Down the hall, patients broke the silence when they lined up for bright red gelatin molds. Foam slippers busily shuffled back and forth, and applause boomed and echoed. “Oh Lordy,” I could hear Mercy shout every time a pill cup met a pair of praying hands. “Lordy! Lordy! Lordy!”
On Sunday, family filled the lobby with a low buzz and the crinkle of new magazines or goodie bags. But my parents didn’t visit, didn’t call, and with the gloomy synthesizer of a Goth song in my head, I wondered if I’d ever see the exit sign to Charity. I wondered if my last six months would end on a hospital bed in a psych ward like a fox with his tail caught in a trap.
“Does he sacrifice his tail to live free?” I asked out loud, “Or keep the tail and die whole?”
“Such melodrama,” Mercy cautioned, “can only give you heartburn. And trust! No one wants to romance a boy with acid reflux. What you need is…”
“Mercy,” I joked.
“Lordy, no,” she answered, ignoring the pun with an elaborate wave of her hand. “No one needs mercy. Mercy runs like water in the body; it’s always there. All you have to do is swallow, and you can taste mercy. A liar, a cheat, a thief, even a killer has mercy in his mouth, honey lamb. A new story, that’s what you need.”
The next day, after nightfall, Mercy broke into the nurses’ station, slipped my file between her legs, and returned to my room to read what she called the Story of My Life.
“I can already tell you how it ends,” I said. “I get AIDS.”
“What kind of fiction is that?” She screwed up her face. “That’s not a story; it’s a sentence. And it’s certainly no joke.”
“No fiction,” I answered, “No joke. Blood test.”
Mercy flared her eyes and opened her mouth but said nothing. Her lips shut as she sat back in the chair and stared at her palms, as if trying to remember what she had last held. With a quick-knotted fist, she yanked hard on the tail of hair at her shoulder and bolted to her feet. She stepped close to the bed, stooped over my head then let her mouth open over mine. Instead of rose or violet, she smelled of red berries and camphor. At first, I kept my mouth closed as she puckered her lips and inhaled, but the power in her breath pulled the air out of my chest and my lips finally parted. Then she slipped her tongue past my teeth where it sat like an oversized lozenge. Instead of melting, though, with menthol and hard sugar, it thickened into soft suede then wet leather. The tongue hammered at the roof of my mouth before my own tongue started to hammer and a blue fire burst into my forehead. Suddenly, her breath drew back with such force that her cheeks collapsed and her eyes locked into place and I was sure she was having a seizure until she recoiled her tongue, snapped her body straight, and said, “You got nothing.”
“You could tell from a kiss?” I asked.
“You can tell a lot from a kiss, trust! But no.” Her tongue made a popping noise, like an egg in a frying pan. “Lordy, no. I read your file. You don’t have AIDS. Wanna know the real story?”
For the first time since I’d awakened on the ward, a cough broke out of my mouth. A long, wet cough. While I’d been asleep, my chest had steadied, and the fever had cooled. My skin remained red, and my ribs still showed, but my feet and hands no longer throbbed. Had the plasma center found a false positive? Had AIDS been a phantom in my body?
When the cough died down, Mercy placed the file on my chest. She’d just turned thirty-three, her Jesus year, as she put it. More than a dozen years since she sprang out of her mother’s closet at nineteen, same age as me, flashing a rose-colored negligee and a pair of stilettos. She was an adult by then, draft age, voting age, drinking age, but her parents committed Mercy to a ritzy hospital in another parish, where they shot electricity into her brain.
“Ever since,” she said, “I get these tremors, and a knot swells up in my throat until I can’t breathe and a blue fire burns in my forehead and my tongue hammers against my teeth. The scourge, my family calls it. Collateral damage, I say. They aimed for my light but only rattled the socket. I still glow and, yes, honey lamb, I radiate.”
I wanted to ask Mercy about the fire I’d seen in my own forehead but knew better than to interrupt her in the middle of a story. It’s like a hurricane, she’d told me. Just when the eye of the tale moves overhead and the winds ease up, that’s when you know the climax is coming.
“All that heavy voltage failed to dim my girlish glimmer, so the doctors pumped me with bromides then shocked me out of the coma with insulin while my parents stared at me with no lips and no ears. Their faces bore only a pair of shaded eyes. Always at the end, my father would clap my back hard, as if a pink pellet might shoot right out my mouth and onto the floor, where my mother could pick it up, wrap it in tissue, and hide it in her purse. Like a tube of lipstick she meant to discard. When they split, the purse shut, and I ended up here, a dried-up fruit in a bowl of nuts.”
Mercy stared into her palms again while her fingers danced in little spasms.
“You’re no fruit,” I said. “Fruits are sweet or tart, one or the other. You’re both.”
She screwed her lips tight, as if I’d call out her birth certificate name.
“And you’re not dried-up either.”
“No?” Mercy answered. “Then tell me: who hungers for a middle-aged flat-chested giantess? Who visits the bed of a spastic pre-op tranny?”
“The military orderly,” I said. It was a guess. But I pictured him pinning down Mercy’s hands while he stared at the white walls, the fluorescent lights, the heart monitor until his musk filled the room and he commanded her to swallow.
“If you know about that,” Mercy said, “then you know too much.” She waved her finger back and forth. “Time for you to go, honey lamb.”
“You’re an adult. Why don’t you sign yourself out? Why don’t you leave?”
“It’s one thing to leave. It’s another to go.”
Her hands tugged at the knot in her hospital gown until a notebook page fell out. It was a list, a set of prescriptions for behavior. I knew that list. I’d called it out to Mercy one night, telling her of my parents’ search for a gay cure, and the psychiatrist’s directions: don’t wear black, don’t cross your legs at the knee, don’t talk with the tip of your tongue, don’t walk on the tip of your toes, don’t smoke with your fingers in a V, don’t move your head, your eyes, your hips. I’d blubbered about the cure, sobbing maybe the shrink was right, maybe my mother was right, maybe I was wrong-handed, wrong-footed. And AIDS or not, maybe I had hell to pay.
The whole time I’d blubbered, Mercy had clicked and popped and sizzled her tongue. Yet she’d memorized the list and written it down. Through each don’t, Mercy had drawn a red line then marked: Do!
“But I thought…” I started.
Mercy clapped the air with her hands. “Yes, do,” she said. “Do this for me: be for yourself, mister sister. When you get out of this nest, hen-feather your rooster. Sissy everything you do. Mister everything you are. And when some damned fool tells you to stop fucking yourself to death, tell him you’re fucking yourself awake. The world is a book if you only open your eyes to read.”
Then she slipped one more item from the knot in her shirt-dress: a strand of black pearls. Each pearl glowed in her hands and together they looked like the beads from a rosary with the crucifix long lost to time.
“The only stories worth reading never end,” she said. “Or else they all end the same way: To Be Continued. Your story is this: either you got lucky with a false positive or got unlucky with a bad blood test. So flip a coin and decide. Which way will you go? Heads or tails, whatever you choose, let it sound like thunder when you walk.”
The next morning, I waited for Mercy to show as I sat with a zipper bag in my hands on the edge of the bed. I hooked my crucifix earring to the black pearls and folded the last page from a book into my empty wallet. The slim book was one of the first Mercy read, and the final words tw
isted into a paradox: “Soon, we will be again as we never were and endlessly are.” The nonsense made my blood rise when she spoke it. Like a frustrated pupil, I wanted to wring meaning out of every word, to wrench a moral out of every sign. Yet Mercy made a joke of fake meaning, a farce of phony morals.
With only a few hours left until my noon release, I crossed the hall to find Mercy’s room. The door was half-open, and when I pushed the knob, her bed came into view. The corners were neatly tucked, military style, with the pillow set on end, like a headstone. My throat tightened, and my tongue thickened. Where had she gone so early? Why hadn’t she said goodbye? And how had she left: on a gurney or her own two feet?
When the fragrance of red berries and camphor filled my nose, I knew the answer. And when the floor buzzed with news of a missing patient and a missing nurse’s uniform, I knew the story. Mercy had slipped out before dawn. She’d made it to the exit door before me. Now all I had to do was follow. It wasn’t the end of anything. I wouldn’t die of a scourge or a plague. A pulse beat in my wrist, the blood rushed to my chest. No one waited for me outside of Charity. My mother and father had never shown. My disco friends had never called. Yet I wouldn’t walk out alone. I had Mercy’s pearls now. Trust. Maybe there was nowhere to go, but it was morning, and there was everywhere to be. Once upon a time, I said to myself. It was a beginning.
AFTERWORD
Dawn Chorus
When she enters the room she has them with her: flowers like bright crowns of light. Yet I look past them to her hands, clutching the bouquet as if she might wring mercy out of it. A haze surrounds her face and—for a moment—all sound is silenced. Even in the haze, that unreal bunch of roses and lilies shimmers in her hands with artful urgency. The paper and ribbon shine too, as if ripped from a still life on a wall. Her arrangement looks like a tribute for a ceremonial occasion, a birth or funeral, an occasion to reckon each breath as a temporary rite, each moment as a fleeting sacrament. My mother lays the flowers across my chest, and suddenly I look not like a patient on a hospital bed but a corpse in a sarcophagus.
The nurse from the hall looks in, tucks a chart under his arm, and says the last of the discharge papers can wait until noon. He also says that—in a way—I died, that the drug seizure briefly left me without air. I kept murmuring afterwards, but the words ran into a jumble. All except one. My lips came together to repeat my first word and the childhood nickname my mother gave me.
“Boo,” I said, clear and strong.
As she props herself on the bed next to me, Mama remains silent at first, and I’m grateful. Too many words have passed between us already. We’re far past apologies now, past repentance and atonement. Instead of talking, we stare at each other like strangers, and my fingers start to tremble and twitch. She runs her perfumed hands over my face, brushing away my unruly hair. Then, when her palm settles on my forehead, my nerves settle too.
Easy now, she speaks. Just two words: “Come home.”
To a Cajun boy, that’s not an invitation but a command. And I can see it: crossing the threshold with my mother, walking into the family den, slipping into my father’s arms.
Yet I shake my head no—slowly—and meet my mother’s eyes. Going back is no way to begin. In Louisiana, all roads lead to the gulf, and I’ve been in that black water too many times already.
Mama smiles. She knew I’d say no. She stands up, turns on her heels, and I hear it: the clink of a key on the counter.
“Yours,” she says, “when you’re ready, Boo.”
After she goes, my chest shakes and my hands tremble again. Then I look on the counter a second time, and I see Mama left not a house key but a skeleton key. On the spine, there’s an engraving in French. The words are a blur. Still, I take the skeleton key in my hand and stare at its secret. Maybe there’s a door somewhere that fits the key. Maybe that door will lead to a library—or a church—filled with light. Or maybe not. Maybe it leads to no place at all. Either way, I know Mama means it as a sign. A key will lock or unlock, will let you in—or out.
Before I exit the room, I slip the key in my pocket, lie back on the bed and close my eyes with a song in my head. At the start, a slow and quiet melody, then a fast and furious rhythm, full of fiddles, accordions, and triangles. A Cajun waltz of loss and longing. A song of exile. Yet all the people in my head are dancing together as if celebrating at a fais do-do. Men with women, women with women, men with men. Pentecostal and Catholic. Sabine and Cajun. Black and white. Tout ensemble. Everyone whirling so fast that no one can tell the dancers from the dance. Their legs saw in and out to the beat. Their arms link and unlink. Then they throw back their heads, open their mouths to the heavens and let out a wild cry as I nod into a dreamless sleep.
When I wake, the clock strikes noon, the door cracks open, and the floor echoes with the sound of walking thunder.
Merci
Midwife: Stephen Kijak/DB
Den Mother: Eric Polito/Edie/Miss Bamboo
Little Sister: Jason Sellards/Jake Shears
Wild Boys: Andy Bailey/Iggy; Christopher De Kuiper/Stella; Joe Marci/Little Joe
Souvenir
Makeup: Kevyn Aucoin/Glamour King
Hair: Newman Braud/Naomi Sims/Miss Gay USA
Photography: George Dureau/Master Valentine
Merci Encore
Samantha Shea & Georges Borchardt/Georges Borchardt Literary Agency
Tyson Cornell, Julia Callahan, Alice Marsh-Elmer
& the whole flock/Rare Bird Books
The Antioch Review: “Flounder” & “Two-Headed Boy”
Epoch: “Revival Girl,” “Wanted Man,” “Skinwalker,”
“Feathers,” & “Makeup”
Five Points: “Altar Boy”
Glimmer Train: “Father Fox,” Finalist, Very Short Fiction Award
New Orleans Review: “Father Fox”
The Rattling Wall: “Masked Boy” & “Revelator”
National Endowment for the Arts
Black Sheep Boy Page 13
