Desire Path by Jeremy Elder
CBC Books | | Posted: April 13, 2022 1:20 PM | Last Updated: April 28, 2022
2022 CBC Short Story Prize shortlist
Jeremy Elder made the 2022 CBC Short Story Prize shortlist for Desire Path.
He will receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and his short story has been published on CBC Books.
If you're interested in the CBC Literary Prizes, the 2022 CBC Poetry Prize is open for submissions until May 31.
You can read Desire Path below.
I often daydream of art and of artists.
After discovering the story of artist Félix González-Torres and his partner, Ross Laycock, I would imagine myself magically introduced into their New York City lives as they navigated the 1980s together.
Side by side by side, loverboys trailing lazy park naps and grass stains in our wake. We dangle and smoke from our sunset perch on the pier as dusk rolls over, both the Hudson and the world at our feet. To the pinnacle of the dance floor at Pyramid Club, babes in a toyland, we part for a moment and then turn into each other from the three apexes of our triangle. Our eyes meet and we ignite.
A trio on tour for the first time, they take me to Boybar. Their genesis point. "Where the 'you' in the two of you began," I said.
Stripped of my shirt, we dance until I also lose my shoes. A pulsar easing in my veins, strobes layer a kaleidoscope dimension across my lips, my chest, my hair. Each light is a laser. Every sound is neon.
I watch Félix study a go-go boy dancing on a platform. He's offbeat but wasn't hired for his rhythmic skill. So many dirty thoughts packed into those pure white briefs, hosed down and then hung out to dry. Félix tilts his head like a thought just spilled in. He grins at me and grabs my hand.
We walk home. Gutter slick, my socks turn to oil. Ross is supermodel tall so he pulls me onto his back and piggybacks me across the lower east side's nocturnal remains. Félix never stops dancing.
We don't aspire to conventional lives. Lust is a hyperdrive and love is boundless. Pulled into each other's orbits, we propel forward and surrender any moral constraints. We slip away from the dead weight of expectation the same moment we slip out of our clothes and into each other.
We don't aspire to conventional lives. Lust is a hyperdrive and love is boundless.
In the morning air, the thin membrane of blue curtain wisps while it holds in as much as it holds out. Turning over the tangle of Félix's unmade bed in his apartment on Grove Street, I wake first and see the dead candle has sacrificed itself across the window sill. I count constellations of freckles on their sleeping bodies. A Sagittarius on Félix's arm, a Perseus on Ross' back. A milky way pours through our lives and sets our tristar aglow.
In my real life, it was a regular day in 2006 when I first read about Félix's installation"Untitled (Portrait of Ross in LA)." That night I also dreamed of it. I had a vision of myself slowly entering a gallery and seeing Félix's work for the first time — but I wouldn't arrive there until a decade later.
In the meantime, I'd imagine us all together. Félix, Ross, me: a threesome across space and time.
*
Félix was a sculptor and installation artist. He was an innovator of the process art movement, where the experience of inventing an ongoing work is as intrinsic as the "finished" product. The pieces are endless and open to subsequent interpretation. They can never be completed because their very intent is to be continually recreated. They are made for the future.
Ross was a marvel: a science major, an English minor and a sommelier. A designer, an activist and a lover of opera who knew how to mount a snowmobile. He turned from a child to an isolated teenager in a miniature mining village in the far Canadian north. Norman Wells, Northwest Territories: population 778. As he crossed six feet in height and kept growing, he supernaturally absorbed an aurora borealis gleam and broad spirit that gave him the outdoor virility of a lumberjack tempered by the gentleness of a seahorse.
He looked, in the very best way, like a cowboy from a porno. Paul Bunyan in an Armani shirt. Once in New York, he was stopped by a stranger on 7th Avenue and asked if he'd ever considered modelling. Ross demurred. Asked about it later, true to form, he was gregarious but almost annoyingly modest. It took a few drinks and the right atmosphere before he'd admit the man who approached him was Calvin Klein.
When Ross was diagnosed with HIV in 1988, the doctor set his ideal healthy weight at 175 pounds. A goal to aim for, but that would, in those days, inevitably, inexorably slide away.
"Untitled (Portrait of Ross in LA)" is one of Félix's most revered works. It's 175 pounds of rainbow bright, plastic-wrapped candy displayed in a pile.
The candy sits unguarded. Its purpose isn't to be gazed at from afar but to be participated with closely. Each viewer is meant to take a piece from the mound. At night, more candy should be added back until it weighs precisely 175 pounds again.
As the disease takes away, your lover's size may dwindle, but the heft of their spirit — the drive to replenish, the power to celebrate — brings it back whole with every dawn.
As the disease takes away, your lover's size may dwindle, but the heft of their spirit — the drive to replenish, the power to celebrate — brings it back whole with every dawn.
This isn't art you view. It's art you become.
The price of admission is to share the burden of the artist's loss. To try to comprehend, across borders and decades, the measure of Félix's devotion. To follow the trail of memory described by the map of his art.
How would I convert the ephemeral and translate the best things about someone I adore into quantities anyone could understand? The decibels of their morning whisper. The pressure of their hand on my back. The volts of intensity in their eyes. The ground speed of their stroll.
Or their weight in a mountain of candy. A heaviness holding everything they are and ever were. Every molecule, every scar. All that sweetness enwrapped, available but afraid.
*
As I learned more about Ross, his life revealed itself as more similar to mine than I'd first believed. He was born on March 5, myself on March 1. Every mercurial Pisces career decision he'd ever danced around immediately made brilliant sense to me. Why be one thing when you could be everything?
We were both born in the Canadian prairies, he in Alberta and myself in Saskatchewan. Places where there was nowhere to go and so consequently most heterosexuals went nowhere and most queers fled. What a waste of vision, when you can see so far. With a panorama so low and lean that all it requires of you is a bit of imagination. And a sky so high that it requires nothing of you at all.
Ross and I both went to university in Toronto. Félix joined him for a period in the mid-80s while Ross studied the very Piscesean combination of biochemistry and English. Why not? Science, at its purest, arcs toward poetry. In 1986, Félix wrote, "... blue kitchen, blue flowers in Toronto. A real home for the first time in so long, so long. Ross is here."
Too often, I uncovered Ross' influence by his absence. Bereft of his name. Erased into a supporting character: "the partner of Félix González-Torres." Where do muses go, after lifetimes and centuries, when all that remains is the artwork named after them? Félix was an explorer but Ross was the compass.
We remember the arrival but not the journey.
*
One day in Central Park, feeling the chlorophyll glow of sunshine through the skin of leaves shading The Ramble, Félix pulls out his much-read copy of French philosopher Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space — his favourite book.
He points to the ground at the curving hemisphere carved through the turf from one angular stone path to another, years of human traffic slowly bypassing the stone walkway for the most organic route across the grass instead.
"Bachelard called it a desire path," he shares. "It's the trail left where humans naturally walk, despite where design or planning dictated they should. It's the triumph of our collective will over what society expects of us. Right there, in the dirt."
They offered us concrete, but we chose the earth instead.
"In a world with so much against us, go where love leads you," Félix said. "Always follow desire."
*
The day we'd finally meet wasn't planned. I was on a birthday trip to Chicago and rose in the morning looking for something to do. I googled "art near me" and there it was blinking in the search bar: Félix González-Torres, Untitled (Portrait of Ross in LA), Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art.
Félix had called for me. I shut the laptop lid and quickly left the hotel.
Entering the cavernous room, I was struck first not by the collection of candy but the emptiness surrounding it. I remember reading once that the universe is 99.99% nothingness. That's why we call it "space."
This gallery felt just as vast. The cellophane spectrum in the corner is the only destination. You confront it or you retreat, just like life. You reckon with it or it reckons for you, just like death.
At first, candy is the allure but what you're actually seeing is a thousand wrappers, reflecting exponentially into galaxies. Gold flint glisten. Orange solar flares. Lucky charm green. Cherry pop. Silver spoons. Each colour flirted with me as it burst forth. Tiny hologram vistas that laid flat from the doorway and then, with each step closer, refracted upwards across the walls into a searchlight of shards.
Once at the pile, I took two candies. One for now and one for forever. One for my mouth and one for my heart. One to consume and one to cherish.
Once at the pile, I took two candies. One for now and one for forever. One for my mouth and one for my heart. One to consume and one to cherish.
I would swallow Ross, too, if I could, and wipe away his virus with sheer will. Ross' atoms would cross into my cells, our DNA spiralling together. A cellular embrace. As long as I was alive, he would be alive. Blood brothers. Blood lovers.
I want to hold everything Félix ever held dear. Slide him into my hands and touch all the things he ever touched. Lay myself down, a dagger on his bed, cut out every part that made him sick, too, and emerge on the other side.
I untwisted one jewel, a smooth stone in my mouth, and sucked it. I thought of the most valuable substance it could be made of: Diamonds. Plutonium atoms. Antimatter. Dark nebulae. Virgin orgasms. Clean blood. Freedom. Infinity — Blueprints for a time machine. A portal that would transport me to 1988 so I could halt the instant this illness began, and in 2028 they would both live in a cabin with a narrow path to a wide lake. Solid and unassuming, with an unobtrusive necessity. A human dam.
I would visit their future haven and slowly approach through an emerald glade. Once in their doorway, a cedar arch, Félix would put his two old hands on my two young shoulders. He would tell me he always knew when he left the invitation that I would be the one to find it. A message in a bottle across an ocean of time.
"You remembered us both," Félix would whisper. "You remembered for all those who cannot."
Just then, Ross would appear smiling at the gate, arbour-fresh and sand-studded. Each silica grain glinting like a point in the dusky sky, comets revealing their tails in moments against his tanned skin. His sunset grin is a bounty.
"Let's take out the rocket." At the finish line of all our trials, cutting across the calm gloss of a remote forest lake, we find solace reunited in a big, red canoe.
We are shepherd moons. The tides we pull always guide us back to each other's shore.
Ross paddles expertly. We've prevailed. Félix stares above the bronzed treeline and sees something none of us do. He smiles. "Life is pretty."
*
Back in the museum, I thought "Somewhere, in some universe, that's exactly where they are." I slid the other candy into my pocket.
In this universe, they travelled to Europe and Puerto Rico. They travelled to LA. But, in their last year, they returned to Toronto. Despite everything I first imagined that placed Ross and Félix at such distance, it was in a Parkdale apartment where they came home in the end and prepared for the final flowers to dry.
I had envisioned us impossibly joined on a metropolis island decades in the past. But it was here in the present, in our shared city on a lake, guarded by a watchtower, where so much of them had been so close to me all along.
Félix said, "The wonderful thing about life and love is that sometimes things turn out so unexpected. I would say that when Ross was becoming less of a person that I was loving him more. Until the last second. I told him 'I want to be there until your last breath,' and I was there until his last breath."
Ross died from AIDS in 1991. He was 32.
"Untitled (Portrait of Ross in LA)" debuted that same year and has been recreated in dozens of galleries around the world ever since. Its museum object label describes it as"Candies individually wrapped in multicolor cellophane, endless supply. Ideal weight 175 lbs."
The five years after Ross' death were some of the most prolific and lauded in Félix's career, but he never left Ross behind. In an interview before his first major solo exhibition at the Guggenheim, he was asked who his work is for: "When people ask me, 'who is your public?' I say honestly, without skipping a beat, 'Ross.' First and foremost it's about Ross."
In 1996, Félix died from AIDS. He was 38.
The same age I became on my birthday that brisk morning in Chicago in 2016, a sentinel standing with Félix and Ross before their tribute to each other. Understanding, at long last, the full meaning of their union. I have never felt so surrounded and I have never felt so alone.
Félix and Ross were supernovas. Burned too bright and faded too soon. Their booming flash, travelling forever, must be seen to become real. A quantum conjunction, these photons spin, only reaching their destinies when they finally find a willing eye. Then their journey is complete. Light-years culminate in a single glance.
Félix and Ross were supernovas. Burned too bright and faded too soon.
In the same way, art becomes art only when it's seen. A sender, a message, and a receiver. Félix, the archer. Ross, the arrow. Me, the heart at the other end of existence, cleaved through.
Today, I still have my wrapper. Its colour is the aquamarine sheen of the horizon line where the sky greets the coral reef. Off an eternal coastline, ocean and orange blur into a brand new hue. The rarest of clarion blues. Holding it, I can shut my eyes and see Ross and Félix again now.
They shine in endless supply.
Read the other finalists
- Me Against Jim Bailey by Susanna Cupido (Sackville, N.B.)
- Dinner With Friends by Nancy Hui Sulaiman (Windsor, Ont.)
- Nesting Season by Anna Ling Kaye (Vancouver)
- Beneath the Softness of Snow by Chanel M. Sutherland (Montreal)
About Jeremy Elder
Jeremy Elder is a full-time advertising copywriter and part-time aspiring poet. He is a settler living in Toronto on land covered by Treaty 13 with the Mississaugas of the Credit. His personal creative writing explores his own history and aims to add to the legacy of queer literature, art, storytelling and community that has always deeply inspired him. Desire Path is his first work of personal fiction.
The story's source of inspiration
"I've been deeply moved by Félix González-Torres's art for years and how his partnership with Ross Laycock inspired their lives. I've thought a lot about what Felix and his cohort of queer artists, who were denied longer life by the HIV/AIDS crisis, might want us to know and remember about them a generation later. Their loss continues to impact us, and we have to work harder to go back in time and find the messages in their work to fully receive them today.
"I wanted to combine memoir with fiction to open up their worlds through my own experience of seeing Félix's art in person for the first time. I began writing by researching Ross, who's mentioned throughout but never really given a voice of his own. I tried to expand on the power of the queer imagination and the ways we go through the world differently. To reflect on our unique experiences of companionship, mentorship, intimacy and sex and then take all of it one step further: to communicate backward and forward across decades, with our real and imagined selves. It's an ode to the power of art to communicate despite death, a thank you note to Félix and Ross for the ways they've enriched my life, and a love letter to my gay self and the potential of my own imagination."
About the 2022 CBC Short Story Prize
The winner of the 2022 CBC Short Story Prize will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, have their work published on CBC Books and attend a two-week writing residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Four finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and have their work published on CBC Books.
The 2022 CBC Poetry Prize is open for submissions until May, 31, 2022. The 2023 CBC Short Story Prize will open in September and the 2023 CBC Nonfiction Prize will open in January 2023.