by Gary Indiana
I wanted his scenarios to come true for him, but when I encouraged him to cultivate reasonable hopes and a degree of resignation, just in case reality didn’t match his fantasies, he assumed that I wanted to cripple his ego and lord it over him. He also assumed that I was eaten up with jealousy when I didn’t know what he was doing. He clung ferociously to this idea, though I would have been much happier to know he was home fucking someone on the myriad occasions when I imagined he’d killed himself. He seemed unusually vulnerable to all the varieties of mischance the city has to offer, and although nothing really terrible ever seemed to happen, Gregory found ordinary living so oppressive that I expected disaster to find him at every corner. I imagined him kidnapped, mugged, shot, stabbed, raped, and dumped in the river if I didn’t hear from him. This worry refined itself in stages; if someone had seen Gregory the day before, I felt less panic than I did if I could only find someone who’d seen him two days earlier. If he was out of sight for three days, I pictured his body decomposing in a dumpster, or in that lurid apartment, killed by a common housebreaker.
He called one morning and asked if I’d come for breakfast because he was scared, the landlord had these guys installing storm windows and one of them seemed particularly interested in his apartment. The guy came in here, Gregory said when I arrived. He came in? Yeah. They had the outside window off and he just stepped down into the room, this black kid about eighteen, he looked around at everything, especially the stereo, I gave him some coffee and he acted polite and all but I didn’t trust his look, now I’m afraid to leave the place. But if he works for the landlord, I said, he wouldn’t dare— Who knows, Gregory said, the landlord runs a pretty shady crew of people downstairs. Anyway half the landlords in New York are gangsters. I mean they can take what they want, but what I’m afraid of is, somebody comes in when I’m sleeping and I wake up and, you know, get killed or something.
I hugged him. Cascades of rough fabric. I wish I could protect you and take care of you all the time, I said, and he said, I feel the same way about you, I want to take care of you and never let anything bad come near you. I’m small, he said, but I’m strong.
After breakfast he wanted to walk in the streets. I said, Aren’t you worried about the guy coming back? Oh that, he said, surprised, as if he’d forgotten all about it. And then I realized that he’d manufactured the intruder, or dramatized an innocuous encounter with the window installer, for the pleasure of seeing me worry about him. Well, I thought, he’s still trying to figure out if I really do care about him. Which should be obvious by now. But he’s been wounded by people in the past, so it isn’t obvious. I felt grateful for the chance to offer proof, only vaguely troubled by the disruptive frequency with which he tested my affection. In a room together, physically together, everything he did to drive me crazy erased itself from memory.
When he saw me reading the paper someone had left on the back seat, the cab driver, an Egyptian with long, thick fingers, said he was a Virgo, and please would I read his horoscope. It cautioned Virgos to anticipate certain snags in their business relations by getting their feelings mixed up in matters of strategy.
In the hospital pavilion, the blue-gray linoleum floors had colored lines trailing across them in different directions. The cancer ward was cerulean, dermatology red, cardiac unit and X-ray yellow, green led to emergency services, and so forth. A wooden maquette of the hospital rested under a sort of oblong cake-saver on a platform near the information desk, complete with tiny trees, drive-up horseshoe paving, miniature nurses and doctors and visitors, a model ambulance with paramedics wheeling off a gurney and life-support systems.
Whole chunks of the actual hospital moved about on wheels, metal instruments and dialysis machines and people on stretchers with cloudy IV bottles plugged into their arms, people with nostril tubes clamped in place with white tape, clutching the padded arms of wheelchairs, all dappled with the greenish yellow aquarium light which flooded in through the atrium windows and gave the procession of medical technology a floaty underwater logic. I thought: That’s what happens, you creep over to the other side one morning, suddenly a chair takes on an incredible solidity, it weighs what it would on Mars. Lying down becomes a complicated negotiation. Even if your body feels normal, you know the slightest unconsidered movement will shake something vital loose or shift something around, this big elastic bag of flesh you’ve carried around in total confidence for years and years falls in love with its own demolition and starts courting randy microbes, loose viral particles, plaques and embolisms and alien cells, it offers bits and pieces of itself for any invader to nibble on, you watch as your body entertains your enemies at dinner, its loyalties divide between you and them, and after a while you become hypnotized by the disappearance of yourself.
I took the elevator to Paul’s floor, where nurses passed in every direction. No one questioned my presence. I wondered why, in a city where so much violence had been directed against people with Paul’s disease, patients weren’t guarded against the much touted general population. But of course the people with the most to say about the illness would never go near its actual victims. All such people are ruled at any and all times by cowardice and a staggering capacity for abstraction. Me too, I thought. Had I thought I’d catch it if I visited Perkins, or had I really kept away because I had nothing hopeful to offer him? I have nothing much to offer Paul, either. He’s standing in the alcove near the elevator, smoking a cigarette. That’s him. He doesn’t look himself. It takes him an effort to walk from the room, he’s looking at me with those deep eyes, I smile but I smile differently than I would if he weren’t dying; tighter, as if it wouldn’t be nice to look happy. He doesn’t exactly smile, he adjusts his body on the wooden bench after sitting down in a way that insists that he’s physically there, still in his body, even though he’s lost about thirty pounds, his face used to be so broad it really beamed when he smiled his devilish smile, now it’s tightly glued to his skull.
Don’t look at me like that, he says. Why would I need to give up smoking now?
I’ve been determined to kiss him on the mouth, but I forget in the crucial moment when I should. Now it would seem histrionic and “brave” instead of natural. I light a cigarette instead.
You don’t look so bad, I tell him.
No, he says. I think we’ve got quite a ways to go yet.
I look at the tip of my cigarette as if I expected it to talk to me, then touch his arm, glance out the window. The Roosevelt Island gondola crosses the air in the middle distance. Have you ever wondered, I say, what sort of people actually live on Roosevelt Island? Not many Roosevelts, I don’t imagine, Paul says, looking at me instead of the window. They’ve taken me off the protocol, he says. Until the other day, I was getting the biggest dose of DDC of anyone in the world, but now I’m having this problem, he continues, rubbing his temples, with my face, he says, they think the virus went into the nerve endings around my cranium, into the facial tissue, here, and here. Insidious fucking virus, isn’t it? It’s torture moving my head right now, if I don’t seem very animated it’s on account of that. They think they can treat it, he says, they’re giving me doses of this anti-seizure drug, bit by bit, they think it will gradually eliminate the . . . the neuropathy. Other than that, it’s just the Kaposi’s, but Jesus Christ, it’s amazing when you get a new pain, first you think your whole consciousness has been taken over by one pain, then you get a new one. They’re not giving me anything for pain, because they’ve got to figure out if this other drug is working. If they add anything to your treatment, even an aspirin, they’ve got to take you off the protocol. It doesn’t seem to make any difference at the moment, but then again I’m not infected with anything, a lot of people get this thrush business, in the mouth, I’ve even heard of the most incredible sorts of rectal pathology. Knock on wood.
I think: If he knocked on wood he’d probably break his hand. I search for something to say, acutely aware that most of my current conversational stratagems involve c
omplaining about Gregory. It’s really offensive to complain to a dying person. Paul asks about him. He asks: Is he nice with you? I think he tries to be, I say, he’s someone with a lot of problems. Paul says: Well, we’ve all got our problems. After a patch of silence we both erupt in malignant laughter, scaring two paramedics coming off the elevator. I look into Paul’s eyes. He’s a shit, I tell him, choking on my own giggles. An absolute total shit.
You always head straight for the shits, he says, waving a fresh cigarette at the window. A city with ten million beautiful well-adjusted guys, and you’ll ferret out the one shit like your life depended on it.
I protest: Well, you weren’t a shit. It’s not like I’m asking for it.
And look where it got me, Paul says, right in the shit, can you feature it?
It’s all shit, I tell him bitterly, grabbing his hand and instantly letting it go, remembering the lesions. I’m sorry, I said, did that hurt you?
They don’t actually hurt, he says. They just suppurate.
We listen to the hum and throb of the hospital and watch the soundless river shatter light into thousands of white drops. It isn’t fair. We used to say: How can we live like this? And now the question really is: How can we die like this?
PART TWO
Pornography
6
The weather turns at last, the new restaurants on Second Avenue plant their tables on the sidewalk. Are we racing forward, into the brave new world? Someone dies in an apartment three floors down, a week later the place is gutted by beefy Polish workers, three weeks later the place rents out to a prosperous, starched-looking couple for $1200 per month. People who sail out the door every morning carrying matching briefcases, dress for dinner, complain to the landlord about the opera singer on my floor who rehearses in the evening, have the hall bulletin board removed as a fire hazard.
M.’s phone now can do conference calls, and he doesn’t need to hold the receiver. The entire studio and living space next door are miked. He ambles through his cast-iron kingdom, touching up a painting, fetching Cokes from the fridge, talking all the while as if other people were in the room with him. A Peeping Tom would suppose that M. talks to himself all day.
Richard’s new answering machine has its own voice: Hello, you have six messages. I will save/erase your messages. That was your last message. It even says: I have detected a malfunction. I.
Libby’s phone has a hold button and call waiting because Fred’s a musician and if a booking agent calls and the line’s busy, the agent will just contact another band. Libby wants separate phones. Fred feels separate phones would indicate that they’re starting to leave each other. It’s only the first step, he tells her. Next it will be separate televisions.
Jane has a “friend line” and a “business line.” The “friend line” stores numbers up to ten, for her ten best friends she only needs to press a single digit. Now, she told me, to call you I simply push “Auto” and then “Two.” Oh, I said, hurt. In that case who is Number One?
Gregory rings me out of an alcohol-heavy sleep, from a recurring dream in which the architecture of a vast hotel continually shifts, revealing unexpected suites and corridors inhabited by figures from the middle past, along with the peripheral gnomes of everyday Manhattan. I’ve started my job. This has already brought me too much attention. I am terrified of failing in public, drying up, having nothing to say. And now there are countless people out in the black space of the city thinking about me, craving my attention, writing letters to me. It is a strange role to play in the lives of others, writing things they read standing up in the subway, at their morning desks, in moments of distraction. When I see my first magazine page in print, my name in blocky letters under a not terribly funny, punning title of the kind the publication favors, I read through the article and think: I’m not him.
I’m not him. He is a personality I don’t really like: a bit stiff, a little too intellectual and too moralistic, not hip enough. His voice strikes a middle register between my voice and the voice the dutiful employee inside me thinks is reasonable enough for the audience. He approaches everything with a lot of inner fidgeting. When I read what he’s written, I see the lonely, awkward child he once was, someone who never quite managed to live in his own body. He expects someone to hit him at every corner, and he can’t dance unless he’s had a lot to drink. No, I’m not him.
The hotel is an expanse of pink and white gingerbread next to the sea, right on the Atlantic. The scene is briny-smelling and Whistler-gray with a chill skimming off it; a flag flaps on the lawn mast. Massy formal gardens, in the Italian manner, are laid out in back. Sometimes the hivelike innards of the hotel mutate, changing into pieces of the Luisiane in Paris, the Locarno in Rome, the Gramercy Park in New York. The figured patterns of the carpets shift, rooms shrink and expand. The dimensions of the elevator cages change from scene to scene. If the dream ever played out entirely, all the people in my life would show up in one room or another, in unimaginable combinations. Even the dead could carry on a second life in the onyx-and-ormolu dusk of the cocktail lounge, regaling each other with posthumous adventures.
When I wake from this dream, the true extent of the hotel is just about to reveal itself, but it never does. Gregory needs $60 to ransom two Cibachromes from the lab. Instead of asking for it, he describes his current situation in Byzantine detail, implying that even if he manages to pay the lab, his problems are so wearying and tangled that it’s almost asinine for him to go on making pictures, or doing anything, really. When I offer the money, Gregory’s voice squirms, dissatisfied. He doesn’t want me to imagine he’s calling just to borrow money, he’s calling to let me know how miserable and hopeless things are, and how little my loan—which he’s unbelievably confident that I’ll give him—will affect his unhappiness. As Gregory dilates on this theme, I remember myself as an adolescent, the incurable discontent I lobbed at my mother whenever she tried to improve anything. Now I have become her, or rather Gregory’s mother, the place where he lodges his complaints and demands restitution for life’s little injuries.
Except Gregory’s injuries are never, in his mind, little. He makes it sound as if he’s doing his work, making his pictures, only to please me, against his own better judgment. I want to say: Suit yourself. But this would unleash a torrent of accusations. It’s easy for you, he’ll tell me, you’ve got a fantastic job and prestige and you don’t have to slave in some menial position where you feel like an asshole all the time, you’re so unfair, you don’t understand, you’re always demanding things I can’t give you and yet you’re not even sympathetic to me. I’ve learned that the gentlest suggestion that Gregory’s feelings of persecution might be exaggerated brings instant, crushing retaliation, threats to end our relationship, intimations of suicide. He tells me I’m insensitive, selfish, incapable of really loving him. If I loved him, apparently, I would succumb to his mercurial but bottomless depression. And to some extent I do. Gregory’s a pro at ruining an evening, a day, a whole week.
I’m happy to give him money, although I can’t really afford it. And I’m afraid he’ll resent his indebtedness before long. But Gregory doesn’t simply want money. He needs my emotional involvement in his need, to feel I’ll be unhappy until he’s contented. I recognize the tone of voice, the note of unslakable grievance. I can’t just hand him the cash. I’ll have to monitor his trip to the lab, call to find out how the prints look, ask if the money covered it, and offer more for his living expenses. What on earth does he do with all the loot he pockets at work? He’s always bragging about how much he steals, then never has a cent. Maybe he exaggerates the thefts, to seem bolder than he is. He tells me things he says to rude customers, always things so cutting and elaborately insulting that I know he never says any such things, I know because I ask: Well, then what did he say?, and Gregory draws a momentary blank, or tells me, Well, what could he say after that, he just gave me a look.
These lies have a youthful charm, they protect his ego and he believes them
. But they break the continuity. How often lately I want to ask: Who exactly are you, Gregory?
He keeps me waiting a half hour in a coffee shop, refuses to sit for five minutes, looks agitated and vaguely scared about something, won’t hear of me going with him to the lab, accepts the money with a bleak smile and promises he’ll pay me back tomorrow or the next day, apologizes for his nervousness, tells me he feels shitty about everything but knows this will pass when he’s taken care of some details, and seems the whole time to be talking to someone else, someone he needs to convince. Then he disappears, stuffing the money into his shirt pocket. I pay my check a moment later, rush into the street, and look for him in every direction. Gregory moves fast.
One afternoon when I had cleared away every distraction, mailed out the phone bill and the rent check, written letters to Europe, tidied up my desk, and settled down at last to work on Burma after weeks of inactivity, Victor called. Victor made cheery, inconclusive noises, hemming, hawing, it seemed he had time on his hands, didn’t quite know what to do with himself, Victor’s habit is never to propose anything, never to extend a concrete invitation, but always, invariably, almost abjectly, to make these noncommittal noises via telephone, ending in what is often called a “pregnant” silence, in hopes that I will pitch some palpable proposition into the furry static of the telephone, which on this occasion carried two faraway metallic voices, one male, the other female, chirping away along a glitched connection.
So now, said the man’s voice, she’s using the kids to speed up the court order.
Oh Hank, said the woman’s voice, she’s cutting up her nose to spite her face. And the sick part is, she knows it.
I says to her, the man said, you already found out we’re not getting any overtime. I mean, she knows we’re not delivering a full week any more and if the local walks off next Monday I’m a monkey’s asshole on the picket line for the next six weeks.
