Half a Life

by Darin Strauss

  “Planning’s begun on this scholarship for next year,” the principal said, “to I think be a really appropriate way in which to say goodbye.”

  She touched her birdnesty hair and cleared her throat, and now even she was looking in my direction. I was the unpredictable quantity this morning: the bomb that might blow, the sparked fuse.

  My inviolability zone was gone. What would happen now?

  “As you all are aware,” the principal was saying, “the worst thing that can happen to a class happened to the Class of 1989 …”

  Every time I circled away from some kid who sat gawking at me (pimply James Harmon, round Mark Reiniger), I’d catch another stare, and another.

  Meantime, the speech inched ahead. A lot of sentiment and intensity, but a kind of murk when it came to purpose and message. An official speech.

  “This is the exact sort of tragedy that is so difficult for a town to get over …” the principal said (or something very like this).

  A cluster of helium balloons on the ceiling left tinted shadows on large-haired girls in sleeveless denim, on jocks and druggies, on some mats piled in a corner, on preppies in tennis outfits, on flannel shirts rolled to the elbow; over hoisted basketball hoops and the intelligent faces of my own anxious clique. It seemed like the Sgt. Pepper’s cover. I was pelted by the storm of color and variety. I was sitting freely among the student body. No one had stopped me.

  “A disaster of this magnitude,” the principal was narrowing her eyes at a note card, “makes us look ahead and how we can strengthen this community using our shared values …”

  Some crude engine of self-preservation revved up in me. “Um,” I whispered. “I think, um.” I was presenting total emotional vulnerability: a calculated decision. “Um, I think—”

  Now, I felt no sadder at this particular moment than I’d felt during any recent other ones. (I had been constantly hurting.) But I felt oversized and bright again, spilling glow on people. I needed everyone to see that this—not just the death, but all this silent judgment, plus the stroke of our principal having given this speech in front of me—I needed everyone to see that it all touched me, too. I needed this for a simple reason: If I were able just to sit here and take it, I’d have been a monster in their final memories of me.

  “Many of us have stories about Celine, so many wonderful and inspiring and …”

  So here was another ritual. As in all rituals, people had expectations about how it should be performed. It was as if every moment at which I could have expressed my real sense of what had happened—my anxiety, confusion, queasy guilt; the Houdini sensation that everyone who escapes blame feels, everyone who has been pronounced blameless—they all worked to obstruct that sense. It was blocked off by a completely different sense, that of other people watching me.

  “Excuse me,” I said. I said, “I’ve got to get out.”

  And with each ritual performed successfully, another wall came up between me and the people I might have gone to and said: I don’t know how to feel about this. Because if I admitted that, it would mean my public self had been a lie, and that lie would become their lasting thought of who I was.

  “Excuse me, please.”

  I pushed through the crowd, which had turned startled and buzzing. I wasn’t really any more inconsolable than a ham in a refrigerated case. Dumb pink meat.

  “Excuse me, please,” I said, with my pre-averted eyes. “Just need to get, um.”

  Where was I going? This seemed new—this slow, vile feeling of complaisance. (Although I suppose there isn’t much progress in a personality: I’d done pretty much the same act for those girls I’d met at the accident site, when I’d slipped to my knees. Those girls had wanted some absolute image of guilt, and I’d matched up with every public presentation of large responsibility we’d all ever seen.)

  Now I wanted the gym to note the impressiveness of my fighting off tears. Inside the shadows of my own life, I was still fumbling around to feel, in a genuine way, my role. (Even the final “um” was deliberate. It felt, in my throat and mouth, sappy.)

  At last I got away. I was alone.

  Outside the gym door, sunshine after a rain. Dew winking on grass, the parking lot looking scrubbed and raked, sun clipping off car tops, bright sky reflected in pools on roofs and tennis courts. At the edge of it all, there was a large maple—water stuck in a hundred leaves—having a private rainstorm.

  I stood and watched and felt pleasantly without audience. Wind collected in my shirt at the armpits and feathered through the hair in front of my ears. I saw geese honk by and heard the leathery muscular flutter of their wings. How hard these birds work to get aloft! I’d never thought about this before. And all around, the pepper-and-grass smell of a clean world after rain.

  It was only after a moment that I realized my friends Eric and Jim (Jim, the movie-line cut-up) had come to join me out by the back fields. My escape from the gym—from its collective, frowning expression—wasn’t just cynical and vain. Removing the distraction of myself had been, in part, a considerate act. Or my idea of considerate. Now the event could continue, as if Celine had been killed not by my car, but by a lamppost or a tree. That is to say, killed not by a classmate, but by one of the world’s hard, inarguable stops. That’s how it seemed, at least, in the bop and echo chamber between my ears. And I appreciated that my friends were here, that they’d shuffled after me outside. If I’m remembering right, we didn’t say anything. Outside the school, I felt no need to cry, even to pretend. I had the jitters you get when you sense you’ve pulled a fast one. That was in there, too. But what exactly had I pulled, and on whom? I kept churning from mood to mood. The fact that it really had been impossible for me to sit in that gym and hear about Celine’s death—this hadn’t occurred to me. Eric, anyway, had also caught the jitters. His shiny face, when I glanced to the side, showed the tender curl of smile on his top lip.

  So my friends and I just hung out for a while, tumbling quietly through the new uncertainty of things. The coming graduation; leave-taking; the world beyond us damp and sunny and waiting for our entrance. I thought that having fled a high-school gym with the selfishness of a coward just because someone’s name is mentioned (and because yours isn’t) maybe didn’t meet all requirements of living your life valiantly for two people. I thought how unlucky it was that, of all the kids in this school, of the five carloads of people who had witnessed the accident—of all the possible others in Long Island—I’d been the one who’d had some girl’s bicycle swerve left into his car. It was the obvious thought, and the first time I’d really felt it. And I thought with uncomplicated gratitude how strange and fortunate it was that I still had a life. I thought what it might mean not to have a life. (I didn’t get very far on that one. What could it mean? It was absence: what was Celine not experiencing, not thinking about, not planning?) I thought I would powerfully if gradually rise above despair. I thought maybe I still didn’t feel the right amount of despair. I thought how do you calculate a sum like that? I thought about unrealized lives. I thought Celine’s parents were both probably home right now, not working on this workday. I thought, Who was I kidding, I’ll never get over this. Or maybe her parents had had to go back to work already, and was that the sadder thing, life forcing you to just go on? I thought how vacant and baggy their house must seem. I remembered my house the day I’d stayed away from school: so moonscape empty. I thought of a house seeming that way all the time, breeze slanting in under the bottoms of windows, carrying warm leaf smells and tarmac-and-exhaust smells, sun on floors and corners and tables. And there also, the undeniable emptiness, the silence on everything, that want of familiar noises—of another creature’s set of noises.

  Eric peeked back inside the gym to see the principal finish up her talk. Then we reinserted ourselves into the crowd. Oh, look at this: Darin’s back. I was a piece of living trivia. The balloons, that broad squeaking heaven, still floated overhead. I took my seat, the ceremony went on, etc.

  About tw
o weeks later, I graduated and left town.2

  I saw college as a type of witness-protection program. I was so eager for the fresh identity, I’d get sweaty thinking about it. Everyone in my high school knew. No one at Tufts did, and while I was there they never would.

  But I did make one important stop in town before I left: Celine Zilke’s parents’ house. At the funeral, they’d invited me to “come by whenever,” so I thought I owed them a visit. I thought they expected this, even wanted it. How I thought about Celine was in large part still governed by conformity, by appearances: if I didn’t know exactly how I was, I could at least control how I seemed, and seeming was where all benefit lay.

  I went to the Zilkes’ alone. I actually imagined a cozy welcome. They’d smile, maybe touch my cheek, we’d cry together.

  I knocked. And when I knocked—when my bunched hand hit Celine’s real door—I realized this may have been a mistake. My stomach shuddered up toward my throat. Maybe nobody’s home? I leaned an ear to the wood, made out the clumps and risings of voices. After a courage-building swallow, I knocked again. One man’s voice got louder and more distinct, coming closer. The door opened. It was Celine Zilke’s father.

  After seeing me, Mr. Zilke turned back to the room: “Oh, look who it is.” I had a good view of the back of his head. “It’s Darin.” He said this as if he was proud I’d showed. As if he’d that very instant been defending me.

  “He’s here to say how sorry he is,” he told the room—really grinding the knuckle of his emotion into the words. “To apologize.” This was a few days after the funeral.

  “Hello,” I said, smiling in a queasy way.

  It was afternoon, and there were five or six other people around, collected in the Zilkes’ den—family members, fellow grievers, people I didn’t know. Pressing into the room (and it felt like a programmed momentum that carried me, not the normal mechanics of foot and leg) had the spooky feel of straining against a gravitational force. Everyone kept their mouths shut with such fervor they seemed lipless. There was the smell of stale coffee. Was I here to apologize? The Zilkes had said at the funeral that they knew it wasn’t my fault, hadn’t they? Did they somehow miss the Newsday article? I had the abrupt-swerve, waking-nightmare sense that I’d gotten it wrong, that I’d imagined the newspaper entirely.

  Mr. Zilke guided me to the couch. His hand, when I shook it, had a really human clamminess. Then he left for the kitchen, came back, offered me a tall iced tea. He put a coaster down.

  “How are you?” I said, stupidly.

  “Okay,” he said. “Yes. You know.”

  “Good,” I said—taking a very long sip and swallowing before finally lowering my glass to the coaster. Then that was finished.

  Mr. Zilke could not keep focused on me. The quiet now was that kind where the only sounds are domestic ones: a far-off refrigerator, acorns clanking onto a drainpipe. Nobody moved. My arrival had strained this place; you could still feel a twang in the air. The thing Mr. Zilke could keep focused on stood behind my iced-tea glass—a picture of Celine in a shiny frame.

  The visit was a promise kept too soon, a handshake attempted in the dark and made with the wrong person. They didn’t want me here and I didn’t want to be here. After a few more minutes, Mr. Zilke shepherded me to the door.

  Under the lintel, he rested an almost narcotized stare on me—tilting his face, squeezing his lip with two fingers—as if sussing out a faint noise in the house, a neighboring yard, a far-off country.

  “No matter what,” he said finally, “we would never blame you, Darin.”

  Past his shoulder, I watched the other guests exchange Well, that’s that looks. I drifted back to my car with the cold sensation of a type of social death—the small certainty you get on a few occasions in your life, when a parting has no assurance of a return. I would never, I was sure, see the Zilkes again.

  Five months later, I learned that Celine’s parents were suing me for millions of dollars.

  2. Before that, though—before graduation, the prom. I’d been set to take a girl from another town. She and I’d been orbiting each other like nervous rabbits, but hadn’t made it even to the make-out stage. Now, though, after the accident transpired—after my name appeared in the newspaper—it was over. I hadn’t thought she’d have even heard about the crash. Wrong. “I’m not going to go with you anymore,” she said, hurriedly removing herself from me and this book. I was pretty intent, all the same, on showing my face at prom. (“The accident hasn’t wrecked me totally; the accident hasn’t wrecked me totally …”) Smiles can be little contentment generators: when you pretend to feel a few clicks better than you really are, you actually get some small upturn in your mood. That’s what I’d been hoping, anyway. And I caught a break: my sweet and lovely date from last year’s junior prom was, improbably, still free for this one, too. She was kind enough to go with me. And so I went to the prom. The end.

  2

  “An accident isn’t necessarily ever over.”

  —Diane Williams

  At college, I spent a lot of my first year with physics and psychology books, gulping down studies and figures. I took solace in math: you’re doing forty, and the girl with the bicycle cuts ten feet in front of you—impact will arrive in something like 700 milliseconds. Human perception time—not only to see a hazard, but to understand one as such—is generally accepted to saw off some 220 milliseconds. Next, the mostly neural job of getting foot to brake demanded another 500 milliseconds. It seemed I was exculpated by 20 milliseconds.

  These numbers I sought in the library. There was a pattern: sometimes when I sat bucketed in an easy chair, or studied coursework in my lap, I’d tell myself it was time for a washroom break or something. But then I’d find myself in the physical-science stacks, my fingers tapping over books, making sure that my reassuring numbers were still there, that they were still reassuring.

  It was always the same, even before I knew I was being sued. It took about forty minutes and then I would end up on my feet—placemarking my textbook, leaving it in the cushions, and shambling off. One time I passed a friend who was going through microfiche—the old whir of newspapers, the blue of ink and gray flashing in front of her head—and I began to tear up, out of panic. Because the library was double-edged. It had my relief in it and my guilt: my physics numbers in the upstairs collections, and, down by periodicals, the record of me and Celine. Had my friend found out, was she searching for me in a Long Island tabloid?

  I still didn’t know that legal threats were gathering, attempts at authorized ruin, cold winds from home. Regardless, I was thinking about Celine as often as ever. I internalized my cares about conventionality and appearances.

  The moments before the crash became a kind of VHS tape, over-rented, overplayed, stripped: the colors scratched away, the sound wobbly—until I didn’t try to remember at all, and the tape would burst into high-def vividness. Hair, bicycle, reflector. I’d be doing something mundane, like removing a soda from an icy case at the Mini Mart. And while my fingers closed around the damp, solid aluminum, I would think: Celine Zilke will never feel a can in her grip again. I was also muddling through the soundstage brightness of occasional flashback. I’d rush to class, take a corner, look at some kids hackey-sacking on the quad and see the gross anatomy of a bicycle lying in the street. Or Celine’s glassy face.

  It never occurred to me to petition for antidepressants or sign myself in for another psychotherapy go-round. I knew what was troubling me. Depression as a chemical shortcoming, a chronic formless mope, could be handled: a pill could gather it and sink it down its hole. But for what seemed an appropriate response to a problem that couldn’t be fixed—that sort of depression struck me as without cure.

  And without much choice, I made sure that another potential cure wasn’t available. No friend could cheer me, could talk me out of anything. The people I lived with and ate with at college didn’t know. No one who encountered me in classrooms, at a frat party, in the campus center, notic
ed the fierce inner battles I’d fought to make the different Darins into a Darin that friends could recognize. Coming back to my room, I always worked up a cheerful face—abstracted but busy. What if someone had said, “Hey, is something wrong?”

  I didn’t know the right answer, and didn’t have confidence in how I’d respond.

  So I quietly indulged in the self-pity that, in the venerable tradition of sad people everywhere, I felt entitled to.

  I began college under-read. Bookishness, rigorous thought, affection for time-consuming study—my public high school hadn’t prepared me for any of it. Besides, until Celine I’d been a lazy student, an underachiever. But somehow freshman year, a faked understanding—a rarefied reference, a split-second attempt to scale the tower—got me through. Oh yes, that’s so right, and wasn’t it Kafka who said …? Gibberish, bullshit. But I felt I had to look smart enough for two. (Not necessarily to be smart enough. It was still largely about appearances, still largely social.)

  Freshman year, I took a “Death & Dying” class. Generous helpings of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, side plates of When Bad Things Happen to Good People, and other softbrained texts—solemn, whispering titles like “Meditations.” I believed I could depend on a professor—student privilege, so I went ahead and wrote my midterm about the accident. A lot of the coursebooks had line-drawn covers showing pine trees or lonely outcroppings of rocks. The grad student who ran this touchy-feely seminar urged me to nose around, to “check out Celine’s side of things.”

  I thought nosing around was a terrible idea. (Everybody can master a grief but those who have it was a Shakespeare line I circled during a survey class.) But I was an obedient student. I had become, after leaving Glen Head, accommodating of any rule; I’d had to become less like a chance-taker who might have once been involved in an accident.