Kailee Pedersen
Winner of the 2018 Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award
Achilles and Patroclus in New York City, 1983
—for Jonathan
Sing, muse, of the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles—
No, that’s not quite right. I’m not a Greek hero, like those
white-marble nudes I pasted on my college dorm walls
in the seventies, when I was full of good books
and poor taste. I read Ginsberg, perched haphazard
on the library steps at Columbia, told myself I’d
stop cruising on Christopher Street, stop
the wide-eyed morning flush of spare bedrooms
and tangled hair, russet mouths opening and closing
just as I had locked myself in my room, danced
to Bowie and the Rat Pack, studying Greek and Latin
measuring time in bottles of cheap champagne
but I digress—in languages that haven’t been spoken
in thousands of years, even—I’m sure you want a love
story. That’s what you came here for, right? A love
story, like the ancients used to play on their lyres
eating grapes in Rome, cutting their hands off
and nailing them to oratory podiums. Well
I don’t know any love stories, but I know
that years ago I met a very young man for whom
I would cut off my hands, my tongue, commit treason
sail to Ilium and back again, twice over. You wanted Achilles
and Patroclus. Here’s what you get: two homosexuals
in a crowded bar, the beginning of a bad joke
slaughtering each other not with razorblades
but with our teeth, hands, and the first night
I swallowed lightning, the exact shade of his
blonde, blonde hair and his thighs cut
by the verses I mumbled against them,
hot and sweet. Where did we begin
and end in our tangled sorrows? We
could have lived the nearest a young man gets
to forever, but I am old now. I know
better. Time has made me colder
than stained glass, winter in New York
raining freezing damnation I remember
we held hands at Christmas. I bought
a snow globe. We smoked cigarettes on the roof
and his mouth was wet ash. In 1980
I put my life into a few cardboard boxes
and drove to the Upper East Side, and unpacked
in his living room—my Patroclus had
a snaggletooth upright, and serenaded me with jazz.
The best days: morning omelettes slightly burned
on one side, newspapers with the perennial coffee stains—
I stacked my books in a corner until the floor
warped, and he hammered together a bookshelf
for my philosophers and my dreamers, Menander to Mann.
Here’s something they don’t teach you in high school
Latin: the gods are petty, worse than the opera queens
at 66th Street, worse than my mother’s frown
when he showed up for dinner with a casserole
and a velvet blazer. Aubergine. Our fights of 1982
were legendary, tempests in Central Park even
on the driest days of the month, with a busted AC
and ice-cold lemonade that evaporated in our hands
he had the flu that summer. The gods would punish
mortals with plagues, eons ago, so maybe that was my punishment
for not defrosting the salmon, for buying the wrong cheese,
for not saying “love” enough, in the way he wanted it
and not in the way I did, a lacuna, a thoughtless silence.
He volunteered at a shelter and made soup. He wanted to fight
when I first mentioned the New York Times article,
“gay cancer”, murders, beatings downtown in sultry bathhouses
where I had once tasted sea salt and danger, submerging
myself in the rip tides. He said there was “work” to be done,
but what he meant, I didn’t know. I taught Latin at a private school then,
that was my battlefield, eighteen kids in a small classroom
talking about the permutations of desire in Catullus
and on weekends we’d get calls that turned into elegies,
funeral games, songs for the dead. I never went to
the hospitals, but he did, maybe because he was braver. You
see? They’ll never carve my name into the Parthenon. Rhapsodes
sang about brave men and their limestone lovers, but I
am not worthy of such poetry. He started keeping lists, filling
notebooks with names of the vanquished and their untranslatable
histories, sometimes he went to protests while I graded papers
and said, no, I didn’t want to have a ceremony, no, I hated
the attention, crawling in the strangeness of my own skin.
He was an optimist. I could have been fired, and there he was
making signs, printing flyers. Patroclus puts on Achilles’
armor, the most beautiful armor made by the gods
to fight because Achilles won’t, he refuses
stays in his tent by the hollow ships, with his hollow
words. I played solitaire when he was gone,
rearranged my books on the shelves according to author
and time period and I ironed his shirts and cleaned
just to still my hands for an hour at a time. I only went
to one funeral: an old boyfriend from college. I didn’t tell
anyone. His family didn’t come, so it was just me
and a few of his friends, weeping, but I had forgotten
the way I used to grieve. I threw dirt on his grave and washed my hands
of him, and said I’d forget. But that night I looked
at Patroclus in the darkness and I wondered if the gods
were taunting me, like they always did, spilling our cologne in the sink,
mixing up our shirts in the laundry. His favorite
was the white cotton with yellow stripes, which I had bought
on sale from a cheerful woman who smiled and said, For
your brother? (I didn’t say
anything.) On a blistering Thursday in March he
rolled up his left sleeve, the one with the ink stain
and there it was: a dark wound. I almost wish it had been
Apollo of the silver bow who had cut him down, because I knew
mercy when I saw it. He got the flu again, but he still wore
my immortal armor, my favorite tie. He quit smoking and said we’d
make it through. You wanted a love story. Here, take it:
the disease loved him more than I did, and it tore out
his bones. After November there was no more
dancing. I brought him Chinese food from his favorite cart,
and fed pigeons outside of our apartment with the leftovers
he couldn’t eat. I started going to his meetings, until I didn’t
because I had nothing to say to these people, who died
of “undetermined causes” while I paced outside of doctor’s offices
and wrote “family friend” on patient contact forms. Out of all of the guys
shooting up in their Wall Street offices, or having sex
with their secretaries next to the copy machine,
there I was. Trying to make sense of the gods.
He told me he didn’t want to go like that. Said he had
better things to do than listen to me pacing at night,
spending all of my quarters on phone calls to doctors
and hospitals, and newspapers, and his mother. No one ever
answered. But one day the sky opened and dumped water
on everyone east of Park Avenue, and I knew it was a sign
of the end times. I took the subway home in soaked clothes
and I found him lying on the kitchen tile. Apparently
he had been trying to cook me an omelette. So it was me then:
I killed him, with the knife and the candles and the Italian dinners
and the ambulance and the uncoordinated ballroom dancing
and all the days I spent fixing grammatical mistakes instead of
finding his favorite radio station or stapling his flyers to telephone poles
or touching his blonde, blonde hair. I slept that night
next to the orchestral operating room, and at last I understood
the real dead language: not Greek or Latin, as I had been taught, but
the strange dark harmony of breathing machines
and the arcane glittering of hallway lights. I was allowed
to visit him the next day. I brought an old book of his
from the apartment, and a picture of the pigeons
on the balcony. But he threw the book at the window,
and shouted at me about nothing in particular. Patroclus dies
because the gods take away his shining armor, and so
I remember him naked, yelling. And I, swift-footed Achilles
fled from battle, a coward. I was told later that he had died
that night, with the pigeons and Oscar Wilde. I was not allowed
at the funeral games. I did not send my condolences.
Sing, goddess, of the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles—
there is no rage left in me. Achilles dies young
and follows his favorite companion to Hades, but I
must keep feeding the pigeons, rearranging my books.
I kept his things, until I burned them. The gods
are cruel, but so are the bickering couples in Times Square,
so is the rain. They never say how lonely it is,
after. I tell myself stories in the dark. So here: it’s not
a love story. But this is the only story I know. Patroclus dies
no matter what I do. Outside the gates of Troy,
or in a hospital room. And when Achilles hears of his death,
he weeps. But I am not Achilles anymore.
You wanted a love story? You got ancient history.
I’m sorry. Let me try again. Once upon a time
there lived two heroes, Achilles and the horseman Patroclus.
They owned between them a broken coffee table, a subscription
to Playgirl, and the Oxford Classical Dictionary.
They had an apartment in Ancient Greece (or perhaps New York City)
and the 1980s made them gods—
Copyright © 2018 by Kailee Pedersen.
About the Author
Kailee Pedersen is a recent graduate of Columbia University in Classics. She was adopted from Nanning in 1996. Her poetry and prose have appeared in New South, Arcturus, Midwest Review, Matador Review, and others. In 2015, she received an Individual Artist Fellowship in Nonfiction from the Nebraska Arts Council. She is currently working on a novel and a poetry collection. This poem is dedicated to her friend Jonathan Baker.