Gabriel (5 page)

I startled awake in the morning

I woke up and he was missing

We kept calling his phone

It went straight to voicemail

This is Gabe leave a message

We called 311

We called 911 every day

The police refused to help us

We begged them to help they refused

Because he wasn’t under sixteen or over sixty-five

He didn’t have a life-threatening illness

They said that epilepsy doesn’t count

It’s not that dangerous

They had never heard of his disorder

This happens a lot with twenty-two-year-olds

They said he was probably just hanging out

With the wrong crowd

He hadn’t been arrested he wasn’t

In the hospitals we thought

Maybe he was stranded somewhere

And couldn’t get home

The trains had stopped running

Maybe he had spent all his money

And couldn’t call us his phone

Needed to be charged

This is Gabe leave a message

We said he had never disappeared before

We said he always called home

We said he had a developmental disorder

It didn’t matter his disabilities

Were not on the list

And so the police refused to help us

He never liked it when things closed

It gave him the feeling of being locked

In a room with bars on the windows

He never liked it when the weather

Interfered with plans he hadn’t made yet

He was never too sick to go out

When he was ten years old I had to drag him

Out of the swimming pool in a deluge

He wanted to cannonball off the diving board

He wanted to stop and slash some golf balls

He wanted to soap up the wet car

And let the sky wash it down

I remember the morning we escaped

From Galveston just before the hurricane

We coasted in front of the destruction

One night I came out of a restaurant

In a light rain and started to drive home

But the storm dropped so suddenly

I turned out of the driveway

Into a waist-high wall of water

And floated the car to the side of the road

I sloshed home through the flood

It took over an hour Gabriel shouted

That car is dead in the water

I thought I was the sort of person

Who could get pummeled by a storm

And stagger home to laugh about it

Forget about the 468 subway stations

Wind shut down the Staten Island Ferry

The bridges and tunnels were closed

I couldn’t sleep I never could sleep

I just stared out the window

Into the blankest space

Not thinking exactly

Worrying obsessively

Waiting for daylight

I left the house at five thirty a.m.

And wandered past the drunks

Sprawled out on Flatbush Avenue

I crossed the Manhattan Bridge

Hooded with blue shadows

The first bicyclists of the morning

I picked my way through Chinatown

Thick with fruit stands

And born-again commuters

I steered my way up Bowery

Sliding from Skid Row

Into respectability

I moved past Canal and Delancey

The New Museum the Bowery Poetry Club

The Bowery Mission Cooper Union

I saw people buying coffee from trucks

And ordering breakfast in diners

Exactly as if nothing had happened

Who cares I ended up at my desk

In an office building in midtown

Wondering what I was going to do

All day the subways were running again

The city presumed normal

My son still missing

Joe thought that Gabriel was shacked up

With a Brazilian woman he’d met

A couple of times in TriBeCa

He didn’t know her name he just called her

Brazil
all their friends did he said

He had only been to her pad

Two or three times he could remember it

Because it was next door to a club

Maybe on Worth or White Street

We found it after a couple of tries

She lived on the second floor

With a recording studio in the front

We rang the buzzer

For every apartment in the building

No one was home in the early evening

We decided to go across the street

To sit on a stoop and stake out

Five floors of empty apartments

They looked comatose in the looming dark

Suddenly the streetlamp across the way

Began to flicker on and off

It’s a sign
Joe said
I hope it doesn’t

Go out
he was very agitated

It’s just a streetlamp
I told him

The light wavered for a moment

And then flicked off for good

I don’t know where Gabe is

Joe said despondently
he’s lost

And that’s when he knew

His friend’s life had been extinguished

Gabriel made his last phone call

To a number in Jersey City

Janet and I decided to go there

It was just a subway ride away

We were probably wasting our time

But why not do something else to find him

We took a train ride and a cab

To the West District Precinct

On Communipaw Avenue

We marched up to the desk

And told our story to the clerk

Who requested our driver’s licenses

We sat on cheap chairs in the lobby

And wondered what we were doing

In a cruddy police station in Jersey City

We waited for twenty minutes

For forty-five minutes an hour passed

Why had we decided to go there

The sergeant is investigating it

We were told to keep waiting

What else could we do

We had been waiting for four days

We had a disease no one wanted

To help us it could never be cured

Four men came out to talk to us

And we followed them up the stairs

Into an office where one of them said

We have some bad news for you

Your son Gabriel has passed away

We’re sorry for your loss

Something about Craig’s List

Alcohol a drug called GHB

Someone called an ambulance

Something about emergency technicians

Who hooked him up to an IV

And tried to revive him

Something about his pallor

Skin cool to the touch

Pupils fixed and dilated

Something about Jersey City Medical Center

Where he was seen immediately

He didn’t have a pulse he wasn’t breathing

On Saturday morning his heart stopped

He never woke up again

He died of cardiac arrest at 6:08

Something about an autopsy

Respectful of Jewish law

To determine the cause of death

Something about finding a funeral home

His body delivered from Newark

And a place to bury him

Something about a ride to the train station

A pledge to the grieving parents

A rabbi to conduct the service

Something about amputating your arm

Because it bothered you

It was never a wing anyway

Something about amputating your leg

Because it hurts

You will never walk away from this

What was done by the twenty-two-year-old

Who took an odorless colorless liquid

On a rainy night in late August

Cannot be undone by the paramedics

Or the doctors or the officers

Working the night shift

What was taken cannot be untaken

By the kid who took a ride out

To Mallory Street in Jersey City

And dropped a cap of GHB

For a long powerless ride to the end

Of a night that would never end

I had never heard of his killer

Synthesized in clandestine labs

And sold for twenty bucks a tab

I had never heard of
Liquid Ecstasy

Georgia Home Boy Goop Easy Lay

Grievous Bodily Harm

What made him feel drowsy

And euphoric what relaxed him

Into a kind of stupor

What made him feel affectionate

And sociable what induced nausea

And made it impossible to breathe

What caused a seizure caused a coma

What stopped his heart and left him

Lifeless on the floor

I will never know why it was written

What was taken cannot be untaken

What was done cannot be undone

Like a blind wing turning in the dark

Like a lunatic spark of light

In the thickening clouds

Like a flashlight flickering in the woods

A broken flashlight in the dark

It will never be fixed again

Like a lighthouse on the horizon

An abandoned lighthouse

Its beacon wandering at sea

Like a crescent snuffed out

In a storm over the waves

The drowned moon

It should have been an eagle

Cutting through the fog

It should have been a swallow

I once saw a car careening

Into a streetlamp on the corner

Its headlights crushed

Like the sound of a stone crashing

Into a wall in a deserted neighborhood

It was too late to save the stone or the wall

Like a stone shot out of a slingshot

In the dead of night in the dark

The slingshot could not control the stone

The thunder sounded like a machine gun

In the dark sky it rattled and stopped

The lightning flashed and died

I was asleep at 6:08 on Saturday morning

I did not see the flashing light

I did not hear the roar

It rained for twenty-two years

And two hundred and forty days

All the days and nights of his life

The rain it raineth every day

From the midnight of his birth

To the early morning of his death

A light rain fell across New Orleans

On the day he entered the world

Before the great flood

Torrential rains swelled the Tiber in Rome

And overflowed the bayous in Houston

We once drove across a bridge of rain

Heavy rains pounded the fields

Of central Virginia the roads of Connecticut

Telephone wires wavered in the wind

His apartment flooded in Massachusetts

He walked through a hallway of water

And stomped into town

The roads were sleek with rain and sleet

But he drove to New York at three a.m.

He skidded home traffic was light

The rain in the city did not deter him

He splashed through the downpour

And bolted the house in a rainstorm

In New York City the rain was constant

For days in Jersey City it never stopped

I can’t bear to think of him in the wet ground

He will come down like rain

Upon the mown grass

As showers that water the earth

Like a swimmer strolling into the ocean

On a breezy day it seems fine

Suddenly the waves start carrying him away

He was always a good swimmer

No need to pay attention to the warning

Flags on a day without lifeguards

Now he can’t get back to shore

Panic begins as a flutter in his legs

And then blasts through his chest

He is fighting against the waves

Riptides drag him down

And swarm him into the underworld

He was somebody’s errant boy

Somebody taught him the crawl stroke

Somebody taught him to respect the water

He stripped off his clothes

And dropped them in a pile on the shore

His last effects

Like a swimmer strolling into the ocean

On an unsuspecting day

No one knew he was out there

Swimming in the rain

The waves got higher and higher

And slashed the shore

He left without a care don’t worry

He was a strong swimmer

But the ocean was stronger

His last fight against the waves

Riptides dragged him down

And swarmed him into the underworld

The stone says nothing

The stone remembers nothing

An ordinary stone

It just sits there coldly in the dirt

By the fence in the cemetery

Doing nothing

All day long all night long

The stone never moves never knows

No one thinks about it

The stone cannot know

No one can forget about it

Because no one knows it is there

We stood at the grave site

Studying the view from the grounds

It’s just far enough from the road

We stood in the low grass

And marched around the trees

And made a final decision

The stone knew nothing about anything

Until someone picked it up

And turned it into a memorial stone

The stone was singled out

It could have been a weapon

Someone could have tossed it

Away without a care

But instead someone picked it up

And laid it gently down

At Section 3 Row R Grave 12

Rest in peace at last hyperactive one

I will stand above you aghast

The Regional Medical Examiner a doctor

Conducted an external examination

Followed by an autopsy

On the unembalmed refrigerated body

Identified as Gabriel Hirsch

Case #09110776

The body is clad in the following items

T-shirt with a design cut

One pair of boxer shorts cut

Accompanying the body

One multi-colored wallet with a Visa Debit card