by Paul Lisicky
Votive
On a cold night in January, Noah and I walk to a reading at the Work Center. A votive candle burns in Mark and Wally’s window. Are we too scared to say what we think? Noah grips my bare hand harder, and just as we turn into the Work Center parking lot, Mike Mazur asks if I saw the candle in the window. “Have you heard anything?” he asks nervously, as if he’s afraid to make something true by giving speech to it. “No,” I say. And I’m moved he’d think I’d know, and I feel empty that I don’t. A lifetime of changes can happen in a day. The reader’s sentences are laced with rich descriptions and a careful attention to sonics, but I can’t get the candle out of my mind.
Awkwardness, Please
The guy on the bed takes two breaths and arches his back almost imperceptibly, his lips slightly parted. I have hold of one leg and his sister one hand philip another hand or part of his arm and we’re sobbing and I’m totally amazed at how quietly he dies how beautiful everything is with us holding him down on the bed on the floor fourteen stories above the earth and the light and wind scattering outside the windows and his folks at this moment standing somewhere on the observation deck of the empire state building hundreds of stories up in the clouds and light and how perfect that is to me how the whole world is still turning and somewhere it’s raining and somewhere it’s snowing and somewhere forest fires rage and somewhere else something moves beneath dark waters and somewhere blood appears in the hallways of the home of some old couple who aren’t bleeding and somewhere someone else spontaneously self-combusts and somehow all the mysteries of this world as I know it offer me comfort and I don’t know beans about heaven and hell and somehow all that stuff is no longer an issue.
DAVID WOJNAROWICZ, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration
Fifteen minutes into the reading, I know life isn’t happening in this space. I feel the walls of the Common Room closing in. The room heats up and one person shifts and others follow. Someone in the back row coughs and then another. Throats are cleared. A barely perceptible moan. If the reading were more awkward, if one section were a little slapdash, it might feel like life with all its coincidences and accidents. I lean into Noah and he pulls away: the room is hot. Someone rushes toward the restroom, a toilet flushing, the door opens, the fan still roars, how annoying—ah, there it is, life. We have no time for empty ritual, all of us sitting side by side in this room.
Such are the demands of performance in a dark, dark age.
Some Change Went through Them All
Everyone in Town is here at the UU Meeting House—at least Town as we know it, people with associations to the art and writing worlds. Chatter in the air, people walking up to other people, greeting and smiling, but with a sense of great sadness held back. It feels more like Christmas than a funeral, maybe because so many are used to going to funerals by now that they’ve been rewired—they look like something else. At times they probably catch themselves thinking they are at a graduation, a wedding, or an award ceremony until they realize that someone they knew, and maybe loved, is dead: chips and ash inside that porcelain urn up front.
Wally is in that urn, or pieces of him. I can’t quite get my head around any of this.
I don’t want to sit in this pew or have anything to do with it. I have been to other funerals, I used to be a song leader at funerals when I was young, but this is different. I know I’m holding Noah’s hand, and I know people I know are speaking, people I don’t know are breaking into song, and it all feels so loving, but I can’t keep still in my seat. I smooth my brows. I’m usually the adult who gets annoyed when other adults are too distracted to stay calm and focused on the thing at hand, and here I am, behaving like someone I’d make fun of. My eyes wander over the tall white walls, the trompe l’oeil ceiling, the wall frescoes done in egg tempera. The building itself was built in 1847, but it’s probably seen more funerals in the past five years than it saw in the twenty-five years before that. What does a building do with all that ceremony, that intensity? Does it lose its carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen? Is it still living, is it watching us? Do all the layers of feeling—or holding back that feeling—alter the composition of the beams, the supports, the floorboards? Do they soak up that residue and hold it, keep it inside like cold Atlantic water, or do they sturdy and flex, like a bulkhead against rising tides?
I could keep piling up metaphors when I know I should be present, know I should be thinking about Wally. Wally with his head on the pillow, Wally walking down Pearl Street with Arden. Wally in the garden. Wally making a joke about high colonics and cleanses. I can’t.
Noah and I stand up. The service is over, people are walking out into the January cold, hugging one another, promising to stay in touch when they know they’ll forget—and could you blame them, finally? I want to rush out the door, undetected: I have done my duty. But I know I must say a few words to Mark before we leave, even though I’m afraid, childishly afraid, in no position to put on the mourning suit of correct language. Even the pressed shirt, pressed pants, and tie I’m wearing feel like a fraud on me. How do others summon up the exactitude to say the right thing, when language, the one we’ve been given, offers us but ten words to make that happen?
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse: “Some change at once went through them all, as if this had really happened, and they were all conscious of making a party together … on an island; had their common cause against that fluidity out there.”
Noah is by my side. Polly there too.
I hug Mark. He feels taller than I remember him feeling—am I crouching to make him feel that way? I don’t want him to feel any less than he is. And there it is: the stunning proximity of aloneness. When my senses are at attention it’s impossible not to fall off the edge.
And suddenly I burst into tears, as Mark’s body feels real to me, and I feel his body’s ache, the body that knew Wally’s body, and my tears aren’t even about me, but what’s to come: Lucy dying, Billy dying, Philippe dying, when do I stop? My mother dying. My father. Denise, my friend.
Getting together with Mark. Breaking up with Mark, eighteen years later.
The time line breaks, scrambles.
We’re held up in the menacing net, over the void—I don’t know what other name to call this space. Lives passing through that net—human, animal, plant, and molecules too small to see, which is another way to say time starts here. The clock is closer to an ending. We haven’t been living our lives, though we certainly thought we were. And all this happens within sight of Noah and Polly, who look stricken, as if they see into something I can’t yet see, or don’t want to. The expressions on their faces pull me back to here. I wipe my eyes and nose on the back of my fist.
“Hold them while you can,” Mark says, holding me a second longer, before letting me go, as if to point out what we already know—it’s all provisional, it’s always been in process. Even when people live and work together, share the same bathroom, same towels, same spoons and forks, same bed, and keep on living in tandem. There isn’t a charm to ward any of it off.
Even if AIDS weren’t in the picture.
There has been too much composure till now. I need to remind myself that I breathe, I have lungs I need to use again. I shift back and forth in my hard, stiff shoes, the shoes that somehow make my head ache. We smile good-bye and talk about staying in better touch.
Then I grab Noah’s hand, swing it back and forth, and we’re out in the day, cold, bright, astringent. And where do we begin as we walk past store after papered-over store?
32
In Between
And you pursue me. And I evaded you, as long as I could.
HUUB OOSTERHUIS, “And You Pursue Me”
There is a test, of course. The prospect of the test scares me because if I shouldn’t get the news I want, I’ve lost my freedom. I still want to believe I can move into my life. And I still want to believe there’s one more life after that.
But freedom? Maybe it’s worse to keep worrying about the wave th
at will inevitably pull me under. It might be better just to get the news now. And maybe that’s why some decide to forgo precautions. It’s cruel to have only two countries, positive and negative, in which to live your life. I think of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, who voluntarily contracts syphilis in order to get twenty years of inspiration.
If inspiration is a country, that’s where I want to live out my days. Faustus: “Disease, and most specially opprobrious, suppressed, secret disease, creates a certain critical opposition to the world, to mediocre life, disposes a man to be obstinate and ironical toward civil order, so that he seeks refuge in free thought, in books, in study.”
The truth of it has to do with my resistance to groupness. Maybe I just think I’m too good to be one of the herd. I don’t want to join their weekly caravans to Boston, I don’t want their generous therapists, I don’t want their weekly dinners made with such love by the people in Town. I don’t want their Christmas and Hanukkah parties. I don’t want to be damaged and ugly. I don’t want to be pegged down to this America, to this Mickey Mouse town, especially when so few countries will even let me across their borders. And just try getting back in.
No wellness without illness, I realize this now. The world was never merely divided into two columns. My body has always known this, but my brain was slow to catch on.
I’ll go to the doctor only if symptoms present themselves. I will live in this in-between state for years and years, longer than I care to name. Maybe I will still be living like this when there’s a cure—what, twenty years from now? thirty? At that point the skin of my neck might be so loose no one will want me anyway.
I must be attuned to my body, and that means everything: how I feel in my shoes, the color of my pee, the texture inside my mouth, my tongue. The taste of my breath—is it stinking? Does it taste of copper, of the pennies I stuffed into my mouth as a child?
It doesn’t occur to me that I could be so strong I might not feel something wrong, even when it’s there, burning inside me, intimate as a lover.
I’m a coward, a piece of shit. And I have as much integrity as any human could ever have under these conditions—I shouldn’t punish myself. Some say I could pass on the virus to someone else, but I don’t have sex that way. Well, most of the time.
I could live better, eat better food, exercise, hydrate, take better vitamins, do yoga, all of it. But is there a cost to giving up the body’s pull toward darkness? The language of my dreams isn’t always nice and kind. The language of my dreams is meat and sweat, hair and spit, bone hitting bone, ruthless. Can a body live without darkness? It might need darkness—or its brother, disorientation—just as it needs the light. The little punishments that give it so much joy, that test it, that make it hurt, dizzy—to let me know it exists.
Dana Spiotta, Stone Arabia: “I read somewhere that the brain needs disorientation to properly develop. That childhood desire to feel dizzy has something to do with increasing the vestibular and cerebellar interaction in the young brain. Proprioception is the activity where the brain orients the inside world with the outside world. Spinning throws off your proprioception and the brain works and develops as it tries to get it back. The desire to spin around is healthy, I guess, because it teaches the brain how to get a stable fix on the world under any circumstances.”
As to the few friends who’ve taken the test: do they have a stronger need to be grounded than I do? Are they wary of spinning off and away, losing their coordinates, their grid? Of the ones who have tested positive, will their health insurance deny them coverage if they’re lucky enough to have it? Will the drugs fail, corroding their kidneys and livers? Do they ever think they might be scooped up and put in a camp one night? Who knows with this government? Once one evil disappears, another evil takes its place, and what better vulnerability to fix on than AIDS with its metaphors of invasion, so close to paranoia, the fear of the immigrant, the foreigner?
Is it exhausting to live like this? How does it wear me down, bleach my thoughts away like sun on a patch of rug until I am no color? Does it leave me stupid, without much room left for an animating thought?
Swallowing, I feel a sore throat coming on one morning. I drink tea with honey. I take another spoonful of honey; I decide I’m dehydrated. But the sore throat won’t go away. I’ve tried to take the vitamins, tried to gargle with saltwater. Chloraseptic. The Sucrets of my childhood. Megadoses of fizzy vitamin C water. Granted, I’ve been staying out too late and have been on my feet all day. It will kill it out of my system. When I go to Outer Cape, it doesn’t help that I’m asked questions with a gravity and concern that suggest my illness could be attributable to only one thing. When I say no to the doctor’s long list of questions, he doesn’t offer to give me an HIV test. I would’ve taken the HIV test. Maybe he’s not allowed, maybe that wouldn’t be done during a routine visit. But the visit has a stink to it. A foul-smelling cloud follows me out of the office and that cloud seems to stay with me for hours into the next day. It smells like a sock, a worn sock that no detergent can get the smell out of, even after it’s been washed a dozen times.
That night, sitting on the post office steps, I’m miraculously better, so much better. (You think I have AIDS? What AIDS? I’ll show everybody I don’t have AIDS. I have never felt better in my whole fucking life.) I tell the story of the doctor’s visit to my friend, but others are in earshot. One person doesn’t look at us, she looks straight ahead, but smiles, to indicate she is an ally. The manner of my report is suddenly shot through with indignation, outrage. Can’t a queer man even stub his toe without some well-meaning idiot attributing it to HIV? What if I went into the waiting room with a bee sting, a hangnail? Jesus. We laugh some, flabbergasted but not exactly shocked. But my indignation feels larger than just me. It crests on a high wave of its own. Anger is so complicated that it belongs in many places, fills many rooms and houses, all over Town and beyond.
Sharrow Vale
An entire novel comes to me one day, at least in my imagination, and in this scene a man sits on the sofa. He has been sitting on that sofa so long he’s not even sure his legs are going to move when he finally gets up. It would be so easy to get up, so easy to wash the dishes in the sink, pull some weeds from the joints between the bricks in the patio, dust the stairs, but to do that he’d be giving in to superstition. His boyfriend told him he’d be back from the doctor hours ago, and it is dark. It has been dark for two hours, fifteen minutes. Why didn’t he go with him? He puts his hand in the fur of his dog. Has his boyfriend been in an accident? Too many people getting into accidents on Route 6, people driving with such recklessness as if that patch isn’t ghosted or cursed, so they’re still racing right through it. He can’t stand this waiting, especially in the wake of this rough week, when his boyfriend’s reported he’s gone to get an HIV test, done this without consulting with him first. Shouldn’t they have been tested together? Since then he couldn’t do his taxes, couldn’t finish a single article in the newspaper. Distraction has been his job all week, and it’s both saved him and done him in. There’s nothing worse than jumping up every five minutes, and he’s not jumping up now. Headlights drag a reflected square near the ceiling, from one side of the room to the other, over the hutch. The engine doesn’t make the sound of his boyfriend’s engine. The dog knows: he hasn’t jumped up in awareness, anticipation.
“When we find out I’m negative we won’t have to use those anymore,” his boyfriend had said, pointing to the unopened condoms on the nightstand. But the man couldn’t summon up enthusiasm then, and can’t summon up enthusiasm now. The space between the test and the results is a deep and sharrow vale. And dread shatters sex, any images related to it. It turns the body into a brain. The brain swells and shrinks private parts, along with animal needs.
A car door slams, the dog barks and lunges at the window. Panting in the room. Oily, hormonal smell. Rather than follow the dog to greet his boyfriend, he will sit where he is beside the lamp. Bad luck to walk to the door with the exp
ectation of good news on his face. Bad luck to look like worry is etched around his mouth. He will stay where he is, holding the pillow over his stomach, and wait for his lover to open the back door and walk into the living room.
His boyfriend’s face is not smiling. He nods up and down, and it is not the face of the man he was but the face of a boy, the face of someone who is scared, so scared. The boyfriend sits down beside him. The man collapses over him, into the heat of his lap, and wails. It is not the wailing of someone from the movies, say, a character in Philadelphia, but someone who’s completely in his body, and sees himself alone, just the way his boyfriend was alone, when he lost his late lover. If he’d already prepared himself for the worst news, would he have been in better possession of himself? The world is not supposed to be as dark as they say it is. All his worrying about the dark was really preparation for the light, right? Somehow he thought they’d escape it. What arrogance to think they’d escape it when New York City is dying, when Africa is dying, San Francisco, West Hollywood, Amsterdam, Haiti, Moscow, Dublin, even the guy across the street visited by the flashing but silent ambulance the other night. When the man raises his head from his boyfriend’s lap, each object in the room burns with such magnificent force he’s surprised they haven’t exploded in tandem. All the while the dog of black curls stands before them, head down, head pressed into the couch, wagging his tail as if that moving from right to left, right to left could possibly make things better in the room.
33
Null
“This,” Noah says. “What is this?”
Lack of specificity pulls everything into it, like a drain. It sucks down all of the characteristics out of his room. And all we have left is our bodies, taut and alert.