Beyond the mundane, there is one thing that I've seen in him that I've not informed him about. (Oh, ending a sentence with a preposition... gotta beat myself up for that later.) It's a kind of vision, of sorts, that only he provokes in me. It has happened twice now, which is why I mention it--it was not just a fluke.
I have never felt myself, on some level, to be part of the human race. It's not a matter of above or below, but rather one of differing nature--I have always believed that if the people I see around me are humans, than I must not be one. If I am one, than most of the people I meet aren't. It makes me look at "humans" with a certain detached curiosity, and, over the past few years, morbid fascination and a growing fear. Not for myself, but for them.
For nearly five years now I've watched Brian move among humans in a way that has always set off the radar in my head. He too is separate, but for a different reason than I. While I consider myself apart, and beside, on the same level as humanity, but of a different breed, to me he looks like a paragon, the perfected end result of a long set of humanity's personal mutations. He is flawless in a way that makes him a leper in the real world. Let me explain myself.
Brian performed in our local production of the Rocky Horror Picture Show for a couple of years. I'd go and see him, and several other friends in the cast, at least once every two months or so. I'm not knowledgeable enough of drama to really judge the performers with any accuracy--you'd have to ask him for that. But that wasn't why I was there, nor was it what I saw when I went. Increasingly, as the hullabaloo (and ain't it a great word?) of the whole production ceased distracting me, I began to chafe at the restraints placed on the performers by our culture, by their positions and themselves. Rocky Horror is a violent film, a graphically sexual film, an offensive film by some standards, and the production our cast put on took advantage of that to a certain degree. But as time went on I began to wish they would go further.
As I watched the humans in their fishnets and corsets prance onstage, flit and flirt and kiss and kill, and later as I watched much the same in the cast's production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, I began screaming inside for a greater potency. These people were nearly naked. I began to ask, why weren't they completely so? These people played at obscenity. Why did they not push for the truly obscene? These people mimicked violence. How many of them would shrink from it if it were suddenly real and visceral? The tiny margin by which they fell short of an unstoppable spiritual rite of simultaneous ritualistic ascension and degradation was unbearable to me. Such a small step... it was never taken.
It was during Brian's performance in Hedwig one night that I finally saw what I was looking for. He was my friend then, and I leaned on him for what he was able to provide me--a willing ear, a kind heart, a neutral ground, and that still-elusive sense that he was more than even he knew--but what I saw that night would change my perception of him forever. That night was early in the time that we started living together, and we had been discussing getting tattoos. He wanted the name of the archangel Michael--the one who rules over his birthdate--inscribed on the small of his back in the flowing Theban script. I, to show him, had drawn it there the night before. It was beautiful. The next night he had a performance, and we had forgotten that he would be playing Hedwig during the song "Midnight Radio," and would be mostly undressed. We hoped it wouldn't detract from his character that the twisting script was still heavy black on his lower spine.
The song is sad, but it's also a song of renunciation, immolation, and rebirth. He was wearing a band of white around his waist and nothing else, and the other performers onstage, lingering like uncertain shades in the shadows, were also dressed fully in white. The spotlight hit his pale skin and made him burn like a star.
Let me say this now: he is a damn good performer. I'm no judge, as I've said, but I'm also hard to move with movies and plays, and he is good enough to shake even me. That night, he surpassed himself in that one song.
He shook, he strutted, he raged in the spotlight alone, and I was filled with joy as the disappointment I'd felt at the almost-but-not-quite performances of the others were obliterated, annhilated in one screaming sweep of his white arm. He fell to his knees, and at the end one image was branded into memory and remains there still: a side view, nearly a silhouette in white, as most of his features were blinked out by the blinding spotlight. The black lines on his back writhing as if to burst forth and grow the wings of its namesake. He arched backward, still kneeling, leading with his right hand and buckling his spine as he nearly touched his own toes with the back of his head. I was reminded with the force of a shock of a statue I had seen in art history and fallen in love with: the Dying Niobid, a Classic Greek carving of a woman in torment with an arrow in her back. She arcs helplessly, trying with both hands to reach the arrow, her body revealing a torturous writhing. But, in the manner of the Classic period, her face is utterly still and serene, as if she sleeps.
I remember in splintered detail the agonal arc of Brian's shape in that moment and how, as he did it, he swept away all the barely inadequate movements before him, how he seemed to phase in and out in my eyes, as if the powers that made him had brought him here for this one transcendant moment, and were now to return him to a place where he would be among the deserving. Though I didn't connect the two at the time, this was shortly before a major change in his lifestyle and outlook. It was for the better. He has learned, he has grown. He is happier and wiser.
I thought the vision was merely a moment of beauty, no more. But tonight I saw it again. DDR at the Student Union--we're on our last two quarters each. On our last quarters, each of us tend to play the three hardest songs we know, in succession, in an attempt to make ourselves collapse before we head on home. I laid back on the bench nearby, building my strength for my turn, listening to his feet striking the pads as he whipped through the selection he'd made. I listened to the music and looked up at the ceiling, where the thumping lights of the machine reflected in pink, green and white. Intervening between these gyrating blobs of color was a whirling shadow, a shape indeterminate and strange, but fast as blazes. The real sound of his feet faded out as I watched it, and I heard nothing but a piercing ringing, as the shadow took on definition from the edges of the color around it, and began to move on its own. There was a polarized version of the beautiful Dying Niobid cast on the ceiling--a dancing dervish in black, but phasing in and out of this world now not with clarity, but with speed. At the moment when I felt the image had become so clear it would leap off the ceiling onto the pad beside Brian and challenge him, and I felt that I must look down to see who would step faster, who could score higher--the song ended. The lights went off, and I looked down at my panting, sweating roommate grinning at his final score.
What does this say? These visions of mine aren't clear. They don't mean anything subliminal on their own--there is no significance, I believe, to the first being a figure in white and the second being a shadow. What I do know is that they only appear to me in moments of decision for him, pivotal times in his life when he has a choice to make. They are an affirmation, a reflection of the transcendant, superhuman spirit I've always seen in him--they are his perfection made tangible, and they say only one thing: You are doing right. You have chosen right. This is the way. And I don't believe they can be wrong.
I don't know why I am the one to see these things. I don't know why he is unaware of them. But I do know that when I see them, I must do all I can to spur him to accept the course he is choosing, to waver no more, to take the path he's selected with brutal confidence. These shades are beacons, lighting the way, and to the side of the road, I stand and point at them. Is this enough? *smile* I don't know. So far it has been.
Labels: Brian, Introspection, Love, Magic
posted by Rivaine # 2:10 AM 
