Talk - 1. Story

talk

corvus

Tomasz split his days caring for his mother, who was dying, and cruising for sex.

Caring for his dying mom was the easy part. She refused to go to the hospital, plus they didn't have the money for it. Now that she hadn't gone to work since last September—teaching grade three kids, who every morning politely called her “Mrs. Biddle,” even though she was divorced—and since Tomasz was a good-for-nothing, they had only the money Tomasz's dad sent them. It was a small abidance. “I'm fucking dying, do you hear?” Tomasz's mom had shouted in the phone back in December, when she could still shout. “Cancer. Yes, terminal. Why the fuck do you care where it is? You don't even care if we starve, you bastard!” There might have been more to the conversation after that, but Tomasz hadn't stayed to find out. He'd left the house and gone to the park, to have a walk and not to have sex. The sex had started in February.

The money from Tomasz's father wasn't much either, but it was reliable. There was a thousand towards the rent of the flat, which Tomasz dutifully forwarded to the landlord on the first of every month. That left about seven hundred fifty for the food and pain meds. After having to go hungry the last few days of December, Tomasz had learned to budget things more carefully and keep a small stash on reserve. It would have been nice, he thought, to have acquired these skills as part of his college education. College had taught him how to seek cheap food, how to cook passable meals, etc.; write passable papers on the night before they were due, etc. In December he'd even scraped together enough willpower to look a recipe for dumplings and make them for his mother and himself. Of course— “I didn't feed you and bring you up so you could make dumplings!” his mother said after coming out of the bathroom. (She went there a lot, because the cancer affected her digestion; she even shat blood on some days.) “Are you applying for jobs?”

“Yes.”

“I don't believe you are. Either that, or you're not trying. Just like your father.” Then she'd gone on about his father for some time, while Tomasz finished his plate of dumplings. “…run off with some red-headed slut. Did you hear me?”

“Yes,” Tomasz said and went to his room. His computer was on, set to the blank Word document in which he'd meant to start his novel. He had been meaning to start his novel for the last few weeks. It would be easy: he had all the prerequisites: a torn family, a verbally abusive mother, a wayward sexuality, etc. He stared at the screen. It was a very nice thing you did for the last Christmas I'll be alive to have with you, thank you, he typed. I love you, my Tomek, & forgive you.

“Goddamn fuck it,” he had snarled and slapped off his laptop without exiting (or saving). Then he'd gone for another long walk in the park, looking dazedly at the Californian dusk. A bit of purple bled over the hills and into the sky.

That part was taking care of his mother.

Starting Feburary, Tomasz set aside about twenty dollars each month for condoms and lube. Condoms, the hard fact went, were expensive, as was lube. Things had been easier at college, where the “Student Life Services” supplied condoms in a little box in the basement. But buying some Trojans alongside the monthly codeine and morphine—with his father's money—was not much more strenuous.

Sometimes his mother lapsed into a kind of benign mood. That manifested itself with her directing Tomasz how to put away the groceries: “Be careful with the eggs! What's that you have there?”

“Nothing,” Tomasz said and went into his room with his condoms and lube. He had to duck his head: ever since midway through high school, which was six years ago, the dangling light in the dining room had presented a challenge.

In May, nine months after he was supposed to have started his grand American novel, Tomasz started writing. He began a sex diary. The entries didn't arrive in chronological order: his mother had just nodded off on the couch, which had become her permanent home, after an incoherent rant about his father. (The morphine caused her to mix events, and commit spoonerisms: “run off with some red-sledded hut.”) That had reminded him of—

ANTON. 35; more like 45. Balding, short. Wears glasses and is fairly unattractive. Good kisser & nearly left a hickey, against requests not to, on my left shoulder. Took my coat when I walked into his flat; otherwise very rude. Asked me where I lived, whom I lived with; told him the truth. “I live with my mom.” “Really? Do you like that—mama's boy, are you?” “Not really—” Then he said: “She shouldn't coop you up in there like that.” “No,” I said in agreement, although I was stiff afterwards in his arms: I realized later that I wanted to argue the point with him, but it was too late for that. Fucked; came twice. Ass and mouth. End of March.

“Tomek?” his mother called from the couch.

Tomasz opened the door and went out. His desk was twenty feet at most from the couch, separated by only a door, but the door meant everything. When he was younger it meant that he could pretend they (his parents) weren't fighting. “What?”

“Could you get me some water?”

He fetched her a glass and she drank it in silence. Then he washed it, set it on the rack against the sun. In nine months he hadn't asked his mother once how she felt. They were pretending that they were not enacting the roles: the mother dying, the son watching her do it.

Tomasz came back with towels. “Here,” he said, and padded them under his mother. The old towels, which had been there for the last six hours, smelled musty, metallic. Like flesh that was decaying.

JOHN? 20ish, though may be older. Asian, looked like he did martial arts. Had a hot, smooth body with a defined chest; met on craigslist. Went to his place 2ish, which was a messy flat he shared with a roommate. Roommate gone. We kissed first, which was a bit awkward because I had the feeling he wasn't that into it, but then I got his pants off & he was on the moon. Lasted about 5 minutes, liked attention to balls. Selfishly did not reciprocate—clearly not into me as I am to him. Stayed a bit longer, had the distinct feeling that he wanted me to go, & resisted. Then, a change of heart, & he asked if I had any condoms. Said I did. Inquired as to whether I “wanted to ride [his] cock.” Proceeded to do the honors of lubing, & went up and down for another lunar landing. Knowing he was selfish, proceeded to jack off before the 5 minute mark; John? came shortly after. Despite selfishness & self-centered-ness, still a very hot fuck. Had a mole on his upper left back, pointed it out to him. Did not seem interested in the fact. His penis unusual in having hair halfway up shaft. Nice & thick, though. Color: a sort of warm gray, perhaps like elephant skin flushed with blood. John?: possibly an econ major. Had bad breath, vaguely chocolatey. Asked (to my surprise) if I would like to spend night with him, but declined. Did not cite reason. Have not contacted since. Late February.

Tomasz stopped and looked at the entries and felt disgust well through him. Was this what four years of education towards an English major amounted to? And who was he writing this for? He felt a chill clench the back of his neck. Not his mother, he thought.

Nine months ago, when his mother had first told him, unceremoniously over the phone, that she was very sick with cancer—well, it had taken him some time before his mind had plodded to the inevitable: sick enough to die. Then, the first thing he had thought— He couldn't remember what he thought. But he could remember what he thought as he lay awake that night: now it would be easier than ever to let her slip into death without ever knowing that her son, her Tomek (his father never called him Tomek) was a faggot.

He had considered the moral complications of coming out—or not—in years prior. For he, Tomasz, despite having graduated and still living with his mother on his father's pittance, was a highly moral and critical person. It didn't matter, he told himself, reasoned, that he was living under his mother's roof, etc. And it didn't matter that he looked at the noonday sun and saw that the sky was a hard bright shell; or that he looked at the evening—those shifting, ambiguous colors from orange suspended through deeper and deeper violet—and saw a hollow. It didn't matter to keep silent; how was anyone connected to anyone else in a truly profound, non-arbitrary way? She was his mother, therefore she was a woman who had birthed him. And he was her son, a young adult with his own independence and life, and she was a human and he was a human, and they were in a panel of time that existed as nebulously as human conceptions of the past or future.

PAVEL, 40s. Cock-size: a baby's wrist. Flat: dingy, a mattress surrounded by un-thrown-away T.V. dinners, a definite smell of mold. Pot-bellied & mean. Mashed my face into a pillow of uncertain pedigree. Stuffed a few fingers down my throat. Had hair down his ass, which, typically, looked like an alien plug. A crater. Wrinkly. Puffed & gray, like his body. Stank. Came once. Said nothing & said nothing. We hardly looked at the other, & which is as it should be. Yesterday—May 30.

Tomasz saved the document, and decided to continue chronicling his debauchery later. That was the sex part: it wasn't so hard either.

His mother died. It happened barely past mid-June. Tomasz wondered if, in the end, she had bled to death. He'd gone out for some groceries, and when he came back, she was lying in an oozing puddle, which was seeping deep into the sofa. It smelled of iron and urea. She had died while he was gone.

The hospital was notified, the forms signed. Then Tomasz called his father, which he had not done in years. It reached a voicemail that belonged to a woman (the redheaded slut, Tomasz supposed), and so Tomasz left a polite, to-the-point message. “Hi Greg—” he'd stopped using “father” after his mother had shrieked at him hysterically, years ago, that it meant disloyalty to her “—this is Tomasz. I'm calling to let you know that Zosia passed away today. I thought that you should know. Also, the funeral is this Saturday at two at St. Paul's.” Tomasz hung up. A few hours later, when it was late afternoon and the sunlight turned the bloodstain on the couch a bright vermilion, he got a return call from his dad; but Tomasz didn't pick up. He didn't feel like talking to anyone. It would probably be an excuse to miss the funeral.

He went out. It was a typical Californian evening: cool without being cold, dry, near completely clear, smelling of grass, pines, a tinge of exhaust. The park was empty, but it would be unusual to find someone before eleven pm. A few couples pushing baby strollers went by. He said “hi.” Up around a slightly wooded hill, he could see—a rustling? Through the branches he could make out the silhouette of a man, or woman, naked.

He turned around and headed home. Suddenly he felt as though the world were incredibly heavy on him, whereas, just a minute before, he'd felt numb. Now he was—they all were—at the bottom of the sea, walking in darkness and immeasurable pressure. He turned: it was his imagination…

The room still smelled of his mother's blood. Tomasz shut the front door. As he walked past the couch where she had died, he felt his mother's presence immensely. She might walk out of the kitchen—not as she did when he came back last year, when she was already tired, but when she was still young, beautiful, and loved him (or told him so frequently), and made him dumplings for Christmas, New Years.

Tomasz went to his room but he stopped at the door. No. “Not yet,” he said aloud. His voice was cracking. He hadn't known that this had been growing inside him. “Not yet, whoever you are, if you're listening to me.”

He turned and looked out the window. California, or what looked like California, returned the gaze with stained mountains, low shrubs, dry grass, the occasional car, a human. “I could've talked to you while you still were around, but it's too late now. Maybe it's better this way, I guess, because then it won't get confused. This is Tomek, Mama, I'm Tomek. I'm alive, that's all I am, that's all we were. I can't help what we are. When I saw you bleed in the bathroom back in December, when I saw it coming out of your private parts, driblets, like you were having a period, like your meat or flesh, what was inside you, was dissolving—that's when I realized, when it made me realize. We could've been more if we'd talked to one another but we never did because we never could. It doesn't mean that neither one of us could open our mouths to force out some word or other; anyone could do that. We couldn't listen—or we didn't know the right words. But you're dead now. You're out of this world. You'll know everything I couldn't tell you. It might start to make sense, finally. You'll know what I've meant—and I am saying it now, I'm Tomek, I'm your Tomek—”

painting © A. Dale Nally,
no copyright infringement intended

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