Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me(4)
When I woke the next morning, my sheets were stained with bits of blood and black ink from the tattoo. I stumbled into the kitchen for coffee and had to laugh at what I found left from the night before: At the height of my high, I had written lyrics from “Black Crow” on one of the blank white kitchen walls:
My whole life has been illumination, corruption, and diving
Diving down to pick up on every shiny thing
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Soon after, I decided to get away from San Francisco and spend a month in London. I subleased a flat in Camden from a friend for virtually nothing. Before leaving, I gave Luke keys to my apartment—not just duplicate keys, mind you, but Steve’s set—which seems bizarre in retrospect. I did so on the pretense that, since Luke and his boyfriend were going through a rough patch, he might need a place to stay now and then. But the truth was, I liked the idea of this über-Steve stand-in sleeping in my bed, inhabiting my space.
London wasn’t an arbitrary choice. Steve and I had been there twice to do research for my last book and had fallen in love with the city. I thought that going back might cheer me. Boy, was that na?ve. No sooner had the plane taken off than tears were streaming down my face. I might have turned around and left London in days had it not been for a single item I’d brought with me: a camera.
Impulsively, I had bought a pocket-sized digital Canon the night before leaving San Francisco. If I had thought it through, I would have talked myself out of it; I was traveling by myself, after all, and wouldn’t be taking snapshots at tourist sites of or with anyone. But as I quickly realized, the camera itself was my travel companion. It gave me a reason to leave the flat every day and search for pictures in parts of London I had never seen before.
The photos were not for anyone but myself, which in itself was new. All my writing over the past sixteen years had been, to a great extent, first and foremost for Steve (all three of my books were identically dedicated to him). Our life together had been challenging in many ways: He’d had HIV/AIDS; I was HIV-negative. We went through a lot together as he survived bouts of different AIDS-related illnesses and symptoms—chronic diarrhea, pneumonia, wasting syndrome, night sweats—as well as, bizarrely, a benign brain tumor that caused a condition called acromegaly (for which he had to have neurosurgery). When the protease inhibitor drugs arrived in the late 1990s, they saved his life, and he enjoyed several years of good, stable health. Which was but one reason his sudden death from a heart attack was so shocking; it was most likely triggered by an episode of ventricular fibrillation and had nothing directly to do with HIV, an autopsy confirmed.
Although the pictures I took in London were not for Steve, they evoked him nonetheless. He’d loved everything about the London Tube system, for instance, and so I spent hours underground, taking trains, hanging out in stations, riding the steeply raked escalators, looking for photos.
Couples captivated me—on the Tube, on park benches, arm in arm on the street. Couples so in love you could see it in their faces. But I couldn’t take pictures of their faces, and not because I was too shy to ask for a shot. Their smiles were heartbreaking. Instead, I took pictures of their hands, laced together as if in prayer, or their feet—the erotic dance that is a prelude to a kiss.
Steve’s birthday fell while I was in London. He would have been forty-four. I decided to spend the day revisiting sights he had especially loved, such as the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum and a hole-in-the-wall comic book shop in Camden. But if I had been hoping somehow to pick up his scent along the way, all I found was that it was gone.
I ended the day with a long, zigzagging walk across London’s bridges. I’d brought with me several small personal items that I had not been able to—but wanted to—part with. For instance, his contact lenses, which had just been sitting in the medicine cabinet at home in San Francisco. To me, his contacts were as much a part of his body, his life, as his eyes. Without them, he could hardly see. I tossed them into the Thames and thanked him for showing me a million things. Each subsequent bridge became an occasion for a ceremonial purging and a fresh round of tears. By the time I reached London Bridge, where I scattered the last of his cremated ashes, the only significant thing remaining of Steve’s that I had not thrown in was myself. Not that I didn’t consider it.
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Going through grief is not a uniquely human experience. The fact that fellow primates—chimps, orangutans, lemurs—manifest grief-like behavior is beyond dispute, scientists agree. Upon the death of an infant, for instance, a rhesus monkey mother will carry her dead baby in her mouth for days and days—as if in a fog of sorrow, literally unable to let go—until only skin and bones remain.
For wild geese such as greylag, which, like swans, tend to bond for life with a single partner, the loss or disappearance of a mate triggers equally heartrending behavior. First, the bird anxiously attempts to find the lost one. Scarcely sleeping or eating, it moves about restlessly day and night, flying great distances and visiting all the places where the missing might be found.
In its frantic searching, the searcher often gets lost and can’t find its way back to its colony. It may succumb to the elements. But if the bird does return, it is clearly changed; it becomes shy and fearful, fleeing even the youngest and weakest geese. The bird develops a tendency to panic and hence becomes accident-prone. No matter the age, its rank in the colony sinks to the lowest level. What’s more, the bird undergoes a physical transformation.