Unraveling

by Owen Thomas

  “But understand. It’s not about labels, Mr. President. It’s not about flag pins or French fries. It’s about principle. It’s about identity. It’s about love. What you sacrifice when you love anything or anyone – a person, a country, a principle – what you sacrifice when you love, is the luxury of not caring. If I ever get to the point of not caring, then it will be time for me to renounce my citizenship; to renounce this union altogether and to start another or go it alone. But until that time, I care enough to fight you. The proof of my love for this country and its ideals is that I am up here right now. Call me names, Mr. President; make me afraid. I am here in your face because I care. Because I am a patriot. Because I am filled with a love that will not let me abandon the union in such disrepair.

  “So… I have been absent, yes. But I hear the drumming and am here now. And I will not be lured away from this fight. Not this time. Because I have too much to lose of myself if I do not stand up to be counted. If I do not stand up to object to the slaughter of life carried out in my name. If I do not stand up to take responsibility for my government. If I do not stand up with my brothers and with my sisters and bear solemn witness to the sad state of our union, the union with which you have been entrusted. If I do not stand up to shame you with everything in me that is decent. If I do not stand up to tell you – housewife to President, mother of three to leader of the free world – that this war is wrong, sir. If I do not stand up to plead with you, sir, to end this madness; to stop the killing; to seek another way to engage our enemies and work with our allies; to respect the fact that we are not alone and cannot act alone; to bring our sons and daughters, our mothers and fathers, our brothers and sisters back from the desert.

  “So I will stand up. This is who I am.”

  CHAPTER 72 – Hollis

  The heavy, black Seville fell silent. Its engine did not hiss or pop, nor wheeze any hint of relief at being still. The rental surely would have. The Civic had been but a pony; an old tin burro that seemed to gasp for air at speeds over fifty. The Seville – his Seville – was an iron stallion that did not seem to even need oxygen. He had pushed his luck at eighty miles an hour almost the entire one hundred thirty-eight miles from Port Columbus International Airport to KSU. The little silver Civic would have rattled and swerved the whole way. The Seville had handled it like a trip to Sunday church.

  Hollis pulled the keys out of the ignition and bounced them lightly in his hand.

  So then why did he miss the rental? Why did he feel a pang of longing in his heart when he first saw the Seville waiting for him at the airport, right where he had left it? Was it because in the Civic he had almost died and yet did not? Because it had delivered him, on the back of its tiny, brittle frame, from the desert to the ocean? Was it because the car waiting at the airport no longer seemed to know him, nor he it?

  He looked around the half-full KSU parking lot, almost as though he expected her to be waiting for him. As though she might be standing in space 27-F with her arms crossed tapping her foot. He opened the door and stepped out into the darkening air. He breathed in deeply through his nose.

  It even smells the same, he thought. How is that? How does one collapse decades in a single whiff?

  It was Kent. Good old Kent. City of Trees. Not just one among dozens scattered across the country, but the original City of Trees. Kent, Ohio might have been called Davey, Ohio, after John Davey of the Davey Tree Expert Company who, back in the mid-1870’s as a cemetery groundskeeper, had planted hundreds of trees around the city that were now the great deciduous stanchions of Hollis’ memory. But the naming honors had gone instead to Marvin Kent who had helped to bring the Atlantic & Great Western Railroad steaming through the sleepy village of Franklin Mills, waking the region from its bucolic agrarian slumber into, suddenly, a bustling life as a stop along a major east-west commercial artery; an artery for whose support an entire local industry had risen, seemingly overnight, directly out of the soil.

  Although the size and the speed of the industrial transformation were unprecedented for Franklin Mills, the arterial metaphor was not entirely without some historical continuity. Franklin Mills had always been, it seemed, a passage. A place of connection. A conduit marker. This was a place through which a person passed in the journey West, chasing the sun along the axis of forward time – of progress, of exploration – pulling the weight of the past to be ceremoniously unpacked and re-established somewhere in the future.

  Before Franklin Mills’ awakening to the modern age, an eighty-two mile waterway, the Pennsylvania & Ohio Canal, had been carved, pick-by-pick, shovel-by-shovel, through the township on its way to Akron from New Castle, Pennsylvania. The canal project had ignited a land speculation boom, seeding the area with enough people and nascent commercial development to allow for a rapid and graceful segue into railroading, a mere twenty-five years later.

  But the historical conduit of Franklin Mills had run not only East to West. The place that would become Kent had also been a significant stop on the Underground Railroad, running South to North, as slaves escaped up into Canada. The abolitionist John Brown himself had lived in Franklin Mills in the 1830’s, operating a tannery on the banks of the Cuyahoga River with Marvin Kent’s father, Zenus Kent. The South-North passage ran along an axis of emancipation. It was a journey on which one carried only the clothes on her body, leaving all the rest. Leaving, if necessary, the husband; the children; the past and all of its shackles.

  In 1910, decades after the canal had been shut down and the A&GW Railroad had fallen into receivership, Kent was selected as the site of a new teacher training college, beating fourteen other eastern Ohio cities out of the opportunity. The fifty-three acres of land for the school was donated by William Kent, son of Marvin, grandson of Zenus. For his generosity, the school was given William’s name, making the Kent State Normal School the only public school in the state named after an individual. Kent State University was now, almost a century later, far and away the city’s largest employer. Education was its industry and its mission. Kent had become a conduit marker on the axis of enlightenment, where one came not to escape the past, but to transcend it.

  That, when he thought about it, was what Hollis smelled in the air. Not the buildings or the trees or the Cuyahoga River or the soil nor the scar of the old P&O Canal or the abandoned tracks bolted into the earth. It was all of it together. It was the character of the place. It had a smell. Now. Then. It was the smell of history. Of time itself.

  It had been twenty years or more since Hollis had set foot on the KSU campus. Not by design. He had no reason to avoid it. His life had simply taken him in other directions. The closest he had come had been as a tour guide for the erstwhile Bethany Koan, but they had run out of time before visiting Kent.

  How glad he was that they had never made it to KSU. It would have been wrong to bring her here. The whole misadventure had been wrong from the very start. But that … to traipse around these grounds hand-in-hand with Lynnette Moss – for that is who she was to him now; Bethany Koan was but a fiction that he himself had helped to create – traipsing around hand-in-hand, here, like this place meant nothing to him; hand-in-hand with anyone but Susan in this place of all places… that would have been a sacrilege.

  He took in another lungful.

  It does smell the same.

  His heart thrilled at the old memories wrapped so carefully in their old feelings.

  He locked and closed the door and pocketed his keys. He turned in a slow circle to get his bearings. The tennis courts were new. Or, new to him anyway. And the roads were different. The way he had come – South on Midway from East Main, rather than North on Terrace from Summit – was not the way he remembered getting onto campus and he was a little disoriented. It did not help, he supposed, that he was exhausted from travel and sleep deprivation. He had that over-caffeinated zombie feeling behind his eyes.

  He turned slowly.

  Tennis courts wrapped in chain link. There was White Hall. Over to his le
ft, he pointed through the car, over beyond a border of trees much larger than he remembered, was Engleman Hall where, from the sounds of it, students were beginning to celebrate nightfall with music pumped through speakers wedged into the frame of someone’s window. He couldn’t see past the trees. But he could see it in his mind’s eye. That was Engleman. That was where Susan had lived for two of her years here. How many times had he stood outside in the Engleman courtyard, just on the other side of those trees, waiting for her, waiting for the night to begin? Or waiting with her, keeping her from going inside, not wanting the night to end?

  It had gotten easier, of course. The edifice was hardly an impenetrable fortress. He had been inside – slept inside – many times. But not in the beginning.

  In the beginning…

  Hollis took another long, deep breath, letting himself fall back in time.

  In the beginning, when all he seemed to know of himself was what he did not have and what he wanted out of life, it was excruciating. It was excruciating to see her, to touch her shoulder, to hold her hand, tell jokes to her, dance with her, sing with her, to court her in earnest as though he were applying for a lifetime appointment, to bring her back in the evening, to bring her back here, to Engleman Hall, to kiss her goodnight, and yet, to not quite have her. Excruciating. Like his heart was made of paper. Excruciating.

  For all of our successes and triumphs, he thought, it is the wanting, it is the desperate longing for that which is not quite ours, the times in our lives when triumph eludes us, flirting with our very composure, that we seem to remember ourselves most vividly. With time, that torture becomes treasure; the excruciating becomes exquisite, and we would sever whole limbs if only to experience that agony again. It is yearning, not having, that is the essence of living. All success, all triumph, all acquisition, is ultimately self-defeating. It all dies on the mantle. We only really live in the yearning.

  Someone was laughing. Someone is cooking meat on a grill. Someone is singing. Fight on for KSU, Fight for the Blue and Gold!

  Others join in, their voices up in the tree tops, he imagines them sticking their heads out the windows.

  We’re out to beat the foe; Fight on brave and bold! Fight on for victory, Don’t stop until we’re through. We’re all together, Let’s go forward, K-S-U!

  People began clapping and cheering. And as he stood in the parking lot, within earshot of the growing commotion boiling out of the windows of Engleman Hall, he felt as though his heart were, once again, made of paper. He felt desperate for her. Susan. She was gone. She was not his. Not any more. Not yet. It was a terrible feeling. It was an exquisite feeling. He wanted to go back. He wanted it to be 1967. He wanted his chest and his biceps and his full head of hair.

  He wanted to see himself in her eyes, those gorgeous living-green eyes, and know that she was not yet his and that anything was possible. He wanted to go back to the time before those eyes had grown used to him; before they had seen him fully and come away disillusioned and disappointed. He wanted to go back. He wanted to push through the trees and wait for her to come out of Engleman Hall all over again.

  And yet, he knew better. He knew that yearning for the past, yearning for the man he used to be, was no way to live. He knew because that is what he had become in life: a man who yearns backwards, as the world rolls forward. And he knew, because he had always known, that Susan had been waiting all of these years for him. Out of loyalty. Out of love. And then out of duty. She had let the world roll forward and she had waited. Waited for him. Waited up on the mantle with everything else that he had plucked from the living, roiling river and preserved so as to remind him of the way things were and who he once was. What he knew. What he had accomplished. What he had acquired. Just so that he might feel a little better about who he is: a man with no future except his past. A man with no yearning in his fat muscle of a heart.

  Until now. Now that he had all but destroyed everything. Now that the look in her eyes was gone. Now that his adult life had brought him full circle and his heart was once again made of paper. Now at last, again, he yearned. And it felt like he might just die, right here, outside Engleman Hall, wanting what he no longer had.

  He walked away from the car and the tennis courts and Engleman Hall, out the way he had come. Once he found Terrace Road, the backbone of the campus, he would know how to find the hill at the foot of Taylor Hall; the spot where he had last seen her.

  Part of him still could not believe that it had, in fact, been Susan, his wife, on that television screen. Maybe he had been more intoxicated than he realized. Maybe it was the microphone always obscuring some part of the woman’s face, or the podium that hid everything beneath the shoulders.

  No. It had been her, he was sure of it. He would not have reacted like he had been shot in the chest. He would not have bolted for the car and driven all night two hundred and thirty miles into Los Angeles for the airport and then waited for another six hours for a flight to Columbus had he not been sure. He would not be here, back at KSU.

  But it was also … not her. Not his wife. And he was somehow just as sure of that. The Susan of the hotel television was not the Susan of recent memory. She was … she was… what? Angrier. Smarter. Younger. Much younger. The camera had added five pounds and taken away forty years.

  He found Terrace Road and followed it West and then South, passing one colonnaded memory after another. He had forgotten the names. One of them was Lowery Hall. Another was Merit Hall or Merrill Hall. Van Housen something or other. They each looked exactly the same in the thickening dusk as they had when he had, decades ago, felt free to sprawl out on the lawn and wait for Susan to come skipping out of art or sociology, usually with a cadre of her followers close behind.

  People passed him, mostly twenty-somethings, backpacks slung over their shoulders, twisting their bodies to pass him on the sidewalk, approaching and from behind, paying him no interest. Evidently he was moving too slow.

  He came to a bus stop near a sign that identified VanDeusen Hall. He stopped and stepped onto the grass, forced to step aside for two women, one pushing and the other pulling, a wooden bookcase on a dolly. They were laughing, seemingly at the ridiculousness of a story in the making, five, ten, fifteen years from now. Remember when so-and-so ditched out on us and we had to push that stupid bookcase on a dolly all the way up Terrace Road in the dark?!

  Invisible, he watched them maneuver around the bus stop pole. The dolly did not cooperate. More laughing. They were young and beautiful and perfect in their time. They’re all so perfect at that age.

  The one pushing the dolly was a rich chocolate brown. She wore a pink sweater and jeans and flip-flops. She looked up as they drew next to him. She smiled and thanked him. His paper heart faltered.

  He saw in her face Minnie Watson, standing at the door all of those years ago smiling at Naughty Dillon. How long had he pretended to himself that that look had been for him? All summer. For her he had marched in the streets of Cleveland. For her he had waved signs impugning the integrity of the president of the Cleveland School Board. For her he had taught school. For Minnie Watson. And she had not known. And it was so much the better. For everything had remained dreamily possible. All summer.

  But that was Freedom Summer, 1964. Has he ever since been that free? That willing to imagine a future so radically different than the present? To be someone he was not and had never been? Has he ever since been so audacious? Has Cleveland? Has Ohio? Has the country? How much freedom had he traded over the decades just to keep from starting over with a clean slate? Just so that he could keep comfortably yearning backwards rather than imagining forwards? What is freedom anyway if not the freedom to start over? Just because you can. Just because your paper heart yearns to be reignited. Just because your paper heart yearns for the immolation of the very self that holds you down, heels to the past like roots to the dirt.

  He asked how to find Taylor Hall. They both pointed. He had passed it. It would have been easier for him to see in the day
light. But there it was. Right where he had left it. On the other side of VanDeusen Hall, at the top of the hill. He thanked them but they were already several steps away, still laughing at the dolly that refused to steer straight. He cut into the shadows, across the dark grass and around the building, stepping out onto a large open green that gathered and sloped upward to the colonnades of Taylor Hall.

  He had made a hundred strolls across this soil; starlit meanders up that hill just as the evening was winding down and the only thing left to do was to sit among the trees and imagine the future as the moon came up over Ohio. Hollis turned in slow a circle, looking.

  Too early yet for the moon. It was still below the tops of the trees.

  Initially, it had been all of them; Susan and her merry band of stoned flower children. The Aquarians, he had liked to tease her after they were married. An unkempt motley crew of peaceniks all too cognizant of what they looked like and sounded like and what they were meant to do in the world. Mickey, Don, Ed, Karen, Jane, what was his name, the one with the beard, Cliff, that was it, Cliff, Sammy K, Jules, Billy. There were others. Pete. Quinn. Others. Faces without names. A shifting amalgam of identity.

  They stood apart from much of the student body. Kent State was, by every measure, a very long ways from Haight-Ashbury. Because thinking was one thing. Even believing. Lots of people had thoughts and beliefs. But the difference was in acting on those thoughts and beliefs. Committing to principle. Committing to change. Kent State had its share of thinkers and believers. But changing the world would take action. It would take uncompromising speech. It would take determined, conscious living. It would take a heightened-consciousness. It would take a willingness to make the establishment uncomfortable. By not looking away. By not being polite. By showing up for the fight. Every time. This, they believed, more than how they looked or sounded or greeted each other, brother-this, sister-that, this is what set them apart.