61 Frames Per Second by John Constantine Today in Hooksexup's videogame blog: Friedrich Nietzsche, River City Ransom, angry nerds, and the horrors of time. So, you know, business as usual.
The Remote Island by Bryan Christian Veronica Mars returns (maybe), RuPaul is haunting us (definitely), and the Dexter "Pscyho Therapy" quiz (creepy.)
The heat was strange. A summer day — in October. I lived in an area of Brooklyn that had been predominantly Polish until it was acquired in a hostile takeover by bohemians-in-training. My aluminum-sided building sat near factories and dirt parks where hookers and homeless families camped. I woke up sweating.
My third-floor apartment was dirty, crooked, makeshift — not unlike my life then. I'd nailed black polyester lace curtains to my window casements, too lazy to install rods. I stood at the window, pulled aside the drapes and stared at the hot morning. Light shot off cars and trucks on the elevated highway a few blocks away. People walked on the glittering sidewalk, heads bent under the weight of the sun.
"Christ almighty," I said as I stepped into my stairwell, and the odor hit me.
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Identical apartments were paired on all three floors. That they were all the same railroad layout was something I knew from quick glimpses into half-opened doors, and from the noises of kitchens — and bedrooms — in the apartments below me. This common blueprint put the bathroom near the front door. That day the acid smell of diarrhea filled the building. I couldn't determine which unit was guilty. I held my breath till I opened the flimsy, scarred door and stepped onto the hot sidewalk.
For the next few days, it stayed hot. Whoever was sick in my building stayed sick. I started to dread the stairwell: the junk mail that was piled on the foyer radiator. An ancient banister missing half its stakes. Steps that practically zigzagged up two flights, coated in dust. The smell enhanced the bad feeling I'd had, since the day I moved in, that the building was simply wrong. Blue smoke rolled out from under my neighbor's door. His incense couldn't cover the stench, though. He just added a note of sandalwood.
On the fourth day, I woke up sweating again. Weathermen declared the heat wave official. When I stepped into the stairwell, I realized the smell had not been coming from one apartment. It originated downstairs and was just too powerful.
On the seventh day I woke up sweating.
Reporting such a simple thing wasn't simple, though. Our little castle was inhabited by assuming white twenty-somethings who were all probably late with rent. We were used to avoiding the landlord's calls, not dialing his number. On the rare instance I passed someone in the foyer, we eyed each other, wondering who would bring up the subject of the smell, who would suggest steps to be taken. But the house rules, written by some unknown and omniscient hand, stipulated no talking in the common areas. It was somehow uncool to discuss the problem. So we moved away from these encounters in opposite directions, in silence, necks of t-shirts pulled over noses.
On the seventh day I woke up sweating and gagging. The smell had infiltrated my bedroom.
We almost never saw the landlord on the property. I think our shed by the highway was one of the more trivial satellites to his kingdom. But on the eighth day, I walked down the stairs and an employee of the landlord was bagging our tubs of recycling. I practically embraced the man.
"Yeah," he said, his cigarette a stick of ash between work-roughened fingers. "I think it's a squirrel."
"I never thought of that."
He gestured at the walls with his burning filter. "He's in there somewhere. We're going to take care of it."
It was on the ninth day when I finally put two and two together, and felt stupid for having taken so long. Strolling up the block from the subway, I saw men in white uniforms outside my building. In the golden slanting light of that Brooklyn afternoon, I walked up to them with a funny sense of pride. Although it was a grotesque situation — a wall full of dead rats — I felt like a sleuth for having figured it out.
The men wore surgical masks around their necks. One man held a clipboard. He had a blonde receding hairline, and blonde hairs on his muscular arms.
"Were you — working in there?" I asked, suppressing an odd smile.
The handsome man nodded, then asked if I lived there. I nodded.
"Did you clear something out of there," I asked. "Did you find an animal?"
The man turned to his coworker, and he smiled at him. The coworker smiled back in the same way but didn't speak. With dark amusement the man asked his friend: "Did we clear something out?"
The blonde man turned this slow smile to me. He had large green eyes, and they didn't waver. "We did," he said. "Your neighbor."
Jason lived on the first floor. And Jason died on the first floor. In a year, we hadn't gotten to know each other. When he moved in, we made initial small talk and my sixth sense immediately picked up sickness or weakness. My response was primitive: kick this one out of the herd.
Jason was clumsy at flirting, but insistent. Whenever he found me shuffling through mail in the foyer, he discussed the weather at length, like a senior citizen. I used ordinary tricks — hesitation before responding, a feigned interest in the supermarket circular — to make clear my disaffection. I wanted to downsize his courage so he'd never feel comfortable knocking on my door for sugar.
His hair was baby-blonde, shoulder-length and stringy. I'd estimate he was in his early twenties, and maybe twenty pounds overweight. His round face was without definition. It lacked the power to declare a personality. He wore dirty sneakers and gray sweatshirts from mediocre universities.
Jason used to sit on our railing, squinting at the street, his skin wet like white chocolate in the sun. His posture annoyed me, because it wasn't that kind of railing and it wasn't that kind of street: it wasn't a stoop and it wasn't our neighborhood. But he must have needed to get out of his apartment, although he had nowhere to go. He seemed to be an amateur at life.
On the late afternoon of that ninth day, the blonde man in the white uniform asked me questions. The shadows intensified, but sunlight lit his head like a gold crown. He was handsome, partly by way of the fortitude demanded by unpleasant, difficult business. The scene was straight from Law & Order.
"Did you know him at all?"
"I knew who he was."
"Did you spend time together?"
"No. I mean, small talk in the foyer."
"Did you see any friends come and go?"
"No."
"Did he ever talk to you about drugs, offer to sell you drugs?"
"No."
It was a honeymoon of sorts, and one of the newlyweds was a ghost.
Jason had OD'd on heroin, they'd surmised, based on the paraphernalia found near the body.
"Not that you can really call it a body," the man said, "after nine days of heat wave." Not that you can call it a body. I thought about that one for a while. A year and a half later, I'm still mulling it. Because I think about the kid with exponentially increasing frequency. I remember him with something absurdly and dangerously close to love. I imagine him perched on that railing, filthy high-tops tucked behind iron staves, glistening white wings folded on his back.
In high school, I never carved skulls and crossbones onto notebooks with a ballpoint pen. My pink diary wasn't full of suicide-note drafts. I didn't feed Alka-Seltzer to seagulls. I never burned ants with a magnifying glass in the sun. (I had brothers who took care of those things for me.)
But I was recently giving a proselytizing lecture on love and death to a friend when I noticed she wasn't listening, just grinning.
"What?" I said.
"You're like a morbid teenager," she said.
The truth is I'd been lucky: I didn't have to believe in mortality until I was twenty-eight. But Jason was the coda to a hard year, the fifth of five deaths. The other four had been beloved intimates, three of whom had been "too young" — a concept that has evolved in meaning for me, changed from a cliché to a mystery.
In the next few weeks, Jason haunted the building; the perfume lingered. A year of loss had culminated in a death so close to home I finally tipped over into epiphany: I looked at my ramshackle life, and saw in a flash that I was not imprisoned there, except by my own fear. Within a month, I'd subletted my apartment. I ended up on an island off the coast of Washington State.
It was a honeymoon of sorts, and one of the newlyweds was a ghost. At night, in bed, I lay in the arms of Jason's memory and listened to the West Coast rain. Sometimes, on the edge of sleep, we made pillow talk. He whispered into my ear: see, Jardine, you can't afford to wait. You understand, now, baby? No need to be frightened of living anymore. That, little girl, is the last thing that should scare you.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder. We always want what we can't have. But those are not the only reasons loss can lead to love.
Why did I start to love Jason after he died? To be honest, I do a lot of things backward. And men are not always where you'd think to find them.
I went out with a guy who lived on a beach down south. The pinnacle of our affair came when he left me alone in his house, palmettos shushing outside. I wandered the rooms in his shirt, feet picking up sand from the floor. The X-box, the games, the joysticks. Box of Cheerios on the counter. Maxim on the john. Propped in corners: surfboards, golf clubs and shotguns. It's not that I love things. But those things, by being his, made me love him that day.
Are there women out there who have never revered a man’s dopp kit? Never looked with awe at the battle-scarred, leather pouch as if it might be jammed with Kryptonite, instead of razors and cologne? The power of a man’s presence can be enhanced by the objects occupying his absence.
I have a certain kind of dream a couple times a year: like a wet dream except it's more love than lust. Waking is abrupt, disorienting. The notable aspect is who always stars in the dream: a stranger, a fabrication. The last featured a man in a sea-green v-neck. He and I were in love. As truly, profoundly, deeply as I've ever been in life. My mind had manufactured a split-second encyclopedia of experience he and I had shared, the illusion of years passed together. My heart takes days of convincing after these dreams. And it never quite surrenders. When I tally up what I know about love, the man in the sea-green v-neck figures into the conclusions. So he does exist, in a way.
Loving a dead man isn't easy, but it isn't as hard sometimes as loving a live one.
I'll tell you another place I tracked down true love where there was no man. You know how one song will make you crazy? You can't drive straight when it comes on the radio. But it's not the greatest melody, and you don't have a crush on the band. What grips you is suspended midway between the song and the singer, held aloft by the tension between the two and kept spinning: an atom of humanity. That secret place exists between the actor and his part, the writer and his character, the icon and his reality.
Sometimes standing face to face is too close to see someone. We need detours, back doors, byways. Recently I squatted at the glass case in an antique shop. The cufflinks in the ratty, red velvet box were silver and inscribed with italic Fs. Oh, F, I thought. Where are you, F? He was right there, summoned by the pendants, and I could feel him. The universe, in this instance, had written effective shorthand for a whole human life.
Love is a tight spot. Occasionally you must reverse into it.
Loving a dead man isn't easy, but it isn't as hard sometimes as loving a live one. The scales of armor that made Jason a hard person to like, let alone love, fell away when he died: the dirty ankles and untied laces, the toxic sheen on his brow, the chatter about wind or ice or rainbows, the stuttering hellos and goodbyes. He stripped off his persona like it was a suit, hung it on a hanger, and stands there now: a naked soul.
Usually, in romance, the body is the portal to the spirit. Once in a metaphysical while it's the other way around. To love him now is not to love him in a mortal way. I don't love his "self", that jumble of characteristics he needed — everyone needs — to interface with other human beings. Loving him is like standing under a full moon: I can't touch him, but every square inch of my skin is washed in light. He even shines through me.
Walking by my old building, I half-expect to see white feathers scattered on the sidewalk. At least a pink carnation and picture of Jesus nailed to the door. I could have put a candle in the stairwell in his memory. This essay can be a candle.
Some lessons you only learn by proximity to the evidence. I think back on those nine days, how my cats slunk around the apartment, bellies to the ground, fur standing up. They knew from the first day what had happened in that house.
I can't forget the smell. Putrid, somehow floral. Walking in the woods recently, I caught the faintest whiff, a molecule that came and went in a moment with the breeze, something I never would have picked out before. Once you know it, you never mistake it or overlook it. A cop told me the smell gets into steel, even, and can't be washed thoroughly away.
I dream of kissing Jason. I'd kiss him to remind us both that we're alive.
In love, I'd always been afraid to commit, terrified of my imperfect self and any imperfect self who wanted me. I was offended by the imperfection of selves in general. From his heaven or hell, Jason reached back to me, made me better at loving the brothers he left behind, the men still walking the glittering sidewalks, heads bent under the weight of the sun—the men who own the concrete world now, if not forever.
I wish I could rewind the days and nights to steal back one moment before he died. Maybe I could be kinder in the foyer — yeah, it does look like snow, you're right. I hope it snows, I want it to snow. Maybe I could tiptoe down to leave a cup of sugar by his door. I could invite him up for a cup of coffee in my kitchen. Not that my point is for everyone to be nicer to strangers. We conserve ourselves, especially in cities, because we must. We avert our eyes from those of passers-by; we're cruel a thousand times a day. Otherwise, we'd be mortally fatigued within a half-hour.
It's just that I dream of kissing Jason. I'd kiss him to remind us both that we're alive. I'd kiss a bit of the chemical sweat from his neck: a mystical, medicinal kiss. Not that he was a leper and me a martyr — we were just neighbors. I would kiss him for the sole purpose of kissing him. To love humanity, it helps to start by loving a man. n°
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jardine Libaire holds an MFA from the University of Michigan. Her stories have been published on Hooksexup and in Fiction and Chick Lit , an anthology. She lives in Brooklyn. Here Kitty Kitty is her first novel.
