Love and Other Ways of Dying (24 page)

Other details emerged: They’d begun drinking around 4
P
.
M
., stopped to go to their respective homes, rejoined each other around 7
P
.
M
. At an intersection well before the site of the accident, Xavier had jumped out of Flynn’s car and run ahead to Jax’s for matches, after which they traveled several “lengths” behind Jax before peeling away along a road leading to the party.

It was senior year, seventeen years old, the soccer and football season just over, a party in the offing. Could life have been any better?

At the end of the school year, just before prom, my prayer was answered: On a humid, cloudy night, I got my call. Already I’d racked up my cardiac arrest (that neighbor of ours) and a chaotic highway accident (an unsatisfactory broken femur), but this sounded promisingly bad.

We were summoned to a vast saltwater farm with its rocky hillocks and ancient oaks, a place we knew for its Revolutionary War battles and midnight cow-toppling. This night, however, the
darkness was almost a substance, and even as we directed our spotlight up into the trees, the rays were absorbed, leaving nothing to see. Eventually we came upon a car on the shoulder with its hazards blinking, someone who had witnessed the accident and rushed to help. The ambulance stopped, and I jumped out.

The way I’d dreamed it always involved saving someone. I would perform some suitable miracle, and later, in the most ridiculous part of the fantasy, my victim and I would become friends, exchange gifts, and, if she was pretty, maybe get married, her wheelchair being proof that I’d snatched her from sure death. Now, I ran over soggy ground to the car. I shone a flashlight over boulders and downed branches. The car was off in the trees, sitting a couple of feet back from the gnarled trunk of an oak, the hood accordioned to half its normal size. The driver’s door was ajar and a dark figure loomed in back, the Good Samaritan trying to pull and hold traction from his awkward angle.

Despite his best efforts, the woman’s head still lay facedown on the steering wheel. I could smell gasoline and manure—and gin and beer. I, too, was in an awkward spot, down on one knee inside the open front door. I positioned the flashlight on the dash and then, as I placed my hands over each side of her head, over her ears, with both my pinkies lifting from below her jaw, her face rose before me. Her skin was soft to touch but she was badly bloodied, and her nose, where there had been one, was now just a piece of bone. There was a clean hole in her forehead and something green and gooey seeped out. Her eyes, half shut, were white. She was groaning softly, rhythmically, the kind of groan that reflected a pain so deep it may not have been felt consciously.

I regretted my decision the minute I made it. And now we were stuck together.

It was going to be a long time before we could move her—we were going to need the Jaws of Life to get her out—let
alone before she would see an emergency room. The girl, or woman, maybe in her midtwenties, had hit the tree going very fast, fast enough for her skull to have been punctured and brain matter to have seeped out.

I can recall a lot about the minutiae of that night, about how the firefighters arrived, lighting huge spots on the car, making it seem like day in that glade, and then cutting her out, the whining of the saw. Another ambulance arrived, with grown-up paramedics authorized to administer drugs, which they did, running lines from drip bags to the veins in her arms. There must have been fifty or so people working, spectating, helping, at the height of the action. And then after they cut her loose, I remember standing on the back runner of the grown-up ambulance, standing there as they sheared the clothes from her body—her skin was pale, her breasts full—and put in more lines and an oxygen mask over her face, trying to stabilize her before leaving for the hospital. At my feet, her blood ran in rivulets out the open back door.

Afterward, when the grown-up ambulance went screaming off, everyone took their things and quickly retreated. We were pretty shook up; someone on our crew was crying. The woman was in a deep vegetative state, on her way to death by morning. And we’d done nothing to change that. I myself came closest to a feeling when the clouds parted and the moonlight came down over everything, including the serrated wreckage, in thick, pale, silver beams, a moment that could have been godly but was nothing of the sort. The feeling was of betrayal, and shock.

Now, whenever my mind slips to such naïve meditations—these mock-heroic dreams of saving anyone from anything—I need only conjure that girl’s face in my hands again. I need only hold that unmendable body close to realize how far I’d traveled from Thanksgiving. I got what I’d wished for, and I wanted to give it all back.

One last memory of that night: When I came home in my ambulance whites and orange fluorescent jacket, splatters of blood on my sneakers, my father was sitting at the kitchen table, his work arrayed before him in scribbles on the yellow legal pads he favored. I gave him a few details, leaving out the part about when the girl’s parents showed up at the scene.

“It sounds pretty bad,” he said.

“Yeah, it was,” I said.

There was a pause, a long one. I couldn’t look him in the eyes for fear it would all come out, all at once, in a great overwhelming gush, everything I’d held down. He might have already understood this. But I’d spent the year arming and armoring myself, and no one dared to approach anymore.

My father sat at the table, his face registering a father’s concern. If he had something he needed to say—or a question to ask—he thought better of it. Or I cut him off, on my own at last.

“Good night,” I said, putting my foot on the first step of the back stairway leading to my room, unmoving for a moment, then shifting my weight heavily to climb.

“Good night, son,” said my father.

This past Thanksgiving marked the thirty-third anniversary of Jax’s car accident and of Seger’s death. For a long time afterward, you could see scars of the wreck on the trunk of the maple tree they hit, written in what seemed like Sanskrit. It was hard to look at; but for the few marks, the tree itself seemed to flourish, carrying no memory of that night.

Over time, the enormous trunk healed itself, its bark without blemish, and then one day it was simply chainsawed to widen
the sidewalk. In all those years that the tree had loomed there—blooming its gaudy leaves in the spring, losing them like discarded twenties in the fall—I’d pass by searching for evidence that the accident had actually happened, that it hadn’t just been a dream. My attitude was coldly forensic. I often thought to stop and touch the markings, like an archaeologist, though never did. When the tree suddenly vanished—only pale sawdust littered the spot—there came this rush of feeling: sorrow, elation, guilt.

Three decades’ worth of teenagers have since been released from that high school, from that town, and taken their place in the world. Or not. It feels like yesterday, and at the same time one of those dark fairy tales from very long ago. After the trial, we spoke less and less about the accident, and then for many years dropped it altogether except for Jax’s occasional quips about seeing one of the two others around town. Or a passing mention of having visited Seger’s grave.

For years Jax seemed twitchy, on guard and alert, and, underneath it all, inconsolable. Sometimes when visiting home, I might drop in on him on a Sunday to find him hungover, on the couch beneath a blanket watching old horror films. Eventually, some time after the rest of us, he married. A few years back, when I told him I wanted to write something about the accident, he said, “Write the truth, then.”

It took a long while, because, as I found, the magnetic field around the dead really does repel memory at first. It even went against my own inclinations, violating both the privacy of our friendship and the larger cultural prohibitions of digging up the past. But I couldn’t shake Seger, the one who couldn’t speak at all, the one who kept coming back. One newspaper article from the time of the civil trial detailed the courtroom testimony of a financial expert, who was asked to assess the amount of money Seger might have generated in his life. The expert said $1.3 million
was a fair guess, which would amount to about $2.6 million today, but it seemed all the more tragic to reduce his life to a number like that. Give us any other number: YouTube videos sent or dogs owned, favors for neighbors or baby pictures emailed. Before the rock closed over the vault, I wish someone had speculated about what he’d found that night, when he passed through the tree.

I’m a father with three children, the eldest of whom has recently entered high school. Jax also has three kids, in the same configuration: two boys and a girl, the eldest a dead ringer for his dad. Over the years, as I moved west and farther from home, and then back within the same time zone, I’ve watched Jax move within a five-mile radius of where we grew up, from living with our buddies in a small house near the water, to a bigger house with fewer buddies closer to the water, to his own bachelor bungalow, to a comfortable, white clapboard home with a pond out back, which is about a mile from the site of the accident.

Perhaps we really are surrounded by the past, made prisoners of it. No matter how far we travel, how hard we try to forget, the scarred tree forever stands by the side of the road, if only in our minds. The only way to drive by is to set the past straight, once and for all, by remembering.

Talking to my brother, a lawyer now with kids of his own, I ask what he recalls about that night, and he says two things: (1) that the EMT from our ambulance service had told him something he couldn’t ever forget: that Seger had been found with a shard of glass in his eye, and (2) that I had originally planned to join Jax and the rest of them on that evening, prior to the party.

And maybe if I had, I would have missed the opportunity to write this down, as I have, which is the only way I can make sense of anything, or realize ultimately that there’s no sense to be made of it: that once upon a time in a faraway town, we grew up—and
some of us lived. And some of us tried to turn away, but never quite could.

But most of all, if I’d been there that night, I couldn’t tell you now that Jax, my old friend, can still be a beautiful pain in the ass and the truest person I’ll know. If I were never to see him again, this would be my memory of him, of that year: the bucket full of blues, the encyclopedia without God, the energy of his wiry body flying, bowed in the sun, trying to remember why he ever wanted to leave this earth in the first place.

M
ANCHESTER AND
L
ONDON WERE DELAYED ON
account of weather, and Tel Aviv was a faulty wing flap. Tenerife, Johannesburg, Málaga, and Marrakech had been canceled for various reasons, and stragglers from those flights were trying to figure out their next move on this humid, thunder-stricken night at the end of May. Some were arguing with the airlines; some were studying the ever-shuffling flight board; some were headed off to nearby hotels, parched and ready for cold gin and tonics to ease the dull throb of their long day. A few scanned the terminal mournfully, searching for the right bench or piece of floor to camp on for the night. Later it would make a good story: the purgatorial night spent in Terminal 1 at Charles de Gaulle Airport.

Meanwhile, the flight to Libreville, which was to leave in two hours, had brought a raucous horde to the Air Gabon counter, the women dressed in colorful gowns, a cacophony of clipped tribal dialects punching holes in the fabric of the terminal’s white noise. The group, maybe two hundred in all, had materialized
suddenly, as if by incantation, and would just as quickly vanish, in the silver gut of a 747 roaring southward over the desert for home. Like everyone in this place, they were apparitions, part of the incessant tide that rushed, then ebbed, that filled and emptied, filled and emptied—at moments leaving the airport a lonely beachhead, one that bore no trace of those who had just been there.

As the hour grew late, the terminal took on a nocturnal malevolence. To be inside this place was not unlike being inside the belly of a dying thing. Upon its completion in 1974, Terminal 1 had been hailed as a triumph, an architectural breakthrough built by Paul Andreu, who had proclaimed that he wanted the airport “to project the image of Paris and France as one of equality, and prowess in engineering and commerce.” It appeared as a gray doughnut-shaped flying saucer—outer space brought to earth—with a burbling fountain at its open-air center. But over the years the fountain had fallen into disrepair and the water was shut off, revealing, behind its vapory curtain, a wreckage of rusted pipes and a cement shed, the inevitable artifacts of the future disintegrating, then becoming the past.

The whole world passed through this place, on the way to Paris, or from Paris, or simply using Paris to leapfrog to the next time zone. Disembodied voices called passengers to their gates, where they were delivered heavenward. Soccer teams and school bands tromped through, as did groups of old people wearing the same fluorescent T-shirts or church groups wearing the same baseball caps. They sat reading or photographing each other. They went for coffee or hamburgers. They wheeled by in wheelchairs. And then they were gone.