Up Up, Down Down

by Cheston Knapp

  “I can’t say for certain we have the guy,” the officer said.

  “What does that mean, exactly? Like, you have a guy and you aren’t a hundred percent it’s the guy? Or you’re not sure you even have a guy?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Yes, you have a guy? Or yes, you don’t have a guy?”

  “Yes, the first one.”

  “Okay, so I don’t necessarily have to hurry back inside and lock all my doors, is what you’re saying.”

  “No, that’s not what I’m saying at all. I can’t say that’s not a good idea. It’s a good idea actually. Regardless.”

  Trying to imagine the protocol he had to follow, all the cogs of bureaucracy his uniform represented, was like trying to hold my entire family tree in mind. It just kept going back, back, back, back, back. I decided to cut my losses, thanked him for his time, and headed for home.

  By now the first reporters had arrived, ageless men and women in civvies holding spiral notebooks and little electronic voice recorders. It was mesmerizing, watching them bop around like pollinators, bystander to bystander, as they tried to catch up to the story, a story that’d started as all stories do for them, in medias res. A few of these reporters approached me for information, but I begged off, claiming I knew only as much as they did, which was next to nothing, and mostly true. Being approached in this way unsettled me—I’d been unwittingly cast as a minor character here. Plus I couldn’t shake the thought that we, Peter’s neighbors, were entitled to a knowledge that they, the reporters, and by extension the public, were not. At least not so soon.

  A woman reporter wearing a no-nonsense pantsuit pressed me after I played dumb. But had I known the man who was murdered? The victim, what was he like?

  No, I said. I hadn’t. He was just my neighbor. And as I walked away, resentment burbled in my gut. Gone pugnacious now, I wished I’d known something real juicy, if for no other reason than to feel like I was withholding something from her.

  Back inside my house, a new urgency gripped me. I knew I had to break the news to Alexis. As I took the stairs up toward her office, I debated how to phrase it. Died? Was killed? Murdered? Died? Was killed? Murdered? My resentment of the reporters grew more pointed and intense. I held them responsible for my feeling like I’d been turned into the bearer of information, a data delivery system, and decidedly not a storyteller, or at least not the kind I was comfortable with. The story here was related to this news, of course, but wasn’t exhausted by it. There would be excess, ragged edges. I mean, this was Peter’s story after all, wasn’t it?

  * * *

  When Alexis and I were looking at what would become our first house, in 2010, near the bottom of the most recent financial crisis, our Realtor talked a lot about this neighborhood’s potential. She emphasized this word, “potential,” in such a way that you knew it existed somewhere as a bullet point. Worse, you knew it existed there for buyers like us, a couple of young white DINCs with more future ahead of them than past behind. And we felt full of this potential ourselves, full of the very power that lives inside that word. There seemed to be no difference between our lives and how we’d choose to tell the story of them, no need to alter or amend. We’d gotten engaged not long before—and in Paris. I’d planned things for the story I thought Alexis would want to tell, hopefully, for the rest of her life, so the bridge we stopped on afforded an unobstructed view of the Eiffel Tower, which glittered bedazzlingly behind me as I proposed. And now we were planning a wedding. We’d settled on a location, an idyllic farm outside Portland. In their pitch the owners told us that, on a clear day, you could see the four ghostly mountain peaks of Hood, Adams, Saint Helens, and Rainier. The prospect of buying a house (we were preapproved!) had only kicked our imaginations into overdrive. How easy it was to cast ourselves ahead in time. How wondrously did the future shimmer! We populated that future with children, a whole passel of towheaded and cheeky little cherubs, so adorbs that people flagged us down on the street to tell us so, children born so painlessly and inconsequentially that they didn’t disrupt our lives, not a smidgen. Experience after experience unfolded in the crystal balls of our dinner conversations—holidays, sure, birthdays and other special occasions, but summer BBQs and routine pizza Fridays, too, the predictable rhythms of a Tuesday afternoon—experiences that brimmed with significance, that were so loamy rich with meaning that they’d continue to feed us well into our dotage. All these future memories, would they begin in this house? In this neighborhood? The stock here was among the city’s best, after all, block after tree-lined block of handsome old Foursquares and Craftsmans, places with “good bones,” a phrase I now understand to mean that they’ll renovate nicely, which is really to say that it won’t be too tough to erase what’s currently there. And the cutesy knickknack shops and fancy restaurants that the city was (in)famous for? They were getting closer to us all the time. Had we read about the upcoming development on Williams? All the eco-friendly condos and their concomitant storefronts? Or about the projects the city had planned to beautify—or at least descarify—Killingsworth? She might as well have sparked some incense and taken us on a guided visualization that replaced the murder mart with a tasty brunch spot, the sketchy furniture outlet down the block with an industrial-chic cocktail bar. But go further still and imagine a street full of young families like ours, with kids of their own, kids who could play in the streets undaunted, crime having dropped to squat, who would attend the local schools that had, with time, improved beyond all recognition.

  Obvious though it is, it bears stating: to imagine what a place can become is to dismiss or reject what is already there. “Imagination” of this sort really functions as an insidious and particular brand of arrogance, one that ignores all but economic forces. I understood this in an abstract way when we moved in and it gave me pause. I felt guilty. But this guilt didn’t give way to historical inquisitiveness, to a desire or, better still, a duty to understand the social dynamics that had swirled through the area like pressure systems. No. My guilt was one fit for a venial sin, something mincing and pesky but that nonetheless called for forgiveness. It was like, growing up, having to apologize to and ask forgiveness from one of my younger brothers: I knew I’d done whatever wrong I’d done and felt ashamed for it but disliked having to apologize, because apologizing ratified the story of my wrongdoing, made it real and put it in the world, and of course that was the point but still. In any case, I understood all this had to do with community, a word I kept hearing tossed around. I no longer fully understood what people meant when they said it and it now put a question to me like a poke in the chest. At root it seemed to have something in common with the idea of family, to partake of the same sense of belonging, complicated and fraught as it may be, full of the same self-sacrifice and intimate fucked-upedness, fucked up because of the very nature and extent of that intimacy. But it was more casual than that, the way I was hearing it used. I kept wondering what community was supposed to mean in an age that also advocated such staunch and unremitting individualism, whose highest ideal is the turbidly vague state of authentic selfhood—a culture of you-do-you. Is it nothing more than social back-scratching, then, the orgy of mutual masturbation you find online? Follow-for-follow, like-for-like, etc.? Or, worse, was it simply economic symbiosis, as it seemed when my neighbor thanked Alexis and me for buying our house for what we bought it for because it allowed him to refinance his? What I knew for sure was that the chief downside of gentrification was the dissolution of community and I didn’t want to feel responsible for that, for what amounts to arriving at a party and immediately changing the music. I didn’t want to think of myself as that kind of character. So when I saw Peter walking down the sidewalk soon after we moved in, I experienced something like relief. Here was the agent of my absolution, just the man to sell me an indulgence of sorts and open the door to a form of membership, belonging. “Community.” And all of this could happen below board, without anyone (possibly even me) being the wiser.


  It so happened that Peter and Linda got their first silken windhound, Apollo, at about the same time Alexis and I got our dog, Percy. This was a couple months after we moved in and, sharing the giddy excitement of new parenthood, we formed a quick and easy bond. On walks with Percy, I’d first stop by Peter’s house, a beautiful old Craftsman he’d been in since the eighties, with a yard he’d let go to seed and grow into a ready metaphor for madness, with a small rickety metal fence out front that kept the dog penned only when he didn’t feel like jumping over it. He’d suit Apollo up and we’d head to Peninsula Park, less than half a mile away. A sunken rose garden with manicured, rectilinear hedges and a century-old fountain season the park with a distinctly continental flavor. Down in among the roses, you might could be in a French or Austrian or Danish city. This flare of foreignness, the way the park can make you feel like you’ve been transported abroad, was one of the things that finally sold Alexis and me on the neighborhood. When there, we could easily imagine we were, in fact, elsewhere, as though our lives together were nothing but a permanent vacation, a sixty-year holiday before our second and final shift down in the mines; where, as on vacation, we could easily overlook or ignore whatever at the time was making our lives complicated and hard, whatever we might choose to revise or edit out of our life story. And while it’s not a dog park, after we made sure no security was about, Peter and I would let the dogs off their leashes and, as they chased each other through the hedgerows or circled each other in the field above, we’d stroll behind them and talk.

  Peter was about as old as my dad and at the time, in my late twenties, after a spate of father-son contretemps, banal run-ins that left me feeling embarrassed about how much pain they’d caused me, it seemed I couldn’t meet a man of a certain age without saddling him with filial baggage, great bulging panniers of misapplied longing, thinking maybe he could help me, give me some guidance. Of exactly what sort, this guidance, I couldn’t say. Might’ve been as simple as wanting someone to demonstrate that life was possible, that one could get accustomed to the fact that it went on, that is, until it didn’t. Something so straightforward, but it seemed impossible to me then, that one’s life continued to happen, that the days and years and months and weeks kept coming. How did one countenance it? And what was one to do with the collateral damage of all that time: “experience”? It was in about here that I found myself walking around muttering this sound bite from Gertrude Stein like a sinister mantra: “Identity always worries me and memory and eternity.”

  Everything seemed so far away, maybe most of all myself, and I thought someone could or rather had to shepherd me out of this morass. Prima facie, sure, Peter made for an odd casting choice. Even when he had his shit together, when Linda was still living there and he had the dogs, his life, by any conventional marker, was a mess. He was no longer teaching and the reasons for this were cloudy and charged in a way that you knew not to ask after. I figured it had something to do with his drinking and that the drinking was related to unrest of a deeper, more unresolvable sort, an unrest that fed his wildness. And it was this wildness that first attracted me. There was something poetic to it, something that suggested the age-old binary star of madness and genius. He seemed, in short, to live closer to the sweet sour molten marrowy core of life and I envied that, idealized that way of being. It had a musk of authenticity I hoped would wear off on me. This musk, on Peter, had a whiff of failure freely embraced, of ambitions deferred or retrofitted or abandoned altogether. Not shamefully, but willingly, in a way that struck me as noble. In my work as an editor at the time, I seemed to be dealing exclusively with successes, with writers who’d just sold—always “just”—X to Y for $Z00,000, who’d been nominated for Important Prizes, who’d won them. MacArthur Fellowships and National Book Awards and Pulitzers. I worked on a story with one writer who, shortly after, won the fucking Nobel. Being exposed to accomplishment on this scale was obviously and rightly humbling, but it got to be cloying, stultifying. It made it so easy for me to indulge the worst and most facile sort of writerly kvetching. Perhaps I would always only help others tell their stories, I’d bemoan, my authorial jollies forever confined to having an image or sentence of mine not accepted, exactly, just not stetted. How’s a little dinghy supposed to navigate waters crowded with such tankers? Being around Peter eased the lamest of these anxieties, and helped me recall why I’d started reading and writing in the first place: for the fun of it, for the leagues-deep sense of belonging.

  And so we walked, talked.

  These talks, they were the kind that almost erase themselves as they go, that follow digression after digression until the starting point has long been lost, no Hansel and Gretel trail of thought leading back to the beginning. Peter was nothing if not a world-class talker and it’s thanks in large part to this that, rangy as they were, these conversations never felt scattered or diffuse. He had a scholar’s thoroughness and attention to detail and a poet’s gift for association, so that each digression he introduced in some way augmented or amplified what’d come before, no matter how big a leap it seemed on the surface, from philosophy to poetry to music of all genres to pop culture to painting to history. Big as he was, I sometimes imagined he had more literal room to store knowledge, that his body was one great lumbering maze of learning. He often adopted a Socratic style, proceeding by interrogative feints and parries, so sure of himself, of all he did and did not know. And early on this frustrated me. I’d bristle when he introduced a new angle, a related topic, ask whether I’d considered things from this or that perspective, etc. I also thought of myself as something of a reader, fancied mine to be catholic tastes, book- and culture-wise, and while decidedly not a scholar, I was no sciolist either. But then I learned to give over to the experience of our conversations, let them grow into the untamable organic things they wanted to become, and began to understand that when Peter projected authority, it was not at the expense of his curiosity. He wasn’t being pompous or dickish, but a teacher. He’d admit when he didn’t know something and would really listen as you talked about it—you could practically see him rearranging his mental lumber to make room for the new knowledge. And as each day’s walk came to an end, what we were left with, more than knowledge proper, was a sense of resonance, something akin to what exists in the air after a rung note stops ringing, a gentle disturbance in the fabric of shared space. So this is how I prefer to see us now, when I survey the past, as two men, neighbors, standing side by side in the field at Peninsula Park, the marked difference in our heights making us look like a bar graph of considerable loss, letting a break in our conversation extend and experiencing in the silence the tug of respect, the pleasure of it, of giving as much as receiving it, as we watched our dogs play.

  Silken windhounds—I’d never heard of the breed before. They’re sight hounds, like something straight out of the pages of Tolstoy. They have the lithe f-hole bodies of a borzoi or whippet and their long legs and flowing coat make them look ghostly and elemental when they run, which they were bred to do. And Percy? She is a silly small vehicle of hypoallergenic cuteness, imagineered for the dander-intolerant to cuddle, a breed whose name embarrasses me too much to set down here, but—hint, hint—it shares a suffix with a world-famous cookie. It was always impressive and entertaining to watch Apollo, hunched low, his paws appearing to barely touch the ground, looking not unlike a rhythmic gymnast’s ribbon, run literal circles around Percy. A thing of wonder, to behold an animal in its element like that, unencumbered by questions of purpose or ends. Every so often Percy would get spooked and pull up short and Apollo would have to make a last-second adjustment, often leaping gracefully over her, and, skittish as she is, Percy would tuck her tail and cower and look back at me. How, she seemed to ask with those cartoonishly adorable eyes, how is he managing to be everywhere all at once?

  * * *

  By almost any standard you want to judge it, the chase that followed Peter’s murder was tame, even dull, and as Caprice told me what’d happened (gave me
the scoop), I found myself having to temper what I recognized immediately was a very shitty form of disappointment, a species of boredom brought on by life’s having failed to live up to the expectations that stories had nurtured in me. There were no roadblocks or helicopters or K-9 squad. No standoff or hostages or demands. No. The action here had been far more ho-hum than that, actually almost Lynchian in its banality. After the stabbing, the suspect, Steve, one of the heretofore nameless figures Peter had sat with nightly on his shadowy porch, walked calmly up the block to the murder mart. There, according to Caprice, he bought a six-pack of beer, cracked and downed one can right away, and was at work on a second when the police picked him up, when they apprehended him.

  “This was just there,” she said, pointing down the way to nothing in particular at Williams and Jessup, where the second cluster of cop cars had been earlier.

  Caprice was eager to relay these details when at last I got some time with her. I’d returned outside after Alexis and I shared our private moment and after talking to Scott and asking him to let the folks from Irving know what’d happened. I told myself it was important that our people find out from one of us, and imagined word racing like a lit fuse through the branches of a ramifying phone tree, trying to outpace all the other, less intimate media channels out there. The action outside continued as more officers showed up, suit-wearing homicide detectives now among them. But before I left the house for the second time, I grabbed my pocket notebook. It was a pathetic gesture of credibility, I knew, and there in my hand it seemed a cheap prop, an absurd affectation. Who was I hoping to fool with this act? With this performance of myself as “writer”? More than anyone, to be honest, probably myself. I hadn’t written anything in months and had started to wonder whether I ever would again. It seemed recent life events had conspired to crowd me out, to deny me the space I needed to translate them, which is to say, tame or control them. And after all, couldn’t I be happy with a life in literature lived offstage, gesturing directions inaudibly from the wings? Wasn’t I already fluent in the passive-aggressive semaphore that editors employ? Guilty as it made me feel, though, even I, with my underdeveloped nose for narrative mojo, recognized that what was happening outside was material, the makings of a story.