by Casey Gerald
I should have said something, though, even if it was just the only honest thing I had to say then or now about that night. Dang, Tashia. That hurt.
Not the death part. Not being burst upon or thrown to the floor or tied up or cursed or knelt into or threatened or embarrassed. All that was pretty bad, but I won’t lie and say it was the worst thing to ever happen to me. Nor was it the best, though I decided to spin that story many years later—said that facing death had made me a nobler person, a person with a purpose and without fear, ready to give his life for Causes and to Others. But none of that is true, either. I did not face death—nobody has ever looked Death in the face. Surely not me. My eyes were closed.
All I know, or what I believe, is that Death itself matters much less than the terms on which death is offered, the circumstances by which death comes. What those terms, those circumstances, do to us. And so I often wonder whether actually dying would have been better than lying in the presence of death on account of my sister. She was the only proof I had and needed that there was always a place in the world where I was safe, where things would be okay, a place that I could always hide behind or stand on, always believe in—even if that place was not a place at all, but a person.
I miss that place. Don’t know what else to tell you.
PART THREE
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
Genesis 1:2
chapter THIRTEEN
I should say—or maybe I shouldn’t, but I will—that I do not recommend this life to anyone. Not that mine is worse than any other, just that it is the only life I know well enough to speak on with some authority and so I say: Don’t do it. That is also what I would have told my mother and my father when they got the idea of me in the first place but, of course, no one asked for my opinion (or yours, as you are here with me). Now the milk is spilled and we can cry over it—we should cry over it—but we can also find some use for all that milk down on our floor.
If, for example, you find yourself in a dark confusing period of history, when the gods have ceased to be and the Christ has not yet come and man stands alone, you will have some sense of how things fall apart and a dim view as to how they might be put back together. You will know that it is hard to draw a clear line between this falling-apart and that putting-together; impossible to stop the one or to prophesy the other. You will know, when you look back on the other times you stood alone, that the question is not whether you are alone but whether you are standing. You do need a place to stand. At least I did. And it struck me not long after I got up off my sister’s floor that Yale was as good a standing place as any other, so I went back for my second year with greater interest if not hope, and I signed up for Professor Ehrgood’s sophomore English class because: In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.
By which John meant, perhaps, that we have to say something because the words make us feel less alone, and the words help us tell the difference between standing and not, and the words help to guide the first few steps from our place in the dark.
It’s plausible.
What’s that?
It’s “plausible.” That’s what you mean, Casey. Not “feasible.”
Oh.
Ehrgood hovered around the oval oak table that sat sixteen students and filled most of the small classroom, made to feel smaller by the walls: one lined with narrow windows that did not open, the other three covered with palimpsestic chalkboards. In front of the chalkboard closest to my seat, Ehrgood stood. He stretched to write the two words and slashed a line between.
Feasible means that something can be done, he explained. A plan is feasible. Plausible, which is what you intend to say, means that something is, at least on the surface—and it could only be so on the surface, understand—reasonable. Believable. You don’t say an argument or an idea or a theory can be done. You say it could be true, even if it’s not clear that it is true. That’s plausible. Plausible.
Ever since I’d learned feasible—apparently I had not learned it, after all—the word had been my favorite weapon. I brandished it to feign intelligence. I lobbed it as a flash bang to escape overwhelming ideas. When I felt petty, I used the word to maim a self-assured classmate who would be insulted if I said that his argument was only feasible, not true. Ehrgood was not fooled. He faced me now, massaging chalk residue between his thumb and forefinger, blinking.
Okay. Try again.
I think what you say is plaus—
No no no.
He scurried to a barren chalkboard and scrawled: I THINK. Drew an X through the phrase.
I know you think it. You wouldn’t say it if you didn’t think it. Try again.
Clearly, it’s plaus—
Ah. Too strong.
On the same chalkboard, Ehrgood wrote clearly and, next to it, obviously. Drew an X through each.
Now. If it were clear. If it were obvious. You would not have to tell me. I would already know. Everyone would already know.
His face—at least the mouth and cheeks and corners of his eyes—held the early signs of a snicker, of joy, as if somewhere inside him, the right word, the precise phrase, led to ejaculation (another word that he would hate because it ended in -ion). He fluttered his hand at me without saying the go on that the flutter implied.
It’s plausible.
Yes. Exactly. Good.
Ehrgood hardly ever said great, rarely said words like amazing, and never, as far as I can remember, said perfect. To him, confusing something that was feasible with something that was plausible, something that was good with something that was great, was damn near as bad and just as dangerous as setting out for spice in Asia but, instead, landing in the new world (another misnomer). And with so much lost language all over the place, he could not imagine anything being perfect.
Do you understand?
Ehrgood again, later in the semester, opened class with this question. He had assigned a text by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas and now he stood, arms outstretched—chalk in one hand and Habermas (the text, not the man) in the other—asking a student if she understood. The classroom was small enough to hear a low voice, an uneven chair, a giggle at the word philosophize, but Ehrgood kept sliding toward the girl, leaning his head toward her at an angle that drew a sandy tuft of hair down over his brow.
What’s that? I can’t—I can’t hear you.
I can’t tell you what the girl said, but I’m willing to bet my rent check that Ehrgood had already stopped listening.
When you are unsure—he slid back toward the chalkboard, chalk-hand and Habermas-hand now clasped at his chest—you get quiet. Psst psst psst . . . umm . . . psst psst. The longer you speak, the more unsure you become. By the end of your point, you have lost all faith. And worse—and worse—we have lost all faith in you.
He blinked and smiled and took a brief glance at the ceiling.
Don’t do that. Don’t do that. When you are unsure, speak louder. Sit up straight. Look into our eyes and say it. Whatever it is—SAY IT. Okay? Yes. Now. Do you understand?
He asked the girl again. He went around the table and asked each of us. For the first time since I arrived in New Haven, I was not the only one who did not understand.
Of course you don’t understand. Of course!
He wafted around the oak table reading a passage of Habermas in a tone that made you wonder whether, at some point years ago, Habermas had said a sideways word about Ehrgood’s mother. He laid Habermas to rest on the table.
You have to know that if you don’t understand, it is the author’s fault. Not yours. It’s not your fault.
This is not altogether true. It is helpful to believe, though, when there are many things you do not seem to understand and you
have waited many years to point some fingers. My wait was over now that I had learned this lesson, taught to all the boys and girls who, for three centuries, had come to Yale and been informed that we were in these halls to learn to think (not do), to think like this: like something more than simple men and women. Like gods? We were—was I to be the god that was the word and life and light of men? The light that shineth in the darkness though the darkness comprehended it not?
Ah, no. I was the darkness.
But for once! Somebody gave the Darkness a chance to do it his way: to choose the words, to say what could be done and believed, to walk his path without the light breathing down his neck. Ehrgood did with my mind what Coach Walton had once done with my body—and this new instruction, just like the last, carried me a long way from where I started, right up till I realized that I’d left myself behind. Hold my hand . . . I’ll show you.
chapter FOURTEEN
No, really. Hold my right hand. It is broken.
I did not know that it was broken, at first. I knew that it was the third quarter of the ninth game of the 2006 Yale football season, that this game was our second-to-last chance to clinch the Ivy League championship, and that this championship would vindicate the band of boys, myself included, who had staged a coup (I suppose you could call it a violent one) over the past year, intent to overthrow our leaders and make this team our own. Not that they resisted much.
The coup began in Philadelphia, on a dark doomed cold wet Franklin Field, the oldest football stadium in the country, 22 October 2005, during a game against the University of Pennsylvania Quakers. I won’t bore us both with too many technicalities, because a game is simply the sum of one hundred or so plays, with eleven boys from each team on the field at a time, each with one primary job—quarterbacks, to throw; wide receivers, to catch; cornerbacks, to stop the wide receivers; etc. etc.—along with a few support jobs, mainly blocking and tackling. All these jobs are designed to help the job of the offense (to score points) or the job of the defense (to prevent points from being scored). The offense and defense support the job of the team (to win). And all this, even in a small silly way, supports The Job that humankind has always wanted more than any other: to live forever. And if you know this, you can boil down the many zigs and zags to a simple human drama on the field.
That is all we had to do, we twelve freshmen who had been invited to travel with the varsity to Philadelphia. A dozen eighteen-year-olds from many nooks of America, most of whom had no business at Yale and who, knowing this, had no delusions about our intellects yet had enough sense to know that nobody on the field for Yale was very good at their job(s). Didn’t take a Yale degree to know what an ass-kicking looked like.
By the end of the first half, our offense, led by the team captain, a future Dallas Cowboys quarterback, had negative-six yards. And our defense, anchored by the two boys, now seniors, who had hosted me on my recruiting visit, had given up almost thirty points. We twelve stood on the sidelines in the apocalyptic gloom, the oversized stands of Franklin Field nearly empty yet offering, thanks to the rain bouncing off aluminum bleachers, more noise than any crowd would. Under his breath, one of the twelve put the scene in words both typical for the sport and inappropriate: Goddamn we’re getting raped out there. The worst was yet to come, at halftime.
One of the senior leaders, a loud man-child from Manhattan who always taunted underclassmen and preened in practice and had (I heard) once been a great player, suffered from some condition that made him weak and fainty during games—so much so that he often needed an emergency IV to stay alive enough to run up and down the field. I would call this condition being out of shape, but the doctors felt it was more serious.
Shocker—this was his nickname, likely self-styled; he wore number 1, which he passed to me when he graduated (we really did and still do like each other, I just have to tell this story)—had given such a valiant non-effort that his health was in grave danger by halftime. His long hair was strewn down his back and over his face and dripped water—rain and sweat—over his uniform and down his arms, at least one of which was already hooked up to an IV. As the team entered the locker room, we twelve huddled in a corner, staring out at our leaders hunched over on rows of old wooden benches, the screaming coaches kneeling before them. Beyond this, we saw, in the opposite back corner of the room, a naked body in a cloud of steam. It was Shocker, taking a shower. And out from the mist of that shower-tomb, we heard his voice crying out: Don’t give up, fellas! Don’t give up! as he shampooed his hair.
The second half was only less disastrous for Yale because Penn removed their starters, then their backups. Only then did our future Dallas Cowboy score a touchdown, against the third-string Quaker defense. When it was all over, we showered in silence and processed to the freshman bus, which trailed the two upperclassman corteges up I-95 back to New Haven. By the third hour of that sad ride, we twelve had decided to call a meeting the next day: a freshmen-only meeting, a rare event if only because freshmen hardly ever have anything important to talk about.
Word spread throughout the night and early Sunday morning, from the twelve to the rest of our class of thirty, which would become notable not only for its wins but also for the fact that not a single member quit the team over four years, perhaps out of fear. After the Sunday morning workout we thirty huddled in the varsity film room and waited for Grant McKay to close the door in the faces of the upperclassmen, who had been walking by, peering in at us, confused and offended by such a blatant violation of social mores. Grant was one of the larger of us, six feet, three inches or so, maybe 250 pounds, with a head the shape of the old G.I. Joes and the personality of many boys I’d come to know at Yale who wanted deep down to be president, but would likely peak at, say, governor of Maine.
I know some of you weren’t there yesterday, but we decided to call a meeting of our class because these guys—he pointed out to the hallway at the upperclassmen’s shadows—suck. It was embarrassing to be a part of what happened at Penn.
Tommy Downing—who, had he not be born in New England with a football in his hand from an early age, could have easily been a terrorist or any number of other things that require blind faith in a simple cause and a deep hunger for physical violence—could not wait for Grant’s peroration, so he stood up. The room fell silent. I’d like to say there was spit foaming around Tommy’s mouth, but that’s too dramatic and probably not true, although I did in years to come see this foaming business a few times.
This has gotta fucking change, fellas. Starting today. Fuck these guys. Yesterday—never again. Never a-fucking-gain.
Tommy didn’t speak for much longer, and his portfolio of words quickly pared down to fuck. It was more than enough. We who had been there knew. And those who had not been could feel the shift: some collective trauma had transformed the collective itself, had created, within a team of one hundred twenty people, a new team yet unborn—a we to come.
We struck in the spring of 2006, when the current class of juniors had all but assumed their roles as senior leaders. They bossed us freshmen around, chose the best jersey numbers, stood at the head of lines, tried to negotiate a hard and bitter peace with the coaches. The leader among these leaders was a pretty Californian who, even after a three-hour game, might not have a single hair out of place. He raised a grave concern a week or two into spring training, via an email that I’ve lost but still remember, more or less:
Fellas,
We are here to be student-athletes, but the current spring morning workout regimen makes it hard for many of us to be good students at all. We leave morning practice so exhausted that the rest of the day is a wash. And with the cold weather, guys are getting hurt more often, which means we will be coming into next season still trying to recover. Many of the rising seniors have discussed this and agree that we should talk to the coaches about lowering the intensity, which will be better for everyone. Let me know if you have any thoughts before I talk to
Coach.
—DB
I’m almost sure none of us freshmen responded. Each of us, except perhaps Tommy, hated waking up at six a.m., hated the nauseating wind sprints, the pneumonial cold. But more than this, we hated the upperclassmen—not for who they were but for what they symbolized: weakness, defeat, yesterday. They wanted less intensity. We gave them more.
We showed up every morning and outran them. Out-hit them. Out-taunted them. Out-led them, too, since we followed one another’s orders before we yielded to theirs. And as the mornings summed to the final spring tally, the team was, in spirit if not in fact, our team—not least because seven of us had earned starting jobs going into our sophomore season. And what a season it had been.
After falling to the University of San Diego in the opener, we had not lost again. Destiny and dumb luck drove us on from one game to the next, all the way to this second Saturday in November, the ninth game of the 2006 Yale football season, fifteen minutes away from our seventh win in a row and an Ivy League championship and history. If only we could beat Princeton.
We had reached the holy moment that comes in some games, when you stand on the field and spin around to look out and up at fifty, sixty thousand bodies smashed together in the stands—when what was once a dean, a senator, a dining hall worker, your mother, is now a blot in a great sea of blues and tweeds and fur and orange or crimson. When the noise is so loud and varied that the thousands of voices become one voice, and the cold wind blows across from a sliver of the North Atlantic to make the flags atop the stadium all wave in one direction, and the forty practices and hundred hours of film and thousand plays have turned eleven boys into one body that looks at itself in the mirror and asks What am I about to do? And knows. And knows. In the midst of all the chaos comes a moment when it is still and quiet down on the field. We had reached that moment in this game against Princeton. But we were tired. And we knew—or at least I feared—that we were about to lose.