(wall 1)
All I asked for was a fast wheelchair. The paramedic told me this. Without memory, I can only listen to others’ accounts of the scene. Another story I’ve heard—and have now plugged back into the vortex of head trauma—is that with my forehead on the dash, bleeding, open-eyed, and silent, I appeared dead. Minutes later, I rose, palmed the driver’s face, and clawed into her cheeks tightly, repeating a litany of, I don’t want to be hurt, I don’t want to be hurt.
What I can remember is driving through the intersection at other times, in my own car, on that same stretch of road where my blind date t-boned a van—though I couldn’t remember anything beyond its hulking silhouette—and where a girl hung herself from the school bleachers a few months before. Both times I turned my head ever so slightly to look.
Impact. Then opiates. Then the only memory is light.
The prescription: to heal at my parents’ home in Virginia. The house is flooding, even as I arrive. Their yard smells of wet fire. He’s not talking to us. I answer their questions with few words. I hear their muffled voices through the bedroom wall. I draw human spines, with my herniated vertebrae in red, from anatomy books for hours. My mother says, yes, yes, yes to all that is said from the other end of the phone. Each day I read confessional poems and vomit painkillers. He’s got a new personality, she says. One Sunday two figures enter my room. Their arms pry against the dresser that is in front of the door. You can’t heal like this, a voice says. I believe it is my mother. I don’t want to believe it is my mother. Your body could heal but you won’t let it heal. I believe in waiting for the muscle spasms to end. Forgive yourself for what you’ve done. I’ve spent months lying very still. Forgive yourself for whatever sexual sins are holding you back. I am alone. Miles, it’s so easy to get confused. I am always confused. You and your teacher are over. I do not know a teacher with which I began. Homosexuality can be stopped, even forgiven, the other figure in the doorway says. I stand, turn away from my father. We love you; we only want you back. I open the window, leap through it, and run barefoot under the trees until the mites bite my skin so fiercely I can no longer stand.
(wall 2)
After leaving Virginia, and returning to Utah, I’ve done nothing but drive around with my friend Michael while he drinks. He goes to work: serving tables at a rib place, and afterward drinks hard at houses in the mountains with various men. I’m the one who gets the call to take him away from the strangers; I carry him to his car after he pukes on sidewalks and lawns. I like him more for vomiting. We’re the kind of friends who let each other destroy ourselves. He listens to me drone about my hunger, my physical pain. I allow him to punish himself with mixed drinks and sex. Both of us are cut off from our families right now. Michael and I first bonded because we had the same male high school teacher for creative writing. Our mothers thought we all had sex: the teacher, Michael, and me. We’re quite the pair: both of us singled out as gay by our families, driven from their homes because of the pain we’ve caused. Yet he’s the only one who actually likes guys.
Since I’m not gay, the circumstances of being, “outed” only become another collision to deal with, another place where my body doesn’t belong. Back in Utah, I realize my mother has spoken to others about her suspicions of my sexuality: at a family party, they all stare me without speaking. A cousin finally asks me, “Well?” However unnecessary, I’m getting a taste of what many friends and strangers go through in this Mormon town. The difference is, the process is not a relief for me; I wish all the suspicions about me were true. Then I could grieve the loss of family, and find a young man to keep me company. That’s the point of coming, “out.” The sad thing is, the gayest thing Michael and I did together was make collages and read poetry.
At the Cure concert, I pop narcotic pills and we sit on the same blanket, waiting for night. I’m so hungry, and the pills keep up this buzzing of blood in my head, which distempers and churns this nausea in my gut. I’m losing weight rapidly. I’m unsure of the cause. By today, I’ve lost thirty-five pounds in six weeks. I can’t keep anything eaten down. Before the music starts, I go looking for water. A girl from my new college is eyeing me. We talk. I want her so badly; but I’m afraid, with my nausea, that I’ll puke in her face. I turn away from her like a scolded dog. When I return to the blanket holding a bottle of water, Michael tells me to stop fucking pitying myself. He says that no one else thinks I’m gay. You could never look like a boyfriend of mine, he says.
(wall 3)
I’m awake. Awake, away from the hospital, and still bleeding. Bleeding from the incision in my stomach that half encircles my navel. My hand fills with blood quickly as I cup it my fingers beneath the incision. It’s not painful; it’s happening. It’s not painful: it’s happening too fast. I’ve sopped two shirts, a sweatshirt, and two blankets with my blood. And it’s still coming out. My cupped hand runneth over. A voice behind me says Ahhh. I know my father wants to take care of me. But the bandage is worth nothing. He holds the bandage square, out in front of him, the way you might hold a towel out to a child after bathing him.
At the emergency room, they’re screaming. A doctor and two nurses decide it’s a gunshot wound before I can explain.
My surgeon, in this same hospital, has sent me home too soon. I’m doubled over, hugging myself, gathering fluids back up. They’re sure I was shot. They pull me down until I’m lying flat. I’m writhing into myself, twisting like a caterpillar, resisting this position that pulls the taut mouth of my belly ajar. The incision asserts itself like a gaping mouth; this tiny monster spilling beyond its suchered teeth. Tonight is Halloween. I don’t know this yet. My monster mouth needed this gift from the calendar; it’s feeding on irony, and the appropriate gore of this holiday. A large needle punctures the incision. Minutes later, another goes into the wound. I’ve never had to do this before, but your bleeding hasn’t stopped. The doctor stands above me constantly. I want to grab his face.
(wall 4)
My uncle and I have been to the Mexican border twice today. The first time I realized only at the border that I’d forgotten my ID. We had to drive back to my uncle’s apartment in San Diego, and then return with fury. I’m starting to see the effects of a brain injury. Every simple motion must be broken down into its most basic steps: hold wallet, lift wallet, pocket wallet, stand. Insert key, turn left to lock, turn back, remove. Now we’re driving along the coast of Baja, looking for a town where we’ll meet my grandfather. He wants us to meet his girlfriend, Sonya. My uncle teases me, says we’re going to see, “Pampa,” which is what I used to call my grandfather when I was two-years- old, before he left us all. Suddenly, Pampa needs us now. We drive further and further along the dusty red and white towns arranged like hard candy on the bitter toffee of Mexico. We stop the car. I do not know this town. I want to collect rocks on the gravelly beaches to fill my pockets. Yet we’re here, walking up to the restaurant where my grandfather and his new someone are sitting somewhere within.
Our host is the honeybee of this seaside hive. He sports a blue jacket with brass buttons embossed with ship anchors, and announces our arrival: Bienvenidos a la Casa de la Langosta! Welcome to The House of Lobster. The mariachi band drones toward us. My uncle and I are pulled through the dark woods and orange walls to the table where my grandfather, his girlfriend, and her children are waiting. He’s seventy-five. She’s two years younger than my mother. What they have most in common is that they both have AIDS. How my grandfather contracted the virus changes each time: a prostitute in Maryland, a blood transfusion in Utah, a man in New Jersey. He cheated on my grandmother for thirty years of their marriage—ultimately with his secretary to fulfill the cliché—then escaped to Florida to help housewives lose weight at Jenny Craig. Ten years later, he started asking me for dinner moments like this one in the Casa de la Langosta.
To begin his meal, my grandfather sits in the Lotus position on his chair—cross-legged, closed fingers, and chanting a long ohmmm. He again reminds me how he teaches yoga and could heal my body completely if I let him. But he’s also talking about shrunken heads again. These tribes in the Amazon cut off the heads of their enemies, extract the brains with potent enzymes, then soften the bones of the skull until the tissues of the face shrivel into a miniature head. They sell them to tourists. Next to him, Sonya is explaining to my uncle how she put her kids in other people’s homes because she was going to die last year. I doesn’t look sick now, she says. Look at me, Miles, I am looking so much better. She also keeps interrupting herself, turning to me to say, How come you never seen your grandfather? You are not good children. How come you never seen your grandfather?
To my right are Sonya’s three children. The youngest girl has her head down on a plate and doesn’t speak the entire night; the middle boy can’t stop sword fighting himself with the utensils; and the oldest daughter is looking straight at me.
Not just looking, leering. She eyes me viciously, licking her lips, even once holding her fingers in a V shape to her mouth, and thrusting her tongue through. I cannot look there. The finger-licking fifteen-year-old suddenly becomes the top danger spot at the table. Yet I’m also trying not peer over at my grandfather, who is coiled on his chair like a self-charmed snake. And I can’t look at his girlfriend Sonya, or I’ll have to answer her questions, which are only utterances of the unaware.
On blue ceramic plates, our lobster finally arrives. I enjoy lobster; however, this crustacean is the gourmet equivalent of a plastic dinosaur: lukewarm, chemical aftertaste, with intimidating lumps in the wrong places. Yet chewing keeps me in motion, gives me time to avert all eyes at the table, all words from their mouths, and all of their desires to teach me a lesson. Throughout this lunch, the mariachi band’s instruments keep and squealing worse than pre-game tailgaters. They stay parked by my side the whole evening, playing their hot brass in my ear, rattling me with the soundtrack for the dissonance we share.
(the ceiling)
Tonight I could invert myself by pulling at the corners of my lips. My imaginary girlfriend Björk is coming at me through the air with tongues of fire. I’m lying on my back. She’s wailing in white feathers. I am haunted to sleep. I wake in sweat. Sleep. Hypersleep. I can’t reach the stereo to change the music. Why would I want to reach the stereo? I must stay here where it’s warm. Ghazal. Wendy Darling. Sounds I can taste. Björk chortles the words Uncertainty excites me and repeats the phrase I’ll heal you… I’ll heal you until I’m convinced she will. Arousal in a carousel. Tonight I’m in love. Maybe I’m in love with the girl at Michael’s party who played the guitar. She sang me drunk at the strings. Cognitive razor-wire. Everything smarts. Everything against me aches fire, every bit of furniture
held against the door come crashing. Björk, the dark mother, descends from the air again: my Icelandic demon, my healer, my whole. Footsteps down the hall. It’s colder than I thought. I can’t find my mouth.
The furnace in my basement apartment stopped working this January. A repairman fixed it, then turned it back on. Four days after that, two men have come down the stairs to check the furnace again. From my synasthetic reverie of music and longing, I tell them to shut the hell up, I’m trying to sleep. One voice says, Shit. There’s someone living down here? The other guy checks the carbon monoxide levels with a handheld meter and pronounces the place lethal. The men power off the furnace, and rush up the stairs. I’ve been down here for four days, lying like mummified pharaoh against the sheets of my bed, hallucinating and unmoved. At first, I felt sick, but thought it was purely emotional, so I stayed in bed; then I felt sicker, believed it was a physical illness, and stayed in bed more. When the furnace was turned on the first time, its fumes didn’t ventilate to the outside, so the unit kept pumping its vapors straight into my room, pocketing the carbon monoxide between the ceiling and me.
The landlord worries about a lawsuit: I do nothing. I continue lying in this bed, returning to more familiar abdominal pains. The swinging windowpane above my bed stays open constantly now. Snow dusts onto my blankets from the large opening, and I shiver with the thrill of clean air. If I need it, I need it chilled. Tonight, I could sleep myself to death. I’m healing, and I’m preserved. I’m healing, or merely preserved. My body could heal in this descending pattern, arranged as chord progressions in music. Forgive my limited perception, since this room will not budge; but I’ve already got my own little joke for the pain, for this self-indulgent scrambling at an awkward existence: Bienvenidos a la casa de la langosta, bienvenidos a la casa de la langosta.
