As we left to go, my brother pulled me aside. He also worked at the ambulance service, and had heard that the night’s on-duty crew had left the scene with two bodies. When my brother said one of them wasn’t breathing, I reflexively thought, Don’t let it be Jax, and repeated that in my mind, imploring some higher power as my dad drove me beneath the sodium points of light on the highway. In the zero-sum of that moment, it didn’t even occur to me what the inverse meant: Let it be Seger. And how guilty I’d feel for years after about it.
Growing up, I thought my town was a wonderland. The lawns were always freshly cut, gardens overflowing with explosions of color, the blue sky etched with mystical fans of ice from the planes that came and went from New York. Somewhere out there was the wild world, but here, we lived in our own disassociated nirvana, a place where a kid felt protected and free. We rode our bikes everywhere. We swung on rope swings and swam in pools, or at the beach. There was nothing really to fear, so my mom set us loose out the back door each day, and we raced through the woods, to some neighborhood yard where there was always a game of football or Wiffle Ball raging.
There, too, lived Seger, an athletic kid with blond hair and blue eyes. I remember one year splitting time with him at quarterback on our Pop Warner football team, the little guys with good hands who conveyed the ball to bigger guys, who then tried to run through, or over, the opposing team. Later, in sixth grade, we’d hung out with two neighborhood girls, meeting after school, loitering, trying out the first rehearsals of sexual attraction. He took the lead, with the confidence of having older siblings. The louder and funnier and more kinetic he was, the more I struck a pose of dumb bewilderment.
And then we sort of lost track of each other. He moved, to Jax’s neighborhood by the Sound, and they became close friends. I saw him here and there, but didn’t really overlap again socially until high school. By this time, he’d become starting safety on the football team—but had a sentimental streak, too. Late at night, at whatever party, he could be counted on to hijack the stereo, caterwauling at the top of his lungs to one of his favorite songs. “And them good old boys were drinking whisky and rye …” He sang that song every time—and it became a ritual that made everyone laugh. Ah, there goes Seger again, we said. He sounds like a dying cat! Only later did we realize the irony. He’d been singing about an accident all along.
At the hospital that night, the waiting area was flooded in bright light and the stench of iodine. I kept replaying this disconnected memory of a summer Sunday earlier that year—the full-color positive to the stark negative of this moment—when I’d gone with friends from the ambulance to a remote reservoir where swimming was illegal, the sort of prohibition that was too hard to resist. We bought beer at some shady package store and, once on the right dirt road, pulled over and climbed through a hole in the fence, then hiked into a pine-lined lake where we leapt from rocky cliffs into clear drinking water. It was one of those endless afternoons, jumping, swimming, sunbathing on the rocks, all punctuated by salty gulps of cold beer as the day unfurled, then curled back on itself. Every hour felt like a day, and I remember returning home that night, my skin still hot from the sun, feeling as if I’d been gone a week.
Now, here we were, perched on a cold November night, at what felt like a certain end, in a state of suspension, as the seconds flew. The news was eventually delivered. Seger’s dad arrived, and heard for the first time about his son’s death. He was handsome like his son, with a smooth face, but now his expression contorted, and he let out a high-pitched keen that made us all tuck our heads lower, knotting our hands over our stomach.
Afterward, we sat all night—our circle of friends—stupefied, empty. We were all, more or less, facsimiles of each other. We got good grades, played sports, would soon be off to decent colleges. And now we were marked, too, however indirectly, by this night. So we waited for the news about Jax, with the same sense of dread. When the sky shifted from black to purple, someone told us to go home, that there’d be more news in the morning. So we got up and moved like automatons to our cars.
After getting dropped off by a friend, I dragged myself up the small hill of our driveway, climbing into bed, exhausted but wide awake, staring at the ceiling as the first light leaked in and shadows creeped there like a claw. I felt very old. Like I was so ancient, I might never move again. As if I’d turned to stone. But like a child, I thought, If I don’t come out from under this blanket, will it all go away?
We’d had a dead cat, of course—and our first dog (RIP, Buttons). There was my cousin Cindy who drowned when we were both five, but I’d been too young to comprehend. And my dad’s dad, who I never really knew though wish I had, attached to some weird bag at the end. But the accident was the first time someone in my everyday life—someone on the bus, someone in the cafeteria, someone in my PE class—had just vanished. Up until that point, I’d yet to encounter a dead body on any ambulance calls. And now Seger’s death led to the shock of that other question: Was Jax going to die, too?
No, it seemed, he wasn’t. The morning after the accident he struggled back up to full consciousness. Despite severe injuries, he was able to talk to his family—and he asked to see me, too. We’d been friends for nearly ten years by that point, first thrown together on a Little League baseball team. I drove back to the hospital—alone this time, in one of those first-generation Honda Civics the color of a yellow daisy button—wondering if he was disfigured or what he’d say, the traffic gliding with terrible normalcy.
When I was shown into the ICU, there he lay, hooked and wired, legs in weighted traction, wearing a neck brace. He was so pale I could see a network of veins under his face. He looked as if he’d just washed up on a limpid tide after the storm, having been a shipwrecked party to some unspeakable acts. His cheeks and forehead were pimpled with the buckshot of the shattered windshield. He struggled to raise his head. And I couldn’t look away.
When I’d first met Jax at second base—we played the same position—he stood spewing flecks that sparkled in the bright sun, making a Tourettic sprinkler of spit. I took note of his oversized mitt (didn’t he know that besides me he was the smallest one out here?), his untucked shirt, the points of sandy hair from the ridiculous shag beneath his maroon cap. He didn’t quite fit in the frame—brash, misplaced elf that he was. Off the field he wore strange, moccasin-like shoes he’d gotten while living in Europe.
Jax was a blurter, a motormouth, a fantastic nicknamer, the name capturing the thing in you that was your weakness, or your greatest exposure. For instance, there was another kid we knew who spoke in chopped-up, sputtering excitement, and as a young teen could often be found motoring around the Sound in his whaler, jumping waves. And so he became “Hooten, Hooten, Merrily.” (I’m not even sure what it meant, but it was perfect.)
And Jax was fearless. I saw him dive madly at ungettable balls, and later fly in a rage at his older brother or the class bully, scary for the fury of his attack, his willingness to sustain a hail of blows if only to land one. Once he launched himself onto the hood of a moving car, trying to reach the driver, a boyfriend of his sister’s. I saw him take flight many times from the wooden, paint-peeled railing at the Pier, plunging into the warm water of the Sound, his wiry body in catlike adjustment to the force of push-off, the midair moment of peace, then always that little spasm of joy as he crashed through the water’s surface.
Now here he was, Jax, the once-mighty berserker, laid low. In legends, he would have been the knight felled by the act no one dared to make, the wading of some rough river, the arrow slung at the giant, the throwing of his body at Doom, sacrificing his life for something perhaps meaningless. But here, in suburbia, he’d marked the days of our boredom by stunts and diversions, driving, say, with only his knees, to his girlfriend’s, over four miles of twisty road. Or jumping from a moving boat. Or laughing that laugh that was on you, and with you.
Everything in life held a joke, except this, right now. He rolled his eyes, trying to focus, sma
cked his cracked lips, unable to produce saliva for all the painkillers mainlined through the IVs needled in his arms. His tongue was swollen. He looked frightened, diminished. “I’m sorry,” he said with difficulty, then fell back to his morphine pillow.
That was it. But he’d needed to say it, and wanted me to convey it, to our friends—and beyond. Whatever had occurred on that night before Thanksgiving, he took full responsibility for it. His eyelids fluttered shut, while I stood awkwardly, watching him sink beneath the surface, as if bearing witness to a drowning. Then I was shown out.
It happens sometimes with the dead. A magnetic field builds around their absence compelling silence—or, worse, repelling memory, driving it underground. Until, later, it rises again. And it always does: a drive past the spot in the road, or the cemetery, or the house where Seger lived—then didn’t—and the recollection of a life, and the accident that claimed it, come back in bony fingers.
So how do you pry yourself loose of the past? We were teenagers then. We knew everything—and nothing. As the story got stranger some of us acted out in unaccountable ways. There were those who disavowed the accident entirely, while others, like me, stupidly went looking for a second accident, to reenact—or atone for—the first.
In the days and months after Jax hit the tree, we regularly visited him in his hospital room, where uneaten meals came and went on wheels, where he floated on the fine chemicals that inhibited his pain. When their powers dimmed, you could almost feel him sinking, wincing, fighting. He couldn’t move, couldn’t get up to pee on his own. Already thin, he quickly lost about twenty-five pounds. He had skin grafts, gnarled, scarred, screaming-red attachments on his feet and legs, both of which were badly broken. And yet, over time, as he regained his senses one by one, he tried to create a whole life up there: nurses who laughed at his jokes, a parade of friends that revolved through. His mother and girlfriend were a ubiquitous presence, as were the wobbly, Day-Glo blocks of uneaten Jell-O perched on the nearby lunch tray.
Once, several weeks after the accident, as if recording the severity of a crash he knew nothing about, I drove by the body shop to check on the condition of his beloved sports car, the one that he’d bought with money earned from odd jobs. But he pointed to a deck of glossy photos on the sill. Fanning them in my hands, I found shot after shot of the ruined car. “It’s still a miracle you lived,” I told him, instantly realizing the larger cliché that everything you might say in such a situation sounded clichéd, which is when I shut up about all that.
Of course, Jax saw no miracle in his survival. Seger was dead, and he hadn’t even been able to attend the funeral, the church pews loaded with friends who came as their own act of penance. (“The cemetery is my first stop when I get out of here,” Jax kept repeating.) And there was no miracle because, he knew, someone would be made to pay.
Jax was a brutal realist. Hung like a tattered kite in the antibacterial blankness of his hospital room, held up by wires and sinkered lines, he awaited his fate: to be charged by the police with manslaughter. His body already broken, the blow would hurt less than Seger’s death. But, still, it was a desperate way to think. He’d been reduced to an immobile fugitive whose faith rested on the fact that he might go to jail.
One other thing about the dead: With them so, too, goes God sometimes. This is normal, I suppose, in the aftermath of tragedy: to question one’s faith. But no matter how grim the circumstances, Jax never seemed to have done the same, for he was one of my few friends who didn’t go—by choice or force—to church every Sunday. There’d been a summer night between our sophomore and junior years when we sat out on the Pier, just the two of us, Jax reeling in blues. After he filled a bucket with them, and a school of thrashing bunker moved on (they beat the water into a desperate froth above the blues that gave chase), we sat staring at the stars draped over everything and got into an argument about God. I said He existed; Jax said no way. We ended up in his bedroom, paging through his World Book encyclopedia, as I tried to press my case with “facts.” The more I jumped from one entry to another—Noah’s Ark, the Ten Commandments, miracles—the more absurd my “scientific inquiry” sounded.
“It’s all made up,” Jax said, laughing more at my stubbornness. “You’re never going to find proof of Him in there.”
At Seger’s funeral they played another of Seger’s favorite songs, “Wild Horses,” with its lyric Childhood living is easy to do. People stood and said the right things. People—Seger’s girlfriend and parents, family and friends—became distraught.
I wanted to show some emotion, too—because he would be badly missed—but there I sat, boiling at God/no God, while otherwise disembodied, bringing the dispassionate intensity of my EMT training to every detail so I could report it back to Jax. As if we were all part of one body that could be fixed somehow, as if we could tick off the checklist—airway, breathing, circulation—to find the hidden ailment stuck in the left ventricle, and be saved.
Soon, the enforced patterns of our quasi-martial school life reasserted themselves: We dutifully went to our classes, to physics (where the teacher prattled on about the inadequacies of highway entrance ramps, chalking on the board in a swirl of scribbles all the horrible ways you could die while entering the faster flow of traffic), and English (we were reading Gatsby now, the empty house, the body in the pool, the green light, the orgiastic future), and calculus (as if to solve a proof might put the universe back together, reveal a different god). The swim season had begun, hours lost in bubbles, lap after lap staring at the black lane line of my own failing. And, of course, I continued riding the ambulance, showing up at random accident scenes to splint the broken femur or bandage the bloody hand.
There was a night when we were called to help a man hit by a car. He’d been thrown to the side of a busy main street, bloody and covered in slushy dirt. He was drunk and belligerent, and as the cars came and went, and the strobes lit his face, it slowly dawned on me that he was my old swimming coach, Mr. Wharton, a guy I really revered. When I told him who I was and reminded him that he’d coached me over hundreds and hundreds of hours in the pool, he tried with difficulty to look me in the eye. How many times had he pumped me up, or patted me on the back, or screamed at me in the pool to quit slacking, or celebrated a come-from-behind win, all to show he cared? But on the shoulder of the road now, unable to focus on my face let alone stand in place, he said, “Why don’ya go fffuck yourself!”
Much more polite was the concussed kid at the ice rink, who gently barfed on me when I bent over him, covering me with bilious warmth. “I’m sorry,” the boy mumbled.
From his first return to consciousness, Jax had no memory of the accident, none whatsoever, but admitted his guilt as a reflex. Of course, we, his friends, didn’t care about blood alcohol levels and toxicology tests. He’d made a bad mistake, was filled with contrition, and had our instant forgiveness.
But Jax’s lack of memory didn’t stop the police in their investigation, it drove them deeper. What exactly had happened that night became a nagging mystery. Pixels of rumor and eyewitness account began to resolve into startling coherence.
For instance, I had friends who, at the time of the accident, had just finished playing paddle tennis at the country club up the road. They’d heard the loud crash, and when they came out of the parking lot, they were startled by a car shooting past them. Later, when piecing it back together, they kept wondering: Why was Flynn’s car speeding away?
But all of these things soon became clear when the police chief paid Jax that awaited visit one day in his hospital room, offering a surprising theory that went like this: On that dark stretch of twisty road, as Jax zoomed north, Flynn’s car went to pass, bumping the rear left panel of Jax’s car, which sent him careening off a telephone pole, into the protracted skid that listed left to right, and hurtled his car into the tree.
Could it have been true?
When confronted with the theory, Jax was incredulous. According to the police transcript from the
taped interview, he said, “I don’t think any of my friends would do that.… First of all, [Flynn] and I are damn good friends.”
(Beneath the fusillade of his verbal assaults, one of Jax’s greatest redeeming traits was that he saw those in his inner circle as figures of unimpeachable character, as loyal as he. For the sport he made of us—and we of him—he was absolutely blind to the deeper stamp of one’s defect. His belief in his friends was so complete it verged on naïveté.)
Sometime around Christmas, then, Flynn’s car was impounded, the rumor being that paint found on its front fender matched that of Jax’s car. By spring, Flynn had been charged with negligent homicide, reckless operation of a motor vehicle, and evading responsibility. The narrative that had Jax in a moment of singular teenage elation and irresponsibility now opened to another: Two cars traveling at a high rate of speed when one car passed on a tight turn and drove the other off the road. Or this: Flynn’s car passing without warning. That is, as much as Jax had screwed up, maybe it hadn’t been all his fault in the end.
So much of what happened in my town—the ancient town I knew and loved, the sprinkler-fed garden that existed during the Reagan Pleistocene in one of the outer rings around Manhattan—was never spoken of, or if so, only in whispered gossip. Affairs, eating disorders, teenage pregnancy, trips to rehab: Everybody seemed to know everybody’s business, but it was cloaked and closeted. No matter how egregious or boorish the behavior or betrayal, to say it out loud, to reveal it beyond the social circle for which it was meant and belonged, was an affront almost as egregious. Every scarlet letter was partially hidden.
This is true of many places, or perhaps true of every place. No small shame accompanies the moment when our failings are made public—and it’s with tense, bated breath that most wait for the unpleasantness to go away. However unsettling the news, a year, or two, or three, and it can be relegated to the snowdrift of memory and then forgotten, replaced by the new drama of the day.
Love and Other Ways of Dying Page 17