The infernal, p.4
The Infernal, page 4
The Senior Advisor: I did not tell you to split up with your boyfriend.
Well it’s not like it was really working anyway! I say.
In 1996 we see cat prints and the crypt, we draw up our new life stories, build friendships in the House and Senate offices. Our shirts so white, and we press them every morning.
In January I get called on, I stand up with my notepad and ask a question, and boys in newsy caps won’t stop shouting about it.
In January all up and down Pennsylvania Avenue they thrust their papers in the hands of men going by and shout about everything I ever did wrong.
A thousand cats yowling overhead.
In January, February, and March I tick off the names in my Rolodex. My brother has to laugh—Brother, he says, you are connected.
In February the Senior Advisor takes up with Pauly.
In January he drops me.
In April my brother says, I can really only spare like forty bucks. He says, It’s a little tight right now.
My brother’s the best thing in my life.
Maybe someday he’ll move out here.
In October my eyes go wide and I say wow I haven’t eaten out in such a long time.
In October I say this is the best food I’ve had in so long. I wear the old white shirt and tie and the Senior Advisor reaches out and tousles my hair. He calls me crazy boy. He says, You’re going to make me insane. I’m not sixteen anymore, I’m twenty-five. I’m not a shirt and a tie on the floor of Congress, I’m just another shadow slipping between sycamores in Dupont Circle. But I feel so comfortable. He gives me money and takes me out places. I drink infused vodka, jump on the bed, learn the names of staffers. I lie back on his bed, and he says, Let me take you home. He means let me suck your cock.
We’re stuck in Dupont. You can’t leave, not really, even if you get a swank apartment. Soon enough you’re back, slipping from tree to tree. One day me and Billy and Pauly decide to find the way out—investigate how to get out of Dupont Circle for good. We all get out our trusty notepads, and then we have to laugh. We’ve all spent time in the briefing room. Maybe the notepads are part of the problem! So we throw them in the trash. Pauly says we need something all new. He says he’ll make us business cards.
But somehow we don’t find the way out. We spend a whole week investigating, but we never find it. And Pauly doesn’t make the cards—or he does, but it’s just our names and question marks, and what does that even mean?
We were pages once, and we were beautiful. Now we’re here. But maybe there’s some new use for me? For all of us, or most all of us?
That’s why I’m making my consulting firm. Maybe it’s K Street we’ll find our home?
In March it’s slim binders at the copy shop, plastic sleeves, eighty cents apiece on color prints. This is when the last of the ads is finalized. The cover shows three guys in funny hats pointing at a tree. There’s this word cut in the bark, Croatoan. That’s a historical word.
That word means something to me and my brother, it means something to our consulting firm, and it means something to AmericJP4+K SBMS11 61H XT
In 1587 Sir Walter Raleigh, intending to persevere in the planting of his country of Virginia, prepares a new colony of 150 men to be sent thither.
In January they churn out stories about me.
In January they won’t shut up!
Even when they get it right, they’re wrong. But I try to put a good spin on it.
I think how my face might look on TV, eyes cast up, and real cherry blossoms, so much torn pink and white, hitting my eyelashes. And the shadows of the sycamores that cut your cheeks until the wind comes along, until it shakes the patterns from the trees.
It’s March and it’s two in the morning, and sometimes I hurt people. It’s kind of cold out. Sue says: Why are you here? Why’d you come to Dupont Circle tonight? And I say, Well why did you? And she says she wanted to see how it looked empty. Not just when we were hiding, but totally empty. Because if it could just be empty of us boys for one night, she says, if she could just see it like that, well: maybe she could imagine a future with nothing to do with Dupont Circle, with the men who pick us up, who drop us back off.
I gave you money! she says, I saved up and gave you all money so you’d all have something else other than this! For one night!
She says, Don’t you want to stop all that? Hiding in the trees? Going in cars with men?
I say, We don’t hide. That’s the part you’ll never get.
Just because you can’t see us doesn’t mean we’re hiding, I say.
This is where we live, I say.
And sometimes you can’t see us.
Are you crying? I say. We’re sitting on the curb, knees to chin, lights cutting past in either direction. It’s pretty cold. She says: You all promised not to come here tonight, this one night!
I listen for the cats in the trees. Mine and all the other boys’.
But there’s nothing—nothing I can hear.
I say, I’m sorry I let you down.
In 1986 me and my brother catch a TV special, The Mystery of Roanoke. The voice-over’s so deep! like a dead person sunk way down in the ocean. They run quotes from the search party. The word Croatoan interrupts me and my brother, our normal lights-out talk.
We say the word—say it over and over. We lie in pitch-black beds chanting it until we’re terrorized into fits of giggling and shushing. We call out to the lost and long dead. We mark ourselves to be vanished.
In April the Senior Advisor says, I don’t want your ads, are you fucking crazy? I say, I just need you for a reference. Just for the sales kit! No one’s going to see them but me and my brother’s clients.
He says, Clients? What clients? I didn’t know you had a brother.
I say, I’m gonna have lots of clients! I say, Why are you asking about my brother?
I tell him that what he wants from me and what he’s been taking from me has nothing to do with my brother. I’m sorry I mentioned my brother! I say.
Never call me, he says. I mean it! he says.
When I mail my brother the ads, he says the word: Croatoan. I can tell over the phone he’s looking at it. He says, Are we like the men pointing at the tree? Or are we like the men who are already gone? Or the Indians that took them away?
Me: See, that’s what’s so great about it. In politics you need to be all three.
Sue always has a deck of cards. In January she gives me a Walkman.
Helen keeps me fed. She has these great pearls. I do the clasp. Helen: What a gentleman!
In March my brother asks when I can start paying him back. He asks when I’ll have the sketches for the sales kit. Because we can’t build the kit until he has my sketches.
In 1587 some men go missing.
In 1986 I’m just a kid and I watch a TV show.
Ten years later I get on a train that takes me here. Now it’s another ten years, and I have these months. The ring of sycamores, traffic cutting the ring both ways, three rings altogether. I pass from sycamore to sycamore until the rivers of light join up. I am in Dupont Circle again. I am always here—even after the Senior Advisor sets me up in the apartment, I keep coming back. Sometimes in Dupont I think: I was born here, and here I’ll die.
But it’s not. It’s not where I was born.
At the center you have the sea, the wind, the stars: all of that’s wrapped up in a big fountain. All day long the new boys tumble up from the Red Line and through the sycamores, not seeing the trees, not seeing the older boys, or the cars that stop for us. Boys in their white shirts and ties! Feeling the fountain’s spray without looking back at the sea or the wind or the stars!
For hours I move from tree to tree, until at last a light detaches itself, and a door opens. You don’t see the door, you hear it. The sound of an opening door, so smooth. The workings of a luxury vehicle, the rustling of the sycamores, the trees you know by heart. And you would stop yourself from going there, you would halt and press a hand to your head, you’d try to understand how this new story opening in front of you might fit with the other parts of your life story, if you weren’t already inside, already speeding somewhere else.
The first night of our being on this island, we took five great tortoiseENP H1O S0 PSCENNRZ2F0L07R T0 C6BXLHQFOGQ0 POQT2 # 8MY
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binders are just a stopgap. When our sales kit is complete, my company’s gonna be real.
Starting your own business changes your life, I truly believe that. You won’t even recognize me! Sue can come work for us. All the boys of Dupont Circle, they can all come work for us, either for her or for me, whichever they want. A sandwich shop, a consulting firm. Course I’ll get a reference from the Senior Advisor, I tell Helen. What choice does he have? He can find me my first clients, I say. Helen says, enunciate! Don’t slouch! She asks why I’m crying. Well, sometimes I miss my cats.
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first night of our being on this island, we took five great tortoises
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sixteen of our strongest men were tired with the carrying of one of them but from the sea side to our cabins.
In 1996 a congressman takes to me to the crypt. He pulls skateboard stickers from his briefcase, sheet after sheet: skulls, grenades, naked ladies. He asks me if I skate. I flush. Well, I had a Nash when I was a kid. Course, Nash sucks, I say. I feel so dumb! He brushes back my hair. No, no, he says. You skated.
In April Helen hands me back an overdraft letter. The color prints, the plastic binder for the brochure. These are separate transactions, two thirty-five-dollar fees. She goes in her purse.
I say, Don’t give it to me, if you do the same for the others.
She tells me shush.
I’ve had these years. I’ve tried to understand! There was a time in Dupont Circle you could keep your white shirts clean. Then not so much. At some point we switch to street clothes. It means we’re older. We wait to see if we’re picked for the press corps, but there’s so many of us. And there’s not enough slots. Sue visits us boys every day with her box of sandwiches, her water bottles. You trade in your white shirt and tie for street clothes, but somehow Sue keeps coming around. That’s a good thing! Other things aren’t good. Like the times a boy fills his bag with rocks. It’s something private that Sue and Helen can’t understand. Sometimes I think I could tell my brother. But then I think: no I can’t.
Pauly says, We still look beautiful.
Bill: But we don’t look like we did.
Sue: Doesn’t anybody play cards?
And when the wind stops at night, you hear cats’ claws rilling the sycamores as they glide from tree to tree.
After the first year, when they’re through needing us on the floor of Congress, we still hang out nearby, because sometimes they need us in the cloakroom, or the crypt. But then that’s over too—their needing us like that, in those places. So we go to Dupont Circle and that’s when we really and truly see the sycamores at last. Each night new boys show up, and Sue just shakes her head. Night after night she comes by to check on us. Boys, she says, my boys! She means all of the boys of Dupont Circle. From the very first time she says it, she’s our life-friend. But she’s always shaking her head.
In January I tell Sue that Helen has the nicest pearls. I say, maybe someday I’ll buy her some just like that.
Sue brings us water bottles and candy and I stash them. I’ve got a cubby behind a loose piece of masonry under the fountain—when no one’s looking, I open up a damp black space only my arm’s thin enough to reach in.
Most days Pauly and I trade sandwiches. Then I give Bill half.
I’m just not that hungry.
Of all the boys of Dupont Circle, I’m the slimmest one. That’s a sales point, even if some guys don’t like it. But fuck them.
In December, in the briefing room, I think: this is amazing! all these folding chairs! But I’m lost, I really am.
Helen sees how it is, and the next day she saves me a sea Z1OSS RVE XD2KW+942VFPA00SRFOG
I learn all I can from Helen. Helen’s made the press corps her world, she’s made the institution a life-friend, a life-animal. I love Helen! When she raises her hand I raise my hand, when she speaks out of turn I speak out of turn. I bring her hard candy and water bottles. I try to think up the questions she’d ask.
The briefing room doesn’t look the way you think it does. Folding chairs, a cramped little space like in the basement of any old office building, stained carpet, dinged-up paint, a boom mic they’re fishing overhead like a rat on a pole.
In January I ask my own.
Or the one the Senior Advisor gave me.
In January I ask one, just to be helpful.
That’s all we ever did in Dupont Circle—help people.
And they destroy me.
At the center of Dupont Circle the fountain sweeps up into twisting lines, the wind, the sea, the stars. Some boys walk the edge, arms straight out.
Each year boys in white shirts and ties go to auction. Congressmen hand them animal masks and make them fight: hawk vs. rabbit, seal vs. spider, cat vs. cat.
One year I fought Bill, another year Pauly.
Bill and me it brought closer. Bill and me became boyfriends.
With Pauly and me, though, it was different.
Sue takes us to the doctor when we need to go.
You wouldn’t have thought you could pass unseen in Dupont Circle, but after a few months you get the moves, you see that where bones cut air, there’s possibilities, deferrals, something like silence that you’ll never confuse for silence itself. It’s so still! You wrap yourself in the sea, the stars, the wind. You see the darkness and the streams of light that only ever protected you, and for a while you can go unseen.
In January I ask a simple question and the mimeographs start up like a thousand teeth shaking loose.
In January everything they ever heard about me gets typed up, bundled, and tossed in big bales of newsprint on every corner in the city.
Isn’t it just one more peg to haul myself up on?—I have to believe that, we’ve all got to.
Listen: whatever damage was done, we did it to ourselves.
I want to be clear.
Listen: see, I’m not blaming anyone.
Helen always gets the first question. Helen says, Thank you, Mr. President.
That January I made a choice.
They reacted to it.
Even as a little boy, I always made my own choices.
We’re life-friends, the boys who came up together. The congressmen take us one at a time on private tours, they show us the crypt, the cat prints, the workings of power. You don’t like to be around another boy when you’re with a congressman. Because you might spit in the other boy’s face, or just close your eyes. And ten years later, when you’re in the briefing room, it’s the same thing—you don’t ever meet eyes. But we need each other! We can’t make it all alone. The darkness, the sycamores, something like silence, our rings of light. The trees so slender, and tough as bone—you can’t scratch a word in.
They say a little boy can’t be in charge of his choices.
Well that’s what they say.
In October Bill says we should just be friends. He says, This isn’t the end of anything. I say, Terrible things happened to me in my childhood. I say, Every day I live with terrible things.
In May the prospective employer mails back the brochure.
In April I tell him he can keep it.
It’s February and now Pauly’s living in what’s not a palace.
I’m out and he’s in.
He and the Senior Advisor are both asshoABCE6VFN02XQVO 1A3MNAK
Bill’s an asshole, too—for not saying I love you when he had the chance, but I still have these feelings, and at least he lets me crash with him sometimes.
They say a little boy can’t be in charge—not of his choices!
But other boys would have—did!—choose differently!
And now I can make better choices—can you understand that?
I can’t control anyone else—not their actions.
Not their reactions to my choices.
But I can control my choices.
Still!
They destroyed me!
Or I mean they tried!—they really genuinely wanted to destroy me!
In February Sue drops off a box of sandwiches.
Helen’s had life-achievements. She lets me crash on her couch sometimes, and get my mail there. She helps me because she’s old, I guess.
Sue helps because … I don’t know why Sue helps.
Every month and every day: Sue and her sandwiches.
Maybe she has a complex.
In March I ask her how she keeps it up year after year.
Sue: I can’t.
I look around and it’s not 1996 anymore. We’re not sixteen, we’re in our midtwenties. And I think how beautiful we were, tumbling up from the Red Line, not even seeing the sycamores. Touching them with our fingers as we flew past and yet not seeing them! I look at us, all the boys stalking Dupont Circle, just a footprint, a big cat’s grin, and think: We’re still beautiful. But where did I pack away my white shirt and tie?
In April the prospective employer flips through the brochure. He says, This isn’t a creative position. I tell him I know that. I say, I just want a foot in the door. I use words my brother gave me. Multitasking, organizational skills, team player, no dropped balls. I say, the sea, the stars, etc. Then I walk him through the ads. This is Pretty Pauly, I say. This is the orange cat, one of my life-cats. The prospective employer says, We’re talking about answering phones here, getting coffee. He says, Don’t I know you?
In 1986 my brother and I escape into the woods behind the house. He hollers as we run in opposite directi40YXEG 0X2 ZTY
his screams skitter away from my own in the high branches. I bury myself under leaves, pressing my face and stomach into the black and the smell of last year’s stuff turned to mud. I let out a noise, it must be that I let out a noise. Or hide myself incompletely, or in a place too obvious. I mean: my brother finds me. He drags me out from under the leaves by the wrist. I’m streaked black all down my front. We are laughing, we are in trouble.
