The Town of Babylon

by Alejandro Varela

My theory: the misery of his adulthood was an order of magnitude greater than the misery of his youth, and over time, less miserable somehow transformed into “good old times.” In fact, it rankled my brother that I didn’t recall our youth more fondly. As if my memories risked contaminating, or in some way invalidating, his.

They wanted to go back to the city—to any city. They believed that distance and anonymity would give them privacy and control over their destinies. A common desire, before and since, especially of those conditioned to want more.

To them, hardship was class-based, and in this country, class was temporary and situational.

And yet, Álvaro and Rosario’s affections were present throughout, just beneath the rancor and exhaustion, like old blankets caped in thin layers of dust and, sometimes, fiberglass dust. They knew they’d cobbled together an unsustainable life. Rosario and Álvaro knew it when they lay in bed at night waiting for their blood pressures to drop, heart rates to slow, and cortisol levels to return to their rightful places. Always they were rethinking and regretting their choices, praying for better lives for Enrique and Andrés, and, at times, holding out hope for creating more life, miserable as it might be, until the ring of an alarm clock signaled the beginning of the next day. Again.

I feel half myself, and the half that remains is only two-thirds invested in us.

I sensed that if I ever stopped performing, even for a moment, the audience would leave; so, in a way, I left first. It never occurred to me that they’d remained in their seats.

All night it’s been like this: traveling back and forth—a future inside of a past, or flashes of the past in this future.

The problem is, I’ve been propping up this wall between them and me for so long that I’m afraid of what will happen if I put my arms up and step out from behind it. Does it fall squarely on me? On them?

I was a few months out of college then and thinking only of my future, which I couldn’t reconcile with my past.

A curdled bloodline that had culminated in a subtle, white-supremacist-fueled self-loathing, prioritizing the Spanish imperialist ancestors over the Indigenous ones and completely ignoring any trace of the African and African Indigenous mestizajes, pretending instead that an entire continent had been born as if by immaculate conception and not through colonization, holding within its own porous, undefined boundaries internecine struggles that mirrored and perpetuated the racism at their inception. A people and a boy desperate to fit in.

And so was seeded a lifetime of contradiction: Stay out of the midday sun. Avoid bright colors. Cover up. Lower your voice. At the same time: Be yourself. Be proud. Be the best. Be. Succeed while hiding in plain sight. Be better in order to be equal.

There was no drug more potent than being liked by everyone.

Even a perfect test score could somehow prompt a rebuke that left me scrambling and made success feel like a vulnerability.

The first time I saw my father after coming out, he gave me a five-pound wholesale bag of restaurant salt packets. “You can throw this in their eyes and run,” he said. “Always run, mi’jo. Always.”

She’s radiant and vibrating, like something carbonated that’s been shaken.

It was subtle, but several times she told him how handsome he was, in that way that older white women try to mask their racism by complimenting people of color.

His bi- or pansexuality made me uneasy, primarily because I wanted both of us to feel the same way about everything. But he had a way of making me feel like the center. It didn’t matter if we were with friends or in class or at the prom, I knew that his eyes were trained on me, following me around the room, ready to wink in my direction. He was, at least in that way, the abiding star. In retrospect, it’s unbelievable that our carelessness didn’t betray us more often.

Frankly, I didn’t care. I was infected. Jeremy’s confidence was my first sexually transmitted illness. He made me, in a way, carefree. His affections and attentions transformed me into another person. I was popular, but he was cool. A cool kid with good looks and rough edges, who’d been in fights and played baseball, whose reputation cloaked our sins. If our ships sank, at least they would sink together.

In retrospect, it was rather obvious that he was flirting or trying desperately and unnecessarily to get attention that I would have given freely. It was easier, however, to believe that he was messing around, that my sublimated queerness left me inadequate to the task of being an adolescent boy fluent in the language of horseplay.

But I’d gone along with the motions because of the race: the checklist of heterosexual credits along the road to fucking.

There was a brief spell of relief—not quite seconds, but moments—while my eyes remained closed, before the embarrassment, shame, and regret settled into the room.

I hadn’t done anything wrong, I told my newly altered self as I searched the mirror for my previous self. There was no proof of anything, I thought. Nothing had happened. Nothing to be ashamed of. Nothing to pray about. Nothing to confess. Nothing to regret. But I did regret. I did feel shame. I would pray. Something had indeed happened.

A familiar tremble in my chest commences, not the trill that accompanies sex, but the one I get when I want to curse out a room, a cop, or a centrist.

As far as I can tell, the suburbs are where people go to preserve their ignorance, in service of a delusion they’ve mistaken for a dream. They tired of the more interesting human experiment and fled. Cowards, the lot. Working class, middle class, and one-percenters alike.

And soon he realized that the only thing worse than worse was remaining the same.

Whatever it was that was transporting Henry through this life never slowed down long enough for him to hop off.

I worry about how aging makes humans conservative. I think it has something to do with fear. Fear for one’s own safety, fear of damage to one’s property, fear of new and unknown things. Adult-onset conservatism is also just exhaustion. A lifetime of being optimistic about life’s unsolved problems fosters disappointment and, eventually, pessimism. But no one wants to believe they’re pessimistic, so they switch perspectives and move the goalposts. The injustices that could have been remedied with more resources or more empathy transform into intractable dilemmas that we then argue must be addressed with austerity and hard knocks, when the truth is that we never pumped in enough resources or empathy to have truly solved anything. Boom: conservative. Or maybe it isn’t a consequence of fears, but a fear in and of itself. The very fear of examining the past and our complicity in that past.

“I think they medicate us because they don’t know how else to deal with our genius.” She says this quickly, with a trace of now-or-never desperation. A part of me understands, even agrees with the sentiment. We are, after all, a society that mistreats people to the point of damage so that we can then use the damage as a pretext for more mistreatment.

Even those who didn’t know one another recognized their neighbors’ struggles as a simulacrum of their own. Rows of nearly indistinguishable homes, on equal-sized plots of land. Each filled with three generations: grandparents who spoke with accents; parents who understood the old language but didn’t speak it well; and children who knew only a few exclamatory or culinary words. Every family, it seemed, occupied the same place in their American trajectory—not only a cultural and chronological intersection, but an economic one too. It was their sameness that protected them. It allowed them to be the social creatures that humans are meant to be. Without differences to navigate, life was made simpler. If one, after all, is equal to their neighbor, what is there to fear? What is left to covet? To doubt? They weren’t plagued with the sorts of insecurities that run amok in uneven societies. Absent were the wedges that fracture some communities and prevent others from forming.

The previous neighborhood may not have been as pretty or as close to anything, but at least they’d had neighbors, real neighbors, Phyllis argued, people who wished them well. People who stopped to talk. People who waved. People who looked you in the eye. People whom she still visited with on the weekends. Here, they’d only moved closer to the lion’s mouth, somewhere near its incisors. And for what?

Fucking white people. Barely eke out a high school degree, spend time locked up, and earn next to nothing, but they’re still making bank off of slavery-era memorabilia. Meanwhile, someone mentions reparations, and immediately everyone wants an itemized list of how exactly Black people are going to spend every last dime of their money.

Betwixt the love, we hurt one another. In fact, I was as surprised that the infidelity hadn’t happened sooner as I was that it happened at all. Our therapist suggests that we imagine ourselves in the future, as ninety-year-olds who’ve persevered. “The long view might shrink this one trauma to an almost insignificant degree,” she said. It’s an effective strategy, but it hasn’t erased the moments of doubt. It hasn’t kept me from envisioning a road paved with corrosive, lingering distrust, and resentment.

Before Jeremy, Andy had been an expert at retreating. Always making an effort to hide how he felt and who he was, measuring himself against the other kids in the room. How did the boys move? Speak? How did the girls? How did the white kids? How did the Black kids? The few other kids who were neither? To what extent could he borrow from one without being admonished or ridiculed by another? Jeremy changed all of that. Andy had never before felt the power and weight of a mutual, romantic love. Being with Jeremy peeled back a layer of artifice, leaving him feeling new and alive, but also vulnerable. How many layers were there? he wondered. And how long would he need to be this happy and free before he could actually be a happy and free person? The person he would have been if the world were as it should be. What would become of him now if Jeremy disappeared?

All of this led to more irritability, arguments, and long spells of silence, interrupted only by moments of passion, a pattern similar to the one Andy had known all his life, the downward spiral of fear and affection that he’d grown adept at managing and, occasionally, breaking. It was all made worse by the subterfuge—lying, hiding, borrowing cars—required to see one another.

He’d been as nearsighted and detached from his family as his age allowed.

My parents are at church now; Jeremy’s wife and children are there too. I wonder, as he and I lie in my room, if our families might be seated near one another, in adjoining pews, or in the same pew, having no knowledge of how they are linked—in this town, it’s possible to know only the people who you know, and no one else.

Jeremy and I settled back into our cadence rather quickly. The only difference now is how articulated our roles are, no longer defined by the curiosity and discovery that marked our adolescence, when we wanted to know how the entirety of each other functioned. We weren’t reckless back then, but we were rapacious hunters and foragers of the body, testing and tasting with abandon, quick to devour and be devoured in equal measure.

Maybe my body unlocked for him. The ecstasy of the moment didn’t erase my fear of disease, but the battle between hypochondria and libidinal joy was won handily by the latter.

I felt uncomfortable, angry that there was a person in this world who continued to know me so well and uniquely, after all this time. He was a living embodiment of an invasion of my privacy, and I hated him for it, for having unauthorized access. I also loved him for it.

But if the past festers still, isn’t that the present?

What had made him fall out of love with me? And even if he had fallen out of love, certainly he’d gotten used to me—wasn’t that reason enough to call, to explain, to respond? Inertia alone should have guided him back to me, just to check in, to say hello. Or goodbye.

I am no longer in love with Jeremy. I am in love with the lust and the time travel, but in this moment I feel the rejection, deeply, because I know that nothing ever could have kept me from meeting him that day twenty years earlier. Nothing and no one.

The guys we know who are cops are the guys I would have never wanted to carry a gun.

People walking around with a license to kill. That’ll corrupt anyone, especially in an uneven society that uses the pretext of poverty to legitimize racism.

In order to reduce the risk of disagreement or discomfort, Andy and Henry stuck to the past. Remember became the introduction to every one of their conversations.

You’ve both moved on. And if you try to come back to the past, you’re going to mess up your future. Yeah, it’s sad what happened between you two, but it’s not worth the disruption.”

I had hoped Simone’s advice would be more impulsive. I expected her to tell me to run away with Jeremy. To take a chance. I don’t even know if that’s what I want, but I wanted someone to advocate for it.

It brought the sorrow out of the darkness, made it into something tangible with unambiguous boundaries, with a roof, doors, and windows.

Periodically she’d reminded herself that a life spent proving people wrong wasn’t a life at all.

She wanted someone to blame. Who? Not her. No. She had done too much of it right. She’d navigated this miserable life, one giant Indonesia-sized archipelago of indignities. She’d refrained from running over all of the horrid children and their parents. She’d never raised her voice at the harpies who’d pulled their children away from Simone in the playground. She hadn’t taken a pen from her purse and stabbed any of the people who’d passed their hands freely through her daughter’s hair. She hadn’t burned down the university when it overlooked her for tenure. She hadn’t driven south to buy a gun in order to shoot all of the people who’d taken liberties with her. The Hey, girl people and the Smile more fools and the No need to be defensive, emotional, to get worked up, to have such an attitude, to make this about race know-nothings. She hadn’t clawed out the eyes of all the police officers—the mustached one with the potbelly who told her and Wesley that there was nothing to be done about the vandalism on their house, or the freckled one with transparent eyebrows who pulled her over for speeding one mile above the limit when everyone else was driving ten to twenty over, or the platypus-looking one at the hospital who asked her several times if she was sure her husband hadn’t been on drugs. She’d maintained her composure, chosen her moments carefully, hoping that if she absorbed enough, her daughter wouldn’t have to. But she’d also run away more often than she should have. Retre...