Imagine Me Gone (14 page)

What are your treatment goals?

1. Ordinary unhappiness

2. Racial justice

Current Symptoms:

Yes

Personal Medical History:

Yes

Family Medical History:

Let’s not pretend either of us has time for a complete answer here. In brief, Dad didn’t make it; Mom’s never taken a pill in her life; Alec had an ulcer early on, when they were still fashionable, but has since transitioned into the back-pain industry; and I’d guestimate Celia’s chronic fatigue peaked out around ’94 somewhere in the Bay Area, though she still has Persistent Annual Lupus Scare Syndrome (PALSS) and Cryptogenic Abdominal Rash Syndrome (CARS). As for my grandparents, all four suffered from Eventual Death Syndrome (EDS).

Have you ever been hospitalized for nonpsychiatric care or surgery?

On Christmas Eve 1992, I came down with a self-diagnosis of esophageal cancer requiring what amounted to an overnight stay in the decongestant aisle of a twenty-four-hour CVS in Medford.

Please briefly describe your educational background:

The usual grade-school misery. Though a boy named Ralph eventually befriended me over
Star Trek
and the music I played him. Funkadelic’s “America Eats Its Young,” for instance. When I heard George Clinton ask,
Who would sacrifice the great grandsons and daughters of her jealous mother by sucking their brain until their ability to think was amputated by pimping their instincts until they were fat, horny, and strung-out in her neurotic attempt to be queen of the universe? Who is this bitch?
(read: America), it struck me that our fifth-grade curriculum was somehow incomplete. I thereafter spent every nickel of my allowance on funk. This being 1978, there was a lot to catch up on: Curtis Mayfield, Gil Scott-Heron, everything by James Brown. I listened to records in every spare hour, including while I did my homework, and on my headset after I’d “gone to bed.” I couldn’t be certain what it meant to “Give Up the Funk” or “Tear the Roof Off the Sucker” or why Parliament would title an album
Mothership Connection
. But I had my first secret joy at knowing that beyond the veil of the apparent, meaning ached in the grain of music. A joy accompanied by my first intuition that black people might know a thing or two about the need for that meaning—history being the culprit. The only affective correlative of such history I had thus far experienced being the queasy feeling I’d get in my stomach watching my grandmother show extra politeness to black people on the rare occasions she encountered them, in order to make very clear that she was not affiliated with those terrible, other white people who hated and mistreated them, success being when a black person smiled back at her, acknowledging her politeness and her goodness, thus completing the blameless circle of liberalism.

As for high school, moving overseas and returning less than three years later didn’t much help. Nor the premonition I had that second autumn we were back in Massachusetts, in the woods where my father later disposed of himself. My family has an unfortunate habit of taking walks: my father by upbringing, my mother by faith in the medicinal quality of fresh air, Celia because of an idiopathic athletic streak, and Alec, as ever, in affectation, dolled up like some child earl, all tweed and Wellingtons. My mother was the one who nettled me into compliance, nagging me to abandon my station at the turntable and accompany, on that particular day, Celia and my father on a walk with the deracinator, who scurried off her leash like a giant swamp rat in heat. It was a Sunday afternoon in November (don’t ask me for a nature description; there were trees, a path, etc.). We got to some kind of clearing. I was bored and hoped we would turn around soon. The fornicator had vanished down a landscape feature. Celia had gone after her. My father sat on a fallen tree. A general pause set in.

The horror was brief, a few seconds. Flayed bodies swarmed in front of me in a bloody, contorted mass. I looked up and away trying to evade the menace, but it was pressing down from above, filling the circle, thriving on its own gore. Years later, when I came across the paintings of Francis Bacon, and saw those innards turned outward but still alive, it struck me that the man understood. As in his
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion,
with those mouths agape at the end of nearly human limbs, testifying not to physical suffering but the bleeding of the mind. At the time, however, I just went cold, my mouth dry as chalk. And I knew evil was seeded in that place, waiting to bloom.

I don’t particularly believe in a spiritual world, other than music. I’m a materialist to the bone. But I had the overwhelming sense of needing to escape whatever it was that dwelt there. I hoofed it home like a ghost from its enchanter fleeing. I couldn’t sleep that night or the next. I watched my father and Celia for signs that they had sensed it too, but they behaved as if nothing had happened.

For months, I’d been pleading to be allowed to go back to England to finish my schooling with my friends. Now I had no choice. I had to get away. I stopped asking about it and just called my friend Simon, who said I could live at his house, and then I told my mother and father I would be leaving after Christmas. To my surprise, they no longer protested. In fact, they seemed relieved. I realized their previous resistance had had nothing to do with me. They just didn’t have the organizational wherewithal to cope with my demand. As soon as I lifted that burden from them, they folded like a cheap umbrella. And so I left them there, my family, without ever warning them, without ever telling them what I’d seen. Left them to face it on their own. An act for which I’ve never been able to forgive myself.

To go and live with Simon and his family in a damp stone house back in Oxfordshire, just up the road from Fairford Air Base. I was given a spare bedroom overlooking a paved courtyard. The return to the States had put me behind on my A levels. On Saturdays, Simon and I went record shopping in Oxford, but otherwise we mostly slept, went to class, and studied. I found no pleasure in speed-reading Thackeray, but there you have it. I had to fly through those ballroom scenes on jet skis.

It wasn’t until spring that I went to get my hair cut in the village and met Angie. She worked in a little salon next to the greengrocer, just two chairs, a wall of mirrors, and a waiting bench, with a sink at the back and photos of soft-punk hair models in the window, like head shots for the Human League. The day I went she was the only stylist there. We had the place to ourselves. As soon as she put on Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” and began singing along with it, I knew we had things to discuss. That track may have started as a monster gay-club hit, but Angie sang it as though it were a personal anthem, nothing camp about it. She was beautiful. Right away. A slight, African-American woman between the hopelessly sophisticated ages of twenty-five and I don’t know what, with freckles under her eyes and across the bridge of her nose. She had three earrings in each lobe and a metallic blue bandanna wrapped around a cascade of Jheri curls. I asked question after question, and she answered them freely, her hands cupping my head, tilting it this way and that as she clipped. She’d grown up and gone to school in Cleveland. That’s where she’d met her husband, who was a jet mechanic at the air base. They’d been stationed in Turkey, then Germany, and now Fairford. This was the first place she’d been able to get a job of her own, which was a good thing too, she said, because her husband was in the habit of cheating on her with what she called “native women,” and she’d asked him for a divorce.

Was it the Sister Sledge / New Order mix tape that I brought her on my second visit that transformed me in her eyes from a client into a living subjectivity? Maybe. All I know is she didn’t complain about my returning every three or four days to get my bangs trimmed, with ever deeper and more challenging compilations in hand. She didn’t know Kraftwerk, or for that matter any German industrial music. It was when I suggested she give Einstürzende Neubauten a whirl that she said, “You’re cute.” That evening, Simon insisted she must have meant it in the diminutive sense, as you would speak to a child, not a prospective lover. But he hadn’t been there. He hadn’t seen her smile.

When I dropped another cassette off the next day, I enclosed a note asking if she would go on a date with me. I suggested we go to Oxford, imagining she might feel awkward being seen with me by the locals. I envisioned us holding hands on the night bus back to Carterton, perhaps with her head resting on my shoulder. I would absorb all her suffering, leaving her weightless, and free to love me. We had never touched, and yet she had already voided all of my worries but one: when I would see her next.

After forty-eight hours, she still hadn’t called. Desperate, I tried to make another appointment, but her colleague said she was booked up and couldn’t see me. That night, after the salon closed, I slipped another tape through the mail slot, this one starting with Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” along with a note apologizing for being too forward, saying I understood she might need time, given that her divorce wasn’t final. It was three days later, on a Saturday evening, that Simon and I saw her at the pub. She was with one of the other girls from the salon. I could tell she was trying to ignore me. But after she’d had a few drinks she relented, nodding hello from their table in the corner. Simon told me that I was crazy, that she was an older woman, and still married. Simon had a girlfriend, and they seemed to like each other, but I could tell from hanging out with them that he didn’t feel for her what I felt for Angie. They enjoyed each other, but they were still individuals. Their love hadn’t obliterated the quotidian; it hadn’t rid them of their workaday selves. That’s what Angie and I were capable of. She and her friend didn’t protest when I dragged Simon over to sit with them. They made us buy them drinks. Angie was tipsy but not drunk, and she didn’t move her leg aside when I touched it lightly with mine (of such miracles, strung endlessly together, true happiness is made). We talked about the deathly boredom of the Cotswolds and how Simon and I were going to move to London. When the publican barked last call, her friend said she hadn’t realized how late it was, and had to dash. Simon wisely did the same. Which left the two of us. She was taking the bus back to the base, she said. I asked if she would let me walk her to her stop. The thin fluorescent light that filtered through the scratched plastic siding of the bus shelter wasn’t strong enough to reveal her expression as we stood there watching the drizzle wet the pavement. And so it was with extreme trepidation, braced for rebuff, that I put a hand on her shoulder and leaned down to kiss her gently on the lips. But she closed her eyes and let it happen. After a moment she even put her hand to my arm, giving me the passing sense that I had a physical body.

Whatever psychic bandwidth I had for A levels vanished. I could think only of our future. I had curated my mix tapes for her with great care, but now they took whole afternoons. I needed to keep impressing her with my taste but demonstrate at the same time how much emotional experience we already shared. Those tapes were the line of flight out of the trap of language. Through the incision of music we could know and love each other much, much faster.

Each time I went by the salon to give her my latest cassette, she would thank me, take it quickly, and tell me she had a customer and couldn’t chat. I’d go every evening to the pub, risking the ire of Simon’s parents, and stay until closing, power-reading
The Mill on the Floss
by fake candlelight, waiting for her to appear. And on the nights that she did, she and her friend would sit with me again, kidding me about my exams, drinking more than I ever could, and Angie would let me walk her to the bus stop, and if no one was around, I got to kiss her, and sometimes hug her, too.

And yet to my consternation, she refused to let me take her on a full-on date. She kept using her husband as an excuse. But contained in each refusal, by the implication of her tone, was the one acknowledgment that counted: sooner or later we would see each other again.

I don’t know what most people mean when they use the word
love
. If they haven’t contorted their lives around a hope sharp enough to bleed them empty, then I think they’re just kidding. A hope that undoes what tiny pride you have, and makes you thankful for the undoing, so long as it promises another hour with the person who is now the world. Maybe people mean attractiveness, or affection, or pleasantness, or security. Like the nonbelievers in church who enjoy the hymns or go for the sense of community, but avert their eyes from the cross. I feel sorry for them. They are dead before their time.

As it happened, I didn’t do so well on my exams. Angie’s husband attempted to reconcile with her the week they started. I pleaded with her to go with me on the bus to Oxford, just for a single afternoon, and finally she relented. The day before my Modern History A level, I took her to the Debenhams on Magdalen Street. I had seen a fitted silk shirt in a catalog that Simon’s sister got in the mail, and I wanted to buy it for her, but she was crying intermittently and didn’t want any gifts. If you go back to your husband, nothing will change, I told her. He’ll keep you close for a while, and then cheat again. He wants to retain you for your physical beauty, but anyone can appreciate that. We’re on the threshold of something much greater. I may have confused her when I said our worlds could end as soon as we joined, but I meant only our life-worlds as separate subjectivities, not a material end. She told me I read too many novels, and led us out of Women’s Tops back onto the sidewalk.