On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous Read online

  I asked her what she was thinking. As if waking from a sleepless dream, she answered in a gutted monotone. “I used to be a girl, Little Dog. You know?”

  “Okay, Grandma, I know—” But she wasn’t listening.

  “I used to put a flower in my hair and walk in the sun. After big rain, I walk in the sun. The flower I put on my ear. So wet, so cool.” Her eyes drifted from me. “It’s a stupid thing.” She shook her head. “Stupid thing. To be a girl.” After a while, she turned back to me as if remembering I was there. “You eat yet?”

  * * *

  —

  We try to preserve life—even when we know it has no chance of enduring its body. We feed it, keep it comfortable, bathe it, medicate it, caress it, even sing to it. We tend to these basic functions not because we are brave or selfless but because, like breath, it is the most fundamental act of our species: to sustain the body until time leaves it behind.

  I’m thinking now of Duchamp, his infamous “sculpture.” How by turning a urinal, an object of stable and permanent utility, upside down, he radicalized its reception. By further naming it Fountain, he divested the object of its intended identity, rendering it with an unrecognizable new form.

  I hate him for this.

  I hate how he proved that the entire existence of a thing could be changed simply by flipping it over, revealing a new angle to its name, an act completed by nothing else but gravity, the very force that traps us on this earth.

  Mostly, I hate him because he was right.

  Because that’s what was happening to Lan. The cancer had refigured not only her features, but the trajectory of her being. Lan, turned over, would be dust the way even the word dying is nothing like the word dead. Before Lan’s illness, I found this act of malleability to be beautiful, that an object or person, once upturned, becomes more than its once-singular self. This agency for evolution, which once made me proud to be the queer yellow faggot that I was and am, now betrays me.

  * * *

  —

  Sitting with Lan, my mind slides, unexpectedly, to Trevor. Trevor who by then had been dead just seven months. I think of the first time we had sex, not with his cock in my palm like we usually did, but for real. It was the September after my second season on the farm.

  The crop was all hung, packed from beam to beam to the rafters, their leaves already wrinkled, the green, once deep and lush in the fields, now dulled to the shade of old uniforms. It was time to fire the coals and speed the curing process. This required that someone stay all night in the barn, burning briquettes piled in tin pie plates set eight or ten feet apart across the dirt floor. Trevor had asked me to come hang out for the night while he stoked the coals. All around us the heaps burned, glowing red and flickering each time a draft made its pass through the slats. The sweet scent swelled as the heat warped its way toward the roof.

  It was past midnight by the time we found ourselves on the barn’s floor, the oil lamp’s gold halo holding off the dark around us. Trevor leaned in. I parted my lips in anticipation but he left them untouched, going lower this time, until his teeth grazed the skin below my neck. This was before I knew how far into the year those incisors would sink, before I knew the heat in that boy’s marrow, his knuckled American rage, his father’s inclination for weeping on the front porch after three Coronas while the Patriots crackled on the radio and a hardback of Dean Koontz’s Fear Nothing sat by his side, before the old man found Trevor passed out in the Chevy’s truck bed in a thunderstorm, the water lapping at his boy’s ears as he dragged him through the mud, the ambulance, the hospital room, the heroin hot in Trevor’s veins. Before he would come out of the hospital, clean for a whole three months before hitting it again.

  The air, close and thick from the summer’s last heat, whistled low through the barn. I pressed myself into his sunbaked skin, still warm from the day in the field. His teeth, ivory and unrotted, nibbled my chest, nipples, stomach. And I let him. Because nothing could be taken from me, I thought, if I had already given it away. Our clothes fell off us like bandages.

  “Let’s just do it.” On top of me, his voice strained as he struggled to kick off his boxers.

  I nodded.

  “I’ll be slow, okay?” His mouth a gash of youth. “I’ll be easy.”

  I turned—tentative, thrilled—toward the dirt floor, planted my forehead on my arm, and waited.

  My shorts at my ankles, Trevor postured up behind me, his pubes brushing against me. He spat several times into his hand, rubbed the spit between my legs until everything was thick and slick and undeniable.

  I put my head back down. The scent of dirt from the barn floor, notes of spilled beer and iron-rich soil as I listened to the wet clicks of his cock as he stroked his spit along its length.

  When he pushed I felt myself scream—but didn’t. Instead, my mouth was full of salted skin, then the bone underneath as I bit down on my arm. Trevor stopped, not yet all the way in, sat up, and asked if I was okay.

  “I dunno,” I said into the floor, panting.

  “Don’t cry on me again. Don’t you cry on me now.” He spat another wad, let it fall on his length. “Let’s try again. If it’s bad we’ll stop for good.”

  “Okay.”

  He pushed, deeper this time, pushed his weight down hard—and slid inside me. The pain sparked white in the back of my head. I bit down, my wrist bone touched the contours of my teeth.

  “I’m in. I’m in, little man.” His voice cracked into the whisper-shout terror of a boy who got exactly what he wanted. “I’m in,” he said, astonished. “I can feel it. Fuck. Oh fuck.”

  I told him to hold still as I braced against the dirt floor and gathered myself. The pain shot out from between my legs.

  “Let’s keep going,” he said. “I gotta keep going. I don’t wanna stop.”

  Before I could respond he was pumping again, his arms planted on each side of my head, the heat pulsing from them as he worked. He was wearing his gold cross, the one he never takes off, and it kept poking at my cheek. So I took it in my mouth to keep it steady. It tasted like rust, salt, and Trevor. The sparks in my head bloomed with each thrust. After a while, the pain melted into a strange ache, a weightless numbness that swept through me like a new, even warmer season. The feeling brought on, not by tenderness, as from caress, but by the body having no choice but to accommodate pain by dulling it into an impossible, radiating pleasure. Getting fucked in the ass felt good, I learned, when you outlast your own hurt.

  What Simone Weil said: Perfect joy excludes even the very feeling of joy, for in the soul filled by the object, no corner is left for saying “I.”

  As he heaved above me I unconsciously reached back to touch myself, to make sure I was still there, still me, but my hand found Trevor instead—as if by being inside me, he was this new extension of myself. The Greeks thought sex was the attempt of two bodies, separated long ago, to return to one life. I don’t know if I believe this but that’s what it felt like: as if we were two people mining one body, and in doing so, merged, until no corner was left saying I.

  Then, about ten minutes in, as Trevor went faster, our skin sucking with humid sweat, something happened. A scent rose up to my head, strong and deep, like soil, but sharp with flaw. I knew right away what it was, and panicked. In the heat of it, I didn’t think, didn’t yet know how to prepare myself. The porn clips I had seen never showed what it took to arrive where we were. They just did it—quick, immediate, sure, and spotless. No one had shown us how this was to be done. No one had taught us how to be this deep—and deeply broken.

  Ashamed, I pressed my forehead to my wrist and let it throb there. Trevor slowed, then paused.

  All quiet.

  Above us the moths flitted between the tobacco. They had come to feed on the plants, but the pesticides left over from the fields killed them soon as they placed their mouths on the leaves. They fell all around
us, their wings, in the midst of death throes, buzzed across the barn floor.

  “Fuck.” Trevor stood up, his face disbelieving.

  I turned away. “Sorry,” I said instinctually.

  His cock, touched at the tip with the dark inside me, pulsed under the lamplight as it softened. I was, in that moment, more naked than I was with my clothes off—I was inside out. We had become what we feared most.

  He breathed hard above me. Trevor being who he was, raised in the fabric and muscle of American masculinity, I feared for what would come. It was my fault. I had tainted him with my faggotry, the filthiness of our act exposed by my body’s failure to contain itself.

  He stepped toward me. I rose to my knees, half covered my face, bracing.

  “Lick it up.”

  I flinched.

  Sweat shone on his forehead.

  A moth, suffocating, thrashed against my right knee. Its huge and final death merely a quiver on my skin. A breeze shifted the dark outside. A car hummed down the road across the fields.

  He gripped my shoulder. How did I already know he would react like this?

  I twisted my face to meet him.

  “I said get up.”

  “What?” I searched his eyes.

  I had misheard.

  “C’mon,” he said again. “Get the hell up.”

  Trevor pulled me by the arm to my feet. We stepped out of the oil lamp’s gold circle, leaving it empty and perfect again. He led me, along the barn, his grip tight. The moths dipped in and out between us. When one hit my forehead and I stopped, he yanked and I stumbled behind him. We reached the other side, then through the door, into the night. The air was cool and starless. In the sudden dark, I made out only his pale back, grey-blue in the un-light. After a few yards, I heard the water. The river’s current, although gentle, frothed white around his thighs. The crickets grew louder, lush. The trees rustled unseen in the massed shadows across the river. Then Trevor let go, dipped under, before quickly surfacing. Droplets ran down his jaw, tinkled around him.

  “Clean yourself,” he said, his tone oddly tender, almost frail. I pinched my nose and dunked under, gasping from the cold. In an hour, I’ll be standing in our dim kitchen, the river still damp in my hair, and Lan will shuffle into the glow of the night-light above the stove. I won’t tell anyone you been at sea, Little Dog. She will put her finger over her lips and nod. This way, the pirate spirits won’t follow you. She will take a dishrag and dry my hair, my neck, pausing over the hickey that, by then, will be the shade of dried blood under my jaw. You been far away. Now you home. Now you dry, she will say as the floorboards creak under our shifting weight.

  The river up to my chest now, I waved my arms to keep steady. Trevor put his hand on my neck and we stood, quiet for a moment, our heads bent over the river’s black mirror.

  He said, “Don’t worry about that. You heard?”

  The water moved around me, through my legs.

  “Hey.” He did that thing where he made a fist under my chin and tilted my head up to meet his gaze, a gesture that would usually get me to smile. “You heard me?”

  I just nodded, then turned to shore. I was only a few steps ahead of him before I felt his palm push hard between my shoulders, leaning me forward, my hands instinctually braced on my knees. Before I could turn around, I felt his stubble, first between my thighs, then higher. He had knelt in the shallows, knees sunk in river mud. I shook—his tongue so impossibly warm compared to the cold water, the sudden, wordless act, willed as a balm to my failure in the barn. It felt like an appalling second chance, to be wanted again, in this way.

  Far across the fields, just beyond a line of sycamores, a single lit window in the upstairs room of an old farmhouse flickered in the dark. Above it, a handful of straggling stars were biting through the sky’s milky haze. He gripped my thighs with both hands, pressed me into him, to further prove the point. I stared at the water’s convulsed shapes as I caught my breath. I looked between my legs and saw his chin moving to work the act into what it was, what it always has been: a kind of mercy. To be clean again. To be good again. What have we become to each other if not what we’ve done to each other? Although this was not the first time he did this, it was the only time the act gained new, concussive power. I was devoured, it seemed, not by a person, a Trevor, so much as by desire itself. To be reclaimed by that want, to be baptized by its pure need. That’s what I was.

  When he was finished, he wiped his mouth with the back of his arm, then mussed my hair before wading to shore. “Good as always,” he said over his shoulder.

  “Always,” I repeated, as if answering a question, then headed for the barn, where, under the oil lamp’s waning glow, the moths kept dying.

  * * *

  —

  After breakfast, around ten, while I sit on the front porch reading, Mai grabs my arm. “It’s time,” she says. I blink. “She’s going.” We rush into the living room where you’re already kneeling at Lan’s side. She’s awake and mumbling, her eyes roving under their half-shut lids. You run to grab bottles of aspirin and Advil from the cupboards. As if ibuprofen would do us any good now. But to you, it is all medicine—remedies that had worked before; why shouldn’t they work now?

  You sit beside your mother, your hands, finally empty, lie in your lap. Mai points to Lan’s toes. “They’re turning purple,” she says with eerie calm. “The feet, they go first—and they’re purple. Only a half hour now, at most.” I watch Lan’s life begin to recede from itself. Purple, Mai had said, but Lan’s feet don’t look purple to me. They’re black, burnished brown at the tips of the toes, stone-dark everywhere else, save for the toenails, which had an opaque yellowish tint—like bone itself. But it’s the word purple, and with it that lush deep hue, that floods me. That’s what I see as I watch the blood pull out of Lan’s black feet, the green surrounded by clusters of violet in my mind, and realize the word is dragging me into a memory. Years ago, when I was six or seven, while walking with Lan along a dirt path that hugged the highway off Church St., she abruptly stopped and shouted. I couldn’t hear her over the traffic. She pointed out the chain-link fence that divided the interstate from the sidewalk, eyes pupil-wide. “Look, Little Dog!” I stooped down, examined the fence.

  “I don’t get it, Grandma. What’s wrong?”

  “No,” she said, annoyed, “get up. Look past the fence—there—those purple flowers.”

  Just beyond the fence, on the highway side, lay a spill of violet wildflowers, each blossom no larger than a thumbnail with a tiny yellow-white center. Lan crouched, held my shoulders, leveling her eyes with mine, serious. “Will you climb it, Little Dog?” Her gaze narrowed in mock skepticism, waiting. Of course, I nodded eagerly. And she knew that I would.

  “I’ll boost you up and you just grab them quick, alright?” I latched on to the fence as she lifted my hips. After wavering a bit, I made it to the top, straddled it. I looked down and immediately felt sick, the flowers somehow tiny, faint brushstrokes on a whir of green. The wind from the cars blasted my hair. “I don’t know if I can!” I shouted, near tears. Lan grabbed my calf. “I’m right here. I won’t let anything happen to you,” she said over the traffic. “If you fall, I cut open the fence with my teeth and save you.”

  I believed her and jumped, landed in a roll, got up, and brushed myself off. “Get them by the roots with both hands.” She grimaced as she clung to the fence. “You have to be quick or we’ll get in trouble.” I pulled one bush up after the other, the roots bursting from the dirt in ashy clouds. I tossed them over the fence, each passing car made a gust so strong I almost fell over. I pulled and pulled and Lan stuffed them all in a plastic 7-Eleven bag.

  “Okay. Okay! That’s good enough.” She waved me back over. I leapt up the fence. Lan reached up and pulled me down into her arms, clutching me. She began to shudder, and not until she put me down did I realize she was giggling.
“You did it, Little Dog! You’re my flower hunter. The best flower hunter in USA!” She held up one of the bushes in the chalky ochre light. “These will be perfect on our windowsill.”

  It was beauty, I learned, that we risked ourselves for. That night, when you came home, you pointed at our harvest foaming across the brown, dirt-polluted windowsill, their tendrils lacing along the dining table, and asked, impressed, how we got them. Lan gave a dismissive wave, saying we had found them, thrown out on the curbside by a flower shop. I peered from my toy soldiers at Lan, who placed a finger over her lips and winked as you took off your coat, your back to us. Her eyes smiled.

  I would never know those flowers by name. Because Lan never had one for them. To this day, every time I see small, purple flowers, I swear they’re the flowers I had picked that day. But without a name, things get lost. The image, however, is clear. Clear and purple, the color that climbs now to Lan’s shins as we sit, waiting for it to run through her. You stay close to your mother and brush away the hair matted on her emaciated, skullish face.

  “What do you want, Ma?” you ask, your mouth at her ear. “What do you need from us? You can have anything.”

  Outside the window, the sky is a mocking blue.

  “Rice,” I remember Lan saying, her voice somewhere deep inside her. “A spoonful of rice.” She swallows, takes another breath. “From Go Cong.”

  We eye each other—the request impossible. Still, Mai gets up and disappears behind the beaded kitchen curtain.

  Half an hour later she kneels beside her mother, a steaming bowl of rice in her hand. She holds the spoon to Lan’s toothless mouth. “Here, Ma,” she says, stoic, “it’s Go Cong rice, just harvested last week.”