And Then the Gray Heaven Page 6

  Just weeks before their solo show in the University gallery, they asked for my help completing the artist statement they had been avoiding.

  Okay, I said, give me some terms that you would use to describe your work.

  Like all of my work? said B.

  Yes, your body of work: just some unifying themes or, is there a way you’d group each object in your show together?

  See this is why I haven’t come up with a title for the show yet.

  You’re going to have to send it to the vinyl place for gallery text this weekend anyway, so now’s a good time to figure it out. Just tell me what you’ve been thinking about while making your show this semester.

  Okay. B took a deep breath and closed their eyes. They opened one eye, like a reverse wink. Ready?

  I’m ready!

  They said: post-conceptualisms.

  I rolled my eyes: NEXT, I said.

  Hypermaterialism.

  Fine.

  How exploring othered lives, no matter how careful, is a busted process. Fetishized labor plus good ol’ fear of annihilation.

  Okay, now we’re getting somewhere.

  But like the dream-version of fear. The unfearsomeness of that fear. Deterritorialized identity. Why I’m donating my body to science.

  Why again are you donating your body to science?

  If I were going to take up my birthright and do myself in, they said, pausing (B’s grandfathers on both sides had ended their own lives, which they casually referenced far too often). It’d be a murder-suicide because my brain came from somewhere else and will go back to that alien place and the world can have my body for cuttings and sweetmeats, small life they go on bringing.

  You’re a fanatic, I said. Are you your brain or your body?

  B thought for a second. I wish I were my body.

  Me too, I said. Maybe some people are.

  Will you hold my hand? they said suddenly, reaching out.

  Sure, I said.

  B was such sweet nonsense. At the end of this exercise, I ended up just asking them for their perfect shopping list for the show: what real or imaginary materials would they have sought out or purchased if they could have every little thing they needed.

  The artist statement I wrote for them read:

  For this show, B Khong would have liked to give you everything. Please help yourself by imagining these objects they specifically meant to pick up but did not have time:

  half-used birthday candles

  an oversized calculator

  fists cast from fists

  postcards from the interior of a small (unlocatable) room

  play bricks

  wicker toys

  twins

  a memory game

  candy cigarettes

  a wolf mask

  a garlic press that cannot be unpressed

  tenterhooks

  an unnameable mineral oil

  a stack of paper hats

  “nun things”

  baskets so large everything in the world sifts through

  magnetic tape

  fishnet stockings ripped at the crotch

  the sound a hearing aid makes when it runs out of battery

  mines both flooded and on fire

  a cut leather belt

  a mountain with a zipper up the back

  safe assumptions

  some blue octagons

  a honey spoon

  a little drink umbrella over a sewer grate

  data visualization software

  “more purples”

  a lightbox

  fermented fruit

  a teardrop-cut ruby

  endangered dunes

  17

  Theo and I pack the truck midmorning to drive to the Wonder Gardens. Before we get an hour out, we pass a peach stand and an egg stand and a boiled peanuts stand, and each time Theo hops out of the truck and jogs over to the spoils with an enthusiasm I cannot decipher.

  What’s so exciting about boiled peanuts? I finally say.

  There just aren’t a whole lot of places you can buy stuff from local farmers anymore. I love them.

  I mean I like boiled peanuts just as much as the next person, but they’re nothing to write home about.

  I love the farmers, they say, sneering.

  Oh that’s right, you come from farm people.

  Theo says: what kind of people are your people?

  I don’t know, I say. Moonshine people probably.

  Moonshine people are farm people, basically.

  Or something really boring: railroad people? Shoe people? Cement people?

  I wouldn’t trust you with cement, Theo says.

  Yeah, I really shouldn’t be pouring sidewalks. I’m not cut out for public consumption.

  Maybe railroad people. I can see you riding the rails, dropping into places for a day or two and looking around. Maybe you stay in a small town and befriend some folks and solve all their problems before you leave. Like in those movies, all those movies. You could change your name every day. Theo makes a waving motion with their hand.

  I do love being different people. Different helpful people.

  Yeah, because you’re a Gemini-Cancer cusp baby.

  What does that mean?

  What should we have for lunch?

  I don’t know. Whatever you want, I say.

  That’s your Libra, Theo shouts, cutting the wheel sharply to the left into a driveway I didn’t know was there. A little yellow cottage with a hand-painted sign that says “UGLY PICKLE”.

  What is this place?

  They have fantastic sandwiches, says Theo.

  But I don’t know which birth time is right.

  It’s the Libra one, says Theo, touching my elbow.

  They walk toward the cottage, and I’m thinking oh no, I’m going to start caring about astrology now.

  When we get to the Everglades Wonder Gardens, there is a summer camp going on and I realize I’d forgotten about the summer camp B created for middle school students to explore animal ecosystems. B wanted to lead the kids through actual marshlands and wade through shoals, but the Wonder Gardens was too worried about liability: they had already had some close calls on the grounds, and it seemed like all they needed was for one overeager kid to tumble into the muck like Augustus Gloop and it’d all be over.

  Theo and I look over the Gardens map and made a quick list of the places we absolutely must see, with a few honorable mentions if we have time.

  In the order of necessity: parrots, snakes and reptiles, alligators, turtles, butterfly garden, flamingos, petting zoo, bromeliads, gift shop.

  Theo figures it’s only fair that if we see the parrots, we have to spend some time with the turtles, which is fine by me. The alligators are essential for first-timers, so we buy some pellets. I give them the warning the tour guides give about how close the alligators get, and how they’re so used to people by now they’re bored but careless. I also tell them about the exhibit that’s just a gold watch in a case, a gold watch that saved the left hand of one of the Wonder Gardens scions at feeding time years ago. I’m watching the time to make sure we get to the butterfly garden because it is a strategic place to tell them about my plan.

  The parrot house is exactly as B left it, and their latticework ceiling shimmers like a forcefield over the bright parrot heads and enormous fronds. There’s a tiny plaque next to the glass that mentions B’s renovations, but does not mention them by name. At first I’m upset, but then I realize that the plaque would deadname them forever, so it’s best this way. Collective memory is complicated for us. When we die, do we belong to only those who remember us as we knew ourselves? I would say we do, but that’s not what history is.

  Theo lights up when we get to the turtles, and it’s like the boiled peanuts all over again. They are mysteriously excited about so many things, I’m starting to wonder if I’m just so accustomed to being unexcited I’m the one who’s off. Then we get to the butterfly garden and I get nervous because I’m
going to have to let Theo see really see me, see my grief and desperation and beyond that, what I’m capable of. The raw lunacy of my scheming. What I would do for B.

  We’re watching a blue iridescent butterfly alight on a few overripe slices of pineapple, and then a tiny white butterfly lands right on my hand. I lean in to get a closer look and for a second it seems like the butterfly is making a facial expression with its actual face. I think does this butterfly know something. Then an identical tiny butterfly lands on my other hand, then a third lands on my shoulder. Theo is laughing.

  Hold still, they say, holding up their phone.

  Wait, I say. How’s my hair.

  Cute, they say, and they run their fingers through my front curl once and take the picture.

  The butterflies are still with me, and I feel their quiet power. I say, hey Theo.

  Yeah? Theo says, swiping through the pictures they’ve been taking.

  I was wondering if I could borrow your truck. For like, a few weeks.

  Theo lowers their phone and looks sideways at me. Going somewhere? they say.

  The butterflies lift off and round each other like skywriting, and I am looking for the message.

  Jules, Theo says.

  I have a plan, I say. I need to do something, for B. It’s kind of big and kind of illegal. Very illegal. But I’ve been doing some research and—

  Okay, wait, Theo says, dropping their phone into their shirt pocket. Tell me everything.

  Maybe you should sit down, I say.

  So, Alvin came by the other day.

  Oh wow, they say. Everything okay?

  He dropped off some of B’s ashes, I say.

  Theo makes a little O shape with their mouth. O-okay, they say. Some?

  Yeah, I say, just some.

  I go over the basics, that B worked in a lot of museums over the past fifteen years. I tell them: there were a few projects they really loved. Big career-making moments, and more than that, places they were really happy. Gainesville, Chicago, New York, I say.

  Gainesville? they say back.

  Their first job, I tell them, and well, I’ve never even been to Chicago.

  They’re giving me this worried look, then they look pained, and by the end they’re sitting next to me with their elbows on their knees, reeling. They are trying to wrap their head around this demon idea, so we’re doing a call and response thing: three museums, two weeks, they say to me.

  And this ground, it’s softer than real ground, I say back.

  Three museums, says Theo. You want to bury B in these places they made.

  Right, I want to bring them home.

  They look up at me with the same glint in their eye now, and they say: where they can really rest.

  I smile. No weather, I say.

  18

  The summer after B graduated from school, we visited Fran in New York. They hadn’t seen him since they stayed with him after dropping out of high school. They left their parents’ house and caught a ride to New York because they had already been trying desperately to visit Fran when their family discovered they’d been sleeping with a girl from art class and doubled down on isolating them from their friends and the world. Fran had taken them in and, among offering other points of access (club kids, the art underworld, and well, drugs), set them up with a mattress on the floor and a GED class right in Harlem.

  Fran invited us back to celebrate B’s college graduation with him in Fire Island, and I had never been invited to do anything so gay out in the blaring light of day. This was more B and Fran’s world than mine. I had been to smalltown gay bars where butches and femmes paired off to slowdance around pool tables. Even the few times I had been to drag shows up in Savannah, or clubbing in Miami, I didn’t know who I was supposed to be, how I was supposed to dance. By my second night in Fire Island, I wandered away from the men in thongs playing volleyball and hipster bars, and found a group of women down the beach who called out to me. They said I looked lost and offered me a seat in their chanting circle. We did a little chanting, but mostly we just talked about Chelsea and film and the ocean and how disappointing it was that all the art queers were corporate jocks now. Their trans press was holding a retreat for a month on an artist grant, and they were tired of the whole scene by day one. I spent the rest of my nights at their fire, feeling something in me seen for the first time. When I would get back to Fran’s place at whatever time, he and B would be talking about some surreal adventure they’d just been on, and Fran would feed me something and say, having a good Fire Island baby?

  Maybe it took me awhile to arrive to myself, and at such a silly gay resort, but it felt like the beginning of my real life, and by that I mean not who I was or am (which I’ve always known), but who I belonged to. There were people who not only saw me but wanted me, and not because we were the same, but because no one was the same and it was exhausting to live always trying to make it all fit.

  When B and I got back from New York, there was a message on the answering machine from the Florida Museum of Natural History. That Wonder Gardens heiress who had been so taken with B’s parrot house recommended B to a family friend in museum development. She heard they were looking for an artist who knew the South Florida landscape to do painting and restoration in the People and Environments exhibits, and that was B’s ticket (and my ticket) out of the swamp.

  It was strange to move to the dead landlocked center of a state so defined by the Atlantic, and even stranger to leave the suburban swamplands of our childhoods so that B could rebuild them in an air-conditioned exhibit hall for people to look in on. The Everglades defied observation: that is, they were impossible to watch because there was no place to stand where you were not immersed in their wetness, that wild bog life taking your creature body way back in time. In the Everglades, you sweat a sweat that redistributes you to the land. That’s what it’s for.

  B started at the Florida Museum before we were even fully moved into our place in Gainesville. They spent their days learning how to restore a life-sized mangrove forest while I worked as a personal assistant through University of Florida and a server at a bed and breakfast on the main strip. We didn’t have a lot of furniture, and were driving around in the evenings looking for couches on the curb or dresser drawers next to a dumpster. Some of my clients donated kitchenware, a nightstand, and an old organ with stuck pedals that B would play Queen songs on for the neighbors every Sunday morning like our very own queer church service. One client gave us a brown re-cliner, and B would sometimes fall asleep stretched out in it reading up on the history of the Everglades, which we knew but didn’t know because the education system had failed us by trying to make us feel kindred with colonial ambition. The American dream had already variously soured for each of us, so we were bad history students and good shit-stirrers.

  In addition to repainting the freshwater pools of South Florida, B was doing some shit-stirring in the fishing gallery at the Museum. They were starting on a restoration of clay huts and figures illustrating the Calusa people fishing the estuaries. Nowhere in any of the gallery text did the Museum acknowledge how exactly the Calusa and Tequesta peoples had been annihilated, or even how the Seminole came to be a diverse alliance of escaped slaves and tribes pushed into the Everglades by the U.S. military. B would sometimes act out by sneaking in a particular anachronism meant to unsettle museum visitors, like a sculpted clay can of Bud Light in a Calusa chief’s hand, or an oil spill in the background of a miniature demonstrating the use of fishing nets.

  They were able to get away with it because they were starting to get attention in the industry; but they were quickly moved along to restorations in the Northwest Florida: Waterways and Wildlife exhibits where they wouldn’t be tempted to be “political” (as if the earth were ever apolitical, B used to say). While they worked on the hammock forest and marshes, other restoration artists would take notes. People came from larger museums to observe their foreground plant techniques. They could paint around an irregular curve in the back
ground scenery and use color so hyperreally, it was like standing inside somehow staring at a distant horizon. They were known for their understanding of weather patterns, their clouds like wheels that made the still skies move. And they had a special thing they could do with lighting design that made the sun seem like it was bursting through the clouds for this one specific moment on the forest floor.

  In real life, B knew how to find the light too. They would just be making lunch or pulling weeds from the garden or talking—saying something smart but morose about the nature of the human soul, like how we don’t know what it does so it’s possible that it’s anywhere doing anything. Look out, your soul is working at the plastics factory! Or whathaveyou—saying something ludicrous but compelling, and this beam from somewhere would find their face and shred the shadows around us.

  19

  Theo is going to let me use the truck on the condition that I stop pretending like I can do something like this on my own and ask for help. They have some vacation days coming up anyway, they say.

  Okay, I say, but I’m not getting you arrested. I go in alone.

  I wouldn’t take that from you, they say, and I know they get it. But maybe we can get some walkie talkies for while I’m in there, I say.

  You know we have smartphones now, right?

  Yeah, but they can’t put a wiretap on a walkie talkie.

  No one is trying to wiretap your ass breaking into a museum to not even take anything, says Theo, giggling.