Stories From the Plague Years (20 page)

It is the dead of Charleston who lay siege to us . . . desperate to have us see them. They hunger for our sight. They drink our gaze—clear mountain water amid lowland stagnancy. The dead are creatures of dreams unseen in a city that never wakes. They are invisible as chime notes.

Among the fleshless ghosts, we hunted our murderers. We did so as an act of will. Not in response to a profound call—as Sheila had responded to the call that drew her to her murderer’s deathbed—for Justice is in part a creature of time. We know that, now. Justice is cause and effect. The fullness of effect is not always known before Justice is inflicted. We moved among the forested screams. The stone-still cries. We hunted our killers easily . . . the living eyes of Charleston are talked into blindness.

We stalked your mother to the beach. You knew where she would go.You knew where she would be. Standing on a pier the pilings of which touched the Gulf Stream, we looked down upon the stretch of cold sand you knew you mother would walk this mild winter day.

And for the first time in either of your lives, you were moved to tears.

Your mother led her autistic daughter along the surf. Gently. So lovingly. What had she become, this murderess, that she could love so tenderly? She still carried her cruelty . . . we saw it as a brimming urn she held by her heart. Yet she did not let it spill.

She who is your sister not by any flesh wore loose clothes that flapped in the wind. Fully grown, she still looked a child. Her hair flew in wild directions. Your mother carried a picnic basket, and your sister not of flesh bore fresh spills and stains on her shirt—traces of what the basket had held. The beach was empty. There were no accolades to be had. No pity to be bestowed by onlookers who admired your mother for her strength. Just a woman and her ruin of a daughter.

You, unseen by her, gave her the pity for which you had been butchered.

I comforted you that night. I held you to my heart and stroked your hair. The comfort I gave you was too small a hill to rest upon, my body an inadequate homeland.

We hunted my father next, knowing we would not now kill him, but knowing we would have to know
why
we could not now kill him.

You gasped as you felt me feel a pang of love for the old man, as I saw the liver-spotted hands that had wrung my neck.

You exhaled softly what you had inhaled as a gasp as you felt me feel jealousy toward the young man who was now his son. Strapping. Beautiful. Glowing with health and vitality, the young man who in flesh would be my brother walked with my murdering father through the banal consumerist landscape of a shopping mall. He did not love his father. Filial hatred was etched into his face. Yet he walked with my father, who plainly loved him. Yet he walked with my father, who limped slightly due to his newly replaced hip. Filial hatred was meshed with filial duty. You and I, knitted from behind time—who have never walked a visible path save for that which Justice had decreed—saw the injustice we would inflict if we killed my father now. To kill my father would destroy this boy . . . he would be the focus of an investigation that would ruin him, even if he were found innocent. To kill my father would kill part of him; to take away the object of his hatred and his sense of duty would flood him with an ambiguity of feelings he could not endure.

You comforted me that night by making love to me. You took away the pain of inaction by desiring me.

As best you could.

Justice would tell us when to strike.

And thus, besieged by the dead, we began our siege.

And thus we closed off ourselves from Charleston, living in it, participating in it, but always closing ourselves off from the place where the dead were so badly treated. Where ghosts were trinkets to lure tourists along with gewgaws made of sawgrass and plaster. We closed a siege wall around us, as we lay siege to our murderers, waiting, always waiting.

We waded into the confluence of Charleston. We waded into the silt of fictions and dreams and lies. We walked among the living and the ghosts.

The dead looked in our eyes and coveted.

Here, a woman in an ancient dress, her gullet full of holes. Her moonlight form rosaried with knots of the pain she had felt in life. She stood in the street, a thing of February forced to exist against a backdrop of May, forced into invisibility by the eyes of the city that had killed her for loving wrongly. We saw her on a bright corner, as a horse-drawn carriage freighted with tourists passed her.

We waded into Charleston’s indifferent cruelty, “
You must love it here!
” punctuating our stay the way “
Amen!
” does a tent revival.

Commodities, we were invited by
nouveaux riche
Belles to behold and marvel at the purchases they had made with the money of husbands who saw them as trophies and incubators and little more. We, commodified as furniture queens, marvelled.

Here, the mouth of a child gnawed away. The rats that had nested in her unfound body did not follow her in death, did not ghost themselves with her, though the violet she had died picking had. A man with a flayed back walked with her, a man who would have come back as an avatar to avenge himself if he had not died at the hands of so many who had been enraptured by the fiction of
Birth of a Nation
.

We, commodified as educated strangers who had come to Charleston and had learned the truth of how things really are (did we not answer in the affirmative to, “
You must love it here?
”), agreed sagely with the city’s fat white patriarchs, who would spout their provincial blather believing they could create informed opinions about anything, having seen nothing of the world save what they have seen through the fiction of tourism, the fiction of the dream of Charleston they take with them no matter where they go.

Here, a man composed of the sheen of tin. A thing of numb, uncaring fleshlessness, he walks the Battery, walks foolishly on the stagnant water of the harbour. He is a buffoon in death, as he had been in life. In life, he had been a happy figure, a person of frolicking dementia who ended the jolliness he provided by inconsiderately freezing to death one unseasonable evening. The sheen of his un-living flesh is as cold as the wind that had killed him. He sleeps his dead sleep at the very spot in the park where his body had first been flecked with dew.

We, commodified as faggots, fell in with the destitute and inwardly exiled gays of Charleston. We saw the broken down men of King Street, coolies bitter that they have not married the Rhett Butler they had always believed they deserved. We saw the faggots from other places who come to Charleston to plunder fraudulent antiques much as Mr. Kurtz had come to the Congo to plunder ivory. We fell in also with the Charleston queer aristocracy, those who, less because of their sexuality than their caste perceptions, always went elsewhere to indulge their sexual proclivities. Some went to New York to screw young black men not as an expression of sexual taste or desire, but to express racial contempt, and contempt for the foreign culture of the North. Some went to Thailand to express their contempt for a culture older than theirs by fucking its youths. Some kept apartments under false names in San Francisco, simply because they could.

We became conscripted for the sake of Justice to save the life of one such Charleston scion, to keep his damp and earthen soul in his body. We interfered in his acquiring of AIDS by taking his attention away from a drag queen crack addict. We were compelled to interfere, saving the life of this respectable son of one of Charleston’s finest families so he could be later punished by the as yet unborn avatars of those he had killed. He was marked . . . that we could see. His crimes could be read in his eyes. He was marked perhaps for fisting that boy to death in New York? Perhaps for that child whose kidney ruptured in Thailand? Maybe they both would be reborn to take him. Perhaps as twins.

As we led the scion away, we saw on the drag queen’s face what she would become. We saw the mirrored un-living shadow of her that would move as a breeze—with the feminine grace she had in life always wanted—down the quaintly cobblestoned streets she worked.

Charleston is a mindset. Its crowded loneliness is an eyesore. We walk amongst its dead, those conscripted to invisibility, those whose screams are stifled by the apathy only the living could muster. Besieged, we waited. We could not breathe for the thickness of our fleshless siblings. Ghosts are born of guilt without catharsis. Without redemption. You cannot be rid of a ghost until you own the sin that has created it. To own a sin is to acknowledge History, and Charleston has none. History is where the past and present interact. There is no such interaction here. Charleston has no History . . . for though it loves its past, such love is nothing but antiquarianism. Such love objectifies. Such love is not, and can never be History. Justice is impossible in the drunken fog of such lack of History. Our fleshless siblings will never be free. The weight of the air is too heavy in Charleston. The cold places of the North—the dusty attics and the chilled cellars, the shadow eaves and October breaths—give expiation to ghosts. They provide a way home. Here, the weight of cast-off bourgeois dreams keeps ghosts earthbound. Slaves. The disenfranchised. The refugees who found refuge here only for their bodies, not their souls. The refuse of a brutal agrarian plutocracy based upon stolen labour. The foolish men who, having read the pretty fiction of
Ivanhoe
, had believed in the chivalry of agrarian plutocracy and who now cannot fathom why they did not die nobly, but died shitting themselves and screaming for their mothers.

Incontinent and bloody in their Grays, they are soldiers still of the siege. We would help them if we could. Yet how can you dig a grave for a body already buried in haze? They look and glisten in the moonlight. They hunger to be seen.

The city gets smaller as Justice makes us wait.

We go to our polite jobs as
Boys
, such as we, are expected to. Yes, we are
Boys
. Queers are not full men . . . any challenge to patriarchal normalcy cannot be tolerated. Your female boss finds us “darling” and “clever.”

Justice makes us wait.

Justice keeps us unseen for what we truly are.

Who, among the living, is invisible enough to truly see us?

The Call came in the depths of summer.

There is a peacefulness to butchery. Mining. Excavating. The path through flesh is a path of discovery.

We stood from our couches in our living room. The sound of the television passed to nothing; we were not truly watching it. We kept it on at night because the light of the screen reflected on the windows and blanked the faces of the dead who milled, who longed to be seen, who formed themselves out of ether not out of Will, but out of its terrible absence. Will is a thing for the living. Will is the ability to Sin, which we have not. Without Will (truly without Sin?), we stood and calmly took our quarry.

To have been near Sheila when she heeded her Call was to see—as you see in the moment before a summer storm—something drawn out of all the green around you.

We
were that which is drawn out of the green. We were drawn out of where we were while still present.

“Where are we now? Where shall we go?”

There is a certainty a child knows with finality—that it must never touch fire.

We knew with the same certainty and finality that tonight was the night to avenge.

We harvested your mother, knowing her daughter was in the care of an aunt in a cooler place. The terrible heat was making the child mad. Dehydrated and sick, she had been packed off. To punish your killer tonight would not punish the autistic child she brought into this world.

We harvested my father, knowing his son was away hiking with friends. The closeness to his father in the heat was making him mad. He went to the mountains. To destroy my murderer tonight would not destroy his son. The boy could let go his filial hatred if he had an alibi not only for those who would investigate, but an alibi for himself . . . that he could not have saved the man were he with him the night he disappeared.

Out of politeness for my father, and consideration of his hip, we put him in the back seat of our car. Not in the trunk with your mother.

We, the un-avenged dead, dug our graves in their flesh.

The marshes are tannic. The marshes crawl with life that is hungry. We buried our open-fleshed graves in the marshes.

I look at you, and wonder if I love you.

Dried blood on the lids of my eyes makes it hard to blink. My eyes hurt. The phone has stopped ringing again. When had dusk come?

There should be a difference in weight, for what we have lost.

There is skin upon my lip, and I would spit it away.

Yet we have been spat away this night, we have been left behind like skin.

Our souls, avenged

. . . ascended.

They cast us aside, we fleshy vessels. Justice was served by us—we things of marrow and blood and gristle are empty now. Our souls are free and we wish them back. We are uninhabitable, even by ourselves.

Love.

How can we love while soulless?

I look at you, and wonder.

We are dead. Nothing is held by our gazes. No soul or spirit. The ghosts crave our glance no more than they would from corpses. They have ended the siege. As I saw them walking away, I realized that if I could still feel anything, I would miss them.

“Where shall we go?”

We have not even graves to crawl in to sleep. They have been dug into our murderers and given to the marsh.

You ask one last time.

We are in Charleston.

We are dead.

We might as well stay.

With night, come the sounds.

You hear them as you walk beneath halogen street-lamps that give light the color of brandy, as October air touched with frost becomes warm, heavy as breath. Your step is muffled, as if you walk on a wool blanket. The sounds come, as they have come before, while dusk deepens and stars spread across the dull suburban sky, while lamplight and the flickering blue of TV screens fill the windows of the houses you pass.