Authors: David Gilbert
He just tottered on the curb and sort of half-stumbled, half-stepped.
It all happened so fast.
It was surreal.
Total slow motion.
Boom, ba-boom
, like that.
And for a second he seemed fine.
I can still see him, clear as a bell.
Do you want to know if there was much blood?
Do you want to know if his mouth was ever so slightly open?
It became one of those stories, never told honestly.
Do you want to know if he said anything?
Do you want to know if the bus driver handed me his shoes or if I just took them?
N
ORTH ON
P
ARK
to 96th Street and down to the river and onto the FDR, the merge always an ordeal, waiting for the opening and then gunning into the lane, but by now the natural aggression of driving—
Fuck you, cocksucker
—in New York is flowing, a relief since those first few minutes behind the wheel are always doubtful, as if today might be the day you lose your nerve, but once blown free onto the FDR you can sit back and trust your mirrors again and play three moves ahead, pinching the son-of-a-bitch Civic trying to cut in for no real gain, and after the Triborough, forever the Triborough regardless of the RFK rebrand, you can flip on the radio, as I did now, and almost relax. Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Something about the hidden dangers of the federally mandated lightbulb. Everyone was outraged. It was ten in the morning and the traffic was light relative to the normal mess. The potholes, the amount of crap on the shoulder, the state of the bridges, suggested a fresh topic for Brian. The roads seemed war-torn. Or maybe that was just my mood. I-278 East to I-95 North and I no longer cared because gray was starting to give way to rudimentary color and driving became a pleasant kind of drifting. The GPS guided me, her sexless charm trumped by her seductive knowledge. Here was a person, a woman, on my side. A wrong turn was merely recalculated. We would never get lost. The two of us had hours together, long gaps between her commands, and while my eyes focused on the basic chore of moving forward, the rest of my thoughts roamed without direction.
It was Richard who smelled the smoke. He was talking with Gerd in the kitchen, voicing his concerns about his father and asking her opinion,
if maybe they should hire a nurse, if Gerd had any experience with senior care, and Gerd was saying she thought she could handle the bulk of the issues, at this point at least, when Richard interrupted her and asked if she smelled something.
“What?”
“Like smoke.”
“I have a cold,” Gerd apologized.
Richard followed the smell from kitchen into foyer, pulling himself forward like his nose was on a string. Definitely smoke, he thought. Definitely a something-burning smell. It seemed more cigarette than straight-up catastrophe, like any sidewalk outside an AA meeting, but also heavier, especially the closer he got to his father’s study. The string was now a rope. A cigar? A hundred cigars? Or worse? He dropped speculation and burst through the door, his imagination prepared for a possible blaze, the curtains crawling, the walls engulfed, like one of his all-time favorite movies as a boy and he would sprint in, part Steve McQueen, part Paul Newman. But instead of
The Towering Inferno
, Richard was greeted by a roaring yet relatively cozy fire in the fireplace. The rest was just smoke. A lot of smoke. “Jesus, Dad.” Richard waved his hands and headed for the windows.
“You still here,” his father said from the couch.
“You forgot about the flue, Dad.”
“Don’t you think I know that?”
“This is a mess.”
“It’s my mess and you can leave.”
“All this smoke can kill you.”
“Just leave.”
“C’mon, get up, get up.”
“It’s not that bad.”
“It’s bad. Now get up.”
Gerd poked her head in. “I called 911.”
“It’s just the flue. Help me get him out of here.”
Gerd and Richard lifted Andrew to his feet, no small ordeal, and Gerd took charge of leading him into the living room while Richard rushed into the bathroom and soaked a few towels. Before smothering
the fire, he noticed what was burning, the manuscript pages blooming in reds and blues and greens before withering into a thin film that fluttered in the newly introduced draft. The paper made for quick kindling. Here and there a few lines poked through—
Sometimes the only way to free yourself from one of those ruts is to do something awful, really disgraceful, and I was in a terrible rut, the deepest ever, and I
—which toyed with Richard’s thoughts. You want
Ampersand
? Well here you go. The fire said Fuck you and Richard said Fuck you back before he laid the wet towels on top and there was a hiss and a mini mushroom cloud that choked the room. He imagined charred flesh on the other side.
The building’s super appeared with four firemen.
“Only a closed flue,” Richard said, sounding almost demoralized.
Thirty minutes later they got the other news from a policeman.
During the service, I wondered if Andrew still had the smell of smoke in his nose as Richard and Jamie brought him down the aisle of St. James. I was standing near the back, uncertain of what I had done exactly, if I was the dreadful cause. Richard and Jamie led their father forward like sympathetic guards to the gallows. Whatever their burden, the prisoner seemed already dead. People assumed his downcast eye and general slump confirmed his absolute devastation—
oh, to lose a child
—but Andrew stared down mostly amazed that his feet still touched the ground. Let go and he was certain to haunt the rafters. Unlike my father’s funeral there was no procession, no boys’ choir, though the church was filled with teenage boys and girls, classmates getting their first taste of peer mortality. The boys wore their solemnity like rented formal wear, their emotions as hard to pin as a detachable collar, while the girls tried on this sadness for size, as if the deceased had taken something more precious than virginity. Fellow Exonians Felicity Chase and Harry Wilmers held hands in their pew, though Harry’s palm was prickling with sweat and Felicity was trying to remember the last line of
The Great Gatsby
, something about a green light and the snow falling faintly. A few pews closer Doug Streff had gotten stoned in honor of his pal, which was an epic mistake, the entire church pressing in on him like he was responsible for every breath.
Parents and teachers, old family friends, the usual funeral and wedding crowd, sought comfort in their shoes, ashamed of being in the presence of an Almighty who could allow a seventeen-year-old to get hit by a bus. Once again a handful of A. N. Dyer fans showed up but none of them brought books; they only offered him the communal readership of their tears. What bullshit, Andrew thought, as he was steered to the front of the church, half-expecting Richard and Jamie to shepherd him all the way to the coffin and tuck him inside. But that was bullshit too. He knew exactly what was going on even as his mind was roiled by the Prelude and Fugue in A minor, the organist’s favorite since he was a child growing up near historic Williamsburg. How did Andrew know this? Because at this moment he insisted on omniscience. Like passing Gerd in the third pew he knew that years ago she had answered an advert in a Stockholm newspaper—
Surrogates needed, 100,000 kr
.—and went to a grand Gothic estate where five-year-old Einsteins daydreamed about time in that slanting Nordic light. Her new employers informed her that a couple in the United States needed help, and after a thorough medical exam and signing a thick contract, she was taken to a dorm to live with other young women, none of them realizing the future they carried. Nine months later, Gerd was forever reshaped into mother and she begged to remain involved with the child, even if just as a nanny. Yes, Andrew knew everything about everyone as the cadenzas in harmonic minor decorated his mind with ribbons of synaptic light worthy of the Grand Illumination. Richard and Jamie positioned him in the first pew. What was the point of this? Death had rendered the story moot, and as in a fable, Andy had transformed from fantastic puppet into plain old boy.
Reverend Rushton spread his arms, and Andrew had him say, I am the resurrection and the life and all the rest, but this time he recast him as Professor Serebryakov, arrogant and ineffectual, and if Andrew had a gun he would have taken better aim than Vanya. He would probably still miss. Our roles might change yet we are fated to the same lines. That sounded fine, but what the hell did it mean? What was his role now? What were his lines? No doubt Edgar Mead, sitting with Christopher Denslow and Rainer Krebs, could jump in and tell him, Edgar Mead who hated himself when he was alone. “This is all bullshit,”
Andrew muttered, and Richard and Jamie tried to quiet him but he was ready to push them aside and leave this ceremony, as artificial an ending as anything lowered on a rickety crane. “Total bullshit,” Andrew muttered again. From behind a pair of hands reached forward and rubbed his shoulders with a forgotten yet not forgone touch. “Get through this and we can go home,” Isabel whispered, the word
home
settling him down, making the infinite local.
Reverend Rushton said his amen and we all sat. There was no eulogy, since no one was in the proper frame of mind to talk, and frankly, Reverend Rushton preferred it this way, having witnessed over the last decade an overabundance of eulogies, some families insisting on as many as three speakers, which turned the whole affair into a grim retirement party. He had a solid homily prepared. He had worked the theme of fathers and sons into the flow from Job 19:21–27a to Psalm 121 to 1 Corinthians 4:14–21 to Psalm 23 to John 6:37–40. And this time around he insisted on a communion. The ritual had its healing place, plus it was an opportunity to introduce the power of the Real Presence to a younger, less sacramental generation. In other words, he had a good crowd. It reminded him of his early missionary days, the best of his life. “Why do you, like God, pursue me never satisfied with my flesh?” the Reverend read. “O that my words were written down! O that they were inscribed in a book! O that with an iron pen and with lead they were engraved on a rock forever!”
Enough about books and iron pens, Andrew thought. Andy should be the one sitting here, trying to muster some pity with Richard and Jamie, who might glimpse their father before he turned forever into rock. A wave of mourning broke toward the altar, and Andrew sensed Jamie getting lost in turbulent water. He was the one who went to the hospital after Richard had called him and told him what happened, Jamie jumping into a taxi with Alice, who insisted on coming. In the emergency room they were escorted into a smaller waiting area that seemed reserved for the particularly dire, inside which another couple sat, their bodies wringing the air. Thankfully Gerd showed up and could tackle the questions on all the forms. A doctor eventually appeared and he crouched in front of them and with a gentle voice, like he was reciting a grim but thoughtful tale, told them how Andy had
suffered multiple traumas, the first being the impact of the bus to his body, the second and far worse being the impact of his head to the street, and between the swelling in the brain and the cardiac arrest, they could never get him properly stabilized, and despite their greatest effort, he unfortunately succumbed. Gerd covered her mouth as though blocking the news from getting in, and Jamie grabbed Alice’s hand and squeezed. He remembered being thrown by the word
succumb
. He pictured Andy being attacked and no longer fighting but standing firm and letting go, like Sean Connery on the bridge in
The Man Who Would Be King
, a movie he loved as a boy. The doctor asked if he wanted to see his son before they moved him, and Jamie was in no shape to correct the mistake and simply accepted the promotion. Son, brother, father, what did it matter anyway? The boy was dead. Before leaving he turned to the other couple and wished them good luck, which he hoped was a decent thing to say but later feared the opposite. Good luck? The doctor guided him through the ER to a nearby trauma room, en route describing what Jamie would see, the body and its effects, the bruising, the procedures, the extreme measures taken, which frightened Jamie. Suddenly he was scared of misery and its hollow question. “I just want you to be prepared,” the doctor told him. Jamie went into the room alone. The floor had been recently cleaned, the supporting machinery unhooked and pushed aside, avoiding eye contact, it seemed. Under the normal hospital smell lingered incongruously the first few drops of summer rain on hot pavement. Jamie thought of turning around and leaving, but instead stepped forward like he was fessing up to stealing. Only Andy’s head was exposed, his face less scathed than Jamie’s; the rest of him was wrapped snugly in a blue sheet. The body possessed an uncanny stillness while everything else in the room resembled a whirlwind. It’s nothing like sleep. It’s the opposite of sleep. And please no using the word
peaceful
. Jamie stared for a long minute, his feet sensing an edge, whatever emotion overcome by the vastness of the fall. Unsure what he was doing exactly, he reached down and touched Andy’s chest and with his other hand touched Andy’s forehead. Again with the stillness. The skin was damp. A few sharp hairs anticipated an eventual need for a razor, and a cluster
of pimples embarrassed his chin. There was that sundial nose, fully formed and recognizable, and those thin lips, forever sphinxlike. This was his last face, already foundering. “I’m sorry,” Jamie said. He placed his thumb on the faint worry line that over the years would cut a deep trench and he tried to draw up from the boy via a mystical kind of energy he never believed in all the memories from his young life. He offered it space in his own body, to fit wherever it might fit. He performed this improvised ministry and when he came to the end, or the beginning, he said once again, “I am so sorry,” not quite grasping the apology though sensing somewhere the reason. It was all too much to bear, right up to the moment in the church when his father surprised him by wrapping his arm around his shoulder and pulling him close.