The Medicine Burns

by Adam Klein

  He pulls the guns from the back of the truck. “The first shot has no target, just to let you feel the gun.” He puts the pistol in my hand, and points his rifle out across a clearing of low shrubs. The mountains in the distance are muted by gray fog. I imagine towers on them, medieval castles.

  “Not too high,” he says, watching me steady both hands before me, holding the gun out like it was an anxious bird. The tingling comes into my fingers, the numbness I associate with caring for Tom.

  He holds the rifle by its checkered gun handle. His initials, JM, are engraved on the barrel. And though he’s comfortable cocking it, tilting the barrel up, I think of how this instrument of finality, of exactness and timing, makes no sense in his hands, and how the engraving of Vietnam on his chest seems more appropriate than his initials do on the gun. He pops the bullet into the breach, and in a moment, the deafening trajectory and pungent smell of gunfire overwhelm us. “Now it’s your turn,” he says.

  For a moment, the return of stillness after the blast makes everything mute. Then a hand on mine, thin as gauze, guides the short revolver. It is Tom’s hand, I think, locking me in. Perhaps it’s Antonio’s hand. I pull the trigger, startled by the blast and the kick of the gun. But falling back, I’m held by John, whose fingers, still curled around mine, are warm and real.

  India

  1.

  Before my lover died, Wednesday nights were reserved for cards. He’d pull the folding table from the closet, fill some bowls with candy, and wait for his guests to arrive. They were always prompt. They were cordial with me, even though no place was set for me at the table.

  When I first moved in, they all volunteered to show me how to play. My lover offered to play with me as a team, but I refused. I always found cards tedious; they insisted my attitude would change once I participated. For the first few weeks, I’d hover around the table looking at each of their hands, incapable of evaluating them. Don and Rob never did get comfortable with my standing behind them and always pressed their cards to their chests when they felt me approach. I began to stand further and further away from the table.

  I suspect they never trusted me. Perhaps that’s the reason I had them over to see his corpse. There were no knife wounds or rope bums on his throat, just a look of surprise in his still-open eyes, as though he’d walked in on a party thrown in his honor. He died of pneumonia. There were other complications. He had his arms around me when I heard the death rattle. A few moments later, the coffee pot, set on a timer, began to brew.

  I called his friends and sat in the bedroom awaiting them. I was afraid if I left his side he might decompose instantly, that I’d open the door of the bedroom for Don and Rob and all they’d see were wrinkled sheets and bones. He was skinny at the end, but not that bad.

  When Don and Rob did arrive, they ran to him as though he’d been waiting. It’s funny, I thought, they’d been prompt for all the card games but came too late when it really mattered. I moved off the bed and sat in a chair and listened to them weeping behind me. They were trying to hold his clenched hands.

  I wanted them to leave. I never saw them in the apartment except for the once a week they played cards, and I felt suddenly as though I had made a mistake by inviting them over. Would he have wanted his card buddies gathered around him after death? How would they know when it was time to leave without a game played to the end, without a winner?

  I wanted a drink, but didn’t know if custom frowned upon it. I went to the living room and took a bottle from the bar. I was quiet with the bottle so I didn’t have to offer them. I didn’t care if it was proper, and I didn’t want them to join me.

  They came out of the room shortly after I’d drained my glass of Scotch. They came out to console me they said, but I was in wonderful shape compared to them. They sat down on the couch and I stood about as far away from them as I would when they were concealing hands. They asked me to bring them tissues and I brought them a roll of toilet paper. When they realized I wasn’t tearful, they stopped offering the paper to me and got a hold of themselves.

  They started asking me questions about my health and what I planned on doing. I answered everything vaguely, but answers that might have contented my lover brought a look of mistrust into their eyes; then it was time to end our service. They kissed me and asked if I wanted to go to the gay church for more comfort, but I declined. Later that afternoon, I emptied our joint account and had traveler’s checks made up. He left no will so I decided to have the body burned. He would have wanted a burial, but it was too costly and I couldn’t bear to see his friends again.

  All of his family were dead and buried somewhere in the Midwest. Only his senile mother remained in a nursing home in Chicago. I think she was beyond knowing or caring whether her son was dead, but I sent her a card anyway. I didn’t tell her who I was or how I knew her son. That wouldn’t have been important to her now that he was gone. I don’t think he’d ever mentioned me to her before.

  The cremation was simple enough. They took the body and exchanged it for an urn containing his ashes. I was not encouraged to watch the procedure. The gentleman on the phone explained that it was best to remember a loved one intact. When I received the ashes there were numerous laws explained to me regarding their disposal. I couldn’t simply drop them in the ocean or a public garden. They spoke of his ashes as though they were toxic waste. I was surprised they’d given me the urn at all.

  I placed it on the mantle carefully, the way he had arranged everything in that apartment. But I could not escape the feeling that where I’d chosen to place the urn was somewhat arbitrary, that the order he had managed in our life and home was not part of my considerations. I wandered about in his bathrobe, feeling compelled to finish off every bottle of liquor in his cabinets, even the heavy cherry liqueurs. I left the dishes in the sink and on the countertops and began eating from the fine china he had stored away for special occasions. What could be more special than his death? With enough drink in me by two P.M., I would lie down on the big, white couch and sleep without any guilt about the sunlight filling the windows of that apartment.

  Four days after the cremation, I sat in the living room thumbing a National Geographic when I stumbled upon a pictorial of Banares, India’s holy city on the Ganges. Hordes of people and cows were pushing through the tiny streets and down the ghats, and at the water’s edge, people anointed themselves, washed their clothes, and drew up water in clay pots to carry home. I carried the magazine into the kitchen with me and kept glancing at the pictures while I prepared lunch. The food was getting moldy, and I was at the last of his china. There were two more bottles of wine, though. I uncorked one of the bottles and began to drink until I felt dizzy enough to seriously contemplate India.

  We’d talked of taking a trip together, and he’d started the account. He thought it would make him better to have something to save for. I mentioned India to him. I knew what he’d say. They’re starving there. He was starving here.

  I volunteered to pick up his meds when he was sick the first time. But when it got to be regular, I’d stay out longer. I liked walking through the stores, the escalators, the bell that quietly sounded before a page was made over the intercom. It reminded me of walking with my hand in my mother’s when I still believed that mannequins were people posing. She’d guide me confidently from department to department, and I followed dreamily beside her. Somehow I’d found my hand clutching a stranger’s, a woman just as surprised as I who nervously took me to the information desk and turned me over. A prim, unconcerned woman let me talk over the microphone. My tearful panic made me incomprehensible to her so she let me plead my case directly, thinking rightly that my mother would recognize my cry. She came back for me in no time, admonishing me for having gotten lost while covering my blotchy face with kisses.

  He would complain at first. He’d tell me not to feel I had to care for him, that there were volunteers he could call, even Don and Rob would be happy to pick up his meds. But I insisted. Nevertheless, th
ere was always something that got in the way of a prompt delivery: buses would break down, stores would close early and I’d be forced to go elsewhere, even old friends would turn up out of the blue. Once, when I came home having forgotten the meds entirely, he was sitting up in a chair, head lolling and his breathing imperceptible. I had him rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. Don and Rob visited him regularly and sat protectively by his bedside. It shouldn’t have surprised me when on Wednesday night they resumed the card game in the hospital, using the rolling tray my lover had been eating his breakfast from. By Friday he was released.

  Images of India had already begun to impress themselves on me. The public library was featuring it in a bulletin board display during the last month of my lover’s life. At the center of several panels of blue contact paper, an image of Kali was tacked, red tongue jutting from a lava black face, an expression of fierce rage mute behind glass in a library display. Around this face, like the petals on a black-eyed Susan, were other Indian pictures: a sadhu buried in the ground, with only his head emerging like a strange vegetable; a marketplace jammed with bicycles; a woman on her rooftop watching the monsoon floods wash her possessions away.

  Even though it was three weeks before my flight would leave for Calcutta, only the physical presence of the ticket encouraged me to stagger out from under my lassitude. I kept the ticket in the bedroom dresser, in a drawer where my lover had kept his neatly folded boxers. The underwear I’d dumped into a box, but hadn’t found a charity for. Everything would have to go into a box to be reclaimed, repossessed. I lifted the ticket from the drawer whenever I returned to the apartment from an errand—inoculations and passport business. I held the ticket too long, I worried about it. It seemed too insubstantial to me, just paper that could degrade in water. I worried over the red carbon that stained my fingers, that I would somehow lose this destination.

  What nagged me were his possessions and his friends who left long messages on our machine, asking, under only the thinnest veil of concern for me, what would become of his VCR, his clothes, and his car. After about a week of my not returning their calls, their memories of him deepened, and they began to ask for his framed movie posters. Mostly they were interested in the Joan Crawford posters they’d once enviously admired. It was fitting that they were so aggressive over these. But they even asked for his china, which I thought of packing up in its sordid condition and shipping off to them.

  I’d arranged to leave in three weeks, but by the last two I could barely stand to enter that apartment; not from any haunting memories of him, but because the place had become so disordered. Somehow I felt responsible for that, for not having maintained what we had tended together. So I stayed late into the night at a bar on the corner, where there was pool and a jukebox, and I could sit stirring my drinks for a long time.

  Some of the guys would pull up stools beside me and watch me in the mirror until they felt compelled to ask, What’s on your mind? or Are you alright? And then I would tell them that my lover had died, and that I was planning to go to India for an indeterminate amount of time. Why? they would ask, or they’d tell me, They’re all very poor there or Isn’t it dangerous?

  Only one man seemed to understand, a black construction worker named Joshua who thought it sounded exotic and who asked me if I liked dark men. I answered yes, and he moved his stool closer.

  I brought him back with me that night. I left the lights off in case he could read me too well by the squalor, the half-packed boxes, or the dirty dishes. I dragged him down with me on my lover’s bed and begged him to fuck me. I was holding him, kissing him desperately, as though he were a dream I was trying to remember. I ran my lips and nose up the side of his body, searching out his taste and smell, but he had bathed that night and I couldn’t find it strong enough. His tongue entered my mouth as though Kali had broken through the display box glass, forcing her mute fury back into my throat.

  He told me he was cold, that I was cold, and that my skinny arms couldn’t keep him warm. So I asked him to slip on my lover’s robe lying at the foot of the bed. He stood up and drew it over him. I sat up in bed admiring him with that pale silk hanging from his shoulders. My lover’s white, slender body seemed as cold and far off as the moonlight in the folds of the sheet. We talked tentatively, as though we only knew each other’s language from a book. We only wanted to talk about things we’d done, places we’d lived. That was enough. Both of our lives were full of broken lines, false starts. We didn’t ask each other questions about how we’d arrived here, what impulses led us. These were simply choices and decisions that we’d made.

  He had a serious, attentive look on his face when he’d listen to me, and then the hunger would just appear behind his eyes. He seemed to know my whole situation intuitively, to adapt to it. He spent my last two weeks in the apartment with me, never questioning the disorder, but hastening it. He left holes in the couch, drunkenly missing the ashtray, open cans on the countertops, and clothes strewn around the floor. He was wearing my lover’s clothes, drawing them out of the boxes I couldn’t bring myself to seal. He could sense that I wouldn’t sell my lover’s things, or give them up until I had to. He was taking them off my hands.

  Two days before I left, I sat beside him on the couch showing him pictures from a library book on India. They were photographs of the monsoons, villages lifted up in the muddy water, and all of India looking like a tide. People were in train stations and markets and on narrow streets choked with rickshaws and cows. I stared at the blurred faces moving in one direction, down to the burning ghats of Banares, and I wondered if they shared an inherent persistence toward life. I wondered if I moved amongst them if I would share their destiny.

  Joshua helped me pack some of my clothes into a piece of my lover’s luggage. “The rest,” I told him, “goes to you.” He accepted calmly, managing what I knew was an eagerness outweighing gratitude.

  I put the car keys and the video club card on the table. “Take what you can use and leave the rest,” I told him. “There are boxes in the closet for the TV, the VCR, and the stereo.”

  “You’re really not planning to come back, are you?” he asked.

  “There won’t be much to come back to, will there?”

  “I’ll drive you to the airport.”

  On our last night we celebrated, each of us, our private successes. We were both drunk, talking too loud and too grandly. At one point he whispered he loved me, but when I looked at him curiously, he laughed gently and asked me to flick off the light. He was still smiling at me in the dark - I was already a memory to him. Perhaps that was our greatest success, that we never allowed ourselves to become familiar with each other; we’d mastered the end early on. I urged him to hold me as tightly as he could. I wanted him to fill me the way he had my lover’s clothes.

  I couldn’t sleep that night. I only had a few hours before the flight and I suddenly remembered the urn on the mantle. I felt I couldn’t leave it in an apartment that would soon be ransacked, then emptied, then tenanted by a stranger. I felt compelled to dispose of the ashes, but I couldn’t imagine how to do it, or a suitable place. I only remembered the places I couldn’t do it: the beach, and the public garden. I wished I hadn’t been left with his ashes. His things could be given away, but not his memory. I carried the urn into the bathroom and shut the door behind me. I poured the ash into my hand. There was a lot of it, and pieces of bone, too. I turned the faucet on and watched the ash mix with water, letting it run from my open hand down the drain.

  I went back into the bedroom where Joshua was sleeping and got under the covers with him. I wondered what kind of life he would slip into once I had left, and wondered too if I was not the first person to leave him with all my possessions the way my lover had left his to me. Already I’d become a traveler, growing lighter with every box I gave away.

  Joshua was in the hall, asking me to hurry. I heard his voice, distant as the future. I was walking backwards through the door, my history in that apartment reasse
mbling itself. I was slipping quietly away from Tom and his friends who were still gathered around that folding table, hiding their winning hands.

  2.

  I woke up in darkness when the crickets began jumping from the squat toilet. Was it morning or evening? I pulled the rusted chain hanging from the bare bulb overhead and the question no longer concerned me. I turned the shower on and sat beneath it wearing my kurta pajamas. It would dry in no time in this heat, murderous heat that made it impossible to escape the long, oppressive days. I was in Calcutta, in a rust-painted cement room with an attached bathroom, and I had been there for weeks.

  I hadn’t planned to stay in Calcutta, but I’d fallen sick, and the train ride to Banares seemed too long and hot to endure. It seemed, also, that I should wait for an experience, especially since I had no plans or engagements, and my clock was still reading the time of another country. So I walked for a few days, short walks in the oppressive heat, until I began to recognize some of the faces, until one of the child beggars began to wait for me, idling outside the guesthouse gate.

  Sometimes he’d walk alongside me, patiently waiting for me to finish a bottle of water. I’d hand him the bottle and he’d run off to exchange it for a rupee. One day I told him I would take him for lunch. He pointed to a nearby restaurant crowded with exhausted-looking men who pounded scrap. They watched us blankly as we entered.

  The fussy proprietor hit the serving boy on the back of the head, hustling him over to our table. The tourist was going to get special attention.

  They served us rice, dahl, and vegetables on a palm leaf. The proprietor and serving boy hovered over us while we ate. My friend made rapid little gestures at his food, then he’d look at me from eyes that were too dark and serious for his age, and it was hard to see the appreciation in them.