Palaces

by Simon Jacobs

  A mild panic of disorientation takes me at the corner on the street above, having exited at a stop I don’t recognize, the traffic insistent in all four directions. The past version of you moves off with authority, and for a second—for the moment where I see just the top of her hair in the crowd—an old impulse nudges me to intervene. She disappears, and my recognition spreads to the rest of the street, skewed younger, toward my generation. Shifting from one face to another, I make inadvertent eye contact with a blonde girl, broadly familiar. I break it; the way I let my eyes fall to the ground, skittering over her body, makes it feel as though I’ve regressed by years, like I’ll have to start all the way over, to re-teach myself how not to make these judgments. I blur my eyes until they—her and everyone—become teeming, indistinct shapes, straining as hard as possible to black out my gaze.

  When I described my first subway encounter to you later, the staring man, you looked at me incredulously, like I knew nothing: these experiences had been your whole life. “What decade do you live in? Are you an ascetic?” you said. “It’s a body. We’re all being watched. Have you ever considered the use of lipstick? It’s basically a bullseye for your cock.” It was declarations like these—combative, associatively broad but unequivocal—that had drawn us together, had tonally linked us, and around us had built a wall against the world.

  Three hours after someone’s child disappears underground we reconnoiter at the apartment, new and disparate parts of the city poorly configured in our heads: today, you’ve been to the west, to slaughterhouses converted in recent decades to boutiques and gourmet dining. We fuck against the vase, our hands on its sides like a third party, a coolant wherever we touch it. Your breath fogs up the porcelain. I watch your fingers clench on its surface, tensing and unbending, the wrinkles flexed open at each joint, like bright wounds among the encroaching dirt gray. I’ve been to the library downtown, making use of the public bathrooms and reading up on the vase’s origins and those of its kind, trying to put together what I didn’t take from the plaque on the gallery wall. I whisper “Satsuma” in your ear, like an exhalation, a new word that’s not your name but is actually a Japanese pottery style tailor-made for export, for Western consumption. The vase is probably not as old as I originally thought. In the end, the ways we each spend our days reduce down to the same thing, making maps of places we’ll never visit again; a product of Japan is the same as a product of America. You wear the dirt like it’s something you earned, but we didn’t fall into this, we didn’t end up here by accident. We jumped.

  *

  Our first week in the apartment, before we turn off our phones and find the vase, you read online—a link to the Richmond newspaper via a wayward text from someone you haven’t heard from in a year—that Casey, the grinning, perpetually buzzed, hoop-eared kid from the old crowd, the kid we’d shot fireworks at the night we met, has died in a car wreck. The article is non-committal, but the shape of the thing is obvious: he and a friend, whose name you don’t recognize, in a parent’s borrowed car on eastbound 70 and fully blazed, sailed obliviously off the road and across the grassy divide between highway lanes, directly into oncoming traffic. Needless to say, both of them were creamed. There’s a picture of each accompanying the article, an old high school yearbook photo from a familiar era: Casey, with his four-bar Black Flag cap and his preposterous ears, smiling as always over a neutral-cloudy backdrop. He was nineteen. It’s hard to pinpoint the last time you’d seen him on purpose, though until a month ago, until we left, you’d both been in the same town your whole lives.

  There’s an immediate flurry of activity as you start texting people back, finally, after months of unanswered silence, in the wake of this tragedy re-establishing lines of communication previously cut or abandoned with a place we decided we would never return to, relationships that had ended long before we came here, before we met, even. You double over your phone and type ceaselessly into the screen, your multi-armed condolences and empathy reaching across borders and back into Richmond. The pattern, the technique of your virtual reappearance is familiar, and I watch you resurrect yourself, piece by piece, word by word, assuming the position of someone who left—as a lot of people left—but always remained connected, who has been a part of it all along. Every so often you speak a name, share a marginal anecdote like an incantation; the room, briefly, is populated with another.

  An hour or two later—a time I’m meant to believe you’ve spent deliberating, that you hadn’t made your decision the instant you saw the name in the Palladium-Item article—you look up from your spot against the wall and tell me: “I want to go back for the funeral.”

  “Back to Indiana?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I think I should be there.”

  “For who?”

  “Are you kidding? He called me Mom, John. We’ve known each other since middle school.”

  I answer immediately, I go broad where I shouldn’t. “This isn’t something you want to be a part of,” I say.

  “They’re my friends.”

  “You’re not the grieving parent, Joey.”

  “Fuck you—I don’t have to justify my relationships to you.”

  You don’t, but nonetheless I’m moralizing before I know it, some stupid manifesto based on the train, an unrelated, arbitrary tragedy from those shared college years, which had already crystallized before we met my junior year. In the days immediately after that accident—equally fatal and conceptually the same, kids in the path of a speeding object—the tiny campus was reduced to fearful paralysis with the loss of two of its students. A girl told me how horrible she felt for “not crying enough”—one of the girls who’d died had lived in her co-op and been familiar to her, they had shared a kitchen. Eventually, this not-weeping girl would join the caravan of mourners to attend the funeral in the other girl’s hometown, three hundred miles away. I was skeptical of the instantly formed grief, of her commitment to its totality. I remember thinking at the time that I felt too young for my life to be defined by significant deaths, and at the same moment that I couldn’t have picked from a small crowd the faces of the two people killed.

  “You can’t just suddenly care again,” I say now, equal in my resolve, deep in my moral hole, a code I’ve decided heedlessly to cling to, about consistency and friendship, like Casey’s death was a ploy to coax us back. “You don’t get reattached just because there’s a disaster or someone dies. We said we wouldn’t be those kinds of people. You don’t reappear at a fucking funeral.”

  You motion at the empty vacant room around us, which for an indefinite amount of time before we arrived was explicitly ignored, condemned. “And that’s why it’s just the two of us?”

  The silence through the empty doorway turns our domestic space into something else. There are times when I can’t remember how long I’ve been this way, this absolute. Occasionally it’s felt like we were locked in an unspoken battle for who could be more extreme, who could experience abjection most completely, but now I am the extreme one, the one pledging isolation—out of what, jealousy? spite?—and I answer, without really responding, “We left to get away from all that shit.”

  Your phone vibrates again. “I’ve always cared. I didn’t leave because I stopped caring.”

  “Then why did you leave?”

  You flick your finger down the screen of your phone, shooting one of your text conversations back in time. I’m distracted by this gesture—maybe that we’re still grabbing internet from somewhere in this derelict building, that the technologies seem mismatched—and I only hear your answer, or think I hear your answer, quiet, a second after it clears the air: “For fucking you!”

  It catches me, because I’m already losing track of how this argument began and the part I’m playing in it, the scope of our conversation escalating with every word, and because this idea, that I was the reason for our departure, that I instigated it, this is nothing that I’ve ever considered or conceptualized, such that I fee
l it’s been slipped into the discussion like venom to disorient me, a trick you’ve been saving, subtly deployed.

  And so my next point is even more opaque, when I feel that I’ve absolutely lost control of what I’m saying, having swerved from a line of reasoning grounded in actual life into pure abstraction. “I thought we”—the phone vibrates again, on the table whose origins, too, are unclear (no, the floor, on the floor, vibrating beneath me), and my eyes flick toward it, the proof I seek—“I thought we agreed on these things.”

  These things—by turns, everything becomes more and more vague. I feel myself, in my embodied half of the conversation, growing more horrible with every passing moment, becoming this monstrous, unanswerable thing. Your brother flickers back into my consciousness as an entity I should be aware of, that I should be cautious to remember when I speak.

  “I’m still connected with the people there,” you say, “whether it’s against your fucking moral imperatives or not.”

  “Still connected? Are you gonna stop by your parents’ too, then? Tell them where you’ve been since the last funeral you dropped in on?”

  You let out a startled breath, as if from a blow. I feel evil. I knit my fingers together and flex them, struggling to find something to say next, to soften what I’ve said. My dry hands slide audibly in and out of each other, and I try to transmit the demonstrative angst of this sound over to your dark corner of the room while, to others, you re-solidify from afar. They poise for your reappearance.

  Reading this memory after the fact, our bodies are difficult to orient—their relative positions, in what room of the apartment—because there’s no furniture to base them around, just walls at intervals. In my memory, I’m sitting on the couch and you’re in a chair by the window, though there wasn’t a couch or reasonable chair left in the whole building. The light, the tonal makeup of the room built into the memory—they’re all familiar elements, but not from the city. In the memory, it’s as if we’re in the apartment in Indiana, a different living space, as if we’ve made this decision already, to not engage, and this is a conversation we’ve had many times before.

  The funeral comes and goes. We stay in the city, but I’m convinced that it has nothing to do with me—if you really wanted to go back, there’s nothing I could do to stop you. Neither of us says anything, but within the same night that we hear of Casey’s death, you stop texting people back, and once again, disappear. A while after that, we ditch our cellphones for good—it’s not directed, we just do it, the way you sometimes abandon a habit. We take the vase. A son is lowered into the ground.

  *

  Like Casey, your brother is dead. He’s been dead for over a year, but I often forget this, randomly, at terrible times. He died, or was killed, in the worst possible way, too, as a soldier in Iraq, years after combat ended, in a freak transport accident. The first time that I notably forgot—four months after the funeral, which I’d attended—when I asked if he was taking any leave to come back to the States for the holidays (feeling, at the time, vaguely proud that I’d remembered he was serving overseas, that you had a brother at all), you didn’t seem to mind, and told me that if it were my own brother who’d died I would probably care more, which seemed harsh but, ultimately, true. As an only child, the absence of a sibling in my development was passive, innate, while yours had happened upon you after growing into it the opposite way. The worst time, however, was at a house party six months after that, the semester we graduated and did death-drive things like go to house parties, when some kid I didn’t recognize saw your hair (spiked high at that point, like mine, or mine like yours—visually, it was more obvious than anything that we were partners) and tried to strike up an awkward conversation while I was standing nearby. “Do you have any brothers or sisters?” he asked, as his fourth question.

  “I had a brother,” you said.

  “Had? What happened to him?”

  “He died.”

  There’s nothing I can say in my defense: he’d died during the time that we’d known each other, and I’d been sitting right there when your mother called to give you the news. Still, maybe there was something in your delivery, or maybe I was proximity-drunk or just too dissociated at that point to care about anything, but I actually laughed, as if it was a joke you used frequently to end conversations you didn’t want to have. The kid looked over at me because he obviously believed this to be the case, that this kind of dialogue happened often enough to be considered classic: this was how the lie spread.

  You stormed out—difficult to pull off given how packed the room was—while holding your middle finger up above the crowd, which made it obvious.

  By the time I saw you again a week and a half later, I’d done something else irreversible: this time, the frightening blue head of Yama, the Hindu god of death, to join the collection of famous faces on my leg. You didn’t notice until it had healed enough for me to blur the timeline.

  Later on, at another party where neither of us were drinking, just before we left for good, I casually introduced you to some-one as my wife, equally without thinking, at a college party for fuck’s sake, but as if I’d been doing so for years, and in some way, by this forgetting where things stood, these two gestures—the gone brother, the taking of one family for the other—were the same reversal of history.

  *

  We go to a show, one show. It’s farther downtown, at one of those venues that claim the origins of punk in this city, a place that by virtue of the pedigree graffitied onto the basement walls is supposedly different than the others, than its regional variants like the Hoosier Dome or Villa Scum in Indiana. It isn’t any different. From the instant we descend the stairs, it’s copies of people we’ve known before—Crass vests, hairstyles like wilting plants, street kids and their giant backpacks, someone’s dog, figures huddled in the corner, smell of yeast and rot; every once in a while, a spiked leather jacket out of 1977. As we walk in, I tilt my head toward the crowd abutting the stage, maybe sixty strong, all frantic movement. The show is two or three bands in. I shout at you: “Do you see the poison?”

  “I see it.”

  I always keep a wall to one side of me, and at first we hang back in the corner, straddling the line of backpacks shoved against the wall, but there’s a particular hum to the atmosphere tonight, a frictive pull to the center, and when the next band comes on we’re drawn forward, and are quickly separated. The room is densely packed enough for me to lose sight of you almost instantly, and the narrow walls cause all sound to bend inward, filling the air above us and quaking the bodies below, making of everyone rooted to the ground a bell, a conduit for vibration. The music is indiscriminate noise—I have the sense that the band onstage isn’t actually playing their instruments, but just thwacking at them beneath some louder, all-encompassing sound. Unhooked from that sensory anchor, the experience suddenly feels alien from what I remember: a scrum of bodies pressed together, compacted but still full of frantic movement, digging into me at every angle, ceaseless contact like always, but this time it feels purposeful rather than casual, I feel surrounded, like the blows are directed specifically against me, shoulders, elbows, heads, and hands, a mix of camaraderie and revenge. The air is thick, particulate warmth; it coats my skin like a spray. I am insanely hot. I feel a pair of hands—an actual pair of hands, with serious fingernails, the act of identifying them is strangely enraging—push me forward. I stagger in the crush, an elbow hits me squarely in the ear, and my head rockets to one side—my falling body clears a few feet of space, I leave an after-image of me behind. As I steady myself—which I have to do by using someone’s naked shoulder as an anchor (the flesh is warm and sweaty beneath, like it’s just come from a shower)—my left ear is ringing like the filmic equivalent of bad news. I turn to find you, but it’s impossible in the flurry of movement and the physical smell and the smoke and the awful lights, which have started, or have always been, or merely appear to be strobing. My arm is still stretched out in front of me, hasn’t been there
for more than a few seconds, but as I draw my hand back from the human shoulder, with the ringing, I have consciously forgotten that I put it there, that it’s even my arm at all rather than some hackable limb in a forest that’s standing in my way, and from there, everything goes to shit.

  It was another show like this on a different scale, watching from the middle distance and shouting along, to which I traced back the planting of this idea: that we could leave Indiana, Ohio—not just leave, but sever completely, our world and everything in it replaced with something new and unfamiliar, people without history, without our history. This show was later on, outside Richmond (after the Richmond scene had splintered apart), somewhere indisputably Business where you could buy tickets online; the band didn’t matter. Initially I’d thought it was us both mishearing the lyrics, shouting the wrong thing at the same time, until I realized that in fact we were addressing each other through the noise, screaming from opposite ends of the couch: we were claiming space, we were testing how loud we could be without assigning the words meaning. We didn’t know the lyrics but pretended we did, and our worst assumption was that they mattered at all. The music, or the energy behind it, or the fact that this kind of sound existed, however it was brought into being, this was the primal motivation: one of us was suggesting something, and the other was agreeing, the other agreeing. We were already making plans. We’d been together ten months at that point.