“Pay no attention to Ja,” advised Lucinda.
“Silence! We’re conducting a performance of The Tempest!”
From what I could gather— The Tempest was beyond me, though Scarcross provided a sort of running commentary—a magician named Prospero. had been booted from his dukedom because he spent too much time nosing through his books. He landed on an island with his daughter, Miranda, and enslaved two inhabitants—a monster and a fairy—and began to make arrangements to win his dukedom back. Only thing was, it was nice on the island—good books, good food, good weather, good fun … like Gilligans Island with a really good script. And Prospero hardly talked at all about his wife—if you asked me, he might have had a thing for the fairy, whom he was always calling “my dainty Ariel.” My favorite character, Caliban, the foul-mouthed monster, got all the best speeches and took shit from no one. Scarcross would grumble all of Caliban’s curses, his once-ravaged throat performing admirably. But Eli was really more suited to Prospero: both had an air of exiled royalty. Magda started crying when Scarcross mimicked barking in a scene in which two drunkards got chased by hunting dogs, but Eli repeated—virtually singing it—Caliban’s speech about the noises of the isle, and Magda’s weeping faded into sweet narcotic sleep:
Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices,
That if I then had wak’d after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again, and then in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that, when I wak’d
I cried to dream again… .
It made me sleepy too, in a delicious sort of way, like when you’re young and drowsy in the backseat of a car and all you hear is traffic, and your parents, and Top 40. And I thought of all the voices on Juice’s tape recorder, and the voice of my mother, and the voice of my father, and the voice of Ian Lamb—the voices of my world. Scarcross’s words were like a jigsaw of them all, like waves of peaceful static, like a hurricane of calm. I reached for his hand, and I held it for a while. We were standing in a current, but his body was drifting. Something was tugging at it, something indistinct, and I could only stand there, anchoring him. I could have let go even then, if I wanted. But I held on to his hand until he drifted back to me. He opened his eyes: they were full of the world. They couldn’t see a thing, but he was looking into me. And at last he sat up, and he clapped the volume shut, and he asked me for my honest opinion of The Tempest.
“I like Caliban,” I said, “even though he gets screwed.”
“Caliban’s a monster,” Fr. Scarcross informed me. “What does Prospero want?”
“Prospero wants power.”
“No!” Scarcross answered. “Prospero wants love!”
“What about Ariel?” Scarcross continued. “Is he free in the end?”
I didn’t know what he meant.
“Ariel,” Scarcross said, “is he free, Toby Sligh?”
“You mean is he released?”
“That’s not what I mean at all!”
Beside us, Magda started crying in her sleep. She was whispering a woman’s name over and over. She awoke from her dream and looked over at us. Two orderlies entered with a chattering metal gurney.
“I give this to you!” Scarcross handed me The Tempest. “Hide it underneath your mattress! It’s truer than roses!”
They hoisted Fr. Scarcross onto the gurney.
“True or false, Toby?”
He wouldn’t let me go. They wanted to remove him, but his hand held fast to mine.
“Prospero is a good man! True or false, Toby?”
“False,” I said to Scarcross: Prospero was a liar.
“True or false, Toby! Caliban’s a monster!”
“False,” I said to Scarcross: Caliban was true.
“True or false, Toby! Ariel is free now!”
I was looking at him closely; his hands abandoned mine. “True or false, Toby!” They were wheeling him away. “True or false, Toby! True or false, Toby Sligh!”
Was Ariel free? Prospero had released him. He had done what he had to; now he was free to go. But would someone else enslave him? Did he even want his freedom? I thought I had my answer. What would Ariel’s be?
While Scarcross was in surgery I tried my best to study, but I felt the sudden urge to see the face of my mother. I didn’t really need to see the face of my father; I only had to look into a mirror to do that. Fathers and sons are photographic negatives; a mother’s face you sort of have to touch base with. So I said goodbye to Cindy and then to Lucinda, and they said to hurry back, because Scarcross needed me.
In the lobby of St. Osyth’s I was stopped by a kid with a quarter in one hand and a lost look in his eye.
‘Have you seen my uncle?” he asked.
I said I hadn’t.
“Don’t you have a nuncle?” the kid said, and cracked his knuckles.
I told him I didn’t: in fact, it was true. For relatives, I only had my mother and father.
“I just have a mommy and daddy,” I explained.
That sucks the kid said. “Here, you can have my quarter.”
Since my mother and father’d moved out of the house, it had occurred to me that families, like figures in history, repeat the same mistakes with ridiculous precision. It was a peculiar trait of the Sligh household that we didn’t have a family besides ourselves to speak of. And when I say “to speak of,” I mean exactly that: my parents didn’t speak of either one of their parents, nor would they speak to them. It was like they’d never been. And here I was, a third-generation talking cripple, miring in the quicksand of communication breakdown. My relatives were somewhere. I didn’t know where. Something bad had happened a long time ago, scars had run deep, and now nobody spoke. So in a way I did and didn’t have relations; and I couldn’t bitch and moan about a clan I’d never known. Did I have aunts and uncles? If so, nobody’d told me. It was weird, the whole business; we were all the Slighs we had. And Mom and Dad wouldn’t talk about the families they’d abandoned, or by whom they’d been abandoned, many bitter years ago. The topic of the breakup, in fact, was so taboo that something in it must have been awfully romantic; I imagined a spectacularly decadent elopement, shotguns and squadcars and squalid hints of incest, sins so enormous only love could hush them up. A world of shit had happened before my arrival and my folks were fools to think it wouldn’t be my legacy… .
But I still believed in truth, in spite of everything. I knew it was somewhere, like the Loch Ness monster, waiting to rear its legendary ugly head. Mom had moved out of the house for a reason; my father had followed her lead for a reason; neither of them spoke to their families for a reason; and now, for a reason, neither of them spoke to me. Ian’s glass eye, Juice’s crying jags, Anquanna’s battered cheek, Fr. Scarcross’s illness—these things had reasons: I could learn them if I wanted; I could learn them if I waited: if I learned to be sly. The simplest revelations required simple patience: the blood that Wu drew from my arm taught me that. It was somewhere in a lab. Someone was looking at it. If they saw something bad they would make a note of it, stick the note in an envelope, and mail it to Wu. And if I tested positive for the HIV virus, somewhere in a baker’s dozen years I would be dead—dead just like André, dead just like Peter, dead like Scarcross would be in a matter of days, dead like so many unfortunate others whose bodies told the truth because the blood never lies. And if I had the virus, Ian Lamb probably had it. And whomever he might sleep with, they would get it too. My parents had the Cold War, the Bomb outside the body. We had AIDS. The Bomb had moved inside. Nations once afraid to even look at one another were replaced by lovers frightened by the simplest touch or kiss. And the virus was alive in every truth we never told—alive in the laundry someone scattered in our yard, alive in the white Plymouth terrorizing me, in
Juice’s tape recordings, in Ian Lamb’s equivocations, in the ravaged throat of Scarcross on the operating table. All these were lies or the products of lying. I only knew a few things that were absolutely true: that I loved my parents, that I loved Ian Lamb, that I even loved Juice and Fr. Scarcross in my way. These things were true things, plus one important other: that I was a faggot, an incurable faggot, and that I had spent seventeen years on this planet denying the undeniable truth of my existence. Toby Sligh was a lie. Toby’s world was a liar’s. And now his biggest lie was multiplying in his blood. “The truth,” Ian said, “the truth is a bastard.” But Ian was wrong, and I was learning what was right. The truth—that men wanted, that men needed one another—was the truth of my existence, and to lie would be to die. I had lived long enough in my labyrinth of lying. I would tell my mom I loved her. And that Toby Sligh was gay.
The frontdoor to my mother’s efficiency was open, though it had been camouflaged over with fronds. I entered without knocking, without shouting out. I didn’t want to shock her; after all, she had a shotgun. I was immediately struck by the way the place had changed: purple shag carpeting covered the floor, a half an inch thick, bouncy as a trampoline, and the peach-colored walls were covered with drawings of a nude guy who bore a resemblance to Ian. The kitchen was spotless and free of cockroaches. Something like gumbo was aboil on the stove. This was how my mother would have lived if she’d been single—surrounded by her drawings, and her cooking, and herself. The place was a mess, but it had a messy order. It was my mother’s mess. It was distinctively fucked up.
In the kitchen I lifted the lid off the gumbo and was going to taste it when I heard my mother’s voice. It wasn’t so much my mother’s voice as her laugh; it was shrill and schoolgirl silly, like a menopausal Mouseketeer’s. Outside it was fantastically bright and hot, and the sun had emerged from a flock of fleecy clouds and was charging the backyard in great bursts of light. I looked out the window and could make out my mother standing in jeans by the dilapidated Chevy. Standing atop it, in my mother’s wedding gown, was Ian, and my mother was making alterations. Neither of them saw me; they were horsing around. Ian said something and my mother slapped his ass. A bunch of pins were sticking from her mouth, and Mom would remove them and poke them into Ian. I thought I heard a siren, then the sun disappeared, and when it reemerged Ian hopped down off the Chevy and he and my mother started waltzing in the yard. They were turning in elegant, radiant circles, and my heart was in my mouth, and when the waltz stopped, they kissed. The kiss was delicate. My mother’s lips were full of pins… . But already I was crying fucking buckets by then, my mind pregnant with a hundred dirty possibilities as I fled the apartment, Toby Sligh’s truth in tow.
Across from Sacred Heart, there was a park. I went for a walk and a man followed me. He asked me for the time and I told him what it was. He went into the woods, and I followed him.
My mother groan’d! my father wept.
Into the dangerous world I leapt:
Helpless, naked, piping loud:
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.
Struggling in my father’s hands,
Striving against my swadling hands,
Bound and weary I thought best
To Sulk upon my mother’s breast… .
There were tubes and needles in Scarcross’s body. The partition had been drawn, so his bed was in shadow. I removed the books covering the chair beside his bed and took a seat quietly. Eli was in a coma.
“It’s something with his heart,” Lucinda had informed me before she led me in. “It happened during surgery. They couldn’t find out what was wrong with his throat. Then his heart sort of— quit. We’re glad you’re here, Toby.”
Scarcross was dying. Pretty soon he would be dead. You could read it in his breathing. You could read it on his skin. And any fool could see the operation was disastrous. His neck was bruised and battered, like a lacerated flute. And his chest wore a massive black crucifix of stitches that would mark him forever when they thrust him in the ground. I picked up the volume of Blake at his bedside and read two poems aloud—“Infant Joy” and “Infant Sorrow.” I didn’t understand them; they got jumbled in my head. But somewhere in the limbo in between them Scarcross lay:
“I HAVE no name:
“I am but two days old.”
(My mother groan’d! my father wept.
Into the dangerous world I leapt …)
What shall I call thee?
“I happy am,
(Helpless, naked, piping loud:
Like a fiend hid in a cloud …)
“Joy is my name.”
Sweet joy befall thee! …
In the infancy of dying, Fr. Scarcross was reborn. The dangerous world was receding into death and his limbs were as disheveled as a baby’s in oblivion. If he could see himself, would Eli be surprised? In the Gospel of Scarcross, sorrow equaled joy. And joy equaled sorrow. It was God’s odd equation. Where we had come from and where we were going to, God only knew: we lived, and then we didn’t. The least we could do, in the Gospel of Eli, was to enjoy the lousy ride, however ugly it might get. And by the look of Scarcross it could get pretty ugly: the lesions, the stitches, the tentacles and needles, the skeleton like bike spokes poking up beneath the skin—this was what happened when the hourglass ran out, when you found yourself staring at the other side of being. “Our little life is rounded by a sleep,” Prospero claimed when we had read The Tempest. But Prospero was a liar. This sleep didn’t round you; it was all razor edges. What was meant to refresh left you helpless and naked, like Blake’s blasted baby. Sleep was an ordeal. And what I saw before me was a man who’d been stripped of all life like a twig being stripped for an inferno. How did it happen exactly, dying? Conception is simple: sperm meets egg. But when one begins to die, are there similar collisions? What meets what? And could you purchase contraception? I couldn’t stop thinking of the things I had done in the park, with the stranger, in the darkness of the trees. We’d looked over our shoulders, the two of us, groping; there had been too much fear to allow for any pleasure. When we’d finished, we left, and we didn’t say goodbye. We didn’t say a word. We put our cocks away and walked … while somewhere across town Mom was waltzing with Ian, and Dad was waltzing with his shadow, and Fr. Scarcross lay alone. Was this Jesuit here because he’d done the same things with a similar stranger in a deeper, darker wood? And how long would it be before I lay here like Scarcross? Before Ian Lamb lay here? And the strangers we had touched? You would live just so long as you never touched anybody; to touch was to die; and to love was to touch.
I hadn’t scrubbed up. I had taken off my mask. And I shouldn’t have done it, but I took Elijah’s hand. It was as light as a lady’s empty glove as I lifted it up to my forehead, and my chest, and my shoulders. I said, “Father, forgive me for I have sinned,” and I listed my sins to a God who couldn’t hear me.
And for penance, I promised not to search for the truth. I would let it come to me.
And pretty soon I was asleep.
“Toby! Toby! burning bright… In the foress of the night… What immortal hand or eye … Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?’ ” a soft, familiar voice purred into my ear as two dark arms curled around my drowsing neck. “This whatchoo been doin’ for community service, sittin’ up here, reading shit to a dead man?”
“He’s not dead,” I said, waking up. “And it’s not shit. Who let you in here?”
“Lady did, Toby. Got a note from Kickliter.”
He held up a note in Kickliter’s scrawl.
“K. told you I was here?”
“I axed him, an’ he tole me.” Juice rubbed his mask. “This the priess who spoke to us?”
I nodded.
“Got AIDS. I was right, Toby Sligh.”
I took the Blake from him and told him he was.
“Poem’s dope,” Juice continued. “That shit about the ‘Tyger’? I’m the Tyger,” Juice boasted. “That kid, G., is me.”
We drove Juice’s
shit-car to an inner-city playground just a couple blocks from where Juice’s father lived. Juice wouldn’t drive to the playground in the Porsche because he was convinced he was still being followed. The beeper Juice wore on his belt kept going off, and Juice would slap it quiet, then switch it on again. “Prob’ly my dad,” Juice explained. “Sometime he calls me. When he wants crack. I ain’t givin’ it to him.” Before we left, Juice took the cellular from Baby and dialed his mother’s number over and over. There wasn’t any answer, so he stuffed the phone in the glovebox. I heard a bag crinkle. Juice scratched his nuts. “Gonna try to stay with my aunt tonight, Toby. My auntie-in-law,” Juice said. “Anquanna’s mama.”
“So your mother, or your father, is—”
“It’s complicated, Toby.”
I took his word for it: families were.
“When’s your birthday?” Juice asked.
“September,” I told him.
“Happy birthday early.”
Juice produced a shopping bag.
In it were Ray-Bans, Nike Air Huaraches, baggy Converse trackpants, a silk Adidas tanktop, Reebok athletic socks, furry purple sweatbands, a fat gold chain, and a Knickerbockers cap. Also in the bag was some Oscar de la Renta. I squirted some on me, then I squirted some on Juice.
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