ITHE PALACE
There was a time
when I didn’t know
anyone who was dead—
let alone any ghosts.
—JAIME MANRIQUE, “Ghosts and the Living”
I came to the Palace because the man I sought kept a room there. He stood at the point of egress, supporting himself against the door frame, not just thin, but skeletal; lips shrunken and chapped; the skin of his face pulled taut over the skull. I led him back to the bed, where he looked at me, kind yet wild. His eyes burned with life, as if the spirit had left the flesh and concentrated there, in irises bright and glassy, the milk of the whites unsullied. His voice, though fey, came hale and lucid, and when he spoke, he did so without obstruction, no wheezing, no confusion (that is, until the final hours, when he slipped into delirium, speaking nonsense and quoting from literature). I told him I would stay, play bed nurse, however long it took. The truth is I had nowhere else to go, and both of us knew as much. Juan insisted that, after his death, I remain in the Palace and take over his room. He asked that I finish the project that had once consumed him, the story of a certain woman who shared his last name. Miss Jan Gay. “Come,” he said with a wink, “squeeze mother’s hands as a sign you will do it.” This was an allusion to some famous scene I could not place; it was not a joke. I took his hands, all knuckles and finger bones, into my own. He was near death, and I would have promised him anything.
“I had never meant to keep my promise. But before I knew it my head began to swim with dreams … What’s that from?”
“I don’t know, Juan. But I will keep this one. I mean to.”
“Some call her one thing, some another,” he said. “Yahn, or Jan, or Helen. Holy fairy, mother of grace. Our Father who art in between.”
I had ventured off to the Palace with the last of my money, alone after all had been lost to the metropolis. I had no work, no degree and no pedigree, no feel for the game, no man to support me. I bought a ticket for a bus headed west, to a small city thousands of miles and several days away—to the place where I suspected Juan might have retreated. I carried a single duffel bag stuffed with clothes. Hour upon hour, I watched the landscape change, through windows filmed over with grease. When once I tried to rub clean the view, using the edge of my sleeve, I instead created a halation effect, like the Vaseline smudge of an Old Hollywood close-up. There I was, nose unscarred, black curls tamed, every hard feature softened in reflection.
* * *
Along the way, we cycled through buses and drivers, one of whom was an appealing man, brown and burly. His smiling eyes twinkled in the rearview mirror, and he announced each stop with folksy joviality. As seats came available, I found myself moving forward from the back, nearer and nearer, until I was directly to his right, only slightly behind, close enough to notice the hairs sprouting on either side of his knuckles. Watch, he said to me, this whole bus is about to empty. Our last stop before we cross the Big Muddy. And so it came to pass, everyone piled out; he and I alone made the crossing. The river was wide and rushing and indeed muddy, a milky chocolate color, which reminded me of Easter holidays, of bunnies wrapped in foil with lifeless, sugar-candy eyes. He asked where I was headed, and I told him, and he said, Well, it won’t be me who takes you there. And then his mood changed and he dropped the act, simply nodding at those who boarded. When the new driver arrived—pallid, officious—I felt not exactly frightened, but less brave. Chilled. Journeys end in lovers meeting played in my mind, but where I’d picked up the dreadful line, some book, or film, or nursery rhyme, I could not recall. I returned to a seat in the back. The people who boarded at the stops thereafter were of a different sort—they seemed to me exotic, interior, anti-coastal—and then the landscape really began to flatten and the visible horizon expanded in every direction, so that the sky grew bigger and more vaulted, and I found I could look and look forever into the desert, and never tire of the new earthy pigments—new, at least, to me—the pinks and coppers and sand and clay.
* * *
We arrived in the early morning, and I disembarked, hoping to hitch a ride from there, but very few cars passed. For several hours, I stood on the side of the road beside a small mesquite tree. The paltry shade dissipated with the noontime sun, and the dust caught in my throat. When what I counted to be the fiftieth car whipped by, I began to despair, but then came a vision of brake lights and the crunch of tires pulling onto the gravel shoulder. European tourists, a couple. You do not cut a particularly threatening figure, the man said. He offered to take me all the way. The woman scowled; I realized they had been fighting and that I was to serve as a diversion, so I chattered a bit, though it wasn’t long before she picked up the thread of their argument in a hushed and accusatory foreign language and I returned to the landscape.
And so we pushed on, farther into the desert, to an even smaller city, a village really, in search of the Palace, in search of Juan, until I found him, a skeleton in the entranceway.
In another life, Juan and I had only known each other for a total of eighteen days, nearly a decade before, when I was just seventeen. Even then, he felt frail, though sharp of mind, and so attentive. At that time, my own grandparents were still relatively young, in their late fifties, and so I had no experience with the elderly, as I considered Juan to be, and I was made nervous by the dry and mottled skin of Juan’s arms and hands, the manifold creases at the corners of his lips and eyes. “My senescence,” Juan called it. “An affront to youth and beauty.” And though I knew he teased, I did feel repulsed, not by Juan himself, but by elderliness as abstraction. I found it impossible to imagine my own adolescent body succumbing to old age, deteriorating. Back then, I had looked at Juan and thought, No way that body is my future.
The Palace rose monumental from the dusty street. A desert building fallen into disrepair. The once-white stucco a dirty ivory color, here and there chipped away, exposing the brick beneath. I don’t know how the nickname came to be; there are no palaces in this country. It would have been a hotel, or a stately asylum, once upon a time. The roof’s wide eaves were supported by carved corbels, and above the entrance, at the peak of the facade, a cutout had been sculpted in the shape of a three-leaf clover, which reminded me of the ace of clubs from a deck of playing cards, and which may have been a bell gable once, though no bell hung inside now, only framed azure sky. The marble staircases had worn yellow, the interior spaces haphazardly subdivided into smaller rooms with painted plaster walls and mismatched trim. Grand doors were bolted shut and whitewashed. I had no idea who ran the Palace; a charity, I assumed, a place for those without family. Juan had his own room, a desk, a miniature refrigerator, a hot plate, a small closet, and a twin bed low to the floor. Books ran along the baseboards. Juan was allowed visitors for certain hours in the morning and afternoon, but kept his window cracked, and at night I shimmied up the fire escape and snuck back inside and sat on the edge of his mattress. We talked. I had many questions, and many hours with nowhere to be. Some nights I spent with men, tricks I picked up in the village bar, the Depot, next to the bus station. Or else I picked them up by lurking around the bus lot itself, or cruising the toilets, but soon I found I wanted only to be in the room, with Juan. I liked best to spend the night in the bed beside him, where I could feel his bones and papery skin, and breathe in his rotten breath, and know he hadn’t left.
Juan did not think much of the other residents, wandering souls, whom he referred to as a badling of queer ducks. I’d never before heard that collective noun. “All bitter,” he said, “or broken. Or lunatic.” The kitchen, the communal toilets, the showers—nowhere in the building ventilated properly; instead the rooms held the residents’ scents, musk and shit and grime and scorched food. Juan preferred not to venture beyond his own door. He ate only canned soup, tomato and cream, or lentil, which I heated for him, setting the can directly on the hot plate. I’d prop him up and watch as he spooned from can to mouth with tremulous deliberation. Afterward, while we talked, he picked at the wallpaper by the side of the bed as carefully as his fingers allowed. “Just underneath, the paper is all the more beautiful,” he said. He’d uncovered a patch the size of a dinner plate, the pattern a circus scene drawn in a delicate, old-fashioned style: pink poodles leaping through a hoop; an elephant balanced on one leg atop a small stool; hobos clowning each other. “I’d like to excavate the entire wall before I die, but I won’t, will I?”
I did not talk about after; instead I told little lies about the future. “One of these days, I am going to get you a pot. And a bowl. And watch you eat with dignity.”
The grand project, which I was to complete after Juan’s death, involved a file folder stuffed with scraps of paper, newspaper clippings, photographs, and scribbled notes, along with two massive books whose pages had been mostly blacked out. The books comprised a research study, published in two volumes and titled Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns.
Right away, I felt the magnetism, the mystery of these books; a work of intense observation transformed into a work of erasure. And I wondered about Juan’s connection to Miss Jan Gay, mentioned in the introduction. I asked Juan if he and she were blood. “No, no.” And yet, he told me, I was right to believe their connection “ran deeper than nominal similarity.” That was all he said.
I couldn’t understand why, but once I arrived, and once the promise to continue the work had been extracted, Juan seemed to lose interest in the books himself; he turned his face to the wall, to the wallpaper, and I found it difficult to get him to explain anything. Still, I prodded with questions about the research study, about the sex variants described therein, about Jan Gay, about who had blacked out all the pages, and why, and was it Juan himself? “No, no.” He’d found the books that way, erased into little poems and observations. He insinuated he would tell me more, in time, but first, he wanted to know about me and my life in the decade since we’d last seen each other. Juan knew just how to get me to talk, despite myself; the words pulled forth as if through hypnotic force.
Juan worried over me. The Palace, he claimed, attracted those undone by trouble. He suggested, with sincerity, that I was on the lam, but this was another figure of speech with which I was unfamiliar, and even after he explained, the entire notion of running and hiding seemed funny to me, as old-fashioned as the wallpaper.
“Running from who? The cops? Bookies? A pimp?”
“From whom,” Juan said. And after a moment he added, “Your mind, then.”
The hemp of the bedside lampshade warmed the light so that his brown eyes burned a rapturous color, liquor-like. I couldn’t get over how they shone, the incongruence, the rest of his face a death mask.
* * *
Downtown, around the Palace, the buildings and the roads held the day’s heat and radiated warmth through the night. Infernal nights with no escape. The bed was small. The ceiling fan worked only at the slowest speed.
“As if everything here is permanently set to some languorous tempo, eh, nene?” Juan said. “The fan and the air, you and I, time itself.”
Copyright © 2023 by Justin Torres
Excerpt from “Now and then” from Collected Poems, by James Schuyler. Copyright © 1993 by the Estate of James Schuyler. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from “The Cage of Voices” from Collected Poems (Holt, Rinehart & Winston), by Horace Gregory. Copyright © 1964 by the Estate of Horace Gregory. Used with permission.
