It’s late now, which I know without checking. 2:50 would be my guess, by how the moon looks, the western edge obscured. I have to be at work by seven, a roofing job with a guy who talks to me sometimes about beating up his girlfriend. Tina. Brent has some regrets about this but not enough to stop. Does she really think sequins are appropriate for dinner on a Tuesday he says. Does she not know they fuck with the light around her and ask for attention? I smiled at this and neither of us knew why. Brent’s company aside, I like it up there, the higher the better, straddling the peak and laying down the shingles that will keep the water out. Sleep deprivation can be a kind of drug, a different type of consciousness, and I like how it makes all my senses more alive to the work, more moved by the view.
I want to tell you about what happened to my mother, at the end, but first I have to tell you about how she happened to me. My hope is that if I can explain it, how she vanished, then I won’t need to disappear myself. Isn’t it true we only follow or imitate what we don’t entirely understand?
You don’t need to worry that I’m telling anyone about this—if I tried they wouldn’t believe me. Good night, Mr. Kahn. I hope you’re the kind of person who sleeps well, proud of who you’ve always been.
Yours,
Wright
* * *
December 2, 1980
Dear Mr. Kahn,
Have you ever hit anyone? My mother would be heartbroken to know that I’m capable of violence, she the detonator of bombs. She would have said what she did was a kind of communication, and that the brawl I started today at work was a way of eliminating the possibility of any. I can’t help wondering if it had been a roofing gig, like I was doing last time I wrote, I could have resisted that part of myself. Having only limited surface area to walk and think on, being very intimate with the sun, slows down any reaction.
Me and two other guys, both veterans, were redoing a woman’s kitchen. She is what you would call a classic Texan lady of the house. How her enormous outdated beehive survives uncharred is beyond me. The required amount of Aqua Net and the omnipresent Virginia Slim, the nail polish wand that comes out at the slightest provocation—these seem like a deadly combination, though I am someone who fixates on a fire hazard, so.
She had read that an open plan was in vogue and wanted us to make two rooms a seamless one. Also she wanted an island and loved the sound of the word and repeated it often. So I can just lean over the island and talk to my guests while I’m fixin’, etc. Fixin’, in Texas, is not a transitive verb. Among the things my mother did teach me was grammar, a love for language, believing, apparently, that an adult way of speaking would make me stick out less, not more. Did you like Texas when you were here? I somehow can’t imagine it suited you but then you were probably as insulated from the outsized culture of it as anyone can be. I hope you’ll forgive my presumptions. I ended up in Texas I don’t know why, partially on account of your having lived here, partially on account of the movie Giant. It was James Dean’s last, something I watched on television in Ecuador, an idea of this country that predated my experience of it. Have you seen it? It spans thirty Technicolor years, and the actors all play themselves as they get older, all get the same violet-gray hair color at the same time, which comforted me deeply, the idea of parity and fairness in our dying. When I dropped out of the college Claudette and James paid for, I ended up on a bus to Houston, and I’ve spent the last two years floating around the state.
We had anyway already knocked out the wall between the two rooms and hauled out the pink linoleum countertops and the attached wooden cabinets and most of their upheaval’s detritus. Olivia was a constant presence, picking things up we’d just set down and trying to hand them to us. It didn’t help anything, nor did my claustrophobia or allergies, both of which I acquired sometime in my teens and neither of which is a good excuse for what I did to Brent. I told myself in the hour after that if I had been near an open window, or if breathing hadn’t felt like something that required concentration, I wouldn’t have done it. Like my mother, I always have an accusatory finger on the environment. I don’t like that, but I see it.
Brent wears his fatigue jacket to the job even though it’s Texas in the summer and he has to remove it immediately to get to work. Shane is another story, always twenty minutes early, won’t put together a full sentence unless it’s absolutely necessary. He presents as a nonentity except that you turn around and he has sanded and planed an eight-by-ten piece of pine and sawed out the shape of a sink. Over the course of two weeks Brent has attempted to engage Shane with no real luck except the initial acknowledgment that yes, he had served. Brent’s version of hello is cocking a head at someone and asking—You serve? He did this to me and when I said no he squinted and said, Too young, as in what a shame.
Brent has cadged and leaned on Shane without getting any real information, and I knew this was making him angrier and angrier. Combat medic is my guess, he said, between surges of the electric drill. Green Beret? You will kill me if you say Green Beret. By day five or so he stopped guessing. You’re a deserter, he said, and stared at Shane whenever he could, even while caulking or hammering. Shane, who has the kind of exceptional focus that sometimes comes to the very frightened, used this as encouragement to work even more efficiently, thinking, I could tell, toward the wad of money at the end of the gig and the grunt from our supervisor in the smoky trailer office. The only thing Shane did that made him a less than perfect employee was to always leave five minutes before our scheduled lunch break, going to hide somewhere that I never found out.
Fifteen feet from us, Olivia put on a Patsy Cline record and raised her chiffon neck scarf around her mouth, unhappy and immaculate on her plastic-covered sofa. She was insane, as was Brent, as was Shane in a different way entirely. Though he had managed to avoid it almost altogether, by going through me or interrupting his work to fetch the tool he needed rather than asking Brent to pass it, something came up Shane hadn’t anticipated. The polyurethane had to be applied almost immediately after the wax, and he had forgotten to retrieve it from the truck. I was in the nearby bathroom pissing when I heard his voice, the sound of which I’d almost forgotten or never registered in the first place. It was deeper than you’d think, the kind of voice that even in whisper reverberates. Brent, he said, I’m going to need that polyurethane that’s in the bed of the Ford awfully quick. Is there any way please you could grab it for me? I could tell by the ceasing of the drill that Brent had stopped his work on the cabinets. You can’t say two words to me all week and now you want my fucking help? This is a Christian house! I heard Olivia yell. She was oblivious to what was about to unfold, already into her second afternoon G & T. I just need it quickly, Shane said. Then we can talk. I promise.
That was the last thing I heard. I came back and Shane’s brush was wobbling in his grip, dripping wax onto the surface he had made perfect, and he’d brought it up onto his shoulder to kind of embrace himself. His eyes didn’t know where to go. I don’t know how, but I felt certain that the fear he had then was the same as what I had felt hiding in those bathrooms as a thirteen-year-old, crouching on a toilet seat and wishing the earth would relieve me of my existence. It’s our mistake, I wanted someone to say, not yours. You were right. You were not meant to be here, not like this, and we’re taking care of it immediately. It sounds ridiculous, but the only way to put it is this: I believed Shane and I were the same color.
Brent advanced to whisper something in his ear and took a hunk of Shane’s hair in his fist. He twisted Shane’s hand with the dripping brush in it, all the way back until it lost its grip, and that is what got me started. I don’t imagine you’ve assaulted anyone in your life, Mr. Kahn, and I’d like to believe that I’d be that person too had my life unrolled differently, had I always been worried about by someone else. I wear this turquoise ring of my mother’s on my pinky, sharper than it looks, and the bleeding on his face was significant. A minute in Olivia threw her drink on me, which did nothing to put out the si
tuation. I didn’t have to pick up the spare piece of wood. He was already on the ground. Okay, he was saying. Okay, okay, okay.
Shane left with me and we walked, crossing the street to the promise of shade every few minutes. I didn’t desert, he said. I told him I knew and that I wouldn’t care if he had. I just can’t talk about it, he said. I think about it enough. We were both leaving that month’s pay behind and there were altars in almost every yard, crosses adorned with fake flowers and planted in multicolored pebbles.
I’ve been hiding out in my apartment a week, waking up to the messages Brent’s been leaving when he calls early in the morning. Moving seems very likely, though the thought of surrendering to whatever punishment has some appeal, too. I like the idea of having a face people in line don’t want to look at. Before I go anywhere, I have to visit Shane, whose mother called to let me know. He’d been living with her since the first hospitalization. She thanked me for standing up for him, and said even if she didn’t condone violence she knew I had probably protected Shane from some. There was one nightmare in particular that he had described to her, something someone in his company had done to a corpse. They had seated him in a chair by his home and formed his fingers into a peace sign, so he would look that way when his family arrived home. His head was basically gone. Linda apologized for being so gruesome, but she wanted me to know what had kept her son from sleeping. He is not crazy, she said, he just can’t get a good night’s sleep, and what can you do without that? I agreed. There is very little you can do.
Her name is Linda and she thought it might be nice to go together for his birthday, his thirty-third, although she warned me that the Thorazine might keep Shane from visitation hours altogether. Do you know any boys like this, Mr. Kahn? I imagine not. Have you thought about how strange it is that while you were treading completely virgin ground this was going on below you, sometimes just by the light of the planet you walked on?
The apartment won’t be hard to pack. It’s embarrassing, the way I live. Cans of nuts the only thing in the kitchen, a bed on the ground I’ve never once made.
Yours,
Wright
1.
1981
Wright left Texas late in the afternoon and a garbled message for his landlord on the office machine, apologizing for leaving so much behind and saying of course he understood about the deposit. Money was something he could not care about, like a person to whom you are introduced and can think of nothing to ask. The feeling was mutual. He did not know what things cost and could not be bothered to compare the prices of similar goods, and he bought next to nothing save an occasional manic spree after a paycheck—he would emerge from a department store with a fishing rod and an unseasonal sweater, a discounted blender and a white leatherette address book. He was twenty and objectively beautiful, the mangy native state of his body refined and filled by his jobs in construction. There was someone people thought he looked like. He was frightened by conversation and spent any looking somewhere else, a habit that gave him the air of cockiness.
In the middle console of his truck he put two packs of cigarettes he’d emptied into a bowl. He smoked a pack a day, Marlboro 27s, and it felt like the punishment he believed he deserved. To wake up and cough was a perverse pleasure. The man he’d assaulted at work had finally made good on his threats to return the favor, showing up at a bar where Wright programmed hours on the jukebox and played paper games of Hangman with the bartender Frank. A quaint drinking village with a fishing problem, said a sign above the bar. All pool sticks were attached by a generous length of wire to the wall, a measure that kept them from being taken out front and snapped in the service of an argument. Frank knew where Wright lived and had driven him there, three times Wright could remember, more that he couldn’t.
“Hey, soldier,” Wright had said when Brent sat down next to him, a poor opener that escalated things quickly. He was the one to suggest the parking lot. Brent was bored by how little he resisted, making up for what the fight lacked in an antagonist with whatever props were around, a fistful of gravel he rubbed into the side of Wright’s face, a jagged piece of bumper left behind that he used like a bat on Wright’s lower back. “Am I wrong or are you the type of faggot who likes this,” Brent asked. He was genuinely surprised. On his belly Wright flashed a peace sign and threw a kiss over his shoulder. Frank appeared with his .22 on his shoulders, a hand slung over each end.
“I hear there’s some good television on at your house,” Wright heard him say. “I hear cable’s a notifying miracle.”
It had been no heartbreak to leave that apartment, which he’d decorated only with the occasional fortune cookie scroll Scotch-taped to the card table he ate on. The few visitors had been disappointed women. Imitation pearl earrings or turquoise belts way up the waist, pageboy bobs or hair that fell warm down the back, breasts high and mean or low and brown, all of them left confused about why they hadn’t been enough. At first when the moment came and he couldn’t, he apologized and excused himself to the bathroom, but lately he just fell to the side and welcomed them to sleep there or not. If he saw them later in the drugstore or supermarket he never greeted them by name.
The clouds as he left the state had a truant feel, thin and distracted. On the radio was the inaugural address, coming to him in two-bit phrases as he looked for a station playing something else. The president had been an actor, a B-rated cowboy who spoke out of the side of his mouth. Wright imagined him like this still, splayed on a horse in the movie posters he’d passed in the downtowns of places they never stayed long. The watching world, the new president said. Economic ills, mortgaging our future, patriotism quiet but deep, the giants on whose future we stand. After minutes of searching for something else, he turned the knob to off.
It was the weather, he told himself, that he wanted. Northern California had moods like his, the fog in the morning skulking guiltily around the hills until noon, a correlative to the half-dead feeling he had the first few hours he was awake. He respected the sun’s expression there, mercurial and withholding, and how the light breezes turned over into something pushy and corrosive in under a minute. There was a shame in returning, and also he knew that the influx of information any new place required would pass right over him now. He’d spent the majority of his days off the last year in bed, wishing for a meal to appear as though that were something he could not orchestrate himself, newly frightened of things that had happened a decade before. The suicide attempt he refused to think about, how even for that he had not planned well. He put the belt in the plastic garbage liner, after, and wore his pants loose and low. The letters to the astronaut were similarly avoided, a part of his emotional life he starved out unless he’d been drinking, when he wrote and wrote and walked cockeyed to the mailbox six blocks away. He must have known if he left them until the morning they’d never get sent. On the way to California he ate sunflower seeds and sang to himself, Phil Spector’s love songs, catchy and wicked. He hit me and I knew he loved me!
* * *
January 21, 1981
Dear Mr. Kahn,
As I was getting ready to leave, looking through the things I own, I kept thinking—it’s strange what persists, more arbitrary than I’d prefer. I have an old driver’s license of Randy’s that he gave me, I don’t know why, some early token of love. I have a photo of Claudette I took with a camera they gave me, her sleeping face revealed in the leftmost third of the photo through a cracked door I made out of focus. A Bible my mother stole from somewhere and rolled joints from, a magazine I’m on the cover of, not the one I’ve mentioned.
I don’t imagine you’ll know this, because it took even the press a few years to put it together, but that was not my first time, at the launch I mean, on the cover of Life. I guess this is something you and I share, that we are some of the few individuals to make it twice. Of course I realize that worshipping coincidence is the province of the insane. No one knows I write to you, have I told you that?
Maybe you remember the phot
o. I’d argue the composition is the most striking thing about it, although my mother would say it’s my face, the determination there. There’s a row of National Guardsmen, diminishing in size into the distance, and facing them a row of people in their twenties and thirties. Where the two lines meet is a tree, fat and dark and with a canopy that hangs just a foot from the ground, one that was everywhere in San Francisco and which most people confuse with a pine. Actually, it’s a Pacific yew, which you can tell by the little red berries it litters everywhere. I know my trees. My mother always said the way we show our affection for life is in our ability to name it. I would say she’s right about that, although I can’t say my botanical interests were so loftily motivated. If you are a boy without a door that closes, you quickly find and love any place that might hide you. The Pacific yew, fate bless it, gave me that.
In the first line of people, the sameness is shocking, and I don’t just mean the starched epaulets and built-in belts that cut just under their ribs and the rounded helmets strapped on at the same one-hundred-and-twenty-degree angle. I mean the faces and the postures and the way they hold their guns, which I have to say seems gentle, the elbow a little loose to accommodate the length of the rifle as it crosses the torso. There can’t be some military dictum on how to arrange your face, but in this photo the twenty sets of lips are identical, all performing something of an underbite, all looking like they’re keeping something secret behind that lip, a match or a penny. Ditto the forehead, creaseless, and the stare, a kind that has always made me nervous, one that remains firmly on the line of horizon. They’re all white, of course, all of them with their feet spread just wider than their frames and one cocked back, none of them obviously deviating from a general mold of five ten and a hundred and sixty.
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