Page 27 of The Immortalists

• • •

Purp’s new hires are terrible—they’re sixteen and freaked, they can’t even dance—and the audience is thin, a couple of guys huddled in the corners and a few more grinding feverishly near the platforms. After their shift, Adrian is jumpy. “I need to get the fuck out of here,” he mutters, toweling off. So does Simon. He gets in Adrian’s car to cruise the Castro, but the owner of Alfie’s is sick, and the scene at the QT’s as depressing as it is at Purp, so Adrian takes a sharp turn and heads downtown.

Cornholes and Liberty Baths aren’t open. They stop in Folsom Gulch Books—Committed to Pleasure, the tagline reads—but the movie booths are occupied and nobody’s in the arcade. Boot Camp Baths on Bryant is empty. They wind up at Animals, a leather den, and neither Adrian nor Simon are wearing leather but thank God, at least there are people here, so they dump their clothes in the lockers before Adrian leads them through a dark maze of rooms. Men in chaps and dog collars ride each other in the shadows. Adrian disappears into a corner with a kid in a harness, but Simon can’t bring himself to touch anyone. He waits by the entrance for Adrian, who returns in an hour with wide pupils and a slick red mouth.

Adrian drives him home. Simon breathes. He hasn’t messed up, not irrevocably, not yet. They park a block away from Simon and Robert’s apartment and stare at each other for seconds before Simon reaches for Adrian, and this is how it begins.

• • •

Klara stands onstage beneath a pool of blue light. The stage is a small platform designed for musicians. A scattering of audience members sits at round tables or on stools at the bar, though Simon can’t tell how many of them are there to see her and how many are just regulars. Klara wears a men’s tuxedo jacket with her pinstriped pants and Doc Martens. Her tricks are skillful, but they aren’t big magic, they’re quippy and clever, and her script has an air of studied perfectionism, like a graduate student at a dissertation defense. Simon swirls his martini with a straw and wonders what he’ll tell her afterward. Over a year of planning and this is the result: scarf tricks in the only place that would take her, a jazz club on Fillmore whose patrons are already drifting into the cold spring night.

Only a handful are still there when Klara uncoils a rope from a nearby music stand and puts a small brown mouthpiece between her teeth. The rope hangs from a cable that hangs from a pipe on the ceiling, controlled by a pulley Klara rigged herself and which is now held, at her direction, by the bar manager.

“You trust him with that?” Simon asked last week, when Klara explained the procedure. “Do you want me to do it?”

“I don’t mix business with pleasure.”

“I’m pleasure?”

“Well, no,” she said. “You’re family.”

Now he watches her rise to the second-story windows. During a brief intermission, she changed into a sleeveless dress, nude-colored and covered with gold sequins; its fringed skirt hits mid-thigh. Klara drifts in ghostly circles before pulling her arms and legs close to her body. Suddenly, she’s a blur: red and gold, hair and glitter, a vortex of light. As she slows, she becomes his sister again—sweat gleams at her hairline, and her jaw is beginning to shake. Her feet stretch toward the stage, knees buckling once she’s low enough to reach it. She spits the bit into her palm and bows.

There is the clink of ice, the screech of chairs being adjusted, before the applause begins to surge. It isn’t magic, what Klara has done. There’s no trick—just a curious combination of strength and strange, inhuman lightness. Simon can’t tell whether it reminds him of a levitation or a hanging.

While the next act sets up, Simon finds Klara in the greenroom. He waits outside as she talks to the manager, a broad man in a tracksuit who looks to be in his fifties. When he shakes her hand and wraps his other one around her back, resting it on the curve of her bottom, Klara becomes rigid. After he leaves, she glances at the door before walking to the chair on which the manager left his leather jacket. A wallet bulges from one pocket. She takes a wad of bills and stuffs them down the side of her dress.

“Seriously?” asks Simon, stepping inside.

Klara whirls. The shame in her face turns to righteousness. “He was an asshole. And they paid me like shit.”

“So?”

“So what?” She pulls on her tuxedo coat. “He had hundreds. I took fifty.”

“How noble of you.”

“Really, Simon?” Klara is stiff-backed, packing supplies into Ilya’s black box. “I do my first show, the show I’ve been working on for years, and this is all you have to say to me? You want to talk about being noble?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means word gets around.” Klara closes the box and holds it between her arms like a shield. “My coworker is Adrian’s cousin. Last week, she said, ‘I think my cousin’s dating your brother.’”

Simon blanches. “Well, that’s bullshit.”

“Don’t lie to me.” Klara leans toward him, her hair brushing his chest. “Robert is the best fucking thing that ever happened to you. You want to throw it away, that’s your choice, but at least have the decency to break up with him.”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” says Simon, but the worst part is that Klara doesn’t know half of it. Cruising Golden Gate Park in the early hours of the morning, fucking strangers in Speedway Meadows or the public restrooms at Forty-First and JFK. Hand jobs in the back row of the Castro Theatre while Little Orphan Annie sings onscreen. Hordes of men at the Wasteland at Ocean Beach, warming one another.

And the worst night: May, the Tenderloin. A drag queen in a spangled silver dress and chunky heels leads him to a single-occupancy hotel on Hyde. Someone’s pimp grabs Simon by the collar and searches for his wallet, but Simon knees him in the crotch and stumbles upstairs. They take a room and flick on a bedside lamp, and it is then that Simon sees his partner is Lady. She hasn’t been at Purp in weeks; they all assumed the worst, that the gay cancer got her, and for seconds, Simon feels a gust of relief. But Lady doesn’t recognize him. She takes a miniature vodka bottle out of her dress pocket. It’s empty, with an aluminum foil screen. She stuffs a rock into the chamber and inhales.

• • •

On the first day of June, Simon stands in the shower. Last night’s Myth performance was the first time that Simon touched Robert in days, the first time they stood together without arguing. Now, Simon tries to masturbate, thinking of Robert, but he can’t come until he remembers Lady crouched over her homemade pipe.

He picks up the shampoo bottle and throws it at the shower caddy with all his strength. The caddy jolts upward to smack the showerhead, which jumps out of its setting and swings wildly, wetting the ceiling, until Simon is able to turn the goddamned thing off. He slides down to sit against the tub’s cool porcelain and sobs. The dark mark still leers from his abdomen, though when he leans in, it looks more like a mole than it did the day before. Yes: it could definitely be a mole. He stands and adjusts the shower caddy, then steps onto the bath mat. Sunlight glazes the bathroom. Simon doesn’t notice that Robert is standing in the doorway until he speaks.

“What is that?” He stares at Simon’s stomach.