The dead he once made love to often return to check on him, and to show off how they’ve grown no older or weaker than when they last had sex. He, of course, suffers mortality’s predictable losses that they’re far too polite to mention. Instead they smile and wink and lay bare parts of their flesh to prove they remain as desirable as ever. They seem glad to be out of the underworld, and able to show off to the living what they preserved out of sight, in the timeless vault of the imagination. In the garret of his mind he finds the color-field painter stretching his skin like raw canvas across his sturdy frame, and in the kitchen the waiter whose succulent lips pucker like a guppy’s in a fishbowl. In the bathroom waits the hairdresser whose chest is as thick as an old-growth forest, clicking his scissors like castanets as he dances on the tiled floor. But the dead, though gorgeous, are not interested in seduction. They might unbutton their shirts down to their navels, but they never take them off. Nudity is reserved for life and not for these post-mortal encounters. The dead who contact him are always men he met during the day, his afternoon delights, as if the sun burnt their images on his brain. He picked up a few in the early morning, after a fruitless night of lust. But he met most of them in late afternoon, when work was officially over and dinner plans yet-to-be-made, when he could saunter free from care and open to possibility for others like himself, filled with desire, men taking the air and unafraid of taking all of it.