On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous Page 10
* * *
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The boy is standing in a tiny yellow kitchen in Hartford. Still a toddler, the boy laughs, believing they are dancing. He remembers this—because who can forget the first memory of their parents? It was not until the blood ran from his mother’s nose, turning her white shirt the color of Elmo he had seen on Sesame Street, that he started to scream. Then his grandmother rushed in, grabbed him, and ran past her reddening daughter, the man shouting over her, out to the balcony, then down the back steps, shouting in Vietnamese, “He’s killing my girl! God, god! He’s killing her.” People ran from all over, from their stoops down the block to the three-story apartment; Tony the mechanic from across the street with the wrecked arm, Junior’s father, Miguel, and Roger, who lived above the convenience store. They all rushed over and pulled the father off his mother.
The ambulances came, the boy, hoisted to his grandmother’s hip, watched the officers approach his father with guns drawn, how his father waved a bloody twenty-dollar bill, the way he did back in Saigon where the cops would take the money, tell the boy’s mother to calm down and take a walk, then leave as if nothing happened. The boy watched as the American officers tackled his father, the money slipping out in the tussle and landing on the sidewalk lit by sulfur lights. Focused on the brown-and-green money-leaf on the pavement, half expecting it to fly up, back onto a winter tree, the boy did not see his father cuffed, dragged up to his feet, his head pushed into the patrol car. He saw only the crumpled money, until a neighbor girl in pigtails swiped it when no one was looking. The boy looked up to find his mother being carried out by paramedics, her broken face floating past him on the stretcher.
* * *
—
In his backyard, an empty dirt field beside a freeway overpass, I watched Trevor aim his .32 Winchester at a row of paint cans lined on an old park bench. I did not know then what I know now: to be an American boy, and then an American boy with a gun, is to move from one end of a cage to another.
He tugged at the visor of his Red Sox cap, his lips scrunched. A porch light reflected on the barrel a small white star in the faraway-dark, which rose and fell as he aimed. This is what we did on nights like this, a Saturday with no sound for miles. I sat on a milk crate sipping Dr Pepper and watched him empty one cartridge after another into metal. Where the rifle’s butt recoiled against his shoulder, his green Whalers T-shirt wrinkled, the creases grabbing with each shot.
The cans leaped one by one off the bench. I watched, recalling a story Mr. Buford told us back on the farm. Years ago, hunting in Montana, Buford found a moose in his trap. A male. He spoke slowly, rubbing his white stubble, describing how the trap had cut off the moose’s hind leg—a sound like a wet stick snapping, he said—save for a few stringy pink ligaments. The animal groaned against its body, which, bleeding and torn, was suddenly a prison. It raged, fat tongue lolling out a voice. “Almost like a man’s,” Buford said, “like you and me.” He glanced at his grandson, then at the ground, his plate of beans speckled with ants.
He put down his rifle, he explained, and took out the double barrel holstered to his back and steadied. But the buck noticed him and charged, tearing its leg clean off. It ran right at him before he could aim, then veered toward a clearing and broke through the trees, hobbling on what was left of itself.
Like you and me, I said to no one.
“I got lucky,” Buford said. “Three legs be damned, those things can kill ya.”
In the backyard, Trevor and I sat on the grass, passing a joint sprinkled with crushed Oxy. With the back blown clean off, only the legs remained of the bench. Four legs, without a body.
* * *
—
A week after the first time, we did it again. His cock in my hand, we began. My grip tightened around the covers. And that inertia of his skin, damp-tight against my own, made the task feel, not merely of fucking, but of hanging on. The inside of his cheek, where the flesh was softest, tasted like cinnamon gum and wet stones. I reached down and felt the cockslit. When I rubbed the warming globe, he shivered against himself. Out of nowhere, he grabbed my hair, my head jerked back in his grip. I let out a clipped yelp, and he stopped, his hand hovering beside my face, hesitant.
“Keep going,” I said, and leaned back, offering it all. “Grab it.”
I can’t make sense of what I felt. The force and torque, of pain gathered toward a breaking point, a sensation I never imagined was a part of sex. Something took over and I told him to do it harder. And he did. He lifted me nearly off the bed by the roots of my follicles. With each slam, a light turned on and off inside me. I flickered, like a bulb in a storm, seeking myself in his steering. He let go of my hair only to put his arm under my neck. My lips brushed his forearm and I could taste the salt concentrated there. Recognition flinched inside him. This is how we were going to do it from now on.
What do you call the animal that, finding the hunter, offers itself to be eaten? A martyr? A weakling? No, a beast gaining the rare agency to stop. Yes, the period in the sentence—it’s what makes us human, Ma, I swear. It lets us stop in order to keep going.
Because submission, I soon learned, was also a kind of power. To be inside of pleasure, Trevor needed me. I had a choice, a craft, whether he ascends or falls depends on my willingness to make room for him, for you cannot rise without having something to rise over. Submission does not require elevation in order to control. I lower myself. I put him in my mouth, to the base, and peer up at him, my eyes a place he might flourish. After a while, it is the cocksucker who moves. And he follows, when I sway this way he swerves along. And I look up at him as if looking at a kite, his entire body tied to the teetering world of my head.
He loves me, he loves me not, we are taught to say, as we tear the flower away from its flowerness. To arrive at love, then, is to arrive through obliteration. Eviscerate me, we mean to say, and I’ll tell you the truth. I’ll say yes. “Keep going,” I begged. “Fuck me up, fuck me up.” By then, violence was already mundane to me, was what I knew, ultimately, of love. Fuck. Me. Up. It felt good to name what was already happening to me all my life. I was being fucked up, at last, by choice. In Trevor’s grip, I had a say in how I would be taken apart. So I said it: “Harder. Harder,” until I heard him gasp, as if surfacing from a nightmare we swore was real.
* * *
—
After he came, when he tried to hold me, his lips on my shoulder, I pushed him away, pulled my boxers on, and went to rinse my mouth.
Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you’ve been ruined.
* * *
—
Then, one afternoon, out of nowhere, Trevor asked me to top him, the way we had been doing it, which we now called fake fucking. He lay on his side. I spat in my palm and snuggled up to him. I was only up to his neck in height, but lying down, spooning, our heads met. I kissed his shoulders, made my way to his neck, where his hair ended, as some boys’ do, with the strands whittled down to a small half-inch tail at the nape. It was the part that shone like wheat-tips touched by sunlight, while the rest of his head, with its fuller hair, stayed dark brown. I flicked my tongue under it. How could such a hard-stitched boy possess something so delicate, made entirely of edges, of endings? Between my lips, it was a bud sprouted from inside him, possible. This part is the good part of Trevor, I thought. Not the squirrel shooter. Not the one who axed up what was left of the shot-up park bench to splinters. The one who, in a fit of rage I can’t recall the cause of, shoved me into a snowbank on our walk back from the corner store. This part, this flick of hair, was what made him stop his truck in the middle of traffic to stare at a six-foot sunflower on the side of the road, his mouth slack. Who told me sunflowers were his favorite because they grew higher than people. Who ran his fingers so gently down their lengths I thought red blood pulsed inside the stalks.
But it was over before it began. Before my
tip brushed his greased palm, he tensed, his back a wall. He pushed me back, sat up. “Fuck.” He stared straight ahead.
“I can’t. I just—I mean . . .” He spoke into the wall. “I dunno. I don’t wanna feel like a girl. Like a bitch. I can’t, man. I’m sorry, it’s not for me—” He paused, wiped his nose. “It’s for you. Right?”
I pulled the covers to my chin.
I had thought sex was to breach new ground, despite terror, that as long as the world did not see us, its rules did not apply. But I was wrong.
The rules, they were already inside us.
Soon the Super Nintendo was on. Trevor’s shoulders shook as he hammered away at the controller. “Hey. Hey, Little Dog,” he said after a while. Then, softly, still fixed on the game: “I’m sorry. Okay?”
On the screen, a tiny red Mario jumped from platform to platform. If Mario fell off, he would have to start the level over, from the beginning. This was also called dying.
* * *
—
The boy ran away from home one night. He ran with no plans. In his backpack were a bag of Cheerios taken out the box, a pair of socks, and two Goosebumps paperbacks. Although he could not read chapter books yet, he knew how far a story could take him, and holding these books meant there were at least two more worlds he could eventually step into. But because he was ten, he made it only to the playscape behind his elementary school twenty minutes away.
After sitting on the swings for a while in the dark, the creaking chain the only sound, he climbed one of the nearby maples. The leafy branches jostled around him as he climbed. Halfway up, he stopped and listened to the neighborhood, a pop song coming from an apartment window across the lot, traffic from the nearby freeway, a woman calling in a dog or a child.
Then the boy heard footsteps on dried leaves. He pulled his knees up close and hugged the trunk. He held still and stared down, cautious, through the bows, which were dusty and grey from the city’s smog. It was his grandmother. Motionless, she looked up, one eye open, searching. It was too dark to see him. She seemed so small, a misplaced doll, as she swayed, squinting.
“Little Dog,” she said in a whisper-shout. “You up there, Little Dog?” She craned her neck, then looked away, at the freeway in the distance. “Your mom. She not normal okay? She pain. She hurt. But she want you, she need us.” She stirred in place. The leaves crackled. “She love you, Little Dog. But she sick. Sick like me. In the brains.” She examined her hand, as if to make sure it still existed, then dropped it.
The boy, hearing this, pressed his lips to the cold bark to keep from crying.
She pain, the boy thought, mulling over her words. How can anyone be a feeling? The boy said nothing.
“You don’t need to be scared, Little Dog. You smarter than me.” Something crinkled. In her arms, held like a baby, was a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos. In her other hand was a Poland Spring water bottle filled with warm jasmine tea. She kept muttering to herself, “You don’t need to be scared. No need.”
Then she stopped and trained her eyes on him.
They watched each other between the shivered leaves. She blinked once. The branches clacked and clacked, then stopped.
* * *
—
Do you remember the happiest day of your life? What about the saddest? Do you ever wonder if sadness and happiness can be combined, to make a deep purple feeling, not good, not bad, but remarkable simply because you didn’t have to live on one side or the other?
Main Street was empty the night Trevor and I rode our bikes down the middle of the road, our tires swallowing the fat yellow lanes as we sped. It was seven p.m., which meant there were only five hours left of Thanksgiving Day. Our breaths smoked above us. With each inhale, the pungent wood fires made a bright note in my lungs. Trevor’s old man was back at the trailer, in front of the football game, eating TV dinners with bourbon and Diet Coke.
My reflection warped over the storefront glass as we rode. The stoplights blinked yellow and the only sound was the clicking spokes beneath us. We rode back and forth like that, and for a stupid moment it felt like that strip of concrete called Main Street was all we ever possessed, all that held us. Mist came down, diffracted the streetlights into huge, van Gogh orbs. Trevor, ahead of me, stood up on his bike, arms out on both sides, and shouted, “I’m flying! Hey, I’m flying!” His voice cracked as he mimicked the scene in Titanic where the girl stands at the bow of the ship. “I’m flying, Jack!” he shouted.
After a while Trevor stopped pedaling and let his bike slide to a stop, arms at his side.
“I’m starving.”
“Me too,” I said.
“There’s a gas station up there.” He pointed to a Shell station ahead of us. Surrounded by the vast night, it looked like a spaceship had crashed on the side of the street.
Inside, we watched two frozen egg-and-cheese sandwiches spin together in the microwave. The old white lady at the counter asked us where we were headed.
“Home,” Trevor said. “My mom’s stuck in traffic so just getting a snack before she comes for dinner.” The woman’s eyes flicked over me as she handed him the change. Trevor’s mom moved to Oklahoma with her boyfriend almost five years ago.
On the stoop of a dentist’s office, across the street from a shuttered Friendly’s, we unwrapped our sandwiches. Warm cellophane crinkled around our hands. We chewed, stared into the restaurant windows, where a poster of a sundae advertised a ghastly green “Colossal Leprechaun Mint Boat” from last March. I held my sandwich close, letting the steam blur my vision.
“Do you think we’ll still hang out when we’re a hundred?” I said without thinking.
He flung the wrapper, which caught the wind and blew back atop the bush beside him. Right away I regretted asking. Swallowing, he said, “People don’t live to a hundred.” He ripped open a packet of ketchup, squeezed a thin red line over my sandwich.
“True.” I nodded.
Then I heard the laughter. It came from a house on the street behind us.
The clear voices of children, two, maybe three, then a man’s—a father? They were playing in the backyard. Not a game, exactly, but an embodiment of vague excitement, the kind known only to very young children, where delight rushes through them simply by running across an empty field not yet recognized as a tiny backyard in a shitty part of town. From their shrill cries, they were no older than six, an age where one could be ecstatic just by moving. They were little bells struck to singing, it seems, by air itself.
“That’s enough. That’s enough for tonight,” the man said, at which the voices immediately faded. The sound of a screen door slamming. The quiet flooded back. Trevor beside me, his head in his hands.
We rode home, the streetlights here and there above us. That day was a purple day—neither good nor bad, but something we passed through. I pedaled faster, I moved, briefly unmoored. Trevor, beside me, was singing the 50 Cent song.
His voice sounded oddly young, as if it had come back from a time before I met him. As if I could turn and find a boy with a denim jacket laundered by his mom, detergent wafting up and through his hair still blond above baby-plump cheeks, training wheels rattling on the pavement.
I joined him.
“Many men, many, many, many, many men.”
We sang, nearly shouting the lyrics, the wind clipping at our voices. They say a song can be a bridge, Ma. But I say it’s also the ground we stand on. And maybe we sing to keep ourselves from falling. Maybe we sing to keep ourselves.
“Wish death ’pon me. Lord I don’t cry no more, don’t look to the sky no more. Have mercy on me.”
In the blue living rooms we passed, the football game was dying down.
“Blood in my eye dawg and I can’t see.”
In the blue living rooms, some people won and some people lost.
In this way, autumn passed.
* * *
—
Inside a single-use life, there are no second chances. That’s a lie but we live it. We live anyway. That’s a lie but the boy opens his eyes. The room a grey-blue smear. There’s music coming through the walls. Chopin, the only thing she listens to. The boy climbs out of bed and the corners of the room tilt on an axis, like a ship. But he knows this too is a trick he’s making of himself. In the hallway, where the spilled lamp reveals a black mess of broken vinyl 45s, he looks for her. In her room, the covers on the bed are pulled off, the pink lace comforter piled on the floor. The night-light, only halfway in its socket, flickers and flickers. The piano drips its little notes, like rain dreaming itself whole. He makes his way to the living room. The record player by the love seat skips as it spins a record long driven to its end, the static intensifying as he approaches. But Chopin goes on, somewhere beyond reach. He follows it, head tilted for the source. And there, on the kitchen table, beside the gallon of milk on its side, the liquid coming down in white strings like a tablecloth in a nightmare, a red eye winking. The stereo she bought at Goodwill, the one that fits in her apron pocket as she works, the one she slides under her pillowcase during rainstorms, the Nocturnes growing louder after each thunderclap. It sits in the pool of milk, as if the music was composed for it alone. In the boy’s single-use body, anything’s possible. So he covers the eye with his finger, to make sure he’s still real, then he takes the radio. The music in his hands dripping milk, he opens the front door. It is summer. The strays beyond the railroad are barking, which means something, a rabbit or possum, has just slipped out of its life and into the world. The piano notes seep through the boy’s chest as he makes his way to the backyard. Because something in him knew she’d be there. That she was waiting. Because that’s what mothers do. They wait. They stand still until their children belong to someone else.