Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through

by T Fleischmann

  But on this bus moving south, I think of what is not written, the silenced past and the terrifying future that weigh on autobiography. I can’t account for most of what happens, my own life getting in the way of it. My dear friend Sterling died from complications due to AIDS one year ago. He was still alive when I started writing about Simon and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, so I can’t reasonably make sense of his absence in the story, although it still frustrates me that the writing doesn’t. There are many little absent moments as well—walking with Simon to get more beer from a bodega when we first met, I bonded with him over our obsession with ice in the moment it breaks. He used to take photographs of it, he told me. I write about it, I told him. I described my obsessive chronicling, trying to write ice as it is, purely there. We talked of the difference between desiring ice in the moment of its break, or desiring ice in the moment before the crack, or after. I didn’t put any of this in the essay, either—what the ice means to Simon, its metaphors, none of it being mine to share.

  I arrive in New York City late, take a quick nap, and, as the sun rises the second time (its rise over the building horizon), I transfer to another bus, continuing south. This is the start of an open summer, a couple thousand dollars I’ve saved from a freelance gig and a two-year visiting position teaching at a college in Chicago that is waiting for me in the fall, so I’m trying to be optimistic. I occasionally read a poem or two in Wanting in Arabic, but mainly I sleep in the back seats and try not to think about peeing. As I am literally moving away from Simon, I do some visioning of what my next relationship will be (open in the ways Simon was unavailable; romantic; transsexual) and I cast intentions, projecting this openness toward the universe as a spectrum announces itself unto the heavens. I think of the love I have within myself and in thinking of it make it an offering to the many-handed hunger of transsexuality. I try to become aware of the movement of my body, which feigns stillness while crossing an earth that spins and arcs, and in that collapse of motion I sense the impossible movement of love’s potential, an ecstatic spatiality. I become through this meditation more than myself, physically, and so I find a way to move directly through the possibility of Simon and into simple possibility. I drink Gatorade, many different Gatorades, over the long ride. When I reach the rural mountain holler where I used to live, I pee wildly beside a barn, and fall asleep on a friend’s couch that smells of tobacco and the damp summer ahead.

  When I’m in the woods I always feel a bit crisper, as though I experience myself more here than I experience myself when I am in a city. My body becomes social with the bodies of trees and of the creek, and the bodies of all the living and dead things, its strangeness comfortable and good.

  It has been a year since I moved away from this place, where I lived the longest as an adult. A short fling brought me here, a hookup telling me about a farm where his friends, mainly trans people, were growing food and teaching each other carpentry—an escape, as I wanted to flee and to become something else again. There are actually rural pockets like this all over the country, of weird people, come to find out, doing all sorts of odd things in places you wouldn’t expect. When I learned that this was true, I was excited by the possibility of living as I wanted outside a city, what with cities seeming like this kind of queer inevitability, necessary if I wanted to fuck and dress weird. It was also the recession, and while I had gotten by for a few years with a grad school stipend, like the undergraduate scholarship that I used to leave my hometown, I wasn’t earning enough to cover my bills, let alone my debts. Living rurally was cheap, and it meant that the job I picked up fencing at a goat farm, along with the money I made writing things for people off Craigslist, was enough to pay my bills for a while. At the time I thought: building things, and growing things, and hammer, and tomatoes. It was only a year or so, however, before learning how to swing a hammer let me think I am the one who makes my body different and before I knelt in dirt and placed my hands on rock and decided to start dropping little blue pills underneath my tongue when I woke, to take more control over my future body.

  This desire to farm, to build and grow, has something to do with a generational obsession with the coming end, when the machines of capitalism and nation will inevitably fail. I made the decision to live rurally shortly after protesting the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, when I first saw the hooves of a police horse land on the legs of a protestor. As police raided the homes of organizers and activists, the convention catalyzed my politics, orienting me toward legacies of direct action. Sitting on my roof in the Midwest after the RNC, smoking with my friend Torrey, our conversation darted between her life in the world of cross-dressers and mine in queer anarchy. We were two friends everyone knew to be boys and who knew one another better than that, and on the roof I could think of very little other than the course of humanity, eating us dead.

  Torrey lived outside the queer enclaves I had carefully inhabited—queer brunches, guerrilla queer bars, queer road trips and music festivals and bookstores. I was envious of this difference, a difference that held our conversation to honesty. She had short blond hair and no makeup as she offered her perspective, that perhaps the world was not about to end, but had already been ending, violently and again and again violently once more. I was born in 1983, and heard for the first decade of my life no mention of queerness outside of the context of hate and epidemic. As media representation and legal protections grew in the following years, so too did a queer cultural anxiety around political collapse, and a gnawing awareness that those protections were flimsy, insufficient at best. Washing endless piles of dishes with Food Not Bombs, or organizing a misguided action at a Bash Back! meeting, I resisted the mainstreaming of queerness, as it seemed urgent to sustain a more radical tradition, assimilation being a form of death. I still know that the liberal state is a trap, and capitalism a death drive, but back then, as I pointed toward climate change, peak oil, and the escalating “War on Terror,” I thought I was pointing toward an inevitable future catastrophe. In fact, I was just facing the ongoing catastrophes of history, and still living in the intractable world of my youth.

  People tend to remember the starts and the ends of things. Although my move to the foothills here came with a sort of naive, dystopian concern, my move elsewhere five years later was more about committing to romance than it was about committing to a politic. My last night, Simon visiting from Brooklyn, he and I fucked on the side of the hill until a friend came across us—“Clutch was ready to ride that dick,” although I was actually face-fucking him, knees beneath his armpits and my hands holding his head steady. The next morning, we put boxes in a rental car and drove off, planning to go first to my mother’s home in Michigan, and then into a future somewhere, unspecified but for the fact we would be together. This would prove to be Brooklyn and then Seattle, and finally, abruptly, apart after we found ourselves unfucking and underemployed in the view of Mount Tacoma, an eight-month coda to something like friendship.

  Despite this year having passed since I moved away, I am pleased to discover on my return that I wake just after the sunrise, as though hearing the creek beside the shack I built recalls from my sleep that the chickens might need releasing from their own house, too.

  I smoke a cigarette even though I said I’d quit. I spend some time with the creek, knees down and everything trickling. It splits outside my old shack, each direction framed by the Appalachians, their steep hills the one way and their flat rock walls the other—a new creek, I guess. It’s a dry creek, as the water runs beneath the rocks, and, when it rains enough, it rises, and there are tiny fishes. Part of a long series of creeks across the rim, basin, and plateau here, that made the land rich hunting ground for a number of tribes over the centuries. Settlers first arrived here around 1795, following a military expedition the United States launched against the Cherokee who had taken up resistance in the region. A mill built around 1800, a ten-minute walk from my shack, anchored a small community of settlers, and people soon built their homes down t
he hollers, with the poorer white families and enslaved people in the back and the wealthier, slave-holding families out in the valley. The mill is still there, although it doesn’t work, and near my shack two of the poorer families’ barns stand after more than a century, each tilting. The plateau where I used to live and the mountains in general are eroding, smaller than they used to be, but they still hold large expanses of uninterrupted forest, where the creeks lead to more creeks.

  When I walk to an outdoor sink the first person I see is Jackson. He is Australian and visiting my friends here for the summer. I first met him three autumns ago when he passed through the States, and while we barely talked he remained sharp in my mind. “Hi, we’ve met before, I’m Clutch,” and “I remember.” As we talk, I am acutely aware that I have not yet had time to shave. I notice the thin mustache above Jackson’s lip, which is soft (the lip), and insist on thinking, persistently, about the fact that I have not shaved. He tells me that it’s his birthday and he invites me to a gang bang on a pontoon on a lake nearby, where our friends will be fucking him. He is short, with short hair and a slight mustache and the kind of tattoos that make you look like a desk in a math class that has been scribbled on, and he is incredibly handsome. I decline, so tired, not having shaved, and when he leaves I immediately regret it and feel I have left again that version of him who had stayed in my mind so sharply. Later, a year after we started what I thought was a fling, which is to say the day of his next birthday, I write a little poem about this moment for him as a birthday gift.

  The gray slats of wood that are six inches or so by eight feet or so by half an inch or so.

     I know  the sink inside   and think of how I need to shave and behind you are tools against an old single-paned window, purple-painted wood.

  I did not know this was happening for some time.

  You are something like where I find you,

  where I can’t do the same thing again even if I try.

  Even if I try to do the same thing,

  anymore than a tree,

  anymore than you.

  Anymore than when I met you, and then I met you again.

  I say good-bye to Jackson—“Sorry, no gang bang for me today, see you later”—hold a hot washcloth to my face, and go on a short hike to circle the land and revisit its plants. There are little bugs, the kind I can’t stand, but it is a gorgeous day of sunshine and shade.

  Up creek I find a dead baby possum, lying on the trodden grass of a pathway, too young and pink and embryonic to be out of its mother’s pouch. Its eyes are such pale gray slits that they seem neither open nor closed. I stare and try to understand. Then, a few feet away, I find another pink abandoned baby, this one somehow still alive. It has the heavy arrhythmic breath of a dying mammal, taking in gasps that don’t carry oxygen, with no noticeable exhale before the next sharp breath in.

  Searching farther, I eventually find seven abandoned babies, five dead and two alive. They are scattered in a zigzag path with roughly two or three feet between one another. I see a friend who grew up around here and who knows the landscape better than I do, and she helps me track the possums down and confirm that there are no others. We ask each other, are they actually dead possums, or can possums play dead even when they are that young? Searching the brush for ten or fifteen minutes, and with nothing else to be done, she takes the babies that are already lifeless and poses them together for a series of photos. I take a rock and bash in the heads of the ones that are living, knowing that a quick ending is better than their extended, laborious breathing in Tennessee summer heat. The gashed head of one is too gruesome for the photo, but the other maintains its peaceful stare despite its blood leak. Like six old men in the clover, pink and still. We dig a small hole and bury the family together.

  When possums first crawl toward the pouch they are only the size of a bean, and many fail to attach to a teat or secure themselves inside, falling off instead and often forgotten. The mother possum had made that crawl when she was young, too, and then made whatever possum life that followed, which I’m sure wasn’t easy. Is this what it takes to live sometimes? Digging into a pouch, tossing, rummaging, tossing, and running? Leaving what you love, three feet apart? Our own nature can pull us so easily to a horror like this, to throwing to the ground as we flee who we were. It seems unrecognizable to that other sense of nature, the pucker-hugs of cloverleaves over cloverleaves and grass and dirt beneath, but I guess each is a way to live and make more life.

  My friend tells me that the possums are just dead because we’re in the woods and things have to die, and we walk to her house so she can email me a copy of the image. The woods do seem to toss the dead at my feet. This is a steady thing, seasonal even, unlike the deaths of people in my life, which are more and more every year, always. It took me a while to accept this, that the deaths were not singular, but the toll of capitalism and hate, which accrues. Knowing the movements of the crayfish under the rocks, their burrows where they gnaw decaying wood—this is calming, that each one of them is going to die, too, and then there will be more crayfish there, at least until there aren’t.

  I hope to see Jackson while daylight remains. The height of the hills means darkness falls first in an early shadow, and then fully, as I ride my bike to where I think he will be. When I do find him it’s at the start of an orgy on an old school bus my friend converted into a home. Aligning our bodies across bodies, reaching and joining, we immediately begin fucking, becoming just the two of us, an orgy of two that lasts for days. Our union is a further splitting open of time, in the way erotic time is composed of infinite moments. It moves me forward like da Vinci’s Vitruvian man stays still. We fuck in barns and yards and the backs of trucks, into the night and morning both. I barely see the friends I came to visit. We fuck in the afternoon after napping, and I wake him by first gently kissing his tits, then shoving a Snickers ice cream bar into his mouth and fucking him again. We decide that we love each other. We lie in the sun. We smoke cigarettes. We fuck so much that when we realize we are both headed to New York for the summer, we change our flights so we can fly together and fuck on the airplane.

  Between all of that, we still find plenty of time to talk, the exhaustion in our bodies giving way to loose, quick conversations, the kind that makes it easy to feel like you’re getting to know someone.

  “There are people setting up human composting in Seattle,” Jackson tells me.

  “I heard about that when I lived there. Like figuring out how to set it up.”

  “Why can’t you just put a body anywhere? The earth isn’t hurt by bodies.”

  “Tennessee is one of the only places in the States where you can arrange to be buried at home, if you own the property,” I offer. “I don’t know why you can’t just put ashes anywhere, though. Or maybe you can.”

  “Was it Calvin who was doing something like that?”

  “Like an art garden for burying people. In Seattle?”

  “Wouldn’t it have to be here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “For my birthday in Seattle one year Rizzo gave me thirty seconds in a candy shop and however much candy I could grab, she bought me.”

  I laugh. “What kind of candy did you grab?”

  The day of our flight, I wear a short romper with no underwear to make it easier to fuck on the plane, and we put our things in bags and hold hands. Backtracking the path, I find another scattering of baby possums—although this time, weirdly, they are older, with gray fur, so that I might have thought they could survive were they not already at death, unable to crawl or stay still, twitching. Rocks to the heads again, but something about the older age or the repetition of event made a photo seem unkind. Instead, I set them one at a time in the creek, where they float off like loosened lilies.

  I always know there is going to be some bullshit at the airport. On the ride there I breathe and prepare myself for a combination of touch, inspection, and exposure, rehearsed to the specifics of my body. This time
what happens is that I lift my hands above my head into a triangle in the whoosh machine and my romper rises too and my balls peek loose, and then I’m done. I laugh about it and hold my bag closer for a while. At a layover, I sip from the fountain, skipping anything more so I won’t have to pee, and text my housemate in Lefferts Gardens to say I am bringing my new boyfriend home with me for the summer. “That’s great, how long have you been dating?” Ben asks. I reply, “Two weeks,” and get another affirmation: “That’s great, fabulous! Love it!”

  One disappointment about summer is that there is less ice during it. When I used to keep my daily practice of describing ice in prose, I would refrain as much as possible from writing of anything but the ice, not only avoiding the qualities of the rocks that abut it, for instance, but also remaining focused enough to avoid describing shapes when possible, or edges. Tedious and repetitious, I almost always went wide and failed the game, although the practice came with some ease in the winters, for the dull fact that there was ice around me. Getting close to ice made it easier to get my prose close to ice, and in turn the summers, glaring and sweaty, had a sheen distinct from that gradient white.

  I get my old bedroom, which before it was mine, was mine and Simon’s, and before it was mine and Simon’s, was just Simon’s. The funny thing, I’ve noticed in cities, is that people don’t seem to think much about who has been in the apartments before them, although that has usually been so many people. I found my way to this apartment not because Simon lived here, anyway, but because of the inane rules of acquiring hormones. There were only a few places, at the time, that would give me a prescription for estrogen and testosterone blockers without my “living as a woman” or some bullshit for a year, talking to a therapist and so on—I’m not going to go to all of this trouble just to pretend to be a different thing that I’m not. That wouldn’t make any sense. There was a women’s clinic in Atlanta that worked off the informed consent model I needed, but when I called, they told me they provided services only for transgender men (what?) and wouldn’t be able to help me. That left Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York as my closest options. I considered just buying an irregular supply of hormones through “the internet” or “friends,” but having followed a lady I had a summer fling with to Brooklyn and formed some connections there, I made the commitment to visit New York every six months for the next few years, taking a bus or catching a Craigslist ride up the coast and getting my blood drawn at a place named after Michael Callen and Audre Lorde.