Xhenet Aliu - Brass

Normal, inevitable, like your own fate. It is probably easiest to just accept that you are a turd, and parlay that self-loathing into something like a formidable narcotics addiction, so that each of the rest of your days is intensely and terribly purposeful. You are certain that you could score something instantly life-wrecking just outside the motel door. Instead, you remain in bed, tossing and turning, which means that Ahmet has remained as wide awake as you in the king-size bed you have no choice but to share, the motel having rented out all of its twin rooms to the versions of you that arrived earlier in the evening.

“I’m sorry,” you whisper. If you’re not yet capable of utter self-annihilation, you think that perhaps you should make one last attempt at decency.

He doesn’t answer at first, while he mulls over whether or not to continue feigning sleep, but then answers, also in a whisper, “Sorry for what?”

“For keeping you awake,” you say, now in a normal speaking volume. “And for peeing so much. And not buying your Whopper. I should’ve got lunch for you. I should get all the lunches from now on.”

He rolls over on his side to face you. You recognize this as an intimate moment, and you work to correct the recoil your body instinctively makes, so that when he says, “It’s okay, I can buy my own Whoppers,” your mouths are actually not a foot from each other on your respective pillows, each breathing in the air the other breathes out. You can smell just vaguely the essence of that evening’s dinner, which for him had been a carton of Muscle Milk and a sleeve of sunflower seeds, and it’s just short of repulsive, just enough that you’re able to hold your position and smile uselessly because it’s too dark for you to be seen. You know that there’s something wrong with you when pulling away comes so easy but lying still with someone sets off a panic, and you think that it probably isn’t Ahmet’s cheesy leather jacket or the startling amount of product he uses to maintain what looks to be fairly acquiescent hair that kept you from allowing him to ever touch you. It’s been all you, babe. Your body—and, in fact, the brain that controls it, keeping its motions awkward and rigid and the skin perpetually goose-pimpled—is messed up, designed as a barrier to the outside world rather than a vessel with which to experience it. If humans are actually social creatures, as you’d been taught, then you are possibly not even human.

And yet maybe you could reprogram yourself to appear human, like the very best cyborgs of the future would one day be.

“Thank you for doing this for me,” you say. “Driving with me and everything. It’s crazy. I mean, it’s crazy that you would just take off like this for me.”

He doesn’t disagree that it was crazy. You can tell that it’s something he’s been thinking about for a while, the first little seeds of regret beginning to sprout way back in Pennsylvania, making his attempts at conversation a little more stilted, so that the volume of the music had subtly crept up over the course of the hours in the car, until finally there was no point in even attempting to hold a conversation while it played. But it matters to him, what you just said, you can tell that, too. You aren’t sure whether it makes you feel better or worse that it matters so much, but it makes you feel something, and you decide to run with that. You decide it’s time to repay his generosity by giving him the thing for which he’s been so patiently waiting. You reach out and find his hand, and it’s cold and slightly jarring to feel it, because you were expecting something warm, the way you expect coffee to be warm no matter how long you’ve neglected the mug on the counter. He’s jarred, too, because he jumps a little at your touch before relaxing into it, grabbing your hand back and holding just a little too hard.

“You needed someone,” he says. “It’s not right that you should be alone. I mean, that your mother doesn’t even care that you left with a guy she doesn’t even know? It’s messed up. How does she know I’m not a murderer? How can a mother not care about that?”

By not knowing, you think, but that would ruin the moment you’re trying to create. So far this isn’t making you feel better, but you tell yourself that that’s because you just aren’t used to it. It’s always uncomfortable to try something new: shoes, running long distances, speaking in a foreign language that relies on parts of the mouth not utilized by English speakers.

“I’m sorry,” you say again.

“Why are you sorry? I’m sorry for you. I’m sorry that your people didn’t care more about you.”

“It’s not like nobody cared at all,” you say, though that was indeed what you had spent many sleepless nights convincing yourself of.

“The way your father just left? What kind of man would do that?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

“Nothing could ever make me do that. Nothing.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do,” he says. “I do.”

“Well,” you say.

“And your mother just let him go? Just like she let you go? I couldn’t even tell my parents that I’m with you. I’m a twenty-year-old man and I had to tell them that I’m with friends in Myrtle Beach.”

Your instinct is to defend your mother, despite having been the one to convince him of the things he has just said about her. It is true that a week before, you had omitted certain representative facts that might have weakened your case to hit the highway. You never mentioned, for example, the celebratory pizza nights and that time she took you to the Beardsley Zoo on a Saturday because you’d been down with a stomach bug on the day of your third-grade field trip. You perhaps didn’t mention that though you often felt more like a responsibility than like an object of affection, you were a responsibility your mother took seriously, when there were plenty of people like Margarita around to remind you that there was no responsibility that a truly negligent human would find too great to shirk. Yet you didn’t feel like you were lying to Ahmet a week ago. You seem to remember feeling completely justified, just absolutely, 100 percent right.

The thread that carries between then and now is your inherent shittiness, and that’s the thing, really, you’ve been trying to flee from.

You curl your shoulder to move in a little closer to Ahmet. “You’re a good person,” you say.

“So are you,” he says.

“No, I’m not.”

“Don’t say that. Of course you are.”

“Name one nice thing I’ve done for you,” you say.

He’s quiet.

“See?”

“You invited me on this trip,” he says.

Christ, you think. Jesus fucking Christ.

You will your arm to reach for Ahmet’s back, to pull him closer to you, since he seems not to understand that you want to pay his generosity back. His boner is instantaneous and, even to someone entirely inexperienced with boners, rather impressive. Still, his arms feel rigid under you, like those of an unwilling partner at a middle school dance. You scoot your body closer to his, until you’re pressed together on your sides, two tectonic plates just beginning to move. His lips find yours and his tongue is also colder than you’d expected it to be, and it tastes of nothing despite its smell of several somethings. Still, it’s not unpleasant. It’s soft, and you like the feel of his breath on your neck when he pulls back for air. His hand begins moving up and down the length of your back, but his arm remains stiff, so you grasp it and squeeze, willing it to loosen up. You’re doing this for him, after all. This isn’t a thing that you want, except that your body does seem to begin moving on its own, pressing harder into his and—there’s no other term for it known to you—grinding on him. You pull his top leg in between the two of yours and move over it, and without even meaning to, without having had to plan an exhibition of desire, you moan softly. Though you haven’t even learned to masturbate successfully yet, the pressure there feels familiar, and you instinctively seek release.