The Smoke of the Land Went Up

We were the three of us in bed together, the Palm Tree Wholesaler and the Division-I High Jumper and me. The High Jumper slept in the middle and on his side, his back facing me and his left leg thrown over the legs of the Palm Tree Wholesaler, who released long, grunting snores in choppy blasts. This snoring seemed a conscious labor, an object of severe but frustrated focus. The athlete’s breathing was nimble in comparison to his lover’s, and together the two sounded like unfamiliar animals getting acquainted in a black wilderness.

I had not asked what brought them together, even though I wondered about it constantly. The D-I High Jumper was around twenty-five, a couple years younger than I was. The Palm Tree Wholesaler was white-haired, bearded, in his early sixties at least. His snoring got louder, then it ceased altogether, and I felt movement through the mattress, the flop of sheets being tossed aside, the weight of him rising off the bed. He padded to the bathroom; piss dribbled into the toilet bowl. I listened to him flush and rinse his hands. “You awake over there?” he asked. “Yes,” I said. “How awake?” “Completely,” I said. “Come sit with me,” he said. 

I followed him to the suite’s darkened living room, where the sky filled the windows like a curtain of blue velvet, no stars, the upper columns of the twinspan bridge glowing orange, a fire someone had left to burn out on its own. The Palm Tree Wholesaler, boxer shorts softly edged by the milky light of a moon I could not see, gathered up a bottle from the minibar, hooked his fingers into two glasses.

I sat by the window. From there I could look down and see the collapsed Hard Rock Hotel. Or, the collapsed construction once meant to be the Hard Rock Hotel. I’d driven the