THIRTY-ONE
cel
On Monday afternoon, Cel hails a taxi outside the studios.
“Do you work there?” asks the driver. Cel thinks maybe he’s Punjabi.
“I did.”
“Did you make a lot of money?” He sounds like he might be considering a change of career.
Cel gulps. “I did.”
At Grand Central, they’re restoring the constellations on the ceiling. The constellations are partially backwards, she’s read, though that’s not what they’re fixing—they’re only peeling off the layers of tobacco smoke they used to think were soot. Cel can see patches where the original glowing pale green is emerging, reminding her of the aurora borealis. She saw that once, because of Ruth. “Get up, get up, get up,” she’d said, as though it was some kind of emergency—which, after all, it was.
She takes a train to New Haven, another train to Springfield. A bus all the way to Hanover; an even smaller bus after that one. From the station, she hitchhikes for a while: she keeps expecting someone to ask her what the hell she’s doing, but no one ever does. Her shirt is ripped from changing in the Greyhound bathroom; on the road, she ruins her shoes. She takes a pleasure in the irrevocability of this: the only thing she knows for certain is that she will never have shoes like these again.
At the house, Hal’s NO TRESPASSING sign is still posted. It is rightly being ignored—a trail of trampled-down grass leads from road to stream. Cel likes the thought of rogue fishermen being lured here, so tempted by her stream’s magic they cannot bear to stay away. She takes down the sign, clutches it to her chest, and begins to trespass.
The house, she’ll leave alone. Her business, now as ever, is with the woods. With the stream. With the tiny matter-of-fact plants she can no longer name. With the deep ocher water, muddied from rain. With the trees casting shadows that look like scaffolding to her now—she doesn’t remember what they used to look like. With the tiny white flower clinging ferociously to the very edge of the bank—so precisely what Ruth would have liked that Cel can’t help but scan the stream for other signs: of glass or toys or treasures. There is nothing in the water right now, it seems—but this, like everything else, could change.
Cel pulls off her jeans and sits down in the stream. She pulls off her shirt and hikes into the woods. Why? Is she trying to commit suicide by redneck? In the forest, many things besiege her; she remembers them all at once, pulling literal cobwebs from her eyes. She scrambles over rocks with a competence that surprises her, then makes her smug, in the exact same place it used to. She hadn’t even known that place was still there. She is startled by the number of upended tree roots—ominous and stark, like the warnings of vanished civilizations.
There must have been a hell of a storm here since she left, and the part of her that will always be a baby is sorry that she missed it.
She reaches the top in an hour: but wasn’t this a pilgrimage once?
She sits on a rock and awaits visitation.
* * *
—
In western Cleveland, Cel buys her first and only car.
This, she has heard, is the official start of the Midwest; she feels that Hal would have advised her that the prices here would be more reasonable. It is Hal who taught her to drive stick shift; Hal who taught her to drive at all—in tiny circles around the Big Y parking lot, years before it was legal.
She selects a jaunty little teal Geo Metro, which she begins to hate before she’s even out of Indiana.
But before that, she buys a train ticket. A man asks her about the beautiful concourse he’s seen in all the pictures, and she has to tell him that’s the other one. And for once in her life—and it will be only once—she’ll feel like a New Yorker.
But before that, she takes a taxi to Penn Station. On the radio, they’re discussing Ryan Muller; she’s relieved when the tunnel scrambles the signal.
But before that, she goes inside the studios one last time. She has a badge to turn in, a desk to clean out. Luke comes by to supervise. He leans over her to ask if she’s been stealing straws from craft services the entire time she’s worked here, and then she kisses him. It’s a joke, then it isn’t, then it is again.
She pulls away and he blinks at her.
“What?” he says.
“Nothing!” she tells him, and runs laughing down the hall.
* * *
—
She will end up in San Francisco, which is as far as she can go without a passport. The wind from the Pacific is unruly, unmitigated by any serious buildings. She walks along the Embarcadero; the Golden Gate Bridge prickles in the distance, like a glowing spine. In North Beach, the streets go up at vertical angles; Cel hunches, nearly crawls. She feels like she could actually fall off the sidewalk and into the bay—this is not dissimilar to the way she’d felt the first time she saw a Broadway show: that vertiginous sense she might drop into the orchestra pit (“Not possible,” said Nikki, through cheerful bites of popcorn).
On Kearny Street, she notices a sign announcing an open mic night in front of a place called the Purple Onion.
She’ll peer into the doorway, trying to glean a sense of the place, but the only way to see it is, it seems, to enter. She goes in and, on a savage impulse, adds herself to the list. She’ll down a whiskey and a half before her body catches up to what her brain has decided and her hands begin to shake.
She does not listen to any of the others; on a napkin she is preparing to burn all her life’s material. Everything she’s ever used at parties; a few she’s been too afraid to even try.
The cutest vintage accessory of all is the Lindbergh baby!
(What is it with her and the Lindbergh baby?)
Thyroid cancer is like the dogfish of cancers.
(A high-concept head-scratcher, at best.)
A bit about Curious George’s keeper, speculating about what might be under that yellow hat of his.
(The skeletons of Georges I–IV? Cel has always felt that everyone will understand this joke, but these are not the things you know for sure until right now.)
She trips a little on her way up to the stage; for a moment, she can’t see anything at all. She wonders if this is what it’s like for Mattie, every time he stares out at the audience. When you gaze into the void, the void gazes back into you: pick your voids, then, very carefully. Cel feels a sense of pulsing all around her; she can hear the clinks of glasses, the muffled skeptical murmurs.
“You just never know about people,” she begins. “You never, never know.”
* * *
—
And so this is where she’ll be: monkeying about on a stage in San Francisco, having the hands-down time of her life, so buzzed on joy that when she walks off the stage and hears someone say Holy shit, Mattie M’s been shot! she’ll smile and get ready to laugh, waiting for the punch line.
THIRTY-TWO
By the time she reaches Luke, Cel already knows what he will tell her. She’s learned it all from CNN, which she watches for several hours at a strip club called Big Al’s. This is the first place she finds that will admit to having a television, after she goes tearing out of the Purple Onion, weeping. A man in the doorway sees her and says, “Hey, sweetheart, you were fine! How ’bout a smile?”—and Cel somehow has room to feel pleased, then insulted, then disgusted with herself, all while crying and running, inexplicably, up a hill.
At Big Al’s, she explains herself to the manager. He is balding and, she somehow understands, kind. He’s already heard the basics: that Mattie M was shot, that the shooter was that guest who’d gone bananas on that other guy with a tire iron a while back, that he’d turned himself in immediately.
What he does not know is whether Mattie is dead: this seems to him a secondary matter. Nevertheless, he lets Cel into his office to watch TV, and even watches with her, for a while. She finds it oddly comf
orting, to be watching along with someone.
From CNN she learns that Mattie is in critical condition at a New York hospital. She does not learn which one. She learns the shooting occurred at the end of the rally, just as Mattie was leaving the stage.
She learns from an extremely pale eyewitness that “it did not look good.”
She learns that Mattie’s speech was a great success, in the view of the same eyewitness.
She learns that the shooter was calm while being taken into custody. “I did what had to be done,” he reportedly had said.
She learns there are no updates on Mattie’s condition.
She learns several eyewitnesses believed he had died at the scene; some are skeptical to learn that he had not.
“It really didn’t look like something someone could survive,” says one of them.
At some point, the manager brings her a sandwich. Then he brings her a drink. The sandwich is very good, the drink much better. She’s begun thinking of the manager as Big Al, though that probably isn’t his name. He seems unfazed by the fact of a weeping young woman in his office; maybe this is something of an occupational hazard, at a strip club.
“Was he a good boss?” he asks at some point.
“No!” says Cel. “He was horrible!”
She laugh-cries in a way that sounds too much like Ruth: then she just cries, for a while.
Big Al lets her use his phone, even though it’s long-distance, and he won’t take any cash, not even for the sandwich. His patience seems extraordinary; as the hours pass, Cel begins to consider ulterior motives. Her situation is a spectacle, after all, and will be an interesting story to tell at parties.
Cel will tell it many times herself, in fact, and in many different ways, and after a while she’ll start telling it as a joke, first at bars and then on stages: the story of Big Al and his creepily delicious roast beef sandwich and how when this is what happens the first time you try stand-up, it’s hard to ever be too afraid of any kind of bombing that’s not a literal act of political violence. She’ll use the story to remind lackluster audiences that it could be so much worse; she’ll use it to remind hecklers that, unless they’ve got some really top-notch zingers, the worst day of her comedy career is already behind her. It will become useful, this story, and maybe Cel senses the use of it even now, in Big Al’s office. Maybe he does, too, and is being kind because he’s curious.
But no, she eventually concludes: he is being curious because he’s kind. He’s probably some kind of modern saint, she decides, as she calls Luke then Sanjith then Luke then Jessica then Luke then Elspeth then Luke then Elspeth then Luke then Luke then Luke.
From CNN, she learns that the CPA has released a statement; she changes the channel before they read it aloud. She wonders what Tod Browning or Lee or Lisa will be saying about this tomorrow; she wishes she could watch New York TV.
She learns that the NRA has not released a statement. They never will, in fact, though this is something she learns much later. She’ll learn other things, too, in the days and years ahead. She’ll learn that Mattie was shot four times with a legally obtained ten-millimeter pistol, sustaining a head injury that was “not compatible with life,” in the words of the autistic infant doctor tasked with delivering the news conference. She’ll learn that when the gunfire began, some people thought it might be part of the demonstration—a part of Mattie’s speech or maybe even his show—and that a few of them had lingered near the podium, declining to run, hoping to be on TV. She’ll learn that a lot of them did get to be on TV, because they were the only ones still hanging around when the press showed up ten minutes later.
Later, Cel will learn the text of the speech Mattie gave before he died; she will, along with many other people, be surprised at how good it was. She’ll learn there is hope among activists that Mattie’s speech and death, alongside the Ohio shootings, could be a significant catalyst for gun reform.
Later still, she’ll learn this hope has been abandoned.
At Mattie’s funeral, she’ll learn he’d been a hatcheck attendant as a child. She will not learn what a hatcheck attendant actually is. She will learn that Mattie’s ex-wife is small and sort of ugly and that whatever Mattie did to her wasn’t bad enough to keep her from showing up at the service, where she’ll cry and cry and speak not a single word to reporters.
Cel herself has stopped crying by the time CNN makes Mattie’s death official. She tries to start again, but can’t. She says this to Luke when she finally reaches him—after she calls one last time, for absolutely no reason, as there is nothing left to ask.
“That’s how I feel all the time,” he says. “Crying for me is like trying to come on coke.”
“What?” Cel hiccups a little. “Are you—are you trying to make a joke right now?”
“I get really close, you know, I want to, but—”
And then, unbelievably, they are laughing.
* * *
—
Brookie comes home from the hospital the day they bury Matthew. Together, we watch the coverage of his funeral. Outside the church, the press is interviewing protesters.
“Well, that looks familiar,” says Brookie. He is having another good day: a couple more of these, and we might just start calling them “days.” The doctors don’t know why he’s still alive; his death remains, as the doctors stress, a statistical certainty. But even they admit that, from a purely medical standpoint, Brookie is not dead yet. From a medical standpoint, there’s no reason he can’t squander his remaining minutes on this earth gawking at a funeral for a man he’d despised long before it was fashionable, while holding the hand of the only living person who has loved him, unbelievably, for even longer.
The protesters, it’s becoming clear, are not establishment-type loonies; the professional talking heads’ crusade against Matthew has abruptly ended, though no one’s claimed a victory. It seems inevitable that syndicated episodes of Mattie M will be quietly un-boycotted, and can be expected to run relentlessly until the end of time. Forget the cockroaches: this is what will outlast us all. A dubious legacy for everyone, not only Matthew Miller.
“You should have gone to the funeral,” says Brookie.
“I wanted to be here today,” I tell him.
It is true. I do not need another funeral. That is not where grief happens anymore.
It will happen in other ways, I suppose, in the months and years ahead. I am coming to understand that mourning will be the work of my lifetime; I will go to my grave without seeing it complete. But some of my grieving for Matthew, I find I have already done. Not all of it—hardly all—but enough to feel the difference. It must have happened years ago, while I was wandering the city and gnashing my teeth and believing I had come to know true sorrow.
This was a delusion that became a mercy: these days, I’ll take them both.
* * *
—
After Matthew Miller left the first time, I told everyone he never wrote me. But the truth is I did receive a letter, once—typed, unsigned, mailed from Staten Island.
I know no one on Staten Island and have no idea why anyone would go there—though it’s true that Matthew Miller went everywhere, in those days when he still went anywhere at all.
Through the years, I’ve kept the letter—though let it be said I’ve kept a lot of things: Brookie has reminded me of the high incidence of hoarding among eccentrics in their middle age. When his jokes get meaner, I can tell he’s feeling better, and feel entitled to ignore him.
I wait to reread my letter until Brookie goes to bed. This happens at seven o’clock precisely; he has a thing about making it past the Nightly News. The letter lives in the box under my bed, along with a bunch of play programs and old issues of The AIDS Newsletter and the letter from Ryan Muller and some scattered Polaroids Paulie took a million years ago. Those photos were annoyances once, objects of in
tense sentiment later. Now, for the first time, I see they might be pretty good pictures. Would Paulie have been a photographer in another life? In any life that he deserved, he would have had a lot of lives.
In my room, I sit staring at the letter; outside, it isn’t even thinking of getting dark yet. I do not know who wrote it or who it was meant for; the window for certainty now is past. But for tonight, I will decide to imagine Matthew—standing on the deck of the Staten Island ferry, letting the air slam into his lungs, clutching the letter I am holding in my hands, imagining the day, or perhaps the many days, that I will read it.
After I went back, alongside my devastating guilt would be an almost tactile desire to stop time, to step outside of my life, for just a single moment. And once, I finally did: I fell asleep on a flight from New York and dreamt a lucid dream about you. We were moving around weightless in a room. It is still embarrassing to remember the intensity of my relief in that moment—not because it was finally happening, but because it finally wasn’t. I was being given the gift of a conscious moment alone with you—not just physically, but morally, temporally alone, a moment recused from any causal relationship to reality. And so in that moment—excused from all gazes, mine and yours, both—I did it: I kissed you, and you didn’t feel like an apparition, maybe because we both were. It didn’t feel like the first time, or the last, because it wasn’t any time at all. And you seemed to know and understand this, too—that none of it was real, that none of it would count.
But even all these years later, I have this lingering hope that perhaps it did—that on some other plane it happened, that in some footnote to time it was noted, and somehow I was not the only one of us left with its memory. In this life I cannot have this moment—I cannot even dream of speaking of this dream—and perhaps, after all, I never even dreamed it: for who is to say who is reading this letter, and who is to say who has sent it? But if the string theorists are right, then in some universe I am signing this letter, and in another we are moving weightless through that room.
The Spectators Page 33