Something in My Eye: Stories

by Michael Jeffrey Lee

  Because he can tell us what he knows.

  Good. But will what he knows bring your brother back?

  No.

  Why?

  Because my brother is probably dead.

  Good. Then why would we care to listen to the gray-haired man?

  I don’t know.

  Because the gray-haired man will have interesting things to say.

  Since when do we care about hearing interesting things?

  We are starting today.

  I don’t want to.

  Do we have anything else to look forward to?

  Why do you keep reminding me that my brother is dead?

  Because grief has made me strange.

  Me too.

  I’m sorry.

  Are you making an excuse?

  Yes. Is it a good one?

  Yes.

  She takes her son’s head in her hands and kisses him. Do you know why I love you?

  Because I’m your last one?

  No.

  Why then?

  Because you will never die.

  I hope so.

  Do you still want to look for your brother?

  Yes.

  Get your coat, then.

  We might have made a mistake. The world is too big and full of life to dwell here, we think. Broad parody, we shout. They don’t resemble anyone we know. The mother? Sadism drives her. The son? Delusional, traumatized. Write him off. Write them both off, we say. In fact, write off the house, the neighborhood, the neighbors, the woods, the whole town, everyone is clearly complicit.

  Here is a scene we would much prefer: a mother and her son sit at the breakfast table. The mother serves the son pancakes, the son eats them with gratitude. The son is getting ready for school, the mother speaks to him of the coming day. (Have compassion, he would say. Honor those beneath you with your attention. The mother is the very picture of endurance, the son innocent, incorruptible.) Fine, we say. Just get them out of the house, into the sunlight, the fresh air. Please just get them out of the house!

  The mother and son begin to look. They leave the house, the mother closing the door behind them. Outside: autumn and its acute sadness. Piles of fallen leaves. The air is cold, beautiful to breathe in.

  The mother takes her son’s hand. They don’t speak, making their way to the woods. This would be an appropriate time to pull away, we think. To be left with this image. Two wretched people strengthened only by each other. But we are feeling better outside.

  We don’t dare search their thoughts, yet we stay with them. Our own motivation escapes us, sometimes.

  The mother and son are at the trailhead now, looking. They enter the woods, the pine trees tall and teetering slightly in the wind. The son points to places off the trail, a hollow trunk, a branch, the dirty stream, and they search them all. They wind their way through the square mile, sometimes on the path, sometimes off, until both believe that they’ve exhausted every hiding place. When they reach the trailhead, the mother stops and squeezes her son’s hand.

  Are you satisfied? says the mother.

  Yes, says the son.

  Did you see the gray-haired man?

  No. Did you?

  Yes.

  Where was he?

  He was high up in a tree.

  What was he doing?

  Looking.

  Did he see you?

  Yes, says the mother.

  What did he do?

  He regarded me.

  What did you do?

  I regarded him.

  Should we tell anyone?

  No.

  Why not?

  He’s not going to hurt us.

  How do you know?

  Because you can’t hurt someone when you are high up in a tree.

  Shouldn’t he be punished?

  I don’t know.

  Why didn’t you tell me?

  I didn’t want you to be scared.

  I wouldn’t have been scared.

  Do you want to see him now?

  No, says the son. Did you see my brother?

  No. Did you?

  Yes.

  Where was he?

  He was high up in a tree.

  Did he see you?

  No.

  I’m sorry. What was he doing?

  I don’t know.

  Was he dead?

  Yes.

  Why didn’t you tell me?

  I didn’t want you to be angry.

  I wouldn’t have been angry.

  Do you want to see him now?

  No.

  Why not? says the son.

  I remember him alive, says the mother. I would like to keep it that way.

  Do you want to go home?

  Yes.

  Good.

  We walk them to their door, but only out of courtesy. At last the sun has fallen, the putrid light finally gone. The neighborhood is dark, the woods darker. Well, the mother and son are clearly deranged beyond help. And the killer? The victim? High up in trees! We’ve seen everything. Or enough, at least. Enough to recall, later, if necessary. It was our mistake. Yes, we’ve made the mistake. We could have stayed at home, on the other side of town. We have families there: healthy ones. We lead reasonably healthy lives. We have no business getting carried away. (He will call us weak-stomached, infantile, rational, graceless.) Let him. Let him threaten us vaguely. Pervert. Decrepit cunt. We’ll see, we’ll see. Let them tell it themselves, we say:

  good morning son good morning mother did you sleep well yes and you yes I made you some pancakes i would love some come sit down i will are you still satisfied yes are you yes do you know why i love you because i will live forever yes and because you are my last one will you live forever yes I will do you miss the rest of them yes every one of them do you every one of them but we are getting along yes we are getting along will you answer the door yes I will hello sit down please sit down please we are listening yes we are listening what do you have to say please tell us what you have to say you don’t need to apologize or even explain just tell us what you have to say.

  I Shall Not Be Moved

  I will not be separated from the city I love. Here I have found, if not complete acceptance of who I am, an environment in which I am able to exploit the odd dimensions of my body to achieve something resembling a normal life.

  My lover and I have worked out our routine: from Monday to Saturday of every week, he walks me, just as he does now, to the Golden Lantern before continuing on to work. While he works, I sit on the bar and drink with my friends. At five in the evening he drops by to pick me up, ordering a soda and catching up on what he has missed. Then we walk back home, and I lightly fuck my lover until I climax or become too tired to continue.

  Sundays, on the other hand, are relaxing days. My lover goes to church, and I sleep all day long. I do not touch a drop out of consideration for his religious beliefs, though that is perhaps the only concession I will make for him.

  I am, admittedly, a bit stubborn. But beyond that, the stress from evacuating this city would put an unnecessary strain on my heart, which is already and, I should say, naturally, a bit overworked. My lover does not know this, and I don’t want to worry him with something he cannot alter. For all his supposed interest in little people, though, he has no idea of the very real medical problems we daily face.

  It is a lovely, slightly overcast Saturday morning, and the heat is as it always is in August: wet and persistent. I am in my usual leather, my lover’s favorite. My lover and I live in a shotgun in the Marigny, so our walk is an easy stroll west on Royal Street into the French Quarter. Were it any other day, the street would be full of sweet, silly men, meticulously cleaning up behind their tiny dogs. Today, however, there are only a few, but they’re busy packing their belongings into their cars, with grim, distracted looks on their faces. I would say that the mood is slightly anxious, were I not several gin and tonics into my morning, and therefore immune to such sensitivities.

  When we reach the Golden Lantern
, my lover kisses my cheek and hands me a hundred dollar bill. It is an unusually high sum.

  “I want you to get whatever you want,” he says. “I want you to get as drunk as you possibly can.”

  “So that you can kidnap me and drag me to Houston?” I ask.

  “Oh, Derrin,” he says, “you’ve figured out my plan.”

  “Yes, I have,” I say, “and that is why I will only drink soda until you return.”

  “If you stay sober today,” he says, “I won’t ask you to evacuate ever again. But only if you stay sober. If not, I’ll ask you when I return, I’ll ask you as we walk home, I’ll ask you long into the night and all of next day, when landfall is predicted.”

  “Promise me something,” I say, buttoning my leather vest with an important air, “that if we do stay, and we find ourselves in the situation where we are both hungry, and surrounded by water, with no help in sight, I want you to promise that you will eat me to survive.”

  “Don’t joke about that,” he says.

  “Promise me. ”

  “I won’t.”

  “Then at least promise me that after I am dead, and you have thoughtfully buried me, that you will enlist the services of a woman to have your child, and once the child is born you will name him Derrin, or Derrina, after me, after the little man you once knew.” I nibble at my lover’s palm.

  “I won’t eat you. I don’t want children either.”

  “But dear,” I say, “don’t you know that if the city is destroyed, and our house is underwater, and the Golden Lantern is closed indefinitely, and you are going hungry right before my very eyes, don’t you know that I would want you to eat me?”

  “I’ll see you after a while,” he says. I give him my empty cup to throw away.

  The Golden Lantern is a long, rectangular room, smoky and intimate and not for the faint of heart. Occasionally a curious tourist will poke a head into the bar and, finding the assortment of tawdry queens and hustlers not exactly what he or she had in mind, quickly run in the direction of Bourbon Street, where the straight and vacant dwell. Today it is very quiet; there are only two people in the place: Jimmy, who tends bar, and a handsome young boy I do not know.

  “Hey, little daddy,” says Jimmy. He comes to my side and lifts me up on the counter, where there is always a space cleared for me to sit. Jimmy is in his seventies and speaks through a voice box in his throat, and he is by far the most courteous person I know. I believe he beat his cancer simply because he never thought death might be required of him.

  He pours me a gin and tonic in a plastic cup and sets it in the crook of my arm. “I have a reward waiting for me if I stay sober,” I say.

  “What might that be?”

  I take a long swallow of the gin. “He says that if I keep to the soda today, he won’t ask me to evacuate.”

  Jimmy points to my drink. “Do you want me to get rid of that for you, sweetie?”

  “Absolutely not. I can pull myself together in time. You’re staying, are you not?”

  Jimmy does not hesitate before depressing the button on his voice box. “Yes, indeed,” he says.

  “I wish you would speak to my lover. His mind is all but made up.”

  I lay the large bill on the counter next to me. Jimmy looks imploringly at me. “It’s from him,” I say. “Let me buy you a drink. And the handsome young man over there, buy him one, too.”

  The young man can be no older than seventeen. He possesses the longest eyelashes I have ever seen. To my delight, the blue T-shirt he is wearing has the quite original phrase dairy master printed across the chest. I notice that he is scribbling furiously with a pen on several napkins.

  “Little dear,” I say. “Young man.” He glances up from his work.

  “What?” he says. “What do you want?” I do believe he’s trying to sound tough.

  “I want to know what you’d like to drink.”

  “I don’t fuck for just a drink,” he says.

  “And I don’t buy drinks for handsome young men in the hopes of fucking them,” I say. “It’ll be enough just watching you enjoy something.”

  Jimmy reassures the young man with a gentle nod of his head.

  “Red Bull and vodka,” the young man says. Ah, the youth and their cheap thrills!

  “What are you writing?” I ask.

  “Just a little poetry,” he says.

  “Will you share some with us?”

  “You’ll laugh.”

  “We will not. Please, immerse us in beauty.”

  “All right,” he says. “Can I have the drink first?”

  Jimmy pours the young man his request. The young man takes it down, and is revived.

  “This is called, ‘Young, Scared, Happy.’”

  “It sounds wonderful,” I say. “Is it autobiographical?”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “I’m going to start now.”

  “Wonderful,” I say.

  “I dance in the dark,

  Without a stage.

  I twirl in sexual revolution,

  Without protection.

  My heart is exposed,

  My heels dug in.

  And the people protest,

  They rage,

  They stand erect.

  Yet I shall not be moved.

  I shall not be moved.”

  Jimmy and I applaud. It is a shame that the city of New Orleans should lavish so much attention on its music, when there is clearly an equally vital poetry scene. I, for one, have always wanted to put my complex feelings into lines. I ask the young man if he’s staying for the storm.

  “I moved here two weeks ago,” he says. “I don’t know what to do. The news is scaring me, though. What are you doing?”

  “I don’t want to leave,” I say, “but my lover insists that we go. I am in a bit of a bind.”

  “More drinks, then,” Jimmy says.

  We all three pleasantly fill the time. There is small talk about business, about drama from the previous night, about the largest we have ever taken. I am quickly catapulting to a place beyond inebriated. I check the clock on the wall, and find that it’s a little past one in the afternoon. All three of us have graduated to taking shots, still on the hundred dollars my lover gave me.

  “What could we do to commemorate this day?” Jimmy asks.

  The young man has a secretive thought in response to Jimmy’s question, and he whispers it in his ear. Jimmy smiles naughtily.

  “Well, little daddy,” Jimmy says, “Are these the last days?”

  “We would be the last to know,” I say. “Can you please help me down?”

  Jimmy lifts me from the counter to the floor. I walk toward the bathroom in the back of the bar. If there is one aspect of the Golden Lantern that stands to be criticized, it is the lack of a sanitary place to relieve oneself. A small quibble, but the urinal is practically mossy. I utilize it anyway.

  I am thinking of my lover, I am drunk and thinking longingly of my lover. I didn’t love him at first, of course, but he paid for my meals and let me stay for free in his home, as long as I fulfilled a certain duty at the end of the night. I was happy to agree to this, though I found him rather cloying and unimaginative. Over time, however, and I think it truly mysterious how these things happen, I came to see him not as my benefactor, but rather the person I was destined to love, and to test his own attachment to me, I approached him one night, and asked him how he would feel about my leaving. He admitted, with tears filling his eyes, to falling in love with me. He had not meant to, he said, but he could do nothing about it, and therefore offered me anything I wanted as long as I stayed. Sensing my opportunity, I chose the Golden Lantern six days out of the week. I think of my lover as he must be this moment, meticulously nailing plywood to his office windows. I wish he was with me, that he loved to drink as much as I.

  The bar is as dark as a mausoleum as I leave the restroom. I keep the bathroom light on just to understand what is what. Someone has closed the door of the bar and lowered the bl
inds. I can, however, make out what is happening. The young man sits nude, on the bar counter, as Jimmy sits on a barstool, fellating him. I want to look away, but I am too intoxicated not to be interested. The young man notices me.

  “I’ve never had a dwarf before,” he says.

  “Oh no?” I ask.

  “I’ve also never had a man that couldn’t talk through his mouth before, either. It’s a day of firsts for me.”

  Jimmy presses his finger to his throat. “Derrin, he says, “give me a hand with this horse.”

  I have forced the fluid from a thousand members in this bar in all my years here, so this is not a shocking invitation. I am aroused within my leather pants, and I think again of my lover. I have a lover who accepts my many whims and even encourages them, who knows for a fact that I have engaged in lewd conduct in this bar and has hidden his jealousy and contented himself with the fact that, at the end of the day, I am his. I see him again, boarding up his office, preparing his mind to leave the place that he too loves. At this moment I want only him, long to be deep inside only him.

  “Three’s company,” says Jimmy.

  I am only a man, though, at the end of the day, but I do believe that certain boundaries should be set. I believe it is the Lord of scripture who says that one should be either hot or cold, to exist nowhere in the middle, but I am afraid that the man who wrote that did not spend one moment in the world that he created. It is, in fact, very advantageous to find a compromise between extremes.

  I decide to stand beside Jimmy as he pleasures the young man, and am happy to simply watch. I furrow my brow and form my mouth into an o. I make low sounds in my throat. Both Jimmy and the young man are in ecstasy. The young man has reached a point of drunkenness in which he has forgotten the aged face applying suction to him, and Jimmy is thrilled to be making a boy fifty years his junior lose control. Let the storm come now, I think, let this be their eternal pose. I encourage the young man to ejaculate onto my chest, which he does with all the vigor and strength of his age. He slips from the bar and dresses. Jimmy hands me a fresh bar towel for cleanup, then raises the blinds and opens the door of the Golden Lantern. The clock tells me it is now just after two.

  I take my remaining money and walk down the street to Verti-Mart, where I purchase a gallon of water, a chicken salad sandwich, and a tin of breath mints. While in line, I notice a ribbon of jissom on my leather vest, just above the breast pocket. Sweet remembrances. I wipe off the souvenir with a complimentary napkin from the deli. The clerk carries my purchases back with me to the Golden Lantern.