Light Fell by Evan Fallenberg

planets above him, as if the whole universe were falling into its rightful place just as he and Yoel were finding theirs. They fell asleep together enmeshed, and woke together that way, too.
    “What were you doing that whole time I was translating? It seemed like hours that you left me there.”
    Yoel released his grip on Joseph, rolled onto his back, and said to the ceiling, “I was praying in a tiny room at the top of the house, begging God for some guidance, some wisdom. Strength to fight this. I recited psalms and medieval piyutim and the confessional portion of the Yom Kippur service and a few incantations I learned from a sixth-century kabbalistic text. I strung together whatever seemed relevant.” He took a deep, steadying breath. “And after I don’t know how long I asked myself what I wanted to happen, what I really wanted. And from the noisy jumble in my head the answer came as clear as the blast of a ram’s horn: Joseph. I want your beauty. I want your mind. I want your friendship.” He paused, quieter now. “I have never thought this about another human being, but I want your body and I want your soul. I crave you.”
    He pulled Joseph in close, and Joseph nuzzled into the soft fur of his chest. “I don’t know whether this was showing appreciation for a most marvelous and wondrous creation of God’s or the opposite, idol worship,” Yoel whispered languorously into his ear, filling him with fresh desire, “but I felt words of prayer and thanks on my lips the whole night. Blessings and songs of praise for the beauty God has created in his world. Yehuda HaLevi must have composed this one, nearly nine hundred years ago, with you in mind: ‘With all the delights of the world I will ransom / The night when my lust was fulfilled / By the gazelle of loveliness, and I scraped / From his lips the flowing wine of his vineyard / And kissed his ruddy cheeks.’”
    Joseph rolled to his side and wrapped Yoel’s arms around himself. “And I was thinking that I never live in the present—mostly in the future and occasionally in the past, but never in the present. But last night I was nowhere but here, the whole night, completely and totally with you.”
    Yoel murmured agreement, but Joseph felt him stiffen. “And now it’s the day after and we will dress and go to our endeavors and the doubts will creep in, and the guilt. And the guilt will last until the next time we meet, when we have begun to wonder, begun to know, in our separate prisons, that we have crossed a dangerous boundary into a country that demands too much of citizens like us—shame and abhorrence followed by complete repentance, or the shattering of our lives as we know them.” He said this with such matter-of-factness that Joseph at first thought he was joking. “Time will tell if the power of our love and attraction is enough to sustain us in place of our relationships with God.”
    “Why ‘in place of’?” asked Joseph weakly, fearing the answer and the whole discussion. “Can’t we love one another and God?”
    Yoel propped himself up on one elbow and looked into Joseph’s face. “No, my friend. The question is not whether we can love him, but whether he can love us, and if the humans he has created in his own image can love us. And the answer is a clear no on both accounts. Now let’s shower and dress and eat breakfast and start trying to continue living our old lives with our new knowledge.” He stood up and offered a hand to Joseph, embracing him as he rose to his feet.
    “We must always be there for one another, no matter how awful it gets,” he said, and Joseph, deciding not to wonder how awful that might be, planted his feet resolutely in the present.
    Joseph and Yoel continued to communicate and meet as often as possible, usually at the apartment of Yoel’s in-laws. In particular, there were four Friday mornings, maybe five, when they worked together to decipher several marvelously sensuous poems penned by the great