With the remote he turned on the TV but there was no sound, and he didn’t care what channel it was on. It was more just for the feeling of company. He put the remote down and looked at the coffee table. There were copies of Men’s Fitness and GQ and Out. The covers were so slick they were like mirrors. And he suddenly had the feeling that Lem would not be in his life much longer. “Golden Years” popped into his head and he replayed the guitar riff over and over and thought about the shiny magazine covers, Lem sleeping the sleep of the dead in the next room, the bread machine which was one year old and brand new, and his own job at Playboy Enterprises; the fact that the whole time he had worked there not once had he seen anything even resembling porn cross his desk. These were 4 am thoughts. Lem was hot, yet he never went to a gym and he had a subscription to Men’s Fitness. Now and then he vaguely alluded to lacrosse and that was all. He looked upon mainstream gay culture with distaste but he still had Out on his coffee table. The GQ was the only thing that made sense. Grant probably cared even less for any of those magazines but it didn’t matter. He realized he could not explain to himself why he found Lem so compelling. But it also didn’t matter. Or rather, it didn’t change things. He was just going to have to go down this path wherever it took him.

There was the sound of a train going by. So he wasn’t just living inside his thoughts after all, he was in the real world. There was an infomercial on. The set was a kitchen and the two pitchmen were fooling around with some gadget. He didn’t pay any attention to what they were doing but instead studied the set, the location. He thought maybe if he looked hard enough he could tell what it was like to actually be there. It strangely resembled Lem’s apartment. It looked like a staging ground for something.