Imagine Me Gone (26 page)

I shook my head.

“This guy next to me totally cruised me. Seriously. He gave me a blow job in the parking lot at 128. We exchanged, like, three words.”

“That’s gross.”

“Oh my God,” he said. “You are
so
homophobic.”

“Oh, please. He could have murdered you.”

“And that makes it
gross?
”

“It’s just a little extreme,” I said. “Like maybe you’re acting out.”

“I thought you worked with Bay Area homeless kids. How is this extreme?”

“You don’t prostitute yourself to pay your rent.”

“That may change,” he said.

“Whatever. My point is, is this really what you want to be engaging in? Wouldn’t you rather have a boyfriend?”

He gaped at me, incredulous. In my exhaustion I had walked right into it—the blithe demonstration of my heterosexual privilege in suggesting such a thing was so readily had, when I knew well enough that it wasn’t. But here he was, attractive and articulate and employed, and I didn’t get why he couldn’t find someone else like that in all of New York City. It was half the reason he’d moved there. So why was he exposing himself to these random encounters?

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I take it, then, you’re not seeing anyone at the moment?”

“No,” he said, fiddling with his cuticles.

“Could you stop that picking?” I said.

“Okay—something is clearly up with you. What is it? Paul?”

“No. I’m pregnant.”

He glanced from his hands straight into my eyes, testing my sincerity. When he realized it was true, his mouth fell open. “You’re shitting me,” he said. “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? Are you saying you might have a
child?
”

“Well, I’m not going to have a
deer
. You say
child
like it’s a disease. You sound like Michael.”

“Okay, let’s just say, that would be a game changer. Procreation?”

Seeing his reaction, I felt almost giddy, as if all of a sudden my escape vessel was complete, and I’d made it out onto the open water, free at last. What better veto of filial duty than an infant?

Officially, Alec and I were no longer competitive. To be explicit about it would seem petty. But it still squirreled its way into moments like this, when the battle became primal again, and we struggled, pulling each other together because that’s what we’d always done to get through, and pushing each other away to convince ourselves over and over that we were more than just functions of a loss.

“I haven’t decided,” I said, generously, not wanting to scare him any further. “But who knows? Maybe it would be good for all of us. You’re the one saying we don’t think enough about the future.”

This took him a moment to digest.

On the table beside him, next to the fluted lamp with the hexagonal shade of waterfowl, the picture of a younger Dad stared from behind the glass of a studio portrait. He must have had it done for some business venture. Mom had found it in his papers and had it framed. We didn’t do family photographs on the mantelpiece or the walls. This was the only one. It occurred to me in a way it hadn’t before that my father would have liked Paul. They would have gotten along. Paul would have been able to reassure him that he was a reliable person, trustworthy, an observer of the social contract. Nothing awkward would have arisen. If Dad had been well enough to focus on the fact long enough, he would have been politely happy at news of a grandchild.

“Well, that is a stunner,” Alec said.

He had ceased his fidgeting, oblivious to the dull horn of his mask that still poked from his forehead. The house had gone quiet around us.

“I love you,” he said. “For whatever it’s worth.”

Michael

AFTER-ACTION REPORT

Operation Family Therapy

Mission:
Enhanced communication / familial well-being

Outcome:
Pending

1. After taking cannon fire from a beached dreadnought on Mass. Ave. two klicks east of Central Square (allegiance and origin unknown), Mom continued to operate our down-armored Honda at below regulation speed and ordered the commencement of a routine park-and-destroy mission. The entire unit was placed on alert. Multiple initial space sightings proved false. We tacked south into Cambridgeport, keeping to side streets. Weather was hibernal. Birds were occasional. Eighteen minutes out from rendezvous a viable space was ID’d in front of a deli. Mom was skeptical but maneuvered the vehicle into position. As she shifted into reverse, a VW sedan driven by an irregular nosed into the designated space behind us. Mom immediately launched a DEFCON 1 verbal barrage, which backfired against the closed windows, causing multiple casualties. Celia was swiftly medevaced to Ramstein Air Base for a laparoscopic frontal-lobe transplant and returned to active duty four minutes later. Others ran for psychic cover only to find the terrain on fire. Fog of war. Following the skirmish, tensions in the little platoon rose. Trying to regroup, Alec commenced a psyop designed to convince Mom that an open stretch of curb downwind of a laundromat ended more than twelve feet from the adjacent hydrant. The operation failed. Mom ordered a higher alert. Celia observed that we had been on one for a decade. Eleven minutes out, Alec suggested we consider PAYING for a garage space. At this point, command and control began to break down. Mom hissed aloud, Who are all these people? I suggested they might be people who lived in the neighborhood. Seven minutes to rendezvous, after Mom had threatened to drop us off and go on alone, an enemy sport-utility vehicle bearing a Dole/Kemp sticker vacated a meter in front of Crate and Barrel. Alec leapt from the vehicle to secure the perimeter and Mom backed our transport into the slot.

2. Unit reached the training facility on time. Decor was South by Southwest (Naugahyde couch, Sierra throw). Vaginal imagery detected in wall hangings. Waiting room ransacked for war loot; none found. I suggested that Mom read
Field and Stream
to kill the additional minute and thirty seconds. Mom nonresponsive. Mortar fire heard from the direction of the Charles River; presumed friendly. Five minutes after scheduled rendezvous, a woman uniformed in Geiger jacket and pearls, presumed hostile, exited the training office with no visible wounds. Engaging unilaterally, Alec kneecapped her with a bronze Navajo sculpture. Body stored in closet. Mustachioed training officer, balding, presumed neutral, then escorted the unit into a semicircle of modernist sitting furniture. Coffee table, presumed original, bore a leather, presumed Naugahyde, box of Kleenex. Unit ID’d itself by rank and serial number. Training officer’s diplomas were too far away to make out; presumed valid. Training officer, smiling, introduced himself and asked us to call him Gus. Silence. Gus requested a report from each member of the unit regarding what we considered our mission to be. Rear Admiral Celia appeared depressed and drained in these opening minutes of the engagement. PTSD from park-and-destroy mission not to be ruled out.

3. She nonetheless reported out her sense of our situation: (1) unit cohesion, and affect of individual soldiers (me), still questionable years after resignation of the co-commander. Elephant still in the room. Ghost still in the basement; (2) retraining required to improve overall performance. Alec generally concurred. Mom said something about having nothing against talking. In an effort to get her to elaborate, Gus referred to Dad as her “life partner.” Man, was that a mistake. The phrase grated violently on the brain of the unit, causing instant suspicion that the training officer might be a New Age–language infectee, thus unable to survive Mom’s judgment and impotent to assist us. Gus asked what was so funny. It’s nothing, Mom said, it’s just that I would never refer to John that way.

4. Mom ordered by Gus to Reeducation Camp Worcester to meet disciplinary standards for therapeutic self-description. Junior members of the unit did not object. Countermanding the instruction, however, Mom ordered a cruise-missile strike from the USS
Passive Disdain,
a destroyer under her command presently operating in the waters off Cape Cod. Camp Worcester reported leveled.

5. Adult acne became general. Scattered reports of giardia, stress fractures, and hair loss.

6. During initial interrogation, Alec informed Gus that he was gay. Celia responded by observing that we were here to discuss things we didn’t already know. Resulting friendly fire caused minor damage to decor and fenestration. Mom seen wincing at loss of family privacy. Gus asked if Alec had anything he wanted to say to the family as a whole on this subject. The PFC reported that, yes, in fact, he had kept much of his struggle to himself, in tacit deference to the hierarchy in which Dad’s resignation still ranked above all other battle wounds.

7. Records indicated that the little wheezer had come out to Subcomandante Celia first, somewhere back during the Opium War of his middle adolescence. According to later reporting, he had suggested to her he would end up a closet case in light of his ambition to join the Senate (may he be forgiven). Second up was his reveal to Mom (a conversation about which the less imagined the better). Only after he had gone to college did he bring it up with me. I was driving us to the cineplex one summer evening in the Cutlass. He asked if I had met anyone at BC, and if Caleigh was my girlfriend. This came as a surprise, given that he and I never talked about such things, his being his larval, stripling self—boy pretender to the empty throne—and my being generally ashamed. He was single, he said, knuckling bravely through the awkwardness of talking with me about it. And it turned out, he said, looking away from me and out his window, that he was attracted to men. We had just passed the house of one of his high school friends, a precocious fan of Stüssy gear, pretty in a Duran Duran sort of way, whom I remembered him being particularly fond of, and I was saddened at the thought of the little fidget-buster being lonely. I told him that I approved of homosexuality as a counter-hegemonic subject position. That it constituted one of the key sites of resistance to patriarchy, and should be understood as a revolutionary stance. In retrospect, I could have used a more personal touch. He might have wanted something more from me, given the absence of the father function.

8. Moving on, Gus noted that I had yet to describe my own sense of the unit’s mission. Searching for cover, I found none. The night before, after Commodore Celia had granted me leave to discuss Bethany in our session, I had stayed in my old room listening to her favorite Aphex Twin tracks, and trying to read a little Althusser. After repeated tries, Caleigh finally answered the phone at her parents’ house, where she’d gone for Christmas. To my disappointment, her instructions were to heed Celia’s advice: own up already to the hollowness of the salvific fantasy of romance, to its childishness. And take to heart what Celia kept implying: that my lamentation was misplaced, that the loss of Bethany was a stand-in for the older grief, a loss I was bound to repeat until I let its real object surface. This, of course, was a Freudianism straight out of basic training, and a principle I readily accepted. The problem being that basic training had so little to do with actual combat. My intellectual grasp of my situation never seemed to hold much. Life kept slipping through it. And in life, I needed Bethany. Because she could let me love her now, in the present. And even if doctrine held that this love wouldn’t give me back everything I’d lost, what if it did? After Caleigh tired of my resistance, and we said good night, I took my meds and fell into a dream-soaked slumber. I found myself at an auction. A stage, or block, had been erected at the back of a Christian Dior boutique in old Charleston. There, up on the platform, naked and glistening in the spotlight, was Bethany. Some bidders snapped photographs. Others stepped close to appraise the tone of her muscles. White women in beautifully cut dresses made disparaging remarks about the condition of her hair. Meanwhile, on the wall behind her, between two glass display cases of couture gowns, blood ran from the palms of a High Gothic Jesus, skeletal and pale. No one seemed to notice him. I tried taking suits from the rack to cover Bethany, to shelter her from the eyes of the crowd, but the saleswoman told me I had to purchase the merchandise before using it. At which point a hole opened in my chest, and I vomited into the hole, the hot liquid circulating back up through my heart and neck into my head. Bethany crumpled to her knees by the footlights, bowed and silent. All I could do was stand there, failing to save her.

9. Deciding it might be best to skip my dream sequence, I told Gus I concurred with Celia. Airing the effects of the past was long overdue. As Marx tells us, the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare upon the brains of the living. I was all for the discussion of transgenerational haunting. It was just hard to focus at the moment owing to a woman in Ohio I needed to visit.