by Mark Doty
I’ll never forget his doctor’s single house call, in November, two months before he died. Wally was watching television from his bed; at some point TV had become simply what he could do. First it was a source of distraction. Undemanding electronic company, for many people of my generation, represents a certain sort of childhood comfort, a voice and energy and presence—something paying attention to us—that feels, for better or worse, like a part of home. Later I think there was just something comforting in that continual play of light and motion. Wally couldn’t tell, by then, if he’d already watched the same show that day; it didn’t matter, exactly. He was in the present, with laugh tracks and music and jumping electronic figures, energetic squiggles of light to fill his brain with something else, somewhere else. When Dr. Magnus showed up to see how Wally was doing—since by then getting him into the wheelchair and down the block to the clinic was out of the question—he didn’t stay long. He told me later, when I ran into him in the park, where he was out for a walk with his lover taking photographs of icicles, that “Wally seemed more interested in watching TV than in talking to me.”
It took me, as it sometimes does, time to get angry; a lag time has to pass in my head before I’ll give myself permission to really feel rage. All the doctor needed to do was to press a button on the remote control and switch off the set. If he had, he’d have seen Wally looking at him with the same kind of sweet openness—the self made permeable, expecting nothing, letting everything wash in and out—with which he looked at the screen, when he did bother to look at it. By then, I’m not even sure Wally could have switched off the remote control by himself.
Dr. Magnus wanted to be important; he wanted to be the center of Wally’s attention. Couldn’t he see past his own ego to read the face of a man with wildly increasing neurological damage? He wanted his questions answered, his importance as a “provider” validated—a kind of need I saw in nurses and doctors again and again, as if, as Wally became more ill, they needed to confirm their own importance. A larger man, a more generous man, might not even have needed to turn off the television at all. If he couldn’t do anything, he could pay attention to the man before him, with his gentle, tender, ruined face lit up in soft artificial colors by the light of the goddamned stupid screen. Why couldn’t he see that? His doctor’s sense of self-importance only allowed him to see, by then, a man who was indifferent to him.
Even I can tell the difference between brain damage and indifference.
He never saw Wally again.
And so this tossed-off assessment of my condition triggers a profound resentment, an anger which in itself feels like part of the pain I’m in.
Thus raising, of course, the possibility that she’s right.
Or partly so—if what’s residing in my back is held, pent-up feeling, couldn’t that hurt the muscles themselves, too? I imagine the emotional and the physical tumbling together like a pair of acrobats, two halves of a single somersault.
But what would I do about this—go home and feel? As if I hadn’t spent five months already weeping, desolate, incapacitated, able to function only in my own limited horizon? I’d just begun to be able to get out a bit more, traveling a little, doing my professional work. and then my back crippled me as my heart had earlier. And this was because I hadn’t felt enough?
So I decided to try something else, or rather it was as if something else were offered. As the most useful of Chinese proverbs says, “When you don’t know where you’re going, go by a way you don’t know.”
I’d met M. before, socially, and I’d known he did massage work because Bill had been his client since last summer, when Bill’s body had blossomed with KS lesions. Bill’s easy, bright attitude toward his illness was—shocking word, in this context—contagious; he was perfectly happy to go to the beach and let the sun wash over his body, where every week another pink-purple bruise seemed to develop. He would expose himself in a way that many men with KS would, understandably, find terrifying; there seemed something deeply freeing in his yielding his body to the sun, to scrutiny.
I remember Bill, that July, walking back from a session with M., passing my garden with a dreamy look on his face, and when I asked how he was he answered, “My whole body feels like a penis.”
By the time I encountered M., back in town after a while away—a failed affair, a dark season in the East Village—I was doing better, overall, though I still felt fragile and, most frustrating, was unable to sit for any length of time. No writing at my desk, no restaurants, no movies, only the barest minimum of driving. He gave me his card—Mind/Body Massage—and explained that his work was emotional as well as physical, focused on releasing emotion stored in the body.
Days later I was due for another trip to New York. I’d planned to fly, tried to make it as easy on myself as possible; I felt, if I was careful, I was up for it. But the morning before, ironing a shirt, I felt my left hip start to throb, a deep ache, and I knew I’d never handle the plane, carrying even the lightest bag, if I didn’t do something.
M. could see me that evening, and said in fact he’d been wondering if I would call. My first session with him—initial encounter of a series which would change and deepen my life, entirely unexpectedly—was a revelation that happened unassumingly enough. I arrived at his cottage, at seven, a tiny place behind a huge emporium of tie dye and bongs and all manner of objects with skulls on them, one of the last remaining head-shops (in the world?) which has mutated into something less sweet and optimistic than the way I remember those places. No Donovan there; the prevailing mood is heavy metal. Down a little alley to one side of the building’s Boschian murals—Alice gone through the looking glass into the Garden of Earthly Delights—M.’s cottage was a single room dominated by the folding table of his profession.
He himself, in fact, also took me back twenty years—twenty-something, with shoulder-length hair, wire-rims, and a choker of beads, he looked like the men I used to hang out with in 1971, when I was first in college, and then—odd doubling—like my students look now, their retro gestures gleaned from—where? Old album covers? Deadhead tours? The culture reaches back toward a time which feels more innocent, now that it’s easier to edit out the past’s risky, disturbing edges. M.’s place—polychrome images of Krishna and his beloved Radha, incense burners and wind chimes—made me feel oddly at home.
He explained a little about his technique and study, how he’d begun studying massage in high school, traveled to ashrams and workshops, his own sense of vocation. And then, undressed and half-covered by a sheet in the warm room with its vague smells of incense and unguent, I began to surrender.
Touch, among other things, makes the body real to us; confirmed by another, making contact at the boundaries of our skin, we come back to ourselves, experience ourselves—contained, uncontainable—anew. Some lines of Lynda’s, about sex:
…making love was a way of saying yes,
I am here, these are my borders, hold me down
a little while. Make me real to myself.
Something about M.’s particular brand of touch—working at the muscles, pulling gently, opening out the closed spaces in the body—makes my muscles feel three-dimensional, awake.
And there’s some imperceptible descent, a process I can’t quite trace, through which the mind moves from awareness of the pleasure of being touched into a kind of effortless introspection. A paradox, that being stroked all along our edges should move us further inward.
The tension in my arms, beginning to loosen, makes me think how hard I worked, how long, to hold Wally in a space of relative safety, a zone in which it was possible for him to live as long and well as he could. My arms feel so tired, weary of controlling, protecting, lifting. M.’s touching my face, massaging the knots which have appeared on either side of my jaws. “That’s rage,” he says, though I can’t in fact feel it. Certainly I can register the clench, but not any emotional correlative.
He encourages me to breathe, to make noises—part of the “relea
se”—if I’m so inclined. The firm and easy series of strokes, gentle but somehow driving, leading the experience forward, is punctuated by permission, injunctions to feel. He mentions how much I’ve been holding, he says there is so much grief in my body.
He arrives at my hips, my lower back. I am lying on my back now, eyes closed, and he’s lifting my legs and rotating the thighs in their sockets, pushing, circling, reversing the circles. He lifts my right leg in the air and pushes it toward the left side, so that my leg is crossed over my body, stretching out the muscles deep in the right hip, stroking the long tendon along the back of my right quadriceps with a firm, long stroke, his thumb pushing deep toward the bone. And I feel everything shift. My face contorts, involuntarily. Without any warning, with knowing first what I feel, I burst into tears. The grief, the knowledge of grief, isn’t in my head; the knowing is locked up in my thighs. What my body knows comes welling up, shaking me, deep quaking indrawn breaths and sobs. He keeps touching me, easily; he covers my face with a cloth so that I will not be ashamed. He enjoins me to let it out but I don’t need any more coaching. I couldn’t stop if I tried; a deep well of the darkest and most brackish water of myself has been tapped, an arterial spring held under tremendous pressure. Except that we think of springs as clear, pure water, and this is the fountain of sheer darkness, interior geyser of bitterness held at such depths it pours forth laying waste, burning everything in its path. How did I ever contain it? These great breathless heaving sobs are mine. I let them rumble and tear loose, rising up out of me into the air. I am literally and metaphorically naked, helpless, entirely vulnerable, and for some reason I feel completely safe, able to give myself over to this pouring out of myself. When we talk about being self-conscious, we’re really talking about being aware of others; to be self-conscious is to be afraid of being judged. What I felt was self-possessed, in the old sense of possession: fully entered and inhabited by myself, purely immersed in this body’s grief.
And not just the sorrow of grief. But the rage of it, too, the salty choking bitterness, the self-pity and incoherence and ferocious negation of it.
The freeing, fierce negation.
The massage ended in peace and stillness; one can weep so much, and then that purging leaves us exhausted, quieted. Some unidentifiable plant essence, odor of earth and crushed leaves (“Egyptian oil,” he later told me it was called) was held under my nose. A prayer to Shiva, god of destruction and dissolution; if the forces of the world dissolve people, dissolve what we love, then they also dissolve tension, pain, difficulty.
My pain—in the suddenly infinite, enormous room—dissolving into this music, some chant on the tape player. Then stillness.
I walked home deeply relaxed, enervated, exhausted. And after throwing a few things in a bag for the morning plane I slept dreamlessly, deeply, given a little hiatus from pain.
Which reappeared in the morning, an ache becoming more pronounced by the time I caught my second airplane of the day, a Boston to La Guardia shuttle, a pillow behind my sacrum, shifting as much as possible in my seat belt to keep the muscles loose. A taxi to my friend Jean’s apartment on 110th and Broadway—empty, since she’s married an Irish painter and spends half of each year there, though the space she’s inhabited is full of her calm radiant depths, her quiet—and then straight to bed, into a sleep from which I wake, early in the afternoon, to the strange sensation of having all of New York City around me, and no stamina to participate in any of its huge, indifferent, multiplicitous life.
What could I do? What felt right, that steamy May afternoon, was an easy walk. The cathedral, St. John the Divine, right around the corner, is a place I love, even more so because it remains unfinished, great theater of aspiration, lifetimes till it’ll be done. In fact the new plans for it continue to become stranger, more surprising: a design for a sort of greenhouse, high above the transept, will someday have the walker or worshiper below looking up through the great stone vault into trees.
Sacred spaces have enormous power, even when one doesn’t subscribe to the way their builders or users construe the holy. There’s something undeniably affecting about ritual actions performed in places that have been set apart and consecrated. Once, when Wally was ill, I lit a candle for him at an altar in a mission outside of Tucson, where Latinos and the Tohono O’odham people (who’d built the church, under the yoke of Spanish Jesuits, early in the 1700s) came to pray to a wooden effigy of St. Francis Xavier, pinning onto his pretty dresses and petticoats little metal milagros, images of whatever in their lives needed healing, from body parts to tractors.
I am not, anymore, a Christian, but I am lifted and opened by any space with prayer inside it. I didn’t believe that my candle lit to Francisco Xavier was going to make a bit of difference in the progress of Wally’s illness, much as I might wish it. But there’s something in his spirit and in mine that was benefited, joined to our community of fellow pray-ers. Something in us, in this way, is honored and held up, lit.
I didn’t know why I was going, today, to stand in the long cool darkness of St. John’s; it had seemed just a destination, a manageable whim. But my body knew, as bodies do, what it wanted. I entered the oddly small door of the huge space—like those spaces in dreams, or like Wonderland, whose immensity opens out from the tiniest passage—and walked without hesitating down the right-hand aisle, halfway down the enormous length of the cathedral, to the altar I hadn’t consciously remembered, a national memorial for those who’d died of AIDS, marked by banners and placards, a bank of candles. My heart melted, all at once, and I understood why I was there.
Because the black current that M. had touched wanted, needed, to keep flowing. I’d grown just enough of a skin to function, these last months, but the strength I’d been feeling wasn’t, in fact, real. It was a gesture toward going on in the world, toward continuance, but I wasn’t ready to continue, I hadn’t finished confronting that deep internal sense of desolation. I’d needed to know I could go on, but I’d also been needing to collapse.
Which is what I did, some timeless tear-span of minutes sitting on a little ledge at the base of an immense column of naked gray stone. After a while, I could walk to buy a candle—a light, for Wally, his flame rowed with the others there, a double line of representative flickerings, so few of them really that each might stand in for ten thousand dead.
The candles are held in wrought-iron stands, in metal trays filled with sand to anchor the glassed votives and loose tapers people place there. In the sand, next to a vacant space, was a tiny stick of wick, nearly invisible now, a half inch of flame seeming to lick up out of the sand itself, all that was left of some man or woman’s light. I used that flame to light Wally’s fresh candle—new, the flame high over the rim of the glass, while others around it burned halfway or nearly to extinction. A little arpeggio of lights, each floating above its liquid level of wax, to represent countless and increasing vanishings. Kneeling in public makes me feel self-conscious, posed, but I got down on the padded rail anyway. Then I forgot my self as the floodgates opened again.
The weeping steadied, in a while, to a different rhythm, a more sustainable breathing, a stillness. People came and went—boyfriends, teenagers, a Hispanic woman who knelt alone at the altar, crossed herself, prayed, smiled at me as she rose. I asked her if she might have a Kleenex; she rummaged in her black patent purse and apologized for finding nothing.
I tried to leave then, but I couldn’t seem to walk out of the orbit of the altar, some magnetic pull in those ranks of candles, the unrevealing banners of appliquéd felt. I’d begin to walk away and some little spasm of grief would break free, as if floating loose from below, rising to the surface, choking, blinding. I sat back down on the column base, and in a moment there was a tap at my shoulder: the Hispanic woman, come back with—where had she gotten them?—the kind of paper napkins you get with an ice cream cone. It seemed to me the most genuine of gifts, made to a stranger: the recognition of how grief moves in the body, leaving us unable to
breathe, helpless, except for each other.
So began my weekend’s retreat in Manhattan. Out Jean’s bedroom window a great wall of windows opened across 110th—panoply of lives, New York’s theater of stacked views, glances into the unknowability, variety, and immensity of human lives. When I was a first-grader, my family lived in Memphis, Tennessee, and my father used to take me to a museum called the Pink Palace. It was an unfinished mansion some wealthy man had commissioned to be built of smooth pink granite, one stone fitted carefully to the next, but the Depression or private ruin had wiped out his fortune and the unfinished estate became the property of the state, a museum for children. I can remember only one of its exhibits, which I loved: a large wall of little doors, arrayed from floor to ceiling, each with a tiny handle. Some I could reach myself, while my father would have to lift me to others. I must have worn him out with my desire to open and then close every single one of them. What was behind each door was a pane of glass, a window which gave onto a great—real?—tree, and each aperture revealed some different aspect of its life: nests, squirrels, spiders, stuffed birds whose glass eyes looked back with gleaming veracity. There was no way to ever see the entire tree at once, only the hundreds—were there?—of alternative perspectives the doors opened. This great curio cabinet, this museum of viewpoints, serves in my memory as a metaphor that resonates in many directions. The past itself seems to me like that tree, unseeable in its entirety, knowable only in its parts, each viewpoint yielding a different version of the story about what the whole might be.
