and asked her to meet you at a hotel in Brooklyn
You would not meet her in Vegas where the sounds of your mother’s
movements came through the walls between your rooms
Meanwhile, in another state Death courted our brothers on Uber and Grinder
As you removed one blind eye from the invisible pocket of your black bra
You realized that your memory of your brother had an invisible purse
With its zipper sewn on its side and its contents were pennies or wishes
So when they hit the surface of your eye the world you knew rippled
Back then all you wanted was a plate of black olives impaled by toothpicks
charred from a wild fire that raged Northern California
In winter, you wanted a fireplace, too, and a thick soup
you weren’t allergic to
During autumn rain the earthworm on your sternum writhed
And you were deciding whether to die or live your life wedded
To Zinfandel’s fading legs or to walk through an inch of snow
To buy three mangosteens from a corner grocery store
Back when I knew none of this and knew you less, I climbed wet
Stairwells, snowflakes melted on my eyelashes, and clumps of snow fell off the trees,
which were heavy and shaggy and white and green
I pulled myself close beneath my heavy coat and the train I got on began moving
In and out of the elongated, silvery body of an eel while the conductor
Spoke through his amplified microphone attached like a second, semi-translucent,
chain-mail-like skin, “Do you need anything? Say chocolate?” And, the trainy
eel obediently responded, which surprised you greatly, “The compressor in me is broken.
It’s like the heart of the AC and, no, all I need is a new shoulder, honey.”
As if the train seat had been a bassinet, the engine a chimney
coughing up clouds, I knew that I would drift off in smoke and for another year
Or two I’d doze. Back then I told everyone
My favorite thing about Pennsylvania is leaving Pennsylvania on a train.
Especially after Clarice Lispector spit black tobacco into a tin can and left it
near the railing. I have always known this about love: the ground you
place it on does not exist. I knew, too, that sleep is not a type of aonair
wine, situated above my consciousness, waiting for their insomnia of volcanic
ash to make me drift like a listless soul. Beneath that Lispector phlegm, that thick
oral mucus, hint of smoke and ash, was an answer to a question I had not yet learned to ask.
So, all the way to Brooklyn, I slept. The train rocked my body back and forth
like a jug of water inside of a stroller. From the window view, the effervescent
trees were woefully mourning their winter-torn sleeves, standing tall and hip-wide
like pregnant women in a dream, I exited the train, and climbed the stairs to your hotel room,
where you lay on your back begging Death to let you sleep on the railroad track
or take pesticides in the countryside with South Korea. The winter had been
long and wet and when, in a dream’s sunset, I crept up the steps, I like to
think Death heard what you could not hear yet,
because she startled and she left and the sun spread, warm and diluted, on
the backs of my eyelids and I woke just as the train screamed into Penn
Station’s open mouth. With the grayish duffel bag strapped over my left shoulder,
I lowered and bowed my head while my feet slowly marched
through the crowd’s soporific mourning of procession.
Each human head was a dark blue, wilted tulip, its witless petals drooped
and sagged heavily against the gullible sound of footsteps amplifying and
triangulating the proximity of my distance. I shoveled along the cylindrical
cement walls, into the yellow glow of a stairwell, and stepped up just as the
sun set on Vernon Boulevard.
Meanwhile, on the other side of Pulaski Bridge, maybe 40 minutes
walking distance, you sobbed intermittently into a grocery bag which waved
like a half-staffed, mortified flag in the wind, & eventually it floated away from you
as you stopped at the corner of Nassau where clumps of sooty snow had
melted and frozen again and the walk sign flashed white and you crossed
the avenue just like the living do. The short walk was the longest walk you ever took
in your very short life—the compelling wind was pushing you and you like
a pregnant woman, pushing you towards the metro, pushing you into the pavement,
pushing you into the snow. By then it was night and I stood beside a giant window
on the 21st floor of 474 48th Avenue watching the Empire State Building
change color. The black sky was perforated with a thousand tiny squares
of light, each one ushering me, like a Russian novel, into its own domestic
tragedy: a tv glowing in a living room, a couple eating take out at a kitchen
counter, a man smoked on a narrow balcony and curled himself against the wind.
To stand beyond the reach of weather, I discovered, was yet another
way I may be lonely. It was all emptiness, staring into the private things that
couldn’t stare back at me. Sometimes the intimacy of distance
was too much. The glasses on the ridge of my nose refused to be that lonely
rose, fading, wilting from that indeterminate breath that had fogged up their glass.
I took the elevator down 21 flights to the street where black cabs stood
waiting and a driver asked if he was waiting for me. I assumed no one
was and I crossed the street. At that point, I had met you twice.
Once I took an Uber to a restaurant where clavicles were juxtaposed
between wooden and metal chairs shifting in and out of periphery, but
your clavicle was most prominent of all. You sat diagonally from me, silently
sipping hot water with a wedge of lemon, your fingers spread with gentle
strength around the teacup’s opening. You ordered salmon and ate slowly
with your eyes shyly downcast. For a moment, I sat inside the soft light of
your quiet pleasure, the setting sun lit the wooden table and glowed
against your profile. You squinted slightly, and delicately speared small flakes of
salmon. You hardly spoke save when someone said I was adorable, and you shyly
raised your eyes to mine and you agreed. When you left, the place
you sat was stainless and the sun fell behind you, leaving the city in a
dismal neglect of chance. I, however, collected myself and you placed me
in a box called Wisdom. I waited by the light for life to change her colors
from infancy to myopia. You waited and waited for the city to change
what we were unable to change until four years into the future. That evening,
sitting with my legs curled up by the hotel bed, I thought
about my brother, Jim, who had a way of holding me tight in
his arms when we slept. Years later, when he took a large bubble
bath full of foam in India, I kept on having a recurring dream of Jim
dying and of having to announce the devastating news to new people
each night.
We met, the first time, inside a crowded convention
center. Djuna Barnes, famous fictionist, wore a cowboy hat. She stood
several rows from me, and laughed with such exquisite abandon. By contrast,
you stood patient as the sunlight, and I leaned toward your
warmth the way some plants twist out of shade. I have always
been so reticent in the company of others, my sapphic shyness
peeling out of me like a clementine in front of a bay of unripe avocados or
overripe raspberries. You gave me chocolate and two books and later, the
next day or the day after that, I could not stop crying while I waited for my
train to come and take me back.
Four years ago, in that endless Pennsylvania winter,
I wrote you, “All I do is grade papers but I have a fold-out.”
It was a faceless message, the kind written in the quiet, iridescent
recess of my idleness, the kind that arrived after a storm has been built
right into the towering headdress of a tornado, the kind that walked
out of you like a vagrant beggar from a beach house near the sea. When I
was young, I coped with my queerness, my handsome isolation, my
overwrought loneliness by smoking weed, one string of
vaporous vapor ornamentation after another, by the window and climbing
through it after dark. My body was strikingly vigorous, though I spent
most of its innocent muscularity by being restlessly listless, walking in
and out of kitchen doors like I knew the difference between having a
wallet and David Foster Wallace.
You were reticent and precise. The wind
blew into a window and the stacks of papers before each paid
grader swirled around the room, save yours, which you held down
with your free hand, while tapping your sharpened pencil
against the tabletop. The others, limp and languid like overwatered
houseplants, shuffled listlessly between the window and the vending
machine. You did not hear them. Your focus was unparalleled, your eyes
scanned the page, you made a swift mark, and moved on. They nudged
their papers to your side of the table. I cannot help but picture them: boorish
brothers and grinning stepsisters, turning the key in the lock, and leaving. You
did not notice. You turned the page, and tapped your pencil against
the tabletop. Then it was five o’clock, a winter night. The castrated
photographer pushed his bike over the ice and up the rolling
hills and past the frosted cornfields to your door. I wonder what it was like
to say goodnight. Your profile, your steady eyes fixed on the horizon,
and your silence, while he confessed he’d like to dip his fist into your head.
He said it would come out sweet and soaked in golden honey. He painted you a blurry
picture of yourself. Your wrist bone bent oddly to the left. He had a sheep’s head
shipped to you from Morocco and a Nordic Wolffish from the Arctic Circle.
He wrote a sonnet each day and sent them in a box he’d carved from
whalebone inside a box made of glue and pigeon’s nests. You did not
know what to do with all of these intoxicated gifts. You could not carry
them around and so you bought a plastic storage box, folded
each gift neatly into scented tissue paper, and closed the lid. I wrote
you in Pennsylvania. I said, “I have a fold-out,” then I put on
my headphones and spent the evening walking under the yellow
glow of street lamps, the red brick, the sparkling snow. That was
not the same year. I walked like a downcast philosopher
beneath the Kinzua Bridge, measuring my time and distance slowly. All of
my vacant thoughts were in the clouds, waiting for the
precipitation of a long- lost meaty memory of meeting a future
you to rain back down to me, storming my petite form into an
ambulated oblivion. My life has been this long, arduous academic road.
My head always in the dense pages. Those long endless paragraphs
where the wheat, the cornfield, and the muted stone of an idea traveled
back and forth between prolixity and nothingness.
From time to time, I
wonder if you would marry me even after our galaxy stopped
expanding. I wonder on nights like this if you would mutely climb
inside my submarine and sit beside me until all the speed boats sped
past. I wanted to walk beside you up a narrow stairwell with arms full
of paper bags and rice and cabbage and keys jangling in your hand. I
wondered whether you’d love me more if we fell onto the bed or
if instead, I scrubbed the crisper down before dumping the vegetables in, or
whether you’d forgive me if I slept and the sound of engines carried
my dream to the beach and if a smog curtain closed behind me and if I
went on wondering whether you liked wrist bones or clavicles best, or if I
went on wanting, in spite of it, to fold my mouth around your hip, would you know?
Would you hold my face in your hands like a melon and carry my head home?
We’d hardly met. I was learning so many words do not mean what
I thought they did. I have come to understand moisture in a very different
way. Words often, despite my heavy proclivity for wanting them to, do not
have much moisture in them. They lack water and something else.
Something I can’t pin my fingers on. Something to do with acoustic
signals or density or the waxy content in the cranium of dolphins. After
reaching into my armpits in the dark afternoon many years later for
two wheats and three stones, I found your fingers cracking out laughing
like they heard a terrible knock- knock joke from the edge of their
alpha-keratin. I wonder if you would love me less if all my clocks and
obligations cracked wide open and I oozed out, formless as raw egg or if I
was not ticklish or if I owned an orange cat. The kind that spoke Cantonese
or Vietnamese with a Southern drawl. The kind that a mandarin orange
would mistake for its distant, house-arrested cousin. Some mornings
when I woke up in the early light to unlower the blinds,
the kind that made you more sultry and less formal in the Houston
darkness, I imagined you being a fruit basket that someone
accidentally left on the third floor of a vacant apartment complex. There
were bell peppers that didn’t shake like bells and there were mythologies
in you that didn’t arrive with a broken chariot on its coeval asphalt.
In times like these, you don’t ever take the elevator with me to the rooftop
with the lavish bar and flamboyant cocktails that night we ordered
cabernet and sunk into the plush cushions and did not drink a sip of it and I felt
as if I’d stepped inside a future where I did not exist or a memory that
belonged entirely to someone else. The night was all around us and, for
an instant, I was certain it was me and not my brother who was dead.
But in the morning when I raised the blinds
your stillness, which is either that of a hummingbird
or its opposite, is so exquisitely composite and fatalistic and so
I try hard to step inside of it. A fantasy you once told me.
I lean over you. I brush your cheek. My neck crowned by
a collar of trees. I say, Baby, how did you sleep?
I slept poorly and
unevenly—like my subconsciousness sat on an old- fashioned
scale—the owlgift vintage—the kind that represents truth and fairness. But
on the other side, the other side of your amnesia, the one you had only
known briefly and intermittently, the one outweighing everything
about the rapid heartbeats of raven who sat (unevenly) on an old redwood
tree by the side of road. Compelled by distance and sadness, I swiftly cup
your face like an old beggar cleaning knives for the endangered denizens
of the foggy city he dreams up each night, then watches swirl slowly
down the drain of each morning, leaving his belly full of a
sadness that is jagged and undefined. It is possible,
of course, to miss someone who sleeps beside you, too,
and so I remove a hybrid hyacinth from a drawer of a
tree and whisper soporific leaves into it so that it is always
falling asleep by exfoliating into what you always
love and can love. There is a mist waiting outside like a widow.
Her eyes are soft and wet with tears or sweat from running up
an evanescent hill. I try to run my hands through her near the mulberry
well as a way of telling you that I wish your heartbeat smelled like a tea
kettle with fresh mint stuck in its sprout: metallic and fresh and blooming
with an arc of wheat. Longing so thick makes my hands
somnolent, even my knuckles lull the handle of a
teakettle to sleep. In your absence, I pour hot water up into
a mug, with a wedge of lemon and take the steam into myself
as if I were pulling on your breath. Meanwhile, a livestream
of the Governor’s address drones on in the background, I sigh
into a kitchen that is newly emptied of you and the kettle sighs,
too, and the governor says it’s impossible to quantify suffering.
But I have drifted to a time long before Ida or Covid-19, I am
rousing my Manhattan- bound self from a dream,
and pulling her by her winter sleeves, up the endless steps
of a Brooklyn hotel, ordering death to leave.