Uranians by Theodore McCombs

Author:Theodore McCombs [McCombs, Theodore]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000 Fiction / General
Published: 2023-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

It’s not so terrible. Pencils roll when they fall to the floor. On greendeck, the trees grow aslant and vegetables root as if on a gentle hill. Water levels at a slight tilt in glasses and saucepans. Arrigo slips wads of paper under his chair legs and sleeps with his bed against the wall. He barely registers the grade now, not consciously. It’s just that nineteen years is a long time to live tipped back. Life cranes upward, ever so slightly, toward their destination, Qaf, and when he stumbles, when he loses his center and staggers, it’s back to Earth. He is oriented toward Qaf—time flows there—Qaf is his eschatology, his unearthly paradise, a bizarro Eden surging with impossible life that will fill his poems with unimagined beauty.

Qaf is a note sounded along the lute string / we are the lute, he writes. He crosses it out, blowing a raspberry.

• • •

“WHY AREN’T YOU on the Vine?” Arrigo asks Mike again, on their first date. Coffee—in tin cups and saucers, at a little verdigris table. Arrigo takes Mike in, admiring his fleshiness, his thick arms and thighs, muscle and baby fat, which he’s set off in a tight button-down shirt and tight jeans. Arrigo’s crutches lean against the little table, a watchful chaperone.

“Where did you grow up?” Mike says.

“Nuh-uh. Can’t get out of answering, this time.”

“I am answering. Did you feel safe in your hometown, coming out?”

They are on the patio of the café cooperative Sánchez Saornil-Guérin, on greendeck, shaded from the sunline by a banana tree growing through a ramada. Crows waddle between the tables, heads darting, cocking. Whenever anyone looks at them, they rattle their pinion feathers and pretend to peck the dirt. Arrigo and Mike’s foreheads shine with sweat and their fingers stink of raw coffee beans. The co-op asks members to put in an extra hour’s work weekly, harvesting coffee cherries, milling, drying, and gardening. It is all very anarcho-utopian, which seems to be Mike’s thing.

Arrigo considers Mike’s question. “Safe physically, sure—emotionally, no.”

Mike nods. “It wasn’t safe physically, for me.” He watches how Arrigo receives this—his nostrils flare, he doesn’t want sympathy. He kicks his chair back, balancing on its rear legs. “Honestly, I’ve had enough of people.”

Over his head, the café’s oak-beam lintel is painted with the purple words: EARTH IS CANCELLED.

At the tables around them, people wear colorless hemp and homespun and stainless-steel rings on all their fingers. The café co-op is the ship’s dog park for heterosexuals. Well—that’s unfair, as far as numbers go it’s probably no straighter a space than the labs or galleries. Still, it crackles with that anxiety Arrigo associates with a certain sort of straight people, who feel as misfit as their queer friends but can’t pour that rootlessness into an identity or ascribe it to a specific persecution. Hence their rage, that frantic righteousness. Mike seems to know everyone here; his attention keeps breaking to return someone’s fist bump or extremely butch nod.

Arrigo asks, “What about your parents,

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