A Love Like Blood (12 page)

T
he stench of vinegar forces me to see I've bunched the sheet into a rope. If I continue down it could twist into a noose. Tie, slipknot, tighten, suspend, and Father's shame will end. All deaths are equal; they are all hyphenated. According to Islamic law, Junior should be smearing oil across my head in a straight line and wrapping me in white cloth. Then, drive to the mosque. There, an emerald cloth with Allah embroidered in gold should be draped over my body. Fortunately, we aren't standing on a land of limited contrast. Here, Fathers aren't as tall as gods.

The sky outside my window is black as a grave. Dressed for a funeral – but I imagine that – Marian Anderson sings to me. The possessed sound from her lips, I need to stand with, walk to, and move away from, but I can't move from the bed or the blanket. By accident, I touch my ribs through my shirt and feel a thick lump under my skin. As I press on it, the possible becomes dreaming in waking. A hot light, attached to a stand, is the only light on in my room. I wish I could fold every light and my other equipment in half and pack them in my suitcase, but none of it will fit. That is a different dream.

A thumbtack pings, dropping on the nightstand and rattles rolling down an empty frame. Stacked behind it are ten more. Dust flies up from a portfolio. Down feathers scatter on top of it. Plastic crackles as I flip it open to Father shooting a father shooting his son and grandson. I turn the page to the homeless man huddled under the sculpture in Daley Plaza. While clutching his coat, the bones in his hands stick out like spines on a prickly pear cactus. His faded conductor hat whitens his chalky beard. On the next page, there is a drag queen wearing an aluminum foil skirt. She and a blond in a matching Speedo pageant wave under pink confetti in a parade. Caught from the side, her legs endless and her body is a wire coat hanger. A bearded man dressed as a bedazzled nun holds up a poster that says, Our Sex Is Holy Too. His hands, covered in dark hair, resemble bear paws. These are my photographs Father has never seen. As my knee bumps the frame, I slide out Father's photograph from the portfolio. I frame it and hang it beside Marian. Then, I hang the homeless man, the drag queen, and other men I've photographed on the wall.

Staring at the scuff marks on my suitcase, the frame I'm holding slips, and I sink into the bed. In South Africa, I dragged it against a memorial, which left white marks on the front and side. A lapel ribbon wedged into the back wheel during a trip to London. A barcode sticker, unable to peel off, is by the top handle. A hirsute ticketing agent at the airport in Acapulco placed it there. The handwritten luggage tag, from our last trip to Somalia, is fastened to the handle. On each trip, Father and I shot on assignment and lived out of cheap hotels. Now, I will live out of this suitcase on the street.

As I slap the bed, the vinegar smell explodes. It's photo developer that splashed on my hands yesterday. Vinegar and ammonia are my kiwi and melon. All of the faces staring back at me were born under these baths with these hands, except three. They will be without a father too. Thirty minutes passes and half an hour turns to two. My suitcase is empty; however not knowing where I'll sleep tonight is crippling. I slump deeper into the bed; tears come. My door opens and groans, then closes. Where I expect to find Father, instead I find my older brother. The miniature version of him, Ricky, tiptoes in chewing candy.

Sitting down beside me, Junior asks, “Are you going to stay with Brett?”

“How do you know about Brett?”

“Ricky told me. He's seen you two hanging out.”

Ricky lowers his head, hiding his eyes.

“It's okay Ricky. I'm not mad. I don't know where I'm staying.”

“What about in the room above the studio? You don't use it for anything.”

“You're right.”

“You already have a key and I can steal his.”

“Thanks and thank you for what you did downstairs.”

“Have you seen the payphone by the studio? Anything you need, just call, and I'll help.”

“Me too,” Ricky says. “I won't tell daddy. I promise.”

“Thanks, Ricky.”

“You know I don't care about you dating Brett,” Junior says. “You're my brother, and I want to know what's going on with you.”

“Okay.”

“Okay,” Junior mimics the way I said it. “That bitch is sleep. Stay and leave in the morning. He won't know.”

“You said bitch.”

Shoving Ricky's shoulder, Junior says, “Go to bed.”

Ricky puffs out his chipmunk cheeks, leaving quietly.

“If you're bold enough to have it, you should be bold enough to use it,” Junior says and pulls Brett's knife from his pocket. “Also, if you want, I can hide your porn in my room.”

“How do you know about that?”

“Ricky told me.”

“Damn nosy kid.”

“Is Brett your boyfriend?”

“No. We're just friends.”

“Tell your boyfriend he needs my approval before he talks to you again.”

I punch my brother in the arm, and we both laugh.

Unlike any other night before, I know tonight Junior and me will stay up and talk for hours as a way to hold onto this crumbling time that we have left. It might never happen again. Friendship is a foreign language our Father failed to teach us. It forced us to translate, and we violated the language.

In the fifth grade, Junior started dating a Puerto Rican with blue eyes and a love of red lipstick. By sixth grade, he was dating a Russian girl. Seventh through tenth, he dated a different girl every month. Family dinner conversations always drifted to Junior and his women. Eventually, he would ask, “When are you getting a girlfriend?” Father waited, often with a glimmer of hope in his eyes, for my answer. Every time it was,
shut up
.

Ninth-grade year, when Junior moved in with Grandfather, I savored the silence. For the first time, I invited my friend over to our apartment. We kissed on the couch while pretending to watch television. A key crunched in the front door, but we didn't hear it. The door swung open as our mouths moved apart. Junior waddled in eating fries out of a paper bag and plopped down in between us. Instead of questioning him, I ignored him hoping he'd leave. A rapper wearing a zebra Speedo popped on the screen. A mountain of women in bikinis jiggled and gyrated around him. The music video was titled, “Pumps and a Bump.” The rapper's low-slinging bump, in the front, bounced. It swung and hit his middle stomach muscle. He had to have stuffed something in his Speedo; at least it appeared larger than possible.

A soft
oh
came out of my friend's mouth, and his hand dropped between his thighs.

Junior started singing the chorus to the rap song, and then stopped and said, “Sing, Carsten. It's okay if you change it to the boys with the pumps and a bump.”

The smack of the throw pillow, hitting his head, felt wonderful. Though the punch to my chest, from him, did not. My friend's eyes grew wider watching us fight. And we continued until Junior snatched the remote from my hand. He flipped through channels to a press conference. A man stood at a podium inside what appeared to be a crowded theater. The first words out of his mouth were gay men. Junior howled.

He rambled on saying, “Gay men rub feces all over their bodies during sex for sexual gratification. They're not normal.”

“You two play in shit?” Junior asked.

Talking to my brother, I laugh, cry, pack, remember, cry more, and then I am pushed out the house by my black-robed Father and erased as his son. The fatherless world cracks open, like a pop can.

In the summer sky, fireworks, gold, green, white, and red explode at a neighbor's house.

T
he storage room welcomes me in with the promise of fire to fat. I transform from teenager to grilled meat with the turn of the lock. Although after walking miles in the heat, even this sauna is a relief. I undress down to my underwear and one-by-one remove the contents of my suitcase: cameras, equipment, portfolio, clothing, junk food, a plastic bag, the knife, pushpins, and Marian Anderson. The weight of unpacking my life strips me down further, past blood, bone, marrow, identity. In Father's eyes, he sees birth date, hyphen, death date, above my name on a grave – and there is no coming back. As long as I sleep here, it will break me knowing drywall and plaster separate me from him. The room is empty, except for three metal shelves with a box of rat traps. Four large windows face out onto storefronts on Main Street below. Wetness spreads over my underwear as I struggle opening the windows. Paint flakes dazzle my hands like glitter. Its heaviness makes me feel lightheaded, and I have to sit.

Sunlight gleams off the metal finish on the Land camera that Father shot with during the 70's. From its classic shape, the camera collapses into a rectangle, slightly smaller than a notebook. The metal parts are hot. My arms become a tripod to sharpen the image of the room. The film sheet inside passes through a pair of rollers and the rollers spread chemicals out onto the sheet. Dyes, acid, and developers react, creating the picture. With instant photography, the magic isn't watching the image appear from whiteness. The magic is the ability to manipulate the image. As it's developing, I take a rusty nail from the windowsill. I etch lines in the top of the Polaroid to highlight the emptiness. Then, I pin it in the space between the middle windows. When I look outside, I can look inside as well. I shoot four more pictures of the room, and as I pin them up, I stick dead moths over them. Their bark-like bodies, hairier than I'd imagine, add texture to the Polaroids.

Snap, I hear behind me, followed by squash, then a double dunt. Walking toward the back, I see the blood and guts of a rodent and the mutilated rat caught in a trap. I grab a newspaper off the rack, scoop the guts and trap inside, and throw it all out of the window. A black cat darts over from across the street, pouncing on it, and drags the trap away. Clacking follows.

Through the windows, the hint of meat cooking drifts into the room. The aroma drowns out the stale air smell. My stomach gurgles, but I'm too tired to open up the world. As a family, we quit eating junk food for Lent. However, the day Lent ended, April 12
th
, I bought five bags of sugary bites. All of the plastic in the bag rustles as I grab the largest item. I unwrap a cream cheese Danish, devour it, and unwrap another, licking my fingers as I finish the second.

An hour later, as I'm eating another Danish, the entry alert device dings. I lower my head to the floor, listening. Shirtless and pantless, I become stone. Tap tap, I hear, from Father's shoes. If I move, the floor will squeak. The door bells chime. Sweat drips down my stomach as I remember I opened the windows. The door dings and the burden of being discovered sinks to my feet into the floor.
Rip
, I hear. Triplicate paper, possibly.
The mechanical whirring of a printer on its deathbed
. Unclear.
Tap tap
. Church shoes. My nose tingles. I sneeze from breathing in dust. My hand slams down, and a staple rips through my skin. With tears in my eyes, I wait, listening, for the glass door to shatter. Instead, the door to the darkroom slams close. I pull the staple out, and my entire body unloosens. Blood surfaces.

Even with drywall and plaster separating us, in my head, I can see him. He ties a black apron around his neck and slips on goggles and gloves. I am in my underwear upstairs. The safelight lamp, with a red bulb, switches on. I imagine the light in the storage room turns red. Father first feeds the film, to be printed, onto the Paterson reel. He places the reel in the handheld tank, allowing the film to soak in Kodak HC 110. He flips the tank over several times for ten seconds. For thirty seconds, he lets the film rest, and then flips it over for five seconds, stops for thirty seconds, and repeats the last two steps five times. The storage room transforms into a darkroom and in the darkroom, I am standing beside him, watching everything. He pours the developer out of the tank using a funnel. Then, he holds the film under cold water, at sixty-five degrees, for half an hour. The chemical residue, splotches, and fingerprints wash away. And, finally he hangs the film in a drying tank. The process changes the film into negatives. From the negatives, the photograph can be enlarged and developed. An Ethiopian bride, veiled and virginal, appears under water.

The first time I developed a perfect photograph in the darkroom I was ten. The experience, seeing blank paper transform, I knew would change my relationship with my father. He kissed me on both my cheeks and my forehead. At ten, it was okay for him to kiss me. At eleven, it wasn't anymore. At that age, he asked me, who my girlfriend was at school? I invented a girl's name that sounded like the human version of a character from my favorite cartoon. Luckily, Father wasn't well versed in the land of motionless childhood.

The urge to urinate comes, and I squeeze the muscle in my anus to stop it.

“Double D's,” I say to myself.

Downstairs, Father whispers,
double D's
, to himself.

During that same time when I was younger, he demanded I yell that out along with four P's, for kitty-cat, to help me process prints. Much later, I learned kitty-cat wasn't in reference to the furry-legged animal that purrs. The double D's are: start developing and stop developing. The four P's immediately follow the double D's: fix the print, wash the print, dry the print, and make it. At any step, film or a print can be destroyed and each time I destroyed work, we had a talk-talk.
Are you listening
, he would repeat. If I didn't nod like an excited puppy, he would hit me. Then, I had to demonstrate what I learned without failure. Failure meant bruises.

In the storage room, my foot kicks over a gallon jug, repurposed into a urinal. The cap prevents the urine from spilling. I press my ear to the floor, listening out for dropped sounds and running to prepare myself. Minutes go by and nothing. Father continues working. I reach for the jug and set it closer to my face. The yolk-colored liquid resembles Stop Bath. Photographers use Stop Bath to stop the development of film or paper by either washing off developing chemical or neutralizing it. The chemical bath is dark yellow. In the darkroom, we use emptied milk jugs for Stop Bath, Fixer, and Hypo Clear.

My legs shake as I glance at the yellow. I twist off the jug cap in a hurry, almost spilling the liquid on my feet. Hopefully, Father cannot hear the splash of urine against plastic.

Finished, I drop the container close to the wrappers. Twenty-five cents printed in red ink stands out on the packaging. I fan the wrappers around a store receipt, with the nutrition labels showing. Beads of sweat from my forehead drip as I shoot the summer wreath of waste. The word sugar is in bold on each wrapper. My eyes slide down the labels to the letter T, next to an A, followed by N and K. Somehow while in grammar school, I learned pouring sugar into a gas tank could ruin a car engine. The idea was that the heat would melt the sugar, sending granules into every nook. Four years ago, Junior and I poured sugar into our Father's previous car, in retaliation for beating us for playing with a neighbor's dog. After three weeks of disappointment, Junior forced me to ask my science teacher about the rumor.

“Sugar does not dissolve in gasoline,” he said. “What do you do if you want to have an effect? Put water in the tank.”

Pouring several cups of water into a car causes the fuel pump to fill the fuel lines with water instead of gas.

“The car would still function, but not as well,” he said.

After filling Father's car with water, Junior and I observed: the car shook when idling and jerked when accelerating. He had to push the pedal to the floor to accelerate. When he pressed on the brake, the pads screeched. Watching it all happen was beautiful, but I felt guilty. I promised myself I wouldn't allow Junior to talk me into anything unsafe again.

Before I convince myself not to, I ease into my wet shirt and pants. I tiptoe down the steps, listening for the studio door to open. I hurry to Father's car parked in front and with a smile on my face I pour piss from the container into the tank. Looking around, I see the rat's head on the sidewalk.