~NARRATIVE REPORT CONTINUED~

Blithe woke up restless at 5:00 a.m., made his smoothie and his coffee. He meditated and then sat on the couch, scrolling through the Gram. When he got to Aiden’s image, there was a scraggly aloe plant instead of a beautiful body. The caption bewildered him, and when he clicked on @fieldsofpen, he was taken to a page of aloe portraits and a locker-room selfie, a bunch of dogs. Nothing held his attention.

He got in the shower, and as he was scrubbing himself with eucalyptus wash, he felt unreal, like the arm he was looking at didn’t belong to him. He’d been mildly dissociated his whole life, but this was different, because he was turning away from himself and somehow toward himself.

He did not want to take deep breaths or “process.”

He needed to go.

Blithe filled a weekender bag and drove out of the city under a rose-fingered sky. Turning onto CA-62W, he briefly thought about the logistics of his abrupt departure, but he was always leaving people in one form or another. He could smooth things over with the studio if he explained his trip as “last-minute research” and his parents—well, they had just been on their own jaunt.

Once he started losing service, the morning thickened.

He passed small sun-bleached towns of misery with missing letters on their church signs and fast-food restaurants. The desert began, cut with telephone lines, wind turbines, and unfinished pueblo houses.

He stopped at a gas station to get a seltzer. He loved the rural-urban interplay, the ringing bell of the gas station door. He could see his own desirability and elite status when the young blond cashier with tanned forearms bagged his wet drink and said, “That all, boss?”

He pictured himself gliding through the morning desert, without his boyfriend knowing his whereabouts, his charisma at a level where he could seduce a desert gas station attendant without fear of reprisal.

“Yeah, but take that out of the bag.”

Blithe headed toward Joshua Tree, even though he and Saul gently mocked their friends who spent days realigning in the Integratron or building solar ovens for Bequinox. After about two hours, the road started appearing too close to the windshield. He pulled over clear his head. He stepped outside of the car and smelled the most delicious burning. Blithe had always thought of the desert as annoyingly sparse. He was wrong. It wasn’t sparse but clear, as clear as a blade coming down. He was bottoming for the desert and wished he could lean against the hood of the car and pull down his pants to let it all the way in, without fear of poisonous creatures or crazed folk who might confuse his gesture.

He walked away from the road, stopping at a flowering crown-of-thorns cactus, and as he looked down at the delicate pink flowers, his entire girlhood came crashing through his body. He closed his eyes in pain and knelt down on the ground. He was an agave plant. Spiky pencas were removed to reveal the piña, the heart. Then this squash-shaped vessel was sliced open and its nectar poured into the crack.