by Jarod Powell
Daryl McAdams is a legend.
When you’re seventeen, the bar for legend is set pretty low. The base for everything is romance, and every living creature is coated with the weird blue glow of that romantic ambiance. Every action of your peers is interpreted, somehow, someway, as sexual. The charisma of the object of your lust is greatly exaggerated, and every gesture towards you or towards anything, really, is a direct call for you to get naked. Though, this never crosses your mind. You wouldn’t want to cheapen it with petty human wants. No, it’s much deeper, much more profound.
In the tunnel vision of a child, these objects obscure the glow on the other side. Even when they’re alive and well, they die fantastically: A leap off the Victorian balcony. A stage dive from the foot of the orchestra. Sinking into the quicksand of an ethereally lit wheat field. An icon or a symbol, translated by you, and only by you.
And when they die with a thud, they go on and live.
The first time Daryl McAdams died, it was a false alarm. He collapsed in History class after his heart simply stopped, as the macabre bitch Mrs. Danforth read a back issue of Cosmopolitan. She removed herself from her trance, looked down at Daryl’s twitching body losing what little color was there in the first place, eyes half-opened but mostly closed, inviting the light in but barely tolerating its burn, and said to the class, “Why are you just sitting there? Call an ambulance for Christ’s sakes.”
She started to return to her magazine, but realized there were about twenty plump, adolescent faces gazing at her, their teacher and caretaker for the hour, suddenly very aware of a possible dead body in the room. She put down her magazine and threw her hands incredulously up as a boy ran to the office.
Mrs. Danforth had surely heard the rumors about Daryl, and the look on her face suggested that this was inevitable-- That, if anything, she was surprised it took this long.
So an ambulance was called, and Daryl was revived at Delta Trinity Hospital. He was absent for the rest of the week.
He walked the halls with a translucent almost-halo for a few days after his return, his black t-shirt and Levis emitting the stench of a dead boy but his olive skin glowing, as he had resurrected simply because he felt like it, at God’s inconvenience. I wanted to touch him every time I saw him. He would eat a burger in the cafeteria and to me, he ate like a king, chewing as slowly as he felt like and giving the monitor dirty looks that seem to pierce his snitchy little skull. He read, and he understood everything, though he pretended he didn’t in his typically adorable fashion.
Every time I stopped to say hello, I approached him with a look of cautious wonderment, just to touch him. I’d ask Daryl if he’d finished his paper or something like that, and touch his shoulder, then draw my hand back. It burned me.
Daryl would smile politely, though he was annoyed, for I had no business bothering him, but I couldn’t help it. Then he would move along briskly. I didn’t mind.
The mystery he felt about himself was evident to no one but me. Like the Son of God, he was pretty sure he was alive, though the clock was ticking. He was no angel, and though he nearly died and did touch death for a little while and saw lights and heard deep omniscient voices giving him directions upward, and all of that, he still felt physical feelings such as nausea and drowsiness from the side effects of the pills he took for whatever his parents thought was wrong with him, like he was being gently asphyxiated, and good things too, like how a warm bath felt after walking home from school in the cold.
Daryl McAdams was no angel and he guessed that’s why everyone was so curious about his presence. Maybe they wanted to know what Hell felt like, or maybe they were mad at him for returning, maybe they were wondering how someone who never even went to church and who everyone knew stole food and money from the local drive-in burger stand on a regular basis, would ever be on the list for Heaven, let alone wear the artifacts and come back to tell the tale. He didn’t deserve to be let back, and they were jealous.
Daryl had many unsavory habits and did many unspeakable things, which were spoken about often. He was rumored to be the town’s only drug dealer, and it was uttered several times that he sold his own body. It was thrilling to overhear parents in the supermarket ominously gossip amongst themselves about Daryl like Babylon. I wanted to know him more than anything in the world, because I know he hated our little village and I hated it too. The bad habits that were supposedly killing him were his ticket out.
It was the only way and on some level, it was his mission to get out. I knew that someday he would succeed. That thought kept me warm on some nights and I prayed I had the strength to follow him someday.
The second time Daryl McAdams died it was his fault. He took too many pills right there in the cafeteria and then washed it down with Dr. Pepper while the school security guard watched and did nothing, but still it was Daryl’s stupid fault because he of all people should know how rotten those pills are and how they fuck up your insides instead of actually help you.
He of all people should have known that and he did know that and that’s precisely why he did it.
That day paramedics showed up with a social worker and took Daryl’s twitching mass away to the emergency room, and Daryl’s mom could only watch from the office lobby, crying a lot but wearing big dark sunglasses as if that blocked the tears from coming out, but it was obvious. They all stood and watched and they weren’t surprised and they weren’t really that glad, including myself. We were simply bored.
While Daryl was suspended everyone talked casually and they were dismissive.
Daryl had died once before by accident, but now everyone had room to suspect that dying in public had become his new thing. “You got money, you’re allowed to go kill yourself. You get to come back and do it again and again until you realize it’s just not fun.” Everyone would say shit like this, referring to Daryl being an heir to some sort of farm equipment fortune, farm equipment their fathers all used but couldn’t be bothered to memorize the name. They would say it a lot and I guess it got to me. I realized that it was the spectacle he died for. As the blue glow turned fluorescent, I saw that I misjudged him completely.
We dismissed what we would call growing pains as laziness in thought, a lack of drive and a lack of eventfulness in life; it was having everything that made his mind go off the rails in the most predictable way, and caused all sorts of things like his kleptomania and his tendency to hang out in neighborhoods of houses with dirty rain gutters and taped windows, where he clearly didn’t belong and didn’t fit in, and car crash after car crash, a shiny cherry-red brand new whatever-car of the moment with dents and bruises and scratches. Yes, in a few years he’d be a sushi and wine aficionado and would take his inheritance and move to Connecticut where no one ever frowned and everyone had fake lawns. Everyone knew the day would come and we found it pathetic that it was obvious to us but not to Daryl that only the most banal of excesses wait, no matter what he did to subvert it.
He’d ditch his outcast friends and their terrible obscure taste in music and stop being so weird and stop acting depressed, stop using it as a propeller into space as he did during History class every day, or maybe he’d just wander off into the bland membrane of that particular day and decide to stay there, forever young and stupid.
The death of Daryl McAdams was no longer a topic at school after a while, his strange glow had disappeared and was replaced by the sweet, earthy smell of a rich man and he walked the halls with a stupid grin, actually making eye contact with pretty girls despite being invisible to them again. He no longer had the sheen of a boyish rebel but seemed a needy old man in a boy’s body and was repulsive. His gaunt frame became healthy in every conventional sense and his skin got rosy again, like any other person on Earth.
It took a lot of work to get used to it so instead of trying, everyone just stopped paying attention, and Daryl was kind of happy about that. That was the third death of Daryl McAdams, and the last one I witnessed. He eventua
lly did actually die of course in the I-stopped-breathing sense, probably many years later of natural causes so just consider it death’s pre-show. He was a warm body that breathed and whose heart would eventually beat like everyone else’s and he seemed to accept this curse as if it were just another material gift, like a brand new cherry red whatever-car.
I could be wrong about all of this, I’m sure. But I fear that I’m not. Not only was it the death of Daryl, it was the death of the libertine I had become gleefully obsessed with. He was not Daryl, he was just Daryl, a chump with a stupid hillbilly name who was borderline illiterate and self-destructive and all too human.
I’ve seen it happen since, and so it goes in adolescent mythology. The spark is just gone and I know it’s happened to him too, and everyone noticed. Seemed strange to these people, people who were watching and talking and thinking, that the only person at school who wasn’t afraid of death would just coast through life on cruise control like he had seen it all and was only hanging around because he was too rotten for Heaven and too green for Hell, and was just buying time until his inheritance came and he could spend it on sins like your average rich dude, and would probably never share what he’d seen with anyone, as if it had never happened. But they all wanted to know and wanted to believe. As for me, faith eludes.
Fish Out of Water