Jesse Kellerman

by The Executor (v5)

  marathon, which was what I was still watching, nine hours later, when my parents returned from identifying my brother’s body.

  4 A

  n eerie stillness then descended on our house. There was no more name-calling, no upended platters of green beans. Nevertheless, one would be hard-pressed to describe the atmosphere as peaceful. It was, to the contrary, extraordinarily tense, not because we expected another terrible turn of events but because the future seemed absolutely blank, holding no promise at all. We startled easily; we felt restless and unable to concentrate. Conversation faltered at the gate. My grades suffered, and I was reprimanded for repeated tardiness. Waking in the middle of the night, I would come downstairs for a glass of water and find my father sitting surrounded by crushed beer cans flickering like dull blue embers in the light of the muted TV I would stand there, waiting for him to acknowledge me. Only once did he do anything more than nod, offering me a swig. It tasted like mildew; I gagged; he told me to go rinse my mouth out. The change in my mother was even more profound. She stopped cooking, and for two months we ate donated casseroles. She abandoned her sewing circle. She neglected her garden; come springtime, where there had once been strawberries and tulips, the earth raised nothing but weeds. At times she looked catatonic. Migraines kept her in bed long past the start of school—hence my tardiness. Eventually Rita started coming by to pick me up on her way to work. I changed, too. I had already figured out that I was different from the rest of my family, but how those differences would add up to a personality was, until then, still very much an open question. When Chris died, I began to answer it. I had taught myself to read right around my fourth birthday. We had nothing on the shelves at home—come to think of it, we didn’t have any dedicated bookcases, just places to stash disused crockery—and so I lived at the local library, becoming staff pet, volunteering there after school, pushing a cart up and down the aisles, restoring order. It has become cliché to say that knowledge is power, but as a young boy I came to understand the irruptive force of even a single new idea, not least with respect to one’s self-image. I began to feel superior to my family, and contemptuous of them, developing a vocabulary and habits of speech that would’ve been odd anywhere, at any time, let alone there and then. My brother used to refer to me as “the Alien,” and that pretty much summed up how everyone felt, including me. It wasn’t people per se I had a problem with—I was friendly, if a bit shy—but these specific people, my immediate family, who valued the physical over the intellectual, the blatant over the oblique. I looked at the chaos around me and concluded that it was the result not of evil but of stupidity. Drinking yourself into a frenzy was stupid. Getting into fights over nothing was stupid, too. Resorting to violence when you ran out of logic was stupid, and so was spending your day moving around heavy objects, or rooting for a bunch of gorillas in uniforms, or believing that life held no higher purpose than the acquisition of a riding lawn mower. Stupid, all of it. My contempt soon became pity; pity, bewilderment. There had to be something better out there. There had to be a world grander than the one enclosed by Highway 77 and a muddy, unfishable river. I could see that, and I was a child. Why couldn’t anyone else see it, too? But they couldn’t, and since I had no hope of making them understand, I had to get away, or else risk becoming one of them. If all this was true before Chris died, it became much more so after. Like many philosophers, I started out as a mystic, and like so many mystics, I ran first to the Church. I’m embarrassed to think of it now, although I take some comfort in counting myself among the ranks of luminaries who have flirted with zealotry, religious or otherwise. Until the age of sixteen, when I ceased to believe in God, I was a stalwart at Mass, the ace of my CCD class. In these pursuits I was encouraged by my mother, herself weepingly devout. She considered my dropping by the rectory to hang out with Father Fred a welcome alternative to smoking dope on the auditorium roof. These days a close, closed-door friendship between a priest and a young boy would be cause for alarm. Justifiably. But in our case it was innocent. Father Fred was (is) simply a decent man, and I credit him for keeping me sane. He was young, not much older than my father, and despite having been born in our town, he’d gotten out, earning a BA from Columbia, an M.Div. from Yale, and ordination in Rome. Speaker of four languages (English, French, Latin, Italian), reader of two more (German, Spanish), music aficionado (he kept a mandolin on the wall of his office)—he was far too cosmopolitan for our little backwater, and as a teenager, I couldn’t fathom why he’d ever returned. “Eventually, life circles around. And when you arrive again at the starting point, it looks different, because you see it through the lens of accumulated wisdom. This is where I belong, Joseph. God was wise enough to put me here in the first place. In my ignorance, it took me fifteen years to grasp His intent.” Unlike my parents, who called me Joey, Father Fred never referred to me by anything other than my full name, and it was thanks to him that I began to think of myself that way: as a complete person, rather than a childish summary of myself. With the onset of adolescence, the alienation I’d always felt from my family began to boil over into a more general hatred of humanity. I condemned everyone around me for sins real and imagined: their narrow goals; their lack of imagination; the false piety of their grief, girls who’d barely known Chris hugging one another and sobbing extravagantly at assembly. I was the prototypical Angry Young Man, my age-appropriate inner turmoil exacerbated by having endured something unspeakable. I was desperate for someone to take me seriously, and Father Fred was that person. When I reread what I have written, I realize that it might make me sound overly clinical, even cold. This I consider an occupational hazard. People misjudge philosophers when they think us dispassionate. I was and am full of emotion. But I also believe that those emotions find their best expression in language, and that language ought not to be waved around like a loaded gun. Think. Deliberate. Examine. Question. Embrace ideas, and believe that they matter at least as much as possessions, for knowledge has value far beyond its instrumental use. Live awake, and you will have had a better life than the sleepwalker. It was Father Fred who taught me these things. Through him I came to appreciate the thrill of rational dialogue, learning that even those who disagree can find wisdom in each other’s positions. Argument could create, rather than destroy; it did not have to be loud or end in tears. He took the white light of my hostility and passed it through the prism of reason, separating my emotions, giving them vector and function. Most of all, he never condescended to me, never gave pat answers or tried to put a rosy spin on what was, to me, obviously a miserable, vain farce of an existence. The Greeks, Avicenna, Descartes, Kant—he showed me how to read them and reach my own conclusions. Together we spent afternoons listening to Anita O’Day LPs and locked in discussion, all the old questions, the ones that have always driven philosophy: What is real? What can we know? And how ought we to act? No matter how many times we had hashed over a subject, there were always new angles to consider, always more to read. He coached me on my college applications, wrote me a letter of recommendation, and lobbied my parents to roll over the money from Chris’s educational fund into mine, enabling me to aim higher than State. When I got into Harvard, he was the first person I called. As the one to introduce me to Nietzsche, he readily appreciated the irony when I began to lose my faith. Still, he continued to treat me with respect. If anything, my atheism became a new and fruitful topic for discussion, because he wanted so badly to win me back. And though he never succeeded, he was proud of me for not having run from the confrontation. All he asked was that I continue to push myself. Philosophy, Plato has Socrates tell us, begins in wonder, and at that age I had much to wonder about, in contrast to my parents, for whom life had drawn the curtains.

  PRACTICALLY THE ONLY THING capable of rousing my mother from her torpor was the battle over what happened on the night Chris died. It took years for the case to be closed, although it was never truly resolved. The facts were these. After leaving the house, Chris drove to a gas station, where he
was denied cigarettes after failing to produce proper ID. He then asked for the bathroom key, informing the clerk upon reemergence that there was something wrong with the toilet. It is possible—although speculative—that while the clerk left the register to investigate, Chris reached over the counter and swiped a pack; by the time police got around to asking for the CCTV video, it had been taped over. Sometime after eleven, he turned onto Riverfront, which runs east before curving north and becoming the Crawhorn Bridge. A patrolman parked at the corner of Riverfront and Delcorte reported seeing the truck go by; he noticed because the driver’s window was open, one arm hanging out, never mind the cold. Near the entrance to the bridge, along the right side of the road, the guardrail was partially down, having been mangled the day before by a snowplow. According to the county, orange hazard cones marked the spot where the asphalt dropped away toward the water. No cones were ever found, however, not on-site or in the river, so either the wind had carried them a considerable distance or, as seems more likely, careless workmen had neglected to put them out. Police later determined that Chris took the curve at upwards of sixty miles per hour, far too fast to make that turn on ice. The pickup slid clean off the road and tumbled down the embankment, flipping once before landing on its side in the partially frozen water. It took a while for the cab to become fully submerged, and, if conscious, he should have had more than enough time to crank open the window and climb out. But when they pulled everything up, they found him still wearing his seatbelt. Initially, the coroner ruled Chris’s death an accidental drowning. Four months later, this was revised to drowning resulting from a motor vehicle accident, with a probable indication of suicide. The general consensus was that the change came down from the county supervisor, who had taken heat in the local paper for his neglect of the guardrail and his failure to put out cones. Prior to that point, my parents hadn’t considered taking legal action, even turning away an attorney who had approached them offering representation. Now, however, my mother was outraged. She went on the warpath, motivated less by greed than by a need to refute the county’s unflattering judgment of my brother. Chris’s behavior had been erratic, but that didn’t make him suicidal. He was an inexperienced driver, and he might not have realized that he was going too fast. If he hadn’t gotten out of the truck, that was because he was unconscious; one needed only to look at the bruises on his forehead where it had smashed against the steering wheel. If he’d intended to kill himself, why go to such elaborate lengths? We had guns in the basement. Moreover, the guardrail had come down less than thirty-six hours before the accident. How could he have known to drive there, of all places? It didn’t add up. In another of her rare bold strokes, my mother called up the attorney and filed suit for wrongful death and negligence, thus beginning a six-year process that would eat up what scant reserves of spirit she had left. Back then I sided with her, more out of loyalty than anything else. In years since, however, as I have devoted my attention to considering the ways in which people choose, I’ve grown leery of easy explanations. It’s possible that Christopher both did and did not intend to drive off the bridge. I will never know. These days, more than ever, I understand that nothing is more inscrutable than the human heart, and that no act, great or small, righteous or wicked, can be so named by one who stands outside the actor’s mind.