The Elephants

from The Conservation of Mass: Stories (forthcoming, Essay Press, 2017)

The Operation

“Sorry,” is what he heard just before Dr. T pulled the mass out to show him. When Virgil saw it clutched at the end of Dr. T’s instrument, the polyp looked smaller than he imagined it would. Though just before, in his Fentanyl and Versed sedated state, he saw on the screen the moment it was snagged then cut out from his hot little hole, and now it popped out at him, an angry red eye. And though he would miss all the calls about the results, he called back, panicked, but to learn it was benign. Still, he reveals this red warning to his lovers, letting them know how he’s turned the corner, gotten to be closer to their age, a fellow traveler, sharing issues along the way.

In Manhattan, Dr.S, when he pulled a cyst out, cut from a tendon, a translucent schwannoma from deep in his armpit, Virgil was much more clear, and awake enough to feel the pain as it was removed. “We have a slam dunk,” is what Dr.S. said as he was carving it out, yanking across a nerve’s surface. Virgil even had to ask Dr.G for more anaesthesia, from which he would be rendered unable to move much, his arm, useless, an entire day, but Malcolm would be there to take him back to his long apartment in Brooklyn to sleep off the drugs.

It was snowing then, and wet, but this was all he had to worry about. This and the watercolors of lynched black bodies he made, and of green trees, all on the red table that he packed in his affordable Desiré sent by moving company to Sacramento.

But this is what’s happening now: Virgil feels like the grilled crust on the shrimp is keeping him alive, and so too is the polenta, stuffed in his mouth at the same time, or the bread soaked in the crab that exploded around his plate. Eating porker, how does Virgil return to the language of all the bodies, the taste lasting so briefly in his mouth? Virgil’s feeling is particular about them, particularly now that he is as smooth inside, as he is outside, he thinks, when he is being fucked by Clean, Butch, Lost, Big LashMexDad (who uses a rubber), or The RailMan (Though he is in all likelihood dead of pancreatic cancer). Still, he will not lacerate their dicks during the action from the steel staple DrT left inside to seal the very hole that was once a polyp.

Virgil thinks of this for one second, the tip of Clean’s cock, pricked by the staple left in the wall of his insides after the “defect” was removed. Three to eight weeks to fall out, but, thank God, it fell out in one.

Virgil does not recall a time when he was perfect, because at the time he was closest to perfection, his BMI did not reflect his muscle mass, or his full head of curly, shiny black hair, his unshaven teeth, or his dimples, settled into the jaw of his skin, as shiny as his hair, clean and free of the worry he must genuflect, now, but still, he tries his best to stay as free of as many blems as possible.

It is out of this desire that he holds on to the tiny steel clip that braced together his inner wall against what was removed. Candy, he thinks, but the staple looks like a miniature spaceship, one he places in a corner of the pressed wood cabinet sealed by a mirror.

In another outcome, Virgil may have had to have more of his intestines cut out, been left to sport a colostomy bag, sung a song to others that he’s had sung to him by at least one daddy cornered in the Townhouse: “Nothing is going on down there.”

This song never bothers Virgil; in fact, the phrasing is like the start of a manifesto, a right of entry into a life, a way to figure out who this old lover will be. Variety in Intention. In the mirror, Virgil looks hideous, he thinks, and is tired. Like a meteor crashing into the earth’s atmosphere, he is less the rock upon entry, less its burning back into the atmosphere, less able to dissipate. Virgil’s glasses are smudged, and worn, and he is old now. Virgil is fat. Virgil is ugly. Virgil is not. Virgil layered together through broad framing devices for what is known by projection is something apparent at the surface of Virgil and the Operation’s healing wound.

What is called white-hot “nickel” is the metal not the coin. Dropped on the top of a chunk of planting Styrofoam, by tongs, the trick on Youtube is that the metal converts the heat through the material’s core, and as the exterior cracks, the foam chars into a black box contracting then cracking. The close-ups are then of the tongs, used to remove the nickel ball resting on top, but still doing damage. The ball is dropped in a bowl of water to hiss and steam. The last shot is a close up of the insides of the Styrofoam as it is now, transformed, tongs scraping back the black crust, fissures that show glowing insides, warm and red-orange held—this, too, is the money shot.

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Silent Incantations

Virgil wasn’t always so fair; in fact, he was a towering brown body, lording over that LittleDandelion, who still haunts him, or signifies his coming into consciousness around how he was held back by Little Dandelion’s power, which happens to so many, like us, Virgil thinks, all the time. What we need he also realizes, wandering in his own Venice, is a bag—it doesn’t matter the cost, you know some are 3,500.00 Euros, some are 590.00 Euros, whatever, that flesh in the drop of the field of soft, perforated leather will, in fact, fill his need, his conspiratorial kin with something that was, after all, once out of his pocket’s reach, but never his heart’s, a longing, a drift to return—but to where will he return? If it were so easy, and it sometimes is so easy, Virgil would settle into the fight of his life, or the fight of MommaSpine’s who is held together by pins, and steel, valves shut, stunted—she says it was too much candy.

They say we can put her back together, her spine, the root gone to compounding in on itself, fused vertebrae, killing the nerves. There was a prayer. There was an attendant. Virgil does not have a God of his own, like she does. But he has never so long walked on back to back double shifts, on any such hard hospital floors, caring after the left behind, and not caring after that back of hers that is no longer able to turn them over in their beds, nor to lift them further away from their dying.

Once S-olds, Virgil’s very important poetry teacher, noticed something, that something was missing, that something in the poem wasn’t right. It wasn’t ekphrastic, nor did Virgil think of that encounter between objects as a possibility in language and being, as in what one thing could be made without the other, but, still, to her wise eyes, he left so much of the poem out. Why? It was, he felt, somewhere else, something out of his reach in a room, a gym, a community center, where he saw another black body dancing.

To Virgil, he could see into the arc and point of the dance, wanted to make the connection between his poem and that body, but felt lost in the cross-wiring, an incomplete link, which to S-olds, was so obvious. The solution—remove the poem. But what Virgil knows now, is that this connection is impossible to solve, two planes whirling apart into the ever distance of the not knowing, there, only traces of a past lined into the present.

For instance, Virgil does not know the name of where he first went to school, but he can see a day there unfold before him in a home movie shot by MommaSpine. He does not need to make this life, nor does he need another entry to make the whole, whole. It is a special day: “International Day,” Virgil recalls, at least that is what it was called on that base in Millington, or was it Guam, or does it matter? Further, does he know that the Super 8 clip cannot be optimized, that even after 4 hours, there will still, in the end, be the same error message, and no upload?

It is unalterable, but somehow, what Virgil wants is exactly what Virgil gets. He slows that blue boy version of himself and asks a pause in realization:

“Why would I ask you to wipe under the table, on this wet, wooded deck?”

It has, indeed, rained, and Virgil, after all, has gone off on the waitress at Aldo’s—And when she says to The Musician, “I like your necklace,” which is a big black/brown seed on a gorgeous African American Woman, Virgil, the violent, has a Kara Walker moment. The seed should go where it goes, plunged into the seeker. Ponderous is so far from pondering, Virgil realizes within a few clicks, but this does not change his anger, or his tone, nor his need to plant the seed somewhere else, somewhere far from the neck, somewhere away from The Musician, somewhere into the drift of pulling the pieces of his protracted anger into this recounted point—

“I went off on her, and she still smiling.”

There isn’t a song as he tries to hold onto what he remembers. The silent movies would get stuck, and suddenly a burn, the black boiling opening up into the shot, and then Virgil’s Dad and Naldo would stop and splice, find the wound in the film, and close it. And then they would all watch, and eat popcorn popped in a pot.

MommaSpine sewed. Patterns to make her sons, not fit in, but to stand out, covering them in costumes of origins, of other countries, Lederhosen, or silver rivets in black slacks, hi-boots for a little brown boy as a blue matador in whose head?—Anything to make, to represent the country in which they were imagined to live, anything to figure out a way to be, to find a way, not back, but into where they landed.

And suddenly, Virgil is compelled to cut, to paste, to build. Little white boy on a sit and spin. Little white boy in a brown field. Little white boy in a fact. Little white boy who has it all, who, surely, given his tiny body, still contains the force to say, you know, you don’t want this. I don’t want you to have anything I want to have, and to steal it is for you to be the toy itself, which is after all mine, and because it is not yours, we in fact have you, Virgil, surrounded, if even by me.

Virgil, the man, could not give a care. Virgil, the man, is old. He oscillates. He cuts to salve the patch. Understands opposition, not as tension, but as drift, though Virgil, the boy, is lost when trying to recall his mother, not dead, but so alive, a kind of constant return to that which evades him, to that which is like a bolo that kills, or like a skip on a street, or like a bolero, or like a summer hat, or like that which MommaSpine has sewn together in the form of a weapon to save his imagination.

Virgil’s Dad understands baggage to be like things one should carry, like the poet DKBlaster explained how like in a video game, one picks up weapons along the way, as if by chance, as if by accrual; and if one does not, and if one, simultaneously, cannot let things go along the way, one dies. But hit, reset. What will Virgil carry along the way he realizes, shifts. He will not take a side, nor have a take. Leave Virgil Alone. Leave Virgil Alone.

The little white boy is not the little blue boy, who is the little brown boy who got that bully back. Who waited with a set of heavy keys on a chain with other keys, to move into smack his assailant’s freshly haircut head in the nape of his neck.

SALLY BOW!!!

The little blue boy had been, after all, sewn together by silence. Two fingers spit on, would clip a neck back, but keys? A revenge so quick, not caught—Virgil knew that when he leapt, and struck that older white boy, it would crack into his enemy’s soul to know he could never retaliate. The fact was that the little brown boy he would want to fuck up for fucking him up, bad, had slipped into the safety of his class.

In the memory of that furious sentry pacing, wanting to kill Virgil, Virgil thinks some about LittleDandelion, his little wish, blown into his face, and in the sun, the sun that Virgil makes his arms move around above his head, forming into the shape of another eye, elbows out, and then he arches his back, torso up into the sky, back against his chair, like he must have done, so long ago, then in relief, relief in getting his most hated back, then walking home, and leaving the next day, forever.