Not of Luck Exactly
Post-season five
There's a boy named Justin who wins. It's a charm, but not of luck exactly.
There are posters up on the usual buildings, rolled against the brick, thin and steadfast as paint, breathing his colors in my ears: angry, lonely, azure distress and blinking pink panics. His gorgeous soul laid against brick, sticking hard, drawing attention. Most things looks suggestively like lips or penises, but also like bats and water, angels and piano keys. He has a beautiful mixture of the old and new, a quality of revolutionaries.
Danny asks about them when I stop and stare.
"I think I knew this boy," I tell him, covering up what is fear with a laugh of excitement, which is there too. "Yeah, I… I did."
Danny is beautiful. He's twenty-five, a sue chef for something up-and-coming, I forget the name. Anything alive in New York City that isn't a hit is up-and-coming.
"You dated him?" Danny asks steadily.
"Maybe five years ago?" I ask the air, still looking at the posters, one after another, mirror images of each other, angry muscles and blank, male eyes staring at me through their dramatic blue haze. Danny is quiet.
Danny is quiet a lot, and I'm getting used to it. He's 1/8th Native American, and I like that he's quiet and that his skin color almost matches mine. I like that his eyes are too crystal clear for his face and that he chopped off his long traditional hair on the first birthday his mother allowed him to. Now he wears it in a hotly-straight, dark brown faux-hawk. I like that our heritages contain a similar history of displacement and extermination. I like a lot of things about him.
We went to the gallery show. Danny was terribly bored, I could see, and he was confused by my lack of action. Justin appears, and I'm amazed to see him, pale golden and icy as always, god-like, like cut glass. He doesn't talk unless someone approaches him, and even then his comments are sparing. His smile is quick and easy. He doesn't seem to care what these New York bastards think of him, and he sips at the cheap wine from paper cups while his eyes roam the room.
I keep waiting for Brian. Brian never appears.
"Let's go." I tell Danny quietly, grabbing his elbow. He's standing in front of a wide, tan canvas, textured with the image of a leg, a long, strong calve with the thigh crouched down over it, and a naked hip with a thin belt and beeper attached. The painting cuts off at the middle back, but the body is heavily muscled, almost too heavy and a hand enters blindly through the top of the painting, holding a syringe. The work is entitled, "Ben."
Danny turns to me with a look of confusion.
"Aren't you going to talk to him?" he asks.
I grimace weakly with indecision, glancing back at Justin who is alone, leaning against the table where the wine is being served.
I shake my head. "No. Let's go home."