A Love Like Blood (10 page)

P
lastic pushes photo paper and a high heel floats to the top. The letters P. L. E. A. S. E. appear on one line, followed by the words,
use another bathroom
, on another line, in a sign above the flower girl's head. Black marker turned precious under the flash. In a rush to use the bathroom, she hurls the bouquet at the sign, with one leg kicked up high. The tightly pinned peach roses burst into petals, stems, and lace. This picture ends my story of the young bride and groom's wedding. We have about twenty prints to develop, before finishing. The word, please, written in black marker, shimmers like the contours of Brett's knife. The word, please, is never heard from the lips of Somali men. Since, it is not an entry word in the Somali dictionary. Therefore, I should have known disappointment would greet me soon after Father said,
please drive to the museum
last year. After winning a grant from the county, we signed up for a class at the Museum of Contemporary Photography. Having worked as a photographer for over thirty years, our instructor was also an attorney. A black and white image that he shot and showed us kindled a fiery discussion. The center of interest was a blond crying holding up a poster that said, less than isn't equal. Piercing and strong, best describe his stare past the camera. The background was an empty courtroom and beside him the ghostly figure of a man edited into the photo. The man's partner (the word the instructor used) was struck crossing the street by a driver on a hit and run rampage. Six people died under the front end; however, the husband suffered only a broken leg.

I tried to hold onto every detail in the story. Somewhere in the middle, my thoughts whirled away and drifted to Manhattan to Seventh Avenue to the driver. I pictured myself bundled up in his seat on Valentine's Day and wondered how it felt watching the life drain out of a man. Through the cracked windshield, Father's eyes stared back at me, and I punched the gas pedal. My ink pen clacked, hitting the floor. After a simple surgery on the fifteenth, the husband died from blood clots in his lungs.

“The widower filed a wrongful death suit against the hospital. The appellate court concluded he didn't have the right to sue because he and his partner were men,” the instructor said.

My hand moved to raise a question, but seeing Father's fist stopped it from rising above my ribs. Father stared over his shoulder multiple times at the cat-shaped clock and huffed. Someone behind me started huffing seconds after him. The instructor ignored them. There was a lesson to the story that would prepare us to become greater artists. And it was – photojournalism is about finding the story's best image as a way to render text detachable. To explain, he pointed out parts of the photo I had not noticed: an enhanced wedding ring around the ghost's hand, a smoking gavel, and missing courtroom seats.

“New York law allows not only spouses to sue for wrongful death, but also parents, children, siblings, grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins,” the instructor continued telling us.

Father's fountain pen popped against the table, and I nervously glanced over at him. He scooted – cursing under his breath – to the edge of his seat and looked like he was preparing to stab the instructor in the eye. I feared for the instructor's life. Father was capable of anything. He huffed and right on cue the person behind me huffed too.

“The couple met on Long Island in 1985,” the instructor continued. “Eleven years later they were joined in a civil union and.”

He stopped speaking mid-sentence and I looked to where his eyes were at the baby-faced college student. Tears were coming down his cheeks. In a soft voice, he said he planned to marry his boyfriend, and could not imagine slamming against that concrete wall of grief.

“Khaniis,” Father whispered.

Then, the Latina sitting behind me whispered a derogatory Spanish word.

I wanted to stand up and yell, curse word you, at both of them. I could not of course, or flying fists would have cracked open my chest.

“Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God?” Father said, quoting from the Bible. “Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor the effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God.”

The student said, “No it is actually. Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor the effeminate called malakoi, nor abusers of themselves with mankind called arsenokoites. Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.”

I wrote the word malakoi in my notebook as tiny as possible to prevent Father from noticing the letters from his seat. The Encyclopedia Britannica at the library in downtown Chicago did not have an entry for it, when I snuck there five days later. However, the male librarian that always winked at me helped me research the word. Originally from Wisconsin, he always told me how he liked to drink beer while eating pancakes, and he had the slight belly and the larger behind to prove it.

“God's same words,” Father said, in response to the student.

“It's man's word,” the student shouted. “Malakoi means spiritually weak. When Paul wrote Corinthians, it didn't mean homosexual. He was talking about boys who had anal sex with older men for money.”

“Gross! Please, stop,” the Latina said.

Father stared at her with such love that I expected a proposal. I assumed she was a lesbian and regretted laughing with her before class. I even offered her a peppermint.

The student continued, “The sin is prostitution not attraction. A translator made it effeminate. Arsenokoites doesn't easily translate into English. It referred to an outlawed sexual act between men and women and men and men at that time. A translator made it homosexual. They aren't about loving relationships between two men.”

“Loving relationships do not exist between two men,” Father said.

“Everyone I wanted to say,” the instructor said.

The student yelled, “That was the King James version written in 1611. The John Wycliffe version, written in 1380, is whether ye know not that wicked men shall not wield the kingdom of God. Do not ye err, neither lechers. A lecher is a man addicted to sex, which became fornicator. Neither men that serve false gods, neither adulterers, neither lechers against kind, neither they that do lechery with men, neither thieves, neither avaricious men, covetous men or niggards, neither men full of drunkenness, neither cursers, neither raveners shall wield the kingdom of God. The sin is.”

“Sin. You are stupid,” Father said.

“I studied the Bible. I didn't learn to single out a group of people.”

Watching the student debate with my Father, I became aroused at his comfortability with himself, and around strangers. I photographed his face with my eyes, focusing on the frozen youthfulness; the plastic pink lips; the scratch mark beside his mouth, the pinched nose, almost elfish. He was carefully groomed – maybe even wearing makeup – and not quite a man, but long beyond being a boy. I photographed the name written on his shirt pocket while trying to remember what his last name was to find him in the phonebook. However, I could not put a finger on the name he said.

My Father stood up, scowling the student until the student snatched his schoolbag and stormed out.

Everything in my body welled up as if inflamed. I wanted to grab my chair and beat my father until he could not hurt anyone else. When we returned to the studio, I tampered with development solution, destroying negatives of pictures we shot during a bikini competition. A men's magazine hired us to shoot the women. Father lost three hundred dollars on that assignment. As did I, but I gained something greater – dignity. The women now live on the wall in front of him. That was one of the four times that I saw Father cry. To a photographer, a destroyed negative is worse than death because the negative is lost forever. However, the memory of death sleeps and wakes with everyone who experiences it.

A
photograph of a man's knife-slashed stomach floats in a black frame beside my dresser. His scar goes from his left hairy nipple, zigzags and goes up and around his chest and under his armpit. Little nicks along the zigzag resemble fern fronds. A rounded chunk of flesh is missing on the lower right side. Thin, finger-long welts dent his pasty belly. The man is holding his turtleneck sweater up, and the camera angle decapitates him. Brett traces his finger across the white man's scar. His work shirt rises, exposing the waistband of his pink underwear. The fear and desire that I am experiencing is so palpable that I might collapse and die this morning. Father could catch Brett in my room, and Brett and I could end up carved up like the man in the picture. Instead of a stark white background, a silver exam table would be behind us. Fortunately, the job that Father left for ten minutes ago is an elaborate wedding fifteen miles away.

“All these photos on the wall,” Brett says. “And you have more photos of women than men. That's strange considering,” Brett says and laughs.

“Considering men are more photogenic than women.”

“Exactly.”

“Then let me take your photo.”

“Let me use the bathroom first,” Brett says and walks on an invisible tightrope, one foot ahead of the other, into my open bathroom.

The photography editor at The Tribune told me my work questions past and present events. He saw this through tight close-up shots of female Somalis, Ethiopians, Russians, Germans, and Puerto Ricans. Portraits are sensual and intimate; a relationship builds between the photographer and the sitter. I hold my camera close enough to welcome in the sitter's warmth. That intimacy in a session, I try to avoid, one-on-one with men, especially attractive men. However, many of the male portraits that I have shot, I have them hidden. Next to the dresser, on the floor, is a trunk with a brass decorative handle that Father gave me. It belonged to grandfather. Photographs of mine that are not publishable as determined by my father, and, therefore, have no place in a portfolio I store in the trunk. Some of the hidden photos lie buried at the bottom of the trunk. Seven portfolios, full of my photography, are stacked behind the shaving box. As a photographer, I am interested in mastery of technique through filters, lens, lighting, equipment and environment. Each portfolio represents a different stage in my development.

In two minutes, I have my portable backdrop assembled in front of the wall where Marian is singing. I unravel the white paper background to hide the wall. The black-framed pictures and posters would shift attention away from Brett, with their own narratives. I hold the jagged end of the paper down with seven oversize books. The bathroom doorknob clicks as I move the tripod in front of the background.

“What's that red stuff in the sink?” Brett asks.

“Clay from a mask. I washed my face earlier.”

“What's all this?”

“I want to do something like Avedon. Plain white background. Black and white film.”

“Make me look important,” Brett says.

The contrast of his pink underwear against my blue walls would make a provocative photo on masculinity and desire. I have never seen a man wear masculinity and femininity the way he does as if it is a lace scarf, its unthought, part of his uniform. This blending of gender is a flirtatious performance that I love watching. His masculinity is not enclosed in aggression, and his femininity is not centered on his love of pink, but his sensitivity, gentleness, and strength. Since yesterday, his beard has grown in thicker, and his curly hair is spiraled with tighter curls.

I laugh watching him standing still, not sure what to do, maybe nervous. It is the equivalent of entering a room with an almost domesticated jackal captured in the wild, not dangerous anymore yet dangerous still. Watching him through the viewfinder, he walks to the tripod, grabs the camera, and flips it around.

“Smile.”

The high-powered flash turns the room white. The room is white, then red, and then a million colors.

“You can add your picture now,” he says.

Grinning like a schoolboy, he scoops his hand around the curve of my back. His lips, an opening redness, brush my bottom lip. His kiss is the equivalent to peeling mangoes with a knife: a knife for meat, danger for pleasure, and a burst of juice on the tongue, then down the throat. When this sweetness collected in the bowl of my imagination, it would turn rancid prematurely. I would leave it on the kitchen countertop of my mind untouched until I was curious again. Now knowing it, this pleasure, that bitterness seems wasteful. Eventually, Brett and I are out of our underwear on my bed with our tongues in each other's mouth. We are black and tan cutouts against white sheets. Our bodies become tangled and twisted up like a salted pretzel, unrecognizable from its previous body.

The one room in our house without photography equipment is my bathroom, the reason I spend no more than ten minutes in here. Even when using skin care products, I slather them on and continue working, in my bedroom, to feel anchored. But for half an hour I have been crying over the sink, with the water running. After Brett and I laid down from exhaustion and dozed off, I woke up with his arm draped over my chest. The heaviness of it terrified me. Men, who love the person they are sleeping next to, hold them in that way. Love, lover, boyfriend, Brett, the words rolled around in my mouth and solidified on my tongue, becoming real. They were as real as the photographs hanging on the walls. Under the shadow and weight of Brett, the tears started. What I experienced was a miracle of mirrors and transformation and looking at myself through an unexpected lens – the other side of the camera.

“What are you doing in there?” he asks, with his mouth close to the door.

“Washing my face.”

“Please open the door.”

The hinges crackle. Through the small crack, first I see Brett's pubic hair, then his lean body when the door is fully open. Naked and boyish, Brett erases his erection with cupped hands in between his legs. Remove all forms of femininity from Brett, clothing and mannerisms, and he is still himself, but bare and perfect. In my head, I am photographing him. One day, I will shoot him the way he is now, a silhouette, and move him in exaggerated poses to feminize the shape of his body.

“I heard something downstairs,” he says.

His head turns toward the door inviting me to listen. In his profile, I see a teenager becoming a man; a magnetism that could go unnoticed if there were more explicit details. That transformation is an aspect of men that is quieter and more narrative, I think, in part because men rarely see it themselves.

After staring at the bedroom door for four minutes, Brett asks, “Are you cool?”

“What did you hear?”

“I don't hear it anymore.”

“Do you hear things no one else does?”

“You know what.”

“What?”

“I like you,” Brett says and kisses me before I can respond.

His words permeate my room in the same way perfumes spread from wall to wall in an unventilated room, and suddenly I smell frankincense, earth, and dampness. His body is warm; mine is pliant, moving with him. He kicks something on the floor. Book pages rustle. Avedon's
Portraits
opens to Dorothy Parker's basset-hound eyes exposing Brett's knife. We lie down in bed, surrounded by pictures of my father and brothers and working men I have known all my life. The space between our bodies smells like underarm must and mint mouthwash. I grab his hand, stare at the dedication and lines, and kiss it. I love the male body, but in particular I love hands. They carry answers as equally as the face and, like the face, can express every emotion. A hand slams a car door somewhere far away on Evergreen.

Brett's finger pokes my chest with the emotional tone of an exclamation mark. “Have you told your dad you're not going to marry your ex-girlfriend?”

“No.”

“What are you scared of?”

“That he'll kill me.”

“What you think will happen, already has. You don't know how he'll react until you tell him.”

As Brett says the word he'll, in my head, I see the word hell. Hell and he'll sit on the front of my brain and poke and poke and poke. I get a slight headache staring up at the dotted globs of white paint on the ceiling. In Chicago, I would stare up at the ceiling in my room asking myself how could I be manlier. In Father's eyes, I wasn't man enough. His love teetered over my manliness, or lack of it and his love changed, becoming greater than, when I started dating my girlfriend. The day I ended the relationship with my girlfriend and was faced with telling him, I thought about jumping off our apartment building. I talked myself up to the roof, but when I looked out into the world, I saw the pictures I would never take. I pulled myself from the edge and decided not to tell Father about my girlfriend or the roof.

A thumping sound similar to bags dropping on the floor downstairs shocks me and my head bangs against Brett's head.

“Carsten,” Father yells from downstairs.

“Shit,” Brett says and jumps out of bed.

Tap, tap, hard-bottomed church shoes step up the stairs.

“Where's my underwear?” he whispers in a panic.

“There,” I say, pointing by the dresser and snatch my boxer briefs off the floor. Behind me, I hear a noise I should not hear, a quick click and creaking. I thought I locked the door. My father is coming into the room. Brett is naked bending over. I am naked and frightened, with my only form of protection being the underwear I'm holding. Often my thoughts are in Somali and I translate them before speaking. Dhimo, I see the word before I say to myself, “we are going to die.”

“Carsten,” Father yells from behind the door.

Both my hands drop to cover my genitals with the balled up boxer briefs. I hear a soft sliding sound behind me, and something bumps my bare foot. At my feet, I see the knife that Brett gave me. I grab it quickly.

Father's head moves up, to the side, and back in surprise. “Where are your clothes?”

“I was about to shower.”

“Well, don't. Get dressed and come downstairs. Cecilia's waiting for you.”

“What? Why is she here?”

“You are getting married, and you haven't –”

“We aren't getting married.”

“Yes, you are. Stop talking. Come downstairs now,” Father says and exits, making his decision final.

I fly to the door, fast, like an Ethiopian White-backed Vulture on a rotted bushpig, pushing the door closed. Father's church shoes crunch on the wood flooring at the bottom of the stairs. The thin door lock, cold at the touch, makes the tiniest sound, similar to a hiccup from a mouse. Everything in my body gives.

“So you are getting married,” Brett says, unseen, from beside my bed, on the floor.

The way his body is, half hidden under the bed, and with his face tense he is aged ten years.

“I'm seventeen. I'm not getting married. My father's insane.”

Reassured, Brett's body collapses onto the floor like a failed soufflé. He drags his left leg out from under the bed. Had he moved more under the bed, he would have knocked over a pile of books. Then, Father would have found the boy he banned me from seeing, hiding in my room with an erection. The knife thuds, hitting the floor. I had stuffed it inside my underwear.

“What was that?”

“The knife.”

“Would you have used it on your father?”

“I don't know.”

Brett's fists press against his wrinkled forehead. A pink sticky note floats to the beige carpet, unstuck from the bottom of his arm. I wrote out a list of equipment to bring to a wedding on the note.

“Cecilia is downstairs. What am I going to do?”

“Go downstairs and tell your father you're not going to marry her.”

For a second, I try to see it. What I see is a gray world flipped upside down, a reverse snow globe. The snow is ash. Imagining telling my father I like men, I feel as if I am falling forward fast off the bed, face-first to the floor, even though I'm not falling.

“Relationships aren't photographs,” Brett says. “You can't edit out parts you don't like. That's called lying.”