Let's Get Back to the Party, page 19
Oscar’s right: You’re crazy.
That night, I couldn’t sleep. I carried myself into the living room and sat down on the sofa with my copy of Tiberius at the Villa. I skimmed through baroque passages of Roman musicians clawing at each other’s faces for the chance to spend the night in the emperor’s chamber; of the Old Goat of Capri lecturing his cruel grandnephew on the nature of power as they walked along passageways painted with obscene murals; of prepubescent boys nibbling the emperor’s genitals like well-trained fish as he lay in a warm bath.
Oscar’s right: You’re crazy.
The words I read felt to me like an elegy, a desperate salvage attempt, the last dying gasp of someone who knows his time has come to an end and yet is driven mad by the idea of life continuing on without him. I read about elaborate banquets and seaside orgies and fantastic theatrical performances. I read a lengthy paragraph describing wine and semen stains on the emperor’s tunic. I read it again. And again. And again.
Oscar’s right: You’re crazy.
Oscar
Across the street, construction on the Echo continues in earnest. Sometimes, I’ll take a break from my desk to sit outside in the warming day and watch the workers crawl like ants over the building’s cantilevered roof. That, or I’ll stare in frustration at the new sign, put up just last week, that reads opening soon! lease up today!
When it gets really bad, when thoughts of Sean buried in earth or dispersed into the wind start to get to me, I go to the haphazard pile on my nightstand, the Leaning Tower of Sean Stokes, and take up one of his books. I read them everywhere I can, the books. On the Metro, at bars waiting for others, on the toilet. Sometimes just sentences, sometimes a whole chapter. On nights when I can’t sleep, I pour myself a generous glass of bottom-shelf scotch and read on the sofa until I wake up hours later with Ecce Homo or Tiberius at the Villa tented over my belly.
It’s guilt—guilt and shame—that makes me take up these books again, that pulls me back to the delicious stories of life in bathhouses and public parks, in leather bars and basement dungeons and waterfront piers and private clubs that no longer exist. But all the perverse rebellion, the joyful queerness of it all—it’s gone. The spell’s broken, as if the only thing that kept this world alive for me was the existence of its creator. Now it’s all just a bunch of words. Stories told by a dead man.
Still, I keep reading.
Then there’s the death itself. I think about it while in the shower or at the grocery story, while watching the timer on the basement washing machine tick down to zero. Everything I know about Sean’s death, let alone of his last two months as a married man, I’ve culled from late-night online searches, from archaeological digs into the social media posts and five-hundred-word articles of friends, students, the handful of ex-lovers still alive. I prowl for funeral photographs, for parting words from the husband, for some kind of literary appreciation or reevaluation. Nothing. And the thought of that nothing, the fearful truth that I’ll never know what those last months of life were like for him, if I ever knew him at all, drives me mad. It sends me on walks over to the Ambrose Bierce House, looking now like a shuttered castle from some children’s bedtime story.
It wasn’t cancer. It wasn’t a heart attack. It wasn’t an opportunistic infection he’d kept hidden all this time. He wasn’t run over in a car by a desperate john or strangled by a self-loathing lover or beaten to death by some homophobic zealot. He wasn’t, as I feared in those first weeks after hearing the news, a suicide. I waited to find, somewhere in my searches, a variation on “His body was found in the Delaware River after he’d been reported missing for several days by his husband.” Perhaps because I imagined that, at the end, he’d realized his mistake, realized he’d betrayed the philosophy he’d set down all those years ago in Ecce Homo, and he just couldn’t bear the trap he’d found himself caught in. (Or maybe it’s because if I were in his situation, stuck in conformity, I’d have pulled a Virginia Woolf, too.) But no. Sean Stokes, according to cryptic internet message boards, simply fell down the stairs. Five steps, to be exact. A modest tumble, but he fell the wrong way, headfirst, so that when the paramedics arrived they found a split skull, a broken neck, a vacated body.
Sometimes, at night, I imagine all that life, all that history, leaking out from a blue-black fissure in Sean’s forehead. I imagine a moment, mid-slip, when Sean’s ankle twisted and his body torqued and he felt the drop in front of him, the dangerous weight of gravity pulling him down to the fierce edge of the bottom stair—I imagine a moment when, instead of trying to cushion his fall, Sean just decided to drop. Gave himself permission to go while the going was good. Let all those little deaths—the dead friends, the dead career, the dead culture—embrace him. It’s okay, Sean, those ghosts say in one voice. You did plenty. You don’t want to stay for what happens next.
I suppose the logical way to stop dwelling over the insignificance of our lives—the eventual insignificance that came for my father, that came for Sean, that comes for countless people around the world every single minute, that one day will come for me—is sex. It worked for Sean, who even during the worst of the plague years continued to fuck with abandon. But it doesn’t work for me. At least, not anymore. For the past month, my penis has hung abandoned between my legs, itself, I suppose, in a state of mourning. At Broadway sing-a-longs and Sunday afternoon tea dances my friends drag me to, I catch glimpses of myself in some distant mirror looking shell-shocked, oblivious to any flirtatious gestures sent my way.
I go home alone more often now.
Even Outrage feels like a chore. Yesterday, I forced myself off the couch and headed over to a pirate-themed bar in Rockville, paneled in wood like the belly of a galleon, dimly lit, ringed with stuffed parrots and skull-and-crossbones flags, the air reeking of used frying oil and cinnamon-sweet grog. We wanted the straight buccaneers and wenches to feel as if their ship had been unwillingly boarded, hence the T-shirts I’d had made that read ass pirate. But instead of disturbing the status quo, I spent the evening tucked away in a corner of the bar, alone, ordering round after round of grog and reading through old emails from Sean. Trying not to feel trapped on a giant sinking ship.
Ever since that first sinister text from A. last month, I’d no intention of doing anything. In fact, I did what I often do on Cruze: ignored the message. Then, a week later, he messaged me again.
Hi. Oscar. How’s your night going?
I didn’t respond.
The next day: How are things?
I didn’t respond.
Two nights later: What are you up to tonight?
I didn’t respond.
Then, a week later, different messages.
Talked to Mr. Mote lately? He alright?
I think something’s wrong with Mr. Mote.
Hey, did you tell Mr. Mote how we met?
And no, I shouldn’t have written back, but I was drunk and I was bored and I was sad and I was lonely and I was angry and, like every other gay man on this blessed and cursed phone app, I just couldn’t help myself.
I don’t talk to him anymore. We’re not friends. I don’t think we ever really were. In fact, I’d stay away from him. He’s crazy.
?????
Yeah. Nuts.
I thought that had done the job, because I didn’t hear from A. for a while. Life trudged on, with its parties, its brunches, its freelance and temp gigs, its failed job interviews, its expensive rent and utilities—just as I imagined, in the hinterlands, Sebastian’s life trudged on, with what I imagined were his classes, his grading, his yardwork, his cleaning. His silly little vegetable garden. And then, having slipped shamefully away from the Outrage party that day at the pirate bar, back on my couch and flipping aimlessly through Tiberius at the Villa, wondering what was going through Sean’s mind when he wrote about the Old Goat of Capri lounging poolside while, under the water, young boys wound around his legs and nibbled at his cock and balls, the seventeen-year-old liar reemerges and asks if I have time for “a serious chat.”
Not really. Go take your boyfriend out for ice cream or something.
I don’t have one anymore. He found out I was on here.
Well, I’m not taking you to prom if that’s what you’re asking.
Already happened. I went with friends. He wasn’t there.
What does he have against Cruze?
He thinks it’s for sluts. He thinks it’s for sad people.
He’s a piece of shit. Besides, you’re on here.
Maybe I’m sad, too.
What do you have to be sad about? Someone bullying you?
No.
Parents kick you out of the house?
No.
Then there’s nothing to be sad about.
I think I’m sad about Mr. Mote.
How is that ass hat?
He’s gone.
Gone?
He left the school. Leave of absence, the principal told us.
Oh. Shit. Where did he go?
I don’t know. I bike by his house sometimes, but I don’t see anyone outside. His car’s there. I’m too afraid to knock.
Like I said. Crazy.
What if he killed himself?
Sebastian? Why would he do that?
I don’t know. There was a student last year who killed himself.
Sebastian likes to hide. He likes to be by himself. I wouldn’t worry.
He thinks we hooked up.
What did you tell him?
I said it was none of his business.
Great. Couldn’t you have just said we didn’t?
I wasn’t thinking. Could you call Mr. Mote for me and make sure he’s okay? Maybe he’ll listen to you.
I don’t have time for this.
Please.
I’m sure he’s fine. There’s nothing to worry about.
Please.
Forget him.
PLEASE.
Wait. Are you hooking up with him?
What? No. Are you?
What? No.
OK.
And then, shocking even me, something stirs in my jean shorts. A sign of life! It’s like those bells they used to set up next to Victorian gravestones, attached to strings attached to index fingers so that, with just a twitch, the accidentally buried could make a noise those up in the land of the living could hear. Ring! Ring! Ring-ring! I’m still here! Help me! I look down beyond my phone, beyond the book, at my lap. Yes. Something still breathes under the denim, eager to be exhumed and rejoin the horrible human world.
