Jorge: Amor amor

*

You know, it's amazing (J's friend R said -- they were sitting in a wine bar with a crowd of acquaintances) but there's a whole community existing now that is cut loose from its homeland and completely fine with that fact. They come perhaps from Southeast Asia, they make their way into the west, they speak a language that would have been inaccessible to their parents' parents if not to their parents. Not just the nouns, not the verbs but even the basic thoughts (and whatever well they come out of) would have been "Greek" to their progenitors. And that's all fine with them. They have no problem with that. They smile about it.

They are comfortable here. Now. In this very strange and placeless place. Asians. Yes, J said in response, and that ease of theirs is beautiful. Nevertheless.

What about, let's say, the things very similar that the shrewd monde used to say about Jews in oh, let's say the 20s. The critics liked to say: international. Brows would rise. The critics liked to say: without a home. They would then say: comfortable. Trotting out the epithets. Then moustaches would be stroked and the hurtful word would finally come out: deracinated. Homeless. Then historically there was the whole thing that happened next. And after that: Israel.

So is being free from a place, or seeming to be free, something like passing through freefall? Is it like that neutral space between gears, the "dead" space of the French? Like a grand, expansive "awkward age"?

*

No one surely can survive long without place. Without a place, yes, but without place. No. that would be between gears. The car wouldn't move.

*

Not having a place is like being underwater. If you are a mammal, it is just a fact that you will eventually surface.

There was a boy at the university who had almost pure Venusian DNA. He walked like a man, talked like others. What then was the distinguishing sign? Perhaps only at first look the stubs on the shoulder blades. 2 wings covered with soft afterimages of feathers. They were like appendages snapped off -- he was winged.

All the others in his lineage had been put to the ban, immolated. Even Venus was said to be no more -- and looking around the world you felt this to be true. He was as the last survivor of a reprobate old tradition. The girls decided to call him Eros. Jorge would just call him E and leave it at that. Did he blush at the name? His skin blushed all the time so it was impossible to tell.

E's form of havoc lacked arrows or any form of release. His victims reported his claim to be unable either to achieve orgasm or cease trying. (Though something was transmitted all the same, as they said later.) He ached constantly with this painful craving for God knows what, something indefinable. Perhaps it was this aching to entregar, to give himself completely to another. Through the dorms he flew like wind, but one should not say "flew", no one saw him fly. Maybe despite the wings he was nothing but an unhappy human, after all.

But Jorge was sure that he was not human. One day he followed the stranger into the cemetery and watched him give an offering to his mother, was it his mother? -- fruits, wine, crushed flowers, the bodies of little bees -- it was not a dream, though surely felt like one. There was a Jewish grave by the trellis, upon which someone had marked a swastika with a black marker or evil spraycan, one of the kids from town -- or maybe, God protect us, another college student had done this, "one of us" -- and Jorge was suddenly too scared to move. Behind the grave was a garden of fussy statuary -- caryatids eroding back into their stone -- their shoulders and backs just a saddle shape in crude rock, and behind them hidden was the statue of the mother, Jorge felt sure that was who it was. The boy lay upon it. When J went back a few hours later, the demon was still there -- one could clearly see the humps under his t-shirt. And dogs were prowling on the gravel. This was not just a boy.

*

All study ceased in the dorm when he was there. After the half-year, when he left, in the first weeks -- before the illness -- an empty feeling churned inside his friends, something like a vacuum -- preoccupying, an involute shape with "can't live without you" carved out of its middle. Off the chart and with no notes for survivors, the suicides of 3 or 4 young ones, plunged from buildings or swept under trains, because life is not worth living without you. The mere pressures of studying couldn't have caused so many deaths. That was the act of a placeless one, to take away your place too, without even occupying it, just taking it. Around him, the solidest people seemed to lose their center.

Love deracinated.

Eros, can't you rest? Can't you settle down? Jorge asked. It was a terrible year, rationally unsupportable, insoportable, no soporto, no soporto. The itch to make love consumed the dorm.

Rumblings of wild behavior everywhere.

Remember we are not -- we cannot and will not act -- in loco parentis, the school said. The authorities backed away.

Everywhere sexual looseness took on the primness of a norm. We are treated as unclean, the virgins cried. Treated as unclean, outcast, something to be sprayed with room spray. We were the handful of girls who refused to play. The word shun wrapped us like a satin wrapping. The virgins were isolated, demonized. They were not to be touched in any way if not to be touched in that way. It was because they seemed so strange to everyone else. Their reserve was treated as a disease.

At midnight the football team captain would stand in the dorm hall screaming: Please have sex with me -- anyone! anyone!

The classrooms had a plaguey smell. Eros would huddle for hours in the maid's closet trembling. Then he would come out and prowl.

Jorge too had his history of love -- then suddenly none at all. Love unrequited, an ancient story. When amor went sour he retreated to his room -- a single with a soft and useless lock. He tried to nestle inside Psalm 139, prayed in the broken way that a person prays in the center of aporia:

You know Lord and I don't. You know me more intimately than I know myself. All the disgusting stuff inside me, you stand inside it somehow. You can bear it I can't. When I don't know why I do what I do, you know. So won't you at least give me a clue? Oh please oh please. Tell me why I always feel so sick.

Love music came from a distance out of somebody's speakers, an old Robert Bridges song updated: "Why is there nothing in your eyes?" Jorge fell asleep and dreamed of deity descending into the world -- a soft larval shape, white and vulnerable, deliberately exposed to trouble in utter tenderness, its openness a model for humans, a rule for behavior: do not spend all your time defending yourself and hurting others. You want to be like God? Be abundant and expose yourself to woe. Try it -- take off the carapace. That was what the music said to him. When he awoke Eros was lying at his side, having picked the rubbery lock.

With nothing in his eyes?

A pagan baby to scare us all? Just a ghoul with tight abs?

Jorge put his hands over his flaming genitals and said: Do not touch me. Don't. Don't.

And Cupid asked: Are you ashamed to be seen to be with me? or are you ashamed to be with me? Which is it?

Neither one but I am terrified of you.

Amor amor you have all the power. Everyone fears you and craves your blessing. Even though we all know you are a fake -- we know but play the game of not knowing and so do you. We are afraid to entregar -- to give ourselves up -- to the real God.

When we don't have you we feel worthless and despicable. But it is not your love I want but God's, the real God, I mean -- but I'm afraid he despises me for being queer -- even though I know he knows the why of my being and therefore understands and therefore forgives or even feels no need to.

In any case -- don't touch me because I might give into you if you do. And then I would kill you.

Love lay on its back with shoulder blades flattened and the wings compressed like coals. Its nipples stuck through the cheap t-shirt and provoked the heart they punctured. Jorge closed his eyes and felt the bed almost capsize. The other one was dry-heave sobbing, no sound, no water -- a sorrow with no issue or purpose.

I'm diseased, I'm infected, the god said. I have AIDS now -- my cells are damaged.

Please let me lie here and float through the night. The cost to you is nothing.

So they floated together without touching, chaste as two old-time Christians. And every time the pagan god shifted on the bed, everything seemed to turn upside down in the room, so that Jorge felt, "yet once more", the almost gymnastic weight of what was basically his own complete solitude. The feeling of another as dead weight.

*

Fantastically good-looking, astoundingly beautiful, don't look don't look. For the rest of his life J would wonder if he'd just been a fool not to turn, not to turn his face. Not just to give in.

One evening he woke from a lesser nightmare and felt an appendage crossing his legs, its tip on his groin. It was the stinger of a giant scorpion, resting outside attack mode, limp and hideous. The carapace scraped the sheet as the creature snored. If I don't move, nothing will happen. Jorge let his breathing take him into a distance from the one visiting, the pagan revenant, the ever recurring marea. He prayed as fervently as the legendary atheist in his foxhole. There was a divine release as he sank back into his own dreams.

In the morning the beautiful beast was gone, had even left town. That same day the reports from the student health center began. Everyone, almost everyone, was ill. Only the Asian students and a few Latinos had somehow -- mostly -- managed to avoid what the more hysterical students and administrators insisted on calling a "plague".

And we want to know who is responsible! Jorge stood in the center of the turmoil, feeling painfully well -- as though some menacing and (do not lie) bracing phenomenon had backed away from him suddenly. The sudden opening of the lion's jaw. Where is your friend? the administrators cried. We can't find even a forwarding address!

No no, Jorge said. You can't just demonize him. You have to fear and respect him and find out why he was here.

Look at all those young women in the hospital! they cried. That is Love's work!

But I don't think so, Jorge said.

*

When you offer up your entregar that's the whole point. You can't know if you'll get anything back or if so what it will be.

You have to give it to the right Person. That's how serious it is.

And if you give it you can't just ask for it back.

He was not the right one but that wasn't his fault.

*

The seasons passed irreversible. The missing person couldn't be found. A war started and young people were sent (or offered to go) overseas. You could say that life went on but in a sense it didn't. Not for everyone -- what a mystery! It moved in stops and starts and for some the stops lasted forever. Meanwhile the demon took on a legendary status on the campus but Jorge -- perverse to the end -- continued to defend him.

In a way Love had never touched anyone. His whole being had been abstract, a sort of myth-shaped hole. And there's no way he could have infected all those people they attributed to him. He had different DNA, remember?

He was Amor, he was really from Venus, not here. They are different and do things differently there.

*

Poem: Time the "Already"

*

Of time, the "already", there already were
substantial quantities -- for some too much --
they stood along the curb, nothing to do --
others had none at all, or couldn't seem
to tap into the place where it was stored.
Not enough, not enough, and so they swerved
in their big trucklike cars, doomed to be late
no matter what -- and for those at the curb
and for those at the wheel -- one single time,
there was one time, not two --
stretching to cover whatever there was,
only the distribution seemed bizarre:
jagged and somehow discontinuous,
jerking and pulling sideways like a bus.

*

Poem: The game

*

It was the time of solemn games when God --
the God even of those who didn't want
a God -- God would withdraw -- the God
of winter closed his mouth and subject words
were put back into assigned slots --
in a box of polished wood -- were put away --
nobody used the words, nobody could.

The way to play was to pretend
nobody played -- nor were there rules --
nor could you find the board nor were there turns
to take or not to take
nor was there anything at stake
nor any game but winter played alone
till our inertia woke us up again.

*

Poem: The wind

*

There was, outside, intention roving
that wasn't yours -- you neither knew, nor had,
the will whose shivering embodiment
was these curved weeds. It wasn't just applied
from the outside. It was and was the weeds
bicycling through. You scarcely moved.

You were like paint on a transparency.
You only moved as it moved. You were pinned
to this invisible breast of wind
heaving with its brief consciousness of you,

whose surplus, yours reluctantly,
made your own brief ability
to feel available -- and its intent
held like a hostage your complete consent.

*