Goodnight Irene
by Donnie Denome
Her boyfriend looks at the plant. “What is this?”
“The first thing I’ve been able to keep alive in years.”
“Does it have a name?”
She tells him.
“Oh.”
“I couldn’t save him,” she says. In the end, all her brother was really good for was giving her newest beau another great case of KS lesions to draw. “So I named a plant after him.”
“If you had been a cancer researcher and he had died of leukemia, would you blame yourself?”
“It’s not the same.”
“Is too.”
They don’t argue much more than that.
She goes back to work – real work, not the book – a week after his death. She can’t help but see his face, covered in purple spots, every time she closes her eyes. The awful of him retching fills her nightmares. Did it pick away at his brain when he stopped taking the pills? He died with his sight intact – what did he last see?
“Hey,” her coworker says, “don’t take it so hard. There’s nothing you can do. Could do.”
“He was only an hour away.”
“And he didn’t want to talk to you or see you. He woulda called if he did. You don’t have to blame yourself.”
“He’s dead.”
“And there’s nothing you can do. There’s nothing you could have done.”
“My brother is dead. He died of complications from the stupid little virus we’re researching right now. It’s my fault.”
Her coworker walks away and eats his sushi in another corner of the quad. She fumes and downs another swallow of rose tea.
Eyes slip close after another sleepless night of coughing and hacking. His face, purple and zombie-like in the cold white light of the morgue, flares in front of her. She snaps back to reality. The bench is freezing under her. She rocks back and forth, begging prayers from a saint who’ll never listen. Just because he died in that city doesn’t mean anyone in Heaven wants him.
And what of the other one, the one two years younger than her brother, the one who threw himself off a bridge in the dim shock haze afterwards. The one whose body was not recovered, the one whose empty coffin slid into ground alongside her brother’s.
She considers calling her friend, the brother of that young man who jumped, but most likely his mother will pick up and her Spanish isn’t good enough to have a conversation with the old woman. Or the men in the city, the ones who took her brother in and treated him like a… not a son, but a friend or maybe a brother of sorts. No. She bites her tongue and texts her coauthor on the book. They discuss meeting for drinks after work that night but she knows she won’t go.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “Can you hear me?”
He doesn’t answer and she goes back to rocking, hoping that one day she’ll stop seeing his gaunt face behind her lids.
***
She gets home – having avoided drinks with her friend altogether – and looks at her plant. It’s sprouted one more leaf and that somehow gives her hope. “Hey, little guy,” she whispers, “how are you doing?”
The plant doesn’t answer, of course, and she goes on to stare at the wall while not making pasta for dinner. She considers calling her boyfriend. He would make her pasta and make her feel useless for relying on anyone besides herself. She didn’t date for a long time while her brother was alive – not that there was any correlation or causation in the two. It was only after she and her friend started writing their book together that she realized how lonely the world was. Her friend has, in her opinion, the easy part – writing about libel possibly committed by a famous journalist decades ago and how this contributed to the lore and misinformation of those horrid decades.
She, on the other hand, has interviewed so much loss and death and disgusting decay in the last few months that she doesn’t know if the book will ever see the light of day now. She waits. She rocks back and forth, hoping that someone will rescue her.
There’s a knock at the door. She recognizes the voice that says her name – it’s her brother’s lover’s brother, the man from down in the farmlands. She opens the door. “Hey,” he says.
“You bring your mother?”
“Nah. One of the neighbors is taking care of her. I came to check on you.”
Everyone assumes that she is weak. Everyone assumes that she can’t hold herself together. She wishes that she wasn’t falling to pieces but also that she didn’t look so fragile. She leads him into the apartment and offers him a seat. “Lo siento. There’s no dinner.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to make me anything.”
“No, it’s just… I mean, how many ways can you say, ‘I can’t focus anymore.’”
“Are you having trouble sleeping?”
“Yeah.”
“I came to terms with, you know, him a few years after he left but I didn’t know how to tell him. I mean, what do you do – call him up and say, ‘No, it’s okay, I don’t hate you, please come home?’”
She never told her brother she hated him but they never had a good relationship anyway. The man paces. “So he died thinking that I wanted him dead.”
“Did you? When you were younger?”
“I never said… I never said that but some of the things I told him might as well have been ‘I wish you would just die.’”
She nods.
“I once told him, ‘you run off, you go to those big cities, you know how you’ll die. You disgusting fairy.’ And look how it ended.”
“It didn’t kill him in the end.”
“It killed your brother.”
“Because he stopped taking his meds.”
“Okay, look, they both died by suicide. No way around that. You don’t just stop taking your drugs for weeks and then refuse treatment when you get – what was it?”
“Pneumocystis pneumonia.”
“Yeah. That. You doctors and your big names. Jumped off the bridge is so much more poetic.”
There are many names, she considers, for what killed their brothers, and none of them fit nicely into a doctor’s diagnosis handbook. There are no drugs in the pharmacopeia to treat those ailments and even if there ever were, it’d take a cold heart to prescribe them.
He coughs. “I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I wish I could get up the guts to go to that bridge and apologize… as if he could hear me. I pray, it does nothing. I wish there was a better way.”
“I wish so too,” she says in a small voice.
They suffer together, apart. He spends the night at her place, not wanting to get a motel room, and then leaves the next morning before she gets up.
She moves the plant to a sunnier area. All those horror stories about being cold. Blind, cold, terrorized by a rotting brain. She almost doesn’t go to work. Images of human suffering keep her from a job where she seeks to end that suffering in a manner devoid of it completely.
The pathogen plushie that showed up in a large box at her doorstep one day years ago sits on her couch. “Hey, you,” she says to it. It stares at her.
She wants to destroy it.
“You disgusting piece of – garbage, that’s what you are!” She grabs the plushie and throws it across the room. “You want names? You want the names of your victims? Hundreds of thousands, millions the world over – all your fault. Dying alone and unloved, a million faces of every color! You killed them! You! You and all like you! You killed my brother, you piece of – ! You killed my little brother! You killed him! You drove my friend’s brother off a bridge! You killed both of them! You wreak havoc, tragedy, you make people point fingers! You – piece – of – horse – manure!”
She realizes that she’s yelling at what amounts to a stuffed… pathogen. Virus. Whatever. She stops kicking it around the room and screaming. Slowly she regains her composure and puts on her coat to go to work. “I’m sorry,” she whispers, “I’m so sorry.”
***
Her friend is waiting to take her to lunch when she steps out of the cold grey laboratory. “Hey,” she says as her friend smiles. There’s a stupid grin on her face. It does little to cheer the one who lost her brother up. “You wanna get pizza?”
“No.”
“Please, you gotta give me something.”
“What have you suffered? All you do is sit on your rear and talk about how one guy slandered another. I’m reliving his death and a million others with every single interview.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s my fault.”
“How is it?”
“I shouldn’t be dragging your day down.”
“No, no. I made the mistake.”
They drive to pizza, order, and eat in silence. She stares at her friend’s ornate blue stone necklace from across the table. There are no words to describe how much that blue is like that old ratty raincoat he loved so much. No… not a raincoat. A parka. It was this bright blue parka he wore down to nothing. They gave it back to her along with the rest of his belongings.
“Have you spoken to your parents?” her friend suddenly asks. The question turns her stomach.
“No.”
“Is it, like, a they don’t want to acknowledge him thing?”
“No, it’s a we don’t talk ever thing.”
“Is it because of him?”
“It’s because he ran away from the fancy boarding school they sent him to in the city and decided to sell himself out. The gay thing, they don’t talk about that.”
“Oh.”
“I should call my cousin,” she says in a tone that she hopes implies she never will call her cousin. “She’s probably grieving.”
“Did she go to the funeral?”
“No. It would have been too hard for her.” Her cousin works nights in a bar and has a kid. That might be her excuse but the woman knows her cousin is really just trying to cover her grief. She was much closer to him.
“Well, that’s okay,” her friend says. “I feel so sorry for you. I know it just makes you feel awkward for my pity but… oh, goodness mercy, he was your brother. You don’t have to work on the book if it’s going to make you feel worse.”
If nothing else, now she sees the dying faces of thousands of young men – just like she did before he died – instead of her brother’s. They’re nearly all the same – gaunt, blank stares behind all those purple blotches. All that’s different is their actual faces. But those are hard to see behind the disease.
“It’s gonna kill me,” she says. “All diseases – they have their victims and then they have the ones who – you know, who don’t die because their immune system is shot or because they’ve a brain tumor or anything else but they might as well. The victims where the cause of death is stress or suicide or just exhaustion. Nothing fancy. But what causes stress?”
Her friend knows she’s waxing lyrical and philosophical but lets her talk. “Yeah,” she finally says. “Yeah, a clean blood test doesn’t mean it can’t kill you.”
Maybe her friend understands. Maybe she doesn’t. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” the woman says. “I never said a word to him after he ran away but it was like… knowing that he was alive and probably mostly safe was my life.”
“Mostly safe?”
“I woulda gotten a call if he had been arrested.”
“You need to go to the city.”
“I feel sick to my stomach just driving north. I’m not going to the city.”
“You need to retrace everything.”
“I’m not going to kill myself because he’s gone!”
“You’re already pretty damn dead!”
She lets out a hissing stream of air. “I’m just trying to maintain my sanity. I’m trying not to let everything slip away.”
The friend nods. “You’ll find closure in the city.”
“What, do you tell that to the people you interview who ran away from there?”
“I do not!”
“Just because he didn’t die in the – ” she swallows the expletive and focuses on the piece of mushroom dangling off her slice, “ – eighties doesn’t mean it hurts less.”
“Let go.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? Don’t focus on the fact that he’s dead and I can’t do anything about it?”
“You couldn’t do anything about it if he had died any other way.”
“Eff you.”
“Fine. Get mad at me. It’s true.”
***
If her friend really wanted to hurt her, she would have said, ‘Go to Kerouac Alley.’
The woman stands in the entrance to the portal between worlds at the Chinatown side. “Walk to North Beach,” she says, “walk to North Beach.”
She can’t force herself.
“Walk to North Beach, walk to North Beach.”
It’s like an exercise in self-hate. Flagellation, really.
“Walk to North Beach. Pick up your feet and walk to North Beach.”
“What’s so hard about walking to North Beach?” the man sitting on the green electrical box a few feet into the alley says. “Is it that they hung out here?”
“Yeah,” she says.
It’s him, the man who treated her brother like a son or brother or whatever was between them. “I’m sorry,” she says.
“Walk with me.”
“Where?”
“Up the Embarcadero? I don’t care.”
He offers her his hand. “You shouldn’t be doing this,” she says.
“Chris won’t care.”
She didn’t mean it in a cheating way.
“I want to stay here. It’s where he loved to be.”
“Okay.”
They sit on the box and don’t talk. “I wish he would have called or something.”
“I never thought to make him.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to.”
The man puts his arm around her. They stare at the mural across the alleyway. “I never wanted him to get hurt. I never thought it would come to that.”
“Me neither.”
“Do you think he’s better?”
“There’s no consciousness after death,” she says.
The man stays quiet. “It’s over,” she says, “I don’t think I can ever be right again.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I loved him.”
“I know.”
“What do I do?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
***
The plant has bloomed when she gets home.
“Hey,” she says to it, “are you doing alright?”
No answer.
“I’m sorry, Leon. I was a terrible sister.”
No consciousness after death, she knows, but she swears he says, “I love you, Irene,” right then.
by Donnie Denome
Her boyfriend looks at the plant. “What is this?”
“The first thing I’ve been able to keep alive in years.”
“Does it have a name?”
She tells him.
“Oh.”
“I couldn’t save him,” she says. In the end, all her brother was really good for was giving her newest beau another great case of KS lesions to draw. “So I named a plant after him.”
“If you had been a cancer researcher and he had died of leukemia, would you blame yourself?”
“It’s not the same.”
“Is too.”
They don’t argue much more than that.
She goes back to work – real work, not the book – a week after his death. She can’t help but see his face, covered in purple spots, every time she closes her eyes. The awful of him retching fills her nightmares. Did it pick away at his brain when he stopped taking the pills? He died with his sight intact – what did he last see?
“Hey,” her coworker says, “don’t take it so hard. There’s nothing you can do. Could do.”
“He was only an hour away.”
“And he didn’t want to talk to you or see you. He woulda called if he did. You don’t have to blame yourself.”
“He’s dead.”
“And there’s nothing you can do. There’s nothing you could have done.”
“My brother is dead. He died of complications from the stupid little virus we’re researching right now. It’s my fault.”
Her coworker walks away and eats his sushi in another corner of the quad. She fumes and downs another swallow of rose tea.
Eyes slip close after another sleepless night of coughing and hacking. His face, purple and zombie-like in the cold white light of the morgue, flares in front of her. She snaps back to reality. The bench is freezing under her. She rocks back and forth, begging prayers from a saint who’ll never listen. Just because he died in that city doesn’t mean anyone in Heaven wants him.
And what of the other one, the one two years younger than her brother, the one who threw himself off a bridge in the dim shock haze afterwards. The one whose body was not recovered, the one whose empty coffin slid into ground alongside her brother’s.
She considers calling her friend, the brother of that young man who jumped, but most likely his mother will pick up and her Spanish isn’t good enough to have a conversation with the old woman. Or the men in the city, the ones who took her brother in and treated him like a… not a son, but a friend or maybe a brother of sorts. No. She bites her tongue and texts her coauthor on the book. They discuss meeting for drinks after work that night but she knows she won’t go.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “Can you hear me?”
He doesn’t answer and she goes back to rocking, hoping that one day she’ll stop seeing his gaunt face behind her lids.
***
She gets home – having avoided drinks with her friend altogether – and looks at her plant. It’s sprouted one more leaf and that somehow gives her hope. “Hey, little guy,” she whispers, “how are you doing?”
The plant doesn’t answer, of course, and she goes on to stare at the wall while not making pasta for dinner. She considers calling her boyfriend. He would make her pasta and make her feel useless for relying on anyone besides herself. She didn’t date for a long time while her brother was alive – not that there was any correlation or causation in the two. It was only after she and her friend started writing their book together that she realized how lonely the world was. Her friend has, in her opinion, the easy part – writing about libel possibly committed by a famous journalist decades ago and how this contributed to the lore and misinformation of those horrid decades.
She, on the other hand, has interviewed so much loss and death and disgusting decay in the last few months that she doesn’t know if the book will ever see the light of day now. She waits. She rocks back and forth, hoping that someone will rescue her.
There’s a knock at the door. She recognizes the voice that says her name – it’s her brother’s lover’s brother, the man from down in the farmlands. She opens the door. “Hey,” he says.
“You bring your mother?”
“Nah. One of the neighbors is taking care of her. I came to check on you.”
Everyone assumes that she is weak. Everyone assumes that she can’t hold herself together. She wishes that she wasn’t falling to pieces but also that she didn’t look so fragile. She leads him into the apartment and offers him a seat. “Lo siento. There’s no dinner.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to make me anything.”
“No, it’s just… I mean, how many ways can you say, ‘I can’t focus anymore.’”
“Are you having trouble sleeping?”
“Yeah.”
“I came to terms with, you know, him a few years after he left but I didn’t know how to tell him. I mean, what do you do – call him up and say, ‘No, it’s okay, I don’t hate you, please come home?’”
She never told her brother she hated him but they never had a good relationship anyway. The man paces. “So he died thinking that I wanted him dead.”
“Did you? When you were younger?”
“I never said… I never said that but some of the things I told him might as well have been ‘I wish you would just die.’”
She nods.
“I once told him, ‘you run off, you go to those big cities, you know how you’ll die. You disgusting fairy.’ And look how it ended.”
“It didn’t kill him in the end.”
“It killed your brother.”
“Because he stopped taking his meds.”
“Okay, look, they both died by suicide. No way around that. You don’t just stop taking your drugs for weeks and then refuse treatment when you get – what was it?”
“Pneumocystis pneumonia.”
“Yeah. That. You doctors and your big names. Jumped off the bridge is so much more poetic.”
There are many names, she considers, for what killed their brothers, and none of them fit nicely into a doctor’s diagnosis handbook. There are no drugs in the pharmacopeia to treat those ailments and even if there ever were, it’d take a cold heart to prescribe them.
He coughs. “I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I wish I could get up the guts to go to that bridge and apologize… as if he could hear me. I pray, it does nothing. I wish there was a better way.”
“I wish so too,” she says in a small voice.
They suffer together, apart. He spends the night at her place, not wanting to get a motel room, and then leaves the next morning before she gets up.
She moves the plant to a sunnier area. All those horror stories about being cold. Blind, cold, terrorized by a rotting brain. She almost doesn’t go to work. Images of human suffering keep her from a job where she seeks to end that suffering in a manner devoid of it completely.
The pathogen plushie that showed up in a large box at her doorstep one day years ago sits on her couch. “Hey, you,” she says to it. It stares at her.
She wants to destroy it.
“You disgusting piece of – garbage, that’s what you are!” She grabs the plushie and throws it across the room. “You want names? You want the names of your victims? Hundreds of thousands, millions the world over – all your fault. Dying alone and unloved, a million faces of every color! You killed them! You! You and all like you! You killed my brother, you piece of – ! You killed my little brother! You killed him! You drove my friend’s brother off a bridge! You killed both of them! You wreak havoc, tragedy, you make people point fingers! You – piece – of – horse – manure!”
She realizes that she’s yelling at what amounts to a stuffed… pathogen. Virus. Whatever. She stops kicking it around the room and screaming. Slowly she regains her composure and puts on her coat to go to work. “I’m sorry,” she whispers, “I’m so sorry.”
***
Her friend is waiting to take her to lunch when she steps out of the cold grey laboratory. “Hey,” she says as her friend smiles. There’s a stupid grin on her face. It does little to cheer the one who lost her brother up. “You wanna get pizza?”
“No.”
“Please, you gotta give me something.”
“What have you suffered? All you do is sit on your rear and talk about how one guy slandered another. I’m reliving his death and a million others with every single interview.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s my fault.”
“How is it?”
“I shouldn’t be dragging your day down.”
“No, no. I made the mistake.”
They drive to pizza, order, and eat in silence. She stares at her friend’s ornate blue stone necklace from across the table. There are no words to describe how much that blue is like that old ratty raincoat he loved so much. No… not a raincoat. A parka. It was this bright blue parka he wore down to nothing. They gave it back to her along with the rest of his belongings.
“Have you spoken to your parents?” her friend suddenly asks. The question turns her stomach.
“No.”
“Is it, like, a they don’t want to acknowledge him thing?”
“No, it’s a we don’t talk ever thing.”
“Is it because of him?”
“It’s because he ran away from the fancy boarding school they sent him to in the city and decided to sell himself out. The gay thing, they don’t talk about that.”
“Oh.”
“I should call my cousin,” she says in a tone that she hopes implies she never will call her cousin. “She’s probably grieving.”
“Did she go to the funeral?”
“No. It would have been too hard for her.” Her cousin works nights in a bar and has a kid. That might be her excuse but the woman knows her cousin is really just trying to cover her grief. She was much closer to him.
“Well, that’s okay,” her friend says. “I feel so sorry for you. I know it just makes you feel awkward for my pity but… oh, goodness mercy, he was your brother. You don’t have to work on the book if it’s going to make you feel worse.”
If nothing else, now she sees the dying faces of thousands of young men – just like she did before he died – instead of her brother’s. They’re nearly all the same – gaunt, blank stares behind all those purple blotches. All that’s different is their actual faces. But those are hard to see behind the disease.
“It’s gonna kill me,” she says. “All diseases – they have their victims and then they have the ones who – you know, who don’t die because their immune system is shot or because they’ve a brain tumor or anything else but they might as well. The victims where the cause of death is stress or suicide or just exhaustion. Nothing fancy. But what causes stress?”
Her friend knows she’s waxing lyrical and philosophical but lets her talk. “Yeah,” she finally says. “Yeah, a clean blood test doesn’t mean it can’t kill you.”
Maybe her friend understands. Maybe she doesn’t. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” the woman says. “I never said a word to him after he ran away but it was like… knowing that he was alive and probably mostly safe was my life.”
“Mostly safe?”
“I woulda gotten a call if he had been arrested.”
“You need to go to the city.”
“I feel sick to my stomach just driving north. I’m not going to the city.”
“You need to retrace everything.”
“I’m not going to kill myself because he’s gone!”
“You’re already pretty damn dead!”
She lets out a hissing stream of air. “I’m just trying to maintain my sanity. I’m trying not to let everything slip away.”
The friend nods. “You’ll find closure in the city.”
“What, do you tell that to the people you interview who ran away from there?”
“I do not!”
“Just because he didn’t die in the – ” she swallows the expletive and focuses on the piece of mushroom dangling off her slice, “ – eighties doesn’t mean it hurts less.”
“Let go.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? Don’t focus on the fact that he’s dead and I can’t do anything about it?”
“You couldn’t do anything about it if he had died any other way.”
“Eff you.”
“Fine. Get mad at me. It’s true.”
***
If her friend really wanted to hurt her, she would have said, ‘Go to Kerouac Alley.’
The woman stands in the entrance to the portal between worlds at the Chinatown side. “Walk to North Beach,” she says, “walk to North Beach.”
She can’t force herself.
“Walk to North Beach, walk to North Beach.”
It’s like an exercise in self-hate. Flagellation, really.
“Walk to North Beach. Pick up your feet and walk to North Beach.”
“What’s so hard about walking to North Beach?” the man sitting on the green electrical box a few feet into the alley says. “Is it that they hung out here?”
“Yeah,” she says.
It’s him, the man who treated her brother like a son or brother or whatever was between them. “I’m sorry,” she says.
“Walk with me.”
“Where?”
“Up the Embarcadero? I don’t care.”
He offers her his hand. “You shouldn’t be doing this,” she says.
“Chris won’t care.”
She didn’t mean it in a cheating way.
“I want to stay here. It’s where he loved to be.”
“Okay.”
They sit on the box and don’t talk. “I wish he would have called or something.”
“I never thought to make him.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to.”
The man puts his arm around her. They stare at the mural across the alleyway. “I never wanted him to get hurt. I never thought it would come to that.”
“Me neither.”
“Do you think he’s better?”
“There’s no consciousness after death,” she says.
The man stays quiet. “It’s over,” she says, “I don’t think I can ever be right again.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I loved him.”
“I know.”
“What do I do?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
***
The plant has bloomed when she gets home.
“Hey,” she says to it, “are you doing alright?”
No answer.
“I’m sorry, Leon. I was a terrible sister.”
No consciousness after death, she knows, but she swears he says, “I love you, Irene,” right then.