Uncanny Magazine - JanFeb2017 Read online

For Cyd it was sexual, that long weekend welded at the hip. I see that now. For me it was nostalgic. Cyd’s energy, his passion, his vulnerability all took me back to the boy I’d been when I was his age. Not so long before, chronologically, but seeing Cyd giggle I realized I’d aged out of all proportion to the years.

  Sunday night, after an endless overcrowded dinner and a whole lot of loud raucous arguments among twenty–odd people—some silly Cyd thing I couldn’t follow from my end of the table, about The Great Gatsby being science fiction, I think, or a warning from the future?—we were returning to our hotel rooms and he got off the elevator and said good night and then turned around as the doors were closing and stuck his leg in.

  “I want to come up to your room,” he said. The doors slid open. His eyes were on mine. Cyd had beautiful eyes.

  “I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” I said.

  “I’m not drunk,” he said. “You won’t be taking advantage of me. If anything it’ll be the other—”

  “No, Cyd, I’m sorry.”

  “Is it because I’m trans?” he asked.

  “What?” I said, and “No!” I’d known he was trans, and filed the information away as irrelevant—or had I? Who knew what my brain got up to, left unattended.

  “Lots of gay guys get grossed out by vaginas.”

  “What? No. Sorry, Cyd, you’re adorable, but I need a friend in my life more than I need a fuck buddy.”

  It was a line I’d used before, but Cyd was too young to spot that. His face crumpled for a split second, and then he smiled. “I need a friend too.”

  He kissed me, and we hugged, and he smelled so good, and then he was gone.

  I didn’t know why I turned him down. Later I’d spend an awful lot of time wondering. That night I didn’t give it a second thought. I spent hours scrolling through hook–up app profiles, all beards and muscles and wolf smiles and tattoos, an endless line of bodies, like fence posts that penned me in, noticing for the first time how old they made me feel, until at the end of it all I felt too sick to my stomach to go get fucked by anyone.

  He went home to Albany. I stayed in my city. And for days I felt it in my heart and in my head, in my gut and in my knees, the full–body pain of withdrawal from Cyd, a pain I hadn’t felt since high school crushes thwarted, the sweet joy I’d misdiagnosed as friendship and could only now recognize by its sting. It had been love. Love was what I felt for Cyd, but already my mind was spinning excuses faster than a spider weaves a web—he lived too far away, the age difference, we were both bottoms.

  Only much later, when Cyd was dead and I met Link and she made me delve deep into my own reasoning, did I wonder if maybe part of it was fear of losing face, of calling Cyd up and saying “I changed my mind about wanting a friend, what I want is something more.”

  When Nick and the gardener are carrying Gatsby’s soggy corpse from the pool, and they find the body of his murderer a little ways off, Nick reflects “The holocaust was complete.”

  While it’s true that the word “holocaust” was indeed part of the English language long before it earned a capital H when applied to the Nazi slaughter of millions, a computer–aided statistical analysis of texts over the course of the past century show that its usage prior to 1952 was vanishingly slim. The only other time it appeared anywhere in print for the entirety of 1925 was in a Popular Science article, to describe a forest fire. And while we could have a mere case of a writer overly fond of his thesaurus, the rest of the book doesn’t bear out that harsh judgment.

  Gatsby’s death is a metaphor for the extermination of the Jewish people, but it’s bigger than that. It’s a parable of genocide, of every genocide, of the fact that such monstrous crimes take place while the world watches. No one loves Gatsby, not really. No one considers him their brother. No one lifts a finger to help him. They enjoy his parties, they drink his moonshine, and they abandon him, and they don’t care when he is butchered.

  “I’m sorry,” Link said. A new bottle appeared in her hand, gin this time. Cyd’s drink. Cyd had juniper berries tattooed across one bicep. “I shouldn’t have said that to you. That was a dick move. I’m not in a good place, Kelvin.”

  “No,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Did you know Cyd got his arm broken in high school? Jumped by five bullies.”

  “No.”

  She smiled. I had taken the bait. “You didn’t know anything about Cyd, did you? All you two ever talked about was books and theory.”

  “That’s not true. We talked about lots of things. We talked about what Cyd wanted to talk about. He liked talking about books and theory.”

  “He liked it because you did. And you never cared to ask about his real life.”

  “You don’t know me, Link,” I said, mildly. Talking to Link provided a purgative, masochistic pleasure. Link was bad medicine. I needed to feel bad. I had failed Cyd, due to some twisted flaw inside me, and until I found and fixed it I’d continue to fail people.

  She sighed dramatically. I decided I liked her, for how deeply she’d loved him. And I realized I needed her. Just like she needed me. We were both broken up and dealing badly with a post–Cyd world.

  “No. No I don’t. Because I don’t care to. Just like you didn’t care to know that Cyd had night terrors, or practiced aikido, or had a weird polar bear fixation that bordered on the sexual, or—”

  “Is it true they didn’t bury him yet?” I asked, and she seemed happy to be interrupted.

  “What? No. Funeral is tomorrow.”

  We watched the fire.

  “Cyd was obsessed with fire,” she said. “He said he was made out of fire. Fire in human form. He said all human thought is fire, and once we realize that, we’ll be able to control the fire. Share thoughts, see the future, the past, that kind of thing. He said that’s what mental illness is, or some of them, anyway. He said it was contagious, said one person could spark the fire in the mind of someone else, maybe even lots of people. He had this whole theory about the Stonewall Uprising being ‘the first public demonstration of the supernatural phenomenon that has been called collective pyrokinesis, multipsionics, liberation flame…’ Some bizarre bullshit he read in an unpublished oral history that’s been circulating in academia for thirty years.”

  “Cyd was crazier than a soup sandwich,” I said. “You know that, right? I loved him, but he was a lunatic.”

  She stood, and walked toward the fire. I followed.

  “Cyd wanted to be cremated,” she said.

  “Cyd wanted a lot of things.”

  She took a long time before she said, “I know where his body is.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  Link laughed, stooped to pick a stone from the edge of the fire circle. Threw it into the river. Standing between the fire and the water I could feel myself coming unmoored. Infected. By Cyd. His most deranged ideas felt perfectly rational there, then. “He was working on this massive book,” she said. “A treatise that was going to be the vector for the infection. Change human nature forever. Did he ever show you any of it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “He shared some stuff.”

  “And he had that crazy Great Gatsby thing.” I could hear the alcohol creeping into her voice, into her grief–shattered thoughts. “His family are such assholes. They asked me to come to the funeral home, bring some old photos from when we were kids. I knew I shouldn’t go, but I went anyway. They kept using his girl name. Place was full of pictures from before he started to transition. A couple dozen Cyds from twenty years ago, in dresses, looking miserable.”

  It had never occurred to me that Cyd once wore another name. I watched the water. Tires caked in river–bottom muck lined the shore. Behind us the city smelled like tar, nicotine, duct tape. Albany was every bit as depressing as I’d expected it to be. How’d you last as long as you did , I thought, before offing yourself? Even better—why didn’t you just fucking move? Surely the unknown you faced packing up and moving to a new city was le
ss frightening than the unknown you faced when you shot yourself in the head … Loud distant braying laughter startled me out of this train of thought, which was just as well. A suicide sparks a thousand questions, and none of them has a satisfactory answer.

  I handed her a Cyd Card. “Got one for me?”

  “This is Rick’s,” she snorted, inspecting the card. “He gave Cyd HPV.” She flicked it away into the darkness. Wind carried it waterward. The air had an edge to it, now.

  “You want to see the emails?” I said. “The long detailed correspondence where we talked endlessly about all kinds of things? So you can see that we actually were friends?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I want to see them.”

  I called them up on my phone, handed them over. I wanted her approval; wanted her to turn to me and say, You really were a good friend, you really did do everything you could, Cyd’s decision had nothing to do with you . I watched her read, anxious about what she might find, but not too anxious, because I never said anything too terrible to Cyd, never confessed anything scandalous or shameful. Which maybe meant she was right about me and Cyd.

  “Holy shit,” she said, long minutes later. “You wrote ‘ Our job as readers is to find the scientific formulae for survival ’?”

  “Sounds like something I would say.”

  Link produced her own stack of Cyd Cards. In the photo he was arguing with someone outside the frame. His arms made martial–artist moves in the air. On the back, attributed to Cyd: “Our job as readers is to find the scientific formulae for survival.”

  “That little thief,” she muttered.

  Link started to cry. Her tears finally tugged my own out of hiding.

  Meyer Wolfshiem, Gatsby’s business associate, a receptacle of loathsome anti–Semitic stereotypes seemingly meant to make Shylock look kosher, has a legitimate business front for his many criminal enterprises. It’s called the Swastika Holding Company. And while “holocaust” would have had no meaning to Fitzgerald’s readers, “swastika” would have plenty—a harmless, faddish symbol with faint whiffs of Orientalism and occultism.

  But no contemporary reader can fail to find something ominous about this association of odious anti–Semitism with a swastika. One needn’t accept my admittedly outlandish theory of Fitzgerald the Time Traveler to be unnerved. Wolfsheim is the archetypal Evil Jew, the one the Nazis invoked as justification for genocide. While many readers have decried Fitzgerald’s apparently uncritical invocation of these stereotypes, their juxtaposition with the swastika is the key to understanding them for what they are: an illumination of the role that even “harmless” popular culture cliches play in large–scale oppression; the way stereotypes and demonization can coax the broader public into acquiescing to even the most catastrophic endeavors.

  A bottle broke. Someone turned up the volume on one of the car stereos blaring Cyd’s favorite radio station at us. Something from one of Albany’s lesser colleges, sounding like a mental institution taken over by its inmates, like punk fucked disco. Someone laughed. Lots of people were laughing, treating this like a party instead of a chance to celebrate someone who was dead.

  So many of them were beautiful boys, butch magnificent monsters. Cyd and I clearly had the same type. Their bodies gleamed in firelight. Broad shoulders, big forearms. My stomach hurt from wanting that, from not being that.

  Everywhere I went, everything I did, it was the same. Bodies mocking me. Undying unchanging superhuman bodies extending into infinity.

  Link and I talked. About each other, some. She was an indie–music–mag photographer. She had shit to say about every weird grindcore or folktronica or Krishnacore song that came on the radio. Her snapshots made and broke careers in Albany’s tiny exuberant scene. Mostly we talked about Cyd. The Cyd she knew was invincible and all–knowing, superhuman, hated by a fake and flawed world because he was destined to one day destroy it. Her Cyd fought a hard fight and lost. I liked her Cyd a lot.

  My Cyd was small, fragile, unfit for survival, and most importantly, I now saw, a projection of my own failings. I saw Cyd as damaged and parochial and naive, stuck in a stage of youthful enthusiasm that was appealing but exhausting, because to admit that I was in love with him would take me too far outside of too many comfort zones.

  Those things are awful , he told me, once, when I mentioned I’d been averaging three brand–new one–time sex partners a day thanks to some new app. Just another way to reduce human beings to things, objects.

  Ummmm… isn’t that everything? I sent back. Next you’ll be trying to tell me you think capitalism is awful. The internet. The iPhone.

  I do, he said.

  You poor thing, I typed, and then deleted without sending.

  “Let’s go,” I said, to Link.

  “Go where?”

  “Go get him.”

  She stooped to grab the canister of gasoline from beside the fire and stalked off.

  The Great Gatsby is a book obsessed with race. As much as its old–money protagonists zealously cling to the customs of class and behavior that separate them from upstarts like Gatsby, so too do they see racially Other boogeymen and –women lurking in every shadow, objects of spectacle and portentous omens.

  “‘Civilization’s going to pieces,’ broke out Tom violently.”

  [An aside: Tom’s violence is the violence of patriarchy; later, Nick will see that violence surface again when he “matter–of–factly” breaks his mistress’s nose. The nose–breaking, like the racist ranting, goes unchallenged by Nick, our passive stand–in].

  “The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proven.”

  Tom cites a book, The Rise of the Colored Empires , which is fictional, but which connects to the very real history of racist American pseudoscience. American eugenics, in fact, which evolved from our own legacy of racism and the status quo’s desperate and constant need to explain away the atrocities on which it was built, went on to shape Nazi science.

  “This idea is that we’re Nordics. [… ] And we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?”

  Tom’s “Do you see?” is important: he has offered his racist worldview to Nick, and is soliciting Nick’s endorsement. He presents Nick, our stand–in, literature’s most passive witness, embodiment of a world that watches ugliness unfold and does nothing, with the rationale for the Holocaust, and asks Nick to agree. Nick attempts to distract us (“There was something pathetic about his concentration…”), but one wonders whether he would have had the courage to demur from Tom’s genocidal philosophizing. Nothing in this book gives us any reason to believe that he would. Maybe he didn’t say “Yes,” but he certainly didn’t say “No.”

  “We shouldn’t be driving,” Link said, eyeing the road like a math problem she’d probably get wrong. By now the bare tree branches were invisible against the black sky above us.

  “We shouldn’t,” I said.

  “I treated him like a god,” she said. “I made it my mission to make up for all the bullshit abuse and hate and transphobia and disrespect he’d experienced in his life. I loved him, but I put him on a pedestal, and that’s a terrible place to be. I don’t blame him for jumping off of it.”

  So. That was there, in the air between us: why Link blamed herself. It should have made me see more clearly, grasp the arrogance and dishonesty inherent in both of us claiming responsibility for Cyd’s death, but instead it made the moment more weighty, steepened the sense that Link and I had been destined to make this drive. Plus we were tearing down those country roads without a moon. I’m a city boy, and that degree of darkness felt prophetic, weighty, fated.

  He’d call me, late at night. He’d sob. Sometimes his voice would cease to sound human, and roar like a forest fire heard from far away. I’d find a book or video game to focus on, because to give him my full attention, to truly open my heart to his hurt, would be to risk c
ontracting it.

  In those moments, as now, I’d know he was right. Some sicknesses can leap from mind to mind like fire spreading.

  But here’s the thing: I could feel him, after those calls. Blustering against my mind’s defenses like wind against an old barn. Cyd wanted in. I’d lie awake looking down at Manhattan and feel his mind moving.

  “Cyd wasn’t my messiah,” she said. “That was my mistake. Just one more misfit prophet without honor in his own land.”

  I figured I’d earned the right to give her some shit. “Cyd was a person,” I said. “That’s all any of us are.”

  “Bodies,” she said. “Bodies stacked like firewood. Cyd said that’s how I’d know he was free, was safe, had broken through. I’d get a vision of bodies stacked like rows of logs, waiting to be burned.”

  Weird chills went through me.

  “Funny,” I said. “He told me it’d be a bird, breaking free of a burning room. Flying away. That’s how I’d know he’d broken through. Was free.”

  “You’re a fucking weirdo, Cyd,” she said. “And here we are.” The car passed a house that was indistinguishable from all the other houses on the street. She kept going, parking far away enough to not attract attention.

  “This is crazy. You know that, right?”

  “It was your idea.”

  “I don’t think it was,” I said.

  “Cyd was skinny,” she said. “We can carry him out to the car together.”

  “All this way? You overestimate my strength. And probably your own.”

  We laughed out loud in the silent dark.

  Gatsby is Other, whether or not we accept the theory that he is Jewish, or Black, or A Metaphor for European Jewry, or—to go with what the book actually says—Working–Class–Turned–Nouveau–Riche. He is welcome in the world of the Toms and Daisys only as long as he’s willing to play by its rules. And its primary rule is Assimilation. All signs of difference must be erased. But difference can never truly be erased, and when Gatsby refuses to accept the dishonesty that characterizes upper–crust marriage, that’s when he must die.