“I hardly bleed,” he explains. “I do not resist the bullets. I let them pass through the emptiness of my heart.”
When Jared and I watched the movie, I suspect that each of us was too afraid to tell the other how deeply we connected with that line. Wishing we could learn such a trick, and teach it to friends and allies, and others whom we loved, so we could at least sharpen our edge against a city that had decided it could do without us.
Our only regret being that, for some, we’d still be too late.
When Serge died, killing him might not have been the initial intent, but things like that so easily get out of hand, it may as well have been premeditated. He was cornered one evening near the mouth of an alley by some cock fascists, four of them, one for each of the cardinal points, so there was no direction to run. Their fun was strictly casual for the first few minutes, using only their fists. Then they got serious. Started in on him with a length of pipe that turned up in the alley.
Somebody who later watched the police inside the yellow-tape corral said that the homicides stood around with coffee, joking over Serge’s body. They already knew who he was; a couple of the uniforms on the scene had rousted him with some younger guy a few days earlier, after we’d had an argument. They’d been in a car near his favorite coffeehouse. Now one of the homicides squatted down, inspected Serge’s pipe-broken jaw, used a latex-gloved hand to waggle its huge, grotesque skew, and said, “Looks like this cocksucker just didn’t know when to say when.”
Four years later his murder remains unsolved. Infer from that what you will.
When newer friends, people who’d never met him, would chance across a picture of us together and ask whatever became of Serge, I usually said he’d moved back down to Tampa. Couldn’t stand the cold winters here, the way they seem to start in October and end in April. Used to be I could tell they knew I was lying, that they’d caught the throb of some raw nerve that had escaped cauterization.
Eventually, while I’d told Jared the truth, no one else suspected otherwise.
Sometimes I go scratching at the wound, to make sure I’ve not forgotten how to feel it. But I have to dig very far down, because only the most deeply concealed nerves still feel flayed and raw, like the tendrils of sea anemones scraped with a wire brush.
The rest, my public nerves, must’ve become as encrusted as the city.
I used to think this was something to aspire to.
Used to think it was what I wanted…so that somebody else would be forced to look me in the eye someday, and tell me how I’d changed, except he wouldn’t speak it like an accusation; rather, with admiration, for all I could withstand.
A few afternoons later I came home from the video store, and he was back. I’d had days to anticipate and dread and rehearse the moment, but had wasted them, too fearful of even contemplating it.
He must’ve heard me on the stairs, was there waiting as soon as I came through the door. He hadn’t forgotten how to smile, but it seemed a reflex, as if he might’ve forgotten why he’d want to.
“So, it’s…done?” I asked.
He nodded.
“What’s it like?”
“It’s…different. But different isn’t bad.”
“Did it hurt?”
“Hurt…pain…those really aren’t part of my vocabulary now. So I’ll just say no.” Jared seemed profoundly calm and thoughtful, and when I asked how Hieronymus Beadle had done this thing to him, he recounted it as if telling me about something that had happened to someone else that he’d heard about secondhand.
“He took me to a warehouse, I think it must’ve been. All you have to do, really, is look in his eye, but that’s where any sense of time falls apart. I know I walked around some afterward, but I still don’t know how long I’ve been gone.
“You just look in his eye, and he won’t let you look away, no matter how much you want to. He’s taking everything you hate most about yourself, and that scares you about whatever might be ahead, and turning it right back at you. Taking you through it all, but a hundred times worse than you dreamed it could be…until you just…give up. Then he kisses you, and it feels like he could suck away every breath you ever breathed. And then you sleep. Or I did.
“But I think it’s solved a lot of the problems I was having. I think I’ll be easier to live with now.”
Jared shrugged, turned away to leave me wondering what life with him could possibly be like now. What life might’ve been like elsewhere, in a place that never existed but we’d spoken of just the same, where bigots were few and the diseases all had cures.
We used to joke about it, our own private Israel, a queer homeland.
But on second thought, that’d just make it easier for all the righteous fuckers, who brought picket signs to funerals, to raise their own air force and deploy bombers.
I followed Jared toward the bedroom, where he’d disappeared, and halfway down the hall I stooped to pick up a pair of feathers. Small and pale gray, they took me back to that day at the beanery when Jared had told me of the man he needed to find, and how he’d fed crumbs to pigeons, asking why they were so hated by so many.
The bedroom floor was dusted with them, so many feathers a pillow might have been ripped open. But pillows don’t bleed. Live birds do. Feathers and tatters of flesh lay clumped about the room. Wet pawprints were tracked everywhere, while here and there larger heaps of meat were still intact enough to recognize, with bent wings and scaly stick legs. The tiny strewn organs glistened bright red, the pocks of shit a chalky white.
Jared was sitting in the middle of the mess, before the open window, through which a cold autumn breeze was blowing, scattering feathers like chaff.
“Look what I can do,” Jared said, as he watched Voodoo burrow his fangs deeper into the cavity of a shredded abdomen. “Nothing. I can do nothing.”
One reason I’ve always enjoyed talking with Danielle at the video store is her accent. She originally came from Alabama, and there’s something about a Southern accent that can infuse sorrow with enough whimsy to make it tolerable. She once told me that lesbians didn’t get beaten up in her town, the same as boys were, because they presented too keen a challenge to most red-blooded hetero guys, who knew they had the proper cure between their legs.
“So I started carrying this big old dildo in my purse, about two sizes past horse,” she’d told me. “And whenever one of these guys’d tell me I didn’t know what I was missing, I’d pull out Mr. Ed and tell the guy if he could top this, he was on.”
She was one of the few I’d told the truth about Serge, and so filling her in on Jared made sense to me, and then it made more sense to keep going and tell her that it was a temptation to take to the streets again. Hunt down that peculiar man in his top hat and walking stick, and let him work his anesthetizing magic on me, too. And then it would no longer matter that the flesh I loved and fit best with was now emptied of the stuff that had first made it so appealing. Such terrible temptation.
“I never told you about when I came out to my family, did I?” Danielle asked.
I told her I didn’t think so.
“When he found out about me, my daddy called me an accident of birth,” she said. “Scarcely said a word to me for the next two years. Didn’t even want to look at me, and us in the same room, why, you’d think we were strangers. And I suspect I suddenly was, to him. An accident of birth. Got so I played it for a joke, and I’d stand all quiet-like around a corner, lying in wait for him to come face to face with me, so I could see him squirm, just like a wiggle worm on a hot sidewalk.”
I wondered which was worse: someone who abandons you in the flesh, or one who does it while remaining under the same roof.