Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through

by T Fleischmann

  TIME IS THE THING A BODY MOVES THROUGH

  TIME IS THE THING A BODY MOVES THROUGH

  T FLEISCHMANN

  Copyright © 2019 by T Fleischmann

  Cover art, Ommatidium Oma-tittie-ah Quilt, © 2016 by Stevie Hanley

  Photograph of cover art by Robert Chase Heishman

  Cover design by Kyle G. Hunter

  Book design by Rachel Holscher

  Author photograph © May Allen

  Coffee House Press books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, cbsd.com or (800) 283-3572. For personal orders, catalogs, or other information, write to info@coffeehousepress.org.

  Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Fleischmann, T., 1983– author.

  Title: Time is the thing a body moves through / T Fleischmann.

  Description: Minneapolis : Coffee House Press, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018040653 (print) | LCCN 2018059169 (ebook) | ISBN 9781566895552 (ebook) | ISBN 9781566895477 (trade pbk.)

  Subjects: LCSH: Fleischmann, T., 1983– | Authors, American—21st century—Biography

  Classification: LCC PS3606.L453 (ebook) | LCC PS3606.L453 Z46 2019 (print) | DDC 818/.603—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018040653

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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  TIME IS THE THING A BODY MOVES THROUGH

  CONTENTS

  SUMMER

  NOTES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Funder Acknowledgments

  The Publisher’s Circle of Coffee House Press

  SUMMER

  I leave Buffalo when the moon is still out, and on the long bus ride south I find myself unable to read. I often can’t read on transit, the presence of so many other people demanding a half-attention that interferes with the attention a book requires. Instead, I look at Scruff, where the hills and plateaus offer just blips of men. Most of them are stationary, so the bus’s crawl puts them at steadily increasing or decreasing proximities, of two hundred miles and then one hundred and eighty, of one hundred and eighty and then one hundred and sixty, of eighty and then ninety. One guy seems to travel a similar path, a similar speed, either following me or preceding me, thirty-one miles away, thirty, thirty-one.

  On the grid I keep checking an account that features three gray-haired men, their arms around one another, each a bottom. “Top who wants to join our family. Who does like to play games and believes you can love more than one person. Is ok with having sex only inside our group and so on.” Further into the profile, each describes himself, although these short paragraphs seem only to further conflate their lives—they all like hanging out, dogs, and especially their pugs. “I like to read, write, and relax with my boyfriends,” one says. Another, in a typo, says he likes to “cook and do choirs.” They are all smiling, beaming really, but the one in the middle of their embrace, the shortest one, his smile is the widest.

  Bottoms seeking their top, I imagine them all in a king-sized bed, asses in the air, waiting. And when the two met the third: the realization that he, too, was a bottom, and the disappointment that must have given way to familial, romantic love. Does the newest bottom fear he is there only to heighten the appeal to their eventual top—not there as a he, but as one of them? He must run to the other rooms to get the lube, their double-headed dildos (but this an intense joy, so a top might puncture it; it is good they are isolated on this plateau).

  I came to Buffalo to see my friend Simon in his new home, but also to visit him, a guy I love in my own weird way, without the potential of sex charging our time. “We’ll never have sex again then, we’ll just take that off the table,” I said over the phone a month earlier, years of occasional fucking ended with relief instead of histrionics. These expectations cleared up, I arrived to find his body the same muscled, pale thing it had always been, his smile the same quick grin and his jokes the same bleak insights. I settled into this new arrangement, although the relief from touch felt to me like an ache, or like the auditory hallucination that would linger after I listened to the same song on a loop all afternoon.

  We wandered the streets of Buffalo gay pride as two close friends, friends who knew each other to be just that as we played pool, which we did, poorly and drunkenly. We held the doors open for one another and lit our own cigarettes. I insisted on a fancy meal, my treat, and we followed cocktails with cocktails, and when our feet touched under the table it seemed only to underscore what we would not be doing that evening, rather than tantalizing the possibility of what we might do. We still laughed and we still complimented each other’s shirts and we still talked books on our long walks. Friendship was an easy enough place, our relation to one another locatable in language—“a friend visiting from out of town,” Simon explained to the men who hit on him at bars. But we had always been friends, a word that reduced our odd joining to something less than what it was.

  Before boarding the bus, I sat on Simon’s bed and he sat a few feet away, at his kitchen counter. We shared a carafe of coffee with Democracy Now! humming on a radio by the window. We talked about his large taxidermy dog, Germanard, a German shepherd who had died protecting his former owner during a home invasion and that Simon had put in storage. He got ready as I got ready, and he went off to the coffee shop where he worked, and I went to the bus, leaving while the morning held its chill, then taking my jacket off and crumpling it into a pillow to use on board.

  Scruff offering me nothing, I scrunch up into my laptop and open the thing I’m writing, a project I began in the erotic vibrations of my friendship with Simon several years ago. It’s not that I believed our relationship transcended anything, exactly, or that it would become anything but what it was—we were always clearly a pair, we two friends. I was writing instead to see where my excess of desire would go, when a simple thing like falling asleep with my arm across a guy I loved meant I would buzz with anticipation of falling asleep all day. I tried to write in such a way that there would be room for that buzzing along my words, even if I did not always find room for it in my life.

  For the month of July, I stay in a room in an apartment in the

  Lefferts Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn.

  There are two other people who live here, one a close friend

  and one an acquaintance.

  I share the room with a third friend, Simon.

  He, like me, thinks often of the breaking of ice or glass.

  In the living room is a small round table with a lamp at its center.

  Surrounding the lamp is a pile of individually wrapped candies,

  thirty or forty maybe, all of them a crisp and glistening blue.

  They are quiet until you touch them, and then they crinkle.

  The first time I walked up to “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in

  L.A.) I stood before the piece by Felix Gonzalez-Torres for two

  or three minutes, a few feet back.

  A friend had earlier explained it to me, so I knew I was

  allowed to step forward and take a piece of the candy.

  I selected one wrapped in bright yellow foil.

  I knelt, lifted it, and fingered it for a moment before

  unwrapping.

  I placed it in my mouth.

  I sucked at the candy as I contin
ued to look at the pile, slightly

  diminished.

  I felt for a moment an acute sense of loss and beauty, each

  indistinguishable from the other.

  The candy was very sweet, and it was melting.

  I have never properly lived in Brooklyn, but spend time here

  every season or two.

  I come to see the doctor who gives me the hormones that make

  my body different.

  New York is a city where people talk often of how it was.

  I glanced the place for years, first in poetry and novels, then

  visual art,

  the idea of it suggesting something like possibility, so far from

  what I knew in small-town Michigan that it suggested I could

  be possible, too.

  This spring, I came during an exhibit at the New Museum

  titled NYC 1993, and made plans to attend the show with my

  friend Benjy the day before his own opening in Chelsea.

  Instead, I stayed out the night before until sunrise, Jägerbombs

  and drunken arguments with strangers, and slept into the next

  afternoon with Simon’s arm slung across my body.

  Now, returned to the city for the summer, I see that the

  Whitney hosts a similar exhibit: I, You, We, a survey of the

  museum’s collection from the eighties and early nineties.

  When I attend, I walk the lopsided circle of the show twice,

  embarrassed by my sentimentality.

  I try to think of the world when the art was made, and I try to

  think of now.

  It’s odd, when everyone seems to look back to the same time

  at once, to realize collectively that it can be seen from a new

  perspective.

  It reminds me that we’re all telling ourselves a story, as we try

  to understand where we’ve arrived.

  There is a heat wave in New York City.

  One day, as I’m suggesting I’d go again to the Whitney if they

  wanted to see the show, two friends and I become incapable of

  leaving Simon’s small, air-conditioned bedroom.

  We lie together on the bed—

  Simon beside my left arm, our friend Henri beside my right.

  In the past I have imagined what it would be like to date each

  of them.

  In the past I let this affect how I behaved when we were

  together, rather than letting any of us be who we are,

  horny and joined somewhere between the platonic and the erotic.

  We scroll through gay hookup applications on our phones,

  comparing the men with whom we occasionally chat.

  This activity goes on for hours.

  Sometimes one of us leaves the cool air to make a cocktail,

  and we briefly try to relocate to the breeze of the roof.

  Another friend comes, joins us in the bed, also scrolls through

  boys on his phone.

  We laugh at the images on the applications, a queer grid in

  which the four of us occupy a single row, me and three tired

  faggots.

  An hour or two past midnight we put our phones away.

  Simon, Henri, and I fall asleep in the air-conditioned hum,

  each curled up to the shape of another.

  As we leave the next morning, Simon grabs two of the blue-

  foiled candies and places them in my purse, little shards that

  will begin to melt in the heat of the subway.

  I connect first to Gonzalez-Torres at the point of aesthetics,

  a string of lights or a photo of a bed made exhilarating.

  In part because of this allure, it is possible to forget his political

  efficacy.

  In intention and execution, his work is as driven by motors of

  dissent as by the mechanisms of beauty—

  or rather, the mechanisms of beauty as brilliant dissent.

  He spoke of his interest in occupying power, in infecting it,

  through the billboard, the distribution of objects, the dissemination

  of information,

  those reproductive systems of capitalism.

  His work does not simply endure, but rather it replenishes itself,

  proliferating freedom, grace, and change.

  It is a thing that can be taken from and put back together to

  be taken from again.

  Like so many of my friends, I found my way to this city because

  of what it had been.

  What it had been, we thought, meant what we could be.

  I walk up to the pile of candies.

  I take one for myself.

  This candy is free and it is mine.

  I think of Ross in L.A., and of how truly little we might transport

  from the past, when we find ourselves at this point that

  feels like connection.

  I am aware that I take something away.

  I am not certain, however, of what I contribute.

  There is a critic in the city whose writing I came across a year

  or so ago.

  While in Lefferts Gardens, I email him—

  Hello, I like your work—

  and he accepts the offer to have drinks on my roof an evening

  while Simon is out of town.

  The night of, I put on a see-through gray T-shirt, and use a

  Q-tip to make perfect lines of my red lipstick.

  We laugh, talk about books some, and after he asks to kiss me,

  we head downstairs.

  When he leaves, I have the bed to myself, which I rarely do.

  Although we text back and forth, he declines my offer to have

  another date.

  I futz away my evenings on other boys, my nights veering

  toward more immediate pleasures, my makeup always smeared

  by sunrise.

  My lingering attraction to the critic, I tell myself, has to do

  with his words as well as his body.

  I want to inhabit, alongside him, the space he writes,

  think my way apart from what I know.

  I joke with my friends,

  “The critic has broken up with me already,”

  and we decide, as you are allowed to mourn a relationship for

  half the length of time it lasted, that I can take three hours at

  the bar for this.

  I experienced the act of removing the piece of candy, with

  its overt ritualization, as an act that both grounded me and

  pushed me further into an imaginative space.

  The tactility of unwrapping the paper and tasting the melting

  sugar situated me in my body, while the fact of Gonzalez-

  Torres’s romance with Ross removed me from my experience.

  I know, however, that I was only in my own memories.

  My losses are squarely different than his,

  as none of our losses are the same.

  His work moves between fact and imagination, the object and

  the memory, to open a new space:

  from me, to something that exists beyond that limit.

  Like I was only a boundary before, and now I can move again—

  pushing through a crowd until I come out the other side, and

  the air opens up and I breathe.

  My roommates and I hold a small party on our roof.

  The critic, invited, does not come.

  I spend the night smoking cigarettes with a handful of friends

  I have dated or am still ambiguously dating, all of us clustering

  in a corner with less roofing tar than the others.

  To chart these romances would be to name constellations

  among stars that will not stay still.

  At one point, a friend laughs,

  “I want one of those damn candies but I guess
some important

  artist made them,”

  before taking a candy.

  There is Another Trans Poet at the party, a stranger to me.

  He does not match the enthusiasm of the conversation I offer

  to him, and we reference only a few favorite writers before he

  returns to his date.

  Later, I won’t remember the conversations I had, just that an

  old friend comes up behind me and holds me, their arms a

  firm pressure against my chest,

  and that, when the moon first peeks above the geometry of

  Lefferts Gardens, a guy in purple makeup is surprised to see it

  so low, insisting that

  “it is always higher,”

  despite agreeing that it rises and sets.

  What can one do with a past?

  What I mean is, what can we do with our bodies?

  I want a white-walled room, a bed with white sheets, a lamp

  and a pile of books,

  as my emotions linger on what I have not experienced, on two

  men together, and how that must feel.

  With the heat in Brooklyn there was nowhere for my friends

  and I to be but beside one another in this bed.

  The night seems hotter when there are more people gathered

  together,

  hotter though the sun goes down, and the city’s dim lights

  turn the streets silver beneath us.

  I am still uncertain whether these are the experiences I had

  hoped to find,

  just as I can’t tell whether I am conforming to fill a shape or

  drawing its boundaries.

  I leave the party on the roof while it continues, everyone

  leaning in closer together, some queens showing up late and

  passing me on the stairs.

  I come and lie beside Simon.

  He and this bed are two things that I know.

  They are familiar.

  We are so boring, we laugh as we talk in and out of our sleep,

  the party’s buzz above us.

  We both prefer an empty room and glass when it breaks.

  I felt then that I was beginning to navigate some of that desire for Simon, which was a quality of loss, as I understand all desire, or rather, all the desire I have known—that my want for another body arrived, first, with the knowledge that it could not be. Maybe this is what binds the family of men together? The desire for the top and the lack of a top, a torque of specificity and hope.