Into that Good Night

by Levis Keltner

  “I know Emily doesn’t speak to anyone but you since …” John started. “Hey, it would mean a lot to me, buddy.”

  Buddy? Though they were the same year in school, the Dead Man hadn’t once said hi or seemed interested in his rare though valid contributions in English class or passed him the ball during a stupid gym basketball game, where winning didn’t even matter. It was true E. didn’t talk about her younger sister and had become more hermitlike, having fallen into a monkish vow of silence with everybody except Doug. Even then, he wouldn’t describe E. as chatty. She only talked about big ideas. Recently she’d been reading brain-science stuff, which Doug struggled to follow whenever she explained it, but didn’t get too bummed when he couldn’t. He just enjoyed hearing her be excited about things. Her ability to be impenetrable matched Doug’s one stalwart quality—patience. He figured E.’s silence was her way of coping with the trauma of having a sibling hacked so awfully across the stomach that the girl had been found in roughly two pieces (or so the rumor went). She made it seem, however, as if she weren’t speaking simply because she’d been given the best excuse in the world to withdraw from people for good. Doug didn’t understand John’s request and couldn’t imagine any reason why she would talk more openly with the guy. Maybe his was some kind of kooky deathbed wish. Doug found himself unable to say no, at the same time curious and afraid of what he wanted.

  “I—I could.”

  “Today. At the library.”

  “Ah … OK.”

  Doug wasn’t oblivious to the pathetic dribble of his voice. The starts and stops made others treat him as indecisive or foggy-brained, neither of which he believed was true. If anything, too many thoughts popped into his mind. Most were purely dumb, but some were smart, too. They all rushed in at once and he became uncertain of where to start. The task of communicating a complete idea with all notable threads seemed impossible and created the awkward gaps in his speech. Doug also fought hard to parse what he wanted to say from what he knew he should say to avoid causing upsets and arguments, any conflicts at all, really, and the result was the irritating meekness of his voice. For example, how was it that John knew the public library was E.’s after-school hangout? He wanted to ask, but didn’t, to avoid seeming accusatory or overly protective.

  What he said was, “You be there, too.”

  Doug blushed at the stupidity of attempting to sound as assertive as this guy he could never hope to compete against. John nodded in acknowledgment, closing both eyes for a moment—in embarrassment for him? The guy returned to the land of the living with his poster boy smirk that made most people believe him earnest and good-natured—to release the tension between them? The smile looked pretty phony to Doug. This close, he noticed a tightness around John’s eyes that said his confidence could crumble in an instant. Yeah, so Dead Man Walker was freakily good at baseball and had assistant-coached the school’s Special Olympics team and volunteered at the animal shelter over summer breaks—he could do it all. But he didn’t know everything. He didn’t know what it was like to be nobody. He never would.

  John didn’t turn away to the window, like he wanted, while waiting for Doug to leave, despite how taxing it was to present a pleasing mask. Fortunately, the bell rang, signaling the start of next period, and the dork sprinted off, spilling his books after ten feet. Unobserved in the otherwise empty hallway, John relaxed for a few breaths and allowed the pain seething in his bones to surface. It consumed his features and twisted them into a haggard wince. He would need his strength for the more important work ahead. John disappeared down the stairwell before Doug could glance back and see him changed, any less capable of greatness than ever.

  3

  Before fourteen-year-old John H. Walker became a wonder, he’d been a lean powerhouse of a third baseman with great potential. Potential was the word his parents and coaches used most to describe the boy and what’d led him to expect a life more extraordinary than his peers. In only a few short years, the legend grew greater than the boy. So when a shattered femur after a standard dive revealed the malignant tumor thriving above his kneecap and doctors said he’d have to give up baseball for good, John mentally collapsed. For most of that summer and first semester of eighth grade, he lay prone by his family’s pool beside a glass of lukewarm lemonade, crushed by the opposite of potential.

  •

  In November, City Council mistook his withdrawal as solely symptomatic of his worsening sickness and they held a candlelight benefit for childhood cancer in his honor. An intermittent and icy rain plagued Peaks Park that evening, as residents packed around the tented stage or else huddled beneath the skeletal trees, dismal as winter birds. The mayor held his opening speech until well after dark. He let the heartwarming music repeat until its lyrics seemed to mock the sincerity of attending, and a few fights broke out over accusations of encroachment on another’s dry space. The mayor watched the clock more than the restless crowd, desperate for their homebred symbol of eminent greatness to materialize like a vision of the Virgin. At some point, he prayed for mercy, then made a speech, the slogan “keep the fire burning” (it was an election year; the job market what it was), and all were asked to light candles during a moment of silence, mostly spent sparking lighters against the wind. Then the school band played jittery renditions of interfaith songs, including a Kwanzaa tune that the many white, working-class folks in the audience were curious to hear when announced, big-hearted in that moment, full of the potential to be more than what they were, which really impressed themselves. The mayor, however, interrupted the band, spotting John’s parents as they arrived late and sat among the other speakers. Palos Hills’ star had refused to shine on them that night. The mayor asked the Walkers to say a few words of assurance, but there was some confusion with the band, who abruptly resumed “Celebrate Kwanzaa” over his encouragements for them to take the stage, only to be cut short again by the mayor’s insults. The rain worsened after that and snuffed the vigil, and residents went home feeling childhood cancer was only the beginning (Of? No one dared ask).

  Photos of the event, which John’s parents afterward subjected their son to, of familiar faces bound in scarves, huddled together against the winter chill, a candle in every glove, confirmed the boy’s suspicion that the town was mostly mourning for itself. He couldn’t recall one of those kids entrusting him with confidences, like real friends do, or needing him for anything except to outperform them on the field. In all their bent necks and solemn faces, John saw a lot of hangers-on crowding around the flickering light.

  •

  Corroborating rumors he had six months to live, John Walker withdrew from school and social engagements entirely. As the Palos Pirates suffered all-time lows in the preseason, messages from his baseball buddies went unanswered urging him to appear at crucial games. His coach’s calls rang to voicemail insisting the kid drop by one lousy practice.

  John refused to answer. He would not have been himself. At home, while the hall clock struck midnight and the icy rain scrubbed the world clean of all that would not persist, to think of anything but his present condition felt false, pathetic, the return of the fiction of his potential, what’d made him a star by age ten—sought after by opposing coaches, beloved by his teachers, and talked about respectfully by other kids’ parents—and, for a few terrific years, what’d imbued John with the charisma responsible for his many friends and fans, for all of his hometown fame—all meaningless. Post-diagnosis, that giant, terminally wounded word—potential—ravaged his mind, clobbered every dream on the horizon, and brought his entire future down with it.

  Down he remained, crushed and unresponsive in bed or between the paper-stiff sheets of various hospital beds at Palos Community, Advocate Christ, the Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Chicago, and lastly the Cardinal Bernadin Cancer Center at Loyola. You might not have noticed him, he was so flat, a bump in the covers, plagued by recurring nightmares of dissolving—muscles first, then his bones, made granular, would crumble
into his organs and form tiny pools, gray as mercury, until all just evaporated, he did, left not a stain. John awoke terrified. He could barely sit up, he was so badly beaten. His mind raged against the reality that a boy who could dance on the field lay nailed to the earth. Though his anger was superficial compared to the loss of who he’d been, being angry was the one thing left in John’s power to do exquisitely. So, in the Get Well Soon messages his mother read, he heard Get Well Now. And when the team and town sounded frustrated that his condition had worsened, as if owed his company to raise their spirits and to make them feel like winners again, John gave them what he was left with—nothing.

  •

  John’s parents tolerated their son’s reclusion, believing it best to allow him time to cope with his disillusionment over youth not equating invincibility. This lesson came with age to every child, they rationalized. It’d only come early to John in a grander form, as had most things. He would be as good as ever in a year’s time, they assured friends of the family—stopped on the doormat or, if insistent, ushered into a corner of the front room on a firm sofa unused until now, shielded from a view of the inner rooms by two venetian dividers; and never invited into the kitchen to see the cookbooks and pale and gnarled vegetables and vials of powders and musty-smelling drops for several homeopathic remedies; and never ever allowed upstairs where they might peer under the single lamp covered with great-grandmother’s shawl and glimpse the pill bottles and wilted bouquets and the unresponsive face of their son. He would enter high school on schedule, better than before, ego tempered after learning what was of most value in life. Though, if asked, neither would’ve been able to pin down exactly what that meant.

  Just as they’d carted John to games and practices and award ceremonies, the Walkers wheeled him to screenings and treatments and specialists. These were joyless, hours-long visits in acrid waiting rooms and doctors’ offices and adjoining rooms, clean but for the feeling that someone had left moments before, with doctors who were too jovial to have faced cancer, unless they cured it without fail. Mostly, they talked with well-meaning nurses in what looked like Easter-colored children’s pajamas, who translated the jargon and quick handshakes of the doctors as gradual improvement. The Walkers left and arrived again beaming, in deliberation over which private high school to enroll him in next fall and then which universities to apply to, with names so long polished they glowed, that would admit their boy with full-ride scholarships and a difficult though flattering bidding war. They lived in shock during that time, their marriage no great meeting of souls but a highly efficient system of realizing a single, shared goal—to give their only son the world. All they’d worked so hard to build teetered on his health. So they remained affixed with hope to the utter success that all previous signs had confirmed that their progeny was destined to become.

  John, however, interpreted the space they provided as willful obliviousness to the gravity of his illness, maybe out of fear of jinxing his recovery, maybe out of neglect. The isolation allowed his head to settle, to cool until cold, until the boy became grateful that his parents had helped him accept what he would henceforth be forever: a nobody, nothing.

  •

  The boy reappeared at school sporadically after winter break. Teachers didn’t seem to care if “Walker, John” produced homework. When he did, they might pause to gleam with pity or admiration, sometimes both, at his efforts. They’d then carry on as if he were invisible, already dead, the specter in the desk an occasional reminder of what’d already come to pass. Soon, those who’d begun to believe John overvalued for being merely a handsome and respectful boy and a fine athlete were quick to criticize that he hadn’t entirely ceased to be special, he’d only entered a new phase of specialness—a transparency or, as these peer critics called it, “the ghosting of John Walker.” He came as he pleased, filled a desk midday without saying a word, remaining a period or two, or else the wavy image of him spectated from the high bleachers during gym class, only to vanish before the bell. Running into ex-teammates still required an awkward exchange of too-gentle high-fives. Catching him down one of the building’s long hallways, a desperate-to-be-noticed girl might occasionally squeal, “Walk this way!” echoing his ballpark anthem, currently in moratorium. In each case, the boy would smirk and decline invitations to meet later at a game with a stock excuse, “doctor’s orders,” which he did until he hadn’t any remaining buddies, then barely any acquaintances, so that, if he were never to show up again, it might be years before any of his classmates recalled an inning he’d saved in a clincher, or that he’d never used others as the butts of his jokes, or the gorgeous contrast between his dark forehead and the corona of his hair in the summertime and ask, “What ever happened to that kid?”

  4

  Alone but never lonely, E. lived and learned within the maze of shelves at the Palos Hills Public Library. Her self-sufficiency wasn’t so much a matter of having so many friends between the covers of the Fiction section. Not anymore—stories were kid stuff. Since puberty, the girl read only nonfiction and had matured as swiftly intellectually as physically. Nature had endowed E. with breasts by age ten, a gift she begrudgingly hid beneath baggy layers to keep her body from defining her. For this and family drama reasons, the local library had become her sanctuary. The stink of aged paper and walls of spines stood against time and the small-mindedness of Palos Hills, the brightest thinkers in human history her compatriots. Here she sought answers about the “grown-up” world that made little sense, such as the contradictions and failures in character and the general ignorance exhibited by most adults (e.g., why her very-much-not-in-love parents, who could live financially secure without each other, were still married; and generally, why people preoccupied themselves with inane distractions, a weakness for comforts and pleasures that became dependencies over time). E. pictured the road to understanding life profoundly as steep and narrow, a nearly impossible climb that required too much study to waste her time obsessing over boys in the brainless manner displayed by so many hetero girls her age—like her dead sister, (once) the world’s most darling idiot. They’d gotten along well growing up and had played for hours, House and Doctor and such games, mostly dramatic dialogue about how to survive another brutal winter on the prairie and prevent the loss of the newborn to diphtheria, or about measuring the risks involved in a dangerous though necessary procedure that would leave the family destitute from medical bills alone—until Erika began playing games that involved much less talking with a neighbor boy down the street. The girl was lost to E. since. She tried not to let what’d happened (forever) keep her from reading, from moving upward. When she did think about it, though, E. determined that ignorance and love, or something like it, had killed her sister.

  Not that E. didn’t have urges that followed the absurd logic of what adults broadly labeled “hormones.” She simply packed physical urges into tightly bound boxes in her mind and launched them into deep storage.

  For instance, when Dougy sulked up the aisle followed by John “Dead Man” Walker, E. found herself struck by the lunacy of attraction. She denied her eyes the pleasure of lifting from the broad pages of her book, Fundamentals of Abnormal Psychology. She couldn’t even ask why her friend was exhibiting symptoms of a depressive episode. Hormones compelled her attention past Dougy to tractor-beam on John’s tragically beautiful face. It seemed that losing Erika was making her susceptible to sympathetic delusions. To gaze at the boy for more than an instant seemed liable to whip up an infatuation that would threaten the solitary life she had chosen, such was his extraordinary potency. E. plowed onto the next sentence. The next. Finding no relief, she risked another glimpse at the soon-to-be-ghost to understand his sudden supernatural grip on her better sense.

  John was different than she remembered—Mr. School Spirit who, during those trivial end-of-the-year award ceremonies, received so many medals around his neck that he left looking like a gangster rapper. The version standing before her included the same strong jaw and
boyish handsomeness. There was something new, too, a quality of weariness in his manner that E. interpreted as experience, perhaps even wisdom of the kind she sought. Its gravity sickened her. She focused on his negative qualities: the boy was cute, athletic, indistinguishably kind—otherwise generically all-American. She knew plenty of fictional characters that were more real than the sum of traits exemplified by John H. Walker. E. mostly despised what he represented in the community: a false sense of unity that rested on intrinsically worthless human abilities (hitting and catching a ball—to what benefit to the human race?). But no matter what E. told herself, desire pestered her to learn how facing death had contributed to his maturity. Was it superficial or authentic? What E. did know was that to depend on anybody for anything was foolish, and the only defense she had against that at the moment was holding the hardback book in front of her face.