Chemistry

Author's note: this is the sixth installment in a ten-part series.

~

It is more than a mile to the little strip with a handful of fast food restaurants. A Taco Bell, a KFC, a McDonald's. I hate all of these places, and especially hate physically being inside them, but I am desperately hungry. One of the campus shuttles makes a stop out there, but it runs so infrequently on weekends that it is usually faster to walk. It is a hot and uncomfortable slog, made more uncomfortable by the disorganized clamor in my head.

To calm myself, I focus on what I'll say to order my food. "Twenty-piece chicken nuggets, large fries, apple pie, Dr. Pepper. Twenty-piece chicken nuggets, large fries, apple pie, Dr. Pepper." I repeat this over and over to myself in a whisper. Alongside the regular rhythm of my steps, the chant starts to calm me down a little. Endorphins start to circulate in my body and I come back to myself slowly, step by step. Eventually, I have some quiet space -- enough clarity to hold the events of the last few days in my head, get some perspective.

The stumbling block is obvious. Clearly, there is something going on between me and a guy.

With Jamie.

I force myself to think his name. I mean, we had... we had been...

"You fucked a dude, Amir," I say, out loud, angrily. A fact. An element, indissoluble, an incontrovertible peak on an analytical trace.

So what does it mean? Does it mean that I'm

gay

? I let the word shoot out over my tongue a few times, pressing the beginning of it hard against the roof of my mouth.

"Gay," I say, quietly, between breaths. I am puffing a bit from walking so fast. The word feels irregular in my mouth, saying it, out loud. Certainly, it would apply to what had happened last night, in the dorm. The details are still fuzzy, my memory is not working right. Had I really sucked his cock? And he sucked mine, his hand on the base of it, squeezing my shaft as the tip disappeared into his mouth. Had I really pushed my cock into him, his ass? It all seems so improbable.

But there is no getting around that whatever happened, it had happened with Jamie, a biologically male human. Two men fucking. That is the definition of gay. Textbook. I think this, and slowly, I accept the fact on its face. But.

But what?

There is something

off

about it, about the word

gay

, at least as it pertains to me. Something wrong with the

feeling

behind it.

I try to hold on to the strands of my thoughts, which attempt to scatter and flee to other, safer realms. I force myself to stay with this, to proceed, tell myself to stay calm.

There is something...

synthetic...

about all of this. That's the word I am looking for. For the feelings I have been having, the sexual response. Synthetic, artificial. Incredible... as in, not believable. How is it possible that I could suddenly be gay? How is it possible that I would know what to

do

, with a guy? Without ever having done anything like that before?

I remember the feeling of pressing my face into Jamie's crotch, the arc of his hard cock against my cheek, the soft pliancy of his ass, my tongue pushing into him. My cock starts to get hard; it's bending awkwardly in my underwear and pushing against my thigh as I walk. I reach down into my pants to adjust myself. All at once I am consumed with the idea of finding Jamie again, somehow, right now, pushing him down, tonguing his ass into compliance and then penetrating him roughly, unloading my cum into him.

I let the thought run through my head but I'm able to keep just enough to the side of it to sense its oddness, its irregular shape and texture. Its violence. No, there is something wrong about this, for sure. Despite my hard, leaking cock and my seemingly uncontrollable urge to find Jamie, find my way back inside him, I sense danger, and I am afraid.

Why is this happening to me?

I find myself at the strip, presently, having been lost in these thoughts, walking on autopilot. In the bright sun, the garish colors of the building and signs, flashing of car metal and windows is jarring, angular, almost menacing.

It's just a fucking McDonalds, Amir. Relax.

And then, suddenly, there he is, walking out of the McDonald's just as I am walking up to the door. I stop dead at the sight of him.

Jamie

. He is wearing a short-sleeved, button-down shirt, light blue. Light-pink shorts that partially expose his thighs. Black and white chucks with no socks. My fingers and lips tingle with the feel of him, his skin and hair. He holds the door open and a girl walks out behind him, a blonde girl, wearing black sunglasses.

"Yo, Amir!" he says when he sees me. "What's up, dude?"

"Hi," I manage to say, despite feeling like I've been doused with ice water.

"How's your weekend, bro?" he says. He and the girl come to stand by me, next to a bike rack on the sidewalk by the entrance. They're both sipping on straws extending up from large plastic cups.

I stare at him, not understanding.

How is my weekend? What does he mean?

I look back and forth between him and the girl.

Who the fuck is she?

Is he trying to pretend that we hadn't...

"Yeah, good," I say, after an awkward pause, then continue, "I, um... I mean. We..."

Jamie cocks his eyebrow at me. The girl turns to look at him and I see discomfort spread over his expression. He interrupts me.

"Hey, cool. You know, we gotta run, but I'll see you Tuesday at soccer, right?" he says, moving off with the girl toward the parking lot.

"Sure," I say, dumbstruck.

"See you then, buddy," he says, grinning at me. He slaps my upper arm, playfully. Then he walks away.

I watch their backs as they leave. He reaches out to stop the girl from walking out in front of a car speeding toward the drive through, and then they cross the parking lot to opposite sides of a blindingly bright white SUV. He puts his drink on the roof of the car and digs for keys in his pocket.

I am still standing there, like an idiot, but realize I am staring at them like a creep so I walk into the McDonald's. The smell of the grease and the cold of the air conditioning hit me at the same time. It's packed. The people and the lights and the noises are overwhelming; I stumble around to the back of the restaurant and into the bathroom. It is quieter in there, darker. I run water in the sink and wipe my face.

What the fuck was that?

I stare at my haggard reflection. I remember lying next to him in the bed, just hours ago, covered in sweat, our cocks pressing into each other, our arms around each other. Then a thought comes to me with a terrible clarity.

He is doing this to me

.

Somehow, and I don't know how, but Jamie is doing something terrible to me, fucking with my mind, twisting my thoughts. Manipulating me. The realization is like ice in my veins. In the mirror, my eyes steel over.

~

I chew my food in silence, slowly, not tasting it, churning with thoughts, sitting alone in a grimy, molded plastic booth. Children are screaming all around me but I barely notice. I am putting together a puzzle in my mind. Around a central organizing principle, facts begin to fall into place. I am being targeted, controlled by Jamie somehow... that is my conjecture.

I probably

had

met Jamie at a party last year, and at that party he had... infected me. Or perhaps implanted something inside my head. Some sort of program, or a virus... or maybe even a physical chip. Something that had stayed dormant until being reactivated when I saw him again this year, in the locker room. Through this... conduit... he has been manipulating me, controlling my dreams, maybe even my thoughts. Stupidly, I fell for it, I had played right into his hands.

I think about his smug grin just now in the parking lot.

Of course.

He knew I would be here, he is probably tracking my location. He showed up here just to mess with me. To throw me off, pretending like last night had never happened.

But why?

The thought is as uncomfortable as a splinter under my skin. I don't understand his objective. Does he want some sort of programmable sex robot that he can turn on and off? That seems too simplistic. There has to be a deeper meaning to what he's doing. Amid the bright colors and noise of the restaurant, I sense the tendrils of some immense and sinister truth lurking just beneath the surface.

I sit, sipping my soda, thinking, thinking. My thoughts keep jumping to memories of Jamie's body against mine, his mouth on mine, the feeling of pressing my hips against him. In the light of my new perspective, I recognize now that these are

forced

thoughts -- intrusions -- Jamie's attempts to distract me, stop me from figuring out what is happening. The food and caffeine from the soda are helping me concentrate, though, so I am better able to compartmentalize my thoughts as I contemplate my next move.

How am I going to undo this knot?

I have to find the house.

The thought is clear. It feels real. Authentic.

I have to find it, the place of that party. The origin.

I get up, toss my trash in the bin, and go back out into the bright, hot day.

~

I am not sure how long I walk, but the sun is low when I eventually find the house. I stare up at it, the looming Victorian with the wrap-around porch. I look around. Where am I? What street is this? I can't place myself, but it doesn't matter. I'm here.

There is nobody around. The whine from the insects in the trees is incredibly loud. I walk up the concrete steps from the sidewalk into the front yard and then around to the side of the house.

There is the door from the kitchen, the porch railing, and the stand of pine trees, just like in my memory, with the almost imperceptible gap running through them. I stand still, just off the porch by the kitchen door, listening into the house to hear if there is anyone there. There is no noise that I can discern, no movement in the windows. The place looks completely deserted.

I walk up onto the porch and try the kitchen door. Locked. I look in one of the windows and see a generic kitchen and part way into the living room, but it doesn't look particularly familiar. I can see the edge of a couch, a lamp, a rug. All the lights appear to be off.

I hop off the porch and find the path through the trees. I move along it, furtively, half-expecting to encounter Jamie in the backyard, and then, what? I would have to explain myself. But there is nobody there. The back yard is empty. The grass is neatly trimmed, just as it was in the front, and the lot backs onto a tall wooden fence. Beyond the fence is another house -- another row of houses. There are no towering trees. No trail leading to a creek bed.

There is, however, against the rear wall of the house, a set of rickety-looking stairs leading up to a cream-colored door on the third story. I feel a shiver across my back.

I know this place.

I am not sure if it is a real or synthetic thought. I approach the stairs and step onto the bottom step. The wood is old and spongy and I feel it creak under me. I begin to walk up the stairs and try to keep my weight close to the house, as the staircase seems very poorly supported. The wood strains under me and I am half way up when I realize there is a good chance that the whole set of stairs will collapse. But I am compelled to keep walking up, up, until I am standing at the top. In the long-angle light of the late afternoon sun, I see that the beige paint is flaking off the door. The door doesn't fit evenly in its frame, and it's small, like a door for a three-quarter size person. I try the handle. It turns. I give the door a push and it gives a little, then pops open when I push again. I stoop to pass through the doorway, and then I am standing in the hallway.

Inside, it's dark, and my eyes take a moment to adjust. The only light is coming from the open door behind me. The hallway dead-ends at what looks like another set of stairs leading down to the floor below. There are four doors evenly spaced along the hall, all closed.

I see a switch on the wall and I flick it. A bare, exposed bulb hanging from a fixture on the ceiling comes on, dim and red, like the light in a photography dark room. It casts an eerie glow onto everything. I look at my hands in the light and see the greenish tint of the dark skin on the back of my hands. The lighter skin on my palms is brighter, almost glowing.

I walk down the hallway to the last door on the right, the one my memory tells me to approach. There is a deadbolt as well as a knob on the door, and I remember watching his back -- Jamie's back -- and hearing him laugh as he drunkenly fumbles with his keys. How I pushed him against the wall to kiss him, right here in the hallway, felt his hard cock pushing against me as we made out. The liquor and cigarette taste of him. I reach for the knob, twist it, and push. The door opens.

I jump with surprise when I see a huge face leering at me. My heart pounds hard, but I take a deep breath -- it's just a poster on the wall opposite the door. David Bowie, a close up of his face. I push the door open further and step inside.

There's nobody in the room. It's large and extremely cluttered. Books and magazines and papers and clothes are all over the floor. Several thirsty-looking potted plants sit on a desk facing the only window, which is propped open slightly. There are strings of holiday lights -- unplugged -- strung around the rim of the room where the walls meet the ceiling. There's a bed with a mattress, dirty-looking sheets. In the corner, I see a terrarium with a heat lamp inverted over it. The lamp is on and casts a warm-looking, reddish-orange light down onto a twisted wooden stump, where some sort of lizard -- a pair of lizards -- are basking.

Is this Jamie's room?

I bend to look at the papers on the ground. They look like ripped pages from some sort of technical manual; tiny, packed printed words in French, German, and Spanish. There are other papers with random-looking doodles on them.

I move over to the desk and see that there isn't really anything on it aside from the plants, just a mechanical pencil and some stray pieces of graphite lead. I sit down in the chair, a ratty office chair on wheels, and place my hands on top of the desk. For a moment, I sit motionless, sensing the immense mass of the old house around me. It's completely quiet in here.

I pull open a desk drawer. Random detritus, paper clips, a few coins, matches, a pack of post-it notes, a marker. I pull open another drawer and see a battered shoe box. I lift it out slowly and remove the lid. Inside is a stack of pictures bound with a rubber band. I freeze when I see him -- Jamie -- grinning up at me from the top picture in the stack.

My hands tremble as I pull the pictures out of the box and slide the rubber band off. I hold the top picture up to get a better look. The light is dim, so I angle the photograph toward the window, into the waning daylight.

It's definitely Jamie, maybe a bit younger and skinnier than he is now, but the smile is unmistakable. In the picture, it looks like he is standing on some sort of mechanical apparatus in a large building, maybe a factory, or a warehouse? He's standing on what looks like a set of huge interlocking pipes. His smile and his body ignite something in me, an echo of sexual desire, the memory of his body under mine. I shake my head, not wanting to be distracted, sensing the attempt to deter me, stop me from looking at these pictures. I put the picture down and look at the next one.

Jamie is grinning and sitting next to someone, a guy. His arm is draped casually around the guy's shoulder. It looks like they are sitting on a bench in a park. Or maybe they are at some sort of carnival -- there are bright lights in the background. I can't see the other guy's face -- it's blurred -- but he has dark skin and big furry arms. He seems kind of big and bulky all over.

Like me.

In spite of myself I feel a pang of jealousy.

Is this one of Jamie's boyfriends?

The next picture is Jamie with a different guy, a skinny white guy. Again, I can't see his face, the guy is leaning out of the frame of the picture. They are on a pier overlooking a pond. Jamie is grinning. I flip through the next two pictures -- Jamie with two other guys. Jamie is grinning in each of them.

Hold on

.

I look back at the pictures I have already seen and feel goosebumps rise on my neck and arms. None of the guys' faces are visible. And Jamie's grin in each photo is almost identical. Not almost. Exactly identical.

I flick through the rest of the stack quickly. Picture after picture shows Jamie, grinning, in some sort of bucolic scene, each time with a different guy. White guys, black guys, brown guys. None of their faces are visible. I feel panic rise in my stomach. I squeeze my eyes shut. I feel the urge to put the pictures away, stop looking. But I force myself to open my eyes and continue. I uncover the next photgraph.

It's different -- a picture of a small figure, standing far away from the camera at the end of what looks to be a long, dark hallway. I flip to the next one. The figure, a person, is a bit closer. I flip again and now I can see that it is a skinny-looking guy standing in the hallway. He stands perfectly straight and the harsh light of the flash is reflected off his ghostly white body. It looks like he is naked. In the next picture he's closer. My heart begins to thud. It's Jamie. I recognize the color of his eyes and his general features, but his body is sickly thin, emaciated, emptied out.

In the next picture, he's maybe ten feet from the camera. His arms are hidden behind his back. The grin from the earlier pictures is gone. His expression is completely flat. The change in him is jarring, there is a dead, sunken look in his eyes that terrifies me.

There are only a few pictures left. Trembling, I look at the next picture. Jamie is a few feet from the camera, now, and he's holding out two objects, a hammer in one hand and a long, thick nail in the other. His head is cocked and he's looking straight into the camera, his mouth is part-way open, as though he is about to say something.

Suddenly, I hear a loud slam that shakes the house. I drop the stack of pictures on the floor. I whirl around. There is nobody there, but I hear muffled voices from somewhere in the house.

Fuck

. I stoop to pick up the pictures and get them back into the box, but they have scattered everywhere and I hear footsteps now, pounding up stairs.

I leave the pictures and move as fast and as quietly as I can out of the room, down the hallway to the cream-colored door, which is still open. The voices are close now. I exit the door and pull it shut behind me, hoping that they haven't seen me. I hustle down the stairs, which make a cacophonous noise, and then I run through the back yard, back through the pines, around the house, and down the steps to sidewalk. I run as fast as I can for several blocks.

When I finally stop, I lean on a large oak tree, breathing hard and feeling the adrenaline releasing its grip on my body. It doesn't seem like anyone has followed me from the house. It is dusk now, the sun is down. I try to orient myself but I don't recognize where I am. When my breath comes back to me I walk down the street until I come to an intersection, but it isn't marked with any signs. I arbitrarily go left, then backtrack when it looks like I am going down a mostly dark street with no houses. After a while and a few more intersections, I finally find myself on a street I recognize, which I follow until it leads back to campus. It's completely dark by the time I get back to my dorm.