Up Up, Down Down

by Cheston Knapp

  When I first received the letter I assumed that the author had made good on the promise to alert the neighbors to what Peter had said, to his “threat.” This seemed the easiest and most reasonable explanation, the one that required the least amount of mental gymnastics to figure. But there was a catch, a snag: the envelope. If it’d been the author, how to account for the photocopy of the opened, postmarked envelope? The longer I thought on it, the more I came to believe that it’d been Peter who’d made the copies, who’d slipped the letter in my mailbox. Maybe this was his way of reaching out, of asking for help. Or maybe it was his strange take on neighborhood watch, selling out the squares or narcing on the narcs or whatever. It’s also entirely possible that he thought I’d find it funny. I can see him there, standing in the self-service copy shop up the street, laughing to himself as the pages multiplied in mysterious mechanical accouchement. But in the end, I can’t say for sure one way or the other that it was or wasn’t him. The only thing I can say with certainty is that no self-defense videos ever arrived. Had they, well, then we’d have a different story.

  * * *

  That Saturday night a handful of us gathered at Ernie and Caprice’s for an impromptu and pretty half-assed wake. Their place is always murky dark and a little leaden and, as a result, entering presents a perceptual mindfuck, because while you walk up the porch to do so, it feels more like a descent, like surprise! you’re spelunking! The decor inside appears to have sat undisturbed for ages, and Caprice smokes wherever she well pleases, so there’s a pervasive and hearty musk of spent cigs. But I don’t mean to suggest it’s uninviting or cold. It’s not. It’s rather more ember-warm and homey, imbued with decades of coziness and conviviality. By now it should be apparent that Ernie and Caprice are party people, people people—tap their walls with your Moses staff and you’d drink a delicious eau-de-vie. In a way, to visit them is for one’s spirit to slip into a pair of footie pajamas. Hospitable as they are, though, isn’t it also always bizarre? going into a neighbor’s house like this? It begins to dawn on you as you walk around, as you take in their choice of curtains and paw their gewgaws, the uncanny realization that life happens here. Life! A vital and vivifying mystery, this—all the meals made and eaten and the stacks of dirty dishes done, the routine maintenance of bodies (shit shower shave, lather rinse repeat, a whole kiddie pool’s worth of fingernail clippings) and the innumerable loads of laundry (all those undies folded into drawers), the walls positively sponged up with scenes of sickness and sadness, anger and reconciliation, tenderness and care. Can it be? That all this is housed here? And so close to where the epic drama of your own life is set? It’s almost too much to get your mind on the outside of.

  Alexis and I added a bottle of wine to the smorgasbord of inebriants on offer and took our place on the barstools at the kitchen counter. The soft lighting felt fittingly lugubrious. Someone had brought one of those frozen pizzas with the laudable, leavening crust. A great tree of a woman, attractive in the mother goddess mode, was leaning on the end of the counter. When I asked her how she’d known Peter, she was bashful, even a little dodgy. In due time it became clear that things between them had been complicated, to use the parlance, that they’d been “involved.” Visibly heartsore, she seemed confused as to what her role there was, how exactly she fit into the story. I could sympathize. In the far back corner, at a table in the breakfast nook we look out on from our kitchen window, a Native American man wearing a feathered fedora sat smoking, a blanket or shawl wrapped around his shoulders. With him was an older woman who appeared to be consoling him.

  While Caprice fixed us drinks, she told us about the memorial service set for the next morning. It was to be a celebration of Peter’s life and, as such, we were encouraged to bring music or poetry to share by way of a eulogy—this would be my first West Coast funeral. She handed us our glasses and raised hers. “To Peter,” she said, and in kind we responded, “To Peter.” And together we drank in remembrance of him. Full of an almost spritely energy, she left the room and returned in a trice with a CD and a number of articles she’d printed off local news sites.

  “Did you see this one? About the song?” she asked, and laid an article before us. “Man wrote song just before he was stabbed to death, says friend,” the headline ran. And of course I’d seen it—I’d read everything I could get my eyes on and in the process had learned that his last name was also that of an apostle: John. Story goes Peter had been sitting on the porch that morning, watching a bird lave gaily in the stone bowl on the ground, when inspiration had seized him. He strummed out chords on his guitar and jotted down a quatrain. “They weren’t here for the Appalachian spring, / The sweet oboe solitary ring, / That small sparrow dipping wing, / Even frolicking.”

  “ ‘Appalachian Spring,’ ” she said, and held up the case after she’d loaded the CD. “It was one of Peter’s favorites.”

  The first measures of Copland’s suite played so quietly you had to strain to hear. But this was disturbance enough for the two people in back, who stood and made for the front door.

  “You know Chinook,” Caprice said, and, in response to the silence that followed, “This is Chinook. And Marilyn.”

  To them she presented Alexis and me and we all greeted one another but Chinook made clear with his face that now was not the time for further niceties and continued on his way out the door. Marilyn and Peter’s onetime inamorata followed him out.

  “He’s pretty shaken up,” Caprice said, and then explained that he’d been there when it all went down, that he was an eyewitness. After Steve stabbed Peter, she went on with his story, he stood there blocking Chinook’s path to the front door. Peter lay on the ground between them. A brief standoff ensued. “Are you gonna murder me, too?” Chinook asked, and Steve nodded, slowly, yes. In these moments he appeared to Chinook possessed, his eyes having gone frosty, vacant. Chinook then took up the fireplace screen and hurled it at Steve, buying himself enough time to bolt out the back door.

  “Jesus,” I said. “I can’t imagine.”

  And none of the reports I’d read online had asked me to. The public story had been bowdlerized into a simpler, more digestible form, one related to the event in the way a blueprint is to a building. Given the bones, you had to picture the skin for yourself. Freed from the burden of specificity, the simple facts had been repeated until they wore a groove in the community’s consciousness, a narrative path that would usher the incident, and so Peter, into the past, the rampant radio static of history. That Peter had been helping Steve, letting him crash at his place, made this a story of senseless betrayal, one that challenged our deepest beliefs—in the inviolability and sanctity of the Home and in the notion that we’re duty-bound to care for those less fortunate than ourselves. No good deed goes unpunished, indeed. And from what we learn of him, Steve Kovacs makes for an easy Bad Guy, on par with such Disney villains as Maleficent or Jafar. He’d committed capitalism’s cardinal sin, was unemployed, and, worse, he was homeless. His mug shot, featured online with most of the reports, shows the weatherworn mien of long, hard living, of bad decisions made daily. Beneath a dingy beard his washed-out face skin sags. Suspicious red-eyed sores spot his cheeks and forehead like someone’s had at him with a tenderizer. And to his last name there cling little barnacles of xenophobia: “Kovacs, Kovacs. How are you supposed to pronounce that?” What’s more—and this I had not known, because how would I have?—Peter had planned to leave town. Though there’d never been a sign out front, he’d actually arranged, with Caprice’s help, to sell his house, and had gone so far as to put money down on a parcel of land upon a hill not far off, over the border in small-town Washington. There he would build a modest house where, rid of the stress of testy neighbors, he could play his guitar and his music as loud as he pleased and live again in peace with Linda and his dogs, looking out on a bucolic view of the river down below. In this way Peter’s was a story that’d been interrupted at a turning point. It teases our desire for resolution, for redempti
on. An Oprah ending had been in the offing, the reports would have us believe, if only he’d been given the time. If only, if only, if only.

  “That’s when I ran into him,” Ernie said. “He was out in the street saying his phone was dead, call 9-1-1. Then he said Peter’d been stabbed and I ran over to the house as fast as I could.”

  He went quiet. Ice tinkled in his glass and he replenished it with a four-finger whiskey. He took a long, measured look at the booze, as though the rest of the story lay in it.

  “I’d lost my scarf,” Caprice said, lifting an end of the one girding her neck. It’d been a gift from Ernie, who for the moment seemed happy to relinquish the story’s reins, and it was among her most cherished possessions. High and wide they’d searched the house—no scarf. “I thought I might’ve left it in the car so I sent Ernie out to check.”

  The misplaced scarf was now a link in the great chain of cause and effect. Magical thinking had put it to work in the day’s plot, transformed it into a horrific meet-cute. And many such details, things that’d gone from arbitrary to weighty and welling over with consequence, populated the day’s growing matrix of meaning. Caprice took us through some of her favorites, but only after first refilling our drinks. The bird song, for one—his last poem and proof positive that, above all, Peter’s had been a creative life. That he’d eaten what sounded like a kingly dinner the night before, prepared by an old friend, an accomplished chef, and that he’d remained sober, or at least relatively so, through it—a meal fit to serve as a last one. That he and Chinook had started to get serious about sobriety, had planned to attend AA meetings together, according to some as soon as that very day. That he’d been reading Proust and listening to Concert for George when Steve came into the room.

  These details were meant to charm part of the chaos still, to capture some aspect of Peter’s life worth memorializing, and, maybe most important, to direct our attention away from how it had ended. Caprice was wired as she related them, too, in a swoon of sorts. For the moment it seemed she might also be getting drunk on significance, on symbolizing. And while I hadn’t been aware of it before going over to their place, I started to realize just how badly I’d wanted to hear this, the unexpurgated version of the story.

  “Inside, the first thing I had to do was to roll him over,” Ernie said, tapping back in. “He wasn’t a small guy either, you know. Something like two-eighty or two-ninety or something. And there was blood everywhere.”

  And was this not also part of what I’d been hankering to hear? The straight dope? Was there not something sickly delicious about learning that the floor had been in such a state that Ernie’s boots had trouble finding purchase? That as he attempted to administer CPR he was slip-sliding away like something from an SNL skit written by Cormac McCarthy? But beyond scratching an itch for morbidity, what purpose did such information serve? To what end were such details put? In order to understand what had happened to Peter, did I need to know that the knife Steve had used was a USMC KA-BAR, a fixed-blade, leather-handled combat weapon whose clip point gives it a sharklike profile? Did I need to watch as Ernie approximated the blade’s length, measuring between his pointer fingers the size of a fish you’d keep? In what way was I edified by descriptions of the wound, by picturing a slot in his chest large enough to accept a silver dollar? Or by being asked to imagine his breathing, gone disturbingly audible? How necessary was it that I learn that Ernie thought he’d felt, between his compressions, the final beats of Peter’s expiring heart? Did these details aid my efforts to understand what’d gone down?

  My gut tells me that, at bottom, this has to do with empathy, with our ability to imagine ourselves into another person’s situation and exercise deep care. This is an essential characteristic of our humanity, after all, isn’t it? Part of what sets us apart from the lower order of beasts? My question then is something like: can so-called empathy coexist peaceably alongside the relief and gratitude we feel that what happened to someone else did not happen to us? Does pity preclude care? Can we learn so many details about a story that they cease to be empathically productive? At what point do horrific details begin to double back on themselves? To merely stoke the horror and so stultify any manner of healing? Like trying to extinguish a fire with gasoline? What do we say, for that matter, after we hear such horrible things? To my mind the most respectful, and so least pitying, thing we can say is “I can’t imagine.” But doesn’t that seem to be the very opposite of empathy? Or maybe it’s empathy’s purest expression, in that it articulates our inability to comprehend the details, allows them to haunt and confound us, too, and therefore validate the sufferer’s own confusion, the ineffability of his or her pain. And perhaps this is the final mystery at the bottom of all tragedy, the way life can scramble our greatest humanizing resource, the imagination.

  “They say it’s good to talk,” Ernie said. “I grew up on farms and such, around animals. I’ve seen death before. I’ve seen dead babies. But never anything like this.”

  It nearly passed me right on by, so casually was the revelation made. Dead babies? What could have compelled him to offer up such an observation? I let it sit awhile and, sure enough, our drinks again revived, the conversation ended up providing an answer. I hadn’t known this, but back in late May, early June, a dead baby had been found at a local recycling center. It’d rolled right out on the conveyor belt. This, too, had been a big story, local news–wise, full of brutal facts. The child was full-term, or very nearly so. A girl. Five pounds, four ounces. Her umbilical cord had been cut or torn, but was otherwise intact. A forensic pathologist confirmed that she’d been alive at birth, had breathed. From the evidence he’d gathered, he couldn’t say for sure how long she’d been there. A day, maybe two. “One of our employees found human remains on the commercial sort line,” the company’s president offered in a statement. “We are saddened by these events.”

  That employee was Steve. He’d gone into work expecting another day of rote labor and walked out with a new ghost. And ever since he’d suffered a form of psychic torment that falls under the capacious diagnostic umbrella of PTSD. He’d ended up losing his job at the recycling center and hadn’t been able to find another since. And according to Caprice, among the bad decisions he made was that he couldn’t be bothered with unemployment or disability. What details from that day had been kept alive by the incubator of his memory? The imagination reels when it tries to re-create the moment of recognition. The foreign form on the conveyor belt resolving into limbs, a tiny body. The frayed end of a torn umbilical cord, affixed to the nameless baby’s tummy like a Pull ’n’ Peel Twizzler. It’s almost too much, attempting to picture the condition of newborn skin that’s been stewing in a slurry of beer cans and cardboard and backwash. To whom does such foul shit befall? And how would one begin to recover from it? I can’t imagine.

  The conversation moved mercifully on and we ended up discussing Ernie’s family, his history. He took us through the house, pointing to portraits of his relatives on the walls. Our drinks were filled again and the photo albums brought out. Here were Ernie and Caprice at our age. Pictures of old neighbors, friends from community theater, adorable shots of their daughters from times bygone. Alexis and I finished our drinks for good and made an exaggerated show of needing to leave. It can be endearingly difficult to extract oneself from a hang with Ernie and Caprice.

  “You know, I really needed that hug,” Ernie said as he saw us to the door. “Just wanted to say thanks for that.”

  It was the least I could do, I assured him, and said we’d see them in the morning, at the service. We hugged again, this time more tentatively, bashfully, peppering the embrace with many manly backslaps. Tempted though I was to do it again, another tender cupping of his braid’s nidus wasn’t in the night’s cards, not even with the aid of all the sauce. And as Alexis and I made the short commute across the alley to our house, I couldn’t get over how caught up we all are in one another’s stories, how much we happen to share what happens to us.<
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  * * *

  On this idea of community much academic ink has been spilled, a whole wine-dark sea’s worth. And the curious autodidact, hoping only to glean some pointers for how to draw closer to the people he lives around, can find himself swiftly to the nostrils in jargon and charts, in schemas that smack of specialization and icy expertise. You’ve got your gemeinschaft vs. gesellschaft and your manifold forms of social capital, be they bridging or bonding or what. If you were of such a mind, you could freely brain yourself with a pallet of Bourdieu. Though at times enlightening, such reading can also make it seem so effortful and dull, this getting up with and going amongst other people, so much so that you can get to wondering how we ever manage to do it at all. And yet of course we do. Without ever really learning all the rules, we play the game. We get up with. We go amongst.

  Reared as I was under the aegis of protestant faithfuls, I can trace my own most enduring and articulable notions about neighborliness and community to stuff I learned from the Bible. There are the basic Sunday school moral imperatives like “Love your neighbor as yourself” and the parable of the Good Samaritan, which ends with Jesus’s simple and startling call to mercy, “Go and do likewise.” Then we find this in Romans: “We, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members of one another.” And what a phrase that is, how odd and poetically out of joint, “members of one another.” With that sharpened clause Paul captures the sense of belonging and interdependence that a community is founded on, a sense of belonging that I’d experienced growing up, as an active member of my church’s youth group and Young Life, not to mention as part of a large extended Christian family, a family that met for reunions not once but twice a year. And what about those times when a member of our community becomes difficult? When internecine conflict crops up? In Life Together, the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes, “It is only when he is a burden that another person is really a brother and not merely an object to be manipulated.” I’d been assigned to read this book before arriving for that summer of intentional Christian living on Martha’s Vineyard, an experience I still sometimes find hard to believe is part of my story. But I’ve strayed far less dramatically from this part of my history than I often like to think, and, consciously or not, I continue to try to act accordingly, to measure my behavior against it.