June - The Liars 19 страница

We were having a lot of sex, basically, and it was getting more and more public. The relationships between the people on the community, once I had started my own, suddenly became more apparent as well. It was like that Where's Waldo? piece, only now I was finding good things, like Waldo plus one or two, and it was a thrill to see so many people forming relationships. Paul and Tonya had been the only public face of coupling from before, and seemed to be the only monogamous and long term relationship within the group. They had known one another for years and while Paul had always liked her, her transgender status had been a barrier. Not to Paul, who had only known her as Tonya and loved her as her, but to the outside world. These were the "family issues" that had been alluded to before and the root cause for most of her homelessness until The Bear. I had no idea how hard it was for some people to exist in the "real world" until Daniel had phrased it so pointedly, and then I had learned a bit more about Tonya. Her race certainly affected things, too, because race always did, but it was impossible for her to maintain a job as Tonya. Though her name change was legal, there were a lot of other hurdles and legal loopholes. There was a lot of it I just wasn't sure about, but what I did know and what I could see was that she was much happier here, and here with Paul. The two of them had been together for nearly three years now. Her status at The Bear was not hidden, but it was also not brandished. It didn't need to be brandished, Daniel and I talked about it one night, but he still thought it needed to be explicitly addressed sometimes. He had known Tonya before she had any changes, but was still it that in between space. He liked her a lot, used female pronouns, and completely respected her ("I have to when someone undertakes that much of a life overhaul and commits to it as much as she has"), but he did not want to always be at war with Eurasia. He wanted her to talk about her old life as a socialized male and not worry so much that it would damage this one; it wasn't even an old life per se. All of those people from before had been Tonya in some carnation - just like those three forms of Daniel (the abandon houses, the protests, The Bear) had been him, and just the same way myself with Gerard as the exception was still the same as me now, with Daniel. I understood that more than ever, and it seemed to me that everyone at The Bear had been evolved in some manner. That type of interrogation was needed in order to even think of entering a place like this, cut off from the "normal" realm of society; you had to first understand your place inside of it before you could determine whether or not you wanted out, even for a little while. I liked to think that I understood Tonya, even in the most basic and fundamental ways, because I knew what it was like to be so fractured and fragmented. We all felt this. It was basic and human. And while I knew the answer to trying to fix this cohesion was not in my gender, I could understand the role it could play.

Paul understood this too, probably better than anyone. He loved Tonya, and was completely devoted, I could tell. They kept their affair to themselves, like they must have kept former parts of their lives, and mostly stayed together in their house, out of sight. When they were at dinner, they held hands and occasionally kissed, but that was it. I wondered if they resurrected this distance themselves or if bad past experiences had happened and created the divide. Daniel did allude to some people who had been kicked out of The Bear, but he had never elaborated as to why. When the newer people did finally realize that Tonya was trans, it was a different response than most people realizing that Daniel and I were in a relationship. It held a type of stigma I had never born witness to before and it seemed to all be contained in the smallest of facial ticks. No one said anything, though, and I hoped that this would be a learning experience, if they had not already reached that stage in their development yet. And that in time, Paul and Tonya could be more open. Then again, the two of them had lived at The Bear the longest, so maybe the public displays had eventually lost their allure, though I saw no sign of that stopping anyone else just yet. The distance between the shower stalls was getting less and less, and according to Kristen, this happened a lot, without fail, every year.

"It's that whole philosophy of love the one you're with, you know?" she said and shrugged her shoulders. She had been talking about the kinship bonds that she had studied when she had taken animal biology in her schooling, but she hated it when she got too science-y outside of work. She liked to explain things to people on their level, instead of making them rush up to hers. "I hate to adhere to the idea that all communes are hippies that want to have sex. It's a ridiculous notion. We're a working community, and we love one another, and we get by. So what if we show our love this way? Not all of us fuck our brains out."

Kristen identified as lesbian, but she said she waned in her attraction sometimes. She was very work minded, orderly and astute, and seemed to channel any excess energy into the plants and growing food. She had been the one to take care of the bear when it came, and any other animals that came by she often tended to as well. She and Gwen usually got along very well and connected on a scientific basis. Though Gwen was a physics person (never professionally trained, but she snuck into lectures throughout her youth), she knew a lot about all scientific disciplines and was eager to learn more from Kristen about crops and soil. They formed their own relationship, though strictly Platonic, and mostly as apprentice and master. Kristen was the oldest at The Bear, though she never told her age, and Gwen one of the youngest at twenty-two. Because of this gap, I usually enjoyed watching their conversations and sometimes being included, though I knew absolutely nothing about science anymore.

Of course, there's was Gwen's own public declaration of her sexuality. She was openly asexual, "like amoebas!" she would tease, but then go on into a psycho-social lecture about the varieties and subscale within asexuality. She still formed relationships with people, though usually not monogamous or long term ("at least, at the moment," she smiled quietly) and she had had sex before. She was very clear about making that a point.

"I know what it's like," she told me, very open and candid. "It just didn't always work for me. I get too distracted half the time anyway and would be analyzing some formula in my head. It just happens."

Most of the other people there had formed into couples, and mostly heterosexual unions. Catherine had decided to stay without Nicole, mostly because she had befriended Chris, and though the two were still dancing around their attraction, it was imminent. Even if there weren't pairs forming here and there, there was open affection. Kissing, touching, hand holding, and general love and concern. Even if the admission, "I love you" was often passed around and the sincerity of the words were felt in daily interaction. You had to respect one another to be here, to live in this place and have things all work out. Nicole had left because she couldn't handle the experience and that was fine; many others had done so before her. But those of us who did stay, all shared a strong bond. Even Korey and I became close in a way that was not expressed tangibly. We worked side by side most days, and when you were working that hard next to someone, lifting large weights together, and sharing the burden of some larger task, you formed a bond. I trusted him far more than I had trusted any co-worker before. He and I had zero interests and commonalities outside of the place we lived and the food we ate, but that was all we needed. Like Daniel had said, relationships were circumstantial, but extremely important. Some of these relationships manifested their love and respect through sex, and some of them didn't. But it was there, this bond. For the first time in my life, I could actually see the thread that ran through each and every one of us, and how it pulled us apart and how it pulled us together.

I felt my chest, where my heart was, when I was alone in the woods. I needed that time in the morning, just to distance myself from people and wander around my own mind. I felt my heart, sitting on the log after a run, and I wondered if I could still feel the beating thread that lead me to Gerard. I wondered if even from this far away, with so much distance between us, if I could still feel loved by him and connected with his body. It seemed like I had already come into contact with so much skin, so much touching that I had lost it all in a flurry of handprints. But no, I thought to myself. My heart pumped fast after my run, my body craving oxygen and relief. Lub-dub, lub-dub, it went on beating, and I felt what I had always felt around him. He was there. I knew he always would be, but I had gotten tired of carrying him around and insisting upon him so much. I wasn't that brave anymore, I didn't want to be that brave anymore. Or that stubborn. I just wanted to lay my hands down on other people, and have them respond back.

Daniel and our relationship continued to grow stronger as the days of July went on. Another group of people came halfway through, just after Nicole left, and there was that initial awkward phase while we all got reacquainted with everyone and adjusted to a job change. It was a relief to have more people around, because it meant the workload got spread out. There was more time in the morning to run and walk, and then even have time to spend with Jasmine afterwards. She was tiring out more, and the new batch of people meant she basically got to just cook or help Tonya and Paul with business letters. I had been surprised when she picked cooking because of its domesticity, instead of opting for the power that an office position would entail.

"No, Frank," she told me in the morning as she got dressed. She buttoned up another one of my shirts as she looked out the window. "I like cooking. I always have. I like the body I have and I always have. It's fun and it gives me pleasure, why wouldn't I?" She gave me a little wink. "But I hate what society tells me what I must do with this body. What I must do with my life because of the body that it's linked to, and not because of the person inside. I like being who I am, it's just... sometimes I don't see a place for that in the world. It seems that sometimes there isn't enough room for that person to exist. But here? I do see a place. There is plenty of room. Even with more people than before, there is always plenty of room."

I nodded, knowing she was right. There seemed to be silos that stretched on for miles, and though they had needed to move some people around to adjust, Jasmine and I got to stay where we were. But there was something beyond finite space that she was referring to. She turned back towards the window as she finished getting dressed for the day, and I sat to wonder what I was going to wear. I had brought so little, and Jasmine had been borrowing so much of it that I didn't think I had anything clean at all. Jasmine wasn’t wearing any of her own clothing anymore; her jeans were men's jeans from Hilda. She said she wore them because they had a bigger waist, and thicker fabric to keep her guarded and protected. She looked good in what she was wearing, but it always threw me. It made me stop and look and her, really look. Something inside of me burned the same way it did for Daniel, and neither of us could put it into words yet. She was different here, the most different version of Jasmine I had seen yet.

Her use of the word world had thrown me as she spoke. I had been so used to this environment for so long that this was the world to me now. This was the only place that mattered, it felt. I was living so close to the surface of my actual existence, being who I actually was or who I thought myself to be. It seemed that Jasmine was inhabiting that same type of mind space, but only with the slight realization that this, like all good things, would eventually end. I had no idea what day it was anymore or how much longer we had here, but I chose to not think about it all too often. I was still working through my own identity, but the sheer fact that I had time with which to figure all of that out was amazing and enlightening. I knew I would never be whole, and Jasmine knew this about herself as well. We had had endless discussions about the power of myth and how perfect unity did not exist.

"But it's still nice, though, to think about," she had lamented one night. We were both naked, after sex, and I was holding her in my arms. I could feel Paloma kick. "I still think there is a balance that can be reached, even if it can go off kilter, we can strive to get it back there."

It was the same sentiment that Paul had said to me at the beginning of our trip: it was the thing to strive for, even if it never really existed. He was becoming the most enlightening person I had met, outside of Daniel, who was a different type of sensation that involved both mind and body. I had been reading Alexa's books and Jasmine and I would often pour over stuff about the unconscious together. We would talk about our lack, or a lack of a lack. It all felt heady and too academic in the bad way sometimes, but when we related it to one another, when we had this giant belly between us, and we had power generated by the sun, it didn't feel so abstract. I would get anxious, sometimes, because I could predict and really know nothing. A thunderstorm had come by and completely ruined our garden one week and we spend three days fixing it. I had been jumpy then, and Daniel had to sit me down and calm me down. But was I ashamed about it? No. Not anymore. I could feel what I wanted here, and to me, that was the whole world.

Daniel was the one experience that I had needed the most. I understood what Jasmine saw when she noticed us first interacting with one another, and I understood the reason she pushed me toward him. "I can't give you everything, Frank. It sucks that I can't. But we forgave ourselves, for that, right?" she would always remind me if I got distant or evasive during the early stages. Forgiveness was followed by acceptance and so much forgiveness with the world and one another was needed in order to live life. In order to be with Daniel, fully, I needed to forgive the giant place that I had given to Gerard, and how it was now being closed in. Gerard was there - just like Jasmine was still there. There were lots of heart threads that would never be lost with time. But he could not be everything. That was impossible. But this new realization did not diminish that he used to be everything. Those times still stayed perfectly clear. They were what came to me in the mornings, most of all, as I ran into the pink dawn.

In addition to Alexa's books, Daniel had been teaching me a lot through the zines and books that he kept around. He and I, as well as Jasmine, did have a lot of meaningful and exciting conversations. Most of them passed through my mind and then disappeared into the blur between our bodies and nothing seemed to stick with me like our first conversations, or the ones we had about Gerard, about guilt and sexuality, about people in our lives. He had filled this needed place in my life and he was the embodiment of all that I was afraid of in myself. He was also just amazing. I felt bad, dwelling so much on my own problem and burdening them on him. I realized, and he had caught me, making him into a mythological figure in my head.

"Don't do it," he warned. "I know you're not doing it because you mean to. It's the society we live in - and since we live there, those ideas get fed to us and we start thinking them too. It's one of the reasons I came to live here, but the thought process still happens. Put a cog in the machine. I am not a myth. I'm actually very real."

I knew part of that discussion was race fueled, but I still had a race, even if it was the one that held power. I was still apart of things, and I needed to be careful how I did put people in my mind. Gerard was a man, human. He was flawed like Daniel was flawed, and just because Daniel came into my life didn't mean I had to make him into something special that was beyond us in our forms now.

"Maybe one day, you'll tell people about that really cool guy you had sex with a few times and how he gave you books about anarchism, and man, that was awesome. It had been just what you needed to stop being so serious for a little while. But maybe you won't talk about me at all. You and Jasmine will leave and then go back to the real world and forget."
I swallowed hard at his choice of words. I knew, from my experiences between the two worlds, that forgetting was impossible. I didn't know how I would figure Daniel in my mind just yet. Relationships were always contextualized in hindsight. Our only sight was on one another at that time and would be, I knew, until I decided to leave.

"We haven't had sex yet, though," I told him, practically reminded him. He seemed disappointed, though I had tried to cushion what I was saying with a playful quality. He turned the page in the book we had been reading, and after awhile, told me that we had had sex. We had brought one another to orgasm, we had been naked together. That was sex. That was sex in his mind. It was being with the person in the vulnerable state, and it wasn't dependent on dicks. I hadn't realized that I was conceptualizing my sexuality that way, and like the other comment that I made to him earlier, I felt my face flush and I apologized. I thought back to all the relationships that I knew of, and of course the dick part was useless. Jasmine and Hilda had had sex and there was nothing between them. I felt terrible and guilty and when I got back to Jasmine that night, I went down on her and that was all we did. It was an hour of that, of her panting breaths. I considered that sex before, but I realized that since I had already had penetrative sex with her, that I didn't hold it in the same "lack of a lack" before. Since I had not penetrated Daniel, nor had he me, then I saw everything we did as an almost, but not quite there yet. I felt horrible, and the next time I went to see him, I told him I finally understood. He looked at me skeptically at first, but then, he trusted me. We moved on.

I was learning so much, not just about veganism, but how my mind worked behind the words and the images that I was given. I was seeing what Jasmine saw in the world, and it was making me horrified. I had already learned a lot about sex from Gerard, and I already knew that there didn't have to be penetration to have fun, especially recently when it was harder and harder for him to get it up. I knew it was about intimacy, but Daniel reminded that it could be about pleasure, too. We could just touch each other because it felt good. It didn't have to mean the world and more and everything all at once. We just liked one another, we wanted to have fun, and so we did. We said we liked one another a lot, and though I wanted love to bloom between us - Gwen and Jasmine were exchanging "I love you!" declarations almost daily from the dinner table as they passed one another bread - Daniel and I had both set up walls between us. He would sometimes become rigid during sex, not wanting to be held in a specific way, and I would struggle to interpret where he wanted my hands to go. Sometimes he would place me where he needed me, and I would him, or sometimes we would touch one another and then finished ourselves off next to the other person. We talked about politics, not art. We made pleasure, not art. I was surprised I was enjoying it, but I kept coming back to the story I had told him before. It was The Story of Gerard, once it had escaped my lips, and like Jasmine's essays was taking form again. He had been a huge part of my life and finally having another person there who knew about him was a relief. I didn't have to keep it inside. I would give constant references to him, to things we had done, and then explain little pieces about myself that had been formed through him (I often cut bread the way I did because of the first time he had shown me how to at his apartment when I was seventeen, I sometimes mimicked his hand motions, I folded towels the way he did, in thirds and not halves. They were small things like that, but they ended up manifesting something beyond me that I sometimes could not always pin down.). Sometimes I would just tell Daniel thank you again for letting me tell the story in the first place. He became overwhelmed occasionally, but always extremely open and caring with it, too.

"Confession can be a good act, but only to the right amount of people. And you can't become too lost in it," he warned, subtly hinting. I knew that I couldn't keep telling him these things, so I considered my other connections at The Bear. Gwen was more Jasmine's friend, and though Kristen and I talked a fair bit, I did not feel comfortable telling her. There was a big difference between telling someone you lived closely with in a work and living type environment, than telling someone you wanted to be in bed with.

"There's also telling strangers," he reminded me, and I was confused at first.

"You mean like walking up to them and saying, oh hey, I used to be with this forty-seven year old when I was seventeen, and how are you today?" I laughed but Daniel just shook his head.

"A lot of what you're telling me is driven by an impulse to not feel invisible. You think people don't see your difference, don't read you as having had relationships with men, and therefore erase yourself. And while I think you need to realize how lucky you are that people don't see you and make snap judgements, at the same time, I know it's alienating not being connected, somehow, to your own personal history through the people that you meet. There is a distance that places."

He got sad for a second there, and I found myself negatively making the connection between his cut off native history and the history that he was given within the US. I caught myself, like I was being better at doing, and realized that was not it at all. He wanted people to stop thinking he was one of those Cowboys vs. Indians, at one with nature, type of people and start realizing that he had been in foster care. He had been abused in foster care, and that was his history. That was what made him who he was and he was proud of that, as horrific and traumatic as some of it had been. Not all foster care was like that, he had reiterated to me over and over again, but some were. And that "some" statistic happened to involve him, so it was a big deal. He would touch his scars a lot, I noticed, especially the cigarette ones. He would clutch his own history when it felt like it was being taken away.

I thought about telling strangers and about the idea of being invisible. I was not read as gay, that was for sure, especially now that I had Jasmine and our baby. I hated thinking that it was so easy - for hating that it was so easy. There were people who could not live in the outside world because of how it eviscerated them on a daily basis. I could. I really could if I wanted to and there was no harm coming to me. Just that nagging guilt, the self doubt, and the compulsion to keep the history so close to me, almost enough to scar.

"You're going to have to figure that one out on your own, Frank," Daniel concluded that night's discussion. "I'm fresh out of ideas."

July was the hottest month of the year, and though we were farther north in New Jersey than where Jasmine and I typically resided, it got fucking hot. The trees provided very little shade and relief when it still felt like wherever you walked you were cutting the air like a knife. Jasmine and I were even sweating in our silos at night, even as we sat on the bed and read. Catherine had passed out from working in the garden the day before, and when we realized that the next day was going to be even hotter, Daniel and Kristen made the decision to stop most of the work. The tasks that needed to be done every day (mostly toilets and food prep) were easily finished and could be done indoors and with the safety of not being out in the sun. Although work was cancelled, the two planned something else for us all instead: a swim.

There was a lake about a mile from the community that was open to anyone and really not as bad as some people probably thought Jersey water would be. We were close enough to the border and far enough away from downtown chemical plants that we could get away with swimming and not coming back with some kind of disease or third limb. Since Kristen was a biologist, and had tested the water previous years, her approval was good enough for everyone. It was not suitable for drinking until it had been filtered and boiled, but we were definitely going to cool off. We all grabbed our towels and the clothing that we wanted to swim in and headed down. We took umbrellas to shade ourselves as we walked, along with several aluminum water bottles in order to prevent further passing out. I walked close to Jasmine, holding the umbrella over us both, and everyone kept pace with everyone else. There were no outliers, and Daniel specified that point. We were only going to go as fast as the slowest person because we were a community. When Catherine had fallen, we had all fallen, as Daniel eloquently put it that night at dinner when he declared no more work until another storm broke the heat. Our slowest person in this case was Jasmine, and we all slowed down to her waddle as we walked along the dirt road. She was in good spirits about it, and even began to enjoy everyone curtailing to her pace. Kristen and Catherine even stuffed their towels underneath their shirts to mimic large stomachs in a sympathy walk. I thought this would anger Jasmine at first, but it made her feel more included. She wanted people to talk about the pregnancy, about the fact that things were different for her. It felt rude to her if they just ignored it. They were responding the right way, and I eventually put my towel under my shirt and then the rest of our party became pregnant. I really wanted someone to come barreling down the dirt road and see this huge passel of people with fake bellies who were all being led by one pregnant person with hair down to her waist. We were quite the spectacle. I had a full beard at this point - maybe not Walt Whitman full, but I could dream - and having that pregnancy bump was amusing to me, too. Jasmine seemed to enjoy the juxtaposition too and reached out to grab the sides of my scruff at one point. I thought she was going to lean in a give me a kiss, but she whispered that she needed as beard as well.

"Then, and only then, will my outfit be complete," she quipped and then did give me the kiss I had been waiting for.

The lake was pretty small, but it appeared to us like a beacon of hope. Most people started to scream and yell they were so excited. They cheered it on like they had the thunderstorm, and to show their affection for their new object of desire, began to disrobe. It was encouraged implicitly that this would be skinny dipping, but there was no pressure for anyone to be naked, and some people did keep their clothing on. Jasmine was wearing one of my t-shirts again and a pair of my boxers as her gear, and waded into the water only slightly. Tonya and Paul stayed relatively dressed as well, and off to the side. Tonya was having a hard time for a while, and Paul was calming her down and rubbing her back. She whispered in his ear a few times before she suddenly began to smile, and Paul cracked a joke I couldn't hear. She began to dip her feet over the edge of the water now, using a rock as a base, and her red toe nails glittered against the sun. Paul held back, still, not being the type for water, but he kept one of her hands in his. He was so supportive of her, I almost felt like a bad partner. I went over to Jasmine to "be supportive" but she was already kicking around the water and having fun with Gwen, who also kept her t-shirt and shorts on. Most of the men were naked - Korey, Ray, and Chris all disrobed and jumped in, while some opted to keep their shirts and shorts on as well as some of the other women. Catherine, after going off with Chris to one side of the pond began to take her clothing off with his help, and then everyone started. By the end of it, it was just Jasmine wearing her shorts and Gwen in her outfit, along with Tonya and Paul who were clothed. There was no pressure on either one of them to disrobe. We all enjoyed one another, together, and it was just pure fun. Being naked in the water was strange to me, especially around this many people. In spite of Chris and Catherine going off by themselves, their interest in one another had not taken on sexual dimensions. No one's had. We were all just splashing and swimming, racing and having water fights. There would be occasional kissing and calm touching, but that was it.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14