Love and Other Ways of Dying (21 page)

When I step outside into the bright early-morning sun of California, I have the top off the Tupperware. And although later I will return the brain to Harvey, I am for a brief moment the man with the plan, the keeper of the cosmos. Do I feel the thing that all totems and fetishes make people feel? Something that I can believe in? A power larger than myself that I can submit to? Salvation? Have I touched eternity?

I’m not sure. The beer cans strewn in the parking lot make out the rough shape of America, surrounded by pools of sudsy, gold liquid. And the birds have come down out of the sky and they’re drinking from it. Even now, the universe is filling with dark matter. We are slowing down. Snowballs the size of jumbo trucks are pelting our atmosphere. Perhaps a meteor has just been bumped into a new flight pattern, straight toward Earth, and we won’t know anything about it until it explodes us all, as meteors once exploded the dinosaurs.

But I am here now. In the now now. Day has come back up from the other side of the earth, the birds have come down from the sky. There are flashes of orange light, the air is flooded with honeysuckle. I feel something I can’t quite put my finger on, something euphoric but deeply unsayable. Is it love or just not
hate? Is it joy or just not sadness? For a moment, all of time seems to flow through the Flamingo, its bright edges reflecting the past and the present, travelers packing their bags and rivering into some farther future. We are always driving with our secrets in the trunk, amazed by the cows and rainbows and palm trees. And do I dare to think that there will be no ending of the world, of America, of ourselves? I do. I really do. For in some recurrence, in some light wave, in some shimmer of time, we are out there now, and forever, existing, even as surely as Einstein himself continues to exist, here in my hands.

T
HE ACCIDENT
—
THE FIRST ONE
—
OCCURRED ON THE
Wednesday night before Thanksgiving of my senior year in high school. It left one friend injured and one dead, and for a while afterward, the whole thing seemed so surreal and impossible that all we could do—friends, family, anyone connected but not in the accident itself—was try to re-create the simultaneities of that evening, the first person at the scene, the shock of the couple at the nearby house from which the call was made for an ambulance, and then: who called whom and who was where when they heard. Given our own shock, we couldn’t imagine the parents of the victims hearing those first words:
There’s been an accident …

When the news reached my family that night, in that orbit of calls, my parents, perhaps like other parents among our friends, presumed their child might have been in the car, which wasn’t the case, though might have been, had I made a different decision earlier that evening. For us seniors, it was a gloriously free night with no school the next day, a holiday from everything, including our cursed college apps. Mine was spent with my girlfriend,
so I missed the preparty, and then the ride to the real party. And so I missed the accident, too.

There were two cars, belonging to Jax and Flynn, driving from the beach north up through town to someone’s parentless house. Riding with Jax was Seger, and with Flynn, Xavier. On a stretch of road by one of the town’s country clubs, Jax lost control of his car, hit a telephone pole, and skidded a hundred feet into a tree. The crash drove the engine through the dashboard. The Jaws of Life was required to cut the bodies from the wreckage.

At that moment—as the first siren sounded, as the first numbers were dialed, as the bodies were gathered and rushed away—I was watching a movie/eating Chinese/on a bed with my girlfriend, I can’t remember exactly. Lost in the oblivious haze of youth, I was oddly certain, like billions of teenagers before me, that nothing would ever touch us there.

Until, of course, it did.

Growing up, we had this odd thing in our town: an ambulance service run by kids. It’s still there today, in fact—thriving. Then, it was housed in a defunct red train station that rattled and roared every time a passing commuter train rushed by on its way to Manhattan. In winter, icy gusts came lunging through the walls. There was a garage with two ambulances, and off of it, a cramped radio room. Inside the station was an open common area, where presumably tickets had once been sold, but which now hosted our training sessions and organizational meetings. Upstairs, there was a loft where the CPR mannequins were stashed. Sometimes you’d forget and go up there at midnight to turn out a light and nearly have a heart attack at all those synthetic bodies laid out, staring dumbly at the ceiling.

The ambulance service had been founded in the seventies,
as a way for teenagers to understand the ravages of drugs by working with addicts in a nearby town. Then it morphed into a first-response ambulance. It was as if some Hollywood execs had sat around spitballing one-line pitches for after-school specials, until someone blurted, “
Emergency
 … but with kids in charge.” Of course, we had a cadre of adult advisers, who played a vital role—and our mercurial, fifty-something patriarch who cursed and yelled and berated everyone, calling them “boobie,” in an attempt to gauge our toughness. And yet it was we teenagers who did the bulk of the work. We started in the radio room in ninth grade, and graduated to gofer on the ambulance in tenth, then went on to become EMTs and ambulance drivers. As an experiment, the ambulance had succeeded a little too thoroughly, and by the time I came along, there were about fifty of us who worked there in one capacity or another.

Still, there were those in town who wondered: Could a sixteen-year-old EMT (someone who had only recently learned to drive a car) really help at, let alone handle, the worst accidents? It became our job, then, to be overdiligent and professional so as not to let anyone down. On every night of the week, including weekends, holidays, and religious days, a crew was “on duty” at the rickety station, where we’d run through checklists, train, sit and do homework, or just flirt and shoot the shit, pimply, hormonal teenagers that we were. From 6:00
P
.
M
. to midnight, we acted as first responders, clad in our “whites” (a curious uniform choice for those dealing in blood) and orange fluorescent jackets. The rest of the time we carried pagers, in school, at practice, wherever. And our precious weekends were soon filled with fund-raising, myriad chores at headquarters, and more training courses, including hours logged at a local emergency room. In this, we were taught to regard each new accident with a sort of dispassionate intensity, no matter how extreme the circumstance.

Initially, however, I remember a lot of time spent blowing air into those synthetic mannequins, real lip to plastic lip, thrusting palms down on fake chests loaded with thick springs, and, at the end, paper readouts issuing from a slot at the ribs, a ticker showing the peaks and valleys that gauged one’s efficacy at giving CPR. Repetition made for perfection on those fake bodies, though reality, I would soon find to my dismay, could be different. When the grandfather of the boy next door keeled over on the lawn, I lined my palm up on his sternum as I’d been instructed—and had succeeded at so many times before on the dummies—and with the first thrust, felt three real ribs give way.

When it came to treating victims, every kid at the ambulance had at least one call that remained indelible—maybe a multicar crash on the highway, maybe a cardiac arrest or a house fire or head injury—that introduced us to a world of pain and grief we hadn’t known before, that took us behind the veil of our town. I recall responding to a daytime suicide, at a house not more than a mile from my own, and when we spilled out of the ambulance and hustled through the strobes in our bright uniforms, hoping to save the overcast day, fix the wrong, piece back the body—crazy-competent mini-adults that we were—one unimpressed police officer stopped us short on the doorstep.

“You’re not going in there,” he said. When we insisted, he exhaled an exasperated sigh and added, “She slit her goddamn wrists in the tub, and you’re kids, and I’m not letting you in there.” I remember we protested, outraged that he’d called us kids, and we wouldn’t leave the scene, waging our own quiet sit-in, until we were finally called off by an adult adviser. But even as we worked ourselves into a bruit, I had this nightmare image of a submerged naked body, blood streaming from her wrists, face twisted in some ghoulish rictus.

Half an hour later, I was sitting back in Calculus, trying to figure out a derivative.

The night of the accident I returned home from my girlfriend’s house to find my parents and my sixteen-year-old brother sitting grimly at the kitchen table, a scene that undoubtedly played out in other kitchens across town, too. My dad, who would have been in his late forties at the time—my age now as I write this—was a business executive who worked long hours, seemed to have boundless energy for house projects on the weekend, and made sure we were at church each Sunday morning, where he often volunteered as a lector. My mom, a country girl transplanted to suburbia, possessed a deep reserve of patience for her four wilding boys. Among them I was the oldest, recently sprouting up an inch taller than my dad, attaining full, moody man-boy status. In that moment, I knew nothing really, and was being told nothing. My parents said they’d drive me to the hospital; I said I could drive myself, but they were having none of it.

As we left to go, my brother pulled me aside. He also worked at the ambulance service, and had heard that the night’s on-duty crew had left the scene with two bodies. When my brother said one of them wasn’t breathing, I reflexively thought,
Don’t let it be Jax
, and repeated that in my mind, imploring some higher power as my dad drove me beneath the sodium points of light on the highway. In the zero-sum of that moment, it didn’t even occur to me what the inverse meant:
Let it be Seger.
And how guilty I’d feel for years after about it.

Growing up, I thought my town was a wonderland. The lawns were always freshly cut, gardens overflowing with explosions of color, the blue sky etched with mystical fans of ice from the planes that came and went from New York. Somewhere out there was the wild world, but here, we lived in our own disassociated
nirvana, a place where a kid felt protected and free. We rode our bikes everywhere. We swung on rope swings and swam in pools, or at the beach. There was nothing really to fear, so my mom set us loose out the back door each day, and we raced through the woods, to some neighborhood yard where there was always a game of football or Wiffle Ball raging.

There, too, lived Seger, an athletic kid with blond hair and blue eyes. I remember one year splitting time with him at quarterback on our Pop Warner football team, the little guys with good hands who conveyed the ball to bigger guys, who then tried to run through, or over, the opposing team. Later, in sixth grade, we’d hung out with two neighborhood girls, meeting after school, loitering, trying out the first rehearsals of sexual attraction. He took the lead, with the confidence of having older siblings. The louder and funnier and more kinetic he was, the more I struck a pose of dumb bewilderment.

And then we sort of lost track of each other. He moved, to Jax’s neighborhood by the Sound, and they became close friends. I saw him here and there, but didn’t really overlap again socially until high school. By this time, he’d become starting safety on the football team—but had a sentimental streak, too. Late at night, at whatever party, he could be counted on to hijack the stereo, caterwauling at the top of his lungs to one of his favorite songs. “
And them good old boys were drinking whisky and rye
 …” He sang that song every time—and it became a ritual that made everyone laugh.
Ah, there goes Seger again
, we said.
He sounds like a dying cat!
Only later did we realize the irony. He’d been singing about an accident all along.