![\"Photographer:](\"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/Skyopensground_apr7-240x300.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nAll over the news is a story of a woman and her pet monkey, Travis. The two of them used to take Xanax and drink wine together. One day her friend came over to visit, and the chimp mauled her friend\u2019s face off \u2013 took the whole thing. The monkey\u2019s owner tried stabbing him to death, but she couldn\u2019t get it to stop.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
I can\u2019t help but think of every single moment in that woman\u2019s life with her pet monkey, leading up to that second. And, of course, the woman with the missing face. How incredibly routine their lives had probably become. I can only imagine the monkey and his owner sat around together and drank wine and took Xanax hundreds of times, and just watched the hours go by. The woman-that-used-to-have-a-face would pop by every so often. Just to say hi.<\/p>\n
The officials thought the monkey had been incited by the woman\u2019s haircut. I can picture her at her local hair salon earlier that afternoon, sitting in front of the mirror excited about her new hairdo. Unsure or nervous or proud or determined, turning her head, side to side.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That was probably the biggest change she had seen in a long time. She had no idea what was about to happen.<\/p>\n
My father was thrown through the windshield.<\/p>\n
He was a tile setter. He drove a large, white Econovan with all of his equipment and supplies in the back. It was hit broadside by the train. On impact his body was ejected through the windshield, and the van flipped over several times before landing on its side. Bags of grout scattered, and crushed ceramic and marble came down a fine powder, snowing over the tracks, the soot settling all around him, covering him in white ash. When they excavated his body, a negative impression was left behind.<\/p>\n
My phone goes off.\u00a0 It\u2019s a text. The first response to my ad today:\u00a0 \u201cNice pic. Got a face?\u201d<\/p>\n
I reply by sending a picture of myself taken earlier with my camera phone, shirtless in front of a mirror. I touch the screen and enlarge my face with my thumb and index finger. I quickly center it, crop it and send it.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u201cNice. Could you meet at mine?\u00a0 Union Square. 6pm. 200 roses.\u201d<\/p>\n
Before taking a bath I was sure to ask: \u201cU want me clean?\u201d Some men wanted me to stink. \u201cNext time don\u2019t shower,\u201d tricks have said after coming up from between my legs.<\/p>\n
I clean the bathtub then pour some Epsom salt into the running hot water. Once full, I step into the bath, and slowly sit down into a squat. Inch by inch I sink until I\u2019m all the way on my back, and let my head slip under. I listen to the pipes and the electricity moving around like whales, and the footsteps from the apartment below are anchors hitting the ocean floor, really slow and heavy and muted. I hold my breath for as long as I can, until everything around me almost stops.<\/p>\n
When I lift my head from the water, for a moment everything is slow motion. The water cascading off my hair and shoulders is now a cool gelatin, doesn\u2019t move fast enough or wash away, becomes a medusa headdress of blubbery ripples and congealed ringlets in my wake. Pulling myself up from the tub, the water clings to my body, eventually sloughs off, splashes into frozen splatters, the shape of hundreds of split second raindrops below me stubbornly holding their form. One leg steps out and it seems to take whole minutes before reaching the floor a mile away. My other leg follows. I\u2019ve become a giant, moving through a miniature village, great and delayed and potentially destructive just by the nature of what I am.<\/p>\n
I towel off, get dressed, grab my parka and head out the door. It\u2019s incredibly cold, but the sun is shining brightly. This is the false warmth of blinding light in the winter, sparking rockets off hoods, windows, the street. Walking to the train I see a flock of pigeons moving like a school of fish in the sky, ricocheting white underbellies, flashing every turn as if they were being jerked by\u00a0 a lure. Up the steps and onto the subway station I lean over the ledge, above the tracks, looking for the train like leaning into a microphone.<\/p>\n
At my father\u2019s funeral I gave a eulogy at a podium with a mic in front of family members I hadn\u2019t seen in years, and friends of my parents who slowly arrived over the following few days after the news. My father once told me he figured life had to be just like a rose \u2013 beautiful while it lasted. There was calmness and a reassurance in his voice when comparing the fleetingness of life to a rose.\u00a0 My father balled up one hand inside the other, unfolded his fingers. His fist unfurled and broke free from his other hand until both were stretched, palms out to show they were only holding nothing.\u00a0 I relayed that story, and held my own hands up towards the grieving room as witness.<\/p>\n
I mentioned how my father was known for finding shiny things on the ground.\u00a0 Always looking down at his feet, finding stray earrings, coins, anything metallic or glass, anything with a reflection that might catch the sun in his path. He kept a bowl on top of his dresser where he collected the things he found. Over the following months, people placed a menagerie of twinkling junk at the little wooden cross by the tracks, shards of mirror from the crash site, a large glass diamond, an old coke bottle crawling with fire-ants.<\/p>\n
My train pulls into the station where I\u2019m waiting, and begins screeching to a stop. The stirred air takes my breath away, pulls me back to reality. In the passing windows I catch brief, choppy glimpses of my reflection. The brakes are applied, and a loud high-pitched scraping sound echoes across the empty platform. The train\u2019s door skids to a stop right in front of me. In the window\u2019s reflection on the door I swear I see the pale boy from my dreams replacing mine, so I throw the fur-lined hood of my coat off my head just as the doors part, the image splitting in two with the separating windows. When I get on the train I hurry to another window for the reflection, but I\u2019m surprised to see it\u2019s only my own.<\/p>\n
The JMZ rumbles across the Williamsburg Bridge, a gaudy, purplish construction, modeled after the Eiffel Tower with its intricate steel lattice precision, and thatch-like skeleton bowing upwards into two peaks across the length of the structure.\u00a0Two looming towers mirroring each other, mirroring something else further away, much darker, much more romantic and serious.\u00a0 Something about the color almost renders the bridge obsolete, juvenile, insensitive, the same way large frescoes arguably become once restored.\u00a0All those specialty human hands fumbling across the ceilings of chapels, sanitizing and erasing nature\u2019s intentions. I\u2019m reminded again of the flower my father believed to be symbolic of something bigger. He had found comfort in the impermanent effects of a single bloom, something beautiful that inevitably wilted.<\/p>\n
Then it\u2019s his corpse in the hospital, waiting to be identified. This is one of the many recurring jumping off points. It\u2019s the whole thing about my brother claiming the body. My brother later said he knew it was our father as soon as he saw his hands.\u00a0This precious, morbid scrap of information made it back to me somehow, delivered from long distance phone calls with my mother, or gleaned from the dreamlike trespasses of the mourning family and visitors during the days after the accident when I returned home. I wasn\u2019t ever sure if that meant the rest of his body was unrecognizable, or if his hands were simply the first things he saw?<\/p>\n
After years of mixing grout, my father\u2019s hands had been eroded to a rough finish, smooth in their seamlessness, but calloused and toughened. Air tight skin swelled in a Darwinian attempt to preserve what little moisture it possibly could.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2026A cactus’ trunk is ribbed so when it stretches full with rain during infrequent desert downpours it won\u2019t split at the seams...\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\u2026Camels in Mongolia eat brittle ice from the desert ground in very tiny portions.\u00a0 For long seasons this is their only source of water, and they risk freezing to death if they eat too fast. I wonder if the careless ones would at least not know thirst during the passing moments it took for their body temperatures to drop fatal, and for the great beasts to be tempted to sleep, never to wake again<\/em>...<\/p>\nHis hands occasionally split, but bloodless, like a crack in granite.\u00a0When working, he sometimes dropped smooth slabs of marble tile, because he had no traction providing fingerprints left.\u00a0He often joked about how he\u2019d always be able to get away from crimes he could, and might one day commit, having no prints to leave behind as evidence.<\/p>\n
\u201cI knew it was him as soon as I saw his hands<\/em>.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\nI never asked my brother what he meant, and my brother never spoke another word about it.\u00a0One day, if we ever really<\/em> spoke again, I\u2019d like to ask him what it was he saw. I want measured and educated brushes to go over the ghostly artifacts, not to restore<\/em> any surface, making it as ridiculous as possible from the brightly lit bulk of memory, but to start from scratch, on a whitewashed domed ceiling, stretching in enormity, a place for laying out ascending sermons and prayers like wet leaves. I want a mural full of everything I missed being miles and miles away, and by some stroke of miracle, everything that was yet to happen, as well as the one thing I could have tried to stop, had I known what was coming. \u00a0<\/p>\nThe city skyline opens up as the train rattles across the East River.\u00a0I look into my own hands, and lean forward into my palms, as if I could lay my whole body down into them \u2013 an entire ship, mast, and sail, through the neck of a bottle.<\/p>\n
The train reaches the end of the bridge and slips back underground. At the next stop I transfer to the F at Essex and take it to Union Square, then walk the labyrinth of the station towards the exit. There is a young woman with long, brown braids playing the saw with a bow. It sounds like a woman moaning and wailing. It moves like clown mirrors through the station, and follows me until I\u2019m above ground, suddenly negotiating a faceless, hurried crowd, honking cars, skateboarders, a lady on stilts in front of Tower Records handing out flyers for a furniture sale somewhere in Jersey. It\u2019s the beginning of a new semester. Incoming NYU sorority girls are wearing large Ray Ban sunglasses and being led all around 14th<\/sup> Street and below, their lenses spray-painted black so they can\u2019t see where they\u2019re going. The pledge sister simply has to trust the other girls guiding them by the arm.\u00a0<\/p>\nI head for the address on my phone.\u00a0 I hope the guy won\u2019t turn out to be a creep, and decide I\u2019ll ask for the money up front.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m 15 minutes late. The doorman I was told would be there to let me onto the shining brass elevator is nowhere to be found, so I start to text the stranger I\u2019m meeting. An older woman with a poodle on a leash comes in the front door, and uses her key to summon the elevator.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat good a doorman is,\u201d she says hastily, and bends down to grab her dog by the harness, leading it onto the elevator as the doors open. I stay behind, feeling like an intruder and start to text again, but the woman says quickly, \u201cYou know where you\u2019re going?\u201d<\/p>\n
I say I think so, and step over the gap in the floor as if it were capable of swallowing me whole.<\/p>\n
We both look straight ahead, watching the numbers change, pretending like the other isn\u2019t there.\u00a0 As it climbs, I hear something hissing, then smell ammonia coming from the carpet. I look over and make eye contact with the dog. It\u2019s in a squatting position, pissing all over the floor. I glance at the woman, but she is looking at her reflection, unaware or simply not interested in the messy inconvenience the poodle is making.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I get off on the 5th floor, and down the hall I see the door I\u2019m supposed to go in, and it\u2019s cracked open for me. I give my dick a quick squeeze outside my jeans, and lightly knock before easing my way in. The man I\u2019m meeting is standing in the living room wearing all black. Black shirt, pants, shiny black shoes. He\u2019s very short and pudgy, just standing there with a large book in his hands as if he were giving a lecture to an empty room.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI was worried you changed your mind,\u201d he says, closing the book, and I close the door behind me. The man looks at me and says, \u201cI\u2019m glad you didn\u2019t,\u201d then offers me a drink. The apartment is bare except for a few large canvas paintings, a bookshelf, a couch, and a long slate of glass on metal legs for a coffee table. Having moved to the kitchen, the man asks from the other room if I would like any ice. I say, \u201cNo, thank you.\u201d\u00a0 I recognize one of the paintings. It\u2019s a Ross Bleckner. It looks like floating red blood cells, red bubbles suspended in thick plasma. The man\u2019s books are all hardback and expensive looking. He comes back with a bottle of water. He seems happy with himself. Happy with a boy standing in his living room. He hands me the water, and suggests we take a seat on the couch.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I want to know if I should take off my boots. The man says if I want to, so I do. Sitting down I unlace them and slide them off, wondering if this seems sexy to the man. The way he\u2019s watching me I think it might, so I bring one of my boots to my nose, say I love the way leather boots smell. The man grimaces, asks cautiously what they smell like. I say, \u201cSex,\u201d and embarrassingly, get no reaction, so I set them on the floor, my toe poking through a hole in my sock.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy don\u2019t you take off your coat <\/em>instead?\u201d the man asks. \u201cI don\u2019t care about your boots.\u201d\u00a0 I take my coat off and unbutton my shirt, roll up the sleeves, and the man says, \u201cHairy, very nice.\u201d\u00a0 And he touches my hairy arms and small biceps. \u201cTell me a little about yourself. What do you do?\u201d\u00a0 He\u2019s biting his cuticles.<\/p>\n\u201cI\u2019m an artist. I guess. Charcoal on paper, mostly.\u201d\u00a0 This is true, or used to be true, I notice the heavy art books on the coffee table, and pick one up. It\u2019s a large book on modern architecture. I leaf through the slick pages.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s my building on the cover,\u201d says the man in all black.<\/p>\n
I close the book. Look at the big glossy jacket. It\u2019s a skyscraper, sleek glass. All glass, actually. The clouds and blue sky are reflected in the building, as if you\u2019re just looking straight through it, and to the other side it\u2019s where the sky continues.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s really beautiful,\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s in Barcelona,\u201d the man says dreamily.<\/p>\n
\u201cDid you go to school for art?\u201d the man asks. \u201cArt\u201d like it\u2019s hypothetical.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo. I kinda just taught myself, but I\u2019ve been told I\u2019m pretty good.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOh yeah? I\u2019m sure you are,\u201d says the man, still biting his cuticles. We\u2019re just sitting there on the couch. It\u2019s a couch with a big white slip cover over it, all sloppy, supposed to look like he\u2019s renovating, or about to do something messy maybe, but everything is strangely immaculate.<\/p>\n
The man seems bored. He slides closer towards me, and puts his hands with the now bleeding fingertips inside my shirt, pets my chest like the scruff on a cat.<\/p>\n
\u201cShould we go to the bedroom?\u201d he asks, and I purr for him, \u201cWhatever you want.\u201d<\/p>\n
The man gets up and heads down the hall. I stand and begin to take my jeans off, hopping on one foot as I pull my leg free. When I follow the man into the bedroom, he\u2019s already naked and on his back in bed. He is breathing in from a bottle of poppers held up to his nose. I can smell the vapors from the foot of the bed, I think about the pissing poodle, and I crawl between the sheets. We kiss and fumble from beneath the covers, and he\u2019s quickly on top of me, jerking himself off. Just as he\u2019s straddling me, and about to climax, from below I can see a giant purple scar coiled across his testicles, and I wrench my head away right before he shoots. I knock the poppers off the end table on accident, and it spills all over the floor. I look up at the man now, and he pulls himself quickly into a sitting position, leans over the edge of the bed, says, \u201cfuckfuckfuck, gimme a towel, fuck,\u201d but I\u2019m just lying there. I look around and see nothing, so I take off my shirt, and the man takes it and bends over the bed, onto his stomach, barely able to reach the mess on the floor below, his white ass and legs kicking and flailing behind him. I offer, \u201cHere let me get it,\u201d but the man\u2019s not giving up the shirt until he\u2019s satisfied.<\/p>\n
He slides off the large bed and walks a few feet over to his open closet. \u201cI\u2019m still going to give you your money,\u201d he says, as if something had been jeopardized.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re very hot, you know.\u201d\u00a0 He holds out a striped polo button down, sizing it up, deciding if it would be an appropriate fit for me. \u201cIn a strange<\/em> sort of way. Here, see if this fits. I\u2019ve gotta get those sheets up,\u201d so I get up and put each arm into the shirt, but leave it half unbuttoned. The man is tugging at the fitted sheet stained with nitrate until it finally comes free in a snap that makes him flinch.<\/p>\n\u201cMoney\u2019s on the mantle. We\u2019ll try again another time,\u201d the man says, not even looking up from his task. \u201cYou can let yourself out.\u201d<\/p>\n
For a brief second I try to decide what the appropriate goodbye would be, but quickly realize there isn\u2019t one, so I leave the man alone and naked, tending to the small spill. I put my jeans back on in the living room, grab the cash, and shut the door behind me. In the hallway, I gather myself for another moment, then take the stairs down to the lobby. Once I\u2019m out onto the street I bring the wadded up, wet shirt to my face, inhale, then drift along 6th<\/sup> Avenue towards the subway like a parade float, all hot and giant head, tethered tautly by men with tiny strings.<\/p>\nA flock of pigeons are stubborn to get out from under foot. I remember playing Duck Hunt with my brother when we were kids, lying on our stomachs in front of the TV on the day my father came back home from a vasectomy. His far away and creepy look I now recognize as somebody that’s been heavily sedated. It\u2019s how he looks now in my dreams, dead-eyed, trying to show me something I don\u2019t really want to believe. His scrotum was shaved and swollen, a gnarly scar stitched shut in a criss cross of black stitches with wiry, loose ends. My mother shrieked when she saw my father, zombie-like, giving a naked show and tell, and afterwards me and my brother played Nintendo, pretending nothing ever happened.<\/p>\n
I pass a stack of newspapers. The front-page is a photograph of the woman ripped apart by the monkey. Her head is swollen and bubbling over. Both eyes missing, one lid sewn shut, the other completely gone, just a raw pink socket unblinking. My phone vibrates.<\/p>\n
\u201cGotta face?\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
That night I dreamt again. This time the boy with the spoons steps off stage, and walks right up to me as if it were a dare. I still can\u2019t make out his features, although he\u2019s right in front of me. The boy is covered in chalky, white body paint, and baby powder that billows out all around him.<\/em><\/p>\nI have monkey paws for hands.\u00a0 I hook my monkey thumbs into a breathing gill underneath the boy\u2019s chin and flip the whole thing up, like a nose job I saw done once on television, thinking I\u2019d discover the boy\u2019s real identity, but I never do.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
![\"Photographer:](\"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/Skyopensground_apr7.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n