June - The Liars 10 страница

"I know," I told her, my voice oozing empathy. "I know exactly what you mean, and I love you so much for that."

She was struck by my sudden expression, but took my hand and squeezed it tightly. I expanded more on my own argument, and we ended up having this huge discussion open up between us where we aired our problems and our likes about the social constructionist perspective. It was the most animated discussion we had had in weeks where we were both talking, about something that wasn't to do with work or Paloma or Gerard. I had missed it.

"See, Frank? You'll always find someone who gets it. Changing everything because people tell you it's wrong is ridiculous. It makes you resent. Like I resent Braden now." She sighed. "He had been such a good friend. It really sucks letting him go. But I know from the way he was looking at me that he knows I'm wrong, and he's the type of guy who won't let that go. He won't be able to see past that."

I took a while with Jasmine, and I rubbed her back. She was having the same moment with her old friend that I had with The Professor. Good discussions, good intentions, but sometimes, it was hard. You couldn't be told you were wrong on a daily basis. You couldn't change someone else's mind. You found people who thought like you and you stuck together. You picked and chose your friends, as well as your family. You also went to find as much information as you possibly could, in order to defend that point of view.

"I'm still thinking about that question you asked me before," Jasmine said suddenly. "About the waves, and what I think the next one will be. I know there will be a fourth and especially in a place like this, I can see it forming around us. Do you?"

I nodded. I had been watching the crowd the entire evening, still unable to really articulate what I saw with words, but could definitely feel brimming underneath the surface.

"Right. There is something here. There will eventually be a name for it. People will eventually write about it, and then like all other events, it will become history. It's the same as anything else." She paused for a moment, her hand running over her stomach. "I think what's been going on here is what I've been looking for this past little while."

"Do you think you're getting close?" I asked, and she nodded. She was staring straight out ahead, but not at anything in particular. She turned to me suddenly. "And have you found what you were after? I haven't seen you work this hard in years."

I blushed with the sudden attention, and then let out a sigh. My eyes dropped to our laps, my hand still entwined with hers. I was working on it, that was all I could say.

We moved on after that, our discussion becoming a bit too heavy. Jasmine told me that Hilda was supposed to show up to Food Not Bombs, and we now kept our eyes peeled for her presence in the crowd of people. As we waited for her, we got up again to grab some more food, and decided to walk around a bit. We had small conversations with people as we went along, but tried to stay away from too heated arguments. A lot of people came up to Jasmine and wanted to talk to her about the baby, but it was pleasant. She still didn't like her stomach being the object of discussion and would try to move it onto some other things. She would promote her magazine instead, since she and Meredith had finally worked out a contract and were getting things on the move. This venture related to pregnancy in a safe enough way for her to interact with strangers. Most people sounded excited and took her business card, saying they needed to see better representations and options out there for people who did choose to have kids. Meredith had had a son, Zachary, and was going to be coming back into work with more frequency now. It was going to look like Jasmine was only going to be away some of the time, and would probably take up doing half-days. We still hadn't quite figured out what that would mean for Gerard, but she had also considered working at home as well. She and Meredith had also considered the option of alternating full time days, and watch the other's kid while one was at work.

"I don't know quite yet, but it'll work. I think it's going to work," Jasmine said, and then we entered into another realm of conversation with people.

A guy came over to talk to us at one point, having spotted Jasmine from across the serving line. He was tiny, and I was excited to see someone my height. He extended his hand out to me politely, and the Jasmine introduced the two of us. His name was Alex, and she had interviewed him a while ago, way back in December, when she had been covering trans healthcare and safe places for men to get pap-smears. Hearing this, I did a double take when I looked at Alex, much the same way he did a double take when he looked at her.

"And you're pregnant now!" he stated the obvious. Jasmine rolled her eyes again, but rubbed her stomach fondly. While the two of them talked and reminisced, I found myself scanning Alex's face for signs of facial hair, his voice for deepness, and all other trivial markers of masculinity on his body. I knew they were trivial, too, and I felt bad for doing it. I knew I would not have analyzed the size of Dean's hands or feet the way I was with Alex right then, and I knew, being short myself, that I would have never appreciated my height being scrutinized as part of some essential element of being a man. But I was still fascinated by Alex, in the most superficial of ways. Hormones could do some amazing things, because Alex did look like a guy. He was my height, with closely cropped light brown hair, and was dressed in a t-shirt and skating shorts. His body was small, but he had no breasts, and there were faint signs of stubble and side burns coming down the side of his face. He laughed deeply with Jasmine; his voice has definitely broken. He manifested all the same markers of apparent masculinity as I did; he was as much of a man on the surface as I was. Although I did wonder, if you were to undress us both, where would the similarities and the differences end? I didn't know that much about trans issues, and so far as I could recall, this was the first person I had met in person. But through Jasmine, I had learned a lot, especially being in the alternative resource library the past few days. I didn't know the intricacies, but I got this in an instant. Alex was male because he said he was male. There was no point in arguing, because it was what he believed to be truth. It was what I believed to be true about myself, and neither of us was wrong. This was an abstract concept that could be applied to bodies. This was how we communicated with one another, and I wanted to talk to him, to show him that I understood.

When Alex turned his attention towards me, he was kind and polite, but he must have sensed my initial double-take. I felt bad for making him uncomfortable, but I did not know how to break that silence with understanding. I tried to remember that theorist Jasmine had mentioned earlier, but fumbled through my thoughts. Alex, probably used to this by now, began to tell us both a story.

"I heard you two already have names for this little one, but I want to tell you how I picked mine, because hey, I like boasting about my name because it's pretty damn cool. Although having a neutral one like Alex got me misgendered like you wouldn't even believe up until about four months ago," he started, moving his hands animatedly. He had already eaten, and set his plate down on the ground, so he could be completely engaged with us.

He began to tell us about the Greek figure of Alexander The Great, and how, all through Alex's high school years, he was obsessed with this historical figure. "I read books about him, had pictures of him tacked up in my locker, you name it. He was my role model in school. I was a really smart, kid, man, like super smart. I would have gotten valedictorian if not for all the other shit in the way. I worked myself too hard, really. I mean I worked all the time. Alexander The Great conquered the world by the time he was thirty-three. This was the goal for myself. I knew I couldn't have the world, but I wanted to be really successful. I wanted to get into medical school, or law school, or some fancy Ivy League institution. It actually didn't matter to me, so long as it was important, so long as I could objectively say I was successful. I guess you can see how that turned out," he pointed down to himself, and kind of shrugged. He had disclosed before that he was only twenty-seven, and had just started to take some night school classes again.

"There's still time to conquer the world," I told him.

He smiled and laughed a bit. "That's the point, though. There is still time, but I'm not doing it. I didn't want the world, I realized. I just wanted to be Alex. Being Alex was good enough for me."

I nodded. I thought of Gerard and living in Paris. He had first gone there to become this famous artist, but living in the city for those seven years had been good enough for him. He could say that he had done it, and that his life was not a regret. I thought of Chris and Socrates from before, too. Socrates would have gotten the world if it killed him, and it did. But Chris was accidentally killed; he had realized before then that the world was too much. He did not want to die. He just wanted Alaska, like Alex just wanted to be Alex.

And the conundrum Jasmine and I had stumbled upon came back to me: what do you do after that? After getting what you finally want? I looked around us at all the people here. I could see Hilda approaching from the other side of the street now and Jasmine got excited and excused herself to go greet her. She was struggling up the small hill with her nine months of pregnancy on her. Alex made a comment about Hilda, and how that baby was going to be hell on wheels as soon as it got out of her. "With half her DNA, I don't anticipate any child-proof lock will suffice," he had quipped. He eventually left our small group, wanting to go and see his girlfriend (who was the one with the dreadlocks, I found out), though he and I did exchange a few stories between us. He told me about some other feminist authors that Jasmine had left out of her history and that I couldn't wait to talk to her about.

"Stuff by Kate Borenstien. Man, I cried when I read that book! Look for Bergman and Feinberg, too. They may be hard to find, but I assure you it is worth the effort. I'm sure Jasmine would be into it. She knows a little about it already, but probably not enough to speak on it yet. You know her, she always wants to be sure," he commented. I smiled at his remark, knowing that he was right. Jasmine had been so clear before, she had probably left out any authors she still couldn't fully place. Maybe we had stumbled upon the fourth, I thought, and maybe we could do it together. Still excited, I told Alex Aristophanes speech during The Symposium about the way that the gods had split us all apart. He had been completely into the idea.

"Sounds like me, honestly," he confessed, and I felt better about our prior misunderstanding. He elaborated on how he felt like one of the beings with four arms and four legs, but he hadn't been split yet, only hidden and repressed. Now that he had gone from being Julia to Alex, he felt more complete and whole. He realized that he would always be Julia in a way, but he was determined to live his life as Alex. I wondered how his girlfriend came into this equation of bodies, and if they would also try to put themselves back together in the same way Gerard and I had tried.

I thought about that for a while as Alex left, waiting in the shade. I began to wonder if I could ever be that four legged creature that Alex was talking about, someone who seemed so balanced and whole. He knew who he was, he was definitive on that point, but I wondered if that really existed. I had once been in his position and known who I was. I had known all these things about myself, but now I felt that foundation shaking. Was Alex in the cave, too, like me? Were we both watching illusions that we thought were real? I didn't like how The Professor had gotten under my skin, even when I had run away from it. I knew that was why I had been reading so much. I wanted to counter his argument about myself, because it was that essential self he was questioning. It was difficult stuff, and there was one thing I could agree with: it was the most simple and complex question.

Who are you? Rattled around in my brain, and I tried to form an answer that I could say back into the world and not lose who I was, my history or my past. As much as I knew that we had to take care of one another, as much as I was beginning to understand that we were all linked and we all had our things to say, I still grappled with the idea of freedom, too. How could I be free if we were all linked? How would I be happy knowing that I would be working a full time job and raising a family? That I was losing the most important part of myself? Although I had separated my identity from Gerard, he was still all of me, in mind and memory. My freedom stemmed from him. Where was I supposed to pick it up again if he did not show me how, if he disappeared from my horizon completely?

Hilda came up alongside me and slapped me on the back playfully. She had been showing a lot more affection to me recently, though we had never repeated our kiss from before. We didn't really need to. She asked me to go get her some food since she was a blimp, and I went and got whatever else I could. I also took the Tupperware container that I had stashed in my bag out and began to pile some of the food in there for later.

When I came back with her plate, Hilda was lamenting about the fact that this would probably be her last dinner with us for a while. Jasmine and she were sitting on a bench, further away from the Food Not Bombs crew. Jasmine seemed devastated by this news. She needed Hilda in her life; she needed a close friend by her when she was pregnant in order for the experience to not be so scary. She loved Hilda, I saw that, though I wasn't sure if Hilda loved Jasmine in the same way.

"What's going on?" I asked.

"The baby's coming out butt-first. Should have figured. I would come out mooning the world too," she explained. "I'm going to have to have a c-section. In the hospital. Lydia is going to be there, but she's probably going to be angry at everyone the whole time. She may not say anything directly, but that woman's stare can cut through steel. And I'm gonna have a scar from all of this, too. A big one! Probably can't have kids any other way after this."

"How do Brian and Ryan feel?" Jasmine asked, holding Hilda's hand when she had finished her meal.

"They're okay. They want the baby out of me as much as I do. We have a good relationship," she stated.

"But you can still see us after the hospital, right?" I offered, knowing that Jasmine wanted to ask this, but wouldn't. "I mean, you'll be there for a few days, but we can visit you and bring you flowers and embarrass you to the nurses. Then you can just hang out with us awhile when you're released and healed."

Jasmine and Hilda both got quiet, and that was when I knew that Hilda, forever wanting to move on and not stay in one place, was going to be going as quickly as she got here.

"I'll probably stay close by. I mean, I do workshops and stuff and move around a lot because of those, but apparently Brian and Ryan are getting all sensitive and want me to know the baby. This wasn't part of the deal, but I kind of like it here," she said in a blur, clearly agitated. She put her arm around Jasmine on the bench, and slowly began to play with her hair. It was very candid, a technique to calm both of them down.

Maybe they did love one another, I thought. I was okay with that, but it did make me feel lonely. Jasmine and Gerard were all I had, and Gerard was slowly fading. Soon, it would just be she and I. We had been reading so much information together, though we did have moments of closeness, I wondered if our overwhelming sense of knowledge and constant exposure would eventually tear us apart, too. It was the knowledge of distinction and differentiation that made the people with four legs and four arms understand themselves as having been in love and whole, though. We were only in this much pain now because we had something good. I held onto Jasmine's hand and tried to give her comfort through her own separation.

Hilda left shortly after that. She told us she was staying at the fathers' house tonight in preparation for the operation. She insisted that she would tell us when the procedure was finally scheduled so we could come and see her, but I knew that she actually wouldn't. Hilda liked her solitude and independence as much as I had in the past. Though she had come in and out of our lives, she was done. She had made her impact, her handprint was on my wall, and she was forever etched into Jasmine's memory. She had interviewed her countless times for the magazines and the two of them had collaborated. She had given Jasmine all of her zines; if that wasn't a goodbye present I didn't know what was. This was the third wave ending for Jasmine: it had started with Kathleen Hanna on that television screen, she had majored in feminist theory, written an MA thesis on a feminist publishing house and researched the career of an unknown lesbian feminist romance writer, and then she had fallen in love with one of the original Riot Grrrls herself. It hurt her to know that this section of her history, and herself embedded inside of it, was now complete, but I wanted her to know that there was still so much going on around her. There was still so much more for us to discover.

After Hilda had left, I expected to be around to comfort Jasmine, but she was okay. She wanted to get up and go socialize more. Alex from before had waved her over, and she went there for a while and met with a group of people. She offered for me to come over, but I wanted to stay where I was. I wanted to watch the group from the outside, to be on the margins looking in.

I had not really understood the activism aspect of this community before. Veganism especially felt so restrictive and like too much work. There were too many people, too many attitudes coming together at once. But when big groups began to work together, even if it was merely a social circle like Jasmine was in right then, I began to see how much stronger the chain became when it worked together. I thought of the waves we had just rolled through, and the revolutions that had been started for large groups of people, and I thought of the multitudes that some people could not comprehend. I loved Gerard, I loved him with all of my heart, but I began to change and morph my definition of freedom then. I would always be an artist. Even with groups like this, as much as I felt involved and sometimes even free within them, when Jasmine went off to join the center, I would always stay at the margins. I was too internal, too much into my own little world to fully grasp what anything beyond it was all about. But I now saw the freedom in numbers, and how we were all linked. If one of us was not free, then the rest of us suffered. This was why the waves kept happening, because someone was always left behind. And we had to come back and get them, in order to live in peace ourselves.

Maybe I was suffering alone right then because the person that I loved was at home, I thought to myself. Mikey and Alexa had come over to take care of him, Cassandra and Noelle taking care of their kids. I saw the way that people took care of one another in order to ensure their freedom. But part of me was tired. So, so exhausted. I had gone through philosophers and theorists from A to Z and over one hundred years of oppressed history and back again and I was so fucking tired. I had been trying to remake Gerard and remake our life together in my head this entire time. I had been trying to get all the things that I thought I knew together, examine them once again, and then keep them held up with sticky tape. I needed to know that I would still be free when he was gone. I had tried to find the answers from all these other people, but I knew it already inside of me. I would always be free, because that was just a choice I had made. I could be free wherever I was at that time, if I let myself be, and I believed it.

But that still didn't stop me from thinking about him, and being in pain. Freedom did not mean the absence of pain, in fact, I was beginning to think that freedom meant you understood how much pain there really was in the world. I thought of factory farms and dead bodies, torture victims, floods and natural disasters. I thought of mutilated bodies, bodies that were burned, bodies that were dismembered, and bodies that were traumatized but left with no mark at all. His body had no mark at all, but his mind was full of madness and forgetfulness. He was losing himself, and because I was so free, I felt it too. I felt all of the pain in the world and I was free to do something about it. I understood how awful it all was, maybe not fully, but enough to know that every step I did mattered. Every last word I spoke meant something. Even if it all drained away in the end, no life was meaningless. Even if it ended in the worst way possible, the worst way that I feared for Gerard, it was not a waste.

Tout ce qui pas donne est perdu. All that is not given is lost. I repeated his words to myself, again and again as I sat on that bench. That was the only thing that got wasted: whatever was not shared, whatever was not told, whatever was not done because you thought what you were doing was wrong. That was the only thing that was wasted, and I knew I had the power to change that.

I had done enough thinking by myself on the bench. I got up and began gathering together my stuff, and saw that Jasmine was waving me over anyway. I walked by and most people had cleared out since the food leftovers had been driven away, but a few still stayed behind.

"Hi, Frank," Jasmine said. "This is Daniel. He's been coming by the alternative resource center for a while. Daniel, this is Frank."

I stuck out my hand on impulse, ready to shake hands with yet another person I was meeting this evening. He was a tall, slender guy with dark hair and features; his eyes locked with mine as we completed our handshake. He greeted me, said it was nice to meet me, but I was still stuck on his eyes. There was something there, something that I wanted to touch.

I looked back at Jasmine, who was holding my other hand. "Daniel was telling me about this commune he works and lives at. Commune is sort of a bad, word, I guess. It's less hippy-like and more like a small village community. Am I getting that right? "

Daniel nodded. "It's an off the grid type of lifestyle. We grow our own food, generate our own electricity, and other things of that nature. Anyone is welcome so long as they help out. We have a car going up in the next few days, starting in the beginning of July. Independence day, right? We thought it was ironic." He smiled, and his teeth were so white. I tried to guess his age; he appeared to be maybe a little older than Jasmine and I, but not much. I was so fascinated by him that I was barely listening to what he was saying, and what Jasmine was asking me without words. She tugged on my hand and then I looked down, and got it. She wanted to go to this community.

"Not forever," she explained. "But for a little while, maybe a few weeks or a month. I'm somewhat overwhelmed."

When she admitted it, I began to feel it too. Everything, all at once, overwhelming and crushing. I wanted to leave, but I didn't think it was feasible. I brought up Gerard, her doctors' appointments, and work, and she brushed them all aside with quick response. We would figure it out. This was the only chance we got to do this. The more persistent she became, the more I began to realize that this was her Alaska and her Paris. This was her one last hurrah to make herself feel free and in touch with herself, before life took over again. This was what she wanted to do before she was okay just being Jasmine again. I bit my lip, still stuck in my own internal resistance.

Daniel looked at both of us, then said, "You don't have to decide now. I just wanted to extend the offer. There is still some time before June is over. Give me a call. We're going up regardless if you're going, and we always have room."

He was about to leave, but I reached out and grabbed his red hoodie to stop him. I had considered telling Jasmine that she could go alone, but that separation and distinction, that minor loss of self, made me reach out and break through what had been holding me back.

"No, it's okay," I told him. "We'll go."

Chapter Six

The trip would be good for us, I had decided. Jasmine and I had not been spending that much time together just being together. We had become so busy and let our lives get in the way of our own creative reality. We had been so busy tracking down history and all that had come before us, we had lost ourselves and what we had wanted to say in the mess. You created your own reality, Gerard had always told me that. It was one of his lessons that I still hung onto vehemently. I also thought of what Mikey had told me the artist had taught him: chose something, between nothing and everything, and I needed to make that decision. I was choosing this life with Jasmine and Gerard, but I had become overwhelmed by all that he had become and all that would lead into him. I needed to take a break, just for a while. Daniel said that this trip could last as long or as short as we wanted it to be. Although they were off the grid and had to make most of their own power, there were roads to get there and back. There were places to escape to if we needed it, and even if no one we knew would come and get us, there were usually cars coming in and out to take people places. We also didn't have to pay anything to go; so long as we worked on tending to plants, growing food, making repairs, and generating power. Most of the houses they had were solar powered, but there were other tasks to do that weren't always so pleasant, like dealing with waste and getting down into dirt. This part I didn't find too appealing, but this was important to Jasmine. She needed to take the next step, something I realized she had not done yet. She had gone right from high school into her undergrad, and from there into her masters thesis. She had been working at the magazine ever since, and though her experience with Meredith was proving to be a joyful one, her work had let her down so much. Jasmine was not an ordinary person, either. She was just as creative as Gerard and myself, but with other mediums. She had escorted me through one hundred years of history and told me just as many stories, the way Gerard had taken me through art. Jasmine was bursting at the seams for this next step in her life. I knew I needed to support her in this, like I had supported Gerard in Paris. The more I entertained time away from Gerard, away from work, away from everything that had created my initial emptiness, the trip began to make more sense.

Jasmine was ecstatic. As soon as I had told Daniel that we would go with him, she started to breathe so quickly I thought she was having a panic attack. She began to speak in half-formed sentences, talking about how she was going to write a book, "Like Thoreau! Or something," while she was there, or that she was going to read an entire library, over and over again, so much that she could memorize and recite on demand. Daniel gave us some more details and his number so we could call if we had any questions, and I gave Jasmine the names of the authors that Alex had told me about. She wrote them down frantically and then nodded, a flare of recognition in her eyes. She told me candidly, growing more serious as we progressed in our discussion, that she would need to think about a lot of things while she was there. As we walked back home, she buzzed with more excitement and we began to brainstorm a list of people that we would need to call and talk to in order to make this possible. We wanted to see my parents before we left, and we did, that night, very briefly. The sun had only just begun to set, and I knew they would still be awake. We knew we didn't want to make it a long visit, anyway, because Jasmine was still not comfortable staying for a meal. They tried to drag us inside for longer, offering us tea and cookies to entice us, and we eventually settled inside. Jasmine had never really met my parents for this long before. She had come by on occasion so they were familiar with her presence, but they never really got to know her. From what I could tell, as we began to have discussions beyond the hi how are you drivel and then belly rubbings, they were impressed. Her education made it easy; it always looked good on paper. My mother kept gushing about how wonderful it was going to be to have a granddaughter around, since she had been around boys for so long.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14