My posture isn’t very good, he said. I looked back up, as he pulled on a pair of grey sweatpants, still shirtless. He tried to straighten his back a little, pushing his head further up through the tent. I’m working on it, he said. I’m worried I have scoliosis.

I smiled and reassured him that I highly doubted it. He then lifted his left arm, sniffed, and apologized—One downside is the shower situation. It’s hard to keep up my usual . . . freshness.

You’re usually fresh? I asked, eyebrow cocked.

Wouldn’t you say?

That’s not the word that comes to mind.

He laughed. Oh yeah, what is?

Mmm . . . musky.

What, like a-a dusty old attic?

No, not musty. I chuckled. Musky.

Oh, I was going to say …

Like the smell of the earth.

Or maybe more like the air after thunder. Or a birch, peeled of its bark. A thing can only ever be described in relation to something else. One body described by another. He stood there in front of me shirtless, neither performative nor self-conscious, as if daring me to study him. I suddenly felt as if I was in a different Mann novel altogether, on a beach, considering a beguiling Polish youth. Without another word, Kyle knelt down on the carpet facing me. And I moved off the air mattress and down onto my knees on the blanketed ground, facing him. And without ever touching one another, we closed our eyes, and gradually relinquished ourselves to the frequency of the Earth; to the most intense and bracing pleasure I have ever known.

Afterwards, I lay awake trying to gather myself until morning light began to seep through the tent’s translucent walls. Another night with barely any sleep. But I was not tired. I had never felt more awake. Strangely, I felt little guilt or approbation over what we had done. It was not sex. It was an intimacy unlike any I had experienced. To say sex and tuning were akin because they both invoked intimacy and pleasure was to say rain was akin to an ocean, or breath was akin to wind. Lying there now in my sports bra and pants, without shoes and without a shirt, basking in a night’s worth of accumulated body heat—the scene had all of the trappings of violation, transgression, obscenity. And yet I felt none of those things. I lay there in a wholly different kind of afterglow, thinking about limits. The limits we imposed upon ourselves, and the limits nature imposed. What were the limits of nature? I was aware of Kyle’s chest slowly rising and falling beside me. We were cocooned in separate, mouldering sleeping bags that smelt of bygone camping trips. Mine had some sand in it; probably from some childhood excursion to a canyon, or a beach.