Before Running Out of Time

THE MAN FACING me from the tabletop is aware of all my shortcomings. He looks strong, wholesome in his youth, with a big nose and heavy jawline. Because the eyes are too close together, he is almost ugly, but it just adds to his Apollonian quality. We’ve only just met a moment ago when he emerged from the box in a cloudy close-up that barely reveals the outlines of his face, as if he was all aura. I feel guilty for not giving the moment its due solemnity. I was texting my best friend about her upcoming trip to visit me in New York, not really paying attention as I picked up the paper folder. The very professional first move I make in this archival research is forgetting to place the big “Out” card in the box to keep track of the order the folders came in—the most basic rule just explained to me by the blonde library assistant.

I have this absurd impulse to yell after the assistant and ask her to take all the boxes away. She’s so much younger and yet has her shit so much more together than I do. When giving me the run-through of my appointment, she sounded fresh, knowledgeable, self-possessed, while I just sat there and nodded with unexplainable mortification. I want to apologize for making a mess, for looking like one, for having the nerve to come here this morning.

I keep sifting through the photographs, in most of which he’s naked, though the images feel oddly desexualized. Even on these cheap, xeroxed sheets, his features are so striking, his gaze so confident, that I’m slightly embarrassed. The pictures are all black and white, but I can safely assume he has greenish-blue eyes. Like my uncle’s.

During our class last Monday, midway through explaining the assignment, the professor broke into a passionate speech about the great unfolding of academic possibilities when you are the first to discover an archive. That was, in fact, his big break to a tenure track. I don’t think I’m cut out for this. Any of this. Even if I could understand Gregory Thompson’s awful handwriting, there’s just so much random information here. I don’t really care about discovering anything. I want things to be explained to me; I want someone to tell me what happened and what it meant so I can know how to feel. I was led to believe for almost 30 years that my uncle had died of lung cancer, so naturally I knew how to feel about smoking. And that’s the thing about burying the truth: there are many ways to conceal information. My family did it by telling me nothing; this archive is doing it by telling me everything.

The whole enterprise makes me uneasy. I feel like I shouldn’t be rummaging through a dead man’s personal belongings. The journals are so intimate and yet so overbearingly mundane. Why should this be of public interest? I wish I could tell Gregory his life had value and that this value is not attached to the fact we can make an appointment to access his most private musings at the Fales Library and Special Collections, on the third floor of Bobst, between the hours of 10 and five.

And that’s the thing about burying the truth […] My family did it by telling me nothing; this archive is doing it by telling me everything.

The second folder is a collection of journal entries from a friend of Gregory’s. On February 21, 1988, when they went on a movie date, his health had already deteriorated significantly. The pages are numbered but randomly organized, some repeated more than once—three, seven, one, two, one, seven, six, five, four, three, six, five, four—which makes no sense. Of course, I could set the confusion straight by asking the blonde assistant. No doubt, she’d be prompt to blondly assist, but I’ve interacted enough. Instead, I strive to find some meaning in the nonlinearity of the numbers, some message from the beyond, some faithful coincidence that will bring about a revelation.

I read about a short trip this same friend and Gregory took to the gay rights march in Washington, DC: “It was along [sic]ride, he was already weak and sick, but he spent the whole day on his feet”. All I can think about is the story my mother told me about a day trip she and my dad took with my uncle about eight months before he died. It was the last time she remembered him being well, as if he were saying goodbye to them. Or to himself. Everything after that was mostly a sad progression of the disease. My father never told me about this day. He never talks about his brother; I don’t know what he remembers.

The third folder contains a small leather diary signed Gregory Thompson on the first page. It’s falling apart. I get annoyed. Tedious to-do lists, haphazard financial ledgers, and weekly schedules fraternize along the pages with erotic drawings, newspaper collages, and recountings of sexual escapades. I’m in a predictable movie. This is the part when I’m supposed to have a fit of mania and give all this crap a close read until I unveil some astonishing connection between his life and his death, his art and his disease, and, of course, between the late artist Gregory Thompson and myself. I refuse to play this ridiculous character. I don’t want to go through the trouble of figuring everything out. I wish someone else had gotten here first, someone more qualified to make sense of it and put together an academic article or a biographical book—then I could just read that. I wish I cared more about the archeological thrill of exploring raw material, piecing the puzzle together and assigning it my own meaning, controlling the narrative. I wish I could scan everything, generate bullet-pointed highlights on ChatGPT, and call it a day, but I have neither the lack of principles nor the patience for it.

A good 20 percent of the diary is blank toward the end, and I’m tempted to elaborate this as a metaphor for his running out of time before running out of pages, but I know it’s not true. All his other journals have roughly the same blank pages toward the end. Maybe he just liked to start a fresh notebook after the previous one got too old and beat-up, which all of them are. There is no underlying meaning to any of this. What I’m looking at is just the most banal registry of someone who once existed, lived, breathed, had sex, had fun, had friends, bought groceries, went to school, made art, took trips, took photos, took notes—and then ceased to do all of the above.

This is the part when I’m supposed to have a fit of mania and give all this crap a close read until I unveil some astonishing connection between his life and his death, his art and his disease, and, of course, between the late artist Gregory Thompson and myself.

I just spent an hour and a half moving commas around on the two insipid paragraphs I have so far instead of investigating the archive in front of me. It’s probably a good time to take a break, go to lunch, walk around Washington Square Park, but I’m afraid if I leave this room, I might not come back. I have three boxes to go, each with a dozen folders, and I’m already defeated by folder number three, box number one. I glance at a short note in the diary that reads “NYU Deadline”. We belonged to different departments, in very distant decades, but maybe I can grasp at this feeble affinity to produce the three to five pages about an archival artifact of my own choosing I need to turn in. In a parallel universe, Gregory and I would’ve bumped into each other on campus all the time, discussed our favorite readings, complained about midterm papers, gone together to that Alvin Ailey exhibit at the Whitney, where I ended up taking the boring guided tour because I was alone and knew nothing about modern dance. My uncle danced in an independent ballet company. I kept imagining how he would have looked hanging in black and white from the 17.5-foot ceiling of the gallery, frozen in his blurry leap against the crimson background. If granted more time, would that leap have carried him all the way from Rio to New York?

I spot a loose strand of my hair on top of Gregory’s annotation, and I think about the symbolic gesture of leaving something behind, of allowing myself and my own family history to mix with the researched subject. Maybe a fourth of the DNA embedded on this hair will brush against the DNA of residual skin cells embedded on the pages, and two handsome men with artistic inclinations and bluish-green eyes, about the same age, with the same free spirit, who endured the same disease, separated by five thousand miles and by the unfortunate condition of no longer being alive, will finally meet. They’ll become instant friends, flirt a little, perhaps even sleep together, because why shouldn’t they, being young and beautiful, with their entire lives ahead of them in a city where being lost just means you are looking for something? A crucial other to keep them from pouring out into notebooks that will be read almost 40 years later by a tired woman who has no business being all up in their business, because she will never know who they were, and she will never know the freedom or the pain they experienced. Even if she gets lost in this city, and reads all his journals, and looks closely at all his photographs, and interviews all the people who ever knew him, and furiously searches for hidden meanings, she will never know. He can no longer be known, not really, not ever. She missed her timing, and no amount of academic research will allow her to share the same space and time with him.

I look at the papers spread out on the table and at the box full of untouched items, realizing I forgot to place the damned “Out” card again. I do my best to put everything back in its place, retracing the order in which I removed each item, but too much time has passed, and too much has happened already; in the end, I can’t be sure. Maybe I can be forgiven for this also. I fish the hair out and toss it aside, go to lunch, don’t come back.