Later

by Paul Lisicky

  Needless to say, the scenario remains proposed and stays in that space.

  It probably takes all of an hour. We suddenly feel like travelers from some cordoned-off tropical country, and the real world starts to lose the crackle of novelty and becomes closer to what it is. Even though Polly is straight, she, too, is already weary of a world that appears to be built in support solely of procreation and generational stability. A world of the whitest white people, with no room for difference. A world in which queer people and artists are way off to the side, if they even exist at all. The lights in the stores hurt our eyes. Our mouths are dry, our psyches like pieces of felt to which someone has taken a needle and started scratching until there’s no surface left. We haven’t eaten enough. And we’re low on protein, on hydration. Our eyes are full of looking and looking at too much junk, at stuff that doesn’t even merit our attention. Is this too much immersion and our senses are drained? Have we wasted valuable time? We just want to be back home, but we don’t feel like driving the long route back, two lanes most of the way, not just the thirteen-mile stretch of Suicide Alley, but the speed trap of Eastham. I can see the tiredness in Polly’s face, the left corner of her mouth weighted, the spot between her brows knit tight and tense. I’m sure she can see tiredness in mine. Something has turned. The milk has soured, too much time in the car, in front of a heating vent or defroster, too much time trudging back and forth across parking lots, slamming car doors shut, and driving to the next lot with weeds growing in its cracks. In people’s faces you can see the cost of taking on several low-paying jobs in winter, living off unemployment or Social Security checks. Food on the cheap side, kerosene heaters in the kitchens, all for the sake of living near the precious ocean and dunes. Polly and I think this is the real world, but for these people, this cape is their escape; this is their Provincetown. We come back home with flannel shirts or sweatshirts we might wear only once or twice before they drop to the bottom of the drawer, take on the smell of mothballs or camphor, only to be donated to Ruthie’s at the first sign of a crocus next year.

  Only when the Pilgrim Monument comes into sight do we sense why we have left Town. We’re lucky to have visited the world. We’re even luckier not to have to live in it.

  Dutch & Farsi

  On quiet nights like this, I think, I should call Denise, my oldest friend, whom I once talked to every day for two hours. I tell myself to pick up the phone and then I decide to put it off until the morning. Is it just that I no longer have time for long analyses of the people who aggravate and mystify her? Not just that. When we try to talk now, all we hear is distance in our voices, and it hurts at either end, I can tell. She’s living in a suburb some would call upscale, in a restored house with a high-end kitchen and restaurant-sized stove—and I am, where? What could you compare to Provincetown? I’m talking about a place where it’s impossible to speak a sentence without folding death inside its structure, and when we talk, we hear two different languages that can’t be bridged—for now. It will change later, but that will take years. The single time she comes to visit, she steps off the plane as if she’s dressed for East Hampton, by which I mean expensively, with high heels, gleaming hair, and makeup, and when we take a walk on a fire road toward Truro’s Highland Light, she talks incessantly about boyfriend troubles without lifting her head to see the trees, the cliff, the immensity beyond. Squint a bit and you can’t even tell the sea and sky apart, the lucent blue is exactly the same. It goes from the bottom of the world to the top. And that’s as close to a sign as I’ve ever been given. No binary, no division. Why won’t she see?

  Maybe it is too painful to know there is another life when the life she has needs to mean everything.

  Skyscraper

  I imagine Denise’s words upon stopping in Boston after her time in Town:

  So many tall buildings.

  The awe and dizziness of looking up, as if she has parachuted back to earth after being dead for so long.

  13

  Imbued

  Queer ephemera, that transmutation of the performance energy … function as a beacon for queer possibility and survival.

  JOSÉ MUÑOZ, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

  To make something beautiful is a radical act, especially when bodies are decaying, splashed with red spots as if a paintbrush were shaken over bare skin. The bartender at the A-House? Legs so swollen from KS, each leg is the circumference of two legs. None of the doctors and nurses have seen such a thing, so they wrap them in moist rags, which doesn’t relieve his pain. Richard Baker paints a red tulip. Someone might think it’s merely a flower, but he’s looking at a body, maybe even a specific part of the body, a penis, a nipple, a throat turned inside out. Same goes for the waterfalls falling out of one of Polly’s heart paintings. It’s a body that knows how close it is to the precipice and maybe that’s why it coruscates off the canvas. José Muñoz again: “Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.”

  Taxonomy

  There isn’t a name for what Hollis and I are for each other. Someone could say we are friends. The word friend is capricious, its very sound is warm, inviting: it has the potential to contain many dimensions. And yet it feels like dissembling to introduce him as “my friend Hollis,” as if he’s merely a workout partner, a study buddy. My anxiety over this matter might compel me to drop his name more than if I had an actual category for him. Do I simply want to own him? Or do I want to be owned by him? Neither of these options sounds satisfactory without the other, but then again I wonder if intimacy and attachment are even possible without the roof of a category.

  As much as I claim that categories are restrictive in every other realm.

  Hollis uses the term fuck buddy, but that seems simple, malnourished, as if we are just two teens getting together after soccer practice rather than two grown men in their early thirties. It diminishes, it builds tight walls, and it doesn’t even give us any space for fondness and affection. Does Hollis think about his fuck buddy late into the night when he can’t sleep? Does he grab on to his pillow with his arms, or put it between his legs and think about how deeply he’d sleep if the fuck buddy were lying next to him, resting his head on his chest?

  The two of us are walking up Pearl Street toward the Work Center. These days the sun goes down at four. Often you can feel the light starting to dim after two, which does not gladden my spirits, especially today. Another moody day: the sky never left darkness behind. My writing isn’t going so well. That doesn’t mean I’m not trying, just that I have written only a handful of scenes in months. They are possibly on-the-way-to-good scenes, but I can’t seem to grow the novel before and after those scenes. I’m agitated into my deepest layers. Suddenly my desire to be simply among—to be just another Provincetown queer—isn’t enough. It pales against what every human wants: purpose, recognition, contribution—attributes that could possibly have significance beyond the day we’re in. For the first time in my life I have been living for now, against futurity. But for today at least that isn’t enough for me. I have been working on two novels at once; I have been working many years, and to turn my back on all that now? Well, that would be crass. It would disrespect all the people who have read my work and pushed me and counted on me.

  And what if I’m not around in two, three years? I doubt that I’m dying, but it would be callow to be too certain. A sickly child (mononucleosis, mumps, chicken pox, speculations of leukemia and cystic fibrosis), I learned early on to be attuned to my body, to what hurt, to the parts that felt tired, achy. I do not think I’m sick, and though I could take the test, I’m apprehensive. Why be tested when the drugs they have are useless and damage the body? Is that the way to live a longer life, a better life? AZT, Bactrim, DDI, Retrovir, aerosol pentamidine: names out of science fiction films that don’t even evoke comfort, but have a violence in them
, as if to remind us that the disease requires an ongoing vigilance: guns, bombs, and knives to keep a genocide at bay.

  But maybe the disease is stealthier than anyone’s ability to outrun it. I will simply wake up one morning. I will reach over for my glasses on the night table, put them on, expecting the usual miracle of sight. I will not be able to see. I will try to blink blink blink the darkness away but I will be like the narrator of Sebald’s Austerlitz, who thinks he knows what’s at stake years before his book is out in the world. “Even when I glanced up from the page open in front of me and turned my gaze on the framed photographs on the wall, all my right eye could see was a row of dark shapes curiously distorted above and below—the figures and landscapes familiar to me in every detail having resolved indiscriminately into a black and menacing cross-hatching.”

  My Lie

  Occasionally an acquaintance asks me if I’ve been tested. Once, I say I am negative, as if this person, a casual acquaintance, wouldn’t be able to bear it otherwise. If I told her the truth, it might might even be an occasion for a lecture. To which I could respond: All the sex I have is safe sex. And see her looking right through me, as if she can see right into that night with Billy, our two bodies lying side by side on the bed.

  I haven’t seen Billy in so long. Someone tells me he isn’t doing very well.

  And I can’t get my mind off my lie. It is the one and only time I lie, and though I excuse myself by saying that people of good character do bad things at times of extremity, I don’t like to meet this part of myself, as maybe this part of myself is unstoppable: a creek run over the banks, flooding neighborhoods. Why would it be so much harder to say, I don’t know? I’m afraid. I want to live a life that isn’t focused on my health, on prolonging my life, or on avoiding my death. I want to have as much freedom, and opportunities for trying and failing, as you do. I want to have the privilege of being bored. I don’t want to endure the smells of a doctor’s office, or the repeated sticks of a syringe. I don’t want to get used to the sight of my blood, or a tongue depressor. I don’t want to wait by the phone for my latest test results, shuddering when they’re not what I want to hear. I don’t even want the adrenaline of good news, because that’s always followed by a physical letdown: fatigue, depression. I don’t want to lie awake at night, thinking of my doctor’s face, whether I’m still handsome enough for him to feel attracted to me, as absurd as that sounds.

  I want some control, even though I know that not dealing with the future is a fiction of control.

  Let the day ahead be a bowl on the table. I will fill it up with want, and let there be nothing beyond that to measure. Until the next day.

  I’m not ready to be old now that I’ve just become young. I wasn’t young for so long, even when I was five years old.

  Then again my agitated feelings are probably too big to pin to any one explanation. Lack looms on this cold, moody afternoon. Lack pools and settles into my bone tissue, the empty shops and restaurants on the streets. On other days lack is on the periphery. Lack is bearable when it isn’t right in front of me, in the center of my vision. On this day all I can see are piles of oiled sand on the street, unswept steps, side yards unmown for years, a doormat curled in the middle of a lawn, broken flowerpots turned on their sides, the dead marigold stalks still crisping and colorless. Town does not look loved. And if people do try to love Town enough, wind, rain, salt, sleet, blowing sand, and snow will do their part to undo human efforts.

  “Look at this street,” I say to Hollis. “The houses on this street. Did you ever notice how fucking ugly it is?”

  “It’s not ugly,” he says, laughing, denying my perception the way my father routinely does. We keep walking, silent. And for the first time ever, I hear just a shadow of doubt in his tone. He doesn’t sound so sure of himself and is perhaps startled that I’ve been so blunt, as it is out of character for me; he’s known me only as agreeable, pliable, sweet. And maybe he senses I am not talking just about how people take care of their houses, but about us.

  Or maybe my disillusion is just the necessary turning point. I’m no longer a visitor, but I’m becoming somebody who’s putting down roots. It’s taken four months to turn my past to blank, unremarkable terrain, not unlike that moon up there.

  Seal

  I can’t sleep one night. A tree casts its shadow on the ceiling. I feel the branches of that tree in my body, as if it’s grown into my ribs. Will I wake up one of these nights, cold, with chattering teeth, sheets drenched in fever? Will I find rashes on my side, on my face? Will I look up at the ceiling and think, What if it’s in me? I try not to think of the metaphors of political paranoia, but I can’t get them out of my head. Why did I wait so long to attend to this? Why do I still wait? Could that encounter with Billy all those months back have sealed my story?

  Musicale 1

  On a cold night in February there’s a benefit to raise money for art supplies for people with AIDS. Billy is both the curator and the Johnny Carson of it. The house is full, every ticket sold, and with each reader or performer, Billy’s face gets prouder, brighter. He can’t hide his enthusiasm and his love for us. It’s one thing to come up with the idea for a fund-raiser, but something else to pull it off, especially at a moment when his health isn’t so great, and several people in the audience, his closest friends, are visibly struggling. Hardly any event in Town takes place without somebody leaving to attend some health emergency. Off to the side there are two men in wheelchairs, docked close to the exits in case they don’t have the stamina to stay.

  The two Michaels read, Mark reads, Marie reads a poem.

  Kathy: first time she’s read since Arnie’s death. Face shy.

  When it’s my turn I read a bit from Bad Florida, a novel I’ll soon put aside for good, although I’ll always know it as my first novel. A woman and two children, one her son, the other kidnapped from a boyfriend, are escaping from home. Their departure is anything but easy. They have loved their house, loved the place where they’d hoped to spend their lives. It’s 2 a.m., long past their usual bedtime. They’re escaping Chick Keatley, a former astronaut, with Halley, the man’s disabled daughter, in tow, heading to Golden Gate, Florida, because there’s a cinder block house there and it’s cheap and they don’t know where else to go. They’re in the convertible with a hole whistling air through the top. When Natalie, the mother, sings a line from West Side Story’s “Somewhere,” I sing-speak it in my own voice, quiet, deliberately awkward, and a shade under pitch, instead of reading it, as I do the other text. I want to make sure it’s not pushed or asking for feeling. This isn’t about whatever wisdom and sensitivity I’ve been able to catch; I’m long past disappearing into my role. There’s a place for us, somewhere a place for us. I don’t yet know that those borrowed lines are more important to the audience than anything else I could have read. I don’t know till the evening is over that I was singing about AIDS.

  David Sedarisness

  In the car one day, Hollis puts on a tape of a guy named David Sedaris, though he won’t be David Sedaris for years. Some of his stories crack me up, especially the one in which he talks about his lover Bruce Springsteen, and other guys whose straightness is never in question, but the work as a whole doesn’t get under my skin the way I want it to. It doesn’t make me feel dangerous or nervous, and as soon as I admit that to myself, I listen only toward trying to identify what Hollis sees and hears. The humor, of course. The proud badge of geekiness—expressiveness—as a way to manage absurdity. Hollis tells me I should write like David Sedaris, which sounds like he believes my own work is not funny enough or else he’d be putting my book on tape into his tape deck and we’d both be driving down Route 6, spitting out laughter against the windshield. But David Sedaris is good because he’s found the David Sedarisness inside himself, brought it up through his fingers, and typed it out. David Sedaris wouldn’t have listened to the person who told him he should sound like, I don’t know, Phyllis Diller? I keep that to myself.

&nbs
p; Responsibility

  Oh, it’s more than just a good time. Sickness doesn’t exist out here, in this space, in this pocket of an hour. Out here we can pretend to burn any sickness out of our bodies, out of the bodies not even on the floor, or near.

  It’s actually the best time when it’s just me and some of the other Fellows. The middle of the week, minutes before midnight, and as soon as we step onto the A-House dance floor, we claim the space as our rec room. The temperature inside is far less feverish than it is over the weekend. In spite of the roasting fireplace, the room is not such a sauna with only a few of us here; it’s calm and comfortable and dark. Bodies stand on the sidelines, along the bar, green beer bottles held at belt level. The music is Yohan Square. Nobody needs to work too hard. We’re not about merging, nothing so simpleminded or cohesive. We’re stepping in a single line around the perimeter—first parodies of wooden soldiers, then robots. We don’t have any responsibility other than to illustrate that we are heads, arms, legs, cocks, cunts, assholes, belly buttons, fingers, tits, feet, hands, butts, elbows.