Nocturnals

by Edited by Bradford Morrow

  There is also a Shiras moose—Alces alces shirasi—a species that he discovered in Ontario. “Moose grazing on roots of aquatic plants,” Matagamasi Lake, Ontario, 1904, peacefully huge with dead trees behind, and behind them, more and more night; it piles up without weighing down, but instead lifts off from the rolling shoulders and the trees.

  A second later, all would be terror, the blinding light, the blinded moose, the striking noise, the animal leaping in all directions at once. Shiras noted that often the animals would not return to the spot or take the same path again for weeks or even months.

  Doe across water now take your feather and lift the boat into brilliance now row through your own ether fawn after it’s over and the legend of strange suns that live only an instant the legend of a boat that is itself immeasurable distance it must take the animal whole minutes maybe even several to get back its night vision during which he or she is incredibly vulnerable

  “Three white-tailed deer leaping to escape,” Michigan, c. 1920, balletic desperation, the panic of complete articulation and a choreography of light against night that gives everything eyes.

  “Albino porcupine on a floating log,” Whitefish Lake, 1905, a study of whites all studying themselves. And albino deer: “Albino stag in the forest,” Grand Island, Michigan, date unknown, his own beacon, so much lighter than the lit leaves above him. “Three deer and an albino deer,” Grand Island, Michigan, likely the same one leading three does, his light held firmly within him.

  Three white-tailed deer leaping to escape, Michigan, c. 1920.

  Cutting a bright slice across the lake, animal in length, a caution of lanterns, of antlers, among an orchard of wild oak.

  “Moose in the morning,” Nictau Lake, New Brunswick, 1907, gliding straight toward us, the mist luminous across the water behind him, perhaps all the light he needed.

  The title of the English translation of the exhibition catalog is In the Heart of the Dark Night; the fact that the original French title is L’Intérieur de la nuit invites us to take the word heart as a metaphor for center. Given that darkness is edgeless, endless, then every point within it must be its center, meaning that night is an entity composed of nothing but its own heart. And what is a heart? You could say that it’s what both drives a system and keeps time for that system. Or more simply, it’s the rhythm that enables life, or even more simply, a recognition that it is rhythm itself that enables life and is the will that becomes the muscle to ensure it. Why it is night and not light that does this, I don’t know, but I assume that it’s because light constitutes another, perhaps as yet undiscovered, organ.

  Nights in the Asyntactical World

  Ann Lauterbach

  1.

  Sparked enemy cluster radiant ball

  Applied rodent blue fuel

  Cast nearly to sated arrangements pooled

  Clamor for arrival near the other

  Ocean fired claustrophobia of what

  Washed out cauldron miles and deftly

  Uploaded for the licensed opera

  Begun under weight of the never seen

  Mud between roiling atmospheric ages

  And apparitions once annealed once

  Thought cold once revered and swept

  Into the prelogistical curve

  Mountain arc trail fate

  Suffered among skip adventure the atoms

  A nation’s flames

  Habitat scald or reflection rising

  Puddle clouds the instant

  Arrival as of final last star strewn

  Apogee flown now

  Detained as signal

  Trussed upheld local celebrants blinking

  The hazed adventure

  Vernacular gun heavy struck

  Sainted or leveraged

  By knowing the turn’s

  Yield glad pearl moon drawn

  Path not soon nor ever under way.

  2.

  Crave earth gone moody sold under wraps face obscure murder

  Dressed meekly assuage reason tech trimmings coil drainage

  Acquisition procedural blast-studded trial crested

  Flow after auction blockage oily vision’s gaping retrieval.

  After lens doubt formidable recess pulse drowning matter

  Sign of curtain trigger wind namesake token permanent closure

  Aching for rhythm literal extension dusted power permission

  Came lately drawn callow predicate Latin tarnished flickering ball

  Fictive recursive hold finger after jazz after halo after

  Market verbatim shallow encounter crisis adage to dwell

  Skeptical bondage filled fact acres wall needy repair

  The sutured redemption the dissonant tide tower mirror

  Happy for touch the hill the declension of habit poison

  aged poison reason answers redundant caress crisis of mind.

  3.

  Slowed to an apparatus say of speech frequented

  In the collect of sighs urns signal aspiration

  Not close to sleep now gathering torn burdened eve

  Close to awakened trivial rugs glass trivial lyric

  Architectural tonic foreseeable trains as immobile

  Sky clad in broken gloomy barricades for birds

  Titled as song reaching pitches pitch as tonal degrees

  Married among fallen disputations of a silent partner’s

  Woes. Cat wants food. Kids want more. Mundane

  Ballet of ordinary refusals at the kitchen’s narrative

  Gloss. Heart’s nightly pillage refrains collect standard

  Feather dressed radical erasures clausal yet kissed

  As by art. Care marvels. Sleeping crass ending totals

  Under wind hoped encounter cancels good sex.

  Desertion hopscotch plenitude graffiti

  Across migrant goals logged smoked down bridge

  Not to look dressed numbers under stark

  Killer mobs fortune music gets traded on show

  Forget it went trolled forget trails underfoot

  Weather delay and the yellowing willow aflame

  Drastic choice undo the fire settled claim

  Resting on knowledge and damaged continue

  Damned then halt ask them stop as on an altar

  As on a stoop pink bat leaf pink ball underfoot

  Had hidden name had filtered passage

  Striving to enter to climb the mosaic render the icon

  A poppy or rose a title or a blessing of water

  A spoken allowance for margins to braid an infinite reel.

  4.

  To address scandal nerve vibration culled fingered

  Blast moon roams doom grass natural conundrum paint

  Slander high vigil forest over frontispiece you vanquished

  Antics slow mosquito wintered playtime exaggerated now

  A paw stretched hair loose array feminine secreted thus

  Abundant seek bliss say kindness measured enrollment

  Among ill met speaking strangers’ unseen halo

  These amendments culled to be spoken the stories tell

  And meet still carry emblems order traced conundrum

  On shelves interior volume and acres persist

  Allowance repeated enclosure respite trail footprints

  Signed fox itinerant child hears cry comfort this note

  Raising better often pulse star visible anthem

  Coterminous near fables belonging to none still

  Mute vehicle fugue mainstay rode slippery gamut

  Futurity solved musical palace domed receptacle torn

  Further as if when these evasions wrist ascendant

  Figured as classical ambit tune monks among thieves

  Again softly appended grace further structured mode

  Terrible arch hollow with dolls meager at best turgid

  Also blown arms raised hello formerly stranded gold opens

  Silhouette against trouble seductive aggression marvel
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  Holy in plastic garbled yet forsaken for whom knowledge

  Give travelers their punitive roam at twilight this time

  Feathers united float glue dangle to obstruct harmonic

  Rendered as marvel orange dust ready not sooner

  The vagary ends. Would more appreciate a must for all

  To listen partition to regulate form a ring’s shambles tonight.

  Dutch Kills

  Han Ong

  Henry drops me off at the Dream, where I am pulling an atypical late shift—eight hours of cleaning rooms that will see me taking the train home at four in the morning, likely to sit in a car sparsely populated by other graveyard shifters and the stray homeless body horizontal across a row of seats, the Bowery look of them or maybe their stench staking a claim to the surrounding spaces, assiduously avoided by even hardened New York commuters.

  Early that morning I had gotten this call from him:

  HENRY. Will you help me out today? Can you?

  HAN. Henry? What time is it?

  HENRY. Oh. Didn’t realize. Sorry to wake you. I’m a little excited cause I got good news. Good news on the Laurence front.

  HAN. He’s come back from the dead.

  Laurence, our literary forebear, godfather, who had schooled us in a writing workshop at the Gay and Lesbian Center a dozen years ago, and who had killed himself earlier this year, in his apartment in the West Village.

  HENRY. Good news on the office front.

  HAN. What office? You’re calling me about an office? At (Pause.) seven thirty in the morning?

  HENRY. How many times can I say I’m sorry. I need help. I just rented a U-Haul. Will you meet me at Laurence’s storage? It’s on West Twenty-Eighth and Twelfth.

  HAN. Now?

  HENRY. (Beat.) How long will you need?

  HAN. What’s this office.

  HENRY. Renata has donated money and a contact. We have an office. The Laurence Warshow estate has an office.

  HAN. Rich lady Renata?

  HENRY. From the memorial, yes. It’s in Dutch Kills.

  HAN. Where?

  HENRY. It’s in Queens. A converted building. I’ve only seen pictures but it’s a coup. You’ll never believe what the building is.

  HAN. I know you’re pausing to maximize the suspense but let me warn you that I’m about to fall back asleep any moment.

  HENRY. It’s a monastery.

  HAN. A what?

  HENRY. A Buddhist monastery. Monks.

  HAN. I know what a monastery is. Wait. I don’t understand. They’re evicting the monks?

  HENRY. No. The top floor of the building that houses the monastery is available. The monks stay put.

  HAN. What did the office used to be?

  HENRY. No idea. Renata called late last night. When am I meeting you?

  HAN. Are you coming to me or the other way around?

  HENRY. Meet at Twenty-Eighth and Twelfth. LockUp Storage. In an hour?

  HAN. That’s asking a lot.

  HENRY. Tell me when.

  HAN. Ten thirty?

  HENRY. Three hours?!

  HAN. I get it that you’re excited. I get it. But my back is aching from cleaning rooms and I’d like to lie down for at least another couple hours.

  HENRY. Sure. OK. Ten thirty.

  HAN. Are you calling Patrick?

  HENRY. He’ll meet us at Dutch Kills at one. He’s bringing lunch.

  HAN. Bitch ain’t gonna heft boxes?

  HENRY. He has an agent meeting.

  HAN. OK. Ten thirty. Henry?

  HENRY. Yup?

  HAN. This is good news. Congratulations.

  No elevator, up four steep flights to the very top, a dusty-floored oneroom office awaits, bare except for a table by the street-facing windows, on it a Mac desktop that is a gift from Renata—one of her grandchildren’s that has been abandoned for the newest model. We do not share our entrance with the monastery, which takes up the other four floors of the building. It is very quiet at not-quite noon. The building being a monastery, this is of course no surprise. But the neighborhood and certainly the whole block is also very quiet. Appearing to be a commercial zone, with one tiny bodega two blocks away, and the rest—except for an automobile mechanic’s—anonymous establishments sharing generic signage and dirty windows. At least that was what had been apprehendable through my squint. No sunglasses after five minutes of searching in my apartment and I had had to run out into the daylight undefended, which worsened my haggard appearance, though Henry had said nothing. The desktop is up and running, wireless connection and all, also courtesy of Renata, so while recovering from the work of hauling twenty-one heavy boxes up those stairs, I type the street address into Google to see what of the building’s former life is on record. What immediately comes up is an image that greeted us when we pulled up in the van: an immaculate facade without any signage, save for a bas-relief lotus centered above the double-height ground floor’s two large windows. The lotus is painted red and blue and the lotus pad a sober, matte gold. The pic belongs to an article from the Daily News, a year-old rounding up of recent “artsy improvements” to the heretofore-little-known, “up-and-coming” neighborhood of Dutch Kills. Scan down to the last paragraph: “… a former car-parts warehouse turned monastery-cum-residences for live-in monks spearheading recent changes to this once-quiet neighborhood. Who knows what other exciting things are in store for Dutch Kills in the near future?” In other words, the monastery’s seemingly serene spell over the neighborhood cannot be trusted. In truth, it is a death knell. And if the monks are to be blamed, then so are we, so is Renata: we are all one more arm in gentrification’s tentacular reach in this city.

  This building used to be a car-parts warehouse, I tell Henry.

  At that moment, there’s a knock on the door. Come in, Henry and I say in unison.

  Patrick enters, both hands up in the air, and the clear smell of Thai food emanates from the large brown bags held aloft in them. Isn’t this cool, Patrick says.

  This place used to be a car-parts warehouse, Henry says to Patrick.

  Twenty-one large boxes, unmarked on the outside—nine boxes from Henry’s cleanup at Laurence’s apartment, twelve deposited by Laurence himself in the Chelsea storage unit that seems like a half-hearted first effort at records keeping some long time ago. Having done initial detective work, Henry assures us that the boxes Laurence squirreled away have nothing surprising to unpack—whatever reason Laurence had for taking out (and keeping current with the rent for) a storage unit, it isn’t to conceal, like some miser with a handful of gold coins, a Warhol canvas, a love letter from Christopher Isherwood, a signed Hockney silk screen, a Robert Mapplethorpe self-portrait, a Rauschenberg canvas, a handwritten score by John Cage, pages from the original draft of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”—gifts that might have been traded for his own signed, handwritten offerings, a peers’ barter that banked on some future judgment of equal greatness.

  HENRY. It’s all papers.

  HAN. Why don’t we do this. Figure out some categories—like chronology or subject matter—and then scan each page or group of pages and make a decision into which box they should be dropped. That way, at the end of however many hours, we’ll have a system. Fine?

  PATRICK. Who are we doing this for again? I mean I know it’s the estate but what is this for, specifically?

  HAN. The biographer?

  HENRY. If we’re selling his papers—

  HAN. Not if.

  HENRY. Sorry. I mean when. We need to provide a catalog of the contents. And Han’s right. Also the biographer.

  PATRICK. So you want us to sit here and read each page?

  HAN. Scan. Make your best judgment.

  PATRICK. What are the categories again?

  HAN. What did I say?

  HENRY. Chronology and subject?

  HAN. Would you like to add anything to that?

  PATRICK. So anything dated gets automatically dropped into chronology?

  HAN. Yes. W
e can go through a second time and arrange the chronology once all the piles have been sorted.

  PATRICK. And subject?

  HAN. Henry?

  HENRY. Thinking like a biographer? Off the top of my head: Youth, Family, Fame, Writing, Sex, Later Life.

  HAN. Sounds good to me.

  PATRICK. And don’t forget Berlin.

  HENRY. Youth, Family, Fame, Writing, Sex, Later Life, Berlin.

  We lay out a grid on the floor, each category indicated by a neongreen Post-it. For Chronology, we leave four squares, four Post-its, counting on Laurence to be fastidious on dates. After four hours, the Chronology squares are underpopulated, and the most voluminous section turns out to be Youth.

  I like boys. No I do not. I like boys. No I don’t. Back and forth, the torture is intense; needless and intense; having to press down on the truth, which pushes back up with equal force: No, I do not like boys, no, I am not one of those kinds of boys: Yes yes, yes you are, who are you fooling, who do you think can’t see into your dirty heart and even dirtier brain? I am thirteen. Thirteen and tortured and this state will stretch on for so many more years—such waste! When all that time could’ve gone into … So much fear, yet paradoxically, that metal tang in the mouth provided an extra erotic charge for all those encounters with boy-men similarly afraid—in fear for our lives, jobs, families, in fear for the loss of our “straight”-jacketed lives, that false face we turned on the watching world … We wanted to be “doing it” and at the same time to be done with it, to be replaying those couplings for our private delectation in the safer precincts of memory. To have put something over “normal” society—sex was so much more than sex, and all it took was to be very, very afraid, to honor the thin line between life and death that has always run through the middle of our everyday existence and which seems to take some form of chemical or genetic or spiritual outlawry like homosexuality to bring into laser-like focus. We could all have gone at any moment: the police might’ve barreled through the doors of our apartments, hotel rooms, the doors of the bathroom stalls where we fornicated in the middle of the night, exposing us not just as criminals but, even worse, even more shamefully, as failed heterosexuals, “abnormals” who would always be in prison, making that always imminent jail sentence a painful redundancy. All this primal recollection of fear—effortless surges of fear and more fear—and I wonder when was it that I stopped being afraid and sex became just itself, one body next to another, or maybe a few others, all of us going through motions graphable by the intersecting lines of habit and sport? When did my heart increase its beating simply for the dopamine spike of sex itself and not for the possible death it might bring (not disease-death, at least not yet, with AIDS still beating around the corner)? I am ashamed to say this, but it took getting to my thirties for me to let go of the fear of being found out for who I was. And then, of course, once the fear was relinquished, a kind of manic joy rushed in to take its place. I became one of a group of “gay” writers trumpeting the news of the new gay visibility. But to go back for a moment to that bit about waiting till my thirties to step out of the long shadow my parents’ generation cast over ours, just think of it: to not be a full human being until more than a third of your life has already been lived. What kind of life is that? To be a boy who likes boys and to consequently swing, in one lifetime, from fear to jubilation to mortal fear to a kind of prolonged twilight of the soul that is the emotional room temperature of the survivor. In its way, I suppose, as full a life as is possible to live during my time.