And Then the Gray Heaven Read online

  13

  Theo checks in on me every day after work at the cat hospital. They sometimes bring me dinner, but they eat a lot of greens, so now I’m healthy I guess. Sometimes we watch a movie, a comedy, and Theo fills in the dull bits with stories about Tina and their mom, and the purple house the three of them shared down at the dumpster part of the beach where they set up the carnival every year. But mostly we just swim together and talk about not B. I wonder if Theo notices me noticing them avoiding any topic that would bring us back to B. Thing is, it doesn’t matter how much they try to avoid bringing up B because every other thing in my universe is connected to B in some way that flares a hundred times in a conversation.

  Maybe it’s because B and I have known each other since we were kids or because these are the shapes that molten grief carves in an already compromised head like mine, but B lives in everything. Like Christ. Sometimes I feel like Christians just took up the love imaginary and made it about someone with total and yet implausibly benevolent control, which is so convenient—can you imagine if the people we love could intervene on our behalf, if we could really save each other from suffering or even boredom? As a child satanist, I was suspicious. Now I’m just jealous. Who wouldn’t want that god-love? Now that B is gone, I’m even more at risk to join a cult and always have to be on the lookout.

  One day I let my guard down a little and answer the door when the bell rings, and of course that’s when Alvin chooses to show up on my doorstep trying to hug me. I let him hold me for a half-minute then I’m doing a move with my hands that I learned in self-defense without meaning to, breaking his grip. He stands there with his mouth open.

  Sorry, I say. Just still a little on edge.

  I’d say, he says, stepping back a little.

  Well, I wasn’t expecting you, I say.

  Can’t family drop by unannounced sometimes?

  I laugh out loud. The mountain of nerve. You want to be my family now? I say.

  He looks hurt. Hey, I’m trying to be here for you, he says, and B. Wait right there, I’ll be right back, he says, running to his car.

  He comes back with a box, and pushes it into my hands. He looks at me like this is a gift he’s waiting for me to open, so I pull up the little flap and peer inside. There’s a ziploc bag with a gritty gray sand, and then I realize it at the same time he says:

  It’s B. Well, it’s some of B.

  Wow, uh yeah. I got that, thanks.

  My parents got the rest, and I couldn’t talk them out of putting poor B in this hideous vase thing for eternity. But I scored you—he looks at the bag up close—I’d say a good two-thirds.

  Score, I say, closing the box.

  I hope this helps some, he says. He looks around behind me into the house.

  Did you want to come in? I say, regretting it immediately.

  Oh no, says Alvin, I like what you did with the kitchen. Hey I have a guy who could get you set up with stainless steel appliances for half the cost. He does countertops too.

  Thanks, I say, but the dishwasher is new. We’re still honeymooning.

  Oh, says Alvin, looking back to the dishwasher and smirking. I have to get going, but maybe some other time we could catch up?

  Looking forward to it.

  He starts to go in for a hug again, then bounces back and says, just kidding.

  I tolerate it. I even smile.

  He waves from the car, and I wave back.

  My disdain for him just feels like more loss.

  I take B inside with me and sit at the kitchen table. I leave them there to do some thinking laps. I do a lot of coat closet strokes because I like the way they let me go under and then reemerge new and shining with the water falling off my eyelashes. I like to get reborn so many times in a day. Each time I resurface, there’s a good chance I could be something new.

  Inside, I eat a yogurt that Theo bought me and think about myself as becoming the kind of person who eats “a yogurt.” I feel wholesome. I sit at the table with my wet suit dripping on the tile floor and pull the bag of B out of the box. I hold the bag with both hands and some of B droops down between them. I really thought two-thirds of B would weigh more, well, not weigh more, but be more substantial. They were this unfuckwithable thing, this supernova of a person oozing idea noise and gossip. They were huge to me. Sure, their hugeness was my devotion, but it was more than that too. The biggest thing about them was their curiosity and want for the world, which I could never really share. I feel a pang, this time, of the absurdity of mishap. Mishap should have taken me. Get mishap in here. Just then I get an alert on my phone. Another hurricane warning. This one’s name is Beryl. We’re one notification short of an evacuation order. I should get supplies. Maybe I should run, get out of Florida forever. Get safe, if that’s a thing.

  Well, I say to B, at least you are safe. Something to be said for that. The safety of the dead.

  14

  I’m walking around the house holding B to my body like an ice pack, which is not entirely untrue because it kind of aches and soothes me the same. It’s also a little dusty and that dust is this person I love, and I know this is why people aren’t supposed to be carrying cremains around like this. I’m trying to think about any place on earth good enough for B to spend eternity, so I stop in the living room to spend some time with my favorite miniature B ever made. In a wooden shoebox-sized diorama suspended above the fireplace, a family is hurriedly cleaning up a picnic, gathering their blanket, all the while looking over their shoulders at a floatilla of storm clouds threatening.

  B started making miniatures their last year of school, and their landscapes were so polished you would have never guessed that they were half-made in the silverware drawer. We ate out for two years and kept our garbage. The world smelled of spray glue and plastics glue and wood glue and super glue.

  B really got into a styrofoam thing for a while. Little discs of styrofoam from so many takeout containers cut with punchout tools. Styrofoam blocks to root the plants in and styrofoam slabs for building foundations. Styrofoam heads for carvable faces with lifelike jaw-lines. The people were so fragile: it doesn’t take much to make a person look like not a person. One time I accidentally melted a group of hunters into an unknowable goo and B didn’t even yell at me. Jules, they said, keep an eye on weather.

  They were saying, don’t worry about it. Things fall apart. Down-pour and decay are a part of life, and in fact, the very things that tell us we’re involved with the world and not just here. What they were learning to make in these scenes was frozen action, a saturated moment of life removed from the conditions that actually create life. These bodies in motion were animated by the mere suggestion of motion. When B painted in the photorealistic background, they used a tiny brush they pointed with their mouth. They ate a lot of paint back then.

  But they were such a careful student of weather: what made the sky real was never some clear blue yellow sun nonsense; but the shadow detail of heavy clouds, eerie green storm light, and sick pinks at the bottom. Weather itself, it turns out, is just what we think of as bad weather—anything that stirs the skies.

  I am looking at this little picnic and thinking about how much I love this family but also how much I love the storm. When B told me keep an eye on weather, they meant whatever ruins the picnic is how we know we’re alive.

  In the scene, the storm takes up most of the background, and the blue-gray clouds billow with such electricity, they seem to move closer every time I look away. B taught me about this: light enters the eye more readily from the corners, so the trick is to put the highlights at the back of the storm system, which in real life is exactly where they’d be. In B’s work, I’ve found the magic of representation is often real magic, but more carefully rendered.

  I move my eyes back and forth between the faces and the clouds, like I always do. Fear and abstraction. Then for the first time I notice the ground under the family. I take my finger and I lightly press a spot next to the picnic blanket. It’s not solid:
it’s real soil over styrofoam and felt and some other squishy organic things B cleverly used as filler. I get an impossible idea in my head and I glitch a little, but it’s the good kind of glitching. I know how to lay B to rest.

  Theo comes over with as many jugs of water as they can fit in the back of their truck, and we swim. We do the regular hurricane talk: we say hey how are you are you okay need anything, but then I surprise us both. I grab the side of the pool and ask:

  Are you busy tomorrow morning? I want to take you somewhere.

  No, they say, I’m supposed to work the late shift—why?

  Have you ever been to the Everglades Wonder Gardens?

  They laugh. Maybe they think I’m joking.

  I think they’re probably going to shut down for a bit when Beryl hits—they always do when it’s bad, you know, to protect the animals. Anyway, I wanted to make a visit before it’s too late.

  Oh, says, Theo, yeah I’ve never been. What, uh, what do you want to do there?

  Well, I say, trotting out the inevitable, B used to work there when we were super young—

  Oh! says Theo, softening. They’ve been waiting for this moment. I’m bringing up B, processing my grief, sharing my inner world. Look at me go.

  They worked with the animals, with habitats, and I was hoping to go see some of their installation work. They built some cool perches for the birds. And the tortoise. And the snakes. They made a lot of the habitat structures that are still there. They were really into that ridiculous place, and they kind of transformed it the way they did. The way they did. The way—

  I start glitching, so Theo jumps in.

  Okay, sounds fun. I don’t really like birds but I’m up for the rest, Theo says, swimming over to me.

  The birds are really particular anyway, you know they may not like you either.

  I mean, I’m willing to give them a shot, Theo says.

  No, probably best to stay away. They can sense it. They will feel your antibird sentiments.

  Theo gives me a look.

  I slip under the water like a big hand came from above and pushed me. I go all the way to the bottom and pull my knees up to my chest. I open my eyes and the pool lights make the water blue in a way that is more than blue: cerulean. Cerulean, I think. Cerulean cerulean cerulean. The word itself is deoxygenated. This blue is holding its breath.

  When I resurface, Theo says, hey. You know what I’m excited for tomorrow?

  What? I say, wiping my nose.

  Well birds, for one thing.

  That’s the spirit.

  When Theo was a kid, they tell me, they would leave their house after Tina and their mom and their mom’s girlfriend were asleep and walk around the carnival. It was only a block from their house and bright enough to light up the entire shoreline. When they kept showing up night after night the guys who worked the entrance started letting them in for free, and they would hang out at this one game stand where people would have to shoot the little rubber frogs into lily pads. When they learned how hard it was to win a top row giant stuffed animal prize, they stopped believing in luck and realized that so much of the world moved like those lily pads. The game wasn’t broken, it was just rigged by one person with hand controls and people were just hopelessly flinging those stupid little frogs all night thinking somebody’s got to win right? It could be me—why not put another dollar down? After games, Theo would ride the ferris wheel by themself, even though they weren’t quite tall enough, and they’d look down at their house looking just like a dollhouse with the little porchlight on and have this dangerously zoomed-out perspective for a kid with no way out of that neighborhood. The last thing they always did before going back to bed was hike up their pajama pants and walk carefully along the surf, shepherding any baby sea turtles dazed by the carnival light back to the water. Even so, Theo says, the birds would find a way to snatch up a few at sunrise. They wouldn’t tell me how they knew, but I understood what they wanted me to understand about birds.

  15

  B’s part-time work at the Everglades Wonder Gardens was a way of leaning into a lifelong curiosity about the natural world, which they had engaged with only in the suburban apocalyptic sense. Every road in their town, pavement or gravel, or mud, led to barbed wire wasteland and then just beyond: swamp, nasty embankments and viperous groundcover. And then there were the finer touches of the post-industrial landscape: marked dog graves in a sacred semicircle around some high voltage transformers. These were the vistas of my childhood as well, but I was farther from the ocean, and farther still from the safety of resting my head on the backseat window of the family minivan, which is to say, I could not relate to B’s urge to push into the wild. I was a feral child. B had bunkbeds and a basement game room and one carefully groomed poodle. Remarkable what ripens in the young headspace of imagined other lives: they wanted wilderness the way I wanted my own bedroom.

  The flora and fauna of south-central Florida are a colorful lot: spindly, poisonous beauties that thrive in humidity and sawgrass and garbage. Despite everything, I have always felt at home among them.

  Come to Florida! We have sixty kinds of orchid! We worship mating pairs of bald eagles and other symbolic birds! Come to Florida: you will only get blown over a little, burned a little, bitten a little. Florida has a reputation for being both uninhabitable and too overgrown with life. But make no mistake: the precarity of the peninsula is white settler legend. The land is hostile because it is good at fighting for itself against invasion. All of the venom of Florida is purposeful. When Europeans first took Florida from the Seminole and Miccosukee people, they found they had to do a lot of work to make it comfortable, or more specifically, that they didn’t know how to live in Florida because they were not supposed to be here. Basically, they got here and immediately regretted it, which did not mean they stopped being greedy and murderous, but just that they didn’t want what they’d stolen and looked for greedy and murderous ways to offload it. It goes like this: after hundreds of years of colonial violence, the Spanish handed over Florida, a “neglected colony” to Great Britain. A few years later, the British returned Florida to the Spanish because they couldn’t handle the elements. These callow conquerors, they fled the weather.

  Because B was trying to get closer to the animals and plants native to Florida, working at the Wonder Gardens seemed like a good way to do that while still maintaining the ironic detachment of an art student. At first they had to perform a rotation of low-level roles at the Gardens, including cleaning up after the animals, which for the two weeks they did it around the clock, threw them into a full existential panic. Nothing like standing around waiting to catch animal shit to really put you in your place. I comforted them, and then gently reminded them that some people do this work all their lives, at which point they looked at me with full-blown middle-class horror. Then the guilt would bubble up and they’d reassure me that I wouldn’t have to do home care forever, and I would say for the millionth time, I actually don’t mind it. Even now, when I think back: I’ve had some of the best conversations of my life while cleaning up shit.

  After scrubbing tanks and picking up soggy gator pellets for their last training rotation, B had racked up a few ideas about how to improve the animal habitats. They thought, given their extensive construction experience under Mr. Nguyen, the Wonder Gardens might be open to their renovations. Occasionally the owner of the Everglades Wonder Gardens would run a staff meeting for that family farm feeling, and B kept plans in their locker in preparation for that moment. When there was a special staff meeting to address the gator incident with a tour group that had to run for the exits, B was ready. Following the meeting, they pitched a construction project in the parrot house that could be replicated for the other bird habitats. B’s plan was to build swinging, tiered perches that allowed for better visibility for Gardens visitors while also creating more space for the parrots to actually fly in between resting periods. B also proposed replacing the lower section of the roof with a hanging lattice tha
t acted more like a forest canopy, which shimmered with the fake fan winds that guided the parrots’ coasting movements.

  B used old reptile habitat materials the Gardens already had in a storage shed, and many of the parrots were more active and healthy than they’d been in a long while. Crowds began to gather in front of the bird habitats again. B and their supervisor gave a presentation on the success of the project, and B remembers the Wonder Gardens owner, a particularly entrepreneurial descendent in the Wonder Gardens dynasty, smirking at them in a way that they swear they saw little cartoon dollar signs pop up in her eyes. B was promoted to habitat restoration. Within a year, they were heading up the department.

  16

  B’s schoolwork had taken a real dive: they were on track to graduate but could not find anyone to chair their thesis committee. They had refused the recommendations of three different professors, which amounted to a chorus of concerns about measuring technical proficiency in a particular medium. B had made a collection of objects they felt spoke to one another, and no two shared a material ancestor. The centerpiece of their exhibition was a masterfully detailed diorama of a circle-jerk scene in a dingy attic with peeling floral wallpaper. Depending on how carefully people looked, they would be scandalized or barely notice. The move was so midtwenties of them, it kills me.