by RE Katz
AT ONCE DARKLY HILARIOUS
and surprisingly heartbreaking, RE Katz’s debut novel defies genre expectations just as its protagonists defy the gendered, artistic and relationship constructs that surround them. AND THEN THE GRAY HEAVEN reads like a series of pearls slipping off a necklace—a series of stories, images, moments, songs and poems that at first appear absurd, then shocking, then brilliant, then, finally, divine.”
—Steph Post, author of Miraculum and A Tree Born Crooked
AND THEN THE GRAY HEAVEN
is at once an art manifesto, heist, and road story. Here, the disorientation of grief has a surprisingly joyful orientation of its own. Katz lovingly crafts a diorama of queer kinship and artistic lineage: rendered in such detail it’s realer than the real thing.”
—Zach Ozma, co-editor of We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, 1961-1991
AND THEN THE GRAY HEAVEN
—RE KATZ—
5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd.
Ann Arbor, MI 48103
www.dzancbooks.org
AND THEN THE GRAY HEAVEN. Copyright © 2021, text by RE Katz. All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Dzanc Books, 5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48103.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available Upon Request
First US edition: June 2021
ISBN: 9781950539277
Jacket artwork and design by Emma Anderson
Interior design by Michelle Dotter
Printed in the United States of America
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“But I know that I want to live. At the moment, the road is reflecting this bright part of the sky that’s up ahead, and all the trees have receded into this thick dark green bordering both sides of the road. And there’s a gray cloud right at the end of the road and above that some strips of white pulling through the sky, and then there’s this blue, a really beautiful cobalt, very light with a lot of gray in it, and then above that more dark clouds in front of a strip of a bright-white cloud line. And then the gray heaven.”
—David Wojnarowicz, Weight of the Earth
1
I married my electric dishwasher. A man with thick armhair like barbed wire came to install it in the kitchen, and I made him stay for the ceremony. I lipped a glass and then set it facedown in the top of the dishwasher, a second lipping that would seal us to each other forever.
So you’re like really into that dishwasher? the dishwasher man said, touching his belt.
We’re into each other, I told him.
I loaded and unloaded the dishwasher and ran it a few times in order to adjust to its new mouthy presence. The pockets of heat. The orange light at the end. I opened my arms and folded myself into the dishwasher’s breath of steam.
B died, I said to the dishwasher. B is dead. It’s just us now.
It was supposed to be me. I should have been long dead by now. As a kid, I was always sure I’d get eaten. That’s how someone like me was supposed to go. No one was watching to make sure I survived my childhood of humid horrors. If you weren’t trying to get the hell out of the Everglades, you were waiting to die there. I was born during the summer solstice into a place with no seasons to a woman who did not want me. I know that she was on drugs. I know that her name was Daniella, which I hate. I know that she was fond of Betty Boop because the one thing that went with me from the hospital was a faded beach towel with her little heart-shaped pouty face. I still have a hanky-sized snippet of it that I hold in my right hand while I sleep. I call it Boop. Obviously.
My gigantic mistake of a birth produced a second mistake: two separate birth certificates surfaced at DSS years later when they transferred me to the group home. They were identical except for the fact that I was born at 11:59 on the first and 12:00 on the second. In other words: I was born twice, and both times sucked. So, of course I have always been trying to kill one of me. Now here I am barreling into the shaky future in a tightly controlled spiral, bringing myself together in this, which is the only way I’ll survive.
A week ago B was unconscious in the ER. For me that seemed manageable—even getting the call, even rushing in to be told that they had fallen on the concrete floor of the garage and hit their head—manageable. I was at the copy place when I got the call, and I squeezed the life out of an industrial stapler—but I did not panic. B had been unconscious in the ER before, and the next day we were eating soggy french fries and watching the Hallmark channel like nothing had happened. I’m not unfeeling. I actually have a lot of feeling—fifteen consecutive DSS reports describe me as “too sensitive (uncooperative)”. And now, I have just wasted too much of my life on panic to end up fine and eating soggy french fries on the other end.
Seven days ago B was not out of the woods yet, and the hospital called their brother to get permission to release details to me on the swelling in their brain. He was out of town, so they called a cousin that B had not spoken to in years, and because the cousin had never heard of me, they frowned and told me nothing.
Doctors continue to use the phrase not out of the woods yet, like we all share one kind of woods, like pine trees spring from our collective consciousness with a fine dusting of snow and we are delivered there on cue. I think of my first waist-high white plastic Christmas tree that I bought with B at a dollar store. I think smaller to get to something more life-sized. I think like B. I remember a patch of fake moss the size of a thumbnail and a cellophane creekbed that runs into a perfect vanishing point. All the woods B made.
I grew up on a witchless beach surrounded by frail dispossessed palm trees. For years it was more like the breezeless set of a beach with sunset after sunset, and white noise machine waves rolling on repeat. Then the bad hurricanes came one after the other, and then it was even more toxic-beautiful sunsets to cast the pile of debris and nomadic tarp people in garish paradise neon. Either way, being a kid in the swamp was lonely. People seemed pretty busy driving around and going to strip malls and getting things pierced. It’s not like any of those people belonged to me in particular anyway. I was the most alone a person can be. I hadn’t even started my rock collection yet. I had no pets. I had no parents. I had no stretchy bracelets. I had a document that told me my blood type. It was B-. I thought it was the grade I was given for being born.
When the electric dishwasher arrived, I got the dishwasher man to ask me on a date so that I could turn him down.
I don’t do that anymore, I told him.
What, you’ve given up already? he said. You’re not that old.
What a thing to say.
I’m ancient, I said, and you are a damned baby. Whoa. Calm down lady. He folded his arms. I narrowed my eyes at him and made them into lasers. You are not even a baby, I said. You are a baby apprentice.
Like every publically shared kid in a peninsula state, I had learned to swim. I could swim crazy fast. They even tried to get me for swim team, but I was doing my own thing. I knew what other people did and I just chose not to do those things: I wouldn’t do a backstroke or a breast stroke or a donkey kick butterfly but sometimes the forward crawl is called a freestyle, and I was into that.
My social worker was a tender-hearted woman with a perfect bowl cut. She wasn’t naturally blonde or maternal, but she was always looking out for me. She was the one who took me shopping for my first bathing suit. I remember it because it was one of the first times I thought about what it means to have a body.
I had gone down to the public pool to swim some odd laps in my regular Wrestlemania shirt with cut-off sleeves from the group home donation pile. It was my weekly me
eting day with the social worker, and she was supposed to be picking me up from the Y. I didn’t want a suit, but I was her responsibility, and she wasn’t going to let me go to school or hell in a Wrestlemania shirt—since there was no way I wasn’t going to either. I saw her waiting on the bleachers from the shallow end. She called out. She said:
Hey, what are you doing uglying around in the pool like that?
She pointed to my oversized swim shirt. They let you wear that in the pool? Baby, even if a boy looks your way he’s not going to see anything in that.
This part really bothered me because boys. So I said something like:
So? What’s the point of a boy?
And then she said:
A boy is the difference between being alone and not being alone.
Well, I said:
I never get to be alone.
She didn’t like me complaining about what the lord had given me, so she said:
Well aren’t you lucky I’m here because I won’t have you getting seen like that. I’m taking you for a girl suit today.
And she stood there and stared me down. She shook her head. She said:
Girl, people must think you’ve got a demon.
So that’s when I went all demon child on her and hissed the word Ssssatan and slithered back underwater like a seasnake so she couldn’t say anything. And I remember looking through my goggles and seeing the XXL black shirt slow-motion scrunching up around me like a protective walrus skin, and that’s when I knew that somewhere inside there, I was a body. And people want a body to behave.
As a ward of the State of Florida, I was doomed to play an extra in other people’s spring break capers forever. I have appeared in the background of so many vacation photos this way: capsizing in giant black t-shirts. Imagine identical bikini girls in mesh coverups bobbing on floats with cupholders. I was the oil spill dogpaddling behind them. A lot of it is funny. The rest I’ve blocked out.
2
Six days ago B was really not doing well. They were unstable. They were critical. They were the thing before not out of the woods yet. They were in the woods. I ran to meet them in the woods. I ran to meet them there and take their hand and lead them by the light slivering the floor out of that place. But I was not allowed to see them, and no one would tell me about those woods. No one would tell me what it was like for B who was lost in those woods.
I sat all night in the hall outside the ICU. I let them stop me, like a dope. I didn’t make a scene. B would have made a scene for me. In the morning I went home and swam to calm myself down. I did laps. Freestyle, but also my own strokes with their own names. I did a double windmill and a shovelface and sometimes a coat closet. Then I went back to the hospital and sat down at the edge of B’s woods and waited.
Doctors are such clowns. Every interaction I’ve ever had with a doctor has felt like an inside joke that I’m on the outside of. One time a doctor looked at my sunburn and told me it was the worst sunburn he had ever seen.
How can it be the worst ever? I said. You’re a doctor.
Well, he said, you’re a baked potato.
The humor in this example comes from a few places:
absolute terror at having something that is categorically “the worst ever”
absolute terror at the contrast between the doctor’s control of the situation and my lack of control of my own body
absolute terror at the doctor’s glib delivery of the diagnosis, which itself was glibly unscientific
the use of the words “baked potato”
the parallel structure of the equivalency: i.e., doctor-him=baked potato-me
absolute terror at realizing that to the doctor I was in fact essentially a baked potato and always would be
Four days ago, B was somewhere beyond woods metaphors, and I was running out of time. I didn’t know that I was running out of time. I thought I was waiting patiently for them to be okay again. I was pacing in the public areas of the hospital. I was in the gift shop pretending to look at cards, and I was in the family restroom. When I got caught pacing, I moved along to another restroom. One of the nurses said that I could maybe see them in the afternoon. I asked the cashier at the hospital cafeteria what she thought I should do and she said just wait it out.
She said, don’t bother the doctors because security will kick you out and never let you back in again.
I said, you’re right. Besides, I can hang out down here with you.
Well no actually, she said, my shift is over.
Can I buy you a cup of coffee? I said, worried about how desperate I seemed and was.
Why the hell not, she said.
We held cups of coffee with both hands and looked at each other. I said nothing. I was thinking about how I hadn’t talked to anyone about what had happened yet. This is what people have families for. I felt crushed into a fine powder—I was pigment. Blue. Windowsill blue. Ash taking air before gusting apart. No one to talk to and no reason to reach out. I didn’t want our friends to worry, and I had no information or comfort to offer them.
This was all too much to say, so I just looked at the cashier’s face in the glossy table laminate. I—I said to her table-face. What—she said at the same time. Then neither of us talked. She looked at the clock.
You have to be getting home soon? I asked.
Well, she said.
I’m sorry, that was rude.
No, she said. It’s my son’s birthday.
Oh wow, I said.
And I haven’t picked up the cake yet, she said. I love cakes, I said. How old?
Eleven, she said, grinning so wide I saw her two gold molars gleam.
3
I was eleven when I was placed with my foster mother and Ben. You’d think people would have tried to adopt me when I was younger and cuter and less of a satanist, but I was never good at being seen. I was too sensitive. I couldn’t play the game. Someone would drink a bottle of mouthwash at the group home or someone would stab a pizza delivery man, and the next day it would be like, come on, the show goes on.
My foster mother ran an airbrush souvenir shop and needed daytime help. Voila: I was wanted. My social worker figured it would be a good arrangement because my foster mother was a weekly church-goer and I could use some churching.
I didn’t mind church really. Just a few weeks before my foster placement went through I had even started talking to god. I was split open to god possibilities when I got saved in a car graveyard. For me, it wasn’t so much learning how to pray as it was learning what prayer was for.
My group home roommate Cheyenne had tricked me into boosting car parts with her one slow afternoon. The car graveyard was spooky with its smashed windows and melted seats and limp air-bags; its disaster leftovers, its dashboard dust handprints. When the sun slipped behind our town’s one hill, I asked Cheyenne if we could leave soon because I was getting anxious, and her face dropped. She looked at me out of her eyecorners and told me that she knew I was going to rat on her and she never should have brought me. She made me swear allegiance to her.
She said:
Say you’re in this with me like your life depends on it.
So I said:
Of course I’m in it.
Swear you would die for me, she said.
Die how? I said.
Die any way, all ways. You know, cross your heart and hope to die. She meant it.
But my answer might be different, I said. Like I would be shot but not ripped apart by dogs.
She was just looking at me so I kept going:
I would be run over but not get burned alive. I would run off a cliff but not drown. I would be crushed by a heavy object, like an anvil, but not eat a stick of dynamite.
I hoped she wouldn’t notice that I was riffing on Wiley Coyote, my painless death guru—dead a million times but never once dead.
But she was busy being mad now. She waited a beat, then she went in:
Say I can kill you if you tell anyone about this. She grinned like a mob bos
s.
I tried to talk but it came out a whisper. I said:
How will you kill me?
What do rats get? She answered my question with a question.
I thought really hard about rats and all I could see in my head was Templeton, who got a smorgasbord, which seemed pretty nice. So I said:
Food scraps?
When she laughed, I thought I had passed the test and we were pals again. Then she told me to take off my shoes and hand them over. She looked down at my bare feet, and I looked down at my bare feet, and I realized that I was standing in a circle of pulverized glass. I looked up and she was gone just as quick as that roadrunner. I cried out desperately. When she was still within earshot I begged her to come back. I screamed until I watched her turn into a headless speck on the flat horizon, and that’s when I went silent. Sound-making is something I have mainly done for others. Quiet is for myself.
But then some miracle came for me. The glass shard ring became a prayer circle and I prayed and prayed there. I put my hands up and made one of those promises that people make in movies: if you do this for me, god, I said. I knew it worked when a group of skater kids came by before dark and actually felt bad for me, and they carried me out on their shoulders like a star player. That night I sat on the edge of a parking garage and stared up at the white pop tab that was starting to be moon, and I actually believed.
My foster mother was good to me. She made Spam sandwiches, which they never let me eat at the group home. She let me ride around in the bed of her truck. She even asked me to call her “mom,” which I never did, but it was a nice gesture. I called her FM for foster mom instead of her name, which still made her feel good about us having a special name thing.
