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“Now hold me like you used to, baby.”

As she makes a choker of your hands, centering your thumbs on her larynx.

“Hold me. Hard. Hold me. Tight.”

(That black-lettered yellow streak of plastic banner drooping, snapped, by one side of the front door. That front hall carpeted with dead insects. The distinct lack of footprints, other than your own, in the dust beneath you as you mounted the rickety stairs.)

And what’s that term? Off of Oprah’s newest rival, one afternoon when you cut class to surprise Lisa with a quickie. And she wasn’t there, of course; it’s not like she could read your mind, after all. Any more.

So you flip on the tube, and it’s a panel of parents, crying, talking about walking in on their sons in various states of undress, belts and cords looped around their necks. Slumped. Slack. Porno mags nearby. Most do it alone, and die. Some do it like any other contact sport, using a spotter, somebody who loves them enough to let go once they black out. The high as your throat closes off, the luxuriant gasp of climax, as you come like your life depends on it.

Auto-erotic. I mean, erotic. Asphyxiation.

You stare down at her, with eyes abruptly narrow enough to be clear, and see—for the first time—how she waxes and wanes with the ebb of your urges. Her face, seen full-on, is a flicker; something meant to be intuited, meant to be glimpsed from the corner of an eye rather than studied closely. A white darkness in every line of her slumberous haze of toxic dreams. She arches against your grip like a domesticated animal, flexed and lithe, trained into desperation for human contact of any kind: Love, love me do. Kiss me, kick me.

Kill me.

You see her, suddenly, like a blow to the face, as wholly as one can see any ghost. And she, just as abruptly—

—sees you too.

Both speaking at once:

“You’re not—”

“—not. You.”

Cloudy blue, Arctic depths, glaring upward. Crystallizing. As the shared delusion of her physicality, punctured by this double recognition, begins—slowly, steadily—to come apart under pressure.

(The moment of truth from that old Japanese movie you saw with Lisa one birthday, not too long back at all. The girl with the long black hair, the morning after; the willing skeleton bride.)

Oh, I’m going, I’m going.

As she melts, becomes ether. Seeps inside you like a novocaine kiss, penetrating you to pool around the fluttering muscle between your lungs and squeeze it—tight. Hard. Hard, in absolute sorry fact, as your own dinosaur member, which—instead of wilting—just swells along with the flow, the sub-zero uprush, painfully full as a clogged artery, reaching for consummation. Blackout orgasm. Closed-heart surgery. Cooling it to a light sheen, to a frosty glow. Until it gives one last, convulsive clench, and cracks wide open.

Dark river, suck me down.

Now, if you ever read the paper for more than the Sports section, maybe you might understand why you’re about to die. You might have seen the pictures of a woman’s body, found naked and bloated in her apartment after a game that went too far. You might have heard the descriptions of her lover, garnered from friends and family. You might have remembered certain things Lisa used to tell you, before you stopped listening—those pseudo-Wiccan fatuities about how violent separation from the body sends what’s left roaming aimlessly in pursuit of its most recent passion, of anyone who knows its name. How it confuses emotions: Pain for pleasure, rage for tenderness. How it forgets everything, except for the last person who touched it as though it was still a human being. You might, however briefly, even have time to pity the man she thought you were, for the horror he’s going to feel once she finally finds him, and moves back in with him—moves into him, completely, never to vacate his heart again.

But you don’t, so you don’t. And so you die like she did, not knowing how or why things have gotten so far out of hand—in that most terrible of states, having expected only bliss.

* * *

Love, love. The worm in every heart. That little speck that keeps on burning after everything else is gone, right down to the bone, and the dust of bones.

Because you were right, after all—the world is full of thieves, baby. And so many of them have somehow gotten hold of your name, your walk, the same tactile net of warmth that used to hover between your hands, binding me to you.

But they all have the same face under their masks, once they’re off: Slack, and white, and hollow.

I only want to be yours again: Only that. And with such a righteous goal to drive me, I think I can be forgiven for maki

ng a few errors in judgement.

They say the moment just before you die is the loneliest moment in the world. Well, I’m pretty lonely now. I’m full. I’m empty. I’m nothing but what I want, nothing but my own need. And when that’s all gone, there won’t be a part of me left to hurt.

So find me, baby, before I forget why I wanted you to, in the first place. Find me, and hold me.

Hold me—hard. Hold me . . . tight.