by Dale Peck
I said If you wanna leave
Then you know I’ll understand
He wasn’t here too long
He wasn’t here too long
When he was here he was my life
Now he’s gone he is my song
I remember our first kiss
Yes, I remember that first kiss
Words fail me to describe it
But that kiss I’m gonna miss
That man was like a castle
And he given me the key
I lived inside his walls
Now he lives inside of me
I’m a-coming home
I’m a-coming home
I’m a-coming home
I’m a-going home
I been blue all day
I been blue all day
Love is gone away, boys
Come and dig my grave
10. Smell
In your bathroom there is a sink, a white oval, the shape of a halved hollowed eggshell, a porcelain bowl that rests upon a porcelain pedestal. Hidden within this pedestal is the pipe that carries away your sink’s refuse, which is your refuse: your whiskers and sloughed-off skin cells, hairs that have broken from your head, blood that has leaked from gums or nose or fingers. It is a feature, this sink on its pedestal—so says your landlord—but, in fact, because of the pedestal’s narrow width, the pipe within it lacks what plumbers call a trap, that double curve of pipe shaped like an S too lazy to stand upright. The trap is meant to hold water in its valley and so block sewer gases from rising into your bathroom. But your sink lacks this trap: the water from your tap rushes straight back into the earth like rain falling on a windless day, and often, on hot days especially, a fetid smell rises into your house, a thinly but evenly spread stench that takes over your life like the sound of an argument in the house next door. Light a match, your landlord said when you complained, and left it at that. Now, years later, it has become your companion, this stink, something to talk to when you’re alone the way other people talk to a pet or to the walls. Oh, it’s you again, you say, and you wave a hand, a greeting and a clearing of the air—and, so, a farewell as well. Sometimes, when you awaken in the middle of the night for a pee and there is no smell in your bathroom, you put your face right into the shell of sink and sniff deeply, pulling into your lungs a past that is deeper than memory. Once, after doing this, you stand up and catch sight of yourself in the mirror. Your face spooks you for some reason, and you grab nervously at the book of matches left in a concavity of the sink meant for a bar of soap. You take a match, light it, you hold it to the mouth of the drain. It sputters there, a brief consolation, and then, as if tweaked by fingers, it goes out. Your sleep-glazed eyes stare at a rising ribbon of smoke that seems to offer both rebuke and absolution, and then a second breath, yours or the pipe’s, disperses even that illusion, and you are left with nothing but yourself.
11. Death
The hands are the body’s conjunctions: they can bring together anything they can grasp, hold, pick up, carry, move, anything they can touch. Look at your hands now, the unmarked left one and the right with its two nicotine-stained fingers. Those hands have touched pens and penises, and food and forks and knives and spoons to eat that food, they have touched your naked body and the clothes that have covered it, and they have touched the hands of living and dying and dead men. They have dug into soft earth and run bunches of freshly mown grass over your skin, tugged daffodils from the ground and pulled your body up the rough trunks of oak trees. They have grasped doorknobs and turned them, and turned back blankets, and turned on taps to release jets of hot and cold water, and they have touched that water. They have run through the grooves in an elephant’s skin and untangled the matted mane of a horse and pulled back from the sting of a honeybee. They have held books and tickets and clocks and maps and money and guitars and iron bars, and they have held nothing except air. Oh, how can you stand it, Gordon, how can you bear to think of all your hands have touched, how can you continue to reach out for more? But your soul grows lonely, trapped within its bodily prison, and so there is always that reach for more, for excess, for the fifth cup of coffee, the body in the darkness, the bullet, to slip into the chamber. Dear Gordon, your soul is like the soul of anyone: it reaches out for both good and evil. It is neither good nor evil in itself, for like any creature with two hands you can reach out with your left and touch one thing and reach out with your right and touch another, and your soul reconciles these opposites through the medium of your body. But the search of the soul is really the search for the soul, and the search for the soul is, finally, the search for death. One day—one day you will reach out too far to the left and you will reach out too far to the right. You will reach out so far that you will be unable to draw your hands back in, and so you will continue to reach farther and farther out until your body splits open and what is inside is released and shines forth, like a star.
12. Art
What is left is the word: everything else died or departed long ago. What is left is the imagination. If I had to formulate a theory of language then I would say that because our grammar allows us to link any one word with any other—the words “life” and “death,” for example, can be joined by a single conjunction—then no word can quite escape all those other meanings. It’s not just that nothing is simply one thing, it’s that one thing can be, must be everything, and this multiplicity of meanings is, I believe, the writer’s only consolation. How else could we live with what little we manage to get on paper? I choose to locate my quest for the soul in you because there is no way something as imprecise as this language can ever arrive at the absolute nature of love, of pain, of hunger, of the soul. There can only be my love, my pain, my hunger, my soul; there can only be your love, your pain, your hunger, your soul; and it’s my hope that somewhere in the conjunction between you and me I will arrive at something that is more than either of us. We have, as they say, poured our souls into every word we’ve written. We’ve tried with each of those words to communicate a complete vision of the world. We know that art, like radical politics, seeks to make itself unnecessary: embedded somewhere in every poem, every story, every play is a utopian vision that, if achieved, would make the words irrelevant, redundant, unnecessary. You have your vision, I have mine, and I suspect that these visions are closer than we realize; and now I’ll reveal something about myself to you: I don’t know what good it does to write about someone after they die, but I’m not above thinking that if I write about someone before they die then they’ll keep on living. I don’t mean that metaphorically, and I don’t mean just you. “The epidemic is the revelatory aspect of our time,” you wrote in a letter when you were alive, but what it reveals to me and what it revealed to you are not, I think, the same thing. Faced with that, all I can offer is a variation on childhood’s dare: I’ll show you what AIDS has shown me, if you’ll show me what AIDS has shown you.
13. Dreams
Just before I fell asleep I heard water dripping out of the drainpipe in the back garden. Robbie was sleeping beside me; his hand was on my stomach and their steady rise and fall seemed a conjunctive effort. We had just had sex; I was thinking about death. (I am moving away from you Gordon, I know, I am moving back into myself. This is what I meant when I talked about the conjunction of you and me: I am offering a piece of myself to you now, in the hope that you can pick it up and give us both meaning.) The water dripped slowly: the rain had stopped hours ago and what I heard was just the last coalescing drops falling the few inches from the bottom of the pipe to the concrete sidewalk, a slow and surprisingly regular rhythm made more of silence than of splashing. I wondered, then, where the water went, and I thought I remembered the rusted bars of an iron grate, the darkness of a hole visible, or invisible, between its slats. So the water drains from a smaller pipe into a larger, I thought, drop by drop, and then goes where? The canal, I thought, no more than a quarter mile away across Mile End Park, and as I slid closer to sleep my breathing fell in with Ro
bbie’s and my mind fell in with the water, and together—me, the water, and Robbie—squeezed and shimmied our way down that long narrow tunnel until we spilled out into the canal. And the canal carried us to the Thames, and the Thames carried us to the Channel, and the Channel was like the clasped fingers of the Atlantic, holding us in its embrace. I was almost asleep by then, and I thought, children leave their parents this way, and lovers leave each other, and the soul will leave the body like this, like a drop of water making its way back to the ocean, slowly joining and rejoining and joining yet again, until what was whole once becomes, once again, whole.
ALMOST CLOSED
We heated our house in Kansas with a wood-burning stove. Each night the last person still awake had to stoke the fire so it would last till morning. This was a task with which I was finally, occasionally, entrusted in my late teens; it was a clumsy, potentially noisy operation that had to be achieved with some attempt at silence since everyone else was asleep, and I can still feel the weight of the cast-iron shovel in my hands as I tried to skim ash from the stones that covered the stove’s bottom without dragging the shovel over their rough surface. The ash had to be removed, the coals consolidated, a few fat logs maneuvered through the stove’s narrow door and laid gently atop the glowing pile. I would close the door then, and lean heavily against it so that the metal of its handle wouldn’t squeak against the metal of the hasp as I fastened it. Finally, I would adjust the air vent to almost-closed, so that just enough oxygen would enter the stove’s interior to keep the flame alive, and then I would go to sleep. Even these precautions weren’t enough, and the only way to ensure that the fire would still be going come morning was by checking it during the night. This was the only thing left to chance: no one set an alarm for 3 A.M. or anything, we just hoped someone would wake up. Usually I did. I would lie in the dark for a moment, my body cocooned in blankets, my face exposed and cold; then I would rush to the bathroom and pee; then I would go to the stove and open it quickly, quietly, only a crack. There was something rhapsodic in the moment, something that demanded pause. I stared into the fire, shivering. I looked at the orange embers, tiny, fiercely hot and yet restrained, and only slowly consuming the logs laid on top of them. Air entered the stove and the coals flickered, glowed more brightly; within moments a few flames would have appeared but by then I’d have determined if the fire was okay or if another log was needed, and one way or another the moment passed. The stove and its small warmth were soon resealed, and I returned to my still-warm bed and fell asleep listening to the crackling fire settle into its own version of slumber. In the frigid morning, the stove’s vent could be opened wide: in their steel shell the coals would pulse and spit sparks until, with almost concussive suddenness, the logs would burst into flame and heat blaze into the house.
This is one way to live.
(1994)
Visions and Revisions was assembled from more than a dozen different essays written over the course of twenty-five years, many of which were previously published. I want to express my thanks to all the editors who helped me improve these pieces, not least my editor at Soho, Mark Doten, who played an invaluable role in helping me shape this book.