It’s been happening since the beginning of time. People like you who give no value to memory, who no longer imagine nor dream, should have evolved into something else a long time ago, but you’ve somehow endured without evolving; you make no sense and yet you are infinite, everlasting—and if you’re really going to go here, as you apparently are, you can drag it all the way back to Alan Brickmann’s marshmallow dick.

You always dated girls, but in seventh grade, there was Steve Marcini. In eighth, Parker Colson, Jimmy Bender. In ninth, tenth, eleventh, there was the fat kid, Sam Levenson (when he broke it off, that’s when you punched him), and in twelfth, and even while at home from college, there was Chuck Myers, and you carried a thing for Chuck Myers through college, until senior year when you heard Chuck got married and you kind of went bananas and stopped tracking last names, sometimes even first names, and although you are Not Gay, there have always been men, young men, handsome even if they were not handsome, and it was only when you found yourself in your twenties in DC, clerking for a Republican congressman, when a woman walked by and was like Has anyone ever told you you look like Ronald Reagan? that the way forward made itself known: you became Ronald Reagan. And so to gay rights? Human rights?

Look at your hair, coal-black and coiffed. Look at your cheeks, nose and jawline. Your closet is full of shiny men’s loafers, pastel summer sweaters, blazers with thick, padded shoulders, brass buttons. Look at your endless striped ties. You, you faggot, are an aardvark, an irrational, everlasting Earth-product, and whether you are ready to accept this or not, you have been, all this time, it must be said, wearing the skins of your enemy.

“If you want a peek, go ahead,” Marlen says. “You won’t believe what they do with ’em. I half expect ’em to wake up, come to life like Lazarus,” he says, haha.

“Who’s Lazarus,” you say, because even Marlen, with his Bible, reads more than you do.

Marlen shakes his head at you. You are a politician, he’s thinking. Unlike you, he’s got real-world experience, he knows more than you do about the world, about life, he’s got the Bible and he’s got street smarts, and Marlen talks to himself as he leaves the room, vacuum in hand, as though you don’t deserve to hear what he says, but you with your incredible hearing catch him answering your question out loud from behind the closed doors:

“Jesus brought him back from the dead! Resurrected him! Brought him out of his cave. And Jesus said unto them, ‘Take off the grave clothes and let him go…’”

You are not ready to View Greg Tampico. This all could still be some kind of joke or some accident, you think. Like, maybe the wake Marlen is talking about is not Greg Tampico’s wake, you don’t know, but all at once you do not want Greg Tampico to be behind the room divider.