by Ty Roth
“Go on,” Gordon said.
“We’d go down to the bay,” I continued. “Tom and I would skip stones while Dad sat on one of the big slabs of concrete that had been dumped there as a breakwall. He’d just sit and stare at the water like it was talking to him or something, whispering secrets. But we never went in, just played along the edges.”
“That’s sad,” Gordon said. “More than sad. Unnatural.”
Again, Gordon’s ambiguity made it difficult to pin down his meaning. I wasn’t sure if his “unnatural” referred to my father’s death or my landlubber status.
“What did you do for fun?”
I stared at him blankly. I’d never really thought of fun as being some kind of requirement for living. I’d always figured that fun was not for a child “intellectually advanced for his age,” as I had often heard myself described by teachers. Fun was not for a white boy forbidden to play outside in an otherwise all-black neighborhood. Fun was not for a kid with walking-dead parents haunting his house. Fun was not for a wannabe writer who was certain to have been granted too short a time in which to make an indelible mark. There had always been too much to read, too much to be afraid of, too much sadness, and too much yet to be put into words to be able just to go out and have fun.
By the end of that day, however, I would realize that all of the pursuits that I thought I didn’t have time to experience were the very things I needed to do if I had any hope of having anything meaningful to say, anything to contribute.
“I flew a kite once,” I offered pathetically.
“A kite? Was that after you’d finished a quick game of marbles? For Christ’s sake, Keats, it’s the twenty-first century.”
I ignored Gordon’s sarcasm and continued my recollection. “I was only seven or eight years old. It was April. Easter Sunday. My dad was only just confined to the wheelchair. I had jelly beans and some marshmallow Peeps in my Easter basket, and this cheap paper Spider-Man kite.” I paused, then went on. “Most of the kids in the neighborhood had been dragged to church services and the corners were empty. My dad stayed on the porch, shouting instructions. I took off down the sidewalk with my kite trailing at shoulder height. Then the wind took it. It flew as high as it could go, and I walked back to my front yard, careful not to snag the string in a tree branch or something. We watched the kite. I felt the wind tugging at it. In my little kid brain, I thought the kite was trying to lift me up—out of that place. I remember thinking that I wouldn’t resist if it did.”
“Then what?” Gordon asked, pulling me out of my flashback.
“They shot it.”
“What!”
“Three guys, still wearing their church suits. Four or five quick shots. Obliterated the thing. It was probably a dare or something. Haven’t flown a kite since, but sometimes I still imagine that a big wind will come and blow me out of there.”
“Yeah. You and your dog Toto too,” Gordon said.
“Something like that.”
We were drawing near to the north shore. It meant that the culmination of our quest and our final farewells to Shelly were approaching. Bowed by the emotional weight of the past few days and the literal weight of lugging around her ashes since the night before, I simultaneously dreaded and looked forward to letting go of her.
“Do you think we’ll see her again?” I asked.
“See who?”
“Shelly.”
“You mean like in heaven or some shit like that?” Gordon said with his typical irreverence for all things sacred.
“Yeah.”
“Nope. Don’t believe so. This is it, Keats. One shot,” said Gordon.
“Me neither,” I said, before I hedged. “At least, I don’t think so.”
“No shit? I always thought you were one of the good guys. I’ll be damned.”
“Very funny.”
“Did you have some kind of revelation when I stopped to piss back there, or what?”
“No,” I answered. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot since Shelly died, and it just doesn’t add up.”
“Slow down, Keats. I don’t want any part of an ontological meltdown.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.
“Sure you do. You’re a smart guy. You just don’t know you know.”
I was surprised, and pleased, to know that Gordon thought of me as smart.
“You’re talking about the existence of things—what we know exists and what we don’t know exists. How we know it, and what we’re even capable of knowing in the first place. You’ll hear it all in Fulop’s senior Introduction to Philosophy class.”
“Oh,” I said, pretending his explanation had cleared it up.
“It’s like you’ve burst some kind of existential cherry, and I don’t need to be blamed for it. I’ve already got enough blood on my hands, and I’m tired of being blamed for shit I didn’t do.”
Again, I had no idea what he was talking about. What was with Gordon’s obsession with cherries? “Anyway,” I said, returning to my thought, “I don’t believe any of it either: the soul, heaven, hell, God, the devil.”
“Whoa. Slow down there. Don’t get all Nietzsche on me. I didn’t say I didn’t believe in anything.”
“What do you believe in?” I asked. “Sex, drugs, and rock and roll?”
“Those are pretty good places to start, but even I’m not so shallow as that. There might be something more, some kind of power. I just don’t think it’s the dude they teach at school or in churches. As far as I’m concerned, ‘God’ is just a word, a metaphor for whatever the fuck makes you hard, and heaven’s a metaphor for the wishful thinking that’s actually the nothing that comes next. Like I said, there may be something out there, some kind of creative force or energizing spirit, but I don’t believe there’s some judgmental prick with a shitty sense of humor waiting for the last laugh. At least, I sure hope not.”
“That’s what Shelly said too.”
“Well, Shelly was weird, not dumb.”
“What if you’re wrong?” I asked, ignoring his sloppy characterization of Shelly.
“Then I’m fucked, but what if they’re wrong and by listening to them, I waste my life saying no to damn near everything that makes me feel good and alive? I need more than men in black saying ‘Because I told you so,’ or some bullshit holy book full of more nonsense, contradictions, and God-sponsored cruelty than Homer could have imagined in a thousand epics. Nope. That shit’s not for me. I’m betting on the bird in this hand”—he actually grabbed his crotch—“and fucking every burning bush worth fucking. If you want to see Shelly again, take off that stopper and take a long hard look, because that’s all that’s left and all the reunion you’re ever going to get.”
I took the absence of an immediate and directed lightning strike as a point in Gordon’s favor, but I backed away a few paces just in case. (On the average, there are ninety fatalities each year in America due to lightning strikes.)
“What’s that?” Gordon said, surveying the hazy blue sky with both eyes and ears.
I mimicked his tilted head posture and sensory activation. “It sounds like …”
“A plane.” (You have a one-in-eleven-million chance of dying in a plane crash.) After he finished my sentence, he pointed over my shoulder toward the south and the mainland. “Let’s go.”
“We did just pass the airport,” I reasoned with him.
“I know, but it’s flying awfully low and circling without being in any hurry to land, at least not until it finds what it’s looking for, and I think that may be us. I don’t know; it just doesn’t feel right. We need to hurry. I can feel it.”
“Shelly’s dad?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
I felt Shelly swishing around inside of the urn as we ran.
I.
DEATH IS HERE AND DEATH IS THERE,
DEATH IS BUSY EVERYWHERE,
ALL AROUND, WITHIN, BENEATH,
ABOVE IS DEATH—AND WE ARE DEAT
H.
II.
DEATH HAS SET HIS MARK AND SEAL
ON ALL WE ARE AND ALL WE FEEL,
ON ALL WE KNOW AND ALL WE FEAR,
III.
FIRST OUR PLEASURES DIE—AND THEN
OUR HOPES, AND THEN OUR FEARS—AND WHEN
THESE ARE DEAD, THE DEBT IS DUE,
DUST CLAIMS DUST—AND WE DIE TOO.
IV.
ALL THINGS THAT WE LOVE AND CHERISH,
LIKE OURSELVES MUST FADE AND PERISH;
SUCH IS OUR RUDE MORTAL LOT—
LOVE ITSELF WOULD, DID THEY NOT.
—PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, “DEATH”
16
The summer between my sophomore and junior years—between Shelly’s and Gordon’s junior and senior years—as I worked on my writing and website, Shelly was on North Bass, and Gordon was overseas. The three of us were largely incommunicado (nothing atypical as far as I went, since the Beacon had been my only consistent link to either one of them and, obviously, there was no summer edition). That June, my mother passed away, and not long after, Tom displayed signs of the onset of his tuberculosis.
At only twenty years old, he felt the burden of being the man of the house, and he didn’t always deal with it in what you might call “appropriate” ways, especially after Mom died. He’d made some pretty shady friends at work who’d introduced him first to pot and cocaine and eventually to heroin. I know I should have done something, but put yourself in the situation we were in, and you tell me what you would have done. To make matters worse, Tom had been lazy in treating his diabetes (number six killer of Americans), and neither of us had healthy eating habits. I assumed that his lingering cough, constant lethargy, and weight loss were due to the drugs and poor diet.
His health deteriorated. He was fired from his job, for his constant coughing was giving everyone the fantods as they wondered what he might be spreading. Besides, he looked like a zombie; his appearance was enough to drive potential customers screaming from the restaurant.
When I finally convinced him to go to the clinic at the county health department, the doctor diagnosed his tuberculosis (not to mention his drug usage, which led the doctor to also have Tom tested for AIDS—negative thus far). The precautionary test for TB ordered for me came back negative. Tom was prescribed a combination of antibiotics that required vigilant regimentation, which I knew he would struggle to maintain, in order to be effective. But at least he was being treated.
My mother had died in her sleep. One noontime in late June, I realized that I hadn’t heard her stir all morning. I found her lying in bed, already bluing. I knew she was dead, but I called 911 anyway. Then I called Tom. One of the EMTs notified the same cut-rate funeral home that had handled my father. By midafternoon, my mother was on a gurney being wheeled from house to hearse. She was buried next to my father with even less ceremony than his “blue light special” interment. It sounds awful, I know, but her death was sort of anticlimactic. She’d all but died that day years earlier when my father had received his ALS death sentence.
With my mother’s passing, we felt freer to seek any and all of the governmental assistance for which we were eligible but that our father had abhorred and our mother, as head of the household, had been too cataleptic to pursue. Pride and honor are nice and all, but you can’t eat them, and they don’t pay the utilities.
Thinking Shelly might go with me to the cemetery, I called her house. But the woman who answered the phone (I assumed it was her stepmother) curtly communicated that she hadn’t seen Shelly in days. She offered me Shelly’s cell number, but by that point I’d already determined it had been a bad idea to call, so I didn’t take the number. I figured that Shelly was preoccupied with the goings-on at North Bass that summer anyway.
Although I completely lost touch with Shelly from when school let out in June until it began again in early September, in between composing and posting new poems to my website, I was able to follow Gordon’s book tour through blogs on his professionally administered page. So much happened to all of us during those months he was away. It was the summer that changed everything.
After bleeding dry the overwhelmingly female market of young adult readers in America, that spring Pandroth had unleashed a number of foreign language editions of Manfred into the European market. Its author, accompanied by his agent, Ms. Martin, and his mother, followed soon after—fangs bared. When the four-week tour of book signings and appearances concluded, Gordon successfully bullied his mother into allowing him extended vacation time, with a brief visit to western Turkey and a prolonged stay in Greece, both of which had held a special place in his imagination since his early readings of Homer. In an effort to ease Catherine’s worry, Ms. Martin arranged for Johnny Hobhouse, a recent Columbia grad and an intern at her agency, to fly over and serve as Gordon’s chaperone for the remainder of his pilgrimage.
Upon his liberation from his matronly cotravelers, Gordon’s blogs grew infrequent. I mostly learned of his Aegean adventures and Shelly’s own quixotic summer the following fall from Shelly. Apparently, Gordon emailed her with occasional updates, attaching photographs of himself in various locations. In one that Shelly shared, he was dripping wet inside a peeled-to-beneath-his-waist wet suit as he emerged in the half-light of dusk from a large body of water. According to Gordon’s email, he had just recreated Leander’s swimming of the Dardanelles, a strait separating the Aegean Sea from the Sea of Marmara, not far from the ancient city of Troy.
The idea for the swim had originated years ago at the Rood, where Willie had shared the story of Leander and Hero, and had even posed Gordon as Leander for one of his sketches. In the myth, Leander of Abydos and Hero of Sestos fall in love during a chance encounter at a festival honoring Aphrodite. However, Hero’s parents refuse to allow their daughter to enter into a relationship with a boy from the rival city-state directly across the Dardanelles—or the Hellespont, as the strait was then named. In defiance of her parents, Hero agrees to Leander’s plan for her to light a lamp in her bedroom tower window as a landmark by which he can navigate as he braves the turbulent waters and secretly swims to her. The ritual continues nightly. One evening at the onset of winter, however, a strong wind extinguishes Hero’s lamp in the midst of Leander’s crossing and leaves him floundering, directionless, until he drowns in watery confusion. Spotting his lifeless body washed up on the rocks beneath her tower on the following morning, Hero throws herself from the window to die next to Leander.
When Gordon finally emerged from his swim, he was met by Hobhouse, who snapped the photograph sent to Shelly. As it turned out, Hobhouse had more than a few wild hairs of his own, and Ms. Martin couldn’t have picked a less suitable chaperone for her boy genius.
From northeastern Greece, they relocated to the Athenaeum InterContinental luxury hotel, located twenty minutes from the nightlife of downtown Athens but near to the Acropolis, the Parthenon, and the Temple of Apollo. The hotel’s close proximity to the metro made it an ideal launching pad for their planned adventures. Initially, their itinerary consisted of the stuff of standard Greek vacations, but it was soon discarded in favor of a more epicurean, less touristy stay. The pair began sleeping until noon, and then commencing their daily ritual of afternoons spent at the beaches of Glyfada, light dinners and coffee in any of the numerous cafés in Athens, and clubbing until dawn.
One morning, however, Gordon broke from their established cycle of sloth and debauchery, cut short their morning slumber, dragged the hungover Hobhouse from bed, and rode the municipal bus from Omonia Square to Cape Sounion, the southernmost tip of the Attica peninsula. There they visited the ruins of the Temple of Poseidon. As if to touch the past and to link himself inextricably with his self-acknowledged patron god forever, Gordon snuck past the barriers and carved his name into the base of one of the remaining pillars, while Hobhouse distracted the security guard with a perfectly timed bout of vomiting.
“That is as close to immortality as either one of us will ever come,” Gord
on told Hobhouse upon extricating himself from the cordoned-off temple.
“Whatever,” Hobhouse moaned, badly in need of some serious hydration and a nap before the night’s revelries.
Hobhouse quickly grew accustomed to being blown off by Gordon whenever his ward made the company of a local beauty. In fact, on their first full day in Athens, while the two of them were shopping in the boutiques of Kolonaki, Gordon met three sisters who, in Hobhouse’s estimation, were all in their early to middle teens. Made uncomfortable in their company by his own relatively advanced years, Hobhouse excused himself.
Gordon, meanwhile, accompanied Teresa, Mariana, and Kattinka to their suburban home northeast of downtown Athens. Among the three of them they didn’t appear to share ten words of English. The Macri sisters’ home was a four-story Grammatikos stone maisonette with a view of the Evoikos Gulf, and was worth more than a million euros. Compared to downtown Athens, it was rural, uncongested, and, if nothing else, free from the incessant smog that lingered over the ancient city.
No sooner had Gordon set foot on the dark German hardwood of the first-floor living room, than the squealing sisters scattered to their respective bedrooms. Gordon stood stock-still among a collection of abstract sculptures and paintings until the girls returned; each was wrapped in a bath towel and nothing else. Gordon had a sneaking suspicion that he wasn’t the first boy they’d collected and brought home.
Teresa, the one Gordon thought to be the youngest (perhaps thirteen), took him by the hand and led him, followed by her two sisters, through a sliding glass door into a first-level pool and Jacuzzi area. Without ceremony or hesitation, the sisters dropped their towels, joined hands at the pool’s edge, and jumped in as Gordon watched.
Treading water, the three formed a line of synchronized swimmers and turned to their guest. “Well?” Kattinka, the oldest, asked.