—Dear friends, the instructor said, his voice quiet and meditative but resounding all the same, I invite you to come into your bodies. Please take vajrasana, kneeling pose, and ease yourself into the forty-seven corners of your frames. Melt your bones out to the recesses of your skin, but at the same time stay within the boundaries of your flesh. Good. Very good. Take a deep breath in, now a deep breath out. Ahhhhhh. Excellent. Please go ahead and thank yourselves for coming into class tonight. For giving yourself this gift. We have a very whetted understanding of time in this room, don’t we, and we appreciate that this hour is precious. This is a special class. We are a special group. And because we are unique in yoga, I thought we deserved a unique flow. Our very own, this night.
He slipped his eyes closed and pressed his hands in prayer. The room was still. I looked at Alice, but her eyes were closed, too.
—When I was a boy, the instructor said, we used to hold these undercover séances. We’d turn off all the lights and repeat the names of our dead grandmas. Grandma Sue? Grandma Beth?
A small collective laugh filled the room.
—You there, Grandma Jo? To our great relief, we never heard back from our dead grammies. The last séance we ever held, one of us was trying to reach a dead parent. Our friend Bobby, his dad was a truck driver who died when his eighteen-wheeler flipped off a mountain pass in Idaho. Holy moly, how we all hoped he wouldn’t come to us. Even Bobby. We couldn’t fathom how far his dad had fallen, and we were terrified by the notion. If he spoke to us from beyond, we’d have probably pissed our dungarees. Looking back now, I realize that the purpose of those little séances was not to talk to these dead relatives but, rather, to scare ourselves “to death.” Because wasn’t that the scariest thought in the universe? Death?
In the darkness I saw the room nod. There were soft squeaking noises in the walls that I was sure were mice.
—Now, my friends, we have a unique gift in the world. All of us on this earth have a life sentence, we are walking around with an expiration date under our cap, but most of the people you see out there, bouncing around without a care in the world, they don’t know when. They might live to a hundred and ten. The way they act, it’s like coffins are for vampires, am I right? Well. For those of us in the room, the sentence is a tad bit sooner than that, isn’t it? And as I’m sure many of you have come to feel, there’s a marvelous freedom in that. We are not scared of death, not in the same way, because from this point forward, we begin at death. Are you with me?
Again the room nodded. A Poland Spring bottle crinkled. I heard the sound of water slipping down a throat. I used to hate the noise my father made when he smacked his thirsty lips to make moisture. He was a diabetic and sometimes his mouth ran dry.
—So this evening, I’d like us to begin in savasana, corpse pose. May we, in yoga, as in life, begin at death and travel onward from there. Now bring yourselves to lie down, release the legs, and push out through the heels. Soften the root of the tongue, the wings of the nose, and the taut flesh of the forehead. Let the eyes fall to the back of the head, then turn them downward to gaze at the heart. Release your heavy brain to the back of the skull.
Once the room was lying down, Alice’s hand found mine in the relative darkness, grasped it, and the instructor began to whisper.
—You are not your disease, dear friends, HIV/AIDS does not define you. HIV/AIDS are merely letters. You are not your body. Your body is a rental, as K. Pattabhi Jois famously, exquisitely said, and soon it will be time to return your lease. You won’t be penalized for the dents and the overage of miles. Instead, you will be given a brand-new car, more beautiful than you could have ever imagined, and this one, my dear friends, will have the ability to fly.
* * *
AFTER THE CLASS WAS OVER, we walked outside and stood in the sun. The line where Alice’s jaw met her neck was so beautiful as to be licentious.
—What the fuck? I said.
—When you’re depressed or in grave trouble, she said, people think you should be near children, amusement. They invite you to dinner, they prop you up and shine their happy light in your face. It’s bullshit. The opposite is true. You should seek out the dying.
I felt there was something evil about that, something evil in her. I asked her if she’d gone to HIV yoga before and she said of course, many times. She said she went to desperate places whenever she was feeling unfortunate. She liked to do her taxes on the quiet patio of the Beverly Hills Cancer Center, with its flushed jacaranda and its sterile herringbone bricks.
Now I worried she was cruel and careless enough to leave me even after she knew who we were to each other. I wanted to stitch our bodies together.
At a crowded restaurant we ordered pâté on baguette and arugula with Treviso from a girl with interstellar bangs. There was porridge on the menu and something called a risky biscuit. The font on the menu was old diner style. The slices of bread were tremendous, ash-powdered, hard on the outside, cloud-soft within. We sat out on the patio, arid with brown vines and piles of firewood.
—How far along are you? she asked.
—I have no idea.
—Are you going to keep it?
—I don’t know, I said, even though I knew I would.
She put her hand on my arm. Moments like those, I couldn’t imagine she wouldn’t love me.
—Why don’t you go to the police? Tell them this child is a runaway. Have them send it back to its mother.
—I can’t go to the police.
—Such an outlaw, Joan. Are you wanted in New York City? Are you the one who killed Vic?
—I just don’t trust the police.
Alice nodded and didn’t ask me to clarify, but the police officer appeared to me then. There were two who came that night; one of them dealt with the bodies and the other dealt with me. He was in his early thirties with the pale bloated face of a young boy that merely expands out at the sides as he ages. It took me a while to realize that he thought I’d done it. He wasn’t intelligent. Even an hour later, when the trajectory of events became clear, he remained cold. He treated me as so many men in the future would.
—So tell your landlord, she said, laughing. I’m sure it’s another coda in the lease.
—She’s a little girl, I said as I touched my stomach.
—You have your own child to protect. Are you a warrior, I want to know? Or are you some husk that men—and now this girl—have had their way with?
After the words left her mouth, there was no trace of them on her face. I realized that no matter how much I’d told her, she didn’t understand my life. Of course, I hadn’t told her the end. Big Sky, in one of his pontificating moods, said it took fifty years for a death to be completely forgotten, but sometimes it took only two weeks. Some people, he said, were stronger than others.
I realized in that very instant that I would never see Big Sky again. I would never see his face again. Feel his warm and reticent touch. Of all the rapes I’d sustained, this was the worst degradation—the way a man who thinks nothing of you can loom larger than your life, and another life inside of you. That was the most awful thing. That, like my mother before me, I felt that my child was a burden.
25
LENNY MET ELEANOR ONE 103-DEGREE afternoon. She was curled up on the couch when he knocked. I felt I was opening the door to a shameful secret.