by Ocean Vuong
* * *
Three freckles on his nose.
* * *
Three periods to a boy-sentence.
* * *
Trevor Burger King over McDonald’s ’cause the smell of smoke on the beef makes it real.
* * *
Trevor bucktooth clicking on his inhaler as he sucked, eyes shut.
* * *
Trevor I like sunflowers best. They go so high.
* * *
Trevor with the scar like a comma on his neck, syntax of what next what next what next.
* * *
Imagine going so high and still opening that big.
* * *
Trevor loading the shotgun two red shells at a time.
* * *
It’s kind of like being brave, I think. Like you got this big ole head full of seeds and no arms to defend yourself.
* * *
His hard lean arms aimed in the rain.
* * *
He touches the trigger’s black tongue and you swear you taste his finger in your mouth
* * *
as it pulls. Trevor pointing at the one-winged sparrow thrashing in black dirt and takes it
* * *
for something new. Something smoldering like a word. Like a Trevor
* * *
who knocked on your window at three in the morning, who you thought was smiling until you saw the blade held over his mouth. I made this, I made this for you, he said, the knife suddenly in your hand. Trevor later
* * *
on your steps in the grey dawn. His face in his arms. I don’t wanna, he said. His panting. His shaking hair. The blur of it. Please tell me I am not, he said through the sound of his knuckles as he popped them like the word But But But. And you take a step back. Please tell me I am not, he said, I am not
* * *
a faggot. Am I? Am I? Are you?
* * *
Trevor the hunter. Trevor the carnivore, the redneck, not
* * *
a pansy, shotgunner, sharpshooter, not fruit or fairy. Trevor meateater but not
* * *
veal. Never veal. Fuck that, never again after his daddy told him the story when he was seven, at the table, veal roasted with rosemary. How they were made. How the difference between veal and beef is the children. The veal are the children
* * *
of cows, are calves. They are locked in boxes the size of themselves. A body-box, like a coffin, but alive, like a home. The children, the veal, they stand very still because tenderness depends on how little the world touches you. To stay tender, the weight of your life cannot lean on your bones.
* * *
We love eatin’ what’s soft, his father said, looking dead
* * *
into Trevor’s eyes. Trevor who would never eat a child. Trevor the child with the scar on his neck like a comma. A comma you now
* * *
put your mouth to. That violet hook holding two complete thoughts, two complete bodies without subjects. Only verbs. When you say Trevor you mean the action, the pine-stuck thumb on the Bic lighter, the sound of his boots
* * *
on the Chevy’s sun-bleached hood. The wet live thing dragged into the truck bed behind him.
* * *
Your Trevor, your brunette but blond-dusted-arms man pulling you into the truck. When you say Trevor you mean you are the hunted, a hurt he can’t refuse because that’s something, baby. That’s real.
* * *
And you wanted to be real, to be swallowed by what drowns you only to surface, brimming at the mouth. Which is kissing.
* * *
Which is nothing
* * *
if you forget.
* * *
His tongue in your throat, Trevor speaks for you. He speaks and you darken, a flashlight going out in his hands so he knocks you in the head to keep the bright on. He turns you this way and that to find his path through the dark woods.
* * *
The dark words—
* * *
which have limits, like bodies. Like the calf
* * *
waiting in its coffin-house. No window—but a slot for oxygen. Pink nose pressed to the autumn night, inhaling. The bleached stench of cut grass, the tar and gravel road, coarse sweetness of leaves in a bonfire, the minutes, the distance, the earthly manure of his mother a field away.
* * *
Clover. Sassafras. Douglas fir. Scottish myrtle.
* * *
The boy. The motor oil. The body, it fills up. And your thirst overflows what holds it. And your ruin, you thought it would nourish him. That he would feast on it and grow into a beast you could hide in.
* * *
But every box will be opened in time, in language. The line broken,
* * *
like Trevor, who stared too long into your face, saying, Where am I? Where am I?
* * *
Because by then there was blood in your mouth.
* * *
By then the truck was totaled into a dusked oak, smoke from the hood. Trevor, vodka-breathed and skull-thin, said, It feels good. Said, Don’t go nowhere
* * *
as the sun slid into the trees. Don’t this feel good? as the windows reddened like someone seeing through shut eyes.
* * *
Trevor who texted you after two months of silence—
* * *
writing please instead of plz.
* * *
Trevor who was running from home, his crazy old man. Who was getting the fuck out. Soaked Levi’s. Who ran away to the park because where else when you’re sixteen.
* * *
Who you found in the rain, under the metal slide shaped like a hippopotamus. Whose icy boots you took off and covered, one by one, each dirt-cold toe, with your mouth. The way your mother used to do when you were small and shivering.
* * *
Because he was shivering. Your Trevor. Your all-American beef but no veal. Your John Deere. Jade vein in his jaw: stilled lightning you trace with your teeth.
* * *
Because he tasted like the river and maybe you were one wing away from sinking.
* * *
Because the calf waits in its cage so calmly
* * *
to be veal.
* * *
Because you remembered
* * *
and memory is a second chance.
* * *
Both of you lying beneath the slide: two commas with no words, at last, to keep you apart.
* * *
You who crawled from the wreck of summer like sons leaving their mothers’ bodies.
* * *
A calf in a box, waiting. A box tighter than a womb. The rain coming down, its hammers on the metal like an engine revving up. The night standing in violet air, a calf
* * *
shuffling inside, hoofs soft as erasers, the bell on its neck ringing
* * *
and ringing. The shadow of a man growing up to it. The man with his keys, the commas of doors. Your head on Trevor’s chest. The calf being led by a string, how it stops
* * *
to inhale, nose pulsing with dizzying sassafras. Trevor asleep
* * *
beside you. Steady breaths. Rain. Warmth welling through his plaid shirt like steam issuing from the calf’s flanks as you listen to the bell
* * *
across the star-flooded field, the sound shining
* * *
like a knife. The sound buried deep in Trevor’s chest and you listen.
* * *
That ringing. You listen like an animal
* * *
learning how to speak.
III
I’m on the train from New York City. In the window my face won’t let me go
, it hovers above windswept towns as the Amtrak slashes past lots stacked with shelled cars and farm tractors shot through with rust, backyards and their repeating piles of rotted firewood, the oily mounds gone mushy, pushed through the crisscross of chain-link fences, then hardened in place. Past warehouse after warehouse graffitied, then painted white, then graffitied again, the windows smashed out for so long glass no longer litters the ground below, windows you can look through, and glimpse, beyond the empty dark inside, the sky, where a wall used to be. And there, just beyond Bridgeport, sits the one boarded house in the middle of a parking lot the size of two footballs fields, the yellow lines running right up to the battered porch.
The train barrels past them all, these towns I have come to know only by what leaves them, myself included. The light on the Connecticut River is the brightest thing in the afternoon’s overcast. I’m on this train ’cause I’m going back to Hartford.
I take out my phone. And a barrage of texts floods the screen, just like I expected.
u hear abt trev?
check fb
it’s about Trevor pick up
fuck this si horrifc call me if u want
I just saw. damn
i’ll call ashley to make sure
just lmk ur good
the wakes on sunday
its trev this time? I knew it
For no reason, I text him: Trevor I’m sorry come back, then turn off the phone, terrified he’d answer.
* * *
—
It’s already night by the time I get off at Hartford’s Union Station. I stand in the greasy parking lot as people hurry through the drizzle into waiting taxis. It’s been five years and three months since Trevor and I first met, since the barn, the Patriots game through radio static, the army helmet on the dusty floor. I wait alone under an awning for the bus that will take me across the river, to the town that holds everything Trevor except Trevor himself.
I did not tell anyone I was coming. I was in the Italian American Lit class at a city college in Brooklyn when I saw, on my phone, a Facebook update from Trevor’s account, posted by his old man. Trevor had passed away the night before. I’m broken in two, the message said. In two, it was the only thought I could keep, sitting in my seat, how losing a person could make more of us, the living, make us two.
I picked up my bag and left the class. The professor, discussing a passage from Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete, stopped, looked at me, waiting for an explanation. When I gave none she continued, her voice trailing behind me as I fled the building. I walked all the way uptown, along the East Side, following the 6 train up to Grand Central.
Into—yes, that’s more like it. As in, Now I’m broken into.
* * *
—
The bus’s lights make it feel like a dentist’s office gliding through the wet streets. A woman behind me coughs fitfully between bursts of Haitian-inflected French. There’s a man next to her—husband, brother?—who rarely speaks save for the occasional “Uh-huh” or “Bien, bien.” On the highway, the October trees blur by, branches raking purple sky. In between them, the lampposts of soundless towns hang in fog. We cross a bridge and a roadside gas station leaves a neon throb in my head.
When the dark in the bus returns, I look down at my lap and hear his voice. You should stay. I glance up and see the fabric peeling from the top of his truck, the yellow foam spilling out at the tear, and I’m back in the passenger seat. It’s mid-August and we’re parked outside the Town Line Diner in Wethersfield. The air around us dark red, or perhaps that’s how all evenings, rendered in my memory of him, appear. Bludgeoned.
“You should stay,” he says, gazing out across the lot, his face smeared with motor oil from his shift at the Pennzoil in Hebron. But we both know I’m leaving. I’m going to New York, to college. The whole point of us meeting was to say goodbye, or rather, just to be side by side, a farewell of presence, of proximity, the way men are supposed to do.
We were to go to the diner for waffles, “for old times’ sake,” he said, but when we get there, neither of us moves. Inside the diner, a trucker sits alone over a plate of eggs. On the other side, a middle-aged couple is tucked into a booth, laughing, their arms animated over their oversized sandwiches. A single waitress hovers between the two tables. When the rain starts, the glass warps them, so that only their shades, colors, like impressionist paintings, remain.
“Don’t be scared,” his voice says. He stares at the people glowing in the diner. The tenderness in his tone holds me to the seat, the washed-out town. “You’re smart,” he says. “You’re gonna kill it in New York.” His voice sounds unfinished. And that’s when I realize he’s high. That’s when I see the bruises along his upper arms, the veins bulged and blackened where the needles foraged.
“Okay,” I say as the waitress gets up to warm up the trucker’s coffee. “Okay, Trevor,” as if agreeing to a task.
“They’re old as fuck and they’re still trying.” He almost laughs.
“Who?” I turn to him.
“That married couple. They’re still trying to be happy.” He is slurring, eyes grey as sink water. “It’s raining like hell and they out there eating soggy Reubens trying to get it right.” He spits into the empty cup and lets out a short, exhausted chuckle. “I bet they’ve been eating the same sandwiches forever.”
I smile, for no reason.
He falls back in the seat, lets his head roll to one side, and eases out a come-on grin. He starts to fumble the buckle over his Levi’s.
“Come on, Trev. You’re blazed. Let’s not, okay?”
“I used to hate it when you call me Trev.” He drops his hands, they lie in his lap like unearthed roots. “You think I’m fucked up?”
“No,” I mumble, turning away. I press my forehead against the window, where my reflection hovers above the parking lot, the rain falling through it. “I think you’re just you.”
I didn’t know that would be the last time I’d see him, his neck scar lit blue by the diner’s neon marquee. To see that little comma again, to put my mouth there, let my shadow widen the scar until, at last, there was no scar to be seen at all, just a vast and equal dark sealed by my lips. A comma superimposed by a period the mouth so naturally makes. Isn’t that the saddest thing in the world, Ma? A comma forced to be a period?
“Hello,” he says, without turning his head. We had decided, shortly after we met, because our friends were already dying from overdoses, to never tell each other goodbye or good night.
“Hello, Trevor,” I say into the back of my wrist, keeping it in. The engine jolts, stutters up, behind me the woman coughs. I’m back inside the bus again, staring at the blue mesh seat in front of me.
* * *
—
I get off on Main St. and immediately head toward Trevor’s house. I move as if I’m late to myself, as if I’m catching up. But Trevor is no longer a destination.
Realizing, too late, that it’s useless to show up unannounced at a dead boy’s house to be greeted only by his grief-fucked father, I keep walking. I reach the corner of Harris and Magnolia, where I turn, out of habit or possession, into the park, cross the three baseball fields, the earth rising up musty and fresh beneath my boots. Rain in my hair, down my face, shirt collar. I hurry toward the street on the other side of the park, follow it down to the cul-de-sac, where the house sits, so grey the rain almost claims it, rubbing its edges into weather.
At the front steps, I take the keys from my bag and jostle the door open. It’s nearly midnight. The house sends over me a sheet of warmth, mixed with the sweet musk of old clothes. Everything quiet. The living room TV hums on mute, its blue washes over the empty couch, a half-eaten bag of peanuts on the seat. I shut off the TV, walk up the stairs, turn toward the room. The door’s ajar, revealing the glow of a clamshell night-light. I push it open. You’re lying, not on your bed, but on
the floor, on a mat made of folded blankets. Your work at the nail salon has left your back so badly strained the bed has gotten too soft to hold your joints in place through a night’s sleep.
I crawl next to you on the mat. Rain, collected in my hair, falls and blotches your white sheets. I lie down, facing the bed, my back to your back. You startle awake.
“What? What are you doing? My god, you’re wet . . . your clothes, Little Dog . . . what? What’s going on?” You sit up, pull my face to you. “What happened to you?” I shake my head, smile stupidly.