August - An Archive 9 страница

I had taken out my work that night and I began to go through everything once again. I got the computer going and I began to print off several copies of each person's story. I felt bad, doing all of this while Hunter was in the next room sleeping, but halfway through the project he got up as well. He said that pregnancy made him sleep funny, and he was taking naps in the afternoon anyway.

"I'm almost done work," he assured me. "I just have to get to September, and then Meredith is taking over until I'm ready to go back, and then we'll swap out and figure it all out."

I asked him if the previous issue with Meredith's July magazine had been solved, and he shrugged. He would have to get used to people's opinions that differed from his own, he had stated. I swallowed hard, wanting to then ask him how he thought work would take this new decision. It wasn't like his employers were narrow-minded, and he had worked with transgender issues before in the paper. But it was a lot different talking about it openly versus coming in and saying that you were this person now. It was ridiculous, I knew, but I also knew how the world worked. If you were the person who had worked on that story, then you were still the same person. It didn't matter what you were called, only that you were called by the right thing as soon as you knew what that was. I had always known this as a given fact, even before the people around me had put it into words, but I had always considered it an abstract principle. I had always been okay with being Frank. For the most people, what people generally presumed me to be was correct. I had no idea, to the extent that he expressed, that Hunter had always wanted to be as such. He had needed different words to express himself and now it was falling into place, making language like an art where he needed to. He made the abstract principle from before become concrete, rendering visible the assumptions that had manifested, the catalyst that deconstructed them, and now what was beginning to be rebuilt. I held him close anytime he talked about work or about navigating this new terrain. He began to help me with the archive, and when I explained it to him that it was only going to be for us, he got into it more. We both began to draw family trees and plot connections. We made our own legal documents and got all of our paperwork together. Hunter made himself a new birth certificate with his new name, and for a while I wondered if he was going to make himself a death one, too. I thought of what Daniel had said about Gerard always being the exception, even if I slept with other men, and I asked if Hunter felt the same way about his previous life.

"It's still me. I still love what happened to me then. It's the past and I can't change it, but more so, I don't ever want to change it," he told me as he sat at his desk. He was drawing more trees and then working on binding each one of the archival stories we had gotten together. "There have been a lot of shitty things that have happened to me in the past and I learned a long time ago that it was pointless to dwell there. I need to get on with things, and this was what I needed to do."

I nodded, very relieved that he was not going to be at war with Eurasia, like Daniel had explained. I told Hunter about the conversation that I had with Daniel about Tonya and the gay community and the moniker that he refused to wear, and he nodded empathetically. He knew what Daniel was talking about, having learned it all from the peripheries of the Women's Studies Department in his undergrad. It was that type of attitude, the ignoring of the past and nearly fascist attitude about identity that made him think that what he felt wasn't real. But it was there, it was always there. Even if things looked differently on the surface, there was always something lurking underneath. We went back to work shortly after, but my mind did wander to more questions about things I still didn't understand and about details that were still obscured from me. I wanted to interview him all over again. But I knew that these pieces of information would come with time. I knew that if I looked back over our story together, I would see the clues in hindsight. Even if I wasn't aware of that was what they meant, I would now. Relationships, even with ourselves, I supposed, always made more sense in past tense.

I tried to focus my mind on where I was right then: in Gerard's room. I had been speaking of Gerard in past tense for far too long in my mind. The amount of 'when Gerard used to do this, when Gerard used to say that' that entered my mind was staggering. Although the archive had been done for us and our own evolution of the self, I did not need to butcher him in my mind and make him into the past. He had a past, one that I had transcribed, bound, and then placed in binders, but he himself was not past. Even with all of the organization I had done with Hunter in the middle of the night, the project would never really be done. This was our version of a family scrapbook that would be updated and our interpretation of our lives since we would not always match what the real world declared us to be. But these books, these texts we created in the middle of the night, they were as real as anything. And so was he.

I shifted on the stool in Gerard's room and I held his version of the archive under my arm. It was the prototype that Hunter and I had put together and contained all the interviews that we had done so far. It was thin, but it was a start. My initial plan upon entering the room was to wait until he was awake, and then the two of us could go through it together. I had these visions of reading it aloud to him and suddenly having him remember everything and then throw his arms around me. Suddenly, he would be better! As if this small document could erase the past and what had happened and what was going on in his brain. I was convinced, so deeply so, that if art was the one creating the forgetting disease, then maybe art could save him, too.

As I watched him sleep, I began to feel foolish. I put down the binder, and then I got into bed with him. There was nothing that could take away the past, take away the years of absences, the fights where we had yelled mean things at one another, and nothing that could reverse the damage that had already been done, both cognitively and emotionally. He had tried to tell me that time did not have to be deterministic, but there were only two things that were eventual: life and deterioration, leading to death. The rest that was in between you could be free to choose whatever you wanted, and it was the time between those two points that mattered the most. But he was getting closer to the point where he couldn't choose anymore, and there was nothing either of us could do about that. I got into bed with him, and I tried to stop thinking about myself and what I was losing and all the mistakes that I had made. I got into bed, and I just held him.

When his arm moved and he held me back, and slowly began to wake up, I was relieved. I checked to make sure he wasn't grasping me out of fear because he didn't know who I was, but his face was calm. He looked up at me, and placed his hand on my back.

"Hi," I told him. "Are you okay today?"

He nodded, and then I let myself go. I laid back on his chest and I hugged him. I felt myself crying, but I didn't want to worry him. I kept trying to brush the tears away. He placed his hand on the back of my head and made a noise that could have been "shhh." Even with everything that had happened, he was the one comforting me. I took a ragged breath to compose myself.

"You were looking for me last night," I told him, and he nodded. "I'm so sorry I was not there."

I hugged him and I felt his chin nod against the crown of my head. I touched his skin, I pushed my fingers under the sleeve of his shirt, and I closed any distance between us. His smell, once so permeated by coffee and cigarettes or the oil of acrylic paint, was now so different. It was of dust and mildew, the faint odor of sweat from staying in the same clothing too long during the summer. I knew I would have to get him up soon and get him ready for the day, along with starting another round of laundry, but I stayed close to him. He wrapped his arms around me too, and I knew that he knew who I was.

"I'm sorry," I apologized again. I had moved my body so I was no longer laying on top of him, but beside him. Both our bodies formed concave semi - circles and our foreheads were pressed together. He had to lie slightly askew because of mobility issues. Though he was working through the partial paralysis from his stroke at a good pace, some positions were more difficult to maintain than others. But his eyes were active and my heart ached when I got to hear him talk again.

"Frank, I missed you, but it's okay. You don't need to be here all the time," he said.

"Are we okay? Do you forgive me for leaving?" I wanted to add more pleas: do you forgive me for not paying enough attention, for not loving you enough, for not doing your memory justice, for failing, for everything. But I didn't need to. He looked at me, touched my cheek, and tried to lean forward and kiss me.

"Do you forgive me?" Gerard asked, and all I could do was nod. Of course I forgave him for leaving. In the letter that I wrote to him but threw away in the cushions of an orange couch, I told him that I hated him for leaving me those seven years. Those were years we could have had together and that he could have remembered, those were years that Vivian did not have to be a mess, those were years that were now gone and were never coming back. But I had let all that negative emotion go and I felt no iota of anger. I had left to go to The Bear for the same reasons he had gone to Paris. I understood his motivations and emotions so deeply here. Of course I forgave him.

I nodded because I could barely get out words.

"Then that's okay. We owe one another nothing, remember?" he smiled, knowing the irony of him asking about memory. "That's what makes us everything."

"I know," I told him, biting my lip. I knew the dangers of extremes like this one, but that didn't matter. Birth and death were extremes. They were the only time for this type of mentality, this type of talk. I held him closer to me, and we stayed like this most of the morning. I wanted to tell him that I would never let him go, but I knew better. He was lucid this morning and he was Gerard. He would full well know that no matter what type of state he was in, I was always to let him go. He would tell me to let him go and that it was imperative to my own freedom that I did. There was no ownership between us, and even in death, we were never promised to one another. He was never promised to anyone. I didn't say anything else, because I knew he would tell me those things that I already knew and still wasn't ready to hear.

I got up from the bed after we had been together for some time and I grabbed the archive. I helped him sit up in bed, and then I began to show him what I had been working on. I read most of it out loud, and started through the stories to jog his memory.

"It's funny," he said at one point, just after Vivian's story. I was about to agree with him, and reiterate the point he had made to her long ago about life being absurd, but he shook his head and tried to articulate his point. Before he had sometimes been listening intently, almost blankly as if I was telling him a story about someone else, but other times he smiled and nodded. He hadn't been saying much, but he was present and engaged. I had been tempted to see if he remembered something we had just read, but I didn't want to quiz him. Up until this point he had not made a sound, and I now listened intently and rubbed his back as he struggled through the words and concepts that once came so easily to him.

"Funny. The things we know about ourselves and are so integral to our identities, other people tell us," he finally said. I let the comment sit in the air awhile, before I probed him to explain more to me.

"If you can," I added cautiously.

He shrugged, and then asked, "What is your birthday?"

My heart fell, thinking this was a symptom, but he shook his head and tried to convey that he was there and not lost. This was still very much a part of the conversation we were having and he had not lost his place.

"May 22nd. Why?" I answered.

"How do you know? Do you remember it?"

His question stopped me entirely. I realized that by saying I didn't know for sure because I could not remember that day (no one could, as Alexa had told me), left me in the same vulnerable position he had be placed into. Suddenly being diagnosed with an illness, whether the gaps in his memories were detrimental or not, suddenly made him an unreliable authority over his own life, when we all were not really sure about some things. I only knew my birthday was May 22nd because my mother and father chose to celebrate that day. For all I knew, I could have been born in June or even in December, and no one would have really known. It could have been the best kept secret alive. I could have even been born another year, in 1979, and when I told Gerard this, he smiled. We may not have gotten into as much trouble as we had a long time ago.

He went on to ask me my name and how I knew it was my name. I smiled, thinking of Hunter, and I began to explain to Gerard the changes that had happened the night before. Hunter had sent out some emails when we were working in the middle of the night, and would be dealing with the responses and some meetings today, but he said that he was okay to do this by himself. It was his choice he needed to make and he was going to re-invite people into our lives with this slightly new premise with it. But I knew it was okay for me to tell Gerard, because he was already well aware of the metamorphosis that had been happening between them and the pages of books.

"Jasmine's name is different now," I started slowly, gauging his facial expressions by his eyebrows to see when he was perplexed. "We're calling him Hunter now."

I waited. I wondered if my pronoun choice was okay, and if it was enough. Though my mind sometimes lapsed when I thought of him in prior months, it was harder to think of him now using anything but he. Gerard pursed his lips a bit, but he didn't say anything.

"Do you remember the story of Hyacinth, Zephyr, and Apollo?" I asked him, and though he nodded that he did, he asked me to tell it again. We had deliberately not yet gone to Hunter's story in the archive, so I flipped it to there and I began to read aloud again.

When I finished, I met eyes with Gerard and he sighed. "See? It's funny. Everything we think makes us who we are is told to us through other people. This is not bad. It is very good. It makes me love you more."

He reached out and grabbed the hair at the back of my neck, and pulled me closer to him. I told him I loved him, and I kissed his neck, his chin, and then his mouth. We kissed for a while, before I broke away. Our mouths were dry from talking so much, and I went up to get us some water. We shared a glass, as I looked nervously at the clock in the room, realizing Mikey was going to be downstairs very soon.

"The two most important parts in our life," Gerard started again, motioning with his hand that had its dexterity. "They are birth and death. These two points are what makes the stuff between good. But we don't see them. We can't remember them. Other people tell us who we are and sometimes we believe them, and other times we create something better. We decide. I decide."

He was getting a little jumpy with his speech, but I understood every word he was telling me. I got into bed with him again, and held his hand. "What is your very first memory?" I asked him. The question was genuine, and not one meant to scope the degree of deterioration. I wanted to know more about him, not his birth or death, but what happened in between those times.

"I was painting. Color in my hands," he said after some time. Long term memory was better than short. Gerard could probably tell me about the color in his hands all day, but not be able to repeat Callie and Dean's story. I was okay with that. I was completely fine with that. I let him go on for a while, talking about his childhood, mentioning Mikey a few times, and then he started to talk about me. I listened intently as he described his earlier memories, and not once did he get lost. It hurt me deep inside when I heard the car pull up in the driveway, and I told him softly that I needed to go.

We had barely spent two, maybe three hours together, and I knew it would never be enough. The archive still sat in his room and though we had gone through what was there, it would never be enough, either. The familiar overwhelming sense of failure possessed me as I was beginning to leave, but I tried to push it away. I had needed him to see that binder before I left. I needed him to know that in spite of never being promised to anyone, he had affected everyone, including me. But I was still missing from the archive, I reminded myself. I didn't want him to think that I had left myself out because I didn't have anything to say about him. The most important things about ourselves were always told to us by other people, and it shamed me deeply that I had not told and showed him how much I loved him, yet.

As I looked around his bedroom, about to say goodbye again, I saw his eyes light up and dance as he followed my gaze. I realized I didn't need to reinforce my story, because he already knew it. All of the prompts that were around him for his memory were the ones from me and our story together and he had told me all about himself, using me as reference, so eloquently using them that morning. There was the dove box, the yellow handprints, and the rainbow and our painting we had done together. Even the artists that lined his bookshelf and the ones that were placed on his wall were ones we had discussed and worked through together. The triptych of Picasso, Van Gogh, and Frida stared back at us from just above his bed. I touched the archive one final time before I let it go into his hands as I gave it to him to read. I gave it to him to hold onto when I was gone, until I could come back and read or add more to it. I gave him parts of himself back that were told by other people; he was the only person he had ever promised himself too, and these were the people who loved him because of it and who held him up and bore witness when he could not do it anymore.

"Frank," he asked me, just before I left. He held up the book instead of formulating the question. I walked over to him again and placed a kiss on his forehead confirming what he thought. My story was not in there, at least, not yet. It would have to be, eventually, even if this entire room was filled with markers of the life we had had together. I still needed to string them together, to show him something he could look at when I was gone, but he was still looking for his way inside of his memory palace.

"Tout ce qui n'est pas donné est perdu," I said, butchering the French. "All that is not given is lost."

I looked down to see if there were any signs of recognition. I then wrote it down, and I placed it above his bed. He nodded, maybe remembering it from the original context, or maybe not. But he nodded, and this was all I could give him just then. It was time for me to go.

Chapter Six

Hunter and I began to deliver the archive out to members of our family later that week. When we had explained the new intention behind the project, they were happy and excited for us and accepted the gift of the binder with open arms. It gave us a thrill to watch people as they reacted to the telling of their own story. They began to relive the experience, but in a more positive way. Even Cassandra didn't mind reading her own memory or having other people read it. It illuminated parts of ourselves to one another that we had had no idea about, and more importantly, it gave us all a way of articulating Gerard's relation to us outside of the established family framework of blood. We were all connected, that was for sure, and it made us freer rather than more restricted. It was a private, personal freedom and we all felt exalted by this fact.

"You still have the art space, though," Vivian reminded me. "I love this book, but what about the show?"

Hunter and I had exchanged looks then and realized that even though we had been working really hard through the hottest days of August, we needed to keep going. He was still going to work, but had been starting his assignments there and then bringing them home. We had no idea what we were going to do with the art space and I knew that it was never going to be cohesive. Not only did we not have enough time, but we were not just dealing with just myself and my art anymore. Even though he had been working frantically to get his last piece for the magazine finished, Hunter had become my collaborator. I had been surprised at how much energy the two of us had that night when we did the bulk of the work for the binders, and I had confided to him that I wanted to repeat that experience. His eyes had lit up, and that was all we needed to understand that our creative lives were now merging. Whatever we ended up doing with the art show, it would be something we did together. We had talked about trying to work on one large piece that we both contributed to, but instead decided that we would work parallel and see if we merged at one point. He had a lot of things that he needed to communicate through his own art form, collage and cut-up, and I very much needed to get back to my own. I went through and developed any old canisters of film that I had lying around and back over the ones that I had taken and developed since I had gotten back in December, my hands shaking as I did so. I felt a thrill I had not had in such a long time, and I stared down at my palms, finally happy with myself. I sat with my piles of photos around me and they all took on a heavy significance. I wanted to display almost the entire set of Gerard and I to the world, the ones that I had taken as a throwback to Robert Mapplethorpe. I showed them to Vivian for the first time, and though her eyebrows were raised, she was happy with them.

"They're beautiful. Honest. Also, someone will want to buy them, someone will want this around," she nodded to herself. The idea of someone buying this made me stop for a second. It wasn't like this was the first time that someone had bought a photo of Gerard and myself. It was one of the first ones I had ever sold, actually, but that had been just our hands. This was definitely a little more than that. I went home after talking to Vivian and made doubles, triples, of all the prints and then I felt my mind more at ease. Vivian had recruited Dean and Callie away from their treasure hunts and love-fest to help out with the show. They weren't back at school yet, but since they weren't thesis defending until later, they had spare time.

Callie and Dean had gotten a copy of the archive, and when I dropped it off, I told them that things would be a lot easier to understand once they could see from our point of view. They nodded, and though they skipped to their own story first, they eventually got around to reading it all and came over to me to express gratitude. They were happy that I had included them as part of their family, as distant cousins, but still around.

"You helped us move. You saw us when we needed help the most, and thank you for that," I assured them, nodding my head and shrugged. "I was only telling the truth."

Dean shook my hand and gave me a hug, whispering that he and I needed to talk a lot more, before he went back to work. Callie lingered.

"I'm sorry," she said. I didn't know how to accept her apology at first, wondering if she was pitying me and the need to make an archive until she clarified. "For what I said before. I should have been more sensitive. I should have just known, you know?"

I breathed a sigh of relief, and I told her it was okay. "No, I get it. Sometimes our relationship doesn't always make sense, but it works."

"That's why we all do art, I guess. Dean always says it's an act of translation for the things that don't make sense. I agree, it helps a lot, actually, but sometimes you miss small pieces and it ends up affecting everything afterwards. The archive is a work of art as well as a document and assembly of facts. It's just that it's our facts now, I guess." She smiled, and then reached over and gave me a hug. "Thank you for making it our facts, too."

I nodded, overwhelmed by how much Dean and Callie were flattered by the book. I wanted to emphasize that we were distant cousins as displayed in one of Hunter's family trees, but it didn't seem necessary. Distant cousins were still family. It would take a while, sometimes, for them to really get it, but they loved us enough to stick around and try it out. Callie and Dean were so normal compared to the rest of us, I thought. But I watched them work in their very well-dressed attire as they framed my photos, and I remembered Dean's story he told me about his lover in college and his inner turmoil that had been so similar to my own. I remembered Callie's voracious mind, her need to discover and save things, and her sudden knowledge of Slovak at the party. They were full of surprises, too. They were full of secret knowledge and experiences, and just because they were distant cousins, did not mean they had to stay that way. We all went out to dinner that night, where Dean began to tell me more about that lover he had once had, and I told them they needed to keep in contact when they left art school. They were already going to keep in touch with Vivian, because she practically demanded it or else they would never get any reference letters, but they agreed with me.

"Send me some postcards," I told them, remembering all the travelling they had in their future.

"We'll do more than that," Dean teased, but never elucidated on his secret plan. I didn't need him too, because I knew he was good to his word.

The reference letter from Hilda finally came as well during all of this turmoil. She had attached a note to the outside of the pre-sealed letter, where she congratulated Hunter and I. She had used his new name, and everything was all set up in order now, she had said, including this letter. "Feel free to read it and gaze at the wonders of my bullshitting. And good luck. I hope you get the job and fuck things up from the inside. ¡Viva la Revolución! " she had signed it with her name, and then crude drawing of her own fist that wasn't for punching. I laughed, way too loud, and didn't even care. At this point in the office, they were used to me being the odd one. I sent off my forms that day, and when I got home that night, I mailed Hilda a copy of the archive. I attached a note for her at the back, and told her that whenever she was around, we would have those parties again and live the revolution with every step we took. It felt so odd, saying all of this, but I loved it. It was a new form of freedom I had not felt before. It was a freedom that I still did not believe was fully mine yet, but it was one that echoed through my house on a daily basis now, especially since Hunter was well underway his side of the project.

He had been going through a lot of his notes from his old Women's Studies classes and began to cut them up and tape them back together to form something new. Sometimes he would just cut out single sentences and place them on black backgrounds to have this anonymous letter technique, or he would merely remove difficult and interesting words (performative, cissexist, language acquisition) to see if poetry could come out of something so socially charged. He cut out some of his notes to form wave after wave, and added them up until four distinct versions and colors overlapped and took over a syllabus for his first year course. He had even found a lecture where his class had discussed the Hunter/Gatherer societies; he ended up framing this piece after he added layer upon layer of watercolor paint to give it a different hue, and he had underlined Hunter several different times.

"A long time ago, when I first heard this lecture, I used to think I was both. I thought that I could hunt all of this information, and then gather it together and then I would be complete, whole," he said when he noticed I was looking at this piece in particular.

"Sometimes I think it's foolish, you know," he said to me suddenly, and I told him that I didn't know. I didn't think that anything he had ever done was foolish, and that it would take a lot for me to think that way.

"And besides," I told him, "I've done some pretty foolish things myself."

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14