I went up to see Mom at the hospital every other weekend, and then three people at work quit at the same time to protest the way my asshole boss was treating them. That was how I’d become assistant manager, and that meant I couldn’t go up and see Mom as often as I liked. Sally was the one who kept Dad away from the hospital when I showed up. He soon drifted further and further in the distance until I had only a few crunchy leaves of color in my hands. The tree had shorn itself of me.
The waft of freshly brewed coffee that I served my customers wasn’t enough to keep my listlessness at bay. Craig had been dead for a few weeks.
Those nights I felt his ghost drift through my room and evaporate. I was angry with him for keeping me awake for so long.
I discovered that the only way I could sleep was to forget all about him.
Must I do the same with you? I don’t want to.
James, you’re still alive.
I don’t want you to die in my dreams.
You can still come back.
I don’t want you to float slowly through the smoky halls of my brain, pausing to look back now and then. I couldn’t bear to see the desire aflame in your eyes again, not unless you were sure you wanted me back permanently.
With you, I felt as if I was opening up like a wheat field, an ocean rushing in, when you entered me for the first time. I wasn’t tense or afraid. I couldn’t stop touching the sweat sopping your chest when you grunted away. I knew I didn’t exist, not in that moment when it was all about the thrusting, but I was alive. I felt redeemed.
Strange that I needed a tall and handsome stranger to show me a way out of that exhibition hall of ghosts. I’d thought all the doors to the land of the living were locked. I could see through the panes of glass the grass turning bright green and the buds blooming in a confetti of color. Inside, I couldn’t focus my eyes on anything long enough to render sharpness in my own vision. The dust of ash covered everything. If I inhaled, I choked on the acridity of death. My feet were heavy with the weight of the dead. I couldn’t move quickly enough. I had to be patient with myself. Some nights I felt as if I’d moved only one inch, but even that felt like a victory. I was a snail. I was afraid of letting light into the shell of my heart. If my first boyfriend could die within a year of meeting me, all the men would surely die after having sex with me. I was infected with fear and paranoia.
That’s why I knew it was quite all right to have you as my man. Didn’t matter that you had one foot. It meant that you were free of death, of illusions. It’s strange how I don’t remember specifically how you walked beside me. I must’ve floated with you because that’s how you’d made me feel.
That winter walk, the only one we’d undertaken after the snow came and stayed, is a chunk of dry ice left permanently in the freezer of my heart. I’d joked that we should try something different that December afternoon.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Hey, I know. A walk. We could take a walk out in the woods.”
You glanced out the back window. The sun was half-covered by clouds. It was ten degrees, but there was only a slight wind.
“Sure.”
You should’ve seen me stop myself from falling off the ottoman in your living room.
You walked to your bedroom and returned with a different prosthetic foot. “This is better for walking on uneven ground,” you explained.
I watched you take off your jeans and swap your prosthetic feet. It may sound strange for you to hear this, but I felt honored that you didn’t hide from me for the first time. I felt as if you knew I wouldn’t bolt from seeing you do such a thing.
I watched you button up your sexy red Union Jack as I put on my long underwear and tucked my jeans into my Sorel boots, a carryover from the days when I lived further up north. It took us fifteen minutes to get ready with sweaters, scarves, and mittens.
God, we couldn’t stop smiling at each other. Don’t you remember that?
The snow was a foot, a foot and a half, deep. It had fallen earlier that morning.
The whitescape was beautiful.
An occasional trail of bird prints crisscrossed each other, and rabbit pellets had rolled like marbles down the smooth inclines.
We didn’t say much.
I watched you perch your crutches forward, lift your foot, and bring up the crutches. You went ahead of me. I was in awe of the huge size of your footprints.
The clouds took to hiding the sun. It was as if the sun was cold too.
Up the hill you were like a shadow climbing further away from me, and you suddenly stopped. You leaned against a thick birch tree. You smiled at me as I grunted my way up toward you. I remembered that you used to be an avid hiker.
I was surprised when you pulled me into your arms, and I felt the hot cock of your tongue probe deep into the hole of my mouth. The tiny icicles of your beard bristles melted on my chapped lips. I couldn’t stop sipping the pearl drops of you. I slaked the sweetest thirst.
I held you for the longest time.
I wanted to cry from so much happiness, but I was afraid that my tears would freeze and zip my eyelids shut.
You kissed me again. And again.
I was so surprised. You rarely showed me affection outside sex.
The land beyond the birches was level so it was easy to walk. There wasn’t as much snow either. I heard birds flutter in the branches above us as they bounced from tree to tree. Maybe they were hoping we had seeds and crumbs for them.
The trees began to cluster closer and closer together until it was harder to navigate. I wanted to ask you where you were going. Was there a cabin hidden somewhere in the woods? I had hoped so. My mind’s eye danced with us cuddling fiercely against the dying fire inside the dank cabin. You would tell me how much you needed me, how much you wanted me, how much you loved me.
Instead you took me inside a small clearing. “Sometimes in the summer I come here, take off my clothes, and jack off while I smoke my cigar.”
You smiled at me as you held my hand, your glove in my mitten.
What happened that made you feel so cold toward me?
Sometimes when I’m lonesome, I like to remember climbing up on a haystack to look across the fields. The golden sun lathered honey all over my face. I felt all right with the world. I didn’t need a book at that moment to feel alive. All I had to do was close my eyes and feel the sun caressing my face. That’s why I understood your preference to stay away from the city and stick to the country.
When I wandered through the so-called “back forty” on your property, I felt as if I had entered a new world. It was calling back to the child I once was. How could I have abandoned him so? There was in you something like the father I’d longed to have in my childhood, and the eloquent silences you spoke made the child in me hum, more so when I saw how easily you wove among the birches and the cottonwoods that crowded your land. I wanted to have you embrace me in your solid arms so I could feel small again, like the boy I’d forgotten to say goodbye to in the middle of that mad rush to grow up and move away. That boy hadn’t known how loved he had been, and I’d neglected to tell him so.
When you caressed my face in the darkness that first night, I felt as if I’d been touched by the hands of the sun.
Mom went through a full round of chemotherapy only once; it was too much for her. It was enough to convince her to die. She didn’t want to fight anymore. Each round, lasting a few hours a week, was enough to zap her strength. She wasn’t anymore a woman of enough strength and stamina to keep the house clean, look after the chickens and the garden, and pay the bills. She wanted to go to sleep and never wake up. She hated feeling weak, unable to move when there were many things that needed taking care of. Sally told me how she had to vomit into the bucket next to her bed.
I never learned how Dad dealt with it, but I imagine that to him, it was just another crisis, like how a cow might be finicky with her newborn calf and didn’t want to be milked. Was she just another farm animal to h
im? I couldn’t help but wonder. Dad had grown up on a farm without the latest equipment, so he was used to doing things the tougher way. None of that fancy stuff was necessary if he could save money. All of us siblings worked the land with him, and my three brothers became farmers. Sally married a truck driver, so she didn’t see him much either. I think Dad had prepared us to expect a lot of silence from the ones we’d love. Anyone talking a bit was indeed too much for us.
I taught Composition 101 in exchange for my graduate school tuition. It was frightening at first to stand in front of fifty students at a time and explain the ins and outs of grammar and punctuation. Even though they were only a few years younger than I was, I felt old. Learning how to write essays, even if only two pages long, seemed too difficult for them.
They slothed back in their chairs.
They slurped sodas in their containers. Sometimes they were quite loud.
A few of them drifted off to sleep.
The smell of coffee was strong at the beginning of class, and evaporated by the time class ended.
For the first time I felt pity and compassion for my teachers. I had no idea how hard it was to make a lifeless subject interesting enough to keep anyone awake. But I figured that if I’d paid attention to what was hot in their world of music and movies, which was easy to do as I consider myself a pop culture aficionado to begin with, and peppered my talks with references to them, they might sit up and take notice.
One by one they did.
Not all, of course, but their sense of entitlement was occasionally breathtaking. Had they been that coddled in high school?
Their assignments broke my heart. They seemed so illiterate. How was it possible for them to have graduated from high school, let alone get into the university? I was stunned. I had always thought I was an average writer, or at least a writer with some promise, but grading their homework made me realize how much better I was as a writer.
I sought out published essays that were beautifully written and distributed photocopies.
I told them they had to copy each word in longhand. Yes, in longhand. They had to learn, to look at each word. I prayed that they too would take the time to think about what they were copying so it wouldn’t be entirely by rote.
No one liked me that first month.
I didn’t eat or sleep well. I couldn’t always concentrate on my own studies. I forced myself to crank out little stories for work-shopping in class. I didn’t like any of them, but my classmates oo-hed and ahhed over them. I was stupefied. They couldn’t be reading the same stuff I had written, could they?
No.
They had to be on some drug; no way anyone could rave on and on about how perfectly executed my sentences were.
“You’re very sharp. You don’t mince words when you write.”
“You’re just like Hemingway.”
“I don’t know about you guys, but I know I’m not going to see those haystacks the same way again.”
Oh, please.
Even though I used familiar locations from my childhood, I never wrote autobiographical fiction. I was afraid of coming off as mawkish, sentimental, annoying, self-serving. No. It was much better to observe everything as if through a pair of binoculars and write down what I saw. Since I was so far away, I wouldn’t be able to hear their voices so I had to imagine the stories unfolding through their actions. I felt like God overseeing his serfs, who were bad actors trying to pull off another decent show. They played characters who lived and died, and who were full of elegiac bullshit. I knew my work was bullshit, but I cranked it out anyway. I was already doubting whether I was cut out to be a writer.
It was heartbreaking when no one in Comp 101 seemed to care much about the craft of writing, let alone try to write more simply and clearly. Some of my students did work hard on writing their essays, but it was hard to grade them all. I knew I didn’t have the heart to be a teacher even though that’s what many Creative Writing graduates did once they got their degrees.
Each class session forced me to become someone else I hated.
After being held at arm’s length within my own family, I’ve always wanted to be loved. It hurts a lot more than it should when strangers who barely know you beyond your name don’t want to hang around and say hello. Yes, I was their teacher, and yes, they had other classes to attend, but I had become that tough asshole who was way too nitpicky about shit that nobody was ever gonna care about.
Each week, when I graded, I sought out the smallest signs of improvement, of comprehension in their homework. They did appear, but I had to hunt for them. When I found them, it felt like a little victory, and when I read other writers for the classes I was taking, I nearly cried at their mastery of language. It was such an exuberance to drink in such clarity. Semi-colons and colons were used correctly, and the Oxford comma was used consistently. Sentences were carefully strung together to achieve a certain effect. Paragraphs had stanzas of rhythm, and each page was like a pop song captured perfectly in the mind’s ear. They were fearless with expressing themselves in quietly startling ways. Such music was manna from the heavens. I could listen to it nonstop.
Did I ever talk about any of this with you? No.
See, I knew that you weren’t a reader; you’d told me so.
I’d never seen you as less equal to me because you didn’t care for books. Oh, no. Growing up on the farm has taught me the value of common sense that a lot of book-smart people don’t always have. I know what it’s like to work the land. There’s no romance in mind-numbing repetition.
When I spent weekends with you up north, I felt a reconnection to my past and to the family I’d lost a long time ago when I escaped to the mountain of books for safety. You didn’t pass judgment on me. You gave me hope, however fleeting, that my own family would welcome me back with open arms.
Earlier today I thought of Craig. It was the seventeenth anniversary of his death. Had it been that long? Have I gotten that old?
I stood in front of the bathroom mirror at work. I saw something I hadn’t quite noticed before. I leaned closer. There were a few gray hairs in my beard. Fuck. I wasn’t expecting that!
I knew that day would eventually come, but I never thought it would come so soon. Time has a sneaky way of doing that to you.
All that day, when I wasn’t busy serving cappuccinos and chai lattes, I prayed that my beard would turn a crisp salt-and-pepper color like yours. Now that I’d met you, I’ve developed a major weakness for such beards.
With each accidental glance in the mirror behind the counter, I tried to imagine how I would look at fifty, fifty-five, sixty. I couldn’t imagine myself that far into the future.
Would I be still aching for the unattainable you?
Would I be happily married to someone else?
Would I be still alive?
I never thought I’d survive this long after Craig.
At his memorial service, I wasn’t strong enough to read the poem I had written to remember him by. My friend Ted took the poem out of my hand, and I kept my face to the floor as I heard him try to read it with an even voice. He had met Craig a few times, but they didn’t know each other well.
To Ted, he was just the boyfriend of his college friend.
Ted salvaged me. I’d lost my voice, but when he finished, a sudden beam of sunlight broke through the clouds and filtered through the stained glass window of St. Sebastian’s.
Everyone looked up with surprise.
It was a sign from the heavens. It had to be.
Afterward everyone agreed that Craig had just said goodbye to everyone.
It was not the kind of goodbye I wanted.
I wanted him to say goodbye to me when we were too old to move around much. I wanted to feel his gnarly liver-spotted hand wrap around mine and hear his age-gruffed voice before I faded into my eternal slumber.
When Craig died, Mr. Death shadowed me everywhere. I didn’t know what he looked like, but I knew he was there. He was transparent as air, and I didn’t
like that at all. I need to see something first before I can sense how I can control it. But no, he breathed down my neck each time I gazed too long at a man. Would that man give me the same kiss that Mr. Death had longed to give? I showed up at bear events because at least the men weren’t skinny. They didn’t have AIDS, or at least they looked like they didn’t. They made me forget for a short while that Mr. Death hid like a hangnail lost inside a shadow. They wouldn’t lose massive amounts of weight so quickly that they’d fade away like the legs of the Wicked Witch of the West under Dorothy Gale’s house. Their weight meant they were vibrantly alive. They had been inoculated against Mr. Death’s contagious kisses.
Mr. Loneliness shielded me from Mr. Death.
He and I had committed to stay together until one of us cheated with Mr. Death.
Mr. Loneliness whispered many things in my ear.
Things like: “You don’t need to find anyone special because you already have me.”
“Craig wouldn’t want you to die. You can count on me to keep you alive.”
“You don’t want to die young and hurt your mother, do you?”
When I saw Mom after Craig’s death, she said, “What happened to you?”
I tried to explain, but my voice was a croak. “He died.”
“Who?”
“Craig.”
She didn’t ask any more questions. His name was enough.
Each time I went to see Mom, she floated further away. Her coughing echoed between us. Soon she had wires attached to her body, and she pounded the hospital bed with her fists. She was so angry. She had to have one more cigarette, dammit. She still smoked. She’d figured that as long as she was going to die, she might as well enjoy another cigarette. I didn’t know what to say to her on these last few visits.
Flannelwood Page 7