bodies two

Hey everyone. I hope you are all doing well. I mean it. This will be disgraceful and disrespectful and I am sorry.

It is February which means it should be cold, but it is not. Surely the globe is warming, right? It has been lovely. Sun peaks, hits, never burns. Eyes feel open again.

My grandfather died when he was almost one hundred. He died only a few weeks ago, but it feels like the past and not the present, so I’ll say he died when he was almost one hundred. Closer than I will ever be. He spent his childhood in Brooklyn during the tail end of the Holocaust. He moved to Switzerland to study medicine and was taken in by a widow who had recently lost her son. She taught him French and he graduated at the top of his class. He spent his career delivering thousands of babies in New York City. His first wife died a few decades back and he married my grandmother before I was born. I didn’t know we weren’t biologically related until I was a pre-teen and realized not everyone had six grandparents. It just wasn’t something I questioned: Poppy is family. He hummed constantly. No matter what he was doing, he was humming. The melodies were somewhere between Verdi and Rosenblatt, opera and cantorial. He loved Judaism. It was his entire existence. He used to drive me to and from the beach in his Toyota convertible, top down and radio blasting. He had horrible hearing. Caruso cut through the wind with his characteristic resonance. Poppy taught me how to hear the beauty in the voice. He hummed beautifully, beatifically. My cousins and I would make fun of him for it, but I never realized it would be the last thing I’d hear from him. He died slowly. Cancer, sepsis, more cancer, organ failure, somehow more cancer. Metastasis, motion and contamination. He died slowly and without pain.

I remember morphine. I remember the feeling so well, being cared for. There is no greater love. I remember the nurse injecting the clear liquid in me, the taste of blood and then sunscreen and then the bitter agent they put in duster to keep us from huffing it too much. Morphine doesn’t make your eyes go black, but blue. Pale something, blurry kaleidoscope. I don’t mean to write poetry. I hate poetry. I remember nodding off in the hospital trauma ward. Beeps hastened and one nurse quickly turned into seven. Someone was praying. A beautiful woman with brown hair and a gentle face held my hand. Something was pumped through my veins. I felt nothing but the swell of my arms, liquid inflating my internals, data, wires, overflow. I threw up all over the place. The beautiful woman, I couldn’t feel her grip, but I knew it was there. It wasn’t a miracle, but I woke up. My parents were crying and no one called it an overdose because it was the doctors who gave me the drugs.

Poppy died there in that pale blue. When I knew he was dying imminently, I rushed to the basement of the university’s student union building and filmed a video singing an Italian aria I figured he used to hum. Dad sent a text to the family that night saying he died listening to that recording. I was already drunk by the time the text was delivered and he was dead. I asked my friend to hug me and she did, I took a big gulp of whatever and thought to message my old voice teacher. If Poppy taught me how to find beauty in the voice, Stefano taught me how to harness that beauty and turn it into something miraculous. I sent the maestro a brief message explaining how Poppy, who Stefano had heard plenty about during our many hours together, had passed away listening to me sing. He responded with a lovely something about how I have “The Gift”. He looks nothing like Poppy, but in our months together, Stefano’s face grew inseparable from my dear grandfather’s. They loved in similar ways: discipline and principle in a perfect collision with boyish humor. During our lessons, the maestro would often demonstrate portions of pieces I had found particularly difficult. His voice simply happened. There was no beginning or end, the notes were distinct, but always of the same spirit. He said it was sol fiato, “one breath”, not in the literal sense, but rather in the way that all sounds exist as emanations of the One. The maestro would talk in puzzling spiritual paradigms. He was pushing me to reach for the beyond. I quit because I found the beyond he was looking for never fulfilled me.

Poppy’s funeral was held a few days after he passed. I flew down to Florida and the air was horrible. It’s thick there, slow and clammy. All the air feels like steam. I arrived at his home decorated with almost one hundred years of various things from all over the world. I remember years before he was dying, he had told me the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his life was a herd of wildebeests, countless, charging across the plains south of the Sahara. The sun was setting and there were birds above, moving separately as one wave, subatomic push and pull in polyphony. I imagine orange and red.

The actual service was held at a very Floridian Jewish funeral home almost an hour away from his house. I wore a dark green-brown suit with a darker green tie. I had nothing black. My grandmother had asked me to sing at the funeral, that same aria I had apparently sung for him as he died. His casket was open for a comically brief visitation. He looked like wax, like one of those robots made to look like humans. I imagined his chest compressing as his heart beat, his gut expanding and deflating with breath. This was some random thing, some foreign object. Poppy became a body. Is it at the moment of death when a grandfather becomes a body? I wonder if he seized up. I wonder if my dad was really holding his hand. I wonder if he was really listening to me sing. Fiction has always been more important than reality. We make it all anyways, we might as well make it good. My dad gave a beautiful eulogy and the service felt like it was over in less than ten minutes. We took a short limo ride down the highway to the cemetery where he was to be buried. I got carsick and had to roll the window down. The cemetery staff tasked with his burial fist-bumped one another after they picked up the casket and placed it on the lift. He wasn’t buried at all, actually. He was slid into a predetermined space along a massive stone wall like a book on a bookshelf. The hydraulic lift was so loud we could hardly hear the cantor sing. Someone said there were cobwebs in his hole in the wall. Do you rent gravesites? Is it possible to buy something for forever?

I was left sleeping by Tracy Emin

I met a man. He’s Irish and the first thing he said to me was an apology for not having an accent. He has an accent, it’s just a bit muted. He grew up in a small village on the coast. He described the cliffs as “like the moon”. We met at a yuppie bar and I dressed the part, button down, corduroys, sweater, and an overcoat. The second I saw him I knew he was beautiful, not just visually, but truly beautiful. Something essential. We talked and drank cocktails for four hours. I picked up the bill with money I don’t have and brought him back to my apartment. He said he loves seeing other people’s apartments. We kissed on the couch and I brought him to my bed. We undressed like kids about to swim in the lake. He kissed me like I was running out of oxygen. His naked body was leaner than mine and alive in the orange lamplight. When he was inside me it felt like my body was where it was always meant to be. Some kind of destiny. He came and I came and he held me for an hour. We showered together, taking turns with the water, shuffling awkwardly around one another. We kissed under the hot stream. The water made it so I couldn’t tell whose mouth was whose, where he began and I ended. I asked him to sleep over, but he had a meeting the next day.

The next day, yesterday, I decided to play it cool, so I sent him a message in the early afternoon. He replied and we talked for a bit and then he didn’t reply. A lifetime of unrequited love and incomplete circuitry compelled me to message him several times and apologize for each and every word like I was handing him shards of glass, one whole broken mirror, bit by bit. He said don’t worry, I like to respond on my own time and I understood that he was right and that makes sense and why would I expect someone to message me right away anyways?

The issue is that my towel still smells like him and my bedsheets too. I ran on the mountain last night and the city lights reminded me of a million eyes attached to one impossible body. Poppy’s eyes were closed in his casket, thank God. I imagine them open; glass or plastic? They say the eyes are the first to be removed in the mortuary process. I can taste the Irish man’s breath and it brings me the comfort of morphine, slow-fast like a stream on a slope, it never ends. Sol fiato, one breath. Surely one body. I need to feel that love again. It is amazing how quickly two strangers can create something beautiful.

I saw someone on the mountain. I was running uphill and he was running down. I could have sworn he was you. I would’ve known if I’d stopped and looked in his eyes. I looked away and looked back and he’d collapsed. Slipped on ice or a heart attack maybe. My phone read SOS, I would have texted you if I could have. I saw a painting of a bull watching a meteor destroy the world. It was all blue.