Nude Men

my mom repeated the conversation to me afterward. She remembered every word the way I had heard it, and not only that, but I also remember every single word exactly the way I heard it both times.”
    Sara might be lying, which wouldn’t make much difference at this point anyway.
    “Sara,” I say, reasonably, “I am willing to go hang gliding with you. I’ll risk my life for you, but I won’t sleep with you.”
    “It’s because of my beard, isn’t it?”
    “No,” I say, hoping I am telling the truth.
    Sara goes to her room, upset. I sit on the couch and think. I decide to wait for Henrietta, who should be home soon. When she arrives, she is rather surprised to see a fat, pretty, dead goldfish on the floor, and water stains on the wall against which it had been thrown. She is also surprised to see a tiny thing floating around in her saucepan, which I tell her is also a fish. She finds a flat ripped fish in the corner of her living room. Each new fish corpse she finds upsets her more, because it depicts a not very flattering portrait of her daughter’s mental state.
    “Are you going to do it?” Lady Henrietta asks me.
    “Do what?”
    “Grant her dying wish.”
    “I’ll go hang gliding with her.”
    “Not that one. That’s not her dying wish. That’s merely the wish of a dying girl. I meant the other one.”
    “She told you about it?”
    “Yes.”
    “Do you want me to?”
    “It’s up to you.”
    “I will not grant it. I don’t think it would be right.”
    “Do dying wishes have to be right?”
    “No, but they should not be wrong.”
    “Isn’t that the whole point of a dying wish, that for once in your life you can wish for something wrong and people will comply?”
    “No,” I reply. “There are some things in life that even dying wishes should not ask for.”
    “Are you doing this for her own good?”
    “Yes.”
    “Why? You think it would harm her to sleep with someone before her death? There certainly could not be any long-term psychological damage.”
    “No, but I believe she will be more at peace during the last moments of her life if her dying wish is not granted.”
    “Do you mean she will be more happy?”
    “Happiness, at this point, is not the point. It does not matter, it is trivial.”
    “What does matter?”
    “Peace and serenity.”
    “Don’t you think she’ll get enough of those when she’s dead?”
    I pause. “Okay, so you want me to fuck your girl?” I hope to shock her into accepting my point of view.
    “It’s up to you.”
    “I feel that I should not do it.”
    “Or rather, you fear that you cannot.”
    “What do you mean?” I ask, knowing she’s alluding to the beard.
    “It’s the beard, isn’t it?” she says.
    “No, but if it were, I would thank the beard, because it’s making me act the right way.”
    “You just switched into present tense, which means you just admitted that it is the beard.”
    “Think what you want.”
     
    * * *
     
    P eople start to clap when we have dinner at other restaurants as well.
     
    S ara has been flipping coins lately, asking Fate if she will live or die.
    “Everything in life is a fifty percent chance,” she says, to justify her flipping of the coins.
    “No, almost nothing is,” I tell her.
    “Heads means I’ll live, tails means I’ll die,” she says, ignoring my answer. She flips the coin. “It’s heads.” Indeed it is heads. She flips it again. “It’s heads again!” It’s heads again. “That means Fate is telling me twice that I’ll live. Fate is reconfirming her answer.”
    “What if you got two tails now, what would that mean?”
    “It would mean that I’m bothering Fate too much and she wants me to leave her alone. She’s not answering me anymore, and she’s leaving the answers up to Randomness.”
     
    W e go hang gliding. Sara does not shave anymore, so everyone thinks she is a young man. My beard is almost as full as hers. She started letting hers grow before mine.
    We fly on separate hang gliders, each of us with an instructor. The parrot follows us. He’s big, sky-blue and white. Tears are running out of my eyes, from the wind and from my thoughts. My beard is plastered against my cheeks; hers must be too. Once in a while, I hear parts of the parrot’s favorite phrase, “Death and dying.” As he circles us, I hear “and dying,” or “death and,” or even “time yet?” and “soon?”
    When we land, Sara says she loves hang gliding and that she had the best time of