You know their expectations of you.
You know how they think your fists were meant for hurting, how your body was made to compete, how the only words your lips can speak to girls is ones that will wound, in one way
or another.
Your body is poison, and it could kill any one of the girls you've sworn to protect.
You think of the cage your sister has, one built of stockings and lipgloss, her hands bound together by whispers of 'slut'. You think of your own, and how you suppose to them, it might look like freedom.
That was then, you suppose.
Last week, your whispered your greatest joy and greatest fear to your sister, protected by blankets, by smothering night, where nobody could gaze at your jaw and assume it's curves were masculine. When the words hung in the air, sizzling, she replied.
"I've always wanted a sister."
"You've always had one."
You don't have to envy, any more. You are not on the outside looking in, the fence separating them, now, you realise, was never there. Your girlhood is tangled up with theirs, wild and freeing. You are good for them, you know. They love you, too, the one they call sister, sweetheart, EliEliEli, until your name breaks apart in their mouths, and tastes like honey.
You were never man.
You were never poison.
You were girl from the moment you stepped foot on an earth not ready for you.
You don't need to change, to be who you always were.
The lake has nothing for you.
In his checking account Saul has $9.00. Exactly. Right on the nose. The day before, Saul had bought a bag of russet potatoes with a coupon. He does not exactly know how much those cost. But he is now impressed that it brought his account to an even dollar amount. There is something round and level about it.
The bank account is used for rent and for groceries. Everything else is paid for in cash. There is not a lot of cash in Saul’s wallet. Most of the cash is stowed in a non-functioning computer speaker sitting on the far right side of Saul’s desk. Saul does not own a computer. Saul does not own much.
Saul’s apartment is a studio on Staten Island. It is directly above a Mediterranean grocery whose operators also make gyros, falafels, schawarma, and the worst Philly cheesesteak Saul has ever had the misfortune to steal off of an unwatched plate. Barely worth it. The rent is not exorbitant. At least it is still part of the city technically. Anything to stay within an arm’s reach of those skyscrapers across the water. Saul can see it all from the roof. He is not always allowed on the roof. Sometimes that it where his neighbors smoke weed and sell harder stuff. Saul respects their space. He is afraid.
Saul is planning on leaving America altogether. He is low on money. The letters like this morning’s never stop coming. Saul believes that leaving for South America would not solve his problems but would certainly defer them for a very good amount of time. Bolivia would be nice. Saul knows an old friend from high school who studied Quechua in grad school. Maybe he could live in the Amazon with him. His name is Ethan, and Ethan smokes a lot of weed. In a year or so he can save up the three hundred dollars for a one-way to La Paz. Once there, he will be okay. His cash will stretch farther down there.
Saul looks into the pitiful mirror in his bathroom. He has just washed. There is no shower. He combs his hair, which he shampooed separately. The bathroom has a claw-foot tub, but the water is never warm. Boiled water on the stove, dumped four times into a mixing bowl. Then to the bathroom with it, where he lathered over the bathtub. There is no toilet. Saul goes down the stairs to the basement to use the toilet shared by the Mediterranean grocery. It is closed after midnight and is not unlocked until six.
Saul’s hair is like cleaved obsidian when clean. Black and strong and dense and enviable.
Saul would kill for a shower. A regular one. A hot one. Once, Saul won two months’ membership to some shitty chain gym. There, he was often pressured to shell out for a personal trainer.
“For only $150 a month, you could really kick your fitness regimen into high gear,” they always said. High-gear. Saul didn’t have $150 a month to spare. He barely had one percent of that to spare for an off-brand soda from some shitty bodega on the walk home from somewhere.
“Really? Because if I talk to my manager, I could get it lower.”
“How low?” asked Saul. He would humor them. It felt wrong not to humor them. This was free.
They’d always have that same gooey tone. They would clap their hands and look around the gym. Then they would say, “One time I got a guy a personal trainer for $110 a session.” Saul would put his headphones in while shaking his head and apologizing “Yeah, but no.” It always took an effort for them to leave. Nothing was ever attached to the ends of those headphones.
Saul had used the membership for the locker room. He would walk down there before bed and step into the community showers. There was steam always. Hot water. Free soap. Clean towels. He would have to avoid the gazes of the prowling men. Saul wished he looked like them—at least, that he had their look. He feels hollow seeing himself in the mirror like he is now. With eyes like he does. Eyes that watch out. The men at the gym, they had eyes that see and look and observe. One of them once called him a “weasel.” Because of his neutral face that sometimes reads like a sneer in certain light. And because of his lankness.
Weasel. He hates that. Looking in the mirror, he consciously tries to smile, and it is repulsive. These muscles never naturally perform that act. Then he tries to frown. Same result. If he stands there with that lax face, but with his eyebrows raised, he looks normal. He looks rather surprised or interested by something. He has learned to make this face whenever someone is telling a story. Sometimes he forgets to make that face.
Saul does not have a lot of furniture. The bare essentials. A chair, a table, a bed, a couch. No nightstand, no dresser. His closet has all of his clothing hanging up. Saul’s socks and underwear are stowed in the bottom drawers of the desk that sits next to the stove.
Saul thinks about the party tonight. He walks out of the bathroom and over to the desk, pulling on underwear. He practices smiling—it’s awful. He practices the eyebrow thing, the interested look, in the weak reflection in the coffee table glass. Better. He hikes on a pair of very tight jeans. They fit well. He slips on a thin blue t-shirt that has an asymmetrical black stripe. Also good. Then on comes the brown cord bracelet with the cameo of an elk. All good.
This is the uniform. Saul knows who he gets to be at the party.
Spencer’s friends are all artists, liberal arts majors, men from the drama program, young adults studying Foucault and Chaucer and Derrida and smoking cigarettes and Gericault. Saul fits in around them because when they look at him they think he’s disaffected. One of these sorts who would have hid behind Warby Parkers and a shrub-like keffiyeh five years ago, rolling his eyes and dissecting the emptiness of Vampire Weekend. A disposable person who people sketch and draw and write angry poetry about. Saul likes being that sort of person people put into a frame. Instead of what he is. Which is something inscrutably off. Tonight Saul will get to puff opium in Spencer’s parlor and pilfer toothpaste and painkillers from the medicine cabinet and join the ranks of others with blank faces and cultural paralysis. He will sit on a fat chair somewhere and look to his left, where there will be a girl blitzed on some needle drug with her swollen, lolled tongue still on her bottom lip. He will look to his right and see a boy slumped against the wall, eyes wide, hair slicked back by his nervous hands, staring. Paused. Stoned. A statue of lostness. And Saul will feel if not at home, then at least camouflaged. One among several.
And Jude will be there too. Saul is always glad when Jude is there.
Saul’s gaze lingers on the magazine on the coffee table that sits next to his reflection. It has sat there for a couple weeks now. There are petrified orange peels on it. Between them, Saul can see the headlines and the little snippets from the articles within—“WHO IS HE,” “QUICK AS LIGHTNING,” “A LA STAN LEE”—running near the image on the front. The boy in the trenchcoat and the sunglasses. A snapshot of him perched crowlike, owllike. At night. Not a comic book on Saul’s coffee table, but a magazine. A rag, but nonfiction all the same.
Saul makes his eyebrows go up. He takes a deep breath and goes to the mirror. He watches.
“Did you hear about that guy? ‘Quick,’ y’know? I think that’s what they’re calling him now. He was just on the cover of… oh, what’s that magazine?”
It still looks false. The look of excitement, of interest. Waggling his eyebrows. He looks like a video game character. Schlocky reactions. But Saul knows that as long as he insists he’s on E, they’ll all just think he’s weird. He’ll take that.
2
The car directly behind Eli is traveling just under the speed limit—say, 38 or 39—but the cars next to him are accelerating—he can smell it from the exhaust and the rumbling of the transmission—one is a manual and the other is an automatic—it will rain tonight, sooner than expected, he can smell it—if he turns right just now, he’s going to get clobbered by the taxi that is pulling up to three tourists—Eli’s not going to be laid out on the pavement two blocks from his walk-up, no thank you—the temperature is about to start dropping, it’s that time of day—the man on the corner is coughing, hacking up a lung, Jesus, someone get him some Nyquil or something—Eli lays out all the sounds and images in layers in his mind like a recording engineer with all the tracks divided—the thumping of Be Impressive from two cars behind him and one to the right—hot damn, he loves that song, Nooowww you’re fuckin’ crazy!—if he swerves to the left to squeeze between this Nissan and this yellow Stratus, the guy behind him’ll lay on his horn for sure—at least Eli will be bracing for it, bad news if he isn’t—he’ll crash to the asphalt from the pain, but he’ll remember at least to roll at a 30-degree angle backwards to avoid the taxi’s rear wheels—here’s an opening, it’s right there, just ease to the left—Eli holds his hand out to signal, sweeping port—Eli feels the warmth, the sputtering, the particles from the Nissan’s tailpipe on his exposed calf—his jeans are rolled up to avoid getting caught in the derailleur during some elaborate maneuver—Manhattan is terror to a cyclist—but Eli eases through the opening like water over a dam—he tugs his satchel closer, his pack, it wobbles, nuzzles the side mirror—and then he’s over onto the sidewalk, and up over the seat he dismounts like a hero at Waterloo, feet on solid ground at last—the man is still coughing as Eli walks his bike past him, eyeing his neck, that vertex of throat and jaw where Eli worried there might be proof of a sickness, some lymph nodes gone crazy, some gland gone haywire, some paleness, some swollen signal of something more than just a springtime allergy cough—the cough is dry, scratchy—there’s nothing, it’s nothing. It’s evening.
For just a moment, Eli gives himself a moment to catch his breath there past the corner. He can see his house from here, half in shadow from the angle of the sun. Behind him, the car blasting that indie song rolls through the intersection, and though he cringes, Eli does his best to remember it. The sounds, they were always either feathers or harrows, either too soft to truly enjoy or too rough to withstand. And that went for everything else.
Even through the din he recognizes the shuffling gait of Teresa Trujillo coming up from the garden level apartment behind him. She is small, a halfling, about to finish kindergarten, and she always wears orange, which is fitting for the sort of girl who, like right now, uses pedestrians as stalking-horses to try to scare Eli. But Eli’s tough to sneak up on. For many reasons.
“Nadie puede verla hasta…” he says, stopping suddenly. His voice is gravelly and dramatic like the narrator of a telenovela. “…que sea demasiado tarde!”
Nobody ever sees her… until it’s too late!
Her laugh comes from behind a fat man in pinstripes. He’s on his phone and furrows his eyebrows—he’s on a call, therefore no one should be playing games. Eli grins out of spite. It’s easy, by now, for Eli to make out her dirty little white sneakers as she leaps from passerby’s shadow to passerby’s shadow.
“¿Quién es?” he asks. He assumes a wide stance, arms out, ready, like an adventurer about to be ambushed by natives… only, from where? “Ella es tan rápida como un rayo—¿cómo nadie puede escapar?”
Who is she? She’s as quick as lightning—how can anyone escape her?!
Suddenly he’s jostled from behind, and Eli’s thrown off balance. He doesn’t fall, of course, it’s been ages since anyone pushing him has sent him into the sidewalk, but all the same, he almost loses the contents of his messenger bag. Student papers all over the avenue would be bad. He grabs himself and straightens up. He had been distracted. That’s usually when it happens: when he’s concentrating on something else entirely. That’s when someone can get him like that. Just some idiot not looking where he’s going, but still, Eli should’ve sensed him.
And then all at once she lunges out from the people walking by and screams out, “Bah!”
The little girl jumps onto Eli’s leg, and he actually yelps a little.
The headache starts.
“Hey, Teresa,” says Eli. She has a elephant barrette in her hair. It’s new. “Cool barrette.”
“Thanks!” Her voice is squeaky and young. Chattering birds. A motorcycle idles nearby.
The headache worsens.
* * * *
To anyone else, plodding through that pain for any longer than you’d want to would make the trek to front stoop and up to fourth floor landing seem like months of arduous travel like unto the pilgrims’ harrowing journey to the New World, but Eli knows it was one minute and two seconds. Mundane shit like that overflows his brain, and it’s half of what’s making his temples throb, like the thumping of a subwoofer behind his eyeballs. “Christ,” he hisses as he fishes his apartment key from the many on his carabiner and unlocks the door.
He pushes it open and walks in. Down in the vestibule he picked up his mail, which he now sets on the counter next to the knife block. Another day he might go right to the fridge and crack open a can of Jarritos that he would then sip very, very slowly as the fizz tickled his tongue, but not today. The balm would have to be more potent today.
Eli’s apartment is swanky. A large mock-Persian rug sprawls across the living room underneath an expansive coffee table and long cabinet atop which rests a vinyl player and a row of records. The sunlight from the three ceiling-height west windows washes over his armchairs, his reading table, the posters above the couch for three black-and-white films that Eli had seen both long ago and very recently and which were none of them in English. There’s a hall that leads down to the right to the bathroom and the bedroom. Eli doesn’t walk all the way down it, but he does take two steps towards the restroom door, to where his foot nuzzles underneath a long carpet that runs the length of the corridor. There, he knocks his sneaker-clad foot against a floorboard that doesn’t creak like the rest of them, but knocks.
Knock, knock.
It’s like the hammer on the anvil of his skull.
Eli squats over the loose floorboard. His satchel droops down, touching the ground as he jimmies the board loose and grabs one of thesmall baggies from within. It’s full of a maltese powder as fine as flour and as beautiful and expensive as saffron. More so. A thousandfold. It doesn’t glisten in the sunlight but it’s diamonds, it’s crystal, it’s gold, it’s blood, it’s water, it’s life.
At the drug store near the university, they know Eli’s a scholar-in-residency. They know he studies with Dr. Tafts, who is on television sometimes, an expert on anatomy, on the nervous system, who is consulted sometimes by anti-GMO men from the other side of campus. At that store, they sell Eli as many syringes as isn’t suspicious, which is never a problem for Eli. Although… there’s only five left on the drafting table right now… Soon he’ll have to drop by again…
Off comes the satchel, tossed onto the couch. Off comes the belt on Eli’s slacks, wound around the lower part of his bicep after he rolls up the sleeve on his button-up. Down come the shades on two of the windows. Over at the long cabinet, like a ritual at an altar before service, Eli slides an album from its elegant sleeve. He chooses something easy that’ll lull him along, what do we have here, ah, good, Mr. Brubeck, smooth if not soft. Up comes the lid on the turntable and down goes the record; up comes the arm and then down goes the needle. Up comes the arm and then down goes the needle. Out comes the music and out comes the breath. Away goes the needle, away goes the headache.
Here, where others would drift, Eli is with us at last. The buzzing of facts, of measurements, of statistics, of knowledge, of coughing men on corners and width-in-inches between fenders and handlebars, they are all fastidious honeybees at last quelled with cool, cool smoke. The unusual parts of Eli go away. For the next couple hours, Eli takes in the world as a normal person. The sun is bright but not agonizing. The music from the record player is slick and stylish, not a program of time signatures and harsh snares. And he no longer hears everyone in their apartments. The world is small and dull as it should be. The one thing that has not shut off is his memory.
Which is fortunate, considering what Eli sees on the couch next to him.
The flap of Eli’s messenger bag has fallen open, and the papers of all of his students are spilling out onto the cushions next to and underneath him. A couple paperclips have come undone, which Eli quickly returns to their loose pieces of paper, making sure he hasn’t jeopardized anyone’s grade in his scrambling to get high. But in scooping them all back together and setting them in a neat pile on his coffee table, prepping for the long three nights ahead of him, Eli notices something that any of us might. Something unremarkable, for once. A clue that he felt almost comforted knowing he could find without his god-like senses.
A purple note. A Post-It where it was never meant to be. A note that had been set on a desk somewhere, on a bed, on a counter—and then this essay laid on top of it. An accident, stuck on the back of the last page of one of the papers.
1018 HADRIAN ~10pm S. METTERNICH {buzz #40}
get off at Cortelyou
It was fortunate, you see, that Eli’s memory still works, because he can now recall some hushed whispers, words in class as his back is turned, tapping out diagrams on the whiteboard. Words said alongside the name Spencer that could only mean one thing when whispered. “Stuff.” “Party.” “Can he get me some.” Get me some what? Spencer Whispername sure as hell isn’t getting anyone Mumford and Sons tickets. You think Shane Greenglass listens to Mumford and Sons? Not in those sandals, not with that poncho. No, Spencer Whisperpants can get what Eli needs.
The sun is not even setting yet, which means Eli has plenty of time to laze here. He stands up, feeling the waves of chemicals wash him away. He raises the blinds on his windows once more and sits in front of them. The light is warm. For a moment, with the jazz all around him from the record player and the sun beating down, his heart thumping contentedly and the prospect of crashing a college party thrumming in his mind like wind in trees, Eli felt positively electric. And then the surge died off, and Eli slumped onto the carpet.
“Thank god you’re in Minneapolis, ma and pa,” he murmurs. His eyes are closed. He laughs. “So you don’t have to see to what depths your little Eli has sunky-wunk. Hffff.” And the drug hugs him like a sister.
I’ve decided to serialize a novel I am currently in the process of writing. ...And to serialize it here, on Tumblr, no less!
The novel is of the superhero variety. For a long time I’d supposed it to be graphic novel, but I decided, no, fuck that, whatever, it’s going to be words. Which isn’t to say I wouldn’t be inclined to you beautiful boobs drawing my characters. God knows one of them already is.
For those who want to follow it (or blacklist it, do what you wan’t, I’m not a cop), I will be serializing one chapter every Thursday at 6PM under the tag #the beards of the young men and its respective chapters in the format #tbotym1 for chapter 1, for example. (And yes, it’s from Walt Whitman, which should give you a sense as to the flavor of hero you’ll see.)
Be prepared for heroes who are drug users, drug peddlers, college teachers, college students, punch-givers, punch-takers, bastards, assholes, asshats, assvests, asstrousers, angels, atheists, dicks (of the usual and private varieties), and an NYPD police lieutenant named Escalus who doesn’t care if she has better things to do, she isn’t fucking messing around with this goddamn trenchcoat-wearing superhero bullshit.
