Glimmering

“It’s like we all have two jobs: living, and dying. We just don’t like to think about the dying very much. There’s music that people have recorded, of what it sounds like to die—What it sounds like when your body starts to break up, when the cells all begin to decay. Leonard played it for me one night. And when I heard it, I freaked. Because it wasn’t new to me. It was something I’d heard before. It sounded like the wind, or the sea. Or like after you’ve been running and you hear your own pulse in your ears…”

She touched his hand. “It’s not something to be afraid of, Jack. We are inside the engine of the end, you and me. It doesn’t heal us. All it does is change us. But maybe change will be enough.”

She placed her hands on his shoulders, gently pushed him down upon the mattress. He felt as though he were choking, this mass of unbearable knowledge being shoved at him—

“Hush,” murmured Nellie. She began tugging at her jeans, until she sat beside him, naked. “I’ll help you, let me show you.”

He shook his head.

But then Nellie touched a finger to his chin and rested her hand upon his knee. Her touch grounded him; that and her voice, wordless yet reassuring.

He had not been so near a woman since he was fifteen. Her body was small and compact, narrow-waisted and wide-hipped, her skin the color of amber. “Do you feel better?” she asked.

“No.” His voice caught as she moved closer to him. Her breasts were full, dark-tipped, the nipples almost indistinguishable from the cicatrices left by petra virus. Displaced wonder settled upon him: why had he never noticed how lovely petra’s scars were, the tiny furrows where disease had harrowed flesh, what might they engender?

He looked away. “Please—leave me—”

“I can’t hurt you, Jack.” Her face hung before his, her mouth parted in a smile. “You’re safe, here…”

She touched his breast, her head dipped and she took Jack’s cock in her hands.

“No. I’m immune, remember?” she whispered. And, of course, that was what the petra virus did, made you immune to the HIV virus while it infected you with another. “I’m not contagious, Jack. I can’t hurt you.”

He saw in her face nothing of desire, nothing he could recognize except a weird kind of joy. His fear fell back. Not gone, but quieted, amazed at this arousal as by everything else—what was he doing with a woman? With this woman? He raised his hand to touch her cheek. A moment later he felt her mouth around the head of his cock, and her tongue, constricting warmth as her fingers tightened around him. He was hard, but his desire was detached from everything he could see: the woman drawing momentarily away, so that he glimpsed her breasts, her narrow thighs. She smiled, but her hands never left his cock, and an instant later her head dipped once more, lips parted as she took him into her mouth.

His breathing quickened; he waited for his erection to fade but it didn’t. When he shut his eyes he saw her still, gold against the pulsing darkness. He could smell her, so different from Leonard or Eric or any of his lovers. Not the raw pollen scent of semen but musk and salt.

“I know,” she whispered. “But I wanted to see what happens…”

She knelt and took his hands, drew them to her waist and pressed them there. He felt her ribs. She made a soft urgent sound, and so he moved his hands lower, until they stroked the inside of her thighs, muscular as a boy’s, then slid between her legs to her cunt. Her pubis had been shaved; when she opened her legs her labia had the split sheen of an apricot. His finger found the soft node there and probed it, even as he leaned forward and nuzzled his face against her neck, pressed his open mouth against her. Tasting salt, a faint crystalline bitterness. He closed his eyes and saw Emma standing in his bedroom, mouth tight as she gazed at emerald granules adhering to a tongue depressor.

The viruses change us, but they also open us, so that things can get inside.

He drew back as Nellie moaned. She moved against him forcefully, reminding him that she was there—that’s how it works when it doesn’t kill us: we become gates—reminding him that her body was nothing like his, and that none of this was happening by accident.

“I—I don’t know if I can,” he murmured. “If we can…”

Though he was still hard, and when she took his hand and pressed it to her groin the skin there was soft and yielding.

“We can,” she whispered. “This way.”