Tristan
It was a few years earlier that Tristan rode in a summer-hot Buick gazing sideways out the window. The old metallic smell gave him a headache as always. But this day was a good day – he was going to see his mother, and his eyes were brighter than usual. His husky father drove the grizzled old sedan with something clattering in the hubcap, and the late afternoon sun beat hard across his jagged, unshaven face, casting a shadow in which Tristan hid. He wasn’t his real father, and Tristan just thought of him as ‘the old man.’ He’d always looked slightly absurd driving, Tristan thought - the look of annoyed concentration on his large blood-engorged face, the way his shoulders and chest seemed too bulky for him to move around. A cigarette was pinched between his lips and he occasionally puckered on it and released a cloud of smoke, never touching it. Tristan cracked a window.
“Whaddyudoin’? Close the window.”
“I need some air.”
“The AC is on, idiot. Shut the goddamn window.”
He sunk down and looked again out the window at the passing architecture as they passed through the city streets. He squinted and allowed his vision to blur. His focus strained far away beyond the buildings, to the horizon, then wrenching back too close, he crossed his eyes. He rolled his eyes around painfully backwards, further and further to try and focus on what was behind his eyes. He saw red veins close-up as if under a microscope and particles floating around, little amoebas, all against a background of pink and orange, full of blood which pulsed in his temples. He relaxed and focused back on the sidewalk and buildings, his vision jostling and askew. A mythical beast passed by, prowling the sidewalks, and another was stalking pedestrians. He felt cool fresh air and he studied their gruesome features, increasingly familiar and somehow more distinct than the rubbish and bicycles and neon storefronts all around.
Tristan was simultaneously young and old, and the onset of teenage years had solidified his cold, forlorn exterior while other warm sources burned inside him. Breathlessly he watched the creatures of a vicious, urban phantasm bordering on reverie. His fingers found their way to the holes in the pockets of his black hooded jacket and he distractedly tore at the remaining fabric. Radiant vampiric stalkers mingled with pedestrians, and a stone gargoyle on the façade of an old bank awoke and subtly leered at him as they passed by.
His father’s unsteady right foot jerked the car forward, followed sharply by the braking left foot. The old jailbird clouded up the enclosed space and murmured about odds on the football game that evening when he stood to win $200 if the Colts could make just twenty first-downs against Miami. The caramelized residue of nicotine and salt oozing from his pores gave him an encrusted, yellowish hue.
They slung widely into a gravelly asphalt parking space and Tristan walked ahead to the entrance. Their visits had become less frequent once it appeared that no further recovery was likely. He was reduced to asking his father for a ride whenever his longing for his mother began to haunt him, which was more than weekly. He hated to admit it, wishing awkwardly that the old man would orchestrate these visits and that Tristan could simply go along. Last time they came she never woke up. What would she be like this time?
Entering the facility his face soured anew with that unique smell, the same at every nursing home everywhere: unpleasant, attempting clinical but merely chemical, fetid like bleached urine, a smell of mist blown from the Stygian river just over the next hill. Alarming gaunt faces stared urgently at him as he and the old man walked down the hall to his mother’s room. The eyes followed him, a young fellah, ogling him like refugees at a junk food buffet, glaring with their sunken cheeks and wrinkling brown liver spots and wispy yellowing hair. He recoiled. Were they not decrepit prisoners awaiting release? They beheld his young eyes, and celebrated his mobility. They reached for his firm skin and imagined his intestinal regularity. What euphoria it would have been just to take his supple hand in theirs and press it to their faces. Oh, it didn’t matter to them that he had dyed his hair jet black, or that he walked with a slightly hunching gait. They basked in his dim light. He was fresh, just fourteen. His clear blue, tired and virgin eyes shifted and drew inward.
His mother was asleep when they arrived in her room. The old man stood near the door and looked at his watch. “Go say hello to your mother.” Tristan stood silently at his mother’s side trying to let the image fall lightly on him so he would maybe not have more nightmares. Some time passed and he saw her hand flinch. Her eyelids were drawn down and slightly ajar, lacking the seal of mucus present in those who are deeply asleep. Was she awake and bored? Unaware of her visitors, uninterested in them as strangers? Was she used to strange people coming and going, doing things to her body, being nice to her? He could not tell, but he could see a little bit of her iris under the drowsing eyelid, and so he imagined that she was awake.
“Are you awake momma?”
He reached down to touch her hand and she startled, and he took a quick step back, cooing and whispering “Sh-sh-sh! It’s OK, it’s just me, momma, Monk. It’s Tristan.” She began to breathe more rapidly, her enormous breast rising and falling, and her head turned slowly back and forth. With a lurch into her physicality, he grasped her clammy hand. Her lips moved and she whispered and mumbled something unrecognizable with each breath, “himidy, himidy, himidy.”
The words gained strength and he heard her gibberish and the silent room and yellow light swallowed him up in terror and gooseflesh. As the utterance got loud enough for him to distinguish as repetitive nonsense he turned to move away and she stopped, and she said “Sugar, aw, sugar.” It was clear speech, and it struck him in the gut. This word, his pet name, brought a fast stream of tears to his eyes which he wiped away with a jerk of his sleeve. Her head bobbled around and finally her drooping eyes lighted on him, but there was no light of recognition, no smile of pleasure at his visit. She looked right through him – into his face and beyond to the wall behind him.
He steeled his nerve and looked full into her empty eyes. He saw himself, his life in her. He searched for something to recognize in her face, some expression he would remember or some flicker of cognition. Her mouth hung halfway open drooling and her eyes could not stay open.
“Did you say sugar? Sugar?” he attempted.
In what appeared like total exhaustion, she mouthed the word imitating him. Then she fell back to sleep and could not be roused. He drifted back from her bedside.
“Why is she in this place with all these old people? She’s not that old.” The old man did not respond, and Tristan had not really expected an answer. A nurse came in and checked some statistics, then she left. Tristan looked halfway over his shoulder at the fat figure, not making eye contact. He clenched his jaw and felt the awkwardness of the silence. He was thinking about one summer when his mother had held him close after a severe beating whispering “Sugar, there now, sugar,” and then the old man spoke.
“The doctors put her here. Caint nobody help her.”
“She’s just lying here, how come she cant lie in bed at home? I don’t want to come to this place no more. I want to take her home. If she’s not gonna live, let her die at home.”
“This is a place for people like her; who got what she got…”
He mumbled, “people who got almost drowned by someone…”
“You shut your goddamn mouth, Monk, or I swear to God!”
Tristan hunched a shoulder, running his fingers across his hair in a defensive block in case the fist came at him, but it didn’t. His eyes turned cold and heavy as disgust swelled. Amid the tension he felt a tender female hand on his shoulder, the unseen hand of his new friend, a lover, a strong young lady who had come to him. It was the hand that soothed him at night as he raged on his bed for the death and sickness and poverty that surrounded him. He found the strength to control himself from further words or from releasing his pent up anger on the one he suspected had intentionally taken his mother away from him.
It was a few years earlier that Tristan rode in a summer-hot Buick gazing sideways out the window. The old metallic smell gave him a headache as always. But this day was a good day – he was going to see his mother, and his eyes were brighter than usual. His husky father drove the grizzled old sedan with something clattering in the hubcap, and the late afternoon sun beat hard across his jagged, unshaven face, casting a shadow in which Tristan hid. He wasn’t his real father, and Tristan just thought of him as ‘the old man.’ He’d always looked slightly absurd driving, Tristan thought - the look of annoyed concentration on his large blood-engorged face, the way his shoulders and chest seemed too bulky for him to move around. A cigarette was pinched between his lips and he occasionally puckered on it and released a cloud of smoke, never touching it. Tristan cracked a window.
“Whaddyudoin’? Close the window.”
“I need some air.”
“The AC is on, idiot. Shut the goddamn window.”
He sunk down and looked again out the window at the passing architecture as they passed through the city streets. He squinted and allowed his vision to blur. His focus strained far away beyond the buildings, to the horizon, then wrenching back too close, he crossed his eyes. He rolled his eyes around painfully backwards, further and further to try and focus on what was behind his eyes. He saw red veins close-up as if under a microscope and particles floating around, little amoebas, all against a background of pink and orange, full of blood which pulsed in his temples. He relaxed and focused back on the sidewalk and buildings, his vision jostling and askew. A mythical beast passed by, prowling the sidewalks, and another was stalking pedestrians. He felt cool fresh air and he studied their gruesome features, increasingly familiar and somehow more distinct than the rubbish and bicycles and neon storefronts all around.
Tristan was simultaneously young and old, and the onset of teenage years had solidified his cold, forlorn exterior while other warm sources burned inside him. Breathlessly he watched the creatures of a vicious, urban phantasm bordering on reverie. His fingers found their way to the holes in the pockets of his black hooded jacket and he distractedly tore at the remaining fabric. Radiant vampiric stalkers mingled with pedestrians, and a stone gargoyle on the façade of an old bank awoke and subtly leered at him as they passed by.
His father’s unsteady right foot jerked the car forward, followed sharply by the braking left foot. The old jailbird clouded up the enclosed space and murmured about odds on the football game that evening when he stood to win $200 if the Colts could make just twenty first-downs against Miami. The caramelized residue of nicotine and salt oozing from his pores gave him an encrusted, yellowish hue.
They slung widely into a gravelly asphalt parking space and Tristan walked ahead to the entrance. Their visits had become less frequent once it appeared that no further recovery was likely. He was reduced to asking his father for a ride whenever his longing for his mother began to haunt him, which was more than weekly. He hated to admit it, wishing awkwardly that the old man would orchestrate these visits and that Tristan could simply go along. Last time they came she never woke up. What would she be like this time?
Entering the facility his face soured anew with that unique smell, the same at every nursing home everywhere: unpleasant, attempting clinical but merely chemical, fetid like bleached urine, a smell of mist blown from the Stygian river just over the next hill. Alarming gaunt faces stared urgently at him as he and the old man walked down the hall to his mother’s room. The eyes followed him, a young fellah, ogling him like refugees at a junk food buffet, glaring with their sunken cheeks and wrinkling brown liver spots and wispy yellowing hair. He recoiled. Were they not decrepit prisoners awaiting release? They beheld his young eyes, and celebrated his mobility. They reached for his firm skin and imagined his intestinal regularity. What euphoria it would have been just to take his supple hand in theirs and press it to their faces. Oh, it didn’t matter to them that he had dyed his hair jet black, or that he walked with a slightly hunching gait. They basked in his dim light. He was fresh, just fourteen. His clear blue, tired and virgin eyes shifted and drew inward.
His mother was asleep when they arrived in her room. The old man stood near the door and looked at his watch. “Go say hello to your mother.” Tristan stood silently at his mother’s side trying to let the image fall lightly on him so he would maybe not have more nightmares. Some time passed and he saw her hand flinch. Her eyelids were drawn down and slightly ajar, lacking the seal of mucus present in those who are deeply asleep. Was she awake and bored? Unaware of her visitors, uninterested in them as strangers? Was she used to strange people coming and going, doing things to her body, being nice to her? He could not tell, but he could see a little bit of her iris under the drowsing eyelid, and so he imagined that she was awake.
“Are you awake momma?”
He reached down to touch her hand and she startled, and he took a quick step back, cooing and whispering “Sh-sh-sh! It’s OK, it’s just me, momma, Monk. It’s Tristan.” She began to breathe more rapidly, her enormous breast rising and falling, and her head turned slowly back and forth. With a lurch into her physicality, he grasped her clammy hand. Her lips moved and she whispered and mumbled something unrecognizable with each breath, “himidy, himidy, himidy.”
The words gained strength and he heard her gibberish and the silent room and yellow light swallowed him up in terror and gooseflesh. As the utterance got loud enough for him to distinguish as repetitive nonsense he turned to move away and she stopped, and she said “Sugar, aw, sugar.” It was clear speech, and it struck him in the gut. This word, his pet name, brought a fast stream of tears to his eyes which he wiped away with a jerk of his sleeve. Her head bobbled around and finally her drooping eyes lighted on him, but there was no light of recognition, no smile of pleasure at his visit. She looked right through him – into his face and beyond to the wall behind him.
He steeled his nerve and looked full into her empty eyes. He saw himself, his life in her. He searched for something to recognize in her face, some expression he would remember or some flicker of cognition. Her mouth hung halfway open drooling and her eyes could not stay open.
“Did you say sugar? Sugar?” he attempted.
In what appeared like total exhaustion, she mouthed the word imitating him. Then she fell back to sleep and could not be roused. He drifted back from her bedside.
“Why is she in this place with all these old people? She’s not that old.” The old man did not respond, and Tristan had not really expected an answer. A nurse came in and checked some statistics, then she left. Tristan looked halfway over his shoulder at the fat figure, not making eye contact. He clenched his jaw and felt the awkwardness of the silence. He was thinking about one summer when his mother had held him close after a severe beating whispering “Sugar, there now, sugar,” and then the old man spoke.
“The doctors put her here. Caint nobody help her.”
“She’s just lying here, how come she cant lie in bed at home? I don’t want to come to this place no more. I want to take her home. If she’s not gonna live, let her die at home.”
“This is a place for people like her; who got what she got…”
He mumbled, “people who got almost drowned by someone…”
“You shut your goddamn mouth, Monk, or I swear to God!”
Tristan hunched a shoulder, running his fingers across his hair in a defensive block in case the fist came at him, but it didn’t. His eyes turned cold and heavy as disgust swelled. Amid the tension he felt a tender female hand on his shoulder, the unseen hand of his new friend, a lover, a strong young lady who had come to him. It was the hand that soothed him at night as he raged on his bed for the death and sickness and poverty that surrounded him. He found the strength to control himself from further words or from releasing his pent up anger on the one he suspected had intentionally taken his mother away from him.
