Fiction by Justin Torres

In another life, Juan and I had only known each other for a total of 18 days, nearly a decade before, when I was just 17. Even then, he felt frail, though sharp of mind, and so attentive. At that time, my own grandparents were still relatively young, in their late fifties, and so I had no experience with the elderly, as I considered Juan to be, and I was made nervous by the dry and mottled skin of Juan’s arms and hands, the manifold creases at the corners of his lips and eyes. “My senescence,” Juan called it. “An affront to youth and beauty.” And though I knew he teased, I did feel repulsed, not by Juan himself, but by elderliness as abstraction. I found it impossible to imagine my own adolescent body succumbing to old age, deteriorating. Back then, I had looked at Juan and thought, No way that body is my future.

The Palace rose monumental from the dusty street. A desert building fallen into disrepair. The once-white stucco a dirty ivory color, here and there chipped away, exposing the brick beneath. I don’t know how the nickname came to be; there are no palaces in this country. It would have been a hotel, or a stately asylum, once upon a time. The roof ’s wide eaves were supported by carved corbels, and above the entrance, at the peak of the facade, a cutout had been sculpted in the shape of a three-leaf clover, which reminded me of the ace of clubs from a deck of playing cards, and which may have been a bell gable once, though no bell hung inside now, only framed azure sky. The marble staircases had worn yellow, the interior spaces haphazardly subdivided into smaller rooms with painted plaster walls and mismatched trim. Grand doors were bolted shut and whitewashed. I had no idea who ran the Palace; a charity, I assumed, a place for those without family. Juan had his own room, a desk, a miniature refrigerator, a hot plate, a small closet, and a twin bed low to the floor. Books ran along the baseboards. Juan was allowed visitors for certain hours in the morning and afternoon, but kept his window cracked, and at night I shimmied up the fire escape and snuck back inside and sat on the edge of his mattress. We talked. I had many questions, and many hours with nowhere to be. Some nights I spent with men, tricks I picked up in the village bar, the Depot, next to the bus station. Or else I picked them up by lurking around the bus lot itself, or cruising the toilets, but soon I found I wanted only to be in the room, with Juan. I liked best to spend the night in the bed beside him, where I could feel his bones and papery skin, and breathe in his rotten breath, and know he hadn’t left.

Juan did not think much of the other residents, wandering souls, whom he referred to as a badling of queer ducks. I’d never before heard that collective noun. “All bitter,” he said, “or broken. Or lunatic.” The kitchen, the communal toilets, the showers—nowhere in the building ventilated properly; instead the rooms held the residents’ scents, musk and shit and grime and scorched food. Juan preferred not to venture beyond his own door. He ate only canned soup, tomato and cream, or lentil, which I heated for him, setting the can directly on the hot plate. I’d prop him up and watch as he spooned from can to mouth with tremulous deliberation. Afterward, while we talked, he picked at the wallpaper by the side of the bed as carefully as his fingers allowed. “Just underneath, the paper is all the more beautiful,” he said. He’d uncovered a patch the size of a dinner plate, the pattern a circus scene drawn in a delicate, old-fashioned style: pink poodles leaping through a hoop; an elephant balanced on one leg atop a small stool; hobos clowning each other. “I’d like to excavate the entire wall before I die, but I won’t, will I?”

I did not talk about after; instead I told little lies about the future. “One of these days, I am going to get you a pot. And a bowl. And watch you eat with dignity.”

The grand project, which I was to complete after Juan’s death, involved a file folder stuffed with scraps of paper, newspaper clippings, photographs, and scribbled notes, along with two massive books whose pages had been mostly blacked out. The books comprised a research study, published in two volumes and titled Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns.

Right away, I felt the magnetism, the mystery of these books; a work of intense observation transformed into a work of erasure. And I wondered about Juan’s connection to Miss Jan Gay, mentioned in the introduction. I asked Juan if he and she were blood. “No, no.” And yet, he told me, I was right to believe their connection “ran deeper than nominal similarity.” That was all he said.

I couldn’t understand why, but once I arrived, and once the promise to continue the work had been extracted, Juan seemed to lose interest in the books himself; he turned his face to the wall, to the wallpaper, and I found it difficult to get him to explain anything. Still, I prodded with questions about the research study, about the sex variants described therein, about Jan Gay, about who had blacked out all the pages, and why, and was it Juan himself? “No, no.” He’d found the books that way, erased into little poems and observations. He insinuated he would tell me more, in time, but first, he wanted to know about me and my life in the decade since we’d last seen each other. Juan knew just how to get me to talk, despite myself; the words pulled forth as if through hypnotic force.

Right away, I felt the magnetism, the mystery of these books; a work of intense observation transformed into a work of erasure.

Juan worried over me. The Palace, he claimed, attracted those undone by trouble. He suggested, with sincerity, that I was on the lam, but this was another figure of speech with which I was unfamiliar, and even after he explained, the entire notion of running and hiding seemed funny to me, as old-fashioned as the wallpaper.

“Running from who? The cops? Bookies? A pimp?”

“From whom,” Juan said. And after a moment he added, “Your mind, then.”

The hemp of the bedside lampshade warmed the light so that his brown eyes burned a rapturous color, liquor-like. I couldn’t get over how they shone, the incongruence, the rest of his face a death mask.

Downtown, around the Palace, the buildings and the roads held the day’s heat and radiated warmth through the night. Infernal nights with no escape. The bed was small. The ceiling fan worked only at the slowest speed.

“As if everything here is permanently set to some languorous tempo, eh, nene?” Juan said. “The fan and the air, you and I, time itself.”

I strutted about the room naked down to my white cotton underwear. I only ever dressed to go outside, and even then I didn’t wear much. Beyond keeping cool, I hoped to give Juan a thrill, but he rarely flirted. He kept himself covered in the thin bedsheet, though I’d seen his body many times, helping him out of bed and down the hall to the toilet. At first, I turned away from the shock of his skeleton, but over time I grew accustomed to his emaciation, and I would watch as the bones and joints moved under the skin with uncanny and fearsome beauty.

Juan himself gave off very little body heat, but on the hottest nights any skin contact at all, no matter how slight, proved insufferable, and I would move from the bed to the hard floor. Sleep was impossible; we didn’t try. Instead, Juan’s voice floated down to me. He liked to guide me into a trance, and he was good at it; so good, I felt that one of those nights I might not recover.

It was in an institution that Juan and I had met. At the time I was still several months shy of my eighteenth birthday, but I’d been deemed too mature for juvey, and so they fudged the rules and housed me with the adults. Back then, I felt somehow proud to be insane in an adult way, though now, in the stifling room, that world felt further away in both space and time, and I saw how young and immature I must have seemed to Juan. The past is a foreign country, Juan would say, quoting, and indeed back there, in that other place, they do things differently. Juan and I had been wards of the state, kept under constant observation.

From the moment I arrived, I was met with rules, a litany of regulatory proclamations. I shivered on a chair before the intake nurse, trying to grasp my change in circumstance. I kept quiet, meek, tracing the pattern of pinprick ventilation in the dingy suede of my sneakers, unable to make eye contact, to utter even a word of protest. The entire scene felt like a copy of a copy of a bad script, one I recognized from television and books. Everything, from the nurse’s icy demeanor to my own timidity and dread—all of it a cliché little drama that must have played out in that very room countless times. I tried to observe the scene as if outside myself, focusing on the details, the ventilated suede, the scratch of the pen, the boredom in the nurse’s voice.

Only when the nurse deployed the phrase privy privacy, without any sense of irony, did I find there was still enough of the teenager in me to snicker.

At first, I’d known him by a false name. The nurses all called him John. Only days later, after we broke our silence, did I notice his medical bracelet read JUAN GAY, a name I found discordant, but also amusing.

When I asked why the nurses did not use his real name, Juan explained that he’d been in and out of that place for decades. A few of the staff knew him from way back, a time when every even slightly foreign name was Americanized. The false name had carried over from the older nurses to newer ones. Juan never much cared what they thought, or what they called him; he never felt a need to correct the misapprehensions of others. Even then I had thought he seemed free, though of course neither of us were allowed to venture any farther than the locked double doors at the end of the hall.

Juan was deeply reserved and much older than the other patients, and I was deeply terrified and much younger. We sat side by side in a quiet corner on a pine bench, thickly glossed, with turned and painted legs. At first, we did not speak very much. In our silent communion, we faced down the immense stretches of gray boredom. On occasion, the rebellious adolescent spirit might flare up, and I would want to lash out, cause a scene, but I wanted more Juan’s presence beside me, so I stayed quiet and still and used the edge of my thumbnail to carve a curse into the bench, pressing so hard my wrist throbbed in the night.

At first, we did not speak very much. In our silent communion, we faced down the immense stretches of gray boredom.

Such a gentle old man. Later, I would learn all manner of vocabulary to think about sex, and gender, but invoking any of those words would be anachronistic—I was a teenager from bumfuck nowhere; I saw only that Juan transcended what I thought I knew about sissies. When he spoke, he spoke in allusion, literarily, often pausing to check, with a look, whether I followed. I don’t think he expected me to understand directly, but rather wanted me to understand how little I knew about myself, that I was missing out on something grand: a subversive, variant culture; an inheritance.

This text was excerpted from Blackouts: A Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2023), winner of a National Book Award for Fiction.

Photo: Pierre Axel Cotter. Unsplash+