by Jeffery Self
He sighed and sat up, looking down at me. The moon was fixed right behind his head like a halo or crown or hipster fedora.
“I’ve only gone all the way once, and it was different from this. Not bad but different. It was this kid at camp and we didn’t really know each other that well. I think we were just so freaked out by the therapy that we wanted to see if the world would end if we had sex. So we did it, and it didn’t.”
I nodded as he slipped his shirt and jacket back on, the air getting chillier by the minute.
“Is that what you want to hear—that this was different?” he asked. “Because it was.”
“You don’t have to patronize me,” I fired back before I could weigh the boldness of the statement in my head.
“I wasn’t!” he shouted defensively.
What the hell am I doing? I wondered to myself. Here I had just had the most magical time with the most magical boy and now I was starting a fight over the way he’d answered an awkward question I’d asked.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You weren’t patronizing, I’m just being weird. I’m just … this is incredible, and I guess I’m freaking out because I have no idea what I’m doing. I only know I want to do it.”
As he stood up, he grinned at me, that same grin he’d given me at the supermarket the first night we spoke.
“This really is incredible,” he said, looking down at me. “Do you hear that, world?” He spun around dramatically, shouting at the night sky. “This is incredible! Being with Marley is INCREDIBLE!”
“Shut up!” I said, laughing now.
“I’m sorry, I can’t hear you right now. I’m too busy thinking about how incredible we are!” he called out, grabbing hold of the water tower’s ladder and swinging himself onto it. “I’m sorry, Marley, but I need the world to know that you are, really and truly, unlike any boy I have ever been with before! Because this, world—THIS IS REAL!” He began climbing the ladder to the top of the water tower.
At this point, I was convulsing with laughter; he’d gone from scrawny gay teen to Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire within seconds.
He pounded on the empty tower as he ascended the ladder. Shouting “incredible!” and “Marley!” the whole way.
I pulled on my shirt and ran out to look at him atop the tower. He stood there, proud and beautiful. Just then he began to shout again, but he slipped—he slipped and began to slide, letting out a quick “Oh shit!”
Exactly how it happened is still hard to remember because I was so lost in the moment before. The moment I still dream of going back to. When I try to remember what comes after, it’s like a collage. I can see his face, the stars, the moon, the tower, the ladder, my sneakers still on the ground, him falling. But none of it forms into a total picture. It’s as if the moment itself was thrown to the ground and shattered into a million pieces.
I remember thinking it was part of the joke, part of the comical proclamation of his passion.
I remember laughing at first, as his foot tripped on the pipe.
I remember thinking how ridiculous and hilarious he was being, as his legs went out from under him on the slippery metal roof.
I remember the sound of his sneakers, making this high-pitched squeak as he slid to the tower’s edge, like nails on a chalkboard.
I remember him saying “Oh shit” as his hand reached out behind him, grabbing on to nothing.
I remember him, in what seemed like no time at all, falling, crashing down.
I remember screaming.
I remember him falling.
I remember screaming.
I remember him hitting headfirst onto the pavement.
I remember this horrible foreign noise as his skull met the earth. Not quite a crunch and not quite a crack.
I remember screaming. Not for help—there was no help.
Just screaming.
I remember running over to him.
I remember seeing him there, motionless, with his neck twisted sideways at an angle necks aren’t supposed to twist.
I don’t remember what I said to him.
I don’t remember if I said anything at all.
I don’t remember shouting for help.
I don’t remember being able to help, because I couldn’t.
I remember a sense of choking as a terrifying shock took over my entire body.
I remember the moment when I went from shock to the moment I knew he was dead.
YOU GRIEVE AND YOU GRIEVE and you grieve, and at some point you wonder if the grief will ever run out, but you quickly realize that there is a limitless supply of grief. It is there when you reach for it. It is there when you don’t reach for it. It can seep between the cracks of any wall you put up. It can invade even the happiest of thoughts. It can even hijack your dreams. Grief can find you no matter where you are, no matter how far you’ve traveled.
I’m in the backstage hallway, heading over to the greenroom to see what food they have tucked away in there. The food situation in my dressing room is less than ideal. I’ve been greeted at just about every one of these speaking engagements with the same unappealing platter of sliced veggies and hummus. I’ve had it up to here with hummus. I am thinking that: I’ve had it up to here with hummus. And then very quickly, I am thinking, You have no right to complain about any of this. You have been living in an alternate world ever since Christopher died. This is not reality. Reality died at the water tower. This is the progression of pretty much every thought I have.
Look at me, in this new, altered reality. I am the pretty (after hours of hair, makeup, and Instagram filters) gay boy whose boyfriend killed himself because of his homophobic preacher parents. I am the beautiful victim and the world loves me for it.
Or at least that’s the story I’m selling.
Just a week before I came to New York to accept this award, Harrison called with even more “big news”: I’d sold a book about my experience. A book that would be published as a memoir but was actually fiction. The book advance I was being offered would save the house my father’s book-advance gamble had lost.
This is what my life has become. All because Christopher’s life will never become anything other than what it was.
I didn’t do any of this for money.
I did it because of what happened right after he died. I did it to prevent the real Christopher from becoming entirely erased.
I must remember that, but everyone around me is making it harder and harder to do so.
When I get to the greenroom, I am immediately greeted by Janice Atwood, the executive director of the LGBTQ Society of America, which exists to promote LGBTQ positivity, especially for those under parental disapproval and family scorn. Janice is a lovely woman who left her mega-important CEO job at some Silicon Valley start-up to devote her life to helping others. She’s got these long blonde-and-black dreadlocks that hang down to her butt and she’s maybe the coolest and calmest human being I’ve ever met. She has no idea she’s backing a fraud.
“Hey, mister,” she says the minute I walk through the door frame. She’s filling a little paper plate with yogurt-covered pretzels.
“Hi,” I say, nervous. Janice always puts me on edge. I guess it’s because it’s intimidating to be around someone who has devoted her life to good.
“Get this! The silent auction raised close to half a million dollars tonight!” she says in a voice that gets an octave higher on every word. “And we haven’t even closed the bidding on some of the big prizes. You should feel proud to have been a large part of that, my friend.”
“Yeah.” This is the most I can come up with. I don’t feel proud. I can’t, even though I know in some small and moderately screwed-up way, I have helped.
“Hey … I know all of this has been a lot, buddy.” She stares deeply into my eyes, the way only a truly good human being can. “But you better remember that Christopher is somewhere up there, and he’s so damn proud of you.”
“Thank you,” I say, turning to leave the room.<
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I’ve officially lost my appetite.
I RUSHED TO MY PHONE and dialed 9-1-1.
It did that thing where it said DIALING for what felt like forever because I only had two bars out by the tower. I began pacing, or at least I think that’s what I was doing. I had never dialed 9-1-1; it’s such an odd feeling. Seeing those three numbers on your own phone for the first time.
Finally, an operator answered.
“Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?”
“Someone has … My boyfriend … I think his neck is broken.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m at the water tower, out on Old Mill Road. He was …”
She was already dispatching an ambulance before I could finish.
“Hurry. Please,” I implored. Then I hung up. I don’t know why I said to hurry; I’d felt his pulse as well as I could remember how from my health class freshman year. He didn’t have one and he wasn’t breathing and his heart wasn’t beating and his neck wasn’t even human.
What do I do? This was the only question repeating over and over in my head. What the hell do I do? Who do I call? Do I call his parents? Do I call my parents? Do I call Audrey?
I shook his stiffened body, screamed for him to wake up and talk to me. I’d never seen a dead body before. It’s indescribable in its strangeness. So human, yet so hollow. I don’t know if I believe in God and I don’t know if I believe in spirits or ghosts or whatever … but something is missing when you look at a dead body. A person, with open eyes and an open mouth, but not quite a person. More like a painting, but there, right in front of you, in your arms.
“Wake up,” I heard myself whisper as I cried some more. I don’t know how long I waited there until the ambulance lit up the darkened silence with its flashing sirens. At some point the sounds, along with those of tires on the loose gravel, surrounded me. Paramedics came rushing over. I don’t remember what happened next. The paramedics trying to revive him and putting a blanket over me as if that would somehow help anything whatsoever. Eventually cops arrived and taped off the area with crime-scene tape.
As they loaded Christopher’s body into a body bag, I understood that, officially, he was gone. A numbness took over my entire body. I honestly think you could’ve put me in boiling water in that exact moment, and I wouldn’t have felt it. I felt nothing, I saw nothing; I was asleep in a terrible nightmare, yet awake in the middle of the forest.
A robust, older policeman came over to me and asked if I felt all right enough to talk to him. Looking up at his kind face and the face of his colleague, a much younger woman with a black ponytail and friendly smile, I agreed.
“We received a police report over an hour ago that a Christopher Anderson was intending to commit suicide. Can you identify this body as his?”
A body. That’s what he had become. Not a human, not a person; a body.
“Yes,” I said, immediately remembering the suicide note. “But …”
I stopped myself. I don’t know what it was, but something in my mind told me to stop myself.
“But what, young man?” the cop asked as I felt all the blood in my face go somewhere between feet and ankles.
Here was the moment I could have told the truth. I could have explained the story in its entirety, from his parents to the camp to the escape plan to our wonderful night. But I didn’t. All I could do was think about him and every moment we’d had and how he’d told me, once upon a time, that what he wanted in life was to fix things for kids left in the position he’d grown up in. This current scenario was, admittedly, not exactly what he’d meant, but I wasn’t thinking about that, or anything rational, for that matter.
“But … I tried to stop him and it was too late.”
As the words left my mouth, I knew I’d done a very, very bad thing. I had lied about something so terrible that, if there did end up being a God, I would never be forgiven. I felt guilt from the top of my head down my spine to the bottom of my toes. But it didn’t stop me from unleashing the story of his parents and the camp and the therapy and how horrible they’d been. I was vomiting up every word inside of me. I gave them every detail of his life as I knew it, leading up to this catastrophic mistake.
Except for one very, very important part.
Police responded to a 9-1-1 call just after midnight Saturday morning reporting someone having fallen off the Old Mill Road Water Tower. Police and paramedics arrived at the scene and found the body of an unconscious teenage male, age 17. The young man had broken his neck and died instantly in the fall. The body was later identified as Christopher Hank Anderson, son of Reverend James and Angela Anderson. The Andersons, known for their televangelism empire, had only recently relocated to North Carolina. There has been no word on whether the death was accidental, intentional, or foul play. Funeral arrangements are being made for Wednesday morning.
THE REST OF THAT NIGHT was a blur that lasted until the sun began to come up Saturday morning and a new day began and life continued on with frustrating similarity. I’d never lost someone I was that close to, aside from grandparents, but something about losing a grandparent felt expected and normal. Losing someone who not only happens to be your age but also the person you had fallen in love with—that’s a whole other kind of despair.
The way life goes on after death is infuriating. You want to shout at the newscaster giving the weather updates about clear skies for the rest of the week that they should show some respect and not wear a yellow tie at a time like this. You want the whole world to feel what you feel. Which is especially maddening when you’re not entirely sure what you feel. For me it was hodgepodge of shock, devastation, anger, and overwhelming guilt.
Mom and Dad had shown up at the water tower the night of the accident as soon as the police called them. So had Christopher’s parents.
This was not how I’d imagined them meeting.
In fact, I’d never imagined them meeting. I’d always thought of me and Christopher as … apart.
My mother seemed more overcome with emotion than Christopher’s, who maintained her steely expression and clenched lips as she and her husband identified the body and spoke with the police and comforted each other.
They did not talk to me. They did not ask me anything. They did not want to know their son’s last words.
Already, I felt myself being erased from their version of Christopher’s life. I might as well have been an anonymous hiker who’d found him lying there. I might as well have been no one to them.
Mom and Dad drove me home in silence. Once or twice they asked if I was okay, and then we all just sat there, reflecting on what a stupid question it was. I was not okay. I was pretty sure I would never be okay again.
When we got home, Mom asked if I wanted to talk and I said no and they told me that they would give me space but that they were there when or if I wanted them. Sunday and Monday and Tuesday, Mom cooked all my favorite foods and even let me order pizza WITH a gluten crust. Audrey came by every day, but I wasn’t in a place to talk to her. I just wanted to be alone, to grieve in peace and to figure out what the hell was true and what wasn’t. It was true that he hadn’t killed himself. But it was also true that if his parents hadn’t sent him away, hadn’t punished him so harshly, he’d still be alive. I didn’t want to let them off the hook. I wanted them to feel the hook as painfully as I was feeling the hook, and I didn’t care how screwed up that might have seemed.
Christopher’s parents had planned a funeral for Wednesday morning at eleven a.m. Mom bought me some black pants and dress shoes to wear and left them outside my door. I could hear them getting ready in a strange silence that seemed to fill the house. Whatever tension had existed between my parents had been lifted in the wake of the tragedy. That’s one good thing about horrible deaths—they do put stuff in perspective.
As I attempted to figure out how to tie my tie in the mirror, I looked at the reflection of myself for the first time in days. The dark circles under my eyes gave the pupils a gray,
depressing hue. My hair was a crime scene and my skin was paler than a vampire’s. My mouth was the weirdest part of all, my lips appearing to be stuck in a downward position that was not quite a frown but something worse; it was expressionless, like a painting where the artist got too tired to finish the mouth and gave up.
I looked awful. But I felt worse.
Dad knocked on my door.
“Come in,” I said. It was odd to hear my voice; it was like I hadn’t said a word in days.
Dad came into my room, dressed in the same old suit he wore for really happy or really sad occasions.
“Need help with that tie?” He was already tying it, well aware of my lack of coordination when it came to accessories, or pretty much anything for that matter.
“Thanks,” I managed.
“How’re you holding up?” he asked as he straightened the now tied plaid tie.
I shrugged and he nodded. Then we just stood there for a while, staring at the little flecks of color on the off-white carpet.
“I can’t understand why a kid would do that. He was just a boy,” Dad said, unable to help himself, and I could tell he regretted saying it immediately. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I said, and took his hand, feeling a rush of guilt so heavy that I almost told him the truth. Mom appeared in the doorway, in the kind of black cotton dress you only wear to funerals.
“We should get moving,” she said.
How could I explain to her that I was incapable of moving? How could I explain to her that it felt like time had stopped?
I couldn’t.
So I went to the funeral.
Throughout the ten-minute drive to the church, Mom and Dad went to great lengths to make small talk about whatever they could come up with. Making half-finished statements about houses we passed or unenthused observations on the lack of rain as of late. Mom blamed it on something having to do with the upcoming harvest moon. It was as if they’d been challenged to do whatever it took to keep the car from being silent.
