Chapters (23)
He says, “How are you?”
I say, “All right.”
Silence.
I say, “How are you?”
He says, “Great.”
What am I supposed to do? I don’t have any way to get at what swirls inside me; I am so scared of myself, really, that I don’t feel there is anything inside of me, just a blank place, emptier than the hospital room. I have no questions; my sense of anything my life might be is tiny, inchoate, buried beneath a great weight. Where would I start to talk to this man, the first gay person I’ve ever met who actually says he’s a gay person? Does he say it—to me I mean? I don’t even remember.
There is an idea, in contemporary physics, that time branches out into multiple dimensions, that what doesn’t happen in one world may happen in another, as all the possible outcomes of any gesture fan out into a wave of possibilities. This moment, in my hospital room, is a kind of crux; if he and I could actually have talked, how might my sorry present and my uncertain future have changed? Suppose he had said, “God, I used to feel just like you”; suppose he had told me how much silent company I actually had, how many kids felt exactly the way I felt. Suppose he told me how he’d come to breathe more freely, how possibilities opened for me like those multiple realms, worlds I couldn’t even see yet. Suppose we talked about our common sorrow till we could actually laugh about it, till I could imagine that sorrow as something which might end; suppose he had just told me to have patience, that the loneliness and sorrow of gay kids is just something to be lived out.
I imagine the effects of any of those statements as plainly earthshaking, an unthinkable openness. I envision it like this: the lid of the box of myself sprung, no more constricting sense of being sealed off. Air come rushing into the tomb, fear brought into the light and shown for what it was: a shadow, a mistake that didn’t need to persist, a sorrow which could pass. Years and years open out differently, and my story writes itself in another, freer hand.
But that moment doesn’t take place, not that way. In 1967 the doors are locked, the exits sealed; I can find no route away from shame. The talk we’re supposed to have flounders, since neither of us knows where to begin; the possibility of connection sinks before my eyes, as if an ocean liner were passing out of sight before you had the first idea where it might be headed.
He looks at the floor, fiddles with my chart. Then he says, “Tomorrow you get to go home.”