, the absent, brown eyes. For a moment, I’m at his first Little League game, when he missed every single pitch, and the other boys on the team corralled him, drawing a menacing circle tighter and closer. I watched this happen from the fence, with my fingers clenched in the wire. On our ride home, I said nothing to take the wicked sting out of his shame. 

“Would you like a bag, sir?” the clerk asks.

“That’s my son,” I say, pointing, convinced this has some meaning. 

The clerk, a fine-looking young man, tents his dark brows and nods, not quite believing me as I slide Micah away, pixel by pixel, into the sack—first his feet, then his torso, and then his sweaty face until every inch of him is concealed.

 

Several months ago, I met Rita in the basement of Grace Church during a meeting of SOCAL (Supporters of Children with Alternative Lifestyles). My wife had been attending for years since our son Micah came out as homosexual. I said, “This doesn’t change how I feel about you,” but I secretly prayed he would come home to tell us otherwise. My wife went to SOCAL alone because I couldn’t stand all the whining, the woe-is-me, the blaming. It seemed my wife couldn’t commiserate enough with the other parents. I didn’t see the problem. “So, our son’s gay. So what?” I told her every time she asked if I wanted to go. 

Most of those people like to talk but never say anything, and I did that thing with my hand she hated. Talk, talk, talk. 

“He’s your son, too, David,” she’d say, disappointed. 

After she moved out, I thought about joining a group for divorcés. But all those weepy men? Instead, I showed up at SOCAL one evening. I suppose it was my way of taking up some memory of marriage after twenty-two years. And who could blame me for wanting some company?

At the time, Micah was living in Manhattan. Although we spoke often enough, once every couple of weeks, our relationship felt strangely formal, as if we were meeting again after a prolonged absence. I don’t believe Micah didn’t want to talk to me, but after the divorce, something between us shifted like the quick movement of a storm. And with it came a wall of rain, further blurring him to me. It made me feel as if I’d done something dreadful. And hadn’t I?

 That first evening, I sat in the circle with all the other parents, some married, most divorced. And there was Rita, outspoken and boisterous, saying things like, “We don’t just need to tolerate our kids. We need to accept them for who they are! Gay, HIV positive, and all!”

Rita’s son, Clark, had been beaten in an alley outside a bar in downtown Columbus. He sat beside his mother that night, sullen and listless, a moody boy with the same intrepid posture, flat back, and rigid shoulders. Bruises ringed his silver-blue eyes. He was missing a tooth. It didn’t seem likely that he’d been the victim of what Rita called a hate crime. He was big and burly at six feet three, with large, pan-sized hands and a deep, commanding voice. I wondered then how a man like Clark had been ambushed. What sort of man was he? 

I thought of Micah, just as tall but less formidable. Could something like this have happened to him? Would he have put himself in such danger? Indeed, Clark had deserved this flogging for parking in a deserted alley and walking to his car alone at three in the morning. My son was too clever for that, I found myself saying, and before I could shut my mouth, I’d made enemies with just about everyone, including Rita.

“What does his sexuality have to do with it?” she asked me from across the circle. “I’ll tell you, Mr. Newcomer. It has EVERYTHING to do with EVERYTHING. So next time, think before you fucking speak.”

  

Ten minutes up into that soaring blue, we hit turbulence, during which Rita clutches my arm, her nails leaving faint grooves behind.

“Talk to me, David,” she says. “Tell me about Micah.”

 So, I tell her about my son: his strenuous birth, the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck, the time he was three and fell off my shoulders, about rushing him to the hospital, his head gushing blood. I tell her about when he was nine and found his mother and me playing used-car salesman/prospective buyer naked in the garage. The camping out on our bedroom floor from ages eleven to thirteen, after I’d mistakenly taken him to see Invasion of the Body Snatchers (at his repeated request, because, as he said, “I like being scared, Dad.”). The first time he kissed a girl, Dianne Spence, behind the tool shed in our backyard, the last time he kissed me goodnight, at fifteen. The years of straight A’s, the battles with his weight, thin to fat and back again, the trouble finding him suitable clothes. The bullying. The bulimia.

I tell Rita about Micah, and as I do, he transforms from my son into more of a boy, a boarder who lived in my house, ate my food, and slept in the brass bed I bought him for his twelfth birthday. He becomes the detached arms, words, and face of any stranger who has made little or no impression in the room—a collection of details at once too real and vague to make sense to me. As we get closer to landing in New York, I realize something: I can’t separate the moments of my son’s childhood from my own. 

 

Up in the air, I forget Rita is a sparkling new addition to my life—we haven’t been together that long—and forget Micah is gone, and there will be no funeral, not even a remembrance. In a way, I’m glad about it. I’m saved from having to say a few words about my son.  

Here is Queens, and there is Manhattan, the skyline, buildings, and traffic. Why does anyone willingly choose to live in such a place? Why, Micah? His choices still stymie me.

In the taxi, Rita smokes, her fingers trembling. She sits with her knees pressed to her chest and her face locked to the slightly open window. “Second-hand smoke kills, too,” I say softly as we drift away from LaGuardia. I’m trying patience and levity. Things look different on the ground, colored gray with the failing afternoon light. My hands are liver-spotted, and my skin is cragged like a tree trunk. In the rearview mirror, I catch my face, the creases of time in my forehead and around my eyes. I’m aging at an alarming rate in the backseat. I think about Micah, half my age, gone and never coming back, and then about all the mysteries and secrets he kept in his skin, the bones of his skeleton. 

It is Saturday afternoon, and the traffic is heavy. Even so, we get to the Chelsea Lodge Hotel on W. 20th Street at remarkable speed, so our cab driver claims. Rita leans in and whispers, “Tip him well,” kissing me on the cheek, and for a moment, everything is as it should be, except we aren’t in the city on one of our weekend excursions. We’re here to collect and carry away my son’s possessions.

Once in the room, Rita uses the bathroom while I call the roommate. As I dial, I count the years they’ve been living together. One, three, four—he answers on the third ring, says, “Are you at the hotel already, Mr. Horvath? I hope you like it.”

“Very historic,” I say, although one hotel room is like any other. “It’s great. Terrific.”

“I guess you’d like to come by—” he says and pauses. “To—well, I’m not sure. I got some boxes and trash bags.” 

His voice has magnificent strength, sorrow, and an unexpected softness, which throws me off. So different from that other voice, the voice on the phone yesterday, with its finality and detachment, as if he’d made the call a million times already. Suddenly, it strikes me that he might be someone more to Micah than simply a roommate. Not that it matters because it doesn’t. Not really. But I have to know. The details have always eluded me; I want them boxed up, too. 

“You and my son were more than roommates, correct?” I ask as Rita flushes the toilet and opens the door to the bathroom. 

She sighs and lights a cigarette, the room filling with her. She hangs behind me, her breasts pressed against my lower back. I feel discomfit swell and deflate inside me, something white-hot and red-centered. “I loved Micah,” he says, rattling off their address. “You’re very close, by the way. It shouldn’t take you long.”

“What did you think, David? Try brushing up on your euphemisms,” Rita says, full of chutzpah after I hang up, dazed. “I mean, talk about the Dark Ages.”

 

As we walk from the hotel to W. 22nd Street, hordes of young, clean-cut, good-looking men in tank tops and shorts stroll past, although it’s far too cold for such clothing. They stand singly and in pairs, glancing first at my crotch and then lingering on my body, muscular if not more so than most of them, than most men my age. I detect wonder and confusion in their eyes: Is he one of us? For a moment, I lose myself, as Micah must have lost himself in this other world without women or their hearth-and-home influences. With Rita beside me, I feel the slow, renewed displeasure of where we are and why.   

“Some of them have over two thousand different sexual partners,” she once told me on the way home from our meetings. “Some have even more. It’s the same, gay or straight. Men are men.” 

But wasn’t it different? Isn’t it? 

I later learned that Rita spoke from experience: her son, Clark, contracted HIV in the mid-90s. He told her a condom had broken. But how could she know for sure? I wanted to tell her that we only have what our children share with us, and if they’re truly ours, they’ll lie as we did: to maintain our distorted vision of them and ourselves.

And then suddenly, I stop, ashamed, and grab Rita’s hand. I kiss her, displaying an unusual affection for a man who dislikes that sort of fanfare, such unnecessary, albeit sweet, intimacy. 

“Are you all right?” she says, tightening her grip. 

I want to tell her I’m not ready, that I have never been prepared for this, that I should outlive my offspring, and that I’m scared because I see Micah everywhere. I think of the magazine stuffed deep inside my carry-on and want to tell her about this and more about Micah, the adult he became. But I don’t know what kind of adult he became. 

“Yeah,” I say. “Just fine,” though my muscles spasm as the lie takes hold.

 

So, the facts: the roommate, Henry, and Micah were indeed a couple. I find pictures of them on Micah’s desk. I search the drawers, but there are only bank statements, computer cables, iPhone paraphernalia, letters from his mother, and the miscellany of any life. The bottom-most drawer is locked, which doesn’t surprise me. As a boy, Micah kept a metal lock box in his closet full of bits of quartz, a BB gun he wasn’t supposed to have, a slingshot, broken and irreparable, and an arrowhead. I know this only because I discovered the key. What surprises me is how Micah hid things even from Henry. And the key: If I find it, what then? What nasty secrets will I discover? 

Henry and Rita’s voices rise and fall through the closed door as I search the room further. There isn’t much here. A dusty and worn throw rug, an old, framed poster of The Big Sleep, and a trophy from 1976, which he won for second place in the Bicycle Rodeo at Eagleton Elementary. Micah changed drastically after winning that trophy. His tantrums increased in size and pitch, he grew sullen and irascible for no apparent reason, and he put on more weight. My wife wanted to take him to a child psychiatrist, but I wouldn’t hear of it. 

“We can handle him,” I said. “This isn’t leaving the house.” 

I often relate Micah’s change to that trophy because nothing went well for him after that. I imagine he must’ve been under the spell of winning, that rush of adrenaline that comes from good luck. We can only hide behind our trophies for so long before they are put on the shelf and forgotten. And that’s precisely what happened: I put Micah’s shiny trophy on the mantelpiece and returned to my life. 

 I dump the dusty trophy in the box and wonder what I am doing here, sniffing around his room like a jealous wife rifling through her husband’s desk for love letters. What do I expect to find? There is greed and hunger in the process, something all too natural. I try the locked drawer again. Locks are something else we had in common. 

When Rita knocks and steps into the room, I’m on the floor, my eyes moist and my nose twitching with dust. 

“Henry wants to take us to dinner. Are you hungry?” she asks.

I turn my eyes to her, and suddenly, I miss Micah more than ever. I want him back. I want that day back, I think, and my anger swells until my fingers clench into fists and then uncurl, spread out, absently attacking the rug. I want my son back, I’m shouting, but Rita can’t hear me because my lips don’t move. 

“Yes, we’d love to,” Rita says. “David just needs another minute.”

 

At Viceroy, on the corner of W. 18th Street and Eighth Avenue, we wait outside until our table is ready. As we stand there, Rita and Henry discuss the rise of HIV infection across the country while I drift off, watching the men parade up and down, jolly and, dare I say it, gay. Sometimes, they are with women, but mostly, they are not. They gather around us in clusters of three, five, and seven. I can’t help but wonder who they are, this onslaught of men who resemble one another, from the shape of their facial hair to the precise style of their Nikes. None of them is overweight or out of shape. An army, I think, and some are even wearing fatigues. 

Henry spies me staring and rolls his eyes. Leaning into me, he whispers, “The Stepford husbands,” an inside joke. 

One of the men, Frank, bald with earrings and a thick mustache, fifty years old if a day, approaches Henry and says, “Chuck will be in Nova Scotia for Micah’s bon voyage, so he can’t make the memorial in East Hampton, but rest assured I certainly will. We all will.” With this, he motions to the spectral army roaming up and down Eighth Avenue. 

As Henry thanks Frank, Rita draws my hand into hers and squeezes. It’s a friendly squeeze, but something else lives in it: lusty loneliness and determination to see us through. I will underestimate Rita for as long as we’re together.

Henry turns to me, lower lip slightly rouged, and says, “I forgot to mention…” but before he can finish, Frank interrupts him. “Chuck and I are just horrified about what happened to Micah. You may have a lawsuit on your hands.” He slides a business card to my son’s roommate. “Call me,” and then, with a subtle nod to Rita and me, he turns back to his friends. 

 

Our waiter brings out the food, and I look down at my plate, the curried mango chicken, my stomach clenching. Rita dabs her burger with ketchup, glances at me, and says, “That looks yummy, David,” as if she’s speaking to a child. 

With methodical care, Henry chews each bite of his blackened redfish. The dangerous thread of bones, the undetected remains left in the fillet. I make it a practice never to eat fish I haven’t caught. I devour my plate of chicken, rice, and mango chutney; it tastes good, the first authentic meal I’ve eaten all day. I’m used to going without food, primarily out of forgetfulness. It’s a funny habit. (“Not funny as in haha, David,” said my wife. “Funny as in weird.”) It’s essential to remain fit, to draw life out to its most conclusive end. 

Swallowing his last bite of fish, Henry says, “Mr. Horvath, there are some things I need to make clear…”

“Maybe later,” Rita interjects, but this is too important to wait until later. Later, I may not be here. Later, I may be hunting. Later.

“Tell me,” I say, resting a hand on Rita’s. She fidgets uncomfortably, and there’s nothing but concern under my touch. I’m glad you’re here, I think. So very glad.

Drawing the napkin from lap to mouth, Henry says, “Micah and I took care of each other, and I think that’s the most important thing. I loved—love—your son, Mr. Horvath.” He pauses. “This is difficult. I don’t know how much you know.” Another pause. “Micah wanted the liposuction and made appointments and consultations without my knowledge. I couldn’t talk him out of it.” He pauses again and searches the room as if Micah may walk through the doors. He shakes his head in defiance or sadness, but I can’t tell which. “This place can make you crazy if you let it get to you,” he says. I suspect he must mean the men, their gaudy, seductive displays. 

I turn to Rita, whose face is liquid in the restaurant's dim light. 

“Will you both excuse me for a minute?” I ask, rising. More than rising and floating, I am down in the bathroom. The mirror reflects at me this older man's face, with crevasses, a meaty chin, and ill-begotten ears. As I wash my hands, my son slips across my face, a fugitive shadow, and I turn away toward the stalls. 

Slipping into the space, no larger than my closet at home in Columbus, I slide the latch shut. What I’m about to do takes effort, the focus of fire. I think of all the tiny misgivings, childhood aches, and subtle pains. The memories: of that sharp throb below my navel, that compression of breath by some unseen hand, those moments I was convinced of a heart attack—all this before the age of twelve. My father, the physiologist, said: “It’s all in your head, boy.” Was it? And my mother, later, in the darkness of my bedroom, her cool hand on every uncomfortable point. “There,” she’d say and, like some saint, smooth it away. But did she?

I inspect my middle finger over the porcelain bowl, the clean bluish water, and the hint of lemon disinfectant. My sister, Kathleen, showed me the grace of the middle finger and taught me her magic one evening while our parents fought. 

Even now, as I kneel beside the toilet and glide this finger past the uvula to the back of my throat, that moment lives again, briefly, when every ache, sorrow, grief, and disappointment evaporates. It only takes a second. While I disgorge the contents of my stomach, there is an incredible silence, a calm like no other. How beautiful it is to have this much control. 

It isn't easy now not to think of Micah, of that time long ago when he accidentally found me in the bathroom. 

“Are you feeling bad, Daddy?” he said in his pajamas, holding a donut. 

It was a Saturday morning, and in the background, I heard the TV, cartoons, the coyote, and the roadrunner, one in constant pursuit, the other in continuous flight. My wife, Micah’s mother, was doing the breakfast dishes in the kitchen. And there I was, on the tiled floor, throwing up the eggs, toast, and oatmeal. I could’ve been sick. I told myself I was.

“Are you feeling bad, Daddy?” Micah repeated, his face blanching with worry.  “I’ll get Mommy.”

I flushed the toilet. I said, “Yes, daddy’s not feeling too well,” taking my son around the shoulders, perhaps too gruffly. “But let’s not bother Mommy right now. I’ll feel better soon.”

How can I explain to you, Micah, what your father was and still is? I’m not stupid enough to believe that what I do is normal. Or that it won’t someday lead to dire consequences. What I didn’t know then, and what I do now, is how, in that one minor miscalculation—not locking the bathroom door—I think I may have bequeathed something to Micah, something far too heavy for him to hold. I see his face again, as it was that morning, the disapproving lines around his mouth hardening, gravity suddenly made manifest—the mysterious will of a child. 

At the table, Rita sits beside Henry, her wallet out. Pictures of her son, Clark, in front of her: Clark as a boy in the choir and captain of his Little League team, dressed as Joe DiMaggio. I’ve seen these pictures already, and as I sit down, Rita hastily folds up the wallet and replaces it in her purse, saying, “Do you feel like some dessert, David?”

I’m laughing, not at Rita’s question but at how we slide between worlds and the secrets we keep and how, not less than five minutes ago, I was hunched over the toilet bowl. What secret is Rita keeping from me? Because isn’t that the true nature of love, protecting each other from our wickedest parts?

“If we’re going to make that memorial in the morning, I’d like to return to the hotel,” I say.

 

Driving home after that first meeting of SOCAL in the basement of the church, I cursed myself for having gone and swore I’d never return. What did I need with a bunch of malcontented parents? With a guy who turned to me at one point and said, “I’m not surprised your kid ran away.” What did I need from them?

A few days later, the phone rang, and when I answered it, I was startled to find Rita on the other end. 

“I know it’s none of my business, and I’m sure I’ll regret having this conversation later, but I just need some clarification: Are you as backward-ass as you appear?” she asked. 

I couldn’t help laughing, but she remained somber and severe. What could I tell her? I read a book a year, liked to fish, and made a decent living. I hunted deer and wild turkey and had never raised a hand to my wife or child. But I had stirrings I couldn’t explain, strange slants toward violence, judgments before the fact. Damage. Insolvency.

“I recognized you, you know,” she said when we got together later in the week for dinner. “Goliath Gym. I always told Clark, ‘Those two are the most handsome men in the county.’ Clark always agreed.”

“Thank you for the compliment,” I said.

It was the first time I’d been out with a woman since my divorce. I wasn’t sure how to behave, whether to force my charms or let them sit in the back, simmering. I thought of telling Rita about my wife but then thought against it. There would be time for that, I hoped. We were at that age when time sped up, and we glanced at our watches, and it was hours later, not minutes. I was having a damn good time.

“It’s too bad Micah doesn’t live here,” Rita said, grinning. “I think our kids would probably hit it off.”

“I don’t know,” I said, returning the grin. “I haven’t the foggiest.”

 

After a bout of terrible sex, Rita says, “Maybe I should have my saddlebags sucked out.” She is sitting in the rumpled, uncomfortable hotel bed with tiny sweat buttons glistening on her consternated face. “Maybe you’d enjoy fucking me then?” She moves into the bathroom, rippling as if I’ve just dropped a pebble into the center of her. Through the door, she adds, “And maybe I’d enjoy you more if you liked touching me.”

“Rita,” I say, “that’s not it.”

What can I tell her? That the sight of her nakedness doesn’t repel me as much as it reminds me? “What the hell am I doing—with you—acting like Florence Nightingale?” she says, returning, hairbrush in hand. “You. Invited. Me.”

I have no idea what I’ve done. I didn’t call out my ex-wife’s name and didn’t say an unkind word. But I suppose it’s all in what I’m not saying that offends her. 

“I just lost my son, so fuck off,” I say weakly as if this can explain away the last thirty years of my life. I am calm, and in my calm, Rita finds further offense.

“Yes, you did,” she says, softening, climbing into bed. “But you say it like you’re telling me the moon’s out.” She pauses. “I already know the moon’s out, David.” 

I shake my head, lie beside her, and shut off the light. I’m not a talker. I come from that generation of men who had their feelings tailor-made by their parents and country. What is the use of talking about how I feel when nothing is how I feel?

Hours later, I open my eyes to find Rita naked and snoring, her hair bunched around her face. The TV is on, and the large square screen casts a Neptune-blue glow through the room. Ten stories below, the night traffic shoots up and down the avenue. 

In the bathroom, I wash my face in the dark, eyes shut to the eyes in the mirror. I switch off the TV and squat at the foot of the bed, watching Rita sleep. The freckled, mushy skin of her thick arms droops, and a breast pokes out of the sheet, the nipple hard. Cellulite clings to her thighs. Not that long ago, she would’ve been called voluptuous. Today, women like Rita are called plus-sized. 

 If it is possible, the sidewalks are busier than before, buzzing with packs of men, young and not so young, smoking and chattering and showing off. Micah’s world is opening to me again: how he saw it and how it saw him. I think of the SOCAL mothers and fathers, my ex-wife, who will arrive in the morning, and the drive out to East Hampton, where the memorial will take place. Henry arranged it, including our limousine, the flowers, the music, and the catering. 

It was an unexpected announcement, this memorial. Walking from the hotel to Micah’s apartment, I ponder what I will say—the synopsis of my son’s short life. What stories do I have to share with these young men, who seem more like orphans in this unwelcoming world? Where are their fathers, the moral divining rods of a generation? The faces of these boys, younger and younger, pressed up against the sides of the street, trapped in this ghetto. I see Micah everywhere: the sharp lines of his face, the brown-amber eyes tinted green in summer, the cleft chin, the broad curve of his back. 

I buzz Henry; I need information. I want to know what went wrong. I want to hear the story of my son’s life and have Henry tell it. I will not leave until my father’s sense of righteousness has been eased. I am in a slow, ungracious decline. 

The intercom crackles, the lock clicks, and then I’m up the stairs and on the landing. Just as I’m about to knock on the door, a boy brushes past me, and it takes a moment to realize that the boy is Micah. Such sightings after the fact, intentional disappearances, and coincidental vanishings are not unheard of. When you’ve tampered with a body the way I have, it’s common to experience auditory and visual hallucinations. I know this is exactly what’s happening to me from fatigue—both emotional and physical—and the depth of my grief.  

The desk and Henry can wait. 

Light-headed, I race down the stairs after him and back onto the street. My heart feels detached from the rest of me, a shambling, clunky muscle. Micah’s mother used to say I’d never die from a heart attack because I didn’t have one—a heart, that is. This was toward the end when I let her have every gut punch and betrayal. 

He strides quickly down W. 22nd Street, trailing dozens of trios and quartets—a stream of older men in chunky military-style black boots and tight jeans. The younger men, like Micah, sport the latest Nikes and looser-fitting dungarees. Some don baseball caps, and most are clean-shaven. They appear narrow-hipped and well-toned. I imagine that when naked, they would put most women I know to shame. 

 Micah moves swiftly across Ninth Avenue and veers to the right. The wide lanes are filled with taxis and SUVs, with the occasional ambulance, a telltale sign of misfortune. I hurry to keep up with my son, the black streak of his head merging into another tangle before separating smoothly like quicksilver. 

He hastens right again, a toy soldier dressed in shiny black leather. The night air is chilly off the river, and the wind etches the stone caverns and moistens my eyes. Micah pauses in a dark doorway. From my vantage point at the corner, I can almost hear the flint striking his lighter and the effort to ignite the fire. The wind eases, and smoke swirls, an orange eye in the gritty darkness. Behind me, the New Jersey shore dapples the Hudson with artificial light. 

 The crowd fans out like a blooming hydra, a being with a thousand arms and heads, and everyone is packed near a door lit by a single blue bulb. A massive lump of a man, bald and purple as a prune, wields a scepter, its end adorned with a shrunken head. Stringy hair, toothless, grinning. The black door swings wide to swallow an anointed pair of men, gleaming with oil and hard with muscle. Others push and prod at the velvet rope, but the doorman remains unwavering in his stony regality. He selects two young men with bleached eyebrows and pink mohawks from the middle of the crowd. Gawks and sneers rise and fade away. The two punks make their way inside. 

 In a black leather jacket festooned with a billion paperclips, a boy hands out postcards to the same dance club I am trying to enter. It’s called the Ninth Circle. Many cards lie abandoned on the pavement, with oily sneaker treads blotting the solitary image of a man’s ribbed abdominals. If I didn’t see it here before, I see it now—these are their love letters. And Micah, swift and beautiful, is stationed among them but decisively apart. He slides to the rope, which parts and then disappears into the warehouse. 

   

In Grace Church, I learned about the lives of urban gay men who left behind their homes and families for life in New York. I often heard about their spontaneous meetings on the streets, in the subway, and at bars. Rita recommended books, so I explored my son’s life through reading. Public bathrooms with holes carved into the walls, deep-shaded groves of bamboo, an abandoned pavilion—hunting in Prospect and Central Park on bright summer days. The author wrote about their need for danger and the pursuit of beauty. I read everything, including gay magazines, books, and newspapers. As I sat with Rita and Clark, I wondered if things could have turned out differently if I’d told Micah just once, all those years ago, that I liked him—while we fished, played catch, and painted the house. At times, I felt desperate to understand who I was and how I was, while the world seemed to choke off that part of me that could’ve saved us.

 

An hour later, I am finally chosen, but before I can enter, the doorman asks me if I have abandoned all hope. 

“Say it,” he commands.

“Yes, okay,” I say, and I do, and then he steps aside to let me pass.

I move through the shrouded darkness of the hall toward a line that ends at a ticket booth. A tall, slender woman with just one false eyelash perches behind the Plexiglas window. $25 later, I find myself waiting in another line—the coat check. There, men strip down to nothing: shorts, underwear, or even less. All of them, regardless of age, remove their shirts to showcase the personal diaries of their bodies. The eerie machinations of vanity. Inhuman bodies. Everyone is hairless, tattooed, and bronzed under the lights. 

 Another oblong corridor and then the main chamber, a city block long and two stories high. The music punches through me, rattling my rib cage and the cartilage of my nose. I’m not the only one dressed, but I feel naked and scrutinized. 

As I make my way around the perimeter, the heat intensifies, and I’m wet almost instantly—the tropical warmth of jet streams formed by sweat, breath, and the hot, dancing bodies. A few men lounge on large couches, sipping pink drinks from frosted martini glasses. I slip away from them, their squeaky laughter piercing above the deep bass of the house music. (We play similar music at Goliath.) 

A vast, mirrored ball reflects odd rosettes of colored light—yellow, green, blue, orange, red—onto the waxy wooden floor. Slowly, it makes sense: I am standing in an old roller-skating rink—the dance floor shaped like a gaping mouth, the lips the railing. In the center of it all, I spot Micah, his shirt hanging off a belt loop, his body a memory of my own. 

I think about his mother and how she danced around the house when she believed she was alone. I think of Rita, asleep in the hotel, and how much I long to be with her. Micah spins and swirls, finding the nearest person, and presses himself against them. They are unmatched in size and height; Micah is far too tall, while this stranger is far too broad. Yet they dance with even, graceful gaits, the curves and angles of their bodies finding balance in one another. When they pivot, there is Henry, the roommate, though this seems incredibly unlikely, and I laugh. My stomach feels hollow. Anything can happen here.

As the song merges and blends, Henry, his pupils big, black, and dilated, unravels from Micah and heads toward the bar. There is no kiss, no intimacy left between them; they’ve burned it all off in the fury of the dance. Micah rebounds immediately, already in the arms of another, and their circle closes. The lights go out, and the music shifts abruptly. Some dancers decelerate, and others still race and rock, gyrating to an internal, drug-high glissando. Someone blows a whistle: A calling for what? A warning? 

Arms and hands joust the air, reaching. Here is Micah’s true family, I think, all these men. They paw at my son, his thin musculature, the jeans, his only clothing until he’s finally exposed, the outline of his sex visible through the thin white cotton briefs. Is that ecstasy or panic on his lovely face? Are the hands raised in defense or allure? As I push hurriedly through the dancers, I feel something, a jagged peak rising into a familiar and warm terrain of disgust. Life spins under the spell of lights.  

“Let’s go, Micah,” I say into the wild, febrile air behind him. The recognizable whorl of his big ears, the swirling bristle of dark hairs along its spongy, pink ridge. Several moles line the soft expanse of his upper shoulders, his back smooth and unblemished, with no thick, hairy wings.

Micah pivots around to face me, and his horsy brown eyes are loose and wandering. He sizes me up and down, not like a son but a consumer, gauging produce bins for freshness. He doesn’t recognize me or, if he does, pretends not to. 

“Baby,” he says, inching as close to me as possible. “Dance with us,” he adds, then circles me, grinding into me and bumping my hips. 

“Get dressed, Micah,” I am saying, but the music murders my words. “I’m taking you home.” I pick up his discarded jeans, moist in my fingers, and hold them out. “Put them on.”

I unbutton my shirt, and the men watch me, faces questioning. My body is sleek and firm, the hair on my chest curly and gray. One man reaches out to stroke it, but I disabuse him of the gesture with a quick snap on the wrist. He seems bewildered and enraged, as if I’ve broken some commandment. While I’m wrapping a strangely pliable Micah up in my shirt, Henry returns from the bar, wielding two cocktails, his handsome face deflated and friendly at once.  

He says, “Mr. Horvath?” He thrusts a cocktail at Micah. “What are you—”

“We’re going home,” I tell him, and he nods, backs up and away until he’s nothing more than another body among the dancers.  

 I help Micah into his jeans, one button at a time, in a dimly lit corner near the coat check. “I just got back from backpacking through Europe, and I’m here to tell you, Pops: they have the best clubs by far. Just give me a French disco to drive away all my bad thoughts,” he says. His stony eyes shut for a few seconds, and then he mumbles in some exotic language, maybe Yiddish, although I’m not sure when he learned it. We’ve never been out of the country, but maybe it’s time to go. 

The jeans are secured, his shirt tucked in, and we wait for the girl to bring his coat. I tip her $5, and she says, “Happy Birthday to you, too,” after which I carry my son out of this hell into the morning’s cold electricity.

 

After reading about David and Goliath in Hebrew school, Micah came up with the gym’s name.

“And since you’re David,” he said one night, tucked up in bed, “it just makes sense.” 

Yes, Micah, it made sense back then to call our gym Goliath, as if the world could be divided into men and giants. However, the world on that crisp morning doesn’t seem so simple anymore; it feels far more significant than I could have imagined. I wonder how I confused external and internal forces and how much harder it is to slay the giants when they are our own failed marriages, our trapped and disappointed lives, and the things we learned long ago that have become written.

I lead Micah to the Chelsea Lodge, and on the way, we stop off for coffee, cinnamon rolls, and flowers for Rita. I devour two rolls in the elevator while Micah sips his coffee, black and without sugar, the rouge of his cheeks the surest sign of life. On the third roll, I decide it may be better to save it for later when I’m starving. 

“You keep calling me Michael,” he says, and in the light of the hallway, I see his face clearly at last. A tight approximation, but this boy isn’t mine. 

“Micah,” I say and spell it out. 

“He must be pretty sexy,” the boy says. “I’m Sean from Duluth. Are you just visiting, or do you live here? Lots of people live here, you know,” and then he kisses me on the cheek. “You’re attractive for an older guy.”

My face goes fiery, the rest of me icy and numb. “Thanks,” I say.

When we slip into the room, Rita is still asleep. “Hey, wait a second,” Sean says as I turn and lock the door. Rita awakens and calls out my name. “Yes,” I think, “yes,” and I smell the smoke on my skin for the first time. 

My son is staring up at me on the floor beside the bed. But he’s also at the door, wanting out. He’s everywhere. In the brown paper bag, on the dancefloor, nowhere. Here. In me. And out there, beyond us.    

Rita sits up, speechless. Her breath catches, and before she can speak, I can tell she sees what I saw: this boy’s peculiar resemblance to Micah. Sean walks over to the bed and the magazine. He holds out his hand. Gazing at me, Rita rises and disappears hurriedly into the bathroom. 

Sean picks up the magazine, flips through it, and prattles on about nothing, high. “Hot dude,” he says. 

I hear the shower. 

“Take it,” I say. “It’s yours.”

“Oh, but I thought,” he says. 

“It’s late, and you should be in bed,” I say. At the door, I ask him, “Does your father know?”

The New York sun wrestles through the curtains at six o'clock in the morning. In a few hours, Rita and I will make our way out to Long Island, a beach in East Hampton, where I will tell a group of strangers about my son. Henry will be there to greet us. It’s a friend of a friend who’s housesitting for the photographer who shot Micah, he will tell me, but I won’t care. Medical students will study my son’s organs. A body. A cadaver. They will know his name but not how much his body meant to me.         

“I don’t talk to my father,” he says. “Hey, do you want my cell number or something?” 

After he’s gone, I join Rita in the shower. She’s pressed up against the wall. “Tell me, David,” she says, turning toward me, drooping breasts, paunch of a belly, the scar from her Caesarian. “When did you first kiss a girl? When did you grow hair under your arms? Were you a popular boy? Smart? What did you want to be when you grew up? Tell me who you were. Tell me who you are.”

I picture Micah raising his trophy high above the winner’s circle. I picture him posing on a motorcycle, spread eagle on the hood of a black Mustang convertible. I picture my son’s body, erect penis, and the alien glaze in his eyes. 

Then I grab the soap and lather my body. The smoke washes off my skin, but the other stains do not come off as easily. I have neglected entire areas, forgetting the soles of my feet and the back of my neck, and sometimes I can hardly touch myself. 

“I can’t keep anything down,” I tell her, beginning.