It Is Here We Are Living

It Is Here We Are Living

I brought him there because he knew the place was holy to me as a poem, the place I went to be born whenever I felt like dying. If I took Elie to the Forts it meant I didn't have to tell him any of the anthems turning feral in my head, we could just sit and watch the waves and think about the end of the world. We sat on opposite benches, not saying a word to each other, not taking out eyes off the ocean. It was the only time I'd visited the Forts during daylight in the year and a half I'd lived back in Massachusetts, possibly since I graduated high school and left home six years ago. White women with perms and pleated shorts, loud children, somebody's grandmother in a windbreaker. Voices polluting the tunnels, overwhelming the graffiti. This is why I only came here at night, and rarely in the summer. That, and it was July, Red Tide, and the harbor smelled like a warm dumpster, or Chinatown in New York City.

But we had gotten there late to watch the sun set — soon we were red-washed, sun bobbing in the water, rays lining us up like a cue stick marking the cut. I felt phoenixed enough to breathe again, or at least speak. There was nothing to say, though; this was a place of no words — just sounds. For me, anyway. And Elie and I shared the same best-friend brain so he said nothing, too. We rolled down the hill instead.

We stopped just short of the crumbling concrete wall and walked inside. The whole embankment seemed to shutter with intrusion, but it was just the echoes of our heartbeats in the increasing dark. In the winter everything turns to ice. Ice foams out of every crack and hole but all it is, is cracks and holes so the whole walls swell and freeze. Our heartbeats were now encased there, and in the winter when I return I can put my head to them like a chest. In the meantime, yellow snarls had permeated the fortress. Stained with ice. Tainted with history. This place is made of echoes.

No matter what time of day, what season of year, everything is pitch black once one takes a single corner. There are hidden passages I discover every time I go, always a surprise, always darkness and secrets waiting. I wanted to take Elie there so we'd have something discovered together. Even only rooms of ghosts and prison cells that never held a captive, even only old graffiti painted poorly in the dark by stoned pre-teens. We flicked our lighters and read. The graffiti was the same as always. The ice in winter pushes oxygen from the cement structures, but not the memories. They swell and freeze like everything else. “Metallica Rulez! 4:20,” our brains said together, “1992 sucks,” “Jenny is a slut,” “for a good time, call TONY'S MOM.” Outside on the northwest platform, there's a giant pentagram every year, and every year it gets washed away by rain or maintenance, but every year it comes back.

Aerially, there is no “Fort Revere.” The top was strategically flattened and grassed for sake of subterfuge, save for the pentagram and a few very deteriorated and narrow staircases. Elie and I laid on our backs in the grass and watched the stars. The forts are a strange scientific anomaly — no matter what season it is, Orion is always hovering above, waiting for the battle that never comes. Through all my years traveling and hopelessly looking for stars to wish on around the world, I'd always felt a peace of mind once my eye could find Orion somewhere. Once I found Orion, I found the Forts beneath him. Light-years away, but still somewhere in my realm, somewhere I could somehow reach, that hadn't disintegrated in my absence. Also, my grandfather.

In the space between where the cliff of the Forts drop and the harbor waters crash hungrily into the rocky earth, there is a graveyard where he's buried. I have never once visited the grave, but I have come to the Forts alone at sunrise to perch myself at the edge of the world and cry. The water at sunrise when you're sad turns pink and mercurial, stops laughing, there is no sound but your own deeps breaths and your grandfather sobbing inside you. This night though was me and Elie, a world falling apart and being lapped up into the sound of the black waves below, Orion still overhead, and my grandfather and all the other ghosts sound, sound asleep.