And then I did look into the blue grainy distance, at my family. They waited in the car for me. (But so why had Celine swerved all that way—over two lanes, first crossing into one and then, after a wait, into the other?) Maybe she’d been startled by a noise. Or a bee had gone after her hand a couple times. But wasn’t there something I could have done differently? The only noises now were the muting sound of water someplace else—a whispering repetition—and the gathering and receding swish from an occasional car. These passing cars made our Honda rock a little bit. The two sounds sounded pretty much the same. I was surprised there weren’t accidents here every day. What could I possibly have done differently that morning with Celine?
My heart sped up, just as it had a few minutes before, when we’d driven to this place. Whether at any moment she was vivid or faint, forgiving or disagreeable, or nearly gone—Celine had stayed with me. Today’s sun was no more than the harsh glower of my past. I saw an office park: big glass Rubik’s-Cube buildings across the road, not very far off. There hadn’t been an office park here before. The cars on the road were makes that hadn’t existed when I’d had the accident. The grass was new, the nineteenth season of new grass. Maybe some of the sand on the shoulder was the same. I felt sad and distracted. Maybe the vaguely respiratory beach and road sounds were the same as they had been. Just sad in a distracted way: that was all I felt. I waved to Susannah and the boys. I don’t think they saw me. Or perhaps it was just that I couldn’t see them: the windshield was showing the rags and pinks of the sky, and I couldn’t make out Susannah’s features, only the shape of her head. (I say distracted because the sadness felt docile, and fuzzy.) There was nothing profound about feeling only sad. The car sound on the acoustic asphalt evoked a bit of anti-nostalgia: all the lonely schoolbus waiting of childhood, plus a death. My eyes were dry. I couldn’t do what Mrs. Zilke had commanded me to do. If I was able to have just this one life from here on out, what would Celine Zilke do without me now?
I wrote and wrote and listened close for whatever the past was trying to say to me. It was still tough even to think about this girl who died.4
I omitted a thousand things, because a life is so much the same thing over and over. I omitted my being a ski bum in Aspen with some friends, including good old frontseat-passenger Dave, and getting so drunk the first night in town that my shoulders went numb; I omitted losing my virginity, or trying and failing to lose it—urging an evening to curl itself away and vanish. Those are what life is, but they are not at all Celine.
Day after day, draft after draft: I was surprised by the stuff that came out—my blunt and jumpy chapter and verse; the brake sounds and disclaimers. Until I started writing this, I’d forgotten the library books, the face I wore in my dorm, the way that Mr. Zilke had been at the court, angry, humble, and sad. And I realized I’d been lying to myself: that fact was the first thing I learned.
Maybe I could have done fifty things to avoid the accident. Left the car in the garage that day. Hurried through a yellow light that I’d stopped at. Gone to the beach instead of mini-golf. Been alone, not talking to friends. But I did all those things, and Celine hadn’t done the many things she could have to avoid the accident, either. All the things get done and you regret them and then you accept them because there’s nothing else to do. Regret doesn’t budge things; it seems crazy that the force of all that human want can’t amend a moment, can’t even stir a pebble.
“Was it worth the trip out?” Susannah said after a silence, on our drive home from West Shore Road. Everything man-made got taller, shinier—preparing to enter the competition of New York City. “Did it help?”
“Help to write it?” I said. “Or help, generally?”
This was back in the early days in my writing this story. Warmth was surging from the heater onto my face.
Susannah said, “Either one.” She turned her head and looked at me. “How do you feel?”
“I don’t know.” The words, inane and true. “I don’t feel—
—much”? “—all that I had expected”? “—something to cap off my experience”?
Part of me was still uncomfortable letting myself feel better about the accident, twenty years after it had happened. I worried what “better” would even mean. The mind is like a fish: stillness makes it afraid.
For a long time I had believed I was missing some crucial and important thing. There was a dead spot in who I was; a mildew. The same worry for my future that I’d felt at eighteen, at twenty, at twenty-seven, when that woman at the cineplex told me there was no way I could live with such a horrible past.5
“So you didn’t experience anything too profound when we stopped,” Susannah said. “It’s a good sign, don’t you think? Or was it a waste of a trip?”
I agreed it was a good sign.
But often I couldn’t do the writing. I’d will myself into remembering, the way I had tried to will myself to tears during high school. Ignorance is maybe the most stable matter there is; it’s very hard to lift your personality from the bedrock of solidified principles, of petrified ideas.
I’d slump there at my writing desk, sweat out six gallons and maybe a hundred words; the next day I’d strain a little further. And then, finally, on the page, Celine was there again, cutting in front of me. And I was at the movie theater with Dave and Jim, not feeling enough and feeling so much. And the next writing day, the story got a little more vivid, and the truth more achievable; and also the day after that. It was in the doing, the rethinking, the simple inundation of it, like those bereavement tapes on infinite playback in lonely homes.
And at night, I could switch the computer off and walk down the hall to where the people now in my life were making their different sounds.
4. See the way a forgiving brain runs that sentence, even here, even now? The girl who died. I still have to fight against being passive, about being shy. Or, if you prefer, cowardly.
5. I should disclose here: I’d started going to therapy several years before this—though not (I really don’t think) as a response to the accident. I’d gone with pretty boilerplate stuff: your typical mid-thirties complaints. Trying to swim with the tide of your life’s important associations. Squaring ambition with reality. Just getting one’s psychic shit together. My therapist said how does this make you feel and empowerment and a process of healing. I said, well, so you think I’m okay? She said patience, patience; that’s all the time we have for this week. But any knowledge was impossible without my having stared down the accident. And so my therapy attempts had always been near-misses, fizz-outs if not outright failures.
I don’t want to say that in any Proustian sense I’d consecrated my life. You don’t create a personal bible by ripping out all the myths.
Here is what I’ve come up with:
Because I was alive in a certain place, Celine Zilke isn’t anymore. That’s all this was. Statistics and figures, mathematical anomalies; sour numbers on America’s balance sheet. Forty thousand die on U.S. roads every year. (And with almost every fatal accident, someone walks away suspecting he’s put on the executioner’s hood.) But it was me and it was Celine. She was someone I happened to, someone who happened to me.
I learned to see the accident the way a painter sees a picture—up close, dots of circumstance; step away, an image, stuck and clear. When Celine wrote, “Today I realized that I am going to die,” there’s a good chance she meant only that she’d come to understand that she would—in the future, when all of us are quietly smudged from the blackboard, one by one—die someday.
After I came to accept that, there was just no way not to follow these crumbs of thought to their destination: I can’t know—not for sure—if I may have been able to avoid killing Celine Zilke.
We can try our human best at the crucial moment, and it might not be good enough. That I do know.
The girl I killed: never before had I eased up and stood next to those hard words.
The knowledge that shadowed me with its wing—that the o
nly certainty I have is that I did the best I could when she took her inexplicable turn across two lanes—would have painted the younger version of me with guilt. My journal-entry assumptions were meaningless. I’m typing this right now in a library, and there is a calm to my breathing; everything is more or less okay, brainwise. My mind isn’t sounding out sharps and alarms: fraudulence, guilt. But I keep spacing, keep looking to Reference, where the lady shushes a hyper young girl, and I begin to cry. I am not weeping, not really. And I think it’s from something like relief.
Celine Zilke’s life ended in front of me. But I can’t access her. I know nothing important, nothing real about Celine except how she died, and that I’m part of the reason she died.
I just read the policeman Paul Vitucci’s Newsday quote again—for the first time in decades—and it came like a gift from the past. I’d forgotten the completeness of the absolution. It was clear and direct and full enough to seem an express message to this future me, a dispatch meant to comfort and assure.
I remember Officer Vitucci once told me if I’d swerved the car differently that May 1988 morning, I might have flipped it. Say that had happened. Say Celine had lived and I hadn’t; what of herself would she need to put to the side, in trying to think about me: the stranger who had managed somehow to swerve away from her bike, and who had died because of it?
I used to think I’d like her to not remember me at all. Not to have to contend—at eighteen, at thirty-five, at all life’s cozy moments—with a stranger. I’d like her to be spared the feeling that she’d traveled for two decades with a ghost.
But now I don’t know. I don’t know if that would be fair, or even best for her. And not, I don’t think, because I’d want the spirit of who I was to be kept quote unquote alive in her. It’s more that if she’d been too comfortable with my dying, she wouldn’t have remained a fully live person herself.
It’s not that I outran Celine, or that half of my life. It’s the reverse. The accident taught me this.
Things don’t go away. They become you. There is no end, as T.S. Eliot somewhere says, but addition: the trailing consequence of further days and hours. No freedom from the past, or from the future.
But we keep making our way, as we have to. We’re all pretty much able to deal even with the worst that life can fire at us, if we simply admit that it is very difficult. I think that’s the whole of the answer. We make our way, and effort and time give us cushion and dignity. And as we age, we’re riding higher in the saddle, seeing more terrain.
So it’s an epiphany after all. You have it in your hand the whole time.
Whether Celine had been intent on dying that sunny morning or not—this has, in the end, little to do with me. Of course, the new element of doubt effects the wide and somber assurance of those reaction-time numbers I’d needed in college. Suicide is suicide, accident is accident, and ambiguity lives in the gap between. But suddenly—that is to say, after half a life, plus a few rocky months at the keyboard—I finally get it. And it’s mountain-stream clear: This tragedy isn’t mine to own. It’s hers.
What I hated in myself, for more than half a life now, was feeling lucky for being alive. For not being blamed. Merely for being allowed to continue, when Celine wasn’t. How could anyone be unhappy about that? But how could a person with my story agree to feel relieved and blessed? The accident has formed me. I can no more discard it than I can discard having grown into adulthood. But I am grown now. And because I am, I can say no. I can say no to the hectoring, blistery hurt. I can say to myself: It’s all right to take in the winter beach and grass smells, and crackle back across the sand of the road, and smile at the faces you love.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Every book is collaborative. Or that’s what they say. With this book, the truism felt more fully true than it had before. Which is surprising, because what you hold in your hands is an acutely personal story. But Half a Life was an out-and-out team effort.
My thanks first to Ira Glass and Jane Feltes at This American Life and Michael Rapkin at GQ, who edited excerpts of the book skillfully, and with steep compassion. But the thanksgiving doesn’t stop there. My wife, Susannah Meadows, and my friend David Lipsky did Lishgrade work on the manuscript. I’m forever grateful.
At McSweeney’s, Eli Horowitz was patient and sharp and loving and he improved the book hugely. Dave Eggers was generous, passionate, hands-on—easily the most hands-on editor any writer could ever want. He cared a shocking amount (down to the last disputed semi-colon), and that was very humbling.
I owe Dave and Eli another thanks. They were willing to take a chance on this book as it had been pitched to them; I said I saw Half a Life as a forty- or fifty-page oddity. And Eli said, “Whatever it needs to be.”
Sarah Chalfant and Scott Moyers at the Wylie Agency—The Amazings—never pressured me to make the book any longer, or anything other than what I wanted to make it. That it ended up coming in at almost four times what I’d planned is a testament to how freely I was allowed to explore.
There were and are also that day’s carloads of unfamiliar eyewitnesses, the police officer Paul Vitucci, my friends and passengers David Wohl and Mike and Jeff Newman, my schoolmates Eric Salat and Frank Santoro—and so many people at North Shore High in 1988. My primary mission here has been to make the words of this book an adequate expression of my gratitude.
Finally, my family. If you’ve read any of what comes before this, you got to see a little of their genius for kindness, for espousal. Bernie and Ellen Strauss, Susannah Meadows, Tracey Hechler—loving advocates, all of them. And finally, Beau and Shepherd, my sons. Thanks for coming.
HALF A LIFE
Darin Strauss
A Reader’s Guide
AN ESSAY BY DARIN STRAUSS
By being an author I have in a sense made the public my confidant.
—Kierkegaard
I
When I started writing Half a Life, I thought it would be an account of one scrubby little terrible accident and that’s all. But the story ended up throwing big shadows.
In 2008, I’d read it (a very short, early draft) on This American Life. A stack of paper, sixteen on-air minutes, the soft tickle of microphone to mouth. That would, I thought, be it. Nobody would care too much. I’d been on radio before, and impressed very few. Now I got hundreds of emails, though—literally hundreds, and immediately.
“[For] the first time in 16 years I now know that I am not the only human being that knows what this feels like,” one woman wrote. Another: “My life has changed forever because I heard it.” And one of Celine’s friends—someone I hadn’t known—wrote: “I want to thank you for bringing this memory back in such a meaningful way.”
Others asked if I might send them a printout of what I’d read. One of these askers knew a Westchester boy whose car had hit and killed a seven-year-old; another’s husband never discussed his sister’s death; and another, etc.1 All these people thought a loved one might be comforted by reading an account of this disaster, of my slouch and bungle against it.
II
In writing, avoid what Saul Bellow called “helpful-to-the-sick clichés or conventional get-well encouragements.” That was my exact fear: that I’d end up for sale in the personal-help wing of your local bookseller.
And yet.
There must be a way to confess and avoid confessionalism’s dreck. The bullshit of most self-help shouldn’t mean that we can’t help ourselves by reading, or others by writing.
Maybe this is a peculiarly American idea—that even literature should be pressed into service-industry work? I turned for answers, as lit nerds do, to my bookshelf. David Foster Wallace said writing’s first obligation is to address what it is to be a human. Or, as has been said about Beckett, of all writers: Literature should give “comfort to those in need.”
Like Wallace and Beckett (only quite a lot more imperfectly), I write fiction—that organized, wrought-out thing. So I believe there’s not just beauty in fiction’s strict f
orm, but also what Martin Amis has called a kind of ethical principle. Fiction writers arrange facts in ways that come to a kind of moral point. Such is the storyteller idea, anyway. But that wouldn’t jibe with what I set out to do here—which was? Well, merely to offer up a lumpily dutiful telling of my own life. Anything else would have felt false, disrespectful and false.
But here’s a thing I found. Maybe when you loosen a story from the pinching girdles of plot and ironic distance, from rhythm and sophistication—when you take away the casuistry and dazzle of an arranged literary framework—maybe that loss is nearly matched by some gain in simply offering things just (but exactly) as they were.
Besides, when you start really to examine the random pieces of your history, you might start to catch some accents and emphases in the mess. This seemed odd when it happened to me. It was sort of like how, when you stare for a while at one of those books of ocular gimmicks, a discrete image will begin to rise from the page of scribbles.
Those accents and emphases mark out the signposts and mile markers of your own tellable story.
III
Self-protection is a strong instinct, but it has to be overcome when you write down who you are. The drive to self-forgiveness can take you down a pretty distasteful path; there’s a lot of kitsch in a brain’s sly seduction of itself.
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