Stories From the Plague Years

by Michael Marano

  You exhaled softly what you had inhaled as a gasp as you felt me feel jealousy toward the young man who was now his son. Strapping. Beautiful. Glowing with health and vitality, the young man who in flesh would be my brother walked with my murdering father through the banal consumerist landscape of a shopping mall. He did not love his father. Filial hatred was etched into his face. Yet he walked with my father, who plainly loved him. Yet he walked with my father, who limped slightly due to his newly replaced hip. Filial hatred was meshed with filial duty. You and I, knitted from behind time—who have never walked a visible path save for that which Justice had decreed—saw the injustice we would inflict if we killed my father now. To kill my father would destroy this boy . . . he would be the focus of an investigation that would ruin him, even if he were found innocent. To kill my father would kill part of him; to take away the object of his hatred and his sense of duty would flood him with an ambiguity of feelings he could not endure.

  You comforted me that night by making love to me. You took away the pain of inaction by desiring me.

  As best you could.

  Justice would tell us when to strike.

  And thus, besieged by the dead, we began our siege.

  And thus we closed off ourselves from Charleston, living in it, participating in it, but always closing ourselves off from the place where the dead were so badly treated. Where ghosts were trinkets to lure tourists along with gewgaws made of sawgrass and plaster. We closed a siege wall around us, as we lay siege to our murderers, waiting, always waiting.

  We waded into the confluence of Charleston. We waded into the silt of fictions and dreams and lies. We walked among the living and the ghosts.

  The dead looked in our eyes and coveted.

  Here, a woman in an ancient dress, her gullet full of holes. Her moonlight form rosaried with knots of the pain she had felt in life. She stood in the street, a thing of February forced to exist against a backdrop of May, forced into invisibility by the eyes of the city that had killed her for loving wrongly. We saw her on a bright corner, as a horse-drawn carriage freighted with tourists passed her.

  We waded into Charleston’s indifferent cruelty, “You must love it here!” punctuating our stay the way “Amen!” does a tent revival.

  Commodities, we were invited by nouveaux riche Belles to behold and marvel at the purchases they had made with the money of husbands who saw them as trophies and incubators and little more. We, commodified as furniture queens, marvelled.

  Here, the mouth of a child gnawed away. The rats that had nested in her unfound body did not follow her in death, did not ghost themselves with her, though the violet she had died picking had. A man with a flayed back walked with her, a man who would have come back as an avatar to avenge himself if he had not died at the hands of so many who had been enraptured by the fiction of Birth of a Nation.

  We, commodified as educated strangers who had come to Charleston and had learned the truth of how things really are (did we not answer in the affirmative to, “You must love it here?”), agreed sagely with the city’s fat white patriarchs, who would spout their provincial blather believing they could create informed opinions about anything, having seen nothing of the world save what they have seen through the fiction of tourism, the fiction of the dream of Charleston they take with them no matter where they go.

  Here, a man composed of the sheen of tin. A thing of numb, uncaring fleshlessness, he walks the Battery, walks foolishly on the stagnant water of the harbour. He is a buffoon in death, as he had been in life. In life, he had been a happy figure, a person of frolicking dementia who ended the jolliness he provided by inconsiderately freezing to death one unseasonable evening. The sheen of his un-living flesh is as cold as the wind that had killed him. He sleeps his dead sleep at the very spot in the park where his body had first been flecked with dew.

  We, commodified as faggots, fell in with the destitute and inwardly exiled gays of Charleston. We saw the broken down men of King Street, coolies bitter that they have not married the Rhett Butler they had always believed they deserved. We saw the faggots from other places who come to Charleston to plunder fraudulent antiques much as Mr. Kurtz had come to the Congo to plunder ivory. We fell in also with the Charleston queer aristocracy, those who, less because of their sexuality than their caste perceptions, always went elsewhere to indulge their sexual proclivities. Some went to New York to screw young black men not as an expression of sexual taste or desire, but to express racial contempt, and contempt for the foreign culture of the North. Some went to Thailand to express their contempt for a culture older than theirs by fucking its youths. Some kept apartments under false names in San Francisco, simply because they could.

  We became conscripted for the sake of Justice to save the life of one such Charleston scion, to keep his damp and earthen soul in his body. We interfered in his acquiring of AIDS by taking his attention away from a drag queen crack addict. We were compelled to interfere, saving the life of this respectable son of one of Charleston’s finest families so he could be later punished by the as yet unborn avatars of those he had killed. He was marked . . . that we could see. His crimes could be read in his eyes. He was marked perhaps for fisting that boy to death in New York? Perhaps for that child whose kidney ruptured in Thailand? Maybe they both would be reborn to take him. Perhaps as twins.

  As we led the scion away, we saw on the drag queen’s face what she would become. We saw the mirrored un-living shadow of her that would move as a breeze—with the feminine grace she had in life always wanted—down the quaintly cobblestoned streets she worked.

  Charleston is a mindset. Its crowded loneliness is an eyesore. We walk amongst its dead, those conscripted to invisibility, those whose screams are stifled by the apathy only the living could muster. Besieged, we waited. We could not breathe for the thickness of our fleshless siblings. Ghosts are born of guilt without catharsis. Without redemption. You cannot be rid of a ghost until you own the sin that has created it. To own a sin is to acknowledge History, and Charleston has none. History is where the past and present interact. There is no such interaction here. Charleston has no History . . . for though it loves its past, such love is nothing but antiquarianism. Such love objectifies. Such love is not, and can never be History. Justice is impossible in the drunken fog of such lack of History. Our fleshless siblings will never be free. The weight of the air is too heavy in Charleston. The cold places of the North—the dusty attics and the chilled cellars, the shadow eaves and October breaths—give expiation to ghosts. They provide a way home. Here, the weight of cast-off bourgeois dreams keeps ghosts earthbound. Slaves. The disenfranchised. The refugees who found refuge here only for their bodies, not their souls. The refuse of a brutal agrarian plutocracy based upon stolen labour. The foolish men who, having read the pretty fiction of Ivanhoe, had believed in the chivalry of agrarian plutocracy and who now cannot fathom why they did not die nobly, but died shitting themselves and screaming for their mothers.

  Incontinent and bloody in their Grays, they are soldiers still of the siege. We would help them if we could. Yet how can you dig a grave for a body already buried in haze? They look and glisten in the moonlight. They hunger to be seen.

  The city gets smaller as Justice makes us wait.

  We go to our polite jobs as Boys, such as we, are expected to. Yes, we are Boys. Queers are not full men . . . any challenge to patriarchal normalcy cannot be tolerated. Your female boss finds us “darling” and “clever.”

  Justice makes us wait.

  Justice keeps us unseen for what we truly are.

  Who, among the living, is invisible enough to truly see us?

  The Call came in the depths of summer.

  There is a peacefulness to butchery. Mining. Excavating. The path through flesh is a path of discovery.

  We stood from our couches in our living room. The sound of the television passed to nothing; we were not truly watching it. We kept it on at night because the light of th
e screen reflected on the windows and blanked the faces of the dead who milled, who longed to be seen, who formed themselves out of ether not out of Will, but out of its terrible absence. Will is a thing for the living. Will is the ability to Sin, which we have not. Without Will (truly without Sin?), we stood and calmly took our quarry.

  To have been near Sheila when she heeded her Call was to see—as you see in the moment before a summer storm—something drawn out of all the green around you.

  We were that which is drawn out of the green. We were drawn out of where we were while still present.

  “Where are we now? Where shall we go?”

  There is a certainty a child knows with finality—that it must never touch fire.

  We knew with the same certainty and finality that tonight was the night to avenge.

  We harvested your mother, knowing her daughter was in the care of an aunt in a cooler place. The terrible heat was making the child mad. Dehydrated and sick, she had been packed off. To punish your killer tonight would not punish the autistic child she brought into this world.

  We harvested my father, knowing his son was away hiking with friends. The closeness to his father in the heat was making him mad. He went to the mountains. To destroy my murderer tonight would not destroy his son. The boy could let go his filial hatred if he had an alibi not only for those who would investigate, but an alibi for himself . . . that he could not have saved the man were he with him the night he disappeared.

  Out of politeness for my father, and consideration of his hip, we put him in the back seat of our car. Not in the trunk with your mother.

  We, the un-avenged dead, dug our graves in their flesh.

  The marshes are tannic. The marshes crawl with life that is hungry. We buried our open-fleshed graves in the marshes.

  I look at you, and wonder if I love you.

  Dried blood on the lids of my eyes makes it hard to blink. My eyes hurt. The phone has stopped ringing again. When had dusk come?

  There should be a difference in weight, for what we have lost.

  There is skin upon my lip, and I would spit it away.

  Yet we have been spat away this night, we have been left behind like skin.

  Our souls, avenged

  . . . ascended.

  They cast us aside, we fleshy vessels. Justice was served by us—we things of marrow and blood and gristle are empty now. Our souls are free and we wish them back. We are uninhabitable, even by ourselves.

  Love.

  How can we love while soulless?

  I look at you, and wonder.

  We are dead. Nothing is held by our gazes. No soul or spirit. The ghosts crave our glance no more than they would from corpses. They have ended the siege. As I saw them walking away, I realized that if I could still feel anything, I would miss them.

  “Where shall we go?”

  We have not even graves to crawl in to sleep. They have been dug into our murderers and given to the marsh.

  You ask one last time.

  We are in Charleston.

  We are dead.

  We might as well stay.

  BURDEN

  With night, come the sounds.

  You hear them as you walk beneath halogen street-lamps that give light the color of brandy, as October air touched with frost becomes warm, heavy as breath. Your step is muffled, as if you walk on a wool blanket. The sounds come, as they have come before, while dusk deepens and stars spread across the dull suburban sky, while lamplight and the flickering blue of TV screens fill the windows of the houses you pass.

  Stiff leather creaks. Booted feet step. Chains hung from jackets clank. Keys dangling from out of pockets jangle.

  You are alone, surrounded by sound.

  Trying to walk away from it.

  The summer-heat falls on your back, your neck and your hands, which a moment before tingled with cold. You smell the scents of The City you left long ago. The humid, dirty air. The musk of leather and the skin of the men who wear it. Cigarettes and a blend of after-shaves sweetened by sweat. Under the brandy-light you feel, more than see, stars eclipsed by grey city sky.

  Darkness huddles the street. Night folds upon night before you. The suburban street fades as the stars have faded—the brandy-light is gone. The shadows breathe. They mill and they whisper. You walk among them. They have no form.

  Out of the ebony nothingness, from behind the curtain of night, Tony steps before you, as if he has stepped from around the corner of a building that is not there.

  You stop, held by Tony’s stare. You knew he would come. But not as he has.

  Tony is shrunken and ashen. No longer able to fill his leather jacket as he had in life. The weight of chains on the jacket make it hang slackly. Tight jeans that had once glorified his manhood sag loosely, as if worn by a boy who has yet to grow into them. Above his black T-shirt, his neck is thin as an old woman’s. Tendons show through the skin of his throat. His face is gaunt—skull-like as a death camp survivor's.

  You see in Tony’s eyes an awful, lonely fear, a pleading that fixes your sight and settles in an icy pool near your heart.

  He steps toward you. You feel the shadows behind you become heavier, many eyes on your back. The sounds of chains and keys and boots and heavy belt buckles grow louder, closer . . . more distinct. The shadows breathe. They mill and they whisper.

  Tony reaches for you; his ill-fitting jacket falls from his shoulder. Part of you insists that this cannot be.

  His hand is on your shoulder, cold through your wool coat in the midst of this invading heat. The cold of his hand walks through your flesh to the cold in your heart. The air is warm in your lungs. Tony’s lips move as a child’s move while reading. No words come. There is only the chorus of metal and leather as the shadows behind you shuffle.

  You hear his distant voice as the lights of a passing car burn Tony out of the night.

  The crunch of tires smothers the sounds around you. The shadows at your back become wind. You feel living eyes upon you. Two children stare from the car’s backseat window. As they pass, you realize you are cowering, your body hunched.

  Stars fade into being. You feel them look down upon you, uncaring, as you straighten yourself.

  Autumn wind comes, driving away the scents you have been breathing, replacing them with those of dead leaves, bitter smoke from fireplaces, the salt smell of the harbour.

  Yet as you reach your apartment, you smell, just faintly, the scent of a leather jacket, of sweat tinged aftershave—as if you wear them yourself.

  In darkness that is your own, sitting in a domicile that has never been a home to you, you think of Tony’s eyes, how you would have longed for them to have held anger, accusation, the righteous fury of betrayal.

  Not the awful desperation they did hold.

  Dawn finds you awake, still sitting as birds begin to sing. You become aware, as you never have been before, of the beat of your heart and the flow of blood in your veins.

  Veins bulge under the rubber tube around your arm.

  The woman wears surgical gloves. She looks at your forearm, not your face, as she tells you, “You might want to look away if you’re squeamish.”

  (“Bashful?”)

  You don’t look away as the needle goes in and blood arcs into the test tube. Someone once told you that blood is truly blue, and only turns red when exposed to air.

  (A clatter as jeans with a heavy belt buckle fall to the floor. “C’mon. Don’t be shy.”)

  The test tube fills. The blood looks black.

  (The Boy had been like Tony. A cocky, muscular, Italian kid who knew he was beautiful. You once knew the Boy’s name, but you cannot, or choose not, to remember it now.)

  The woman whispers, “Okay,” and pulls the needle out.

  (You had met The Boy in the park, which that night was so very much like the park in The City where men would walk together in pairs and threes to hidden places behind trees and bushes. Summer
heat, summer sweat, summer air combining into an intoxicating liquor periodically spiked with amyl nitrate.)

  A warm red drop on your forearm, wiped away with cotton and cool alcohol. Rubber-gloved hands apply a bandage.

  (You had felt a longing when you saw The Boy, beyond the sexual. You had wanted to be near The Boy so that you could say good-bye to Tony through him. For Tony had simply left . . . gone back to his family in Buffalo to die among people he could not stand to be near while in the prime of his life.)

  The woman labels the test tube with a number and puts it in a rack of others like it. She takes off her gloves and puts them in a red plastic container marked “BIOHAZARD.”

  (At least you tell yourself that is why you let things go so fast with The Boy.)

  “We should have the results of your test in about six weeks,” she says. A testimonial to the shittiness of this town, that all such blood-work must be sent out-of-state in monthly batches.

  (Dangerously fast.)

  “And even if the initial results are positive, there is a possibility it could be a false positive.”

  (Foolishly fast.)

  She hands you a slip of piss-yellow paper. It is a carbon copy of the label on your sample. “This is your test number. Call at the end of next month and give the receptionist the number. He’ll tell you if the results are in, and you can come in for consultation.”

  (Had you wanted this?)

  You walk the ugly green tiles of the Health Department toward the faint daylight at the end of the hall. You are nameless here, a number. It is for your own protection, to be nameless. Your anonymity is a shield. You leave the Health Department through a soot-covered glass door.

  (Had you wanted to be reckless? Had you wanted this worry gnawing inside you?)

  The river, such as it is, flows by in an eroding canal of poured concrete. It is only a few feet deep, and you think of the college kid last year who had tried to commit suicide by jumping off the bridge you are now passing. He had landed in silt up to his knees, trapped, his upper chest and head above the water.