Why They Run the Way They Do

by Susan Perabo

  A horn blares behind us. The light has turned green. Tommy guns the engine and the car jolts into the intersection, shudders, chokes, and dies.

  “Shit!” Tommy says, slamming the gearshift into park.

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Stupid piece of—”

  The horn blares again. “I know!” Tommy yells. “I know! Thank you very much!”

  The guy whizzes around us and offers the predictable gesture. The car starts. Tommy puts it in drive and we move forward again, in silence. Tears eke out of my eyes and roll to the corners of my mouth. I am furious that I cannot stop them. We are only a mile from home when Tommy says:

  “It does that sometimes when you give it too much gas. Dies at intersections.”

  “You should get that checked out,” I say.

  “I guess.” He clears he throat, stares at the car in front of us. “Come to New Mexico,” he says.

  I sniffle ungracefully, lick the salt from my lips. “What?”

  He glances at me briefly, then turns back to the road. “Come to New Mexico. Just do it. What do you have here?”

  “You,” I say.

  “Yeah,” he says. “And I’m going. So we could go together.”

  My tears have dried up. “All three of us? You, me, and Gil.”

  “Sure,” he says. He pulls up in front of my apartment and turns off the car. “I mean, me and Gil. And . . . and me and you.”

  I take off my seat belt. I feel that Tommy and I are at the tail end of a very long date. I blow my nose before I turn to him.

  “I think that’s a little more than my share of pathetic,” I say.

  On Monday I start packing my things at 4:45. I want to be standing in the elevator at 5:00, out of the building before Donald can signal me with his door. But then someone calls and I have to put them on hold forever and then a delivery man comes by with something stupid and important and then it’s 5:05 and the office is almost empty and it’s just me and a couple other girls and Donald’s door is open halfway. I look at it, weigh my options. I think: So my best friend has moved away. So what? It’s not as if there’s a dire shortage of fags who like TV and junk food. It’s not as if anything has to change.

  “Come out for a drink?” one of the girls says.

  Her voice so startles me that I literally flinch.

  “Sorry,” she says. “You wanna come out with us?”

  “Me?” I say.

  “Your boyfriend can come, too.”

  “Who?”

  “From the picnic. He’s cute.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Well, we have plans tonight.”

  And then they are gone and it’s just me and Donald’s door. And I hear the girls’ laughter down the hall and then I hear Ginny’s vacuum cleaner start up in the office next door and I hear—don’t I?—Donald on the phone with Carol telling her he’s going to be late and I hear Tommy taping up his boxes and I hear the din of the television in my own apartment and my bag is packed and I’m out the door in the hallway and Ginny is there with her vacuum and the thick black cord is blocking my path.

  “I’m not who you think I am!” I shout.

  She turns off her vacuum. “Excuse me?”

  “I’m not who you think I am,” I say.

  She smiles vaguely. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Do I know you?”

  I will go to Paraguay, I decide, as the elevator begins its descent. I will go to Paraguay, and I will never return. In the morning I will leave a note for Tommy, telling him what I have done, wishing him smooth pavement and two hundred channels in New Mexico. Then I will go to the airport and board a plane. By noon I will have cleared the airspace of my country and by dinnertime I will be on a bus on a gravelly road. The seats will be torn and the windows will rattle loose in their frames. The bus will smell. Maybe I will smell, too. Maybe I will be happy to smell. And at nightfall I will get off the bus and there she will be, running toward me with bare feet and windblown hair.

  “Mama, Mama!” she will shout. “Mama, is it you?”

  “It’s me, baby,” I will say.

  THIS IS NOT THAT STORY

  The boy fell from the balcony sometime between 2:00 and 4:00 in the morning. It had already been snowing for several hours, and it continued to snow after he lay on the ground, so that when the dirty white truck rumbled up to the residential quad at 6:15 and three men—the groundskeepers—climbed wearily from the back, armed with shovels, the snow was nearly six inches deep. The old groundskeeper, who was the newest member of the crew, set to work clearing the path that led from the north end of the dorm to the student union, where in just over an hour the dining hall staff would begin serving breakfast. The old groundskeeper was in foul mood; he didn’t like his job very much. Leave it to him to pick the worst winter in forty years to become a groundskeeper. His fingers and palms were swollen from shoveling, and his feet were always cold, no matter how many pairs of socks he wore. Every night he sat on the edge of the bathtub and soaked his feet while he read the help wanted ads, looking for something that paid well, that wasn’t too noisy, that was—god help him—warm.

  The boy was behind a bush. The old groundskeeper probably wouldn’t have even seen him had he not stepped to the side, off the path and out of the wind, to light a cigarette. It was the red tail of a shirt that he saw, clotted with snow but bright as a bird. He took a step forward and with the corner of his snow shovel pushed back the bush and saw that the shirt belonged to a boy and that the boy was dead. For a minute he didn’t do anything. No, not a minute. Maybe it felt like a minute because he did take a drag on his cigarette—that much he remembered for sure, and he felt guilty for it afterward. He let the bush fall back into place and then took the drag and let it out slow before he reached for his walkie-talkie.

  That night his wife made blackberry cobbler. She brought a bowl to him while he sat on the edge of the tub, then slid off her shoes and sat down beside him. She was angry that it was he who had found the boy, that it was not one of the younger men who surely had much less to lose. She feared that seeing the boy would remind her husband of all the other things he had seen and worked so hard to forget, all the other things they’d been running from for so many years.

  There’s a story there. But this is not that story.

  The night before, around 8:00, a young man signed his name on a form at Big Red’s Beer Distributor, promising in writing to return the keg that he was picking up for a party in his apartment that night. The young man was twenty-two, a senior, and the people he’d invited to his party had all been friends since freshman dorm. They were seniors, all of them, and it was early in their last semester of college and so they had not yet reached the cold panic stage—that would blossom with spring—but were in the wonderful stage immediately preceding panic when life after graduation is yet far enough off that it seems any number of breathtaking opportunities might come down the pike before then. The young man had applications being reviewed at several graduate schools—he had just sent them off the week before, so it would be another few weeks at least before he started checking the mail obsessively. This was the time, between possibilities and choices, that he could relax. Though he didn’t know it for certain, he suspected that this was the last time that he would secretly believe that anything was possible.

  The party was small at first, twelve or fifteen of them. The Girl Who Was Kind Of His Girlfriend arrived around midnight, and the two of them went out back and sat on the stone wall smoking cigarettes in the falling snow. They could have smoked inside, but if they smoked outside then they could use the cold as an excuse to huddle together, and although it was goddamn pathetic (he thought) that after a year of being kind of a couple they still needed this kind of excuse, he was in the process of promising himself that by spring there would be no more kind of about it. He’d gone back and forth on the whole serious relationship thing; they both had, but recently he’d been wondering what purpose was being served—what field exactly they were playing—by
only being kind of.

  He went into the house to pee. He was drunk by this point and, glancing around on his way to the bathroom, he realized there were people in his home that he did not know. The inevitable tagalongs. The tagalongs of tagalongs. People he didn’t know drinking the beer he’d paid for. Well, he’d been a tagalong once, too. Everyone had. You could get pissed about it, spoil your own good time, or you could accept the fact that every social structure in the world relied upon the concept of the tagalong.

  After he peed, he went back to the girl. She sat alone on the stone wall, legs drawn to her chest, her chin on her knee, a cigarette snug in her interlaced fingers. There was snow in her hair, and it glistened in the harsh light from the bare bulb over the back door. Later, when he looked back on this night, this was the moment he would remember most clearly. This was the moment he should have said something meaningful, should have said, “What about next summer? What about next year?”, or at least told her how beautiful she looked, sitting there on that wall. Instead, he said: “Beer?”

  One of the tagalongs in the living room was the boy who fell from the balcony. While investigating his death, authorities discovered he had spent a portion of his evening drinking at the house of the young man. Stymied regarding the best way to portray its grief, the college expelled the young man for providing alcohol to a minor. His plans for graduate school were put on hold. The Girl Who Was Kind Of His Girlfriend never became His Girlfriend. Not because of what happened that night, not directly, but who’s to say? It was as if—

  But this is not that story.

  The chaplain was pretending. Pretending was the only way he could keep from hyperventilating, which he absolutely could not do because there were so many people around—the president, for one, and the dean of students—and frankly how bad would it look if the college chaplain, faced with his first actual on-the-job tragedy, started gasping like a hooked fish? He wasn’t pretending that it hadn’t happened; that part of it, the death part, he could handle. No, he was simply pretending that the worst was over. He was pretending he had already broken the news to the parents, that he had handled the call with grace and compassion, had been professional yet comforting, and now he was on the other side of that phone call. It was the only way he could breathe—to pretend.

  The college had been trying to reach the parents for seven hours and twenty minutes. No one could find them. Not either of them. The father, apparently, was out of town at a conference, but his precise location was unknown—somewhere in Chicago, one of the father’s colleagues had told them, but what hotel, what conference exactly, no one seemed sure. The mother, as best as could be figured from a number of phone queries to friends and family, had been running errands all day. No messages had been left at the family home—what would such a message say? How could the caller not give the truth away in tone alone? A command center of sorts had been set up here in the office of the dean of students. Everyone else was milling about, but the chaplain sat at a desk—not even his own, so no opportunity to pretend to do other work—hitting the redial key every three to five minutes.

  It wasn’t the anticipation of actually delivering the news that was suffocating the chaplain. He just wanted it to be over. He did not like knowing what they didn’t know. He had a secret, and once the secret was told, nothing would ever be the same for the people to whom he was going to tell it. The father was at a meeting, the chaplain imagined. At this very moment he was at a meeting and he was not thinking of his son. His son was nestled in the back of his brain, nestled as surely as he had once been nestled in a bed when the father came home late from work and peeked in on him to make sure he was sleeping soundly, to whisper good night. The son was in the bed of the father’s brain, tucked away. The mother, the chaplain admitted to himself, could be a different story. The mother was running errands, and this created a variety of terrible possibilities. Perhaps the mother was buying birthday presents for the boy, was at this very moment trying to decide which of two sweaters he would prefer. The boy’s file was right in front of the chaplain and the chaplain could see plain as day that the boy was turning nineteen next month. The mother didn’t know that her son was not going to turn nineteen. But he, the chaplain, a man who had never spoken to the dead boy, he knew. He, a stranger, knew the most important thing that had ever been known about the boy—that he was no more—and the mother and father who had known the boy intimately, knew nothing. If only he could tell them, then they would know too, and he wouldn’t have to carry the weight any longer of him knowing and them not. The rest he could deal with. Tending to grieving students. Speaking to the media. A service, likely outside, during which a tree would be planted, perhaps a plaque dedicated. Future conversations with the parents, meeting them when they came to campus to take the boy’s things home. All of this he could handle, could, in fact, excel at. If only he could reach them.

  He hit redial again. The machine would pick up after four rings, and he would set the receiver down and—

  “Hello?”

  His veins turned cold. Wait . . . just wait . . . just . . . never mind. He was happy to keep the secret. Of course he was. He would keep it forever. What had he been thinking? He would—

  “Hello?”

  But this is not—could not be—that story.

  A little before two that morning the boy was outside looking for a cigarette. The RA, a young woman who faced the world with a desperate, self-effacing cynicism, was standing in the cold, shivering, sucking down a Marlboro Light. She shook one from the pack and extended it to the boy. She had known him for six months. He was among the twenty-four freshmen who were her responsibility, and she had gotten to know him better than most because he was very social and not afraid, like so many of the others, to make friends with the upperclassmen. He was drunk, but not unusually so (she had seen much worse) and thus nothing seemed out of the ordinary until she dropped her finished cigarette onto the fresh snow and saw that the boy wore no shoes.

  She nodded to his feet. “Nice. Little cold there?”

  The boy shrugged, took another drag off the cigarette.

  “Long night?” she asked.

  Another shrug. “Hangin’ out. You know. Whatever.”

  “Anywhere fun?”

  “Not really.”

  She was cold, ready to go in and curl up in her afghan. She gave him another cigarette, for the road, and went to bed.

  She was the last to see him alive. Because of this, she was forced to recount the meaningless conversation over the cigarette at least a hundred times. On several occasions she was tempted to make parts up, because the conversation (if you could even call it that) had been so utterly dull. She wished that he had said something poignant, or that she had, so that a little solace might be found in his last moments. She was a writer—wanted to be, anyway—and she wanted something writer-ly to have happened there at the end. She wanted to have seen it coming. She wanted to have had a premonition. But all she had was a cigarette. At least she had given him one. At least there was that.

  She was not the type to let these things go. It would stay with her forever, his bare feet on the snowy steps outside the dormitory. She would revisit it, seize it with something resembling passion, any time her life veered off course. She would blame herself, exaggerate her role in things, create for herself hundreds of opportunities to save him, opportunities she would have certainly taken advantage of if she’d only been smarter, kinder, a better RA, better friend, better person. Returning to campus for her ten-year reunion, she stepped onto the balcony and felt a grief more acute than she’d felt for her own dead mother.

  But this is not that story either.

  Why no shoes? Perhaps the boy had returned from the party, gone into his room and kicked off his battered sneakers, emptied his pockets, checked the answering machine. Possibly he had stepped into the hallway, bound for the bathroom, and inadvertently allowed the door to close and lock behind him, his roommate asleep inside. “Shit,” he might have said. It
’s likely he paused for a moment, considering. There were a dozen rooms he could crash in, friends up and down the hall who would still be awake. But now he wanted a cigarette; if the evening wasn’t going to be over, a cigarette was in order. He’d find one to bum, out front, and then figure out where to sleep.

  He wasn’t in a bad mood, just weary and sobering up, not in the mood to chat. He was glad when the RA gave him an extra smoke and went off to bed, because he wanted to smoke alone. Something nice, really, about smoking alone, enjoying it not because you were being social but because you weren’t. But why not just smoke it there, on the steps out front? Maybe he wanted a view of the campus, brilliant and new in the snow. Maybe that was the image of himself he was picturing as the elevator carried him to the fourth floor. A still night, snow falling on his bare feet and head, he alone and above it all.

  How did he fall? Everyone has a theory. The railing was high as his chest, so a mere slip on the slick balcony would not have sent him over. Here is what I think: he saw something. Thought he saw something, or someone. Maybe he was waiting for a girl he liked to come home. Maybe he heard voices, friends’ voices, from around the corner of the building. Or maybe it wasn’t a person at all. Maybe it was a rabbit, or one of the campus cats, trotting down the walk, snow puffing under its light feet. I think he leaned over to get a better look.

  But what do I know? Most of this story is mostly made up. Some readers might believe it to be thinly veiled fact, when in truth it is thinly veiled fiction, a fabrication gently draped with the netting of what actually occurred. Half the characters are no more than letters stumbling across my computer screen; the other half have been lovingly adorned with lies and conjecture. “The truth escapes me,” people say, though surely we are willing accomplices to its flight. We loosen its chains, leave its cell door slightly ajar, allow ourselves to become distracted as it lumbers off into the waning light. It’s easier that way, for then everything and everyone is fair game. Yes, this story’s possibilities for the introductory fiction workshop are vast: an exercise in character, in plot, in beginnings, in endings. An exercise in point of view. A story about a college, about a generation, about a culture of excess. A story about the splintering of friendships, about priorities, about the weight of the past, the weight of the future, the weight of the single moment and how it resonates through dorm rooms and classrooms, into bedrooms and waiting rooms, days and months and years away. This story could be all those things, yet it is none of them. So what, then, is the story? Only this: