by David Hopen
Slowly, I approached the tree, a sugar maple. Greenish-yellow flowers bled softly from the branches, falling gently on a body resting at its roots. Noah was lying on his back. His eyes were open, staring up at the sun. His mouth was closed, his enormous arms crossed over his chest, his legs straightened. His long, blond hair was ragged, but with no evidence of blood. He looked, really, as if he were only sleeping, if not for his eyes, frozen in beatific terror.
I took a single step back. My vision swam, my breathing came with labor. Despair, a violent, all-encompassing despair, the sort I imagine precedes the end of normalcy, the end of clarity, the end of happiness, introduced itself to every cell in my body. I couldn’t tell whether I was cold or hot, sitting or standing, speaking or silent, sentient or dreaming, dead or alive.
A comforting deafness pressed itself temporarily against the world. I wanted this numbness to persist, I would’ve given anything to remain in that anesthetized half-life. Then I heard the sound of Amir moaning, of Oliver crying out as he lost his footing and fell to the ground, and with that I knew the world had returned to me. We had no cellphone reception, I thought with strange lucidity, we had no other flare guns, we were hours from the entrance to the trail, we had no fellow campers in sight. I kneeled, finally, over Noah’s body and felt for the pulse I knew wasn’t there.
“No use.” Evan appeared behind me. “He’s gone.”
I tried, desperately, pumping Noah’s chest without knowing what I was doing.
“Ari,” Evan said hoarsely, “leave him.”
I keeled over, sick. After some heaving, sweat pouring from my face, I looked back at Evan. “You did this.”
His gaze was off in the distance, somewhere in the miles and miles of green forest, in the blue mountaintops that floated, tenderly, into a mist of pale clouds.
“You killed him,” I said.
He turned to me. His eyes were dark and eerie, sliding in and out of focus. “Don’t.” His voice hardly constituted a whisper. “Please.”
I launched myself. We fell, rolled. I threw punches, most of which he deflected, though several landed effectively enough, allowing me the satisfaction of feeling the pressure of his skull against my bleeding knuckles. Evan wouldn’t strike me. Instead, when I wouldn’t stop, he grabbed my fists and, in one fluid motion, threw me on my back. I craved the pain, I let it build—in my arm, in my back, in my head—before I forced myself upright. Evan was already standing, though his leg appeared to be threatening to buckle. Oliver, lying helplessly on the ground where I’d left him, had been reduced to incoherent screaming as he pounded his fists into dirt. Amir, regaining himself, had rushed over at the sight of our wrestling. He stood between us, arms extended weakly, breaking us up, and so I nodded and pretended to limp back toward the tree. When Amir’s hands fell to his knees, when I noticed Evan doubled over, I charged again to take him by surprise. This time, Evan swung, in self-defense, and connected with my face. There was a loud, beautiful crack. I went horizontal. All of the ugliness in the world went with me.
June
The Sages taught: When the Temple was destroyed for the first time, many groups of young priests gathered together with the Temple keys in their hands. And they ascended to the roof of the Sanctuary and said: “Master of the Universe, since we did not merit to be faithful treasurers, let the keys be handed to You.” And they threw them upward, and a kind of palm of a hand emerged and received from them. And the young priests jumped and fell into the fire.
—Ta’anit 29a
The helicopter found us, rushed us to a small, local hospital. The medics told us it was Thursday: we’d arrived at Horeb on Tuesday, and somehow Wednesday was gone. I remember rousing momentarily, just as we took off. The pilot muttered about how the area looked like Sodom and Gomorrah, overturned.
Curious prodding ensued at the hospital. I received stitches. Evan’s leg was in rough shape. Oliver’s vision still hadn’t returned. Amir was untouched, save for minor bruises. We were each treated for dehydration and trauma.
They were baffled by Noah’s death. They were running tests, they claimed, they should know more soon. Theories formed, interrogations followed. What kind of LSD? Had he fallen ill? Where did we find shelter during the storm? Their last question, presented with lowered voices, made me nauseous: did I suspect foul play?
One by one, our parents flew up. What happened to their boys? Why didn’t the doctors know anything? Another IV in my veins, I heard from down the hall what I’d been dreading most: the sonic cry of Noah’s mother and father.
In my own room, my mother retreated from me, her body crumpled against the door. “How could you do this to us?” She asked this several times, eliciting nothing but silence. My father, beside her, wept into his hands.
* * *
NOAH WAS ALL ANYONE IN Zion Hills spoke about. People wept openly in the streets, in the butcher, in shul. I was reminded, all the while, of the way I thought of Noah when I’d first moved to town: hero, marvel, everyone’s favorite son.
Nasty rumors circulated, too. By the time we returned home, we were no longer victims in the public eye. They found LSD in our systems, weed in our belongings; our stories conflicted radically, even the parts we weren’t frightened to share. The truth—that we didn’t know what happened, that we had no explanation for Oliver’s onset of blindness or Noah’s death—was beside the point. TRAGIC TEENAGE CULT, one headline read. ACID TRIP KILLS BASKETBALL STAR. Allegations became increasingly outrageous: group sex, animal sacrifice, colonizing the forest, conspiring to murder Noah.
The difficulty with that last theory, of course, was the continued failure to diagnose Noah’s death. There’d be no autopsy, Cynthia decided, despite the protests of the police and the hospital, as it’d be a desecration of the human body under Jewish law. There were no clear signs of trauma. It didn’t seem as if he’d overdosed. There were no traces of poison, no signs of violence. It was shocking, it was heartbreaking, it was grotesque and it remained unanswerable: the death of Noah Harris was a medical mystery.
Late Thursday night, Eddie Harris knocked on my front door. My heart endured a glacial plunge. I thought, at first, he’d come to confront me, to shake me until at last I provided real answers. But Eddie was gentle, disoriented, half-shaven, scarcely capable of concentrating on full sentences. He looked as if he’d been tranquilized, and I realized he likely was.
“Ari,” he said, refusing to cross the threshold of my doorway, pawing at his eyes, “Ari, what am I going to do? What are any of us going to do?”
“I know,” I said. “I know.”
“This was my little boy, Ari. This was the . . . the absolute pride of my existence.”
“Eddie,” I said, the words forming too slowly in my mind, my surroundings sterile now and out of focus, “you should know he was the single greatest person I’ve ever met.”
He cried, which in turn made me cry. We cried together, standing at my doorway.
“I came here to ask—” My head was on his shoulder. I was prepared in that moment to submit myself: for questioning, for capital punishment, for anything that might possibly diminish Eddie’s grief. “You don’t know how much my boy valued your friendship,” he said, wiping at his face, “and Cyn and I adore you, adore your parents. And, well, we want you to know we don’t blame you for what happened, for whatever happened out there and . . . Noah was always going on about what a freaking genius you were, a, uh, a real wordsmith. He always insisted that, did you know?” Eddie lowered his voice, released me from his grip. “Would you speak at the funeral? Would you do that for us?”
I told him it’d be an honor. We shook hands. I felt sick.
* * *
THAT NIGHT I DREAMT OF NOAH. I was sitting in a lecture hall when suddenly he came ambling down my row, muttering apologies as he climbed over legs, targeting the seat to my right. He wore his usual smile, despite the fact that his blond hair was streaked with twigs and luminescent dust.
“Sorry to drop in unann
ounced,” he said, sinking beside me. His voice was unchanged. His left eye, I noticed, had turned a slightly lighter shade of green than his right.
We shook hands. “I didn’t expect to see you for quite some time,” I said.
“How long has it been?”
“Only a few weeks.”
“That’s right.” He slung an arm around the back of my chair. “Still getting the hang of the whole time zone conversion thing.” Someone in the row ahead turned, delivering a glare. We nodded our apologies.
“How long can you stay?”
He checked his wristwatch. “Till dawn breaks. Can’t really miss my shift.”
“I—I don’t understand,” I said, lowering my voice. “How’d you get here?”
“Alone. They make you go alone.”
“They do?” And then, furrowing my brow: “That’s not what I meant.”
“I got here the same way I got there in the first place.”
“Fine, never mind that. What’s it like there?”
“Well, it’s pretty damn busy,” he said. “Not much time for yourself, not much privacy. Good intramural leagues, though. You’ll never believe who’s on my team.”
“Who?”
“Afraid I can’t reveal that.” And then, leaning forward, dropping his voice: “But let’s just say our power forward once gave a pretty rousing spiel in Gettysburg.” He winked and put a finger to his lips.
“Can you—” I paused, leaned closer. “Can you tell me about God?”
“What about Him?”
“What’s He like?”
Noah sighed. “Always with the questions, Ari. Don’t you enjoy some mystery?” When I shook my head he pointed to the front of the hall, at the lecturer onstage. A familiar figure—small, scrawny, no older than eight—was on his tiptoes, scratching equations on the blackboard. I raised my brows in surprise. Noah laughed, doubling over, gasping for air, and then I woke.
* * *
THE FUNERAL WAS LATE AFTERNOON, right before Shabbat. They picked a plot in the center of Grove Street Cemetery, next to where Cynthia’s father, Noah’s namesake, was buried. There was a service first in the chapel—cramped, heavily carpeted, dimly lit—in which everyone fought for seats. It was unimaginably crowded, standing room only. I sat, with my parents, toward the front, near the Samsons and Bellows. The Starks hadn’t come.
It was a long service. Noah’s older sister, a senior at UCLA, had a difficult time relaying much between sobs. Rabbi Bloom, when he went, stressed that “Noah Harris was the embodiment of lev tov, a good heart to which all clung.” Extemporaneously, Rocky stood to speak, only to insist that Noah was the most impressive athlete handed to the Jewish people since Sandy Koufax.
When it was my turn, I walked slowly to the lectern, glancing at the coffin beside me before turning to the crowd. I could see people waiting outside the chapel, unable to gain entry. My gaze moved from Oliver, in his dark shades, to Amir, mournful and, shockingly, shorn of his beard, to Sophia, her delicate crescent of a face formerly but no longer the answer to every question I’d ever posed. I cleared my throat, too loudly, into the microphone, fumbled for the mostly incoherent notes I’d scribbled when I couldn’t sleep. Sophia, her arm around Rebecca, eyed me sadly.
“‘Who mourns for Adonais?’” A rush of disassociation: I gripped the lectern, lifted my head to the crowd. Undifferentiated faces blinked at me, faces of a world reduced abruptly to anonymity and flickering movements and indistinguishable forms of private sorrow. “Today, in this nightmare, we mourn Noah, our Adonais. Eulogizing his dear friend John Keats, the poet Percy Shelley wonders why it is we dread waking from this dream of life. Beyond this world, Shelley claims, awaits peace. Here, however, ’tis we who are ‘lost in stormy visions,’ we who ‘decay / Like corpses in a charnel.’ If this is the case, then what is it that . . . that shatters us in these moments?”
The other time I’d been to this cemetery, I realized, was with Noah. Several hundred yards away, Caroline Stark rested in the earth. “The day I met Noah Harris,” I said, voice choking slightly, “happened to be the day I met the first true friend I’ve ever made. It would be impossible, really, for me to overstate the extent to which his kindness had a profound impact on me.” Oliver’s unseeing eyes were on the floor. Amir glared in my direction. Why had I ignored his calls, why had I pretended to be asleep when he arrived at my house the previous day? He needed a friend, I needed him, but whatever instinct it is that makes us crave human connection had gone quiet within me, despite my desperation to switch it back on.
“The meraglim, sent forth by Moses to scope out the land of Israel, encounter the Nephilim, the titanic sons of Anak. Va’nihee vi’anaynu ka’chagavim vi’chane hayinu b’aynayhem, the spies report. We were grasshoppers in our sight, and so we were in their eyes, too. Noah, we all well know, was a giant. To look up at Noah was to be reminded of your own size—in physical stature, doubtless, but also in empathy, in kindness, in all that combines to make an unfailingly good human being. And yet, for all his greatness, never did Noah even once allow himself to look down upon others. Noah, instead, was a person who respected and protected his friends at all times. More than anyone else I know, he was capable of fitting into all situations, he was a person who never once had a cruel word to say about anyone else, he was a person who insisted, even when others wouldn’t, even when—well, even when I wouldn’t, on maximizing only the good in someone, despite . . .” I dropped a page of my notes, paused to retrieve it from the floor, noticed the words no longer made sense, entire sentences unraveled. “Despite evidence to the contrary. And so . . . I’ll always remain grateful”—I coughed into the microphone, trying to make sense of what happened to my life—“even if I’ll always be puzzled, that someone like Noah Harris decided to take me under his wing. I don’t think anyone can understand fully what it was for an outsider to walk into a room, any room, with Noah as a friend and feel a sense of comfort and security that the person who lights up everyone around them suddenly—”
Surges of color, strange geometrical disturbances. I blinked, I steeled myself against these intrusions of hallucinatory light. From my peripheral vision, I noticed Evan snaking through bodies, tears bleeding to his scar. In those eyes, I’d seen many things before: I’d seen vengeance, I’d seen bereavement, I’d seen a strange sort of deadness, I’d seen pride, I’d seen rage. Now, however, I saw only an inhuman blaze. Even from the podium, even before the crowd, I knew he was allowing me to see this so that I’d know nothing remained in him. I stared for a moment, and then he retreated, hobbling through the exit.
“What I want to say, I suppose,” I said, snapping back to myself. I knew what the crowd was thinking, I knew they were right: my friend’s death was our fault, my fault. I didn’t deserve to be up here. Perhaps I didn’t even deserve to be alive. I folded whatever was left of my speech into my pocket. “More than anything right now, I want to feel what Shelley ultimately describes—some great upsurge of all-encompassing beauty, a ‘fire for which we all thirst’ that connects us, that sustains us with love. I want to believe that hovering above us is something unshakably true, or at the very least something that’s . . . I don’t know, cathartic. Something that makes sense of what’s happened, even if it resists human comprehension. But it’s just—” My voice broke, it appeared. I waited for tears; tears didn’t come. “Kierkegaard deems Hashem’s inability to communicate with mankind ‘infinitely deeper than sorrow.’ But that sorrow reciprocates. We strive, each day, to live connected to God, and yet in this moment, when our need for Him is greatest, He feels most distant. And that’s why we fear death, isn’t it? Because Shelley’s only partially right: there is a fire after which we forever chase, it never really leaves us, but no longer does it fortify. It’s at death that we understand, finally, that the fire is meaningless, that God is incommunicable. Sometimes, devastation is—I don’t know, shapeless, maybe. Sometimes we admit we have no real answers. Today, in truth, I have nothing left.”
/> * * *
MOVING FROM UNTRUTH TO TRUTH, Leo Strauss taught, was not a transition of joy but of “unrelieved darkness.” Such was the period following Noah’s death. Prom was canceled. Our senior trip to D.C. was canceled. Our hard-earned district playoff game was forfeited, Rocky unwilling to stomach the slaughter we’d receive without Noah. Entire days were spent confined to my bedroom, diseased with a spiritual self-revulsion I felt wholly and unremittingly. I skipped the mandatory practice session leading up to graduation. Amir continued leaving frantic messages, though mostly I ignored him. Sophia called, I called back, we never spoke. I heard from nobody else. I scarcely ate, I endured cold sweats and spiked temperatures and fever visions: piano notes, inaudible whispers, amphitheaters. My surroundings turned black-and-white. I sat on the floor of my room, back to the wall, facing the door, knowing in my heart I could no longer hope to recognize what might prove beautiful or lasting.
* * *
ENTIRE NIGHTS PASSED CHANGELESSLY, my conscience deformed, lost somewhere in the dark ceiling. I’ve seen divinity face-to-face, Jacob mused, after wrestling the angel, and yet my life has been preserved. Did he, did Abraham, did Isaac, did anyone ever really carry on with normal life after communing with God, or did they, too, find reality derailed? When I did drowse, I dreamt of gardens and whirlwinds and letting Evan drown. These dreams always ended the same way: with Oliver, Amir and me forming a circle around a body. After too many nights of such torture I could endure no more. Ambien, Sonata, Restoril—anything I could get my hands on. They worked well enough when mixed with vodka, hurling me into dreamless states of unconsciousness. And this was all I wanted: the bliss of oblivion.
* * *
AGAINST MY WILL, I ATTENDED graduation. “You’re too close to entering some—” I was in bed, my mother before me, hand over her mouth. “I don’t want to say it, Aryeh, I don’t, but you’re heading for a kind of . . . unsalvageable depression, God forbid.” I was forced upright, I was dressed, I was in the car, I was onstage. It was joyless, the ceremony. Oliver didn’t attend, neither did Evan. When Rabbi Bloom called my name, he scarcely made eye contact as he handed me my diploma. A memorial video was shown in Noah’s honor. A new award, presented to the graduating senior best embodying the athletic, interpersonal and moral achievements of Noah G. Harris, was given to Amir.