A Lite Too Bright

by Samuel Miller

  I pulled the small red Bible from Omaha from my bag and set it atop the stone memorial. Mara smiled back at me, light reflecting off one damp circle below her left eye. I looked out over the field, and imagined it flooded with students, eager to change the world. I imagined my grandpa, standing atop the hill where I stood now, looking down across the beautiful resistance that he had created; the movement that he had built. I imagined his terror and his guilt as the National Guard showed up, his steel-willed activists looking like children next to the barrels of the soldiers’ guns. I imagined him screaming as the bullets began, running across the field to find Jeffery, holding him as life left him.

  “I wonder if this is where he died,” I said. “In the same spot where he saw Jeffery . . .” His words filled my head. The world is a circle, and what I thought was ahead of me is actually behind . . .

  “Oh, this is too perfect.”

  The voice wasn’t Mara’s or mine.

  “Okay, both of you, drop the backpack, hands on heads.”

  Fifteen feet behind us, Jack stood tall against the side of the hill. It was too dark to see details of his figure, but it looked like the white Great Purpose scarf was his only non-black clothing; a beanie was folded up over his forehead, just above his eyes, and his right hand fidgeted anxiously, a metallic surface catching and reflecting distant streetlights. He was holding a gun. And he was alone.

  “I knew it was just gonna be the three of us.” He took a few casual steps up the hill toward us. “I knew. Right when I met you, I knew.” He stopped less than ten feet away. “With or without each other, we were gonna end up here together. Like a . . . sign. From the divine. Right? The prodigal sons; isn’t that how the story’s supposed to go?”

  We were close enough to see the lines of his face, balanced and dangerously casual as his right wrist twirled and twisted absentmindedly, and his head twisted with it.

  “Well, truthfully, I didn’t see it just like this. I knew it’d be the two of us. You—” He nodded to Mara. “You’re just . . . what? Yoko?” He rolled his head around to smile past me. “Was that the game? Play both of us, stick with whoever gets here faster? I mean, I trust you told our dear friend Arty here about us, right?”

  He motioned toward me with the gun and I felt its impact twice: the threat of the deadly weapon in front of me; the woozy heat of jealousy from behind me. I wanted to turn my head back to her, but I couldn’t take my eyes away from Jack’s right hand.

  “Arthur, he’s lying.” Mara’s voice stumbled frantically from behind me. “I swear I—”

  “Oh, Jesus, Mara. Relax. This isn’t about you. We have more important things going on, don’t we, Arthur?” He used his left hand to straighten his scarf, glanced to the monument behind us, and then found my eyes in the dark. “Where is he?”

  For a moment, with the overwhelming presence of Jack and the gun, I’d forgotten where we were standing, and why we were all there. Jack still thought my grandpa was alive. My face must have broken; my eyebrows must have lifted; my cheeks must have filled with a terrified almost-laugh, because Jack’s lips curled and he raised the gun to Mara’s chest.

  “He’s dead,” I told him.

  “Arthur.” He made a show of clicking something into place behind the trigger; removing the safety, I assumed. “Now is not the time for being shy, or cute. Where is he?”

  “I’m not lying to you,” I said, trying to balance my voice. “He’s dead.”

  He paused, scratching his head with the butt of the gun, then smiled. “Do you know who Sir Kay was?” He waited for a response, but I ignored him. “Of course you don’t. Don’t feel bad about it; no one does.” He took a step toward me. “He was a knight; sat at the Round Table; supposedly he was a legend on the battlefield. No one remembers him, though, because the most famous thing he ever did was be the last person to try removing Excalibur from the stone before King Arthur.” He took another, longer step toward me. “If you think lying to me will prevent me from claiming what’s mine”—he took another step—“you’re wrong. If you think”—another step—“this is a negotiation, you’re wrong. If you think there’s any way I don’t already know—”

  “You couldn’t figure this out?” I cut him off. It was strangely peaceful in my chest. We’re all on death row, I thought. Some of us just have a schedule. “You don’t get why this spot might have mattered?”

  “I’m familiar with the fucking Kent State massacre. I’m Hunter S. Thompson’s son, for fuck’s sake.” I heard the first waver in his voice, noticed the way that fuck had timidly slipped its way into his vocabulary. “You still don’t get it. This is my whole life. You can pretend you know something about this but . . . I fully comprehend why he may have chosen this spot, I know exactly what he was doing here; the only thing—the only thing—you know, and I don’t, is where.” He stared me down, but I held my ground, eye to eye on equal footing. “So tell me. Or I will shoot her. And that’ll be on you, not me. I wouldn’t want to have to live with that, if I were you.”

  I raised myself by an inch, and smiled. “Where are your friends, Jack?”

  He didn’t respond, but took another step.

  “Supposedly righteous force,” I continued. “Threatening violence against innocent people?” I jerked my head back toward the KENT STATE SHOOTING plaque. “You’ve gotta be able to appreciate the irony of this, right?”

  This time, he didn’t smile back. “I’m a patient guy, but—”

  “There’s nothing.” I shook my head. “I told you. I’ve told you everything I know, actually. There’s no secret hiding place, no library, no—”

  “Bullshit!” It was the first time he’d raised his voice, but rather than sliding upward to a scream, it fell downward, booming across the lawn and nearly ringing the bell below us. “That’s bullshit and you know it!”

  “It’s not bullshit. There’s nothing.”

  He shifted the gun from Mara’s chest to mine. “Say it again.”

  “There’s nothing.”

  The gun shook once in his hand.

  “Look.” I spoke quietly. “You don’t have to believe me. You can go ahead and keep looking. I hope you do, actually. Because when you look back in forty years and realize you wasted your entire life searching for something that was already gone, it’ll actually be a fair punishment for you.”

  His eyes dropped to the ground, and the gun dropped from my chest as the wrist and elbow holding it went slack. He took a step back from me.

  I took the chance to step up into him, building steam with every word. “But I’m not lying to you. There’s nothing here, other than the last chapter in the story of a guy whose life was ruined”—I raised a finger and held it to his chest—“because people like you decided to answer some fucking call, for them.”

  Jack didn’t lift his head, instead swinging it loosely back and forth, shaking. “There’s more than that.”

  “Jack, you’re wrong,” Mara said.

  “There’s something else here—”

  I felt her hand against the small of my back. “Time to let it go now.”

  “He left something for me,” he said quietly, rolling his head around to come face-to-face with me again, and my stomach dropped.

  “He . . . as in Hunter Thompson?” I could feel my strength coming back as Jack’s wavered.

  It was as if the color had left his skin, and the fire behind his eyes had died. “She told me, he left this for me. He wanted me to—”

  “He probably wasn’t even your dad, Jack.”

  Jack stood unraveled in front of us, an unassured and abandoned boy where a confident man had once been, the gun dangling recklessly from his right hand, running up the side of his body, alongside the Great Purpose scarf.

  A blue light scanned the field, breaking only against the outline of Jack’s figure, and with it came loud voices and the slamming of car doors. My father must have seen us. Someone must have called the police.

  “This is it, Jack. This is all the
re is.”

  “There was supposed to be something for me,” he said, unaffected by the world closing in behind him. He stopped the gun as it reached his heart, where the Great Purpose logo, the bold, black-and-green fist of his father was embroidered, and rotated the barrel. “There was supposed to be more.”

  I saw what was happening a moment too late, too scared to notice his hand squeezing the handle, his finger sliding around the trigger, his eyes deciding to stop fighting back, and his face mirroring the look I’d seen on my own in every dream, the empty acceptance I wore in the driver’s seat as I sank to the bottom of the lake.

  I threw myself against him. I felt the ripple and recoil of the machinery as I fell forward against his arm and threw both of us backward, red exploding before my eyes as we collapsed and began to roll down the hill.

  The sound of the gunshot was so loud that the rest of the sound in the world disappeared in its wake; Mara’s scream was watery and distant; the sirens were inaudible. I couldn’t tell what I was feeling around me, the wet leaves of the ground intertwined with the wet blood on his chest, the warmth of his body molding with the warmth of my own. He wasn’t moving, and I didn’t want to see what I knew was waiting for me, so I held my eyes closed and laid my head back onto the grass.

  Noises began to filter back in; I heard the sirens droning up from the ground. I heard the voice of my father calling out for me. I heard the voice of my grandpa, swimming through the chaos, at once clear enough for me to understand, and finally, the ringing of the bell, reverberating across the grounds as I lay in the wet dark, the edges of my vision collapsing into blackness.

  6.

  THE LIGHT CAME back, just as it always does.

  They told me I’d been in shock, which was why I’d just lain out-of-body in the dark. They gave me a jumbo Snickers bar and a can of regular Coke to get my blood sugar up.

  We watched as Jack was loaded into an ambulance, the monitor attached to his heart letting us know that he was still breathing, and then followed in Sal Hamilton’s Camaro to the hospital, stretching ourselves across the blue-green chairs of the half-lit waiting room. After a loose explanation of what had happened, Mara and I were both silent. Instead, I focused on walking, and breathing, and avoiding my father’s mournful glances.

  “The protest,” I said finally, and all three heads looked up. “At Kent State. Jeffery, he was . . .”

  I couldn’t finish the sentence, but Sal shook his head. “I don’t know how I didn’t realize it. I mean, we heard what happened, everybody did, but I didn’t know Jeffery Kopek was . . . No wonder we never heard from them again.”

  I leaned back in my chair. “My grandpa blocked it all out.”

  Sal nodded sadly. “Trauma’s a hell of a drug.”

  “I found the article,” my father said quietly, unfolding a newspaper from his back pocket. “While we were waiting for you.” He slowly pulled himself across the room to drop it on the table in front of me. “It’s called ‘OHIO: Our Final Stand.’ He sent all those kids to Ohio. He organized the protest. That’s how we knew about the monument.”

  I nodded. “I figured something else out, too.” I closed my eyes, hiding from the dim light of the room.

  “What?”

  “I’ve spent this entire time thinking that Sue Kopek was reliving my grandfather’s trip to see her five years ago. But she kept asking about Orlo, and Orlo would have been long dead by then.”

  “Why would that—” Mara started.

  “It’s the same reason she kept calling me ‘Arthur’ and my grandpa ‘him.’ She didn’t think I was my grandpa in his old age, she thought I was Arthur in his twenties. She wasn’t reliving what happened in 2010, she was reliving when my grandpa and Jeffery and Orlo left in 1970. They were supposed to come back after the protest in Kent. And that matters, because she’d set up the placement of the chairs, sent those invitations . . .”

  Mara solved the mystery before I could finish. “They were getting married. Arthur and Jeffery.”

  The information hung in the silence of the room, too sad to be touched. I closed my eyes, deciding I wasn’t quite ready to face the world yet.

  “He was gay?” Sal asked, too loud for the room.

  I looked to my father. His head shook slowly, involuntary, as he stumbled, “I . . . yeah, I . . . I didn’t know if he ever really loved her.” He paused. “Us.”

  In the empty space, I thought about Kaitlin, and the moments when I’d loved her, needed her, the most; then I thought about losing her. It had been three weeks and I still felt it every time I breathed. My grandfather had buried his love, and his pain, for forty years, and built a new life on top of it. It was no wonder he’d become detached. It was no wonder he’d rushed to forget.

  “He did love you guys,” Sal said unconvincingly. “I just know he did.”

  I remembered the letter in my backpack, the one he’d written Henry on the night of my birth. “He did,” I told my dad, and when I said it, I think he believed me.

  “Excuse me,” a nurse said, hovering in the doorway. “Are you Arthur Louis Pullman?”

  “Yes,” I said in unison with my father. He had returned to the corner, as far from everyone else as possible.

  “We’re both Arthur Louis Pullman,” I said. “Do you know if . . .” I nodded toward the hallway where the ambulance had raced Jack.

  “Yes,” she said. “He’ll be fine, it just caught his stomach. Relatively minor, considering. If you’d like to press charges, we’re sending someone—”

  “No,” I said immediately.

  “Arthur.” My father sat up. “He pointed a gun at you.” Sal leaned in behind him, the wounds on his face still visible.

  “He doesn’t need to get arrested.”

  “Sure he does.” Sal snorted. “He should be in jail.”

  “Sometimes, people need to be punished,” my father said. “It’s good for them. It’ll teach him to think twice about using a gun like that in the future. Sometimes”—he lowered his voice, below where Mara could hear it—“the only way to make people appreciate what they have is to take it away.”

  He was talking about Kaitlin. He was talking about the restraining order.

  I thought about where I was sitting, upright and unwounded, in a hospital with my father. I wasn’t in a jail cell in Chicago or Palo Alto or Albuquerque, serving time for disorderly conduct or assaulting a police officer. I thought about the closure I got to have with my grandfather, and the years I’d gotten to know him. I’d been lucky. My whole life, my whole week, I’d been lucky.

  Then I thought about Jack, lying one room over in a hospital bed, without any of that. From the moment I met him, he’d been under attack. It was the police, it was corporations, it was Mara, it was me—the world challenged, and he stood his ground, fearless in his belief.

  But now I didn’t even know if he’d have that. He’d probably have to force himself to unlearn everything he thought he knew about his father, his path, and his place in the world. He’d probably have to create an image for his actual father, not a literary icon at all, but just a man; a man who never showed up for his son.

  Jack’s stamp, his symbol, was still permanently pressed to the top of the journals. Without his stamp, I realized, none of this would have been possible. The Melbourne Hostel would’ve closed before I could get there. The back room of the Omaha Library would’ve fallen into disrepair. Without the stamp, there would’ve been no reason for Mara to cross my path. Without Jack, most of my grandfather’s life would still be a mystery.

  “No,” I said again, more resolutely. “No, he’s . . . He should get a second chance.”

  Sal sat back down, unsure.

  I heard the nurse swallow. “I actually came to talk to you about something else.”

  Everyone around the room shifted uncomfortably.

  “My name is Mary, and I—I think I’ve seen you. On the news, right?” She was speaking to me quickly, as if someone might be listening. “You’re the o
ne searching for his dead grandfather?”

  I nodded again, too tired to feel pride or shame or worry. “Look, if you think I stole—”

  “No, not that,” Mary said, and nodded several times. There wasn’t enough light to read her expression, and she hovered by the door. “I—I was here, the night the ambulance brought him in. Your grandfather. I was the attending nurse. I was there when he died.”

  I sat up against the back of my chair. “You were? What, uh, what did he say?” I noticed she was holding a small plastic box in front of her.

  She shook her head. “Almost nothing. We get a lot of people like him, you know, people who were there, at the shooting. On the anniversaries, especially. It was a traumatic event.”

  I nodded, and she didn’t say anything, just stood swaying several feet inside of the doorway.

  “Well, thank you for . . . for taking care of—”

  “Arthur?” she interrupted me.

  “Yeah?”

  “I know it’s strange to say. But I wasn’t surprised when I saw you on the news.”

  Everyone in the room sat forward, listening.

  She closed her eyes. “I always knew someone was going to come for him. He told me someone would. He said someone was waiting for him.”

  We didn’t say anything, surrendering to the soft beeps of the hospital around us.

  “Anyway, I just wanted to leave his personal effects with you. No one ever came to collect them after he died, so they’ve just been sitting here, waiting for you.”

  She set the plastic box on the coffee table in front of me and quickly left the room without a good-bye.

  I smiled.

  There was only one item, a single possession that he’d carried straight through until he died. I’d seen it in his hands a million times, everywhere he went. I’d seen him constantly poring back over its pages, flipping forward and backward, never sharing it, always keeping it close to his heart. Its soft, red jacket was so faded it was barely readable anymore: