A Hard and Heavy Thing (7 page)

[That was my opening, I suppose. I had been lingering around, waiting for him to ask me point blank why I had come, and I should have known that's as close as he'd ever get. In a way, I guess, I had lost my nerve. Or maybe there was some kind of mustard seed remaining deep inside my unrepentant soul. It's more likely that I simply realized that you can't break up with your pastor like you can with your girlfriend. You can't just waltz into his office and say, “I'm done with you and your kind, but let's all stay friends.” They'll never let you go.

You'll never let me go, will you? Giving me the space and freedom I want isn't your idea of love, is it? You'd rather cut me deep on earth to spare me pain in hell, whereas I think hell is right here.

I'm recalcitrant, and you're indomitable. We're all impervious to change.]

Levi stood up and pushed his chair back with his legs. “I don't know why I came here. Maybe to confirm what I already knew.”

“And what, my boy, did you already know?”

“That I can't just pretend.” He waved his hand around. “That this hell is the product of some benevolent deity. Turn on the news. Not just tonight, but on any given night.” Uncle Thomas stared at him and the silence grew uncomfortable. Levi looked down at his shoes and muttered, “God is dead.”

“You can't pretend? And quoting philosophers now? You've got it all figured out? Big smart grown-up, full of logic and reason?”

“Oh forget it.”

“Oh, did I offend you?”

Levi moved to the back of the chair and pushed it in, but made no move to leave.

“Fair enough and perfectly natural, I suppose,” said Uncle Thomas with a shrug. “Young men are often filled with doubt, with restlessness and aimless wanderings. No direction really.” He leaned back in his chair again, and gripped the armrests with each hand. “But you come in here tonight, I try to help you find that direction somehow, and what do you do? You hear something you don't want to hear, and you stick your fingers in your ears and say la la la la. I didn't expect that from you.”

Levi walked to the door. “And I didn't expect to hear the rote recitations of a brainwashed old preacher.”

He walked back through town, through dark alleys, and then he went out of his way to walk along the river. He pulled leaves and twigs from the trees as he walked, picked them apart between his fingers, and dropped them on the ground.

[I spent so much time that year walking alone, trying to figure it out, trying to articulate in my own mind why I was so full of ennui and discontent, but I couldn't. I still can't. Maybe restless is just how it feels to be young.]

When Levi finally returned home, Nick sat smoking a cigarette on the landing at the top of the stairs with his back against the wall. The bruising under Nick's eyes had turned a sickly yellow at the edges. When Levi reached the top of the stairs, he sat next to his friend.

They smoked together in silence for a while. The weight of that strange day hung between them.

“Hey Nick?” Levi said.

“Uh huh.” He exhaled and stared ahead at the cigarette held up in his lap.

“Remember that first time you did Ex with me? The day when your Opa died?”

“Don't remind me.”

“You disappeared and I found you two hours later in your bedroom rocking back and forth. The notebook was open where you wrote over and over, ‘I'm going to hell. I'm going to hell. I'm going to hell.'”

Nick didn't say anything. He just nodded slightly and took another drag from his cigarette.

“I'm sorry I made you do that,” Levi said.

Nick turned toward Levi and cocked his head and squinted an eye. “I know.”

Levi stood and stepped over Nick's legs to get to the door.

“And Nick?”

Nick looked up.

“You're not going to hell.”

Nick looked back down the stairs. “I know.”

The university canceled classes on Wednesday. Nick went off to work a double at Oma's Pub while Levi sat on his couch watching the talking heads on the news. He smoked cigarettes, and every few minutes he'd spark his bowl and take a deep pull. At some point during mid-morning, his dad called.

Levi picked up the cordless from the floor in front of the couch.

Not one for pleasantries, his dad got down to business. “I think it probably goes without saying, but just so you don't complain later that no one told you, we won't be having the funeral there on Thursday. All the flights have been canceled.”

“Got it, Dad.” Levi kicked his feet up onto the couch and rested on his elbow. “So when do you think you'll be back?”

“How in the world should I know?”

“I dunno,” Levi mumbled. “I didn't know if maybe the airlines told you when you could fly again or anything.”

“Nope. It's a mess.”

“So like, what's up with Grandpa's body then?” Levi pictured the body of his grandfather sitting in the back of some truck on the flight line of the Phoenix airport. He pictured the skin drawing tight against the cheekbones, and he imagined the makeup on the face of the embalmed corpse drying out and cracking as it waited. He could see the gray skin underneath the cracked makeup practically sweating in the heat of the truck's boxy cargo bed. He pictured blue embalming fluid leaking from his dead grandpa's eye sockets as his waxy face melted.

Levi heard his father sigh with impatience. “What do you mean what's up with it?”

“I mean like, how long can it wait? You know.” Levi flipped through the channels and stopped on some hip hop music videos.

“No, Levi. I don't know. How long can it wait? Wait for what? He's dead.”

Levi sat up. “How long before it rots, Dad? How long before the body rots? I mean, geez. Don't act like you don't know what I'm saying. It can't just sit there forever, right? It's already been like what, four days? Five?”

“I have no idea. I'm sure it will be fine. Aunt Trudy's been talking to the funeral home. She has a guy.”

“She has a guy? Like a funeral guy?”

“I don't know. Yeah. A funeral guy. Some friend of hers. I'm sure he'll know more. Hey, I gotta go. Call me tonight and see if I have an update.”

“How about you call me? I can't afford long distance.”

“Maybe work more than five hours a week stacking magazines and you could afford long distance.”

“In the meantime, you call me.”

An hour later, his sister called. She lived in one of the big new houses on the south side with her husband and was working on starting a catering company. She had good credit.

“Hear from Dad?” Levi was sure she already knew the answer to her own question. He was also sure she had just gotten off the phone, but her conversation with their dad would have been far more detailed and protracted.

“Yup.”

“Can you believe all this?” she said.

“Believe what? Like The Attacks or that Grandpa's body is rotting in Phoenix?”

“What? Grandpa's body is rotting?”

“Forget it.”

She moved on and spent considerable time lamenting that they hardly saw each other even though they lived in the same town. She asked him a lot of questions about what was going on in his life, if he needed a job, and he gave a lot of monosyllabic answers rather than ask her the obvious, which would have been, “Why are you just now for the first time taking an interest in what's going on in my life?” He flipped through the channels some more.

Finally, she drew out her words in resignation. “Guess I'll letchya go.”

“K, bye.”

“Love you,” she said.

He hung up the phone and went back to watching television.

•••

This is how things went. By Thursday, pragmatism beat out reflection in most of Levi's classes as many of his professors got back down to business. The Logic professor's aide taught syllogisms; History of the Civilized World through 1850 hosted a guest speaker with a giant mustache and a propensity for dropping f-bombs, who gave a lecture on misogyny in American politics; and Professor Brendan, a big-breasted post-grad adjunct with thick-framed glasses that drove Levi wild, gave a PowerPoint called “
Godot,
or No? Minimalism in Modern Casting.” None of the professors dared start a discourse about The Attacks, with the exception of Dr. Buddy Jackson, the Creative Writing transplant from Purdue prone to tie-dyed Kafka T-shirts tucked into his khakis. He had Einstein hair that matched his bright white tennis shoes.

He burst into the room in a flurry. [This is a cliché he would have hated, but it literally was like a flurry with much movement and papers seeming to fly around him at all times like snowflakes. He also would have hated the shifting points of view, these constant regressions into the colloquial first-person, and that's what he would have called them: regressions. I'm almost certain he would say I was unsure of my own authorial voice, that I was uncertain of my own narrative authority. And did I really need to intrude into the story using brackets like hugs? And did I need a hug because I lacked confidence? To which I now reply: If I sound unsure of myself, it's because I am.] He shouted that he was tossing the syllabus because in light of recent events, it was no longer needed.

Dr. Jackson pointed at some mousy girl in the back. “Do you remember when Kennedy was shot?”

She shook her head. He asked the same of all the eighteen-year-old kids in the room and everyone shook their heads no. Finally, he came to Louise, a nontraditional student who looked old enough to be Levi's mother. “How about you?”

She pulled a streak of her gray shoulder-length hair from her mouth. “A little. I was in kindergarten. I just remember they took everyone to the cafeteria and we all watched the television. It was a big deal.” She put the hair back in her mouth.

Dr. Jackson clapped and hopped up into the air. “Exactly. Everyone was crowded around the television. Everyone can say where they were. Everyone can remember the images—you know, Jackie climbing over the back of the convertible to pick up pieces of her dear husband's brain.” He paused. A respectful silence. “Do you at least remember those images from the day? I know you're a young lady, but do you remember the footage on the news of the president being shot?”

Louise lifted her eyebrows in rapt attention and nodded.

“Oh, so can I,” said Dr. Jackson. “I can remember it so vividly. The breaking news. The color video clips––blue sky, Jackie in her pink Chanel suit. The gruesome home video of the president's head just—” he put his hands together and pulled them apart, fingers splayed.

He shook his head and looked around the room. “Except you all remember it the same way I do. It's fake. Artificial. I didn't even have a color television screen. They didn't show footage of the president being shot that day. And the Zapruder film with the clearest depiction of the assassination wasn't shown to the public until twelve years after it happened, when Geraldo Rivera showed it to the world on
Goodnight America
.” He bent his knees and looked around with his eyebrows up, waiting for reactions.

Levi looked around. Some people stuck their tongues in the corners of their mouths and furrowed their brows, pressing their ballpoint pens into their composition books as they doodled. Some people chewed on their pens and looked out the window. Some chewed their gum with the bored look of cows on pasture.

[This is our generation: Here we are; now entertain us.]

Dr. Jackson stood up, disappointed. “I'm lamenting here, people. No one can even tell the difference anymore between what they remember from that day and what they remember from a decade later. Isn't that a tragedy? And now, with the constant news and the World Wide Web and all of that, it won't take a dozen years to corrupt the collective consciousness, I'll tell you that for free.”

No one said a thing.

“Hemingway famously said it is valuable to a trained writer to crash in an airplane that burns. He also said there's no rule about how soon one should write about it. Apropos for this week, no? So use your imagination. Imagine yourself in one of those airplanes or one of those towers. Or the Pentagon. Or a field in Pennsylvania. You have ten minutes to write as many carefully chosen words as you can on The Attacks. And make it personal. Ten minutes. Ready and—” he looked down at his watched and waited for seconds to tick off. “Go.”

[We had not been trained as writers and we had not crashed in burning planes, but Dr. Jackson paced through the aisles assuring us that we would definitely want to keep what we were writing. This would be our shield against the false memories created by the shifting landscape of media. This would ensure that we created our own consciousness instead of falling victim to the collective consciousness, thereby enabling us as writers to help
create
the collective consciousness rather than be manipulated by it. And five, ten, or twelve years from now—when other people finally got comfortable writing about this stuff—novelists would be writing about nothing more than news clips and iconic photographs, e.g., poignant images of men walking out of the ashes and ruffled men in suits jumping to their deaths, instead of anything they actually experienced. Or even worse, they'd all be writing about how they
should
have felt or what they were
supposed
to be feeling rather than what they actually did feel. But what we were doing, he assured us again, was our inoculation against all that. What we were doing—he stamped his foot again—was creating something that could last generations.

No one told him he told lies.

No one spoke up and said that what he proposed was inappropriate and opportunistic. Revolting and immoral. No one told him we were too far away while real people were too close. No one told him it's a sin to create drama where there is none. It's a sin to steal the stories of those who have earned them.