fall

Quiet

Years after the rooftop party, I'd be overwhelmed by my job, troubled in my family, and my subconscious would cobble for me a fresh nightmare from the ledge and the quiet. I touch the mark of that dream often. In it, I'm sitting on a roof edge, gaily swinging my legs. A precipice dependably sends electricity up the tendons of my legs, but anchored heavily ass to tar paper I am released from the churn below--I'm secure as the flexing tip of a grown pine. Bresee and I used to trespass the Nathan Eckstein Middle School roof, princes over the spilling neighborhood, or dangle our legs from a Starbucks awning only twenty feet above the heads of dawdling university students. Like angels. In my nightmare he emerges smiling from the roof access, comes over at a jog. He doesn't slow enough, and I'm silent. The only words are once he's over the edge looking back with nascent terror: I'm going to die. Night of the party was all ruckus. My brother--bigger and older--led me to Clem's apartment on Essex on the Lower East Side. I hadn't been in New York City very long, had made only a couple friends. When Will offered me the inheritance of his social wealth, I accepted. We rang. Clem stuffed keys to the building in a sock and threw them down to us. Up six floors, Clem was plating dishes. We eddied in the tight apartment. Amaury knocked at the door and I answered. His dog Daisy slipped past first, Nicole behind. The guest list ripened, each with something to drink. Before long the bottles were half empty, attendees half full. Everything had to get to the roof. Clem climbed the black steel ladder, heaved the hatch aside, vanished to the roof. I stopped at the highest rung, ready to convey. Music came first, then food, bottles, and a couple more chairs. Daisy was loathe to part from attention. She set to whimpering as the elements of our night flowed up the chain of hands. We ferried her last, a squirming bundle giving affectionate licks at every hand-off. We laid the fold-out table, flooded the roof with glad chatter. I sat back in an unlikely Adirondack and met a west-coast wit behind wide-set eyes--the spread of NYC and new Los Angelenos sitting on offer alongside roasted broccoli and Zha Jiang noodles. Later, I leaned against the tent-like skylights, working a glass of wine. Amaury spoke with a thick Belgian accent, his bawdy humor and eager grin penetrated my wine haze, though not all of his words did. He glanced from time to time at Nicole--by now they are married, two kids underway--while she scratched at Daisy's ears. The dog, still a puppy, broke away. She wouldn't sit still long, and combed the rooftop for willing hands and interesting smells. Outside the bathroom, Will pointed out a pair of oil paintings, The Giles. They were both of Clem's twin brother facing away toward an abstract field, parallel interpretations of the same moment. Their mother painted them. The strokes differed but the forms matched so closely only colors set them apart. One greener, one darker. On another wall, an impossible mirror, probably nine feet to a side. One corner carried a crack--from the day they moved in, I learned later. Perfect reflection couldn't survive the climb to the new apartment. I was back in the Adirondack, talking scifi novels with Nicole when she broke away--where's Daisy?. The music was still loud, the conversation still rolling across the tar, but something insistent had arrived: a fresh stillness. Nicole's question hung unanswered. She called out to Amaury again, more loudly, quavering. Her question even at volume couldn't match the rising silence. Amaury flew downstairs, Nicole wailing in Clem's arms. Someone might have cut the music--it's all silent in my mind now. I imagine Amaury ringing one of the next building's tenants at random, a beat, and then the rest of them. I imagine his words, but I can't imagine his voice. Daisy died in the car on the way to the veterinarian. That's not Daisy's story though. The recognition that the laugh I had just heard would be the last--that wasn't part of Daisy's timeline. She had been trotting the dim roof, mapping it. She had peed in one corner. She would have seen the park lamps below her--what a vantage for a dog!--and run toward the sprawling city. Her paws pedaled in loose summer air. She thrilled toward an opening of darkness, fell into a pocket of time. We continued oblivious above. It waited. ~ We already ate all the best cherries. We'd been gobbling them up for weeks, well before they were properly ripe. It was a Royal Anne cherry tree. They start small and green, just a bitter skin wrapped around the pit, and then they fatten until they are thickly yellow with blotches and blushes of red. The red ones we could get to easy were gone though, and that day was our last chance to pick before we headed out on our Big Trip East to see Mom's uncle and a whole bunch of people she kept mentioning and we kept forgetting. We were set to leave, for Indiana, the reunion was set for July. Plan was we'd drive by way of the Jane and Michael Stern book, Road Food. Many places to eat, see the world's biggest rubber band. Plus the man who made concrete sculptures and had entombed his wife in his back yard, Sam Dinsmoor. Mom said we could pick cherries for the road while they load the car. The tree was eighty years old. It might still be have been growing a little, but it was already a big tree. An adult. The lowest branches, the oldest ones, reached out overhead from the trunk, and the tree house our dad built sat pretty flat in that first forking crown. I went first, scrambling up the rope ladder and onto the platform. My feet were black on the bottom, stained from a summer unshod. Peter came up after me, and we surveyed the branches for cherries. None in easy reach, but tempting clusters of five and eight bobbed on twigs further out. Peter climbed over the treehouse railing and lowered his belly to the bough. Even while crawling, every shift of hi weight sent a shiver through the nearest leaves. The bark under his fingers was so smooth it shone except where scabby fissures broke it up. He moved his hands and feet one at a time, making slow progress. I said something behind him, but he couldn't hear me. He lifted up a bit on his arms and start to turn toward me, but his hand slipped and suddenly he was falling. His arms were out and there were rocks, but then it was loud and bright and hot and he was yelling, his head hurts, it hurts it hurts. I argue often with Peter about which of us owns any particular memory. We're both adamant that it was us who first climbed out of the crib and opened the latch for the other to follow. But I can see my hand reaching for the wood dowel crib gate, fumbling the latch, it's clear in my mind. It's clear in his too. Abrading bark under soft fingers, the pleasure of the red-yellow sunset marbling of a perfect cherry, sitting on the porcelain bathtub lip and scrubbing our soles before slipping between clean sheets for bed are all held in common. We climbed up from the earth together, explored the same branches. Peter fell though--he still carries the bump. For all the detail time has worn away, for all it has confused the images from that day with every story we share, a few parts were durable enough to resist erosion. Sick white blazing, an egg shaped tension in my throat, a possible wrongness in the world pressing to be born, I'm floating in the background and I hear the sound own voice ringing alone. ~ Bresee called me up from Seattle in the summer of 2018 and his outlook seemed to be growing steadily more positive. I thought my ship was finally coming in. He said he had decided to become a teacher. I was elated. After five numbing years stationed at a submarine base, Bresee had headed back to Seattle and slipped into the darkly lit pocket of nightlife. He'd made his living as a strip club manager and dedicated himself to pool. He doubled down on the environments and people around whom he’d always felt most at ease. The GI bill paid for rent and some unassailable online community college classes. He was making payments on a new civic. Even with all these pieces of a life pulling together, for a couple years our phone calls and visits had belied a listlessness, subsurface depression. So when he called me in New York to break good news, to tell me he as going to get in gear, study up and work, let me know the dark days were in the rear-view and that he was awake for the first time in a long time, I was too excited for his upswing to doubt it. Across the country in Seattle, Bresee was spinning up into a deluded hypomanic episode. Three weeks before, he’d lit a fuse to his brain with a cocktail of 900 mg dextromethorphan and 2.5g psilocybin mushrooms. The experience day-of was remarkable and strange for him, but the reverberations were sundering. By the time he called me, he was already struggling to keep lucid linear thought. The special delight of our talk is the constant, passive availability of surrealism and ambiguous meaning. We spoke several times the day of that first alarming phone call. His conversation swung by the minute from epiphanic re-ordering of his life to grim prophesying of war, understanding patterns behind things, and a mounting fear that his mind was racing too fast, cracking. All I could do for him on the phone was slow down and speak plainly. I dropped our game from my speech, assured him as best I could and called his uncles mom, our oldest friends in Seattle. If he was becoming untethered from reality, I would be the anchor. He was taken to the hospital, then escaped, naked to his underwear. He befriended a coach exercising his team at Bishop-Blanchet high school, and who lent him clothes. The police arrived and coaxed him like friendly dog catchers back to the hospital. That time they locked the door. He was going to die. He prayed. He raged. He was sedated, and he was kept in involuntary confinement for twelve days terrified, miserable and alone. I called in during visiting hours. On the other end he was as inert as a soggy pack of cigarettes--his brain too bulldozed by antipsychotics for the familiar spark. He bailed on his medication as soon as he was out of the hospital, and his animation came bobbing back to the surface. I got back to Seattle then. For a day or two, it was lovely to catch midnight at Lake Washington or share a cup of tea with my mom. One morning, he asked for my help. His thoughts were accelerating. He set an appointment with a psychiatrist at the VA, but after the last visit inside, all hospitals were monstrous labyrinths. I was his escort. On the way in, his eyes were wild with fright, flitting around the waiting room. He clung to the thread of his purpose until the first pill was down the hatch and prescription tucked in his pocket. Leaving the hospital, he swung his legs. I heard his easy laugh. He smoked a cigarette and then another with relish. On a bench bathed in cool autumn sun we sat and talked, spitballing ideas about how he might get his job back and what kind of shared apartment he might be looking for. An hour later, a tree’s shadow had crept over the bench. I paused between two thoughts, noted his sinking quiet. How was he doing? I’m sorry Ben, I just don’t think I can understand what you’re saying right now.