Stay

John Bump
11/21/96

He knelt in front of me, his head down as if he were looking at the ground, and he reached out towards me, with his hand, to touch my foot. "No," I said. He jerked his hand back. "What do you want me to do?" he whispered. I was shaking. We'd played some games before but never anything like this. I didn't know what to do, what to tell him. He'd been through this many times before, with other people; he'd told me about it in delicate detail. But now it was different. Now it was me. Us. I touched his face lightly, touched the blindfold with my fingertips, and he leaned towards me. Then I spit on him, spit on his forehead, and he shivered. "I love you," he said. That was all.
We drove to the party late that night, after I got off work. I wanted to stay home with him, talk, touch, watch TV, but I knew he wanted to go, to show off his new girlfriend. He sat beside me, with his hands clasped in his lap, looking at the dashboard of my Escort. The dials glowed in the darkness all greens and reds, and his hands were almost the same color as the tan of the seats, of the rough fabric on the doors, around the black speaker grilles. His fingernails were all covered in tiny white spots, in the material of the nails themselves. We stopped in front of the building, in the parking lot, out a little ways from the rest of the cars. He sat wordlessly. I got out, went around the car, running my fingers across the hood, and opened the door for him. He looked up at me. "You may get out," I said. He stretched, leaned under the automatic seatbelt, and stood, holding the doorframe with one hand. His dark hair was cut to all one length, like a bowl haircut but longer, and when he leaned forward it swung in front of his face, hiding his eyes and nose. I knew he could see out through it, but I couldn't see in. When we walked up to the door of the apartment, he walked one step behind me, the whole way. At the door, people waved, said, "Hi, Keith," and he looked up and smiled, flashing teeth at them. I didn't know anyone, but they came over to me, talked to me, while they looked at him, then at me, then back at him. A tall, thin woman wearing a black silk shirt and black lipstick walked up to me and touched my face, ran her fingers across my cheek, and introduced herself as Leanne, although I later found out that she spelled it 'Lyane'. She had nails painted a burgundy color. She stood there, talked to Keith, and touched my shoulder; I suppressed shivers every time she did that. A lot of people touched me, but no one touched Keith or even came close to him all evening, and no one asked me my name. When I sat down in a large stuffed chair, draped in a purple velour dropcloth, he sat on the floor beside my right foot. We'd only known each other for a couple of weeks, but he already knew what I liked to drink. He'd stand and go mix my drinks for me, part Coke and part orange juice, with lots of rum, and he'd walk back, sit down at my feet, and hold my glass for me while people talked to me. The glass was a heavy cut crystal goblet, unlike anything I owned. One man came over to talk to me, specifically; he didn't seem to know Keith. His forearms were masses of tiny red dots, little scabs. He kept scratching at them, and laughing a lot at the things he said. He talked about working in a lab, taking care of rats for psychiatry experiments, and he left after a fairly short time. When I got tired, I stood up to go and Keith stood up beside me. We walked back to the car, but there was more rum in those drinks than I'd realized, so I decided we should walk back home. We went down by the lake shore, and walked across the sand, north, towards where I lived. The alewives had died again, in the annual spring tradition, and the lake water was silver with their little floating bodies in the flashing moonlight, and huge ships moved slowly out there in the darkness, their lights looking like floating cities of yellow and orange above the mass of tiny silver flickers stretching far out towards the horizon. Keith rarely talked even when I spoke to him, anymore, but suddenly he started speaking. He told me about lampreys, that lived in the water, and how he'd go swimming in Lake Erie and see them winding around like eels in the water below him. "They're huge," he said. "They are as long as your arm, and they're brown, like old leather but harder, and they don't have jaws. They just have a huge round hole in their faces, ringed with teeth." He kicked a stick down the shore to where the sand was damp, and continued. "When they bite you, they suck out your guts. Or at least they do that to perch. I don't think they are big enough to hurt a person, but they'd leave an interesting scar," he said. "They suck out the entire intestinal system of the perch, through its chest, and then they detach and swim away, leaving the fish alive, to slowly starve." He was quiet for a moment, and then he said, more slowly, "leaving the fish alive." I reached out to hold his hand, but he avoided my touch and began to walk behind me again, with his head down.