by Jess Arndt
“Well,” I said.
He grimaced. He’d been tall but now his body was cinched up.
“I hate to go home,” he said. Gerald was stuck in the eighties. His nightmares were endless hospitals. I wedged a twenty under his glass snifter.
“Not tonight, pal,” I said. I wanted him to keep getting good and drunk.
“Try to remember,” I said, arranging his lapel. “We’re safe now.”
I stood on the Bowery platform and waited for the late-night J train. My gut yowled. Our parasite was a new and mysterious development. It was gross, but it gave us something to talk about. I glared warily at the track. Did everyone want to jump in front of the subway as much as I did? Not necessarily to die, although that was, of course, likely. Help! I’d shout. Someone would come. Still, once the thought occurred, it felt impossible to resist. Persuading myself that everyone was gripped by the same mania—a mania so regular it was boring—made it less awful when I shrunk from the inevitable approaching train, scrunching my eyes against the finishing blow.
That night I sat for a long time in the dark of our kitchen, looking past the window’s reflection, out into the yard. Then I went to bed as usual. Our apartment was so narrow it seemed as if we together were Jonah, inhabiting the “inner whale.” You’d disagree, scoffing into your hand: as early as 1520, Rondelet knew it wasn’t a whale but a Great White Shark, you’d say—but for once, you were sleeping quietly. Your job at the new pot shop was wearing you out.
“Can anyone really live in a shark?” I thought drowsily.
Then the Casio was flashing 3:47 and a voice was peeping up from the blankets, urging me awake.
I sat alert, staring at the tapered gloom. Pressing my hand to the wall for balance, I tried not to wake you. But focusing on your warm skin, I found myself in a panic.
Earlier, we’d fought.
You’re so full of shit your eyes are brown, I heard myself saying, a perennial favorite of my father’s. I’d followed it with something ridiculous, light-headed, unhinged even. You hadn’t responded. Was this why I’d stayed up so long, staring out? There was a new edge to everything, wasn’t there?
“Gabriel?” I said.
“Let’s begin,” the voice insisted.
My bladder thickened. You continued to sleep, coma-like. I wriggled around you, clicked on the sound machine standby, “Gurgling Brook,” and crept into the also sloping kitchen. The boards were old, shards of gone forests. The Famous Grouse was capless on the table where I’d left it.
“Leon,” the voice said.
I stood there dimly and searched for its origin. In plain view was a giant mason jar of kombucha plus dividing mother. A pair of gunk-smeared garden gloves. An ancient Vogue with Tilda Swinton on the swanny-white cover.
“It’s me!” the voice said.
The room smelled like snapped pine needles. In my chest, a river was bludgeoning heavy stones.
“Ms. Swinton?” I stammered.
Her alien parts and cinnamon hair, I’d always loved her, the queasy look she gave me!
But the voice came from somewhere closer, near my belly.
“You have a problem,” the voice said.
I digested this halfway.
“I do?”
I thought hard. I pointed, finally, to the garden.
But our parasite disagreed.
“Do you know anything AT ALL,” it said, “about the history of Mexican art?”
When I woke again, a belt of sun was cinching my eyes. Your bare torso moved around the kitchen, pouring maté water, stretching. Outside silent cars were starting up their phony, prerecorded engines. “Safety first!” an automated voice announced.
I raised my head from my cardboard arms. I’d finished the night at the table with Tilda. Turning my cheek, I followed your movement. Your darker areolas met the fawn of your chest with the casual kismet of belonging. I suffered to join their easy glow.
“So that’s it, I’m gone, blitzed, finally cooked,” I said instead.
Your nostrils tightened.
“What happened.”
“Gay bars are out!” I snapped my fingers to my thumb. I wanted to be back in your good graces but I resented working for it.
“Terry called,” you said. “Did you really do something as substantially dumb as that?”
I sighed. My relationship to right and wrong had always been murky. I had a healthy, some said Catholic approach to guilt. But in recent years I’d begun to wonder if my guilt was so all-encompassing as to be irrelevant to any motive or consequence. The realization stranded me without a barometer. It was clear, I didn’t trust myself with much. But I was also sure I could do no wrong. I toed every line almost religiously but was given to taking wild risks without any forethought at all, then, overcome with denial, hiding them.
“Gabriel,” I said, “Giga,” throwing my arms toward your waist.
“I have to go,” you said. “Work.”
A new relationship was being drawn. You worked. I didn’t.
I drifted around the apartment drinking expensive single-source
coffee and clicking back and forth between Manhunt and my newest discovery, YardHard. The homepage was full of popups about “green bums” and “top tips for hoeing,” but RAT574 seemed to know something.
Him: Man knotweed is Axis of Evil numero uno. You got to be tenacious. Know how to spell that?
Me: You just did.
Him: Ok first let those suckers get big and hard. Then when they’re dick thick ;) ;) ;) you machete off the tops RAMBO-style.
Sun was banking off the window, showing all the grease on the thin glass.
Got me???
I twisted on my stool, staring at the yard’s newest growths.
Got you.
Him: Then you dump your kill juice down the stalk.
Kill juice? It seemed extreme.
Me: Can “kill juice” be organic?
Him: No way! Its got2be poison!
Me: . . .
Him: Great band by the way.
When I tried to remember why we’d fought, a gelatinous feeling descended. I was growing increasingly more wired from the caffeine plus somehow I was starving. The combo made me pharmaceutically woozy. Had our parasite, a microorganism who was leeching my precious nutrients, all those hard-earned dollars spent on kale and handpicked cashews, actually talked to me last night? Given me a lecture on art? I mean, there was Rivera of course, and Kahlo to be sure. But that was baby stuff. It was true, I knew next to nothing about Mexican art!
I depended on you to teach me things. Your father was a writer from the outskirts of Mexico City. Your mother was an engineer from Ottawa. You were the New North American: impervious—perfectly sealed off. That was why one night during our recent trip to Mexico, when we were refueling in central D.F., I wanted to go out alone. You were so chulo, so natural in the wide avenidas and plazas that nobody spoke to me and I was anxious to try out my Spanish.
“You stay here,” I begged. We had taken over your friend’s newly emptied Condesa apartment. “Go talk to your abuela or something.”
Your father was her baby, which made you in every way preferential.
“On the telephone?” you said, rolling your eyes. “It’s a big city, maricón.”
“I don’t know, eat flan then.”
I was suddenly desperate to be alone.
“Grow up,” you said. But instead of shoveling into your jacket you watched me go.
At noon it was time to take a Paradex from the naturopath. I grimaced and unscrewed the cap. Then I walked out into the yard. The season was changing. It would be light for hours and hours and hours. Pink shoots raved in the breeze, their heads glistening. They were much taller, already, since yesterday.
My feelings about objects had always been orphic—they penetrated my deepest levels. It was painful to be alive, I knew. Worse, I was somehow responsible. Undisturbed—walls, chairs, rocks, et ce
tera could fend for themselves. But my presence
troubled the atmosphere. If, while walking, I kicked a rock but not the rock next to it, I created an imbalance, pointed at a wound. It then followed, it was the rule, that I turn around and similarly move the other rock. But what if I touched that second rock (it was bigger and so my toe needed more force to push it) longer than the first? Things were now severely out of whack.
“Sorry,” I’d whisper, retracting my foot at hyper-speed.
Small crises like these followed me everywhere I went. Throwing out a dirty chopstick if its mate was clean made me pause at the trash can like an awful, disloyal god. Other times, lone discarded shoes or cracked bathroom tiles leered out to me. Don’t notice them! I’d mutter. But their suffering was insistent.
Now my stomach gurgled but gave no further orders. Above me, a flight of molting pigeons swooped low. I juggled the pill anxiously. It was sweaty in my wintersoft palm. As if on autopilot, thinking about nothing, I used my thumb against the soil to dig a small indent. Then I plopped the dark gel cap in.
That night the clock dragged. You were late. I went to bed and kicked around. Our mattress felt like it was filled with overturned traffic cones. For half an hour, I read about Rufino Tamayo. What, I began to wonder, did our parasite think of his 1978 work La Gran Galaxia? In it the figure, who wore something like a jailbird’s smock, was staring over a bowl of sea. As if a mirage, the inner pink organelle of his body was reflected out, shimmering over the blue expanse, while above the horizon line, a luminous geometry of constellations flexed.
The figure appeared to be yawning.
In quick succession, I sent you some texts.
One said: Our parasite’s kicking, is yours?
No response. I continued.
I think I’m having contractions.
Silence. I switched tacks.
What’s eating you? ;)
Tired of looking at an empty screen and the arrow that said slide to unlock, I turned off my phone.
I dreamed but my sleep was disturbed, watery. In it, I repeated a scene from my childhood. I had grown up near islands—rocky, fir-smothered pods on the north-northwest coast. As a kid I often accompanied my father in his boat.
One morning he woke me up early.
“There’s been a wreck,” he said.
We went down to Fidalgo Marina. Behind us, the sun simmered up over the Cascade range. The consensus among the boat owners was: Drunk Indians. There was a reef between the Lummi-owned Gooseberry Point and a local casino. During the night, a small Bayliner had hit it going full speed.
The men refilled their Styrofoam cups of coffee. Someone handed me one, topped to the brim. Drunk Indians. A no-brainer, everyone agreed. I was ten or eleven, newly effeminate. I liked to wear a solo rubber band in the back bud of my hair. I felt a chill and clutched my cup.
As the day went on, more news came in. There’d been six passengers, all still alive, but some were in pretty bad shape at Harborview and other trauma hospitals nearby. They’d been ejected forward from the boat, thrown like sacks onto the sharp rocks.
Toward evening my father let go of his usual German clamped lip. There weren’t any deliveries to make. He could be wily, even impish at times. He closed the engine compartment where he’d been slowly tinkering at the fuel lines.
“Let’s go,” he said.
We untied and cut out across the strait. I struggled to nice up the buoys. I loved helping my father and did it with a silent pride. But I was brimming with the idea of the wreck. Violent pictures filled my mind. I found myself searching the waves for a sign of tragedy. In all directions, there was nothing. The afternoon was calm and hot.
Then the small tan boat tilted into sight. It lay halfway across the reef, which was, at low tide, a dwarf island.
My father cut the engine and brought in our bow.
“Go on,” he said. “See what’s in it.”
I jumped onto the wreckage with a thud. Suddenly alone. I snooped as best I could. The category “Drunk Indians” dominated. I expected its presence to look fundamentally different from what my father and his brother did together with pails of Coors most nights. Fuck you, I muttered. Fuck you, fuck you. But here was no mess, no beer cans or incriminating plastic jug of booze. Just a small suitcase on the ripped-up fiberglass floor and the bracing zing of being this far away from land.
“Open it,” my father pressed, his voice still close to me.
I hesitated. Drugs, I thought. Big plastic bags of coke powder like I’d seen on TV. My imagination was limited. Money, Uzis.
We were trespassing but my father had his own law.
Queasy, I unzipped the stiff fabric and looked down. A stack of clean washcloths crouched in the web of the opening, starched and tightly folded. I poked them. Towels, shirts. The bag was immaculately packed with someone’s laundry, as if the person who owned it was going on a trip.
“Leon!” my father shouted.
The tide had flipped and the current was ripping sideways. Our bow dragged closer to the reef. We were a team; now he needed me. Dutifully, I hurdled aboard.
“What was it?” he said, as he slammed us into reverse. Freezing green water foamed over the transom.
“Nothing,” I reported, facing ahead.
But that night I was stricken.
I’m sorry, I said again and again to my lowering bedroom ceiling. I’d done doubly wrong. I’d profited from someone else’s bad time. But worse, what really concerned me, was that I’d left the bag abandoned with all that dark water surrounding it—the cloth open, its contents exposed.
I tried to tell you this once but you just shook your head.
“Your dad is nuts.”
Now it was almost midnight and very hot. I thought about the small graveyard, a day’s worth of pills, out in the yard. I fuddled with my phone’s screen. A picture of your face flashed up when I touched your name. Your hair was short and your jaw was feral.
I paused.
Is this about Mexico? I jabbed down onto the screen.
In the D.F., having left you, I walked toward the park that I remembered marking the center of Condesa. Earlier in the day kids had been playing soccer on the concrete monument. Next to the fountain stood a series of columns whose plinths were covered in vines that evoked a jungly snarl without actually being unkempt. Together we’d sipped cans of Bohemia in the sun.
The entire trip, you’d been trying to show me something—at least, I thought you had. In front of me Parque México was blue and empty. I pulled another can of beer out from under my sweatshirt and sat with my back to a column’s shaft. I wanted to go to Tropezedo—a club I’d read about in El Mercurio. Along the path that led out of the park, sodium lamps flashed on, popping and fuzzing into cold arcs. A figure moved between them with his head down. He seemed to be walking toward me, but without actually getting much closer or larger.
Watching him, I was furiously sad. We need separate, differentiated points, I realized, to understand the concept of space. The figure was of course you and the gap between us was only growing. No matter how hard you walked, you couldn’t get to me. In between the lights, the shadows completely overtook you.
My palm was damp, wrapped around the can. I looked down, adjusting my grip. But when I raised my head again, the figure was suddenly directly in front of me. He wore Levis and black high-tops and his hair was long. How could I have thought he was you?
He paused, shifting from foot to foot. His breath was heavy from the effort.
“You want something?” he said in English.
“These are Megaspores,” he grinned, uncapping his palm.
His fingers were smooth and his hands were big. Steam drifted from his body.
“No,” I laughed, embarrassed.
Untroubled, he repeated himself and smiled again.
“These are Megaspores.”
He crouched over me and slipped his hand into mine so
&n
bsp; now I was holding the mushrooms too. We stayed like that under the monument, touching.
Now I was pacing, far from sleep. I pushed into my jeans and a windbreaker; it was humid out and it seemed like it might rain. I descended into the subway. There was a stilled train that felt like a mirage of the train I needed to catch. Lucky. I loped on. Inside, the G was bright and yellow. It dragged through its dark funicular caverns and at Lorimer, the L platform was for once empty.
It’s Friday night, I realized. I considered my options. The problem was, Terry was missing a case of top shelf. He thought I’d fenced it, used it at the BALLZDEEP party I occasionally threw. The accusation was lazy—easy to ignore. But the more I thought about the case I didn’t steal, the more I realized how easy it would be to take.
To my left, the tunnel gaped sourly, waiting to spit out the next train.
“Don’t you get it,” I’d said to Gerald. We were adrift in the horizonless midpoint of a happy hour east of A.
“Between what I might do and what I did do—there’s no difference at all!”
He stared at his brandy hand, planted thickly around his perpetual snifter.
“Have you ever eaten crêpes Suzette?” he said.
I knew by now that he’d cooked for Samuel, stubbornly brought him dishes at St. Vincent’s even when Samuel was intubated, practically gone.
I spilled out for another round. “Yeah, yeah.”
But he described the crêpes to me again in careful detail, so careful that even half-listening, I was sure I could smell them and taste them—the liqueury tangerine syrup, the brown crispness around the broken bubbles where the batter met the scorching, heavily buttered pan.
This train was taking forever.
“Yo,” interrupted a voice I recognized, sounding less like an art professor and more like an East Village court rat.
“Yo, B-boy. You sure about this Tamayo cat?”
I grabbed my gut. Was I sure about Tamayo? I mean, of course I should dig deeper, I had only just started to research.
“Shh!” I hissed into my windbreaker pouch.
