Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through

by T Fleischmann

  travel, working extra hours to save, my life mobile.

  Are Simon and I in a relationship? A: Yes B: No C: Maybe someday

  D: All things exist in relation

  I always leave as many “none of the above” and “all of the

  above” answers as the style guide allows me.

  Before leaving, we browse through apartments to sublet on

  Craigslist and think of location, think of space.

  We decide on a place near the Oberbaum Bridge—a white-

  walled unit overlooking a courtyard, one bedroom and one

  living room, everything about it spare.

  When we leave, Simon takes a different flight than I do, and

  I cross the border alone.

  It is an awful, shameful thing, the violence of its doing and

  what it means,

  and when I cross it a headache comes on, stays with me.

  Simon is hours ahead as I lean my cheek on the airplane

  window and try to detect whether I can feel the change in

  temperature from which it keeps me separate, or whether

  I am just feeling plexiglass.

  Although I know I am in the sky, and that the ocean is

  beneath me, I can’t see beyond this small, dark reflection of

  my face.

  This is probably the farthest I will get from the earth, I think,

  and I am bothered by having thought it.

  To receive the key to the apartment, Simon and I have to go

  to the café downstairs and speak to someone there, someone

  who expects us.

  This is all very romantic, I tell myself, as we sit at the café, and

  as we take our beers into the street and wherever we may care

  to take them.

  What exactly I find romantic about waiting for a key and

  drinking a beer, I am not sure.

  After we unlock the door, we throw our bags onto the tile

  floors, and he begins arranging the furniture of the living

  room into a second bedroom.

  I feel rejected, as two nights prior, in Brooklyn, our bodies had

  fit together as they always do.

  How absolutely silly that we name some things as romantic,

  some as not.

  I have spent many afternoons waiting in cafés, impatient for

  something to occur, or for the day to become different.

  I could not recognize a single key from my past were I to see

  it now, despite holding each of them daily, despite each being

  so necessarily unique.

  Simon and I quickly leave the apartment again.

  We find a park where we smoke, and later, a small bonfire by

  the river.

  It is late, although much earlier for us.

  We approach people with our awkward German, and they

  reply, again and again, in English.

  As at home, my intimacy with Simon in Berlin is ineffable,

  not in that it cannot be said, but that in being said it would

  then cease to be.

  This is true whether we sleep in one bed or two.

  This is true as he links his arm in mine and we walk our way

  back across the bridge, its two spiral towers and the countless

  padlocks fastened to its gridded rail by people in love.

  The shape of the moon’s orbit, an ellipse around our own spin,

  means that we glimpse the edges of its far side but never catch

  more than 59 percent of its surface.

  At its closest point to the earth, it slows, and we can see a bit

  more of its western side,

  while at its farthest point, it speeds up, revealing more of

  the east.

  This subtle movement across that 59 percent is called

  libration.

  Similarly, we exist not at the earth’s center, but rather on its

  uneven surface, each space unique to us,

  and each affording an imperceptibly different view of the

  moon.

  The movements and geometrical quirks of libration are similar

  to the movements and quirks that bring the seasons.

  I for years believed the moon was responsible for the tides, for

  instance, but know now that a combination of sun and earth

  and moon as moving bodies,

  gravitational pulls in all directions, and the shapes of ocean

  floors,

  all of this and more is at play in moving the water.

  The moon is just a thing near some other things, a complicated

  thing to be.

  It’s so close you’d think it would touch.

  Because the strands go quite literally up and down, one of the

  easier reference points for “Untitled” (Water) is a waterfall—

  the blue and clear beads that look like they fall whenever

  someone passes by.

  The piece also offers an occasion to think of movement, water,

  and crossing in relation to the artist’s own life,

  having been born in Cuba, sent with his sister to Spain in 1971,

  and relocated again to his uncle’s in Puerto Rico before finally

  moving to New York in 1979.

  His parents and two of his siblings would escape Cuba shortly

  after that, during the Mariel boatlift.

  Or perhaps some of the water he included, along with these

  relocations, in a 1993 version of his portrait,

  a recurrent piece that lists autobiographical phrases with years—

  1964 Dad bought me a set of watercolors and gave me my first cat,

  and

  1991 Jorge stopped talking to me, I’m lost—Claudio and Miami

  Beach saved me, and

  1990 silver ocean in San Francisco.

  His personal correspondences are also wet with the stuff.

  “Never thought that a natural element, such as the falls would

  generate such an incredible array of fetishisms,

  Niagara cups, belts, lanyards, key holders, etc.”

  he wrote to a friend after viewing the Falls.

  “Well it was OK,”

  Ross added to the note,

  “but they weren’t as big as I thought they would be …”

  Or maybe, like his autobiography, the water is just that—

  waves of itself, lapping body and land.

  Sung, inside a body again.

  And then a body, singing of land and water.

  Simon and I acquire two used bikes, a small girl’s bike belonging

  to a friend, and a matching adult bike purchased off Craigslist.

  The owner of the Craigslist bike turns out to be from the U.S.,

  and in only moments we connect her to a mutual friend, now

  living in Los Angeles.

  Both Simon and I being on tight budgets, the bikes become

  our cheap access to the city.

  The arcs of our rides expand, concentric to our apartment,

  and so we see more each day of the way Berlin holds its history.

  Those of my ancestors that I know of were all German, which

  gives me a vague sense that maybe there is something I could

  learn by paying attention to these particular horrors and

  liberations,

  to keep my eyes on the patterns.

  We come to frequent a bar with pink fur walls and another with

  a sex maze in the back.

  We decide the bar with a sex maze is sailor themed and refer

  to it as such, although there is nothing particularly nautical

  about it, just men there.

  One night, Simon picks up a giant of a man at the bar and,

  too drunk to steer his bicycle, makes the man ride it back to

  our apartment with Simon perched on the handle
bars, laughing

  the whole way.

  Simon is good at the map, but I learn places in relation to

  one another.

  When I am alone I might find my way by memory from an

  art gallery to the sex club, or from the sex club to a squat,

  yet finding my way from the art gallery to the squat remains

  impossible, unless Simon goes on that ride with me.

  Because of this, when he goes to visit an ex-girlfriend in

  Brussels for a few nights, I find myself stuck in only familiar

  places.

  One evening, I follow a stranger, a dancer, to a new bar and

  am relieved that he agrees to come home with me,

  embarrassed that I would otherwise need to backtrack to our

  first location of the night, the opposite direction of my sublet.

  Returned from Belgium, Simon tells me of the sex he had with

  his ex, and I tell him of the awful sex I had with the dancer,

  who seemed only to sit there with his jaw slack, yet moaning.

  Later that evening, he and I get drunk enough that we seem

  to blur into one another.

  Riding around, I spontaneously manage an entire sentence in

  German when he tilts off a curb and I announce:

  Der Mann auf dem grünen Fahrrad des kleinen Mädchens ist

  gefallen.

  We walk our bikes and steady one another, our speech rapid

  and simultaneous.

  When we return to the apartment, there is a note on the door,

  its German requiring a dictionary to translate.

  Where have you gone? the giant man asks.

  I would like to see you again.

  The first image of the moon’s far side came to us on October 7,

  1959.

  It was taken by the Luna 3 spacecraft, a Soviet mission led

  largely by Soviet scientists.

  For decades prior to this, the Soviet space program had been

  propelled forward by German scientists and German research

  seized by the state at the end of the Second World War.

  Mond, the moon is called in German, one of the languages of

  the world that make it masculine.

  Luna 1 had missed the moon by miscalculation, and Luna 2,

  successful, was the first human-created object to reach the

  lunar surface.

  On receiving the images from Luna 3, scientists recognized

  two mares—

  expansive, shaded plains created by volcanic eruptions.

  Two was a small number in comparison to the many mares

  of the near side, which humanity had always seen and often

  mistaken for water.

  They named one Mare Moscoviense, after Moscow.

  The other they named Mare Desiderii, after dreams, although

  they would later come to realize those photographs were of

  poor quality,

  and that it was actually an even smaller mare surrounded by

  craters,

  the dream never actually there.

  The existence of so few mares was a surprise, as were the large

  number of mountain ranges that filled the moon’s unseen side,

  so unlike the side we knew.

  People often refer to this far side of the moon as the dark side,

  although it receives light and darkness in equal measure to the

  side we see—

  two bright weeks, two of night.

  There are fewer mares, anyway, not because our own planet

  shields the visible side from space debris with its mass,

  but likely because the heat radiating off the earth changed the

  composition of the moon in its first days.

  One of those times, when it just takes a little warmth to change

  everything.

  The Berlin apartment is a long corridor that runs along the

  kitchen, then the bathroom, and then the bedroom,

  all facing the courtyard, before the corridor ends by opening

  into the living room.

  While there is no door to the living room, the foldout couch

  on which Simon sleeps is positioned outside the line of sight

  from the hallway, affording privacy.

  My bedroom has a door.

  In Brooklyn, Simon’s apartment is more of a cluster, with the

  kitchen and bathroom to either side when you enter, then a

  living room with three bedrooms off it.

  Simon’s bedroom is the smallest, but his bed is large, and we

  are comfortable there both with and without the door open.

  “Who knows what you two do behind closed doors,” my friend

  Mona jokes on multiple occasions.

  I always insist, Nothing, although I can never find a way to

  make it seem believable.

  Only rarely do we say that we love each other, but when we

  do, it is as we lie in each other’s arms, which we do every

  evening, as of late.

  In Tennessee, I have only my small shack.

  It is one high-ceilinged room, one porch with old barn windows

  for walls, and an unadorned deck, all the same width and in

  a row.

  I find hanging doors to be one of the most challenging parts

  of carpentry.

  A door is heavy and very particular about how it might fit

  snugly into a frame.

  The door in my house hangs unevenly on its hinges, and its

  latch does not line up properly, hitting the strike plate instead

  of clicking into place.

  You have to slam the door to shut it, which I never do.

  I just feel the breeze across the deck and through the screen.

  “Untitled” (Water) came the year before Felix Gonzalez-Torres

  died, the last curtain after “Untitled” (Chemo), “Untitled”

  (Blood), “Untitled” (Beginning), and “Untitled” (Golden).

  There are slight references and happy suggestions across these

  works, reasons to find joy in them.

  There is his golden friendship with Roni Horn, the warm reference

  to bodega curtains.

  The words in the untitled works of curtains are all words of

  life, in one way or another.

  Friends and colleagues always called Felix Gonzalez-Torres

  generous, that description humming through interviews and

  recollections.

  And it’s true, the curtains are generous, they give more than

  enough.

  They work to undo the institutions that procure them, forcing

  the owners to go and buy some cheap beads,

  just as other pieces require owners to give away, endlessly, what

  was just purchased—

  paper, or candy.

  Even with the billboards of the beds, the artist himself would

  retain the rights to the photograph,

  as the collector purchases only the right to distribute that image,

  to proliferate it in endless variations, to rent another billboard

  in another place.

  And shouldn’t those things be free?

  Medicine, water, blood, the goldenness of something beginning,

  for whoever might need them?

  One day, when we arrive to the sailor-bar, we find out that

  someone had been murdered in the sex maze the night before.

  This brings on an awful series of attraction and repulsion,

  which we talk about for days, exchanging horror stories of our

  sexual undergrounds,

  eroticizing the things that try to kill us.

  There is something specific, also, about the giant man coming

  to our courtyard, more so than if we had offered him a street-<
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  facing door or steps descending into an alley.

  Perhaps it has to do with the windows facing inward, with the

  public intimacy of the display.

  “I work all day like a monk /

  and at night wander about like an alleycat /

  looking for love,”

  Pasolini begins one of his Roman poems, written early in his

  relocation to that city.

  The filmmaker and poet had fled there after being caught with

  teenage boys, hiding in the trees,

  a scandal exaggerated to cost him his teaching position and

  drive him from the Communist Party.

  For Pasolini, Rome was a chance to reinvent himself, a necessary

  prospect.

  In Rome he could write novels and face the self that existed

  in this new place, which could be neither “an old nor a new

  Pier Paolo.”

  “I pity the young fascists,

  and the old ones, whom I consider forms

  of the most horrible evil, I oppose

  only with the violence of reason.”

  he writes in the 1964 poem, and describes himself in its closing—

  “Passive as a bird that sees all, in flight.”

  It is a poem of confronting, not just the mobs that condemn

  and disparage his sexuality, but his own actions as well,

  the contradiction of feeling both hate and love at once.

  Which part of it might have appealed to Gonzalez-Torres,

  when he selected the poem for the press release of a 1995 show

  at the Andrea Rosen Gallery?

  It is placed alongside an excerpt from Barbra Streisand’s 1995

  speech, “The Artist as Citizen,”

  in which she defends both abortion and gay rights,

  and an excerpt from Rimbaud’s “The Savior Bumped Upon

  His Heavy Butt.”

  “The Citizen as Artist” might be another way to say it, to

  acknowledge that we are making something by joining

  together.

  I suppose I can pity the fascists, sure—

  I know how painful it is to be defined by something so large

  that it seems to swallow every bit of who you are.

  That’s why feeling joy is so revolutionary.

  So that later, when I feel like I am a memory, all alone in the

  moonlight,

  I will know that I must wait for the sunrise,

  and I must think of a new life,

  and I mustn’t give in.

  Simon must know my disappointment at our separate bedrooms,

  but we offer each other the generosity of leaving this

  disappointment unspoken, too.

  Over the past years, I have selected readily available explanations

  for the why of these periods (a year one time, more)