September - Last Words 9 страница

"Still suffering from dead white men's disease?" I had asked, knowing even before the words came out of my mouth that this was not it. I had grown to like Walter tremendously, and though Vivian had nodded and sort of shrugged, we knew the real answer. We were here for him, wondering and waiting, and seeing what was happening next. It was why Cassandra came and went so frequently, along with Callie and Dean. Everyone was around to keep the house going, even though Paloma was doing fine and Hunter was healed and going into work once in a while to drop off copies. He was doing most assignments from home, but there would be afternoons where I found him, hunched over at a computer, and sobbing. It was no longer the miracle that we had all gone through that he was sobbing for. It was the anticipation of what was next. It hit me again, like it hit me the first time in May, and I let it sink in. Gerard had written madness on his whiteboard. He finally really accepted that something was wrong, and I wondered what on earth we were going to do next.

I eventually went back to bed, but in the morning, after I had gotten Paloma up and fed, I went upstairs to check on Gerard. When I got there he was already up, reading. He was still wearing his night clothing, which was a t-shirt and shorts, but he was alert and attentive. His board still had madness etched across it, but it seemed to be the furthest concern from his mind. He looked up as I came in and nodded, and then went right back to reading. I couldn't tell what book it was, and it didn't concern me too much at that moment. I was scanning his face for recognition, and it seemed like he was doing better than before. Much better, as if before never happened. He looked at me as if he knew who I was, and even without the information on the whiteboard, when I said I was going to get Paloma, he didn't ask any questions. I said I was going to get his daughter after I said Paloma, to see if there was any difference. He made brief eye contact with me, and I said we were all going to sit together.

"Paloma, your daughter, and me, Frank," I said, and then felt bad for speaking so stunted and like I needed to explain everything to him. I tried to be more lighthearted, and added. "And I might take your picture."

He nodded, and I disappeared to where Hunter had placed her in the crib, and took her out again. He seemed annoyed by my actions since she had just finished crying, but when he noticed the strained expression in my face he let his concerns drop. I grabbed my camera too, and he seemed to understand further. I went back into Gerard's room and he had gotten up. He stood in the middle of the room, and then moved towards the closet. He put on his dove jacket, but I had to put Paloma down temporarily to get his pants on him. He sat on the edge of the bed, so close to her, as I rolled his legs up, and then helped him step inside. Once he was settled, he seemed a lot better. He positioned himself on the bed, and when I picked up Paloma again, his eyes lit up. He knew. He had been foggy the past few days, but he remembered now, I swore. He smiled, the left side of his face still affected and probably would be forever (though most of the other damage had healed and his mobility had returned). He grew quite sad again, and I recognized this sadness as the same kind that plagued him during the birth. It was something that he associated distinctly with Paloma, along with this overwhelming look in his eyes of joy. I was beginning to recognize his emotions, the ones he could not quite express, in the ticks of his face, small nuances, and gestures. He wanted me to sit down with him, and when I handed over the baby to him, he took her slowly in his arms. He stared at her and kissed her forehead, absolutely still and quiet. His breathing was even, and Paloma was still. She had cried in his arms before, but even when she cried around him, it was different somehow. I was getting used to recognizing her forming emotions, too. She cried out of the same sadness, this melancholia that had taken them both over. It was not uncommon for her to just cry for no reason with him, and when I went to change her, to feed her, or to rock her, nothing subdued her. He didn't subdue her either, but she fidgeted less with him. Now she was calm, and they both seemed to be locked on none another.

I got up slowly and began to position my camera. I told them both out loud what I was doing, but neither one took heed. I snapped a quick picture, and then another. I got him to look at the camera, and he tried to smile. It didn't feel right, though. He went back to looking at her and she at him. That was what I wanted to capture, and I took one last photo of the two of them together. When I sat down next to him again, I had no idea my heart was pounding in my chest. I realized I was slowly working towards the end of the archive, or at least, the one we were going to keep to ourselves, like a secret knowledge that made us smile in the darkest of times. I touched his shoulder and we both looked down at our daughter. I tried to savour as much of this moment as I could, because I knew I had to go to work and within minutes Mikey would be honking for me to get into his car.

"Paloma," Gerard said suddenly, the word sounding funny in his mouth. He delighted in saying it, in seeing her, in watching her. He smiled and said it again. My heart pounded, and blood rushed into my ear.

"Your daughter," I reminded him, and he nodded. Tears grew in his eyes, and then he passed her to me before he could release them. He still gazed at her, but he kept his hands folded to his chest. My time was running out, and it seemed to be all that he could take for the morning. I was about to get up and leave him alone for a while, but something in my chest gripped me. With her in my arms, I stopped before I got to the door, and turned around to face him. He was smaller, suddenly, sitting on the bed and wearing the jacket that was too big for him, covered in paint, gray now from washing so much, and just old. But the dove was still there, still intact. In the room he comes and goes, talking of Picasso, I thought to myself, and bit my lip.

"Hey, Gerard," I called to him, and he gazed over. "Did you know Picasso painted doves?"

I waited in agony for him to respond, to give me some type of clue that he was there. I held the back of Paloma's head anxiously, my camera heavy over my shoulder.

He smiled, and then tilted his head to the side. He was there, I knew he was. He was playing with me, like he always used to. He was testing me again, this one final time. His smile parted and he said, "No, tell me."

I returned the smile, albeit, a little broken, and sat down on the bed again. The entire time I told him about the doves, she was quiet in my arms, and he never took his eyes off of her.

Chapter Five

At work, the day crunched on. I wanted to be home. Suddenly it was torture to be here, and I felt as if I was having a panic attack anytime I looked at the clock and I would realize I still had an endless amount of hours in this limbo-like panic. I called Hunter, and asked if everything was okay at lunch. He told me that everything was fine, that I was overreacting. "I'm sorry, I mean, I just have a bad feeling, and I know that's nothing, really, but can you check on him?" I was asking, and I knew it was foolish. But there was that pain, in the center of my chest, which would not relent. I had not been sleeping well and my anxiety seemed to be doubling because of it, and due to the realization at four in the morning, I felt exhausted and wretched. Hunter humored me, though there was a thin distance in his voice. I thought he was mad at me, but it took me until after I hung up to realize that he was afraid too.

When I got home that night, I went up to check on him. And everything was actually okay. He was in his room, reading again, but apparently he had been painting earlier in the day. Hunter had eaten most of his meals with him, and spent most of the afternoon together with Paloma.

"He was thrilled," Hunter insisted. He shifted in his seat at the kitchen table, and then, after a while, explained that he had noticed the sadness, too. We talked about it for some tense minutes, gripping hands over the table. We tried to drink tea to calm down, but it seemed to do nothing. I checked on Gerard one final time. He was heading into bed now and I stepped in the room to help him with that.

"How are you doing?" I asked him.

"Fine," he said, and he seemed to mean it. I felt like I had at the beginning of the diagnosis, that I was reading into small signs and symbols as if they were manifestations of something more. I needed to stop, and just believe him. Just trust him. I undressed him, and got into the bed with him. Madness still stared back out at me from his whiteboard, and though it sent chills down my back, I did not touch it. Gerard fell asleep quickly, but not before I kissed his forehead and told him I loved him, to hear him say it back. I whispered into his ear as he slept and I got up from the bed, and then went down into my room.

I saw the camera on my desk, and I knew that there was one thing I still had to do. I got to work on the photos from the morning, knowing that it would help keep me grounded. Inside the dark room, the past few days came back to me in a flurry. I thought of work, of my interview, and of the response that I had gotten from it today. There would be another round of interviews for me, this time with the higher up execs to make sure I was "company material" or something like that. I had gotten the news today, but it hadn't even registered with all the tension I had felt. I nodded blankly, and took the info down on my pink memo pad. It was written on my forearm, and stared up at me as I placed the photos in solution. I had gotten more emails from my parents and Scott, but not bothered to reply to them yet. They sat in my email inbox, taking up no space in reality, but their words came across my mind here and there. I tried to keep my attention on the photos, but even when I began to develop them and their images became clear, when I got to the one with Gerard and Paloma, poetry began to enter my mind. In the room, he comes and goes, talking of Picasso. I breathed in and out a heavy sigh, and I thought about what I had told him. I thought about how much I loved him, and how all of this love seemed to be contained within this small darkroom closet as it came out of the photos. It was as if this was the right light washing over me, hypnotising me, and making me drift off to the smell of chemicals. When I finished my task, I stayed in the darkroom awhile. I was sleep deprived; I felt it all over me. I was about to come out, when I heard a small knock at the door. Hunter was on the other side.

"I know you're busy, but when you're done, can you see me?"

"Yeah, sure," I said, taken aback. I wasn't expecting him to come and get me, and as soon as I answered him, he scurried away and back into his room.

I had been sleeping in Hunter's room a lot with him, especially during the beginning when Paloma was still new and I wanted to watch over her just as much as he did. We had been drifting a bit more these past few days, mostly because he had been working and we were attempting co-sleeping. Though the process was still a bit strange to me, it had been going well. When he and I began to sleep together, we would sometimes keep her in the same bed, but often put her in her crib. I had still been really good about getting up when I heard her cry, and I was actually shocked at how infrequently it was. Hunter had tried breast feeding her, and though we had a large tension-filled conversation when she wouldn't latch right away and we had no idea how to get around calling it breast feeding, it eventually happened and became easier. He told himself it was for her, not him, and that the means justified the ends. He liked his body and he still maintained that he did. It was just awkward now with all these extra societal meanings put on him. We used the term feeding or nursing to make things easier, and he eventually had fun as he watched Paloma latch for the first time and stay latched. He was so in awe that his body could do this, and so was I. He only allowed certain people to watch him feed her, though, and a lot of the time, he would pump his own chest and then leave the bottles in the fridge. This way the act became more private and if he didn't want to do it that way, he didn't have to. It also gave me more availability to just get up and take care of her. Vivian had pitched in with feeding, too, and really, everyone had. Most of the time the reason that I had been staying with Hunter in his room was because mine was occupied with one of our many entourage, usually Dean and Callie since Vivian had taken their spot in the living room. This was probably why having a newborn in the house didn't feel like that big of a deal. Granted, we were only two weeks in, but they were the hardest. Everyone was still adjusting to life, but it made that life go on so much smoother when we really did have a village raising her. I wasn't sure why everyone did this, and I realized, in an instant, how lucky I was.

But no one was staying in my room that night. It was the first time in a while, two weeks after she was born, that it was just the three of us plus her in the house. I hadn't realized that until this moment, and begun to wonder why Hunter needed to see me. The last time I had gone to the fridge, there were several bottles ready to be used for her, and everything else was done for the night. I thought of his voice on the phone earlier, and I noted that we were probably both harbouring this negative feeling in the air. I took a deep breath and left my darkroom.

When I knocked on his door, and then went inside, he was just putting away his writing. He wrote like a fiend some days, and it had been particularly feverish the past while. He looked up at me from his desk, and we both nodded to one another, sensing the same tension.

"It's been here for days," he told me, and I nodded.

"Soucouyant?" he suggested. "Like what Lydia said? I didn't believe her, not really, but..."

I shook my head, and he conceded the point and let the idea go, because that was all it really had been. We didn't say it out loud, but we both knew very well that that soucouyant only existed inside of us. We had been making the bad feeling present and it was our own fears. We were giving Gerard that sick role that he didn't want, that he didn't need, that just left him in his fog of madness. It wasn't fair, and I tried to maintain that distance from those roles. Gerard still had choices and feelings, and I needed to not call it this mythic creature, and instead confess my own demons.

I stepped further inside Hunter's bedroom, and I said one of the things that had been eating me up: "I have a second interview with the company. For Human Resources."

Hunter's eyes perked up. "Good."

I sort of shrugged. It was a good pay, and a good job, I was sure, but it seemed too futile, as if I was reaching too far. "Do you not want it?" Hunter suggested, and I was surprised to find myself shaking my head and feeling a visceral no.

"I want it. I really do. I'm just...waiting, I guess. I don't like that."

Hunter nodded. I walked over to him in his chair, and he wrapped his arms around me. I kissed the top of his head, and I told him that my parents had seen the show. "Did I tell you that?"

He was wide-eyed, a deer in the headlights. He told me no, and then, paused. "What did they...?" he did not finish his sentence, not wanting to know. He was not nervous about his art. He could take criticism there. It was his life, the one that he was still struggling to figure out, that worried him.

"They said they want to meet you again. They want to be reintroduced. I figured it was a good sign. They called you Hunter." I smiled to him, and he hugged my sides with relief. His tension, now dissipated, and we made vague plans to meet with our parents. It came to my mind so easily - our parents. No longer just mine, or even just mine and Gerard's, if that had ever been a unit in my head before all this. Hunter and I had the same family now, and we were family.

I suddenly felt this wave of anxiety spread over me. We were so normal that I couldn't stand it. We had kept the soucouyant, the negative energy, alive so long because it made us feel different. It had us question, and re-evaluate so we could try and fix something, blame something. Now that we had reached this mark, and we were calm, and it didn't feel right.

"I can't believe we're doing this," he stated. He could feel it too. The normalcy was setting in along with the horrifying complacency. I thought of all he had told me about never wanting to fight about laundry detergent, and though we hadn't yet, I knew that in the years to come raising Paloma that we would. We had just talked about our jobs, and our parents, and there were only so many places we could go next.

"So this is how we spend our first night really alone together? With the baby asleep?" I said, and then laughed to myself. Hunter's eyes locked on me and he stood up in his chair. I looked down at him (he was not that much shorter than me, I realized, and Gerard was taller than both of us) and he reached up to touch my cheek. We looked at one another for a long, long time. This was the first time we had really been close to one another since he gave birth. We had had so much happening around us, and now, all I felt was quiet. Hunter's face trembled, and he parted his lips slightly.

"Thank you, Frank," he said.

I nodded. As much as the normality of our actions frightened us, it was something that neither of us had ever experienced before. We never had this quiet, this easy interaction, where families had blended and lives had become completely entwined. I thought it was constricting, as if it cut us off from the world. But with this many people in the house, this many people I felt like we could call at a moment's notice and they would be here, it actually opened up the world. They knew someone who knew someone, and if we kept going, we knew everyone, and everything. I knew it was not that simple, but this entire normalcy we were experiencing right then wasn't that simple either. We still had our art, our writings, and I knew that no matter how much we loved one another, there would be other people. There were always going to be other people, coming in and out of our lives. I thought about Daniel, Hilda, and maybe having both of them come again, but probably not. And if there weren't other people, then I knew there would be other places. I began to talk to Hunter about Dean and Callie's plan to travel after the fact, and he nodded along.

"Anytime they come here now, when they're too busy, they are pouring over maps and trying to figure out the best routes," he stated. And then, catching my gaze again, and becoming very close, we kissed. "Were will we go?"

In the room, I thought to myself, and then pushed it out. I tried to stay focused on him, on us in our day dreaming mode. This was something that we had done at the Bear, and it felt good to come back to it. It made the future, no matter how normal or scary or unknown, take shape and focus. We looked at it with our eyes, no one else's and we reported back what we saw, and hoped it matched. "Well, now, I've already seen Paris, but the rest of Europe looks good. We could go there, spend time in museums, libraries, and any other place."

Hunter nodded, and added, "Maybe we could even go to Alaska for real, and live with our babies in the woods."

He was talking in plural again, and we moved our hips together, bridging the distance between us. Though he still carried some extra weight from the birth, the big distance between our bodies had been bridged. We had crossed the Atlantic in our minds, from Europe all the way back home, and then running off to Alaska. He gripped my back, and our lips met again, and again. Our closeness was more than just the lack of pregnancy, there was something else that had disappeared between us. We held our bodies close together, and as I began to kiss his neck and keep our hips tightly pressed, he spoke up again

"If I start hormones, it may mean I'm infertile," he was going slow, trying to spell it out for himself as well as me. "If we do want babies...we could always adopt."

I nodded. Adoption was a good choice, and I knew that maybe sometime in the future we would do that. Or foster kids. I had heard so many horror stories from Daniel about it, and it made me so sick to my stomach. I wanted to help there, do something, and maybe I could if Human Resources didn't work out. My mind seemed to be going a mile a minute at that moment, as I stared at Hunter. His was going too, and he bit his lip. We pushed our foreheads together, planning our life together in between us. There was another blank slate, an empty canvas for us to fill with whatever we wanted. We both closed our eyes, and imagined the difference of Paris in winter, because I never got to see that. We imagined London and the giant Ferris wheel that Hilda had told us about. I imagined New Jersey and more art shows between us, more free galleries, and maybe even teaching in some side classes. I imagined him and his own magazine, his own book, and Mikey and Alexa with their own books. I saw these lives spend and then fold up together, and I saw us raising children in Alaska. Maybe not Alaska, though, maybe just right here. Maybe right now, in this house, where art lined the walls and seemed to breathe out a heavy "ahhhhh" anytime someone opened up a can of paint or took a picture. Where the garden would always be there, guerilla or not, and sunflowers, these eternal sunflowers, would always bloom. I felt something move inside of me, and I held Hunter close to me.

I wanted to reply and say something, but our mouths met, and we moved beyond words. I held him in my arms, and it was the first time I really felt him. Him as only him, completely solid in my arms. I experienced his body in a different way than before. He was new inside of it, the belly gone, and having finally been healed from birth. Lydia had given him the okay to have sex, and though his hormones were still a little off from feeding, he was good. He had not needed an episiotomy, but any time of penetration, after an act that extreme, needed to be gentle. I went slowly regardless of those facts, because I needed to. I had to start all over again with him and we had to be gentle to one another. This was the first time we had had sex, I realized. The first time fully realizing who we were, with the tension no longer around. We had tried before, but we were both so new and scared. I breathed a heavy sigh and Hunter bit his lip. We were both so scared, and I tried to be as vulnerable as I knew he was. I looked at him, touching his shorter hair, feeling the back bristles on his neck, and then kissing the spaces under his chin, and running my mouth over his Adam's apple. It was smaller than my own, but it was still there.

I began to unbutton his shirt, and he started to do the same for me. We undressed one another like a mirror, and I finally began to see what Gerard had always seen. I was no longer looking for hints of his old life, and I was no longer thinking of him in those terms. I touched his arms, and I felt biceps, his shoulders strong and broad, and as his shirt came off and hit the ground, we put our chests together. I touched his arms, his back, his neck, absolutely everywhere. He looked up at me and smiled, and I felt my heart jump. He, he, he, I repeated. This beautiful pronoun had infiltrated my world, my mind, and my existence as much he had, ever since the first day I met him. My god, I told myself, he's so fucking beautiful.

We moved to the bed, and Hunter got down first on his back, and I straddled his waist as our mouths met again. I moved onto his nipples and traced my tongue along them slowly. I could smell the milk around them, and his voice caught in his throat from the slightest touch there. I moved away and went down his stomach, and began to feel him through his pants. I unbuttoned his jeans and slid them down off of him, and I stood on my knees on the bed, as he began to help me with my own. He cupped my growing erection with the base of his palm, and pulled me out through my boxers before we finally just discarded of our clothing. We both lay down on the bed, naked, and right next to one another. I flipped onto my side, and before we moved onto anything else, I leaned forward and kissed him. I pressed his forehead against my own. I wanted to eradicate the difference between us; I wanted to take away any of his pain. My mouth hovered around him, and I wanted him to know my thoughts. I needed him to know that I was using he all the time now, though there had been fuck ups in the beginning. I was going to fuck up, and so was he with me and my life. That was as much of a fact as how we were going to fuck up with Paloma too, and any other children we may have in the future. Because we could have more children, I told myself. We could go on living our lives, though we had fucked up and would continue to fuck up. But in that moment, I needed him to know that I was trying my hardest and that I thought he was beautiful. Or handsome, it didn't matter, it was whatever he preferred. I wanted him to know that he was mine. Not in the possessive way, because I knew we would never be able to be everything to one another and that was setting us up for failure. But he was he to me, he was my body as much as I was his. We had that connection between the two of us. I needed him to know that what I saw with him, I had myself, and what we did together, I knew what it meant.

"You always knew, Frank," I heard him say in the far distant corners of my memory. "We just both didn't have words."

I nodded to myself, here on the bed, two weeks after our daughter was born. I kissed him again, here with me now, and I knew that the only thing I could do was love him. That was it. If I did that well enough, no explanation was ever needed because we were alone together, here. Just that moment, it was only us.

I asked him before I began touching him, and he nodded and put my hand where he wanted me to be. I asked him what he wanted to be called, what he wanted the parts that I was touching called. He said, "We're the same, so call them the same," and so I ran my hand over his cock, and touched his balls, and the space in between. I gripped his inner thighs strongly as I began to kiss his neck feverishly, and he grabbed my own erection and put it next to his own. Our hips met again, and I kissed his mouth, tasting his tongue, asking him one final time before I entered him.

"God, yes," he told me, his arms around my back. His eyes squinted and he shut them tightly, and pushed his head back on the bed, exposing his delicate throat. When I slipped inside of him, there was a small gasp, but he assured me he was okay. He wrapped his legs around me, and I buried my face in his neck. I ran my hands through his hair, and he ran his own up and down my back. It was no time before we had begun to work up a rhythm and the bed began to shake like an earthquake where we were the only two people alive. It was surreal, this sex, not because of the bodies we used, but because of what we did with them. We had made life with them, when I thought it was impossible, Adam and Adam - and then Adam again. I knew that Alexa needed to hurry, to get those books done and out there for the world to read and begin to understand this new cosmology, but until then, I embraced what I had, what I loved, and what I was finally beginning to understand. We came together, and held one another, as if this were the beginning again.

Chapter Six

My falling dream came back to me again that night. They had been a constant nuisance in December, but had tapered off as my real life began to take on the unsteady nature of the dream itself. In this one, I wasn't walking down the cobbled streets of Paris, I was in a garden. I walked along the back trellis that held all the flowers in the world, or what at least felt like all the flowers. There were sunflowers and hyacinths, of course, but also lilacs, roses, hydrangeas, daisies, a lot of others that I could not name, and then, orchids. I saw Gerard, if only for a split second, after those flowers, before that sensation of falling set in. It seemed to go on forever before I finally jolted awake, just before I hit the ground. I could have sworn I felt hands on me, but when I turned over to look, Hunter was still asleep. He was on his side, and still clutching his stomach like he used to do when he was pregnant. I knew from sleeping with him so often these past few months that he was in a deep sleep; I watched his eyes dart back and forth under the lids. Light broke around the curtains in the bedroom and the clock on the bedside table read almost six in the morning. I took a few more deep breaths, wanting so desperately to go back to the dream, back to where the orchids were again. But it was gone and I was awake now. I got up slowly, placing my feet down one by one, and left the bedroom.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14