“What happened to them?” asked Gogo, part actually curious, part trying to keep Vern distracted.
“Disease,” Vern said, waiting for Gogo to ask more, to give Vern an excuse to look further into the images the fungus had brought forth. But Gogo said nothing. This was on Vern. “They had the same fungus I had.” She spoke the thought at the very same moment she’d realized it, no space between the knowing and the saying. “Except it killed them. They had AIDS,” Vern said.
“Opportunistic infection?” asked Gogo.
“Yes,” Vern said.
“Were they with each other?” asked Gogo. “I mean when it happened. When they died? Say they were.”
Vern exhaled and forced herself to turn to her left so she could look at Peter, who was no longer corpse-gray. His dark skin was awash in tattoos so intricate Vern had to squint to make sense of them even through the perfect vision of the fungus. It was a map, a city, drawn in bold, black lines all over him. Vern turned to face the other, Samuel, whose skin was lighter, body thinner.
“Hours apart.”
“How old?”
“Thirty-four and twenty-nine,” said Vern, opening herself up to their stories. Knowledge rushed through her in a heady haze of images and facts: their mams, Joan Juarez and Patricia Coates, their paps, Ulysses Dominguez-Miron and Jimmy Franks, their siblings, their schools, their favorite books, their first times, their regrets, their favorite ways to fuck （desperately, darkly）。
Experimentally, Vern reached out to touch Samuel’s dead hand, but jerked it away at the coldness. Counting to three, she tried again. She weaved her fingers with his, then with Peter’s.
Their palms warmed in hers, then softened. Samuel’s gripped back, then so did Peter’s, hard so that Vern felt her bones start to slacken under the pressure.
Vern didn’t know what made them appear to her as corpses, awakening only now with her touch. Hauntings were myriad and strange, and their ways resisted complete understanding.
“Vern?” asked Gogo. “Where’d you go?”
Vern’s throat had turned dry as sandpaper. Samuel sat up, Peter next. They looked at each other, astounded, seeing each other for the first time since they’d passed, alive in the fungus still.
“Sam,” said Peter.
“Peter,” said Sam.
Their voices were broken and shrill. Their skin, which moments ago appeared covered in sores, was smooth and glistened under the flickering overhead light beautifully. Their hands still clasped in Vern’s, they reached across her and kissed.
“Vern?”
“They’re awake,” whispered Vern. “Kissing.”
“Awake?”
“Alive. Alive-alive. Like the breakaway bodies in the tree. Like Sherman.”
Gogo swallowed loudly. “Wish I could be there with you. Wish I could see them.”
Counter to her usual nature, Vern wanted to share this with Gogo, too.
“Peter is—he’s the younger one. Twenty-nine. Black. Muscular now, though he wasn’t at first when he was lying dead. Tattoos all over. It’s a city, but it don’t say which one. His hair is buzzed short and flat on the top. And Sam, he’s almost—he reminds me of a professor. Glasses. Longish hair just past his ears, black, starting to gray already. Light to medium brown skin. Facial hair.”
Vern wished there was a way to plug her brain into Gogo’s directly. The description she’d given of the men failed to capture the gentle reverence they had for each other, which in seconds mutated into a rapturing lust. Vern didn’t have the vocabulary to articulate their tinny moans as they kissed most viciously, tongues against each other’s, their bodies overtaken with quivers. Each held Vern’s hand still as they reunited.
“What’s happening now?” asked Gogo, whispering.
“Peter’s using his free hand to undo his pants. He’s—” Vern stopped herself. These two were sharing a private intimacy, and here she was playing voyeur, her own body brought to wanting by their passion.
“Tell me. Tell me about them,” said Gogo. She and Vern both were … not touch-starved, precisely, but used to a particular type of emotional isolation that came after years of convincing yourself it was all right, better even, to be alone. As a defense mechanism, such self-delusion had its place, but once the farce faded, it was like your whole body transformed all its years of misbelieving into insatiable hunger for contact.
“They got their hands on each other,” said Vern.