The Medicine Burns (15 page)

He told me he was cold, that I was cold, and that my skinny arms couldn't keep him warm. So I asked him to slip on my lover's robe lying at the foot of the bed. He stood up and drew it over him. I sat up in bed admiring him with that pale silk hanging from his shoulders. My lover's white, slender body seemed as cold and far off as the moonlight in the folds of the sheet. We talked tentatively, as though we only knew each other's language from a book. We only wanted to talk about things we'd done, places we'd lived. That was enough. Both of our lives were full of broken lines, false starts. We didn't ask each other questions about how we'd arrived here, what impulses led us. These were simply choices and decisions that we'd made.

He had a serious, attentive look on his face when he'd listen to me, and then the hunger would just appear behind his eyes. He seemed to know my whole situation intuitively, to adapt to it. He spent my last two weeks in the apartment with me, never questioning the disorder, but hastening it. He left holes in the couch, drunkenly missing the ashtray, open cans on the countertops, and clothes strewn around the floor. He was wearing my lover's clothes, drawing them out of the boxes I couldn't bring myself to seal. He could sense that I wouldn't sell my lover's things, or give them up until I had to. He was taking them off my hands.

Two days before I left, I sat beside him on the couch showing him pictures from a library book on India. They were photographs of the monsoons, villages lifted up in the muddy water, and all of India looking like a tide. People were in train stations and markets and on narrow streets choked with rickshaws and cows. I stared at the blurred faces moving in one direction, down to the burning ghats of Banares, and I wondered if they shared an inherent persistence toward life. I wondered if I moved amongst them if I would share their destiny.

Joshua helped me pack some of my clothes into a piece of my lover's luggage. “The rest,” I told him, “goes to you.” He accepted calmly, managing what I knew was an eagerness outweighing gratitude.

I put the car keys and the video club card on the table. “Take what you can use and leave the rest,” I told him. “There are boxes in the closet for the TV, the VCR, and the stereo.”

“You're really not planning to come back, are you?” he asked.

“There won't be much to come back to, will there?”

“I'll drive you to the airport.”

On our last night we celebrated, each of us, our private successes. We were both drunk, talking too loud and too grandly. At one point he whispered he loved me, but when I looked at him curiously, he laughed gently and asked me to flick off the light. He was still smiling at me in the dark - I was already a memory to him. Perhaps that was our greatest success, that we never allowed ourselves to become familiar with each other; we'd mastered the end early on. I urged him to hold me as tightly as he could. I wanted him to fill me the way he had my lover's clothes.

I couldn't sleep that night. I only had a few hours before the flight and I suddenly remembered the urn on the mantle. I felt I couldn't leave it in an apartment that would soon be ransacked, then emptied, then tenanted by a stranger. I felt compelled to dispose of the ashes, but I couldn't imagine how to do it, or a suitable place. I only remembered the places I couldn't do it: the beach, and the public garden. I wished I hadn't been left with his ashes. His things could be given away, but not his memory. I carried the urn into the bathroom and shut the door behind me. I poured the ash into my hand. There was a lot of it, and pieces of bone, too. I turned the faucet on and watched the ash mix with water, letting it run from my open hand down the drain.

I went back into the bedroom where Joshua was sleeping and got under the covers with him. I wondered what kind of life he would slip into once I had left, and wondered too if I was not the first person to leave him with all my possessions the way my lover had left his to me. Already I'd become a traveler, growing lighter with every box I gave away.

Joshua was in the hall, asking me to hurry. I heard his voice, distant as the future. I was walking backwards through the door, my history in that apartment reassembling itself. I was slipping quietly away from Tom and his friends who were still gathered around that folding table, hiding their winning hands.

2.

I woke up in darkness when the crickets began jumping from the squat toilet. Was it morning or evening? I pulled the rusted chain hanging from the bare bulb overhead and the question no longer concerned me. I turned the shower on and sat beneath it wearing my kurta pajamas. It would dry in no time in this heat, murderous heat that made it impossible to escape the long, oppressive days. I was in Calcutta, in a rust-painted cement room with an attached bathroom, and I had been there for weeks.

I hadn't planned to stay in Calcutta, but I'd fallen sick, and the train ride to Banares seemed too long and hot to endure. It seemed, also, that I should wait for an experience, especially since I had no plans or engagements, and my clock was still reading the time of another country. So I walked for a few days, short walks in the oppressive heat, until I began to recognize some of the faces, until one of the child beggars began to wait for me, idling outside the guesthouse gate.

Sometimes he'd walk alongside me, patiently waiting for me to finish a bottle of water. I'd hand him the bottle and he'd run off to exchange it for a rupee. One day I told him I would take him for lunch. He pointed to a nearby restaurant crowded with exhausted-looking men who pounded scrap. They watched us blankly as we entered.

The fussy proprietor hit the serving boy on the back of the head, hustling him over to our table. The tourist was going to get special attention.

They served us rice, dahl, and vegetables on a palm leaf. The proprietor and serving boy hovered over us while we ate. My friend made rapid little gestures at his food, then he'd look at me from eyes that were too dark and serious for his age, and it was hard to see the appreciation in them.

The food was bland. I was picking at the rice with my fingers when the serving boy said something in Hindi and my friend looked up from his food. The serving boy said something else. His eyes narrowed and were angry. An argument ensued. The proprietor jumped in and grabbed my friend by the T-shirt. They ushered him out with tears in his eyes.

When I got up to follow, the proprietor handed me the bill. “This boy is no good,” he said. “It is not wise for you to spend time with people like that. If you want to give him a few rupees, that is OK, but you should not bring him around with you.”

I took my change and walked onto the street, but the boy was gone. He never returned to the guest house. I had saved seven empty bottles for him.

After that I became ill. I was sure it was the food. The manager at the guesthouse insisted that it was the monsoons which had just begun. “Any hospital you go to will be filled with Indian people with the same problem as you. It does not only affect the tourists.” He spoke with a prim, English accent, hurriedly, while flapping the pages of his check-in book. He offered this information as consolation to me.

The shower spray restlessly moved from a weak drizzle to an almost painful blast. The water ran down the toilet at the center of the floor. Sometimes feverish, and watching the water drain down that hole, I'd think, “That's what death is like,” then I'd remember my lover's face, the expression fixed on it at death, and that was all I had to go on, the reason I remembered for being here.

It was then I remembered Sukesh, and the previous night. The memory made me feel anxious and powerless.

He might have been following me for some time. There was nothing awkward in his approach, nothing to suggest spontaneity.

“Excuse me sir, where are you going?”

His voice had such authority that I asked myself if I was lost before I remembered that I was walking without a destination.

I answered, “I was thinking I might have a drink.”

“Come along then,” he said, touching my sleeve. “There is a place just here on Park Street where you can drink. They also play live music there.”

I followed him tentatively.
I must tell him I don't want a guide
. But his face was so beautiful and determined. I thought, I must have a drink with him. His eyes were pulled slightly by his turban, which made them seem hard and judging, but his lips were soft. They were dishonest lips that could lie to me without the slightest tremble. I imagined the lies he could tell me that could make me feel right about my coming to India, lies that might have erased the heat and cramps, the overwhelming lethargy, as though I was slowly being consumed, a rabbit in a snake's jaws.

The doormen on Park Street wore long turbans and white kurtas and stood like grim sentinels under the gas lamps. The bar he chose had heavy curtains over its walls. We sat at a table not far from the empty stage.

“Why did you come to India?” he asked, looking down at his menu.

I felt I wanted to tell him everything, but I found myself empty of words.

“I needed to get away from where I was,” I answered moodily.

He called the waiter over and began speaking in Hindi.

“I've ordered whiskey and sodas and some pakoras,” he said.

“I guess that sounds all right.”

“Are you married?” he asked suddenly.

“No.”

“I will marry soon,” he said soberly. “I will see a picture of her before the wedding, but she will not know me until the ceremony.”

“Do you want to marry?” I asked. I wondered if his English was good enough to sense my attraction to him, the real question I was asking.

“I want to fuck a woman very badly,” he whispered. “Is it true that in America this happens all the time before marriage?”

“Yes,” I answered, swigging the rough whiskey, feeling dispirited and letting it show, hoping the disappointment in my eyes might at least discourage any further questions about American sexuality. The heavy drapes began to make me feel claustrophobic. I told him to order us another round.

“What do you think of Calcutta?” he asked.

Now that was a civil question
. “Well, I think it's very beautiful despite the heat.”

He looked at me disapprovingly. “Do you think the beggars are beautiful? Have you seen the slums of Howrah?”

I remembered the restaurant manager who thought I'd overstepped my boundaries by taking that boy to lunch. I'd noticed Indian stratification from the moment I'd arrived. I'd watched two fat women preening on their rickshaw pulled by a barefoot man who couldn't have weighed ninety pounds. They paid him without looking at him.

“Maybe I do see beauty in the beggars,” I said angrily, “maybe humiliation is good for the human animal.”

I might have gone on, but I worried that he might not understand me, if not my words then perhaps my privileged American viewpoint. And I wanted him to understand me because I suddenly felt very alone, and I would have sacrificed my strong opinions if he had asked me to, because the thought of my room depressed me the way my apartment had.

I drank my other whiskey quickly and stared down at his hands which seemed softer than the look I remembered in his eyes.

“What do you do in America?” he asked. His voice had a tentativeness which touched me.

“Well, let's see, I was somebody's lover and before that I was my parents' son.” I looked up at him smiling because my answer amused me when I thought about it, and I knew it would not satisfy him.

He had a beaten expression, as though only Americans could afford to be vague; they speak with the mystery of their money.

Maybe I should have lied and told him how hard I'd worked. By now, I was willing to make a concerted effort for him. I might tell him I was a tax accountant—what I imagined all the bespectacled workers in India's banks to be doing. Honesty was simply out of the question; I felt protective of him.

I hoped sex might make us equals.

“I'd like to walk,” I said.

He stood up abruptly and we began to leave. I noticed him watching the stage where the musicians were beginning to assemble.

I paid the man sitting in the cashier's window. Sukesh was standing at the door, looking away.

When we left the restaurant, the street was slick.

“It must have rained while we were inside,” he said. “Do you want to walk, or would you rather go back?”

I looked at him. Perhaps I was staring. “Do you want to come back to the guesthouse with me?” My voice sounded obscene, the croaking voice of a man luring a young boy into an arcade booth.

“Indians are not allowed into the guesthouses,” he answered.

“Even if you're my guest?”

“This is how they do it in India. They protect the tourist from thieves, from any mistake they might make in their judgment.” He smiled ironically, an irony that suggested he was wiser than he'd let on.

He took my arm and we began walking. School Street was unlit and silent except for the turnings of beggars on their mats. We stopped under the branches of a large tree grown over an iron gate. He stood behind me and I felt his face on my neck.

“Do you like this?” he whispered while his hand ran down the back of my pants.

“Yes,” I answered, feeling loose in my legs, almost feverish.

Then he patted my ass coolly and resumed walking.

I stood back for a moment, wondering if he would just walk off. I tried to imagine myself walking home alone, but the anger, the humiliation, and the dull cramp was too strong in me. I walked behind him until he turned around and smiled. There was that irony again, but there was something inviting, too. I imagined him thinking,
Stupid little tourist, you'll get into trouble this way
.

“I'll walk you back,” he said. He had spiced betel in his mouth and I could smell it on the rain.

It was not a far walk, but the silence between us added blocks to it. At the corner of my street a group of beggars and peddlers came out of the darkness and stood around me with their enamel dishes, shaking one or two coins listlessly.