What follows is a chapter from my upcoming novel The Width of a Human Heart. The whole novel is a cipher for so much of my own life, buried and unburied, but also that of my brother, my father, my grandfather. The absence of the mother from this, sequestered as she is within a penitentiary for most of the novel, is deliberate. It is a novel about masculine anxieties and wounds, self-inflicted, and she needs to be an absent hovering figure, a negative space, for those impacts to sting as badly as I need them to.

This chapter follows Robbie, the main character of the majority of the novel, while he is alone in the apartment he shares with his boyfriend, whom he calls the Angel, who is away at a funeral of another of their friends. Robbie takes this moment to attempt to write a letter to his mother in prison, the first he would have sent her since she went in years before and his father stopped driving him to visits where he would sit and sulk in silence anyway. Guilt eats at him; there’s so much of himself he needs to say, wounds to confess, the anxieties of the death of Matthew Shepherd and of 9/11, but the words keep getting stuck in his throat. I’ve drafted the chapter that follows this one already, after he’s failed and writes a gonzo-style newsletter called GREETINGS FROM SODOM!: dispatches from the homosexual frontier in its stead. But this chapter is the raw pain, the failures to compose, where emotion overwhelms one’s capacity to speak and the burning desire for reconciliation and forgiveness and grace is the same fire that burns you too badly to grasp it.

The title of this email is as long and ungainly as it is because the novel itself is composed of multiple novels within itself, each with titled and loosely standalone chapters meant to give it the feeling of reading a stack of comic books trying to understand an event where the threads always seem to meet somewhere else. The first is the novel, the second is the sub-novel, and the third is the chapter that follows.

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The Epistles of St. Robert

Sundered by red writ thunder, he hounded and bound across the half-lit hallway of the Angel’s apartment, slouching toward that squatted desk hunched excruciating in the corner, mounded with books and letters and opened mail, research material, the stuff of the common life, on and on toward that typewriter with its luridly inked ribbon, the garrote by which the ligature marks across Robbie’s neck might be counted and by letters known that he was slain. In his left hand gripped tight is the letter, that cursed thing, his mother’s name at the top and the spew of human heart afterward, admissions of his homosexuality, how much it hurt when his father struck him in the face and body, how lonely things had been, how he relied on her to be safe, to be strong, how he’d found a boyfriend, found peers, found a career doing art in the indie scene, how friends had already died, how fentanyl and a feasting hunger for heroin seemed to be stealing the love he’d fought hard to see populate his life, how his boyfriend, an angel, the finger which lifted him from his darkness, was so to hooked on the material which Robbie knew in the depths of his heart would steal his angel away, hurl that bright light into his own reciprocal darkness and rendering Robbie again alone, alone, alone. The red ripped through those words, lightning bolt scars, truncations jotted in his warbling handwriting. Too long too long too long. His mother, rotting there in prison, the years passing slow and away and not a word from her only son, the painful distance that he struggled to articulate even to that angel of his, how many tears he’d shed against that hollowed chest trying to choke out the words, to spit out the stone, how she’d protected him in those days of the relentless Georgia heat where his queer heart lay nestled in a bed of clipped boughs inside his belly, ashamed and scared to be seen in the ribcage where it was expected, how she was the thing that kept him safe from his father, and then he saw her beating that woman in the church parking lot, face flecked with blood, those animal eyes, the sound of the woman’s head striking the hood of the car and then the pavement and the vision of his mother, his safety, hyperventilating over the near-kill. No words would come. Not then and not now. If Robbie couldn’t articulate to his angel, what good were his attempts to say it to his mother directly? But that was the only thing to do, to confess in a fright full of tears those long clung to agonies and try to find in her words some means to forgive her, to release the abnegating knot in his chest, to shed the clenched muscle of his own animal pain. But the letter did too much, said too much, went on too much, and so he had to cut and cut and cut in this narrow window while the Angel was away.

His fingers found the keys quick, flying of their own accord, like he could scream with his lips closed if he could just type fast enough. The draft sat crumpled and stained damp with palmed sweat of that harried saunt toward the crouched desk. These were new words, another angle on that repeating pain, a zoescope of his wounded child’s heart, images presenting an image of progression, of animation, but instead forming brute cycles, the horse forever running, home and rest never found. What if Odysseus never found Ithaca again? What if Penelope grew old on those shores, her face etched with lines for every year her love had disappeared? How long would they dream of each other across those waters? How long until love released its hold? And what of the other left still loving, still wandering, alone beyond loneliness? Robbie sucks in breath through his teeth and only then realizes he is crying again. The paper dings at the end of the page and he loads up another. Buries his face in the palm of his hand and lets himself sob, to try to drain that cyst that just keeps filling, that rotted sense of shame that he’d buried this all for so long and still couldn’t get a single word out.

The problem with his art was that he couldn’t be honest, couldn’t be sincere. The surreal was a neat trick, infantile humor getting a cheap pop, but the reason his work didn’t touch Matthew’s or the Angel’s or Tricia’s or Ira’s was their hearts were open to the canvas and the page and the clay. The thing that came out was this earnest reflection of everything beautiful and ugly inside of them; the eulogy Matthew wrote for himself, expecting AIDS or a violent beating but getting fentanyl instead, the first of them to die, stung their hearts and set aflight those wounded tears because of the truth he used to cut to the bone of his own life. Robbie’s stone stuck in his throat. Those agonies unprocessed and unnamed, only ejected from his lips when saddled with alcohol or addled by the same drugs that now came reaving for the heads of his loves, held back anything true he might say, any sweet bells his fingers might run across the rim and set singing in perfumed air. But every word came out stupid and he could only speak when alone when he couldn’t speak well at all. He gripped the page with both hands and pulled it free from the typewriter and hurled it against the wall. The page, impertinent and mocking, instead fluttered about almost still in the air before drifting down and sliding below a bookshelf.

The trip to the convenience store was a nothing, an ink blot of memory. Cigarettes and malt liquor, anything, anything at all, write drunk and edit sober if you have to, just so long as you can bend your body over the bowl and let out that primal scream trapped inside of your bile. He cracked a window, leaned against the sill, cigarette perched wavering in those lips that barely knew how to hold it while he tried again and again with cupped hands to light the lighter to no avail. He wanted to slam the bottle down but no, with shaking hands he laid it on the table and got up, walked to the stove, lit his cigarette the way he had when he was homeless and couldn’t afford a lighter at all. Those shallow breaths took so little of the nicotine in. He waited for that icy shiver through the body, the proof of the hit, but it never came, just a warm wet ash taste in his mouth, something like chewed tar, and the dawning realization they didn’t have an ashtray around, flicking those black and gray witnesses to the crime onto the table, better to smear and leave telltale mark of the ingestion the Angel knew Robbie didn’t do. His eyes traced lines out the window, bouncing between cars and distant windows, the wires laced over the roads and the brickwork and metal of Athens apartments. It took three cigarettes to get anything close to smoking them right and even then it was fast, so fast, feeling like it was barely three drags before the whole cigarette expired on him. Just sip and smoke, breathe in and out, anything to dull that ache, anything to send to stillness the throb of that old wound that made him so stupid and tongue-tied, made people who thought him too smart to be so stupid treat him like he was manipulating them, that he couldn’t possibly have this eruptive earnestness, that the fractured tears juddering from his soaked cheeks were a trick just to get what he wanted. But what did he want anyway? To be safe again. To exhale. For all the death to stop.

Again to the keyboard, but now no draft to rewrite. Matthew Shepherd had died broken and alone, strung up by chains like Christ against the back of that truck, and every queer soul and especially every gay man in American died there with him. It was like losing your brother, your son, your husband, your father in that paradox of youth, everything all at once. How do you tell your mother you’ve been gay as long as you can remember? How do you tell her the image of his broken body looked so much like yours that you had nightmares for months that it was you that died, able to remember clear enough the feel of a tire iron striking your ribcage, a boot on the stomach and on the throat? How do you throw in the face of your mother every wound she failed to save you from while she was locked behind bars in a penitentiary? Robbie couldn’t help but to shake, to make typos, to have to roll the paper back and jot those Xs over the failed words, wish he could write Xs over everything, every word and every image he’d thrown into the frame, every selfish comic and every self-deprecating joke, every year since she’d been locked up and every dead friend. You can escape anything except what haunts your heart; you can move away from everything except the faces and words that sting inside of your brain and call out for forgiveness, for the heat of fresh tears, for the collapse of bodies into each other within the intimacy of weeping. Hi Mom, I know it’s been years without a word from me, but I finally learned that sometimes people die and you don’t get to say goodbye, that good people sometimes disappear and the only closure you get is the knowledge that they won’t ever be back again. Do you include in the letter the dark nights of your soul? Would your mother want to know the parts of you to pray for or would you just be sending anthrax through the mail?

Robbie only had a few days left before the Angel returned. The money in his pocket was enough for food if he was judicious, leaving the rest for cigarettes and booze. Maybe sufficient hunger would shake loose the words he needed to say. Maybe that feral hunger which striped his throat with claw marks could be quiet when starved.