by Jerome Gold
One of the kids told Harry that Brien had broken his window. Mike went to check on him while Harry opened the blood-spill kit, put on gloves, gown, boots, started for Brien’s room. Halfway there, Mike met him, said blood was everywhere. Harry stopped his progress, asked Mike to fasten the gown’s ties behind him, it was flapping between his legs. (Time, time—everything takes forever. But this was the age of AIDS, and the boy had been a prostitute.)
Brien was sitting on his bed, his back against the far wall. His left arm was extended—there were fresh cuts but they had stopped bleeding. His right hand was pressed against the side of his neck. Harry thought he may have cut his neck or stabbed himself and was trying now to stanch the flow of blood. There was blood on his right hand but it had dried—it must have come from his punching the window. The right side of his head and torso were in shadow. Maybe two seconds had passed since Harry opened the door to his room. Harry was standing at its threshold. He asked Brien what was wrong, then stepped into the room.
Brien had a large shard of glass in his right hand and was holding it against his neck. When Harry saw it he drew back. He said, “Come on, Brien. Give it to me.” Brien was terribly frightened. He was nearly unconscious with fright. Suns burned dimly in his pale eyes. Harry felt his balance shift. In Brien’s gray eyes Harry saw worlds not his own.
Brien made a quick downward motion with his hand and Harry heard something tear. Before he could move, Brien replaced the glass against his neck. Harry saw no fresh blood. Then—he didn’t know why; he could think of nothing else to do—he grasped Brien’s other hand and pressed it gently. As though he had been waiting for this specific signal, Brien threw the glass down on his bed and Mike came in and picked it up. Harry looked at Brien’s neck where he had stroked the glass across it. It was raw but was not bleeding.
For a moment after Mike took Brien out of his room Harry sat on his bed, pulling himself out of his eyes, away from the planets orbiting his fear. For a moment, two… Until he reached sixty feet he had not known what he intended, but at sixty feet he decided to continue down into the pit where, decades earlier, they had dredged the bottom to allow the oil tankers in. Ninety feet and down. In a moment he would feel a rush of heat roll up his body, beginning at his feet and washing like a wave to his head, always, for him, the first indication of nitrogen narcosis. Then he would lose his peripheral vision and get the taste of bile in his mouth. At a hundred and twenty feet his skin would get numb, as though it were covered with an additional layer immune to tactile sensation, and his mind would split from itself. Part of it would observe everything around him and another part would tell him that the first part was lying and that he should not believe what it saw and heard. Once, only once, did a third part reveal itself, and it told him that he should not believe either the first part of his mind or the second part, neither what he saw and heard nor the doubting of them.
But he did not experience either the doubt or the doubt of both doubt and certainty this time. At a hundred and thirty-five feet he leveled off and aimed for a wall of sapphire light in the distance. His body was very warm and he was sweating inside his wet suit. He swam for several minutes but he seemed to get no closer and he began to question how this shimmering blue glow could exist in a place without sun, where light graduated in its quality only between dusk and deep night. He began to wonder if he had made a mistake by going so far and he began to ascend.
All Air is Finite
I knew a boy who killed a man by dropping a rock off a bridge through the windshield of his passing car. After two years the boy had convinced himself that the rock had dropped itself.
The hardest story I ever heard, though one that ever repeats itself, concerns a boy who, diving a shipwreck at ninety feet with his father, witnesses his father’s getting tangled in a murk of cables and cannot extricate him. Ultimately his father sends him to the surface—all air is finite, a son’s no less than a father’s—to locate help, but of course the only help he can find is the help that will bring up the body.
This is as far as the story goes.
But there are questions. What would the boy have told himself? Certainly he would recognize eventually that his father, grasping the fact of his imminent death, had saved his son by sending him off in search of illusory help. And inevitably the boy would have asked himself what more he could have done.
But would he have asked himself when exactly did he know his father would die? Was it when he left him? Was it during his ascent? Or was it only on that sun-bright surface, that more common world of foot motility and unencumbered speech, that he understood at last that all air is finite? Would the boy, after two years or three of grief, have persuaded himself to despise his father for dying as he committed his son to live?
What did the boy do with his life? Did he mutilate it with drugs? Did he end it with a gun? Did he hide in a monastery or a university? Did he marry, beat his wife, murder his children?
The boy who dropped the rock that dropped itself went to prison, served his time, got out. I lost track of him, though I heard stories, unverified.
The second boy got life.
Jerome Gold is the author of fourteen books, including The Moral Life of Soldiers, Sergeant Dickinson, and Paranoia & Heartbreak: Fifteen Years in a Juvenile Facility, a memoir of the years he spent as a rehabilitation counselor in a prison for children. He has lived in or near Seattle for more than half his life.