On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous Read online

  We leave the Dunkin’ Donuts heavier with what we know of each other. But what you didn’t know was that, in fact, I had worn a dress before—and would do so again. That a few weeks earlier, I had danced in an old tobacco barn wearing a wine-red dress as my friend, a lanky boy with a busted eye, dizzily watched. I had salvaged the dress from your closet, the one you bought for your thirty-fifth birthday but never wore. I swirled in the sheer fabric while Trevor, perched on a stack of tires, clapped between drags on a joint, our collarbones lit sharply by a pair of cell phones placed on the floor dusted with dead moths. In that barn, for the first time in months, we weren’t afraid of anybody—not even ourselves. You steer the Toyota home, me silent beside you. It seems the rain will return this evening and all night the town will be rinsed, the trees lining the freeways dripping in the metallic dark. Over dinner, I’ll pull in my chair and, taking off my hood, a sprig of hay caught there from the barn weeks before will stick out from my black hair. You will reach over, brush it off, and shake your head as you take in the son you decided to keep.

  The living room was miserable with laughter. On the TV the size of a microwave, a sitcom blared a tinny and fabricated glee no one believed in. No one but Trevor’s dad, or rather, not so much believed, but surrendered to, chuckling in the La-Z-Boy, the bottle of Southern Comfort like a cartoon crystal in his lap. Each time he raised it, the brown drained, till only the warped colors from the TV flashed through the empty glass. He had a thick face and close-cropped pomaded hair, even at this hour. He looked like Elvis on his last day alive. The carpet under his bare feet shiny as spilled oil from years of wear.

  We were behind the old man, sitting on a makeshift couch salvaged from a totaled Dodge Caravan, passing a liter of Sprite between us, giggling and texting a boy in Windsor we’d never meet. Even from here, we could smell him, strong with drink and cheap cigars, and pretended he wasn’t there.

  “Go ahead, laugh.” Trevor’s dad barely moved, but his voice rumbled. We could feel it through the seat. “Go ahead, laugh at your father. Y’all laugh like seals.”

  I searched the back of his head, ringed with the chalky TV light, but saw no movement.

  “We not laughing at you, man.” Trevor winced and put the phone in his pocket. His hands dropped to their sides as if someone had brushed them off his knees. He glared at the back of the chair. From where we sat, only a fragment of the man’s head was visible, a grab of hair and a portion of his cheek, white as sliced turkey.

  “You gonna man me now, huh? You big, that it? You think I’m gone in my mind but I ain’t, boy. I hear you. I see things.” He coughed; a spray of liquor. “Don’t forget I was the best seal trainer at SeaWorld. Orlando ’85. Your mother was in the stands and I lifted her off her seat with my routine. My Navy Seals, them pups. I was the general of seals. That’s what she called me. The general. When I told them to laugh, they laughed.”

  An infomercial buzzed on the set, something about an inflatable Christmas tree that you could store in your pocket. “Who the hell would want to walk around with a goddamned Christmas tree in their pocket? Tired of this country.” His head rolled to one side, making a third fat roll appear on the back of his neck. “Hey—that boy with you? That China boy with you, huh? I know it. I hear him. He don’t talk but I hear him.” His arm shot up and I felt Trevor flinch through the couch cushion. The old man took another swig, the bottle long empty, but wiped his mouth anyway.

  “Your uncle James. You ’member James right?”

  “Yeah, sort of,” Trevor managed.

  “What’s that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That’s right.” The old man sank further into his chair, his hair shining. The heat from his body seemed to be radiating, filling the air. “Good man, made of bone, your uncle. Bone and salt. He whooped them in that jungle. He did good for us. He burned them up. You know that, Trev? That’s what it is.” He went back to being motionless, his lips moved without affecting any part of his face. “He told you yet? How he burned up four of them in a ditch with gasoline? He told me that on his wedding night, can you believe it?”

  I glanced at Trevor but saw only the back of his neck, his face hidden between his knees. He was aggressively tying his boots, the plastic stringheads ticking through the eyelets as his shoulders jerked.

  “But it’s changed now, I know that. I ain’t stupid, boy. I know you hate me too. I know.”

  [TV laughter]

  “Saw your mom two weeks ago. Gave her the keys to the storage in Windsor Locks. Don’t know why took so long to get her damn furniture. Oklahoma don’t look too good on that one.” He paused. Took another phantom swig. “I made you fine, Trev. I know I did.”

  “You smell like shit.” Trevor’s face went stone-like.

  “What’s that? What I say—”

  “Said you smell like shit, dude.” The TV lit Trevor’s face grey save for the scar on his neck, whose reddish-dark tint never changed. He got it when he was nine; his old man, in a fit of rage, shot a nail gun at the front door and the thing ricocheted. Blood so red, so everywhere, it was Christmas in June, he told me.

  “You heard me.” Trevor set the Sprite down on the carpet, tapped my chest, indicating we’re leaving.

  “You gonna talk like that now?” the old man sputtered, his eyes stuck on the screen.

  “The fuck you gonna do?” Trevor said. “Go ’head, do something, make me burn.” Trevor took a step toward the chair. He knew something I didn’t. “You done?”

  The old man breathed in place. The rest of the house was dark and still, like a hospital at night. After a moment he spoke, in a strange high-pitched whine. “I did good, baby.” His fingers fidgeted the armrest. The people in the sitcom danced off his slick hair.

  I thought I saw Trevor nod once or twice, but the TV could’ve been playing tricks.

  “You just like James. That’s right. I know. You a burner, you gonna burn them up.” His voice wobbled. “See that? That’s Neil Young. A legend. A warrior. You like him, Trev.” He motioned toward the poster by the hall as the door closed across him, clickless. We slipped into the frosted air, walked to our bikes, the old man droning on, muffled behind us.

  The pavement drifted out beneath our wheels. We said nothing as the maples, lit by sodium lamps, loomed red and windless above us. It felt good to be free of his old man’s presence.

  We rode along the Connecticut River as night broke into itself, the moon freshly high above the oaks, its edges hazed by an unseasonably warm autumn. The current churned with white froth to our right. Once in a while, after two or three weeks without rain, a body would float up from its depths, a bleached flash of a shoulder tapping the surface, and the families cooking out along the banks would stop, and a hush would come down along the children, and then someone would shout, “Oh god, oh god,” and someone else would call 911. And sometimes it’s a false alarm: a refrigerator rusted and lichen-stained to the shade of a brown face. And sometimes it’s the fish, gone belly-up in the thousands for no reason, the river-face iridescent overnight.

  I saw all the blocks in our city you were too busy at work to know about, blocks where things happend. Things even Trevor, having lived all his life on this side of the river, the white side, the one I was now riding on, never saw. I saw the lights on Asylum Ave., where there used to be an asylum (that was actually a school for the deaf) that caught fire and killed half a ward back in 18-something and to this day no one knows what caused it. But I know it as the street where my friend Sid lived with his family after they came over from India in ’95. How his mom, a schoolteacher back in New Delhi, went door-to-door, hobbling on her bloated diabetic feet selling hunting knives for Cutco to make ninety-seven dollars a week—cash. There were the Canino brothers, whose father was in jail for what seemed like two lifetimes for going seventy on a sixty-five in front of a state trooper on 91. That and the twenty bags of heroin and the Glock un
der his passenger seat. Still, still. There was Marin, who took the bus forty-five minutes each way to work at the Sears in Farmington, who always had gold around her neck and ears, whose high heels clacked like the slowest, most deliberate applause when she walked to the corner store for cigarettes and Hot Cheetos, her Adam’s apple jutting out, a middle finger to the men who called her faggot, called her homomaphedite. Who’d say, holding their daughter’s or son’s hand, “I’m gonna kill you, bitch, I’m gonna cut you, AIDS gonna take you out. Don’t sleep tonight, don’t sleep tonight, don’t sleep tonight. Don’t sleep.”

  We passed the tenement building on New Britain Ave. where we lived for three years. Where I rode my pink bike with training wheels up and down the linoleum halls so the kids on the block wouldn’t beat me up for loving a pink thing. I must’ve ridden down those halls a hundred times a day, the little bell clinking as I hit the wall at each end. How Mr. Carlton, the man who lived in the last apartment, kept coming out and yelling at me each day, saying, “Who are you? What are you doing here? Why don’t you do that outside? Who are you? You’re not my daughter! You’re not Destiny! Who are you?” But all that, the whole building, is gone now—replaced by a YMCA—even the tenement parking lot (where nobody parked since no one had cars), busted through with weeds nearly four feet high, is gone, all of it bulldozed and turned into a community garden with scarecrows made from mannequins thrown out by the dollar store off Bushnell. Entire families are swimming and playing handball where we used to sleep. People are doing butterfly strokes where Mr. Carlton eventually died, alone, in his bed. How no one knew for weeks until the whole floor started to reek and the SWAT team (I don’t know why) had to come bust down the door with guns. How for a whole month Mr. Carlton’s things were left out in a big iron dumpster out back, and a wooden hand-painted pony, its tongue-lolled face, peeked out of the dumpster’s top in the rain.

  Trevor and I kept riding, past Church St. where Big Joe’s sister OD’d, then the parking lot behind the MEGA XXXLOVE DEPOT where Sasha OD’d, the park where Jake and B-Rab OD’d. Except B-Rab lived, only to be caught, years later, stealing laptops from Trinity College and got four years in county—no parole. Which was heavy, especially for a white kid from the suburbs. There was Nacho, who lost his right leg in the Gulf War and whom you could find on weekends sliding under jack-raised cars with a skateboard at the Maybelle Auto Repair where he worked. Where he once pulled a beautiful screaming red-faced baby from the trunk of a Nissan left in the back of the shop during a blizzard. How he let his crutches fall and cradled the baby with both hands and the air held him up for the first time in years as the snow came down, then rose back up from the ground so bright that, for a blurred merciful hour, everyone in the city forgot why they were trying to get out of it.

  There’s Mozzicato’s on Franklin, where I had my first cannoli. Where nothing I knew ever died. Where I sat looking out the window one summer night from the fifth floor of our building, and the air was warm and sweet like it is now, and there were the low voices of young couples, their Converses and Air Force Ones tapping against each other on the fire escapes as they worked to make the body speak its other tongues, the sound of matches, or flames sparked from lighters the shape and shine of 9mms or Colt .45s, which was how we turned death into a joke, how we reduced fire to the size of cartoon raindrops, then sucked them through cigarillo tips, like myths. Because eventually the river rises here. It overflows to claim it all and to show us what we lost, like it always had.

  The bike spokes whirred. The smell of sewage from the water plant stung my eyes just before the wind did with it what it does with the names of the dead, swept it behind me.

  We crossed it, we left it all behind, the spokes ticking us deeper toward the suburbs. When we hit the pavement in East Hartford, the scent of wood smoke blown from the hills came down and cleared the mind. I stared at Trevor’s back as we rode, his brown UPS jacket, the one his daddy got from working there a week before getting fired after downing a six-pack on his break and waking up near midnight in a pile of cardboard boxes, now purplish under the moon.

  We made our way down Main Street. When we came upon the Coca-Cola bottling plant, its neon sign burning huge above the building, Trevor shouted, “Fuck Coca-Cola! Sprite for life, motherfucker!” He glanced back and laughed brokenly. “Yeah, fuck them,” I offered. But he didn’t hear.

  The streetlights fell away and the sidewalk led up to a grassy shoulder, which meant we’re heading up the hills, to the mansions. Soon we were deep in the burbs, in South Glastonbury, and the house lights started appearing, first as orange sparks flitting through the trees, but as we got closer, they grew into wide, fat sheets of gold. You could peer through these windows, windows free of steel bars, their curtains drawn wide open. Even from the street you could see the sparkling chandeliers, dining tables, multicolored Tiffany lamps shaded with decorative glass. The houses were so large you could look in all the windows and never see a single person.

  As we climbed the road up the steep hill, the starless sky opened up, the trees fell slowly back, and the houses grew further and further apart from one another. One set of neighbors was separated by an entire orchard, whose apples had already begun to rot across the fields, no one to pick them. The fruit rolled into the street where their flesh burst, pulped and browned, under the passing cars.

  We stopped at the top of one of the hills, exhausted. Moonlight appraised the orchard to our right. The apples glowed dimly on their branches, dropping here and there in quick thuds, their sweet fermented stink in our lungs. Deep in the oaks across the road, invisible tree frogs let out their rasped calls. We let our bikes drop and sat on a wooden fence along the road. Trevor lit a cigarette, drew from it, eyes closed, then passed the ruby bead toward my fingers. I sucked but coughed, my spit thick from the ride. The smoke warmed my lungs and my eyes settled on a cluster of mansions in the small valley before us.

  “They say Ray Allen lives up here,” Trevor said.

  “The basketball player, right?”

  “He played for UConn—dude probably has two cribs up here.”

  “Maybe he lives in that one,” I said, pointing the cigarette to the only darkened house at the edge of the valley. The house was almost invisible but for the white trim around its edges, like the skeleton of a prehistoric creature. Maybe Ray Allen is away, I thought, playing in the NBA and too busy to live in it. I passed the cigarette back.

  “If Ray Allen was my dad,” he said, his gaze still fixed on the bone house, “that’d be my house and you could always come and crash there.”

  “You already have a dad.”

  He flicked the roach on the road and looked away. It fell and broke into an orange gash on the pavement, then sputtered out.

  “Forget that guy, little man,” Trevor looked at me, soft, “he’s not worth it.”

  “Worth what?”

  “Getting pissed over, dude. Ah—score!” He took out a mini Snickers from his coat pocket. “Must’ve been here since last Halloween.”

  “Who said I was?”

  “He just got his things, you know?” He pointed the Snickers to his head. “The drink gets to him.”

  “Yeah. I guess.” The tree frogs seemed further away, smaller.

  Some kind of quiet sharpened between us.

  “Hey, don’t do the fuckin’ silent thing, man. It’s a fag move. I mean—” A frustrated sigh escaped him. He bit into the Snickers. “Want half?”

  By way of reply I opened my mouth. He placed the thumb-sized morsel on my tongue, wiped his lips with his wrist, and looked away.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said, chewing.

  He was about to say something else, his teeth grey pills in the moonlight, then got up and stumbled toward his bike. I picked up my own, the steel already wet with dew, and that’s when I saw it. Actually, Trevor saw it first, letting out an almost imperceptible gasp. I turned around and we b
oth just stood there leaning against our bikes.

  It was Hartford. It was a cluster of light that pulsed with a force I never realized it possessed. Maybe it was because his breaths were so clear to me then, how I imagined the oxygen in his throat, his lungs, the bronchi and blood vessels expanding, how it moved through all the places I’ll never see, that I keep returning to this most basic measurement of life, even long after he’s gone.

  But for now, the city brims before us with a strange, rare brilliance—as if it was not a city at all, but the sparks made by some god sharpening his weapons above us.

  “Fuck,” Trevor whispered. He put his hands in his pockets and spat on the ground.

  “Fuck.”

  The city throbbed, shimmered. Then, trying to snap himself out of it, he said, “Fuck Coca-Cola.”

  “Yeah, Sprite for life, fuckers,” I added, not knowing then what I know now: that Coca-Cola and Sprite were made by the same damn company. That no matter who you are or what you love or where you stand, it was always Coca-Cola in the end.

  Trevor rusted pickup and no license.

  * * *

  Trevor sixteen; blue jeans streaked with deer blood.

  * * *

  Trevor too fast and not enough.

  * * *

  Trevor waving his John Deere cap from the driveway as you ride by on your squeaky Schwinn.

  * * *

  Trevor who fingered a freshman girl then tossed her underwear in the lake for fun.

  * * *

  For summer. For your hands

  * * *

  were wet and Trevor’s a name like an engine starting up in the night. Who snuck out to meet a boy like you. Yellow and barely there. Trevor going fifty through his daddy’s wheat field. Who jams all his fries into a Whopper and chews with both feet on the gas. Your eyes closed, riding shotgun, the wheat a yellow confetti.