Here is a movie like Night of the Living Dead, but it’s not Night of the Living Dead. It’s black and white, yes. Grainy. And there is, everywhere, a certain hazy light. A dead young man, pale like a lamp, stumbles through a quiet graveyard. He’s eighteen or nineteen. Arms stiff. Legs stiff. Funeral suit in tatters. We don’t know how he died. Maybe he was in a car accident. Or maybe he fell off a building. He’s good-looking in a 1950s kind of way, but his mouth hangs open as if his jaw might be broken. Then another man ambles out from behind some trees. He’s older. Maybe forty. He wears a pair of crooked horn-rimmed eyeglasses. He might have been a bookish type. But now, he’s also dead. Dirt obscures one of the lenses of his glasses. He shows his teeth like a dog. He approaches the young man. They stare at each other. We don’t know what they’re thinking or if, in fact, they’re thinking anything at all. Then the younger man begins pulling at the older man’s clothes. The older man tears the young man’s shirt. Their skin is so pale we can see their veins. Finally, the dead men are naked together. And that’s when the movie changes. It’s hard to describe what happens next. I could say the two dead men fuck. But they don’t exactly fuck. It’s more like a fissure opens on the screen. And some kind of liquid starts flowing out of the fissure. It spreads over the lawn and the tombstones and the dead men who now lie together in the grass, holding each other. It gets all over everything. Anyway, there’s a city, you know? I don’t know where the city is, but there is one. I dated a guy once who was way younger than me—like twenty years younger. It didn’t work out in the end, but it was great for a while. My friend, a straight woman, told me I shouldn’t date someone so young. She said I was taking something from him. But I wasn’t taking anything. It wasn’t like that. It was nothing like that at all.
