Weeping Underwater Looks a Lot Like Laughter (26 page)

“What did you say?” she shouted, picking up her broken aviator sunglasses.

“What?” I said, understanding what fools we all were and falling back against the maple tree and squeezing out the last drops. Emily snapped her bikini on. I stepped into my boxers. We cleaned off in the lake, then dripped our way back to the parking lot.

Thirty-two

In the aftermath of the episode just reported I recalled with humiliation my adolescent fantasy of colliding with the sort of tragic drama that spawned the careers of countless artists, typically drug-addicted and hypersexual. While I avoided mentioning it before, in the wake of Katie’s death I wallowed in the hopeful conviction that I would soon find myself bowled over by a creative inclination that would allow me to rise each morning certain of my life’s purpose and the meaning of its prerequisite misfortunes. But three months had passed and no such inspiration had revealed itself. Assuming it never would, I was resigned to thinking that at best I’d end up one of those silently scarred old men who fascinates us all, a lonely nutcase who’d rant against seat belts and bike helmets and nicotine patches, all the things that made us weak and disallowed the possibility of a true death at a young age when we could still respect ourselves because we hadn’t compromised a single inch. While I refuse to believe that I’ve really become such a person, from time to time I lose myself and go silent for a few days, or curse more often than feels healthy, or consider buying a one-way ticket to Tonga without warning anyone of my plans or bothering to inform them afterward. Just last week I received a surprise visit from Zach’s family that found me alone in my garage, grimacing over a model train set and snapping at my two kid nephews when they suggested I was setting the track too long and I’d run out of rails and there’d be no way of connecting the loop.

The summer after my senior year came to an official close with a Labor Day barbecue in my parents’ backyard. Under the glow of a neon blue bug zapper, during a grown-up deliberation on the increasingly fine line between office heckling and harassment, I began perusing the possibility of quitting college before I’d bothered to start. My final decision in this direction came early the next morning, hours before I was set to leave for Davenport on the same highway that Emily would take to Northwestern. Since my parents had taken the day off work to help move me into the dorm, we found ourselves with more than enough time for a round table discussion on the nobility of confronting life’s most spectacular challenges. In illustration of this point my mom detailed the difficulties of working forty-five hours a week for a cowardly dentist named Dr. Rudge, who hated all his patients and insisted she keep them at bay until the last possible minute, after she’d finished all the cleaning and scraping and there was nothing else to do but smile and nod at the X-rays. But when it became clear she was beginning to doubt the rewards of these daily struggles, my dad played the angle of mathematics, somehow summoning an impromptu set of statistics relating the relationship between “temporarily” delaying college and lifelong economic failure. At one point they even suggested I live at home for a semester and commute to Ames, even though my dad played for Iowa and we’d spent half our lives ragging on the Cyclones. In an attempt to prove my desperation, I ended up begging them to take their old jobs back so we could all move to Davenport together. To my adverse surprise, my mom reacted as though this were a reasonable option, which forced me to make an ugly blubbering mess of myself, claim a mental breakdown, and swear to pursue an ambitious independent education while battling my Des Moinesian demons.

Let me say that these declarations were not as fickle and insincere as they probably sound, especially in the absence of the more personally cogent argument I’d developed throughout the previous sleepless night. The full truth is that I harbored grave discomforts at dragging a less than healed version of myself back to the city of my childhood, thus poisoning a sanctuary of purified memories with all the anxieties that marked life after Katie’s death. While I’ve vowed not to dwell on the nastier episodes of my grieving process (and already broken this vow in the long-winded account of my experience with Mr. Jaffe and Hu and the hole sixteen golfers), it is necessary to know that at various stages throughout the summer I’d experienced no less than cloak-and-dagger nightmares, birthmark distortion, the sprouting of one glaringly white arm hair three inches long, false awareness of leaking faucets, jealousy, constipation, denial, as well as suspicions of premature balding and total spiritual collapse. (Imagine such a specimen cruising the Davenport Children’s Zoo entangled in wanton images of a five-year-old version of himself happily slapping a goat as it stuck its head through the fence to take a bite out of his Captain America T shirt.)

In terms of reasons unrelated to physical health, I should mention that I had no enthusiasm for bunking in a concrete cell with a complete stranger, or pledging a fraternity, or making new friends. I’d also shunned all aspirations of studying journalism, largely a consequence of being slandered in more than one article in the
Des Moines Register
(which I still consider unworthy of its national repute). Earlier that morning I’d reexamined one such article, paying particular attention to the front-page photo of Katie dolled up in her confirmation dress, trying not to smile, but surrendering a last-second smirk reminiscent of a horny young bride on her wedding day. As I stared into her eyes I began developing threads of reasoning connecting Katie’s crush to her death, a tentative theory that she’d staged the accident as a way of tempting me to dive from the tree and race out to save her by way of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation while treading water in the middle of the lake.

Thirty-three

I accepted my first full-time job a few days later at the urging of Frank Moretti, the husband of my mom’s best workmate Barb, and my dad’s singular substitution for his “good-time boys” from Davenport. The Morettis didn’t have kids and were famous for bragging about Zach and me (they once drove to Red Oak to cheer me on in their hometown where all the locals booed and called them big-city traitors) and somehow Frank convinced me I was doing him a big favor. In the mid-nineties, when Frank’s company was still called Moretti Construction and he wore a handlebar mustache and couldn’t stop eating the fat off of everything, Frank had at least half a dozen crews working simultaneously around the city. This made it possible for him to transfer me from one demolition job to the next like an itinerant patient with a prescription for cathartic sledgehammering. Over the next few weeks I smashed outdated kitchens and bathrooms, condemned pool houses, old-time bingo parlors, and even a few bank rupted, fancily decorated dinner clubs on the South Side. (On one of my first days a ceiling fell in on me and a fellow worker while ripping up a basement left water-damaged since the Great Flood. Neither of us was badly hurt, but I passed out and dreamt I was the construction worker star of a soap commercial, scrubbing away the day’s grit and grime while Emily waited with a towel outside the shower door.) I woke even earlier than I had to, doing a hundred push-ups before setting off on long morning runs like an Ironman triathlete who’d stepped it up from wrestling rednecks with cauliflower ears to battling mountains, deserts, and oceans. In the early evenings I got to know every librarian at the Urbandale library—more precisely, they got to know me—and I checked out stacks of novels, plays, and epic poems, mostly working with a group of Russians armed with ferocious reading lists of their own collected works. I teetotaled and went to bed at ten and charged my new friends (some had the gall to impose strict codes of daily conduct, puritanical mores, philosophy, etc.) with training me as a virtuous troublemaker, a dissident troubadour on the hunt. Classes that fall were bedroom dialogues with compassionate outcasts and intellects like Alek, Fyodor, Mikhail, Boris, and their le sser-known acquaintances whose moral sensibilities still crushed me down to size. I cross-examined them, underlined and vocalized them, lay for existential banter on the plush couches of their margins. (What the Schell girls would think if they could see me now! Swathed in the bandages of a mind-bending new idiom!)

In Emily’s first month of college we spoke at least once a week, though she was generally vague about her social life and our conversations often ended with me pondering the sordid possibilities of her big-city, self-help regimen. The biggest news I can recall from this period was that her parents spent the whole week of orientation at a hotel downtown. Apparently Mrs. Schell took the campus tour three or four times and persistently showed up at the dorm to deliver soaps, monogrammed towels, and other cutesy items she’d bought at expensive boutiques around town. But as the length and quality of our calls decreased, my thoughts shifted to Katie—her brazen pleasure in shouting my name, her tall tales addled by overwrought vocabulary, the way her piercing eyes gathered every detail at once, in a glance, like Emily’s but with the sly edge of the undercover. I relived every incident of her physical flounderings, including her crash to the Whitfield sidewalk and the spilled orange juice on the morning of her death. I even saw her in the moments I wasn’t there (alone drafting comics, laughing at her own jokes) and that might never have happened (bossing a frightened boyfriend to the back row of a movie theater, taking the initiative for her first kiss). It was during this period of labor, literary enlightenment, and reverie that I became entangled with the subject of Katie’s time capsule, soon convincing myself that it not only existed, but contained articles of profound insight into her life that would add layers of meaning to her obscenely premature death.

It must have been mid-October when I embarked on a short-lived search for the capsule, beginning with a dramatic visit to Bud Fuze Fords where I bought an eight-year-old pickup with new tires for less than the amount of my first Frank Moretti paycheck. I drove directly from the dealership to Whitfield Academy to casually interview a few of Katie’s old classmates. After witnessing the lineup of mothers edging inch by inch around the circular drive, I parked along the outer road, then progressed onto the school grounds in the character of a confident young administrator with an avid interest in secular education. As classes had just ended for the day, I found the hallways crowded with uniformed students ferreting through lockers and chasing one another, seemingly still caught in the happy throes of a playtime reunion after the summer break. I started off consulting the freshman bulletin board in the hallway. According to the lists of students, Katie’s former class consisted of three forms, each composed of approximately fifteen students. While I recognized few names on the lists, and none of the students at the lockers nearby, I happened on better luck when I entered a ninth-grade social science room covered with enormous maps of practically every region in the world. With the full realization that I had no idea what I was looking for, my curiosity led me to a series of blown-up satellite photos, one of which overlooked the Whitfield grounds and gave me the impression that, if caught rummaging around, I’d be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Midway through a quickened tour of class photos and sign-up sheets, I found myself perusing a poster for an academic club called “Republic of the Debate.” While the poster was dated for the current semester, the promotional photos were clearly taken the previous semester, when I had a good feeling Katie had been involved. Sure enough, on further review, I found her posed as the most serious member of a foursome that included a curly-haired kid trying to cozy up to her, back-to-back with his arms crossed as though to lend the impression that he and Katie were the cornerstone powers of the squad. According to the text below, this student was none other than Thomas Staniszewski.

Feeling that a return visit would raise undue suspicion, I quickly headed for the parking lot, where I asked a random sampling of students if they knew where I might find him. I received more than a few condescending laughs at my mispronunciation of his surname, but was eventually directed to the far end of campus where I found him sitting alone on a cement pyramid, absorbed in a banged-up copy of
Moby-Dick
. Thomas Staniszewski was a sturdy young guy with baby fat and soft freckles. I judged him an obvious outsider, but also a guy who exuded the sort of quirky confidence that would eventually attract what I considered the right kind of women.

“Thomas
Stanshefski
?” I asked, mumbling over his surname as I took a seat next to him.

“Stan-ih-
shevski
,” he said, rolling his eyes. “The
w
is pronounced like a
v
.”

I repeated after him, noting a moderate nervousness as he looked me over, trying to figure out what I was up to without asking. I can’t say that I blamed him. While preparing for the role I was currently performing I’d not only worn a pair of ironed khakis and navy sports jacket, but shaved my facial scruff until all that remained was a thin auburn mustache, neatly groomed in the Cuban style. While a broad, toothy smile might have better accompanied such a cut, in reaction to Thomas’s obvious unease I felt my voice drop an octave and my expression shrink into something confused and borderline grim. Rendered speechless, Thomas turned his attention back to his book.

“Pardon the interruption,” I said. “I’m Rick Wilder, on special assignment from the National Board of Education. I just had a meeting with your principal concerning Katie Schell, who was one of the top contestants this year in our Odyssey of the Mind Competition. First off, let me say how sorry I am to hear about this summer’s accident.”

Thomas clapped his book shut and began packing his backpack with the notebooks next to him, obviously on his way to ditching me. I can only guess that his eventual decision against this course of action was based on my mention of his principal, which might have given him the impression that I wouldn’t be so easy to avoid the next time around. Before he spoke his shoulders dropped and he nodded to himself, softening his defensive stance.