“Did you leave that picture?”
“No, it wasn’t me,” he responded; and he too laughed when he saw it.
Lia and the others became my lifeline. Without their constant visits, I would have surely died. I’m not sure if the two-week episode gave me a glimpse into assisted living, but I lapsed into a regressive state where getting my coconut took primacy over everything else except having my makeshift chamber pot dumped so I wouldn’t have to walk the extra fifteen feet to the toilet. I saved that arduous crossing for bowel movements, usually a scary process attempted only after the energy shot from a coconut or welcome drink. Those trips were about every other day given that I wasn’t eating much. Around a week into the illness I realized that little bit of extra fat around my waist that I had waged war against for the past twenty years had disappeared. I felt a touch of relief when I noticed it, thinking that at least there was an upside to all of this. If it killed me, that was one thing, but at the very least I was trimming down those last ten pounds that had always eluded me. Of course, I could think of other more effective weight loss regimes that didn’t involve semi-consciousness, extreme body aches, a rash covering my body, and wishing I were thrown from a cliff and put out of my misery.
After the doctor’s massage remark, I asked Lia the next time I saw her to bring someone around. She adjusted my pillow for me so I could sit up and drink the coconut she had brought. After she left, I began to drift off to sleep again, head pounding and sinking into a whimsical depression that pulled me under whenever it felt like it. The room was dark with the shades drawn tight. This helped to alleviate the throbbing pain behind my eyes. It also turned the room into a dank sarcophagus and sent me into a death spiral of fantasies for how I could end it. Not many options, though, aside from holding the damp pillow against my mouth. I preferred to call out to God to send a lightning bolt through the roof and into my torso, killing me off for good. I remembered the old joke about people being so seasick they offered to buy the gun if someone promised to shoot them. I now knew how close to the truth that joke came. If I’d had the strength, I would have limped out to the street and hurled myself in front of a truck.
These fanciful dreams were cut short by my own fears of failure and humiliation. No, offing oneself needed to be quick and simple, and most of all, foolproof. Even if I had a bathtub for the cliché razor-blade death or even a rope to hang myself, I worried that God might send someone in last minute to save me. Of course, wouldn’t anyone who’d had this illness sympathize with my plight? But a fear of divine intervention and then having to answer lots of questions about why I tried to do it stopped me. I also held a lingering fear about cosmic retribution for suicide–violating the will of God, if there was one, might mean purgatory for eternity if I was too quick for the last-minute savior to get to me. In the end, I decided to just let go and let God do the damage.
A knock on my door woke me up, and a young woman swept into the room carrying a basket. After the first day of my illness, I had asked the staff to leave my door unlocked so I wouldn’t have to get up to answer it, half hoping that a crazed lunatic would come in and lop my head off and take me out of my misery. In Java, I’d be hard pressed to find any willing participants among those gentle souls even if I paid one of them to do it. Instead, the woman set candles about the room, lighting each of them, along with an incense stick in a simple bamboo holder. Either she must have been told beforehand the room needed a little sprucing up or simply deduced it from her first step into the room. Her oil massage soothed the aching mess my body had turned into, and she left me dozing off to sleep after temporary relief of my pain and itching.
CHAPTER 5 | crumbling tower
I had a dream so vivid and dramatic that it startled me awake, where I lay looking at the shadows caused by the sinking of the sun at the end of a day. Normally, my dreams contained warped versions of reality, but this one tapped into subterranean fear from the mere fact that it spoke the truth to me. It was the summer before my second year at the Academy, and I spent it in three chapters. The first chapter consisted of staying on in Annapolis for a week to drink myself into oblivion with the help of the other Midshipmen who hadn’t yet headed off to their homes for the summer. Then it was off to spend most of the summer on a training rotation aboard an amphibious assault ship. This was all great fun and much more pleasure filled than that first intensive summer where for seven weeks the upperclassmen did their best to turn us from civilians to midshipmen. Despite the long days of grueling physical exercise and near constant yelling and bullying, I appreciated the structure that gave me a life-long sense of durability and resilience. Nothing could ever be as hopeless as that feeling of being ground down and not knowing if I could keep going and become a member of the Brigade.
After stepping off the ship and catching a bus back home to Baltimore, I headed for a backpacking trip through the Monongahela Forest in West Virginia–one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever known. My childhood best friend Thomas joined me on that trip, someone whom I’d spent my teen years with, ambling the Appalachian Trail on various Boy Scout trips and other occasions where we could get out of our drab neighborhood on the wrong side of Fells Point. Thomas and I found each other at the cusp of puberty, and he was one of the few people at my school with a home life worse than mine. While I knew some of the kids pitied my own condition, having more than once seen my disheveled father still in his rubber overalls filthy with fish guts trudging up our crumbling stoop each afternoon with a sour look on his face, everyone felt sorry for Thomas. Compared to Thomas’ household, where he lived with a crusty old uncle stuck in a wheelchair who shouted profanities at anyone who so much as looked at him sideways, mine was a picture of bliss. At least I had a father and he made sure we had food on the table, even if it was the worst culling of the day’s catch. Thomas had no idea who his father was, and his mother had long since dropped him off at her half-brother’s house, saying she would be back to get him in a week, which never happened. The old timers said she was a whore, and we all knew the story, though no one ever said anything. Over the years, she would sometimes send the odd letter or Christmas present with a promise to visit soon. She never did.
On top of everything else, Thomas seemed to draw a black cloud around him wherever he went. He was run over and all but killed on his bicycle in the ninth grade, and then had one of his testicles removed after a short bout with cancer in the eleventh grade. These were just a few markers in a life filled with accidents and just plain being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nothing bad ever happened to him when he was around me. My instinct always revealed the safer path. We had a lot of fun hiking and camping together, and I like to think the Boy Scouts and our friendship were his saving grace. They were also my escape during a time when neither of us wanted to go home. All this changed once I went off to the Academy.
After that first year where I had set out on a path of great promise of eventual financial freedom and comfort, I came home to find Thomas barely holding his life together. Still living with his uncle, he had just been fired from the auto shop where he’d worked the last year of school and then stayed on to complete a few classes he’d flunked, classes he never wound up passing. He always struggled in his courses, and it was only later in life that I wondered if his slow reading and inability to digest the material pointed towards a learning disability–something so often overlooked in those days where both teachers and students seem to operate a little slower due to overindulgence in recreational drugs. So, I was never quite sure if Thomas’ failure to finish high school was the result of one too many joints, a crazy mixed-up brain, or a household devoid of love and healthy parental modeling. For my part, I figured I made it by skipping out on the drug scene and working my ass off to get as far away from Baltimore as possible.
As soon as the bus dropped me off downtown, I headed over to the auto shop, where the owner broke the news that Thomas had been fired the week before for coming in late just one too many times. My h
eart surged as I raced to his house, wondering if he’d already left town for good, but he hadn’t, having nowhere else to go. I saw him out back lounging on an old dusty couch parked in a patch of weeds. He was looking up at the sky and hadn’t noticed me creeping up and standing against the chain link fence out back, watching him without making a sound. I stood there for a few minutes, studying and noting how little he had going for him, not even good looks or charm to win over the people where those qualities mattered. He did have a generous heart, although where we grew up that didn’t get you very far. In fact, it often worked against Thomas since he was always being taken advantage of and manipulated into doing things that wound up getting him into trouble. He was far from feeble–very smart, actually–but his forgiving and subservient nature had done him in every time.
As much as I loved Thomas and respected his durability in the face of poor odds, over the years my exasperation with him grew from acorn to oak. For whatever reason, he seemed to attract the worst people and events; no matter how many times he’d been wronged he still assumed everyone had good intentions. Yet his resentment took shape as a child of Cain donning the mantle of victimhood. The world owed him something, and when that something never came he continued to stumble and blame others.
I suppose that had I walked in his shoes for a little while, I might have lapsed into the same vicious pattern that led to alienation and a slow descent into permanent misery, but that’s what disturbed me most. Both of us stumbled upon more obstacles than most. Why couldn’t he see the paths around them with the clarity in which I saw them? Furthermore, why had he failed to see the beauty and optimism at having come of age just out of reach of the draft? That was a death sentence our senior class avoided by a razor-thin few months. I loved him like a brother, but hated his pessimism. He also served as a grim reminder of what could happen to me if I didn’t keep pushing myself so hard. That’s what angered me most about him–that he was still around and not moving upward.
Thomas eventually turned his head toward the fence, unsurprised to see me and flashing his devilish grin and throwing out a smart-ass remark about my military haircut (his dark hair was down to his shoulders, which accentuated his nose in a comical fashion–warped from being broken back in the eighth grade). A few seconds later I hopped the fence and was wrestling him to the ground. He was stronger than me, but I had greater skill. I simply had to endure his bear growls before cinching him into a head lock. He almost never beat me at wrestling, but could go faster on the hiking trails, which we wound up on several hours later after packing our gear into his beat-up old blue Ford.
We were never sure how long we’d go out, packing enough food for a week and running out by the third or fourth day. That trip wasn’t unusual in this respect, and after stopping for provisions, including a bottle of Southern Comfort, we had our packs on and made our way to Bear Rocks Preserve through the Dolly Sods Wilderness. We’d hiked these trails several times over, both with the Scouts and on our own. We knew the place almost as well as our own neighborhood back home.
My dream in Adipala picked up on this trail, and though the colors were more of late autumn, with its bright yellows and reds than the time of year on that fateful trip, I recognized the day right away. We had camped overnight in a clearing a few hundred yards off the main trail. We found the spot several years prior during our stealth days–where we did our best to hide from everyone else, acting like renegade commandos and even carrying around machetes. On our first few trips, we brought along the machetes because we thought we were cool and didn’t have to play by everyone else’s rules. In high school I’d read James Dickey’s novel Deliverance about a few city boys who ran afoul of some mountain men and one of them winds up raped. The movie version had come out the previous summer, and its horrors were still fresh in the minds of most Americans seeking a little respite in nature. I remember Thomas half-joking on the drive up that we should try to find a gun before setting out in case we run into any hillbillies. Ironically, soon after we started on the trail we passed a crusty old man in overalls carrying a pitch fork who flashed us a rotten-teeth smile. Thomas gave me a queer, self-righteous glance, which I waved off with a grumbled laugh as he thumped out the banjo tune from the movie with his tongue.
That second morning we set out for Bear Rocks, and right away I knew I wanted to race Thomas to the top. He could sense my pace increase, and let out a little chuckle as he matched it. At that point the trail wound up a ridge that emptied out at the bottom of a steep slope up to the rocks. Most people took the kids’ trail around, as we called it. Always looking for ways to test ourselves, we instead went straight up and over the rocks. This required climbing on massive boulders and needing gear we didn’t own, but we always managed to do it, even if it meant lots of scrapes and bruises. It was all part of being better than everyone else by setting ourselves apart. Now I realize the Bear Rocks trip that summer was my last day of doing anything against the grain once I found refuge in the predictable and safe confines of the Academy, and later, the world of commercial banking.
At the base of the rocks, Thomas overtook me, and we each did our best to ward off attempts to knock the other one down. Thomas tried a different route each time, finding new footholds, some that worked out and some that didn’t. Meanwhile, I clung to a tried-and-true sequence that for the most part stayed fresh in my memory over the few dozen times I’d done it. I remember him once telling me how boring I was for always doing the same thing over and over. Like the rest of my life, I wanted to minimize risk and control outcomes, while still taking small leaps towards a goal of winning, whatever that might be.
About half way to the top, hundreds of feet of boulders the size of buses lay below us. Thomas’ new chosen path crossed mine and I spotted him ahead, pulling himself up with the help of one of the few small spruce trees growing up out of the rocks. He had the physical strength I envied, which I could never match. My best chance of winning any competition was to plod along at a steady pace and give it my all, hoping for the best. I’m not even sure why we felt the need to compete to get to the top of the rocks, but that’s the sort of thing a nineteen-year-old does to prove himself.
Thomas’s tree gave way, uprooted. I heard it tear free, then stopped to look up and see dirt and dust flying from the roots and hearing a curse escaping my friend’s mouth as he tumbled backwards, still clutching the little tree like an oversized root vegetable. I stood twenty feet below, watching him scrambling in a fury to catch hold of something to halt his momentum. That something wound up being my left arm, which I hadn’t planned on throwing out to catch him, which happened out of instinct. It all happened so fast that before I could gather my thoughts he was clawing at my arm as he slipped, clutching two of my fingers and the cuff of my shirt. As my shirt stretched, I could hear the stitching tear at the shoulder and the feeling as if my entire arm was being dragged under a strong wake.
The dream brought back a long-buried realization: despite the universal belief that I had done the best I could to save Thomas, I was lying. The truth–the thing I’ve not shared with another soul before now and which only Elena herself might have come closest to recognizing in the dark streak she once mentioned–is that I could have tried harder. On that warm sweaty August morning, looking down at Thomas struggling with eyes gushing with fear, I realized that it was indeed within my power to try to save him. I wasn’t sure then, or even now, if giving all my strength would have helped or perhaps worse, resulted in us both falling to our deaths. In that moment I thought of Thomas and his miserable life and how he’d hinted the night before after too much Southern Comfort that in his depression he often thought of doing the unthinkable.
Oh, what a miserable life he had, and I was sick of seeing its slow train wreck. It sounds cruel, but as he struggled to catch hold of my wrist my mind set off to questioning whether it was the right thing to even try to save him. Perhaps his life had run his course and it would end in a way he would have wanted–out in nature, out in
one of his favorite spots, but his gripping fingers and fear-crossed face held no hint of an internal struggle. He wanted to live, but that was not in the cards, thanks to my abandoning the lessons of valor that were so drilled into me that first year at the Academy. My final memory of him was a look of surprise and terror from holding merely my left sleeve, torn free and with it, shedding our final connection.
That specific yellow flannel pattern still haunts me whenever I notice it on a random scarf or pleated skirt, reminding me that I could have done more if my mind had gone in that direction during those half-dozen seconds that sometimes feel like someone else’s memory. Sometimes fantasy takes me to a place where I rise to the challenge and pull him up and then all is well, and we laugh at the near miss. Those thoughts bring back the shadow of shame, so I no longer entertain them as I did in earlier years.
Sometimes I miss Thomas’ friendship, the kind of eternal bond I would never experience again, neither in companions nor in loving relationships. We had passed through adolescence together, sharing laughter, strife, and the perpetual sorrow of living under the jackboots of home and school. He knew me better than anyone–knew my ambition to crawl out of that miserable neighborhood, my dreams of security and success, and the black side of my heart that I keep hidden from everyone. I wonder if that’s the last thing he saw before signing off for good and falling from that tower of rocks. Over the years I expected his voice to come out in those dreams, either reassuring or condemning. Isn’t that how it works in the movies? But that never happens. Only silence and the truth shining its incriminating beacon, reminding me that no matter where I go in life, whatever my achievements, that stain continues its rot in the core of my being.
I heard a soft knock at my door, and sitting up, I yelled out, thinking it was Lia or one of the others. I didn’t expect to see Zach’s face, but in he came, shining light. He was carrying something under his arm, and approached my bed with a soft step. I wiped my face and let out an embarrassed laugh. I’m sure I looked a mess.
Crossing Allenby Bridge Page 18