Please stop trying to le.., p.13
Please Stop Trying to Leave Me, page 13
As the sun broke through the crisp, thin air, we walked to his apartment: a studio on Twelfth Street whose entire square footage was covered with a purple oriental rug. Although his apartment was tiny, there was a large window on one of the walls. The enormity of the window compared to that little apartment was blinding. When my eyes finally adjusted, I looked around the room and found myself surrounded by drawings. No white walls. Only layers and layers of paper and pencil.
Slowly, I walked along the border of the apartment, looking from top to bottom, side to side. Each piece of paper was held up by either Scotch tape or silver thumbtacks. As the morning sun came in through his window, it illuminated the walls with a gliding contrast of light and shadow, guiding me picture to picture, story to story, like a flashlight giving me a tour inside this stranger’s mind. There, in the pencil-scratched paper, were depictions of chaotic cityscapes, of trees that bore fruit that I couldn’t decipher. Near the full-size bed, of a boy with blood dripping down his freckled forehead and a girl with a staff and a book in her hands. And then there was my all-time favorite: an anatomical heart that was intricately connected to a set of scattered shell-shocked faces. While I looked at his drawings, the infinite man stood quietly, leaning against the sink, staring at the rug. I realized then that he was letting me into a place where he had let no other.
* * *
In the earliest hours of that morning, a tiny white square sat in his mouth: a chemical-coated piece of paper. He said those squares are what had told him the truth about God.
God?
Mm-hmm.
So naturally I asked him for one. We sat side by side at his window, and despite not having slept, we were wide-awake with eager eyes. From behind the glass, we watched people speed-walking over the gum-stricken sidewalk to wherever they had so urgently to go. That’s when I returned his question:
So what’s your story?
With chemicals soaking into his bloodstream, he began by telling me what it was like to grow up Black in Texas, how he learned how to shoot a gun when he was ten, how it was a good thing that guns were legal for people like him where he lived. He spoke of his father, how he rode around that Texan lake on his bike every day to disintegrate the anger that seemed to appear in his hands; and of his teacher mother and how she was now alone in the house with her heavy-handed husband. Then he told me how he had spent his entire childhood singing onstage in his Christian megachurch, how churchgoers told him that his voice was a gift from God; how he believed this and came to New York to spread the word of Christ through his music. Then he told me about how one night, he put a white square on his tongue, and he realized God wasn’t what they said God was. He stopped singing, dropped out of school, and was living off his savings from a Christian album he made when he was nine. Then he spoke of his anger with the world outside. He said that this place hurt so many people; that everyone was either hungry, getting killed, or going crazy. He was angry, but he said that he had a way to fix the pain. The white squares had told him how to. That’s when he talked about the impossible possibilities for the world: systems falling and communities rising; large moneyless, sustainable villages; places where one lived by caring for the land in the day and making art in the evenings.
As the late-morning sun blinded me through the glass window, I said:
I’m not sure that would ever happen, but I’d like to live in that world.
The infinite man smiled. I would learn later that he wasn’t a boy who smiled like that very often. Still showing his teeth, he pulled up his sleeve to reveal the inside of his wrist. There, a tattoo was fresh and flaking. An infinity symbol outlined in bold black ink.
What does that mean?
He answered:
I believe there are an infinite number of worlds to be created. Not by God but by us. The inhabitants of each world are the same as those here, like me or you, but not exactly the same: sometimes they are more beautiful and sometimes less. What I mean to say is that in some worlds, we are a fragment of ourselves, and in other worlds, more than ourselves.
His voice shook, and I knew he had never said these words out loud before or perhaps he had but no one had listened:
Sometimes, we live in these worlds unwillingly. Sometimes even unknowingly. But once you realize the truth, you can create your own world.
Oh.
And I always knew I would start a new world with a girl who loved philosophy. I had a dream about it, a lucid dream.
But do you actually think it’s possible to create a new world? Like it sounds kind of crazy. Right?
At that, he looked away from my eyes as if he remembered something and in this memory became scared of me. He stared at the gold necklace around my neck and said very seriously:
Do you?
My stomach dropped. I could remember him asking me this before. I could remember how, as he asked it, my fingers were pulling at the hair tie around my wrist. Life, for a moment, felt like a memory. The memory continued, unraveling itself into reality, until my hand moved to brush the hair from my eyes, and then I was back in the newness of existence. Was it the drugs? Or was this the beginning of creation?
Before I could answer, the infinite man said:
I think love is the key to making a new world.
Love. I thought of door frames, of footsteps, of being undressed in the kitchen, of china shaking in the curios, of the TV moaning downstairs, of the way, despite all of these things, we always had to say I love you to one another. I looked around the the studio apartment and noticed there was no TV. The infinite man could see the confusion on my face, so he tried:
I’m talking about love like in the Bible. Real love. First John 4:16: “God is love, and all who live in love live in God, and God lives in them.” Funny enough that’s my dad’s favorite passage. Fucking hypocrite.
That’s when it dawned on me:
Wait, you said acid told you the truth about God. What is it?
God isn’t here anymore. He left us. But if we create a world like the one He intended for us: one without money, greed, dictators, and wars; one where everyone is safe and no one gets hurt. If we create a world like that, then maybe God will come back.
On the street below the windowsill, I saw a mother and daughter holding hands and skipping on the sidewalk. I watched them as I said:
I think God left too. All men do. One way or another.
The infinite man’s face got very serious:
What if I promised to never leave?
I stared into his eyes, taking in the contrast between the white of his eyeballs and the dark brown of his skin. I felt my throat swallow the white square as I said:
Then I’d promise the same.
In the world we’ll create, no one leaves. No one walks away. No matter how hard it gets.
Is it really that easy?
For sure.
I smiled. I smiled because I didn’t feel so crazy when I was with him. I tilted my head sideways and asked:
What do you want our world to be like?
Well, I want to make a garden. For us. For everyone out there. It will be covered in flowers and greenery, and there’ll be plenty of room for us to run around like kids. There’ll be singing birds and hundreds of dragonflies. And fruit trees. Fruit trees that border the garden. And when we’re hungry, we’ll pick the fruits from the trees and eat them together in the grass. And at night, we’ll make art and speak philosophy.
Like Eden?
He shook his head:
No. Like this. Right now. Look.
My eyes scanned the studio apartment, and I began to see a garden growing before me. There were ferns dripping from the corners of the room. A lake with fresh water in the sink. Patches of grass forming in the pattern of the rug. I could smell the soil. I could hear insect wings batting against the air. And his drawings had become a fence, a fortress of sorts, keeping the garden inside safe. As I saw this world form before my very eyes, I laughed, and he laughed, and we didn’t stop laughing for a long time.
We spent that morning rolling in the grass and dancing amongst the insects. It was noon when, in the flowering of our garden, he returned from his closet, a cave in the garden, with a Polaroid camera. With his arm outstretched, he faced the camera toward us. I looked then not at the camera but at him, and he at me. Held sacredly in that room, in that garden, there was nothing in the outside world that could peel our eyes away from one another, not even the flash of his camera. He set the developing photo down on the bed of grass by the dandelions, and he moved toward me. My eyes closed and my vision catapulted into fractals. When our lips met for the first time, all I could feel was the tiny white square disintegrating in my stomach. Then I heard his voice:
Dear philosopher, will you transcribe our new theory here?
He handed me the Polaroid photo and motioned to the back of it.
I can’t write theories yet. I’m supposed to just read books by other people. For like years.
We make the rules here.
I smiled, flowers blooming from my teeth. And so, that morning, in our growing garden, the birds sat perched amongst the furniture, and I wrote my first theory.
* * *
After that night and morning, I quickly gathered my things from my dorm room and moved in with him. In his apartment, we grew our own world together, and in our growing of place, we forgot about all responsibilities and duties to daily life. I spent my days drinking from a plastic cup and lying on the futon with my head in his lap, reading out loud the works of the philosophers I once so fervently loved. He listened to me page after page, never taking his eyes away from my face. Weeks into reading, he made me put the books away and think for myself. As he sat on the floor with a pencil in his hands and a square on his tongue, I would ask him questions upon questions until I could barely think anymore.
Why would Mary let them do that to Jesus? Why didn’t she stop it? How could a mother allow people to hurt her own child?
When I finally arrived at a theory that could make sense in our world, he would tell me to write down the new theory on the back of the drawing he had just finished. Then we would hang our latest theory and drawing amongst the other pieces of paper on the walls. This is what we would do every day while most people our age were at parties, getting internships, or having sex. Throughout all our time together, I never had sex with the infinite man. He and I weren’t interested in that. We only cared about each other’s minds, and the philosophy that could come from them.
* * *
After weeks of philosophizing and drawing, emails from my professors suddenly flooded my inbox, notifying me of my absence and my ever-dwindling grade point average. My parents, hearing of my grades, cut me off from my trust and his savings were dwindling. Phone calls and text messages from our parents multiplied in bold lettering on our phones. When I eventually returned my mother’s calls, she screamed at me from some pool in Greece, and when he FaceTimed his own mother, she had a black eye.
Because of all this, we were forced to leave our world every few days for life’s apparent necessities: things like food, school, toilet paper, and jobs. Quickly, the realization settled within us that it was impossible to live only with theories and paper, to live solely within those four walls. We walked amongst the people of New York and listened to them speak loudly about the politicians running for president, the new skyrise construction downtown, and the bombings happening in other countries. That’s when we learned of the recent shootings that were happening in our own country, men with skin like the infinite man being murdered for wearing hoodies or going to the bodega. When I asked him if he wanted to protest with the group in Union Square, he said:
A protest is just like prayer, and we both know there’s no one up there listening right now. No one out there protecting us. We’re better off in the garden trying to get God back.
At first our optimistic days heavily outweighed our saddest, but with every month that passed, with every Black man or boy who was shot by the police or George Zimmerman, the worse it got. As the pessimism in the garden became more frequent, instead of sitting on the futon, speaking in existentialism, we lay there and kept asking each other what was wrong. Trying to remind myself of a time when life was enchanted, I would walk back and forth along the walls with a bottle in my hand, flipping over his sketches, looking for a theory that I could use. It was rare that I found anything except my black-ink words that now, on the page and in my brain, dissolved into an infant’s gibberish: into an attempt to say something but mean nothing.
One Friday evening, there were hundreds of purple flowers covering the floor. An hour before, they had burst open the floorboards and grown between the weaves of the rug. A chipmunk scurried up the walls, the lake whispered, and the tree beside it hummed. I went into the trunk of the tree and placed my lips around a stream of liquid that burned my esophagus. It was cold next to the tree and suddenly it felt as if I had been there forever. How long was it? When had it kicked in? I turned to face the fence of the garden and saw a gray falcon floating toward and away from me.
I hear something.
A voice smooth like clay. My head turned toward the noise, and I saw the infinite man in the middle of the purple flowers. They had grown even taller than I remembered. How beautiful he looked there amongst them. He adjusted his legs, and I swore I saw a snake rustle near his feet and disappear into the sea of stems.
Is it God?
I moved away from the falcon, catching a glimpse of a faucet. A faucet? I walked toward the infinite man. He was cutting a long strip of LSD-coated paper that he kept wrapped in tinfoil. Another one? I sat beside him in the soil and rubbed the purple flowers between my fingertips. I had forgotten his question. I had forgotten that he’d asked anything at all. The flowers were so soft, so purple.
Do you hear that?
Like clay, like the flowers between my hands, now in my ears. An insect clicked. There was a scream outside beyond the fence. I turned to him. And that’s when I saw a knife in his hand. I suddenly snapped back into reality: a studio apartment, a purple rug, a boy.
What are you doing?
I’m protecting you.
That night when the acid had loosened its grip, I sat in front of the window exhausted. The infinite man excitedly showed me what he had drawn, but they were just pages and pages of dark frantic lines that spilled over the edges of the page, leaving what looked like claw marks on the coffee table.
Do you see it?
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I thought the trip and drugs were getting to him. When he finally went to bed, I stayed awake. I kept thinking of him with the knife in his hand. Trying to erase the memory, I threw the new drawing in the trash. I grabbed my philosophy notebook and began to write. As the hours passed, my hand kept moving, and words poured out of me. The words came so fast I didn’t know if I would ever stop writing, and my hands didn’t even feel like my own as they scribbled across the page. I watched my body as a witness. I watched it write and write and write while I thought about bald planets spinning and spinning and spinning. When the words finally slowed, I laid my head on the futon and fell asleep. By the time morning came, I had forgotten all about the writing in my notebook.
* * *
Months later, it was summer, and the infinite man and I had turned into ever-emptying shells of ourselves, and our garden was overrun by fear. The optimism we had shared disintegrated into an overwhelming sadness, a misery rooted in our inability to fix the world and the struggle to even create our own. During every trip that summer, while he looked for God, I saw bullet wounds across his body like freckles. Blood pouring out of him and drenching the soil. I would pace around the apartment, muttering anxiously to myself. Sometimes I heard myself say:
I was supposed to save you. I was supposed to save you.
One time, I was hissing:
This is the devil’s acid. This is the devil’s acid.
When he heard me say this, he came over and slapped me. He told me I was scaring God away.
And then, just after July Fourth, it happened. A police officer shot and killed a Black child, twelve years old, who was simply playing on a playground. For six days, no matter how much sunlight pierced us through the studio window, neither of us could get out of bed. I couldn’t read, he couldn’t draw, and we couldn’t even look at each other. We just lay there in bed with bodies that didn’t work, and we waited for something to happen or for someone to speak. But for hours, there were only the sounds of sirens outside and the bad thoughts between our ears.
On the seventh day, I had a dream I was alone on the streets of Manhattan, wandering, walking aimlessly. I heard police sirens and a gunshot. Suddenly I realized the infinite man wasn’t there. I began walking around the East Village calling out for him, shouting his name, screaming, but the more I called for him the more the boundaries of the dream world shook and began to collapse around me.
When I woke an eternity later, dripping with sweat, I opened my eyes to see the infinite man lying there next to me. I hadn’t lost him. That world wasn’t real. It was just a dream. My body relaxed into the bed. My breathing slowed. He was alive. Even if God had left, how could I be so sad when the infinite man was still here? With that, I woke into the seventh day of sadness with new purpose, and I began to clean the mess we had made.
