By Michael Tyrell

"After finding Harry’s body, Vikram sat at the kitchen table, noting the differences. A spider plant now hung from the ceiling; a bad spackling job had made the walls uneven and patchy-looking. And where was Harry’s view of the Empire State Building? Standing up to look through the kitchen window, Vikram saw the new condo, unfinished but conspicuously taller than the other buildings on this residential Brooklyn street.

In March, he and Harry had stood together at the same window, their bare shoulders touching. Dormancy. Safety. The radiator fizzing. Only a car, once in a while, very small, very far away.

“It’s inevitable,” Harry said. He pointed to what was, at that time, a foundation packed with muddy snow. “They’re going to put up an eyesore. This will be the year, I bet.”

“Maybe the developers lost their capital,” Vikram said hopefully. “You never know. Didn’t you say they haven’t done anything with it in years?”

Harry sucked his teeth, shook his head. Vikram felt stupid. His penis stirred. Why did embarrassment always make him hard?

Harry made an impatient sign with one hand, as if to say, Move, but adjusted his position. He slipped behind Vikram, leaning against him. Harry touched Vikram just below his navel. Vikram’s penis flipped up against Harry hand, making them both laugh.

“Is that a protestor I feel?” Harry asked. “Is he picketing against gentrification?”

They jerked each other off right there, in the narrow space between the two countertops, the curtains not drawn, the heater still hissing. The heater’s heat and the window’s cold glass: a microclimate. Perfect.

Now Harry was dead. Not just a part of Harry, but the entire being, the whole eager and flawed enterprise that had been Harry, was dead. And Vikram could arrange himself (yes, that was the right word, he thought), at this chipped table where he and Harry had eaten at least a dozen times.

His hands weren’t shaking, he wasn’t hyperventilating, he wasn’t cursing himself or luck or God. But though he wanted to close his eyes and keep them shut, he couldn’t. He had to keep looking at everything, if only to buy some time. For example, the table’s chairs, mismatched from both the table and each other. Cane seating, ripped by the cat. A lead-colored stone lay on the table, next to renewal postcards for The Atlantic Monthly and a bent green post-it with an ornate doodle of a woman’s face. Harry had liked to draw people on the subway.

It was all past tense now: Harry’s likes and dislikes; Harry’s arguments against Vikram’s insistence that Vikram keep his homosexuality secret to everyone except Harry; Harry’s accusations that Vikram had “used” him and thus: a) Vikram was a person who was heartless and manipulative, and b) Vikram was calculating and technical, treating Harry as impersonally as the accounts Vikram handled.

“It’s not just that you work for a hedge fund,” Harry had said. “Your whole life’s a fucking hedge.” What did that mean? Barriers around everything, Vikram guessed. They couldn’t go anywhere together, not to a museum or a movie, because Vikram was afraid his brother or someone Vikram knew from college would spot them together and identify them as lovers, even if they were not publicly affectionate.

Harry was now lying lifeless on his futon, his hands at his sides, his eyes closed, no apparent cause of death, no rigor mortis, only a refusal to be revived. Even though Vikram was certain he was dead, he still took Harry’s handheld shaving mirror from the shower stall and held it to Harry’s nostrils. There was no smudge of air. Vikram was seven years old, peeking in on his grandmother’s sickroom, when he first observed the mirror trick. He had seen his father leaning over the old woman, holding the glass just under her regal nose. During the weeks she was dying, her almond-colored eyes had seemed to grow lighter in color and less substantial, until Vikram thought they looked like what icebergs must look like, almost invisible. As he watched his father holding the mirror to his grandmother’s face he wondered if maybe a mirror could do something to the eyes—warm them up, maybe, change them until they were once again dark and alive?

When Vikram’s grandmother finally died, when his father had finished his business with the mirror, Vikram wasn’t allowed to go in and see her body to say goodbye. This was in the London of Vikram’s childhood—a city he remembered for the uncles whose accents added a kind of scornful beauty to everything they said.

“Don’t hold him back,” one uncle said. “He should be allowed to go see her.”

But Vikram’s father had held him back, and his mother looked down at him, helplessly. Her not doing anything gave consent to this; it was, in its own way, a holding-down. Vikram, the sole child among these behemoths, burst into tears and broke free, running out into the back yard.

The subsequent plane ride to JFK was much better, at least initially. Staying awake through the entire transatlantic flight excited him. How could his mother and father sleep? Didn’t they want to see how the clouds could become like faces one minute, then change into nothing the next? The dizzying view from the plane-window complicated and accelerated his thoughts. He was several months from turning eight years old, but suddenly he felt struck by lightning, full of insight.

To distract himself, he read his book of jokes, most of which weren’t very funny, but he still got the hiccups. His grandmother had a cure for hiccups: she’d drop a match into a glass of water and then make him drink the water. How he’d hated it! Knowing he’d never again have to drink that sulfury concoction made him feel happy and guilty at the same time.

When he met up with his older brother Pradip in America, he told his him about his sleepless flight, and about the mirror. As soon as Pradip rolled his eyes, Vikram knew he was in for it. “Idiot. The mirror’s not a remedy. It’s to tell whether they’re dead or not. What you should have done on the plane is taken a sip of Dad’s Bloody Mary. That would’ve really put your ass in the clouds.”

* * *

Sexy Coincidence, the web site was called. There, people posted their “missed connections,” opportunities that Vikram knew were usually just the inevitable collisions of urban life, on the subway or the street corner. Not experiences, just illusions, like his old, embarrassingly childish ideas about the mirror and the clouds.

But he’d done it. Bored and lonely, working seventy, eighty hours a week, he’d posted an ad. It was meant for a silver-haired man in a camel-haired jacket he’d seen at a listening booth at Virgin Records. The man kept looking at Vikram, who was flipping through DVD slipcases. The man bit his lip once, and Vikram hoped this was a sign: come home with me. The guy was clumsy, too—he kept jotting things down in a notebook, only to drop first the pen, then the notebook. Or was this also a coy signal?

Harry said he liked those words in Vikram’s ad: coy signal. Even though he was a far cry from the silvery, sexy klutz, Harry sent Vikram an e-mail. They met up for dinner. There, Vikram told Harry his real name. In the e-mail to Harry, he’d called himself “Miles.” That was the name of the first boy Vikram had ever had a crush on, a very hot and very straight epee player from London. They hit it off the first day of Yale freshman orientation, but Miles quickly ditched Vikram for a Goth girl from Florida. Her father was a skydiving instructor, and she hooked Miles up with an offer of free lessons and free accommodations during Christmas break.

“Where’s your family from?” Harry had asked at that first dinner. He didn’t seem to mind Vikram’s lie about the name. “I mean, where in India?”

“The south.”

“Kerala?” Cur-rah-la.

A wrong pronunciation, but a lucky guess.

* * *

Once, Vikram took a chance and met Harry for a bite at Grand Central Station. Big mistake. It was the day Vikram passed his American citizenship test. Did that make him feel a little invulnerable? Maybe. Their meeting in public could hardly qualify as throwing caution to the wind, though. They sat eating pizza in a booth well away from the traffic of evening commuters. Still, Vikram found himself counting how many times he made eye contact with Harry; he even winced when Harry reached across the table and took a sip of his Coke. How obvious was this? Vikram looked at the strangers rushing by, then at the people in the other booths.

Near the shoeshine chairs, a baby-faced musician belted out “Lay, Lady, Lay.” He played a few bars, messed up, resumed. People still dropped coins in the guy’s cup.

Vikram shook his head. “He’s excruciating. I don’t care if his cup says it’s good for my karma.”

“Remember, we’re in America,” Harry said. “Karma doesn’t always work here.” Why did he sound so bitter?

Vikram smiled nervously. “We should get going.”

“What if someone you knew ran into you now?” Harry asked. “Someone from Yale, or your brother. How would you introduce me?” Harry was smiling cruelly. “Maybe you could use that fake name you told me—Miles, right?”

What a relief when Harry went to the men’s room instead of pressing the issue. It didn’t matter that Harry was right—Vikram had been thinking of a workable lie, in case this happened. It was just the unexpected viciousness that appalled him. Harry had told Vikram he’d once dated another Indian guy, also closeted. If he’d tolerated the other guy’s situation, why couldn’t he do the same with Vikram?

According to Harry, Vikram’s predecessor went home to India and married a Bollywood stand-in. His family had financed a start-up Internet company for him.

Vikram wondered how much his own parents had shelled out to hush up the scandal with the Yale boy. They always said they bought Vikram’s side of the story, but Vikram knew better. Through money and denial, that mistake had been paid for.

Waiting for Harry to come back from the bathroom, Vikram tried to focus on the commuters. He kept an eye on one person in the crowd, until he or she disappeared from view. Once, he’d read a theory about New York: the landscape is the future, and vice versa. You were drawn to the people you met because unconsciously you remembered catching a glimpse of them years, even decades earlier. He didn’t agree with Harry: karma worked everywhere. Maybe this was Vikram’s future—sitting and watching, when he should be walking and pretending not to care?

* * *

One April morning, Harry returned a book Vikram had lent him and a shirt he’d left behind. They’d had a fight the night before.

“So that’s it?” Vikram said. “You’re dumping me?”

Harry shrugged. “We don’t have a relationship. We have a routine.” They fought some more.

Yet Harry had not demanded his apartment key back from Vikram. Months later, Vikram text-messaged Harry: Can I see you?

Yes. That message had come in on June 30, 2005, 12:04:56, seven minutes and twenty-nine seconds after Vikram sent his question.

During this second chapter, Harry didn’t pressure Vikram about his sexuality. For his part, Vikram credited himself for not repeating his mistakes. He didn’t tell Harry he loved him, then retracted it as he’d done the first time around.

That retraction had outraged Harry. “Why did you say it, if you didn’t mean it?”

“I never had an occasion to say it before,” Vikram said.

“I’m a person, not an occasion.”

***

Today, the day of Harry’s death, was a Saturday in August. Early in the week, they’d confirmed that Vikram would come over today. When he’d been walking down Harry’s block, Vikram had sent the usual message to Harry’s phone: On Diamond. On Diamond Street. Meaning, come down and get me. Harry’s apartment didn’t have a buzzer.

Today, the front door of the apartment building was open, and when Vikram didn’t get an answer, he just used the key he’d kept in his wallet.

A suicide. That’s what Vikram thought, when he could think again in roughly linear and logical ways and not detonations of recollection, misgiving, horror, and faint relief.

Still, when he rose from the table and made himself go again into Harry’s bedroom, his head felt like a wobbly handheld movie camera. Another association saturated with Harry—Harry’s selection of disturbing movies: Rosemary’s Baby, The Beguiled, Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things.

Harry was lying on his back. Now I lay me down to sleep. The body was lying prone.

Vikram looked up at the ceiling, the last thing Harry must have seen. He saw little silhouettes in the light fixture—tiny bug corpses, probably. He flipped the switch, but the light didn’t go on.

He looked around for a pill bottle, a razor, a note. Nothing. He leaned over to look on both sides of Harry. Vikram thought maybe Harry had put the evidence underneath his body before he’d died. Would Vikram have to move the body?

Surely, this had been planned. Harry had said, “Come over Saturday.” No blood, no wound, body clothed—to Vikram’s mind, Harry had gone to great lengths to make his death a mystery. That secret was cocooned in Harry, and only a pathologist could rip it out and say what had happened. And Vikram was sure the body’s skin had changed since he’d discovered Harry: Harry’s face was becoming chalkier.

Vikram’s mind flashed over scenes from crime-investigation shows that either had the killer standing over the victim’s body or the cops standing over the victim’s body. Never this protracted silence and awkwardness—Interior, Day. Vikram reenters Harry’s room and stands over the body. Vikram’s face shows only confusion. He’d seen pages from the Law & Order audition sides sent by Harry’s agent, so he knew what a screenplay of this scene would look like.

The following scene would be worse, of course: disposers and investigators, and Vikram trying to explain that he wasn’t involved in this death. He and Harry fucked many times, often with their hands, sometimes otherwise, but what did he really know about Harry? There were text messages between them, but never letters. When the cops questioned him, would they buy the fact that he hadn’t killed Harry? Why wouldn’t they? The problem was that even if they bought it, Vikram was sure it would get back to his brother, his friends, his parents. They’d ask him how he got in, and he’d have to tell them about the key.

And how would he account for Harry’s presence in his life? Harry was thirty-four and he was twenty-four; Harry was a little-known character actor who made guest appearances on Law & Order, and Vikram worked at a midtown hedge fund; they had no friends in common and had no connections through friends, work or school. Harry’s being gay was a matter of record among his friends, but Vikram’s sexuality was something known only to the dozen or so men Vikram had slept with.

Have fun cowering in the closet the rest of your life.

It must have been Harry who’d sent him that nasty e-mail, back when they broke up, but Harry had sent it unsigned, from an unfamiliar address.

“Closet” wasn’t quite it. No, his secrecy was a place like this—this room, whose objects had been deprived of their ownership and function (the television, the light, and the alarm clock all looked absurd now), and where Vikram felt he couldn’t move any sooner than Harry could.

Harry was dressed unremarkably: in jeans and a black T-shirt. Under the clothes, there were birthmarks on the chest and ass; Harry’s cock, which had a little curve. Once, Vikram had let Harry slip inside him, without a condom.

Vikram decided to leave the apartment and let it play out as if he’d never come. Harry hadn’t killed himself for Vikram. Harry had too much pride, Vikram thought. Harry died in some mysterious, sudden way, and it was Vikram’s bad luck to arrive just after Harry’s death. When Vikram opened the door, a middle-aged man and woman were rattling out of the apartment opposite Harry’s.

The woman said something in Polish to Vikram. She smiled. He recognized her from previous visits to Harry’s place. She had on big eighties-style sunglasses, the lenses opaque.

“Nice to meet you,” Vikram said. Why say something like that? He went back inside Harry’s apartment, closed the door. The phone in the kitchen rang, and reflexively he answered it.

“Good afternoon, sir, I’m conducting a survey,” the woman said.

“Yes?” Vikram asked.

“I’m doing market research for the Megamart chain and wondered if you had a few minutes to spare.”

“Only a few,” he said.

“Thank you, sir.” The woman had a thick Western accent. He pictured her at her phone wearing a cowgirl hat and twirling the phone wire like a lasso. He let out a little laugh. Would this show up on Harry’s phone record? Would the cops check?

Ever the telemarketer, optimism suppressing any mockery, she got right on with her questions. Would a Megamart store in his area be a good thing? Would he shop at a Megamart? Would he recommend the store to a friend?

Yes, he said to the first two questions. I don’t know, he said to the third.

“You’ve been a big help, sir,” the woman said. “Could I verify your name and address for our mailing list?”

He gave her Harry’s name, address.

Then Vikram went into the only place he hadn’t visited since he’d been here.

The book room—which was what Harry called it—hadn’t changed much. Its bookcases still seemed on the verge of collapse or implosion (so many stacks in so many different directions) and were still the only furniture in the room. A chair would make me stop thinking, Harry had said. I have to keep thinking. Vikram was surprised to hear him say that; he found it hard to believe that actors did any thinking, most of the time.

Vikram stood before the tower of Harry’s salt-and-pepper notebooks. Opening one of them, seeing some of the handwriting—would this be the thing to make Vikram lose it?

The red rain of Kerala fell in the year 2004. It was a scarlet coloured rain like blood that scientists later analyzed and came up with surprising results. The “rainfall” consisted of microbial agents that were unlike any others on Earth. This discovery was among the first concrete evidence that life on this planet may have come from an extraterrestrial source, like a bundle of molecules on a meteorite. That would mean we are all aliens and strangers. That would mean Earth maybe wasn’t designed for us and that’s why it doesn’t feel like our home. St. Augustine said this, or was it St. Thomas Aquinas (?)

Vikram had read this passage a few months ago, while Harry was in the shower. He was still as much as a spy as he’d been when he looked in on his dad checking his dying grandmother. He was inexplicably moved by the British spelling of “coloured.” He felt flattered and mystified that Harry had taken the time to look up something about Kerala. Harry must have researched it; Vikram hadn’t told him about this.

Vikram had told him that people in his family died young, often in their sixties. They’d been Christians for generations. He had told Harry what he remembered from the Sunday school in Kerala: the minister’s poetic description of Judgment Day. For the good—for the people of this church—it would be a moment of rising, a delirious moment like the take-off of that JFK-bound plane Vikram had been on when he was seven years old.

* * *

Going in for a last look at Harry on the bed, Vikram thought he saw competition.

Marlon Brando looked down from Harry’s wall. Vikram didn’t recognize this young handsome Brando in his motorcycle outfit. The only movies he’d ever seen with Brando in them were The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris. In both, Brando plays characters who have to face death, literally: the dead son heavy with gangland bullets under the mortician’s sheet; the dead wife made-up by a Parisian undertaker.

Should he speak to Harry the way Brando spoke to the dead woman—first shouting at her, then begging her to come back?

The proof of Vikram’s presence was ineradicable, and it’d just get worse the longer he stayed here, implicating himself, pressing fingerprints on objects, shedding a few hairs when he scratched his head. It was time for him to go. He’d take one of the notebooks. He’d have to have some relic.

Why not take Harry’s shaving mirror? He could have that, too. There it was, lying where he’d left it after he checked for signs of breath: on the floor by the bed. He picked it up, turned it over. One side of it magnified objects, and it was in this side he glimpsed his own likeness. Grown-up Vikram, behemoth Vikram.

He remembered how, when his grandmother died, he’d run out into the back yard. He’d been sobbing. It was the arguing uncles and parents that made him cry, not grief or the urgent need to see the body. In fact, he was glad he didn’t have to reckon with the fact that his father had failed. For all his power and omniscience, his father hadn’t used the mirror correctly, and because of that mistake the once-beautiful woman would be lowered into the ground of a country she said she despised.

Would Harry be buried, or cremated? Vikram wanted to know which, and if the first, where.

Even when he was a kid, these details had preoccupied him. It wasn’t death that was so complicated; it was the body’s afterlife that was complicated. Look at his own family: his grandfather buried in India, his grandmother in the UK, and he and his brother and his parents would probably end up buried here, in America.

Even now, standing over Harry, it baffled him. He remembered how, on that long-ago flight from New York to London after his grandmother’s death, he tried to think forward to Judgment Day—all the people ever born coming back, he and his family included. It was like trying to describe every dream you’ve ever had in your life, all at once. So many faces! So much distance and confusion! It would be the end of time, and they’d be scattered across the world.

Vikram wondered: were you alone when you were judged? Or were you with the ones who’d brought you into this world? If there were people besides your family, did you recognize any of the other souls? Were there accidents? Probably not. But at this moment he hoped for them more than he hoped for salvation: accidental meetings and collisions, wrongheaded and sexy coincidences to make him recognize something from his life.

How, how would they be able to find each other when their bodies rose up, on that awful and purifying day?

Photographs: Yellow Bus, Salmon Wall by Abeer Hoque, Bedroom by Michael Tyrell.