What Burns

by Dale Peck

  Shame on you. You’d think this was a frat house party, the way you and that girl are putting them away. I shrugged, and Gavin said, She told me when she boarded that this was her first flight ever, and now she’ll be lucky if she even remembers it.

  She did not tell you that. She flew to Logan from Bangor, Maine. She lives in Texas. I bet she flies home every weekend so her momma’s maid can do her laundry.

  That little girl is up there puking her guts out.

  Better than crying her eyes out.

  Gavin peered at me. What do you mean? Are you tormenting her too?

  Too? I repeated. As in also? As in you? Gavin pursed his lips but didn’t elaborate. What I mean, I said, is that this might or might not be her first time in an airplane, but she’s definitely terrified of them. If she wasn’t vomiting from drinking too much, she’d be vomiting from fear.

  Gavin glanced toward the front of the cabin then, and I saw Heather emerging from the lavatory. Like most people her age, the experience of vomiting up her liquor seemed to have refreshed her, and she walked more steadily down the aisle.

  Gavin stood up. You have an answer for everything don’t you, Francis? He pushed past me. But none of them are straight.

  Heather had come up behind Gavin, and she looked uncertainly between the two of us.

  I’m not going to touch that line with a ten-inch pole, Gavin. But if you’d be so kind as to bring me and my companion a couple of stomach-soothing ginger ales, we’d both appreciate it.

  Heather waited until she was back in her seat before speaking. So how long were you two together? She kept her voice steady, and the determination in her tone impressed me: she had decided to rise to the occasion.

  About five minutes, I said.

  I meant—Heather glanced at Gavin—you and Laird.

  I know what you meant, and five minutes is about as accurate as any other measurement. She frowned with the dissatisfaction of the literal-minded, so I said, All told, I’d say we fucked around for about three months.

  That’s it?

  Heather, my dear, my fate was sealed the day I met Laird. Everything else, as he himself liked to say, was just gravy.

  But how did you—She tried to stop herself, but curiosity got the better of her manners. How’d you get his money?

  How does one get money? He left it to me. In fact he converted it into cash first, and he secreted it in various bank accounts around the world, and he left the access codes inside a Gideon Bible that had somehow found its way to the bedside table of the Hotel InterContinental in Melbourne, and while I was on my way to pick them up—he had asked me to run what he called a business errand—he hung himself. With the aforementioned Hermès tie. Don’t worry, dear, this is a Gene Meyer. There was a will too, which codified everything and protected me from lawsuits on the part of all those poor relations, but possession, at any rate, is nine-tenths of the law. The money was mine, whether I wanted it or not. Do you want to know how much?

  No, Heather said, a little too quickly, and then she said, Yes.

  I told her.

  This time there was no doubt in my mind that Heather’s reaction was genuine. She stared at me for several moments, and something propelled me to add the final detail. Did I mention he videotaped it?

  His . . . will?

  His . . . death.

  Oh my god, she nearly spat. The man was a freak. He was evil. I patted her on the knee, but she wasn’t finished yet. But, but . . . She turned to the window and stared at the darkened sky for nearly a minute before she turned back to me. But you loved him. Didn’t you?

  Heather, I was twenty-nine years old and I was nowhere. Ten years of auditions had landed me nothing more than a series of jobs waiting tables, and Laird Swope was a handsome man whose crotch turned out to be even more loaded than his wallet. If you don’t already have an understanding of the values of these things, then—

  Heather cut me off. I may not know about big dicks, Mr. Rich Fag Who Flirts With Flight Attendants, but I do know about money. My daddy’s a proctologist. He was born in a dirt-floor shack and now he’s got the biggest rear-end clinic on the Gulf. For Christmas last year he made pens that said, “Your shit is my bread and butter.” Out of gold. A giggle interrupted her encomium. But then he was too embarrassed to give them to his patients, so he just gave them to the family.

  Heather, I said firmly. When I used the word loaded, I wasn’t referring to size.

  Heather’s eyes held mine a moment, comprehension almost but not quite entering them. I looked up to see Gavin making his way down the aisle, his head shaking back and forth. He smelled of some kind of soap and, ever so faintly, molasses.

  There’s a problem child on every flight, and you’re mine.

  He spoke to Heather but looked at me, and I was looking back at him and so was quite surprised when Heather practically fell into my lap. She was leaning over me in a manner that afforded Gavin the best possible view of her cleavage. Even though she knew the impulse was out of place, she’d not yet learned any other way to address the situation at hand.

  Gavin, she said, fluttering her eyelashes. You’ve been so good to us that me and Mr. Pelton here would like to buy you a drink.

  Alas, Gavin said, being a flight attendant is a bit like being a police officer. No drinking on the job, no matter how attractive the, um, buyer might be. He looked at me when he said buyer, and I just shrugged. Then, addressing Heather with mock sternness: I have to get back to my dishes, but I warn you, if I have to come back here one more time I’m turning off the tap.

  Heather still lay in my lap. With some twisting, she managed to look up at me. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes bright. Ah, Francis, she said. I feel like I’ve known you all your life.

  But, my dear, you have. My life began when this plane took off and it shall end when it lands—only to begin anew when the next plane takes to the sky.

  The Conk, Heather said, giggling a little, and then her voice sobered. I don’t get it. I mean, you live on airplanes?

  For want of a better term, yes, I live on airplanes.

  But why?

  Oh, I don’t know. Something about the feeling of freedom that attaches to the possibility of imminent death. Memento mori, carpe diem, blah blah blah. Heather continued to look up at me with the truly naive gaze of someone who actually doesn’t know what she wants to know, and I shrugged. I suppose airplanes were all he left me.

  In his will?

  Laird left me money in his will. He left me a whole lot of money, but only a few ways to spend it.

  He wanted you to buy—Heather broke off. She shook her head; then, grimacing, stopped that too. Please, she said. I’m a young drunk redneck from the Gulf Coast of Texas. ’Splain it to me in words I can understand.

  Laird was afraid of flying.

  Laird . . . was afraid . . . of flying?

  Laird was one of life’s great capitalists. He bought and sold agricultural futures. He moved in the margin between people’s need for food and the possibility that that food would actually come into existence by a specified time, and he spent the vast amounts of money he earned buying up anything he wanted, including me. The entire enterprise was based on a kind of faith: that the rain would fall but not so much the fields would flood, that the harvest would be plentiful, but the markets wouldn’t glut, that an elevator fire in Kenosha, Kansas, wouldn’t burn up the wheat he’d bought before it had even been planted. But despite all these purely imaginary transactions, Laird refused to believe that four thousand tons of aluminum, glass, fuel, and flesh could lift up off the ground and stay there.

  When I had finished speaking Heather opened and closed her pretty blue eyes three times. The movement was lethargic but deliberate, registering the transitions between her reactions to my words. Confusion—blink—incredulity—blink—contempt—blink—pity.

  Blink.
<
br />   I just realized something.

  And what is that?

  I’m not scared no more. She raised her voice. I may be a hick but I’m not like Laird. And I’m not like you either.

  Despite myself, I laid my hand on her cheek. It was cool to the touch, but even as I glanced out the darkened window my mind flashed on the bones and veins beneath Heather’s smooth lotioned skin, and with as much sincerity as I could muster I said, I hope that you never do become like me.

  Heather Beaumont had learned some things, but there were others she refused to know. Gently but firmly, she turned her cheek from my hand. She seemed to be casting about for something to say, but the plane chose that moment to interrupt her: the video monitors flickered into life. The in-flight entertainment was starting. Without sitting up, Heather attempted to focus on the screen in front of us. She stared at it intently with slightly glazed eyes, as if waiting for something to appear, and then her eyelids fluttered shut and her chin fell on her chest and she began to snore quietly. She was nineteen years old and she had had six or seven cocktails in the space of about three hours and she had her head on the lap of a raving lunatic: what other escape did she have besides sleep?

  The lights in the cabin dimmed. Scattered ratchetings marked the recline of seat-backs and the raising of footrests. The engine’s efforts produced a wall of white noise over which the only sound was an occasional thump or tinkle from the galley: Gavin, putting away the dinner dishes and making sure everything was ready for breakfast, a foreshortened night away. He walked back and forth between the central and side bays of the galley in his apron, and each time he did he glanced back into the cabin. When he caught my eye he smiled; I smiled back. He mimed drinking; I shook my head. He pretended to comb long blond hair out of his eyes, and I placed folded hands against the side of my cheek, and then I pointed down to Heather’s head in my lap. Once again he mimed the act of drinking, but this time he held up two imaginary glasses, and then he motioned for me to join him in the galley.

  Before I got up I took the money Heather had given me for her first two drinks and placed it inside the front cover of her textbook. On the flyleaf was a fat arrow-pierced heart enclosing the initials H.B. and D.P. Heather’s sleeping face was smooth and untroubled, free of the anxious lines that a conversation with me had temporarily drawn there. I eased out from beneath her. Her head was surprisingly heavy, a literal refutation, if one were still needed, to the idea she was some kind of airhead. Would that I were D.P., I thought as I stood up, Heather’s swain rather than her jaded interrogator, tormenting her with tales of the city for no other reason than that I was bored.

  In front of the cabin something popped loudly, and a small bolt of fear ran through my heart. I glanced down at Heather one last time and smiled at this funny bond between us. But it was just Gavin, opening a bottle of champagne.

  He’d already filled two glasses by the time I made it up front, and he held one out to me as I ducked through the stiff curtain that shielded the galley from the aisle. He’d taken off his apron, and his navy-blue tailored uniform, though flimsy polyester, was still sexy in the way that all uniforms are sexy. He was smiling. He said, A part of me would like to throw this drink in your face for being such a pain in my ass, but . . . He let his words trail off.

  But a part of you wants me to be even more of a pain in your ass.

  We sipped at our champagne, and then he looked at his watch. Chances are it’ll be a good two hours before anyone buzzes.

  I thought I was the one who was supposed to be drunken and forward.

  He shrugged. They can’t exactly fire me till we land, can they? Besides, I’m tired of flying all the time.

  Oh Gavin. So am I.

  Before he could ask about that I kissed him, and that was all we did, but we did it for a long time. When we finally broke apart I reached a hand into the breast pocket of my jacket, and Gavin’s eyes went wide.

  Are you getting what I think you’re—He stopped when he saw what I’d pulled from my pocket: a checkbook. I put it on the counter next to my champagne glass, and then I reached back in my pocket for a little pillbox and put it on the counter as well, and then, looking Gavin directly in the eye, I unbuckled my belt.

  I’d like to give you something. An old flame gave it to me, and I think it’s time I passed it on.

  Gavin’s eyes flashed between my checkbook, my pillbox, my opened belt.

  What? His eyes cleared. Oh. He took a little step back from me, caught himself with a nervous chuckle. So, he said, and shrugged. Over his shoulder a window revealed the first sprinkle of stars, a few yellow pinpricks above bands of deep blue and orange. The idea of land seemed like a dream from someone else’s life. So, Gavin said again, and that was all.

  Manhattan looks like a kipper as you leave it, curling in the sun. The rocks off the frothy coast of Reykjavík look like peppercorns in cream sauce as you approach, and then, as you descend, the blue of the water emerges and they look like the last crumbs of coffee cake on a Hepplewhite plate. And once I remember, though I can’t remember where, I flew over a place where the view was all rolling hills. The trees studding them were leafless, from that altitude nothing more than brown pins poking from a cushion’s surface, and at their bases an old snowfall whitened the ground. It was winter on earth. The scene made me think of a bolt of rumpled burlap laid over something pristine and white, and for a moment I wondered what might lie under that cover, a pale body, a marble frieze, perhaps simply another layer of cloth, and then I’d remembered that I wasn’t actually looking at burlap but at trees and snow and hilly terrain, and then the airbrakes came on with a roar, the plane decelerated, a flight attendant, not Gavin, began to announce connecting flights: Ibiza, Edinburgh, Moscow, Riga, and points north. Looking out the window over Gavin’s shoulder, I remembered the words and imagined a crystalline plain merging infinitesimally into the frozen sky.

  Francis?

  I started slightly, looked at Gavin, at the items on the counter, then refastened my belt. Gavin made no move to stop me.

  So, he said. Why do you spend so much time on airplanes? He smiled uncertainly. Where’re you going anyway?

  It wasn’t the kind of question I normally answered, so I was a little surprised when I heard myself saying, Points north. I shook my head, returned Gavin’s uncertain smile. I tucked my checkbook and pillbox back in my jacket. Though I might fly forever, some things would stop with me. Points north, I said again, louder. That has a nice air to it, don’t you think?

  —2004

  IV.

  I’ve always been drawn to the shape of things. The shell. Tree trunks, the swell of a calf beneath a skirt. Pediments, the tube of a bicycle tire. I like outlines, edges, the mystery of cloister. I see no difference between a man’s chest and a cupboard: both hide something, and I’ve never been able to resist filling them with lies. There are times when the inside shows itself on the outside—ribs under skin, the shadow of dishes in glass-fronted cabinetry—but most closed things like to keep their secrets. Not what’s in there, nor how it got there, but why. Why is always the real mystery; what is just the thing we use to conceal that fact from ourselves. But illness has changed the nature of my vision. No, not illness—I’ve been sick for a long time. Dying. The indolence of death. That’s what’s changed me. As I lie here and look out the window, it’s as if an angel is frittering away the time until she comes for me with the idle gossip of the omniscient. See that girl, the angel whispers in my ear, the one in the striped socks walking past the church? She cheated on her geography final. And that other, with the hennaed hair? Her favorite thing to do is immerse her fingers in her collie’s mane. Her collie’s name is Elfir. Elfir is rifle spelled backwards, but the girl with the hennaed hair doesn’t know that. She thinks it has a magical Nordic sound, elf crossed with Fafnir. The girl’s name is Christina, and she’ll be dead in sixty-two years, but she doesn’t know that eith
er, and won’t until she’s dead.

  The Law of Diminishing Returns

  Someone told me they were more careful in England. He said they were more careful in Europe actually, because of all the wars. He said as a result of centuries of conflict they had less to spare over there, less to waste, and so, dutifully, but not, like the environmentalists in the States, piously, they collected their cans and plastic and paper, their dead batteries, bald tires, and scrap metal and turned it all in for recycling, they built energy-efficient appliances, took shorter showers, swaddled their children in cloth rather than disposable diapers. On account of the wars? I remember asking. They bombed the shit out of that place, my informant told me. Trenches, he said. Mines. Mustard gas. It all had its effect, and they’re still feeling it today. Blood, he said. Blood is a poison. On some battlefields it was years before anything would grow. He said they were more careful in Europe but I had to settle, when I left, for England—the language thing—and I guess I just hoped that the English would follow the European example because I liked the idea of living among a careful people: I liked not just the idea of frugality but return, reuse, of, to put it bluntly, second chances, and it seemed at first that England, that London, where I settled, did offer that. Within a week I had a flat in a terrace house, in Bethnal Green admittedly, but it was cheap and clean, two large barren rooms with a view over my downstairs neighbor’s vegetable garden, I had an umbrella, a Travelcard, an adapter cable for my computer, a phone number even, and I had Derek. That’s my name, I said, when he told me his. It wasn’t my name, but I would have used the line no matter what his had been. I was a new man in a new country and I had decided that a new name—not a new name, but a borrowed name, a recycled one—suited the occasion, if only for a night. Your name’s Derek? he said, fancy that, and then he grinned and he said, Fancy a walk in the park, Derek? I thought he was joking, and brought him instead to my place—I’d gone, on a Sunday night, and on the advice of a gay guide I’d bought, to a loud little club just down Mile End Road—and in the morning I woke up with a large bruise on my tailbone because I had blankets but no bed. No bed and no Derek: he’d slipped out in the middle of the night, leaving only the bruise and a note next to the phone. I took the liberty of taking your number, he wrote. You’re a sound sleeper. He had, in fact, peeled off the tiny sticker affixed to the phone that BT had provided me, and thus he didn’t just take my number, he deprived me of the ability to give it to anyone else, because I hadn’t yet memorized it. I think that’s how he got me. The sex had been great but it had also just been sex; it was the peculiar piracy of peeling off a sticky phone label and pocketing it, so odd, so determined in securing its goal, that led me to believe Derek felt something more than mere lust for me. At that time I believed emotion flowed from motion, from action, that love emanated from routine—sex, shared meals, shopping for Christmas presents—and it seemed to me that Derek’s little theft was the first step in such a routine. Now it seems to me that I was thinking about love as if it were some kind of byproduct. Love is like trash: it’s not something you hoard, merely something you don’t waste, like heat, or water, or paper. Or words, for that matter, because what’s more recycled than the language of love? The language of hate, perhaps, or the language of disinterest: Let’s be friends. Which is what Derek said when he called a few days later. He said, Let’s be friends, shall we? and I assented innocuously, because I was trying to think of a way to ask him what number he’d just dialed. I never did, and as a result didn’t know what my phone number was until the bill came three weeks later, by which point Derek had called several more times, always during the day, and once or twice a week he stopped by on his way home from work. In the meantime I acquired a bed, a sofa, a table and two chairs, enough dishes to feed as many as four people at the same time, and my flat absorbed these new acquisitions and still somehow seemed empty, and so, as an exercise, I typed up every single thing in the flat that wasn’t attached to it by nails or glue, starting with myself and ending with three loose paper clips I found in the bottom of my computer case, and the entire list, single-spaced, a single entry per line, stretched to seven pages. I felt a little better then, and reminded myself how deceptive appearances can be. The list went with me on my first trip to the local recycling center, but the pages I left there were just as quickly replaced by an office supply store I’d found that sold unbleached stock made from 100% post-consumer waste. I had, as they say, gotten my break, and I was working on a screenplay, and also several treatments, and the amount of paper I went through was unconscionable. I wrote at home, all day, every day; the words barely trickled out of me but even so the pages seemed to flow from my printer, the spool of fax paper spewed forth a cataract of queries and comments and suggestions for cutting that seemed to require twice as much new material to fill the gap, and the stacks of paper I took regularly to the recycling center were embarrassingly large. I’d been . . . what, not careful, not in the manner of Europeans, but concerned about waste since I was a child. People think I’m lying when I say that my earliest memory is of Jimmy Carter appearing on television during the OPEC crisis, but it’s true. He sat, as I recall, in front of a fireplace in which burned a few small logs, and in a quiet drawl I still consider the very voice of reasonableness, if not reason itself, he urged Americans to turn their thermostats down to sixty-eight degrees. Put on a sweater, he said, pulling on the placket of the gray cardigan that, along with two destroyed helicopters and seven dead bodies in the middle of the Iranian desert, would become a symbol of his political ineptitude. The cardigan might have been light blue actually, the number of bodies in the desert higher or lower than seven, but the one detail I’ve never forgotten is the temperature, sixty-eight, if only because it happened to be the year of my birth. Sixty-eight degrees and a sweater—not sixty-seven and thermal underwear, not sixty-nine and a T-shirt. Perhaps the only thing that bothered me about my flat in London was that the thermostat was scored in Celsius, and several months into my stay, in my own sweater—and scarf sometimes, and open-fingered gloves—I still worried that I was wasting energy, that irretrievable kilowatts were pushing through the warped glass and wind-rattled frame of my living room’s big bay window and evaporating into the gray gray gray winter sky that hung above London like a shroud, but all I did was buy a set of heavy curtains to help retain the heat. By then I was more worried about Derek, about, I should say, my relationship with him, which had taken on a pattern that seemed a little too familiar for comfort: the phone call from work, the quick fuck between five-thirty and six, the occasional drink at Benjy’s or some gay venue in Brixton or Islington or Shepherd’s Bush—places, as my guidebook told me, distinctly not on the beaten gay track—and finally I just asked him if there was someone else. Not exactly, he said. Not exactly? Well, he said, the truth is there is someone. You’re someone else. He didn’t call for a week after that, but he did call eventually, and he said he had an extra ticket for a play on the South Bank, Friday, he said, eight sharp. Did I want to go? In the end I was early; he was late. I’d wanted to ask him how he came to possess an “extra” ticket for a play, but immediately he said Derek’s ill, meaning, I realized with a start, the someone measured against whom I was someone else. He grinned sardonically when he said it, and I wondered if he were on to my ruse, if he’d found something with my real name on it in my flat, or if he was merely playing a joke of his own, but before I could question him we were rushed into the theater by the usher, just as the curtain lifted. Coffee? Derek said afterward, and I assented, picturing some dark firelit café where jazz would be playing softly, more West Village than West London, really, but it didn’t matter, really, since what I got was one of the garishly antiseptic eateries at the theater complex itself. One espresso later—served in an unbelievably over-designed demitasse made of bleached white paper complete with a glued-on handle whose wings folded open and shut like a butterfly’s—and Derek said, I have to be off. I started to protest but he said, My patient calls, and then
he shook my hand with mock formality, winked, and told me to be a good boy and use the loo before I got on the tube. He nodded at a door behind me. Another espresso—the counter girl looked at me strangely when I presented my paper cup to be refilled, They’re not free you know, she said, to which I replied, I know—and I headed for the door Derek had indicated. It led to a hallway that led to a long narrow descending staircase that led in turn to another hallway, this one dim, dirty, and smelling of subterranean damp, at the end of which was a door marked Gentlemen. There was no Ladies to be seen. I went through the loudly protesting door, and then, three feet farther on, another, just as loud, and found a small room containing three sinks and three stalls. No urinals. I almost turned around but by then I really did have to go, so I stepped into a stall. What a waste, I thought, addressing Derek in my head, 5.0 litres per flush as the Armitage Shanks commode dutifully indicated in faint periwinkle stencil, all for a thin piddle that would hardly fill one of those ridiculously wasteful paper demitasses used upstairs, and almost at the same time as I noticed the hole chiseled into the wall next to the toilet roll dispenser I heard the delayed double whine of the outer doors, and I knew why Derek had sent me down here. The stalls were partitioned by what looked like granite, a brown stone mottled with black and white and flecked here and there with purple, their doors were oak and heavy—solid, I mean, not mere veneer—and brightly varnished, and they reached all the way to the floor; the toilet was, in fact, rather more grand than the poured concrete structure twenty or thirty feet overhead, a structure that just happened to be the preeminent theatrical venue in the country, by which I mean that it wasn’t exactly the place one would expect to find a glory hole, let alone one so laboriously, even lovingly constructed: perfectly round, its edges invitingly soft, and placed at an appropriately average height. The door to the stall next to mine opened, shut, its lock clicked. For a moment I heard only the hum of fluorescent lights, then, distinctly, the sound of a zipper opening, but nothing else, no plash of liquid into the bowl, no jingle of coins and car keys as pants slid down thighs, and so, after a moment, I bent over and risked a peek. All I saw at first was another hole in the wall opposite mine, and then, almost on cue, into the circular frame stepped a pair of dark trousers from whose open fly protruded an erect uncircumcised penis. A brown hand was stroking the penis, which was a slightly darker brown, and when it seemed to me that my own silence had grown conspicuously long my neighbor also bent forward, and our eyes met. I could see just one—it was dark and bright—and a large nose, and a full-lipped mouth that smiled almost immediately, revealing the inevitability of tea-stained teeth. He stood up, and a moment later his penis poked through the hole in the granite partition, but before I could decide what to do with it, or about it, the entrance doors whined in warning and the penis was gone like a mouse retreating into its hole. Faint footsteps, then silence. Then the water began running in the sink and I knew instinctively that we were fine: who washes their hands before they use the toilet? Well, the British probably do, but I wasn’t thinking that then. The water ran; the penis reappeared; for some reason the sound was the license I needed, and without hesitating I took it, first in my hand and then in my mouth. The water continued to run. I closed my eyes against the kaleidoscopic spangles of the granite wall so close to my face. The thing in my mouth seemed to have no odor, no taste even: it simply felt. Warm. Living. Not even human really, just . . . alive. The granite was cold against my forehead when I let it rest there, and my urine in the bowl gave off a faint stink, making me wish I’d flushed. When the man twitched a bit, a warning or an invitation depending on your point of view, I moved aside; when he came his semen shot straight into the bowl and I couldn’t quite suppress a chuckle; when, a moment later, I stepped out of the stall, unconsciously wiping my lips with the back of my hand, I saw a dainty little thing, tight pants, tight shirt, both black and shiny, crowned by a bleached-blond Caesar, standing at the sink where the water was still running down the drain at the rate of one gallon, one British gallon, per minute. I went right up to him and turned off the tap. That’s very wasteful, I said, especially given the fact that we’re in the middle of a drought. A moment later the man from the other stall joined us. He was Indian, about my age, more handsome than I would have expected from this sort of encounter, and taller than I’d realized; he must have had to bend his knees awkwardly to make it through the hole. As we walked out together the queen at the sink said, Greedy, greedy, greedy, in what I think was a Brummie accent, Grey-dy, grey-dy, grey-dy, and then he turned the water back on. My trick’s name was Nigel. He carried a briefcase, wore a loosened tie; he was on his way home from an incredibly late day at the office, he said, and thought he’d check out the cottages on the South Bank before catching the tube at Embankment. My good luck, I said. It’s usually busier, he said, but the play got bad notices. The play? I said, barely able to remember it. You’re American? he said. I assumed he’d noticed my accent, but instead he squeezed my shoulder. Americans are just so big, he said, all that conspicuous consumption, and then, before we’d made it up the long flight of stairs, he’d told me about a few other places, Russell Square, the second floor toilets at Harvey Nicks, Mile End Park on Sunday nights, but the place that caught my ear was the Stoke Newington cemetery. People have sex in a cemetery? I said. What else are they going to do there? Nigel said, and then he made me hold back for a minute so we weren’t seen leaving together. He kissed me first, said he was sorry he hadn’t returned the favor but the boyfriend was waiting at home, and then he grabbed my crotch. Damn, he said. What a waste, and then, with an all-purpose Cheers mate, he was gone. Upstaged then, by not one but two boyfriends, I made my way home. Mile End, as it happened, was the next tube stop past mine, and I decided to ride the extra distance to take a look at the thin spit of trees at the north end of the park across from the station, a tiny copse that, according to Nigel, held as many as two dozen men each Sunday after Benjy’s let out. I wasn’t looking for another trick, but between Derek and Nigel I felt all worked up and there wasn’t anything in particular to rush home to, and it was only a little before midnight when I spilled out of the tube with a large loud number of kids on their way to Benjy’s—straight kids, because Benjy’s only catered to a gay crowd on Sundays, and then only surreptitiously—and I let myself ride their swell for half a dozen steps until I saw the trees across the street, low scrubby evergreens fleshing out the trunks of some kind of short deciduous with pale shiny bark. Stick-skinny girls in short skirts shivered in the cold October wind while boys with acne on their foreheads tossed their keys up in the air and looked around to see if anyone was watching, and measured against their camaraderie the little grove looked cold and inhospitable, but still, I decided to check it out. The nearest entrance to the park was a ways in on Burdett Road, past Benjy’s and a busy chip shop and the back of a darkened dingy council block, and after I’d made it through all that—I was sure that everyone I passed knew exactly what I was up to, and walking through them felt like running a gauntlet—I had to walk back up to the trees across a lawn whose grass was so dry it broke audibly under my feet. The papers said it had been, literally, the driest summer in recorded history, and though fall had brought the relief of coolness the gray skies hadn’t yet delivered any rain. The drought had been some kind of vague comfort to me during my several months here. At first I thought it was simply because it reinforced my natural urge to conserve resources and ration them appropriately. Each evening as I washed my handful of dishes with a barely dampened sponge I watched the news on Channel 4 and felt joined with like-minded liberals all over England. The lawns of Hyde Park browned like toast, black cabs withered beneath a never-washed patina of dust, and swimming pools—said to be in Oxfordshire, although I had a hard time imagining something as American as a swimming pool anywhere in England—filled at summer’s start, were by now nothing more than puddles at the bottom of dirt-encrusted concrete holes, and, as I said, I felt a kinship with these people, which had
comforted me, or at least I thought it had. I would watch the news and give the taps an extra twist to make sure they were fully closed and imagine my downstairs neighbor doing exactly the same thing, but as I walked across the open lawn of Mile End Park I remembered that New York, like London now, had been in the midst of a drought when I’d moved there a decade earlier, and I realized that it was probably only memory that assuaged my loneliness, not recycled water but recycled thoughts, recycled habits: letting laundry accumulate, showering every other day, putting a brick in the toilet tank to save a quart of water—an American quart—with each flush. The moon was the single light in the night sky bright enough to push through the clouds, and I felt its beam focused on me as I crunched my way across the wide open lawn. When I was on the street the trees had seemed slightly sinister but now they cast friendly sheltering shadows, and as I got closer I could make out several gaps in the low evergreens. I headed for the nearest, pushed aside a few scaly branches, and suddenly found myself on a well-worn path. A mulch of last year’s needles and leaves softened my footsteps, which only three or four paces further on brought me to a small oblong clearing, where, like socks on a laundry line, a row of more than a dozen condoms hung over a couple of thin branches. Or flags, I thought. The condoms hung there like a row of welcoming banners in front of a swanky hotel, although that night the clearing was without any guests. It was surprisingly bright though. The branches overhead did little more than filter the moon’s glow, and plastic wrappers from condoms and candy glittered like something more precious than mere trash while patiently waiting out their millennia on earth. A flash on a tree trunk caught my eye: a shred of red cloth. I tried to imagine the man who had leaned up against this trunk and what had caused him to tear his shirt, perhaps a startled twitch as a pair of headlights shone through the leaves, or the inevitable shudder as he came, or perhaps the grove had simply held on to a piece of him when he walked away, unwilling to take the tryst as lightly as he had, as had the men who’d draped the condoms across its branches. A pair of voices disturbed me then. Peering through the trees, I could make out a couple of stout men passing by on the sidewalk, which couldn’t have been twenty feet away. Their blond crewcuts reflected the moon like mirror balls—almost all the white men in this neighborhood were blond and crewcut, just as almost all their South Asian neighbors wore their hair long, either beneath turbans or, on the younger men, in neatly dressed ponytails—and their East London accent was so pronounced I could hardly make out a word, but the tone was loud and boisterous, drunken but not particularly so. I imagined they were making their way home from the pub to their wives, and as their voices faded away they were replaced by the memory of another disembodied voice, this one also loud, but angry, shouting actually, I was only taking a piss, is what the voice had shouted. Can’t someone take a piss without you shutting the light off behind them? and I remembered shouting back, I piss in the dark all the time, even though the light I had shut off had been in the living room. Some people, I shouted, don’t need to look at their dicks to make them work, and a moment later the voice and the body from which it emanated appeared in the door. Well, some of us should clean up the mess we make beside the toilet in the middle of the night, is what he said. I’m just trying to do my part, I said then, to which he replied, This isn’t a play. There are no parts, there isn’t a script. There are only lights, which we leave on so we can see where we’re going—and just then a car’s headlights splintered the grove of trees, dancing a chorus line of skeletal shadows across the clearing where I stood. I shook myself and pretended I was shivering. As a memory, it was simply a piece of trash, and, dutifully, I shoved it back in the bin and slammed the lid down on it. I pocketed the scrap of red cloth and headed for home, and when I got there I showered off the coating of dust I seemed to have acquired on my foray into the woods. I felt guilty that I couldn’t bring myself to shower as someone told me they did in Germany—a quick spray, a lather with soap that congealed perceptibly as the water evaporated from one’s body, a second splash to rinse. I’d tried it only once, on what seemed like a hot summer morning, and when I stepped out of the shower my teeth were chattering and my skin slimy with soap scum, and as I toweled off I looked longingly at the spume of steam that, along with a falsetto caterwaul, rose from my downstairs neighbor’s bathroom window. That night I indulged myself, lingering in the shower for nearly ten minutes, but afterwards I turned the heat all the way down and wrapped myself in a comforter I’d bought when I’d bought my bed, and I said, out loud, defiantly, I am doing my part. In the morning I saw that Derek had called the night before, while I’d been in the park, and he came by later that afternoon to make it up to me. It’s fucking freezing, he said when he arrived, and with a carelessness that I envied he rotated the dial on the thermostat without even looking at it. By the time he left the sun had gone down and my flat was so hot my eyes watered in their sockets. I turned the thermostat down, blindly, as Derek had turned it up, but it wasn’t until I woke up shivering that I realized my place was, once again, freezing, and empty, and life went on that way, it got even colder but still neither rain nor snow would fall, I saw Derek once a week on average, a quick meal usually, followed by a quick fuck, although sometimes he sneaked out on a weekend and we would go shopping, Oxford Street, Covent Garden and Soho, South Ken, and I blew hundreds of pounds on those occasions but it didn’t really matter because in between days with Derek I was writing the most puerile sorts of advertising copy masking itself as cinematic entertainment, for which money was simply being thrown at me, and even at an unfavorable exchange rate I had cash to burn. And so it happened that I woke up one morning after Derek had been there the night before and saw that, Derek or no Derek, my flat was hardly empty. I looked around my bedroom, through the doors to the front room. There were things everywhere. Electronics equipment especially: television, VCR, stereo, computer, printer, fax, phone, the answering machine with its unblinking red eye. Stacks of books grew from the mantel up the chimney, flanked by a pair of candleless candlesticks I’d picked up in the market on Brick Lane, and in the grate itself was a chest I’d bought the same day to hold the British linens I’d bought to cover my British mattress, which, like British paper and British men, was longer and skinnier than the American variety. I remembered then the list of my possessions I’d made in my first week here, and draped by my comforter I made my way to my desk and sat in my chair and turned on my computer—so many things!—and tried to recreate it. I stopped after thirty pages. I hadn’t looked in the closet yet, or pulled open a single drawer, but I didn’t need to: it was clear I had somehow managed to stuff my flat as fat as a Thanksgiving turkey, and I remembered then what Nigel had said about Americans and their conspicuous consumption. For the first time I wondered what would happen to all of my possessions when I left. I tripped on that for a moment, I wasn’t sure why, until I realized it was the first time I’d acknowledged that just as surely as I’d come to London I’d leave it one day, I wasn’t sure when and I wasn’t sure why, but then I wasn’t exactly sure why I’d come to London either. I’d thought I wanted to live unburdened by the things that had weighed me down in New York, but as I scrolled through the list on my computer—I couldn’t bring myself to waste the paper it would take to print it out—it seemed to me that life was nothing more than a process of accumulation. The only thing you lost was time. But I refused to accept this conclusion, and I resolved, again, to divest myself of as much extraneous matter as possible, months of newspapers that had accumulated and needed to be recycled, the books I’d read, which I sold to a used bookstore for a few pounds, also a nested stack of electronics boxes that took up almost all the space in my closet. Why did I save this stuff, I asked myself as I snapped the boxes’ Styrofoam packing sleeves into tiny pieces, why did I think a minor act of conservation could repair the damage already perpetrated by the manufacturing process that had belched forth all this shit? Also in my closet were a couple of shirts that had come from New York with me,
shirts I’d rarely worn there and never worn here, and I decided I would give them to the Salvation Army. The nearest one I could find was in Camden, which required a formidably complex tube journey, but I negotiated it successfully, and handed over the two shirts plus a couple more that I’d bought for Derek and that he’d said he couldn’t accept, and a pair of pants he’d bought me that I liked but still shucked out of spite, and as I handed my package over I told myself that I was becoming one of those faceless people who provide all the great finds in used clothing stores that I’d been adept at sniffing out in my first years in New York. It was an image of myself I liked, and so the circuitous route between Bethnal Green and Camden became a regular sojourn for me. I only went when I had bought something, a jacket or a pair of pants or shoes, and all I did was weed out a similar older item to make room for the new thing, and I hadn’t realized how frequent a visitor I was until one day when I went in armed with a single pair of green cotton chinos, and, because I felt silly going in to surrender one item, a white button-down shirt that I would have had to replace sooner or later, and the old woman whom I saw most regularly smiled at me and said, Simon will be glad you’ve been in. Simon? I said, and the old woman beamed. He works at the weekend. He’s just your size—he usually snatches up whatever you bring in before it makes it to the floor. Says you keep him in clothes, you do. Even shoes. I mumbled something incoherently then, I wasn’t even sure what I’d meant my mumbling to sound like, and quickly left the store, but that weekend, after an early meeting with Derek, I found myself in front of the Salvation Army. There was the thinnest coat of frost on the ground—the weatherman tried to call it snow, but no one was fooled—and I’d worn sunglasses to protect my eyes from the glare. I kept them on when I went into the store, thinking they would serve as some sort of disguise, but when I realized that Simon would have no idea who I was I took them off quickly. There was no mistaking him though. The green and brown plaid shirt he wore had come from my closet, as well as the brown corduroy pants, and although I couldn’t see Simon’s feet I guessed he was wearing a pair of suede boots I’d dropped off on the same day I dropped off the plaid shirt and corduroys. Excuse me, I said then. I was in here earlier this week and I saw a pair of pants I liked. They were green. Canvas, no pleats. Simon looked up from the book he’d been reading. Sorry? Despite myself, I was surprised. He was young—I mean, much younger than I was—and a part of me had expected my own face to look at me from out of my own clothes. Green pants, I said quickly, stammering slightly. I saw them earlier—I don’t work during the week, Simon interrupted me. Wouldn’t know what was here, but I don’t remember no green pants in, what was it, canvas? He stressed the words slightly, and I wasn’t sure if he was mocking the words themselves, or just the way I’d said them, but then he laughed lightly, waved an arm, said, We’ve got loads of polyester to choose from, and as he spoke he turned his book over and placed it open-faced on the counter, a college textbook, economics. He didn’t even look like a younger version of me. His hair was floppy and brown and darkened by a tinge of grease, whereas my hair was crewed like the men in my neighborhood. Derek had teased me when I first cut it off, asked me if I was trying to score with the skinheads down at the local, but then he’d grown serious and run his hand over my downy head and said, It suits you. It suits you, I guess, though I think you deserve the luxury of hair, but still, I continued to buzz it: I’d bought the clippers after all, and couldn’t let them go to waste. I shook my head then, to clear it. I’m sure I saw them, I insisted. I even remember the size: thirty-two in the waist and inseam both. Simon’s expression was puzzled and uncomfortable. He shrugged thin shoulders inside the green and brown plaid shirt. Maybe they sold. The collar of the shirt had darkened from the grease in his hair, and he pulled at it now, nervously, and I felt sweat filming my own neck beneath my scarf. I placed my hands flat on the counter. Could you check in the back? Maybe they were taken off the rack for some reason. Look, Simon said, we don’t take stuff off the floor unless we’re holding it for—That’s it! I said. I asked her to hold it for me. What’s her name, the old woman. Trudy, Simon said. His voice was suddenly suspicious. That’s right, Trudy. I could feel the sweat coursing down my neck now, wetting my shirt inside my winter coat. I could feel the redness of my face and the pounding of my heart. Trudy put it back for me, along with a white shirt. A button-down. Simon stared at me now, disbelief written plainly on his face. Trudy’s holding a pair of green trousers for you, and a white shirt? I just nodded my head then. I couldn’t bring myself to speak, nor even to meet his gaze. My eyes caught the cracked spine of his textbook, saw a yellow sticker, itself creased into near illegibility: used. Just a minute, I heard Simon say, and as he walked from the counter I watched for his feet. There were the boots. I felt a thrill up and down my spine when I saw them, and a knot in my stomach as well, and then Simon was back with the same brown bag in which I’d delivered the clothes. It was stapled closed now, and the word Simon was written on it in black magic marker, and the man who bore that name, and my clothes as well, dropped the bag on the counter. Here you go. I still couldn’t look at him. I grabbed the bag and turned for the door, but Simon’s voice stopped me. All right, hold on. I turned slowly. Yes? Simon’s face and voice were flat when he spoke, but his knuckles were white where his hands gripped the counter’s edge. That’ll be a fiver, he said. I’m sorry? I said. That’s five for the trousers, Simon said again. He paused. And five for the shirt. I thought of protesting, but didn’t. What could I say: But they’re mine? I thought of running out of the store then, even jerked a little towards the door, and Simon jerked when I jerked, not as if to follow, not even in imitation: it was as if his body was attached to mine by the threads woven into the clothes he wore. Slowly, I returned to the counter. I pulled two fives from my wallet and fingered them for a moment. They were fresh from a cash machine, crisp, sharp-edged. You could cut your finger on these, I thought. I thought, This is how much it costs. It wasn’t very much, even if I was buying something that already belonged to me. I gave the boy called Simon the money. Brazen now, Simon put the money in the pocket of the corduroy pants. I looked at him a moment longer. They all fit you. Even the shoes. Something changed in Simon’s face then. Disgust gave way momentarily to shame, and then, quickly, anger rose up again. Aw, go on, get out of here before I call a copper. His voice—young, high-pitched, almost cracking under the strain—wasn’t convincing, but I nodded curtly and left. Outside it was cold and bright and I squinted against the glare until I remembered my sunglasses and covered my eyes. The bag with Simon’s name on it dangled loosely in one hand, and as I walked toward the tube station I remembered something else Derek had said not so long ago, when I’d tried to tell him that my name wasn’t actually Derek. I’d stuttered my way around the subject until, eventually, I realized that he’d figured it out long ago, and that he hadn’t cared. What he’d said was that some things, like names, can be used over and over again—or bodies for that matter. But then he went on. He said, Some things can’t be used twice. There are some things, he said, that are used up on the first go-round, and whatever’s left behind, if anything, is just pollution. There’s no point in saving it, he said, or reusing it, it’s just left over, and as he spoke his hands were on my shoulders and he was looking me straight in the eye, and I felt as though he were telling me I was one of those things that can be used only once. People like Derek, I thought, people like Nigel, they were able to have boyfriends and still find the time for trysts on the side, and tricks, whereas it was all I could manage to be someone’s someone else. They renewed themselves endlessly, shed the days like skin cells and grew new ones without even thinking about it, while all I could do was fade away slowly as though I were simply semi-biodegradable packaging whose contents had long since been consumed, and suddenly I felt the bag with someone else’s name on it hanging from my arm like a dead weight. Why did you keep coming back then? is what I’d said to Derek—it was what I had said in New York—and Derek
had said, I never left, and the more I thought of his words the less I could make of them. In New York it had been worse. In New York it had been: I was never really here, and what can you say to that? I stopped walking then; I’d gone far past the tube station; I looked around and saw, in fact, that I had no idea where I was. But even the strangeness was familiar from my first days here, it brought with it a familiar elation and a familiar dejection, but I threw all these old feelings away, and threw away my old clothes as well, dropped them in the first bin I came across, and then I turned toward what I thought was the east and set out on foot for my flat. I got lost, of course. Of course I got lost: for London is laid out as haphazardly as a warren. It’s a myriad of Streets High and Low, of Courts and Cloisters and Crescents and full Circles, Paths and Parks and Parkways, and Yards, and Mews, and Quays, Palaces and Castles and Mansions and Halls and mere Houses (never so mere in reality), and Drives (which sounds creepingly American to my ears, and suburban at that), there are Ways to go and Ends to be arrived at, Barrows and Buries—or would it be Burys?—Moats to be crossed and Bridges to cross them, also Brydges, which don’t seem to cross anything, and Squares, which rarely are, and all of this (and much, much more) is further complicated by a strange feud between lexicography and cartography, so that what is here a Road becomes, a few feet farther on, a Terrace; a Vale might become a Walk or broaden suddenly into a Mall, Groves are treeless, Gardens without plants, Gates nowhere to be found. London is, in other words, a maze, but I was simply amazed, surprised that it had taken me so long to realize I was lost. But it was why I’d come here after all, to lose myself in a foreign place. That seems, now, just another way of saying that I wanted to throw myself away, and if I didn’t actually succeed it’s probably only because it’s against my nature to litter.