Dinosaurs

“… the foreshadow to his end, the spitting image of his father.”

~ Danez Smith, “Dinosaurs in the Hood”

There was a thing called Heaven and a thing called God, and there was also once a thing called Immortality, long before the prophecies raged and sneered. And then came the sound of a light from just behind the horizon’s seam, and then there were Fathers who fell spectacularly out of the sky. Some with a crash, while others circled the air like frigate birds, the atmosphere heavy with their bodies. The wind smiling against their pale skin. Their milky eyes and teeth smiling back at the world—but we didn’t know then. We couldn’t know. How a man could smile and smile and still be the villain. By then, the world became full of fathers like you. Full of misery. Full of madness.

The light seemed frozen in the bathroom where you taught me how to shape a baseball glove. Then it flickered, containing nothing else. I watched as you filled a bucket with water. “Make sure it’s room temperature,” you said, with that Puerto Rican accent that never went away, even now—before drowning the glove.

I watched the rhythm of your shoulders as you held it under, like you were trying to hide it from God. The hum of the bathroom’s exhaust fan bouncing off your sunburnt neck—I witnessed your glory. Watched that channel in the middle of your bare back as if all of history lay hidden there, like strange rumors from old, forbidden books.

That’s what your love eventually became to me—a strange rumor from an old, forbidden book.

Someone once told me about a team of scientists who defined the feeling of “awe” as a response to an experience that is so perceptually gigantic that we’d have to upgrade our usual framework of thought to understand the scale of it. How the feeling of awe makes time and space seem more infinite and plentiful. I can admit now that I was in awe of you then.

How much of life and human existence consists of psychological warfare? I would later tell my therapist how I titled our relationship Love as Psychological Warfare.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because… I’ve learned a key element to an exorcism is naming the demon possessing you.”

“Oh… ” she said. Then our session ended.

It’s funny because you were a god to me. I remember you once explaining to me how a foggy bathroom after every shower meant your exhaust fan wasn’t doing its job. How excess moisture in the air can lead to mold. How excess mold could lead to sickness and possibly death. And how always, suddenly electrified in explanation, your face bloated with happiness—always a proud carpenter.

I was around eight or so then, so I couldn’t possibly understand how a house, your home, can turn against you, almost killing you. How place comes with a price no one can estimate. That’s why no one’s ever been allowed to own the patent for “Home.”

How my mother and I didn’t come looking for you, yet here is where you found us. How our bodies can be inescapable prisons for our memories.

At first, you were like an alien I watched from a distance. I was maybe two or three then. I can’t remember exactly, the first time I’d laid eyes on you, other than hiding underneath our dinner table when my mother first introduced you. I do wish I could remember your face at that moment, but I can’t. Before history made its home, all I can remember was that your bare knees looked like burnt oranges.

You were an alien who later became a man. But first, you were like one of those tall, cryptic, stained-glass windows before my mother made an actual human creature out of you, who would later become a carpenter with hands like chalky marble. A carpenter who later became a face. Then my face opened, and I saw you, and you were always impressive to me. Always impressive, like pristine columns. Like a museum piece. Like a footprint in lunar dust.

How you held me, my dimpled brown face and long lashes. My beetle-brows. My small hands. My vulnerable legs. The hours I spent between your hands. All of it, like dust, and your hands now like brick.

* * *

Man quickly forgot that he was invited, not summoned. And how the world already stood whole and intact, undefiled by contact. How the ocean was her, and because of that, she couldn’t help herself but to see about the wanderers. How could you blame her? She’d never seen princes and kings before. How could she know? In the beginning, they worked all day by the sea, belted to its shores, salt on tongues from human sweat and tears. They ate civilized in the wild of the morning. At night they sang, hiding behind closed eyelids shredded by the night wind through the maze of trees, and she listened. “Beautiful, beautiful,” was all she said, over and over. What she didn’t know was how they sang traditional songs of planning, of wandering more like demons, like the evil tricks of the day instead of returning to their homes and their mothers’ laps.

You asked for a baseball right out of the box so you could wedge it deep inside the glove’s webbing. “To shape the glove,” you said. “You stretch it, so the pocket shapes around the ball.” You used one of your black leather belts to tie around the glove, facing up, so that any leftover water trapped inside would drain. You then left the glove to drain in the warmest part of the house: you and my mother’s bedroom. “Have to let it dry out before we beat it up,” you said.

By “beating it up,” you meant throwing it in the dryer for about twenty minutes in order to beat up the leather. Only then could you finally slip it over your hand (yours, not mine) in order to start working it in by carefully bending each finger down and forming the pocket more.

“Beating it up” meant you and no one else. Amazing the way a hand bends time and reality. That’s why, if reincarnation really existed, Man will always come back as hands.

Glove oil was the final step, rubbing it all over the glove. Rubbing in the science, inside and out, before you were finished. Helps to speed up the break-in period, the small bottle read.

You taught me about musky colognes; yours always gamey and thick. The prickles on your shaved chin like burning sand. You taught me about a shadow’s urgency to exist, and how the heroine’s name doesn’t ever really matter.

You taught me what you felt I needed out of sex. About imbibing another’s flesh. To fuck like slum children, I once heard you say to an uncle. To do it as many times as women would allow, and to take it if they didn’t. How a real man can convince a woman to think they want to, even if they really don’t. How “romance” was a male construction created in order to get the really pretty girls to fuck you.

How we always lie and get away with it. And if we can’t, we simply rewrite the history.

How you were such an asshole. How I’m grateful I never listened to you.

* * *

Italicized history.

It was me who wrote the dinosaurs into “your” and mom’s Bible, even if you never read it. You probably don’t remember. Never saw you open it one time, just to take a look. Not even out of curiosity. Maybe you were afraid? But I did write them there, into the margins of the Book of Genesis, Chapter Six, by verses twenty through twenty-two:

It was me who wrote the dinosaurs into “your” and mom’s Bible, even if you never read it. You probably don’t remember. Never saw you open it one time, just to take a look. Not even out of curiosity.

²⁰ Of fowls after their kind, and of cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the earth after his kind, two of every sort shall come unto thee, to keep them alive. ²¹ And take thou unto thee of all food that is eaten, and thou shalt gather it to thee; and it shall be for food for thee, and for them. ²² Thus did Noah; according to all that God commanded him, so did he.

I didn’t want the dinosaurs to die alone since God didn’t ask Noah to bring them along. I wrote about their lives. I gave them names and personalities. I gave them families. I gave them love. I gave them jobs and roles. I gave them purpose. I gave these things to them because I felt God hadn’t, and I found that unfair. Because didn’t we, Man, give him those things? It also felt good to me. Somehow proving in my mind that God made a mistake. So I made them a lot like people, because people were all I knew. And isn’t that what we tried to do with the gods? Make them like people so that we understand them? So that we can love them?

Or was it so we could deal with the reality that man is no different than a baseball glove? That it requires drowning and beatings in order to be shaped?

I do remember once showing you my stories. I was so proud, to which you said: “Why would you do that? That’s not the story.”

“What’s the story then?” I asked.

You just walked away shaking your head.

Scientists now claim they might be able to recreate dinosaurs within the next ten years or so. But I’m not sure if I want them around anymore.

* * *

To you, women were always a savage reservation: a place that, for whatever reason, hasn’t been worth the expense of civilizing, so why try now or ever?

But it was mother who mistook you for home. You were supposed to be the bones, the soul that elbowed away her ghosts.

Instead, you were her prison. The metal bars, pipes, and walls making up her cell. The damp, stone floor where every day, you placed her water jug and a few crumbs of bread.

You taught me how a man can become a woman’s clock when before, they simply watched the moon’s daily exercise as it moved along the walls. How we run them down with hammering. On doors with frozen hands that penetrate their sleep. Constant hammering. Against their heads, their chest, inside their mouths, the tips of their tongues, between their thighs, always a constant hammering, like sentinels on a wall, marching back and forth, back and forth, hammering until there’s nothing but cracks and crooked silhouettes. The sky clear but moonless, because the night only falls—it never cracks.

Thank God my mother once said, “You must never treat the lives of women according to the rules of male arithmetic (‘Women =’), because it functions too much like the farming of bones instead of love.”

You were a partly open door leading to an unseen hall and an unseen front door. You and your clenched-tooth tenderness (even though you wore partial dentures). I wish I’d known then how we were destined to be an illegal conjunction.

How I learned from you all my life’s moth holes. How you taught me that violence was a curious way of curing your unhappiness. Your open mouth under that groping mustache, a door for people to prowl in, only to limp away later.

The gull of your voice calling me Pato or Maricón, just because I didn’t feel like being forced to talk to a girl at the public pool as you and the rest of the family looked on. A shirtless me, watching those bare, black corridors of your eyes and open mouth, tilting the axis of the world.

And how that moment became my defiance—I accepted it: “Okay. I guess I am a faggot, then. Are you gonna finally leave me alone now?” Even though it was all a lie. Even though I wanted nothing more than to love you then and not have it depend on whether or not I had the courage to talk to a girl.

How you truly had no heart for me, for my mother. No mind for us. Nothing, but the breeding of the old world, Puerto Rican chauvinism and the cruelties of tradition. How the penalty for breaking tradition was being called a “faggot” in public while taking a severe beating in private.

And how you carried around the metaphor, Father, built into you like a self-destruct mechanism designed just for me and no one else.

You taught me to hate the grimaces plastered over your face. And how that pain in my chest wasn’t love. It wasn’t even symptomatic of a kind of love—any kind. So, it was never tragic, no matter how badly I wanted it to be. It was only pain.

* Pain:

1. As in you.
2. As in when you smile showing all of your gums, like love. Only it wasn’t.
3. As in building a house, only everyone’s dying.
4. As in an unlucky place, banging in the wind. The smell of dead flowers and tree ferns flourishing just out of reach.
5. As in you, sitting at a table with paper, a large pair of scissors, and a large black hat. You take up the large pair of scissors and cut into the paper, piece by piece, each bit falling inside the large black hat, until there’s no more paper in your hand. You then shake the hat before spilling its contents to the floor. You then kneel in order to separate the bits like random lives, turning a few over, revealing there were never any words. You then read the results in a loud, booming voice, even though there were never any words to begin with.
6. As in there were never any words.
7. As in the hum of an empty dial tone in your voice.
8. As in whenever I leave this place, I can’t remember you.
9. As in wherever you are was already circled on a map.
10. As in when we bury things we don’t want to face, monsters grow.

* Love:

1. And that’s how you taught me heroism—your greatest lesson.
2. You taught me how to say, “I used to love my father, once,” because fathers like you are filthy gods.
3. How you were an artist and a madman, and therefore, a creature of infinite melancholy.
4. There are voices which speak of being lost (like me). Dimpled, brown little faces. Long lashes. Vulnerable legs. Like dust trapped inside small hands.
5. How redemption is a subjective term, like selective hearing or memory.
6. Or maybe, it sounds a lot like religion?
7. And you taught it all to me, by not being there in the first place.

Men don’t fear tyrants. They come and they go, but monsters, ghosts, demons? That’s an entirely different thing altogether. Men fear those things—demons. Down to the very marrow of their bones. But now the question becomes: which one are you, and which one am I?

Now I’m left to wonder if all you ever thought about was the dead and humiliation? Which would explain why now I’m cursed to do the same, like an old prison habit. Like setting your body on fire, leaving behind no corpse, and no traces of yourself at all.

I know that one day I’ll have to accept the fact that in the great scheme of things, we might as well not exist in this world. We’re invisible. You and me. And the sooner I accept my own invisibility, the sooner I can remake myself.

Into what? you may ask.

Back into that boy that existed right before you arrived.