Authors: Brad Boney
Mark walked out of the kitchen. “Where are you going?” Ian asked as he followed him to the hall closet. Mark reached up and pulled the Scrabble box off the top shelf. He took it back to the kitchen, sat down on his stool, and removed the lid.
“Why do you want to play Scrabble at a time like this?”
“I don’t want to play Scrabble. It’s an anagram.”
“What’s an anagram?” Ian asked.
“A word or phrase formed from another by scrambling—”
“No, you idiot. I know what an anagram is. I meant, what word or phrase are you talking about?”
Mark placed the board in the middle of the counter and dumped the letters out. “Manick Butter. Tad said Mrs. Brown gives each special edition a distinctive name, but she never tells them what it means.”
“So?”
“So, then it must mean
something
. Manick Butter. Why does it have a ‘
k
’ in it?”
“I don’t know. Marketing I guess, or maybe it’s somebody’s name. Why does it matter?”
“The ‘
k
’ in Manick is there for a reason. I’m sure of it. I bet the anagram doesn’t work without it. So you can either stand there and argue with me or help me figure out what it means.”
“Okay, okay.” Ian sat down, and they spelled it out on the Scrabble board.
MANICK BUTTER
“Now,” Mark said, “we have to rearrange the letters until they form something different.”
“Like what?”
“Hell if I know. It should be fairly obvious, once we figure it out.”
They slid the letters around the board, but nothing took shape. Then Mark got a lead.
AMBIENT TRUCK
“Ambient Truck?” Ian said. “I don’t think that’s it.” Ian rearranged the letters again.
A CRUMB KITTEN
Followed by Mark’s second attempt.
MARTIN BUCKET
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Mark said. He rubbed his face and then played with the letters again. “I know it’s in there somewhere.”
“Again, I’m going to ask, why does it matter?”
Mark sighed and shook his head. Then his eyes lit up and he screamed, “Oh my God, that’s it!” He unscrambled the letters and lined them up into three words. He turned the board toward Ian, who looked down in utter amazement. Using the same letters as Manick Butter, Mark had spelled:
TURN BACK TIME
“No way,” Ian muttered.
“Mrs. Brown knew exactly what she was doing.
Zee keess vill find zee right coostomer
.”
Ian sat back. He ran his fingers through his lush head of hair. His stomach growled, and he said, “I’m hungry.” He got up and went to the pantry. He pulled a bag of chocolate fudge cookies from the middle shelf and then grabbed a pair of scissors from the knife block. He cut the bag open, popped a cookie into his mouth, and chewed. His phone rang in his pocket.
“Who’s that?” Mark asked.
Ian pulled it out. “No one. It’s just the alarm for my meds.” As soon as Ian said the words, Mark jumped off his stool. Ian dropped the bag of cookies onto the linoleum floor and felt goose bumps race up his arms and neck. He could hear his heart pounding in his chest as he said, “Do you think…? It would only make sense, right?”
“What time is it?” Mark asked.
“Four o’clock.”
“The clinic is open for another hour. The results take like twenty minutes.”
“Let’s go.”
Without bothering to pick up the bag of cookies, they ran outside and jumped into Mark’s car. He drove to the public health clinic as fast as he could. Ian signed in with the receptionist and paid the twenty-dollar fee. Five minutes later a young man called Ian into a small room and pricked his finger with a tiny needle.
“That’s it?” Ian asked.
“That’s it,” the nurse said. “Since we’re not busy, it should only take about ten minutes. You can go back to the waiting room, and we’ll call your number when we have the results.”
Ian paced the small lobby until Mark ordered him to sit down and try to relax. Ten minutes stretched into fifteen, and then a woman in her fifties opened the door and called number twenty-one. As Ian approached her, she said, “Your father can come along if you want.”
Ian laughed and turned to Mark. “You coming, Dad?”
They followed the woman into a small office and sat down. She took a seat next to a tiny desk and smiled. “The news is good. Your test came back negative.”
Ian closed his eyes and almost started to cry.
“Was this a routine visit, or did you engage in some risky behavior?” the woman asked. “You seem a little overwhelmed by the results.”
Ian couldn’t answer.
“It’s complicated,” Mark said.
They left the clinic and returned to Mark’s car. They sat in silence for a moment. Ian couldn’t breathe, so he pressed a button on the door handle and lowered the window. The cool, moist breeze calmed him down. The biggest mistake of his life had just been erased. He pinched his arm until it hurt. He had never allowed himself to dream of a cure. He had never imagined a day when he could go on a date without the pressure of disclosure. Ian handled the medical part of the disease without much fuss. He took his meds and maintained an undetectable viral load and never got sick. His doctor told him he’d better plan for his retirement, because he’d probably live a full life. But every time he met someone new, someone he really liked, or even if he just wanted to get laid, he had to disclose his status. That part Ian hated.
When he first tested positive ten years earlier, some of the negative guys he met were okay with it, but then the “DDF” and “I’m clean, UB2” hookup culture changed all that. Disclosure became a brutal gauntlet that almost always ended in rejection. Ian heard “no” so many times that he adopted the word as his protective mantra.
No, I need to work. No, I’m too tired to go out. No, I’d rather not get my heart broken again
. Eventually he traded sex and romance for PornHub and unhealthy crushes on men like Bartley James. He kept up appearances, went to the gym, ate right, and pretended to care. But if anyone had bothered to look closely, they would have seen that Ian had become a supporting character in his own life.
“What’s going through your head?” Mark asked.
“I’m not dirty anymore.”
“Ian, you were never—”
“You don’t know anything about it, so don’t pretend or preach to me. I’ve always felt like damaged goods. I made the stupidest mistake of my life ten years ago, and I’ve been paying the price ever since. But this… whatever it is. This thing that happened to me—it’s a clean slate.”
“So… what? You’re going to start over now?”
“Why not? I’m still Ian Parker. I own my house and La Tazza. I can figure out a way to make this work.”
“It’s not right, Ian. The world doesn’t work that way.”
“Are you suggesting I call Tad and ask him to reverse this? You’d rather I go back to being a lonely, middle-aged, HIV-positive gay man who hasn’t gotten a Grindr message in months? Do you know I wasn’t planning to have dinner with the architect, even as friends? I had about six excuses lined up for how to get out of it. I’m sick and tired of being rejected because of my HIV status, and now I don’t have to worry about that. Ever again.”
“What about your family?”
“I don’t know. I’ll figure something out.”
“What if it’s only temporary?”
“Then I’ll enjoy it for as long as it lasts. Look, I understand if you’re not on board. I know the world doesn’t work this way, but I don’t care. I’m done. HIV has exhausted me, and I want it off my back, even if it’s only for a little while.”
“Okay. You’re right, I don’t know how it feels. I can’t blame you. But I also can’t shake this feeling, like Guinan in ‘Yesterday’s Enterprise.’”
“Who’s that?” Ian asked.
“Whoopi Goldberg’s character on
Star Trek: The Next Generation
. She’s the bartender in Ten Forward. When a previous version of the Enterprise travels through time and changes the course of history, Guinan’s the only one who senses something’s wrong. Whoopi always knows the score. What if what happened to you isn’t some kind of wish fulfillment? What if it’s a rip in the space-time continuum—or worse, black magic? You have no idea what you’re dealing with here.”
“I don’t care. I’ll move to another city if I have to. Hell, I’ll move to another country. But I won’t need to do either of those things if you help me. What did Matthew Perry do when he became Zac Efron?”
“Don’t you remember?” Mark said. “His friend Ned pretended to be his father, and they enrolled him in high school.”
“Well, that’s a ridiculous plot line. I’m too old for high school, and there’s no way I’m going back to college. Have you seen the price of tuition these days?”
“You don’t have to go back to college. It’s possible for you to keep running La Tazza, but you’ll need a cover story.”
“Does that mean you’ll help me?”
Mark gripped the steering wheel. “If you’re determined to do this, then I want to be a part of it.”
“Okay,” Ian said. “Thank you. Then let’s go back to my place and figure out a plan.”
T
HEIR
FIRST
decisions involved the basics of Ian’s cover story. How could he explain to his employees that he woke up two decades younger? The answer, of course, was that he couldn’t. He would have to become someone else.
“It’s not that simple,” Mark said as they sat at Ian’s kitchen island and smoked a bowl. “Do you know what’s happening to me right now, by the way?”
Ian blew out some smoke. “What?”
“I’m sitting here looking at you, the college Ian with a beard, and it feels like we’re hitting the bong in my dorm room. I should be jealous because you’re so young, but the fact that you look twenty-one years old makes me
feel
twenty-one years old.”
Ian giggled. “Excellent. It feels good, doesn’t it?”
“It does.”
Ian lifted up his T-shirt. “Did you see my abs?”
“You always had a naturally trim stomach.”
“Not after I turned thirty-five, I didn’t. Wait until I get this body to a gym. I didn’t even start working out until after I tested positive. Imagine what I can do now.”
“Not you. You can’t be Ian Parker anymore.”
“Then we need to come up with a new identity.”
Mark shook his head. “It’s not that simple. Any story we concoct needs to answer two fundamental questions.”
“What are those?”
“One, who are you? And two, where did Ian go?”
“Oh, shit. I forgot about that second part.”
“That’s why I’m here. If you shaved the beard, you wouldn’t look like Ian at all. Well, I take that back. There’d be enough of a resemblance to suggest that your new identity should involve a relative. You could be Ian’s long-lost son, conceived during one of his youthful and drunken attempts to prove his nonexistent heterosexuality.”
“That wouldn’t explain why Ian disappeared.”
“Good point.”
“How about a brother?” Ian said.
“Born twenty years apart? Possible, but not plausible. We need to keep it simple. That’s the key.” Then Mark’s eyes widened. “I’ve got it. Not a son, not a brother, but a brother’s son. You can be Ian’s nephew.”
“But my brother Jeff’s son is ten years old.”
“So? Nobody here knows that. Jeff is older than you are. Were. It’s perfectly reasonable that he’d have a twenty-one-year-old son, and it’s also perfectly reasonable that there’d be a family resemblance. What’s his son’s name again?”
“Ryan.”
“Then that’s it. You’re now Ryan Parker, Ian’s nephew from San Diego. The best cover stories always contain a kernel of truth. You do have a brother named Jeff, and Jeff does have a son named Ryan.”
“Okay, then what happens to Ian when Ryan shows up?”
“We need to connect the two threads. Something came up with one of Ian’s parents. His mother got sick, and he had to go home for a while, so Ryan comes to house sit and run La Tazza in Ian’s absence. It’s his way of helping out.”
“That could work. Ryan would have to be gay too, though.”
“Even better. Ryan came out to Ian at sixteen. Ian helped him tell Jeff. The two of you have always been close, and that’s why Ian trusts Ryan to run La Tazza.”
“Ian would at least call Colleen and tell her what’s going on. Does my voice sound different?”
“Try a little deeper.”
Ian took a breath and dropped his diaphragm. “How about now?”
“Perfect. She won’t suspect a thing, and if she does, just tell her you have a cold. Say you got a call while you were in Denver and you had to catch a plane straight to Phoenix. You don’t know when you’ll be back, but Ryan will pay all the bills and sign all the checks. How long has Colleen worked there?”
“Two years.”
“Then tell her Ryan lived with you three summers ago and worked at La Tazza for extra money. That will explain why he knows what he’s doing.”
“You’re good,” Ian said.
“Don’t you know it. I can’t believe I’m the sidekick, though. I was supposed to be the leading man if something like this ever happened.”
“Sorry about that. What about my driver’s license?”
“You’ll need to get a fake one.”
“How?”
“I’ll take care of it.” Ian started to say something, but Mark stopped him. “Don’t ask. You want to maintain plausible deniability. Your ATM card and all your credit cards will still work. Your signature hasn’t changed.” Mark snapped his fingers. “I just thought of something. Ryan will need a phone.”
“Awesome. I’m going to get a Samsung this time. Matthew at work has one, and it’s so cool. I need to go clothes shopping too. My pants don’t fit.”
“Okay, then. Let’s do a little test run.”
“What do you mean?”
“What’s your name?” Mark asked.
“Ryan Parker.”
“What’s your middle name?”
“Charles.”
“When’s your birthday?”
“April 19, 1993.”
“Don’t use Ian’s birthday,” Mark said.
“Okay. May 19, 1993.”
“Tell me about your childhood.”
“I was born and raised in San Diego, California. My parents are Jeff and Amber Parker.”
“I will never get over the fact that your brother married a woman named Amber. I have three words for you. ‘Above the Clouds.’ Genius.”