A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me

by Jason Schmidt

  I knew he’d forget. Like he forgot about the bugs and everything else.

  “You should drop out of school,” he said. “Get your GED. It won’t be long now. Just stay here and take care of me.”

  “Okay, Dad.”

  “I need you home,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  But I kept going to school. I kept trying.

  Then one day I came home and found my dad on his hands and knees on the kitchen floor, in a giant pool of his own blood.

  73

  I had to wait at least six months to get tested. I tried not to think about it. When I couldn’t help thinking about it, I reminded myself of everything I knew to be true; the blood he’d had on his clothes was bright red from exposure to the air, and tacky to the touch—well below body temperature—and the virus doesn’t survive well in those conditions. Sometimes I thought about why I’d done it, but I knew the answer to that question. I’d done it because it was what Han Solo would do. Not in the sense that he jumped heedlessly into dangerous situations, but because he was a complicated guy. If he was going to commit suicide, he’d figure out a way to make it look like an accident.

  I kept going through the motions of Frank’s plan, in case I lived. I took the SATs, though I did it on two hours of sleep. I went through a lengthy appeals process with the financial aid office after they processed my application, because their rules said it was scientifically impossible for two people to live on what my dad and I took in during the prior year. Or something to that effect. I had to show them Dad’s bank records and all our food stamps and medical coupons and SSI stuff before they’d believe me.

  Dad spent more time in the hospital. Grandpa was discharged and went back to Camano Island. I graduated; I walked with one of my school acquaintances, from Graphics class. Sometimes I worried about what was going to happen to me. Other times I felt like I’d already been killed, and I just didn’t know it yet.

  Frank got me a summer job as a laborer for a construction contractor he knew. The contractor would take me out to places that had been forests five years earlier—places with names like Bear Creek and Beaver Lake—and drop me at a construction site in the middle of a thousand acres of bare earth, dotted here and there with the skeletons of four-thousand-square-foot houses that were made entirely out of two-by-fours and chipboard. On hot days, the wind scoured topsoil into a brown dust that covered everything. On rainy days, the earth collapsed into the old creek beds and roared downhill toward the nearest lake in a frothing brown and white stampede of mud and rocks. Rain or shine, the contractor would drop me off and tell me he’d be back for me in eight hours.

  “Start a burn pile and get rid of all that trash and scrap lumber,” he’d say.

  He didn’t seem to care much what I actually did, which was just as well, since I had no experience with having to work full days. I’d done plenty of task-specific work in my life—chopping firewood or clearing a patch of land—but I’d never had to get up every day and go do something I hated until it was almost bedtime. I found the idea pretty hard to adapt to. I stayed home one day out of every five. The contractor didn’t seem to mind that either. I didn’t realize until later that he’d probably only hired me on as a favor to Frank, and that a day I stayed home was probably just a day he didn’t have to pay me six dollars an hour for busywork.

  I hardly ever saw Brandon or Ryan, but Frank and I still saw each other around the house when he came to clean. He still talked to me about my future, and he started to give me more advice.

  “Listen,” he’d say. “Your dad will be gone soon. And you’re going to be tempted to believe that everything that happens now has some kind of special meaning, because it’s going to be the last time. The last argument, or the last hug. Whatever happened with you and your dad happened over the course of the last sixteen years. This part is just like a period at the end of a sentence. It’s grammatically necessary, but it doesn’t really mean very much by itself. Don’t fall into the trap of believing it does. Your job during this part is just to get out of this with as little damage to your mind and soul as possible. It’s what your father would want.”

  “No it’s not,” I said. “He told me I shouldn’t go to college.”

  “That’s his fear talking,” Frank said.

  74

  I got into Evergreen, and I got a financial aid package that would cover my bills, but I still couldn’t go. Even for someone with no income and no assets, the minimum student contribution was $1,500. Financial aid disbursals and tuition due dates were aligned in such a way that I needed to be able to front the cash for my first quarter on my own. That included rent, tuition, and the price of books. Between Aid for Families with Dependent Children and SSI, our household income for the year was about $6,000. My summer job added another $600 or so to the mix, but there was just no way I could come up with $1,500 on my own.

  Frank stepped up again, like he’d been doing for months. He never told me about everything he was doing behind the scenes, but I gathered from things the admissions people said that he’d called people at Evergreen and gotten them to take my applications after their due dates. He’d wrangled a financial aid package for me and gotten me a job, and he’d cosigned a checking account for me at Sea-First Bank. He’d taken me to the Department of Licensing so I could get my first-ever photo identification. And now, when I told him about the financial shortfall over the phone, he said, “Jason, I’d be extremely grateful if you would take some money from me, just to get you across the finish line here.”

  “No,” I said.

  “I understand it’s hard.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s not hard. It’s easy. That’s why I’m not going to do it. My whole life, I’ve watched my dad do things the easy way. Make the easy choices. He takes. He takes anything anyone offers him. I don’t want to start off doing the same thing.”

  “That’s why you’d be doing me a favor,” Frank said. “And why you wouldn’t be doing the easy thing. When I was about your age, I was supposed to go to college on a scholarship. The scholarship was contingent on me being valedictorian of my high school class. Which I was, except that I didn’t have a suit. I was supposed to give a speech at graduation, and I didn’t have a suit, so I couldn’t give the speech, so I couldn’t be valedictorian, so I couldn’t get the scholarship. And there was a man I knew who found out about my situation. And he bought me a suit. And he told me that when he was a young man, someone had done something similar for him. And that all I had to do to repay him was to do something similar for someone else someday. So, you see, you’d be helping me settle my debt. And all you’d have to do to repay me would be to do something similar for someone else someday.”

  “Frank,” I said, “you’ve done enough for me.”

  “No,” he said. “It’s only enough if it gets you out of here.”

  “What are you getting out of this?” I asked him. “I don’t understand why you’re doing this.”

  “I told you,” he said. “I’m repaying a debt.”

  “Yeah. I don’t know about that story, Frank.”

  “If you take on the debt, and repay me someday by doing something similar for someone else, does it matter if the story’s true or not?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not used to thinking about things on this scale.”

  “Everything has to happen for a first time. How do you make other hard decisions?”

  So I thought, what would Han Solo do? When I put it like that, the answer was obvious.

  75

  Kris helped me move my stuff to Olympia in September, but I never got all of it. The apartment was always there, waiting. The Section Eight payments happened automatically, and they were apparently enough to keep the landlord happy as long as Dad was alive. So I kept going back, to get a few more things.

  I got the impression, from talking to Ryan and Brandon and people I knew from school, that most people my age were excited about this part. They were looking forward to freedom an
d adventure. I wondered what they were picturing when they thought about living on their own. I had no picture of where I was going, or what was going to happen to me. Even actually doing it—being in Olympia, in the dorm room I shared with some other first-year college student who’d been assigned to me by the housing office—didn’t help me understand how any of this was going to work.

  I had a tacit assumption that I was going to die. That wasn’t what I told people. I told people I was going to get a teaching degree and come back to teach at my old high school. I told people I’d graduate from Evergreen when I was twenty-one, and get a head start on the rest of my life—which was going to be awesome. I told people I was excited about my future. And all of it was perfectly plausible. Like Alexis’s plan to move out on her own: it was mathematically possible for atoms and molecules to arrange themselves in such a way that I’d be a young adult with a college degree and a good job. But from my perspective, I may as well have been describing the house I was going to build in the mystical land of Narnia. I didn’t know what a happy ending looked like. I’d never seen a happy ending any more than I’d ever seen a fucking unicorn.

  On the other hand, I’d seen bunches of young men die in the prime of their lives, alone, with nobody to take care of them or mourn their passing. That was what had happened to Alexis’s mathematically possible happy ending; that was a future I could picture really clearly.

  I went through the motions of living my new life. I got Kris to adopt Dad’s dog, Thunder. She’d been taking care of him for most of the last year, so it wasn’t much of a reach for her. I said my goodbyes to people in Seattle. I got a work/study job in the campus metal shop at Evergreen, and registered for classes and went for walks in the woods. I attended get-to-know-you events, orientations, and mixers on campus. I was pretending this was my life now—at the same time I kept finding excuses to go back to my old one.

  76

  In November of my first year at Evergreen, my dad sent me a letter:

  The irony, from my perspective, was that I’d tried to forgive him a bunch of times. I’d tried to forgive him for lying to me, and for hitting me, and for terrorizing and abusing me. I’d tried to forgive him for letting me down. I’d tried to forgive him over and over again by having an honest conversation with him about any of the shit he’d pulled, and trying to get him to accept some responsibility for any of it. Or at least admit that any of it had happened. He only ever got angry; told me I was making it sound worse than it was, that my childhood had been great, and that I never appreciated what a good parent he was because I didn’t have a basis for comparison. His parents lied to him about everything, he said. They didn’t respect him enough to tell him the truth—about sex, or drugs, or “the system.”

  “I never lied to you about anything!” he’d shout. “Ever! You can accuse me of a lot of things, but I always told you the truth!”

  Now here he was, delirious and dying, and asking me to forgive him for something he’d never done—for lies he’d never told. As far as I knew, Dad hadn’t shot speed in ten years. The only time since he’d had AIDS that I’d “cought” him shooting anything was the time I walked in on him shooting sedatives into his PICC-line in the kitchen. I hadn’t given him the chance to lie to me about that. I hadn’t asked him a single question about it. I hadn’t confronted him, or accused him, or questioned what he was doing. I knew there was no point.

  Speed had been his drug of choice when I was little, back in Eugene. I assumed his reference to it was just some kind of drug addict’s Freudian slip. A guilty echo. The incident in the kitchen was a proxy for all the other lies I’d caught him in. All the lies he wanted me to forgive him for now.

  I called Frank and read the letter to him over the phone.

  “What should I do?” I asked.

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t want to tell him I forgive him. If he wanted that, he had plenty of opportunities. Now he’s trying to blackmail me into absolving him for all the shit he’s done over the years. I don’t even see why he’d want that. He knows it’d be bullshit. What good does fake absolution do him at this point? If there’s a time in a person’s life when I’d think truth matters more than appearances, this would be it.”

  “Those are good points,” Frank said.

  “So what should I do?”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Why do you keep saying that?” I asked.

  “Because the only thing that matters now is what’s good for you,” he said. “Your dad’s story is over. In six months or a year, this will be done for him. He won’t be dealing with the consequences of what you choose to do now. You will. So you make this decision based on what you need.”

  “I don’t know if I can do that.”

  “You’re not understanding me. If what you need, in order to feel good about yourself later on, is to show him some mercy—then show him some mercy. If you need to tell him the truth, do that. But try to look at it in terms of what you’re going to be able to live with ten, twenty years down the line.”

  It was on the tip of my tongue right then to tell Frank about getting Dad’s blood all over me. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. He’d worked so hard to get me out. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him I might have screwed it all up—that I might have killed myself by being stupid and careless. Or by just not caring about myself enough to avoid a lethal mistake.

  “All right,” I said. “Thanks, Frank.”

  “Good luck,” he said.

  * * *

  I went back to Seattle again a few days later. I didn’t seem to be able to help myself. I visited Dad in Swedish Hospital, where he was staying while he waited for a spot in an AIDS hospice called Rosehedge House. I had no idea what I was going to say to him. I hoped he’d just forget, but as soon as I walked into the hospital room he looked at me with his dull eyes and bared his teeth in something that was supposed to be a smile. That same dull, give-me-a-hand-here smile he’d used when I found him in the kitchen covered in blood.

  “Did you get my letter?” he asked.

  His hopeful tone made me sick.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I got it.”

  “Do you have anything to say to me?” he asked.

  I was breathing deeply, like I had when he threatened to have me committed. I stared into his eyes. They’d changed so much in the past five years. It was almost as if they’d gotten lighter; gone from dark brown to a kind of muted yellow. His face had collapsed in on itself. His skin hugged the bones of his face, like a damp washcloth draped over a skull. Only his eyes showed any life, and they were full of a slow-burning anger. Not the rage I’d seen on his face a thousand times, when he hit me or screamed at me. This was something deeper. More like hatred.

  There was nothing in there to tell me what I should do.

  “We can talk about it later,” I said.

  “No. I need to hear it now.”

  I could have the fight, I could leave, or I could give him what he wanted. Whatever else happened here today, I could see it wouldn’t be a catharsis. He’d only ever let me forgive him for things he was ready to admit to, and he’d only admit to things that had never happened.

  “I forgive you,” I said.

  “What?” he said.

  “I forgive you,” I said again.

  He reached for my hand and held it in his.

  I’d never hated anyone as much as I hated him then. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to crush him. I wanted to climb onto the bed like a rabid ape and jump up and down on his chest until his ribs burst out like a little nest, like a boat I could kneel down in while I wrapped my fingers around his neck and squeezed until the meat pushed out between my fingers like putty, until I was crushing his spine in my hands and screaming in his face. My guts cramped, pushing and pulling, tearing like something had torn loose inside me. I didn’t know what.

  I just knew I’d made a horrible mistake, and that I’d never be able to fix it.

/>   * * *

  I slept on Kris’s floor that night and called Brandon to hang out the next day. He and Maria were sharing an apartment up on 15th, five blocks east of Broadway. I never saw Maria when I went over there to visit him. I’d run into her on the bus once, and she’d said he made her leave the room whenever I was coming over. He also didn’t like her to call me or talk to me. Brandon and I still talked, but this had been a thing between us for months.

  In my brief time at Evergreen, I’d learned a sort of problem-solving approach that I thought would help Brandon and me come to some kind of settlement on Maria. They did a thing there where they talked about their feelings as issues that needed to be addressed. Like “I’m finding your demeanor really threatening.” And then whoever that was said to was supposed to dial it back. Maybe even apologize. Where Brandon and I came from—at Garfield, on Broadway, and in the houses we’d grown up in—admitting that kind of weakness was a death sentence. But at Evergreen, it was almost a kind of religion.

  “So listen,” I said to Brandon when I saw him. “We need to work this thing out. About Maria.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” he said. We were sitting in his living room, which was only slightly less messy than his bedroom had been back when he was living next door to me. He and Maria already had a lot of pets, and the smell of them was strong in the apartment. But he had a couch, a few chairs, and some lamps. A few end tables. I could see the idea of a home underneath everything else.

  “I mean I want to talk about this thing,” I said. “Where you’re mad at me for having been with her. And where you tell her to leave the room whenever I come over. And a million other little things you’ve done and said since you guys got together. It’s like you hold it against me, how things went, but all I ever did was the stuff you told me to. Asked her for her phone number. Broke things off when she said she loved me. I was just following your rules.”