Signing the Guest Book
GLENN REED
“Mama!”
Pressing the button again, almost like waiting for the answer on Jeopardy, but with no studio audience. And no dollars awarded for correct questions. And stringing those questions together like beads. And nowhere to hang them as the game show host stares at you with vacant eyes, neither nodding yes or no.
“Mama!” Once again.
She told me that John whispered that. Or yelled it. I don’t remember which.
But pressing the button again. As in a Hollywood production where the closing scene manufactures tears on cue and the previews flash claims of “A love story that’s a real tear-jerker,” or “A tragedy that touches on the pulse of a lost generation.” But without naming the object of that love. Or what generation it is. And there’s no way to edit the crucial scenes and no Oscar nods. There are no critics panning the trite dialogue or questioning the believability of the script.
Could it be thus? That your first word and your last word could be the same? A completed circle, like a retying of the umbilical cord? Does it all melt down in the morphine rush to those first moments of blinding light with the shock of atmosphere that came in the beginning? Please press the button, press the button, and let me suckle ...
What is that rhythm, the click, pause, click, pause, that lays a foundation to her soothing words as she complies with John’s solitary, pleading request?
“Mama!” he repeats.
I wonder if I’ll call that out as everything around me begins to fade and disconnect. If I’ll even have the chance. If my mother would even be there. Will I remember cursing the smashing of empty gin bottles or the bewildered looks and the needles lying on the bathroom sink or being sent a thousand miles away to live with relatives I’d never met and having to start at still another school in the middle of the year? Or would all of that stop mattering?
But I don’t know about needles. I had never known what a tweaker was until a couple of years ago. After I met John. When I first came out West. To Seattle. And just came out.
Still, I try to envision those and other scenes as I enter the hospital room with faltering steps. I try to see the dank alleys on heavy, dark nights, feel the cold concrete through thin, torn jeans, smell the dried- up piss on brick walls and the spills of cheap beer. I try to see the thin-moustached figures that wait in cockroach-infested apartments, their barter balled up in plastic baggies and held out in sweaty hands. I try to see faces that pull up to a street corner on drizzly nights, their faces like a cracking plaster in the soft fuzz of neon lights and the lambent glow from the instrument panels of their Beamers or Audis. I try to see them carefully laying their pin-striped jackets over bland, vinyl chairs, pulling out wads of twenty-dollar bills, blobs of their perspiration oozing into flesh-folds, their legs and arms kicking about like overturned insects on hot pavement. I close my eyes to try and envision this world. Of John’s.
The hospital room is awash in orange light, with strings of brilliant, white bulbs on the windowsill a feeble hint that it is the holiday season. The festivity implied like a mockery. The nurse at the door has asked if I’m “family or friend?” and I hesitate, trying to evaluate my standing as though awaiting some kind of judgment first. “Family or friend?” You must be defined thus, or entry is denied. You are not truly from his world.
But I am in the room and it’s bathed in that orange light, like the light that lingers at dusk on a Northern California coastal road. Or it could be on a dirt road in rolling Vermont hills, or on a bluff overlooking a Cape Cod beach. Except John has never been to either of those places. Not that this matters now. And his mother is waiting and greeting me with a smile that drifts across the room like a feather in a light breeze. Sometime over the last couple of years I crossed into this room, past the question of “family or friend?” and hesitated before visions of frisbees whizzing across a grassy park and boots tramping past towering Douglas firs and on fern-covered forest floors.
“John, David is here.” His mother is whispering. She bends down to the prone shape under wrinkled sheets. One bony arm hangs off the side of the bed. Gently, she lifts it back onto John’s chest. “He can hear you, you know,” she says to me. “Why don’t you talk to him for a while?”
And then I’m back in a doorway, but watching the orange glow pulse over the wrinkle of Pacific Ocean, feeling the foothills darkening behind me. A row of houses along the road and a tiny church with picket fence, but no one stirring anywhere in sight. Stepping forward, but the earth rolling back and the angle of light lingering for scant minutes. Stepping forward and turning the cold iron latch opening onto the fissured sidewalk that skirts the cemetery and creeps to the locked front door of the church. Hearing a name whispered that is unfamiliar, then the spear of white light through a tattering of cloud, and John’s mother whispering, “He can hear you,” and then back in the doorway, where the nurse is again asking, “Family or friend?” And back in the elevator and pushing a button and antiseptic smells and the elevator door sliding open pages to another chapter.
Trying to remember that he can hear me and reaching out because he must feel the touch. Sensing tangles, connections, flowing, pulsing. Liquids trickling and crimson filling bags and needles and a banquet set before me on a long, table-clothed table, then melting and trickling from plates into snaking, plastic tubes, then disappearing into thin membrane, then the hint of a whisper.
“Mama!”
The nurse asking something and staring into my face with a flat-line mouth and glassy eyes. The nurse asking something and then pulling on my hand and extending it to the bed, where the ash-gray skin shrivels over bone protruding from crumpled sheet. Following the folds, the crevasses, upward as they rise and ebb into straggly waves on the Pacific, following them upward to the orange light on the horizon and the dark lines of cloud bank across his forehead, above closed eyes, all bathed in orange light too.
“John, David is here,” the nurse whispers once again, then she glances at me. “He can still hear you. Speak to him.” John’s mother now with a stone-face and seeking to huddle her body further into the corner of the room. A photo of John on the table beside her. His arms are crossed over a wide chest under the Death Valley National Park T-shirt. He wears striped shorts. A brown clump of hair ventures down his forehead and his smile pushes at the picture frame.
Focusing on the hand, the buzzing, like moving insects, of blood flowing, and the warmth. Stone deposits on the beach on a sunny day, with the heat radiating upward until I want to lie down and absorb it. A brief squeeze then, and not knowing if it’s a reflex or thoughts of that beach walk or the hike on a drizzly day with droplets of rain speckling and glistening on the ferns and newly emerged trillium. “Hold his hand,” his mother continues to tell me as the nurse is padding down the hallway. Her footsteps leaving soft prints in the earth as John moves around a moss-covered rock on the muddy, Cascades Trail.
I watch the eyes of John’s mother. They are weighed down by the nights of orange light and by the incessant twinkling of Christmas lights at the nurses’ station and along the windowsill in her son’s room. The Christmas lights prick at her thoughts like gnats. I sense her thoughts waving at them wildly; thoughts of a Christmas tree back in Southern California, the silvery bulbs hanging on its branches, the warm desert air wafting in through open windows, of a five- or six- year-old John gazing at the wrapped presents underneath it with wide eyes. Thoughts of John, many years later, staring down to where she collapsed on the kitchen floor, the tourniquet squeezing her arm, the syringe lying like just another utensil amongst the dinner dishes that she had knocked over. Thoughts of John, in his mid-twenties, staring back across a barren dining room table at the treatment center and asking for his father’s address. He’d once told me about this over a double mocha while seated outside his favorite coffee shop on Broadway. Thoughts of John sharing Jack in the Box chocolate shakes and greasy fries on the last really hot day of August, talking about going to community college and taking trips back to the desert after the next round of chemo. Thoughts of John’s mother grunting as she helped lift him out of bed and cooing as she folded him into her arms and squeezing before he was led back down the sanitized hallways of the treatment center that always smelled of bleach and bad food.
“Here, hold his hand. He knows you’re here.” The nurse’s eyes boring into the back of my head and knowing that I never answered her question and reaching out, noticing the blue tangle of veins in my hand that meander like eskers on a glaciated landscape.
The long nights are slumping his mother’s shoulders. Her hands feel brittle and the skin crinkled when I take a hold of them, when I enter the room, and she pulls me to the bed while part of me is backing up slowly and with horror. Her then telling me to take John’s hand, that he knows someone is visiting, that he always spoke so highly of me. My eyes following the string of Christmas lights on the windowsill that pool white on the wall that fades into gray shadow and an eroded landscape of sheets and blackened lips that mouth something. I imagine that closed eyes may be seeing down tipped garbage can alleys breeding broken glass that shattered under a summer sun in Volunteer Park. This is where I first caught sight of John seated in the grass and twirling a frisbee in one hand.
And it’s only been a little over three years. Or closer to four? Stepping out of the elevator, stepping through the doorway with the nurse asking me, “Friend or family?” or someone asking me that, and stepping into John’s sky-blue VW Beetle on the way to the park, and stepping past his Cheshire grin at the coffee shop and asking him about his Death Valley T-shirt.
“Sometimes I really miss the desert,” he tells me, as another cloud mass outside squeezes itself dry over Seattle. “There’s something so appealing about its openness. It’s so ... utilitarian?”
Pushing the metal latch up and stepping forward on the dry grass, squinting my eyes to read the inscription in the fading light, the diminishing orange lights. Looking back to the stretch of Route 1 as it hints at sources and destinations. Squinting my eyes to look beyond the almost ashen skin, telltale bulge under the crumpled sheets, eyelids opened just a crack on eyes rolled upward and the lips moving haphazardly over a fountain gone dry of words. Squinting my eyes until the room’s a blur and the figure under the sheets melts away into roiling clouds past surf and then a figure in the park, where John is saying hello and then poised to throw the frisbee to me with a glint in his eyes, then the flick of his wrist and the sailing of an orange disc over the grass.
Seeing beyond his mother, reaching out her arms, beyond her to the decorated window opening on a tar-black rain-squall Seattle night. Seeing beyond to an orange, neon light in the shape of a ’58 Cadillac pulsating in counterpoint to the speed limits of the wee hours. Standing at the entrance to a diner bar’s beehive of Friday activity, with the surrounding city blocks blurred in headlights and taillights and streaming in the street arteries up the hill, where three towering antennas scrape at low clouds and blink their red eyes.
Pushing open the glass door and bisecting the row of round stools at the counter and square booths running parallel along the windows. Staring at the neon lady with drooping breasts and big hair glowing pink and blue over the counter and the opening on the kitchen bustle, where heads and shoulders move about like manic pinballs and hands occasionally dart and grab orders like starving animals. An aproned figure comes towards me, with a menu in hand, but I gesture towards John, who is standing over a gentleman in a leather jacket who stares down at his plate of sunnyside eggs and bacon as if it’s a long-despised boss.
“Friend or family?” the aproned figure asks me and I find the question odd. Or did he ask me, “Counter or booth?” or, “Dinner or breakfast menu?” or something else appropriate for this diner at 11:30 p.m. And I look up to the moon-face clock to see if it helps me know what the answer should be. Or did I say something about knowing John at that point and request that I be seated in his section? Or did he place a wad of twenties in one of my coat pockets and reach out a shaky hand and say, “I’m really in need of some good stuff,” while John is whispering in my ear that he needs to keep this job and he’s been clean for almost a year, but then his sky-blue VW sputters into the EZ-Sleep Motel’s parking lot out on Aurora, just a mile from his apartment. He gets out and makes his way to an open door where a robed figure with slicked-back hair waits and says, “Family or friend?”
No, I can’t remember this scene now because John is smiling broadly and thanking me for stopping by and for inviting him out for Mongolian stir-fry food. When was that? About three or four months ago? And he is asking how I’ve been since I last saw him. The nurse stares directly into my face, moves her head back and forth and lets out a long sigh and then John is seating me, and the nurse is turning away and padding across the floor, walking down the main hallway, then disappearing.
A jukebox lurks in one corner of the diner and beyond it is a door that occasionally emits men with goatees and buzz cuts. Through the opening I get brief glimpses into a dim haze of human shapes tangled in smoke entrails. John places a glass of water in front of me and asks me if I’ve ever ventured into the bar section and I crinkle my brow and ask what he means. “I just came out ... west,” I insist, as if that’s an answer. I’m considering an earlier proposition to go play pool the next day and look into his brown eyes and tell him I haven’t played pool since I was a teenager, but he just moves his head in the direction of the bar again, runs a finger along a vein in his arm, then flicks out the ballpoint in his pen as if to take an order. Then slamming his pen downward on his arm and my jerking in alarm as he demands to know, “Friend or family?” and then he turns to attend to the leather jacket man who continues to gawk at his plate of bacon and eggs.
Pushing the button and the jerking motion and the door then opening and it’s springtime. I’m telling John that the sun filtering through the forest overstory is warm on the skin. Following the still muddy path, we are starting a gradual ascent of Tiger Mountain and the effort is raising beads of sweat on foreheads and bare arms. Our breathing is heavy, but rhythmic and the feeling of blood feeding our muscles seems synchronized with the occasional breezes caressing the tree branches and the tinkling music of a nearby stream. Buds are just beginning to embellish the trees and wildflowers poke through the layers of leafy decay amongst tufts of ferns that appear like skirting for the tree trunks.
“I want to do a lot more hiking this summer, when I’m able to get back in shape,” John tells me, while pausing to rub around his stomach. His face twitches, but then he is smiling again. “I want to keep up with you. I’m really sorry that I’m holding you back today. You can go ahead if you want.”
“You weren’t holding me back,” I say as I cross into the room, take hold of his hand and begin whispering into the sterile air. “Remember when you said that to me?” I ask him. I wasn’t in any hurry. The important thing was just being outside on a beautiful day and enjoying the mountains.
The path steepens and is more heavily eroded. We pass a couple clad in REI jackets and carrying a toddler in a special baby carrier. We pass others leading dogs such as golden labs and huskies, with the canines straining on their leashes, tails wagging and their noses in overdrive. John’s breathing is more laborious and he apologizes again. We sit on a downed tree that guides hikers away from an overly used section of the trail and onto a new section that runs parallel to it. I tell him about the speed bumps in my latest relationship and he talks about marriage and children and the differences he perceives in relationships with men and women.
“I think I could really be happy with the right woman,” he says, sliding his fingers through his thick, brown hair. “Really, it doesn’t matter which way I go as long as we click and are happy, but a comfortable relationship with a woman seems really appealing to me—buying a little cottage in the country, growing a vegetable garden, dabbling in my artwork, spending an afternoon walking in the woods.”
A rugged man of about thirty passes by us, sweat-soaked T-shirt clinging to a well-defined upper body and muscular legs revealed in gym shorts as they pronounce the effort of the upward climb with each flexing step. John watches as the man passes by, turns to me, and a smile spreads across his face. “Of course, there are plenty of temptations to go the other way! We’ll see. I could really get into something like that!” he says, nodding his head in the direction of the trail’s climb and the fit man who just passed by us. “I guess I find there’s something more calming about women ... some feeling that’s less pressured. Of course, that could just be that the grass is always greener ...” He stands up with some effort and pulls his knapsack back on. “I’m ready to go now, but if you want to go ahead of me ...”
The trail steepens, but I tell John to focus on looking to the north, where the snow-covered mound of Mount Baker scrapes at strands of cloud and other peaks of the Cascades roil against the blue sky. I say that the view from the top will be even more impressive, with Mount Rainier looming to the south and the Olympics bunched to the west of Puget Sound, shimmering under a late afternoon sun. He smiles, but exhales with effort and his eyes squint as he studies the lay of the ground.
“I don’t have to see that,” he tells me. “I may not be able to.”
And it’s springtime and the sun warms your skin and the summit is not far away. And I’m holding your hand and I’m telling you about my first game of pool in nearly twenty years and sampling a local Ethiopian restaurant and I’m turning to your mother, who seems to be shrinking into herself and I’m saying how you always gave me too much credit because it’s been months since I’ve seen you and I never knew about the relapse and the stones I pass beyond the iron-latched gate are hard to read in this fading orange glow. And I see your mother huddled on cold tiles of a bathroom floor, her legs splayed out beneath a filthy bathrobe stained with vomit and hear her cursing your father and I’m standing in the doorway again and the nurse is whispering in my ear, “Family or friend?”
John holds a needle up for me to see and the sun sparkles through its contents and John ties a tourniquet around his arm and the veins bulge like the network of tree roots around us. His hand turns downward and then plunges the needle into the earth and squirts in the contents and the forest spins and blurs. “I embrace this,” he whispers, as I implore him to keep on walking, that the summit is a scant few minutes away. “I embrace this,” he repeats as I see the tip of the needle slide into a vein in his arm and thick foliage envelops my sight and my limbs plant into the ground and I feel the sun’s heat on my bare skin’s open pores.
So I continue, on my own, to the summit and turn around for the view as the elevator door opens and the long hallway pulls me forward. The nurse passes by without a sound as I reach the room and John’s mother says that he’s not spoken for the last two hours, except when he yelled out, “Mama!” She gets up to greet me at the doorway as a black-suited man asks me, “Family or friend?” He hands me a pen and points down to the blank pages of an open book, its line awaiting signatures. “He always spoke so highly of you.”
Just a moment ago, wasn’t it? Just a moment ago I’m sipping coffee at a sidewalk table in the summer and you walk by, appearing totally lost in thought. I blurt out a desperate “Hey, John!” And you stop, smile and say you are on your way to a support group meeting, but have a few minutes to spare. I buy you a decaf latte after you tell me that you’re “trying to cut back on the caffeine.” My eyes latch onto the unlit cigarette pinched between your fingers. You apologize and explain that it’s been a rough month for you.
“I relapsed, but now I’m back in the meetings. It’s all been a bit too much for me, so I need this.” You hold up the cigarette. Later, as we stand outside for the last remnants of our chat, you light it up. The smoke curls into a crown of thorns around your head.
I didn’t even know that you smoked, but your skin seems particularly sallow in the bright light and your eyes a bit sunken and your cheeks droopy. The cigarette seems a pretty trivial vice under the circumstances.
“I’ve also been really busy working on my drawings. Did I tell you I’m compiling them into a booklet? I’ve been spending most of my spare time working on it. I can’t work at the diner anymore now anyway.”
You never told me about any artwork. In nearly four years. I never knew before what a tweaker was either. I’m shocked by how much weight you’ve lost since the last time I saw you. This was when we went to hear some Celtic music over in Ballard. You were always curious and wanting to experience new things.
“They’re going to try another round of chemo starting next week. They said one of the tumor’s shrunk a little. Unfortunately, they found another one.”
When were you in the hospital? The nurse looking at me and shaking her head and John’s mother moving towards me with open arms saying, “John always spoke so highly of you ...”
Click, pause. Click, pause.
“Mama!”
“Please push the button,” I say as I near the mountain’s open summit. Mama pushes the button. His lips stop smacking and there’s a slight exhalation and a groan. I think I feel the pressure on my fingers lessen. I pull them away, reach out, try to feel the inscription on cold stone, run quickly out of the alleyway.
“I embrace this,” I hear from behind me, and I see spots before me, eyes in the bare light. Ink blots form into writhing figures beneath underpasses and coalesce into shapes of fingers pinching, slicing, injecting, masturbating, touching, shaking, choking.
“I didn’t know you created artwork ... I didn’t know what a tweaker was ...”
The pressure of my fingers sliding across the inscriptions and squeezing coolness from the gravestones. The stones buffering the hills from the sea, the iron gate to the cemetery corralling them and the sentinel church clinging to the road. The whisper of the dusk breezes sliding off the Pacific and John’s voice saying how he enjoyed the drive down Route 101 from Seattle, then the side trip to Route 1 on the long trip south to visit his mother and sister in Palm Springs.
“It’s such a long-ass haul, but I love to soak in those views of the ocean before I head back inland to the desert. Maybe I need a little more time to myself too because I never really know what to expect when I get there.”
I see John’s blue VW cell in the artery of road, teetering along this western edge of the continent, writhing and sputtering in the tubular connections between points of sustenance and destinations and a chaotic pastiche of memories. He is a child, walking to church on a hot Sunday morning, the suit clinging to his sweating body like plastic wrap, and his body dripping and shaking under a dark underpass. A storm-tossed Pacific eating away at the shoreline and wave upon wave of his father standing in a bathroom doorway and cursing his mother to hell. He slumps on the edge of a creaky bed and opens a letter from his father that condemns his whole existence, impaling him with distorted interpretations from a dresser drawer Bible. “Friends” enthusiastically pull him into candlelit bedrooms so he can sample what they’ve just blown their rent money on. And it’s 3 a.m. and he scans Pioneer Square desperately, with the single thought on a trick so that he can go back to that special alley where tattered, scarecrow figures may await with small baggies of crystal.
And I see 3 a.m. on the moon-face clock staring from over the nurses’ station as I turn for the elevator and reach up a finger to push the down button and reach up a finger, bandaged where I sliced it slamming the car door shut. It’s midnight and 1 a.m. and 2 a.m. and I’m trying to compose nearly four years into a shot, into one rush to spice up the morphine. I’m standing at the doorway with your mother telling me, “John always spoke so highly of you,” and it’s been two months since we went out to play pool and six months since the night we sipped microbrews and listened to that blues guitarist in Belltown and it’s six hours until I have to be at work and your eyes are marbles and my eyes are static, garble in the haze of the final rush.
It’s 3 a.m. and I’m waiting for the elevator door to open and I turn to the first page of your manuscript and see the word tweaker and I never knew what that meant before I came out to Seattle. And came out. And you look at me with both understanding and not.
“Mama!”
The last words, the epilogue, your final product, the ultimate slam. Get me the glossary. Melt the definitions down to one last call and tell me now, as the ink has dried. As I read, “I embrace this.” Tell me now that the sweat has evaporated, the bad smells were banished through sanitation, and the soiled sheets have been replaced with freshly laundered white, and thoughts reverberate from the Pacific into human forms asking me, “Family or friend?” and to sign a guest book as though I have been a tourist who visited the foreign country that is your homeland. That was.
Tell me, as I stare at your drawings—at the stark, ashen pain on crisp, white pages. As I stare at the images of sharp needles, impaled body parts, fluids dripping and spilled and splattered across pages, then dissolving into the orange translucence of a frisbee cutting through spring air, the sun bidding farewell from the Pacific horizon and pauses before last sprints to a summit.
Tell me, as the tone indicates the elevator has just arrived at this floor and I await the door’s opening and I watch your blue VW Beetle zip away, spewing white, powdery clouds that glisten behind it in the sun.
Tell me to embrace this all or just turn away.
GLENN REED lives in Vermont where he works for a non-profit. His writing is influenced by a sense of place, the unique people he’s encountered over the years and his lifelong activism. He’s also inspired by photographing hepatica on spring walks in the woods, hand-feeding chickadees and chipmunks, and waiting for those special moments that present themselves when he least expects them.
