In Memory of Angel Clare

by Christopher Bram

  “Call the damn ambulance! Somebody’s bleeding to death!”

  She snapped out of her trance. “Oh! Where’s your—? I see it.” And she stepped off to the side, where Jack heard her pick up his phone and dial. “This is an emergency. We have somebody bleeding to death.” Margaret instantly sounded very tough and no-nonsense. She gave the address and insisted they hurry. “Jack, they want to know if it’s an accident or a crime?”

  “A suicide,” Jack shouted back. “A suicide attempt, I mean.” He hoped. He leaned down and whispered, “Help is coming, Michael. Things’ll be fine. Things’ll be okay.” Talking to the boy, he wanted to lightly slap his face to bring him to. Wanting to slap his face, he suddenly wanted to slap him hard, hit him across the face, grab him by the throat, and bang the bastard’s head against the floor. He could not let go of Michael’s arms, but he was suddenly furious with him. It was as if Jack had been knocked unconscious and only now came to and began to understand what had happened. He was breathing hard, choking up, sobbing. He was crying over this little idiot who wanted to kill himself. The pale face and bony body with bleeding wrists: “You phony bleeding Jesus,” Jack muttered. “You cheap imitation Christ. I’m going to make you live, you twit. You’re not getting out of this so damn easy.”

  “Jack?”

  Margaret again stood in the kitchen where Jack could see her. Her arms were folded across her breasts as if she were freezing. She had not heard what Jack said, only his sobbing.

  “They’re on their way,” she announced, shook her head and sighed, “Oh Lord. The world we live in.”

  The police arrived first, two uniformed patrolmen whom Margaret waved into the apartment. One cop put his hand on his holster the instant he saw Jack on the floor with Michael. The other cop said, “Oh shit,” lifting a hand to his eyes as if he thought they’d walked in on something else. When they understood, the second cop, who was Jack’s age, stuck his head into the bathroom and said, “Uh oh. Looks like somebody’s been playing with Daddy’s razor.” There was nothing they would do before the ambulance arrived except take a blanket off Jack’s bed and wrap it around Michael while Jack continued to hold the boy’s wrists. “For trauma,” they explained.

  Then there were paramedics in the kitchen. A man in white waded into the bathroom. A young woman crowded in, taking over from Jack and ordering him out. His apartment seemed packed with people. Stumbling out to the kitchen, Jack passed a black man who yanked a white latex glove over one hand as he hurried back. Jack realized all the paramedics wore white plastic gloves. “These faggots can’t do anything right,” somebody said, but Jack couldn’t tell who. Everyone he looked at seemed furiously busy, irritable yet intent on saving Michael.

  A collapsed stretcher was brought in and carried back. The young woman came out, looking mildly uncomfortable as she handed Jack a torn sheet of paper. “This was in there. I think it’s for you.”

  It was a note. Jack quickly read it. The note was terse, the way Michael was terse, afraid to go too deeply into anything for fear of what he might find. But Michael had gone deep tonight, hadn’t he? “You never understood before.” No, Michael hadn’t done this solely for himself, but to them, to Jack.

  They were carrying the stretcher on its side through his bedroom, Michael strapped in and covered with blankets, one paramedic holding a plasma bag above the boy. Jack hurried out into the hall in front of them, before they blocked the door. The older cop was out there, getting Margaret’s name and address. “He left this.” Jack gave the cop the note. “Where’re they taking him? I have to go with him.”

  The cop told Jack to ride over in the ambulance and he’d meet Jack at the hospital. “Some questions and forms we have to take care of.”

  They maneuvered the vertical stretcher around the corner and through the door as if it were a long table with folded legs. Once they were past, Jack hurried back into the apartment to close up the bathroom so Elisabeth Vogler wouldn’t get in there. Already the apartment felt intensely deserted, empty. Medical wrappers were strewn on the bathroom floor; the tub was still full of bloody water.

  Outside in the ambulance, Michael lay on his back, snugly bundled in blankets and straps, his face chalky in the bright white light inside the ambulance. “The Mets,” said the black paramedic, apparently part of an earlier conversation. But nobody seemed willing to continue that conversation, embarrassed or annoyed there was a layman present.

  They pulled up outside St. Vincent’s, although it felt like they had driven further than the few blocks separating Jack’s apartment from the hospital. They parked on Seventh Avenue outside the emergency waiting room. The night was chilly and Jack wore no coat; his shirt felt damp. The stretcher was wheeled up a ramp and through the waiting room, then disappeared behind a pair of swinging doors. Jack was told to wait.

  He stood beneath the humming fluorescent lights, suddenly alone. Feeling people glance at him, he looked down and saw the front of his shirt and the knees of his trousers stained with different shades of rust or red clay. His hands were brown with dried blood. He thought he should wash them, then felt he should keep them like this until he knew the state of things. He stepped over to a row of scoop chairs and sat in one. He was exhausted.

  The adrenaline was gone and he felt weak, slowly regaining consciousness, still waking up. Why did it suddenly feel so unreal to him? After all, this was exactly what he had been fearing all day. Which made it more unreal. How had he known? He did not believe in God or even ESP. He had imagined it. Such imaginative sympathy was disturbing, frightening. “You never understood before.” But Jack had understood, without sympathy for such false drama, without love.

  The intercom called, a voice talking to itself inside a seashell. Jack had been here before, not this hospital but a hospital. He thought about phoning Laurie or Ben. He did not have to wait here alone. But not yet. He was not ready to dilute his frightening bond with Michael by sharing it with the others.

  Why had Michael chosen him? Jack knew it was hubris to think Michael had done this to Jack and Jack alone—Jack was too unimportant. Was it only by accident he had chosen Jack’s home? He could’ve done it at Laurie and Carla’s, where he lived, or at Ben and Danny’s. And yet, perversely, Jack was glad Michael had done it to him. It was almost as if Jack would feel jealous if Michael had done it to someone else. He was angry with Michael for doing it at all, but relieved Michael had done it to him. Oh God, he thought. He was closer to Michael than he ever imagined, bound more deeply to the boy than he ever wanted to be. If Michael lived—and Jack felt so weighed down by obligation he knew Michael would live—this was only the beginning.

  12

  “WHERE AM I?” THOUGHT Clarence after he died. “Is this death?”

  There was the sensation of floating and a feeling of resolution like the change of key from minor into major. Then a man and woman began to sing.

  No, it wasn’t death. It was Mozart. The sixth side of The Magic Flute still played on the stereo while tired bones and aching muscles reappeared and reassembled on the living room sofa. He had fallen asleep, and sometime between Tamino’s reunion with Pamina and Papageno’s reunion with Papagena, he dreamed again he had died. Death was never an event in this dream, only a sudden realization, like the realization by a cartoon character who has run off the edge of a cliff and just then notices he stands in midair. Clarence had learned not to panic. So long as you didn’t panic you could continue to stand aloft in your own nonexistence, at least in dreams. Clarence was sometimes relieved and sometimes disappointed when he woke from these dreams to find himself still alive.

  Dishes and pans banged in the sink in the kitchen. But it wasn’t Michael. It was what’s-his-name, the volunteer, Guy Temple—what a name—who had fed Clarence something macrobiotic tonight. Earnest, well-intentioned, admirable, obnoxious Guy. He was cleaning up, which meant he would be leaving soon. Michael had gone out, for a walk he said.

  The window was open and it was a summer evening outs
ide, footsteps and voices and car radios occasionally audible through the Mozart. He wore a bathrobe over his clothes, pulling the robe shut when he felt chilled, throwing the robe open when he felt feverish. Mozart sounded joyful, then threatening. Clarence had slept through the “Pa-Pa” song. Of course he wasn’t dead yet. He was only in the M’s. When he came home from the hospital and found himself stranded day after day on the living room sofa, he had decided to listen to his entire record collection, alphabetically by composer. It took longer than he had imagined. Summer was almost over and he was only to Mozart. He owned a lot of Stravinsky, and, more dauntingly, he had all his Wagner to get through. When he committed himself to this program, he superstitiously believed he would be well again by the time he finished listening to every record he owned. Now, he believed only that he would not die until he finished. Nights broken up by wakefulness and days broken up by sleep, his condition seemed to go on for years. He had been ill for so long he could not remember being well. Death was the only alternative he could imagine to this long tedious dream of sickness.

  Clarence had almost enjoyed being sick, at first. It was good to do nothing again and nice to be waited on by friends and strangers. And it was interesting to be abstracted from your own body. He became a connoisseur of aches and pains, an aesthete of illness, imagining the sunburst pattern of a headache in his skull, distinguishing the cakey textures of congestion in his chest, the bad tastes in his mouth. More interesting, it put him in touch with past illnesses. Healthy, he had never remembered being sick; he seemed to have lived two parallel lives, one in sickness and one in health, each unconscious of the other, and only now could he remember illness, most of it in childhood. He remembered little from college or after, years when he’d been well. Childhood seemed to have been all sickbeds, which couldn’t be right, sweetly boring hours spent among picture books and toy soldiers and a jet of mentholated steam from a vaporizer. There had been days home from school, whole weeks in fact, although he could not remember being in pain. All he remembered were morning movies and Art Linkletter on television, pads of paper filled with drawing after drawing, and Asia, their maid, who alternately tolerated or indulged him on mornings his mother worked with his father at their hardware store.

  Childhood was full of the presence of his parents, if not beside him then in the next room or just down the street, two gentle, private, hardworking people. They married late and died early, when Clarence and his brother were still in high school. His mother was in and out of hospitals for two years before she died of white lung—she had worked many years in a cotton mill before she met Joshua Laird. His father died six months later of a heart attack that relatives called a broken heart. There had been a numb, empty time afterward, a despondency like a dark sleep. He came out of that sleep when he went away to college, where he found a fresh, furious delight in the world around him, music and movies and even people seeming glorious things to him, new objects that had nothing to do with his past.

  Illness was a kind of drunkenness in which he could wander among new thoughts and impressions. For a time he had looked forward to getting well, when he would have the soberness needed to put these new or recovered pieces together. But soberness never came to him. Life remained all content and no form, memories accumulating into mere clutter, like the music he heard where an occasional, familiar phrase peeked into his fog without ever building into anything, the passages between melting away into meaningless background noise. Already, The Magic Flute was over, without his having heard the jubilant chorus at the finale that he remembered loving so much.

  “That was pretty,” said Guy, coming in from the kitchen and drying his hands, looking very moral because he had done the dishes. “Would you like me to turn it over?”

  Clarence shook his head and studied Guy. The fellow was Michael’s age but seemed both older and younger than Michael. He wore a T-shirt today, and his plump thighs were encased in bright yellow gym shorts. When he sat on the chair opposite the sofa, the shorts pulled tight and there was a lump like genitals in his crotch, but he still looked terribly solemn and sexless.

  “Your friend is being quite irresponsible this evening,” he said, looking at his watch. “He told me he’d be back by now.”

  Clarence shrugged. “Maybe he stopped off in Central Park for a quick blowjob.” He enjoyed needling Guy, who hated any mention of sex.

  Guy lowered his eyes and crossed his legs, like an old lady. “I have an MCC meeting at nine, you see.”

  “Oh. That gay church thing,” said Clarence. It continued to amaze him that gay men no longer had to have sex with each other in order to be gay. They could attend gay churches, gay political caucuses, or gay invalids. It seemed like such a strange use of sexuality. When he was Guy’s age he was high on sex, the thing itself, not just the idea and identity. Ben assured him men were still getting laid, less frequently and more carefully maybe, but things had changed. Clarence had changed too, but then he was sick. “You go on to your meeting. I’ll be fine until Michael gets back.”

  “He hasn’t given you a bath today, has he?” Guy sternly sniffed the air. “When was your last bath?”

  Clarence inhaled the rich sourness of his clothes, the tangy smell like iron under his arms. He smiled and said, “Your washcloth? My skin? Is that a proposition, Guy?”

  Guy opened his mouth, closed it again, and blushed.

  Clarence said it only for effect. The truth of the matter was, despite all his abstract thoughts about sex, he rarely had sexual feelings anymore. An erection was a special occasion. His memories of sex were not nearly as round and real as his memories of childhood illnesses, but distant and hypothetical, like his memories of health. Guy’s sexlessness might only be in Clarence’s mind. After all, he could not think of Michael sexually either.

  “Thanks for the offer, Guy. But baths are Michael’s department. And you wouldn’t want me to cheat on Michael, would you?”

  Baths were the closest he and Michael came nowadays to sex. Clarence was quite capable of bathing himself, but Michael insisted on being present, as if afraid Clarence might stay in too long and melt like sugar. He was embarrassed to have Michael watching him—he gave male nudity a bad name. Afterward, Michael wrapped a towel around him and rubbed him dry, which was nice.

  “Perhaps I should be going,” said Guy. “See you next Wednesday?”

  “If I’m still among the living.”

  Guy frowned. Nobody wanted Clarence to talk about dying. “I’ll see you next week. With a vegetarian meatloaf I think you should try.”

  “Turn,” said Clarence as Guy kissed him on a whiskered cheek.

  When the front door bumped shut in the distance, Clarence felt a sudden gust of energy. He was alone now. It was the presence of the healthy that exhausted him. Without their tiresome energy to compare himself to, he did not feel as sick. He sat up, then stood up and padded over to the stereo to play the last side of The Magic Flute again. He returned to the sofa and sat with his slippered feet on the floor, determined not to sleep through the “Pa-pa” song this time. To keep himself occupied through the churchy passage, he took up the copy of Film Comment Jack had dropped off yesterday. The magazine automatically fell open to Jack’s article. And Clarence saw himself again, in black and white, his face screwed up around the eyepiece of a beautiful Arriflex camera, a movie director.

  He took great, goofy pleasure in the image. Good old Jack. He really should thank him better, although what Clarence loved was his photograph. Here he was, just as he had pictured himself in fantasies since college: an eye, a camera, a hand directing an action. It didn’t matter the pose was only a minor part of making a movie. There was something magical about it, simultaneously active and passive, the spectator who was also a man of action. And it was real. Finally, at thirty-eight, he had transformed a wish of himself into a fact, proved to himself he wasn’t the sweet, ineffectual daydreamer everyone wanted him to be. He had made a feature film. It didn’t matter the film was something as
awful as Disco of the Damned—although he had certainly done it to poor Mozart under the credits. He had made a real movie, which somehow made it easier for Clarence to die.

  It was a ridiculous thing to feel, but he felt it. He had made a movie, a bad movie, but he couldn’t imagine the experience of making a good movie to be very different. An experience was more important to him than any results. “When you’re dead you’re dead.” He remembered Ben saying that to Jack back in college, during a bull session about “transcendence”—Jack was still semi-Catholic back then. Thinking of his mother and father, Clarence had laughed and wanted to hug Ben. It sounded so simple and obvious he had hoped it were true. He loved art and sex and filmmaking because he could lose himself in them. Soon he would lose himself for good and it didn’t seem such a bad thing. He had experienced everything life had to offer him. He could be perfectly content if he died this very minute—or maybe not until after the “Pa-pa” song.

  His attitude toward death changed from day to day, but always for the best it seemed. The few times death alarmed or frightened him, Clarence sincerely believed he’d live. When he was sure he would die, death felt perfectly acceptable. Lately, he’d been tending more toward death. It had nothing to do with the name of his condition, which the newspapers treated as an automatic death certificate—Clarence read only the arts pages. No, he was tired and bored and life had become one long sleepless night, a weary matter of duration with nothing to gain by living another year or even another ten. Was it cowardice? He sometimes wondered if he wanted to die just so he wouldn’t have to go through the exhausting ordeal of making another damn movie. He wondered tonight if he were really as comfortable with dying as he seemed. He thought he had touched bottom, without a trace of panic, without any terror of death. Maybe it was only a false bottom and terror would come later. Maybe he was too shallow to be terrified by death. Or maybe he was just too damned tired to care.