Scott Heim - Mysterious Skin

I’d heard from various people how I could find sex anywhere in New York. Great, I thought, but I also remembered something Christopher Ortega had said months earlier, when I’d detailed my plans to relocate. “Don’t have sex up there,” he’d told me, as if I were spaceshipping to some distant and ominous planet. “Dangerous.”

I figured sex couldn’t be as dangerous as the street where Wendy-and now, where I, too-lived. The apartment sat on the fifth floor of a grungy building on Avenue B. As soon as the sun rose, unemployed women and men perched on the sidewalk and sipped from beer cans in brown paper sacks. Kids chased one another, dodging traffic, screaming sentences in Spanish. The neighborhood drug dealer prowled around, chanting his code words “bodybag, bodybag” to anyone who approached. Try as I might to sleep late, I couldn’t, tossing and turning in the makeshift bed Wendy had set up in one of the three rooms, the street’s seismic chatter squeezing into my ears until I woke.

On the evening after I knew the crabs had gone, I wandered through the West Village. New York’s streets made it seem I’d been dropped into some tricky labyrinth. Corner groceries sold autumn flowers in bundles, a concept completely unfathomable in Kansas. Men traipsed outside clothing stores and drugstores, thrusting flyers into the faces of passersby: “Big sale tonight,” “Ten percent off everything.” I felt the hollow throb of hunger in my stomach, so I stopped at a streetside fruit stand and plunked down three quarters for a carton of shriveled, overripe strawberries.

On West Tenth, I saw the sign for an obviously gay bar called Ninth Circle. Three rough-looking boys gathered in front, lingering under a streetlight as if it were warming them, and they glanced up when I passed. I downed more strawberries and pretended not to notice. Their crotch-forward stances and their sneers made me think, Hustlers, no doubt. They were dressed alike-simple white T-shirts, jeans-and I was dressed like them.

A homeless man, one eye as inert as a dead flounder’s, stopped me and asked if he could “have one or two cherries.” I felt the group of boys staring. I handed the berries to the homeless man, which gave me a strange sort of martyrdom high.

Then I discovered I was being watched by someone else. A fortyish guy approached, the kind with a three-piece suit and briefcase, the kind that blends into whatever crowd he happens to be hurrying through. “Hi,” he said when our eyes met. I said “Hi” back. Three minutes later, I was following him home, eager to smash the glass window of my recent celibacy.

The guy was a lawyer, and he’d piled his apartment’s bookshelves with dictionary-size books on law. An American flag covered an entire bedroom wall. I saluted it. He took my hand away from my forehead and pulled me toward him. His eyes flashed in the darkness. I tossed my clothes into a corner; he folded and stacked his. His dopey basset hound padded in to sit beside the bed, attempting to lick my toes whenever my foot dangled over the edge.

The lawyer talked a lot during sex-standard, impersonal porno chatter I still loved. He unrolled a condom onto my dick, then maneuvered his body into a hands-and-knees position. He looked over his shoulder, and I slipped myself into him. For fun, I imagined what he might be thinking: It’s sheer ecstasy having a teenager inside me; If only I were twenty years younger, I could be this boy’s lover and not some freak fuck.

He came, I came, the regular shtick. His face got frantic. “You will stay, won’t you?” He pushed himself from the bed, calmed his fanatical dog, started searching his pants pockets. I began to explain how I couldn’t stay unless I called my roommate first. Then I stopped. The guy had turned around, was holding out a few bills.

Those had been hustlers on West Tenth. And the lawyer assumed me one of them. I took his money. “Sure, I’ll stay,” I said.

I thought: If this isn’t fate, what is?

After the autumn equinox, New York grew dark faster. Around eight o’clock, the streets would curd with a cool and smoky air. The city smelled like fire, like an odor from some voodoo ritual. Machinelike people scurried here and there, no one looking at anyone else.

If my first New York sexual encounter had earned me fifty dollars, then perhaps the job search I’d been dreading could temporarily wait. Besides, I told myself, I’ve got to know this place first. I continued walking the streets. I sometimes returned to West Tenth, where the same cluster of boys stared without speaking. But no more men picked me up. Evenings, I’d arrive home before Wendy, usually with a moronic gift (old “Witching Hour” comic books; more earrings for her collection; roasted cashews from a street vendor) to tranquilize the guilt I felt for shacking up without paying. “I’m becoming a true New Yorker,” I told her. “I don’t miss Kansas one teeny weeny bit.”

But I did miss it; no denying that. After my trick with the lawyer, I’d stretched back on his bed’s doughy pillow as he curled his arm around me, my mind drifting. Before I fell asleep I remembered how Kansas had appeared from the airplane. As the 747 lifted from the Wichita Airport’s runway, I’d leaned back in seat 17A, a slumbering woman and her young daughter beside me, and peeked out the window. Thousands of feet below, the earth became a patchwork of greens and yellows and browns, marked here and there with shiny barn roofs and silos, rivers that twisted like sapphire arteries, and yes, an uncountable number of baseball diamonds. On one kelly-colored outfield, antlike players jogged toward their dugout as the inning ended. An urge crept up on me, and I softly announced, “End of inning. Coming to bat in the top of the fifth…” I imagined how Sun Center would look from the sky. That made me remember Eric, and I visualized my friend and my mom as I’d last seen them, standing at the boarding gate, hands waving in synch. The airplane entered a fluffy cumulus, and Kansas disappeared.

One day, after my legs grew weary, I walked back to Avenue B. Two queens bickered outside the corner deli. “I want names,” one hissed at the other, and I swallowed away a laugh. Beside them, pumpkins were stacked into a pyramid, anticipating Halloween. They looked foolish in the middle of the city: pathetic, nothing like midwestern pumpkins, each no bigger than a dimwit’s brain. They wouldn’t do justice to the upcoming holiday. I scrutinized them, tried to decide which would look best in our apartment window, bought the fattest.

“Jackpot,” I said to the mailbox: a letter from Eric and a postcard from Mom. The latter showed a cyclone demolishing a town. KANSAS TORNADO, the caption said. I read the opposite side as I climbed the stairs to the fifth floor. Mom had scribbled some quick lines about the freezers conking out at the grocery, the weather turning cooler, the house not being the same without me. “I miss you. Hourly.”

I sat on the apartment floor and tore open Eric’s letter. It was dated three weeks back; he’d only recently sent it. The letter consisted of eight handwritten notebook pages, which I recognized as torn from the half-poetry journal, half-secret diary I’d sometimes spied him carrying. Pages one and two rattled on about his grandparents and echoed Mom’s Kansas weather report. Then, somewhere around page three, things got interesting:

Here’s the main reason for this letter. Four days ago I met this guy. It’s weird but I’ve spent tons of time with him ever since, all four days as a matter of fact. No, it’s not what you think, we’re not fucking. I don’t even think he’s queer. I can’t see him ever having sex with anyone, actually. Anyway, he’s just started school at the stupid college. He’s from this totally tiny nearby town called Little River, and I went there yesterday and it looks artificial, like it’s only a dream of a town, its buildings and churches and trees like a movie set’s cardboard cutouts, ready to topple at the slightest kick. That sounds stupid but it’s true. His name’s Brian. He’s blond, awkward-looking, glasses, zits, etc. So here’s the story: he’s obsessed with you. No, I’m not kidding. I caught him hanging out in front of your house, a while after you’d left. When I spied him, he asked, “Are you N. McCormick?” I freaked. I told him no. Turns out he used to play on your Little League team-well, he only played for a couple of games or whatever. He was squad’s worst player, etc. Now take a deep breath, make sure you’re sitting down for this, all that. Yesterday, after hem-hawing and beating around the bush, he basically told me that although he’s not exactly sure, he thinks that when you and he were kids, you were abducted by a UFO and examined by space aliens. He was completely serious, and believe me I could tell from the look in his eyes. He blabbed on and on, sort of baring his soul about this woman friend of his who’s been abducted, been on nationwide TV, etc., and telling me about these dreams he’s had where you and he are inside a blue room and these extraterrestrials are reaching out to you, touching you all over, communicating with you in this weird sort of ESP way (and of course that last little detail really drew me in, considering my interest in ESP stuff). Anyway when he’d finished telling me all this he just looked me straight in the eye and said, “But actually I’m beginning to realize something else really happened, and all this is crap.” (When he said “something else,” it was as if the words were italicized, and when he said “crap” it was like he’d never sworn before.) So what’s the story on this? Do you remember Brian or what? And WERE YOU ABDUCTED BY A UFO? If so, why haven’t you told me about it etc? Weird.