What is it she sees…?

Her face couldn’t have been an inch or two away from the canvas. I didn’t even know you were allowed to draw so close to a painting in a museum—it felt explicit somehow, inappropriate, how little she seemed to care about the distance implied by the trellis of the frame.

She was like a hummingbird immersed in petals and nectar. I became absorbed by her posture, the rootedness of her gaze, which I could feel (like a hole burned through calico cloth) without really seeing the fullness of its aspect.

I don’t remember anything about the painting I had been looking at. Only that it was exactly two paintings to the right of her. Whatever the image was has since been reduced to a movement of heliotropic longing in my mind—which, maybe, was for the best; my attention may not have been diverted if I’d had any clue what it was I’d been looking at in the first place.

There were two things I wanted. The first, of course, was to talk to this girl, ask her what it was about this painting that was so transfixing. This was out of the question. It would upset the significance and tranquility of the pose, which was something remarkable and not to be messed with. Introducing myself into the scene felt somehow repugnant, disgusting. The perversity implicit in making it her problem that I was turned on by random displays of curiosity in public.

The only option was to wait for her to move off, so I could look at the painting for myself. Much more in line with my nature. I didn’t have to wait long: her boyfriend came up behind her, roused her out of her trance, glanced at the painting for no more than a few seconds, and led her away to an adjoining gallery.

Boyfriends could always be relied upon to not give a fuck about anything when it was most convenient.

As casually as I could, I took her place in front of the painting.

I saw a man in the foreground throwing a line into the cobalt-colored water rushing from the mouth of a grotto. The man stood on a small but sturdy-looking plinth of wooden planks raised slightly above the water, contrasted against the sublime darkness of the cavern. To the right of the ‘fisherman,’ the water broke foamy and turbid against stones in its path. To the man’s left was a wall of stone, mossy and imposing. The stones set in such a way as to appear ‘cut,’ arranged: it gave the cave a crypt-like appearance, and the impression, as you stared deep into the abyssal night of the cave that there was something lurking, hidden there….

The fisherman, it seemed, couldn’t be bothered…or had already sounded the depths of this hypogeum, and had accorded it with a kind of sacred respect, understanding from experience or a fear trembling mysterious and blighted in his soul to keep his distance, to just be thankful for the fish that have emerged here for generations from the swell of the chthonic river-god.

The unnerving thing wasn’t the dark itself—you could make out, if you looked closely enough, the back walls of the grotto—although, on the other hand, you couldn’t feel sure that your eyes weren’t playing tricks on you, amidst the strain. Or the mouth of the cavern bordering that void, pale and muscular but somehow delicate, like moth wings spread and vulcanized by a quietly burning fuse. It had language. Like it wanted to say something, or was waiting to say something. Waiting to express the clear pools and wrought stalactites hidden away in the artist’s mind.

I thought of you. Remembered when you found me passed out on the grass in Ocean Park, curled up with my copy of Songs of Maldoror and an empty pint of whiskey. You told me you understood when I tried to explain why my face was so pale, my eyes so sunken, my hands so shaky. I was sure I was crazy—you not only said I wasn’t crazy, but asked me point blank if I was a spy.

I wasn’t, of course; I was just an alcoholic and a drug addict, reading into things I had no business reading into. Curiosity, however martyred and self-destructive, was my only way of preserving the last shred of humanity I had left. You understood that too. You took pity on me, a bird with broken wing, unable to bear the burden of flight. The ambiguity that is flight, which (and you saw this way before I did—you saw so much that took me years—until now—to see in myself) being an irrepressible part of my nature, I’d never quit trying to pull off, one way or another.

In other words: you didn’t want me to get killed. You didn’t want me to kill myself. So, that summer, you let me be your shadow.

You brought me out to bars, introduced me to your friends–huddled murmurs beneath dimmed lights, conspiracy which took on the colors and scents of the night. The paradox by which you entered into me, and I entered into you; our boundaries touched only by a ruse of shades and hues. Fulfillment concealed in a covert glance.

Nourished by the precision, the bare acuity, of your reality, the husk of my emptiness gave way to skin that was odorless, tasteless, cold to the touch–unless I was with you.

You told me–I have not forgotten, could never forget–that what you wanted was to put your finger through a hole torn through the fabric of a black dress as far as it could go, without anyone noticing.

There was something demonic about you. A kind of cruelty–insatiable, carnal (the way carrion is carnal), but always aware of itself, reflective. I never thought about what you saw when you looked in the mirror; I thought about the terror of whatever mirror that existed, or could be invented, that would be able to see you. I never felt safer than when I was by your side.

A shadow of a shadow. We were impossible—me, because I didn’t exist; you, because you did. You are still, all these years later, the most poetic person I’ve ever met. I mean poetry lived. A walking hieroglyph, the riddle inscribed on the dream stele, the cursed wind unable to forget the ruined towers of Ilium. You even dressed like an Egyptologist, a T.E. Lawrence: tan linen slacks, desert boots, an olive-green shirt you always left unbuttoned partway, like you just returned from a long day spent excavating a tomb. Your hair was darker than a night lost at sea, darker than the bottom of the sea, darker than all of our shadows put together, and you were beautiful.

But your collarbones, slender and pale, never took on color. Your fragility, your vulnerability that was so naked it bordered on insolence—a vulnerability that was like a silent and fast-acting poison—made me laugh. It was delightful. You dressed like a boy, had stupid freckles that gave your face a lunar quality and made you sneeze, wore glasses. I remember smoking cigarettes by your car, and you opened the trunk: two dozen books fell out onto the pavement. You must have had a hundred books in there. You shoved Heidegger, Baudrillard, Borges, Fanon into my arms and told me to fuck off….

We used to ride around in your car listening to Trophies, by Drake. You loved that fucking song. You would play it over and over again. You knew all the words.

You were going to Harvard for a graduate program in digital archives in the fall. We would get drunk and fuck and talk about moving to LA together. For the life of me, I can’t remember any specifics of the plans we had–but I do remember your promise to show me the desert. You said being in the desert was like being on the moon. That inhabiting that silence and looking up at the stars was like nothing else.

I still haven’t seen it–I think I’m waiting, still waiting–you were right when you said that my fatal attraction to waiting was the worst part of me. Sitting around dreaming, all the while oblivious to being dreamt.

I knew, even then, that we were only playing. That nothing could become of us; that nothing could happen. Still, I wanted to protect you somehow. The poetry of your life—the contradictions, the enigmatic symbols and signs, the pure intensity—was such a powerful, unknowable quantity because it had to be. You were always in danger. Running drugs, running weapons, political subversion or espionage—I knew you had been, probably would be, involved in all that…but it was a side of you I only saw in silhouette, behind a Japanese silk screen. I knew better than to look. I respected you too much to look.

What I knew about you, I knew only because it was you who taught me how to read. How to decipher, decrypt, translate. It was you that kept me from blowing myself up in my little alchemical lab (my room, utterly wretched, every surface covered in books or lines of adderal); but the stage you were practicing forbidden magic on was much bigger, not self-contained, deadly.

Books are censored, manipulated, killed off, warped beyond recognition in America.

Everyone knows that.

The night Trump was elected (the first time), and that guy got in our faces because he overheard us talking about the Syrian Civil War, and tried to grab your bag to ‘check for an IED’, and I punched him out square in the jaw, I thought that meant I could protect you. God, what a scandal that was…we got pushed out onto the sidewalk before they had a chance to pummel us into dust, amidst the crash of bottles being thrown at us.

Not a scratch on me. So drunk, I could barely stand. Porcelain that couldn’t, or wouldn’t, accept being second-hand. An intaglio of violence, without subtlety, without discernment. Passion scum-covered, turbid, obsessed with itself. We walked back to your place in silence.

The truth was plain: I couldn’t protect you. I was an addict, in other words, a liability. We went our separate ways—you went off to school, never to return. The texts I sent went unanswered; I would haunt the usual places, hoping against hope that you would appear. You never did.

I returned to my hunger. To the husk. Lost myself in what was morbid and meaningless, like everyone does. I got a job at a bar, lived in a tenement with at least 6 other guys, and drank myself through the same situations over and over again for many years.

When I found out you had killed yourself in Arizona, I was still drinking. I cried all night, tried to forget you, tried to forget that whatever was left of me still striving upward wanted to be just like you, or—God forbid—be capable of doing something, anything, to thank you. That summer preserved some element of a language in my heart that could not die out, would never leave me alone. That we would always share together. Someday, someday…I woke up the next day and drank more…I tried again to forget, tried and tried and tried….

It wasn’t until I felt a tear falling down my cheek, looking at that painting, that I realized I no longer wanted to forget, would never forget again. I looked around; no one was looking at me. No one could see that you were alive, while I was dead. Silent, but together again, we walked into the next room.