anything. I am determined to keep calm, I see I am hurting
him with my bitter invective, I am determined to get through
another night, another day. He reads. Perhaps he is cold too?
We talk. We touch hands quietly. We fall asleep together in his
bed marooned. I wake up soon. He is asleep, curled up like a
lamb of peace. Perhaps you have never known a gentle man.
He is always a stranger, unarmed, at night wrapped in simple
sleep he curls up like a child in someone’s arms. It is after 1 1
pm, the restaurant has now been closed long enough for the
wind streaming through the apartment to have cleared out my
115
room so that I will not choke or get head pain or throw up or
have sharp pains in my gut. My lungs will ache from the cold.
My fingers will be stiff. My throat will hurt from the cold. I sit
down to work. I must write my book. I work until the dawn,
my salvation, day after day, when I see the beauty of earth
unfolding. I watch dawn come on the cement which is this
earth of mine. Then I sleep my kind of sleep, of cold and
burning, of murder and death, of paralysis and silent screams,
of a man with a knife who moves with impunity through a
consciousness tortured with itself, of the throats I have slit, of
the heat of that tropical place. In the dream there was no
blood but I wake up knowing that it must have been terrible,
smelly and heavy and sticking and rotting fast in the sun.
*
I watch him sleep because the tenderness I have for him is
what I have left of everything I started with.
My brother was like him, frail blond curls framing a guileless
face, he slept the same way, back where I started. A tenderness
remembered tangentially, revived when I see this pale, yellowhaired man asleep, at rest, defenseless, incomprehensibly trusting death not to come. We are innocence together, before
life set in.
Sometimes I feel the tenderness for this man now, the real
one asleep, not the memory of the baby brother— sometimes I
feel the tenderness so acutely— it balances on just a sliver of
memory— I feel it so acutely, it is so much closer to pain than
to pleasure or any other thing, for instance, in one second
when each knows what the other will say or without a thought
our fingers just barely touch, I remember then in a sharp sliver
of penetration my baby brother, pale, yellow-haired, curls
framing a sleeping face while I lay awake during the long
nights, one after the other, while mother lay dying. It is con-
sumingly physical, not to sleep, to be awake, watching a blond
boy sleeping and waiting for your mother to die. Or I remember my brother, so little, just in one second, all joy, a tickle-fight, we are squared off, each in a corner of the sofa
(am I wearing my cowgirl outfit with gun and holster?), father
is the referee, and we are torrents of laughter, rapturous
wrestling, and his curly yellow hair cascades. He was radiant
with delight, lit up from inside, laughing in torrents and me
