The park is the only place to go. No one too concerned about the real reason their lives have shifted—a reason that dangles in the famous fog and sticks to fomites everywhere—everyone, like me, scraping out what pleasures they can. Even with a friend in the ICU, I forget. Even with her daily pictures: hospital pancakes, views of the bay, the mysterious clear plastic device named Voldyne, like a fancy lady, that opens her lungs. She’s getting worse. You let your two-toned bangs fall over your eyes and look askance: smoky, haunted. I like that. I want to know why.

This is our first meeting. You’ve been furloughed that day from your job as a government asylum officer. You use my right pronouns. You ask my sign and whether I have “sexual vitality.” I say yes, though I’m not sure, exactly, what it means. Whatever it is, I have it. I haven’t seen my girlfriend for six months—she’s stuck across the country, afraid to travel because of a skin tag blocking her trachea. We’ve opened our relationship. Her choice, my treat. This is the first try. Your father has died. I never learn when or how. I want to ask. There’s a picture of him on your refrigerator. Coney Island, late eighties. You, dark-haired, pigtails, eyes bright then, straddling your bicycle with your feet flat on the sidewalk, handlebars tricked out with a purple horn. He, hiding behind sunglasses and a baggy charcoal suit, like he knew he’d be gone one day and wanted to hide himself from scrutiny, his hand resting on the back wheel of your bike so lightly that you wouldn’t have known you weren’t keeping yourself upright if it weren’t for this picture taken in an instant in that part of the middle of an afternoon where the light is ugly and stark, even in the city. This picture you face every time you retrieve frozen cookies, fancy cheese, beer.

Your apartment has paintings of cupcakes and rainbows and tigers on the walls, all this neon cheer to hide the fact that the windows open onto bricks and masturbation sounds pipe in from unknown sources and a teenager lives next door who screams at you to go fuck yourself. You won’t fuck yourself today. Or at least, not only.

I’ve been touched once since the plague began. My friend Eve, visiting from Portland on her way to buy a house in Joshua Tree—Twentynine Palms, really—a little homesteader’s cabin under the lights of the military base. She stood by the fence in front of my apartment on the Berkeley–Oakland border and said, “Are you ready?” I said, “Yes,” because I was, for anything, I’d been alone so long I was going crazy. I had no idea what Eve was readying me for, until she sprang across the distance between us and hugged me, wrapping me in overheated funk from sitting in a white Prius too long in June with only one stop for gas all the way from Oregon. Endorphins raced through me like heroin and I swear I felt good from her touch for weeks.