America Was Hard to Find

by Kathleen Alcott

I was born in 1960, I finally said. What could I answer? What chance, in the shadow of two people so contorted around their very clear purpose, did I ever have of observing myself?

  I enclosed a photo I took the other day, of a homeless man asleep at the back of a bus. I loved the color of his dress, the blue sequins on the orange plastic. Doesn’t he look happy? I hope you’re sleeping well, Mr. Kahn, proud of who you’ve always been.

  Yours,

  Wright

  4.

  That Wright saw Randy one last time, gaunt and bearded, later seemed like something he should have worried about, a mean joke about the smallness of San Francisco, but in his life here he had given up plenty of his old self, denim that didn’t fit right, a habit of apologizing at the slightest discomfort of his own. The thoughts of himself suspended by a noose from an oak tree, twisting over some golden farmland, were all but gone, the imagined weight of a gun pushed back down his right molars, the fantasy of thirty pills dissolving in whole milk and strawberries in a blender. Suicide had been like some billboard he had to drive by every day, he thought, a highly effective advertisement that adorned the horizon on his way to getting anywhere, and somehow, with luck whose longevity he prayed for, he had found a way around it. He had not forgotten how it was to live with that imperative in his mind, a two-word command he had heard from everywhere, and he kept the memory of it as a warning, to remember what kind of town he was living in and what waited on the other side.

  The day was forty-two degrees and flirting with rain, and he had taken Braden’s lunch shift as a means of making amends. At a bar two nights before, a place famous for the fact that no two chairs were alike, he had picked up a boy Braden had been eyeing for weeks, a painter who lived on a houseboat in Sausalito and was always faking concern about making the last ferry.

  It had begun to feel to Wright like a thrilling game, how to make himself seen. It was automatic now, a certain glance, a jaw pointed in the opposite direction of the gaze, a way of standing, his hands woven behind his head, as though he were at rest even then. He understood that making this his talent had its issues, but it was the first time in his life he wanted to be visible, for people to ask, when he leaned over the shifting light of the jukebox or kissed an arriving acquaintance, who is that? Braden found the painter in the kitchen the next morning, while Wright slept off six well-gin gimlets, and after mopped the whole apartment, the aggressive smell of the citrus wax he used a telltale sign of his anger. “It’s like you need every single person to love you,” he said, when they finally talked about it, “no matter how you feel about them. It’s the same old show, watching you after your third drink.”

  On the way home from the restaurant Wright was immune to the street, the florist who lined his windows with unusual cuttings in jars of water, the fire escapes where boys in women’s furs sat smoking. At the corner store where he stopped for cigarettes and to scan the newspapers, a place he generally spent ten forgotten minutes, he heard Randy’s voice. It was unmistakable, a sound that sent up the last decade in smoke.

  Next up in the five-person line, shorter than Wright remembered, Randy was thin and ragged as some plant that has grown in a place where it is not supposed to, counting out some change with a rigid pointer finger. He was slipping coins along the top line of his palm, pinky to index. Wright put his paper back and pushed on his sunglasses and made his way toward the door with his eyes on his watch, an absurd impulse he was only half-aware of, as though Randy, if he spotted him, would assume he was late for an appointment and decide not to bother.

  The hand on his shoulder came a half a block down. He saw the fingers over the line of his jaw, sallow and attenuated. He dug his scapula forward to remove them, spun around to better see the threat.

  “Whoa, man,” Randy said, his arms spread to embrace him. “I thought that was you.”

  Wright couldn’t speak, only wait for what came next. He hung on that piece of time waiting for it to drop. Randy began to talk, as he always had, as though he were answering an audience, a single-file line of burning questions about his remarkable life. The flap pockets of his oilskin jacket were overstuffed and revealed their contents, a trade paperback, a misshapen bar of soap. His showy rhetoric identified him immediately, but there was a postural aspect that had changed, a shifting of his weight, a hedging air.

  “In town for some big meetings. Not anything I can talk about, yet, but this administration is in for a real shock, let me say, if they think . . .”

  The incomplete sentence he punctuated with a hitched-up wiry eyebrow, a smack of either palm to his jaw to crack his neck. He had been underground, Wright calculated, for eleven years. “Where you living, chief,” Randy was asking him, as casual as someone very young to whom an address was a fleeting accessory. Everything about him, this man his mother had loved, ran in opposition to time, called it some old-fashioned joke Randy was above entertaining. This was the chief domain of the unstable, Wright thought, that they saw all minutes and years as having equal importance, not as the pieces of an elaborate construction, foundations and entryways, but some deep bowl of marbles, any of which could shift to become the most visible and relevant. Standing there Wright had a pneumonic feeling. He was sure he could have told Randy that Fay and Annabelle were around the corner editing the latest missive to the press, and Randy would have felt a great relief, followed him without blinking. “Where you living,” Randy had asked, a jocular punch on Wright’s elbow. He heard himself naming the intersection as he had hundreds of times, lightly, Church and Duboce, to cabdrivers, right off the park, to men he wanted to fuck. He had believed himself married to his new life, to the project of his future, but he saw now that at the smallest wave from the past he might consider dismantling it.

  “Right on,” Randy said. “Well, yeah, I can definitely stop by and fill you in. And speaking of that, could you loan me a little something?”

  Why he agreed he didn’t know. It was a memory that appeared like a taste in his mouth, Randy hunched over him deep in the jungle, covering the tight little-boy fist with his hand and pushing up his shirt to suck out the stinger of a wasp. Randy on his guitar in that hotel room where their three lives had been braided together, no sentence started by one of them left unannotated by another, Paul Simon, mama don’t take my Kodachrome away, a palimpsest of interjections and half-remembered dreams and offers of dried fruit or clean laundry, a world of talking Wright had helped to make, and that had made him. From his front pocket he took his billfold and removed everything in it. He watched Randy walk away with it, the bills tight in his filthy hand. “I’ll call you,” he said, though Wright had not offered his number. At a certain point Randy stopped, and Wright thought he might turn, give off the kind of smile that had once bent a room to him, brief, enormous, but he was only looking at a damp cardboard box someone had put on the curb, picking up tapes and warped tennis shoes, trying to find something he could use.

  5.

  It happened in a moment, a look that lighted on Braden’s face. He understood what Wright had never told him, the belief that was too foolish to say aloud. They had cooked breakfast for some friends, Tony—who was called Fucking Tony because he was forever making some fool-hearted mistake, taking home some transient who stole his entire wardrobe, accepting a catering gig that paid a third in coupons, what has Fucking Tony done now—and Jean, who was tall and French and had a way of making anything sound like an aphorism he had coined there on the spot. The bagel it is better because of the part that is missing, no? It was a line they howled and repeated.

  They sat on two chaises, arranged to make an L around a coffee table, hunched over their plates. On the window was a spray of eucalyptus, lolling across the floor in the breeze from the bay windows were three nearly deflated blue balloons, vestiges of a birthday party the week before. God bless your mother, it still said in lipstick on the bathroom mirror. The television was on, the channel changed every so often by someone who forgot to pay attention anyway. When they had mopped up
the last bits of hollandaise they sat back into their hangovers, sorting through the narratives of the night before, deciding what needed to be explained or forgotten. The three of them had gone out, a night at a friend’s, poppers on the roof, but Wright had stayed home. He was trying to be curious about who he was when alone, among only the things he owned and had arranged himself. There was always a moment, a few hours into solitude, when he panicked at the simplest of decisions, to bathe or make a cup of tea, when he balked at the responsibility of a whole body. He had been in the city three years now and no longer felt that it could absorb him, that just by being inside of it something in him was being polished.

  It was December 1984 and the conversations all seemed to be rolling the same way, a slant to the floor of how they were living that was becoming more pronounced. Who did you know who had died? How had he looked at that party in Diamond Heights, and was it only six months ago, and did you remember how he had corralled a group of them—yes, twenty of us walked there, that rope swing that flew out into the view. It was the year people started saying, low voices into cupped hands, I almost slept with him, we had a date that I canceled because of a cold. The men who were sick or gone were always talked about in terms of proximity, as one might mention a movie star, and it was true that their deaths had made them famous and abstracted, the whole of their lives reduced to whichever salient, adaptable anecdote. Anthony the ballerina who had once bottomed en pointe, Forest from Florida who wanted to die with his watch on.

  On the television identical twin girls, fourteen and Aryan, leaned out right and left from a tandem bicycle and blew green bubbles of gum. A white woman in shoulder pads lowered her sunglasses at a white man in khakis. There was no one like them in the commercials for small cellophane candies, antidotes to migraine, juice so fresh it jumped from the glass and clothing so clean it glowed. There was pride in this, that their lives were unmappable, irreducible, existing under the known American fabric, but also fear, like some nightmare in which the mirrors when you pass by them are empty.

  “He was always at the gym,” Braden was saying. “He did handstands as a party trick.”

  “That’s right. He liked to walk on his hands. I saw him do it down the middle of Dolores.”

  “Twenty-eight.”

  As was his role with them, Tony came in with a discursion, always looking, as he placed the opening remark, like he had just been woken from some sleep in the sun.

  “The other day?”

  “Yes, Tony.” Braden had a cigarette in his mouth and was rolling pennies from the jar they kept by the door. He could only stand Tony’s talk if he was accomplishing something else.

  “Downtown. I saw this guy on the street?”

  “Shocking. Foot traffic, in this city?”

  “And as he was coming closer I couldn’t remember his name or where I knew him from, and I felt so guilty. Cute, but very shadowy, I mean some real unnecessary sunglasses, a bad Bogart trench. I figured oh, a very intoxicated conquest, because definitely I had a memory of him with his shirt off! So I decided not to be a puss about it and make eye contact. But our young friend clearly did not like it, because the more I looked at him and waved the more he looked the other way, and then I started getting angry! We’ve all been rejected. It is never a day at the fair, but still.”

  “It is to us like temperature,” Jean said. “We only can face it.”

  “Thank you, Jean, profound, yes,” Braden said. “And?”

  “So as I’m about to pass him I straighten up and I say, real vicious, ‘I’m sorry I fucked you and never called, okay?’ He looked like he was going to flag down an ambulance right there. I was very pleased with myself and decided to walk all the way home, and about ten minutes in I realized where I knew him from. It was Tom Hanks.”

  The minute they spent laughing stretched and tightened and Tony got up and bowed, tipping an invisible hat. Wright had his face in the crook of the couch and could feel that the elastic waist on his pajamas had slipped around. He kicked his slip-on Vans in delight. In the silence after there was the flint of his lighter and a car passing below playing Donna Summer and the light turning over into afternoon.

  “Hello!” Jean said, in a way he did they had ceased correcting, the way one might say, hey, you forgot your wallet, hey, you can’t do that here. He insisted that the two were interchangeable, hey and hello, and anyway it mitigated his confrontational streak, because he was the type of person always accusing someone else of having spilled his drink. Instead of the charbroiled melancholy that was his nature, he gave off a kind of confused gregariousness, a near-constant state of greeting. “Hello!” he had said when a seagull shat on him at China Beach. “Fucking hello!” he repeated, disturbing a passing family, who could not imagine why this man in a leather jacket, with runny avian excrement coming perfectly down his side part, would be choosing this moment to make their acquaintance.

  Jean had snapped his fingers and was pointing at Wright, his middle finger still curled under.

  “Do you know who you look like?”

  Wright shrugged and sucked on his cigarette, using it as an excuse not to speak. In his slippers his feet were pricked with sweat; in his mouth there was not even the memory of saliva.

  “Vincent Kahn. It is crazy, it is exactly. No? All you need is the suit. We must fashion you one.”

  As he turned to Wright, Tony had his hands spread amenably on his thighs and his mouth a little open. Braden, who was tipping his head, then nodding with some conviction, locked eyes with Wright and stopped. The glance that passed between them was a whole late-night conversation, questions backed up to and answered indirectly, shock, exhausted laughter. Inside of it was the evening Braden had knocked on Wright’s bedroom door and found him drunk at his desk, writing a letter, and he had barked not now. Wright tucked his chin to his neck, briefly, as if to acknowledge to Tony this had been said before, but the confirmation was for Braden.

  “I think there’s nothing more boring,” Braden said, “than insisting everything and everyone you’ve known has some counterpart or mirror. The referential is a weakness, I think. Abandon it.”

  His intellectual arrogance was familiar to them, what they hated about him and why they ran to him when they were frightened of themselves. Tony made an involuntary noise in his throat, as though Braden’s idea itself were caught there. Rolling his eyes, Jean moved his hand quickly up and down a small invisible cock.

  “What is the expression? Why are you being such a dirty blanket,” Jean said. “It is Sunday and I am looking only to enjoy, lovely, relaxed, and you are face-fucking me with this philosophy.”

  “This wet blanket,” Braden said, stacking their dishes on his arm and sashaying toward the sink, “cooked you a spectacular breakfast.” Wright made his way down the hall with his hands on the western wall, someone caught on a shelf of rock, and he crawled into bed with his shoes on.

  HE WOKE TO BRADEN AT the foot of his bed, sitting there dressed for the dinner shift, his hair still wet from the shower. The only light came from the streetlamps that had just turned on, the red paper lantern in the hall.

  “What do you want to tell me,” Braden said, “about that look on your face when Jean said what he did.”

  “Right now?”

  He was buffeted still by sleep and tried to release it, sitting up and throwing the blankets off and passing a hand over his face.

  “Right now.”

  “Which war manual did you lift this tactic from? ‘Interrogate the prisoner on his most fearful secrets while he is mostly unconscious.’”

  “Is it a secret?”

  “‘Ensure the prisoner cannot tell his waking state from his sleeping.’ What do you mean is it a secret?”

  “Is it a fact?”

  “I told my grandfather once. A therapist in college.”

  “Only a fact can really be a secret, right? Otherwise it’s just a sad thought you’ve been keeping to yourself. Something that isn’t real can’t really be confin
ed.”

  “That’s kind. I’m feeling very hopeful about this conversation already. The dates line up, Braden.”

  “Which dates. Tell me exactly which dates. This is not something she told you.”

  “The dates she worked at her sister’s bar outside an Air Force base where he was a test pilot. In the Mojave Desert. Starting in 1957. No.”

  “What else. Is there a photo? Is there a letter?”

  He knew how it would land before he said it, so he didn’t. People say I look like him. The referential is a weakness, Braden had said earlier in the living room. He asked for his cigarettes on the dresser to buy himself time. He wanted to be his own creation, as Braden was, as was everyone they knew, and somehow he could not. Around the room were his shoddy attempts, the books about Greek architecture he had dog-eared, the photos of the two of them in the frames he had painted.

  “Why are you doing this,” he whispered instead.

  Braden stood to turn on a light, the brass lamp with the swinging head that was clamped to Wright’s desk. Stacked on the desk were the books he had recently read, a reminder of the information that was at his disposal now, and Braden picked one up and opened to a page in its middle.

  “‘The first conscientious objectors in United States history, the Shakers’ pacifism can still be understood as revolutionary,’” he read aloud, and shut it. “I’m doing this because your believing this is keeping you from something.”

  “They believed god is male and female. What is it keeping me from? Tell me what it’s keeping me from.”

  “That’s the whole thing about prison, isn’t it? You don’t know what it’s keeping you from. Anything could be happening outside of it, and you’re lucky if you get a window.”

  “They knew exactly, about any object they built, where it would go in a room.”

  “I’m late to work,” Braden said. “I’m sorry I can’t go there with you. I would if it made any sense. I would if I thought it would help you.”