Adam
ADAM
I used to look for signs in my dreams. I thought the Holy Ghost was speaking to me through them, telling me what to do, guiding me to make decisions that, in hindsight, were completely inconsequential, like which tie I should wear or what time I should go to bed. At my most devout, that was the beautiful promise of Mormonism: that God wanted to talk to me. Directly. Personally. About even the little things. And that was the curse, too: even the little things seemed like they were of eternal importance. It was paralyzing to search for so much meaning in minutiae.
Now, I realize that dreams are just clearinghouses for unspent feelings. That whatever anxiety I didn’t manage to feel during the day just needed somewhere to go, and that’s why my subconscious conjures up the image of a giant spider giving me a swirly.
It’s not surprising that I often dream of Richie. This time, my ex is standing at the front door of my apartment back in Millburn telling me that his hot new gym rat boyfriend ended up loving Equinox more than him. He made a mistake, he says. He should have treated me better. Even within my dream, I fantasize about being the kind of person who would turn Richie away. I’ve moved on. I have too much self-respect now. But I do what I would do on a lonely night and invite him inside, at which point he asks if it’s OK if his “ new new boyfriend” comes in, too.
I peek out the door to see who he could possibly be talking about and there is Roland Rogers in the flesh, shirtless, holding his hand out in greeting, saying, “Hi, it’s a pleasure to finally meet you, Adam.”
“You’re dating him ?” I ask Richie, ignoring Roland’s hand.
“Well, in this industry, I certainly can’t afford to date myself,” Roland responds on Richie’s behalf, smiling at his cleverness. “This is Hollywood, baby. I’m fifty going on twenty-nine.”
Richie sidles up to Roland’s side, places a hand over the movie star’s absurdly sculpted abs and then says the word from the fridge: “Yum.”
“Yum?” I ask.
“Yum,” Richie confirms. “ Yummy .”
I feel nauseated. Two people this shallow deserve each other. But on the back of that bitterness comes the awareness that I am indeed dreaming, which usually only means I have a few seconds left before I jolt awake. I reach out to slam the door right in their annoying faces, but Roland stops it midswing with an outstretched pinky.
“No one shuts the door on Crag Dynamite,” he says. “Not even my ghost.”
When I wake up, my skull pounding, I pepper Roland Rogers with questions, not even bothering to peel myself off the floor first. I’d probably just faint again anyway, so I might as well stay put.
“If you’re really dead, what was it like to die?”
It still seems like I’m hallucinating. I haven’t been a model of mental stability myself lately. My cat has been my most frequent conversational partner, and he talks way more than I do. Have I been so deprived of human contact that I’m imagining things? The floor certainly feels real against my spine.
“Cold,” Roland answers. “Then warm. Then cold again.”
“Is there a God?”
“I haven’t met Him yet, but if I do, I’ll tell Him you said hi.”
“ Where are you?”
“I’m here.”
“So, are you … stuck here?”
“Well, they say if you make a face long enough …”
“And why would I be the first person you reach out to?”
While I wait for a response, I sit up and take stock of my vertebrae. I am apparently still intact, not that Roland’s unforgiving flooring was any help in that regard. When did rich people turn on carpet? Maybe not in a kitchen, but still: Roland’s entire place looks like an unfinished basement. A Foosball table wouldn’t look out of place in most rooms.
“Because you know what it’s like to keep a secret,” Roland says.
I think I detect a slight crack in his voice on that last answer, though that could just have been a glitch in the speaker. His speech doesn’t always come out smoothly; there are periodic clicks and hitches in the sound.
“You don’t have to believe me right now, Adam,” Roland continues. “But we’ve only got so long before my management gets suspicious no one else has seen me. I need you to be my witness. And we need to write this book before people find out I’m dead.”
“Why?”
“Well, because if they find out I’m dead and then I write a book, that doesn’t really work, does it? They need to think I wrote it while I was alive.”
I should drink some water or something. I don’t have the energy to clarify what I was asking, but I try anyway, my voice going hoarse midway through the question. “No, I mean, why write a book at all? You don’t have to do it.”
Author certainly wouldn’t top my list of ideal post-death occupations.
“Wouldn’t you want to if you were me?” Roland asks. “Remember what you said about secrets being ‘felled logs in the snow’? I lived with mine for fifty years, Adam.”
So, he really did read Sodomite , and well enough to quote it to me. It must have made an impression on him. But would I want to write a memoir if I were Roland Rogers? I ponder the question as I hoist myself upright with the help of a kitchen stool. If I were dead, beloved by America, and held up as a paragon of masculinity, I might be willing to let people live with some false assumptions. Coming out would only fracture his fan base. I can only imagine how some of the more regressive Crash lovers would react.
“And you’re sure you want to come out like this?” I ask him, regaining my land legs as I walk around the island to the fridge. “In a book? You can’t just posthumously post to your Instagram?”
“I don’t have an Instagram, Adam. I’m not a fucking Kardashian.”
Now, that sounds more like a movie star. I treat myself to one of the Voss waters in the fridge without asking, draining half a liter in a few gulps. Before I can ask another question, the blue light glows beneath the speaker again.
“Everyone’s going to remember me as some macho action idiot,” Roland says. “I want them to know I was more sophisticated than that.”
“And being gay makes you sophisticated?”
I can think of a couple ex-boyfriends who disprove that correlation. And yet, if he really is dead, which I’m not ready to admit, the challenge of making Roland Rogers into a literary voice just became more appealing. Compared to the neglected novel gathering dust on my hard drive back home, a gay ghost is fascinating raw material. Would I be the first person to ever interview a dead man? The question is absurd, and yet the seriousness with which I’m considering it makes my head swim. I finish off the Voss in one go, seeing stars as I tilt my head back.
“Look, do you have your phone on you?” Roland asks. “Just check your bank account balance.”
I fish it out of my pocket—thankfully the screen didn’t crack when I collapsed—and see an email notification for a $50,000 wire transfer. I had agreed to accept no money on signing, which set off alarm bells, but my banking app confirms it: I now have $53,000 in checking.
“I took the liberty of having my accountant send over an initial payment while you were out. You don’t have to think I’m dead. You can think I’m crazy. But we should get started, and you’ll get paid either way.”
Paid. We may not have much in common, but Roland is speaking my language now.
“Let’s say you are dead somewhere under a snowbank,” I muse, trying to envision how this will work, “what if they find your body while I’m here?”
“Well, you better write fast,” he tells me.
If this is a joke, it’s an expensive one. I’ll have to hope that Roland either reveals himself to be Oz behind the curtain at the end of all this, or that his remains don’t get discovered by some enterprising ski patroller. I’ll have to lie to Paul—well, I’ll tell him I’m working on the book, and I’ll simply omit the part about Roland being deceased. But I can try to pull this off. The money is worth the risk. If I had something to lose, I lost it a long time ago.
“When do we start?”