"The Big Death" (Short Story)

I wait for Donald to get here so he can help me order white wine. He does it so confidently, without any apprehension. He knows I get tripped up in a place like this because they ask too many questions. You ask for a dry white and they have four, all different grapes, regions, unpronounceable French syllables, wildly different prices -- yet tasting exactly the same.

Donald smiles and hands me a glass, taking a sip from his own.

“How exactly do you do it?” I smile. 

He shrugs with faux modesty. “Some of us have a gift, I suppose.”

I’m vaguely aware that Donald and I will sleep together tonight. We met on the app two weeks ago and went for coffee immediately, a bagel place on a hip street that used to be all Vietnamese immigrants and places where sailors drank. I mis-timed taking sixty milligrams of a friend’s Ritalin that morning so I rambled with a dry mouth that seemed to have too many teeth, telling the handsome man before me rapid non-sequiturs while he politely nodded. Nonetheless, he kissed me goodbye and agreed to meet me again for dinner.

We went to an Italian place that Friday, and, unaided by pharmaceuticals, had much more of a typical back-and-forth. I learned Donald has a black mother and a white father and he takes photos professionally, and I might have seen them in magazines if I happened to read Campervan Magazine. I told jokes that were witty, self-deprecating, and at an appropriate speed. I shared my love for pasta and garlic bread and how I hated self-consciously “sophisticated” restaurants. I lamented how few Italian places in the city really leaned into their kitsch, their lack of authenticity, unlike this place, with it’s red-checkered tablecloths and processed garlic bread sides full of preservatives. Alfonso, the restaurant’s owner, came to say hello and see if we liked our meals. Alfonso told Donald and I that he was born in Naples and all the recipes are authentic to his Nona’s, a point of pride for him. Donald thankfully avoided laughing at me until Alonfso moved onto another table. 

“Do you think Old Alfy knows how much you appreciate his kitsch, Ted?” he said, stifling laughter. But I enjoyed his teasing. 

Earlier tonight, we met at Exit, Pursued By Bear, an inner-city bar with too many white wine options and a joke-name borrowed from Shakespeare’s worst play.  Donald’s sitting before me, both of us in the beer garden, passing a cigarette back and forth, blowing smoke towards the sky and sipping wine. I’m getting drunker and talking more about my childhood and my personal theory that my premature birth somehow caused my consistently low social status at school, a theory which Donald entertains unseriously.

“I’m not kidding!” I say, “I can directly link my mother giving birth early to the fact that Mark Johnson farted in my locker every day for four years.” 

I’m conscious of Donald’s hand on my forearm. “Don’t you live nearby, Ted?”. 

On drunken legs, we walk to my asbestos-and-wood-panelling 1970’s apartment building, Donald playfully tapping me on the butt as I step in front of him. Before we enter, I turn to him. “It’s a one-bed near the city, so it’s expensive, but the windows all face directly into covered courtyards and there’s --”

“I was under no impression that you lived at Graceland.”

Inside, I stare at the knotted muscles on his back while we lay together.

“Are you a top or a bottom?”, I ask him. 

Donald freezes. “Wait. I have to talk to you.” 

I immediately sit up straight, like a schoolboy. 

He holds a weary frown. “We can’t do anything until I tell you this, okay?  It wouldn't be fair.”

“Are you poz or something? I’m safe, doesn’t bother me.”

“No,” he sighs, “please stop guessing.”

 I nod. 

“So, it’s really, very unlikely, but...actually, let me start at the proper start.” He takes another deep breath.

“You can tell me anything, Donald, it won’t bother me,” I say, but I realise there’s likely many things he could tell me that would bother me, like if he told me he doesn’t recycle, or he bought a designer-dog breed. 

“I had this head injury four years ago, fell off a bike. I’m mostly fine, but, to cut a really long story short, after a bunch of surgeries there’s this part of my brain that’s still...vulnerable.”

“Like a baby’s?”

“No, I mean internally. Certain activities fire up certain parts of the brain. Like sex. And when I have sex there’s a slight risk that my brain will ‘fire up’ the vulnerable bit and....”

“Make you sick.”

“Kill me.”

“Ah.”

The erection I’ve managed to sustain for the entire conversation is now something distasteful, like a person wearing a vaguely racial costume to a theme party. 

“I’m willing to take the risk. The rather small risk. But it is a risk and it’s up to you, Ted.”

“I like you, and I would really enjoy sex with you, but if you...I’d have to call your Mum or something, wouldn’t I?”

“You’d call an ambulance. They’d deal with my next of kin.”

“Right.”

“And I’m a bottom, by the way.”

We take the risk. Adrenaline empowers me. I, mechanically at first but passionately soon after, return to kissing Donald and we disrobe. We move to the bedroom and he lays on his back, legs up in the air like a felled cockroach. I watch his face as we begin having sex, listening intently for any kind of death rattle. I cum a fraught ten minutes later when he tells me he’s ready for it. 

Donald falls asleep next to me and all night I wait for him to die. 

# 

Donald and I go our separate ways in the morning. Over the next few weeks, we tentatively arranged two more dates, both of which God cancelled (a storm surge flood, cutting the city in half, and some sort of ethnic protest blocking off all the bridges, respectively) and eventually we just stop trying. 

Over time, Donald’s messages to me become less frequent, less verbose, and his Instagram stories more full of a life that doesn’t involve me. It happens. 

At least I didn’t kill him. 

#

I return to Exit, Pursued By Bear two months later with Hannah, my best friend whom I hate. She orders a cocktail so complicated that the bartender audibly whimpers while I stand by, thinking of a reason I can leave by nine.

Hannah rambles about her day at work. She’s a nurse (or works in a nursing home, or something) and often uses this as the final word in any disagreement between us – as if Hannah’s allowed to have the wrong opinion about Israel and Palestine just because she spends her days saving lives, while I just email people Excel spreadsheets. Occasionally, there’s times when she isn’t speaking, and it’s beautiful. It reminds me of the silence after someone switches off a leaf blower.

I leave Hannah and go to the bathroom, just to pass time. It’s where I run into Donald. He’s fixing his tie in the mirror, wearing a full suit, and he offers me a crowded smile of recognition. “It’s Ted.”

“It’s Donald. In black tie.”

“Friend’s wedding - it was dry.”

“Ew.”

“Yeah. Couple of us came here to play the pokies, can you believe it?”

I can. I’m very easy to trick, even though he wasn’t trying to trick me. “Wanna come to my house instead?”

#

As Donald and I approach my building, I turn to him and say, “Here we are - Graceland.” 

He frowns.“Sorry?”

“Remember? Your joke about me ‘not living at Graceland’, or something.”

“Oh, right.”

Donald climbs the stairs in front of me, knowing where to go. My phone buzzes and I see the preview of a text from Hannah: you absolute dick, I cannot believe you’d…

I unlock the front door and let Donald in. My phone rings as Hannah calls me. 

“Do you need to take that?” Donald asks, sitting on the couch.

“It’s nothing.” 

I temporarily block Hannah on all platforms. I make a mental note to send her something conciliatory later, like a string of pleasant emojis. “So, a dry wedding. I didn’t know you hung out with twelve-steppers.”

“Oh, no, they’re not sober. They just thought serving us alcohol would mean we wouldn’t connect as genuinely or honestly.” He makes a ‘bleh’ face and grins at me. 

I lean towards him and kiss him. He reciprocates as we outstretch on my Hvardik reclining sofa, which IKEA recalled in 2019 because toddlers kept getting trapped inside its workings. 

“Are you still okay with…?” Donald trails off.

I nod slowly.  He leads me to my room and lays down. I relish in removing his jacket, fitted shirt, and slacks. I smell a salty sweat on his skin, probably from dancing at the wedding. 

The neon sign outside my window, advertising a beer called “Yeast: For Ladies”, casts Donald’s silky brown skin in an electric green glow. He’s laying on his back in such a perfect way that I want to photograph him for a shoe-gaze album cover. He smiles, watching me undress. We lay next to each other, kissing and touching, for such a long time that the thought of death never enters my mind. Self-consciousness is out of the question; we become one another, and the sex is passionate and somehow vaguely European. 

Donald announces “I’m gonna come,” and, feeling serene and charitable, like Ghandi, I let him, but stop myself. He shivers, moans, and I guide his hand. Closed-eyed, he pulls at me a few times.

All of a sudden, he stops. His grip tightens for a moment, then loosens entirely. His entire body goes floppy, like a rag doll. I see the whites of his eyes as they roll back in his head. If it at all aligned with my religious beliefs, I would see his soul leave his body right now.

I also ejaculate powerfully and immediately at this moment. It’s strange - I’d forgotten that was the goal, momentarily distracted by the death entering the room. But as it happens, I realise that this is the best it’s ever felt. Every other time, every other partner – meth-addicted twinks, older men who fucked me and forgot my name, that one poor girl before I realised I didn’t like girls, and of course my own two hands -- had been mere moons to an entire solar system of pleasure. All the world’s supply of oxytocin is now coursing through my bloodstream. I revel in this nirvana for a moment, like a post-hit junkie, before I realise I have to call an ambulance for Donald. 

As I reach for my phone, Donald comes back from the dead, or half-dead. My priorities have dramatically realigned. . 

“Oh my god, are you okay?” I say, pawing at him.

“I don’t know...”

“What did you see?”

“There’s a bright light. I felt warm, like I was going home. My dead dog was there.” 

I kiss his cheek. Donald sits up, resting a hand on his chest. My mess, mixed with his, covers his body like particularly inscrutable Pollock. 

“I’ll get you a towel.”

“Wait, Ted, did you cum on me?”

“What?”

“After I blacked out-- did you cum?”

“Nah. You’re tired. I have to find a clean towel.”

I hastily exit the room, but I feel suspicious eyes on me the whole way out. 

#

 I’ve been dating Donald now for ten months. Meeting family (his), friends (mine, minus Hannah), attending Halloween parties together in provocative couples’ costumes (always tangentially Trump-related). The whole shebang. We’re even planning to combine incomes and buy property in a trendy ex-working-class neighbourhood. 

I suppose I am content. It’s certainly possible.

#

Donald wouldn’t have sex, exclusively giving handjobs, for a few months after that first time he experienced what we now refer to as “stepping into the next room”. His doctors call it something else, something I can’t spell. The important thing is it caused no lasting damage and his treating team wants him to have a full quality of life.

That’s how we agreed to start having sex again. I acted like I had no ulterior motive for wanting to resume our sex life. I said things like “sex helps couples bond” and “you can’t live in fear”. So, he started giving in. Rarely. Less than once a month, we have actual sex, perfectly enjoyable, but never like that last time. 

I yearn for that cosmic stage I once experienced; that brief earthly plane in which sex and death coexist (but only if the sex is mine, and the death is Donald’s). He can tell that I’m hiding some disappointment, but how would one describe the grieving process of knowing your pleasure and spiritual peak has come and gone?

It’s not that I want him to die. At least, not permanently. Obviously, I value his life more. Definitely. For sure. No doubt.