Dorian’s new phone
Dorian is the most transcendently beautiful man Max has ever been with, and it still messes with his head. He sometimes finds himself trying too hard, sucking up to Dorian like an aging acolyte, desperate to bask in the pale light of his fair-haired approval. And then, embarrassed, he over-corrects, ignoring Dorian’s texts or turning up half-drunk and forty-five minutes late for dinner.
Max still can’t believe Dorian actually married him. It’s one of the reasons why he, a senior product designer for The Company That Shall Not Be Named, is giving his husband a gift as sleek and flawlessly proportioned as he is: a prototype he likes to call the genius phone. It has a professional-quality photographic aperture that serves as rods and cones for a raw intelligence linked to social media via a sophisticated neural net. In other words, it’s fucking hot.
Max designed it specifically for young professional men in the health and fitness industry. The key product persona — known around the office as Mr. Ten Pack — is a personal trainer with at least 500,000 Instagram followers who lives and dies by his personal brand. Max chuckles as he climbs the stairs to his apartment. Dorian was — and is — his model customer.
He is not surprised to find Dorian pottering around the kitchen, making himself a repulsive concoction of macerated green vegetables, ground flax, and soy protein powder. Dorian pulls out his phone, takes a quick pic, and sends his post-workout smoothie off to his adoring fans on Instagram.
“That looks disgusting,” says Max, hypnotized by Dorian’s tautly muscled torso. He is painfully aware that his own torso is too generously upholstered: the body of a moderately successful engineer.
Dorian’s chiseled face arranges itself into a wry smile Max knows well. Dorian is a practical man. He treats his body like a machine to be assiduously maintained rather than an object of worship. “It’s the price of beauty,” he says, snickering.
Max blinks and snaps out of his abs-induced fugue. “Dorian, I have an early birthday present for you,” he says, holding out a small, tastefully wrapped box.
“Dorian, we’re going to be late!”
“Just a minute.”
“You said that ten minutes ago, and ten minutes before that.”
Max sighs. He and Dorian have dinner plans with Jennifer and Hilary, lesbian architects who want to share children and parenting responsibilities with two sane, solvent, and genetically suitable queer men. It is an intriguing opportunity, and one Max does not want to miss.
He glances at Dorian cocooned into the couch, fingers flying over his new phone. At first, Max was thrilled that Dorian became instantly obsessed with his creation, gazing into its single red eye all day and night. But now Max is unsettled. Dorian hasn’t been to the gym or seen a client for days. His razor-sharp jawline is starting to blur. Max wonders if his husband is sliding into addiction. Dorian once told him that he didn’t drink because he liked it a little too much.
Max’s own phone beeps. Hilary wants to know if they’re still coming to dinner.
“Dorian? Put your phone down. We’ve got to get going.”
Dorian looks up, his face creased and florid. His eyes are puffy and sore-looking under a web of hostile, red veins. “You are always so fucking needy,” he growls. “Can’t you go anywhere alone, without dragging me along as a security blanket?”
Max opens his mouth to say something cruelly cutting and then closes it again. Perhaps he depends too much on Dorian. Perhaps a night out unaccompanied would do him good. Dorian can meet Hilary and Jennifer some other time, when he’s in a better mood.
He swallows a hard lump of uncertainty as he closes the door behind him.
Max is no longer worried about his husband. He is overwrought and closing in on panic.
Dorian rotates between the couch and the bed like a shuffling invalid. Except for occasionally pausing to wipe his ass, he has abandoned all pretense of personal hygiene. Instead of cooking violently green health foods, he orders greasy takeout from an app on his phone. Sticky cartons are stacking up on the coffee table, and they’re even attracting reddish-colored bugs with evil-looking pincers. Max stubbornly does not throw them away. He harbors a faint hope that the filth with spur his husband into action.
It has been two months since Dorian has been to the gym, and his body no longer has the contours of a demigod. His face is heavy and rounded, and a second-trimester paunch flops over his belt. Max is less dismayed by his husband’s degeneration than alarmed. He wonders if he might be clinically depressed or even catatonic, a descriptor he has Googled more than once.
From across the room, Max watches his husband’s belly move up and down like gentle waves lapping against a distant shore. He looks at Dorian’s face; the eyes are closed. He is, to all appearances, asleep. Max immediately lunges for the phone. Perhaps it holds some clue to his husband’s state. He hacks his way through multiple layers of authentication — of course he can, it’s his baby — and plunges into Dorian’s Instagram account.
What the everloving fuck? Dorian has been posting pictures of himself from all over the world. He looks healthy and whole, fitter than ever, and frequently in the company of fitness and spiritual gurus. Of course, thinks Max, that is impossible. Dorian has been here all the time, attempting to bodily fuse with their sofa. He is trying to stack fragmentary thoughts into a reasonable explanation of what is happening when the Instagram screen fades away.
Max sees Dorian walk slowly along a white, sandy beach. A man emerges from the water. He is dark and muscular, thicker than Dorian, but also more powerful. Dorian throws his arms around the man and smiles, exuding a love that’s even brighter and more intense than the tropical sun. Max can barely breathe through the smothering fog of jealousy, but his eyes remain glued to the screen.
He watches, adrenaline squeezing his heart, as the mystery man turns around. Oh my God, it’s me. It’s a fantasy version of Max that exists only in the darkest interstices of his rational thoughts, a possibility he throttled because he felt he had to choose between his body and his mind. He watches himself walk alongside Dorian, his own face shining with love, and sighs. He is happy. He is whole.
Mrs. Krebs in apartment 620A called the police when she couldn’t stand the stench any more. “Our landlord is an absentee bastard. It smells like something died in there, and he won’t even rouse his lazy ass to take a goddamned look,” she groused to the EMS operator.
When Officer Robinson arrives, his nostrils swabbed with menthol, he finds two soiled and barely breathing men. One is huge and fleshy, practically grafted onto the couch. The other is wizened with a face folded like a raisin. A strange phone with a silvery exterior sits on the cluttered coffee table like a diamond in a dumpster. The officer, following protocol, calls for medics. Then he pulls on gloves and picks up the device. Maybe it can give him some answers.
The screen flickers on from the heat of his touch, and the casing feels strangely warm and alive. He gazes into the screen and something he never knew was missing slips into a hole he never knew was there. His knees buckle, and he sinks onto the sticky hardwood floor. His grip tightens around the phone, and he smiles.
