Before we slowed, then stopped, before we inched past the covered body on the ground, we had been the ones speeding by all the bikers. The switchback road offered no respite from its punishing ascent. Curve after curve revealed only another rise. Yet they labored on, veering capriciously in and out of traffic from sheer exhaustion, tensed calves bulging, asses in the air, sweat flitting off slick skin. Already on my first day in Bogotá, Luis, my host and former student, had insisted on getting out of the city. We were heading forty-five minutes into the hills to El Tambor, a popular roadside grill with views of mountains upon mountains where you feast with your hands on succulent meats, sticky-ripe plantains, charred potatoes, short cobs of corn. Now, halfway there, car at a standstill, traffic down to one tight lane, the cyclists were barreling past us. What compels them, I wondered, to push themselves up into this even thinner air, risk these dangerous turns on a road overrun with faster, heavier machines, their impatient operators poised to mow you down for a single swerve?
With a population of eight million, Bogotá lies hugely nestled in the mountains 8,600 feet above sea level. As we climbed, the spectacular cityscape looked like some god-child’s arrangement of toy blocks. I’d been prescribed medication for altitude sickness by my doctor preemptively before my first trip here in 2016, but I hadn’t needed it, never felt lightheaded or nauseous, not even short of breath. This time, while I was eight years older, no longer under fifty, I didn’t bother. Luis, knowing what I wanted to hear, told me that most travelers to Bogotá suffer from it. “You’re the only one who has conquered it!” he proclaimed, and I smiled despite myself. It’s absurd to be proud of one’s good health, but somehow, for me, grateful doesn’t cut it, and forget about feeling “blessed.” I was ready to flaunt it. The first time I had been here, also at Luis’s invitation, he had thrown a party in my honor on my final night, and I had vomited into his tidy patio garden from drinking too much whiskey and indulging in a toke from a fat joint rolled with potent Colombian weed. As we waited in the car, I tried to assure him that I wouldn’t make a fool of myself again. “You didn’t make a fool of yourself!” he said, flashing his generous smile. “You were just having fun.”
Our turn came to negotiate the makeshift single lane, two tires on the gravel shoulder, precipitous cliff just a few meters away. As we crawled around the bend, the first thing I noticed was the ambulance, lights still flashing. Then, a few parked cars blocking the road, a small crowd of EMTs and cyclists, a mangled bicycle in the right-hand lane. And finally, inevitably, behind the ambulance as we passed, the body. Prone, shrouded with black tarp. Unattended, alone. “Oh God,” Luis said, his voice flat and low. “I’m so sorry you have to see this.” “Please,” I said, “it’s not your fault.” But I was sorry, too. The last dead body I’d seen, and I’ve not seen many, was my mother’s, lying face up in the bed she had died in while sleeping, my siblings and father standing with me weeping at the foot of the bed, my sisters moving to lie with her, me standing apart, unable, in my cowardice, even to hold her hand. I looked away from the scene on the road, out onto the landscape of valleys and hills, and a shudder passed through me. Those voids! Vertiginous drops, eternal abysses. As I’ve aged, I’ve suffered increasingly from a fear of heights, just as my mother had. I avoid balconies in theaters, walk as far away as I can from any railing. I’m scared to death of flying. This person had not died in a fall, but something about it happening on this steep incline filled me with the same queasiness. A joyride, a bargain with the devil, a catastrophic loss. I knew what it was to risk going overboard.
An hour later, on the multi-tiered stone patio at El Tambor, the deliberate sucking of meaty juice off my fingers chased all morbid thoughts from my mind. My mother was gone, the biker was gone, I was alive. Perhaps this was crass, insensitive to the departed, but I’d been training myself, especially since my children had grown into their adult selves, to look only forward, not dwell on what has passed. In this moving on, this forgetting, a survival mechanism. As Luis and I caught up and discussed the details of my trip, a week-long residency at the university where he teaches music history, I couldn’t resist checking my phone for messages from Carlos, a guy I had been chatting with on an app for the past month and whom I was hoping to meet this week. The last time I had been in Bogotá, my wife and I had not yet opened our marriage, and I had not yet come out. Luis, who is also gay, was especially excited about this aspect of my visit. We’d known each other for twenty years, but this was a new twist. Instead of throwing a party on my last night, he told me, this time he wanted take me to Theatron, the South American continent’s largest gay club. A few minutes later, my phone dinged, a message from Carlos, and I thought, well, why not invite him along?
Another hour later, having eaten more than our fill, Luis and I dumped our stash of oily napkins in the trash, returned the round woven basket to the counter, and let his small dog relieve himself on the grass as we took in the heavenly vista one last time. On the stomach-churning drive back to my hotel, the city grew taller as we descended. I kept an eye out for the scene of the accident. “That was really awful,” Luis said when I brought it up again. “It’s so dangerous on these hills. So risky.” We talked about my schedule for practicing on his piano that week, weighed dinner options, made plans to return to a craft market I’d enjoyed the last time. And then there was Carlos, with whom, in a few quick exchanges, I’d planned a hotel-room rendezvous for the next morning. Suddenly there it was, the ambulance. Its lights were no longer flashing, and the rest of the scene was cleared. Luis slowed down. Behind the ambulance, a man, sitting upright, legs covered with black tarp, head bandaged and bloody, arm and shoulder heavily wrapped in a sling. “I thought he was dead!” I cried, astonished. “I could have sworn it!” And a few more switchbacks delivered us into the city of millions.
_____
They call it the Mount Everest of the piano repertoire. Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata, Opus 106. A few years before, I’d performed it, scaled it, pushed myself, barely, to the summit. What compelled me, in all of my inadequacy, my litany of limitations, to take it on? The composer’s last five sonatas make an extraordinary set, a late-style charting of unforeseen musical territory, music that twinkles with starlight, rumbles with tectonic force. For a decade, playing these sonatas was my life’s obsession. I’d gotten through four of them, in fact played one, Opus 110, in Bogotá the last time I was here. To complete the project, I needed the Hammerklavier, a four-movement, fifty-minute monster work of intense expressivity and arm-busting technical demands. I knew this music was beyond me. Still, there was no question. The piano is my ride, Beethoven my mountain.
I would not perform the Hammerklavier in Bogotá, though it would have made sense to program the piece on an occasion like this, an international invitation, to show off a little, get more mileage from the sonata after the superhuman effort of learning it. I’d considered reviving it, but in the end, I went for a program of music that I was certain I could play with easier success. Impromptus of Chopin, sonatas of Scarlatti, Prokofiev’s scenes from Romeo and Juliet. My first performances of the sonata had not gone entirely to plan; I didn’t need to make a fool of myself. In putting it back on the shelf, I wondered if I was admitting failure, telling myself that it was wrong to have done it in the first place, foist my imperfections upon the public. Many other pianists, players far more proficient than me, do not dare program Opus 106. But I had to wonder, what are they afraid of? A few wrong notes, some flubbed passages? What could be worth denying oneself the experience of putting that music into your body, making yourself one with it? What, in such an intimate context, is failure in the first place? Who gets to decide? Do a handful of wrong notes invalidate all of the right ones? Is it a failure to lose in the final match of a tournament, when you’ve gotten so far into it by winning? Where, in a performance, does success end and failure begin? Is there a point, a moment of impact? Is death a failure of life?
I’d managed to sneak the Hammerklavier into my week’s activities in Bogotá another way, by offering to take over a music theory class taught by one of Luis’s colleagues, solely for the opportunity to talk about (and therefore play) the sonata’s third movement, the longest slow movement Beethoven ever composed, and the saddest music I know. Some part of me needed to share it, this music that wishes itself into another key, expresses over and over again its desire to be something different, someone, somewhere else. The movement’s conflict is between its actual key of F-sharp minor and the fantasy key of G major. They’re worlds apart, these keys, their affective landscapes as dissimilar as a windswept desert and a mountain lake. When the dark and despairing F-sharp minor, its harmonies thick and confining, slips into its major-key dream, everything opens up. The air clears, space expands between the notes, and a short melody full of longing rings out in the highest treble, a tightwire walker cushioned by an oversize pillow of harmony way below in the valley of the bass. An easy stroll along the thin line of a major scale, the sweetest non sequitur.
In one long passage, deep into the eighteen-minute-long movement, a continuous stream of fast-moving notes in the right hand writhes its way up and down the piano’s high end, heaving and moaning, all wide leaps and tight switchbacks, finding and losing G major again and again. Beethoven’s dynamic markings in this section are uncommonly detailed. At times, they feel counterintuitive—an instruction to remain still when the harmonies obviously want to scream, or to rise and fall drastically over a short span, as if wracked with spasms, or hurled off a cliff. In class, I like to play the passage without observing the markings, flat and expressionless, then repeat it with all of them in place. The music becomes, in this transformation, three-dimensional. A body. A person. And we feel it: something’s gotten to them. They’ve been gut punched.
Beethoven loves, especially in his late music, to create an expanse of emptiness and fill it in. He’ll start off with slow-moving notes, open textures, then move through a progression of faster notes, keeping the tempo the same, increasing density. Sometimes it’s clear that the music is evoking the heavens, reaching out to explore the cosmos. A long stream of thirty-second notes in the last movement of his final sonata, Opus 111, is thinned out, as if spinning in air without gravity. But the string of thirty-second notes in the Hammerklavier’s slow movement, thanks to those expressive markings, is different, physical rather than metaphysical. Grounded, pressed into earth. It connects not through the medium of idea, not through abstraction, but viscerally, as bodies connect.
_____
When Carlos buzzed at the door of room 502 and I opened it, without hesitation but not without a quiver of nerves, we fell, after the merest of greetings, into each other, kissing and sucking each other’s faces and necks for minutes while the door, propped by my body, remained open to the corridor. “Let’s close the door,” I said after a while, taking a moment to breathe, pull my scorched hand out from under his shirt. I’d fantasized about touching his darkly, thickly haired chest ever since first spotting his shirtless profile photo on the app. “Put your backpack down, take off your coat.” It was seven am. Carlos had come straight from work, a night shift. The evening before, I’d asked him to let me know exactly when he’d be arriving. “I need my coffee before you get here,” I’d messaged him, “then my post-coffee shit, then a shower.” He had responded with one of his shy monkey emojis, but he got it. He was a medical doctor, nothing about the body fazed him. After a month of messaging, we had developed a candid rapport. He smelled, finally, of a hard night’s work, tangy, and for the first time, to my surprise, I was attracted to and not repulsed by a person’s body odor. In the bed soon after, shirts off but pants still on, a detail for which I already loved him without knowing it, I vigorously licked his armpit, wanting to taste, like an animal, the place where his smell was coming from. “I never knew I was sensitive there,” Carlos moaned. “I’m happy to be the one to show you,” I sexy-talked back. Returning to his face, I took his whole, broad nose into my mouth and sucked on it like it was the ice cream cone and I was the spellbound child. Later, in the shower, I turned him around, crouched down, and slid my tongue inside his wet ass. This was, for me, another first. When he pressed himself back into me, then pulled forward, then pushed back again, I hardened my tongue and shot it forward like an arrow, never for a moment wondering what compelled me.
“Look how cute we are in the mirror!” Carlos exclaimed after our shower, during which, as if possessed by new strength, I had, in addition to rimming him, lifted him up and held him while we kissed, his legs wrapped around my waist. I’m no strong man, but it was important for me to show him that my body, thirty years older than his, was capable of it, that he could rely on me. Somehow, chatting online, we both seemed to know that we would end up here, so connected it was like we’d known each other forever. We’d felt the burn from our screens alone, like a secret, seductive, something we shouldn’t tell, something we ourselves weren’t sure was true. Now, with our actual bodies involved, finding their easy ways with each other, I knew it was true, and I knew that Carlos knew. We’d both had our share of hookups, but neither of us had ever experienced anything like this wild ride, from the first flare of virtual attraction, to fast friends over a month of chats, to even faster, hungrier lovers, desperate not to be pried apart.
Turning with him toward the mirror, I noticed, in the fluorescent light, two age spots on my temple. It was as if they showed up just at that moment to torment me. Now that I had come out, I thought, had finally started to accept and even love that part of myself, now that I had this beautiful young man in my room, here was something new about myself to hate. My age. Back in the bed, as if reading my mind, comforting me, Carlos reached out to touch my bald crown with shocking tenderness. My allowing it, not shooting my hand up to swipe his away, was equally a shock. I leaned in to lick his handsome eyebrows, then his forehead. Thick black strands stuck to my tongue at his hairline. The skin there tasted of some product I’d seen him applying at the sink. “Minoxidil,” he explained, “to stop hair loss. Sorry! I’m sure it tastes gross!” He placed high value on his hair. “My sister says it frames me, makes my whole face come together.” Without it, he said, he felt he’d be nothing. Hearing him admit this while lavishing attention on my own deprived head caused me to let slip something I’d been holding back since even before the shower. “Carlos, I don’t want to scare you or anything, but there’s something I need to say.” “Are you going to tell me you love me?” he interrupted. “Because I love you, too.”
An hour later, on the other side of an outburst of passion fueled by those words, I announced, with alien, uninhibited sincerity, “Carlos, I’m so hot for you, I would literally eat your shit if you asked me to.” “Oh, I didn’t know you were into scat,” he responded, nonplussed. “You have no idea how much I’m not,” I admitted. Perhaps that was when I had my first inkling of a realization that would only become fully clear to me after my trip to Bogotá. That coming out at fifty, after decades of repressing my sexual self, was a process. That I had not, in fact, come out. That I would be coming out for the rest of my life. If I could tell a man I would eat his feces, and mean it, what else was lurking in my depths?
Somewhere in all of this, during a lull, Carlos picked up his phone and said, “I have to call my mother. I talk to her every morning.” He sat, naked and hard, leaning against the wall, on a round upholstered stool that I’d moved into a corner. I sat, naked and harder, leaning back on my elbows, on the edge of the bed facing him, watching his every move, savoring his every syllable, understanding barely a word, but thrilling at every shift of timbre in his voice, his laugh a slow spill of gravel, his cooing mama’s boy sounds. Every once in a while, during the twenty-minute conversation, he lifted both feet from the floor and put them on my legs, then moved them up to the space in between, cradling one set of balls in another. Carlos’s parents were divorced. His father, a strict man, a physicist, was remarried. Carlos had a second mother. I guess, I thought as I waited, he needs a second daddy. I’d hooked up with plenty of younger men. I’d been surprised, when I first came out, by their advances. It wasn’t until Carlos that I allowed myself to lean into the role-playing. I got quickly comfortable with him calling me daddy, dreaming himself into an alternative family, as I did the same, calling him son. When he ended his call, I moved over to the stool and squeezed myself under him, lifting him onto my lap. We sat for a long while hugging, chest to chest, aroused but wanting to stay there, just holding, heads tucked into curves of neck and shoulder. I forget which of us said it first, “I wish I could come home to you every day,” and which of us simply agreed, “Me, too.” But I remember that neither of us asked, “As what?” or “In what capacity?”
At three that afternoon, I left my otter, my slippery sea creature, my lithe little fox, alone in my hotel room while I went to Luis’s apartment to practice on his piano and have dinner. Carlos would sleep from three to eight then travel an hour by Uber back to work. I’d return to the hotel just in time to see him off. Normally, at home, he told me, he would go to sleep around twelve-thirty or one. He’d given me those extra hours. Given them to himself. To us. He was tucked in on my side of the bed, surrounded by all of the oversized hotel pillows, as I like to sleep, when I turned off the light and snuck out, whispering, “Good night, baby boy.” Already drifting off, he mumbled back something incoherent. My music binder was in my backpack. My passport and laptop I’d left in the room with him, my beloved, trusted stranger, my substitute son.
In a few gorgeous G major hours, I’d gone overboard.
_____
Beethoven’s Hammerklavier is the byproduct of a bromance. Friends were everything to this man, for whom family was an eternal disappointment. His chubby, amiable, and not untalented student, Rudolph, the sonata’s dedicatee, came with an added bonus: he was brother to the emperor of Austro-Hungary, Franz I. They’d begun as student and teacher when Rudolph was seventeen, in 1805. Piano and music theory gave way to composition, and the lessons went on nearly to the end of Beethoven’s life in 1827. The men held each other in high esteem and expressed their love for one another in music. Dedications can mean a great deal. A name, a relationship, can shed light on a piece of music, expose its obscure underbelly. Archduke Rudolph lives on in the Hammerklavier, a friendship etched in its thousands of notes. A love story, then.
Another figure haunts the Hammerklavier. Another young man in Beethoven’s life. I think of him sometimes, a dark-haired boy, walking on the street alongside Beethoven, trying in vain to keep his thin upper lip from trembling. He is the composer’s ten-year-old nephew, Karl, son of his brother Kaspar Karl, who has recently died from consumption. The same disease killed their mother when Ludwig, Kaspar, and their brother Nikolaus were children. Beethoven has been searching for a symbolic replacement of that lost parent-child relationship ever since. Now, the composer is legal guardian to his brother’s son, although a prolonged court case with his sister-in-law, Johanna, who wants her boy back, lends the arrangement a sharp edge. He has to be careful. Tact is not in his nature.
Karl is ashamed of being seen in public with his slovenly uncle, infamous for episodes of senseless ranting and raving. But today the boy is feeling a little sheepish. His grades are slipping at the boarding school where Beethoven has sent him, to get him away from Johanna. As they walk, Karl slips his soft hand into the man’s larger, coarser one and gives it a squeeze, looking for support, some tacit acknowledgment of his struggles. But, as biographer Maynard Solomon describes, Beethoven lets his own hand hang lifeless, refusing a squeeze back. He intends, with this display of coldness, to teach the boy a lesson. Karl is getting off easy. At a recent piano lesson, in frustration, his weird uncle had bit his pupil, a seven-year-old boy, on the shoulder.
Between 1815 and 1820, during which time he composed the Hammerklavier, Beethoven battled with Johanna van Beethoven in court over Karl, shuttling him from home to home, school to school, tearing him from of one set of arms and thrusting him into another. Once, Johanna dressed as a man and stood in desperation at the school fence just to watch Karl take part in gymnastics class on the field. Beethoven, for his part, contemplated kidnapping the boy and shipping him overseas. He had not always hated his sister-in-law. During Napoleon’s invasion of Vienna in 1809, when the royal family, including his buddy Rudolph, fled the city, Beethoven had taken refuge in the home of Kaspar Karl, Johanna, and two-year-old Karl. There, he wrote his Sonata Opus 91a, “Les Adieux,” which describes his sorrow over saying goodbye to his royal friend Rudolph and his jubilance at imagining his return. But now, with his brother’s death six years later, something changed, a screw loosened, and Karl and Johanna became the objects of his obsession. His own family trauma had caught up with him, and he sunk for several years into what Solomon calls “a frenzied, almost hallucinatory, state” in which he attempted to construct a fantasy family structure of his own. Dream himself into a new key, as it were.
In spring 1826, Karl, age twenty and still in a tailspin, struck his uncle during an argument and ran out of the house, back to the rooms where he was lodging. The owners of the home had meanwhile discovered loaded pistols in the boy’s room and confiscated them, which caused the boy to run further. They reported the guns to Beethoven, who sent a friend to apprehend Karl. When he was found, Karl said, “What’s the point? I’ll just find another way.” And sure enough, in early August, he escaped to Baden, in the mountains, where he sat down and wrote two suicide notes, one of them to his uncle, then climbed into the hills with his gun and shot himself in the head.
Not even that desperate act could bring closure to poor Karl’s drama. A man driving by saw the young man lying on the rocks, his dark curls matted, sticky and scarlet, a bullet lodged in his blood-soaked skull. By some lucky accident, he was alive. The man lifted Karl onto his cart, took him down to town, and arranged for him to be sent to his mother’s house. Beethoven approved, and the three of them started the slow process of making amends. Through his uncle’s connections, Karl was accepted into an army regiment, but he had to wait to enlist until his hair grew back to hide the scars. A suicide attempt was a sign of disgrace. While they waited, he and his uncle visited the other Beethoven brother, Nikolaus Johann, at his estate on the Danube northwest of Vienna. They had planned to stay for two weeks, but they ended up there for more than two months. Leaving there, they both knew, would result in their permanent separation, for Karl was expected in Moravia. On the way back to Vienna in December, Beethoven fell gravely ill. Karl stayed for the whole month of January 1827 by his side. From his military post, during Beethoven’s final weeks, Karl wrote letters to him. In them, he referred, finally, to his uncle as “my father” and to himself as “your son.”
All this in the music, too.
_____
At Theatron, I stood out. A gringo daddy, connected at the hip to his Bogotá boy. Early on, sitting with our drinks in the central open area of the huge complex, which takes up an entire city block, Luis and Carlos told me that in Colombia, the word gringo does not have the negative connotations that it does in Mexico and other places in Latin America. It simply meant that I was white. And in Bogotá, conspicuous. Carlos had also a few times called me a gordibueno, a term I understood less clearly but had something again to do with my age, but also with my body being neither skinny nor fat, and my apparent sex appeal. I made no argument, went with the flow, grabbing his ass as I hustled behind him on the swarming stairs, more overrun switchbacks. At the bar, as he ordered me a scotch, I pressed myself hard up against him. He leaned back to kiss me, but I turned my face away. A pair of cold sores had appeared on my upper lip that morning, and they’d gotten more painful throughout the day. First, the age spots, now this. “No kissing!” I lamented when we met up at an Italian restaurant where we dined with Luis before going to the club. “It’s so sad!” “Yes, we can kiss,” Carlos retorted easily. “I find blisters sexy.” True or not, I couldn’t allow it.
We’d kissed plenty, anyway, two nights before, the night of my performance, which my sweet boy had attended. By a stroke of luck, it had landed on his one night off a week. I found it the most adorable thing imaginable that he would devote precious time away from his grueling job to me, my music. We were strangers, despite our professions of love. But Carlos said there was no question, and I knew that it was true. I didn’t see him in the crowd as I approached the piano and took my bow. Forced to take a perilous motorcycle Uber through the sprawling city’s gridlock to get to the recital hall just in the nick of time, he had started in the back row but moved to the front during a moment of applause between pieces. Having him in my peripheral vision relaxed me, made my playing feel like a gift, to him, and by association to everyone in the room. I felt that I was feeding them, that they were eating my sounds, smelling their aromas. I’ve rarely in public performance felt so free in my intentions and their execution. My easy program had become even easier. Carlos said he liked Romeo and Juliet the best. “Of course,” I said, “it’s the love story.” “Thank you, Carlitos, so much, for being there,” I said later as we walked arm in arm to Luis’s car. “And for moving to the front row.” “I wanted to watch your beautiful, thick hands,” Carlos said, stroking them in the back seat on the way to a restaurant. He continued to hold them under the table, where, unlike Beethoven with his own Karl, I reciprocated with enthusiasm.
Back at the hotel, we smoked a little pot, sitting on the floor in front of the cracked window, the heavy curtains cocooning us to keep the smell from entering the room. When we got back into the bed, we noticed a creaking, then a louder crack, then a thud. We’d broken it. Naked and giggling, slippery Carlos shimmied on his back under the low, king-size bed, all the way to the middle, to move the thick wooden support beams back in place. I stood in a slight panic as the last inches of his skinny, hairy shins disappeared under the imposing mattress. But in a jiffy, he was back out, and we were free again to romp as we wished. This was at four in the morning. A curtain fort for smoking pot, the fixing of a broken bed, a fit of giggles, making out for hours, holding hands. It was as if I was a teenager having a sleepover with my best friend, but instead of lusting after him unrequitedly, I had convinced him to love me back. I was no longer a daddy. I was Carlos’s age. I had beaten time. I was a boy, his mother still living, who had taken another route, set himself free to make choices based on pride instead of shame. I didn’t sleep that night, but Carlos did, quietly for an hour or two. I just held him, luxuriating in this transcendent treble.
Nor did I sleep after our night at Theatron. My flight was early. In our short time at the hotel, Carlos grabbed barely enough sleep to shave off one of the many drinks he, normally a non-drinker, had consumed, mostly with Luis, who was likely going to be the one throwing up this time around. I packed, fretted, my emotions in a tailspin. I never do well the night before travel, let alone on a plane, let alone two, let alone ripping myself away from this, what, this fantasy, this new reality, this future possibility? This thing that would within an hour or two be no longer, the distances of age and geography suffocating it before it ever had a chance to breathe. Before he drifted off, Carlos spent a miserable hour crying “I don’t want you to leave!” over and over, as I cupped his round, wet, darkly stubbled cheek in my palm. “I love you,” I said, repeating and intensifying it each time he sang his pathetic refrain. “I love you. I love you. I fucking love you.”
Of course he accompanied me to the airport. Our adieu, the maestro and his prince, was some of my life’s saddest music. In the security line, I stopped at every switchback to wave, body shaking, thirty-second-note sobs barely suppressed, caught in my pressured throat. Before I’d gone through, we’d stood holding each other, stroking each other’s faces, crying softly, for a good fifteen minutes. We were not alone. Clusters of families surrounded us, doing the same, just as they had been celebrating raucously in the arrivals hall when I had landed a week ago, when I remembered thinking, as I had the last time I visited, this is a place for me. In the group next to us, an old woman turned toward us and I caught her eye. It conveyed only sympathy. Luis and Carlos had both praised Bogotá for its progressive attitude toward the LGBTQ community. What passed between me and this woman, imagined or not, sent me into another spasm. “The life I could be living here,” I cried to Carlos, “with you.” But I had to do it, rip myself from his embrace. Once I went through the body scanners, I couldn’t see him anymore. I texted, “Can you see me?” “No,” he replied, adding a stream-of-tears emoji. I’ve only once or twice felt so empty, so punched in the gut by a single word. And by something else, a force potent and invisible. Why is love always the fucking fist?
I had to stop looking. I had to walk forward with Carlitos behind me, below me as I flew home, above me again when I landed in the flat upper Midwest. I was going to be hurt by this. It already hurt so much. I’d made a fool of myself. “You were given a glimpse of another life,” my wife said when she picked me up at the airport after two flights that lasted the whole day, one involving heavy turbulence. She patted my back and held my hand when I collapsed into the passenger seat and, upended, let it all pour out. “A life you might have had,” she said. “But I did have it!” I cried, gasping for air. “I do!”
