July 15, 1992
I got a check in the mail today from Eddie. All the note said was: “Lizzie, I don’t want you to worry about money. All kinds of love, Eddie.” I called him on the phone and told him I couldn’t accept his gift, but I knew I was going to take it. I needed it. I hate needing it. Maria Elena must have blabbed about my pathetic finances. I wish I didn’t need money, not me, not any of us—it’s so violent to need it. Last week, I dreamed I was homeless, nowhere to go. I was sitting on a street corner and I would call out the names of people I knew as they passed me. They just looked at me with the strangest eyes, and I knew there was no longer anything human or recognizable about me—not my voice, not my face, not anything. I was separated from everything that had come before. I wanted, in that dream, to leave my body—but the power to leave myself was gone. And I knew I would be homeless forever.
I keep wishing I could live in a kind and decent world. Everything I see makes me cry lately. I went out to the grocery store to buy some things for Joaquin and Jake. I ran into someone I knew from the hospital. He’d almost died, and there he was laughing and breathing and we sat down on the curb together to talk. It was such a miracle that he was there. And this guy passes us, stares at us. “Faggot,” he said. I could hear the hate in his voice, as clear and sharp as a dry twig breaking beneath a heavy foot. And I wanted to grab him and shake him and tell him that I hated him, too. I wanted to slap him and never stop slapping him and ask him again and again: “How does it feel to be hated? How does it feel?” And, not an hour later, as I walked with a sack full of groceries down the street, some guy eyes me, and I wanted to be nice, so I smiled. Goddamnit, I smiled at him. And he says, not a hint of shame in his voice, he says: “Baby, you look good enough to fuck. I could fuck you till I died.” I looked at him. He was waiting for me to say something back. The sonofabitch was hoping I’d smile. “I’m not your toilet,” I yelled, “so stop pissing on me.” He chuckled. What gives people the right? I’m tired of the world—goddamnit I’m so tired. If I didn’t have a body I wouldn’t be tired.
So I keep wanting to leave my body. When I’m a part of the air, I don’t need money, I don’t need food, I don’t need to hear human voices, I don’t need to touch bodies, and I don’t need to be touched. I don’t need anything. Joaquin says the best part of dying is that you begin to slop needing.
This evening I left my body because I hated it, wanted to be rid of it. It was an escape, a vacation, and I didn’t want to feel. It was so lovely to be a part of the night, to be all colors, to be a star that had nothing to do but shine. I was gone a long time. I didn’t really want to come back. I could have wandered for weeks in the desert of nothingness and never once been thristy. I’m so pure when I’m out of my body. I think I came back because Eddie sent me the money—and because of Jake and Joaquin, and the heron in their dreams.
August 12, 1992
Joaquin told me to bring him flowers today. He said it was the Day of the Dead. I told him it wasn’t November yet, but he wouldn’t hear of it. “No, no, it’s the Day of the Dead—and I’m mostly dead, so bring me flowers.” I didn’t argue with him. I told him I’d bring the flowers. Joaquin and I have been speaking a lot of Spanish to each other. Me and my perfect pronunciation of that language. And it’s mine, that language, mine, and yet it’s no more mine than English. I don’t feel Mexican. I don’t feel American, either. I’m disoriented and disjointed and fragmented lately. I hate all these confusions. I want to go to a place where I’m pure, where I’m certain
The night Maria Elena had her baby, I dreamed about his birth. In the dream, we were all celebrating in a huge room. It was like New Year’s, and amid all the laughter—and Eddie’s smile—his son started to grow up right in front of us. Right then and there, he turned into a young man. When I spoke to him, he shook his head. And then I spoke to him in sign language, and he spoke back to me. We spoke to each other for hours, our hands dancing like leaves falling from all the elm trees in the world. When I woke up the next day, I called Eddie and left a message on the machine. He called back and told me the baby was perfect. But I know he isn’t. I know what the silence meant. But there was another man in the room, and I remembered him when I spoke to Eddie on the phone and I knew that man’s name—Diego—and he looked just like Maria Elena. And I know I’m going to meet him.
I went to speak to the priest at Mission Dolores. I told him everything about what’s been happening to me. I told him about leaving my body, about reading minds, about seeing things in the future. I seemed to need to tell him that I didn’t believe in God. I didn’t have to ask him if he believed me—I could read him easily. He believed every word. He wanted to know if I was going to be all right. I told him I didn’t know. I told him I was scared. I told him the world had changed, and I didn’t know how to change with it. He smiled. And when I cried, he held me, and he told me I would learn to live a new life. He seemed so certain.
Joaquin keeps lingering. It’s as if he’s doing a slow fade. Every day he grows a little paler. I sometimes think he’ll turn into a ghost before he disappears. He seems to always take care of all of us, instead of us taking care of him. And I’m sitting here in this cold summer night wondering why it’s the dead and the dying who are always remembering the living. When will the living learn about the dead? When will the living learn about the dying?
Lizzie opened the door before the doorbell rang and smiled at her mother as she stood in the dark hallway of the apartment building.
“You knew I was standing here?”
Lizzie smiled, “I didn’t want to make you wait out here—too cold.” She took her mother by the arm and pulled her into her living room. She kissed her, then kissed her again. “Coffee?” she asked.
The old woman looked into her daughter’s face as if she were afraid that face would soon be disappearing. “It’s cold—even for a San Francisco summer. It’s warm in here, though.”
“Too warm?”
“No, it’s nice—wonderful. My circulation isn’t what it used to be.” Elizabeth listened to her as she walked into the kitchen. Her mother slopped talking.
“Keep talking,” she said, “I’m listening.”
“I don’t like to yell through walls,” she said.
“Oh Mom, it’s not angry yelling, it’s just talking yelling.” She walked back into the room holding two mugs of coffee. She handed one to her mother. “Just like you like it—black and bitter.”
Her mother smiled appreciatively as she sipped on the coffee. “You make good coffee.”
“So are you going to tell me why you’ve come to visit your daughter?”
“Do I need a reason?”
“Mom, I can count on one hand the number of times you’ve visited me. If you just felt like talking, you’d have called me on the phone.” She squeezed her mother’s hand. “So what’s the occasion?”
“You tell me—you knew I was at the door. You’re gifted, no?”
“I can’t read minds at will, Mama, it just happens sometimes.”
“Have you left your body lately?”
Lizzie shrugged her shoulders. “I’m learning to control that one.”
“Where did you go last night?”
“How did you know I had one last night?”
“Maybe I’m gifted, too.”
“Seriously, Mama.”
“Seriously? You look too thin.”
“I look too thin and you’ve been talking to Maria Elena.”
“I still call her Helen.”
“You’re so stubborn, Mother—it’s not a real name.”
She looked straight into Lizzie’s eyes and smiled. “You don’t seem to mind your name, and it’s not real either—and me? I’m not your real mother—you don’t seem to mind that either.”
Lizzie sipped on her coffee. “I like Lizzie just fine. And, Mama, you’re as real as I need.” She let out a laugh, calm. “You sure it’s not too strong for you?” Her mother shook her head. “You’re real to me, Mama—and you shouldn’t have driven all this way in this cold. I would have been happy to drive to Palo Alto.”
“You hate Palo Alto—and the drive did me good. I’m not on my deathbed, you know—and I needed to get away from Sam. You don’t look like you’re getting enough sleep.”
“What did Maria Elena tell you?”
“She said you looked too thin and that you were working too hard for no money. Who are those boys, anyway?”
“They’re not boys, Mother, they’re men. And one of them is dying.”
“And Elizabeth Nightingale has to stick her nose in everybody else’s business.”
“Mama, this isn’t negotiable.”
“What if you—what if—”
“And AIDS is hard to get—if that’s what you’re worried about. You didn’t come here to lecture me about that, did you?”
“You quit your job, you go and practically live with two gay men, you start talking about revolutions, you start losing your interest in sex, you start reading people’s minds, and you leave your body every Tuesday and Thursday. What the hell are the people who love you supposed to think?”
Lizzie laughed. “I’d forgotten how theatrical you could be, Mama. Revolution, Mama? In this country? Ludicrous. When I say stuff like that, do you really think I’m taking myself seriously? Do you think anybody else does? Certainly not you, Mama. And anyway, my views aren’t new—and I don’t leave my body only on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Sometimes I take myself out on a Saturday night. It’s like a date. And who told you I’d lost my interest in sex?”
“Helen’s noticed. She said you looked tired, preoccupied, and that you haven’t mentioned sex with a man in over a month. She said she’d never had a conversation with you when that didn’t come up at least once.”
“That’s ridiculous. Men have never been that important to me.”
“Ha! Men are all you’ve ever lived for. Boy crazy. You’ve been boy crazy since you started ovulating—and you started rather early as I recall.” She sipped on her coffee. “You were such a lovely child. Stand up. Let me have a look at you.”
Lizzie put down her cup of coffee and sighed in disgust. “Mom?”
“Just do as I tell you.”
Lizzie stood up, pretended she was modeling a dress for a prospective buyer, then lifted up her skirt and stuck her ass at her mother. “Done with the goods?”
“You have lost weight. You look different. Come here.” Lizzie obediently sat next to her mother. “Lizzie, what is it? I just know something’s wrong. Is it your brother? Is it that we lied to you?”
Lizzie sat back on the couch and stared at the framed poster on the opposite wall. “I don’t know,” she said quietly. “It’s everything. It’s as if I have to learn what it means to be alive. Every damn thing’s so strange to me—my body, my voice, the way I look—and I fluctuate between exhilaration and despair. I’ve always been emotional—but not like this, Mama. It’s never been this bad. My feelings are killing me.” She leaned her head on her mother’s shoulder. “Tell me what’s wrong, Mama.”
“I wish I could.”
“Stay the night? Can you, Mama? Can you hold me?”
“Yes,” her mother whispered, “But you have to hold me, too.”
“I promise,” she said, “I promise.”