Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through

by T Fleischmann

  One of Jackson’s dates comes and picks him up and takes him away in a truck. While Benjy and I are working, we use the reflective sheets to take some portraits of ourselves, too, but the sun is so hot I have to keep running back inside to stand in front of a fan so my makeup doesn’t melt off. When we’re done we give the sheets to our friend to use on the house zie is building down the road, which means the silver will be all about preventing radiant heat transfer, as intended. It does feel off to use a lot of resources to make a piece of art, as we drain the earth so fully that our vegetables barely contain nutrients and our water runs dead plastic. Like I go to the museum and half the time I think fuck you. So it’s some comfort that the insulation will go to a home, and that our friends keep drinking Squirt, can after can after can. There’s value just in being happy, I know, in laughing so hard we’re crying when we say “Squirt!” for the tenth time that day, liquid just running down our faces and liquid thrown up at the sky like an exaltation, liquid gushing everywhere like you wouldn’t believe. Squirting.

  Jackson and I get back to Chicago deep in the summer and start to figure out what kind of future we might make together. I don’t have a bed, just a mat on the ground, and he sleeps with me there, the curtain blocking us from the rest of the house, or sometimes he sleeps in the hallway closet, where he has his own mat. In the mornings Stevie wakes up bleary from habitual NyQuil usage and we all brush our teeth. We go to the beach a lot and I even unretire from the nightclubs because Jackson likes dancing. I put on silly outfits and everything and drink cocktails, so I plan for a split-head nausea and podcasts with my eyes closed the next morning. I stop going to just the ice cream shop near my place and go to a few new ice cream shops with him, one of which has a giant ice cream cone out front, and Stevie takes a picture of us in front of it. Everything is relaxing and nice. Because he’s looking to move here, Jackson hires a lawyer for an hour to talk about immigration stuff, and the lawyer says that if we’re considering getting married we should do it in the fall, that if Jackson leaves the country with his visa as is, he probably won’t get back in.

  We sit down to decide, well, what do we do? Jackson goes to the beach to think about it and I get really high out of my potato. I try to call a couple of friends but no one picks up so I get high out of the potato some more and walk to the thrift store, where I buy more sports bras. I get home and none of the sports bras fit; they’re all painfully flat. Jackson gets home. “I guess that seems fine,” I say, “but I’ll break up with you still if it doesn’t work for me,” and he says of course, that’s a given. And so we decide to see what marriage is like.

  “I don’t believe in marriage” and “I am getting married” are a confusing contradiction. Marriage is illegitimate and structures resources unjustly—it should be abolished, along with the state in general and especially the military and the Justice Department, and land should be repatriated to indigenous people. Resources structured through marriage, such as health insurance and the right of movement, should instead just be given to everyone. For years I was surrounded by people who centered their politics on a deliberate antimarriage stance—a queer generational quirk—and I maintain that stance, although I find myself now extending those institutions by engaging them, continuing this colonial practice by moving a white person here, violating what I believe. It’s unnerving, and I have no answer for it, this binding of my relationship with Jackson, which I love, with the ongoing violence of the state, as he and I move in together, and as the legal entity Thomas heterosexually marries the legal entity Jackson.

  It is a particular thing. Me, a person who really likes having flings, which usually last two to four weeks, at most a whole summer. Him, a guy who tells people that he loves them way too early. Just a couple of romantics, I guess, if that’s worth anything these days.

  First Jackson and I move into a new apartment, then we fill the apartment with flowers and trash furniture he finds in the alleys, then Otelia and my mother come to town so that we can take pictures of getting married for the government. It’s a rigamarole where Jackson makes onion tarts so everyone can eat and where I run around the apartment hiding things I don’t want my mom to see like I’m a teenager. Sometimes I yell “Bridezilla wants a coffee!” or “Bridezilla wants weeeeed!” in my deepest, gravelly voice, wearing out the joke way past when it is still funny. I do cry a little when we go to the beach and say that we love each other and take a picture, but that has nothing to do with marriage, just with standing on the beach on a beautiful day with Jackson while my mom stands there surrounded by transsexuals and sees me happy. She’s a retired school librarian, and she always let all the closeted gay kids and troubled teens eat lunch in the library with her. I’m sure, however, this is the first time in her life she has been surrounded by people like me, instead of me and some freaks around people like her, and although I want to ask about it, how it feels, I like it better if she doesn’t have to talk about it and can just have a nice day. The sky is really blue and she stands next to Otelia, who wears a one-piece bathing suit, barely containing her business, and next to Stevie, with a floral shirt. They smile at each other a lot. When the ceremony/photo shoot is done some more of our friends come by, chatting and swimming, and my mom goes out in the water. She swims back and forth, back and forth, and keeps going, the last person swimming after my friends begin to leave. She’s so happy, swimming on this bright day, with some people I love and then just her, swimming, which I guess makes the ceremony/photo shoot worth the effort, if two people being in love means that someone else swims.

  When I dance I like to dance alone.

  I like to dance on the bare floor beside my bed or,

  if I am outside the city,

  on the flat ground of a yard or hollow.

  I like to dance with my headphones on, dancing to something

  sappy like “Linger” by the Cranberries or Joan Armatrading’s

  “The Weakness in Me.”

  My dips and splays are like I am reaching so far that I bend.

  You might think they lack grace, these moves, but that is only

  because I like to dance alone,

  the grace of my movement known just to me.

  For five unannounced minutes a day, there is a dancer on

  “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform), but most of the time

  there is no one, just the square and pale blue platform.

  Plain light bulbs make another square, ten or so equally spaced

  in a line along each of the four top edges of the box.

  So when there is a dancer on the platform, that dancer is within a

  square of lit bulbs.

  Encountering the piece, there is no instruction or schedule to

  indicate the dancer will come, eventually.

  Rather, the dancer arrives—

  a metallic speedo and sneakers, and a Walkman playing some

  song we don’t hear.

  The dancing is kind of rhythmic, reminding me of the go-go

  dancers in Manhattan, men stepping to the side and hips

  and shoulders.

  Sometimes the arms go up, and then they go back down.

  The piece first went on display in 1991, as part of the show

  Every Week There Is Something Different.

  The performance begins and ends when the dancer is on and

  then off the platform, but again, most of the time the platform

  is empty.

  It is a blue square rimmed by light bulbs, and the audience

  leaves the room knowing it to be just and only that.

  Simon and I go to the Cock in Manhatten for their all-you-

  can-drink night.

  These are our last weeks in New York together, as we have

  decided that Seattle will be our future.

  “We haven’t lived in Seattle,” we say.

  We pay ten dollars at the door and get free well drinks all night,

  tequila after tequila.

&nb
sp; The Cock is a tiny space, with the go-go dancers on the bar

  and tall round tables with stools along the walls.

  To dance you have to awkwardly claim a space in the middle

  of the room, where hands keep touching everywhere.

  My movement stays vertical, my feet and shoulders doing most

  of the work, although the music is so bad I’m quickly back to

  the roped-off bit of sidewalk where we smoke with our friends.

  In the back is an area we call the back room, which is just the

  back of the bar, no walls to mark it off.

  It seems like every time I go to the Cock someone tells me

  they had to shut it down recently because the health inspector

  found chlamydia on the bar.

  “Why were they testing the bar for chlamydia?” I always ask,

  but no one has an answer.

  “Because it’s the Cock,” someone tells me tonight, in the

  back room.

  I go down on my knees and my head is spinning as I open my

  mouth to the men and someone else puts a key under my nose.

  I see Simon in the tiny space where everyone is dancing, smiling,

  his hands in the air.

  I see someone else on the dance floor, crouching so he can

  suck a guy off without having his legs splay in everyone’s way.

  I lift my hands a little in the air and start to bounce, like there

  could be dancing here too, and the leather man turns away

  from me.

  Simon goes home with a guy he’d met before, and somewhere

  between blacking out and morning I find myself in our bed,

  full of bile and pain, hungover as much from the cigarettes as

  anything else, still tired after a night.

  I am surprised to learn that Gonzalez-Torres doesn’t specify

  a gender for the dancer, and that the image I have formed has

  been made a man by me.

  Were the go-go dancer announced somehow, perhaps their

  arrival made explicit in the title of the piece (with dancer), the

  platform would be otherwise empty.

  But unannounced, that space is always complete as is, lit.

  It’s a very exciting moment, to wait for someone to arrive,

  to give you pleasure by giving themself joy and pleasure.

  How many people can this person be?

  Can this person be more, somehow?

  But the piece is another kind of reversal in Gonzalez-Torres’s

  work, a tease like maybe some go-go dancers try to be, too.

  You take the candy and eat it, and you fold the paper for home,

  and you walk through the beads, but can you tip the dancer?

  Can you reach your hand out, and if you do, will he take it?

  When Simon does dance, his dancing brings a specific smile

  to his face, and so I have a specific smile on my face, too.

  Part of it is that he is most likely to dance when we are out

  on some sort of adventure into nightlife, high and with our

  looks on.

  I saw him dance in bars to music he didn’t like and very rarely,

  maybe a few times, when some reason had made the occasion

  right, in the bedroom or living room of where we were.

  He smiled and moved his hand a bit up in the air, maybe,

  and his left side would move forward and his right side would

  move forward.

  I have made him dance with me a couple of times, too, once

  to the song “Kiss Me” from that movie where a nerdy art girl

  gets a makeover and dates Freddie Prinze Jr.

  In Brooklyn, the space at the foot of the bed is just enough for

  us to step back and forth with my arms around his shoulders.

  I know he hates it, at least a little bit, but he indulges me, I

  assume because we love each other.

  Okay, he says, one of our last Brooklyn nights and stumbling

  our way home from a leather bar where we had been playing

  pool.

  Stumbling home and we link arms,

  and when we are back he moves his hips for a minute in that

  way and I fall asleep smiling.

  The spare nature of Gonzalez-Torres’s art is not just an opportunity

  to face the power of our own imaginations,

  to extrapolate what we will from the taste of a candy,

  but also an occasion to honor that part of the artist’s life that

  I’ll never know.

  He makes something of his desires, but that does not grant us

  any right to those desires,

  only to the specific thing he has shared with us.

  You can’t touch the dancer.

  Why did you think you could?

  Who told you that you have that right?

  Just love people for who they are, and for all the things they’ve

  chosen to keep away from you.

  Although Gonzalez-Torres died in 1996, people continue

  performing his works, extending and replicating them.

  People spread the candy, its ideal weight,

  and hang the strings of light bulbs, their ideal height,

  and print the stacks of paper.

  While the instructions are clear, they are not exhaustive—

  what shape the candy takes, and where the curtain hangs, all

  of this is mutable, a choice.

  It means that the pieces keep changing.

  It means that the candy I know so well, tucked up in a corner,

  could be in any shape,

  spread like a heart on the ground, or scattered down a stairway.

  What will these pieces look like in twenty years, fifty, more?

  What will they look like, as new imaginations take hold?

  And how would I look, the patch of black hair between my tits,

  the scars on my back, if I put on a silver speedo and danced to

  my private songs on a blue square lit by bulbs?

  There are many other things I miss about being a faggot—

  the specific kind of forbidden, anodyne delight faggots find in,

  say, pouring pink wine at a picnic, or rushing about and tidying

  things in a fussy way—

  but mainly, I miss the love faggots share together,

  a kind of soft and hard friendship that endures.

  You find out that everything means something different,

  when you’re a faggot.

  You learn that you are lovable after all,

  and that once you are done being lovable, you will be ready

  to love again.

  If I ask Simon to dance, and if he does, the days after will

  be a slow slipping away of intimacy, until the right drunken

  moment allows us to come back.

  Intimacy is uncomfortable, and he turns away from it.

  I suppose I do, too, or I wouldn’t commit years to this kind

  of slow dance.

  Maybe it’s just that long loneliness of my youth that makes me

  think I’m lonely.

  We can fuck only sometimes, rarely, and share the same bed

  every night.

  We can move to Seattle, which will be a new place, where the

  mountain is visible from the city.

  We’ll live close to a leather bar with a pool table.

  Like a city we won’t live in long, every time we do fuck—

  and even worse, every time I put on one of my schlocky songs,

  and say,

  “Dance with me, please, just a song”—

  is both arrival and departure.

  It’s never clear if or when such pleasure will come again.

  Sometimes I think that I could watch Simon dance forever,

  and his arms going up a littl
e bit will make us both smile.

  Other times, I just wish that I were a faggot, meeting him in

  an alley.

  But I’m jealous.

  I want all the pleasures, every incompatible one.

  I’d give myself to them, again, and again,

  if I knew how.

  I did give myself to those pleasures, I guess, after all—Simon and I coming together, and then living together. We walked Otelia’s dog together, and we were together on our knees in the woods with old men’s dicks in our mouths, and in the mornings, for breakfast, we ate together, often omelets. Why wasn’t that enough for me? I’m embarrassed that sometimes I wanted that time to be different, even though it always felt just right. I think that probably that is why we had to move in different directions, eventually, because of my dissatisfaction and want. That seems now like a very sad way to have used my imagination, although then I would have noticed only how happy I was. I was very happy, when I loved Simon like that.

  Anyway, I don’t dance much outside of the house anymore, mainly because I can’t drink alcohol anymore, either, and I’m sorry but I really don’t understand how to enjoy a club sober; it’s a place I would go to drink. One day it was only two beers and then a devastating migraine, then a week later, a half a glass of wine with twelve hours of vomiting. I kept trying, goddamn it, until the end, ordering glasses of soda water with a splash of bitters and a slice of lime, until those, too, did me in flat. I spent all this time googling and googling, never finding an answer, what this could be. All the rabbit holes, forums and talks with a doctor at a clinic, led to nonsense theories: a flood I lived through ten years ago, the antibiotics, Happy Meals. Finally, at a house party that is a fund-raiser for a community bail bond, someone clues me in that it’s my testosterone blockers, something about the way they have accumulated in my body, that have done this. Which is ridiculous, because the pills make me feel like I need a drink, actually, to deal with all the bullshit that comes with them. “It has to do with how the Spironolactone is affecting your sodium intake,” Torrey clarifies to me later, the perfect swoops of her hair bobbing as she explains something about potassium and off-label prescriptions that I fail to comprehend. “Who told you?” I ask. “How did you figure that out?” And it’s always friends of friends, where knowledge like this originates, accumulating like the residual of the pills, one at a time, until eventually something clicks together in the social and it can be known.