Summary
In Part 1, "The Palace," nene tells the reader that he went to the Palace because the man he was looking for was staying there. Juan is dying, but his eyes and voice still burn with life. nene tells Juan he will stay and take care of him, and while they both know that nene means it, they also both know that he has nowhere else to go. The narration is retrospective; we are told that Juan wants nene to finish a project he has started after he dies, and likewise that he wants nene to keep his room at the Palace. nene promises that he will do it before he knows what the project entails.
We learn that nene has gone west with nothing: no job, no money, no sense of what to do with life. He is running from something, though that thing is not explicitly named. He gets a bus ticket in the direction of the Palace, thinking Juan has probably retreated to the desert in his old age, but we do not know how nene might know that. nene recalls meeting Juan ten years earlier; all he reveals is that they knew each other for 18 days. When he reaches the Palace, he sees a once stately building that has fallen into disrepair. It is charity housing for those without families. nene stays with Juan during visiting hours and then sneaks back in through the fire escape at night. Before long, nene has all but moved in with Juan, sleeping in his bed with him.
Juan dislikes the other residents, whom he calls a "badling of queer ducks" (13). He eats very little and he picks at the wallpaper, wanting to free the more beautiful wallpaper beneath it. Juan tells nene about the project: there is a file folder brimming with clippings, photos, and notes, and a book called Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns whose pages are mostly blacked out. nene notices that the woman mentioned in the book's introduction, Jan Gay, shares the same last name as Juan. He asks if they are related and Juan says no, but that nene is right to believe they have a deeper connection than "nominal similarity" (14). nene is immediately intrigued by the book, and by the project, and wants to know more about it, but as soon as Juan proverbially gives it over to nene, he seems to lose interest in it. He insists that, before he answers nene's questions, nene must tell Juan about himself.
At first Juan worries that nene is running from something, as he assumes that anyone who ends up at the Palace must be in some kind of trouble. When nene insists that he is not running from anything, Juan determines it must be his mind he is trying to escape. nene tells Juan about the flood at his apartment; after making dinner for himself one night, he was standing at the sink to wash the dishes when he suddenly lost his vision, blacked out. When he awakes back into consciousness, he finds that his apartment is flooded and his landlady, who lives below him, is screaming as her ceiling buckles under the dampness. He describes the crestfallen look on her face, the cruelty of her husband, and nene's confusion over his own blackout: standing there, hearing the screaming and the voices in some distant way, but unable to move or do anything until it was too late.
nene says that he and Juan met ten years before in an institution. He recalls the litany of rules and the theatrical nature of the procedures, which he found to be painfully cliche. Juan recalls them, too, and begins reciting the rules as he remembers them. The narration breaks into straight dialogue at this point, like a film or theater script, and the two of them recite the rules back and forth to each other without commentary. nene continues to recall things from his time at the psychiatric hospital: the shakiness they treated with injections, which ushered in a blackout, his inability to sleep, and the drawings he did of chairs. He was silent in meetings, refusing to participate with the group, until finally one day Juan came to sit by him and nene suddenly described to him a photo he had once seen in a newspaper, a photo of "this old gray couple in a room full of cats" (36).
Juan asks nene why he thought he might have gone to sit with him. nene suspects it is because they look sort of similar, that there was a kind of familiarity that drew them together. Juan had been in and out of the institution all his life; some of the people who worked there still called him John, from the earlier days when all the names were Americanized. nene describes Juan's gentleness, his wisdom, his style, and all the things he taught nene about queerness, the sub-culture, the literature and longing. nene understood that Juan had some kind of deep, unresolved hurt around his adopted mother, Zhenya – something that failed, but not through her fault. nene and Juan bonded deeply, but then when nene was hospitalized after overdosing on pills, Juan was gone. When nene finally left, he received a bag with his belongings and a gold cross necklace he could not remember seeing, but thought must have been from Juan.
nene continues to tell Juan about his life. Juan accuses nene of forgetting about him, and nene says then Juan returned, all at once, like a flood. nene recalls his posturing confidence, his naïveté, with men he dated in the last decade, and his embarrassment over not being more sincere. nene tells Juan about his mother and his father. Juan asks if nene sleeps, and he says never, and the two spend the long, black nights in conversation. nene summarizes the feeling of being in the Palace: not leaving the room, and talking through the night in the heat of the desert, creates a languorous, lethargic feeling, almost like they have stepped out of time altogether.
Analysis
From the very beginning, the novel sets itself up as a formally unusual project that is interested in challenging the traditional modes of narration. The novel opens in summary: we do not get scenes of nene leaving his life and setting off for the desert, we are not waiting to see where he is going and following along with his decisions as he makes them. The point of view is a retrospective one, meaning that nene is recounting these events to us from a future moment in time. As such, the timeline is movable, alterable; we are told on the very first page that nene has gone to see a man in a place called the Palace, and that the man has made him promise to finish a project for him. Because none of this is explained when it is introduced, the text generates immediate tension and curiosity for the reader.
The information then unfolds slowly from there, in a pattern that is impossible to anticipate. Already we get a sense that this is a book as interested in how a book functions, how a story is made, as it is in telling the narrative on the page. Information is dropped in without being fully explained, like where Juan and nene met. In the absence of concrete answers, the reader ends up imagining various possibilities onto the text, making it more collaborative than a traditional narrative. This kind of imaginative, collaborative process also happens in the text at the level of memory when Juan and nene are telling each other stories and interrupting each other, asking questions, and redirecting.
The Palace is the first truly striking and resonant image of the novel, a giant residence in disarray, ironically named. The large house in the middle of nowhere evokes the genre of the southern Gothic, of the big haunted mansions of Faulkner and Tennessee Williams. And the Palace is haunted, as Juan is always telling nene – haunted by all kinds of ghosts who they can ignore or choose to listen to. The Palace, of course, also evokes royalty, and in a sense Juan is a kind of royalty, a king of the queer world into which he brought nene back when they met so many years ago.
The motif of blackouts begins right away with nene's story about the flood (which is also another Biblical allusion). The blackouts are concretized in nene's condition, which is never given a name or an explanation, and used in a similar manner later on in the novel to refer to Juan's lapses in consciousness as he dies. This is how we first encounter the idea of the blackouts: as a loss of consciousness, an absence of lucidity. As the blackout poems begin to appear in the novel alongside the text, blackouts emerge as something obscure and frightening.
The blackout poems, in reality, are something much more revelatory. They are not about absence but about presence – the presence of a particular, unique, complex desire on the page. nene struggles with this at first, longing to know what was in the original text, wanting all the information Juan has about Jan Gay and the Sex Variants book. Juan has given nene a quest without a map, a mission without an end goal, and herein lies one of the main strands of tension in the novel which propels us forward: nene's need for clarity confronts Juan's penchant for ambiguity.
