Then I was on the ground, and they were kicking me, and they were shouting things and spitting on me and laughing. I had my hands wrapped around my head because my instinct was to protect my face, but this left my ribs and stomach open, though I was curled into a ball as well as I could. “Dude, I’m gonna pee on him,” one of them said, but I don’t think he ever got around to it. I was surprised by how much it all hurt. I was almost indignant that I was still so fully conscious, and that I was thinking things so calmly, wondering when they would stop, if there was anything I could do to hasten the end of this situation, hoping Terrence would come out, hoping Terrence would not come out because it would be so terribly embarrassing. Then suddenly, I heard his voice, and I knew that my cousin Jason was with them, and I thought: Oh god, they are going to kill me.

But then I must have really, finally, blessedly gone into shock, because I cannot remember the beating ending, only that I suddenly became aware that they were gone and I was lying in the parking lot and I should probably get up in case someone came and ran me over. But the idea of getting up seemed impossible, and I decided it was all right to lie there because I would see headlights if a car was coming. And then I think I slept, or something close to sleep, because I had the sensation of waking when Terrence found me.

“Oh boy, oh boy,” he kept saying. “Sweet mother of god. Hold on, buddy, just hold on.” I could hardly see his face because the streetlight was behind him, but I knew his voice, and I loved him, oh how I loved him. I knew he would call 911 for me, and I knew he wouldn’t leave me, and I knew that he loved me, just as he loved all God’s creatures, and in my head I pretended that I was a deer that had been hit by a car, and Terrence was the kind of man who would stop, who would pull over, and he was holding me because I was real to him, because my face, in its terrible nudity, demanded something from him. It was my otherness that so angered those boys, my unknowableness, my dangerous wrongness. They couldn’t understand me and it made them want to extinguish me, and Terrence couldn’t understand me and it made him want to save me.

And that was all it was: a difference, a genetic predisposition, some ancient snippet of DNA that made you want to fight what was different from you or else fuck what was different from you, and both strategies existed in our population. I pictured Terrence with a strange-eyed, unknowable Denisovan wife, and I pictured Tyler and those boys murdering his alien and wonderful hybrid babies, and I understood then about bashing infants on the rocks, about internment camps and gas chambers, about slave ships and plantations and shooting black young men on the streets, about all of human history, it seemed, and then I was gone for a little while and I wondered if, even hoped really, that perhaps I was dying, but then the ambulance came and it was like a dream ending, and I wished that I could have stayed in that parking lot with Terrence forever, just breathing and quietly bleeding while he held my hand.

* * *

—

I don’t remember a lot of what came next, but I do remember how bright the hospital lights were and I remember big flurries of everyone doing a lot of stuff to me and then other times when I was left alone for what seemed like a long time. I remember overhearing a conversation between two orderlies who were taking me from one place to another about how one of them had gotten a new dog, and they were so excited to meet the dog and I wanted to ask what kind it was, but when I tried to talk they weren’t able to hear me and just went on talking as though I weren’t there. We took what seemed to be four or five different elevator trips, and I couldn’t imagine what kind of Escher-like design the hospital must have to require so many different elevators. When we finally got to my room, the orderly bent over me and said, so softly that only I would be able to hear, “You’ve gotta get out of here, buddy. This isn’t a real hospital.”

Adrenaline sang through my body, and suddenly I was in a large white room, but I was lying on the floor and I was by myself. I couldn’t see anything else in the room, but I remember the floor was extremely cold and my back was aching from how cold it was, and I wondered if possibly I was simply lying on a sheet of ice, but somehow I knew I was not in a natural place, I wasn’t on a frozen lake, I was in a building, but some kind of otherworldly building with nonreal characteristics, and that is when I became convinced that I had snuck in somewhere I was not supposed to be, and that eventually they were going to figure out I was in here and I was going to be in unimaginable trouble. When I tried to think about who “they” were, I realized they were some kind of angels or aliens, beings from another level of reality, and I was not supposed to be in their area, and they would send me away, and in being expelled I would most likely die. I wanted desperately to sneak out while I still could, but I could not move my arms or legs.

When I woke up, there was a nurse near me, and I cried, “I’ve been in a car accident!” I kept telling people that, because I thought if they found out that I had been beaten for being homosexual then they would refuse to treat me. But no one would talk to me. The nurses and doctors kept having hushed conversations with one another, but they never addressed me or told me what was going on. At one point, I was in a huge shopping mall going up thousands of escalators. I bought myself a blazer as yellow as the sun and one of the nurses tsked that I was selfish. And then I remembered the orderly telling me I was not in a real hospital, and I thought: Of course! What kind of real hospital has thousands of escalators and elevators in it and sells yellow blazers!

My aunt Deedee came to visit me and told me she was incredibly disappointed in me. I wanted to tell her that Jason had been the one who did this to me, that it had been him and his friends, but that I had pushed him to it by means of sickening shade, that it was my incredible, ingeniously sharp tongue that had done me in, that my wit was dangerous and second only to Oscar Wilde’s or Dorothy Parker’s. She cried and told me the TV would be watching me and then she left, and I didn’t know what to make of that, and I became terrified of having the TV on because I thought the people inside it could see me through the screen.

Perhaps the most ridiculous part of all this is that Ann Marie kept coming into my room. She kept talking to me about Jesus and how he wanted to do this weaving in my internal organs, and how they were going to take a wire and put it in my veins and then explore my whole body with it, and Jesus himself was going to do this as performance art.

The sounds that I could hear from my hospital bed were extremely loud and I figured out that the nurses were Foley artists practicing making sounds. Crinkle, crinkle, crunch. Footsteps, footsteps, footsteps. They were working as nurses while they got their degrees as Foley artists so they could work in radio. There was going to be this big resurgence in old-timey radio serials because of podcasts. These nurses were so visionary! I rooted for them, but the sounds they made were also extremely annoying.

Anthony came at one point, and I became aware that my aunt Deedee was also in the room, and that shit was tense. “You guys are going to have to communicate via radio,” I kept saying. “So you don’t have to talk, but you can radio from inside your head, and then he can radio from inside of his head, like, Roger that!”