Blackouts

by Justin Torres

He stood at the point of egress, supporting himself against the door frame, not just thin, but skeletal; lips shrunken and chapped; the skin of his face pulled taut over the skull.

AIDS?

Journeys end in lovers meeting

A few years before, the world had gone crazy over a famous actress crossing and uncrossing her legs, and ever so briefly flashing her naked crotch in a room full of men, all of them interrogators.

“Yo creo que los reyes desaparecen,” he says.

I believe the kings disappear

I told Juan the erasures were a provocation, but the word echoed, a false note.

Juan had taught me to laugh at the past, to laugh at my tendency toward pathos. He modeled a kind of droll humor for me, back in that other place, us two on a bench, pathetic but giggling.

“Darling, the only thing anyone should be embarrassed about is taking themselves too seriously.

If everything stayed the same, you wouldn’t have cause for your precious nostalgia,

As a child, I was too thick to understand that my mother was not looking for a hero, or savior, or father figure, or law and order. She wanted my father to be a father to their child, a husband, to stop hitting her, all of which, after many years, she would achieve.

Though I prefer our copy here, I prefer the books just as I found them, covered in black. Filled with little poems of illumination. A counternarrative to whatever might have been Dr. Henry’s agenda.

“Either way, it’s hilarious. Find me ten righteous Sodomites in all the city, and I will not destroy it. It’s like a joke in search of a punch line.”

I’d lost patience for novels. I did not want to die in the middle of a novel. I wanted only endings, last lines, goodbyes, and reunions. I wondered how might things end for me; how would it read, the final sentence of my life?

I found myself fantasizing about somehow destroying the dog and walking away with the cash. I ought to have felt solidarity, stuck as we were at the bottom, Mad Man master to us both. Instead, I felt jealous of her tiny, perfect jacket.

“Who is it that likens nostalgia to returning to a familiar street only to find the geography has been tampered with? Half-real, half a rearrangement of the sleeping mind

(But promise me, nene, you’ll bend, and lie, and invent, make the inertness malleable. I promise, Juan.);

cross-dressing, underground Harlem scenes … The straight culture turned its attention to our culture, and the sudden increased visibility of course provoked a backlash.

That’s the point of fixation, where the memory short-circuits, overloaded by the sudden double awareness of something burning in me, and a new depth to the ugliness burning out there, in the world.

And then they hear it, unmistakable, the mark of the pansy, fearless; that high and happy bark; that scavenger’s yelp. That queer cry of recognition, the unmistakable laugh of the hyena.”

I suppose a part of him is embarrassed at his own sentimentality, and another part is thinking: How can you blame a person for needing love?”

Who doesn’t want to be lovely, to be someone worth protecting?

For years after, I considered never missing a trick to be the highest form of intelligence. Later, I came to realize the cost of believing so fully in one’s powers of perception. In my daily life, at work on the committee, I swing between states of anxious hypervigilance and fantastical egoism. But at night, you see, I find myself incapable of self-delusion, incapable, even, of simple escape, so I drink and drink and still miss nothing. Only I find moments of mercy in the drink, usually around dusk, when at least I feel less.”

She doesn’t want to be cured. Since she has come to realize that she is a homosexual, she has thrown all conventions to the winds. I guess she has a notion she might as well live her life while she can.”

I’d like to live normally in an abnormal way.”

Remember this: not all ambiguities need be resolved,

“Ruth’s vow is often used by straight couples, as part of their nuptials. The story of Ruth and Naomi is perhaps the first lesbian desire in literature, predating even Sappho.”

Do I need to reread Ruth?

Jan’s first encounter with the word homosexual comes from Emma, who speaks about free love and dignity for homosexuals—which no one did at the time, no one in America, and barely anyone anywhere else.

Legit?

From a certain distance, the catastrophic must be indistinguishable from the sublime.”

All endings are messy endings, nene. All that lies ahead is the great forgetting.

I carefully clip out the questions to which I’ve answered affirmatively and glue them to a piece of black crepe. It is, I realize, a terrifying little poem of perversion. I’m proud of my creation,

I pulled together what I could remember from our conversations into little stories and moments, which I printed and spread across the floor and tried to piece into a semblance of order. I taped some of the photos I’d found among his belongings directly into the manuscript, along with some of my own photos as well.