Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through

by T Fleischmann

  Another way I’m of my generation, fleeing the suburbs and small towns of Middle America for its coastal cities around the turn of the twenty-first century. There is maybe an optimistic streak in there, that promise of the queer horizon elsewhere—not a way to live where you are, but a you who can live only somewhere else. And there is maybe something joyous in that flight, even though it so often begins in terror, from the epidemics of sexual violence and suicide and silence that live in this country’s hometowns—something joyous in survival. Still, many of us, especially the people of privilege, made that flight ill-equipped to live in the cities, ignorant of where we now were, and ignoring the violence and displacement that arrived with us. Hurt people can justify the hurt they cause so easily, sometimes, calling it necessary, feeling it is survival. It’s a thing that must be accounted for, to earn the optimism back, although it seems nothing short of the ocean rising up and swallowing the coastal cities will make the liberal transplants of my generation turn back home and face what lives where we were born.

  All that is to say, whatever my connection to New York might be, it was at first one of temporary commitment, an attempt to access a kinder bureaucracy. I wouldn’t want to add my voice to the voices of those who seek to describe New York in any substantive way. But it did also form me. I fell in love here, for example, twice.

  Jackson and I, unpacked and rested, young and in love and in New York, decide that we would like to collaborate on a project, and so we begin a search for the gay men’s cruising spots of yore. We begin it by smoking cigarettes on the roof, looking over the buildings, and talking about what we know, and then we begin it again by walking down four flights of stairs and out into the city. Jackson is animated, the way he gestures with his right hand, and he always makes me laugh. We are both interested in the things that we came too late for, which means we’re going to have to do them ourselves. I talk about Samuel Delany, chattering on about how he loves dirty, bit fingernails and about Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, where he describes the shuttering of porn theaters in Manhattan as a blow to gay culture, setting liberation back decades. Although I am not queer these days, I know the queer contours of New York better than Jackson, having picked up plenty of subway strangers here when I was younger. I used to be especially talented at it on the L train in Brooklyn, although I stopped when my tits became obvious enough to overly complicate my connection to fag sexuality. I sought the hookup for its straightforward, just-the-dicks-ma’am nature, which seemed beyond grasp when the last guy I picked up, a drag queen on his way home with a wig box, said, “So you have breasts and you’re a top? Tell me about that.” It’s what I learned with my old body, then, that leads Jackson and I on this search for something we know isn’t there.

  My copy of Times Square Red, Times Square Blue has my friend Cyd’s inscription in the front, written to and flirting with our shared friend, to whom the book actually belongs. Cyd and I have been hooking up for about a decade, quick sex the once or twice a year we’re in the same city, which means he’s been a constant through the relationships of my adult life—tick, and then quite a while later, tock. I have a lot of these people in my life who I have sex with when I see them, which is sometimes, although always there is the possibility that when you see that person the next time you will not hook up, so every time might be the last time. People who are or were like this are most of my closest friends. I first began hooking up with Cyd the summer I always wore a fake pearl necklace wrapped thrice as a bracelet, until one day while I was fisting him he pulled on the bracelet-necklace and it burst, fake pearls everywhere.

  Looking back, I appreciate this scattering because it helps me think of the pearls more directly, to engage with them non-metaphorically, which is good, because I’ve been getting bored with metaphors anyway. I’ve decided that I don’t like them because one thing is never another thing, and it’s a lie to say something is anything but itself; it’s ontologically and physically impossible, in fact, not even apple and apple can be each other. So the gay men sexual walking tour of Manhattan has this additional challenge, that I must avoid metaphors even as I seek to experience an echo of the city’s past.

  It is lots of walking, and I am usually in tattered T-shirts that show my tits and Jackson is often in track pants and pornographic shirts he embroiders that show his tits. 1-800 Eat Pussy No Sleep Rave Nation, one of his shirts says. One day, when he’s off on a date, I go for a walk by myself. I wear a torn, floral dress, similar to something Janeane Garofalo would have worn maybe in Reality Bites. I smoke a cigarette even though I said I’d quit. It is very hot. I am late for where I’m going, which is to my friend Avory’s house for takeout. Avory is very good at hosting, asking questions and talking, and always looks put together even when we’re just relaxing, so I’m sweaty and hurrying to go relax. I walk quickly to pass this group on the sidewalk, five adults and a kid maybe four years old or so, although I’m bad at figuring out how old children are. As I walk by, the kid turns to me and says, “Hey, are you a girl?” and I smile and I say, “No,” and then the kid says, “Are you a boy?” and I smile and I say, “No,” and then the kid seems to think very carefully and says, “So you don’t have to be a boy or a girl?” and I say, “That’s right, you got it, you don’t,” and I smile again but start walking even more quickly because there are five adults with this kid and a lot of adults don’t want you to tell their kid to be a transsexual.

  What matters though is that as I am walking ahead more quickly the kid yells out after me, “Hey! I live in a house with a door!” The kid says it with a lot of confidence and a lot of happiness, really wanting me to know this. And I turn around and say, “Hey, me too!” and we both laugh and then I walk down the block.

  Isn’t that so beautiful? “Hey, I live in a house with a door.” I’m hungry for truth and kids are just spouting facts up and down the street. I tell Avory about it and they immediately understand what the kid is talking about, nodding a lot as we pass a blunt. The next day Jackson’s friend from Australia, who is in town performing monologues about sex work, comes to my apartment, and men on the street have just yelled at her. I change course and tell her the story about the kid and start rambling about all this, metaphors, and whatever. She says to me that she actually thinks what the kid said is more beautiful if it isn’t metaphor, anyway. I had shared some information about the world and then the kid wanted to share some information about the world, and if I get all loopidy-loo about what the kid said, I’m probably missing the whole message, which is just, “Hey, I live in a house with a door.” And really, she reminds me, isn’t some information about being alive beautiful enough? That we dry forks and touch hair and throw away a sock?

  That night, some friends and I take a taxi to this party where there is a whirlpool and the taxi driver lets us smoke in the back. It’s a party I always avoid because only gay boys invite me so I assume it’s a gay boy party, and I know the drinks are expensive even for a Manhattan party on a roof with a pool, and the only trans person I ever see in photos from this event is Amanda Lepore. But this week enough of my friends are going to make it a party I want to go to, too, and anyway, Amanda Lepore always arrives before me—on a daytime talk show in the small town where I grew up, a voyeur looking like an ornament.

  An elevator lady takes us up to the bar where the space is a big crowded square. I do enjoy this party because I quickly start to lift abandoned drinks off tables and dance in the whirlpool, which comes to my shoulders, so I dance in slow motion (the water) and with displaced movements (jets hitting my legs and arms). I start to hook up with a friend in the water and Jackson is in the water, too, and he starts to hook up with someone and eventually we take a taxi home and have an orgy. At the orgy I touch my hair, I go and pee, I feel a nipple hard against my own. My inclination is to say something about a door here, a metaphor of a door, but instead I’ll say that when I lick Jackson’s thigh his sweat tastes like Jackson’s sweat.

  Even when I say that the sho
rt walk to the train is hell sometimes, or that human connection is a broken and bruised cock, or that a pearl is a thing with feathers, really, wouldn’t an even stronger connection have been possible without the fantasy? I think about a walk to the train, I think about human connection, I think about pearls. I think of the door the next evening, too, when I walk home and some guy calls me a faggot, whatever, and it is dark and the cars on my street have those blue security lights flickering in their front windows, on the rear-view mirrors, a long row of unsyncopated blue lights. And years ago, pretending to be a young boy, I would have seen this and called it eidolon breathing or a calm like the calm of the stars also flickering above, but it’s really just a bunch of lights and I know now that they say, This is my car, don’t fuck with me, I’ll call the police and they will hurt you, I have something you don’t and I want to keep it that way.

  Jackson and I do a lot of going places, looking for somewhere to pee, and then deciding to go somewhere else. We go to that room that used to be a bathroom with a bunch of pornographic Keith Haring figures on the walls and with all the toilets and everything yanked out. I push him against the wall and kiss him and we start to have sex but I chicken out. The next day he and I sleep late, then go into Manhattan, hoping to find a porn theater that I know won’t be there, but finding ourselves instead at Mmuseumm, a tiny museum in an alley, one of those Manhattan alleys in crime movies of the 1970s and ’80s that don’t seem to actually exist. We’re always looking for somewhere to eat and then eating pizza out of the trash. I think of Simon sometimes, and how we did these types of things, and even these very same things. Simon showed me a good pizza trash can, for example, at Fourteenth and First. And Simon and I jogged around Prospect Park, where Jackson and I fuck in the morning if we’ve been out late enough. Simon would slow his pace for me until I urged him to go ahead, and then he would wait for me, happy, back where we started, until I arrived in my own time.

  For six months or so, Simon attempts to give me a copy of an

  ice book he likes,

  picked up at the used bookstore where some of our friends work.

  He visits me often, as I visit him, and he repeats the intention

  each time.

  “I keep meaning to get you a copy of that book,”

  he tells me.

  When I go to see him in Brooklyn, it is beside his bed,

  recently read, although I do not pick it up.

  The Ice Museum is a lyric-sheened narrative about Thule, the

  mythical, northern land first mentioned by the ancient Greek

  Pytheas, who wrote of visiting it in a book lost to time, The

  Description of the Ocean.

  Thule is like Atlantis but crusted with ice, and, instead of

  sinking,

  its imagined location just becomes farther and farther away

  when explorers cannot find it,

  drawing them north each time, to somewhere colder.

  The people in Thule were giants, or the people in Thule were

  miserable, and they lived off root vegetables and herbs, where

  night or day could each last for months.

  Explorers kept pushing toward the Arctic, seeking the Thule

  that Pytheas described, its imagined location in Norway,

  Iceland, Ireland, Estonia—always elsewhere.

  Over centuries of poetry, song, and myth, Thule became a

  European dream of a utopic beyond, metaphor overtaking

  geography.

  The book is calming, Simon tells me,

  its rolling descriptions of snow, waves, and moss.

  And although we are sincere, he in his intention to buy me a

  copy and I in my intention to read it, I read only the first lines,

  in which

  “the ice sounds a ceaseless warning.”

  He comes to Tennessee, his own copy in his backpack,

  and I return to Brooklyn, where it sits between two volumes

  of Proust on the bookshelf headboard we installed together

  behind his pillows.

  When I stare at the white wall of Simon’s room I imagine

  those masses, those deep-throated moans of ice, inching and

  wind-bit in a place I might never go.

  Beauty is a source of strength—

  I can become my best self when facing beauty, in awe of what

  I can’t possess, can’t fix in language, can’t know.

  It is in wonder at the image of an iceberg that I confront its

  collapse, its warming away.

  An iceberg is pretty, too, and brilliant, radiant, but these are

  the physical qualities, and beauty extends beyond whatever

  object it inhabits.

  It refuses to diminish itself to the terms of our petty desire,

  yet forces our compassion, makes us realize we are sharing

  something.

  I know my love of the ice as aesthetic object first and political

  object second is inadequate, yes,

  but I hope beauty might still touch my humanity, the part of

  me that is shared, that is awful and good.

  Simon comes to Tennessee, I catch a Craigslist ride to Brooklyn,

  and Simon comes to Tennessee again.

  It is winter, and a waterfall, an hour’s hike down the creek

  away from my house, has frozen.

  A waterfall freezes while the water still flows, so first there is a

  drop-off of ice, hidden at the top of the trickle.

  And then more of the creek trickles down, and freezes also,

  becoming a column, incrementally bigger, the flow stilled at

  its edge.

  Over many days of this, the fall becomes larger than it ever is

  when its water runs fast in the warmth of other seasons.

  And the ice, accruing in all directions, appears as a permanent

  froth and rage,

  suggestive of movement, yet calm,

  great ice waves formed hard at earth.

  When Simon and I come upon it, we linger for a while, and

  throw slate into a hole gaping open at its base.

  Our hurled objects disappear behind the white rim and we

  cannot see them land,

  can hear only the slow trickle of more water dripping and the

  plop of solid into liquid.

  We both worry that the sculpture will shatter, a vision we hope

  to see.

  By the medieval era, several places had been reached, each

  named Thule, and each determined to not, in fact, be Thule.

  Cartographers began to indicate ultima Thule to clarify this.

  This ultima was the Thule that had not been discovered, the

  Thule that explorers hadn’t reached and that needed to be

  distinguished from the Thules they had found and that they

  still wanted to write on the map.

  The Thules and Thilas and Thulas of the frozen coasts—

  real places with bearded men and dinners of fish and fermented

  liquids—

  their names mark them as less, their movement from the exaltation

  of what could be and into the tired reality of what is.

  Simon explains this all to me as we lie in bed, having both

  woken early and at the same time.

  He returned last night from Maine, visiting a gay bar where

  the men had salt on their faces while I stayed behind, reading

  and smoking cigarettes on his roof.

  These are some of my favorite moments, when one of us

  has gone somewhere else, and then we come back to each

  other.

  I close my eyes, thinking I might fall back asleep soon, and

  letting Simon’s voice fill the map of my imagination while

  I do.

  That billboard of the unmade bed, those two pillow dimples

 
; from two heads—

  an installation at Brighton Beach, Berlin, Paris.

  Spotlights on a corner,

  as any two people in love might be.

  In 1990, walking around Los Angeles, Felix Gonzalez-Torres

  and Ross came upon Gold Field in a gallery.

  A work by Roni Horn, it is a rectangle of forty-nine by sixty

  inches, two pounds of pure gold pressed so thin that it rises

  barely above one-hundredth of a millimeter.

  Horn’s intention with the piece was to allow viewers to appreciate

  and respond to the gold absent the economic, political,

  and social histories that suffuse the material.

  Knowing that Ross was approaching death, the couple came

  across the flat gold, and, in the artist’s words,

  “There it was, in a white room, all by itself, it didn’t need company,

  it didn’t need anything.

  Sitting on the floor, ever so lightly.

  A new landscape, a possible horizon, a place of rest and absolute

  beauty …

  Ross and I were lifted.

  That gesture was all we needed to rest, to think about the

  possibility of change.

  This showed the innate ability of an artist proposing to make

  this place a better place.

  How truly revolutionary.”

  The revolutionary potential in Horn’s flat gold is not in contrast

  to her desire to extract the metal from those political

  histories,

  but rather it is an accomplice to it, a transcendence.