Eclipse

Note: This story may contain mature themes and adult language.
If you are offended by such material, you might want to turn back.

Chris and I stand together and alone on the shoulder next to ear-high corn and feel the shadow of false night creeping cooly up our backs. Dogs bark. Confused birds stop singing, then start again. So this is what it would feel like, I think, to be the last one left, to see the shadow of the armageddon cover the sky. It is 1984. The cold war is still in swing and fantasies of surviving the holocaust we have all grown up expecting, fantasies engendered by Meredith Burgess as Henry Beamis in The Twilight Zone, still haunt and comfort me. But standing by that cornfield in Virginia and feeling the darkness of a solar eclipse move above us, Chris and I can not know what the approaching millennium will hold. Standing in our own zone of twilight, me on the brink of a marriage and him with his hand firmly planted on the closet door ready to step boldly out, we do not know that the plague has already begun.

I knew the first time I saw him when he walked across the stage at auditions the fall of his freshman year. "This one's gay," I whispered, and "this one" would later become Chris and then a friend, and then, for a few months before I graduated, what, in fourth grade, I would have called my best friend-the person I automatically called when I had some free time or needed to escape campus for a few hours and the person I apologized to. "I'm sorry," I said, "that I didn't invite you to be in my wedding," and I didn't say, "even though you're my best friend now, the plans were already made before." And after I apologized, he told me he was gay. I laughed.

"I know that," I said.

"How can you?" In his voice I heard both relief and disappointment that his courage had not been needed, that the days of worrying about how to tell me had been unnecessary. 

"I knew the first time I saw you, three years ago. Half my friends are gay, Chris, after a while, you can just tell. After a while, you aren't surprised."

"But I didn't know three years ago," he said.

We are driving south through Virginia in separate cars. On my lap I hold a blank index card and in my hand another with a pinhole in it-a trick I'd learned in fifth grade science. As the radio plays, "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me," the circle of light in my lap changes its shape, the edge of the moon slowly encroaching on its center.

"We'll pull over when it gets close to the peak," I said. I am leading. I choose the spot. An exit to a two-lane road that passes through a cornfield. By the time we meet on the shoulder, it is twilight.

I met his parents a few weeks earlier at the Theatre Department breakfast the morning of graduation. I thought at first they were his grandparents. They seemed so old. They had retired to Florida. Chris had come late in their lives. I'm sure they never expected to live through his death. We chatted over cantaloupe and croissants, and though we talked, I said nothing. I didn't say-Chris's friendship has meant so much to me these past few weeks; you should be proud of your son for having the courage to come out at such a small college. And a year later I would not be there to tell them what a fine job Chris had done as Tartuffe, what a lasting service to the community his founding of the Gay and Lesbian Support Group would be. And five years later, I would not be there to say that I loved him, that I missed him already.

Suddenly the dogs stop barking and the sound of the highway seems to die away and the shadow comes in full force and in silence. At twenty-one I have never considered the possibility that my upcoming marriage might end in divorce. At twenty, Chris has not given much thought to mortality. The ancients viewed eclipses as bad omens. In our youthful optimism, we ignore the signs and delight in the eerie darkness.

The last time I saw Chris, he looked too thin, and I chided myself for jumping to conclusions, but by then we lived in a world where a thin gay man more often than not lived under sentence of death. Then came the phone call and long talks about how much good AZT was doing, how being young and strong could hold the disease at bay, how HIV didn't necessarily mean ARC and ARC didn't necessarily mean AIDS. Then the message on the answering machine. A distant voice, a distant friend. Then days of composing a letter to his parents-wondering how much they knew about Chris, standing in the shower for an hour and a half and trying sentences in my head. Then writing nothing. Trying to forget. Trying to be more prepared for the next one.

We stand in near darkness for one minute and forty-three seconds. Then the sun returns and we head back to the highway. A hundred miles down the road, we stop for lunch and give a woman with a dead battery a jump start.

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