Life Gasps and Death Rattles

What’s on the other side of the Door?

I’ll tell you first what I promised: the time I ran into a client at the club. It was a Tuesday night and D. and I had just left a sake bar in the East Village. It was too early to return to our respective homesteads so we slid to L.B. to talk more shit and see what the DJ had in store for us. On the corner with cobblestones I saw a woman I thought familiar entangled in a man’s arms. D. and I chattered and flashed our IDs at the head of the line. The Mugler model at the door scowled and interrogated us but let us through of course. (She’s sadistic is my theory.) We stood in line in the blacklight for the elevator and the couple from outside is behind us; I glance back and squint, I swear I know her face from somewhere. D. is one of the Three Wise Fools of my life, esoteric and sagacious and erratic; he said I should act like I don’t recognize her. Naturally I defied his advice. As we ascended the 18 floors to the canopy I knew I knew her from my work. (Shit.) I only see people from the neck up but she was heavier than I’d imagined, shorter too, with less of the wrathful fire I’d seen in her secret hours. And she was clearly on a date with a Black man. I don’t know why that gave me pause. I looked too hard and by the 13th floor she noticed and our eye contact lingered. “[Redacted]?” She smiled but not with her eyes. “Anderson?” I nodded and squinted to hide my eyes. “I worked with you a bit ago, didn’t I?” Her man turned back and gave me a blank once over and D. turned his head to hide his snickering. She nodded. The elevator doors opened. We all walked in. D. saw how wide my eyes and how shaky my hands and offered me the first round. Then we went upstairs to the night air. My client and her man followed us up there and then back down to the dancefloor. We never looked or spoke back to each other but they stayed in my eyeshot. The dancefloor filled up with men in mesh shirts and short jean shorts. For some reason I felt fear and I still don’t know exactly why.

And I will also give you the gift of the story of one of my worst mistakes. At the time it felt like one of my best. Sensation has a way of lying to us. Not unlike how I lied to myself, saying, what’s the harm of a pleasure that no one else knows about? Or how I lied afterwards, reporting that I’d not slept with her again, that things were still dead between us. The fool that I am, forgetting what the Bible taught me before I could swim, that all done in the dark eventually comes to the light. She was lighter than I remember, or maybe I had grown stronger in the months we hadn’t talked, because I was easily able to lift and hold her up as I entered her. She and her flesh had missed me. It was easy to return. She was just as loud as ever. Passion has a power. Fluids of love stained my shirt. We told each other we still loved each other, we never really stopped — have we, yet? I never had a problem making her finish and vice versa. No, my problem was always that I avoided responsibility, accountability at times, and I was always trying to fill a void within me, and maybe one could say I last too long. By the end of it we were exhausted. I knew if I closed my eyes in her arms I’d fall asleep and have to deal with more consequences in the morning but I did it anyway. I didn’t want to see my regret.

True fear is what I saw in my portrait artist when I asked him: have you ever seen someone die? He told me yes, not too long ago, on the way back from the airport with his wife. They’d been driving in the rain along the Grand Central Parkway and they’d found it eerie that the road was completely deserted despite the clock not having yet struck midnight. All of a sudden after turning a corner they encountered a vehicle on its head with the wheels still turning. Broken glass was everywhere. They stopped and investigated and found it there. A woman was driving in high heels and she must have lost control and somehow her truck had flipped over the upper railing and skid on the roof for half a mile. She was standing near what remained of the passenger side door, hysterical, calling for Michael again and again. “Come on,” my artist recalled her saying, “Get up, Michael, come on!” He stood there and watched her kneeling by the body hanging out of the passenger window as he informed the police of the situation. Michael hadn’t had his seatbelt on, so when the crash happened, his body whipped around the front seat and he’d been half hurled out the open window when they fell. His face looked embedded into the concrete by then because only half of it remained. The slide had ground the other half and his right arm into a textured streak of blood and bone. A diamond ring of his lay ten feet away, glistening on the rain-slicked black street. Michael’s one eye was still open, staring out at nothing, and his mouth kept opening and closing like a fish. My artist, now remembering with his eyes closed, said he heard it when he pulled the wailing woman away from the wreck: wheezing, a desperate gasping for breath. That’s not breathing, the paramedics told him when they arrived two minutes later. That’s the sound of life getting stuck on the way out of the body.

What’s on the other side of the Door?

Here is a story I haven’t told yet: the first time I met her. Another “her”, if you believe that anyone is really different — I’m not so sure myself. She and I were meeting downtown after I spontaneously asked for a drink. The both of us dressed up and neither wanted to admit it. We spent as much time talking as we did in each others’ eyes. Darkness enveloped us but the sparks between us lit up the table. Time skipped by as if we were in a trance. We forgot about the possibility of death. My hands snaked effortlessly around her shoulders and then her waist and she didn’t stop me once. If anything I saw that I could have gone further and faster. But fear held me back again and of what I was afraid I still have no clue. When I try to remember I can’t recall her scent, though I know it was pleasant and floral, nor can I really remember exactly what she wore. I saw her body through it. They say with enough time you stop imagining people as their appearance and more as their aura, the way they emanate around you, the way they make you feel. I was wearing black that night like Christopher Walken and sure enough she made me feel like the King of New York.

I call myself the Count of Barcelona these days. My portrait artist is painting me in the image of King Phillip IV of Spain. Every spiritually inclined woman I meet says I still don’t acknowledge my full power. I remember being a child and declaring after running myself ragged: I still haven’t reached my top speed yet. My best childhood memories are the Saturdays I spent entirely alone.

Because you’ve been so good to me, so kind and patient and generous with your attention, just like God, I’ll tell you the story I’ll be working on writing for the rest of my life: the way it will go on the hour that I die. I’ve dreamt the whole thing already and I just have to live it out. When the time comes I’ll have all the words just right, I know it. I’ve been practicing for years, every time I see the sea. When it comes I’ll be on the beach in a chair laying back with my shirt off and my eyes squinting almost shut from how wide I’m smiling. No one could say if it’ll be real or imagined but I’ll have the playful laughs of my children in my ears. The waves of the Caribbean will be turbulent and topaz and lapping at my wrinkled feet. I’ll be old, somehow. I’ll have said everything I need to say. Over the sound of the water I’ll hear the creaking of the ancient Door opening and the chorus of voices that follow the spilling out of its light in a color human eyes can’t see. The sun might be setting but I won’t have a shadow because we’ll have long since fused. I will close my eyes and still see through all of the craters of the moon. I’ll still be impatient, as I’ve always been, so I’ll have downed a handful of painkillers to hasten the momentum of my sliding into spirit. So I’ll go with a satisfied smile, singing to myself, the issue of my succession having long since been settled.