On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous Page 9

  “Are we close?” I asked, not knowing what I meant.

  The voices roared, straining through the crackle.

  “Yeah. I think we got this.” He lay back, beside me, the dirt crunching under his weight. “Okay, so fourth down basically means this is our last chance—are you with me?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Then why you staring at the ceiling?”

  “I’m with you.” I propped my head up with my palm and faced him—his torso a faint blaze in the half-dark. “I’m with you, Trev. Fourth down.”

  “Don’t call me that. It’s Trevor. Full and long, alright?”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s fine. Fourth down means it’s all or bust.”

  On our backs, shoulders almost touching, the thin film of heat formed between our skins as the air thickened with the men’s voices, the crowd’s corrosive cheers.

  “We got this. We got this,” his voice said. His lips moved, I imagined, the way they do in prayer. It seemed he could see through the roof, to the starless sky—the moon that night a gnawed bone above the field. I don’t know if it was him or me who shifted. But the space between us grew thinner and thinner as the game roared on, and our upper arms grew moist, touched so lightly neither of us noticed it happening. And maybe it was there in the barn that I first saw what I would always see when flesh is pressed against the dark. How the sharper edges of his body—shoulders, elbows, chin, and nose—poked through the blackness, a body halfway in, or out of, a river’s surface.

  The Patriots soared through their winning touchdown. The crickets ignited across the low shifting grass around the barn. Turning to him, I felt their serrated legs through the floor beneath us as I said his name, full and long; I said it so quiet the syllables never survived my mouth. I drew closer, toward the wet salted heat of his cheek. He made a sound almost like pleasure—or maybe I just imagined that. I went on, licking his chest, his ribs, the flare of hair on his pale belly. And then the heavy clank as the helmet tipped backward, the crowd roaring.

  * * *

  —

  In the bathroom with the pea-soup walls, the grandma rolls a freshly boiled egg over the boy’s face where, a few minutes ago, his mother had flung an empty ceramic teapot that exploded on the boy’s cheek.

  The egg is warm as my insides, he thinks. It’s an old remedy. “The egg, it heals even the worst bruises,” says his grandma. She works on the violet lump shining, like a plum, on the boy’s face. As the egg circled, its smooth pressure on the bruise, the boy watched, under a puffed lid, his grandma’s lips crease with focus as she worked. Years later, as a young man, when all that remains of the grandma is a face etched in his mind, the boy will remember that crease between her lips while breaking open a hard-boiled egg on his desk on a winter night in New York. Short on rent, it would be eggs for dinner for the rest of the week. They would not be warm, but cold in his palm, having been boiled by the dozen earlier that morning.

  At his desk, drifting, he’ll roll the moist egg across his cheek. Without speaking, he will say Thank you. He’ll keep saying it until the egg grows warm with himself.

  “Thank you, Grandma,” says the boy, squinting.

  “You fine now, Little Dog.” She lifts the pearly orb, and places it gently to his lips. “Eat,” she says. “Swallow. Your bruises are inside it now. Swallow and it won’t hurt anymore.” And so he eats. He is eating still.

  * * *

  —

  There were colors, Ma. Yes, there were colors I felt when I was with him. Not words—but shades, penumbras.

  We stopped the truck one time on the side of a dirt road and sat against the driver door, facing a meadow. Soon our shadows on the red exterior shifted and bloomed, like purple graffiti. Two double-cheese Whoppers were warming on the hood, their parchment wrappers crackling. Did you ever feel colored-in when a boy found you with his mouth? What if the body, at its best, is only a longing for body? The blood racing to the heart only to be sent back out, filling the routes, the once empty channels, the miles it takes to take us toward each other. Why did I feel more myself while reaching for him, my hand midair, than I did having touched him?

  His tongue tracing my ear: the green pulled through a blade of grass.

  The burgers started to smoke. We let them.

  * * *

  —

  I would work for the farm for two more summers after that first one—but my time with Trevor would stretch through all the seasons in between. And that day, it was October 16—a Thursday. Partly cloudy, the leaves crisp but still on their branches.

  We had eggs sautéed in diced tomatoes and fish sauce over rice for dinner. I was wearing a grey-red plaid button-up from L.L.Bean. You were in the kitchen, washing up, humming. The TV was on, playing a rerun of Rugrats, Lan clapping to the animated show. One of the bulbs in the bathroom buzzed, the wattage too strong for the socket. You wanted to go buy new ones at the drugstore but decided to wait for your wages from the salon so we could also get a box of Ensure for Lan. You were okay that day. You even smiled twice through the cigarette smoke. I remember it. I remember it all because how can you forget anything about the day you first found yourself beautiful?

  I turned the shower off and, instead of toweling and dressing before the steam on the door mirror cleared, like I normally would, I waited. It was an accident, my beauty revealed to me. I was daydreaming, thinking about the day before, of Trevor and me behind the Chevy, and had stood in the tub with the water off for too long. By the time I stepped out, the boy before the mirror stunned me.

  Who was he? I touched the face, its sallow cheeks. I felt my neck, the braid of muscles sloped to collarbones that jutted into stark ridges. The scraped-out ribs sunken as the skin tried to fill its irregular gaps, the sad little heart rippling underneath like a trapped fish. The eyes that wouldn’t match, one too open, the other dazed, slightly lidded, cautious of whatever light was given it. It was everything I hid from, everything that made me want to be a sun, the only thing I knew that had no shadow. And yet, I stayed. I let the mirror hold those flaws—because for once, drying, they were not wrong to me but something that was wanted, that was sought and found among a landscape as enormous as the one I had been lost in all this time. Because the thing about beauty is that it’s only beautiful outside of itself. Seen through a mirror, I viewed my body as another, a boy a few feet away, his expression unmoved, daring the skin to remain as it was, as if the sun, setting, was not already elsewhere, was not in Ohio.

  I got what I wanted—a boy swimming toward me. Except I was no shore, Ma. I was driftwood trying to remember what I had broken from to get here.

  * * *

  —

  Back in the barn that first night we touched, the Patriots game at halftime through the radio, I heard him. The air was thick or thin or not there. Maybe we even drifted off for a bit. The commercials were on, crackling and buzzing through the receiver, but I heard him. We were just staring at the rafters, and then he said, casually, as if naming a country on a map, “Why was I born?” His features troubled in the waning light.

  I pretended not to hear.

  But he said it again. “Why was I even born, Little Dog?” The radio hissed beneath his voice. And I spoke to the air. I said, “I hate KFC,” responding to the commercial, on purpose.

  “Me too,” he said without skipping a beat.

  And we cracked up. We cracked open. We fell apart like that, laughing.

  * * *

  —

  Trevor and his daddy lived alone in an Easter-yellow mobile home behind the interstate. That afternoon his old man was out laying redbrick walkways for a commercial park out in Chesterfield. The white door frames in the mobile home were stained pink with fingerprints: a house colored with work, which meant a house colored with exhaustion, disrepair. The rug uprooted “so no one gotta clean,” but the hardwood never waxed and polished
, and you could feel the hammered-down nails through your socks. The cabinet doors were torn off “to make it easy.” There was a cinder block under the sink to hold the pipes. In the living room, above the couch, was a duct-taped poster of Neil Young, guitar in hand, grimacing into a song I’ve never heard.

  In his room, Trevor turned on a Sony car stereo hooked to two speakers set on a dresser, and bobbed his head as a hip-hop beat intensified through the amp. The beats were interspersed with recordings of gunshots, men shouting, a car peeling off.

  “Have you heard this yet? It’s this new dude 50 Cent.” Trevor smiled. “Pretty dope, huh?” A bird flew past the window, making the room seem to blink.

  “I’ve never heard of him,” I lied—why I’m not quite sure. Maybe I wanted to give him the power of this small knowledge over me. But I’d heard it before, many times, as it was played that year through endless passing cars and opened apartment windows back in Hartford. The entire album, Get Rich or Die Tryin’, was burned bootleg on hundreds of blank CDs bought in forty packs for cheap from Walmart or Target—so that the whole northside echoed with a kind of anthem of Curtis Jackson’s voice fading in and out of intelligibility as you rode your bike through the streets.

  “I walk the block with the bundles,” he recited, his hands gestured in front of him, fingers splayed. “I’ve been knocked on the humble, swing the ox when I rumble, show your ass what my gun do.”

  He paced the room, rapping with purpose, gusto, frowning as spit sprayed the air, landed cool on my cheek. “Come on, man. I love this part.” He mouthed the words, staring at me as if I were the camera in the music video. I followed his lips until we were singing the hook together, my shoulders swaying to the rhythm. “Many men, many, many, many, many men. Wish death ’pon me. Lord I don’t cry no more, don’t look to the sky no more. Have mercy on me.”

  In that room, among the Star Wars poster (The Empire Strikes Back) peeling above his unmade bed, among the empty root beer cans, the twenty-pound dumbbell, one half of a broken skateboard, the desk covered with loose change, empty gum packets, gas station receipts, weed crumbs, fentanyl patches and empty dime bags, coffee mugs ringed brown with old water and joint roaches, a copy of Of Mice and Men, empty shell casings from a Smith & Wesson, there were no questions. Under the covers, we made friction of each other and fiction of everything else. He had shaved his head in the sink that day and the bits of hair pricked us everywhere we moved, our fingers lost around belt buckles. A Band-Aid, loosened from sweat and heat, hung from his elbow, its plastic film scraping my ribs as he climbed on top of me, searching. Under my fingers, the stretch marks above his knees, on his shoulders, and the base of his spine shone silver and new. He was a boy breaking out and into himself at once. That’s what I wanted—not merely the body, desirable as it was, but its will to grow into the very world that rejects its hunger. Then I wanted more, the scent, the atmosphere of him, the taste of French fries and peanut butter underneath the salve of his tongue, the salt around his neck from the two-hour drives to nowhere and a Burger King at the edge of the county, a day of tense talk with his old man, the rust from the electric razor he shared with that old man, how I would always find it on his sink in its sad plastic case, the tobacco, weed and cocaine on his fingers mixed with motor oil, all of it accumulating into the afterscent of wood smoke caught and soaked in his hair, as if when he came to me, his mouth wet and wanting, he came from a place on fire, a place he could never return to.

  And what do you do to a boy like that but turn yourself into a doorway, a place he can go through again and again, each time entering the same room? Yes, I wanted it all. I drove my face into him as if into a climate, the autobiography of a season. Until I was numb. “Close your eyes,” he said, shaking. “Don’t want you seeing me like this.” But I opened them anyway, knowing that in the dim, everything looked the same. Like you’re still sleeping. But in our hurry, our teeth collided. He made a hurt sound, then turned away, suddenly embarrassed. Before I could ask if he was okay, he resumed, his eyes half-open as we locked, slick and smooth now, deeper. Then lower, toward the waistband’s elastic resistance, the snap never coming, the fabric’s rustle at my ankles, my cock, the bead of moisture at its tip the coldest thing between us.

  Surfacing from the sheets, his face shone through the wet mask we made of our scavenge. He was white, I never forgot this. He was always white. And I knew this was why there was a space for us: a farm, a field, a barn, a house, an hour, two. A space I never found in the city, where the tenement apartments we lived in were so cramped one could tell when a neighbor had a stomach flu in the middle of the night. To hide here, in a room in a broken-down mobile home, was, somehow, a privilege, a chance. He was white. I was yellow. In the dark, our facts lit us up and our acts pinned us down.

  * * *

  —

  But how do I tell you about that boy without telling you about the drugs that soon blew it apart, the Oxy and coke, the way they made the world smolder at its tips? And then the rust-red Chevy? The one Buford gave his son, Trev’s old man, when he was twenty-four, the one the old man cherished, having repaired and replaced enough parts to make four trucks over through the years. How its windows were already blue-streaked and its tires smooth as human skin by the time we blasted through the corn, going fifty-five as Trevor shouted crazy, a patch of fentanyl hot on his arm, the liquid melted through its edges and dripping down his bicep like sick sap. Cocaine in our noses, our lungs, we laughed, in a way. And then the swerve, a smithereen of yellow, the slam, glass skittering, the crushed hood smoking under the dead oak. A red line running down Trevor’s cheek, then widening at his jaw. Then his daddy calling from the house, the rage in his scream jolting us from the seats.

  As the engine steamed, we felt our ribs for broken bones, then bolted out of the gasoline-reeked pickup, crossed the rest of the cornfield behind Trevor’s house, past the wheelless John Deere tractor suspended on cinder blocks, the empty chicken coop with latches rusted shut, over the small plastic white fence invisible under a choke of brambles, then through crabgrass and under the highway overpass, toward the pines. Dry leaves crashing past us. Trevor’s old man running toward the wrecked truck, the only car they owned, neither of us with the guts to look back.

  How do I tell you about Trevor without telling you, again, of those pines? How it was an hour after the Chevy that we lay there, the cold seeping up from the forest floor. How we sang “This Little Light of Mine” until the blood on our faces grabbed around our lips and stiffened us quiet.

  * * *

  —

  The first time we fucked, we didn’t fuck at all. I only have the nerve to tell you what comes after because the chance this letter finds you is slim—the very impossibility of your reading this is all that makes my telling it possible.

  In Trevor’s mobile home, there was a painting of a bowl of peaches in the hallway that always caught me. The hallway was too narrow and you could only see it from inches away, more aftermath than art. I had to stand a little to the side to see it in full. Each time I walked by I slowed down, taking it in. A cheap painting from Family Dollar, mass-produced with vague indications of impressionism. When I examined the brushstrokes, I saw that they were not painted on at all, but printed on with speckled relief, suggesting a hand without enacting the real. The relief “strokes” never cohered with their shades, so that a stroke would hold two, even three colors at once. A fake. A fraud. Which was why I loved it. The materials never suggested authenticity, but rather, an inconspicuous sameness, a desire to pass as art only under the most cursory glance. It hung on the wall, hidden in the gloomy hallway that led to Trevor’s room. I never asked who put it there. Peaches. Pink peaches.

  Under the humid sheets, he pressed his cock between my legs. I spat in my hand and reached back, grabbed tight his heated length, mimicking the real thing, as he pushed. I glanced back and caught the thrilled mischief in his eyes. Although this was a mock attemp
t, a penis in a fist in place of the inner self, for a moment it was real. It was real because we didn’t have to look—as if we fucked and unfucked at a distance from our bodies, yet still inside the sensation, like a memory.

  We did what we had seen in porn. I wrapped my free arm around his neck, my mouth searching and taking any part of Trevor that was closest, and he did the same, pressing his nose into the crook of my neck. His tongue, his tongues. And his arms, hot along their tense muscles, reminded me of the neighbor’s house on Franklin Ave. the morning after it burned. I had lifted a piece of window frame, still warm, from the wreck, my fingers digging into the soft wood, damp from the hydrant, the way I now dug into Trevor’s bicep. I thought I heard the hiss of steam coming off him, but it was only October slashing outside, wind making a lexicon of the leaves.

  We did not speak.

  He fucked my hand until he shuddered, wet, like the muffler of a truck starting up in the rain. Until my palm slickened and he said, “No, oh no,” as if it was blood, not semen, that was leaving him. Done with ourselves, we lay for a while, our faces cooling as they dried.

  Now, whenever I visit a museum, I’m hesitant to come too close to a painting for fear of what I might, or might not, find there. Like the pinkish smear of Trevor’s dollar-store peaches, I stare instead, hands behind my back, from far away, sometimes even at the room’s threshold, where everything is still possible because nothing is revealed.

  Afterward, lying next to me with his face turned away, he cried skillfully in the dark. The way boys do. The first time we fucked, we didn’t fuck at all.