Garra Rufa

When I first saw him, he was staring at a painting of the crucifixion set against a plain white background, hung on a blank wall in a church foyer. We were at the first (third-to-last) event I had organized with the local art community; a showing of amateur contemporary, religiously-inspired art, in conjunction with a local church: one of those newer, more progressive churches.

They said they would keep the event as non-denominational as possible. I cringed reflexively when hearing the word, it reminded me of the particular Christo-linguistic tics one hears all the time growing up in the Bible belt.

When I came up to him, hoping to make some small talk, he asked my name, and I said Rhys, and that I was the artist-in-residence who had set this whole thing up—because both these things were true—and he said his name was also Rhys only it was spelled Reece and we laughed a bit. I was drinking the cheap red wine the museum had provided for the event. He held one of those little clear cups of water in one wrinkled hand, taking small sips between his sentences.

I had been ignoring my mom’s calls, and her follow-up calls, and the calls from my brother that came after that. I deleted her messages to avoid nighttime guilt and James—my weed guy—was out of town, or so said the sign on the front door of his camper, which, I guess, was not really used as a camper at all and was really just his house. I hadn’t spoken to anyone in like, a week, and so when I spoke my voice was coarser than expected.

It takes either effort or miracle not to outlive your elders.

We’re programmed to prefer people our own age.

Still, I shook his hand when he offered it, and I took the opportunity to stare at the painting he has been admiring, trying—with some desperation—to invent something intelligent-sounding to say about the piece. I wanted to put some effort—meaningful effort—toward playing the part which I was contractually-obligated to fill: the ‘artist-in-residence’.

I tried to string together some multisyllabic words about my (freshly invented) correlation between the plain white background and the trend of declining religious belief in the United States, and that it reflected something about “the psychological plight of the religious person in a largely secular society”, while simultaneously taking great care to avoid sounding like some sort of overly nostalgic backwards conservative—even going so far as to throw in an off-color remark about the “innate naivety” of any religious belief to ensure that my point had been entirely coated in a fine layer of emotional detachment from its subject matter.

Then there was a pause, and Reece took a sip from his water, pursing his lips over the lip of the cup and audibly sucking in to avoid spilling onto his loose-fitting shirt and tie.

He took his time looking over the painting again, before turning to me and speaking, slowly and simply:

“Honestly,” he said, “I like it.”

Then he paused, before saying:

“I think it’s kind of erotic.”

Then it was my turn to pause and finish off my wine.

I took my time.

“What?” I said, without meaning to.

“I said that the painting is very erotic—it’s—he’s—well, an object of desire here. Looking upwards, stuck somewhere between life and death, longing for either – or just hurting and longing for – well—something—it’s, you know, erotic,” he said and motioned toward the painting with a thin finger.

His tone was simple and explanatory, as though he was an expert on this one painting by some obscure local woman—an amateur artist who, I imagined, painted for fun on the weekends after going to church with her family.

“Oh.”

I noticed that his hand seemed smooth for his age, which I figured was probably somewhere in the mid-forties, judging by the streaks of mild gray in his hair. My eyes rested on the hand for a moment, fixating on its shape before following his finger’s beckoning point and, finally, settling on the painting.

It was becoming harder and harder to focus through the glasses of wine, but I tried to see the painting as he saw it, or at least, how he claimed to see it. A crucified Jesus, tanned and ever so slightly racialized—in the tradition of Latin American Catholicism—his abs flexed, his face turned upward, blood dripping down his hands and feet onto the body of the cross itself, running down its side and stopping when the cross did, ending abruptly against the painted-white background.

In my head, I saw the blood dripping slowly off the end of the cross and splashing against the desert sand below, before soaking in, dyeing the sand red, and, over the next days, drying and fading under the hot sun.

I’d never been able to say erotic without feeling like a parody of myself.

But when he said it, simply and without emphasis, it felt sincere or normal or even something-approaching profound.

I murmured some words of agreement and threw a glance around the room, making sure that none of the good church-going folk had heard us speaking so—well—heretically.

He asked if I wanted to get another drink.

I detested modern spiritual spaces like this one—I couldn’t force myself to belong in a space where everyone was, in effect, identical in upbringing to myself, in a space that looked so much like the exact world I had grown up in. Amongst the banal and the sacred, and as we walked together to the caterer’s table, I found myself filled with envy at the ease with which both he and seemingly everyone but me seemed to move in this world.

I did my best to walk with purpose, despite the wine and anxiety amplifying one another recursively and slowly, surely taking over my brain.

The caterer took his sweet time refilling my glass with the remnants of three identical unlabeled wine bottles.

When he was done, Reece bent forward to grab my wine from the caterer’s hand, his unstarched shirt stretched tightly against his back, and I saw his muscles—his unexpectedly toned back muscles straining against the suddenly thin-seeming fabric.

Staring at his back, I became aware of the blood rushing through my body, rushing through my hand and to my head and humming ever-so-slightly in my ears and of the faint hum of church building’s air-conditioning system and of how the two hums played off each other in an almost musical way, one fading in and the other fading out depending on which hum I focused my attention on. Then I realized that the air-conditioning system was completely inadequate—Santa Fe was such a fucking hot city.

I wanted to press myself tight against his cool skin.

I realized I was staring, and he was looking back at me in a way that made me feel like I was nothing but an overpriced curiosity in a downtown boutique for tourists.

“Rhys?” he said, and he had for—I couldn’t tell how long—been trying to hand me my wine.

Then, I found myself in my body again, and I was forced to become the artist-in-residence—and the humming of the world faded away as I took the glass from his hand.

“To—well—to our shared name!” I said, and we clinked our plastic glasses together.

I couldn’t think of something smarter to say, but I hoped he found my ineloquence charming.

Some red wine splashed from the glass onto the backside of my hand. I licked it off and noticed that he was watching my tongue slide against my skin. Good, I thought, I think I’d like him to be invested.

He gave me his phone number as he left. I said I’d give him a call.

The museum sponsoring my fellowship housed me in a faux-traditional clay adobe on the outskirts of the city. It was cozy, and surrounded by empty red desert, and at night, the cold air rushed in through the glassless windows, which was pleasant until I realized that the wind would send my loose sketches flying all across the living room.

During my stay, I always kept the television running in the living room. I kept its volume turned just loud enough that I could catch individual words and phrases from the shows, but not so loud that the program demanded my attention.

I laid back on my couch and smoked a joint I had rolled for myself. I bought cigarette filters in bulk online, which I would lay at the base of every joint I rolled (a vague gesture toward lung safety). I gathered, from the occasional snippets that made it through my THC malaise, that the news personalities were talking about some active protests in downtown Chicago, far from me. Protestors, they said, were upset about an incident of police violence that had been covered up by their mayor (a prominent former member of a recent presidential administration) for almost an entire year and counter-protestors were upset about the protestors protesting, so they said, or something along those lines.

I was supposed to spend my days here painting and engaging with the local community – refining my ‘craft’ or at least providing some form of cheap community programming to justify my stipend. Instead, I spent most of my days smoking overpriced weed I bought from James—who always smelled bad and lived in the camper down the road from my adobe—and listening to the nonsense noise from the television and thinking about how I really should be doing more painting.

The two newsmen (who—in my mind’s eye—wore nothing from the waist down just because they knew they could get away with it) took turns comparing the protests today to the protests of the past, and arguing that, no, the protests today were absolutely nothing like the March on Washington, or the Watts riots, or the Russian Revolution. Instead, they were really just like the commotion caused by a good deal at Walmart on a Black Friday, or that they looked exactly like Stonewall, or Selma, or like the protests from last year, or the counter protests felt a lot like that famous photo of the crowd of angry white people screaming at the Little Rock Five, or it felt like Nixon’s Silent Majority, or maybe it felt like something the two men just couldn’t quite put their tongue on. It did, however, feel similar to—well—something that they had seen before.

(The police present at the protests were either members of the S.S. or the heroic troops storming the beach at Normandy in 1945. The man in the red tie commented that the rapidly escalating scene looked a lot like the old film ‘Zulu’ (1964), and suddenly seemed predestined to recant his comment to avoid social media backlash.)

(The backlash, which he failed to avoid, later—at least, according to Twitter—resulted in a lucrative book deal.)

I turned off the T.V. and picked up a lukewarm beer I had set on the coffee table before I started smoking. I took a swig.

Disgusting.

I laid back on the couch and pulled my iPhone from my pocket, which I held in front of my face in such a way that, if my grip became too loose, it would fall directly onto my nose.

Reece hadn’t responded to my texts.

I didn’t consider myself to be the sort of person who would wait by the phone, but I sat there staring at the solitary hey (carefully crafted, without punctuation or capitalization: perfectly casual) I had sent him after I woke up this morning.

Maybe he was married—I hadn’t seen a ring, but then again, I had a lot of wine.

And—of course—rings can come off.

I swapped to my email app, and sat there, pulling my thumb down, refreshing the page over-and-over again, waiting for any new emails to come in.

It was late on a Friday; no new emails, and so I cleaned out my inbox, leaving only a single email from my mom, sent a few days ago, with a subject line asking me—begging me—to come home.

I never gave my family my professional email, but it could be found online.

I guess they dug it up somewhere.

I deleted the email, unopened.

Eventually, I forced myself to sit up, put down my iPhone and move instead to my MacBook (both of which were gifts from my parents—rewards for landing this very residency). I scrolled through the various social media pages of friends, family and art world contacts, my eyes reading all the individual captions and posts, my brain not bothering to actually commit any of the text to memory. After a few minutes (hours?) of this, my brain disconnected from the scrolling and the reading entirely.

It felt almost as though I was watching myself from above, sitting there, eyes glued to the conglomerations of pixels, images and images and images making their way across the screen.

Art belonged to the past—painting belonged to the past. It had been replaced with the absolute proliferation of image.

One of my greatest insecurities – as an artist, or as someone who viewed themselves, built their identities, both public and private, as an artist – was that I lacked my own style. I had technical ability, recreating things I’ve seen: taking a photo of myself, drawing it accurately, layering some random abstract pattern somewhere to make it more contemporary.

My best bet, if I really wanted to do art for a living, to make this thing a career, or at least, a vocation, was to make sure the things I painted – which, I hoped, would be viewed, but never viewed simply as themselves—alluded to artistic images, or—even better—popular images (Warhol, etc.) which people have already seen and that they know and already understand as being art.

I rolled another joint, and lit the tip before diving back into social media—this time to Instagram, and now with a purpose—and I scrolled through the pages of various artistic institutions, before settling on the page belonging to the Rothko Chapel in Houston, which only had a few thousand followers.

I liked the plasticine (read: artificial) taste the filter added to the smoke.

I had never been to the Rothko Chapel, and I hadn’t been down to Houston in at least ten years. Honestly, I hated the humidity. Their page consisted mostly of images of a large empty (save for a few benches) space, with muted walls and sets of near-identical, near-black Rothko paintings hung either alone or in arrangements of three.

I finished the joint and set up a dirty canvas against the wall of the living room before coming back to my laptop—still open to a picture of a set of three Rothko paintings which—by the light of my computer screen—seemed like they had been tinted slightly blue.

I stared into a representation of a representation of a feeling, knowing that it could be looped ad infinitum given some mild effort and a camera—taking photos of photos until the end of time.

Staring at the social-media photo, I began simultaneously to stare into an imaginary simulacrum of meaning, receding forever back in layers-upon-layers of representation and recreation, and I realized that I was feeling nothing at all.

I stopped waiting for something—epiphany, epilepsy, anything at all—to happen to me, and started mixing some blue pen ink into one of the pots of black paint I kept around the house.

I looked over the image once more, before beginning to scoop the black-blue paint into my right hand and the paint seeped through the gaps in my fingers before I turned and threw it—like a baseball pitch—at the canvas against the far wall.

The ball of paint flew through the air and smashed into the floor in front of the canvas with an audible thud. A few drops of paint, kicked up by the propulsive force of the throw, splattered against the bottom of the canvas.

I grabbed another fistful of paint and threw again.

And again—paint smashing against the floor with a thud.

Fistful after fistful of aromatic acrylic flying at the canvas.

My head began to sting from the fumes.

Some paint made contact with the wall, some with the floor, and finally, some with the canvas until it (and the wall and the floor) had been entirely covered by a void of my own creation. The bucket of paint almost empty, I took off my ratty t-shirt and did my best to scrub the paint from my hands, smearing it across my palms, soaking it into the shirt’s cotton before giving up and throwing the shirt itself at the canvas.

It was caught by a gust of wind from the open-window and I watched it float for a moment before falling to the floor.

I told myself that I’d clean up the mess in the morning.

The next morning, I nursed a headache and scrubbed turpentine on the paint-stained wall of the living room.

My iPhone dinged from its place on the coffee table.

It was Reece. He apologized, very formally, for not texting me back yesterday, and said that he had left his phone in his car by accident.

I made fun of him for being old.

Want to get a drink? he texted.

I typed yes but waited a few minutes before hitting send.

After sending the text, I hated myself for waiting.

That evening I put eyedrops in while riding the bus to the touristy part of downtown surrounded by several food-service industry workers going to start their closing shifts.

When I got there, Reece had already taken a place at the bar.

He had put effort into styling his hair a bit, and I noticed that his widow’s peak seemed to have receded only slightly with age. His dark hair contrasted against the impressively pale skin of his forehead.

I was always afraid I would have a bad hairline later in life.

I ordered an Old-Fashioned.

Dad worked in the whiskey business.

I drank it to prove that I could too.

Reece and I made small talk, and he scooted his barstool a bit closer to mine.

“When did you decide to paint?” he said.

Raising my voice to be heard over the noise of the bar, I told him that I actually failed art in seventh grade.

“One time,” I said, “we had to draw the Guggenheim Museum, this beautiful, perfect building by a— no—by the giant of American architecture. We were supposed to be learning a lot about perspective and three-dimensional drawing or something like that. So, the teacher—who's specialty, at the time, was making sculptures from old garden hoses and other pieces of discarded garbage—had us replicate all these masterworks of modern architecture.”

“It’s a beautiful building,” he said and smiled.

“Have you been?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

I pulled the orange-peel from my drink and sucked on it for a moment before continuing.

“I think I spent a few hours drawing the rotunda—getting all of the lines and curves just right – and then, when I was happy with that, I never touched the sketch again.”

I set the orange peel down next to my glass.

He opened his mouth to say something, but the noise of the bar muddled his words.

“What?” I said.

“You were paralyzed!” he yelled.

“Yeah!” I yelled back, and then there was a pause.

“I get stuck in these loops,.” I half-shouted, “I find it hard to do things when I should have already done them!”

“Okay.”

“Of course, turning in nothing but a well-drawn rotunda doesn’t get you a good grade.”

I smiled.

He chuckled.

“No, no. I get it,” he said, “Self-sabotage.”

“There’s nothing more depressing than remedial, summer school art classes.”

I ordered another cocktail and asked him what he did for a living, half-expecting him, based on his quiet listening and the tweed blazer draped across his legs, to say he was a therapist or—hell—even priest.

“Banking.”

“Oh.” I said, and I began to comb my brain for investment terms I knew or had picked up from the copies of the Wall Street Journal my parents left out around the house.

He laughed.

“My career’s not great first date conversation.”

“Honestly,” I said, “No, not really.”

We laughed.

We kept talking, saying nothing of interest. I waived the waiter down to grab the check.

Looking down at the check, I noticed he had only ordered water, which is why I found it cute when he stumbled and put his arm around my shoulder as we walked out onto the street like he was a high school football jock, and I was his cheerleader.

Maybe I just stumbled, and he was just catching me—my head had gone hazy from the drinks.

The sun was setting, and so the heat had faded away.

The street was dotted with wrinkled men and women selling faux-authentic ‘Hispanic’ trinkets to unscrupulous (white) tourists in search of a piece of desert authenticity. They laid out their goods on colored blankets in an approximation of similarly tourist-filled streets south of the Rio Grande, where goods of marginally higher perceived-authenticity changed hands for the same American dollars. My family used to spend our spring breaks in Mexican resort towns—Playa Del Carmen, Cozumel, Nuevo Vallarta. Eventually, the news reports on gang-violence made their way to my mom, so we stopped.

I failed high school Spanish too.

My phone buzzed in my pocket.

Reece smiled, and we walked for a little while longer, talking about nothing important.

I reached into my pocket, and fumbled around with my phone, trying to find the button on its side that would shut it off, and I felt Reece grab my shoulder and pull me gently into an alleyway behind another bar.

I felt as he pushed me, again quite gently, as though he was afraid that I would shatter if he used too much force, against the concrete wall before dropping to his knees and fumbling with the buttons and zipper of my pants, which felt stuck to my legs from the sweat of the rest of the day.

As he took me in his mouth, I realized that I should have been running my hands through his hair, or making more noise, or at least exaggerating my breathing a bit to let him know that he was doing—well—a good enough job.

I tried to breathe a little louder.

He didn’t seem to notice, but he did move his tongue down to my balls and licked each one a few times in a way that I couldn’t help but think resembled the way a cat licks its own paws.

Reece didn’t matter—or he did matter, but he didn’t matter to me, which I guess I already knew—well—I didn’t know that I knew, but in that moment, I realized that he didn’t matter, or that he didn’t matter to me, or that maybe he did matter, and it was me who didn’t.

I should have just canceled the date.

As his head bobbed back and forth, I realized—or really—I realized not only that he didn’t matter (etc.) but also that I would have to buy a plane ticket when I got back to my not-real-home, because—well (and there is no non-melodramatic way to say this)—my dad was dead, and that he had been dead for a few weeks, and that I couldn’t change that—and I realized that I was a coward both for not properly feeling feelings for Reece and—more importantly—for not calling my mom back and—(this one I think I might have already realized, before I was standing there with a middle aged man bobbing back and forth on my penis) I knew I would have to leave this place, at least for now—no—I knew that if I left New Mexico I would not return.

It’s not that the blowjob was bad. It was—in fact—passably mediocre.

If I left, it would mean there was nothing for me here.

Well, I thought, that must mean there already is nothing left for me here.

Just like that it was done, and he was getting up off his knees, and then we were back on the street, holding hands, and walking together down the covered sidewalks.

He leaned over and kissed me on the lips. I could taste cum on his tongue.

Later, it would occur to me that this was the only time we kissed.

Maybe I should have just fucked him in the alleyway to feel like I’d returned the favor.

We kept walking for a while, the silence becoming more comfortable or more domestic or maybe just more ordinary with each successive step.

It didn’t matter, I thought, none of this was real.

The date was real, but not really. I would wake up a few days from now, and it would be gone – nothing more tangible than a dream. In a few weeks we’d stop texting, in a year I’d lose his number. Like two cars narrowly avoiding a crash by scraping against one another at high speeds, stripping off one another’s paint, my time with Reece only touched against the surface of the actual, before turning out, by my own doing, to mean absolutely nothing at all.

I reached down and grabbed his hand.

On the sidewalk, a few yards ahead of us, sat an open-air spa.

Two identical chairs lined up next to one another, both well-worn, probably purchased secondhand from a nail salon, with brightly lit aquariums stationed at each of their feet.

Beside them, an old, sun-worn woman sitting on a backless stool, her back on the shopping strip wall. The woman’s heavy eyelids were drooped half-shut, occasionally fluttering open for a moment, before closing back down again.

Clumps of minnows swimming circles in each tank.

We kept walking toward it. I don’t know if I lead him there, or if he led me, but soon we were speaking to the woman. Speaking at her, and she was speaking back at us—us in English, and frantic hand gestures, and her in a croaky Spanish, sans hand gestures.

Soon this would be behind me, and I would be back home.

I was surprised by how sweaty Reece’s hand had become.

He kissed me on the cheek. It took effort for me not to pull away.

I made a smooching sound in his general direction.

The old woman flashed both her hands in the air, and paused, before flashing them again.

Twenty dollars.

I yanked the bills from my wallet without further thought and, as the woman pocketed the cash, I realized that she didn’t seem like a person to me. She looked like a wax figurine, or like one of those rubbery animatronics in Disney World’s Hall of Presidents. Her movements made her skin resemble worn out spandex that had been stretched over a dying mechanical corpse. I guess we all looked like that eventually.

I was happy to waste my money on the date. My dad, when complaining about how his dad slept with money under his mattress, once told me that money begins losing value the moment you begin to possess it, its theoretical future potential shrinking with every second that passes.

Reece thanked me and, in the interest (I think) of being polite, asked if I wanted to try the fish treatment first.

I said that I didn’t want to try it at all, but that I would be happy to sit in the other chair and keep him company for a while. He smiled, and stood for a moment, staring at me, his eyes, in spite of our age difference, pleading with me to give him permission to sit down and rest his legs, and yes, to submerge his feet in the minnow-filled fish tank. I smiled a permissive smile, and he sat down, and I sat down, and he reached over and took my hand in his.

I thought about pulling away, but instead relaxed, letting his hand—which felt so much older than it once had—cover mine, temporarily sheltering my turpentine-dried skin from the night breeze.

I let the tension leave my shoulders and my back, my eyes drifting down to Reece’s wrinkled feet, my mind first noticing, then allowing itself to admire the beautiful: the tiny creatures darting around the tank, nibbling away at his toes, trying to survive for as long as they could, the only way that they knew how, by culling the dead skin from the feet of the world.