Rachel I. Hubata-Ashton

AIWEE

Navajo boys grow up knowing this: There are monsters in this world. You learn early on they're out there. Your grandmother will speak of them. She scares you, too. A little bit. Sometimes a lot. She has a lot of power. It scares you when grandma holds the sheep, the sheep struggles, and she cuts the animal's neck with her knife. She holds the sheep firmly until it dies. It knows it is dying. It tries to get away. But at some point it gives itself to her as she holds it like a kicking baby. Kicking baby. Kicking. You stand there watching her. You're too scared to even run away. She does not think to ask you to hold the sheep. But she will. Someday. The day looms like dark clouds, and it will find you, and you know it. Grandma will have you touch and hold the sheep. Touching the animal as the life slips away. You know something of the touching of things. Grandma touches you, too, and sometimes firmly. She scares you, protects you, grounds you, and someday she will ask you to hold the sheep. You learn early on the enormity of touching things.

Even when writing, we are touching things. Pounding away like a sculptor chips away at the marble of what was. Writing the stories of what happened is a stone. The stone is not unlike a sheep. It has a life that belongs inherently to no one. You take it. Or not. You create the sculpture or not. All of it is monsters.

I am afraid to write about touching him. The monster lives outside with the dark clouds. Touching the story of what touching him was like is, also, chipping away at rock with hammers and a chisel. The thing emerges like the story in the stone. It has eyes. A nose. Fingers. Lips.

Aiwee has a penis, too. It came with being a boy. All boy. We do not discuss it. The penis is forbidden. Like death.

It bled, too.

He was always touching it. The foreskin did not detract all the way. He could peel it back so he could pee. Then, he would gently peel it back a little bit, and it would bleed. It did not need to be cut off —like most off-reservation people would have done—but just slowly over time, discovery was giving birth to what he was inside, the layers of what made him a male.

In the morning, he would have an erection, and there would be a little pool of blood on his underpants, or his pajamas, or the sheets. It all depended on what he slept in. Aiwee preferred nudity since it felt more natural to him. He would grow alarmed, but more curious than alarmed. He wondered what it meant. He always wondered what things meant. This meant he was male. That was all it meant.

It did not mean he was bad. Or that he was a criminal. Or that he was not covered in the skin of his morality. Some considered it a shameful thing. However, it never crossed our minds that Aiwee was in any way shameful.

We simply acknowledged that Aiwee was male. AIDS had not robbed him of everything. Enough. But, not quite everything. He still had his gender. And he even liked it.

Most parents want their sons to cover it, hide it away. Get it out of sight, as if it were some horrific mutation of which they were not the cause. This probably occurs quite frequently since little boys walk around with erections.

I was not his biological parent. Most biological parents would opt for circumcision. Let him squirm and suffer like the sheep. I opted for time, and knew that every hard-on he got would peel it back just a little bit, and his penis-like his life-would emerge from the wetness of the skin that had protected it.

Aiwee was his penis.

My job was to protect him. Loving him was easy. It wasn't really work. Protecting him was work.

We had this big thing between us.

It was an agreement. Engorged with blood. The agreement was important. We agreed that we would interrupt time itself-or events-to pose the question: What do you want?

I want to live.

Was an answer.

I want to be alive.

Was an answer.

I want to be in life.

How to do these things was never easy. They were hard to implement. Harder than a penis on a twelve-year-old boy could ever hope to be.

I want to play baseball with the other boys.

That was a lot to ponder. There was a lot to consider. There was a lot to protect.

There was a lot to touch in life. Touching him was magic. I guess, I didn't want there to ever come a time where he preferred another's company over mine.

Writing about touching him scares me, because I live in the world, and I understand how vindictive it can be and how too many people make too many assumptions, with no evidence to support it. How can I even hope to paint a picture of who he was without telling the story of touching him? You had to touch him to know him. You had to hug him to protect him.

This is not merely to imply the touching of his penis. Aiwee had to go through the whole full-throttle of what is puberty, and at twelve, it loomed and squirmed like a sheep as Grandma held it and deftly made the blood drain in spurts into her pan. I do not understand how some adults view the penis of a twelve-year-old boy-even when it's erect- as an object to be perceived in a sexual context. The thing, exposed, is just too vulnerable.

His penis promised possibility, a seed, and a thing he studied curiously. It was private.

It was something that perplexed him, and he looked to me for guidance and answers. I didn't know how to comfort him or how to answer his questions. I gave Aiwee the only advice I could offer him, so that he would know he was normal.

Your penis is a contradiction. Any boy's penis is a contradiction. Thus, you are prepared to deal with other contradictions you will find in life. Millions of them. The penis is the center of your body and your life.

What do you want?

Baby boys will tell you by their touching that they want their penises.

I want to live.

I want to be alive.

What do you want?

I want you to touch me.

It was not only his penis he meant.

He meant his life.

He meant his soul. Hold all of it. Hold all of it fast and promise you'll never let go. Before I came along, Aiwee had never been held, never been touched, he had never felt needed.

We needed each other. Touching him was my life. I don't know how you could have dealt with AIDS without touching him. I didn't know of any way to approximate giving him what he wanted without touching him. Wrapping him in hugs. Teaching him that life was magic, that he was more than simply there.

Touching him was spiritual. It made me nervous touching him, especially since he enjoyed showing his appreciation of my love by hugging me in public.

He has AIDS., I reminded myself.

Let's be real. It was why I adopted him. Do-gooders doing good, and do-gooder shit runs deep. As deep and as liquid black as the loneliness was in his lucid eyes. I don't care what you think. We were spiritual lovers. It wasn't sex. Love doesn't always entail sex. Plus, I was not about to have sex with a vulnerable twelve-year old boy, struggling with AIDS. I have crashed and burned (many times), but not like this. It seemed strange to me that the community gossipers could never understand a normal father and son relationship, at least where the adopted father was giving care and love to a child inflicted with AIDS. My first few weeks with Aiwee, he was so unused to being hugged or treated with loving-kindness, he accepted my actions as natural. So, no, it wasn't sex, although we were in my bed.

At night he was afraid.

Dreams. He was on Sustiva, one of his HIV medications. Sustiva makes you dream, and not just any dream. The research materials that describe the side-effects of Sustiva use the term LSD-like dreams, and they would scare any twelve-year-old shitless.

They were electric. They were alive. They were visceral. They spoke to him in screams.

Him standing over at the side of the bed late at night, just about the time he was starting his determined independence of being a big boy and sleeping by himself. He'd be weeping. He had either wet or shit his bed. AIDS is not a nice disease. I was exhausted. I would have to clean him up, clean his bedding, put it in the wash, and let him sleep with me. Him clinging to my leg like a remora. What was it going to hurt but for the armchair psychologists and moral authorities who would dissect it later. You're not supposed to do that. It's against the rules. It's a big NO-NO in our impenetrable culture. Him touching me. Me hugging him. Wrapped around my numbness. I gave him that. I gave him things I was not supposed to. Things that I hoped would prevent him from slipping away.

It wasn't sex, and I feel adamant and somewhat absurd that I feel I must keep justifying this over and over. Nevertheless, I need to keep repeating it for the small minds that don't understand close bonds between father and son and the idea that they are healing each other. It wasn't sex. It was survival. I felt such need to accept his hugs and return them with displays of fatherly affection, including the physical contact he was deprived of before being adopted. I can't separate him out from the issues of sex and AIDS when he came from both. I believe his mother passed the virus on to him at birth. I write this as though it were an indictment. It is perhaps unfair. Yet, so is the lack of health care services on Native American reservations.

What was fair about any of it? How he received AIDS was irrelevant, a distraction, a convenient way to avoid having to deal with his reality now, the carnage that he came to bed with. I bought him blue pajamas. It was not enough. Cleaning him, though soft and often intimate, was not sex, either.

At first, my biggest fear was over shit. The smell of it. The feel of it. The disgust. It was not like changing a baby's diaper. It was a lot of shit. Aiwee was far more disgusted with himself than I could ever be. There were times when he was in control of his body and his bowels. But there were other times, the not-so-good-times, when he wasn't in control of much. Finally, we evolved this struggle into a ritual, which helped. It helps to put those horrible things into rituals. I would pick him up and put him in the tub. I would wash him, touching him, and we did not talk too much.

Sometimes he would cry. He had worked so hard at being independent. Now, our secret was that he was a baby once again, always slipping back, and I agreed not to tell anyone because he begged me not to. We had so many secrets.

In time, I did not think about his shit, or the smell of it. I do not remember it now. I remember him.

I would wake up in the morning, and he would have soaked the bed in sweat, clinging to me again, with his twelve-year-old erection pressed against my leg. I ignored this. Some judge, some see, some hear, some speak in tongues and babbles, some reaffirm the contradictions in their lives. Some disintegrate. Some find themselves in faith. I found myself and magic in touching him. We were alive.

In the good times, there was a lot of touching him. Other boys did it quite a bit. It was normal. They did not know he was sick because we did not tell them and he was quite good at covering it up.

During one of the good times (when the pain from his neuropathy could still be controlled by morphine, or later by a combination of methadone and Lamictal), I let him join a baseball team. It was the world to him.

He was supposed to have a physical. I forgot a doctor's signature. It was like being back in high school, and you needed a bathroom pass.

He was quite clear about his desire to do this. Look, Aiwee said. I'm dying. We know that. But before I do, I just want to play some baseball.

What do you want?

I swallow all my fears like they are rocks inside my throat and say, Okay.

What if he bleeds?

I sit in the stands with other parents. In terror.

I am so nervous, my hands tremble uncontrollably, and I have to clench my Coke. Aiwee steps fearlessly right up to each pitch. Swings. That crack. Home run wins him a lot of friends.

Now, they are touching him.

Arms are all around his neck. With their shirts off, they're all over Aiwee. Late at night and summer hot while drinking Coke while the lights from the baseball field have illuminated not quite everything in truth.

I sit in the bleachers with the other parents who have arrived in their SUVs, and worry, worry, worry, not about home runs but about stupid things like him getting bruised and blood, what if…

What if…

Fuck.

What if he gets invited to a friend's house—other boys his age sleep overnight and camp in backyards in their tents—what if all his secrets are found out? Can I? Can I? He wants everything. I do say no.

Just no. Sometimes I am the bad guy.

No, you can't sleep over at John's house.

But, I want to, Aiwee protests.

That and fifty cents.

John's house. Where John and his brothers sleep with their friends in the basement in their sleeping bags, and stay up all night, and eat chips, and cookies John's mother made, and shine their flashlights on their dicks to see who's the most well-endowed.

Like I'm not supposed to know. Give me a break.

I know John. I know his brothers. I know the basement. I know the flashlight, as if it were a lighthouse, and it would be my son, the small ship, who is lost out here in the bigger waves of the sea. I know the laughing squeals of the boys like I know the past. All of it is normal. All of it is stuff you have to let go of as soon as you let them live their lives. As their lives unfold, John will die at twenty in a frat house alcohol initiation.

Aiwee laments, But, I want to go to John's. Everybody will be there.

It wasn't John I objected to. It was the basement with the boys. It wasn't sex or flashlights.

It was chaos everywhere.

AIDS is chaos imposed on time.

Aiwee would go, if I let him, and lose himself in those quickly running moments in the wind, where he was just a boy again, and essentially like friends.

But he wasn't like them. No matter the illusion of the medication he was on.

But, I want to go, Aiwee begged. A basement with sleeping bags and flashlights.

Now, who was going to give him his medication? Would he remember it?

This is where he crawls up onto my lap again. To cry. I am his rock. Either that, or I am being manipulated, the familiarity of him touching me. I am touching him.

It was not John he was going to miss. It was his childhood.

Secrets are everywhere. My purpose is to protect my son.

There are dragons in my discontent. What if he died, and I wasn't there to hold him?

It wasn't sex. It was our survival, touching, waking the soul by tender, roaring strokes to meet our mortal fear.