Love and Other Ways of Dying

by Michael Paterniti

  As a child, I found this disorienting. The parents were whispering about something, something with intimations of pain or dread, dark fairy tales of some sort, but what?

  The charges against Flynn made the story uncomfortably public, and soon the paper ran a long article detailing the events of that night before Thanksgiving; the strained, surreal situation at our high school of friends trying to pick sides, or figure out what to believe in the first place; and the tragedy of alcohol-related car accidents in our town. Was it suburban privilege, or our access to cars, or the dark, winding roads? The police chief was quoted as saying that, over the course of the past three years, a dozen young residents had died in automobile crashes. The minister said he’d never seen such “tragedy with youth.” The leader of a youth religious group claimed, “There’s nothing but victims.”

  Like a lot of seniors, I’d spent the fall visiting colleges, and that winter I worked in a frenzy to finish my applications, mostly for the sake of my parents and guidance counselor, as I really had only one school in mind, this place I’d seen up in Vermont, in the freezing cold, after the accident. What I remember most about it wasn’t the tour or one person’s friendliness or the snowstorm that left more than a foot. I remember looking up from the parking lot when we got back to the hotel that night after dinner, standing there alone as my dad went into the room, and breathing in the multitude of stars, lungs burning, ghosts rising in the exhalations, feeling almost—perhaps a year away from—free.

  I suppose the antipode was what I was feeling now: trapped. It could have been that dreamed-of senior year, but for the funeral (Let it be Seger), or the sharp rise in my snotty attitude toward my parents, or my weird regressions (for instance, Neil Young’s “Words” on perseverating repeat, which put me at odds with at least my Joy Division–loving brother), or the trips each day to the hospital, to Jax in his mechanical bed. When I applied myself, I proved myself capable only of a kind of high-achieving mediocrity. But mostly I, like my friends, found myself reliving an event, one for which I’d been absent, one that couldn’t be repossessed or rewritten, a derivative that defied solution no matter how hard we tried to ace it.

  One night during our monthly organizational meeting at the ambulance service, in a room packed with sixty kids—everything coming to a standstill at twenty-minute intervals as another commuter train roared by—I found myself launching a prayer, the first, really, since the night of the accident. This particular evening included the awarding of special gold stars, reserved for the members of a particular crew for an exceptional call, our version of the Medal of Honor. This crew, as I remember it, had responded to a very bad crash on the interstate, had performed CPR under harrowing circumstances, and had brought someone back to life.

  To be so recognized was the pinnacle, to have your name called to come down and receive a star from the ambulance service’s founder, to be so distinguished for heroics among your own hypercompetent, wildly applauding peers (we all knew they’d seen and done something we both hoped to and hoped not to). It meant that for at least that moment the prophecy was true: You were so good, in fact, that you could raise the dead.

  Dear God, I found myself praying, give me something horrible and bloody. Let my next call be a multiple car crash with gasoline glugging all over the highway, or a cardiac arrest in a house fire, or a kid electrocuted on the railroad tracks. Let it be a shark attack or alien invasion, whatever makes the best movie. Whatever is the most impossibly fucked-up, Lord. Just let me lay my hands on some big, honking, metal-twisted tragedy, so I can work my own miracle this time.

  Jax came out of the hospital with snow on the ground, then convalesced at home for a while. Eventually, he returned to school on crutches, which later gave way to this clunky stimulating device he’d sometimes wrap around his leg and plug into the wall, what we called his “bone machine.” He hobbled the same halls as Flynn, but they studiously avoided one another now while the various lawyers prepared for the criminal trial. Meanwhile, it seemed clear that Seger’s family would bring a civil suit of some sort, perhaps against all the boys involved. But, at least on the surface, everything carried on, despite the awkwardness. College applications were completed and sent out; no one got dumped by his girlfriend.

  Time accelerated. The snow melted, the season changed, and our town bloomed: daffodils and forsythia at Easter, the dogwoods and cherry trees not long after. Lawns turned green again, the leaves drawing lush curtains over everything. The Pier was repainted, boats were put back in the Sound, their sails snapping in the wind.

  With the passage of time, Jax made the switch from guilty party to partially aggrieved with difficulty, especially as he doubled his efforts to retrieve some shard of absent memory. The most important night of his life to that point, and he couldn’t remember anything but leaving Seger’s house to go to a party. It was some cruel, cosmic joke. His antipathies, guided inward by guilt, now had an outward target. When Flynn pled innocent to the charges, reiterating through his lawyers that he hadn’t been at the accident scene that night—a version of events backed by Xavier, his passenger that night—Jax became animated again: He could have forgiven them if they’d admitted it from the start, but as they clung to their innocence, Jax’s fury grew.

  It was simple: Knowing what they knew—or Jax believed they knew—how could they have left him there? And where had they gone?

  In Physics, Jax sat in the last row, wisecracking. From my desk, I could reach back and touch the rough cast on his leg. Our teacher, whom Jax had nicknamed Beaker, was the kind of crusty dinosaur who, over time, had become a caricature of himself, playing up the batty and distracted perhaps as a tactic so he didn’t have to deal with the particular obnoxiousness of people like us as we carried on our conversations with impunity. But one day he snapped, not at us but at Jax.

  “You’ve missed half the year,” he burst out, a vein flicking on his forehead, “don’t you think it’s time to shut up and listen?”

  From Jax’s point of view, he’d lost half a year of jokes. He was entitled to some fun. (Or just a semblance of normalcy.) “The fucking Beaker,” he said. Though he’d put his best face on it, it was hard for him to concentrate on anything but the accident. Everything went back to that stretch of road.

  We drove it every night, in our minds. And Jax tortured himself with trying to remember. Eventually, in conversation with his parents, it was agreed that he would visit a Yale psychologist who used hypnotism. It was maybe something Jax would have once regarded skeptically, but what other choice did he have?

  The session lasted nearly two hours. He left the hypnotist’s office not knowing anything, hypnotized as he was—and nor did his parents. The hypnotist promised that, after reviewing the videotape, he’d send it along. Jax could only confirm what the hypnotist had said, that things had gone “very well,” whatever that meant.

  A few weeks later the videotape arrived. Jax called, I drove down to his house, and we joined his parents to watch it for the first time. When Jax appeared on the television screen—or what I remember of Jax on that screen—he sat straight up, wearing a button-down shirt. His eyes were shut, and he seemed fairly relaxed, answering some basic opening questions. He was apparently already hypnotized, and the hypnotist pointed out a needle stuck halfway into the flesh between his thumb and pointer finger, though Jax said he felt no pain and seemed to have no knowledge of the pin.

  The hypnotist then asked Jax to navigate the first four-fifths of the night in question: Jax described how Seger had loaded in with Jax at Seger’s house, riding shotgun, how Flynn and Xavier followed in the other car. Jax led them up Ocean to Main; Main to Birch; Birch to the high school. Then the two cars emptied through the high school parking lot, turned left onto Coral, and took a right onto High. At this point, they were a quarter mile from the tree.

  In the videotape, Jax, whose eyes are closed but tracking beneath the lids, seems at ease charting their progress, almost jovial as he recaptures the elation that prope
lled them. The hypnotist leads him slowly, asking him to travel another fifty yards down the road and stop to describe what he notices. He recalls talking to Seger, the music on the radio, the streetlights passing in longer intervals now. Occasionally, Jax reports what the needle shows on the speedometer: twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five … He reports on what he sees in the rearview and side mirrors, how they’re bathed in reflected light from the car trailing behind. Then, suddenly, he’s on the straightaway before the curve with the maple tree, and everything slows way down. He resists traveling another fifty yards, as if he’s suddenly aware of the trick being played on him.

  There are leaves skittering over the road, dark branches overhead, a wedge of light before the sports car. He reaches to turn up the music, punches the gas, two hundred feet from the tree. The lights are reflecting in the mirrors, the other car right on his tail. He says he’s talking to Seger.

  He says he’s talking to Seger. The music is blaring. Leaves are skittering. The road takes a turn. Music, leaves, dark branches. He says he’s talking to Seger. Five seconds from hitting the tree, he looks in the rearview mirror.

  “Where’d the lights go?” he says out loud. For the first time he isn’t answering prompts from the hypnotist, he’s talking to Seger. “Where are the lights?” he says. A car pulls up along his left side. His eyes shut tight. He looks stricken, thin lips pressed together. And then his body rocks once, very hard.

  Did it happen like this? If you’d seen the tape, you might have thought so. At the very least, it gave Jax a narrative to which he could finally cling as the courts began to parse the evidence of what had occurred that night.

  First came the criminal charges against Flynn that hovered over him for a year, ending in a courtroom drama that found Jax hobbling in on crutches and Flynn home from college accompanied to court by a dozen family members. Despite five eyewitnesses placing Flynn’s car at the scene after a loud crash, and the judge’s admission that it was “a difficult case to evaluate,” the court dismissed all the charges. What seemed the final blow was the judge’s belief that a court would find the videotape of Jax’s hypnotism inadmissible. With it went the account that mattered most. Outside the courtroom, Flynn’s lawyer said the ruling “completely vindicates my client” and that Flynn was headed immediately back to college.

  In the wake of that dismissal came an array of civil suits that dragged along for years, yet after Jax settled with Seger’s family, everything whittled down to one: Seger’s estate and Jax suing Flynn for his role in Seger’s death.

  Four years later, the newspapers covered that trial blow by blow. On the stand, Flynn testified that they’d been drinking 7UP and vodka at Seger’s house, but stuck to his story, detailing the route of his travels, which were nearly the same as Jax’s, claiming he’d never seen an accident and only learned about it twenty minutes later, after arriving at the party. Under cross-examination, when questioned about the matching paint—and also a damaged right front bumper the police had noted after impounding the car—he said, “I never hit [his car] before, nor any other … car.”

  Other details emerged: They’d begun drinking around 4 P.M., stopped to go to their respective homes, rejoined each other around 7 P.M. At an intersection well before the site of the accident, Xavier had jumped out of Flynn’s car and run ahead to Jax’s for matches, after which they traveled several “lengths” behind Jax before peeling away along a road leading to the party.

  It was senior year, seventeen years old, the soccer and football season just over, a party in the offing. Could life have been any better?

  At the end of the school year, just before prom, my prayer was answered: On a humid, cloudy night, I got my call. Already I’d racked up my cardiac arrest (that neighbor of ours) and a chaotic highway accident (an unsatisfactory broken femur), but this sounded promisingly bad.

  We were summoned to a vast saltwater farm with its rocky hillocks and ancient oaks, a place we knew for its Revolutionary War battles and midnight cow-toppling. This night, however, the darkness was almost a substance, and even as we directed our spotlight up into the trees, the rays were absorbed, leaving nothing to see. Eventually we came upon a car on the shoulder with its hazards blinking, someone who had witnessed the accident and rushed to help. The ambulance stopped, and I jumped out.

  The way I’d dreamed it always involved saving someone. I would perform some suitable miracle, and later, in the most ridiculous part of the fantasy, my victim and I would become friends, exchange gifts, and, if she was pretty, maybe get married, her wheelchair being proof that I’d snatched her from sure death. Now, I ran over soggy ground to the car. I shone a flashlight over boulders and downed branches. The car was off in the trees, sitting a couple of feet back from the gnarled trunk of an oak, the hood accordioned to half its normal size. The driver’s door was ajar and a dark figure loomed in back, the Good Samaritan trying to pull and hold traction from his awkward angle.

  Despite his best efforts, the woman’s head still lay facedown on the steering wheel. I could smell gasoline and manure—and gin and beer. I, too, was in an awkward spot, down on one knee inside the open front door. I positioned the flashlight on the dash and then, as I placed my hands over each side of her head, over her ears, with both my pinkies lifting from below her jaw, her face rose before me. Her skin was soft to touch but she was badly bloodied, and her nose, where there had been one, was now just a piece of bone. There was a clean hole in her forehead and something green and gooey seeped out. Her eyes, half shut, were white. She was groaning softly, rhythmically, the kind of groan that reflected a pain so deep it may not have been felt consciously.

  I regretted my decision the minute I made it. And now we were stuck together.

  It was going to be a long time before we could move her—we were going to need the Jaws of Life to get her out—let alone before she would see an emergency room. The girl, or woman, maybe in her midtwenties, had hit the tree going very fast, fast enough for her skull to have been punctured and brain matter to have seeped out.

  I can recall a lot about the minutiae of that night, about how the firefighters arrived, lighting huge spots on the car, making it seem like day in that glade, and then cutting her out, the whining of the saw. Another ambulance arrived, with grown-up paramedics authorized to administer drugs, which they did, running lines from drip bags to the veins in her arms. There must have been fifty or so people working, spectating, helping, at the height of the action. And then after they cut her loose, I remember standing on the back runner of the grown-up ambulance, standing there as they sheared the clothes from her body—her skin was pale, her breasts full—and put in more lines and an oxygen mask over her face, trying to stabilize her before leaving for the hospital. At my feet, her blood ran in rivulets out the open back door.

  Afterward, when the grown-up ambulance went screaming off, everyone took their things and quickly retreated. We were pretty shook up; someone on our crew was crying. The woman was in a deep vegetative state, on her way to death by morning. And we’d done nothing to change that. I myself came closest to a feeling when the clouds parted and the moonlight came down over everything, including the serrated wreckage, in thick, pale, silver beams, a moment that could have been godly but was nothing of the sort. The feeling was of betrayal, and shock.

  Now, whenever my mind slips to such naïve meditations—these mock-heroic dreams of saving anyone from anything—I need only conjure that girl’s face in my hands again. I need only hold that unmendable body close to realize how far I’d traveled from Thanksgiving. I got what I’d wished for, and I wanted to give it all back.

  One last memory of that night: When I came home in my ambulance whites and orange fluorescent jacket, splatters of blood on my sneakers, my father was sitting at the kitchen table, his work arrayed before him in scribbles on the yellow legal pads he favored. I gave him a few details, leaving out the part about when the girl’s parents showed up at the scene.

  “It sounds pretty bad,�
�� he said.

  “Yeah, it was,” I said.

  There was a pause, a long one. I couldn’t look him in the eyes for fear it would all come out, all at once, in a great overwhelming gush, everything I’d held down. He might have already understood this. But I’d spent the year arming and armoring myself, and no one dared to approach anymore.

  My father sat at the table, his face registering a father’s concern. If he had something he needed to say—or a question to ask—he thought better of it. Or I cut him off, on my own at last.

  “Good night,” I said, putting my foot on the first step of the back stairway leading to my room, unmoving for a moment, then shifting my weight heavily to climb.

  “Good night, son,” said my father.

  This past Thanksgiving marked the thirty-third anniversary of Jax’s car accident and of Seger’s death. For a long time afterward, you could see scars of the wreck on the trunk of the maple tree they hit, written in what seemed like Sanskrit. It was hard to look at; but for the few marks, the tree itself seemed to flourish, carrying no memory of that night.

  Over time, the enormous trunk healed itself, its bark without blemish, and then one day it was simply chainsawed to widen the sidewalk. In all those years that the tree had loomed there—blooming its gaudy leaves in the spring, losing them like discarded twenties in the fall—I’d pass by searching for evidence that the accident had actually happened, that it hadn’t just been a dream. My attitude was coldly forensic. I often thought to stop and touch the markings, like an archaeologist, though never did. When the tree suddenly vanished—only pale sawdust littered the spot—there came this rush of feeling: sorrow, elation, guilt.