Stories From the Plague Years (19 page)

I shift my weight slightly, and hear a fragment of bone under my boot scrape the polished hardwood floor. Blood has leaked from my clothes, drunk up by the fine silk cushions of the sofa we restored. Darling of us, was it not?

The siege has ended.

And another has begun.

I remember what it was to cry. The lost faculty of tears pains me as would the itch of a limb long severed. If I try hard enough, I can remember what it was to dream. I wish I could again . . . both cry and dream. Were I able to dream, I could delude myself that we could wake from this. But mostly I wish to cry . . . for to release what I feel—what I convince myself I feel as an article of a heretical faith—would be a benediction.

“We can have no benediction,” you say, “for what we lack so profoundly.”

You are not welcome in my mind. Even in my emptiness, you are not welcome. But you are here, with me, in my mind. In my sight. I ache to ache for you. I ache to share myself with you as an act of volition.

I remember the snapping of my neck, do you? Is my memory part of that upon which you intrude? I remember the sound of cracking bone, the vibration of the break up to the base of my skull, bewilderment and the taste of the basement floor—concrete and mold. I remember your smothering the way I remember ever so vaguely what it was to dream.

I look at you, and remember love.

Can memory—a shared memory—of love be a kind of love?

When I saw you the first time, I knew who and what you were. When I saw you the first time, we, whose true aspects were then and ever shall be invisible, saw one another. We slipped into mutual visibility. Two pillars of refracted light, revealing configurations of dust motes. Seeing you seeing me had been a moment of completion. Completion is bittersweet. It is the fulfilling of a longing to which you have become accustomed. I welcomed you in my sight. You welcomed me in yours. It had been lonely, to be born of the dead, to have acquired a soul as a mushroom acquires the air from the forest floor, to not have a soul loomed into your mortality.

When I saw you the first time, I knew who and what I was. You defined me in your gaze.

History class—had that been irony or happenstance?

You stepped forward from out of the crowd . . . no . . . not from the crowd. But from the moving, featureless blur I had always seen the crowd to be, even when it had been comprised of my “friends.” You stepped forward, the first face I had ever truly seen outside of a mirror. You stepped forward, a thing of solidity from out a bank of rain.

We knew each other.

Without a word—dead, yet able to breathe—we sat beside each other.

The rain of the others could have spilt rock, split the world; we took no notice.

We, splintered by murder—too old to be part of or fully with those who were so adolescently immortal—joined out of the churn of humanity. Our bonding was a thing of heavy liquidity in the storm, of quicksilver droplets touching in rain.

Of course we would meet in a History class. We are creatures of inevitability. Finality led to our first breaths in this life. History is the point where past and present meet, intertwine, interact. Flesh and memory join in History. We live for having been torn from our flesh. We said nothing, for we did not need to. As you sat in that plastic molded chair in the lecture hall, I had been relieved to hear your chair creak, relieved that you truly were a being of flesh, with the weight of mortality.

My return to flesh had been inevitable. For my father, while still a young man, had been unhappy because of the impolite dissolution of his affair with his secretary, and chose to deal with the end of that clichéd coupling by twisting my head almost completely around while I watched cartoons. He covered the tracks of his suburban murder by throwing me down the cellar stairs, and would tell himself later that I had driven him irrationally over the edge by incessantly pestering him for a popsicle . . . though in fact the offending popsicle . . . a strawberry confection that would be the last thing I would taste before my tongue lolled out to touch the cold cement on which I finally died . . . had been something already in my hand at the initial moment of my murder. But truly, he . . . with his new pot belly and just-softening muscles . . . had come home from the termination of his affair with the intent to kill me, with the intent to vent his flannel-suited anger by lynching me in his un-callused hands. I had been conceived that first innocent time as an act of coercion on the part of my hysteric, valium’ed mother. I was a desperate bargaining chip with which she could refuse him his desired divorce. No child, no chip. Later, better alimonied than she had expected and in her gin-and-pill induced bliss, she would at times not even remember my name.

You knew this, the circumstances of how I died . . . and drew a crude flight of stairs in your notebook while you should have been writing about Leonardo. You knew this, in the way all know the color of the ocean . . . even when we have never seen it.

You had been younger than I had been when you died, when your mother, desperate for the accolades and the attention of a tragedy, smothered you with a pillow and covered her crime by shoving a small plastic toy down your throat. She had not been insane, just bored. You had been another accouterment to her housewife existence. You, unlike a new ‘fridge, had required more care than you had been worth. Dead, you were worth much more to her . . . a cross to bear. Dead, you had brought her a great crop of pity, on which she flourished much as a flower does in sunlight. Your mother’s next child had been a girl, who for her own good had had the foresight and good sense to have been born autistic.

I knew this, and drew a crude pillow while I should have written about the Medici. I knew this, as you had known of my death.

No psychopomps had brought us back to this mortal coil, no spirit-animal had called us up from the earth.

Only Justice had brought us back. Justice . . . which may be older than God, for how else could He have judged Satan? Justice returned us from exile to flesh, to avenge ourselves on those who had razed our homelands of blood and bone, those who had rudely killed us in the summer, while the earth is easy upon the spade and funerals are not so uncomfortable. We had been denied the courtesy of burial while the world was not bright and warm.

We are the interruption of earthly creation.

Justice keeps those who murdered us alive, so that we may serve Justice by killing them. We, Second Born, were brought together by Justice. We, Second Born, knew each other, much as Jews in dull and primitive cultures know each other by a furtive glance. History is where the past and present speak and interact. We could have met nowhere else save in a History class. For others fleshed but only once, Exile from Eden is the Catastrophe to which they owe their bestowment of Original Sin. We are born of the first sin of the first sinners’ progeny. It is a sin that is not ours. Can our flesh be ours?

If we had been brought back in any way to breathing life by agencies of this earth, it would have been by the random collision of genes instigated by both pairs of our respective second parents. Justice has its mercy . . . both couplings that produced us would have yielded stillborns if our vengeance-heavy souls had not been dropped into the womb-clothed blood clots out of which we grew.

My second parents never understood why they never connected with me as they had with my living siblings. You, an only child, as you had been at the time of your death, knew and still know the love of your second parents, though you have never been able to return the courtesy by loving them back.

Those who have besieged us no longer do so. Do I miss them? Do you? Their desirous gaze? Their imaged language?

I look at you. I look at your glance and I long to be held by it. I long to be held by you. We no longer reflect each other in the polished stones of our eyes.

I am an absence in your glance. I hate to think . . . no . . . it is not thought . . . I hate to know that you are absent in mine.

“Where shall we go?” you say.

We have met the inevitable. We have fulfilled it. Existence (
life?
) is a river full of currents and eddies. We have reached the inevitable end of our river. We followed it as one. Our journey became one journey on the afternoon we met, when we followed the immediate and facile path of living men who find each other.

“It wasn’t facile,” you say.

No. It wasn’t.

“Then say it.”

“It . . . wasn’t facile.”

A dorm room . . . walls of cinder block.

The first orgasm either of us had had—we shared it on a stiff unyielding mattress of which I had removed the pillows out of courtesy for you and your death.

The flow of our blood.

The flow of our breath.

The flow of concocted blood from our loins.

The still and rocky landscapes within us moving as would a draft.

Joined together in the larger flow of our lives, our shared inevitability brought us to this city where so many rivers meet the sea.

To our “friends”—our social peers we had to take up and keep on hand like tools in a drawer that are used once a year, yet are indispensable at that one time a year—we were “fashionably queer.” To us, we were the only other members of our particular humanity. Around our island of each other was a poisoned silence, a waveless silver ocean that hurt to look upon.

We had encountered others like us as time went on and our horizons broadened. We met Sheila, the vapid princess who within her soul had been an aged homeless man beaten to death by a Legionnaire in Philadelphia. We shared the bland entertainments of youth with her. One day, we had been eating under a tree . . . three of the Second Born picnicking on a college campus as if they were happy youngsters with all their lives before them . . . two queens and a fag hag, with spirits older than their bodies.

There is a moment before a summer storm, when from out of all the green around you something is drawn out and dimmed.

Such a moment came under that cloudless sky.

Such a moment called Sheila, who glanced up from her student newspaper with a look like that of a fawn suddenly startled. For a moment, her face seemed reflected upon itself, as if she swam a still pond. She literally sniffed the air; we saw, from behind our eyes, the air acquire her.

“I have to go,” she said.

We have not seen her since.

Though we had read in the Philadelphia newspapers of the suspected murder of a very old man—a veteran and a Legionnaire about to expire from lymphatic cancer—who had somehow been abducted from an ICU. Police were searching for the man, even though it was almost certain he had died within moments of being disconnected from his respirator.

We knew better.

Justice would keep him alive until its terrible will was done, until Sheila’s will was done, Amen.

Inevitability had called Sheila away from our sweet picnic facade. She had broken from us as would a piece of ice from a larger floe.

“Where shall we go?” you say.

No such question had been asked before our arrival here.

Migration had brought us to this city . . . a faculty like that which calls birds had called us to meet the economic migration of our murderers. We knew we had to come here, with the finality and profundity of what had called Sheila to harvest her killer.

Our murderers—each of their own accord—had both come to this, “The Holy City,” to retire. An unknowingly shared pilgrimage marking the fulfillment of two separate and distant suburban lives. Charleston, aged city, languid, rising in sea-level barely over a marsh, was the place our murderers had chosen to retire over Florida. Golf had been the deciding factor for both. A happy game to be played in sunshine despite at least one hip replacement between the two of them. Two people, two strangers, both marked by Cain, had both chosen to live their golden years in the same city. You and I, an echo of their crimes (
one
echo? can two sounds make the same echo?) went toward them. Their crimes called their echoes back.

Charleston is bright and warm . . . much like the days on which we had been buried. Noon here is a dream. Amid the steeples and streets, one can never truly wake.

Charleston is where many rivers meet. It is where they flow and intertwine and extinguish themselves in the sea. It is where land and sea suspend each other as marsh. We arrived posing as two respectable faggots drawn to the city for its great history, its great culture, its arts scene, its cheap antiques and charming bargains, its legacy of the dashing Rhett Butler, the city’s most famous son . . . who never existed. What could such a pretty myth mean to us, jaded to existence twice?

Charleston is the confluence of many rivers, and what the rivers bear. Dreams and fictions cast into those rivers with the surrender of a coin to a fountain wash here. The place is composed of fictions that many have casually read and forgotten. They clog the air and the minds here as would silt.

“You must love it here!” said the real estate agent who showed us our house. Not an observation. A demand. A toll extorted.

“You must love it here!” said the furniture store proprietors.

“You must love it here!” Politely, we always said we did love it here. The demand, the statement, was an affirmation on the part of those who spoke it. To not agree would have been as rude as interrupting a prayer.

We did not come here to love the place as they did. How could we love the place, amid the screams?

“No, not the screams,” you say.

No . . . not the screams. The screams that are not released, the screams that are held inside without respite among the dead. Even discorporate, the dead are denied the catharsis of a scream in Charleston.

“It’s the quiet of the screams that deafens,” you say.

The ghosts of Charleston are patient. So terribly patient. We . . . the dead . . . can see them. We . . . the avatars . . . can taste them. We cannot breathe, for Charleston is so thick with them. They are litter left by the inconsiderate. They are ignored, much as Charleston natives ignore visitors who do not fawn over the city as if it were a coddled trophy child. The solidity of their unreleased screams at times seems greater than that of the ancient brick.