Authors: Suanne Laqueur
“No. It’s… No, I’m done there. I know I have to get my degree. I should be able to transfer my credits to one of the SUNY schools and finish it in a semester, a year at the most.”
“You did get into Fredonia. And Geneseo,” she said.
“I’m thinking Geneseo. It’s a great town, and there’s the Geneseo Playhouse. It’s got a great reputation. Maybe I could do an internship there or something.” He looked over at his mother and smiled. “Don’t stay here for me, Mom. I’ll be all right. I can coach basketball, I can tend bar, I can do construction. I’ll put something together.”
“You always do.” Christine put her hand on his cheek, caressed his rough face. “My heart’s broken for you, honey. I’m so sorry it ended up like this.”
He closed his eyes and leaned into her hand. “I’m sorry about the necklace, Mom,” he whispered. “I looked everywhere. I don’t know what happened to it.”
“I know,” she said, her hand sliding down his arm and squeezing his wrist. “You didn’t lose it on purpose.”
He put his head in his palm, pulling at his hair. He didn’t understand how precious legacies were carelessly lost while the token of a killer stayed safe in your pocket. Nothing made sense. Nothing held still. Nothing behaved the way he expected it to.
“These things happen, Erik.”
He didn’t know if she meant the necklace or Daisy. Maybe she meant his father.
He didn’t ask.
SUNY Geneseo accepted him. He guessed his application essay had clinched it—the one and only time he would play the Lancaster shooting card. He wrote of being a survivor, of second chances, the memory of those killed being the motivation for what he wanted to achieve in life. It was humble, moving and brilliant. And he meant none of it.
He shied from dorm life, and took a small apartment off campus. Alone. He wasn’t there to make friends. The less people knew about him, the better. He erased Lancaster from his resume and if asked, told people he had transferred from Buffalo State.
The tuition was less here than at Lancaster. By living frugally and working hard, he could spread the last of his grandfather’s money across this semester, and into the fall if necessary. The courses he needed to graduate were mostly general education credits. His schedule was a mongrel of math and science, plus the advanced stagecraft required for a BA in theater arts. And for his aching soul, he enrolled in both piano and classical guitar.
Which was how he met Miles and Janey Kelly.
Miles was a professor of piano and voice at Geneseo. Janey was a clinical psychologist at the college’s counseling center. She also played piano and sang, and both she and Miles were active at the Geneseo Playhouse.
The relationship worked perfectly—this childless musical theater couple in their fifties and this withdrawn young man with no interest in the party life of college. The Kellys took him in and Miles became Erik’s new mentor. Not a Leo Graham by any means, nor did he possess any of Kees’s flamboyant style. Yet his edges lined up against Erik’s with a satisfying click. They collaborated seamlessly at the playhouse. They ran together almost every night, shot baskets on the weekend, went for beers and talked themselves dry. Despite the thirty-year age difference, they got along like brothers, and Erik felt at home in Miles’s undemanding company.
The Kellys also gave music back to Erik. Janey was avidly social and a superb cook. The doors of the spacious brick house on Ivy Street were always open on weekends, the living room and kitchen filled with their theater friends. Drinks and dinner gave way to long jam sessions: guitars, upright basses, ukuleles, harmonicas, someone showed up with a banjo once. Erik was usually the youngest guest present, but he stayed all night, playing, absorbing, learning, losing himself in the keys and the strings.
Sometimes the parties had a slightly younger demographic, which gave him the opportunity to get laid. As a twenty-three-year-old emerging from a stretch of self-inflicted celibacy, he was dying for it. But he was wary of encounters with girls his age. They were looking for love. He wanted none of that—the idea of opening himself to another relationship and leaning into its joy alternately terrified and exhausted him. He felt no pride in his blunt quests to blow a load and hit the road, but such were the hard facts of life.
And who could I love now anyway?
Women of a certain age suited his needs better. His most regular and reliable booty call was a married friend of Janey’s. Not his finest moment, either, but it allowed him physical connection while avoiding the peril of becoming emotionally invested. He didn’t have to look for an excuse to leave after sex. He
was
the excuse.
They liked him though, those older women. They shivered and moaned under him. They were lavish with their praise, letting him know in no uncertain terms what he was doing to them. He was wild. They swore they never had it so good in their lives.
He didn’t care.
Sex remained an unpredictable pleasure. Sometimes he was fine, other times, too many for his liking, the horrible anxiety flooded him when it was over. He wanted sex, outright jonesed for it, but he hated when the wolves came afterward. He hated even more being in the throes of the act and struck with a wicked compulsion to scratch his partner’s skin or pull hard on her hair. To have “hurt me” on the tip of his tongue. To want the bit of pain nestled gently in his teeth, clamping down just hard enough.
He kissed differently, he noticed. No slow, gentle buildup with fingertips caressing the woman’s mouth. He got straight to it and, frankly, past it as soon as possible. Just a checkpoint. First base. He didn’t want to kiss. It was too intimate, his mouth a vulnerable gateway to the depths of his wounded, shivering soul.
The mindless, heartless coupling was his sole vice. He didn’t smoke anymore—cigarettes only reminded him of Daisy. He couldn’t afford coke and even if he could, he wanted nothing more to do with her cruel high. He would forever equate cocaine as a wintry bitch, cloaked in wanton destruction, full of empty promises she could make everything all right.
* * *
His mother had sold the house and moved in with Fred, so Erik stayed in Geneseo the summer of 1994, working at the playhouse and coaching basketball at the Y’s summer camps.
Daisy’s calls had tapered off while he was still living at home, and she began writing instead. Simple postcard bulletins. The missives then followed him to Geneseo—Christine must have given her his address. Sometimes he read them, sometimes he didn’t, depending on what kind of mental state he was in. The Philadelphia postmark let him know she was still with the Pennsylvania Ballet—just enough information to process. Opened or not, he threw out the letters afterward. To spare himself the pain of lingering over and dissecting her words, he saved nothing.
Then one night she left a message on his machine. His mind nowhere near a good state, he stopped the playback after hearing, “Erik, it’s Daisy,” and deleted it. Then he called his mother and chewed her out for giving Daisy his phone number.
“I don’t want to talk to her,” he said. “If anyone from Lancaster calls for me you can tell them—“
“I’m not your goddamn secretary,” Christine said. “And I don’t lie for you. Answer the phone and tell them yourself.”
They each slammed down their ends of the line. They rarely argued and it made Erik feel sick. Later he called back and apologized but the malaise didn’t go away. He wasn’t feeling well. He seemed to be spiraling down into a funk. He wasn’t hungry, he couldn’t sleep. The piano wouldn’t talk to him, his guitar was sulking. Work felt empty, he couldn’t find his three-point shot. Sex was as appealing as a stomach flu. Time turned back into the enemy. Some days it was a chore to get out of bed. Some days it was an ordeal just to breathe through his mantras.
You will feel nothing. There is nothing more to feel. They died. What happened after was a dream. They are gone. You are left. It’s time to go.
One evening the playhouse was rehearsing
You Can’t Take It With You
and a thunderstorm rolled through Geneseo. It was biblical outside, with multi-branched lightning illuminating the skies and thunder rattling the windows. A tree came down in the park across the street, falling slowly and majestically onto the power lines where it teetered for a moment.
Inside the playhouse, the entire circuit panel shorted out. A Fresnel over the stage exploded. The sound system let out a horrid shriek of feedback, followed by two short bursts of static. A beat of silence. Then a third angry buzz.
The tree finished its descent, taking the power lines with it. And then the transformer blew.
At the epic boom, everyone jumped in their shoes or out of their seats. More than a few people screamed. The company stumbled around the dark theater, clutching their chests, groping for hands, finding each other, gasping with both fright and the laughter of a near-miss.
In the chaos, nobody noticed Erik Fiskare had run away.
He had been in the lighting booth, of course. The explosion and the piercing feedback had him immediately on his feet. Those rapid bursts of crackling static—two quick, a pause, then a third—and then that final apocalyptic detonation. It all came back to him. He ran. Not toward the stage this time, but away, far away in the farthest direction he could find. He hid in a corner of the dark, empty green room, shaking, trying to pull himself together, to come back to the here and now.
Miles Kelly finally found him. “Well, here you are.”
The beam of a flashlight played around Erik’s body, hunched over in a chair. His hands were tucked tight under his legs because it was the only way to keep them from shaking.
Here I am,
he thought.
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah,” Erik said. His voice was an adolescent squeak. He cleared his throat. “Just… I wasn’t feeling well. Just need a minute.”
Miles took a step closer, peered at him in the milky beam of light. Erik gave him a weak smile, then immediately looked away for the smile was too weak a dam for the flood of hysterical weeping behind it.
“Are you sure?”
“I’m fine, I just need a minute.”
“Do you want me to get you some water?”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
“I’ll be back. I’d leave you the flashlight but it’s pitch black in the halls.”
“I’m fine, you take it.”
Once Miles was gone, Erik pulled his hands free and let the shaking overcome him. In the dark, his teeth chattered. He was going to be sick. He couldn’t be sick here. He couldn’t move, either. He put his head down on his knees, counted his breaths, prayed to disappear.
Please stop. Make it stop. Make this stop.
You will feel nothing.
The door to the green room opened and shut. Footsteps approached. With a great effort, Erik arranged his face and picked up his head, squinted toward the beam of the flashlight. “That you?”
“It’s Janey.”
She held out the bottle of water to him, watched as he fumbled the cap off and spilled most of it down his shirt trying to drink.
“What’s the matter, Erik?” she said. She sat down next to him, put a light hand on his back. She was kind, one of the kindest women Erik knew. He liked her. He thought maybe he could trust her.
“What frightened you?” she asked.
“The sounds,” he whispered.
“In the theater just now?”
“Yes.” He took another, more controlled sip of water.
“Drink slow,” she said.
He exhaled roughly. Pulled more air in. Beside him, Janey sat patiently, neither pressing him to explain, nor dismissing him.
“I lied to you about something,” he finally said. “I didn’t transfer from Buffalo. I was at Lancaster University.”
Janey inhaled sharply through her nose, then made a small noise in her throat. “You were there during the shootings?”
Teeth clenched tight, he nodded.
Her hand pressed against his back, and her other hand crept around his fingers. “Were you in the theater when it happened?”
“Yeah.” He held tight to her.
“I see,” she said. “The static and feedback and the explosion. All of it must have reminded you.”
“I think so. I think that’s what happened. What’s happening.”
“You’re having a flashback.” Her arm was fully around him then, pulling him close. “It’s perfectly understandable.”
A fresh round of shaking gripped his limbs. He tried to laugh. “This is just really weird.”
“Sometimes our brains forget but our bodies remember.”
“Yeah.”
“Did you lose friends?”
“My girlfriend was shot,” he whispered.
“Oh, Erik. I’m so sorry.”
He should have clarified what he meant, should have explained Daisy was shot but she had survived, she was still alive.
They all died. You are left.
Then he was weeping, crumpled over in Janey’s lap and she was holding him. An arm around him, her hand stroking his head, rocking him, consoling him, as if for the death of a loved one. Clasped in her calm, firm embrace, Erik was horrified by the idea of it being easier to do this, infinitely easier to grieve for the loss of Daisy if she really were dead.
I wish she had died,
he thought with a passion.
Then right on the heels of that came,
I wish I had, too.
Which was terrifying in its cold, clinical certainty. He thought it again, tried it on for size, like jacket off the rack:
I wish I were dead.
He raised his arms, felt the fit of the sleeves, smoothed down the lapels, buttoned a button.
I wish I were dead.
It fit well.
* * *
Janey came by his place, bringing some pasta salad. And a business card.
“I don’t feel comfortable counseling you, Erik, we’ve been socially involved for too long.”
“Of course.”
“So what I say now, I say as your friend: you need to talk to someone.”
She asked if he had ever seen a therapist, if he was on any antidepressants or had ever taken any meds for the stress. He lied and said he had been in a support group at school for a little while. He fabricated a prescription, he forgot the name now, but he hated the way the pills made him feel, and stopped after a few months. With the taste of fraud in his mouth, he took the proffered business card and thanked her.