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The Sky That's Never Blue

The whiskey was bitter, but it wasn't as acrid as the cigarette smoke or the tang of piss, or the stench of sweat. I cradled my glass in one hand and my head in the other, listening to the dim world around me, this universe of forgotten secrets and shattered dreams, feeling like I was already a part of it. The counter was finely polished, but it was scuffed by age and maybe a million glasses being run or slammed down onto it, a hundred million tears eroding it, gouges and divots denoting time we were all trying to forget.

Over in the corner table, beneath a fractured light bulb, an old man was brokenly singing a song that was young when Hoover was in office. He would stop every now and then to laugh, but nobody wanted to stop him, because, I suspect, we all had the same ache in our hearts.

A woman that might once have been pretty was sitting not far from where I was. She was clothed in a fancy dress and a scarf that looked like props for a dramatic play, her eyes locked on a space between her hands. Below her chair was a big hat box, ragged clothes spilling out from it, a little Star of David glinting in the light. She looked like an actress, what an actress becomes when the business doesn't want her anymore and she seeks out realms of less reputable employment, and is tossed back into the waves of destitution, washing up here. What had those eyes seen, and how far back were they looking?

And coming in from a hard day of no pay the retired circus performers exchanged rude jokes as they went to sit by the far wall. They laughed, but there was an exhaustion in their frivolity, an exhaustion that I was already acquainted with.

And more and more and so on and so forth. I had already finished weeping, my head feeling numb and inert after I had washed the sadness out of my system. I knew it was just biding its time, waiting to come back, because that's what it did.

Even through the alcoholic fumes I could remember how long it's been since he left, since he ran away without saying a word. No message, no phone call, nothing. In those first few days after his disappearance, I wanted to believe it was his fault, wanted so desperately to believe that he had listened to some awful thought and fled to some dark corner of the world. But I knew better than that. I had given him a hundred reasons to run away, if not a thousand. Because I poked fun at him without realizing how cruel I was being; because I had been visiting the slender young male whores down on Sparrow Avenue; because the alcohol was incrementally turning me into my mother. I tried--bet your ass to the devil I've tried--but at the moment he needed me the most I gave up, and ended up throwing everything away. I didn't think that would be the last time, I thought I had another chance.

What does it matter anymore? I downed my glass of Jack and motioned for the man to refill it, to keep the numbness coming.

I see his face every time I close my eyes, each time becoming more and more pronounced, the contrast sharper. There was a flash of dark outside the window by which I sat, and the crow gave a call from the windowsill that sounded so much like "Help, help, help..."

The crow reminded me of his hair, his hair like ebony smoke and it felt like satin. It always smelled either like coconuts or vanilla, sometimes both.

And it had been six weeks since he began his hormone treatments and he was already showing. It scared him, the speed at which his body was changing, and he would often stop in his daily activities to run into our bedroom and relieve himself of the terror and personal anguish. He was strong, but his resoluteness wasn't active all the time. I was helping him through his transformation, learning as much as I could about the process, hoping nothing would go wrong.

Because when I looked at him, I was reminded of a friend from high school who had gone through the same thing, but something went wrong. The pills were bad, the syringes were dirty, the doctor was unlicensed, something I don't remember. Last I saw him he was boarding a plane to Barcelona, and I haven't exchanged words with him since.

And I didn't want that to happen with him. My fear rubbed off on him; he probably saw it as my being disgusted with what he was doing, but I wasn't. He had to know that I loved him no matter what, and I did. "You know you can't call me Jessie anymore," he told me one day, while we were lying in bed one December morning.

"I don't care," I told him, "as long as you're last name changes, too. Maybe to mine."

And that look he gave me just then, teary-eyed and gorgeous. That made up for everything, healed every scar we'd given each other.

The old man sang about worlds of shattered hopes, people who couldn't find what they had spent lifetimes searching for, wilting romances, and I thought about the time Jessie told me that he had written a song that had been published by his school press, and the song went on to be performed by a popular local group. "Hemlocks Are in Bloom," that's what it was called. As the old man sang, and the aging actress stared into her past at the bottom of her glass, and the circus performers by the far wall reminisced about the olds days, I thought about that song and how much hurt lay in it, how much sorrow and caged agony.

And when the barkeep comes back and asks me if I'm doing alright, because my nose is almost touching the scuffed surface of the counter, I tell him that the hemlocks are in bloom. He just shakes his head and walks away and good riddance, because I can't talk to people right now. Just leave me alone, with all I have left of him.

I've begged--I've begged the smells of him that linger in our apartment to linger still, begged the shadows of him to maybe make friends with my growing alcoholism so that they'll never leave.

And I was the one that ran away. It had been a bad day at work, the bills were piling up, my sideline career was tanking, and I told him that I couldn't handle any more of his bullshit. I had had a bad day, but he'd had worse--been having worse for years, and he needed me then, needed me so badly and I couldn't see it. I almost fucking hit him. So I fell down on the bed, and the door slammed to shake the whole building. And that was the first night in a long string of nights I spent in a hell that seemed fit for Mars, or some other distant body in the nebulous black.

And, and, and...there were so many and's, you'd think someone was having a picnic.

Where did he go? He had no one else--that I was aware of--but me in this whole world. His folks had tossed him away, his church the same--apparently God didn't much care for people who were searching for themselves, rather than Him--and he had no friends that I could think of. He just upped and left with no hesitation, with no forethought, which meant I had broken his heart. Broken it, stepped on it, stabbed it, there were a thousand permutations of the same single sensation, none of them really coming close to the real deal. It hurts, goddamn does it hurt.

Where did you go, Jessie? I think to myself as the old man sings, and the actress stares, and the barkers carouse.

Eventually I pull my ass out of my seat and stagger to the door, and from there to my car. It was already night, and ten minutes ago it was only something in the afternoon. The wind was a chill Easterly blast sweeping through the low buildings of downtown White Hill, which meant an early winter was going to raise its pale ugly face. I got inside and turned the heater on, fiddling with it until I gave up, because nothing felt right. I pulled out of the lot and headed onto the freeway, my mind trying to get lost in the dark.

I turn my head and, disregarding everything about traffic safety, heed the impulse in my mind to make a sharp turn onto Gull Street. Down this way, it was an easy shot to the lake. Jessie and I would often drive up to the lake, always at night because he preferred it that way to the muggy, crowded days, and so did I. We loved to just sit in the car, up on Cohaggen Bluff that overlooks Lake Superior--hours would be spent simply doing nothing but looking out at those vast night-soaked waters, and sometimes if we were lucky and it wasn't storming, the moon would be out. The silver light cast by the moon would reflect down onto the lake, and if we were angled just the right way, it formed what Jessie had called a bridge, or a ladder. He explained it to me a couple times, and I might have seen it once or twice, but I didn't really comprehend it. A ladder to the moon.

I parked in an auspicious spot, in a well-worn area. It was a place where kids went to make out or mess around, where junkies got their kicks or an accidental plunge into the roiling blue, but mostly it was just a big memory trip for me. I could still hear his voice, almost feel his hand on top of mine. He would point out over the lake and say "See, Frank? The ripples are distorting the moonlight into steps. It's like a ladder!"

I looked out over the lake now, and though there were no waves, no wind to make them, I saw a ladder, I saw a bridge, something that made here to there possible. And I started crying. Maybe that's where he went, and it was so far away.

Enough time passed that I became aware of the vehicle behind me. I sipped from a beer bottle that might have been in my car for who knows how long and waved them away. Just then, their lights flashed, blue and red, and a siren gave two or three small blips. I swore, smiled, shook my head, nothing mattered without him.

I heard a door open and shut, heard boots crunching down on the grass and gravel, and I heard my brother say "Alright, buddy, license and registr...oh, godammit."

We went through the routine again, the same old rigmarole--my brother made an angry sound as he helped me up to my apartment, telling me that I was lucky this always happens on his shift. I ask him if he feels as lucky as I do, and he swears again. After he leaves me by my doorstep, I thank him, not for what he's done yet again, but for being my brother. He makes no response, just leaves.

I struggle to get inside, and when I do I smell must, mildew, and whatever aroma-thing I bought to fight them. It was dark inside, and when I flipped on the switch it still seemed dim, used up, drained.

As I started taking off my clothes, readying myself for another day's attempt to dry myself out, I saw a note stuck to the sofa, sad blue ink against jaundiced yellow post-it paper. All it said was "I'm sorry," and I tried to remember if I had written that or not.

I didn't know what that was supposed to mean, if, indeed, anything at all.

After I crawled into bed, I kissed the framed photo of me and him and cradled it in my arms, wishing for a lot of things that would never come true. When I dreamed, I dreamed of the moon.