by Paul Lisicky
“I just want you to know I’m positive and undetectable,” texts a man I’m getting to know.
I wait some minutes before I answer. I want to sound casual, but casual in a way that doesn’t seem glib, that doesn’t make him think he’s out of touch. I could remind him that undetectable people can’t transmit HIV, and I’m stupefied that he might not be aware of that. That’s a burden he doesn’t need on top of any others.
How many simply walked away when the word positive came up?
“Totally fine,” I text. “I’m HIV-negative and on PrEP.”
And there’s no mistaking his relief, or the gravity implied by it, even though we’re not exactly face-to-face. When I go over to his place the next night, we talk for a while on his sofa. Laugh about the holidays and their crazy burdens, laugh about the people who don’t tell us when their gifts arrive, and when we move to his bedroom, I watch how he tears open a condom between his teeth. The finesse of it is impressive. He’s had plenty of practice.
I tell him, “You know, you don’t have to use that. You don’t have to put that on.”
The frisson of saying those words aloud, asking him to lay it down, be present. Skin to skin. An element of closeness and danger I don’t ever take for granted.
But he keeps his head low. Doesn’t acknowledge my words. Maybe he’s wary of any drug’s power, even though they’ve probably kept him alive for a long time. But I don’t know him well enough for such a conversation, not now. What better way to extinguish desire?
He won’t admit that the world has changed, is changing. To knock down the tower he’s built? That would be like demolishing the Empire State.
He’s acting out of care, I remind myself.
“Each tablet contains 200 mg of emtricitabine and 300 mg of tenofovir disoproxil fumarate, which is equivalent to 245 mg of tenofovir disoproxil.” Truvada (PrEP)
A grad student of mine tells me about a friend of hers who has an expression for any book written about AIDS: trauma porn. Then he checks an incoming message from his phone, leaves half his salad on his plate, and goes out to have sex at one thirty in the afternoon.
“Oh God,” I say, then begin to crack up out of shock.
“Exactly!” my student says, laughing along.
When I’m not having enough sex, say, when weeks go by when I haven’t made time for sex—there is my father at the back of my imagination, telling me I’m not getting my money’s worth.
You’re paying for that drug, he insists. Get out there.
Do I have to? I say back.
Then the same father says, Why should I have to pay into a system for people who can’t control themselves?
Three years ago I fled from Philadelphia to Town on the day after my father died, because I didn’t want to be anywhere else. I bought a plane ticket almost instantly. Distraction, company, familiar jokes, casual acquaintances, animals, laughter—where else could I find that particular combination but Town?
In the wake of death, I went to the place I associate with death.
My Ganges, but a spit of sand rather than a river. And I started to write.
One day later it still feels surreal to put this down. I don’t think any other being wanted to live more. In the past six months he lived through two separate bedside vigils, three separate stays in the hospice wing of the hospital, lived through nurses and caretakers who didn’t want him to get out of bed when all he wanted was to walk, walk, walk. Just over thirty-six hours ago I was teaching Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts to a workshop full of writers, and a student asked to read this passage from late in the book: “[Death] will do you even if you don’t believe it will do you, and it will do you in its own way. There’s never been a human that it didn’t.” I think a very small part of me might have believed that he was another kind of human. Maybe he’d escape it, find some way to solve it, fix it, which was true to how he approached everything, to-do lists and problems and procedures, ever the engineer—though he just as often put those problems aside to work on the next thing. He never sat still.
He was ninety-one years old.
In my mind every death will always be an AIDS death; everyone will always die before their time, whether they’re twenty-one or ninety-one. Nobody will ever get enough affection; everyone will be abandoned emotionally by the people they’d counted on, who get hardened by procedures, the insurance industry, the medical establishment, the funeral industry at the end. And for all that’s against their terrible journey, the dead burn brighter to me than they do when they’re alive.
Another trip. A holiday this time, Polly about to go to Kent and I’m watching her dog, Petey, for Thanksgiving week. I walk Petey down Commercial, toward Montello Street, and Town is quieter than I expected it to be. I’m in one of those moods when I’m not thinking that the Town I remember is gone. I’m not thinking what I too often find myself brooding about these days: too rich, too white, platform for Airbnbs, flipping, gentrification, everyone over fifty-five. Where’s my little city of the young? Instead, my body reminds me how safe I feel, how well I slept through last night, all night. Safety different from the safety of 1991, but safety nonetheless. Petey feels it too. And that awareness pulses back and forth through the leash, which goes slack only when he sniffs and licks a plant leaf. Petey, who thinks of me as his father, or his best friend. Human boyfriend? It’s impossible not to wonder that when he’s lying on his side, looking up at me from his corduroy bed, which takes up a sizable portion of the small living room. He’s communicating a contract through brown eyes: You’re mine.
Mine.
Then he’s dashed out of his leash, or broken his leash—or what? Slipped out of his collar. Time slows, and all sound rushes out of the world. Petey dashes toward the two Akitas on the street. Does Petey bite, or just threaten to, and what’s he trying to protect? Barks tear the air, but the Akitas look all right, Petey looks all right, no blood on any coat, the humans jerk their dogs apart, but the humans are not OK, not OK at all. The Akitas’ human is wailing. Her safe space’s been violated, and that’s the last thing she must have expected on a sunny, frigid day. Petey’s robbed her of her Town. And me? I’m immobilized, as if I’ve stepped on an electric wire. I’m kneeling, curling my body around Petey to keep him close against the sound of her pain, which whips like a belt on the ground. His heart beats into my palm, his face stunned, ashamed, the domestic side hunted by his wild, which usually feels distant unless he’s running through the woods, crashing through briars. He’s so used to being good, labeled the dear, smart, loyal boy by his humans, and now he’s slipped out of his category. I hold him so close he looks confused by me. I say, “I’m sorry” to her, “very sorry,” but it’s not enough, and never will be. And all the bodies that were lost in Town, smell of sickness on fingers, ambulance pulling up, silent, in the middle of the night, very sorry—and Petey’s one of those bodies. Could I even begin to communicate that to a stranger? Could a late arrival to Town ever understand? “You know what?” she says. “I’m calling the police.” The police? You can’t do that, I want to say. Holy ground. I’m still holding on to Petey and the world outside of Town pours into Town. Town replenishes itself and we won’t ever get it back. Once we would have worked this out on our own, would have laughed after tense words, would have offered to take each other out for a coffee, but it’s 2018, and the world’s too hurt for kindnesses like that. The hour’s too late. And though the police will eventually show up, in extraordinary calm with a suggestion for a harness, and a sturdy one at that, the terms of Town have changed. Two narratives of damage collide—where does her story begin? And now the two of us must write new narratives—bolder, more outlandish, unresolved—or our safe Town will be gone for good.
If you really love a place, you’ll be able to walk with its flaws. Not to love the flaws, not to accept them. Hell, you might even hate the flaws, no reason to describe a world in which hate wasn’t ever ground together with love. Thus, you’ll be able to say Town is about as hard
to get to as Tierra del Fuego, and if you should need to leave in a hurry, know the sky will darken, a storm will blow up, all modes of transportation will be canceled, and the wind will blow and blow for the next twenty-five years. You’ll be able to admit that Commercial Street in summer isn’t the charming narrow lane it appears to be, but a ruthless chute in which you’re a candlepin against a rolled bowling ball: one-way car traffic against two-way bike traffic, delivery trucks, the widest SUVs, widest strollers on the market, skateboards, the Town trolley, pickup trucks with extended rearview mirrors, motorcycles, fire trucks, runners, bachelorettes, three muscle bears in an oncoming row, seniors fresh off the cruise ship, aggressive walkers, texting walkers, brain-freeze walkers, ferry travelers with roller bags, occasional clueless straight couples who hold on to each other’s hands for dear life, no idea what they’ve gotten themselves into. You’ll say that certain locales occasionally smell of a most distinctive conflation of elements: low tide, decaying plant matter, fried clam, semen on wet sand, fox pee, beer on breath, salt air, weed. You’ll say it’s the kind of place where the first person you’re likely to run into is the last person you’d ever want to see—say the guy who still holds a grudge against you for pushing him away at the Boatyard in 1993.
And sometimes when I’m touched I think, I am in life—and that’s an entirely new sensation. I’m not standing apart from myself, watching myself. To think that I’ve lived long enough to live through fear.
But Jackson, Columbia, El Paso, Augusta, Baton Rouge. In some parts of the world HIV is only beginning.
Tender boat, still afloat, even though it’s springing leaks, one in the front, one in the back. As easy to tear open as skin. It was always meant to be a wreck, wasn’t it? If I try to fill it with gifts for the dead, will it make it over that wave ahead, or will it sink right to the bottom, become a cavern for fish?
And what better place to go back to than my first full night in Town? And here I could talk about the kindness that met me when I went into the Work Center office to pick up my instructions and key. And here I could say I didn’t even mind how many times I banged my head against the low ceiling of my room. Seven months ahead of time, pure time. I could shoot a tiny movie right here, a movie that stands for hope, the end of isolation and the promise of company in a brute age. Is it possible to write joy? If I could write joy it would be like soldering five sentences on top of one another. It would be the smell of heart tissue in attack mode, or the dread that comes with any beginning, the body knowledge that the new is its own kind of death. And maybe that’s why I need to keep moving after taking every last thing out of my cherry-red hatchback.
I want to touch you while there’s still time to touch you.
Permission acknowledgments
“Slow Death (Obesity, Sovereignty, Lateral Agency),” in Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant, pp. 95–120. Copyright, 2011, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder. www.dukeupress.edu
Excerpts from Homos by Leo Bersani, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Copyright © 1995 by Leo Bersani.
Excerpt from “Stanzas Ending with the Same Two Words” from Half Light: Collected Poems 1965–2016 by Frank Bidart. Copyright © 2017 by Frank Bidart. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Brief excerpt from p. 125 of The Maytrees by Annie Dillard. Copyright © 2007 by Annie Dillard. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Brief excerpt from pp. 8–9 of Atlantis by Mark Doty. Copyright © 1995 by Mark Doty. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Excerpt from Resuscitation of a Hanged Man by Denis Johnson. Copyright © 1991 Denis Johnson. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Excerpt from Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor, copyright © 2017 by Andrea Lawlor. Used by permission of Vintage Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Excerpts from Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity by José Esteban Muñoz. Copyright 2009 by José Esteban Muñoz. Reprinted by permission of NYU Press.
“Schemes and Visions: Denial, Hope, and Survival,” in In the Shadow of the Epidemic, Walt Odets, pp. 239–242. Copyright, 1995, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder. www.dukeupress.edu
“Some Problematic Reasons People Have Unprotected Sex,” in In the Shadow of the Epidemic, Walt Odets, pp. 204–232. Copyright, 1995, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder. www.dukeupress.edu
Excerpts from Safe Harbor/AIDS Archive Collection used by permission of Provincetown History Preservation Project. www.provincetownhistoryproject.com
Excerpt from “I’m Over the Moon” from Human Dark with Sugar by Brenda Shaughnessy. Copyright 2008 by Brenda Shaughnessy. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press.
Excerpt from “litany with blood all over” from Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith. Copyright © 2017 by Danez Smith. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org
Excerpt from Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Occasions by Michael Snediker. Copyright 2009 by Michael Snediker. Reprinted by permission of the Regents of the University of Minnesota.
Excerpt from Aids and Its Metaphors by Susan Sontag. Copyright © 1988, 1989 by Susan Sontag. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Excerpt from Time and the Town: A Provincetown Chronicle by Mary Heaton Vorse, copyright © 1942 by Mary Heaton Vorse. Used by permission of Vintage Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration by David Wojnarowicz, copyright © 1991 by David Wojnarowicz. Used by permission of Vintage Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank the Corporation of Yaddo, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Returning Residency Program of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Rutgers University for vital support that helped this book come into being.
And deepest thanks to:
Matt McGowan — Michael Taeckens — Fiona McCrae — Steve Woodward — the rest of the editorial team at Graywolf, including Katie Dublinski, Jeff Shotts, Ethan Nosowsky, Chantz Erolin, Susannah Sharpless, and Yana Makuwa — the marketing team at Graywolf, including Marisa Atkinson, Morgan LaRocca, Casey O’Neil, Caroline Nitz, Karen Gu, and Mattan Comay — Leslie Johnson and Josh Ostergaard — Ill Nippashi-Hoereth — Beowulf Sheehan — Kapo Ng — Polly Burnell — Elizabeth McCracken, Edward Carey, Gus Harvey, and Matilda Harvey — Petey — Anna deVries — Mark Doty — Ned — Dawn Walsh — Danella Carter — Richard Baker — Daphne Klein — Eloise Morley — my colleagues and students in the MFA Program at Rutgers University–Camden, including Lisa Zeidner, Lauren Grodstein, Greg Pardlo, and Pat Rosal — Stephanie Manuzak — Deb Olin Unferth — Leah Dawson — Chris Busa, Susanna Ralli, Irene Lipton, Ingrid Aue, and Annie Sloniker at Provincetown Arts — Matt Klam, Claire Vaye Watkins, Lisa Olstein, Carl Phillips, Garth Greenwell, and Victoria Redel — Brenda Shaughnessy — Dara Wier — Joy Williams — the Fine Arts Work Center — the community of Provincetown, Massachusetts: everyone who lived and died.
PAUL LISICKY is the author of Lawnboy, Famous Builder, The Burning House, Unbuilt Projects, and The Narrow Door: A Memoir of Friendship. His work has appeared in the Atlantic, BuzzFeed, Conjunctions, Fence, Foglifter, the New York Times Book Review, and the Offing, among other magazines and anthologies. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he has served on the Wr
iting Committee since 2000. He has taught in the creative writing programs at Cornell University, New York University, Sarah Lawrence College, the University of Texas at Austin, and elsewhere. He is currently an associate professor in the MFA Program at Rutgers University–Camden, where he is the editor of StoryQuarterly. He lives in Brooklyn.
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