Real Life

by Brandon Taylor

  “But you would rather be alone,” Miller says. “You don’t want the hassle, I guess.”

  “I would rather be alone. Or, I’d rather be the sort of person who’d rather be alone. It’s hard to want to be with other people because they just vanish on you, or they die.”

  “I don’t think I’m dying anytime soon.”

  “You could. It could happen anytime. I could die.”

  “You are so morbid. You’re so, so morbid. I don’t think I knew that before.”

  “My dad died fast.”

  “I’m sorry, I know, I’m sorry.”

  “People die before you know them. And then you get stuck wondering, what if, what if.”

  “My mom . . . well, I told you already.”

  “I’m sorry,” Wallace says, kissing Miller’s throat, where it is bristly and firm with cartilage and muscle.

  “But I’m saying, I don’t plan on dying. I plan on sticking around.”

  “That makes one of us,” Wallace says. “You heard that shit at dinner.”

  “I hope you stay. But I hope you leave, if that’s what you want. You can’t stay for anyone but yourself.”

  “It’s strange. They say, study science and you’ll always have a job. And it seems so easy. But they don’t tell you that there’s all this other stuff attached that will make you hate your life.”

  “Do you hate it that much?”

  “Yes, sometimes, you know—we all do, I guess, was what Emma was saying earlier.”

  “Me too, yeah. But I love it more than I hate it.”

  “But fuckers like Roman,” Wallace says, growling under his breath. “They make it unbearable.”

  “I still can’t believe he said that to you.”

  “No one said anything to him; no one did anything.”

  “I wanted to, but then, I guess, I chickened out.”

  Wallace pauses, stills in Miller’s arms. There will always be this moment. There will always be good white people who love him and want the best for him but who are more afraid of other white people than of letting him down. It is easier for them to let it happen and to triage the wound later than to introduce an element of the unknown into the situation. No matter how good they are, no matter how loving, they will always be complicit, a danger, a wound waiting to happen. There is no amount of loving that will ever bring Miller closer to him in this respect. There is no amount of desire. There will always remain a small space between them, a space where people like Roman will take root and say ugly, hateful things to him. It’s the place in every white person’s heart where their racism lives and flourishes, not some vast open plain but a small crack, which is all it takes.

  Wallace presses his tongue flat.

  “Good white people,” he says.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s fine.” The air is getting colder, darker. The sun is gone. Wind in the trees. They’re breaking wood outside, cracking it open. They’re building a fire. Its orange glow issues up in the night, and occasionally, there are embers that pass by the window like stars, or fireflies.

  “Wallace?”

  “Yes?”

  “Will you tell me about yourself?”

  “Why?”

  “I just want to know. I want to know about you.”

  “What’s there to know?”

  “Please,” Miller says, pressing. “Please.”

  Wallace considers this, the act of asking, the intent behind it. Such a strange request. How long has it been since someone attempted to know him? There is Brigit, of course, the person to whom he has said the most and also, perhaps, the least of it. And Emma, who has tried to know him in her way. But there are so few others, because the moment he arrived he decided to shed his other life like a skin. That is the really wonderful thing about living in a place to which you are not connected. It cannot lay a claim on who you were before you arrived there, and all anyone knows of you is what you tell them. It was possible to become a different version of himself in the Midwest, a version without a family and without a past, made up entirely as he saw fit.

  It’s never been put to him so directly, a request to tell something of himself, so complete a history. Miller is losing his nerve. Wallace can feel it in the way his breath is becoming ragged. All he has to do is wait him out, give it time to become another question, something easier, more bearable. Something less complete, an impartial accounting, even, of the events that have brought him here.

  He could say something about taking a Greyhound up. He could say something about the Gulf of Mexico or the mountains of North Alabama. He could say something about the fields filled with white cotton or the beans picked that turned your hands purple or blue. There are so many minor details he could conjure, incomplete reflections of something larger and more awful. But that is not the question that Miller asked him. That is not what Wallace has been asked to disclose.

  The whole of his history feels dark and cold and far away, but it’s in him, settled down, like blood drying. Miller’s eyes are open. He isn’t retreating.

  “Tell me,” he says. “Tell me.”

  His voice is insistent, but gentle, the way you ask questions of people when you know it’s rude. What is he going to say, or do? What can he say or do? It seems impossible at this point to avoid it.

  “I don’t even know where to start,” he says.

  “Anywhere. Start anywhere.” Miller is shocked by his good luck. He was bluffing, gambling.

  Their friends’ voices on the other side of the glass drift up to them. More laughter. They’re telling stories.

  “You already know it,” he says.

  “I don’t.”

  “You know I’m from Alabama.”

  “I know that.”

  “That’s it, really.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s not it.”

  “Why do you need to know?”

  “Because I want to know you.”

  “Knowing about my past won’t make you know me. I’m who you think I am. I’m not mysterious. I’m not full of secrets. I’m me, and who I was then wasn’t me.”

  Miller sighs. Wallace sighs. This isn’t getting them anywhere.

  “You are so determined to be unknowable.”

  “We’re always unknowable.”

  “I’m not,” Miller says. “I’d tell you anything about me.”

  “Because you’re good.”

  “You’re good.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You are.”

  “I’m not, and that’s just how it is.”

  “You are good,” Miller says. He kisses Wallace, and rolls on top of him, and kisses him again. “You are so good.”

  Each time he says it, Wallace feels as though he floats a little farther away, sinks a little deeper into himself until he’s butted up against the cold flat surface of his past. It’s there under him, undulating like a sea beneath ice. Miller is kissing his shoulder and his neck and his mouth, kissing him because when they’re kissing, they’re not talking, not arguing, kissing because it’s easier than this disagreement that threatens to split them. Wallace puts his hands under Miller’s shirt, pushes the buttons apart, and rubs his fingers over his stomach.

  Miller lies flat against him, rests his head on Wallace’s chest. They aren’t going to have sex this way. That much is obvious to Wallace. He’s been pinned. Miller’s breathing evens out after a few minutes. He’s drifting off to sleep, and the weight and warmth of his body is making Wallace drowsy too. They’re on the cusp of dropping fully into sleep when Wallace hears a loud crack outside, and a sea of embers issues up by the window; for a moment he thinks of lightning and thunder, those twin forces that shape a southern summer, where the weather is wild and full of strange magic.

  Wallace gasps, jerks under Miller, who reaches for him in the dark, and fo
r a moment, neither of them says or does anything. They breathe, and then Wallace says, “I’ll tell you.”

  5

  It stormed all the time—thunder and lightning and wind so hard it shook the trees and sometimes twisted them clean out of the dirt. There was so much rain one summer that we couldn’t keep anything in the ground, and there were strange patches of tomatoes and cabbage growing in the briars because the seeds had been swept across the sand by the rain. That’s what comes to me first, the scent of the damp earth, the heat clinging close to the ground, and the gray mist rising after a heavy storm. The clouds were purple-black and gray, softening when the weather broke, and you could tell which way the storm had come from because the trees were still split wide and there was a path through the woods as if some huge animal had come slinking through them. And on the hill, looking down into the ravine, all that water on the leaves glinted like little stars, little trapped earthbound galaxies flaring into life. Soon the ants came, and they latched on to whatever had drowned in the rain, and they took it off piece by piece; once, there was a rat that had been drowned near the corner of the house, its white and gray fur all matted, and the ants were thronging in and out of its mouth like air, like breath made of small dark bodies. Another time, there were birds that had been thrown from their nests, skin translucent and blue like fresh ice from a vending machine, their pink mouths flung wide. Delicate little clothes of skin and feather, bones so light that in another life they might have floated away into the sky, riding on currents of warm air, but now splashed in mud and being disassembled by ants, so many of them that they too were a skin, writhing and dark beneath the shadow of the bushes, almost obscured except, at the moment of passing, when the eye drops down and sees them, and in the body, a startled, horrifying jolt, that something there is dying and dead already. That’s how it was with storms, coming on suddenly and then vanishing, leaving behind dead things wreathed in dark ants and in mist coming out of the trees like ghosts. During the storms themselves, my grandparents turned out all the lights and we sat in the house sweating and breathing in the dark, trying not to move except for our fingers twisting and pulling at the threads in the carpets. Grit slid between our fingers, sticking there when we squirmed and tried to be still. Flies, fat and dark, moving around us, buzzing close to our ears, and we, turning to each other, slapping at each other, trying to kill the flies, but missing, them swinging just out of reach, beyond us, but close by, so that we could feel them sliding around us, moving close to our eyes and then away again. My grandparents sat in their chairs, eyes pointing out through the window into the gray veil of rain rushing down from the sky, turning white and frothy as it spilled down the banisters and met in great torrents those floody waters from the fields and the yard. There was the joining of many waters out there, eddying up the birdbath and pushing hard and steady against the shrubs. When it was over, there would be plums and berries scattered across the lawn, and birds would come swooping, snatching them up and taking them to nests that had been plundered of their contents by the wind. With the storm howling, pushing hard on our windows, we sat and listened both to the groaning outside, the great tumult of the world beyond, and to the hum of our grandparents, who told us stories or sang spirituals. They told us of the Bible and how the flood had come upon the land and drowned all the wicked, and how we’d be next if we didn’t stay still and quiet. They told us how the world was coming to an end soon, that Jesus was coming back and was testing us. The house stank of our sweat and piss and the bathroom always smelled like shit because we kept the used toilet paper in a little tin can next to the toilet. And in that house, fetid and stinking and sweating, I learned all about the ways that a person can do God great ill. Lying, as in the story of the man who had lied his whole life and in the end had been bashed in the head by his wife with a hammer, but before the hammer had come he had been visited in his sleep by demons, licking, lapping his feet with their horned tongues, and in the end he hadn’t even felt it, the clank of the hammer going into his skull through to the other side, because he’d been lying his whole life, because he’d been using and lying and telling falsehoods, bearing false witness against those in his life, and against his wife, that poor woman, wrung clean out of her mind by his lies so that she didn’t know what was coming or going and in the end had reached for the hammer to ease something in herself. You could also harm God by reaching out in the dark for something that was unholy—the shape of another man, for example, as was my case. You get to wanting it all the time, my grandfather said, get to needing it so much you can’t do anything or keep a job or a house or a family, and you go out there and you get AIDS and then it’s over, that’s it, you die. I didn’t need the lights on to know that he was talking about me, talking to me, across the space between us, interspersed with blue lightning streaking the sky, no I didn’t need anything to confirm for me; I knew even then that I was going to hell, that I couldn’t make sense of the space in me that was supposed to be where God slept but in me was just a cavity like a tooth waiting to turn to rot, my soul a blackness, a wound gone sour. If you talked while God was doing his work, you were making space for the devil. If you opened a window while God was doing his work, you were inviting the devil. If you used any electricity at all while God was working, you were making a route for the devil to enter your body. Storms were the only consistent church in my life, the only time I couldn’t sleep in from sermons or turn a blind eye to God. You can ignore a pastor’s words; it is easy not to hear them. But when you see lightning flash or hear thunder crack open the sky, there is no denying God’s fury, his power to break the world with very little effort. And when your grandparents rock in their chairs and sing the songs that their grandparents sang that their grandparents sang that their grandparents sang, there is no denying the power of ghosts, those who are always among us, moving through air and earth, resting their fingers upon this or that, collecting what is there, depositing what they have no need for. There were storms every day—thunder and lightning—and I learned to make myself so still I thought I might slide out of my body, thought I might then and there die, cease to be, fold back into the next life as if it were a comfortable bed, so perfectly parallel had I drawn this life to the next. Even then I was spotting and waiting, watching the world pass me by in repeated patterns, the impression of lightning on the window, its shadow thrown long behind it. Once, there was a red weathervane in the yard, and lightning hit it, charring the paint, and beneath it there was the shape of a rooster, a huge black rooster that was made of metal but had been painted, and so all my life I had thought it red, and that in lightning it was burnt pure and clean, it had reverted, turned back to something else, something new. There was a boy then, a boy I liked who lived around the dirt road from me, who lived in a trailer. He was tall and dark and strong, and once, I let him take me into the woods, let him climb on top of me, let him spill himself inside me, and I went home, bleeding and ugly and dirty, and climbed into the green bin that we kept in the tub because our tub didn’t work, and I tried to bathe, tried to clean myself up, and there were little birds’ nests in the windowsill, and sometimes the babies fell through the mesh and broke their necks in the tub, and I was washing that day, trying to rub at the bruises between my thighs, where he had pinned me open with his knees, trying to make it go away, to become my skin again and not bruised, not marked, not streaked in shit and blood and cum, and trying to reclaim myself, the feeling of wholeness again before I had been breached, before I had let him breach me, before I had let him shatter the membrane that kept the world out. No, another way, another way. There was a man who slept in my house. He was not my brother. He was not my father. He was not my uncle. He was not my friend. He was tall and black and his face was like death’s face, and I woke in the night and there it was, hanging over me, a grimacing thing from the other side, hanging low over me, and he took me into his mouth, and I wanted to cry and wanted to shout but I didn’t because I couldn’t, and he kept coming back, kept climbing
into my bed, except for the last time when my mother caught him and threw him out and then she turned to me and slapped me and called me faggot called me sissy called me everything except son, said everything except I’m sorry that happened to you, but then she had no language for such a thing, no language for apologies, for cruelty, because she had been made that way, because my brother’s father was not my father, because my brother’s father had done that to her, caught her on the way home from school one day, in the kudzu, had dragged her down, pulled her down with him and climbed on top of her like a common beast. This is the story I know. This is the only version I know. That I have. From her. She told me that he raped her. She told me that she hadn’t wanted children. And her mother, my grandmother, told me that my mother had wanted it. That she had deserved it. That she got what she had coming. So it’s not surprising that on the day she threw him from my bed, she slapped me and told me that it was my fault. That I shouldn’t have been acting that way, that I was a child and should know better, but also that cruelty comes this way, visits us, and that in our family we are powerless to do anything except open the door and welcome it. And my father, on that same sunny day, turned to me and grinned with his front teeth missing, already decaying on the inside, already breaking down, and said that he hoped I had had a good time, that he hoped that man, now walking down the road, his wiry shoulders swinging, had done something good to me, for me, that he didn’t care so much that I wanted men. And I stood there squirming on the porch, feeling bruised and beaten, tall for nine, itching all over. I wanted to get out of my skin. I wanted to forget how, in the night, the man from the couch had slid back the wool blanket and had come close to me, smelling like oil, smelling like the pond, like the creek, like fish before you skin them, and how he, so smooth down there, had touched me, put his fingers inside me. And I had lain there, sweating, staring out the window into the night, where there were trees swaying, and I kept thinking how like dinosaurs they looked. And then he wet his fingers some more and put more inside me, and the bed was creaking while he made room for himself, and then, the first, ugly heat of being split open, and I wanted to die, every moment of it, I wanted to die, could feel myself going further and further away from myself, shrinking and shrinking and shrinking, sinking like a stone, heavier all the time, downward through some vast inner ocean. And his face, that smirking skull’s face, over mine, swinging into my body, more beast than man, and then it was over. And I was on the porch, just squirming, just writhing, trying to slip out of my skin like those fish do sometimes, when you’re cleaning them and they are smooth and perfect beneath the scales, as perfect and unfledged as a baby’s skin. How at night I was no longer unfledged, no longer pure, no longer untouched, but sullied. Later, when I went around the road to see the boy I liked, to touch his arms when he asked, to press my lips to his neck and to his stomach, and to let him fuck my mouth, I thought of all the times they had let that man into my room, my mother out of apathy and my father out of a sick pride, and how this young man now, in my mouth in the woods, on my knees, the leaves rippling in the breeze that smelled like honeysuckle, his skin tasting like soap, how I was down there, letting him go at me from the back, gripping the branches, gripping the vines, green, whiplike, how I had brought this about, how this desire I felt was the blooming of something planted in me, and how God couldn’t take it away. I prayed a lot then, layering the words over each other as if they could form a lattice that would protect me. When I let him come on my thighs, and when I let him push me down and punch me and kick me and break me, I kept praying, thinking that the pain I felt would absolve me, that the fire I felt in my guts would abate, would cleanse me. And overhead, trees dappled in sunlight. You can’t know how beautiful the sun is there, how it touches everything and soaks it through, succulent, like water, like moisture. Light beading on the skin, dew, glistening. So much light, an ocean of it, a sea of light spread across everything. He kicked and kicked and kicked, and I went home to wash it all off, the briars and the bruises and the places where he’d dented me, broken me, made me somehow uglier, and when I rubbed the salve on my skin, I kept thinking, kept hoping God would make me whole again. I wanted what I wanted, but I wanted not to want what I wanted. I didn’t know much about God and the devil except what you shouldn’t do to invite one or the other, but I knew that I wanted to be full of one, and if it couldn’t be the one I wanted, then I would take the other. That if God wanted nothing to do with me, then I’d take the devil. I’d take him on my knees where I’d taken the men, let him pull me down in a bed of kudzu and fuck me, so long as I wasn’t empty anymore. I’d keep a tiny God inside me, and one day I might lie down and let the ants take me. When I left it behind me, when I got up the money to go to school and get away, I sealed it all behind me, because when you go to another place you don’t have to carry the past with you. You can lay it down. You can leave it for the ants. There comes a time when you have to stop being who you were, when you have to let the past stay where it is, frozen and impossible. You have to let it go if you’re going to keep moving, if you’re going to survive, because the past doesn’t need a future. It has no use for what comes next. The past is greedy, always swallowing you up, always taking. If you don’t hold it back, if you don’t dam it up, it will spread and take and drown. The past is not a receding horizon. Rather, it advances one moment at a time, marching steadily forward until it has claimed everything and we become again who we were; we become ghosts when the past catches us. I can’t live as long as my past does. It’s one or the other.