A lag tends to accompany tragedy. The duration varies widely. Sometimes the gap shortens so tightly that it flips and becomes anticipatory.
No drivers license lived in my wallet, I might not even have owned a wallet. The phone rings and it’s Sara from the corner. She’s grieving into the phone before we know why. When she gets it out, it’s that the 16 year old neighbor hung herself last night in a moment of grief. No one could pinpoint why she succumbed to sorrow; she seemed to face little of it. In the aftermath, anyway, the street looked gloomy. People walked around downcast and confused.
A few weeks later, the suicided teen’s good friend was struck by a train from behind. Absorbed in music playing in her headphones, walking along the tracks, she must not have heard the iron monster hurtling toward her in hunger. It became clear why the other friend had suspended herself from a garage beam. She had felt the iron monster coming, when the second girl did not.
More usually, the gap occurs in the normal direction. When my buddy watched his best friend collapse permanently in the middle of a fight—I was there too but he wasn’t my best friend, he was my buddy’s best friend—he cried for months. Then he got on with his life. I don’t remember seeing him cry again for years. Instead, he lost the thread of his studies, gave up on most commitments, fell under the spell of an intense Cambodian health program, and eventually completed a transformation of everything about himself.
He began to do every task with the utmost control. The ginger had to be sliced just so. The carrots had to be steamed to the second. Each step extended equally as he walked, and his shoulders never lost their level. When people asked him to relax he told them to pay attention.
A couple years ago, he was driving down a highway with me for quite some time, on our way to Fort Worth. Just driving and talking and laughing and noticing the oak trees at the base of the hills. We had been driving many hours, him at the wheel, always at the speed limit, which I found intolerable.
We were still talking when we got to one of those towns where the highway turns into a regular street for a mile. He must have lost himself in us, and in the way I remembered the times before, because he drove right through a red light. Horns blared but no tires squealed and we came out just fine onto the asphalt beyond the intersection. As we pulled over to reassess I could see he was shaking. Then he burst. He sobbed and sobbed. “I loved him” said my buddy. He repeated it a few times into the sound of his own heavy tears falling onto his fingers and those removable floor mats. “I really loved him.”
After that, he had more fun cooking. Last time I saw him, he even tripped down the stairs. He still goes to Cambodia a lot but he also eats turkey on Thanksgiving. I think his friend gets to relax now, too. The fight finished for everyone.
I got a call about an overdose while I was on an island in the Gulf of Mexico. This was different than these calls usually go. Sometimes, we find out that someone we haven’t seen in years drank himself to death. We might never have seen him again anyway. He might have died the day after we last said goodbye or outlived us to wither away in a chair with wheels, but it’s usually somewhere in the middle. The knowledge bewilders. These cases make me feel the same way as I do when I find a secret written on a scrap of paper in the street. You know something you shouldn’t know but the newfound awareness can be applied in no way whatsoever. This happens to me strangely often.
The phone call in the Gulf of Mexico concerned a close friend that intended to move down to North Carolina, where I was living when I wasn’t on an alcohol-soaked beach surrounded by the slender, tanned, easy-going, and well-to do from around the globe at the center of an expansive teal horizon. An excruciating story came through the earpiece. Alone in his apartment for that bad moment, and alone in his apartment for a while after.
Excruciating timing for me, too. His visit to find a new apartment in Durham—one where I might have joined him for a more reasonable activity—occupied a square on my calendar just two lines down from the one marked Flight Home From Cancun. My faraway reaction blurs. A sheet of tears and tequila and screams, my face leaking into the bony shoulder of a concerned Argentine whose Spanish I found even less intelligible than the news—the news being not as surprising as I wanted it to be. Heroine takes a lot of the kind and intelligent people who move to New York City for a spell.
Every action I took to get back to the States for a funeral felt belated. I hurtled forth in loyalty to a dead man, really sprinting toward a past when I could have done something about it. I raced and argued and went without sleep through airports and toll booths and turnpikes so our friends could stand in the sun outside an Armenian church in Philadelphia, shaking hands and shaking our heads. We didn’t know what to do so we stared at the sun on our suits, glad to be sweating and uncomfortable.
I came back to real life expecting it to feel like slow motion. But the clocks still worked and I could sleep. North Carolina summer still sat heavy and green on everything it could find. I inched along, knowing that a wall of grief would rise up from the horizon and strike me down at the time appointed. Then the calendar got around to the date when he would have arrived to scout an apartment. Nothing happened.
The day came, and the wall of grief didn’t rise up. Then the next day. A month. Then the day when he would have moved in. Nothing. No wall, just horizon.
I took to standing in the sun, shaking my head, my suit waiting in the dark closet for a tearful day that passed months ago.
What went wrong? Maybe I had his dates down incorrectly. Maybe the airline cancelled the flight he would have taken and he never rescheduled. He might have changed his mind about moving south.
Im sure it will feel this way until I leave town permanently. That will let me get on with pretending that he did move down here, that we would be having lunch right now if I hadn’t moved away. I’ll miss him like we miss the living and distant. Then someone will say the words Gulf of Mexico during my wedding reception and I’ll lose the plot, rip off my shoes, jump into the picture perfect lake, and swim down the river to that island. This will make sense to me.
Skookum Atlas 