Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [5]
I was not ready when emergency came. Until then, I had been splendidly noncommittal: neither Japanese nor American, neither poet nor pragmatist, neither straight nor gay. But it seemed all ambiguities had to be resolved that year. I had to choose citizenship—the red Japanese passport or the blue American one, the two colors of blood. I had to choose a career—literature or law. Most of all, I had to choose—or choose to acknowledge—the sexuality that roiled the surface that summer when I fell bewilderingly in love.
The Japanese character for erotic desire is the same as that for color. Some say this commonality arises from the Buddhist teaching that desire, like color, distracts us from enlightenment by calling us to the things of this world. The world’s colorless wave broke kaleidoscopically over me when I met Brian. We lived together after graduation while we attended summer school—he to complete medical school prerequisites, I to prepare for my time in England. Brian was the first in his family to attend college and was, like me, hungry to prove himself. But unlike me, he had directed his intensity outward, devoting his college years to ceaseless public service. This moved me.
One glittering afternoon, we walked along the Charles River. It was a Sunday—the riverside drive was hedged with sawhorses, closed to cars. The cyclists sheared the air. Dazzled by the needles of light stitching the water, I turned to watch him watch them. I noticed his eyelashes were reflected in his eyes, like awnings in windowpanes. As I tried to make sense of that reflection, I found I could not look away. His irises were brown, clouding into orange, with brighter flecks around his pupils. Then it became as important not to look as to look, as I feared I would be lost in a rush of bronze motes.
It hardly mattered that I knew he was straight. I experienced my desire for him, which was a pent-up desire for many men, as having an absolute absolved necessity. Just as the brain seems larger than the skull that contains it, so did my desire seem grossly to exceed the contours of my body. I thought if I could only make him experience the strength of what I felt, he could not demur.
I had, in one sense, chosen the right man. Brian responded with compassion. Yet my desire was now not only thwarted, but exposed. Brian made me acknowledge my knowledge; he made me own myself. I snapped back into my skin. And I felt something in me crack—like a safe, a whip.
Oxford was gray. The stone gargoyles simpered with their cheeks on their long fingers; the deer in the park outside my rooms were, in the college poet’s phrase, “connoisseurs of the air”; genial professors overfilled our glasses with claret, encouraging us to “exploit the meniscus.” But it seemed as if I spent the entire first year in my bed. I retreated into the one-seat theater of my mind, which unspooled images of Brian’s orange eyes, the glittering river. I watched the sunlight that dappled my room gather into the coins of light passing cars would slide across the ceiling. I became so gaunt the tectonics of my face surfaced; I began to feel more a tenant than a resident in my body.
I would think, I wish I were dead. I did not think of it as a suicidal thought. My poet’s parsing mind read the first “I” and the second “I” as different “I’s.” The first “I” was the whole watching self, while the second “I”—the one I wanted to kill—was the gay “I” nested inside it. It was less a suicidal impulse than a homicidal one—the infanticide of the gay self I had described in the poem.
My only consistent foray from my rooms was to the college chapel, where I prayed to gods I did not believe in for transformation. No erotic desire I had ever felt exceeded my desire