Autobiography of Red
Page 4
You know. Satisfied. Geryon was thinking hard. Fires twisted through him.
He picked his way carefully
toward the sex question. Why is it a question? He understood
that people need
acts of attention from one another, does it really matter which acts?
He was fourteen.
Sex is a way of getting to know someone,
Herakles had said. He was sixteen. Hot unsorted parts of the question
were licking up from every crack in Geryon,
he beat at them as a nervous laugh escaped him. Herakles looked.
Suddenly quiet.
It’s okay, said Herakles. His voice washed
Geryon open.
Tell me, said Geryon and he intended to ask him, Do people who like sex
have a question about it too?
but the words came out wrong—Is it true you think about sex every day?
Herakles’ body stiffened.
That isn’t a question it’s an accusation. Something black and heavy dropped
between them like a smell of velvet.
Herakles switched on the ignition and they jumped forward onto the back of the night.
Not touching
but joined in astonishment as two cuts lie parallel in the same flesh.
XI. HADES
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Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.
————
SPIRIT RULES SECRETLY ALONE THE BODY ACHIEVES NOTHING
is something you know
instinctively at fourteen and can still remember even with hell in your head
at sixteen. They painted this truth
on the long wall of the high school the night before departing for Hades.
Herakles’ hometown of Hades
lay at the other end of the island about four hours by car, a town
of moderate size and little importance
except for one thing. Have you ever seen a volcano? said Herakles.
Staring at him Geryon felt his soul
move in his side. Then Geryon wrote a note full of lies for his mother
and stuck it on the fridge.
They climbed into Herakles’ car and set off westward. Cold green summer night.
Active?
The volcano? Yes the last time she blew was 1923. Threw 180 cubic kilometers
of rock into the air
covered the countryside with fire overturned sixteen ships in the bay.
My grandmother says
the temperature of the air rose to seven hundred degrees centigrade downtown.
Caskets
of whiskey and rum burst into flame on the main street.
She saw it erupt?
Watched from the roof. Took a photograph of it, three p.m. looks like midnight.
What happened to the town?
Cooked. There was a survivor—prisoner in the local jail.
Wonder what happened to him.
You’ll have to ask my grandmother about that. It’s her favorite story—
Lava Man.
Lava Man? Herakles grinned at Geryon as they shot onto the freeway.
You’re going to love my family.
XII. LAVA
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He did not know how long he had been asleep.
————
Black central stalled night. He lay hot and motionless, that is, motion
was a memory he could not recover
(among others) from the bottom of the vast blind kitchen where he was buried.
He could feel the house of sleepers
around him like loaves on shelves. There was a steady rushing sound
perhaps an electric fan down the hall
and a fragment of human voice tore itself out and came past, it seemed
already long ago, trailing
a bad dust of its dream which touched his skin. He thought of women.
What is it like to be a woman
listening in the dark? Black mantle of silence stretches between them
like geothermal pressure.
Ascent of the rapist up the stairs seems as slow as lava. She listens
to the blank space where
his consciousness is, moving towards her. Lava can move as slow as
nine hours per inch.
Color and fluidity vary with its temperature from dark red and hard
(below 1,800 degrees centigrade)
to brilliant yellow and completely fluid (above 1,950 degrees centigrade).
She wonders if
he is listening too. The cruel thing is, she falls asleep listening.
XIII. SOMNAMBULA
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Geryon awoke too fast and felt his box contract.
————
Hot pressure morning. Houseful of tumbling humans and their languages.
Where am I?
Voices from somewhere. He made his way thickly downstairs
and through the house
to the back porch, huge and shadowy as a stage facing onto brilliant day.
Geryon squinted.
Grass swam towards him and away. Joyous small companies of insects
with double-decker wings
like fighter planes were diving about in the hot white wind. The light
unbalanced him,
he sat down quickly on the top step. Saw Herakles stretched on the grass
making sleepy talk.
My world is very slow right now, Herakles was saying. His grandmother
sat at the picnic table
eating toast and discussing death. She told of her brother who was conscious
to the end but could not speak.
His eyes watched the tubes they were putting in and pulling out of him so
they explained each one.
Now we are inserting sap of the queen of the night you will feel a pinch
then a black flow, said Herakles
in his sleepy voice that no one was listening to. A big red butterfly
went past riding on a little black one.
How nice, said Geryon, he’s helping him. Herakles opened one eye and looked.
He’s fucking him.
Herakles! said his grandmother. He closed his eyes.
My heart aches when I am bad.
Then he looked at Geryon and smiled. Can I show you our volcano?
XIV. RED PATIENCE
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Geryon did not know why he found the photograph disturbing.
————
She had taken it herself standing on the roof of the house that afternoon in 1923
with a box camera. “Red Patience.”
A fifteen-minute exposure that recorded both the general shape of the cone
with its surroundings (best seen by day)
and the rain of incandescent bombs tossed into the air and rolling down its slopes
(visible in the dark).
Bombs had shot through the vent at velocities of more than three hundred kilometers an hour, she told him. The cone itself
rose a thousand meters above the original cornfield and erupted about a million tons
of ash, cinder, and bombs during its early months.
Lava followed for twenty-nine months. Across the bottom of the photograph
Geryon could see a row of pine skeletons
killed by falling ash. “Red Patience.” A photograph that has compressed
on its motionless surface
fifteen different moments of time, nine hundred seconds of bombs moving up
and ash moving down
and pines in the kill process. Geryon did not know why
he kept going back to it.
It was not that he found it an especially pleasing photograph.
It was not that he
did not understand how such photographs are made.
He kept go
ing back to it.
What if you took a fifteen-minute exposure of a man in jail, let’s say the lava
has just reached his window?
he asked. I think you are confusing subject and object, she said.
Very likely, said Geryon.
XV. PAIR
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These days Geryon was experiencing a pain not felt since childhood.
————
His wings were struggling. They tore against each other on his shoulders
like the little mindless red animals they were.
With a piece of wooden plank he’d found in the basement Geryon made a back brace
and lashed the wings tight.
Then put his jacket back on. You seem moody today Geryon anything wrong?
said Herakles when he saw Geryon
coming up the basement stairs. His voice had an edge. He liked to see Geryon happy.
Geryon felt his wings turn in, and in, and in.
Nope just fine. Geryon smiled hard with half of his face. So tomorrow Geryon.
Tomorrow?
Tomorrow we’ll take the car and drive out to the volcano you’ll like that.
Yes.
Get some photographs. Geryon sat down suddenly. And tonight—Geryon? You okay?
Yes fine, I’m listening. Tonight—?
Why do you have your jacket over your head?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Can’t hear you Geryon. The jacket shifted. Geryon peered out. I said sometimes
I need a little privacy.
Herakles was watching him, his eyes still as a pond. They watched each other,
this odd pair.
XVI. GROOMING
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As in childhood we live sweeping close to the sky and now, what dawn is this.
————
Herakles lies like a piece of torn silk in the heat of the blue saying,
Geryon please. The break in his voice
made Geryon think for some reason of going into a barn
first thing in the morning
when sunlight strikes a bale of raw hay still wet from the night.
Put your mouth on it Geryon please.
Geryon did. It tasted sweet enough. I am learning a lot in this year of my life,
thought Geryon. It tasted very young.
Geryon felt clear and powerful—not some wounded angel after all
but a magnetic person like Matisse
or Charlie Parker! Afterwards they lay kissing for a long time then
played gorillas. Got hungry.
Soon they were sitting in a booth at the Bus Depot waiting for food.
They had started to practice
their song (“Joy to the World”) when Herakles pulled Geryon’s head
into his lap and began grooming
for nits. Gorilla grunts mingled with breakfast sounds in the busy room.
The waitress arrived
holding two plates of eggs. Geryon gazed up at her from under Herakles’ arm.
Newlyweds? she said.
XVII. WALLS
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That night they went out painting.
————
Geryon did an early red-winged LOVESLAVE on the garage of the priest’s house
next to the Catholic church.
Then passing down Main Street they saw fat white letters (recent) on the side
of the post office. CAPITALISM SUCKS.
Herakles eyed the paint supply dubiously. Well. He parked in the alley.
After crossing out the white letters
neatly with a bar of opaque black he encircled it in an airy red cloud
of chancery script.
CUT HERE. He was quiet as they got back into the car.
Then down the tunnel
to the on-ramp for the freeway. Geryon was bored and said he couldn’t see any
good spaces left,
got out his camera and went off towards the sound of traffic. Up on the overpass
the night was wide open
and blowing headlights like a sea. He stood against the wind and let it peel him
clean.
Back at the tunnel Herakles had finished printing his seven personal precepts
in vertical black and red over a fading
stenciled LEAVE THE WALLS ALONE and was down on one knee scraping
the brush on the edge of the can.
He did not look up but said, There’s some paint left—another loveslave?—no
let’s do something cheerful.
All your designs are about captivity, it depresses me.
Geryon watched the top of Herakles’ head
and felt his limits returning. Nothing to say. Nothing. He looked at this fact
in mild surprise. Once in childhood
his ice cream had been eaten by a dog. Just an empty cone
in a small dramatic red fist.
Herakles stood up. No? Let’s go then. On the way home they tried “Joy to the World”
but were too tired. It seemed a long drive.
XVIII. SHE
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Back at the house all was dark except a light from the porch.
————
Herakles went to see. Geryon had a thought to call home and ran upstairs.
You can use the phone in my mother’s room
top of the stairs turn left, Herakles called after him. But when he reached the room
he stopped in a night gone suddenly solid.
Who am I? He had been here before in the dark on the stairs with his hands out
groping for a switch—he hit it
and the room sprang towards him like an angry surf with its unappeasable debris
of woman liquors, he saw a slip
a dropped magazine combs baby powder a stack of phone books a bowl of pearls
a teacup with water in it himself
in the mirror cruel as a slash of lipstick—he banged the light off.
He had been here before, dangling
inside the word she like a trinket at a belt. Spokes of red rang across his eyelids
in the blackness.
As he made his way downstairs again Geryon could hear the grandmother’s voice.
She was sitting in the porch swing
with her hands in her lap and her small feet dangling. A rectangle of light
fell across the porch from the kitchen door
and just touched her hem. Herakles lay flat on his back on top of the picnic table,
both arms across his face.
The grandmother watched Geryon cross the porch and sit down between them
in a deck chair
without interrupting her sentence—this idea that your lungs will explode