A week after Jack’s decapitation, Peter drove Jack’s old truck through the San Fernando Valley and straight into the Los Angeles River. Jack’s truck was the color of Paul Masson. Beyond the bank, deepened by a torrent of January rain, the orange vehicle sank at an angle, a toy torpedo projected by a limb. As his shoes filled with water, then his shorts, Peter thought of the first time that he and Jack were in that truck: Santa Monica, five years in the past. They snaked up black ribbons of hillside roads, people-watching the nightwalkers. They peered through the windows of homes with translucent garage doors and painted plates on their mantles, gawked at the impossibility of wealth. Later in the evening, Jack took Peter back to his apartment complex through a crimson entry gate that must have looked elegant in the nineties. As his chest went under, Peter closed his eyes. He imagined passing through the gate, and through the gate, and through the gate.

When his breath became strained, his hands found their way to the window crank. He couldn’t help himself. His survival instincts pried against the handle, then drew him out of the car and back up to the surface, paddle by paddle. At the first breath, Peter began to cry. He kept on crying to himself until the authorities showed up and fished him out. Then he fell silent. He remained silent as they strapped him to a gurney and loaded him into an ambulance. He remained silent as they transported him to the emergency room. As they hooked him up to fluids, to wires, to electric plugs in the wall. Jack’s torso, stomach, and limbs were in the Pacific Ocean. Jack’s head was stuck on an antique bookshelf in a storage locker out in Torrance, and his truck was halfway sunk in the river. And the truth of that was all Peter’s fault. There was nothing left to say.

◆

At seven, a nurse woke Peter up to take his morning pill. In the dim light, the tablet was cream, the color of a baby’s-breath bouquet. The bead sat on his palm, cold and round. Peter had resided in the hospital for twenty-seven days. So far, the psychiatrist had prescribed him four different pills. None of them compelled him to speak.

“Do you want water?” the nurse asked.

No, he thought. He willed the word against the back of his teeth. Nothing came out. Peter shook his head. He threw the pill back, then lifted his tongue to prove he hadn’t harbored the tablet in his gums. The nurse scribbled something down and left. Peter glanced across the room. His suitemate, this bipolar man named Turner, remained asleep, a dark lump in his bed. Not awake to lecture Peter about the necessity of giving the medicine a chance. Peter didn’t care about chances. His concept of chances was pulled taut, a long thought in the back of his brain, as thin as an electrical wire.

Peter got dressed in his sweats, grabbed his journal, and wandered out into the hall. The air smelled of ammonia. The hospital, a site of chemical warfare, scrubbed daily with Fabuloso. There was a stain in the hallway the janitors couldn’t get off from the time that a six-two gal punted her grape juice against the plaster—two dots and a long line, like a face smiling down from the bleached walls. Peter found his way to the dayroom, empty of patients. He stared out the window and thought the same thought he did each morning, always to some degree of surprise: Oh, the city is still there.

That morning, a handful of officers occupied the park across the road, corralling the houseless like zoo animals. On the corner, a blonde woman stood outside of a Mini Mart with birthday balloons. The balloons twirled in hypnotic circles. Someone turned twenty-five or fifty-two. Peter’s eyes fell to the lawn below. A community garden, a painted desert, from the edge of the flower plots to the fence lining the road. This mass of land was impossible to cross without twenty-or-so signatures to liberate Peter from hospitalization.

He envisioned the baby’s-breath pill on his palm. When will it work?  Within moments, he opened his journal and answered his own question with his hospital-issued Ticonderoga:

Be patient. Give it time.

Marnie, an orthorexic nineteen-year-old, appeared at his side. From what Peter could tell, Marnie wanted to die, but not all at once. In intervals. Organs shutting down, one at a time. Peter knew the feeling. After what he’d done to Jack, he deserved as much. Marnie would only stick around until a spot opened at a residential rehab. Peter would stay until the court said otherwise. Not that the officials knew what Peter had done, that he knew where the most important piece of Jack ended up. The crash remained his only crime on paper.

“Are you talking to yourself again, Peter?” Marnie called Peter’s journal talking to himself. She leaned over his shoulder and mouthed the text. “Give it time,” she said aloud.

Time. Peter’s gospel. Time, like a sonata, slow and steady, carried him through the prior twenty-six years of his life. He no longer felt the same assurance. Twenty-seven days. Day thirty, and he’d return to court, questioned, again, about why he spun the headless boy’s car into the river. If he could share anything more. If Jack were there, he would know what to say. He would say something like: You have to live a full life to go to pieces in the end, Pete. But Jack wasn’t there. Only spatters of him were left, bursting in and out of Peter’s mind.

◆

“Why don’t you tell me about Jack?”

On Wednesday mornings, Peter attended therapy. His therapist asked this question weekly, and every week, the question went unanswered. A navy-colored chart lay open in her lap like a Bible. Peter liked his therapist. She had Coke-bottle glasses and a head shaped like a lightbulb. She possessed more patience than anyone else in Peter’s life. He assumed so, at least, because she didn’t reprimand him for his silence throughout their hour-long sessions. He hated this question though. If he found it in himself to speak, he wouldn’t tell her about Jack. The whole city of Los Angeles knew Jack, but only through a series of news stories on pixelated screens. The real Jack belonged to Peter, alone.

Peter met Jack on the Santa Monica Pier five years ago, when he was twenty-one years old. He had headed out to Santa Monica with his undergrad friends, Joseph and Obi, to blow off some steam before the spring breakers tore the town away from them. They rode the West Coaster until Obi puked, then grabbed hotdogs from a vendor on the dock, then found themselves in a prismatic carriage on the Pacific Wheel. From the top, Peter spotted Jack. Dark skin, red shirt, pink hair: a pinprick of color on the ocean.

Back on the dock, he found that Jack’s hair wasn’t pink at all. Jack wore a jellyfish cap and worked the hat-shack near the edge of the attractions. Peter bought a lobster hat to say two words to him, Thanks, man. Jack must have known he wanted to say more. He wrote his number on the receipt and told Peter he got off at five. Peter’s hands shook as he folded the paper and stuck it in his pocket. Joseph and Obi left. Peter told them he wanted to stay longer, said he’d catch the bus back to his mom’s. He sat on a wooden bench and watched the water throw up on itself for hours. Then he felt Jack’s hand on his shoulder.

“You stayed? Thought you’d leave and come back.”

“I didn’t want to leave,” Peter replied.

That night became the night of Santa Monica, of the black ribbons of road. As they snaked up the hillside, furious shimmers of people filled the streets. The homes that surrounded the sea hosted a circus of strangers: wealthy vacationers drowning in aureate sunlight, corpse-still until disturbed by the tender redness of their own flesh; groups of older Boy Scouts smoking teenage drugs in yellow yards; Fire-Island dropouts from the northeast trying to augment their intoxication tolerance by imbibing low-grade alcohol and kids’ pills until someone puked in the teal pool at the center of the Shore Hotel. The structures that lined the roadside were all sites of wealth. Pastel houses lined by white arbors, coated in jade. Colonnades, lifting wide decks with concrete limbs. Glossed windows, suspending light long after the sun winked out.

And none of it mattered. Because none of it was as beautiful as Jack.

Once the neighborhoods became too dark to house hunt, they grabbed burgers at Hinano Café and talked of life like they had something interesting to say. Jack proved more interesting than Peter. Like, oh, I crashed a dirt bike when I was thirteen, look at this scar. Like, oh, my moms told me I was “of God” when I was little, so I thought I was a saint. Like, oh, I used to dance in some youth ballet down South, before I lost my scholarship because I tore this girl’s leotard and couldn’t pay her back. He stood up and did a few pirouettes in the restaurant. Jack was a saint, alright. Of God.

Peter asked about Jack’s parents, nowadays. If they lived around there. Jack got quiet. Peter’s heart throbbed as Jack suggested they go back to his place. To his place, through the crimson gates. Unit 707A. Jack’s bedroom had boy’s sheets covered in trains and rockets. Peter sat down on Jack’s bed and took off the lobster hat. Jack peeled off his pink cap. And his belt and his socks. Once Jack’s shirt came off, Peter started to cry. He couldn’t help it. Jack was so beautiful. Jack touched Peter’s face, then pulled his clothing back on, piece by piece. He sat down next to Peter. He placed a hand on his thigh.

He said, “Close your eyes. Put yourself somewhere else.”

“Where?”

“Don’t even think about it. Just go there.”

Peter shut his eyes. In moments, he found himself in the redwoods, up north. He visited them on a Scouts trip when he was young. Back when his father hadn’t left, back when his mother loved him. He was miniature again in the forest, the mash of tans, greens, mustards, and sages. Jack touched his neck. The trunks took on a fresh clarity, colored all the way in. Birds cried in a strange octave in Peter’s mind. Warmth spread through his limbs. He felt Jack’s arms slip around him. They fell asleep like that, on Jack’s boy sheets, pulled into each other like magnetic dolls.

Magnetic dolls.

Peter wasn’t in the redwoods anymore. Nor in Jack’s arms. Peter sat in a therapy room, and the walls were solid. His therapist took no concern with his magnetic qualities—only his electric ones, the crossed wires in his brain. She thought, with naivety, that Peter’s grief came from Jack’s death. Not Jack’s enormity.

“Is there anything I can do for you today?” she asked.

Peter said nothing.

“I think it would help, Peter, if we talked before your court date.”

Nothing.

“Peter. What’re you thinking?”

Peter said nothing. He thought of how everything unfolded.

Not long after that night in Santa Monica, Peter moved in with Jack. He vacated the bedroom in his mother’s home, removed himself from her half-love, from hiding his queerness in the back of his heart. Jack filled the empty space, and then some, and then some. They both landed jobs in Hermosa Beach, bartending for sweaty locals. Between shifts, they grabbed sliders at American Junkie, jogged the Strand, watched the sun extinguish itself in the sea. They rode their surfskates down the roads of the Palisades, asphalt flushing their wheels, and shouted into the wind with bloated voices. At nighttime, they chewed gum until the pieces went stale, then kissed in the darkness of city parks, docks, and piers. They kissed and became strange to themselves, until they were strange to the world.

Then, on an afternoon drive to Joseph’s, six months after that first night, during the annual butterfly migration that coated the streets in insects, Peter saw the sign: FOR LEASE. An apartment. Look, Peter said, look. They pointed in tandem. They smiled at one another, teeth like Day-Glow daisies in the sunlight. Jack parked and noted the landlord’s number. He called it fate. Peter believed him. Peter believed everything that came from Jack’s mouth.

Jack’s mouth. Of God. Peter’s mouth was cursed.

Peter remained quiet. Another half-hour of silence passed. The therapist noted the time, then radioed the psychiatrist. Within a minute, the psychiatrist bounced in. The therapist handed off Peter’s chart, then left without another word. The psychiatrist sat down, a new judge on the panel. He read the open binder and frowned.

“Ten milligrams.” He stared up at Peter. “Fifteen?”

Peter nodded. One hundred, he thought. One thousand. What did it matter? Peter could take ten milligrams, and Jack would still be dead. Fifteen milligrams, and Jack would still be dead. He could take every pill in the place, and Jack would still be dead. What did it matter?

*

When Peter left the therapy room, he searched for his roommate. Turner proved good company for Peter. A manic talker. He didn’t expect Peter to talk back. Turner was old. A white mustache clung to his upper lip like a line of cocaine. He stood in the dayroom’s corner, tapping his bent finger against the community fish tank. The goldfish squiggled at Turner’s command. Peter approached him. The glass of the aquarium distorted his reflection, turning Peter’s body translucent like a film cell. A strange unease stole through him. Turner noticed Peter, but he didn’t turn around.

His voice looped out like a lit wire: “There’s a new fish.”

Turner gestured over his shoulder. Peter turned. Marnie led around a new patient. They trailed behind her, looking new to Earth. A hoodie, one that would soon be confiscated, beat against their spine like a hard wind. Peter looked up at the whiteboard over the nurse’s station. A new name: Amber. Amber, like what Peter’s mind was stuck in. He watched Marnie circle the room and force introductions, regurgitating information she’d learned in Group, in the nurse’s desk gossip. She pointed at a blonde woman by the sofa. “That’s Anne. She lost her kid on a train.” A man by the window. “That’s Zeke. He never leaves the house.” Another. “That’s Turner. He took some pills.” Her finger landed on Peter. “That’s Peter.” She paused. Weighed her options. “His friend lost his head. Jack. Might’ve seen it on the news. Then Peter drove—”

Peter hurtled his notebook at Marnie, his palm curling against the long edge of the spine. The book’s hard corner caught Marnie’s eye, then collapsed to the ground in a flutter of pages. Marnie shouted. Peter’s wrist quivered. In moments, two staff members brought him to the floor. His cheek collided with the tile. He thrashed as they pressed their fat hands against his pressure points. A nurse rushed over, stuck a needle into his thigh. He relaxed. The walls began to melt. The hospital colors, the grays and people-tones, sunk into nothing. Marnie, Turner, Amber—each one of them faded into gooey streams of light. Peter felt himself slip underwater. Pass through the red gates, through the redwoods, through the red.

◆

Jack’s head came off. That wasn’t Peter’s fault.

Jack trespassed on a property near their apartment, a regular shortcut to the nearest Quik-E-Mart. Peter was working a shift at a bar forty blocks down in Manhattan Beach. Jack leapt over the fence, habitual, not looking to see if the landscape had changed. He intended to buy Peter flowers, so he told Joseph, a half hour before he lost his head. Apology flowers because they had fought about something stupid that afternoon. But he didn’t look. A construction site stretched up on the other side, a crane, near invisible in the darkness. A sharp chain ran between two clevis hooks, suspending an exposed slice of metal, drawn only halfway back into the machine.

Three feet to the right, and Jack would’ve gotten off with a scratch. Jack jumped straight, his neck across the metal edge, and scratched himself out of existence.

Peter arrived home at three in the morning and crashed. He didn’t notice the void in their bed. Joseph called Peter early the next morning, hysterical. He told him to turn on KTLA. Reporting from the site of a decapitation that occurred yesterday evening. The station offered only the blurred photographs. Peter recognized Jack’s longboard. The wheels were covered in Jack’s insides. Peter turned off the television, then dropped the remote, then dropped to the floor. His mind went bleary. An inhuman sound escaped him. He didn’t remember much after that.

A few days later, Joseph, Obi, and Peter all got together in Joseph’s kitchen to get high, a pseudo-celebration of Jack’s life. They couldn’t afford a funeral. Peter and Obi smoked some Blue Dream. Joseph snorted lines of speed, tiny white coffins on the tabletop. Once he’d gone up enough, Joseph started into his jokes. Made good fun about storing Jack’s skull in whiskey, a child’s formaldehyde. Or keeping him in a cryochamber in Silicon Valley, sticking him on a robot body in twenty years. Obi jumped in, commenting about how an open casket might look—Frankenstein’s monster, an exquisite corpse. Peter nodded. If he didn’t, he would walk to the nearest stretch of the Marina, hop an entry barrier, and lay down against the stripes.

“It’s not fair,” Peter said. “They shouldn’t be able to keep him.”

“What?” Joseph asked. “What’re you talking about?”

“The state. The city,” Peter replied. “Jack’s not theirs.”

“He’s no one’s,” Joseph said.

Peter wanted to argue, but his mouth felt full of lead, weighted and numb. Joseph stared at the table, then smiled. “Hey, you think he’s running through Heaven without a head? Like a chicken or something?”

Peter got sniffly. Joseph dropped his grin.

“Wait here, Petey, wait here,” he said.

Joseph stood up, grabbed Obi by his shirt, and dragged him into his bedroom. Peter heard them talking, hushed and irritated. The arguing stopped. Joseph and Obi began to rustle around, a steady white noise of motion. Peter didn’t move. He tried to put himself somewhere else, into the redwoods, but it didn’t work. Not without Jack. After a few minutes, the duo emerged with a backpack, a screwdriver, and hats. Joseph handed Peter a wide-brimmed baseball cap.

“Come on, Pete. Put this on.”

“Where are we going?”

“Don’t worry about that.”

Peter felt too fucked up to argue. They left Joseph’s apartment. Peter climbed into the back of his Volvo, feet perched on the passenger hump. They rode through darkness for what felt like hours. Peter sweated the entire ride, sobbing against the seat. At some point, Joseph pulled into the parking lot of a Denny’s. They got out, crossed the street, walked a couple blocks west. Stopped outside of a brick building. Peter couldn’t orient himself. Didn’t recognize the structure or the door.

“Where are we?”

“Colorado Street,” Joseph answered.

Peter waited for a full answer, but none came. He watched in awe as Obi tricked the door’s lock with a screwdriver. The glass popped open. A chill slipped out. No alarms sounded, but a camera blinked red, a round ghost following their movements. Joseph pulled the brim of Peter’s hat over his face, then dragged him inside. The dim building resembled an empty theater: cold, tall, and filled with narrow entryways. Joseph tugged Peter along by his wrist. They wound through the place, hall by hall. Obi stopped in front of a steel door, read the placard, then pulled the door open. A light came on. For a moment, the white tile blinded Peter. Then he saw the boxes. Rows of metal cells, strewn against the back wall in a grid. Peter stood in the doorway as Joseph scanned the wall, located what he was looking for. Who he was looking for. He grabbed a handle and pulled.

Jack. Jack, worse than Peter could’ve imagined, worse than the distant reality of the blurred television images. Peter saw dead bodies before on cable, in Chromacolor, and static, during wartime, pandemics, documentaries. There was a difference in seeing the body of someone he loved. More vulgar. Jack, all tagged up in a metal box, alone in there. A sardine. They didn’t bother stitching his head back on. It rested in an evidence bag within a Tupperware, shoved into the locker with him. His cheeks, glassy and moist, coated in permanent wax. His hair, soaked in a strange oil. Peter’s breath became shorter, sharper. Insane. Peter knew the whole thing was insane, but seeing Jack in there, like a snapped Stretch Armstrong, made him sick. They couldn’t leave him there. Split apart. They couldn’t.

“Jack,” Peter whispered. “My Jack.”

“Pete, don’t start wailing,” Joseph said.

“They’re going to sell him to science,” Peter said. “To strangers.”

Joseph nodded. “Alright, Petey, alright.”

Joseph grabbed Obi’s backpack, tossed the screwdriver to Peter, and then, with a swift movement, plopped Jack’s head in the bag. Fwoop. Obi closed the locker, looking pale. Joseph wiped away their fingerprints with his shirt. Peter’s body shivered, electric with shock. He didn’t worry about getting caught, about punishment. Jack couldn’t stay in that graveyard, not behind a metal headstone. Not his holy boy. He knew that much. But Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. Caps low, eyes lower, they snuck back out of the building. Outside, they dashed towards Denny’s, their soles hot on the sidewalk. Joseph handed Peter the backpack. It smelled like medicated lip balm, like stale onions. The head. It bounced around, fragrant as rosemary, as they tore back to Joseph’s car.

Back in the apartment, they stuck Jack’s head in a restaurant-sized pickle jar mixed with Crusoe, Tito’s, and tap water. The head bobbed as if it was made of foam, an alien movie prop. Peter stared at Jack’s slack face. He hadn’t stopped shaking. Joseph made panicked jokes, drugged jokes, said they should try to sell the head to Universal or Paramount. Pass it off as wax, make a penny. Reality sobered Obi. He cried about how they could get in a shit ton of legal trouble for having the head, that they should’ve left him where they found him.

And he was right. So they decided to relocate the head to Obi’s StorQuest locker in Torrance.

No more jokes. Not on that drive. Peter held Jack’s head into his stomach, bracing his elbows against the curve of the container. At the locker, they shoved the jar onto an oak bookshelf that Obi stole from his aunt’s estate sale and left it there. Jack’s head. Locked up in that metal box, alone. Peter couldn’t look at it as they walked out. Joseph dropped Obi off, then drove Peter home in silence. That loud kind of silence. Peter went inside and straight to bed, clothes still on. He laid on the mattress, whispered into the darkness, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ. By the time he was nearly unconscious, he wondered if the theft had been a dream. The death, too. Unreal. Until he woke up to another call from Joseph.

“Pete. Petey. Turn on the television.”

Within hours, Jack’s missing head was everywhere. The headlines, hysterical: LOST HEAD, as if they were looking for a lunatic. Some humanities groups had picked up Jack’s story, focused on the injustice of a society that didn’t value bodies after they lost taxability. The group decided to pay for Jack’s cremation, putting out the call for whoever would pick him up. Peter got dressed in fresh clothing and went to pick up his Jack. The building looked different in the daylight. Warmer. Peter expected to be greeted by officers, but no one detained him. The camera’s blinking red light—a service warning. No batteries.

The staff asked Peter about the head, about the robbery. No clue, Peter said, no clue. He used the word disrespectful, and he meant it. What they had done to his poor Jack. Peter gave Jack’s full name and birthdate, showed them pictures. Didn’t show them his favorite photo: out on the pier, arms linked. Peter, gripping Jack’s elbow, in that one spot, that holy spot. Their lips, curled like flowers.

After a half-hour, they sent Jack home in a purple cremation container. Cheap plastic. No urn. Peter couldn’t see him without popping the lid off. Peter went home and dumped Jack’s old betta fish out into a cup, wiped out the tank, then poured Jack into the fishbowl. His burned flesh, showcased in the glassy dome. Of God. Peter burned a textbook in ninth grade. The aftermath didn’t resemble Jack. Less powdery. Three words survived: eve and remembering the. Nothing in Jack’s bowl remained alive beyond fish bacteria.

Jesus Christ. Peter held the ashes, cried. Jesus Christ.

Hours later, as the night washed over the city, Peter put Saran wrap over the fishbowl and carried Jack to his Paul Masson. He drove through Venice, out to Santa Monica. The darkened hills, no longer foreign and gorgeous. At the pier, he carried Jack through the crowd, down to the far end of the suspended platform. Someone new worked at the hat shack. Another beautiful boy. Peter hugged the bowl into his ribs. Jack sloshed around like the disembodied confetti in an Easter egg.

At the edge at the railing, Peter peeled off the bowl’s clear wrapping. He shook the covering into the water. Watched it drift down, sticky and light, like Jack’s soul was being sucked into the sea. Speckles of Jack broke free, smacked against Peter’s ankles, clung onto him for dear life. For dear life. Then Peter dumped the elbow spot and all the spots of Jack into the ocean.

◆

“Peter. Peter. It’s time for your afternoon pill.”

Peter emerged from catatonia in the unit’s panic room. He rolled over. He didn’t want another pill. He wanted more of that shot’s cocktail. Whatever would take him back to Jack, in any capacity. But he couldn’t get away with noncompliance, not without a dip in privileges. He couldn’t cross the garden, but he could sit in the grass, twice a week. If he refused medicine, his life would remain white all the time. He sat up, threw the pill back, swallowed. Tongue up, tongue down. The nurse led him back to the dayroom. That wall stain smiled over his head, as if saying: Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

 A dozen or so patients occupied the dayroom. Selena, the Jennifer Lopez-version, played on the television. Turner sat on the carpet with a lap-full of lemonheads, sucking them for his Klonopin-induced dry mouth. Everyone else was planted in plastic rhino chairs. They fondled their afternoon snacks, budget-saver banana pops from the Smart & Final around the corner. Marnie laid on the sofa with Amber, legs outstretched. Peter hadn’t left a mark on her face. He still felt terrible, like her head had gone flying off, too.

Peter grabbed his journal from under a row of DSM manuals on the bookshelf, where it slid during his takedown. He wrote an apology to Marnie, then got permission from a tech to give the note to her. When he tried to hand the page off, she waved it away.

“I shouldn’t have brought up your friend,” Marnie said. “Sorry.”

Peter tried to press a word through his teeth, but only air came out. He scribbled out another message in fat letters.

Boyfriend, Peter wrote.

“Boyfriend?”

Not my friend.

“That’s where you draw your line?” Marnie said. “You’re fucking weird, Peter.”

Marnie resumed conversation as if Peter had walked off. Peter’s hands shook. He felt exposed, naked. He never told anyone, outside of Joseph and Obi, that Jack was his boyfriend. His boy, sure, but not his boyfriend. Jack and Peter used to joke any old thing made them gay, but only to themselves. Like, oh, Fanta pineapple made us gay. Like, oh, that expired Corona made us gay. Petting that wolf dog outside Obi’s made us gay. Pop Rocks made us gay. 91.5 KUSC made us gay. They only said this to each other because gay was a loaded word, and they didn’t know the safe places to fire it. There were too many unsafe places. One misfire, they could shatter their lives.

When Jack died, that no longer mattered. There were holes in everything.

Peter wandered away from Marnie and Amber, away from the sofas, the fish tank. He found his way to the pamphlet wall, a wide, plastic frame filled with booklets like How to know your loved one wants to kill themselves and Depressed? Know your options. Visitors passed through the library to get to the greeting rooms. Joseph came to visit him once, to vet if he said anything about the head to anyone. Peter remained silent. Obi never showed.

Peter touched the plastic display. Near the end, Jack landed a position at Sun Coast Press, printing pamphlets for companies, groceries, hospitals. Peter wondered if he’d printed those psychiatry foldables. He grabbed a Suicidal?  packet and slipped it into his waistband. The cool surface clung to his stomach. He imagined Jack’s fingertips pressing the creases flat. Moments later, the page slid down his pant leg. He didn’t shake the foldable out. Instead, he picked up a Depressed? pamphlet, one slot down. Page one: What can cause depression? He read down the listicle.

TRAUMA.

GENETICS.

ILLNESS.

His eyes landed on JEALOUSY, written in wide, yellow letters. He nodded to himself. Jealousy. Jealous of Jack. Sure, Jack had lost his head, but Peter had lost his mind. At least Jack knew peace.

◆

After Peter dumped Jack off the dock, he took his car for a drive back through Santa Monica. January brought a certain misery to the city. Peter often hoped for vacation vacancies in the summertime, anything to improve the chance of peace, the way someone in mourning might appreciate an empty church to pray in. Now, the emptiness felt more crowding than any rabble of vacationers. Sports vehicles were missing from driveways. Hammocks, pulled taut between palm trees, sagged like empty wombs. Slaughtered peonies littered the roadside. As light after light winked out in the royal windows, the nighttime slid into the ocean with Jack.

After a half-hour, Peter found himself in the epicenter of Echo Park, near the water, near the mustard houses guarded by grandparent palms, threatening to topple into the artificial sea. He parked and trekked out to the grass, cutting through the teal of the nighttime. He watched strangers bob through the darkness, distant and ghostly. On the first night after they first fucked, Jack packed a picnic and brought Peter there and told him that was the place where guys like them hooked up in the seventies’ Summer of Love. That Echo Park fostered the queer culture of another generation. Sex, earned in darkness, in corners, alleys and backseats, under the roofs of picnic tables. All exhilarating, all depressing. The lust became shelved by Monday, when those still closeted ignored the out-and-prouds when they passed them in Petrini’s.

“What do you think we’d be?” Peter asked.

“Full-time,” Jack said. “I’m nobody’s part-time nothing.”

Only that wasn’t true. That loaded word. Jack fell silent, then, unpacking each picnic item without looking at Peter: a cheap cabernet, party cubes of Swiss, candied pineapple. A Target label glared up at Peter’s skinny body. Half the letters, streaked out by the glare of nearby house lights, blinded to his evolving lust, as the Petrini’s labels were blinded to boys like him fifty years ago. He stared at the letters until his eyes watered.

“Let me pay you back,” Peter said. “For the wine, or something.”

Jack waved him off. “No, no. It’s poor wine. Poor everything.”

“Nothing about you could be poor.”

“Man. You’re a sweet boy, Pete.”

They smiled, and their grins were enough to make the exhilarating, depressing world forget itself. To forget all the blinded letters before them, the eves and the remembering thes, and all the blinded letters after. Then Jack climbed around the food, and they kissed, long enough for the cheese to become warm and misshapen under their ankles. They wrestled pockets of air between them, moist bodies against the late summer grasses. Then they drank Yellow Tail until their eyes went warm, listened to the rustle of distant strangers’ feet. Peter laid his head on Jack’s stomach and thought that if that was what love was, he wouldn’t want for anything else, ever again.

That next morning, as Jack showered, Peter looked up “gay men park Los Angeles” on Google and realized that Jack made a mistake. Griffith Park, not Echo Park, sculpted early hook-up culture. Jack had fucked up. He fucked up again, and again, and again. He mixed up the parks. He hopped the fence in the wrong spot. He lost his head to the machine, the slice of metal. Now, Peter sat alone in Echo Park, a full-time widower to a lover he never took home to his mother, because he didn’t have a mother. He didn’t have anyone. Peter got that hit-by-a-car feeling in his stomach. The sensation flattened him out on the ground, on the non-historic grass. Jack wasn’t there to get on top of him.

Peter stood up and tore back to his car. He called Obi. Voicemail. He told him, Jack made me gay, something like that. He drove. He felt paranoid and splintered, like the crane that stole Jack’s head was coming for him next. Like the device sat around the bend of the road or on the roof of the Marriott in the distance, ready to snipe him flat onto the mirrored street. Peter sped past a church. Losing My Religion made us gay. One of Jack’s. He felt Jack peering over the tooth-edge of the cathedral roof, crying out over the rhythmic plinking of the organ. Jack was everywhere. No—in Torrance. All that remained of him.

Obi called back. Peter told him that the Caterpillar crane was following him. Obi stayed quiet, then told Peter to meet him at the storage locker. Peter drove, sobbing like a child, snot drenching his seatbelt. At the locker, Obi handed Peter the key, folding his fingers around the metal bit. His hand shook like a tuning fork.

“Go. Go,” Obi said. “Get it out of your system.”

Before Peter could unlock the locker door, Obi returned to his car and tore off, his crimson taillights chasing his exhaust. Peter stood at the door awhile. He waited for Jack to call him inside. To call him his nickname, ask if he was an Avon salesman, a political canvasser, the L.A.P.D. with an outstanding warrant. Then he pried the metal door open.

Peter stepped inside. An orange motion light sprung to life, casting shadows through the space. Jack sat in the back of the locker, on a shelf. He stared at Peter with his shark eyes, pale and foggy. Peter picked up the jar. Jack’s head spun in uneven circles. There was no eve or a remembering the drifting around in the brine. No verses. Only flecks of Jack’s skin, his dead flesh, dancing like snow.

“Are you gonna tell on me? To God?” Peter asked.

Jack said nothing.

“For taking your head?”

 Jack said nothing.

“It’s all your fault. You should’ve looked first. You’re a fucking idiot.”

Nothing. Peter hoped Jack would return the insult. He sat down on the cool concrete. He pulled the jar into his flesh. He tried to take them both to the redwoods. He pulled them inward, then outward, to their shared city, before Jack’s departure.

Back to the evenings post-pier, skating and smoking and touching. Touching the cool stems of fencing outside of government housing, touching the painted windows of art shops in Venice, touching each other. Peter opened his eyes again. Nothing surrounded them but clementine light, a manufactured sundown.

Jack wasn’t there. He was pulled between time zones, neither past nor present, but always. His head, forever a stolen artifact. His body, eternally adrift. Peter never should have carried that head out of that crematorium. Should’ve never said that the city’s ownership of Jack wasn’t fair because it wasn’t fair that Jack died either, but at least that wasn’t Peter’s fault. Now, Jack had become split apart, senseless. Dust and ash and rotten. All Peter’s fault.

So Peter left. He slipped Jack back on the shelf like a soup can, and he got into the Paul Masson, alone. Peter drove. Through stoplights, front yards, sidewalks, and flowerbeds. He drove until he couldn’t see straight. Drove until he reached the roads leading to the river, until the chains guarding the concrete bed imploded, until the red gates opened. He didn’t stop pressing the gas until nothing but black surrounded him. Black ribbons, black water, black sky.

◆

Now, nothing but white. White in his pills. White on the floors, on the walls. White in his mind. Peter walked back to the dayroom with the Depressed?  pamphlet still in between his fingers, the Suicidal?  pamphlet in his pants. The room was abandoned. He glanced around. Heard noise from the dining hall, the sound of plastic cutlery grinding against the plates like a projector coming to life. Distant laughter floated upward from floors below, miles away. He peered outside. Half of the unit sat in the garden. Turner, Marnie, Amber amongst them. Tourists in that menagerie of madness. Peter, a permanent fixture. He dropped the pamphlet, pressed his forehead to the glass. Coldness bloomed through his skin.

“Peter. You okay?” A nurse. Peter turned around. His vision crossed the fish tank. He expected to see Jack’s head, there, in the dirty brine. His shark eyes. Nausea overcame him.

“Do you want to go down to the garden?” the nurse asked.

 Peter glanced outside, again, at the dead concrete of their city. The Caterpillar was not watching him. Jack wasn’t either, not from Heaven or any place like it. Jack drifted in pieces, in intervals, a Pacific purgatory. All Peter’s fault.

“The garden?” the nurse asked.

Peter’s eyes felt heavy. He shrugged.

“I’ll have to clear it with the doctor.”

 He shook his head. He thought of Jack’s hands. Jack’s chin, his lips. His drug eyes. With a pitch forward, he threw up on the tile. Chalky streaks of regurgitated pill ran down his tongue, a bitter tonic. The bile crept over the Depressed?  pamphlet, scalding the ink. The nurse frowned. She escorted Peter to the bathroom, left, then came back with a Medline brush. Peter scrubbed his teeth with the metallic faucet water. No matter how hard he brushed, he could still feel flecks of Jack’s ashes in his gums.

“Are you still feeling sick?” the nurse asked.

Peter shook his head. Not sick. Healthy, alive, unsuccessful in his attempts to go under with the Paul Masson. A coward. But Jack had been dead for twenty-seven days, and he would remain dead. No matter what the court said. No matter what Peter took, or thought, or felt. Peter’s face contorted. His eyes cracked, hot pieces of glass poured over with cool water. The nurse ducked off again, came back, and handed him a Xanax. Peter stared at the pill, a tiny white coffin on his palm.

“Water?” she asked.

No, he thought, No more water. I’m drowning.

Peter opened his mouth. He coughed. No water came out.

“Have you seen people like me before?” he asked.

His voice sounded dry, hoarse, like torn foil. The nurse stared at him as if he weren’t quite real, then nodded. “I’ve seen thousands of you, Peter.”

“Did the other Peters get better?”

“Sometimes.”

He nodded. And he knew. Sometimes, but not for him. His grief was too complete. No gapsto leap through. No sometimes in winter, no way to ride the silver lining of January through to June, to a different boy. No sometimes in summer, no way to chase bleeding sunsets to vantage points along the Strand to find beauty in the death of the day. No sometimes in the fall, when the monarchs migrated to Mexico, expelling their wings when the journey felt impossible. Millions of butterflies, dropping like match heads into Santa Cruz, capsizing into the ocean, not dissimilar from the Paul Masson. From Jack.

Jack. Peter’s Jack. He left a gap the size of a life. Sometimes didn’t fix that.

Peter drifted to his room, not caring that sunlight remained naked against the window glass. Go to bed at five, and Jack would still be dead. Stay up all night, and Jack would still be dead. He could move away. He could swim across the Pacific. He could put a barrel to his chin and go to the redwoods forever. Jack would still be dead. He sat down on the edge of the bed, fingers vibrating against the cheap sheets. Grief folded around him like cellophane. He laid down on the mattress. The springs screamed into the void. He turned his face into the pillow. Over his mouth, over his nose. He exhaled, long and hard.

Put yourself somewhere else.

Peter closed his eyes—and the redwoods were gone, and the ocean was gone. Only Jack now. Jack, in the blackness of nighttime, leaning over the railing of the Santa Monica Pier, illuminated by the neon lighting of the Pier’s arch. A kaleidoscope of rainbow tones burned holes through his veiled clothing. Peter stood right behind him. He placed his chin in the dip of Jack’s bony shoulder. Peter breathed in Jack’s boy cologne, his ocean sweat lurching up his nostrils like cigarette smoke.

He wasn’t real. And Peter couldn’t stay. Not for always. He knew that now.

“Sometimes,” he whispered. “Sometimes.”

Then he opened his drug-eyes, got out of bed. He walked back to the dayroom, past the smiling stain, past the nurse’s station. He picked up a chair, walked to the corner of the room, to the aquarium. He saw his reflection. Saw Jack. Faint but connected. With a hard swing, the chair’s legs crashed through the face of the fish tank. The container capsized, then water poured out, knocking Peter to the floor. A shout came from the hall, then another. Peter didn’t listen. From the ground, he eyed the remains of the tank. He watched the fish peter over the broken glass.

As water filled Peter’s socks, then his pants, the pamphlet still stranded on his leg, Peter cried. He cried as the orderlies descended on him, arms outstretched. Cried as they failed to get him to his feet and radioed for assistance. Cried as they tended to the glass in his arm. He cried as the other patients returned from the garden, mystic from the day. Peter cried as the aquarium filter collapsed over the broken rim, as the red service light flashed like the surviving taillight of the Paul Masson sinking into the Pacific. Peter cried because there were thousands of Peters, but there was only one of Jack. There was only one of Jack. If Jack had to live in pieces forever, encased in glass and metal, alone in the world, then so did Peter. So did Peter.