CEMETERY GATES

Alex Gomez
Dorian’s father wanted him to have pancakes for breakfast, which was absurd. The man should have realized that he wouldn’t have any desire for food. Even after an ordinary night at home, even if he’d slept fitfully till noon, Dorian wouldn’t have been enticed by the prospect of surrealist flour, butter and glucose. “I’d rather not eat anything,” he mumbled. “Nothing at all.”
“You’re already skeletal as it is,” droned his father, placing a no-stick pan on the glowing amber element.
“Good I never liked human flesh.” He scratched an eyelid and removed a rebellious blond curl from his forehead. “I’d much rather bare my bones to the wind. Literally.”
Dorian’s father thrust a livid wad of margarine at the smouldering pan.
“I’m leaving now,” Dorian announced.
“It’s not seven yet. The cemetery gates won’t be open.”
Dorian laughed derisively. “Father, if the door to Paradise were shut in front of you, you’d probably wait until someone came along to open it for you. I, on the other hand, have never found doormen necessary. Unless they’re beautiful.”
He chuckled to himself, well aware that his father wasn’t listening. “At any rate, I’m going to the graveyard. Now. Put your pancakes away.” He stepped into the hallway and began to pull on his tattered, dark green coat, more out of habit than necessity. The dough bubbled behind him and was abruptly reversed by a plastic spatula. Dorian sighed and shut the door.
It was snowing in town, though April had gathered her veils and was springing forward into the arms of summer. He adored the snowflakes, and watched them as they toppled from the gloomy abyss, each one the taunting whisper of a glorious secret that earthly ear would never understand. Yet every one of those intricate miracles would die an instant death when it made contact with the barren concrete stretched obscenely over a forgotten field, and snow became ice and slush. These things made the air colder and froze nostril hairs and coffins. Dorian regretted this—the cemetery was never impressive unless exposed to a furious sun, sprinkled with stars, or draped by a pallid fog.
Despite his oath to avoid the thought of his father, he felt his heart twist itself free of its veins and plummet like a burning coal to the pit of his stomach. He pitied the man, but he didn’t love him, and hadn’t since his turbid days as a child. Garrin Penner had blinded himself with his own hands and had transformed this shield of indifference into a mirror for all who approached him. He simply would not be loved, and Dorian had gradually acceded to his father’s will. In any case, this realization never failed to instil in Dorian a crushing sorrow; a sorrow that was closely connected to the jaws of pain that had devoured him after the loss of his mother, eight years before.
In his own perverse way, Garrin Penner had cared for his only child. Though he would shun the young man’s attempts at mutual feeling and sporadic gems of superhuman intelligence, he always provided his son with enough money so that he could play the piano (Dorian’s passion) and avoid part-time work. He’d also cooked his son breakfast on rare occasions, driven him to his piano recitals, and sheltered him with a bleakly geometrical box named One Hundred Eighty-One Graves Drive.
Often his customary frigidity served Dorian well. When his father had caught him smoking hash with a friend in grade nine, the man had calmly advised him to avoid burning holes in the carpet and left. The first day that Garrin Penner had discovered his son playing at truancy, he’d driven him to his afternoon doctor’s appointment in stalwart silence. Even when he’d returned home early from a business trip in the city and found sixteen-year-old Dorian having sex in his king-size bed, he had politely turned the lights off and withdrawn to his son’s room, without ever referring to this incident in the future.
For a year or two, Dorian had resented his father’s invulnerability to shock. The average teenager finds great pleasure in astonishing parents and other respect-demanding figures of authority. Dorian had known this, and had wanted desperately to put this knowledge to practice with his own father. But Garrin Penner had scarcely blinked at his son’s Mohawk in grade ten and his fascination with women’s cosmetics later in the same year. The shield of indifference had remained impenetrable throughout Dorian’s attempts to shatter it. Approaching the rusted, ramshackle cemetery gates, he was assaulted by the memory of last night’s dinner at home. Dorian had left his nut-and-grain burger untouched, watching his father munch through his own while he skimmed the pages of a financial magazine.
He had sighed emphatically, hoping in vain to attract the man’s attention. “Father, I’m dead.”
Garrin Penner had only cleared his throat and said, “Please pass the ketchup.”
Dorian had done so and risen from the table. “I’m leaving, I’m going to the cemetery.”
Garrin Penner had rolled up his magazine and casually dropped it on the floor. “Please don’t.”
It was Dorian who had been shocked.
“Stay. Sleep in your room tonight.”
And he had. But today he understood that it had been a terrible mistake. He’d left it for good almost two weeks before, expecting never to return (as anyone in his situation would have). Yet the memory of his pathetic parent kept pulling him back, rather like a noose keeping a dead man’s feet dangling over a cold floor. Absentmindedly, Dorian stepped through the thick iron bars and tramped through the slush to a hideous white crucifix. He paused to examine it for what he swore to himself would be the last time. Now he was sorry that Boris and he had never carried out their plan to set the thing on fire, for Christ’s sake rather than blasphemy. No one deserved to have his image so crudely rendered in death.
A cutting wind blew through the cemetery and shook the mournful, lifeless branches of the willows all around him. Dorian stopped to look at the orderly rows of nun graves to the right of the main path, and read once again those unusual and beautiful names. “Hello, Frances,” he whispered. “Hi Sofia, hi Ursula and Abigail, how’re you guys doing?”
They did not reply.
He smiled mechanically. “Just remember: you’re not rotting away in total waste; you’re keeping worms fed.”
He sauntered on, in the direction of the more elaborate, ornate tombstones. He stopped to chat briefly with the Mendoza family, which inhabited a spacious plot with weathered stone border. He blew the infant Petra’s grave a solemn kiss and departed for the ancient, gnarled oak that stood as the focal point of the cemetery. A small, solitary stone sat beneath the low-hanging branches, enveloped in a curtain of leaves during warmer climes. The names carved onto nearby gravestones had almost completely faded under the onslaught of time and the whims of occasional vandals. This particular stone appeared to have lain undisturbed for decades, though it had tilted slightly from what must have been originally a ninety-degree angle. Dorian knelt before it and extended a white, bony hand to caress its surface. “Hello, William Jameson.”
The stone told that the young man had been lost to illness in eighteen ninety-three, at the age of seventeen. It was strange that the coffin sat alone, that there were no other members of the family buried about it. Dorian supposed that this was because the boy had died an improper death, and that it had been deemed offensive to bury anyone else in his vicinity. The previous summer, Boris and he had searched the town library’s archives for news of the boy’s death. It had turned out that the scant information on his gravestone was false; William had not died as a result of poor health. The boy had hanged himself from a beam in the ceiling. Since the form of his death had been considered blasphemous, the townsfolk had raised an outcry at the very idea of having him buried in their community cemetery, amongst lawful and God-fearing Catholics. However, William’s father had been a clergyman and arranged to have his son buried in a decent manner, after all.
“Rest easy, Will,” said Dorian to the ground at his feet. He patted the stone and stood up, glancing about for a sign of Boris, who, as usual, was late in arriving this morning.
In fact, Boris didn’t seem capable of arriving anywhere on time, and this was the reason for his prolonged career as a travelling dishwasher. If possible, he would have been fired more often than hired; yet Dorian knew that this didn’t bother Boris, who was carefree on principle, and gave little value to part-time jobs as a rule—or any sort of job, for that matter. He wrote poetry incredibly well, and both of them were convinced that this would ultimately set him free from a life of servitude. For the meantime, society saw Boris fit only for the cleaning of greasy plates, and he was content to play the game as long as his earnings allowed him to pay his share of the rent, drink, smoke and buy second-hand classical literature.
After they’d met, almost three years ago, Boris had examined Dorian’s collection of books and been appalled. “How can you support those who butcher forests in unreason?” he’d exclaimed. “Merely to communicate their inadequacies. What? Harper Lee? She only wrote that one book, and she wrote it in dialect, which is just a way for a writer to cover up her illiteracy. Fitzgerald, Hemingway—haven’t you realized that there’s no such thing as a worthwhile American writer?”
Dorian had been offended. “What do you mean? There’s Steinbeck and Henry Miller.”
“Steinbeck is boring as hell and Henry Miller stole most of what he wrote from Anais Nin. And Hemingway was the worst for writing in dialect. Milan Kundera in Immortality wrote that he committed suicide because he was impotent. I myself suspect he couldn’t deal with that periphrastic title, The Sun Also Rises. I’m telling you, these people don’t write, they destroy trees.”
Dorian had become angry. “What about you? You use toilet paper.”
“No, I don’t.”
They had both laughed. Then Dorian had played Chopin’s Berceuse Opus 57, and Boris was left breathless with awe.
“That was amazing,” he’d sputtered. “You play beautifully. But then…but then, you are…Beautiful.”
They were both surprised and embarrassed by the remark. Boris had spoken again after a nervous silence. “Ever since I first met you, I’ve wanted to do this,” he’d said, and kissed him. “Writers don’t know shit anyway.”
Afterward they had painted their faces with watercolours and gone to buy cigarettes, looking like savages. If it wasn’t love, it was insanity, but no one should ever profess to be able to tell the difference. Whatever the case, Boris had lost his job at a truck stop, his family’s respect and home, and had gained a black eye and bloody nose—courtesy of his stepfather. Garrin Penner, on the other hand, had never objected to his son’s affair. In fact, he’d never even discussed the matter with Dorian and had stolidly ignored his lover (though he had been aware of his existence, having found the young man in his bed the night he’d returned early from his business trip). And when Dorian had asked him anxiously if he could have a friend stay over for a while, Garrin Penner had shrugged and said, “As long as we don’t get death-threats on the telephone.”
Nevertheless, Boris had moved in with some friends, and soon fell in love with one of his roommates, Sandra Kellerman. Dorian had ceased to meet or speak with him after he’d confessed this, and began to make arrangements to leave town, go to university elsewhere and forget everything.
He found himself paralysed. He couldn’t leave. He thrust his compositions into the fireplace, into flames that were by no means purging. Dorian estimated that his father had invited him out for dinner at least twenty times before he made his first attempt to get out.
He heard his name called and looked up to the gates. Boris was standing on the other side, smiling and waving maniacally. Dorian began to walk towards him.
“They’re locked! I can’t get in.”
“Try climbing the wall.”
Boris thrust a pair of red hands into the gaping pockets of his coat. “I did, it’s icy as hell. I’d need spikes on my shoes to do it.”
“I’m surprised you don’t already have them,” Dorian smirked.
He smirked back. “I did have a pair of spiky shoes, actually, but they’re now a permanent attachment to my stepfather’s face.”
Dorian was reaching for the thick metal chains that bound the gates together when he saw the burly, grey-haired caretaker shuffling towards them.
“Oh, shit,” he whispered, “look out.”
Boris grimaced and slowly turned.
The man’s face was contorted with suspicion and contempt—an expression that was unsettlingly familiar to both of them. “What’re ya doin’ there, ya hooligan? Hopin’ to spray-paint some more headstones?”
“Actually, dude,” Boris replied whimsically, “I was just coming to pay my respects to the last old fool who bothered me.”
The caretaker’s furry chin quivered uncontrollably. “Get the hell outta there before I calls the cops, you mouthy bastard.”
Dorian intervened. He closed his eyes in order to appear unseen. “Excuse me, but unless you want to end up buried next to me, you had better leave this boy alone. He wasn’t joking when he said he’d come to pay me his respects.”
The caretaker froze in stupefaction, glancing from Boris to the gates—behind which Dorian stood unseen—in frantic disbelief. “Jesus and Mary,” he stammered, and after a moment of comical indecision he turned around and ran away as fast as his parenthetic legs could take him.
Boris was seized with one of his violent fits of laughter. Dorian was unable to hold back a chuckle.
“That was really cruel,” he said guiltily. “Poor man.”
“That was fantastic!” Boris had practically collapsed in the snow at this point. “He almost had a heart attack, that jerk. He didn’t see you…He thought—he really thought--”
He stopped to suck oxygen into his lungs, salty rivulets forming in the corners of his eyes. “Ahh, God that was funny.”
“No, YOU are.” Dorian grabbed him by the collar and pulled him quickly through the gates. “Get in here.”
Once Boris had regained his composure, he stepped towards Dorian with his arms outstretched. Dorian dodged them.
“Don’t,” he said warningly.
Boris frowned and followed him along the path. “How’s William?”
“He’s dead,” Dorian replied gravely. “Dead as ever.”
“Oh that William,” said Boris, clucking his tongue, “always so committed to what he does.”
They seated themselves in separate branches over the suicide’s grave. Dorian gazed upwards at the boundless white, brushing windswept locks of his hair from his face with characteristic languor. Boris watched him in silence, tying his brown woollen scarf tightly around his ears. They’d sat in the same positions so many times in the past, often reaching to kiss each other and swing from branch to branch like regressive monkeys. But today they were both aware that something was radically different. A vacuous grey mood fell upon them with the dizzying snowflakes.
“I love you,” Boris intoned quietly.
“Correction: you loved me.”
“No, you’re here, I’m here, it’s now and I love you.”
“Oh for God’s sake Boris, please shut up.”
“Piss off.”
Silence intervened for a sombre moment.
“My sister called me today,” Boris finally said.
“What’d she say?” Dorian didn’t bother to conceal the disinterest in his voice.
“She said, ‘Well now that what’s-his-name is gone, wouldn’t you like to come with me and a friend named Jenny, we could go dancing at this rilly, rilly amazing club.’”
Dorian laughed. “What did you say?”
“I told her that the only place I’d like to see her friend Jenny dancing was on a bed of hot coals, and hung up.”
“She still doesn’t believe we were lovers?”
“Oh, she believes it all right. She thinks it was only temporary insanity on my part and that I’m back to normal now that you’re gone.”
Dorian raised a questioning eyebrow at him. “Don’t you wish you were?”
“Of course not,” he scowled. “Who the fuck wants to be normal? I’m happy the way I am. I love men, so what?”
Dorian paused portentously. “So what about Sandra?”
“That was my moment of temporary insanity. I’ve already explained it to you, Dor. Why do you keep bringing it up?”
“Because I still don’t understand, okay? No matter how many times you explain it to me, I still don’t get it.”
Boris looked away. “I was deluding myself. I was afraid.”
“Oh, and I wasn’t?”
“Well, maybe you were, but your life wasn’t torn apart by your sexual inclinations. Mine was.”
“Well, I’m truly sorry that I had the luxury of a father who didn’t give a damn. So sorry.”
“Will you just listen to me for a second? My life was obliterated in a single stroke. I was kicked out of my home, Dorian, where I’d lived comfortably for seventeen years. My mother swore not to pronounce my name again; I’m still not allowed to see my little brother, because I might ‘infect’ him. How was I to know that the rest of my life wouldn’t end up the same way? I was scared out of my gourd, I just wanted to go back and be like everybody else. But when I introduced Sandra to the family, and I saw the relief in their eyes—as if I’d just been cured of cancer or something—I knew then that it was all bullshit. I didn’t love Sandra, I just thought she had pretty hair.”
“All right, fine. That part of it I understand. But you deserted me. ‘We’re better off as good friends,’ you said. Ha! Crap. We were better off dead, Boris. You really hurt me.”
“Well, what about you? What I did to hurt you wasn’t nearly as bad as what you did. Miles away.”
Dorian said nothing. Winter wailed at them disconsolately.
Boris broke a twig from the branch he reclined on and chewed it. “Did you see your Dad?”
He nodded.
“How’d he react?”
“Like nothing had happened. Do you have a cigarette?”
Boris gave him a perplexed look.
“Just give me one.” He reached for it, after Boris had lit two.
“Always suicidal, aren’t you?”
“Bad habit.”
“So tell me. About your dad.”
“Well, he barely listened to a word I said. In the end I didn’t bother to explain it to him. I’m not so sure I could have anyway. He made me dinner and that was it. Then he asked me to stay.”
“You didn’t, of course.”
“Guess again.”
“What?” said Boris incredulously. “You slept there? How could you?”
“It wasn’t exactly sleep. I just lay in my bed all night, pretending I didn’t notice every time he walked in to check on me. He wanted me home one last night. It was stupid of me to stay.”
“Bizarre is a better word,” said Boris, tossing his cigarette butt on the ground. “Why didn’t you sleep with me?”
“Are you insane?”
“Yes, I’m driving myself insane. Apart from that, I’m lonely.”
Dorian could see it in his eyes. Suddenly his throat constricted under the weight of sorrow, which filled his aching lungs and stretched malignant claws about his heart. He looked away, into the street. Traffic was becoming dense, as the other inhabitants of their charcoal world made their way almost desperately to the slave mines.
“Dorian, weren’t you happy?”
“When?”
“After Sandra. When we were together again.”
He wasn’t sure what to say.
“I guess it’s fairly obvious you weren’t.”
“Things just weren’t the same afterwards. But I hope you’re not thinking it was your fault. It was just…It was just one horrible thing after another. I was quite screwed emotionally. I always have been. I don’t think I had it in me to be happy for long.”
“You didn’t love me.”
“Oh yes I did. You can be very certain of that.”
“Yeah,” his tone was viciously sarcastic. “Very certain.”
“I loved you, you idiot. So much that—I replaced my soul with your image. I loved you to the point where I ached physically when you weren’t with me.” He flicked the remnants of his cigarette into the slush below. “I renounced reality for you.”
His voice was harsh and his eyes were glazed with restrained tears. “Then why did you do it? Why the hell were you compelled to kill it?”
Dorian sighed. “Because it would have died on its own. Like everything else in this world. Nothing lasts. Especially love like ours. Once it’s finished, it doesn’t seem real.”
“God, it was almost too real, Dorian. And even diluted love with you would have been better than none at all. Better than nothing. Which, by the way, is what I’ve been feeling these past two weeks. Absolute and utter nothing.”
Silence divided them again for a few minutes. Dorian looked at the palms of his hands. “Well, I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to be so hurt. You must know that. And I’m sure I’ll be saving you worse pain in the long run.”
Boris had begun to cry. “No, damn it!” He dropped out of the tree and stood facing him. “You can be such a selfish bastard. I’ll never feel any pain worse than this. I’ll be lucky if I feel anything else at all, because of you. Because of what you did. Because you betrayed me…you cheated me.”
“Oh, stop it with your betrayal nonsense. You make it sound as if I belonged to you. Well, I never did. I belonged to myself, and I had every right to do what I did.” He leapt to the ground beside him. “I’ll say it again: I’m sorry. But it’s over now, it’s finished. I shouldn’t even be here now, talking to you. I should have just gone with custom and written you a letter.”
Boris ground a streak of tears into his cheek. He stepped towards him, gasping for breath. “I want…I want to touch you.”
Dorian’s eyes fell. “You can’t. I can’t. I don’t know what would happen.”
Boris groaned. “Fucking coward!” His leg lashed out, and the bottom of his combat boot met with William’s tiny headstone, knocking it out of the ground. Dorian’s mouth fell open in surprise as he watched him run furiously towards the gates.
He couldn’t pursue him, he mustn’t. The wind howled at him and swept the tails of his coat against his motionless arms in a flurry of snow. Dorian squatted to replace the stone in the wedge from which it had been kicked. It was ridiculously light; it was a wonder that it had stood over William’s grave for over a century, and not collapsed under a heavy rainfall. He let the bottom drop into the soil, only to hear something crack loudly beneath it. The sound it made was that of breaking wood. Instead of releasing the stone, Dorian pulled it back from the wedge and laid it carefully on the snow in order to investigate.
It had indeed been breaking wood—someone had buried a small and sturdy black box in the rich earth at the head of William’s grave. He scraped the object out of the ground and held it before his face. The container’s formerly locked lid had been spilt open, and a thin strand of tarnished gold had fallen through and dangled from the inside of the box. Cautiously, he opened it further and caught a gleaming medallion in the palm of his hand.
On closer inspection, he realized that the tiny medallion was, in fact, a timepiece moulded from gold. The miniscule silver hands lay still beneath the crystal window, perpetually marking the hour of four. Dorian knew that it hadn’t been William’s father who had buried this watch. Using his thumbnail, he carefully pried the locket open and saw that the rear shell had been inscribed with a name. He pronounced it to himself in amazement.
Nigel, eighteen eighty-nine.
He sprang to his feet and spun towards the gates. Boris hadn’t yet left. He was standing before the hideous Christ-thing, wrapping his scarf around his head one last time. Dorian called out to him and raced down the path to meet him. Boris watched his descent, his handsome face pale beneath the scarf, his nose and lips red with cold.
“You won’t believe this,” said Dorian breathlessly once they faced each other again. He held the timepiece by its chain and handed it to Boris.
“Who’s Nigel?” he asked, wiping his nose with his forearm.
“I have no idea. But don’t you think—he buried under William’s tombstone, not with him, in his coffin.”
“No way. That’s too coincidental.”
“Maybe, but after all this, I really doubt it. Think about it, Boris. A gold locket. Under the stone. The town outraged at the thought of giving William s some space in their precious cemetery. And, of course, suicide.”
Boris suddenly burst out laughing. “It couldn’t—they couldn’t have been--”
Dorian shrugged.
“Christ, this is too much. This is too bizarre.” He removed his scarf, unravelled the chain and pulled it over his head. “I’m going to keep it.”
Dorian nodded. “You should, William would want you to have it.”
“Ha. Doubt it. He must be pissed at what I did to his tombstone.”
“No, of course not. Will is—a very laid-back kind of guy.”
They looked into each other’s eyes, neither knowing what to make of this unforeseen moment of understanding. Dorian envisioned the previous summer...the minnow stream in the forest on the outskirts of town. One golden afternoon they had snuck through the construction site and run naked through the trees, throwing each other into the stream despite the toxic crayfish carcasses that lined is banks. They’d missed a spectacular sunset in the frenzied search for the forgotten location of their clothing. They had learned that the world in its original nature was beautiful and glorious, and that the concrete game-world that they inhabited, full of its endless tensions, resentments and misunderstandings, was not only horrid; it threatened the existence of that peaceful haven of trees and owls and fish which had received them without judgment and revealed life as it should have been.
But life was finished now; replaced by a monotonous, mechanical existence. The trees served only to extend the concrete shell until the entire earth was covered and asphyxiated. Humanity was a forgotten cause, a word without meaning. People had succumbed to over-production, over-consumption, and an apathetic god defined by greasy paper bills and electronic credit. It was doubtful that any vitality could be retrieved. Still, when Boris and Dorian had rested in each other’s arms beneath a blue and speckless sky, the madness had ceased temporarily and life was unveiled to them once more.
However, their moments had grown less powerful with frequency, incapable of deterring the tide of death that relentlessly infringed upon their union. The shelter that they had created for one another was bound to turn ashen and collapse under its merciless weight.
“That would have been unbearable,” Dorian told the black-haired, wide-eyed young man he’d once loved.
“You could have given it a chance,” Boris said heavily. His emotions were exhausted now. Dorian could see the subtle grey of death in his eyes, and heard it in his voice. He knew though that Boris would recover in time. His poetry, his very soul, would heal him.
“You could have given life a chance, Dorian.”
They parted at last. Before he stepped through the now open cemetery gates, Boris glanced back, looking very small and very lost under the colourless expanse of frozen sky.
Dorian sighed and chewed his lower lip, watching Boris turn and walk dejectedly down the gravel drive that stretched to the main road.
You could have given life a chance.
The words echoed and repeated themselves in his waning consciousness, causing him to shudder violently; the same way he’d shuddered when his mother had clasped his hand and died in a hospital bed. Was Boris right? Had he made an enormous mistake? Was this the reason he’d returned, after all that he’d put himself through? Had he destroyed some marvellous possibility? An opportunity for some kind of transcendence?
And suddenly Boris was doubled over with age on the sidewalk, cane in hand to support his aching, twisted spine, grotesquely visible under his ragged trench coat. His head had lost the greater portion of its hair and was spotted with moles. Overhead, the sky flared in a flash of summer. Crimson leaves danced through a thin autumnal air to descend upon yellowing grass. Persistent flowers bore their faces through the viscous soil, only to expose them to clouds, while buildings fell and rose in new arrangements all around him. Gravestones crumbled to dust and were scattered by a sullen wind Things had already begun to spiral into a vortex of darkness and light.
He walked on, through the graveyard, feeling himself fading away as he did so. He was determined to look upon what he’d been unable to face before. As he reached the pair of small headstones, through twisted, frozen shrubbery, he saw that the word FAGGOT had been spray-painted over one of them in fluorescent orange. He read his mother’s on the first stone, and then he read the name on the second stone for the last time.
Dorian Penner.