by Adam Klein
“This music makes me sad,” I tell him, “even when it’s hopeful.”
“Why?” he asks.
“It makes me think of Vietnam, even though I was just a kid during that time. But somehow, it’s the war I’m most intrigued by. Maybe because it was televised—but televised without censoring the ugliness.”
“I don’t think about that stuff,” he said. “I couldn’t live if I did.”
The Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” swarmed the cab, impossible to remove from the green of jungles and camouflage.
“You remind me of my last lover—not in a morbid way—just the opposite. You seem very determined about life.”
I didn’t know what to say, it was such an odd attribute—the rare and complicated quality of the survivor in me, something mistaken for cold efficiency, untroubled acceptance.
I laughed. “What makes you think that?”
“I don’t know. Your getting off heroin, holding a job. I don’t take that for granted. You want to live.” He’s unnecessarily convincing.
He pulled the truck off the side of the road and we rattled across a path of dirt and stones.
“This is Crystal Springs,” he said. “People cruise up there sometimes.” He pointed at a darker patch. “That’s where I met Antonio.”
He reached beneath the seat and pulled out an old pillowcase. “I only did this once,” he explained. “After he died, I started doing a lot of cocaine, and I was sort of at the end of my wire, and I came out here.” He reached into the bag. “I just had, you know, some of his underwear with me, and some pictures of him.” He pulled out old T-shirts, jock straps. The smell was so pungent and moldering I sickened. I cranked the window open. I watched him in silence, handling the items, shining the flashlight into the pillowcase, illuminating it from inside like an old skin. I wondered if he was going to perform some masturbatory magic with them. I thought of Tom’s clothes.
“I wouldn’t keep them,” I said.
He looked startled. “No,” he said, still looking at them. “It’s probably not right.” He put them back in the pillowcase, and stuffed them back beneath the seat.
We arrived at his house and pulled into the garage. Along the walls of the garage were tall gray shelving units, stacked with numerous boxes, and all draped with thick plastic tarps. The garage was as orderly as a supermarket; along one wall, an enormous collection of canned goods seemed almost displayed, the labels turned out, attesting to either his military background, or his unemployment.
“We have to be quiet when we go in,” he said.
“Why? Is someone here?”
“I don’t want to wake the dogs.”
He opened a door at the back of the garage, and we took a carpeted stairwell into the house. There were pictures too dark to discern in overwhelming frames. The silhouettes of the furniture looked almost Jacobean: high-backed chairs with grotesque animal heads, griffins, lions, and phoenixes. I wondered if Tom would appreciate this gaudy tribute to his favorite period. What would he think of these lions in their permanent ferocity, or the desk, large as our dining room table with legs thick as Atlas’s? I imagined Tom dwarfed by it, unable to pull out its drawers, or push it from the center of this room. We walk up three steps to the master bedroom. How does he afford this? Some pension? Losing an eye…
There is a large bed at the center, a dark brown chest of drawers, and a writing desk. The light above, on a dimmer switch, casts faint, gold light.
“Get comfortable,” he instructed, looking just the opposite.
I sat at the edge of the bed. John pointed out a handtinted photograph in a circular frame above the headboard. I took off my shirt despite the cold. “That’s Antonio,” he said, as though introducing us. The face is intelligent—dark and pockmarked, with thick, circular glasses that make him appear a scientist or aviator.
“What did he do?” I asked, pulling my pants off.
“A writer.” He was standing by the desk, still clothed. He turned to open a drawer, and I worried he might pull out a Bible, or worse, a photo album.
He took out paper folded like a business letter and joined me at the bedside, pulling the chain on a small lamp. I put my arm around him and sat close, reading over the letter as he read it aloud.
Dear Dr. K,
I’ve never been one to complain about pain, to acknowledge it, even. There wasn’t the place or time for it though there was much of it. My lover tells me that terminal people suffer more from their fear around pain than the pain itself. He talks of pain management like time management, efforts that improve us, make us more efficient and vital. But if this pain could be contained, first to just my body and not my fearful and lamenting mind—if it could be shrunk down to the organs in which it originates, or made distinguishable and discrete like tumors, or lesions—it would still not serve to improve my condition or outcome. From the moment this started three years ago with my first pneumonia, I feel I’ve been on an expedition from which there is no turning back, like I’ve entered some dense forest where light can’t penetrate. My supplies are cumbersome: nuclear medicines for the retinitis, rolling stands the drip bags, hang from. I rely on other senses now, some natural, some implanted, and am as foreign to myself as this terrain. I am a habitat overrun with technologies.
My lover will not assist me, Dr. K., he insists he’s in it for the “long haul.” Perhaps I’ve worked too hard to take the terror out of this transformation. I wake up from fevers and describe the perfect beading of perspiration on my body like a suit of gems. I describe my fever dreams as though I’ve been communicating with God. The dreams bring back friends we’ve lost, and I think he envies these hallucinations. Because he is negative, he will be our survivor, nursing us through lost faculties and tempers, remembering us with photographs, or by cold absence. Even now he’s running food and prescriptions over to our friend, Patrick. He pleads with us not to shut him out, now that we’re so close to death. He wants inclusion in a process that often I’m excluded from. I’m only holding on to the parts that aren’t being taken away. I’ve told him I no longer wish to hold on.
I don’t believe in God, Dr. K., but I do believe in angels. The dead surround the dying and bring comfort. My lover leaves the TV on when he leaves the house, and the voices change—no longer bringing game shows and the news, but the words of the dead. I saw you on the television last night, sitting gaunt in a Michigan courtroom. The retinitis has blinded my left eye, so it was difficult to make you out. Your skeletal face gave you an appearance I’m used to—so many of us have shrunken down like that.
I thought you were an angel that would bring relief to my bedside. My lover will not assist me, but you would make it painless and final. I felt your presence beside me, unafraid of my will which, despite my weakness, is still strong.
It is wrong to ask a loved one to take these measures—it’s a job for angels.
I look up at the photograph. It is a face capable of those feelings, a poet’s face, slim and hawkish and brooding. John refolds the letter and places it on the bedside table.
“Was he angry with me, I mean, do you think he was letting me off the hook?” John asks, already aware of the impotence of an answer.
We are sitting on the bed his lover died in, in a room too cold from the air conditioning. I wonder if I’m the first person he’ll sleep with since his lover died. I look again at his lover’s photograph: his face with sharp, critical, perhaps criticizing features. John’s resistance to participate in his lover’s euthanasia expressed a quality I admired: a clinging to the known, perhaps even a fear of hell. My mind raced to pity him, his abandonment. Perhaps there is no landscape free of the plague. It stays with us—like decisions we continue to atone. The dead don’t comfort, but condemn. John’s lover’s mouth is pronouncing his curse while I raise the shirt up over John’s head, and kiss the tattoo of Vietnam over his breastbone. We lie beneath the animated photograph in our enviable senses.
John has asked me to stay the weekend, so neithe
r of us are disturbed by the premature dissipation of our passion. We have not removed our underwear. We lie side by side, out of breath, hands clasped between us. I feel we need this touching, but sense it blocked by the letter on the night table, unfolding under the dim lamp as though his lover were rereading it.
I ask John about his lover—not so much out of curiosity, but because he is there, occupying John’s mind. “Storytelling,” I explain, “is what people do during the plague—they hole up somewhere and have a round table.”
“Antonio always wanted to talk,” he said. “That’s why he wrote, I think. There was never an end to what was on his mind.
“After he killed himself—that’s when I found his letter—I just went crazy for a couple of years. Whatever got me through Vietnam, I couldn’t find. And I’ve seen a lot of death. I lost my eye.” He turned toward me on the pillow. “But when Tony went, I felt like I went blind. I started using drugs, going out on the weekends and through the week. You asked me why I left my job. I couldn’t keep a job. I started having all this unsafe sex, a kind of Russian roulette y’know? Then last year, I found out I had AIDS. Funny, I felt relieved. I stopped looking for whatever it was I was looking for.”
“You felt forgiven?” I ask.
“I just got tired.”
He closes his eyes, and I find myself touching him the way I do Tom. Not with dread, but resignation—a tiredness all my own. He is sleeping, or pretending to sleep, because he pulls me toward him, muttering words into my chest, and his penis presses hard against my leg. Perhaps he’s embarrassed about it. He doesn’t remove his underwear.
I start to fall off, but for a few moments feel the narcotic half-sleep where Tom can move freely into my thoughts. We walk through a dirty street strung with lights, in perfect health, and only at the periphery do we notice the thin hands of beggars and their pleading eyes.
I wake up to a wetness on my skin that has also permeated my underwear. The light on the night table is still on. I move away from John’s body, the evident source of this sweat—the hair on his body and head are slicked down as though he’s showered. The corners of his mouth are white, like a child who’s drunk milk before bed. I notice the moisture all the way across the covers and mattress.
I decide to take a cold shower, already wondering whether he’d be offended if I slept on a couch, or even on the floor by the bed. I quietly make my way to the door, and begin walking through the long hallway—my hand gliding lightly over the wall, and its numerous frames. What felt solid about the home, its upkeep and abundance, makes it also suspect, fortressed, warred upon. I stumble upon a mounted rack. My hand glides over a long hunter’s gun. I draw my hand back, worried I might inadvertently trigger it. I move close to a door slightly ajar, further down the hall.
I hear moaning, at first not different from the hum of air conditioners in the house, then pitched oddly and broken as I approach the door. I look behind me to see if John has awoken. Perhaps it’s his dogs. I imagine John’s lover, Antonio, and mine, Tom. Ghosts, though Tom’s living. The pained breathing is louder—I see plastic draperies around a hospital bed, the thin body of a man sleeping beneath a drip bag, the flickering eyelids of his uneasy sleep. I notice the stubble over his sunken cheeks like an etched-in shadow.
I move further down the hallway, find the bathroom, and lock myself behind the door.
The world is full of suffering—we can pretend to help, like Dr. Klein, jotting impeccable notes for herself, or like me, making unemployment determinations, asking questions with answers already weighed and evaluated. Or John, whose empathy or guilt will kill him, thin him out like the specter in the room next door. But in every effort to assist the suffering, there’s the safety we’re forced to maintain to survive. We’re emotionally set apart like dominoes that cannot touch each other should one fall. It is why Antonio sought an intervening angel to assist him in his suicide. Even then, the alarming sense of his aloneness, which necessitated his faith in the first place, was all he could count on. I step into the shower and wash John’s sweat off my body.
When I return to the room, cold and naked now, I find John still sleeping, though turned in the bed. I feel exhausted, but at the same time my mind is racing. The light on the night table reminds me of Tom’s desk, and I’m struck with a certainty that he has died tonight and has cast his pall over this home. I shut out the light and step back into the bed, my body bringing its own moisture to these sheets. I close my eyes and hear Tom’s recitation, binding me to him, as though we’ve never been bound.
Marke but this flea, and marke in this,
How little that which thou deny’st me is;
It suck’d me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea, our two bloods mingled bee;
Thou know’st that this cannot be said
A sinne, nor shame, nor losse of maidenhead,
Yet this enjoyes before it wooe,
And pamper’d swells with one blood made of two,
And this, alas, is more than wee would doe.
John is up, and I wonder if he always wakes this early, or he wants to introduce me to his housemate—first thing.
“I’ve been cleaning up the guns this morning,” he says.
“I met your roommate last night,” I answer, lifting myself up on forearms and leaning back against the headboard.
“I didn’t hear you get up last night,” he says, concerned and lowering himself on the bed. “Did you meet Marcus or Patrick?”
“I just saw one guy through the crack of the door. His breathing caught me off guard.”
“That’s Pat,” he says, “I probably should have told you. I’ve got a kind of hospice going here—most of the guys who’ve stayed here have been friends of mine, and I run them back and forth to the hospital, get their medications. Truck’s pretty handy—some of these guys have boxloads of medicines.”
“I wish you would have told me.”
“I wanted to take you away from that,” he says sheepishly.
“There’s no getting away from that.”
“You’re angry now,” he says. “Maybe I shouldn’t take you shooting.” He’s smiling, mischievous.
“I’ve been angry a long time,” I say. “Let’s shoot.”
He lays a revolver on the bed. “Start with this,” he advises. “This is a .38 caliber—not much kickback.”
“What was the gun I saw on your wall?” I asked.
“That one out there? That’s a 30-30 Winchester—’the gun that won the West.’”
He lays a rifle on the bed, next to the revolver. These two cold instruments of certainty—I try to see them as benign, controllable, but like standing at a high window ledge, I feel powerless before them, as though an accident were inevitable, some instability in me being drawn out, more certain than any protective measures.
“Once you pull the trigger,” John says, “you’ll know who’s in control.” He leans forward to gather the guns. We both hear knocking at the open door, and notice Pat standing with a bowl of cereal in his hand.
“Hello,” he says, his mouth full.
“Come in,” I encourage.
“Thank you,” he says. “I’m eating the last of your Raisin Bran, John.”
“If your doctor didn’t insist you stay in, I’d force you to replace it immediately.”
“Cereal is the best sick food—easy to prepare, and always, somehow, it reminds you of home.”
He notices the guns.
“John is going to teach me to shoot.”
“I hope you’re not planning any vigilante-style justice. After all, it’s getting harder and harder to point fingers at anyone responsible.”
Pat looks John over. He is rolling the guns in a blanket. “I thought GI Joe already fought his war,” he says. He looks intently at me. “John never takes me out.”
“Not true,” he answers from the corner of the room.
“Dying is so limiting,” he says. “I have too much strength for it.”
/> “You’re not dying,” John says, walking up beside him, straightening the smock which nonetheless continues to convey sickness.
“No, you’re right. I’m presiding over death,” then, pushing John’s hand away, “C’mon, John. Who’re you kidding? I don’t wear this fashion just because it’s in.”
Pat comes off like a ventriloquist’s dummy on death’s knee.
“I don’t mean to be so dramatic,” he explains. “Most people are lucky in that they can forget that life sometimes genuinely warrants our attention.”
John says, helping him from the bed, “sick or not, you’re as obsessed with life as you are with opera.”
John reads us with his life meter. As long as we respond to its shocks, he’s convinced of our will to live. This is what he must have felt about Antonio—his determination to die was read as determination, period. Perhaps that’s the one thing that kept John alive in Vietnam. Tom’s relationship to death is more complicated, shot through with the variables of good days, of enormous gratefulness. Death is a promise. Having been denied so many promises, he’s skeptical it will ever come. But I begin to wonder if it is my fear, and not his, that makes his suffering, his saying I want to die, a complicated thing.
The neighborhood streets are quiet. Fog drifts down from the hills and thins out over the pavement.
“Are you unhappy about last night?” he asks.
“Not really,” I answer, his gentle concern makes me want him, focuses the emptiness of our sexless evening. I put my head in his lap and he strokes my hair. His touch is almost too gende—deathbed touching, an understanding that’s come too late for both of us.
“I have to go home tonight,” I tell him. “I had a strange feeling last night that Tom was dead—that he waited for the moment I’d left to die.”
He doesn’t answer, but I see him looking out over the road, and his thoughts are suddenly naked, clear as sun on these mountains. I should have trusted him…
