Jerett predicted the breakup. Predicted it not as anyone might predict a breakup among lovers in a quad, but as a geologist would predict an earthquake using a seismograph, as a conservation biologist might predict a sudden decline in the number of spawning salmon by monitoring river temperature. Their prediction resulted both from intimacy and from a steady, distant attention. This was Jerett’s work: ecological modeling of polyamorous relationships. This was the metaphor which had earned them, over the last forty years, a career teaching position at a community college in Boston and one book with an academic press. They had a second book finished, ready for publication. In it, they spoke specifically of ruptures, endings. They proposed that a disturbance ecology model—one with long periods of equilibrium punctuated by rapid change—was most appropriate for polyamorous relationships. 

Disturbance. Coral bleaching. Lichen in Iceland rejecting their alga due to increasing heat. Wrasse abandoning salmon to sea lice. Amira and Tobi, their thirty-year partnership, the anchoring couple of Jerett’s quad, split. Not a bad split—Tobi had retired to Oregon; Amira hadn’t gone with her—but not so amicable that the quad would hold, not so amicable that Amira and Tobi wanted to spend two months together that summer, not so amicable they wanted to talk to each other. “Not right now,” Amira had said to Jerett. “Not for a while.”

Carson would take the news badly. “Give me time to get down there before you tell him,” Jerett had said to Amira, and they’d driven south right away—thirteen hours on midnight roads, no traffic even through D.C. at three in the morning. They talked to Amira as they drove. She wanted to make sure they stayed awake. They talked briefly about the split—who would take the dog (Tobi), who would keep the house in Vermont (Amira), who would continue the lichen research they’d begun together (both). Lichen were potentially immortal. As they aged, they reproduced more and were less likely to die. They talked about how best to break the news to Carson, but when Jerett arrived at Carson’s farm in South Carolina, driving past fields which years ago had sprouted peanut hay and cannabis, Carson already knew. 

He’d sensed the split like a change in air pressure. He’d called Tobi to ask what was up, and Tobi had told him. Jerett learned this from Carson’s daughter. “When he first heard,” she said, “I thought he was having a heart attack.” Jerett understood. The breakup wasn’t just a breakup but also its many repercussions, their necessary rearrangements in the face of it—Amira turning to Jerett to process the split; Tobi turning to Carson; Carson losing Amira and Tobi’s house, his summer refuge.

Jerett found Carson in bed, curled on his right side. He’d been crying. His lower eyelids were crinkled and wet, softened by weeping. He’d shaved his beard. Without the beard, his face looked different. Jerett touched the smooth, loose skin. “You stop the T?”

Carson took Jerett’s hand, trapping it against his cheek. “Brynn shaved it.” His daughter. Jerett felt the vague suspicion they often felt after periods away from another person. That something had morphed in their time apart. Brynn had long lived with Carson, but since when had she shaved him? If they expressed this fear, Carson would tease them—“Object permanence, Jerett.” They didn’t express it. They made themself touch Carson, placed their free hand resolutely on his stomach. 

Carson winced. “Crohn’s acting up,” he said. Carson had long suffered from irritable bowel disease, discomfort caused by bacterial die-off within his intestines, his pain the result of famine in another species.

“Amira sends love,” Jerett said, and Carson winced again, perhaps because while Jerett was on the phone with Amira, he had been up with Tobi. 

To move them past it, Carson said, “I’m getting too old to be traveling up to their place anyway.” 

Jerett lowered themself carefully onto the bed beside Carson. They draped an arm over his body, and he leaned into them, and Jerett’s suspicion ebbed. In its place the relief of coming home to Carson. The microbes of Jerett’s body were familiar with the microbes of Carson’s, such that their meeting was like the return of migratory geese to an alpine lake, a seasonal rightness.

Jerett said, “You’d better not be too old to come visit me.” 

“You inviting me to move to Boston? I’m touched.”

“Visit,” Jerett repeated, feeling a pinch of claustrophobia.

Carson huffed with laughter—“You should see your face”—and Jerett understood it had been a joke.

They’d tried living together three times. First in college with Amira, a cohabitation that worked because Amira swung between Carson and Jerett like a door on a well-oiled hinge. After college, Carson moved south to care for his parents’ farm, and Jerett moved with him, just the two of them on forty acres, a cohabitation which didn’t work because Carson couldn’t feel Jerett’s love. This was what he said. He believed Jerett loved him, but he didn’t feel it. Maybe the sex was the problem, they hypothesized. Jerett enjoyed sex, but was never carried away by it. They tried oral, but Jerett found it overstimulating. They tried bondage, psilocybin, tried and failed to loose the reins of Jerett’s self-control. Maybe language was the problem, Jerett suggested, so they hiked up Mt. Cammerer, tried on aromantic and poly and monogamous, discussed the empty promise of such adjectives. Jerett asked about love languages, and Carson said, “That’s evangelical propaganda,” but he admitted he liked gifts. So when Carson’s mittens wore out, Jerett crocheted a new pair. When he needed a USB converter, Jerett gifted him a USB converter. Each gift was perfectly useful. This was the trouble, Carson suggested. Love was excess, superfluity, a grand gesture done for the sake of the gesture itself. Jerett found such gestures illogical and immoral—celebratory takeout (“Now this Styrofoam will float around the Pacific trash spiral for eternity”), cut flowers (“Draining Lake Naivasha to say, Here’s my love for you, now watch it wither and die”), hiring a plane to write a message in the sky (“Hell of a carbon footprint”). Jerett had been only twenty-two, Carson six years older. Perhaps this was why the stakes felt so high. For three years, Jerett tried for frivolity, casting themselves out again and again beyond the bounds of their own desire until finally, after Jerett spent a week’s worth of wages renting a bouncy house for Carson’s thirtieth birthday, after Jerett spent six hours vomiting on a whale-watching tour planned for their three-year anniversary, after a spate of panic attacks left Jerett flat on the kitchen floor, they said, “I can’t do it. I don’t know how.” And Carson suggested they separate.

Jerett went to Amira. They weren’t capable of it, they insisted—love. “You love me fine,” Amira said, but Amira made no distinctions between friends and partners. Everyone in Amira’s life was her sweetie. She needed no further categorization. Amira was happy as one of Jerett’s interests, didn’t mind if other, more urgent interests took them away for days or weeks, didn’t mind if they spent seven hours curled on a corner of her couch, eating only the food she put in front of them, working with graph paper and pen to chart a taxonomy of love, didn’t mind if they ended up with an equation describing relationship longevity as an inverse of intensity and decided on the basis of that equation to move into their own apartment.

In the decade that followed, Jerett kept up with Carson through Amira. Carson married. He carried a kid. Amira found a new sweetie in Tobi and moved in with her. Jerett found an apartment and a job teaching undergrads. For a few years, Jerett spent every other Saturday with Amira and Tobi. They cooked pilaf and played board games and climbed Bald Mountain dozens of times with various beverages, watching the sun set where it reliably did. This triad was what Jerett wanted. Jerett thought it was what they all wanted, so they were surprised by the phone call in their fourth year together, in which Amira said Jerett needed to come around less. Their visits wore Tobi out. Jerett didn’t understand. They’d kept the same pattern for four years. “And now it needs to change,” Amira said. But you didn’t change a pattern based on nothing. What happened? “Nothing happened. We just need some space.” It was after this argument, which ended with Amira saying, “There’s nothing to solve here,” and Jerett walking circles around their apartment, the heels of their hands pressed hard against their eyes which were watering, watering, that Jerett devised the metaphor that had seen them through three decades since. 

In this metaphor, Amira and Tobi were blueberries and ericoid fungi, rooted symbionts who together bear fruit. Carson was a bear, feasting and fertilizing. Jerett was a pollinator, vital to the creation of the berries, but in a seasonal way. Jerett’s first book outlined this new metaphor and its implications. Amira and Tobi teased Jerett for it, but Tobi admitted the metaphor clarified things. It clarified things for Jerett, too. They were no longer upset Amira and Tobi never made the drive to Boston, no longer hurt by Tobi’s tendency to make plans then fail to follow through. Fungi were unpredictable, weather-dependent. Bees were promiscuous, so Jerett explored sex, began hooking up on Wednesdays with a colleague for whom their self-control was an asset. Jerett reconnected with Carson, a reconnection made possible by the boundaries of the metaphor and Carson’s marriage. The four of them spent summers on Amira and Tobi’s property—sharing dinners and the bathtub and a king-size bed—summers which were fundamentally peaceful, all of them lulled by the sun and the lack of everyday concerns. Carson had missed Jerett—their gratifyingly specific questions, their need to finish what they began. “It’s unprincipled,” Tobi said, as Jerett insisted on continuing a lake hike with a sprained ankle, “not to flake out every once in a while.” A joke, but still Carson responded forcefully, “Jerett is the most principled person I know.” Jerett loved Carson in those summers as they hadn’t been able to love him daily—with mint lemonade, with sex, with a willingness to be, temporarily, whatever Carson needed. They never asked if Carson felt this love. Carson never said.

Carson’s wife didn’t like these summers, which left her to parent their daughter alone. When Carson’s daughter was six, his wife began going to lunch with her dentist, who promised her, among other things, monogamy. She asked Carson for a divorce. Carson was bereft. His wife was suing for full custody. So Jerett drove down and for a week got Carson’s daughter fed and to school, got Carson into the shower, soaping and rinsing Carson’s body as he cried. Jerett didn’t expect gratitude, but in the evenings, when Carson sprawled on the couch in front of a comedy show without offering to help with laundry or dishes, Jerett felt like they were being sucked dry by a great mouth. They longed for their Somerville apartment where they had exactly one cup, one bowl, one chair at the table in their dining nook where they could sit and eat a microwaved sweet potato whole, like an apple, looking out their third-floor window, a bee’s-eye view. Then one night Carson’s daughter took a handful of melatonin gummies, lying fetal on the couch when they took effect. “Why the fuck is she taking melatonin?” they asked Carson, who said, “Because she’s up too late otherwise,” to which Jerett responded, “Who is the parent here?” 

Carson said, voice dull, “I never wanted to be single.”

“Me neither.”

“You’re solo. You chose it.”

But Carson had also made choices, had chosen the relationship that left him vulnerable to this all-consuming grief. So when he said, “It’s different for me, I’m alone,” Jerett said, “So am I.” When he said, “You have people,” they said, “So do you. Or else what am I doing here?”

They elaborated on their metaphor that night. As a bear, Carson was high in the trophic levels, migratory megafauna, big and charismatic and stupidly sensitive, vulnerable to shifts in berries and mushrooms. With time, he’d adapt. Carson had laughed then, but over the next six months he did adapt—shared custody with his wife, hosted Jerett over winter vacations, returned to summers at Amira’s. He started growing blueberry hash, didn’t marry again, understood his life required a new pattern. 

Now, Carson groaned beside them, caught in a second grief. This was the response predicted by Jerett’s ecological model. Amira and Tobi’s metaphorical patch of mountain blueberries had been destroyed. The symbiosis which had made berries possible in that fine, acidic soil had decoupled. The slope was now vulnerable to erosion and wildfire, wiped of food. Carson’s summer refuge was no more. This must be the reason for his agitation. His shallow breathing. His sweat, which tasted acrid, like illness. His grip on Jerett’s hand. The metaphor eased Jerett’s concern. Carson would be all right.

“Give it the night,” Jerett said. “It won’t hurt so much in the morning.” 

But the morning brought more pain, the pain—they learned in the afternoon at the hospital—of an abscess which would need to be surgically drained. Hearing this, Jerett felt alarm at their misunderstanding of Carson’s distress. They called their department head, asked for two weeks off work. “You don’t have to,” Carson said, but they would see Carson through the surgery and aftercare. They had always shown up for the crises in Carson’s life.

Over the next weeks, as Jerett blended oat milk smoothies and fitted Carson’s underwear with period pads, their alarm increased. Carson didn’t recover quickly from the anesthesia. He remained foggy, confused. He asked Jerett what medications he was supposed to take in the morning, and the next morning he asked again. The next morning, again. 

When Jerett confronted him about this, he said, “It’s not worth the space in my brain, remembering these things.” They were sitting in camp chairs in Carson’s backyard. It was Carson’s first time out of the house in days.

“So I have to remember them?”

“I wish I’d married you,” Carson said. “Back when we had the chance. I’m not proposing, but I wish I had.”

Jerett went still. “Wasn’t legal.”

“When it got to be.” Carson began rocking up and back, up and back in his chair.

“I wouldn’t have agreed.” Because they’d been settled—contentedly, Jerett thought—in their quad. Jerett reached for the metaphor they’d always used to resist Carson’s statements of dissatisfaction, the ecological assemblage which posited their quad as a sort of miracle, the four of them perfectly entangled, but Carson got there ahead of them.

“You know what bees do to bears?” Carson had grabbed hold of the plastic table, was rocking both table and chair now, wearing himself out.

“Lead them to honey,” Jerett said.

“Sting the shit out of their noses,” Carson countered, rocking himself forward and holding there for a moment, and Jerett realized, as gravity pulled Carson back into the sling of the camping chair, that he was, that he had been for some minutes now, trying to stand, to exit the conversation he’d begun. 

Carson, unable to stand. Jerett’s model didn’t predict this. When a bear’s favored blueberry patch disappears, they find another blueberry patch, but Carson’s grief had manifested as organ failure. An infection in the rectum, fever, an overtaxing of the heart, a crisis requiring surgical attention, an inability to stand up from a chair. Jerett’s model was wrong, they realized in a rush. It had perhaps always been wrong, and on this model, on this metaphor, they had based everything. Without it, they no longer understood their role in Carson’s life, Carson, who slapped away their belated, outstretched hand, who said, “You better go check on dinner.”

Jerett found Brynn inside, making potato salad. Jerett pulled plates from the upper cabinet, said, “I’m worried about him.”

He’d been declining for a while, Brynn said, put on a show for Jerett when they came around. “Dementia. It’s the Crohn’s did it.”

“He’s been diagnosed?”

“You try getting him to talk to a doctor about it.”

“Without a diagnosis, you can’t know. He’s not even seventy.”

“You see it, I see it. It’s about too much for me, caring for him.”

“You coddle him. Cook for him, clean up after him.”

“I never asked to be the one caring for him, but he doesn’t have a partner.”

“I’m his partner,” Jerett said. They didn’t intend to say it. They usually avoided the word, but their metaphor had collapsed. Their language was improvised.

“You’re here two weeks a year, Jerry.”

Jerett had no metaphor, no defense. They were vulnerable to suggestion. Perhaps they should stay. Leave their job, move to South Carolina, care for Carson.

“No,” Amira said that evening, when they repeated this to her. “You can’t, sweetie.”

But Carson needed someone who stayed.

“You can’t. You’ve tried this.”

But their metaphor had misled them. “Maybe we’re a body,” Jerett said to Amira. “Bacteria, blood cells, lymphocytes.” That would explain the organ failure manifested by Carson’s grief, but it didn’t quite work. They were more autonomous than the species that made up a single body. Maybe macrophages in the Proterozoic—love as a periodic involution, swallowing one another. But then who had swallowed whom first? “Coral,” they said aloud to Amira, but coral was a metaphor for monogamy—one anthozoan, one xooanthellae. Brynn had married a man, sat Jerett and Carson down in a diner when she was seventeen to say, “I’m monogamous,” and though the marriage had ended in a nasty divorce, slurs hurled across a courtroom, Jerett wondered now if monogamy was the better choice.  They couldn’t think of one decision they’d made in their life that was definitively right.

“Easy,” Amira said. “Monogamy is rarely as simple as people think. We used to think lichen was one fungus, one alga, but there are dozens of algae and bacteria within any given lichen.”

Jerett said, “Lichen.”

“That’s what I said.”

“That’s the metaphor.” Lichen was perfect. An obligate symbiont, each thallus composed of a fungus, several algae, and an assortment of bacteria. A symbiosis, which was potentially immortal. Stable, provided all three sets of species were present, though the absence of any one would cause a system failure. Jerett needed to throw out their manuscript, start over. 

“You’re two years from retirement,” Amira said. “Don’t undo your own legacy. Some grad student five years from now is going to build a career by tearing it apart. Don’t take that from them.”

“Lichen means all three of us living together.” 

“You don’t need a new metaphor, Jerett. You need to go back to Boston.”

But Jerett did need a new metaphor. They needed it the next morning, packing their suitcase, when Carson suggested they stay another month. “Couldn’t you teach virtually?”

“Lichen,” they said in response. An obligate symbiont. The word obligate was useful. It eliminated choice. You couldn’t create lichen with just two species. Without Amira, Jerett couldn’t stay.

Carson groaned into his pillow. “Another metaphor?”

Every word the two of them had tried for what they were to each other was metaphorical—symbionts, partners, sweethearts, lovers, turtles. Jerett introducing Carson at a potluck as “one of my closest friends.” A nurse calling Jerett after the Crohn’s first landed Carson in the hospital, saying, “Your husband is out of surgery,” and Jerett insisting they had the wrong number—“I don’t have a husband.” No word was quite right. Jerett was weary of this, a weariness combined, now, with desperation. The costs of each day were accruing for Carson. They needed to figure out what they were to Carson, who they should be with Carson, how to care for him.

And then they saw it. What they might do. Frivolity. Excess. A grand gesture done for the sake of the gesture itself. “It’s not a metaphor,” they said. Then, with the gravity of a proposal, “Be lichen with me.”

Carson reached for Jerett, heaved them into bed beside him. “That’s ridiculous,” he said, and the words were as near to romance as they’d ever come. “I get to be the fungus.”

◆

“You shouldn’t do it,” Amira said when they told her. They were in her hammock, Amira between Jerett’s legs. Jerett had been back from South Carolina for two weeks, had hurried west over a holiday weekend to tell Amira their plan. Similar chimeras, Amira said, had been banned in wilderness spaces. They outcompeted endemic lichens. 

“Wilderness,” Jerett said, laughing. “Wilderness!”

“It isn’t going to work.”

But large strands of viral DNA had already been discovered in green algae. Bacterial chimeras with sections of human DNA were so common as to be trivial. The fungus would be hardest to generate, but given that researchers had created human-monkey chimeric embryos in a lab, a human-fungus chimera wasn’t outside the realm of possibilities. This was what the ecohacker had said when Jerett offered him their savings. “It’s already working,” Jerett said. Carson had begun researching different lichen varieties. Carson was showing more interest in the lichen than he’d shown in anything since his surgery. 

Years passed, and Carson forgot the punch lines to his favorite jokes, forgot the fingerpicking patterns for his favorite songs, forgot the location of the bathroom in his own home, but remembered the lichen. When Brynn’s mother died, Jerett stayed with Carson so Brynn could attend the funeral, and the lichen kept Carson from panicking at Brynn’s absence, kept him calm and focused, poring over paper maps. Carson, who got stuck behind the glass doors of his home, unable to work the latches, recalled the backpacking trip they’d taken up Mt. Cammerer four decades earlier, suggested the Thunderhead formation, an outcropping of soft sandstone at the summit of that mountain, for the lichen’s substrate. In the third year, Carson agreed to an MRI because Jerett promised to bring down a sample of the lichen after the procedure. Carson ran his fingers over that carpeted pebble until the lichen wore down to stone. 

In the fifth year, Brynn announced to Jerett and Tobi she was selling the farm, moving Carson into assisted living. Jerett offered to stay for a month in the summer so Brynn could get away. Tobi offered to send money to offset the cost of an in-home caretaker. But Brynn had made up her mind. She couldn’t travel. She couldn’t date. The money she’d get for the land would cover the costs of the facility, and she had her own life to live. Carson moved into a dementia-care facility in North Carolina, and during the first tumultuous weeks, Jerett talked to him on the phone daily, talked about the lichen, the one thing in Carson’s life that hadn’t changed.

◆

And then, one morning, Jerett received a phone call from the ecohacker, inviting them up to the lab. There they saw images of agarose gels with bands of algal, fungal, bacterial, and human DNA. The lichen was done. “You’re being scammed,” Amira said when they told her. It was true the costs were higher than expected. Jerett wouldn’t be able to retire. But their mood had lifted looking at the gel. The banded gray lines were beautiful. They trusted that feeling. 

Jerett phoned Carson to tell him, and they talked about the Thunderhead formation with its gentle, forgiving sandstone, about the various angles of sun on different mountain faces. They would face east. They would root into sandstone soft as butter. As lichen, they would live together.

Carson’s daughter called the next day—“You told Carson he could live with you?” 

“No,” Jerett said. Only as lichen.

“He’s telling me to ship him up to Boston.”

“I’m headed down there this weekend.” They needed Carson’s DNA sample. “I’ll explain when I get there.”

“He’s confused,” Brynn said. “You’ve got him agitated.” 

But Carson would be excited to see the images of gel electrophoresis. The lichen would make him happy, as it always had. With this certainty, Jerett parked their truck in the lot of the facility—a low-slung, brown brick building fifteen miles from Carson’s farm over the North Carolina border. It had been three months since they’d seen Carson. They weren’t legally family, and the viral pandemic had the facility following new visitor restrictions, so they’d have just thirty minutes. They printed their name on a sign-in log, followed a young man through a maze of hallways to a room where Carson sat at a low table beneath a television. Carson was playing a game of checkers with himself. Though they had checked the address twice, though the attendant had nodded when they named the resident they were here to see, said, “You caught him on a good day,” a compliment which warmed Jerett, suggesting they could still predict Carson, though the person before them was familiar in his way, they found themself imagining still that there was some mistake. 

They were thrown in part by the sweater Carson wore, which looked wrong on him—too small, too pastel, not something he’d choose. They tugged the collar playfully as they walked up behind him, “Make it yourself, Carson?” and they were surprised by the grip of the hand which closed around their wrist and forced it away from his body.

“He’ll do that,” the attendant said. “Doesn’t like to be touched.” Jerett bristled. By the attendants, sure, Carson wouldn’t want to be touched, but Carson knew Jerett.

When they said, “Carson,” he glanced up, then back at his board. He said, “When you wake up at night here, people are watching you. They watch me walk to the bathroom.” He lowered his voice. “They watch me piss.”

“Who?”

“Just people. Watching me. Thousands of them. Tobi says they’re spirits, like I’m crossing over already.” He lifted a red checker onto one edge. “Brynn’s upset we’re moving to Boston. She can’t visit me in Boston.”

“I’ve got the lichen, Carson.”

“I’m not packed. You didn’t give me any warning.”

Jerett waited for a huff of laughter, a friendly rebuke—“Sarcasm, Jerett.” Neither came. 

“You don’t need to pack,” Jerett said. “I just need your sample. The lichen’s ready.” They’d brought a cheek swab. Their sample had been used in the earliest prototypes, but they’d waited to ask for Carson’s. 

Jerett opened their phone to show Carson a photo of the lichen. They’d chosen a variant of Acarospora sinopica, a rust-colored crustose lichen. 

“Tobi on about ghosts, you on about lichen. Why is it both of you think I’m done with being a person?”

“I’m going to hike us up Mt. Cammerer, just like you wanted.” The lichen would come in a vial, a slurry they could paint on any substrate they chose.

“I’m not much of a mountaineer these days.” Carson moved the red checker. Cheers and applause from the television, which showed a singing competition. Jerett fought the urge to turn it off. It had been eight minutes. 

“We’ll hike up as lichen,” Jerett said. “Like we talked about.” Jerett took out the swab.

“Brynn told me you’d gotten cold feet.” Carson crowned the red checker. “You come to tell me we don’t live well together?” He laughed. An ugly laugh. No humor in it. Eighteen minutes left.

“I came here to make us lichen.” 

“Lichen, lichen, lichen. My last partner was always talking about lichen. Had one of their own.” 

“It’s not mine. I made it for you.”  Jerett had anticipated this moment as a special occasion.

 “I never wanted it.” Carson jumped the crowned checker over two black checkers.

“You did.” Jerett wanted to prove the point, to pull out emails and call logs, but they resisted this impulse. All those years, Carson had teased them about their fear of change. Object permanence, Jerett. Object permanence. But what was permanent? Not people. The lichen was the nearest thing to permanent either of them had.

Jerett put one hand on the checkerboard, intending only to shift it a few inches from Carson, refocus him on the conversation, but Carson put his hand on the other side, and then they were tugging, tugging, and he said, “Let go. Let go.”

When Jerett let go, he rocked back in his chair, cracking his head against the top rail, giving them a look as though they’d caused this harm to him. They reached to rub his head, comfort him, but when they touched his skull he leaned back against the chair, pinning their hand between skull and wood. Their knuckles pulsed with pain. Carson closed his free hand around Jerett’s arm, and Jerett understood for the first time the true consequences of the lichen. Every metaphor had consequences. As a bee they’d asked little of a flower, but the alga in a lichen asked much of the fungus. Jerett said, their hand pinched, “Please, Carson. Do this for me?”

Carson looked from the swab to Jerett and back. “You first,” he said.

“Mine’s already done.”

But Carson said, “It’s been a minute since I’ve felt anything but my own hand.” Carson said, “Other folks in here get it all the time,” and Jerett understood.

Jerett didn’t like oral sex. Impossible to know from Carson’s face if he recalled this. Impossible, given the proprieties of their visit, to ask. Impossible to know whether his suggestion was an invitation or a dare. They had thirteen minutes. No, they almost said. They could leave right now, give up on the lichen. Their savings were sunk costs. Jerett understood the fallacy of sunk costs. What kept them there was the possibility of a final failure, losing Carson before they managed to establish what they had lost. “What is this?” they said to Carson. “What is it?”

 “A hook-up?” Carson said.

Jerett pulled away from Carson. “We’re not strangers. I know you. I promised you.” Lichen. A grand gesture, done for the sake of the gesture itself. “Quickly,” Jerett said. “And not here.”

“My room is over there,” Carson said, but he couldn’t find it. Finally, an attendant led them down a long hallway, made a single right turn, opened a door. The door didn’t lock. Carson flipped on the television, which showed the same singing competition. 

As the contestant began to sing, Jerett fit their jaw against Carson. He was tidy, clipped. This surprised Jerett, added weight to Carson’s assertion that they were strangers. It was easier than Jerett remembered, an ease Jerett attributed in part to Carson, who remained still, knees splayed, content to receive, and in part to a new, transactional clarity. The questions they’d tried to answer before, each time they had sex—did they love Carson in a way that was legible to him? to the world?—no longer mattered. Only the lichen mattered now.

As Jerett counted strokes of the tongue, Carson said, “We always had good sex,” said, “There,” said, “Isn’t this better than lichen?” When Jerett’s jaw started to cramp, they stopped. Carson, tugging up his pants, said again, “Better than lichen.” 

But Jerett was already removing the swab from its envelope, one eye on the clock. Carson put his head in the crook of Jerrett’s elbow, mouth wide open, so the pocked landscape of his tongue was visible, his eroded molars, his cheeks like wet cave walls to which Jerett touched the arrow of absorbent cotton. They needed just twenty seconds on the right cheek, twenty seconds left, but Carson’s tongue was mischievous—flattened the swab against his front teeth, grabbed the shaft and tugged it, so Jerett had to reposition. Jerett felt suddenly old, next to Carson. They hated games. They had four minutes left. Twenty seconds right, twenty seconds left. They had as much of a sample as Carson would allow. They began to remove the swab, but Carson caught the shaft between his teeth—“Do it like you love me.” 

A plea, but Jerett heard in it decades of criticism. Jerett’s jaw ached, and they had at most two minutes, and Jerett didn’t, in that moment, feel any love for Carson. “It’s finished,” Jerett said. “Let go.” A knock on the door. Jerett was out of time. “Let go.” The attendant couldn’t see the swab. Jerett hadn’t researched DNA sampling protocols in dementia-care facilities, had remained deliberately ignorant. Another knock. Jerett pinched Carson’s cheeks, pressing flesh against molars. Carson’s breathing changed—faster, short. He whimpered. Jerett tugged hard on the swab, and it slipped free, Carson’s teeth clicking against each other. A pink froth of saliva and blood coated the tip of the swab. Jerett sheathed and pocketed it. Carson had a hand to his mouth. He’d bitten his lip. There was a dot of red on the sleeve of Carson’s sweater. Blood on the sweater. The attendant called, “Carson?” The attendant would see the blood. Jerett felt a rising horror at what they’d done, they’d hurt Carson. But no, it wasn’t blood. It was a flower. A small embroidered flower on the sleeve of Carson’s sweater, and their hands shook then not with fear. A clean, welcome anger came over them, and they checked the tag at the neck. A women’s sweater. They checked his pants. Women’s pants.

Jerett threw open the door. “Why is Carson wearing women’s clothing?”

“Sorry?” the attendant said.

“Carson’s wearing the wrong clothes.” They were not shouting. They sounded calm, though not entirely calm, or else why would the attendant step back from them as he said, “He chooses his own clothes. You ready to sign out?”

Jerett glanced back at Carson to see what Carson wanted them to do—advocate or be quiet, stay or go. Carson was nursing his bottom lip and watching the television. Jerett thought he wouldn’t say anything at all, but he did. He said, to the television, “I’d rather Boston,” and Jerett said, “Then we’ll live in Boston,” and Carson didn’t rise from the bed, didn’t insist on packing, understood all Jerett wasn’t offering.

In the hall, Jerett asked, “Where’s the clothing he brought from home? The clothing he’s worn all his life?”

“I’ll check today,” the attendant said. “Possibly their laundry got mixed up with someone else’s.”

The attendant thought Jerett was overreacting, and the anger Jerett felt at this dismissal carried them through an hour of traffic north of D.C., through a phone call with Amira, who said, “There’s nothing to do, sweet,” and “But you’re not his partner,” and, “But legally you’re not, Jerett,” and again, “There’s nothing we can do.” Through a phone call with Brynn, in which they found themself shouting, “A women’s sweater.”

“It’s an affirming facility, Jerett. Dad and I researched together. That’s why we went out of state, why I’m paying out of pocket.”

“They had him in a women’s sweater.”

“Women’s fit him better in the sleeves than men’s. He’s always worn women’s sweaters now and again.”

“It had flowers on it.”

“So he’s getting more femme.”

“Because he’s scared. You can’t be trans in a place like that. They misgendered him.”

“Who did?”

“The attendant. The nurse.”

“Used she?”

“Used they.”

“Jerett, come on. I’m not saying the place is perfect, but he has what he needs, he’s happy.”

“I didn’t see that. Happiness, I didn’t see that.”

“He’s always swung. He’s always swung on gender. You know that.” 

Worn pumps, once wore a dress as a costume, they could concede that, but “This is different. He can’t be who he is in there.”

“You want to move down here and care for him, say the word.”

A taunt. But Jerett was immune to it. Jerett had the lichen.

◆

Disturbance. Two booted feet on a mountain path crush a tiger snail which will not recover, crush a stinkhorn which will, crush the sporophyte of a resurrection fern, releasing a cloud of spores. The slurry is inert in their pocket. Jerett summits at five a.m. As they paint the slurry on the rocks, they feel like a territorial animal. The lichen is brown, runny and granular as excrement. Jerett wants to share it with someone. They have service. They’re just over an hour from Boston, can see the lit skyline. As the lichen dries, they call Amira. 

But Amira has heard the story from Tobi who heard it from Carson. She says, “You left him bleeding?”

Jerett tries to explain: thirty minutes, the singing competition, object permanence, oral sex. The lichen. The only way they could offer Carson a shadow of what he asked of them—cohabitation, eternity.

“The lichen,” Amira says, “will take over everything. It’s a monstrosity.”

The word jolts something in Jerett. The way a metaphor can take you by surprise, make a thing painfully clear. 

“I’m sorry,” Jerett says.

“Don’t apologize to me.”

But Jerett isn’t. Jerett is speaking to the lichen as they pour their drinking water over the slurry. To destroy the lichen now is the moral choice. Jerett hangs up. They wash the lichen off the sandstone. And then they stop. They cap their water bottle. A patch of slurry remains untouched. They feel for the lichen a corrupt devotion, a protectiveness that refuses reason. Is this what Carson wanted from them? “I’m sorry,” they say again, to Carson, but Carson isn’t there. Carson doesn’t witness Jerett descend the mountain, ignoring a twinge in their left knee. Or perhaps he does, as the rising summer sun bakes the rock at Jerett’s back and they become, in translation, a reply to sunlight, geometric as cell walls, naked as chloroplasts rising to belly in a direct ray, the waking of photosynthesis after shade, a tesseract fizzed by a buzz of potassium, the edging out of the thallus into a crevicing of rock, filaments merciless with stone, and warted areolas, and the destruction of a similar being, then another, then another, and an experience of nearly unbearable brightness, and water which lasts and lasts until they burst open in tremendous heat.