Our neighborhood in Harlem is fairly dangerous. The people there don’t like white people, and for good reason. And that’s how we walked around the place, like a huge bundle that couldn’t possibly go unnoticed. They say that in moments of danger the last thing you should show is weakness, but I’m not so sure I agree. For me at least, it’s always been the other way around. I think the best self-defense is showing the other cheek, like the Christians are always going on about. In my case, mounted like that on his back, like an appendage of someone else’s body, not using my own legs for motion, I gave off an enormous sense of dereliction, same as that which emanated from our underprivileged neighborhood. So I didn’t feel out of place and nobody looked at me like a foreigner; it wasn’t the color of my skin but my fragility that made me similar to them, to people white society was trying to undermine.
I’m writing you from bed now, Jim, recovering from a bump on the head. Yesterday was Thanksgiving. I woke up especially cheerful. It was a day for hanging around the house, and socially it justified my not going out and being able to spend the next twenty-four hours amid these walls with all the sense of security they provide. Strangely, even though you think you don’t care what other people think or are used to being criticized, it’s still lovely to feel that you are part of the crowd the few times they let you feel as though you fit in.
That morning we heard an all-too-familiar story on the radio: how the police abuse and murder of the black population goes unpunished. That’s what happens in our neighborhood, where abuse of power is so entrenched in the system that protesting doesn’t make a dent in anything. But dissent and conflict need outlets, and those conduits include gang violence and hatred, robbery and muggings, which, though at times economically motivated, are inevitably amplified or justified by race. But yesterday something happened, the straw that broke the camel’s back. People poured into the streets in droves to protest. The last straw was the news that the (clearly) white policeman who riddled a (clearly) black man’s body with bullets six months ago won’t be put on trial. It’s just one more case that proves the utter impunity the police enjoy in the United States whenever the bull’s-eye happens to be black. In this case, an unarmed fifteen-year-old boy.
Irrational Number and I were cooking our Thanksgiving bird when we heard the news, now with a warning that disturbances were expected, and riots. Thanksgiving. You know I’ve always liked this holiday for a simple reason: because I like its name. Do you remember, Jim, how you always laughed at me when I said that? But it’s true that I’ve always taken advantage of the day to thank people whom I may have failed to appreciate properly in the rush of everyday life or because I was being insensitive or simply selfish. Yesterday I felt the tension in Irrational Number’s hands, the rage on his face when the news broke. The raw turkey, recently plucked, was atop the kitchen table, and I could see him eyeing the cavity emptied of offal. I asked what he was staring at so intently. He replied that he was trying to remember a recipe. I was tickled that he would follow my lead after coming up with that recipe on our first date at the movies. I responded saying all the ingredients were already there on the table: apples, bacon, corn, bread crumbs, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, chicken broth. But he said his recipe was for something else, and marched out of the apartment to pick up a few of the ingredients we were lacking. He returned a little while later and placed what he called the fixings on the table:
A glass bottle
A funnel
Gasoline
Motor oil
A rag
Insulating tape
A lighter
Hands atremble and anger visible in his every gesture, Irrational Number stuffed that turkey with his particular fixings, tied it with a string, and left part of the rag hanging out. And finally it dawned on me. The rag was exactly what it looked like—a wick—and the bird had been transformed into a Molotov cocktail. He taped it up, strapping the wick to the freshly plucked skin. He told me to put on some gloves, dark glasses, and a hat to protect me from his own peculiar turkey roast, and then he disguised himself too. I fell silent. I got it. But above all, I fell silent. That’s how the judicial system works when dealing with a black life. It falls silent. Not to perseverate over insignificant things. But above all, it falls silent, and that silence is what allows the grand jury to holler, to condemn. Not the criminal, but the victim, the person who is dead, the black person, the black father and mother of the black person, of that black person: the dead center of the bull’s-eye.
So yes, yesterday was Thanksgiving. We commemorated the day the Indians nourished the white settlers, thus saving their lives. The very Indians who are now all packed off and secluded in out-of-the-way reservations like animals on the brink of extinction. We heard shouting—the riots were under way. We went outside. Me, once again, on his back. I watched from on high as an enraged mob took to the streets. Their reactions were logical, violent. The police were also on the scene, shoring up the streets with barricades. Irrational Number carried his turkey in a bag. He’d have to use it soon to avoid blowing ourselves up. At one point he handed it up to me. I took hold of it, and keeping everything in mind he had told me when preparing the bird, I launched it at an angle that was between thirty degrees (so it would splatter as widely as possible) and forty-five (to gain distance). I felt a blow to my head. I’d been hit with a rock that was surely meant for the police. I was only semiconscious when I watched our stuffed turkey, the Molotov turkey, suspended in the air for a few seconds. It wasn’t falling.
Despite everything’s being in motion around me, I was able to pinpoint the image of the turkey. I heard the sound of its skin being pierced from within by the first ejected feather, with its quill, the central skeleton, all so clean and straight. Then I heard the rest of the quills being ejected like heads of wheat morphing into many-colored feathers, red ones, blue ones, green and yellow. It was dazzling to watch, suspended like that in midair, so richly hued. It wasn’t even a turkey anymore. It was a quetzal, the bird that dies if kept in captivity. It spread its wings, soaring gracefully, emptying the drippings of its belly over the multitude. I opened my mouth to catch a drop on my tongue. No death, only metamorphosis. A blend of white and black skins in a Dalmatian race. Both things at once now, white and black. The bird flew into the distance, voiding little drops like missiles that germinated a stunning race of mutts, a breed of humans with a thousand different bloods. Yesterday, on Thanksgiving, I witnessed that human amalgam as I fainted. When I came to, I wished so hard that the policeman treating my wound while we waited for the ambulance to arrive were black-and-white-skinned. I guess it’ll be a while yet before that happens, my love, and I suspect my time is nearly up. There’s barely enough time left even to dream about this race of the thousand purebloods.
After a few days at home recovering from the head wound, Irrational Number thought some fresh air would do me good. He arranged everything, even packed my suitcases, and we headed out. It’s the longest trip I’ve taken since your death, you see, and we didn’t even leave the state of New York. After we drove nearly four hours, Irrational Number finally stopped at the Montauk esplanade, just at the tip of Long Island a little west of the lighthouse, the same place we went crab fishing that one time, do you remember? We’d gone out in the wee hours and came back around eight in the morning. Irrational Number rented a cabin there for a month, which is where I’m writing now, about two hundred yards from where the car is parked. The place is still famous for its remarkable marine landscapes, but what really impressed me when I got out of the car that Sunday, even more than the ocean, was how thick the grass is, and its light green color, which gave an impression of youthfulness. You bet—it was springtime again. After such a long time I could change seasons again, even if it was only a fleeting sensation of feeling the freshness of dew on my ankles. I expected my response to be short-lived, but in truth I was overcome all day long by the thrill of freshness, by a certain kind of joy. I tried to take a step forward, and t
hough I couldn’t, I didn’t feel anguished. Just as he had promised, Irrational Number picked me up and put me on his back so I could straddle that huge lover again, the lover who cares for me in my feebleness, in my heartache over having lost you, Jim, and the never-ending pregnancy that is now scaring me, haunting my nightmares, incised with an image of Yoro. Irrational Number takes charge of everything and trots along with all the extra burden as if with his gait he was dusting off the layer of grime that has been settling over everything during my time of confinement.
We get up early every day. The dog goes out to wander about on its own and doesn’t come back until nightfall. We drink fresh milk for breakfast. Everything here seems green and new. Not only the grass everywhere, but also the fresh cow’s milk, the dark blue sea, and the sound of the birds. Even my name seems green to me, and so more alive, more sonorous. Irrational Number is my white horse during the day, my trotting horse at night. At times when we’re asleep, when a cracked window bursts open from a gust of wind, I take advantage of the moment to caress him and he doesn’t move, his sleep is so profound. He’s exhausted from carrying me on our walks. I’m so grateful to him. I love him.
Do you mind that I love him? It’s a different kind of love than the love I felt for you. I would never write to him after he dies because, to be honest, he’s a necessary crutch in my life, and if I wasn’t ill, I don’t know if I’d love him the way that I do now. It’s different, was different, with you. I loved you, Jim, in sickness and in health. Loving in health is what the priests say, as if it were something so easy, but it’s actually the more difficult of the two. Sickness, not health, is what bonds humans so intensely, and sickness is what is imprinting Irrational Number on me, like atomic shadows, the silhouettes of the victims that were carved onto the surfaces of things during the explosion. Like the friction of water that polishes a swimmer’s body, I noticed how my body was conforming to the space left by that man’s body whenever I dismounted. It’s as if my bones were beginning to grow again. Don’t they say that if a woman is young enough, she might grow an inch or two during pregnancy? I am not young, but it’s the feeling I get when I’m on him and he moves while I remain still, and there I am, growing on top of him. Maybe it’s a false sense of physical development, but when I look at my full body in a mirror, I can make out the shape of an absence between my legs. When we separate and I move around the cabin on my own as he rests or walks about a few hours unencumbered by me, I don’t feel solitary as long as I remember how the shape of his back remains impressed in the curve of my inner thighs. When he returns from his outing, I run to the door to welcome him. We put on or take off our pajamas, and I can smell the scent of the fields in his clothes, and all the aromas of my horse.
I’m happy. We’re happy. Who isn’t happy in the spring, even though it’s winter? But it is spring.
That’s what I was writing yesterday when I interrupted myself, because I saw him hanging his head. You might think it’s normal for such a tall man to hold his head like that when he looks at someone my size. But it was the ground he was looking at the whole time, just staring straight at the ground. I tried to justify his attitude, reason it away as if it was just a symptom of his bliss, looking down like that as something contrary to sadness. A downcast glance—I said to convince myself—is a way of noticing a fresh footprint, or the utmost present of all present moments, a blade of grass just sprouting up through the surface when two steps earlier it was still belowground. One looks up at the sky and there’s no birth there. An awakening, perhaps, but that’s something entirely different. The sun that rises again is an old man born millions of years ago. It takes focusing on small details to observe birth, and most often looking down at the ground—where a mushroom burgeons, or an ant colony—or hearing the little audible crack a butterfly makes when breaking out of the cocoon. I thought he was able to observe all of it and feel the joy of each new birth. I mounted him again, to live out yet another day on top of him. We were a few hours into a long walk by the time it occurred to me that my heft and I were all he had in life. It scared me to suddenly find myself thinking such a thing, how geocentric of me, what a narcissistic idea that another life needed to revolve around me, some obtuse medieval asteroid.
I fell asleep, my head resting on his shoulder, and when I woke up, we were passing through an area we hadn’t visited before. I realized that he was not celebrating anything at all. You have no idea what went down. He started walking in fits and starts like a blind person who hadn’t been born blind, but had lost his eyes for lack of use. The blindness of lassitude. His once blue and twinkling eyes were now hollows. Though I felt bad for him, I appreciated how despite his obvious despair, he was still willing to lug me around for the dose of fresh air that little by little was helping me recover. The landscape changed in a second. The day became night when the sun was still high in the sky. The roots of the trees became more visible. They rose up from the earth searching for light. The wind was light, yet trees were snapping, since the roots didn’t have the strength to sustain them. Trees fell over entirely. Fallen trees and trees tumbling all around till we reached the swamp. I suddenly realized I had to get off him or our combined weight would cause us to sink. Perhaps if I had dismounted when we entered the quagmire, if I had stood on my own two feet, things might have happened differently, but when I finally roused myself to try, it was without any luck. I was so completely fused with him we had become elements of a single centaur, and how could I separate the animal from the human without killing myself, without killing him? Neither did I detect in time that song of the equine siren whose melody lures horses bearing gratuitous burdens into the depths of mud. Blind and bemired in the muck, I got wind of the woeful music. From its invisible score sprang the fountain of eternal sludge. Writing this now, Jim, I can hear the same music, a circular melody like the vortex of mud that sucked him down. My trotting man. I feel him so close, as if he were somewhere down below. Might I be writing you from a few yards above his cross? How ghastly.
Sadness may not be the right word to define my feelings in that swamp. It was a kind of feeling that didn’t have a counter. A sentiment without antonyms. Happiness was not its opposite; instead, the feeling was so absolute it disallowed even the thought of a shade to its blackness. I lowered my head. I remember he stopped. He just froze. Instantaneously. I pleaded for him to keep moving, but he wouldn’t budge, smack in the middle of a bog that reached his knees, the surface just beneath my toes. He spoke not a word. I was so frightened I couldn’t own up to my responsibility, and before I dared peel myself away, I preferred to blame it on the music, its tempo, andante moderato, that melody as light as it was heavy, like flour, which thickens with liquid into a mass. I tried to shake him up, intensify his pulse, his breathing, whatever would speed up his slackening pace. I whispered quickly in his ear. I shouted. I encouraged him. I pulled at his shirt. But he wouldn’t dislodge himself. Solid as a marble slab.
Then we started to sink. When the mud reached the level of his groin, it covered my ankles; up to his waist it was at my knees; up to his chest it reached my chest too. I was terrified. He was sinking and taking me with him. The surface of the mud rose like a tide darkening the earth with the sea. I watched his white skin stain from the bottom up till it reached his neck. My white man was growing dark. Only then did I finally dismount, not so much to help him as to avoid being carried along with him. For some reason, I didn’t sink. It was as if he was in quicksand and I was on solid ground. For the first time in ages, I was more stable than someone else, and when I snapped into action and tried to rescue him, it was for him, not just for me. But it was too late. I pulled at his wrists so hard I’m sure it must have hurt him. He mouthed words without making any noise, trying to accommodate his tongue as if this muscle had also become weak. For a few minutes I thought that was all he wanted. To accommodate his tongue seemed like his last wish as he was sinking.
The mud reached his lips and I pulled even harder. I could hear the m
usic in my head moving at the same slow yet brisk pace, like a bad horse pulling my good horse to the bottom of the mire. I sobbed. I insulted him. Then I asked him to forgive me for having overburdened him. I begged him to react and told him I would never mount him again. I promised that he would recover his ability to resist without me. I pulled his hair; I did everything I could. And when the soft black sands covered his teeth and his nose and his vacant eyes and the last curve of his white ears, I hated him. He’d pulled me out of the trench I’d hidden in, that kitchen of my own despair, for this? Once he’d disappeared entirely, once all that was left of him were a few thick bubbles of heavy air, the remnant of what had been in his lungs, I was all alone again. Alone in the middle of that swamp. I cursed him for leaving me that way again, and for taking my four legs away. Then I cursed myself.
The Story of H Page 19