Windows

COHORT 7

When Luke was thirteen and in Beijing, he did a thing he hasn’t told anyone about till now. It began and ended on the class trip to China, with a window in a motel that served dinner for breakfast. The Mandarin teacher assigned Luke and Ezekiel to that room overlooking the square. Ask Luke whose fault it was and he’ll look at you long and soft. Ask Ezekiel and chances are he won’t remember.

It was hot for springtime and the fan was out of order, so at night they’d taken to prancing around in their underwear. Luke wore boxers; Ezekiel wore briefs. Somehow, though, Ezekiel had always been the popular one, the boy who punted the soccer ball over the fence during P.E. and had to run and snatch it as the other boys whooped. Luke, who winced at the car alarms, belonged to the average crowd; but Ezekiel, who even danced to the sirens, was of a league all his own. He could take Luke under his wing without any eyebrows raising.

At the motel, Ezekiel figured out that if you mounted the ledge beside the window, slunk behind the curtain, and pressed your dick against the glass, a sensation so cool would envelop you that you could almost imagine you were home. Naturally, he also tried his forehead and the other conventional parts, but then reported gleefully that it just wasn’t the same.

“Ooh, 同志,” Ezekiel said—his silly name for him. “You have to try this,” he said. “You won’t believe.”

It eluded Luke—still does now—why Ezekiel had a name like Ezekiel and Luke had ended up with the nickname. Luke never had the stomach to call Ezekiel “Comrade” back. Watch the smile split his face as he remembers it: creeping behind the curtain like some kind of actor, his reflection superimposed on the dormant plaza stories below, and finally—thrillingly—unsheathing his small manhood where he guessed his friend’s might have been.

“Right?” Ezekiel said.

“Right,” Luke said. See his breath on the window, opaque and cold.

Things were never quite the same between them after that, though they were never different, either. Luke hasn’t stared out a window the same way since, even now, when windows are just about the only things that haven’t changed. The way people are talking, you’d think they’re fighting a war.

In nearly five months of touching no one outside his family, having to wear a mask but not because of pollution, he’s done more than his healthy share of looking out windows. He’s watched the neighbor, who sits on his back porch shirtless and reads. He’s watched the helicopters circle above downtown like bloated vultures. He’s watched the man with the pickup pull up like clockwork before trash collection, rummaging through Luke’s recycling for anything worth keeping. Hear the engine idling, the clatter of memories poured out. Luke can honestly say he hasn’t flashed anyone in years, but nonetheless he’s wondering who in the world can see him.

Maybe the man with the pickup is new, or maybe Luke’s attention is new. He’s seeing things, outside and inside, that he never thought he would. Everywhere, he’s guessing at what he and Zeke meant, searching for answers in a name whose sound was like a hand clasping a shoulder. He has always thought the first character, “sameness,” resembles a window. As for the second—he can tell you about the second. The character for soldier, undergirded by a heart.