The Hero's Body (24 page)

For whatever reason, I can't remember the ceremony at the church, can't see in my mind the casket at the altar, can't hear the priest and his homily, the holy sentences he would have said. I have no reason to have wanted to bar this from my memory, but barred it is. The graveside scene I remember well, in part because this cemetery had been a daily sight in our lives. It lay between our house and my grandparents' house, and each day we'd driven past its gated green sprawl. People rarely visited this cemetery, but still it was tediously groomed, a placid last stop along the railroad tracks, beside the small regional airport. You could hear and see the red, the yellow, the blue prop planes descending just over the oaks and spruces at the rear.

As a depressed teen—after sunk friendships, after family quarrels, after breakups—I'd walk here with a pen and notebook and sit on some stranger's grave to vomit doggerel I wanted somebody to discover after my suicide. The child isn't certain of literature's personal utility; he understands storytelling but not storytelling's repeatable application to his own living. The adolescent, romantic though he is, begins to see, to intuit, how the right sentence or stanza, how
the elevation of language, connects to his too-frequent upheavals, how it can offer the promise of rescue. My teenage melancholy buttressed my investment in literature; it was then, during those years of puzzling and private anguish, that I fully understood what my life would become, how my vista on the world would form itself.

And now—I was back at this cemetery much too soon. When Freud wrote that the death of the father is the most defining moment of any man's life, he must have meant that the son becomes the father if he wishes to keep the father's essence alive. He must annex the father's selfhood and spirit. I was agonizingly aware of that at my father's funeral: the immensity of it, a central largeness that made my mind buzz, made my senses dulled under such an insistent sun.

It's sweet to think you suffer as a unit, withstand the barrage as a family, but each suffers, each tries to withstand that barrage, entirely on his own. Pain doesn't transfer; it insists on
you
, wants only you. What are those annealing properties of pain we hear so much about? We've turned Nietzsche's macho lie—
that which does not kill you makes you stronger
—into a T-shirt mantra for suburban moms and the many disciples of self-help. The truth is that there are plenty of forces in the world that diminish you in the process of not killing you. A human soul is not a bone; it will not necessarily become reinforced at the broken places. Pain does not put up with bright alterations to its meaning: it is not
a lesson
, not
a learning experience
, is never
useful
. Randall Jarrell:
Pain comes from the darkness / And we call it wisdom. It is pain
.

My family's silhouettes sat beneath a tent to my right, the sun throbbing behind them as I squinted, trying to make out their faces. Sweat-damp, I twisted in those miserable clothes, a cousin's navy three-piece, too baggy through the crotch, too cramped at the shoulders. Then I blathered graveside, telling a hundred mourners or more that this grief felt like arson, like acid crashing through my arteries. I said that no one had had the right to ask my father to stop riding that
Yamaha, and that if he had stopped in order to mollify our concern, it would have been a death of another kind. To keep a man from his passion, to withhold from him the daring he needs, the ebullient, engrained desire that wakes with him each morning—
that
is death. We should all be so fearless, I said.

Then I told them that this day, May 11, was my twenty-sixth birthday, and to bury your father on the day of your birth is to become truly born. And I'm certain that when those last words left my mouth I didn't fully know what I meant by them. Only later did I understand how Freud's declaration lent them a sliver of meaning: I would have to become my father. In his absence, I would become him. Which meant, I thought, racing motorcycles—for several hours that seemed a very real possibility for me—and also impregnating Anna just as soon as I could manage it, having a child of my own in order to replicate my father, and in that way, keep him alive.

It was nonsense, of course, every inch of it. The next week, Nicky would tell me that a longtime friend of my father, a fellow carpenter, after hearing my spontaneous eulogy that day, said of me, “He's a man. To stand there, to say those things. He's a man.” More nonsense, though, however pleased I was to hear it then. Later, I'd feel somewhat ashamed of this eulogy, the muttering of the expected bromides, just as I'd feel uncertain about our decision to display that lionizing photo at the wake. I'd acquiesced to my family's masculine code that day, done what the code demanded.

I'd internalized that code, after all, even though I'd been in violation of it my entire life, taking my father's own escape impulses much further, breaching the Manville version of manhood: with graduate school, with literature, with the eschewing of construction and motorcycles, with an awareness and deliberate expression of the code's frailty. Perhaps this made it all the more necessary for me to
man up
in these public ways, and at a time when the code was at its frailest. This meant muffling that internal scorn (
of course he'd be
killed on that goddamn thing
) and conforming to the day's procedure, choosing allegiance over disruption. In my most self-disparaging moments, this felt to me like weakness and complicity. But I don't know that I had it in me to behave in any other way.

Still—someone else should have spoken that day, someone less conscious of the pathetic inadequacy of language when confronted with calamity, of how the mind and heart just hang there in a charcoal cloud. Someone less apt to exploit the romantic pitch and pull of cemeteries.

I was no less conflicted when, the day after the eulogy, my grandparents asked me, in a query that was also a mandate, to compose the epitaph for my father's headstone. I had thirty-six hours to come up with lines to last the ages. This was no assignment I wanted, the deadline about three decades too soon. My family, I knew, expected lines that sounded the way they imagined poetry to sound: “Write something pretty,” Parma had told me. My preference for my father's headstone—a stanza by Herbert or Donne, by Father Hopkins or Auden—was so far out of the question as to make me seem ravingly garish for thinking it a preference at all.

How could I have been okay inscribing my father's headstone with lines that he himself would not have recognized or lauded or found remotely consoling? What is our duty to the dead when the dead don't care for duty? My answer is that the lines would not have been for him; they would have been for us. The dead don't need poems. In the end, it was that
us
which elbowed me into nixing the possibility of lines from Father Hopkins, because the
us
really meant my grandparents. They were the ones who'd be squinting at the lines each week, in whatever weather the season saw fit to give them. Their daily pilgrimage to the cemetery would last long after the rest of us had returned to our willed versions of normality.

I have a hard time understanding what I meant by the lines I wrote, and rather an easy time being embarrassed by them. I was
conscious of having to maintain an obedience to the uncomplaining stoicism of my family, its strictures of manliness and daring. For the sake of my grandmother, I had to gesture toward the afterlife, at the inevitability of reunion with my father; what was illusory for me was essential for her. I also wanted to hit the right sentiment without swerving into bathos, to be able to live with whatever words I chose, not to sacrifice too much of my own selfhood in the completion of this task. This wasn't mere difficulty; it was futility. So the epitaph turned out to be my elegy in miniature, the propaganda everybody needed, declamations of his strength and his love, of riding hard and building well, and of our becoming him in his absence, which makes sense only so far. Truly becoming him would have meant a Yamaha R1, meant killing ourselves at a hundred miles per hour.

IV

While we're alive we
live forever. Those aren't wheels; those are wings. High-performance machines raced to the brink of divinity. But cross that brink and you are not divine—you are dead. Even gods can be killed. Get killed in an instant and you're deprived of a final accounting.
He never knew what hit him
.

Imagine being too young and finding yourself about to die, conscious of dying by some ill fate, some wrong judgment—consider how downright mistaken it would seem. Your mind would speed before it slowed, would hop from yesterday to tomorrow before settling on the now, on the disappointment, the dread. And when it settled, you'd no doubt consider that negotiations were in order, a moment of diplomacy, some stab at deal-making to annul this error upon you. My father might have had that moment. Most likely he did not, not with his three injuries. That's what I learned after the funeral: he'd suffered three injuries, each of which was fatal—a broken neck, a crushed throat, and severe brain trauma. And maybe, in moments, I'm glad for that, for the quick obliteration, because negotiations with the Reaper never work.

Absence takes up space, has mass, moves from room to room. In its decisiveness, it seeks you. Someone ought to coin a term for that days-long stage between the buzzing of shock and the boredom of grief. Grief is much heavier, much stickier, than whatever precedes it.
Tiring and tiresome, grief will gain complete occupancy of you. On other days it felt as if a silent tearing had occurred at the hub of me, a ripping that sent vibrations out across my body, currents running just beneath the skin. After the initial jolt subsides, what you feel is closer to fear than grief. Lewis:
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear
. You are a tangle of regret for what's left undone, and of remorse for what's now undoable. You quail four or five times before noon. The month, the season, feels all wrong.

Details began filtering in from the six riding partners my father had been with on the day he died. He had complained of brake problems at the gas station just prior to the crash. He planned to lag behind, let someone else lead the pack. Yamaha had recently done a recall on some element of the R1's braking system, but my father never followed up on the recall, so one guy was convinced that my father's brakes failed when he went into that turn, because an expert rider doesn't just collide with a guardrail on a day you could not have painted any better.

Two other guys claimed they'd heard my father say, “I don't feel well,” a sentence he would not have spoken. A man who views the wordless enduring of pain as a sign of election does not gripe of feeling unwell, and certainly not to a clan of riders for whom machismo was a weekly contest. Someone else suggested my father might have had a heart attack as he went into that turn, but he was only forty-seven, and we don't have young heart attacks lurking in our family history. Another floated the idea that a deer might have bounded out in front of him, but just a minute before, a bevy of machines had screamed down the center of the road sounding like a war. No deer bounds out into that unless it's deaf.

There was also this: an irate old farmer in a pickup truck, not pleased by that scream of engines passing him at a hundred miles per hour. Someone offered the absurd speculation that, because my father was lagging at the rear of the pack, this farmer ran him into
the guardrail. So, a homicidal old farmer, then. But even a five-year-old can tell you: it's not possible for a pickup truck,
any
pickup truck, to gain ground on a Yamaha R1.

And then there was this: my father had mounted a camera to the anterior of the bike so that he might study his riding style and make improvements for the following Sunday. But the camera was missing, and it took me two days to discover that another rider had taken it before the police appeared at the crash site. He knew the evidence would show a hollering catalog of traffic crimes. This information created a clog in my chest that would not wash down. A man I did not know was in possession of my father's camera, and on that camera was the crash that killed him. I made infuriated phone calls and finally got ahold of the wife of the guy who'd taken the camera.

“Let me talk to Frank,” I said.

“Frank is very upset about this. Frank was very close to your dad. Frank can't talk right now.”

“
Frank
is upset? Did you just say to me that goddamn
Frank
is upset?”

That week, Frank returned the camera to my brother but I didn't ask if he watched the footage, if our father's crash was on the tape. It was enough for me that the camera was back in our possession, whatever my brother chose to do with it. We had the equivalent of a black box, and I know it makes little sense—grief cares nothing for declarations of logic; it takes whatever egress it needs, whatever path conforms to the enigmas of its own internal working—but I never considered watching it, and I don't think anyone else did, either. I wasn't aware of being concerned about the acceleration of my sadness, about glimpsing scenes that would alter my conception of my father. But watching the crash would have no doubt confirmed his recklessness and blame, and I needed to soak in denial, to
imagine
my route into his death, and in this way perhaps imagine my way into the last moments of his life.

I could see the point of other investigations, other inquiries that yielded to the agency of the imagination—I'd soon be obsessing over documents and details and diction, the coroner's report and police report, the testimony of his riding partners about that day—but I must have been living in a low-level fear of that camera's proof. I could not have proof, one way or the other, because the omission of proof is the only way the sacred stays sacred.

When the pack realized my father was no longer behind them, they waited. When he didn't show, they doubled back and discovered him half beneath the guardrail, the bike on top of his lower half. The old farmer in the pickup truck was there, and a couple who lived in the house nearby, and some others who had stopped. Another rider claimed he heard my father say “Oh God,” claimed he saw him move his arm on top of his chest as he was being lifted into the ambulance. He'd said it all the time, “Oh God”: in jest, in sarcasm, in exasperation, in exhaustion. When Pop found out that my father had mumbled “Oh God,” he said, “He knew he was hurt.”