Up Up, Down Down

by Cheston Knapp

  And so as Peter’s behavior grew increasingly erratic, in the months before his death, I started to feel guilty, ashamed of how our friendship had failed to develop past its infancy. This failure seemed to echo my recent string of relational difficulties and disappointments with Dad. And when I found myself tucked up in the womb of resentment and frustration that I felt I’d let that relationship become, I tried to urge myself to think about all of Dad’s positive character traits. Unlike me, for example, he’s never been niggardly with his free time, never been so fiercely protective of his energy and attention. He used to enlist (compel?) my brothers and me in all manner of service activity, be it Saturday mornings swinging hammers for Habitat for Humanity or shuttling us of an evening to visit with a member of the church going through a rough patch. It was never a question of whether, but how he would help other people—“Let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.” He’s always been a doer, almost restlessly so, and it seemed his faith manifested most in deeds of this sort. The frustrated and resentful cynic in me thinks that maybe he was so keen on service like this because it was visible, could be observed, and therefore end in praise. But it’s wrong to scrutinize motives like this, wrong to judge. The point is that if I was indeed a member of this community, that is, if I wanted to go on thinking that I was different from the author of the irascible letter, then surely something more was demanded of me than the nothing I was doing.

  On one of my walks with Percy during these last months, I saw a slick new Cadillac parked in front of Peter’s house. I couldn’t place it at first but I knew I knew that car. And sure enough, there he was as I passed by, visiting with Peter on the porch: Lawrence, shunned wielder of the blade. I hadn’t seen him in ages, but that didn’t mean a lot. I hadn’t been around Irving much myself since the move. I waved my customary wave and Peter alone waved back—for Lawrence, the simplest human interaction is often cumbered with suspicion and distrust. But for days to come the image of them sitting together convicted me. It was something Dad would’ve done, come around to check up on Peter, see how he’d been doing. Sit, chat. Just be there.

  A few days after I saw Lawrence on the porch, in a welter of nostalgia, I stopped at Peter’s house on my way home from a run. He was outside, of course, with Boo, the white pit bull he’d adopted from a friend who couldn’t care for him anymore. Peter came down his steps to meet me. And although I’d never been up there before, it seemed significant that he didn’t invite me to come sit with him on his porch. We stood with the rickety fence between us and talked. The specter of our short former friendship seemed to haunt us, to imbue the conversation with cautiousness—perhaps he, too, preferred to think of us standing in the field at Peninsula Park watching our dogs play. We stuck mostly to tennis. He asked about “that backhand of yours” and said he hadn’t been playing much lately. It couldn’t have been the only reason, but he said he’d busted the strings in all his rackets. I jumped at the opportunity to be generous and offered him one of my old ones.

  “They’re just gathering dust in my closet,” I said. “Hold tight.”

  Before he could say anything I jogged home. I fished the rackets out of the closet and hit them against one another, listening to the pitch of each string bed, and chose the one with the least amount of wear. I hustled back and when I presented the racket to Peter, he thanked me but insisted on paying something for it. No, no, I said, it was my pleasure, a gift. Some excessively polite dickering ensued before he caved and took it. Case might’ve been that in the end I was the more grateful, somehow.

  We then got on about the guys at Irving and of course ended up talking about Lawrence.

  “He’s a good guy, really,” Peter said. “Just a little pissed off at the world.”

  “Who? Lawrence? Nah. . .” The joke lamed about effetely at our ankles.

  “He comes by every now and again. Knows I’ve got,” he broke off, and his hands came alive, working through an inscrutable sign language before his words caught up to him: “Issues.”

  Though it was obvious to everyone in the neighborhood, this still seemed to qualify as a confession for Peter. Or if it wasn’t a confession, it was something more than a simple acknowledgment. And his sincerity and vulnerability disarmed me. I didn’t know how to respond. Did he mean this to be an invitation for further discussion about these issues? Or was it meant to be an apology? As if by reflex, I made noises of sympathy, ventured gestures of understanding, though in truth I didn’t quite experience either just then. All I can be said to have experienced in the moment was awkwardness. This isn’t uncommon for me, hyperaware as I am of social discomfort (And is not this self-consciousness de rigueur now? Do we not consider being alert to minor social hiccups a mark of sophistication and refinement?), but I often worry that I am also too intolerant of this awkwardness, too quick to turn my back on it. Sometimes, yes, an awkward moment simply needs to be gotten past, forgotten, erased as best as it can by some well-timed backchat. But sometimes awkwardness is only the first step on the way to something deeper. Intimacy or fellowship or whatever you want to call it. Community. Maybe the most evident and ancient example of this is grieving.

  Sad as it makes me now, looking back, my talk with Peter more or less ended there, with his confession. And despite the semishaky way we left things, for some time to come I was flush with that particular pride that altruism brings on. I began to spin out clichéd sports narratives about Peter. His passion for tennis would be renewed. He’d soon start spending his copious free time giving lessons to underprivileged kids in the neighborhood, teaching a new generation his long and magnificent strokes. The community would take notice and he’d be honored with a service medal, an award of some sort. In his acceptance speech he’d quote the philosopher Martins, Buber and King Jr., and the poet Johns, Lennon and Donne. We’d share a knowing glance over the heads of the other crowd members; maybe he’d give me a slight head nod of gratitude. It was like I’d taken a time-release pill of bonhomie, so hopeful was I for his future.

  But Peter must’ve sensed the undercurrent of selfishness in my gift—maybe he suspected me of merely fishing for praise—because one afternoon not long after I went out to get my mail and found, mingling with the envelopes and catalogs, a loose twenty-dollar bill. And even though there wasn’t an envelope or a note, I knew exactly what it meant.

  * * *

  On the way to the funeral home Sunday morning, Alexis and I listened to the Dead’s American Beauty. The sky had gone to pigeon shit–gray again and “Box of Rain” seemed a fitting theme song for the drive over—“Such a long long time to be gone / and a short time to be there.” We arrived and made our way into the lobby, where we found a large wall-mounted TV playing a slide show. Against a stock image of an idyllic woodland river and to the accompaniment of a generic string quartet, pictures of Peter passed over the screen. Certain images kept recurring but at intervals irregular enough to make me think they’d been edited hastily, if at all. We found the programs in a wicker basket and both took one. They were just a piece of paper folded in half like it was touching its toes. On the front was a stick-figure sketch of Peter on his bike, black eighth notes coming from the basket in front. Behind him there trailed a solar system of bubbles, which were filled in with elaborate swirling patterns done with pastel colored pencils. Though it wasn’t credited as one, I’d bet it was a self-portrait. Inside, on a vibrant watercolor background, printed in purple ink, was a short biography of Peter. I hadn’t known he’d been born in England or that he’d shared a birthday with John Lennon or that he’d worked as a plumber before heading off to graduate school. I was suddenly ashamed, embarrassed, wearing a wrinkly suit and holding the book of poems I’d finally settled on. I’d known so little about Peter, had heard so few of his stories. And it seemed then like it would’ve taken so very little for me to have known more.

  As we watched the pictures scroll across the screen and took in the program, Alexis began to weep. Her whole body got involve
d and we discreetly excused ourselves outside, to the parking lot, where we hugged and chatted until the fit passed.

  “It’s just so sad,” she said.

  We’d been married for years now and still the depth and clarity of Alexis’s emotions routinely surprised me. It could still hit me with the force of a revelation, that she was a many-dimensional and, therefore, mysterious being, attuned to a situation in a way I couldn’t fathom. I loved her sensitivity, her awareness of other people’s needs and hurts. And most of all I envied her apparent ability to experience something without immediately spiraling away from it, wondering how that experience might work in words. Here, I envied her grief. Because the scene had failed to produce in me the same Wordsworthian surge of powerful emotions and I considered this to be another in a long line of my failures to meet life with the proper response. Again I understood this had to do with my overawareness of the story being told. What had seemed most sad to me were the pictures, the program—the absurd distance between these documents and Peter’s life. I kept returning to the idea that there must be an irresolvable tension between life and stories. Life is lived and stories are told, after all, and to turn an event from life into a story, to pick and choose details and plug them into a symbolic system, to manipulate them in such a way as to make meaning, is to cheat life in some way. “The symbol is the murder of the thing,” Lacan wrote, basically pointing out that a word is never the thing it names. I don’t think he’s being melodramatic here, either, when he suggests that violence is inherent in the naming process, that there’s a strange betrayal in the house of experience. But then again, without stories, without that linguistic betrayal, how would we get at the stuff of life?

  Back in the lobby we ran into John and some other guys I recognized from Irving but whose names had long since slipped my mind—had I ever really been part of that community? John was wearing a black suit with a shiny purple shirt open wide at the neck. No grille. We all shook hands and our heads as we expressed disbelief. We talked about how speechless we were.

  “Can you imagine?” we asked.

  “I can’t imagine,” we answered.

  Given how little else any of them had to say, I suspected that they hadn’t known Peter any better than I had, and in that moment it seemed as though we were all there to pay our respects to his tennis game. People had started to gather in the hall and we were directed in ourselves. At the front, artistically arranged with the flowers, were Peter’s hat and guitar, relics of a sort, things invested with his presence. Alexis and I took seats in the middle of a row about halfway back. Around the hall I spotted many of my neighbors. Ernie and Caprice were up front, as was Linda, of course. Even Jim had come—he was sitting in the way back. I wondered whether the author of the letter was part of the crowd, basking in some sick sense of vindication. But not everyone was here. Not either of my next-door neighbors and not __________________ from across the street. Perhaps the most noticeable absence, though, was Lawrence—I could’ve sworn he would’ve made this a priority. Before the service started, Boo walked around the hall off leash, sniffing people’s feet and laps. A woman sitting up ahead of us hypothesized that he must be looking for Peter and the folks around her cooed sympathetically.

  When everyone had settled in, a friend of Linda’s, acting as the emcee or officiant, stood and offered some prefatory remarks. We’d gathered this morning to share stories about Peter, to celebrate his life. In his essay “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin writes, “It is . . . characteristic that not only a man’s knowledge or wisdom, but above all his real life—and this is the stuff that stories are made of—first assumes transmissible form at the moment of his death.” The program put this idea more succinctly with, “We are all stories in the end. . .” And the woman kicked things off by telling an anecdote about how Peter had helped her daughter learn the guitar. She then invited us, the crowd, up to tell our own stories. And for the next two and a half hours or so, if you count the intermission, that’s what we did.

  Former students talked about how instrumental Peter had been in their development, intellectual and personal. Friends lauded his passion for music, for both playing and listening to it, and his insatiable curiosity, his fierce devotion to beauty. A man with curly hair wearing great big clown shoes stood and stumbled through a speech about how much Peter had meant to him. At one point he looked at the ceiling and said, “I wore the shoes for you, man.” A cigar box of snapshots was passed around. They were loose and unorganized and the color had started to fade out of some of the older ones, from when Peter and Linda were young. Each picture, like each eulogizer, told a sliver of the larger story, its truth or value not at all diminished for being partial, incomplete. Caprice got up there and mooned about all the times she and Peter had stayed up late chatting in his backyard. What she remembered most, she said, was laughing. There was a recklessness to the way she spoke, as if she wasn’t entirely in control of what she was saying. She got on about how upset Linda used to get, how she’d ask them to keep it down or go to bed, badgering them as though they were teenagers, and I was thankful I could see only the back of Linda’s head. No one was reading poems and with every new speaker it grew more and more clear that I wasn’t going to get up there and read mine. I thought I’d call an audible and talk about his tennis game, how pretty it was to watch, how incongruous, but someone beat me to it. After a while I started to wonder what Peter’s parents, elderly British expats, were making of this production. They were sitting in the front row, their four hands origamied together. What thoughts accompanied his father when during one of the speeches he excused himself to the bathroom? What was Peter’s brother thinking, sitting next to his parents? He turned out to be the only family member who wanted to share something with us. He’d chosen a song—apparently he, too, had inherited the musical gene. “What a Shame,” by the hard rock band Shinedown, includes the lines: “I knew him more than most / I saw a side of him he never showed.”

  The time between speakers continued to increase until it was clear that those people who wanted to share had shared, and then it was Linda’s turn to speak. She talked about how Peter had been taken from us in a moment of darkness, about how his life had of late been shrouded in that darkness. But now we could all take comfort in knowing that he had moved on into the light. It was strange—had I encountered this line in a story, I would’ve found it hokey, forced, and not bought it whole cloth as I did in the moment. And Linda spared no details as she went on to detail that darkness, talking openly about Peter’s struggles with bipolar disorder and his recent hospitalizations. About how they’d been living separately but together and how she’d been the one who found the property he was going to move to. Her tone throughout was calm and measured, almost clinical. And while it was oddly moving, her candor also felt strategic, like she was using these details to exert control over the story. Because it was clear that in telling it, she was also settling on a version of events that she could go on living with.

  After she finished, miniature bottles of soap bubbles were handed around. We were instructed to blow them as we walked out of the hall, which would happen to the tune of “Give Me Love,” by George Harrison. But first we’d sing through it once together. If you know the song, you know it’s repetitive and incantatory and with it on repeat it was tough to discern when it ended and when it began again, so it wasn’t until we were into maybe a third communal singing that we started to leave. And while some folks struggled to make any at all, what bubbles there were that floated and shimmered wet and oily and then blipped out of existence under the funeral parlor’s fluorescent lights were really quite something to behold. I’m even tempted to go for the cliché here and say you couldn’t have written it better, so well did the scene appear to encapsulate the end.

  * * *

  “The first symbol in which we recognize humanity in its vestiges is the burial,” Lacan also wrote. And in an essay on memory and forgetting, Lewis Hyde offers a helpful gloss on this, explaining, �
��The grave marker is the symbol that recognizes that whatever has happened need not live forever. The symbol lives on but the real, once properly inscribed, is temporal and can be buried. Forgetting is the erasing angel that murders particularity so that concepts can be born, so that time can flow again.”

  And for a while after I finished a draft of the above, I thought I’d accomplished just this. Successfully translated and conjugated my experience, both of the afternoon and of my friendship, such as it was, with Peter. I thought I’d fixed things in such a way as to bury the tragedy. But the story hung around, wouldn’t go away. In the weeks and months to come I couldn’t turn off my awareness of things that could be put to use as details, invested with significance. After the murder, for example, I was alarmed to find Peter’s porch light turned on. And it stayed that way, bracingly bright, for days. Coming home from Peninsula with Percy one afternoon, I walked up the front steps and, at long last, stood on the porch. I took in what had been Peter’s view and then peered through the front window and thought I spotted, on the ground in front of the fireplace, a massive amoebic stain. I bought “Appalachian Spring” on vinyl and listened to it over and over, trying to develop a taste for it, an ear for what distinguished it from the soundtrack of, say, Fievel Goes West.

  My cache of details about Peter continued to expand. Late one night and many clicks deep into a Google sesh, I stumbled upon his Rate My Professors page. It covered his time in the writing department at UC San Diego. Given my experience and what I’d heard at the service, I’d imagined Peter as a Dead Poetsy teacher, beloved by his pupils for inspiring freethinking and resistance to sociocultural bullshit. The site, I was sorry to find, failed to confirm this story for me. He had fifty-six ratings and their mean, out of a possible 5.0, was a dispiriting 2.6. A pitiable score. And a lot of the comments, Christ, they stung. “His lectures are interesting, if your not falling asleep after the first 10 minutes of class.” “Peter John, he is horrible . . . i guess some people like him . . . like 10 people that is out of almost 200 . . . His points are invalid and our topics of discussion are ridiculous.” “No. No no no.” It was hard to keep my mind from forming a narrative, reading through these responses. Peter struggling to get his students to care, losing interest, his patience. And finally maybe his mind. Because sure enough a few alluded to a rupture, a breakdown. The most succinct among them put it thus: “He mysteriously disappeared in the middle of the quarter, so I deduce he is unreliable.”