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i.

Candies gush across the ground. They clot and pool. Where the pale floorboards converge against the wall, they glitter in a long stream of plastic-wrapped sweets, the sort you’d see on a receptionist’s desk. Red, yellow, green, swirled through with white, alien in the stark lighting. Dire in the silence.

If you’re a devotee of modern art, you probably know what I’m talking about. But if, like me, you stumble into galleries on occasion and poke around with delighted unfamiliarity—an innocence unvarnished by even the slightest veneer of expertise—then you may be just as disoriented as I am, facing the petrified flood of candy.

Allow me to orient us, briefly: we are in Washington, DC. If this were a film, you would glimpse a flash of busy traffic, bloody taillights, faceless pedestrians hurrying by in suits and blouses. Graffiti-jeweled metro stops, granite monuments, an aerial panorama of the glassy green Mall before we narrow in on the classical columned façade of the National Portrait Gallery. June is weeping over the city. The avenues seethe with interns and tourists and today I am both.

As my friend and I wander the gallery, she takes avant-garde cell phone photographs of the marble busts and speaks passionately about the color palette choices of the walls in each room. Admittedly, they are excellent walls. A handful of paintings hang in elegant gold frames, each containing, say, a spark of blue—dress, curtain, slice of sky—echoed by the tastefully bold lapis of the room. Through the doorway, the next walls might be mauve, or matte charcoal, or burnt umber. (These seem like words the Portrait Gallery would use, much more so than purple or black or brown.) If this were a film, classical music would unspool in the background. We whisper about the art and what summer will bring. My friend is moving to Tennessee in a few days; I’m starting a second job as a nonprofit canvasser. Life in all its needful reshuffling.

Then we enter the candy room.

Imagine the music stops. These walls are white, bare but for unobtrusive placards identifying the artist (Felix Gonzalez-Torres); the medium (candies, 175 lbs., endless supply); the legal disclaimer (Packaged in a facility that handles dairy and nut by-products); and a short bilingual statement of contextualization. The first piece is called “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.). It’s a jarring change from the rest of the gallery. It’s also startlingly familiar, which is when I realize I’d heard about it months ago, from another friend at school, who told me what they haven’t put on a placard, which is that Ross was the artist’s partner who died of AIDS-related illness. The sign says: take some candy. The candy glimmers beneath the lights, bright and sweet and unspeakable.

A list of facts I don’t know yet: Like many of Gonzalez-Torres’s works, Portrait of Ross is manifestable. It can exist in multiple places at once, shifting to fit each gallery. The Portrait of Ross displayed concurrently in Chicago is different from the one laid before us in DC—more mound than river, wrappers brighter and more violently primary. Gonzalez-Torres made twenty candy works in his career. On the wall, we read that Portrait of Ross is from 1991, but I don’t know that the real Ross died that same year, or that Gonzalez-Torres died in 1996, also of complications from AIDS.

I don’t know that in a ’95 interview with BOMB Magazine, Gonzalez-Torres said, “I never stopped loving Ross. Just because he’s dead doesn’t mean I stopped loving him.”

Because we’re here, my friend and I each take a piece of candy from the river that is Ross. Mine remains in my pocket, a starburst of white and yellow, blameless as the sunlight that drowns us upon exiting the gallery.

Eating the candy feels wrong; not eating it feels equally wrong. I think this is the purpose of the portrait, or its mechanics. It’s a beautiful kind of memorial. Ross can be anywhere, offering delight to anyone, but also daring each of us to dismantle him. A brutally paradoxical and political symmetry. You cannot accept the gift without consuming, destroying; you cannot avoid destruction without rejecting its generosity altogether. (I think this is true of life, also.) You must take and confront yourself in the complicity of taking. There is tenderness but scant refuge.

We leave with our candy and my friend moves to Tennessee. June wrings itself out in the gutter, smears itself over windowpanes, flounces madly across the sky. If this were a film, you would see the summer you turned nineteen or twenty. A montage of almosts. I work at my internship, start my second job, and cannot stop thinking of Ross: ever-devoured, ever-prodigal. His ghost follows me at a polite distance, unobtrusive as a plaque adhering to a blank wall. The yellow candy takes up residence in a small box on my dresser and waits. I don’t know what it’s waiting for until two weeks later, when my mom calls and tells me that my grandfather has Alzheimer’s. Also, he has decided to die.

 

ii.

I remember studying his hands.

When I was a kid, we made the pilgrimage down to Tennessee to visit him every year or two. Long somnolent car rides, books-on-tape on CD, the looming mustard-yellow and viscera-red billboards exhorting Jesus to SAVE OUR SOULS. Back then, my grandfather still lived on a huge commune, one of the original havens of the hippie movement. His house had a garden, an arching jungle of tomatoes and unidentifiable vines. The bedsheets in his basement had a certain clean herbal scent I’ve never smelled anywhere else. We would all walk down the narrow wooded hill to the swimming hole, where the water was black and cold. Jumping in from a ledge on the back cliff. Once, they drained the pond and turned up leeches, oblong crimson graspings, little more than elastic mouths. 

The commune grocery was an octagon of colorful creaking wood. Right beside it, a park nestled under a vast iron-skeletoned dome. I remember running with nameless children across the crunching gravel, filling my pockets with tiny spiraled fossils, leaping from the lofty reaches of the playground as my grandfather pretended to chase me, reaching out with his enormous, gentle hands. I remember crossing the fields to the blueberry farm and a night we garlanded ourselves in glow-sticks, hallucinatory halogen wraiths, gorgeous in the sweating dark.

His hands are monolithic. Wide-knuckled stone. Blunt, veined, firm on a shoulder or a shovel haft. They do not seem mortal.

Nobody talks about the things my grandfather talks about. He has seen the edges of time, the folds of the cosmos. He’s honest to the point of absurdity. At seventy-eight years old, the richness of his sex life is among his preferred topics of conversation. On numerous occasions, he has met angels. If you saw him weep as he spoke of divine love, you would believe it.

His wife died very young. In her absence, my mom grew up with a feral streak, taking care of herself and her sister for days at a time while my grandfather went into the city for work. Her childhood was a brief and scruffy one. Ten or eleven years old, cooking pancakes and hauling hay for their wandering horses. My grandfather didn’t save money because he believed the world was ending. He led scrimmages with snowballs or pots of water, all of them chasing each other through the house. Can you hear them howling with delight? Can you see his hands, younger and wilder, clinging through everything to himself and his family?

Six years ago, he moved up north, yielding to my mom’s ingenious stratagem of setting him up with our doctor. So I see him often these days, usually on the pretext of some manual labor: stacking cinderblocks, cutting saplings, relocating his enormous potted cacti. We talk about politics and the universe and art. He invokes grief with the most radiant familiarity. Our hands move in parallel, rehearsing the sparse requiems of physics. Afterward, he lends me books without ever expecting their return.

My favorite story: how he used to write poetry while driving on the highway, his mind blasted open by god-knows-what, clutching his notebook against the steering wheel in one hand and gripping a pen in the other, a conduit for the urgency of verse, the solitary lightning rod in a blazing tempest of meaning. You could call it a death wish—or else the opposite.

 

iii.

Now, I call him from the garden.

A reprise: Washington, DC, my first time living alone. June greening and glorious. The house and garden belong to my paternal grandmother’s friend, a retired professor who’s traveling for the rest of the month. Before her departure, we cooked dinners together and attended a bustling swing-dance concert. With her gone, the house becomes smaller, more insulated from the world.

The kitchen is cool and liminal. Thyme stretches its narrow fingers from a vase on the table, dense sprigs veined by the morning light. Shards of the yellow tablecloth, patterned with blue buds that resemble cicadas, refract idly in the glass. Buried in the walls, air vents cough and shuffle. The clock snaps seconds in half until I venture out into the garden.

My project this week: the unkempt fringe of liriope grass lunging over the lip of the terrace. Sun scalds the sidewalk, steams the freckles of dew. It is impossible to believe in the thunderstorm forecasted for the afternoon. The beds behind me erupt with flowers and insects, ravishingly various, a dizzied euphoria of native species. Clippers, bucket, dirt crusting my palms—these become my meditations. Eventually, sitting on the folding stool in an evaporating puddle of shade, I dial my grandfather.

What do you say to someone who is choosing to die? What comforts do you dwell on? In which cliché do you seek shelter?

He sounds the same as he always has. Per usual, we skip through the pleasantries. He knows why I’m calling and doesn’t hold back details. The lapses and blank spaces, the coffee poured in the wrong cup and words scattered like sparrows. Conversations with his neurologist. There are no tests for Alzheimer’s, except behavioral ones. But my grandfather’s genetic markers place him at a high risk. It is taken as a given that he does not want to live in a mind he cannot trust.

He says the initial fits of crying have passed and he is at peace. We exchange a few exploratory jokes—how he’ll save a lot of money on supplements, avoid a climate apocalypse. We touch briefly upon the finer pharmacological points of euthanasia. (Such a colorless clinical word, adopted from Ancient Greek: good death.)

In turn, I tell him about my new canvassing job, funny encounters with donors. The retired stripper who hit on me as I signed her up. We laugh together, through the static of the phone line. In my hands, liriope stalks surrender, dragging up knots of root and soil.

In his interview with BOMB Magazine, Felix Gonzalez-Torres was asked how long he expected to live. It’s a shockingly intimate question, isn’t it? At that point, he must have been very sick.

His answer: “I want to live until I do all the things that I want to do.”

I cannot stop rereading the interview. He died the following year; did he do what he wanted? I keep returning to the delicate unfolding of accusation, grief, and insistence. The funny thing is, all of us are dying. Yet when you encounter death acutely, immediately, everything changes. The seismic crash from general into particular. That’s the power of art in these moments: freeze-frames of the not-yet, the going, the isn’t-gone. Portraits as preservation. Look at us, in the instant before. Remember us this way.

My grandfather says he’ll see how his symptoms progress. He’s traveling to Italy next week. We make plans to have lunch in DC soon, though someone else will have to drive him. If this were a film, you would know exactly how it ends. But nothing ends, really.

Instead, a few hours later, the foretold storm finally arrives. Gray churning thunderheads jagged as shale. The first gusts tear limbs and leaves from the tulip trees, flinging them across the street. The garden writhes. It is a terrifying, monstrous wind. In the eerie underlight of the clouds, haloes of cyan shift and shimmer, and I have never in my life seen such a color in the sky. Standing on the porch, I stare up until lightning bellows overhead. For the first time, I might cry. A few flecks of rain spit down like gravel. Then there is nothing else but this: the raw dissolution of rain. The rain, roaring, as alive as we are. The rain, generous and ruthless. The rain which reminds me of Ross, too—another deluge of fury and light. Another goodbye still unfinished.

 

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DAVIN FARIS is a student at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. When he isn’t studying philosophy, he loves climate activism, hiking, and dancing. His writing has been featured in The New York Times, Patagonia, Humana Obscura, and others. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2024. He’s a submission reader and book reviewer for ONLY POEMS. His grandfather, Randy Mack, recently published a explorative memoir entitled The New Era of Radiant Aging. Find Davin on Instagram @davinmfaris.

 

Featured image by Chiara Polo, courtesy of Unsplash.