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Wanderlust

by L. P. Kindred

When he first approached me in the train station, I batted him away. I thought he was homeless. The weird, ellipsoidal neck tattoos creeping into view from his collar didn’t help. He persisted, and I took an actual look at him. Not homeless, just rough around the edges. When he talked, it was like he picked up a conversation I was having with myself. And staring into those ebony eyes of his didn’t hurt his chances either.

Coffee lasted hours. So did bedtime. When I asked him why he’d walked up to me, he said he liked the magenta scent of my locs.
With his accent, I thought he administered paralytics or worked in artificial intelligence, until he wrote out the word “synesthetic.” I didn’t really need all that. Just more kisses.

I wasn’t sure what to feel when I woke up and he wasn’t in bed. I leapt to check if he stole my laptop or one of my tablets or my Louboutins. I might as well have run into a brick wall. When I stepped into my living room, he was butt-booty naked standing in the front window. I mean, he looked good, but what got me were the tattoos and scarification.

At first, I thought it was ritual scarring, but the raised tissue played stars—a system of heavenly bodies. Each one topped with tattoos that looked black in the night but glistened like obsidian in daylight, refracting shades of blue, green, red, and yellow like worlds and constellations. As he swept through the light, it was like the pattern swirled, too.

He must have heard me gulp because he turned around, startled. “What the hell is that on your back?” I demanded.

“An orrery,” he said, smiling. No hurry to retrieve a garment. I didn’t mind.

And when he kissed me goodbye that morning, he said, “Your pheromones taste like melancholy arpeggios.” Knowing he was full of shit, I asked which key. “D-flat minor,” he said before going in for a last peck. When he stepped back, the grin reached for his vertebrae. I hustled to get out of the house, but I can’t lie. Part of me was . . . disappointed . . . he wouldn’t be back around. There hadn’t been a session or connection that strong in years. I know because I ran them all off.

When I came home from work that night, he was there, waiting outside with an armful of groceries.

“You . . . what are you doing here?” I asked, realizing I never got his name.

He shifted the groceries up, smirking like his intent was obvious.

I let him upstairs; he proceeded to bang and rattle in the kitchen. We smoked a J and poured some mezcal. I turned off the Henny C—he said Henny’s voice was brown and made him itch. Obviously, a Luther Vandross moment. I deboarded the shower and my whole condo smelled like hot yes. His agile fingers worked peppermint oil into my scalp, shea butter into my skin.

A timer chimed and he scurried back to the kitchen. Dinner wasn’t ready yet, so I unlocked my phone to text Sucia. He snatched it from my hand and said, in his sexy ass accent, “It’s you-and-me time.” He leaned in for a kiss that arched my back. “How was your day?”

I told him how running a creative writing department should have been the level-up my curriculum vitae needed, a prestigious title to help me get a more prestigious title at a more prestigious school. I thought it was all admin and teaching writing, which I already knew how to do. But the pursuit of awards and ass-kissing were more important than the students, especially Black and Brown Students, Queer Students, Disabled Students. So, I started the Marginalized Voices Workshop. For the Marginalized Students, yes, but also so I could be part of something more significant than the Establishment, the ladder climb, and the paper chase.

When I looked up from picking my cuticles, Coco’s attention pierced me. It was fine when he looked at me naked, but he was perceiving me flayed. I redirected to his day.

“I walked around the city cataloguing resonances?”

“Resonances?”

Yeah, I’m a harmonicist.”

“A musician?”

“No but yes, like a musician.”

Embarrassed that I knew his avant-garde vocation but not his name, I asked. Coco. When I asked again, he said Coco. When I told him I would not call him that, he asked, “Why not? It’s my name.” I must have made a face because he added, “What else would you call me?”

I relented and accepted the truth of the situation. Daddy lied. My exes were all still lying. I lied. But the sincerity in his eyes really got to me, and I thought to myself, “Self, he’s an extraordinary liar—or he believes his own bullshit, even scarier—with good boom-boom. Watch yourself.”

I never tasted oxtail or kale made so well or together. He was an excellent singer, masseur, kisser, and vers. When I tell you, I woke up well rested, I mean I fell asleep in his arms and woke up in the exact same position. This time, when I let him out my house, I was certain I would never ever see that man again.

When I got back home later than usual, drunker than usual because of happy hour with the Council of Bitches, he was standing at my door smiling with reusable bags. That man waited four hours and followed me upstairs, made a rabbit pappardelle, and tucked me in. At first, I was annoyed we didn’t fuck, but I don’t really remember falling asleep.

He made me cum for breakfast. I asked him why he didn’t come to bed, and he said sleep wasn’t his thing. “We’ve slept together before.” He said the rhythm of my breathing smelled like honeysuckle and touching my skin sounded like watching solar flares. Too much stimulation.

Still sweet.

Still weird.

Still let him out before I got in the shower.

Still waiting to kiss me goodbye when I passed him in the street on my way to work.

If he didn’t show up with groceries every night, I’d assume he stayed in front of my door all day, every day. But each day I returned, he had food, fresh clothes, never stankin’, never tweekin’, always smiling.

At the three-week mark, I felt confident he wasn’t going to make merguez of me in a sausage grinder—ever the cynic—I asked if we could go back to his place for the night. His face scrunched up. “I live here.”

Live where? “No, you don’t.”

“I spend more time here than anywhere else.”

He ain’t lied but this was not his address. I blurted, “You have no clothes or toothbrush or anything here.”

He smiled with the mischievous grin of a trickster god. Then he nodded. “I have you.”

Undeterred by the bullshit, I said, “Well, where do you keep your clothes?”

“In a tesseract.”

“A what?”

“A localized rift in the space-time continuum.”

“Excuse me?”

“A pocket dimension where I can put things until I need them.”

Thunderstruck. “We have such long stretches of you not being batshit crazy and then you go apeshit instead.”

“I don’t think ableist language is necessary.”

“You think you smell the difference between Jazz and ’80s R&B.”

“Alonzo, I’m sorry. I never considered my exceptionally efficient brain could make you feel insecure, let alone resentful.” He took my hands in his, kissed my knuckles. “You are more than your shortcomings. Regardless, you are my beloved.”

He stared at me thoughtfully, almost mournfully. I exploded into laughter. He became even more confused. I pulled him into a hug that he happily settled into.

“And Beloved?” he whispered between my locks. “Kenny G is not Jazz.”

---

He loved to read my work to me. Super self-indulgent. But man had skills. He wasn’t a voice actor, but he applied unique inflections, voices, cadences, and rhythms to every character, even the stage direction. It was all musical.

“Where did you study?” I asked. He made portraits on my stomach with his fingertips while I finger-combed his loose curls. His eyebrows arched in response. “Music, I mean.”

“I’m not quite a musician.”

“Harmonizing isn’t music?”

“Harmonism.”

“Yes,” I rolled my eyes, “that.”

“You won’t know the Institution.”

“You’d be surprised by the number of shitty musicians I’ve dated. Where?” The words he said were indecipherable and inimitable. They weren’t English, Creole, Patois, Spanish, Portuguese, or French. “Spell it for me?” He meticulously scrawled symbols that reminded me of vevés more than letters. “What language is this?”

“Hemklat.”

“Where the hell is that spoken?” His mouth widened into that trickster grin again. His face could barely contain it, so he tickle-tortured me until I had to share it.

Side-eye. “Why do you try to distract me when I ask you questions?”

“When I answer your questions directly, you refute my responses.”

“Your ‘answers’ defy logic and wisdom.”

“You are so deeply invested in your own wisdom that the presentation of a divergent paradigm threatens your system of belief and, thereby, your intellect. Is it logical to seek to be right more than seeking to understand? Is that wise?”

That should have been a read, but his inquiry was earnest. I should have been mad—I was mad, but . . . I wasn’t right. I usually hid behind someone louder when I wasn’t right. This time, there was nowhere to hide from the rare occasion where I lost my words.

---

Sometimes his clothes were shabby, but sometimes they were sharp. He sang countermelodies to Vandross songs that made Luther sound like a coyote. For someone who went grocery shopping daily, he never had any actual cash or cards. (I know because I checked his pockets for his non-existent wallet and phone.)

As days became weeks and weeks gave way to months, my questions dwindled. I had to acknowledge what was in front of me: a man who lied about who he was, but his actions showed what he was. He wasn’t running up my credit or blacking my eye or fucking his way through my friends. He was a good man.

Coco was there every day and every night unless I wanted me-time, which I wasn’t mature enough to ask for like an adult. I’d pick a fight and kick him out. He’d go away for a few days while I was fake-mad at him. I’d write 10,000 words a day to prove I was better off without him, burning myself out and ensuring my need for cuddles while recharging. At that time, the point at which I started to miss him, when I became afraid he’d not return, he’d be downstairs with an armful of groceries, a smile, and demanding nothing of me but a kiss and to see the new work.

---

When Sucia demanded my presence at the next convergence of the Council of Bitches, I attended wearily. I’d missed a few happy hours and dick debriefs, and I knew I’d be the subject of this roast. Instead, Sucia informed me that he’d planned a trip for me and Weezie and Q. Apparently, the Council decided I was too wrapped up in new trade and this was a long-distance intervention.

I was a little sad to leave Coco. I said as much, and maybe I love you. A breakthrough for me. And he said, “Okay.”

I was the height of pissivity across both plane rides, and my boys did not want to hear my mouth on it anymore. When I got off the plane in Cancún, I went to withdraw some pesos from the ATM. This dude was standing far too close while I tapped in my PIN. While I tried to remember how to say back up in Spanish, I noticed the vibrant tattoo on his hand.

I looked him in his eye and I still don’t know what my face was saying. “What are you doing here?”

“Surprise!” Coco said, smiling like a star lighting up the night sky. His face crumpled. “Did I surprise you?”

He held an index card in front of his chest: You don’t have to miss me. I love you, too.

“Coco, how did you get here?” He gave me that little mischievous grin of his and reached in for a tickle attack. I batted his hands away, but he succeeded in making me snort—my secret shame. “Stop it,” I said, louder than intended. He did, and I composed myself. The Council levelled the airport with their side-eye. “Guys, this is Coco.”

On the ride to the rental in Tulúm, one of my hands laced fingers with Coco’s while the other fielded questions in the group chat. “I thought this was a no-husbands trip?” “Who’s the insecure one: you or him?” “How did he get here before us?” “Why is your man freeballing in the airport?”

I tried to answer, but I was as thrown as they were. As surprised as I was disbelieving. Throw in curious, too, but I was mostly glad. As far as grand gestures go, this one took several cakes.

“How did you get here before us?” I whispered into his ear, afraid his response might send Sucia into another tizzy.

“In a tesseract.”

“Wait, what?” I said, louder than I meant to.

“A localized rift in the space-time continuum.”

“Coco?”

“The pocket dimension where I place my belongings until I need them. But once it’s closed, I can reopen it elsewhere.”

Confuzzled. At a loss for words. The second time. Coco lifted our interlocked hands and kissed my knuckles before covering them with his palm.

Sucia was pissed about our party crasher. Q, who is in love with love, got excited because Coco looked at me like love should look at me. Weezie could not care less because he was air sick, car sick, and ready to lie down.

But Coco stopped us at the door, he said, to clear the space of bad humours. From his mouth, a low, crackly drone skirted the bottom of his voice before splitting into a croon at the center. When the beatbox started, the rhythm was Timbalandic. Then the melody split into harmony and split again. Like Barry White rumbling, Musiq Soulchild gliding, Johnny Gill crooning, K-Ci Hailey growling, George Michael cooing, and Durand Bernarr playing in them whistle notes at the top. By the time he hit the climax, his throat bulged. As the one-man chorale’s song resolved, he leaned into the door jamb. “Enter. Please.”

Coco could sing. I never believed anything to the contrary. But what the fuck was that? An a capella concert with six voices and one singer? And he acted like that shit was normal. I acted like that shit was normal. My freak out would have freaked out the Bitches even more.

Q whispered in my ear as he passed me. “Bitch, I forgot to breathe.” No shit. Deep down where no one could see, I was shooketh.
Despite the weirdness of Coco joining—which I fully intended on addressing later—the meeting of my man and my friends went well. Any time we didn’t head to a restaurant, he cooked and their jaws hit the floor. Current events weren’t his strong suit, but he could get down on art and music, so Weezie and Q were in. At one point, he took a long walk with Sucia, after which Su leaned into me while Coco and Q duetted. “He’s all right.” The highest praise one could ever expect from my Main Bitch.

We were on the beach in the vacation’s latter days when I saw Co scratching vigorously. It was like the opposite of a good massage. With a skilled masseur, they alleviate you of pain you’ve held so long you stopped acknowledging it. I never in nine months saw him irritated by anything other than Henny C’s voice. Including my chaotic, emotionally evasive ass. I chalked it up to mosquitoes, but that night his skin bloomed in a purple rash. And his tattoos glistened and swirled in the light like usual, just slower. Much slower.

Of course, he said he was fine, saw us off at the Cancún airport. The Council asked if he was on our flight and he just said no. They were unnerved by the Cheshire smile. And as weird as when we landed in Cancún, he met me at the baggage claim at O’Hare with another index card: Welcome home, Beloved.

In the Rover home, he complained about a migraine.

When we stepped through my condo door, he crashed to the floor. Fetal and screaming, his nose bled onto the polished concrete. The air around him blazed muggy before ribbons of purple and green swirled around him like the Northern Lights making visitation on his body.

I thought his screams were deafening until I realized they were mine. Every time I reached out, my fingers sizzled too close to the phenomenon. It was scary, but I still considered throwing my whole body at the corona. Coco yelped for me to stay back.

That minute languished for an epoch. Coco screamed like bleach burned his veins when it ended. He wouldn’t let me call an ambulance. We sat with it. Silence and sadness.

I listened as his breathing settled into a wheeze around which he coughed. “You know what this is?” I asked, “Don’t you?” He nodded, and tears leaked from my eyes. It unnerved me the way he didn’t wipe or try not to cry. “Tell me.”

“I love you, Zo,” he said. He sniffed from his diaphragm. “I love you so much, Beloved.”

“Tell me.”

“I am dying.” His words were a spear in my ribs.

The pain spurred me to action. “We can go to doctors.” The words meant less the more I said. “I can pay. There are specialists.”

A tear dripped from his nose and into the creases of his smile. “They cannot fix this.”

“What is it?”

He sighed and forced a harder smile. He kissed my forehead, down my nose. “If the universe is a living organism . . .” He sniffed. I heard his patience working to keep the pain from his voice. “Then your world knows I am an invader, a foreign particle, and it’s trying to excise me.”

I would have sighed, rolled my eyes again. But rolling my eyes stopped me from seeing it all. Stopped me from marrying the oddities. Rolling my eyes stopped me from seeing the whole truth.  

His fingers scrawled portraits on the skin of my arm. “Listen,” he said, “my cells are . . . they cannot survive here much longer.”

“Coco.” I listened for, maybe, the first time.

“I travelled the world and worlds, universes and dimensions to find you. I found you, I love you, and I’m loved by you. I will die here in your arms. Where I belong. Happy.”

I started to speak, but he shushed me before laying his lips over mine again. What were once lush, fleshy warmth were now cold and scratchy, tasting of copper. He held me that night, the first night I didn’t sleep. I listened for his every inhale and hitched at every disruption to that rhythm.

The next morning, I ambled out of the shower when I heard his hacking and wracking in the bathroom doorway and found him lying in a swarm of swirling lights that burned my doorframe. The lights died, and his arm shook as he reached for me. I saw his ribs in the un-sexiest way.

“The atrophy is exponential,” he said, noticing me noticing his emaciation.

“What do we do?” I asked.

“Just hold me.”

“No.” My words surprised me as much as him. “You have to fight. Take medicine. Meditate. Whatever the voices say you should do. You can’t just give up.”

He smiled with a wrinkled brow, more incensed and surprised. “I lived a multiverse to find you. I never gave up.”

“On me? If you die here, you’re giving up on me. On us. You’re giving up on you.”

“I won’t leave you.”

“Death is you leaving me, too. I would have to live without you.”

I’ve never asked him for anything, though he always supplied. He never needed anything from me. But I asked him for this.
I pulled him up, and he leaned on me.

He led me to a park in the barrio and limped us behind a bush. “What?” I asked when he stopped. He waved his hand in the air. It shimmered at his touch. For the third time, I was speechless. He reached into the iridescent aperture and withdrew a denim-clad parcel from inside the blue wave. It harrumphed to the grass. He was still losing strength. He looked to me. I picked up the parcel. It couldn’t weigh more than forty pounds. I looked from the tear in the air to him.

“Tesseract?”

He smiled around a cough.

I wanted to ask if he’d come back. He continued to carry a pained smile. I felt the sob like buckshot to the chest. “I love you.”

“You are my Beloved.”

Coco waved his hand and the air in front of it rippled, pink distortions glistening. He touched the top of the pink, extracting a tendril of its luminescence four feet away at navel height. Coco repeated the same extraction at its left and right sides, drawing himself inside a vertical pyramid. After pulling from the bottom, he collapsed beneath the pyramid, cautious not to touch its edges. The pink base settled into a placid purple diamond. He shambled to me, grasped my hands, held them to his chest before he kissed my knuckles. “I am yours.”

I helped him pull his shirt over his head. The dying worlds and stars that made up the orrery on his chest and back, they showed more color than they had in days.

He guided me to push the parcel through, careful to avoid the chords. That’s what he called them. I hugged him, I kissed him, I kissed him like it was the last time. I kissed him like this was forever, forever. I leaned back from him. One last look before he waved to me. One last look before he slipped into the shimmer. One last look and the shimmer quieted behind him like it never existed. Like he never was.

---

It’s been three years.

I quit my job and took the Marginalized Writers Workshop on the road. It made me an authority on radical self-care and excavating vulnerability in a world hellbent on hardening you. I finished my book—books. Sold them. Pushcart nominations and MacDowell Fellowships. I became the person he encouraged me to be. In fact, I just got back from Howard.

Per usual, I walk over here. To the barrio, where I last saw him. At night, only at night. I got jumped once, they got my wallet. But I come back. I always come back. And I don’t know why. Sometimes, when I squint just right, I can almost imagine the shimmer revealing itself. A pyramid forming, a door opening.

I don’t date. When you find your forever love, it’s hard to pretend that temporary people could occupy permanent spaces.

So I come back.

I come back.

And I come back.

I come back and for the first time, I see a ripple.

A pink wave of iridescence settles into a placid purple diamond. My breath catches in my throat. And I freeze.

I freeze.

Only for a second.

Then I jump through.

---

Host Commentary

About this story, Kindred says: I started writing this story when my ex and I broke-up – a way of processing the dissolution. Within that long-distance relationship, we joked that if we could have a superpower, we’d share teleportation to ease our longing. The story reflects the fairytale romance and the resistance to falling and the ways i can see we made each other better and the hope I held that we’d find our way back to reach other. He’s a best friend now so this story is the second best thing I got from that relationship.

And about this story, I say:
Holy cats, I loved this story so much. I just got happier and happier reading it while I watched the narrator slowly relax into this idea of unconditional, out-of-nowhere love. I was entirely willing to suspend all disbelief about this kind and perfect companionship. And then the narrator made his own life better, in the end, and then, at the last moment, finds a door to jump through, so I can happily imagine a happy ending for this queer love story.

I also thoroughly enjoyed getting to meet the narrator’s friends – every one little pops of color on the page. Kindred has a knack for quickly showing you believable people. And there also were so many wonderful turns of phrase in this story, some of them incorporating that sort of synesthesia that Coco experiences, even when they’re from the narrator’s POV. Coco says “Your pheromones taste like melancholy arpeggios.”, but the narrator also says the immediately graspable sentence: “I deboarded the shower and my whole condo smelled like hot yes.” Totally delightful, and I look forward to Kindred’s next story here.

Aaaand now the Escape Pod news. Congratulations to our sister podcast, because PodCastle’s 15th anniversary is April 1st! Well done, Podcastle!

Now for the rest of the patter. Escape Pod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Don’t change it. Don’t sell it. Please, go forth and share it.

How do you share it, you ask? Well! In addition to your social media of choice, consider rating and/or reviewing us on podcast listening sites, such as Apple or Google. More reviews makes for more discoverability makes for more Escape Pod for you.

Escape Pod relies on the generous donations of listeners exactly like you. And remember that Patreon subscribers have access to exclusive merchandise and can be automatically added to our Discord, where you can chat with other fans as well as our staff members. So! If you enjoyed our story this week then consider going to escapepod.org or patreon.com/EAPodcasts and casting your vote for more stories that take the leap into the shimmer.

Our opening and closing music is by daikaiju at daikaiju.org.

And our closing quotation this week is from Pablo Neruda in Sonnet 17, who said:
“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.”

Thanks for listening! And have fun.