Matthew Aquilone
In the autumn of 1980, right after college, I move in with my brother Vinny on West Twenty-First Street near Eighth Avenue in Chelsea. It’s a tiny two-bedroom apartment, cramped, old and a little crooked. If I stand arms akimbo in the narrow hallway that runs down the middle of the apartment and puff out my chest, my elbows touch the walls on either side. My room has a view only of a pigeon-fouled airshaft. We spend months without a stick of furniture because Vinny—a fastidious, upwardly mobile window dresser slash decorator—has standards to uphold and is unable to find anything acceptable to his taste except a large panel of white satin Austrian drapes that covers the fireplace and exposed brick wall he finds completely banal. He makes me help him hang the drapes, working late into the night, drilling and sinking dozens of anchors and hooks into the soft plaster ceiling. I’ve just gotten a writing degree. I’m not good with power tools.
The effect in the empty room, I have to admit, is transporting, almost the landscape of a surrealistic dream, but also like living in the display window of a 1950’s hat shop. To the décor I contribute only my awful loft bed with its built-in desk underneath, something Vinny rightly finds contemptible. My maelstrom of dirty clothing and books leaks into the hall. Vinny pushes it back in and keeps the door to my room shut. The brick we find on the floor in front of the bathroom sink we soon figure out is for the previous tenant to stand on so she can see the mirror.
Vinny is HIV positive but hasn’t become sick. He is ambitious and talented and hardworking. Sometimes we watch tv together in his bed, but he always falls asleep after a few minutes. I envy him his quick departures from consciousness. Sleeping is a kind of reward in a life increasingly anxious. Every few months or so, our other brother Michael, who has full blown AIDS, winds up back in the hospital. Pneumonia, meningitis, Kaposi’s sarcoma, thrush, biopsies, spinal taps, transfusions, chemo which torments him with elusive itching and burning, to say nothing of the insistent restlessness and nausea. I wonder if being asleep isn’t the only real relief for the physical and emotional tolls that we all experience. Despite the anxieties, I sleep deeply, and I feed off dreams like a hungry vampire.
I work at a quiet little art gallery over on Spring Street. Brent deals mostly in photography. The flat files are filled with beautifully made prints by the world’s best photographers. I touch so many things that were made with serious intent. The AIDS crisis, especially with all its built-in controversy, is right there on everybody’s mind. Photography seems uniquely equipped to process and provoke the moment. Andres Serrano makes a beautiful image of a crucifix submerged in urine; it evokes Titian and perhaps even Caravaggio. Robert Mapplethorpe photographs anatomically correct expressions of his BDSM fascinations in the same manner as his exquisite orchids and lilies. It touches a live wire, and the world explodes into a “culture war.” Mostly, though, I sit alone all day, face to face with a snazzy new invention called a Macintosh computer. I answer the phone. I update the rolodex in my illegible handwriting. I try to be a writer. I’m a secret nervous wreck most of the time. There’s danger lurking everywhere. An air conditioner drips on me from three stories above and for hours I fret over what was in the water. On later examination, a yogurt I bought with complete confidence and ease bears marks I am unable to rule out as punctures, proof of some madman with a cyanide or LSD-filled syringe. I find myself opening doors with my elbow or a pocketed hand and lifting toilet seats with a foot, flushing the same way afterwards. All those uncertain window latches need checking and re-checking a dozen times before I can leave the house.
“Obsessive compulsive disorder often goes in hand with panic attacks, anxiety and depression, especially with young men,” my new therapist, Murray, tells me. The OCD was a recent development. The panic attacks started in college. When they got to be too much, I’d decided to see a psychiatrist at the counseling center. His prescription pad was out before I even sat down. We had a short, entirely utilitarian, almost brusque exchange. Back in my room in the student apartment I shared with three friends, I peeled the label from the bottle of Xanax, the first prescription I ever filled for myself, and took my first pill. Soon, I fell asleep with the label still stuck to my hand. It was relief but it was just the picture of relief. It was rest but it was not rest.
I have been visiting Murray every Thursday afternoon since school ended. He has a tiny office on Central Park West, the closet-sized waiting room filled with expressionistic prints, back issues of the New Yorker, and a white noise machine hissing behind a dinky ficus. Murray prescribes Prozac. It’s all the rage at the time. So far as I can tell, the pills do absolutely nothing. Like my panic attacks, the OCD doesn’t operate according to any stimuli or trigger. It’s a disease of doubt, and oddly inconsistent at that. Sometimes things matter, sometimes they don’t. No matter how many times I watch myself lock the front door, I just can’t be sure. Except of course when I can, which only makes it all the more maddening, except of course when it doesn’t. Somehow that certainty eludes me, like a scratched vinyl record endlessly skipping back over the same phrase, unable to go forward despite the beat and melody, all ready to go. Something like distraction slips in between my thoughts, a filter between obvious reality and the shaky VHS footage of terror that runs in the background. I wind up flickering in a space in between. I come into and out of being as different and incomplete selves. None resemble who I once was. Worry attaches to me and my mind has a mind of its own. I bargain with it all the time, make tiny offerings to not feel like I’m going crazy again, that I’m not helplessly lost forever. And sometimes, of course, it is impossible to sleep. I often spend much of the darkest part of the night taking long walks around Manhattan, sometimes to the West Side Highway where, across the river, New Jersey sits shrouded in blue darkness, pinpricked along its hem by headlights, all going somewhere very fast. That’s where I imagine myself open mouthed, singing to the sky.
**
“Jersey,” Michael says, waking up, catching me gazing similarly out the hospital window one night when I visit. He was sleeping when I arrived, sucking his thumb like when he was a boy. I watched him for a while, the way I watched Vinny back at our apartment, before turning to the window. I’ve put together a mental map of downtown from Michael’s many different hospital windows, proud of how much I can recognize, of how many of its streets I have walked and the understandings that came to me there…and there…and there. In that little park in Soho by the pizza place, where locals played handball, I sat and watched the wind on my lunch hour. A plastic bag stuck in the trees, then free, then stuck again. “It only looks good because it’s getting dark.” Then Michael says, “You don’t have to hang around.”
But I do. In fact, the AIDS ward is kind of a second home. I know on which floor you can find radiology, oncology, the pharmacy, and the chapel. I know where to get ice and extra linens and where there’s a fridge to keep yogurt, fruit salad, sushi and other delicacies from the deli downstairs. I know which elevators are the fastest. I recognize all the security guards and they me. In the hospital world you don’t go anywhere without a big plastic visitor pass. Color is everything. Maternity is pink, Cancer is green, and on the Coleman Wing’s 12th floor AIDS ward, robin’s egg blue is the new black.
The hospital is also a respite, as close to the terror as it is. Watching Michael sleep for those few moments is a balm. The uncanny comforts of the hospital are welcome relief—restful and restorative for me, too. Outside, AIDS is controversial and provocative. In the hospital it is business as usual, and the business is healing people. The AIDS ward is a place of overwhelming love and goodness. It makes so much sense it seems to set even time itself right. The world is turning. The horizon outside the window is on fire, bright orange and red.
Michael rubs his head with the agonies of chemotherapy.
“You just can’t get at it,” he says, trying to explain but slowly realizing that I will never understand. He is seeing things I can’t, and I am helpless to help. I stick around until he falls back asleep again, then I take the elevator I know well, back down to the familiar streets of the Village and I walk.
Later, back at the apartment, when I have tired myself out and Vinny’s not home, I drop my coat in the narrow hallway and fall to my knees and from there, down onto my side where I curl up in a ball and cry. It comes out of nowhere, though that’s ridiculous to say. I cry like I haven’t in years. My chest hurts. My face is raw and runny. When I try to stop, I can’t, which is terrifying.
“Michael,” I say. “Michael.” Sobbing his name over and over like a mantra. I don’t know how long it lasts. I’m as surprised by the number of tears I have inside as I am by the way they came on unannounced. How I am powerless over them. How involuntary my sadness is. How deep and maybe endless. It feels like the very opposite of a dream.
“Depression,” Murray tells me, “comes from unexpressed emotion.”
I will fall asleep just like that. But for the moment I am burst open, indiscreet, as wide mouthed and inexhaustible as the garden hoses we once left whipping on the ruined lawn.
—
Matthew Aquilone’s work has been seen in The Bellingham Review, The Rumpus, Open Doors Review, Tendon (Johns Hopkins), The New York Daily News, The Nervous Breakdown, Christopher Street, Hyperallergic, Theater for the New City, the Ensemble Studio Theater and elsewhere. He’s had fellowships and residencies at the Ucross Foundation, the Norman Mailer Center, the Edward Albee Foundation, the Woodstock Guild/Byrdcliffe Colony. He was finalist for the Tin House Winter Residency, and longlisted for the Disquiet Prize, and was a member of Brooklyn Writers Space. He is a graduate of Vassar College and the NYU Masters Program in Creative Writing. He lives in Brooklyn, where he was born and raised.