twelve. There were so many days of waiting for him to die the third and final time and we’d been talking to him daily because they say hearing is the last sense to go. Sometimes alone with him, the nurse outside the room, I’d take his hands and bend over whispering in his ears: hey, I don’t know what you’re seeing but if there’s light move toward it; if there’s warmth move toward it; if you see nothing then try to imagine that one period of calm in the midst of that sky just where it reaches the ocean. That one place I’ve always seen as a point of time and space where everything is possible, where I could dream myself anywhere in any position and I said move into that, become that, merge with it. Death. I don’t necessarily believe that it’s part of some cycle that repeats in other lifetimes and what difference does it make anyway? Are you supposed to save all your living for the next life? I just tend to see it as some final moment where all the energy of my body will disperse. So now it’s day three or four or five, I can’t remember, and his parents and two sisters are visiting the empire state building; me and philip and betty, one of his other sisters, are standing in the room. The doctor comes in and removes him from the pumps and hisses of hoses and he leaves the room immediately afterward. There’s this cloudy kind of sunlight moving about the room. 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 hallway 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 and at the moment I’m a sixteen-foot-tall five-hundred-and-forty-eight-pound man inside this six-foot body and all I can feel is the pressure all I can feel is the pressure and the need for release.
LIVING CLOSE TO THE KNIVES
I’m sitting in his hospital room so high in the upper reaches of the building that when I walk the halls or sit in the room or wander to the waiting room to have a cigarette, it’s the gradual turn of earth outside the windows, the distant plains filled with buildings that have a look of fiction because from this perspective they flatten out against one another into the distance until there are thousands of windows (each one containing at least one human being that shows no sign of life) looking like small models of a train set against postcard-perfect reproductions of late winter skies and sunsets; the yellowing of sparse clouds and miniature water tanks. Leaning against the glass of the window of his room I see dizzily down into the street and wonder what it is to fall such distances. I’m afraid he’s really dying. When we brought him in here it was just for some routine tests because he wasn’t pissing for days and the slightest movement of an arm or leg brought nausea. He was expected to stay for only two or three days; it’s been a week now and he barely opens his eyes for more than a few seconds. I came into the room this morning, the door swinging open to pale light and that steady figure outlining the sheets. His breath was coming in rapid-fire bursts like a machine gun. I turn from the silence and the window and look at him and an iris appears beneath one half-lifted eyelid and its strength bores right through me. I turn away almost embarrassed having as much life in me as he hasn’t. The iris was the size of the room; it dwarfed the winter light filling the streets outside the window; it radiated across the heavy clouds with fifty thousand windows reflecting the blue of sky through it.
Whales can descend to a depth of five thousand feet where they can and must sustain a pressure of one hundred and forty tons on every square foot of their bodies.
He seemed to wake for a moment; he drifted soundlessly for a while, then asked me in sounds that took five minutes to translate to help him into the nearby bathroom so he could shit or something. I manipulated the machinery in the structure of the bed so that his upper body rose toward me and his legs sank away. I placed my hands beneath his back, it was hot and sweaty, and I pulled him into a sitting position, took one paralyzed leg after the other pulling them over the side of the bed. Then I realized he was going nowhere. He was limp and his eyes were closed and his mouth against my arm breathing wet sounds. I felt my body thrumming with the sounds of vessels of blood and muscles contracting the sounds of aging and of disintegration—the sound of something made ridiculous with language—the sense of loving and the sense of fear. I looked into his face: the irises expanding and filling the room, the curtains of eyelids shutting down over them to lift again and again. I tried to explain that he was too weak to make the trip three feet away to the bathroom. I was suddenly scared and embarrassed again. “I’m not strong enough,” I said, tilting his head back. The sounds of nurses and hospital gurneys far away in the halls but he said nothing—his dark eyes just staring and flickering back and forth from side to side in strobic motion. Was he sleeping? Was he dreaming? What thoughts lay behind them? What pictures forming? Do blind men have visual dreams, dreams of color, dreams of form?
After giving birth a female whale produces more than two hundred gallons of milk a day.
In the yellowing dusk the red bricks of the buildings go to sleep; they fade into the shadows of streets and only the uppermost windows show the slow night coming on. I can place myself out there in the sky: lie down in the texture and dream of years and years of sleep and I talk inside my head of change and of peace for this body beside me of life for this body beside me of belief in these unalterable positions in the shifting state of things; of disbelief, of need for something to suddenly and abruptly take place, like that last image of some Antonioni film where the young woman looks at the house her father built and because of her gaze it explodes not once but twice in slow motion, huge fireballs of rupturing gas lines and couches and tables and chairs splintering into waves of shards and light and glass drifting in glittering helixes and even the entire contents of the family refrigerator lovingly spilling out toward the eye in rage, a perfect rage that I was beginning to understand, seeing myself hovering in the atmosphere outside the building’s walls and wanting a shout to come from my throat that would level all the buildings or else have a strength in my hands where I could rip open the earth like cheap fabric and release a windscreen of lava and heat or with the fists banging against my thighs create Shockwaves that would cause all the manufacturing of the preinvented world to go tumbling down in a slow and terrifying beauty till all the earth was level or maybe just to have some water pour from my head.
First there is the World. Then there is the Other World. The Other World is where I sometimes lose my footing. In its calendar turnings, in its preinvented existence. The barrage of twists and turns where I sometimes get weary trying to keep up with it, minute by minute adapt: the world of the stoplight, the no-smoking signs, the rental world, the split-rail fencing shielding hundreds of miles of barren wilderness from the human step. A place where by virtue of having been born centuries late one is denied access to earth or space, choice or movement. The bought-up world; the owned world. The world of coded sounds: the world of language, the world of lies. The packaged world; the world of speed in metallic motion. The Other World where I’ve always felt like an alien. But there’s the World where one adapts and stretches the boundaries of the Other World through keys of the imagination. But then again, the imagination is encoded with the invented information of the Other World. One stops before a light that turns from green to red and one grows centurie
s old in that moment. Someone once said that the Other World was run by a different species of humans. It is the distance of stepping back or slowing down that reveals the Other World. It’s the dislocation of response that reveals it for the first time because the Other World gets into one’s bloodstream with the invisibility of a lover. It slowly takes the shape of the cells and their growth, internalized until it becomes an extension of the body. Traveling into primitive cultures allows one a sudden and clear view of the Other World; how the invention of the word “nature” disassociates us from the ground we walk on. While growing up I was constantly aware of the sense of all this in the same way one experiences a vague fear yet can’t distill the form of it from the table or the cup one is holding or the skies rolling beneath the window frames.
Ever since my teenage years, I’ve experienced the sensation of seeing myself from miles above the earth, as if from the clouds. I see the tiny human form of myself from overhead either sitting or moving through this clockwork of civilization—the huge ticking mass of it—and it all looks like something out of everyone’s control. Or rather, in the control of only a few: those that made up the gears and springs of the preinvented machine or those that threw themselves from the tops of bridges and buildings. And with the appearance of AIDS and the subsequent deaths of friends and neighbors, I have the recurring sensation of seeing the streets and radius of blocks from miles above, only now instead of focusing on just the form of myself in the midst of this Other World I see everyone and everything at once. It’s like pressing one’s eye to a small crevice in the earth from which streams of ants utter from the shadows—and now it all looks amazing instead of just deathly.
By the last weeks of his life he’d lost most of the feeling in his legs and when he could get himself to his feet, he would fall endlessly forward, arms spinning like windmills until one of us would grab him and guide him. It became a routine. He’d first refuse help as a condition to accepting it; at times it seemed as if every variation of reaction and response had to pass through his brain and out his lips before he could accept certain things or acknowledge limitations.
One day over breakfast he told me he planned to go by himself to Penn Station the following weekend to take a train to see a new doctor on Long Island—earlier that week I’d seen a fifteen-second spot on the evening news about this doctor who was administering typhoid shots to people with AIDS and claiming there were some good responses. The typhoid supposedly sparked the immune system into working again. I would usually tell him of any new developments I’d heard about, if for no other reason than to give him a sense of hope, something reassuring. He’d somehow found the name and address of the doctor and made an appointment. I told him I’d be glad to drive him out there but he shook his head, no, and said he preferred going out there by himself by way of Penn Station. We all knew this was impossible; he couldn’t walk across the room without falling, patterns of bruises appearing on his pale white skin. Most of his friends were concerned about whether or not his body could withstand the dosages of typhoid which apparently were expected to produce fevers of up to one hundred and seven; but we also knew that when he’d made his mind up it wasn’t beyond him to drag himself to the train station. At least he’d have that much control over the illness and his life. By Saturday, three days later, he consented to let me and Anita drive him out there. The morning rolled around and it took us an hour and a half to get him dressed and down the stairs to the car, blankets bound around him to ease the cold heat dial set at full blast and still he was shivering. He’d been in a bad mood for months and this morning he was in his usual good form. He was enraged about dying and took it out on most of us. Anita had told him recently that if there was something any of us could do to make it all stop and for him to get well, some gesture we could make—a wave of a hand, a throw of a switch, something liquid or tablet we could give him—we would; but there was nothing. He softened a bit after that.
Before we even got over the Williamsburg Bridge in morning traffic he began suggesting there was a faster route. I told him I’d gone over the map and there was no faster route. He kept insisting and I missed a turn for the expressway so I stopped the car on the side of an overpass and studied the map again. There was no faster route. “There’s a faster way—you just don’t know it.” He pulled himself deeper into the blankets looking pissed as a hornet. The traffic was worse on the expressway with cars whizzing by at eighty to eighty-five miles per hour. Somewhere out by one of the airports he announced that he had to take a piss and that I should pull over and stop the car. I was in the left lane, cars were driving at breakneck speed and a light rain was falling and there was no shoulder to stop on. I told him I’d have to get over to an exit. “Just pull over and stop—I have to piss.” There’s nowhere I can stop; I have to reach an exit. A wave of his bony white hand, “Pull over … just pull over.” I looked at Anita through the rearview mirror and pulled over, cutting off a speeding car to reach an exit that was coming up. She grimaced back at me. We rode through the rain-colored streets filled with used-car lots and bright whipping banners until we found a gas station and I pulled up to one of the pumps. I asked a cute attendant for the bathroom but there was none. Peter insisted on getting out to piss anyway so I went around to his side of the car and unstrapped him from the seat belt. After pulling off his blankets, I reached toward him to help him out. “Don’t touch me.” Peter I have to touch you to help you out. “Don’t touch me it hurts.” In the last few weeks his senses got hypersharp. He could smell a piece of metal across the room and insist that you get rid of it. Perfume or garlic banished a visitor to a chair on the other side of the room or caused him to throw up. The attendant was filling up the tank as Peter walked by windmill style across the lot. Anita asked, “Are you okay?” “If he wasn’t sick I’d crack him in the teeth,” I answered. The gas tank full, I paid for it and went to find him. He was pissing into a flowerbed that belonged to a two-story white-frame house, his arms jerking back and forth to maintain balance. I felt a little nervous. This didn’t look like friendly territory. When he was done I buttoned his pants back up and led him back to the car. The attendant stared at us as I helped him back into the seat. Then the layers of blankets. “I don’t want the seat belt on.” I said, “You have to have the seat belt on; what if there’s an accident?” “I don’t care.” I continued putting it on. “I don’t want the seat belt on …” “We’re not going anywhere unless it’s on.” He resigned himself to having the seat belt on, “Don’t touch me.” We were back into traffic, circling side streets, trying to find the entrance to the expressway again. He looked like some old billy goat in a cocoon, his eyes peeled for something to snap at. “I know there’s a faster way.”
An hour later we reached a suburban street filled with fat wet trees hanging over quiet sidewalks. The street was also lined with no-parking signs so I pulled up in front of the doctor’s house, an anonymous-looking place with a high plank fence around its backyard. I let Anita and Peter off on the sidewalk. You go in and I’ll be right back. I drove a few blocks and found a nursery-school parking lot, parked the car and walked back feeling relieved that the ride was over. In the distance I could see Peter staggering on the front lawn flailing about in rage. He staggered toward Anita then turned and teetered to the roadside. She stood there with her small hands clasped together, traffic whizzing by. Peter disappeared behind a big hedge—the kind they shape into hippos and elephants at kiddie parks. By the time I reached Anita, he was in the distance, a tiny speck of agitation with windmill arms. I asked her what happened. “I don’t know, one minute he was complaining how long the ride took and when I said that maybe you did the best you could he went into a rage—he threatened to throw himself in front of the traffic. The saddest thing is that he’s too weak to throw a proper fit. He wanted to hit me but he didn’t have the strength.” Where’s he headed? “He said he was going to the train station to go back home.” We walked after him. He was staggering alongside a chain-link fe
nce which separated him from a group of schoolkids kicking a dented soccerball around. He turned briefly, saw us coming, tried to cross the street, changed his mind, started walking toward us, changed his mind again, turned around and started walking back toward the train station. I shouted his name and he hesitated for a moment then resumed walking. When we caught up with him he turned and started talking angrily. “Look,” I said, “just forget it—none of this is important … we came to see the doctor. We’re here, so let’s go see him.” He calmed down a bit and the three of us walked back to the gate and followed the path to the side door.
Up a couple of steps inside the screen door was what looked like the interior of a trailer: fake wood paneling, functional desks overflowing with papers and some rooms to the left where the patients moved in and out, and where a tall man in a white lab coat occasionally appeared to wave them in. To the right were a couple of doors lining a short hallway and beyond that a waiting room, Leave-It-to-Beaver comfortable filled mostly with men. Just next to the entrance a pale boy leaned against one of the desks waiting to pay his bill. Peter recognized him from the office of the doctor both had been seeing for most of the last year and whom both had decided to stop seeing—some scientist uptown in Manhattan. The scientist was working with nontoxic antiviral drugs he’d developed. He’d been treating cancer patients for years until the government brought a case against him for malpractice on numerous counts. He is now on a five-year probation. The fact that the government entered the scene was one of the things that convinced Peter that the doctor might be a genius. All of us hoped it was true. Over the past nine months he’d collected a drawer full of brown bottles each containing the most recent “cure” developed by this man. Some of them required injections which I administered. The deciding factor for many people to leave this doctor was a vaccine he’d developed from human shit which each person was eventually injected with. When Peter told me about this treatment I figured that because shit was one of the most dangerous corporeal substances in terms of passing disease (check the statistic on Belle Glade, Florida, where there are no adequate sewage facilities) maybe this guy figured out something in the properties of shit to develop a vaccine. After all, the bite of a rattlesnake is treated with a vaccine made of venom. But I also assumed that the doctor had at least made a vaccine for each patient out of their own shit. Later we found that one person’s shit served as a base for all treatments. Almost all the patients treated with this became extremely ill. Each one who mentioned this fact was told privately that he or she was the only one who reacted badly. This turned out to be the case many times. There were regulars to this doctor’s office that Peter would ask the doctor about. There was one young man in particular who everyone immediately fell in love with; the one all of them pinned their hopes on as an example of the possibility of success with the doctor’s treatments. When Peter asked how this or that person was doing he was told: fine, fine. Recently he discovered this was not true at all, many were dead and buried and the young man everyone loved had died as well.
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