Up Up, Down Down

by Cheston Knapp

  At first this simply saddened me. Sad for all he’d had to put up with, sad he never figured out how to fit in. Also sad that I had access to these comments and lacked the willpower not to read them. But then a strange form of guilt began to court me, and this guilt only grew more dogged when, during another evening’s Googling, I came across a site that suggested he’d left a different teaching job in the wake of a sexual harassment scandal. All at once my reading and research seemed excessive, borderline invasive.

  I switched tacks, started to look into Steve. To hear Caprice tell it, Steve had looked up to Peter. She’d gone so far as to say that Steve had loved him, as one would a brother. And a capacity for or tendency toward violence? She never would’ve guessed it.

  “He was just a Bubba,” she said. “Just a beer drinker. A bump on a log.”

  In an effort to better understand his motives, I thought the police report might prove useful, so I filed a request. In return I received an official letter saying the case was still open and, therefore, the information I wanted was “exempt from disclosure.” Other channels proved more fruitful, though, and soon I had in my possession a copy of all the classified documents relating to the case. That I could resort to “other channels” thrilled me, made me feel like I was a character in a spy story, engaging in a bit of tradecraft.

  The day’s events were recounted under a bold header: FACTS. I learned, among other things, that Steve had considered Peter his “last hope,” which fit with Caprice’s read on the situation, and that he’d had six beers that morning, not counting the one and change he had after the murder. Steve didn’t consider that a lot, though, because he typically had twelve or more in a day. I also learned that he’d acted in a watery tunnel of unknowing—it was all a blur. I read: “He admitted that stabbing a person in their chest would ‘probably kill ’em.’ He admitted to Detective Michaels that he knew what he was doing was wrong and that he knew he’d be caught ‘probably because I wanted to be.’ ”

  “I’m very remorseful,” Steve went on to tell the detectives. “I still have the fear but, for some reasons, I feel a little better because I know I’m gonna get three hots and a cot.”

  There’s a word in German that is, well, germane here: Torschlusspanik. It translates literally to “gate-shut panic” and connotes that crazed anxiety we experience when we feel time is running out on us. Bets made to recoup losses, doubles ordered at last call, overbidding for items on eBay, etc. Steve seems to have succumbed to some limit case of this that morning. Faced with the tremendous uncertainty of his changing circumstances, “the fear,” he’d snapped. Gone into a fugue-like state and murdered a man he’d looked up to, his “last hope.” My neighbor.

  But learning this was no salve. It only deepened the mystery for me. The story was incomplete, hadn’t been put to rest. And maybe it never could be. I started to feel like I’d wasted my time. Soon I could be found luxuriating in the familiar bathwater of writerly insecurities. At my nadir I believed I was doomed to live out my days as an editor, as a top-hatted fuckwit who niggles with other folks’ prose.

  But it was a fraud, above all else, that I knew myself to be. All along I’d been working under the assumption, tacit though it was, that I could control the details of Peter’s story in a way I couldn’t control those of my own. I’d sought them out as a distraction, as a way to keep my mind actively off other things. Because in the months following Peter’s murder, my parents finalized their divorce and my maternal grandmother, Mamaw, died. I didn’t get back to Richmond for her funeral and because of this would every so often experience a haunting flutter of doubt. Could it be that she was still alive? One evening I found myself dialing her old phone number, my fingers working through the digits with startling ease. It was as though memory had stored them somewhere so accessible that in recalling them I bypassed conscious thought. I returned to my senses before placing the call but it was too late, that sequence of numbers had unlocked a trove of memories that left me sentimental and weepy. Nostalgic. During one of our conversations afterward, Mom told me my uncle, one of Dad’s four brothers, had driven down from Connecticut to attend the funeral. Dad hadn’t been there, she added. He’d been at the graveside service, though. Had apparently ridden his bike over—I didn’t know his license was still suspended. And Jesus, the thought of him arriving to see Mamaw into her grave on some shitty ten-speed he’d bought at a yard sale or off Craigslist was almost too much for me to imagine. For the third time in her life, Mom got a boyfriend. She was always wanting to talk about him, too, and I twice had to ask her to stop coming to me for relationship advice. Dad left the country to be a gym teacher in Morocco and in a conversation we had before he left, he talked about how lonely he was. Later, from an internet café in Casablanca, he confessed to having a girlfriend himself. She lived in Florida and had retired early from her career as a flight attendant. She was “real attractive, a cheerleader type” and used to get busy with singer-songwriter Kenny Loggins. In his voice when he told me this, was that pride? Was Dad boasting about his new Eskimo brother? Bragging about having entered the danger zone? It was as though my past were eroding away, my history being rewritten. And the future? The stretch of time that’d opened so easily before Alexis and me? We lost our first pregnancy to miscarriage and the pain of that was ramifying and pervasive and so very adult. The doctor assured us we’d done nothing wrong, that these things sometimes just happen. But that it was random and out of our control wasn’t the comfort she intended. It only intensified our confusion, contributed to the pain of our loss. This pain went all Whac-A-Mole on us soon after, as several of our closest friends announced, rapid-fire, that they were expecting. And what a fine expression that is, “expecting.” How deftly and gracefully it involves you in your own future. We were no longer “expecting.” And the powerlessness I experienced in the wake of this and all the other life experiences made me painfully aware of an obvious and basic existential truth: I could be the narrator of my life story, its hero or antihero depending on my mood, but I could never hope to be the author of my life. Shit now existed that I could never hope to pin down in prose. I’d gone in for some emotional sleight of hand, then, and ended up putting an inordinate amount of pressure on myself to articulate the senselessness of what’d happened to Peter.

  A story is a residue. It’s the moisture that remains in a sponge after it’s been wrung out. And it’s both a wager in and against time. We hope our preserved little packets of time, fixed between the bookends of beginning and end, will endure. That they’ll float on over the prodigious and imponderable amount of time that flows us right on by, that does not get memorialized in writing or images.

  My faith in narration had been shaken, the foundation now cracked and unsound, but time continued to flow just fine. Daffodils bloomed all over Peter’s yard. Books and cassettes and miscellaneous furniture began to appear on the curb out front as Linda cleared out the house. I found a volume of Auden’s poems but it’d gone fatly dropsical with rain so I left it behind. The buyers Peter had lined up for the house had apparently been undeterred by what’d gone down there—it had good bones, after all—and a woman in her twilight years soon moved in and started to renovate. The rickety fence out front was taken down, the yard tamed, largely cleared. The birdbath, site where inspiration once struck, was disposed of. A retaining wall was built out by the sidewalk and all around fresh beds were laid and planted with sensible, matchy-matchy flowers.

  And before I knew it, it was summer again and at the tennis center in St. Johns one morning, I ran into Lawrence. While we waited to take our respective courts I mentioned, casually, offhandedly, that I’d been surprised not to see him at Peter’s memorial service. They’d been close, after all. Hadn’t they?

  It’s never taken much and I should’ve known better—this set him off.

  “I was a friend to that man in life,” he said, among many exaggerated gestures of aggression. “Any fool is welcome to be a friend in death.”

&nb
sp; I initially shrugged the encounter off—typical Lawrence. But what he said came to assume a new and startling significance after Alexis read an early draft of this essay. She said she hadn’t realized I’d felt so close to Peter, seeing as we’d only gone on a handful of walks and played tennis a few times. This planted a seed of doubt in my mind. Had we been as close as I thought? Or had I merely suggested the closeness for the purposes of the essay, fudged things for effect? It brought to mind the famous last stanza of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art,” which was what I’d brought to share at the memorial service. “It’s evident / the art of losing’s not too hard to master / though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.” Among other things, Bishop is talking about how problematic it is that our loss is wrapped up in its articulation. Pointing out the tension that exists between what we experience and what we say (or write) that we experience.

  And like Bishop, urging herself on to the end, I, too, was having trouble finishing. In the materials my source had retrieved for me there was a schedule for Steve’s trial. I saw that he’d filed various motions and managed to postpone the proceedings. But the trial was scheduled to begin, finally, in August, a year and a half after the murder. I marked my calendar, sure at first that I wouldn’t miss it. The journalist in me knew the story would continue in the courtroom and wouldn’t be properly over until the judge’s gavel sounded and Steve was pronounced guilty. Until the bailiff escorted him out a side door and into the relative stability of what would likely be the rest of his life. Before that happened, the story would, in a way, continue to live and breathe. Another type of storyteller, though, would’ve opted to end things with the image the memorial service provided: bubbles shimmering and blipping out of existence. It provided a ready metaphor—how fleeting our time together is!—and it happened in scene, and ending in scene is one of contemporary storytelling’s many tenets. It’s a tenet I often stress, to the authors I edit, the students I teach. Doing so leaves a reader with the fizzling menace of partial resolution, of consequences to come. But the longer I sat with that, the more it seemed just a trick of time, a contrivance. Deceptive and dishonest. In the end, what I was on the hunt for, and what I suspected I’d never find, was a way to express my astonishment at what remains, at the fact that time goes on and stories take shape. My abiding sense of wonder at how much of this living, in language and life both, is a living without.

  Something’s Gotta Stick

  Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? Where should we be today?

  —Elizabeth Bishop

  I.

  Orientation. It’s Sunday, June 16, 2013—Father’s Day and the first of Windells’s Summer Session 2. Late afternoon and the sun’s out and the sky’s a kid’s picture of the sky, with great big cotton-ball clouds seemingly glued to a lucid blue. I’m sitting with the other skateboarders along the coping of a drained pool in the Concrete Jungle part of campus, which is tucked in the woods off Highway 26 in Welches, Oregon. My board is in my lap and my helmet’s beside me and I’m wearing my favorite of the new T-shirts I bought for camp. It says RESEARCH across the chest. My legs are dangling beneath me with that pleasant sense of groundlessness I loved as a boy, perched in too-high chairs, and didn’t know I missed. Until recently, I hadn’t realized that it was possible for one’s body to miss something that one’s mind didn’t also miss. That one’s mind wasn’t even actively aware of.

  After a brief camp-wide introduction in B.O.B., the Building out Back, a hangar that houses the indoor skate park, the trampolines, and the pit of foam blocks, we were split off from the snowboarders and skiers for our sport-specific briefing. The facts here are simple enough: a month back I signed up to attend Windells’s Adult Skateboard Camp. I paid online—a thousand bucks for the week seemed a steal at the time—and e-mailed over the twenty-page packet of waivers and my insurance information, as well as a physical form my doctor had to fill out. But like so much about my life these days, knowing these facts doesn’t diminish a certain shimmery unreal quality that clings to them, and I almost feel like I need proof that I’m really here. The best I can find is the neon-yellow wristband I’m wearing, its adhesive so strong that it’ll likely depilate my forearm for days to come. This takes me back about an hour, to when I checked in and learned, among other things, that to remove the wristband would bar me from all camp-related activities, including meals and the dodgeball tournament. The wristband is a small yet comforting reminder of where I am, but I’ll take absolutely anything I can get in the way of continuity. Feeling lately’s been that whatever ligatures were used to knit me together have stretched thin, if not snapped entirely.

  Because I was going it alone, one of my unstated goals entering the week was to make a friend, a buddy. Best-case scenario, to get a nickname. I’d read about the Adult House’s hot tub and had imagined having a soak and swapping stories with my fellow campers, slightly embellished tales of how we’d slain our local spots growing up, shredded ledges and conquered sets of stairs. I’m perhaps a skosh overeager to make this happen, which must be why I venture, to no one in particular, that we’ve all gathered here to get our “bearings.” When no one laughs, I spin one of the wheels on my board in a schmucky hint-hint but don’t even get a sympathetic titter. And for a moment I worry that I’ve inadvertently marked myself as a poser, what with my new T-shirt that still has its fold creases and my newish board and my shoes that are hardly scuffed and my lickspittling joke. I stop short of acknowledging the truth: that that’s exactly what I am, and in ways far deeper than I’m willing to admit.

  Jamie Weller, the head coach-counselor, starts to call roll. He’s mid- to late thirties and his hair is close-cropped and so blond I can’t tell whether he’s maybe balding a little. He’s short and stocky and looks like someone you’d encounter in a mosh pit. In response to their names, each camper raises a hand and says, “Here.” As I watch on, a notion begins to take shape out on the edge of my mind. Most of the campers’ faces are in varying stages of development, with disproportionate noses and ears and skin stretched like Silly Putty over still-growing bones. Their limbs are Muppet gangly and their feet almost clownishly oversize. There’s also a coterie of prepubertal boys sitting together, a feral-looking crew that makes me nervous, they seem so unpredictable. After his name is called, one of these kids says, “Present,” and all the boys around him laugh and dole out congratulatory dunches. I bristle inwardly at this rival jokester and fear that if things continue apace, I’m in for a long week, buddy-wise.

  My mind wanders off in defeat. I work my wristband around and my arm hair prickles with pleasure-pain. Ever since I got married, I’ve fussed with my wedding ring in much the same way, mystified by its presence on my finger, wondering, at times, what it could possibly signify. I’ll celebrate my two-year anniversary in a month and I’m still not a hundred percent on what it means to be a husband—that word seems to define a state of affairs that I haven’t fully grasped as part of my identity. I focus on the pool. Although it is drained, it was never intended to hold water, and I’m having a little Wittgensteinian moment with that one when I hear my name.

  “Here,” I answer automatically, but it comes out sounding more like a question. The campers look at me like, finally, the solution to this riddle.

  “Great. All right,” Jamie says, and nods encouragingly. He checks his list. It seems mine is the last name on it. “There’ll be another one of you, too. Maureen. She’s on her way, just not here yet.”

  “Cool, thanks,” I say.

  The notion is fully articulable now: I am thus far the only adult to show up to Session 2’s Adult Skateboard Camp. I am thirty-one years old and some fast math tells me I’m technically old enough to be every other skate camper’s dad. It is then that I recognize the buffer of space they’ve left around me. There could be no congratulatory dunches for me after one of my jokes because I couldn’t touch the closest person on either side of me if I leaned over.

  I put it together that ther
e’s been a miscommunication here. When I spoke with a camp representative last week, I asked how many other adults would be in attendance at Session 2. I was told there would be eight, a not unreasonable number. Enough folks to fill a hot tub. But what I didn’t know to ask was how many of those eight would be skateboarding, not skiing or snowboarding. Had I, I would’ve learned only one. Some lady named Maureen.

  “Okay,” Jamie says, and turns to address the lot of us. “So who here loves skateboarding?!”

  Everyone hoots and cheers. The campers standing poolside take their boards by the tails and knock the noses against the coping. One kid makes this whooping noise that probably qualifies as ululating.

  “Nice!” Jamie says. “I can already tell this group’s gonna be tons of fun.” He then invites the four other coach-counselors to introduce themselves. They’re all early twenties and stand with the same languorous cool-guy posture that skaters stood with back when I was growing up. After we go over the rules and the schedule, Jamie hints at the shindig that will end the week. In B.O.B. there will be tunes and dancing and skating and salty snacks and candy and soda and contests and raffles for free boards and other righteous gear. They’ve christened this sober bacchanal “Disorientation.”