That afternoon in North Adams, the air was cold and fresh on our faces.  I remember that everything on the grounds of the museum was damp.  Had it rained?  The sky was mostly grey.  C. and I had lost track of the time and weather while we were inside.  The electric giddiness of an earlier high had begun to taper off and the little bit of wet sunlight that poked through the clouds had a quieting effect as our mood softened to a gentler state of wonderment. 

 

We advanced to a large structure at the edge of the campus, a boiler house that once heated the long rows of brick buildings that contained what was first a textile mill, then an electronics plant, now a museum for contemporary art. 

 

The boiler house is stories tall, roofless, its interior of iron and steel streaked with rust.  I stood on the ground floor marveling at the giant faces of the gauges set above each tank and the pipes that fanned from their tops, constellating out, joining this duct or that valve, the elaborate skeleton it made, one whose logic made little sense to me except in its size and its ascent – a body that filled the space as it climbed.

 

As we made our way up the grated staircase, the room reverberated with drips and pings, metallic, discordant echoes that hung in the air.  I didn’t hear these sounds so much as felt how they pulled me deeper into whatever dream was at work on me. 

 

A stiff wind blew through the ribs of the place and I pulled the hood of my jacket up around my neck.  C. was somewhere above or below me – we’d lost track of each other. The clouds had blotted out the sun again and the sky darkened a bit. 

 

I was dreaming about my grandfather.  I say dream because that’s how I experienced it.  Not a reaching back to memory, something seen or lived, but a falling forward into the unknown.

 

My grandfather spent most of his life in rooms like these.  I suppose that I’d held the information that would allow me to know that all along, but I’d never imagined it.  Not in those terms.  Never dreamed it enough to place him inside the picture of these machines or to walk around with him there, to ask questions of his existence outside the places in which I’d known him. 

 

In the years since his passing I’d often looked to my memory of him for how one might step into masculinity without taking on its most destructive features.  My grandfather was readily acknowledged as the head of our family – a provider who kept many afloat in times of strain.  He garnered respect but did little to express a need for control.  He was quiet but engaged, deeply curious, sentimental but steadfast.  Around animals he was empathic, kind.  He delighted in children. 

 

At home my grandfather was a craftsman and a gardener, though the latter was less an occupation than a rough descriptor for how he appeared to surround himself with nature, how it seemed to flourish in his presence without effort.  When I picture him it is always in his tiny, coin-slot of a yard populated with guava trees and elephant ferns, delicate orchids, hibiscus, birds of paradise, miniscule hot peppers, as if his simple appreciation of these things was what made them grow.

 

As I floated on through the boiler house, what struck me was how my image of him was based on an entirely inaccurate witness of his reality.  That the balance of his life had been split, weighted toward this other world I’d had no view into.  A world where the fact of his immigrant body and his class position made him into an extension of these machines and the industries they served.

 

Who was my grandfather when he was not at home?  Who was he inside these machines?

 

The factory here in North Adams designed and manufactured components that were critical to the development of high-tech weapons used during World War II, including the atomic bomb.  My grandfather worked in a factory that produced rubber parts – for what I’m not sure.  I can only ask, in the dream of it, what his labor had meant.  What did the factory demand of him?  Who had he helped kill?

 

When my grandfather came home from work he always entered the house through the side door attached to the laundry room.  There he’d stand over a large basin and use Ajax to scrub the black from his hands while he whistled at the canaries that my grandmother kept in cages above the washer and dryer.  After that he’d remove his shoes and his work shirt before joining us in the kitchen.

 

This daily ritual enacted a crossing, from the industrial world into a domestic, maternal one –

and it was there that we met.  The laundry room served as a kind of threshold between the two and what I’d witnessed each day was not the performance masculinity but the performance of escape.  The taking off of.  A queering.

 

I had been a figure inside of his dream, just as he was now a figure in mine.  I’d gone searching for the blueprints of his world, for a key to survival in it, and what I discovered was that there was no version of his self that could be written down, copied, reproduced.  Only the contradictions that keep circling back on themselves.

 

The top floor opened out onto a walkway and from there I could see out past the campus and into the town, its steepled churches and orange hills.  C. and I hadn’t spoken at all during our time in the boiler house but now our eyes met and we nodded in recognition of – what?  Some transition from wherever we’d just been to where we were now. 

 

We stood next to each other, breathing in the view, breathing out our own private ghosts.

 

Notes:

The Boiler House described in this piece is part of the campus of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.  More on its history can be found here. 

 

Though it didn’t register consciously at the time, the noises I describe hearing were part of an installation, a manufactured reanimation of the Boiler House by Stephen Vitiello. His soundscape, All Those Vanished Engines, is inspired by an incredible short story by author Paul Park.  I credit my experience there to the genius of both artists and the ghosts they conjure up.

 

Nico Amador is a poet and community organizer whose work is informed by his experience as trans, queer and Latinx.  His chapbook, Flower Wars (Newfound, 2017), won the Anzaldúa poetry prize for work that explores how place shapes identity, imagination and understanding.  www.nicoamador.com