Appearance
Personal Best
Icarus donned his wings and challenged the sun.
He challenged the unflinching boundaries that govern
his world because he was an irreverent little boy
and he wanted to go higher.
Peter,
I’ve never been able to steer you. For all my irrefutable arguments that you order your life this way and not that, you’ve hewn close to your essential ethic: to be unrestrained. I could never get you to ingest more fibers and less pills and powders, to drive slow or sleep long, to spend lightly, even to floss. You are my most precious relationship, and you are also a fragile, hurtling body and an inheritance of mental illness. Besides, even if I could send you to community college, impress upon you the importance of a budget, or directly inject you with a drop of restraint, it would be a betrayal of the faith fundamental to our relationship You recently quoted me ten percent odds that you kill yourself. A somber appraisal, frankly delivered. It’s not for me to preclude that possibility, bringing you down to solid ground with anxiety and precautions; our friendship soars on a faith in one another’s acceptance and partnership amid uncertainty.
I can’t remember meeting you. It must have been sometime in seventh grade science, and I know for a fact it was before the unit on sexual health, because by the time fuzzy VHS tapes of psychedelically hued sperm were struggling in their 18 cm freestyle, the bulk of my attention was already on you. The first fragment of our life together I can recall is a digital timer. It was plain firetruck red, like only things from childhood can be, with a green, a yellow, and a blue button. You were holding it out to me, asking for my help. Sure, of course. Our warden Mr. Hammersborg had become unmoored from his teaching responsibilities at least as early as my older brother’s chapter at Nathan Eckstein Middle School five years before; nothing could be less important than the autopilot instruction we were audience to. My job was to hit the start button when you breathed in and then hit the stop button the moment you breathed out.
You’d been practicing holding your breath during commercials, and felt confident you were now in top form. You started hyperventilating, slowly at first, with some exaggeratedly deep breaths growing deeper. You picked up the cadence and became a little more conspicuous, but we were sitting opposite the windows tucked out of the way of the cool Seattle sunlight and veiled from scrutiny by the fog of collective boredom in the room. Looking a little unsteady in your seat, you sucked in one great lungful, your shoulders lifting to expand your chest just a tiny bit more, then gulped like a fish, scooping little parcels of air past your lips until you were a mop-headed balloon.
You developed a quiver twenty seconds before the end, starting from your trunk and gaining intensity and altitude until your cheeks were trembling. Your pale face grew paler, and then abruptly, you went completely slack. Your arms relaxed to your sides, the captive and overtaxed air in your lungs burst out of your mouth and nose like you’d received a Heimlich from a ghost. Your head swung down as you folded forwards and slammed into the desk in front of you, a gavel calling all attention to our private drama. For one instant I was alone in my elation and the glare of that curiosity, but before anyone else had a chance to ask a question, you snapped back up with a gasp, turned to me and asked how you had done. A thick cord of snot hung from one nostril to your chin. Three minutes and nineteen seconds, I told you. New personal best. You wiped your nose, the class applauded, and with a stern harumph from Mr. Hammorsburg, we returned to the humdrum of science class.
We started riding bikes together just before high school. In the cool mornings of Pacific Northwest summer, we would set out on loosely charted routes, targeting unfamiliar neighborhoods in the city to explore. A few years later, we’d be training to ride the 200 mile Seattle to Portland Bicycle Classic, but at this earlier stage, we were probing one another as fellow adventurers. One morning you suggested we navigate to West Seattle. I had only been to West Seattle a handful of times, and thought it was a place I only reached by car, and then only to visit some friend of my parents or cousin whose name I consistently forgot. It wasn’t on the map for me, and the idea that we might pedal ourselves beyond the edge of familiar territory was exciting. When I came hurrying downstairs to let you in the front, the door handle was cold to the touch. You were visibly uncomfortably in the blue morning light, shivering and smiling in thin basketball shorts and a tee. I got dressed and we were on our way.
This wasn’t your first time making the 26 mile trip, and you had a highlight reel in mind. We zipped down out of our neighborhood and into the university district. The students were stirring, shuffling about the streets surrounding campus, but the sleepy pedestrian traffic was still mostly mute. The motor traffic by contrast was already bustling. I did what I could to keep pace with you as you slipped between cars and skimmed over traffic paint, under traffic lights, and past traffic signage. Once past the university, Eastlake Avenue straightened out, becoming a funnel towards downtown. The speed of traffic was much higher there, and you must have heard the roar of an accelerating bus over your shoulder, because suddenly you were stomping into your pedals, pulling further ahead of me. As the bus just passed you, you swung left into the lane of traffic tucking in right behind the bus. You’d described drafting cars to me before, but I had no experience of it and didn’t feel safe putting my body so close to so much hurtling steel. You pulled away down the hill, sticking to that bus like a pilotfish to a shark, until you were out of sight.
A few minutes later, I caught up to where you were waiting for me and we set off again. As we pulled off churning Eastlake and onto tranquil Fairview, you set to explaining the principles of drafting to me all over again. There was some algebra. Probably some speculative mechanics. Numbers, efficiency, and optimizing. I can’t recollect how you laid it out, but I remember distinctly that it didn’t add up. I had a quibble to voice; your math or your physics must be wrong. I told you “That doesn’t make sense.”
“I make it sense, Ben.”
I laughed. Of course you do. You did it. You demonstrated the action. You volunteered shards of an explanation. And then, when I had the insincerity to ask you for a tabulated accounting of your meaning, you invited me to step into meaning-making with you. Yes, you make it sense. Why not? That was for us to decide.
[recent chat]
peter
April is paralyzed veterans of america awareness month
Which, like most awareness months, I imagine they could do again in three months and no one would notice
Except me now. I'm keeping tabs.
ben
I used to get confused, thinking "wait, I thought this month was spoken for!" as if there could be only 12 themes to acknowledge.
peter
Lol
Wait! I thought this month was already called April!
Everything is one thing
ben
Oh
Got it
peter
Venn diagrams the world round turn to ash
People stop doing the hokey pokey.
Riding the ducks becomes significantly more hazardous[1]
Swiss army knives melt into useless ingots
I'm having a ball here lol
You wanna do some or should I continue hogging
Political parties become actual parties.
Nice lol
ben
Silverware in drawers no longer fear rejection.
Only stew.
peter
Hahaaa
I can’t keep up with you when you’re bombing. On an uphill, I can settle into a churn. My legs won’t quit, I’ll situate myself with determination in the labor of riding to the top. You do too, but with markedly more rueful comments along the way. Once we pass the summit and start to head down, I can’t spend the altitude with your abandon and delight. That stretch of the Lake Washington Boulevard loop, when you’re coming down out of the hoity-toity residential neighborhood, where the city streets are rich-person windy, is where the difference in our riding is most apparent. The patient, taxing hill up out of the arboretum would get you puffing, cursing, and laughing. We’d coast along the crest for a few blocks before turning downhill, towards the lake, and into those lush, precipitous switchbacks.
I would tense my hands on the brakes before I’d even picked up speed; meanwhile, you’d be leaning into it, squeezing every drop of kinetic juice out of that hill. You would sway, easy and wide on the straightaway then tighten up to the hairpin turn until your tire just kissed the paint on the inside of the curve. Once, after waiting for me to catch up to you at the bottom of that hill, you told me “just follow my line and you’ll be fine.” My body understood the physics. I knew my bike would hold. I trusted your judgment. But I felt fear, and I didn’t believe I could do it.
On a bitter cold winter night two years after graduation you picked me up to find a little wholesome midnight mischief. After climbing into the techno-pumped car, I offered you a sip of the cocoa I had just whipped up. Melted dark baking chocolate, whole milk, a few drops of almond extract, a 2-finger pinch of salt, a few 5-finger pinches of sugar. It had come together quickly, just shy of a boil, and then straight into a thermos.
“Is it hot?” you asked. Without thinking, I answered “No.” I was eager to hear your good review. I watched while you brought the thermos up to your lips and drew a great swig into your mouth. Your mouth was scalded at once. Your whole mouth. You looked at me confused and wounded as steaming cocoa ran down your chin into your lap. “How could you have betrayed me?”, you seemed to ask silently, “don’t you know I trust you absolutely?”
[recent chat]
peter
Marijuana is stupid stupidification plant
That's why people fw it [fuck with it]
ben
NAME THAT DRUG
front of card: anti-calming powder[2]
front of other card: stupid stupidification plant
lsd ?
peter
Uhhhhhh
ben
inverse paperwork
Paperworkn't
peter
Wow what lol
Odyssey juice
Maybe
ben
alcohol: diffusing poison
peter
Nah
It's the soothsayer potion
ben
ah. Juice is the liquid [lsd] format. paperworkn't is the paper [lsd] format.
peter
Aaag
I get it
I always felt alcohol turns you inside out
I guess bureaucracy is the opposite of lsd or something.
The takeover of your psyche on your actions
ben
*phetamine: 1.5 playback speed
I'm diluting.
peter
Diluting what?
ben
diluting intransitive.
I'm diluting
peter
Absolutely 100% confused now
ben
I was riffing on a joke, but the poignancy of my contributions was falling off because I was trying too hard to make more of them.
peter
Bam
Nice communication moves
I am 0% confused
Read like a technical manual lol
ben
I went from contemporary dance to walking in a straight line
peter
Like when you're talking to someone and they not get it and you're like damn how much easier can I make this
Or people with little english
Clarity mode is a funny communication mode to me
And I guess a lot of people are usually shooting for clarity
Taking all the tricks off your language is a language trick
You called me up from Seattle in the summer of 2018 and your outlook seemed to be growing steadily more positive. I thought my ship was finally coming in. “I’ve decided I’m going to be a teacher.” you said. I was elated. After five numbing years in the navy at Bangor submarine base in Silverdale Washington, you’d headed back to Seattle and slipped into the darkly lit pocket of nightlife. You made your living as a strip club manager and dedicated yourself to pool. You doubled down on the environments and people around whom you’d always felt most at ease. The GI bill paid for some rent and some unassailable online community college classes. You were 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 and subsurface depression. So when you called me in New York to break good news, to tell me you were going to get in gear, study up and work, let me know the dark days were in the rearview and that you were awake for the first time in a long time, I was too excited for your upswing to doubt it. I hung up the phone aglow. I turned to my girlfriend Emily and her expression checked mine. She asked if I thought you were okay, and I said, yes, of course, that funky lyrical banter is just how we talk. Emily scowled, thought for a moment, and said that it sounded like you were manic.
Across the country in Seattle, you were spinning up into a deluded hypomanic episode. Three weeks before, you’d lit a fuse to your brain with a cocktail of 900 mg dextromethorphan and 2.5g psilocybin mushrooms. The experience day-of was remarkable and strange for you, but the reverberations were sundering. By the time we were speaking, you were already struggling to keep lucid linear thought. The special delight of our talk is the constant, quiet availability of surrealism and ambiguous meaning. We spoke several times the day of that first alarming phone call. Your conversation swung by the minute from epiphanic re-ordering of your life to grim prophesying of war, understanding patterns behind things, and a mounting desperate fear that your mind was racing too fast for you to withstand. All I could do for you on the phone was slow down and speak plainly. I dropped our game from my speech, assured you as best I could and called your uncles and your mom, our oldest friends in Seattle. If you were becoming untethered from reality, I would be the anchor.
You were taken to the hospital, then escaped, naked to your underwear. You befriended a coach exercising his team at Bishop Blanchet high school, and he lent you clothes. The police arrived and persuaded you to accept a ride back to the hospital. You were locked up. You were going to die. You prayed. You raged. You were sedated, and you were kept in involuntary confinement for twelve days terrified, miserable and alone. I called in during visiting hours often, and on the other end you were as inert as a soggy pack of cigarettes--your brain too bulldozed by antipsychotics for any of your usual spark. A few days after you were released, I got back to Seattle.
You bailed on your medication as soon as you were out of the hospital, and your familiar animated self came bobbing back to the surface promptly. 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 soon, though, you asked for my help. As jubilant as the return to form had been, your thoughts were beginning to race. You set an appointment with a psychiatrist at the VA, but your recent experience had transformed all hospitals into monstrous labyrinths. I was your escort. On the way in, your eyes were wild with fright, flitting around each hallway and waiting room, but you clung to the thread of your purpose and quickly had an urgently needed antipsychotic down the hatch with a prescription in your pocket. As we left the hospital, you swung your legs. I heard your easy laugh here and there. You smoked a cigarette and then another with evident relish. On a bench bathed in cool autumn sun we sat and talked, spitballing ideas about how you might get your job back and what kind of shared apartment you might be looking for. An hour later, a tree’s shadow had crept over the bench. I paused between two thoughts, noticing how quiet you had become. I asked how you were doing. “I’m sorry Ben, I just don’t think I can understand what you’re saying right now.”
[recent chat]
ben
you know 'bout the USS akron?[3]
peter
No
ben
"Coast to Coast" flight and second accident (May 1932)
speaking of lighter-than-air disasters
the footage of the seamen getting lifted is pretty gutting
as you might imagine
or as you might experience
peter
What footage
peter
Wow
What a move
Did those guys just lose grip??
ben
Gotta imagine so.
ben
indefatigable
peter
Won't catch me falling off an airship
We both know better
ben
did you mean both?[5]
peter
Yes
I would know to avoid falling and you would know to avoid me falling
ben
hmm
literally yes
historically no
peter
You have chosen
D A R K N E S W
Shitttt
All that work
D A R K N E S S
What a choke
I had urged you to move to New Orleans. I had thought, shoot, he’d be happy here. People here live with warmth and abandon, just like you do. Living expenses are low. I was paying $500 per month in rent, and I knew comparably affordable rent would be available to you as well. I told you “You should move to New Orleans.” In the fall of 2019, you acquiesced. Initially you sublet from my housemate while his room was empty, but in short order you moved out. When you expressed the disdain you hold for paying rent, I instructed, “You should get an apartment.” I thought that the alternative--living in your Chevy HHR--would prove just as expensive when accounting for prepared food and a social life based in commercial spaces. I thought of the health costs of eating poorly, the psychological costs of no regular access to a bathroom, the emotional cost of being dependent on the stability in your friends’ lives. I had observed the chaos that you live within, and determined that what you needed was my input on what you should do.
“You’re a should-er.” you told me. Your tone was flat but unwavering. Confrontational. I was gutted by the indictment. I had only ever made recommendations because I thought you could benefit from the insight. Because you seemed hell-bent on self destruction so often, and I’m the one who remembers there’s brakes on the handlebars. Because I’ve been practicing and aiming at control over my life for years and I thought I could lend you some of that control--and there it is. A should-er I had been. I have strived to safeguard your wellbeing and never noticed that in so doing, I was erecting boundaries, limits, and rules. I was clipping your wings.
[recent chat]
ben
Here's a thought experiment for you.
What if we took our present mode of communication and transposed it back onto when we would facebook chat in 10th grade.
And then ran that cycle forward ten years.
Then rinse repeat 20 times.
Where would we be now?
peter
That is a good question
I have the video won't load spinning wheel in my head trying to find a clew
[...]
There is richness in our communication
You are the only source of ore
For that brand of richness
ben
It's a funny inversion of hieroglyphics.
peter
And the quarry is largely unexplored, presumably
ben
Sorry, continue.
peter
And what's more
The sounds we make in this cave echo differently as we carve new areas
And to imagine what might be in in is very difficult
It*
But it is a good question
Another thing
ben
ofc[6]
peter
What we are building seems to me the most meaningful thing in my life
ben
ofc
ben
I go to a bday party in the back yard.
Love you, Pete.
peter
Very well. Love you, Ben.
Footnotes
The Ducks were amphibious tour buses/boats that operate in Seattle, offering views of the water and drives through downtown. ↩︎
Cocaine. ↩︎
1930’s dirigible. While docked, it was warmed by the sun and lifted. Four young sailors hung on to the docking rope. One dropped early and survived. Two lost their grip and fell to their deaths. One survived. ↩︎
Elementary school classmate ↩︎
Did you mean both meanings? ↩︎
Of Course ↩︎