Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through

by T Fleischmann

  when our touch isn’t sexual and we are not quite together—

  the long weeks of mending bones following a bicycle accident,

  for example,

  and there was always the fact that we both loved other

  people, too.

  Mainly, however, I just remind myself that I like this,

  that what matters is that we’re together.

  I used to think it was a horrible idea, to move somewhere new

  as a way to escape your problems.

  But now I know that sometimes you can run, that sometimes

  you can get away, so long as you keep your mouth shut.

  Simon makes a plan to visit his ex-girlfriend in Brussels again,

  leaving Berlin the morning before I do.

  Our last night in town, walking down the bridge, we joke

  about taking metal-cutters to the padlocks so each would

  drop to the water below, a plunk.

  When I return to New York, I am exhausted and broke and

  find that my phone no longer works.

  I leave my bags at Simon’s Brooklyn apartment and borrow a few

  dollars from a friend to get to the beach at the Far Rockaways.

  I love this beach because I know that I can go alone, and that

  there I will find several friends.

  It’s very important, I think, to keep going to a gay beach,

  because that way people who are strangers to you will be able

  to meet their friends there.

  Off the bus I am immediately high and naked, stepping into

  the cold water until it reaches my hips, the rise and fall of

  water obscuring and revealing my shaft.

  People give me things to smoke and sugary alcoholic drinks in

  little plastic bottles.

  I walk back and forth, to towels and to lapping waves, rinsing

  the sand off my feet and stepping again in it.

  Touching the ocean I think how far away I was yesterday,

  and now I am here.

  I see the moon, luminous enough to be visible in the day sky,

  and realize that I could have stayed, rather than returning to

  this place.

  When I am exhausted, I enter the water once more, dunk my

  head, and begin to find my way back to Simon’s empty room.

  I get lost on the wrong bus, then wander around the neighborhood

  with my sunburn and sports bra before collapsing,

  finally, in a bed that smells of him,

  and I suppose of me, too.

  Nearly everyone I know relies on sex work to pay their bills, to one degree or another, although I rarely mention this in my writing, and so my essays are filled with people who have these lacunae in their lives, their behaviors and movements and circumstances seeming to lack a certain context or motivation, and their labor erased. I worry they come across like bullshit flaneurs or something, like they have resources or stability they don’t, when the reality is that they are all activists, artists, survivors, finding ways to live under and to fight against a state that tries to legislate our lives away.

  Not that everyone who looks like a bullshit flaneur is all bad. A lot of my favorite books are filled with really wonderful queens acting atrociously, pretty much all drunk and some of them revolutionaries and some of them just absolutely ridiculous and in love, these faggots with so much over-the-top, entering the room style-first. Everywhere you turn, it’s just so wonderful—you can learn the world from the people wearing the silliest clothes.

  Jackson and I make plans for him to return to the United States, to reconnect. If we decide we want to stay together, then when it’s time we can get married and he can stay here, is the plan. I make this plan because I love Jackson and I want to keep being with him—not for the rest of my life because who could make a promise like that, but at least for a while. “I am reasonably confident this will go fine,” I keep telling my friends, proud that I’ve homed in on something that sounds so logical, like I’ve found a way to calculate myself straight into a romance. And anyway, if I don’t care about marriage, it’s hard to think divorce is consequential.

  Grades submitted, I throw some rompers in a bag and catch an early flight to LaGuardia. A couple of days later, Jackson flies in from Sydney, drug-dazed from his going-away party. He is as handsome as ever in his button-down travel outfit and with this look like he’s getting up to something, and I am as happy to see him as ever. Jackson has always made me feel beautiful, from the first moment he laid his eyes on me, and so he has only ever seen the version of me who feels beautiful, who beams with it. “Clutch Tammy,” he says, my whole name coming out of his mouth, “you’re so beautiful,” and just like that we’re two people smiling in an airport.

  Lately, I have been thinking a lot about two people next to one another. Who is next to each other, for instance, and why are they next to each other? Or why not? That sort of thing.

  I talk about this with Jackson, keeping the obsessive chatter of our Skype conversations going in person. I talk abstractly about what being next to each other means, as we ride the train into Manhattan one evening and then later as we lie around in bed trying to fall asleep. Who gets to be next to each other, and who does not get to be next to each other? Most often I’m talking of the concepts, broadly, or specifically about someone else, but also thinking of myself. As in, who am I next to today, and should I be? Does this make us a coalition, and if so, what for? I think these are good questions and appreciate being aware of who I am next to in ways that I might not have been otherwise. I think it’s important especially because I have noticed it can sometimes falsely make me feel safer if I don’t notice people around me, rather than if I do. Like ignoring as superpower, like I didn’t notice you threatening me so it never happened. I find there is more pleasure in noticing anyway. An example is that one evening, after taking drugs, Jackson and I end up on the Upper East Side at three in the morning with this woman who lets me try on a studded leather jacket from some famous music video, I forget which one, and I never see her again. Another is that Jackson and I went to the McDonald’s at sunrise after that, and while Jackson uses the bathroom, I am next to the only other person in line, an older woman in a red jacket who smiles at me twice. Stuff like that.

  One of the reasons I’m thinking about this is that I’m not supposed to be next to anyone, in the sense that I never knew people like me existed, so I never imagined myself next to someone or not. Being a person next to someone feels precious, especially while so many forces in the world work with such violence to make sure I am not next to so many people, and although it is violence, also, that brought me here in the first place, that is why I am next to who I am next to. One night I ask Jackson to make me a list: Why aren’t we supposed to be next to each other, he and I?

  2 good?

  You’re not the next to type

  We both prefer mine on top of yours

  V. modern and unknown and really breaking all the rules to

  have collaborated with these bodies in the first place let alone

  to bring them together

  Because you’re playing pool and I’m having alone time

  And so now we’re next to each other, place to place. He and I take a bus down to Tennessee to visit our friends before we go to my new home in Chicago. I show him a long poem I wrote about him and he cries a lot, and for a while every time we start to have sex he gets overwhelmed with emotion and cries, so for a while we don’t have sex. A lot of things are different from last summer, such as his girlfriend broke up with him and I am now living in a new city, with a new job and some new friends. But for now we make ourselves a little room out of the screened-in side porch of Benjy’s flower patch of a house, with a thin mat for a bed and an ashtray for Jackson to fill, and we settle into a routine of catching up.

  Staying for a bit on Benjy’s porch (where we fell in love, Jackson and I keep saying) means tha
t Benjy and I get to play around with our art some more. He returns one afternoon with new flowers from the greenhouse where Sterling used to work, and I arrange them into letters, one at a time, arranging and rearranging the little plastic planters while Benjy snaps overhead photos from the roof. The series of photos spells out MY EXIT. It’s a quick process, just an afternoon between Benjy’s fleeting thought—these would make pretty letters—and the photographs. If my own exit means something new is growing, that seems pretty optimistic, especially if the new thing growing is all flowers and stalks and the suggestion of spring turning into summer. Like maybe if the climate change gets us before we have a chance to totally scorch the earth, other things will still get to live and evolve here, the water planet of the octopus people and their friends, the wise dolphins. We imagine the series of photographs as an answer to the question, “Is the rectum a grave?”—a sex joke about life, to suggest going elsewhere.

  Jokes really are most of it, for Benjy and me. Our conversations are filled with laughing, as is most of our time working on the art. A good laugh is most of what it takes for us to find meaning, in the way that two people can always make their own meanings. A favorite joke lately is the idea that the art is going to make us rich, that we’ll finally be wealthy, wealthy artists, instead of tax dodgers, underemployed in our temporary employment.

  “Hello, Mr. Moma? Yes, you can have these photos for thirty million dollars,” I say.

  “For you, Mrs. The Guggenheim,” Benjy answers, “the sculpture will cost double that.”

  I decide to head into town to get some supplies and also some drill bits, because I lost Benjy’s helping a friend down the road rebuild her porch. It’s about a twenty-minute drive on curving roads through thick trees and ferns and weeds so overgrown you can’t see around any of the bends. Jackson climbs into the truck with me and on the way we stop at the farmhouse Otelia rents. There’s a barn with a giant cow painted on the side and a rundown shed that leans to the left, what’s left of a general store that operated in the 1940s. The house has a big wide porch out front and whenever I stop by a large sheepdog named Mommy runs out to greet me with her nasty clumps of ratted white fur and a tick or two bulging gray with blood around her ears. There are some other friends visiting and when we all talk I think about the people shared between us who have died over the past couple years, how all of them knew some of us who are here but in different ways, and did they all know each other, which I can’t remember for sure. Jackson rolls a cigarette and starts to pet Mommy while I peel off my T-shirt, so worn through that the point of a nipple is visible, and add a sports bra beneath it.

  When I’m in a rural area I make a distinction between town clothes and regular clothes. Town clothes are for when I go into the little cluster of groceries and fast foods and hardwares that are down the highway a bit. Years ago, when I was first starting hormones and living here, that distinction wasn’t much. I wore tattered jean cutoffs and a T-shirt most every day, and my breasts were little nubs—even if people saw them, most didn’t have the context to know what they were seeing, especially because trans people weren’t all over the TV yet. I was pretty set with this dykey look for a long time, wearing my hair in a mullet and running my only pair of black boots flat before finding some new ones at the thrift. Most people just figured I was bad at being a faggot, which was better than nothing, as far as that goes.

  Not that I’m the first person to fail at being a faggot in this region. There’s a gravestone just a few miles from the hardware for Hiram Kersey, who went by the name “Pomp.” Pomp joined the Confederate Army when he was thirteen, but as the Union advanced, he returned to his hometown, forming a small gang to raid, rob, and murder Union sympathizers in the region. Local histories describe him attending a series of late-night dances at a particular barn, parties known for their “rustic beauties” and strong alcohol. “Beardless Pomp Kersey is said to have attended one of those dances dressed as a girl and to have danced with his arch enemy,” one history has it. In his regular clothing, he returned to the barn an evening in 1864, firing his rifle into the party. As he fled, that arch enemy-cum-dance partner tracked him to the gang’s hideout, where he came upon Pomp and a male companion in their sleep, and shot them each dead.

  It’s easy enough, sometimes, to hide, to blend into a crowd and let everyone pretend that we’re the same. Easy, too, to buy into the fiction of it myself, to forget that the person who puts on a dress in the barn is just as likely to turn around and shoot me in the back as anyone else. Sometimes an anonymity like that can feel safer, like when the cashier at the grocery or the hardware would confuse me for one of my similarly weird-looking friends, asking how someone else’s dog was recovering from a rattlesnake bite, or whether someone else’s neighbor was home from visiting her daughter. It felt nice, in a way, to be untraceable, a vague someone else. It felt like the fall I was thirteen, when I refused to wear anything except one of five Champion sweatshirts in similar greens and browns, as though I could stand against the changing leaves of the woods outside our school and no one would notice me, or who I actually was. But whatever the pleasures of anonymity might be, the horror of actually disappearing, and drifting away into the quiet, white violence of it all—that was motivation enough to get me out of the Champion sweatshirts.

  There’s not much shade in Otelia’s front yard, and the summer in Tennessee is incredibly hot. The air gets thick with humidity in a way it didn’t seem to by the Great Lakes, and I always feel like the constant sweat on my body is radiating outward, merging with the wet air. The whole earth comes alive with the summer, almost painfully, bugs everywhere, and everything is this kind of green that I had never known before, either, a green that shines. I feel the heat bake onto me, like it is more than I can handle, as the earth around me overflows with living things.

  Otelia sits in the middle seat of the truck and Jackson sits in the passenger seat. With the windows down and the swerving roads I put my arm across the back and squint into the sun, reflecting off pavement, until we reach the lumber supply, where I buy three big pieces of insulation that are silver boards. The sheets are made reflective not to reflect sunlight back outward, exactly, but to prevent radiant heat transfer. People put them in their roof, which is more often between people and the sun than the walls are.

  Otelia and Jackson help me load the sheets into the back of the truck, smoking cigarettes and being sweet together, laughing and all that. The guy at the lumber supply always used to ask what my projects were and then I’d tell him what I was working on and he’d sit there at the counter with me while we drew pictures and talked about the choices I was making. He’d tell me especially when I could save some money and he’d also tell me when he thought something might be out of my skill level. I really struggle with spatial visualization and remembering the language of carpentry, and sometimes my mind would empty when I talked to him, and I would just pretend I knew what we were saying. I’ve been gone long enough that there’s a new guy working, though. He’s fine, like he doesn’t pretend to like a thing about me, that scowl and all, but that’s okay because it means he doesn’t ask me what I’m doing with the sheets. I’m always flustered to explain myself when I’m using carpentry material for some gay art project instead of whatever it’s intended for, when I need concrete blocks to elevate the altar to our dead pets, or like now, when I just need to get some insulation to flash the sunlight where I want it to go.

  Which is what I do, two people being sweet together and helping me carry the floppy sheets to the truck. The sun coming off the silver feels hotter than the sun in the sky because the reflected sun is closer to our bodies, and maneuvering those sheets around is a game of staying in the insulation’s shade. On the drive back to where Benjy lives I can sometimes see a little of the hill or some green and blue across the silver but mainly it’s just glare, a pain spot I can’t look at to see.

  We set to work arranging the sheets and mixing up a batch of green liquid for the next step in o
ur Squirt! sculpture. It’s a straightforward idea. We’re making giant letters out of Squirt cans (like the soda) to spell out the word Squirt! in a 3-D sculpture, as high as my shoulders and as thick as my breadth. Then we’re mixing together this liquid that we’re pretending is Squirt but is actually just green food dye and water and corn starch for viscosity. Today, we’re throwing giant buckets of that liquid against the backdrop of hillside and sky, huge splashes of green viscous liquid looking unreal, like a waterfall went backward and extraterrestrial. The insulation is to reflect the sun back onto the liquid, so people can see what it is better. Once it’s all done, we’re going to print the giant splashes of liquid onto a large industrial vinyl sheet, then grommet it above the sculpture, so it looks like the Squirt cans are squirting Squirt into the sky. It’s called Squirt!, with the exclamation point.

  Benjy and I spend a lot of time laughing about Squirt! “See,” we say, “it’s called Squirt!,” and we usually crack each other up while our friend sits there and maybe politely laughs. We sometimes say it at the start, “So it’s called Squirt!,” and sometimes one of us waits until the very end and says, “and it’s called Squirt!” landing like a punchline we’d never heard before. For example when I tell Cyd, who I fisted with the pearls and all that, about the piece we get into a back and forth, him saying he doesn’t understand what I’m talking about and me insisting there’s nothing to get, it’s just about Squirt. “Alright,” he says, unconvinced. After Benjy realizes how expensive it will be to get all the Squirt cans we need (hundreds, it turns out, and like a dollar each with the Squirt in them), I start placing ads on Craigslist, offering to let people see my tits or touch my feet for Squirt cans. I get back streams of emails, but all either thinking I mean “penis” when I say “Squirt can” or offering me, ridiculously, other kinds of soda. When Benjy and I really get going we talk also about a companion sculpture. It will be a fish tank filled with bright pink liquid, and inside it we’re going to hang a neon sign that says, Do you have to let it linger? in curly cursive, and we’re calling that one Cranberry Squirt. Usually by the time we get to revealing the name we’re laughing so hard that we’re tearing up but that doesn’t mean we’re not deadly serious. We take our joy very seriously, our deadly serious joy.