Stay by Bruce Bromley

Sean Benham CC



Stay
  

We’re sure that Larry would be a terrible name for a ghost.
So tiny, so already over, without the sprawling vowels of
Lavinia, Bertram, Annabella. But maybe any ghost wants
to find it possible to say—I need to touch you; I’ve tumbled
into love with you all over again; I remember how your
hair smelled of the long grass that’s never cut. So, this short
name, this sound gone before you hear it, this Larry and
his ghost must match the need that intends to stay.

You’ll try to punch out that longing with what used to be
your lungs, your throat, your mouth, in the hope that 
something in the living world will slow enough to answer it. 
Needs resemble questions, we speculate, since both 
announce the expectation of being met or that their thwarting 
should be recognized. But the impossibility of negating 
the impulse to yearn means that the dead, like the living, 
are hungry. And hunger’s this stomach-slap that says again, 
again. It makes the body—alive or dead—a transporter of 
desires knowable through their repetitions. We’re two men 
watching a movie seen from the ghost’s point of view, 
and we’ve loved each other longer than my college writing 
students have been alive. Nadia’s end, the story tells us, 
involves spiked juice and a plastic wrap muzzle and this 
Chris so innocuous that every parent imagined he can only 
be good. Nadia works at saving Chloe, a high school 
friend, from the horror that muffled her and meets this goal
while lightning’s antlered across our skylight. As if all of
Brooklyn reverted to a sticky marsh, where creatures 
pad appetites around in a world that seems theirs.
Until it isn’t. We get silly/sad, Neil and I, listing 
ghostly names and conceding that an ordinary Larry  
merits his space among the phantom ones. But 
really I’m worried about the compulsion to repeat.

When the noise in my head begins to lag, I see her, 
treating words as though they were in a pail. She drops
a pail of feeling down into the belly’s busy dark and
hauls up what she thought words could never say. Yet
the thing she needs to squint at shudders below the words
and exceeds them, even while their formulations suggest
the fact of shuddering. This Hilda Doolittle fractionized
her name. In 1933, she’s the poet H.D. who lies on 
the famous Viennese sofa, hovering between two
global collapses. The first pulverized her brother,
silenced the pump of her father’s heart, and stilled
her daughter in the act of being born. The second’s
set to rhapsodize about Hitler and the Jews who will
be stateless, because that’s what law can do: rub out
the lives that so many don’t want to look at, anyway.
Adam Phillips introduces H.D.’s Tribute to Freud
by maintaining that “without repetition there is no
improvisation, and no history,” nothing to modify
or vary or transform. But not all repetitions are
equal. And all of them require judgment.

The two planetary bodies that any animal life sees 
with ease disappear and return, and that rhythm 
means: what vanishes can come back. This coming
back regulates every repetitive process beneath
our skin that keeps us upright on ground that always
moves. Our eyes stabilize the turning, misrecognize
it, so a vision of immobile ground becomes an
illusion we can use. To go on walking. To invent
a notion of value tied to what works. And,
the customary logic argues, what works must 
sustain those systems intended to organize
the human lives inside them, rendering them
legible, worthy of being seen. I know that
Neil and I live in a place whose white founders
journeyed on the intention that their landing
would deliver them to this paradise, resurfaced
for their employment. That the inconvenience
of the brown ones who preceded them should
be wiped out, shunted away—and it was. We’re
citizens of a country that values the price of eggs
over the widening of executive powers and
multiplying deportations and the breaking apart of 
diversity support for those who fail to fit the  
approved profile. We know that this yearning 
to go back bewitches all who submit to it, that 
the past was never so uniform as its manufactured 
picture. We’re here to be made narrow and small 
and to vanish. But how can the unseen refuse 
their invisibility?

On our way to bed, the sky sounds like a stomach’s
slosh and grind when missing food. We talk about
Michelle Williams’ Molly in Dying for Sex. I don’t
know the connectors between needing to be fed
and the being seen that’s so urgent for Molly’s
character. I know that the affirmation of visibility
converts you into a sort of footed fire, a mix of 
speed and sheen for which some will want to hurt you,
begrudging a life without interest in or aptitude for
repeating theirs. Not far into the first episode, Molly’s
on a bench in front of a bodega close to our place.
She holds an acid-green bottle whose scale
dwarfs her right hand. It’s called Good Value Diet 
Soda, and she drinks from it as if goodness and
right valuation could be transferred from one
receptacle to another. As if that travel down the
gullet would generate more good, more value, and 
you were equal to their accordance. This happens
after Molly escapes her couples therapy session 
with a husband for whom she’s a thing to be
scrubbed and wiped, dirtied by the cancer that
now returns. She admits never knowing the flash
of loving heat with a body other than her own,
notes the muteness of husband and therapist that
declines to serve her. In her friend Nikki’s car,
Molly drives into the time that her proliferating
cells allow. She’ll burnish and be burnished by
men who see her as more than the object of
a caregiving that couldn’t save her. Neil and I
recall: showing the first episode to my students,
I asked them to reflect— how does this material 
help you to look at what you don’t want to see?
We went around the seminar table. They were
all about their rage at Molly’s husband, at
that unwatchful therapist. When I said,
but no one notices Molly, so how does your
raging differ from the erasure you’ve identified?,
the room got more than quiet. I’d stilled an
almost last shot on the screen. They looked up.
There was Molly on a hospital bed in a swell
of light, too bright—in this moment—for
negation.

I haven’t known unbroken sleep for so many 
months that I’m afraid to count them. But
watching Neil slide into that other place inside
this one seems a beneficence to me: letting go
of what you can’t control, can’t undo, the twitch
of his eyelids at the tale rising up on their 
inner folds, which he’ll be skilled at reading.
Watching dulls the rumble between my ears
in response to the contempt for what isn’t you
that remains this nation’s primary lesson. I think
about the living spellbound by cell phones and
social media platforms with their incessant
capacity for self-promotion, which betrays our
anxiety about being here at all. About tight-hearted
leaders and the population whose votes render
their policies actionable. Maybe we’ve misnamed
ourselves and belong in the company of the dead,
the ones believed to be over and who fight 
the knowing of it. But swapping one side of a 
polarity for another leaves the oppositional charge 
between them in place and makes nothing happen. 
No, I’m not looking for a polarity in this world
that depends on them for its rigidities. I know
how more than half of our human microbiome
comprises what isn’t us—bacteria, viruses, fungi—​
and that their connectivity determines our
continuing to breathe. We’re stranger than we
know, and strangeness is a force. Why should 
the dead be blockaded from participating in this 
hectic fusion? I understand: many, faced with
stressors we can’t quite dominate, deploy 
what we think we know as a foundation for 
what we don’t. But staying with that “don’t” 
forwards our ability to resee, to intervene in, 
to counter the old and favored repetitions. 

That’s what any improvisor can do.




​Bruce Bromley is the author of Guesting: Essays, Essay/Stories (Understory Books, 2022); The Life in the Sky Comes Down: Essays, Stories, Essay/Stories (Backlash Press, 2017), nominated for the 2018 Victoria & Albert Best Illustrated Book Award; and Making Figures: Reimagining Body, Sound, and Image in a World That Is Not for Us (Dalkey Archive Press, 2014). He teaches writing at New York University, where he won the Golden Dozen Award for teaching excellence.

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