Irreversible

by Chris Lynch

  Unless it’s to keep the secret from myself.

  “I want to come home. I made a mess of everything. I lost everything that I thought added up to me. Home, and you, and now even football is taken away, which leaves me with, what? Nothing. Nothing I can recognize other than unhappiness and guilt, which are with me all the time.”

  The truth is that I thought I could outsmart the universe and not be responsible for anything. Instead it all started blowing up inside my skull practically from the day I walked out of the house. “I’m sorry, Dad. I let you down, but I don’t know what I’m doing, don’t know what I am or what I want to be or how I would even go about it if I even knew that much.”

  At first I can’t be certain that it isn’t me doing it, but then it’s clear that what my father calls breathing and I call sighing is surely neither. It has gained strength and is coming out of him in full whooshy waves one after another until he coughs muffled into a handkerchief or some such and it’s gone again.

  “Ray, that sounds awful,” I say.

  “That’s what a chest cold sounds like on somebody like me.”

  “There is nobody like you, Dad. And I want to come home. Can I come home?”

  “You did it to yourself,” he says without obvious judgment. But without the old absolution, either.

  “What?”

  “Football, Keir. It wasn’t taken away from you. You threw it away.”

  “Ray, wait. There is a lot more to this story than that. Quite a lot more. For a number of reasons, people here turned sour on me, and it was clear they regretted signing me so late in the—”

  “You didn’t show up in your best shape.”

  “I worked, Dad. You know that. I had some setbacks, though, and you know that as well. But I was making it back to—”

  “But you’re never supposed to let yourself down like that. Let them beat you any other way they can manage it. But you don’t defeat yourself.”

  “Would you please stop saying that stuff? That’s way too simple for my situation. It does not apply to me. It is not true.”

  It feels as if we’re waiting, or at least like he is, for a bell to stop ringing before he speaks.

  “Adversity is the first path to truth.”

  If he started speaking all his words backward, or composing fifty-word palindromes, he would not catch me more off guard than this.

  “Ray, what was that? It wasn’t you, is all I know. Life is already unrecognizable enough without you morphing into some kind of—”

  “Lord Byron,” he says serenely.

  “Lord Byron?” I say, turning just in time to catch Fabian tucking away the tail end of a fist pump. “You did this,” I say, possibly expecting him to drop to his knees in remorse.

  That doesn’t happen.

  “Well played, Ray!” he calls right past me to my father.

  “Yes indeed,” Ray says back cheerily, and proudly.

  “What’s he saying?” Fabian asks.

  “He’s saying you should knock it off with teaching poetry to other people’s fathers, because no guy’s father should be knowing poems, never mind quoting them.”

  Instead of flipping a quip like I’d expect, Fabian nods, smiles weakly. “Tell Ray thanks. I appreciate the advice, since I wouldn’t have any idea what a guy’s dad is supposed to do.”

  Goddamn it. Is there any patch of ground anywhere in this part of life that doesn’t have a live mine planted beneath it? It didn’t used to be like this. It didn’t ever used to be like this as far as I could see.

  “Sorry,” I say across the room.

  Fabian waves a hand of absolution and starts burrowing himself down under the covers.

  And Ray doesn’t talk now. He doesn’t sigh or wheeze or perform any function at all that would permit me to hear him.

  “Dad?”

  “I love you, Keir, and it couldn’t be any other way if my life depended on it. I’m proud of you. Do you have any idea what the sound is like, when a big fat dumb old baby of a man bawls his heart and lungs out? And he does it in an empty, echoey old house with fragile plaster walls that were already echoing far too much stuff at him even before he started his wailing? Good, I’m going to let you carry on with that silence, hoping and figuring that it means no, you do not know that sound.” He’s pausing more frequently now, and returning each time with a slightly weaker, wearier, sadder voice. “If you need to hear it, I’ll make a recording next time. But those events don’t come around as often these days—kind of like your sisters.” He allows himself a laugh that has so little joy and so many multiple pains, he cuts it off in the middle. “I kept feeling that you had gone off and died on me, kept letting my brain go all brainless believing Fabian was covering it up, just like the college, the police, whoever. Nobody around here to tell me different, right, so why not? I’m free now to make whatever reality I want just because I say so. Even if I don’t realize that it’s not me controlling everything in there sometimes. That kind of grief, it turns out, is every bit as destroying to a person as the real kind.”

  This time I don’t need a very large opening to get myself in there. “I am even sorrier now than I was ten minutes ago. I was wrong, and I was selfish and heartless, and I want to come home. I have no business being here, and no good explanation why I did it in the first place.”

  “I’m much happier now, Son. Just to have heard your voice. I’m getting too tired to talk much more, so just listen. Now, I want you to stop apologizing. You have nothing at all to feel guilty about. I know why you did things the way you did. Took me a while, but I know my boy even after all that’s been said and done. And I think it took guts taking that big step without asking me or anybody else to hold your hand. And so, no.”

  “No?”

  “No. I’m not going to allow you to come home. Do what you meant to do. It’ll look a little different from what you were expecting, but the notion is the same. You won’t quit. You will keep going forward. You will find your way soon enough, and then you’ll go on and be who you are supposed to be. You can’t do that here.”

  “What about the money? I don’t even know how to apply—

  “The college has been in touch with me. You’d be surprised how efficient they can be with financial matters. Anyway, we came to an arrangement on settling your fees for next semester, and that’s done and they’re settled, so it’s time for you to get likewise.”

  “That’s a lot of money, Ray.”

  “I guess you better turn out to be worth the investment. But the money is spent, the rest of the year all yours, bought and paid for. I don’t want you thinking about that end of it, not at all, for the whole of your freshman year. And that’s that.”

  “Dad. Hold on, you can’t just chop off the subject without involving me at least enough so I know how I’m managing without my football scholarship, if somebody asks me.”

  “Nobody’s going to ask you that,” Fabian says from under the covers.

  “Please, just butt out,” I snap at him. Then quickly to Ray, “I didn’t say that to you, you know that. You know I never would, Dad, right? Dad? Right? Ray?”

  I have a short panic attack that manages to pack the wallop of several full-blown ones into ten or twelve seconds.

  Then I realize that at the point my father said, “That’s that,” that was that. And if I chose to continue chattering like an idiot, then that would be entirely up to me. Because there wouldn’t be anybody else to stop me.

  just suppose

  Two semesters, right here in the palm of my hand. Get settled, get sorted. Find out. Learn.

  Be the guy you’re supposed to be.

  How many fresh starts, new first days, can a person expect to be granted? Gotta figure there can’t be many more coming along for me.

  House money. I’m playing with house money, so I got no chance of losing this time no matter what.

  But for the fact that the house money came from the homeowner who isn’t rolling in dough by any stretch. There is a
loss possible, a great gulping sinkhole of a possibility.

  My one and only job is to be the guy I’m supposed to be. But first I have to go out and find him, and he could be hiding anywhere.

  • • •

  The classes I chose for myself at the beginning of term were not designed to inspire anything particularly, and in that one respect they have been entirely successful. I go to them most of the time, hand in all my assignments, get along well enough to learn a few things and remain essentially anonymous. I’m earning required credits, and that’s an essential part of not losing the house’s money.

  But the other side of things, the intangibles, the things that open up a guy’s life at college to the possibilities that could be more than curiosities, those are to be found all over the place at Carnegie.

  I get up early, because I remember that I love getting up early. I go to the gym often enough that I have reached the nod-hey-yo-g’mornin’ relationship stage with around a half dozen other mourning doves, and I look forward to that fleeting connection so much that I confess to going to the gym this morning for no other reason than a shot of nod-hey-yo-g’mornin’. And once I get it, I’m fortified. The crunchy cold November air under gunmetal gray sky will not wait, and I will not ask it to.

  You find out quickly that the campus of a college this size is a tiny throw rug on a massive landscape. I have run every route, climbed every scalable surface, blazed every unbeaten trail the Carnegie College environment has to offer. Done it all a dozen or more times.

  I don’t see a time I could ever tire of it. But I know how things go, how a place can shrink, how you can get so familiar that beauty and history and love aren’t even powerful enough to hold you anymore. No doubt it has happened to thousands and thousands of onetime freshmen who fell in love with these same woods, foothills, mountains, statues that annoyed them right out of town a few short years later.

  I dread there ever being such a time, no matter what logic and upperclassmen might say. What has to happen to make somebody not want to sit on the arched bridge and dangle his legs above the duck pond?

  And I will recognize one more new first day, not necessarily a good one, when I walk down the sloping path curving past the chapel and I no longer feel the pop of charmed, surprised amusement at the Yurt poking its helmet head up through the earth.

  I’m thinking early on this day it’s just one more quiet campus touchstone I’m passing on my morning rounds, until I see the glow of some kind of amber light, and hear the murmur of a honey-chocolate voice coaxing listeners gently into the new day.

  “Hey,” I say when I’m sure the long-hair guy isn’t still on a live microphone.

  “Oh, hey,” he says, rising right up out of his chair to come and meet me in the bull’s-eye center of the round room. “I’m George Seldes. I’m the manager of CC Radio. Didn’t we meet already?”

  “Sort of. I’m Keir Sarafian. I came in one afternoon with Fabian Delmonico.”

  “Aahhhh,” he says, pointing at me with both hands poised like revolvers.

  “That’s why we didn’t quite meet,” I say. “The atmosphere with you guys seemed a little . . . challenging.”

  “Well, yeah, you got it exactly. But as for Fabian and me personally, some days I don’t know if I’d bother getting out of bed if I didn’t expect him to be out here someplace waiting to do battle. I don’t know how well you know the dude, but man, Fabian makes the world go round. You want some really strong coffee?”

  “Oh, um, sure.”

  George leads me over to his post, in charge of the radio station broadcasts, whatever they may be. He monitors the music that is playing, and how long it has to run. Long enough, it seems.

  “I noticed you admiring my Yurt,” he says.

  “Admiring,” I say, “yeah, absolutely. But didn’t Fabian say this was the Writing Center?”

  “I have no doubt that he did. But look around you. Is there anything in this fine upturned bowl of a place that says ‘Writing Center’ to you?”

  I do as told and look all around. There is an unbroken bench built into the wall and running the full perimeter of the place. There is a chunky rustic table and four chairs set up in the center. Aside from that there are puffy throw pillows scattered around, and the radio operation, which stands out as a shock of modern functionality compared to everything else.

  “See?” George says, shrugging. It is quite a feat, managing a triumphant shrug, but George nails it.

  “Except,” I say, and point straight up, to the quote by the poet Robert Burns that won’t go away.

  “Right, but we are waiting for the right moment to paint it over with ‘The medium is the message,’ by Marshall McLuhan.”

  “If I get a vote, I go with that one,” I say. “Why is that other one all over the place around here? It’s spooking me.”

  “It’s Carnegie-Burns. Andrew Carnegie—the name might ring a bell—was a big admirer of the poet Burns. So all the thousands of Carnegie libraries all around the world that were funded by the Carnegie Foundation try to suck up to the boss by splattering ol’ Rabbie all over. So you can imagine a whole college in the Carnegie mold. . . .”

  “There’d be no escaping it.”

  “Exactly. You a little squirmy about that ‘to see ourselves as others see us’ riff? No shame in it if you feel that way. You’ll have plenty of company.”

  “You?”

  “What? Don’t be daffy. I know how deadly cool I look to everybody. My only quarrel with that poem is it makes me jealous of all the lucky folks who get to look at me from such a better angle than I can.”

  This kind of outrageousness must be routine to George, because he doesn’t even bother looking for a reaction out of me before turning his attention to the broadcast control desk again.

  But he must sense the heat of my blown-away stare. He turns to me with sly-guy eyes.

  “I was joking entirely. Read the poem, Keir. Really do. Give it your full attention, all eight demented Scots stanzas of it. It’s the perfect antidote anytime you feel the impulse to assume you’re better than you really are.”

  The locked-eyes deal he has trapped me in feels unbreakable. So I try words instead.

  “I thought you were on the opposite side from the poetry folks.”

  “I was just starting to like you, Keir. It would be both tragic and ironic if I had to have you killed to protect the secret shame of my literacy.”

  I open my mouth to respond, though I have no idea what could possibly be a fitting reply to that. I’ll never know, either.

  He gives me a shush finger just like that before turning his microphone on. The ON AIR light glows, and I feel a little unscheduled underground coolness of my own at having stumbled into the inner sanctum of this rarefied world of broadcasting. Even if it might not be casting all that broadly at this early minute.

  It’s a privilege, the very kind I’m supposed to be here for. The kind that will not pass by unnoted or unappreciated.

  “That, loyal listeners, was the great John Coltrane, from his seminal album, Giant Steps. Now, I’ll let you in on a special secret that only my crack o’ dawn faithful get to hear. And that is that I do not know what on earth Mr. Coltrane is getting at with that record. Not a clue. But if you don’t play some ’Trane every once in a while on a jazz show, then you get dismissed as a know-nothing faker. So, there ya go. If you happen to catch my evening show later in the week, I will be playing that very same stuff and you can just listen to me wax so poetical about that same unfathomable squawk of a record, you’d never know I was talking to you directly from my permanently puckered rear end. See the privileges you get by being part of our smarty-pants early morning population? Now, for a special treat, another of our tribe, Mr. Keir Sarafian, is gonna tell you everything you never knew about our next featured ensemble, Ella Fitzgerald, McCoy Tyner, and Joe Pass. Keir, over to you. . . .”

  “What?” I say, as unprepared as it is possible to be for one’s radio debut.

&nbs
p; “You were just saying,” George says, clearly enjoying himself, “remember, about the one thing about this trio that always bothered you?”

  I stare over at him in desperation, hoping for a helping hand. But there are no hands available, since they are both clamped tight over his laughing mouth. He keeps gesturing with his eyes toward the guest microphone in front of me.

  “Um,” I say, “I never heard of the other two guys, I’m sorry. But I know my dad, Ray, has always loved Ella Fitzgerald. So that counts as something I know, right? Hey, Ray,” I say, out into the zero point zero zero percentage chance I could be talking to him.

  “Well, that was sweet,” George says, composing himself enough to come back on and pick me up the way a proper radio station manager should.

  I’m starting to feel relaxed a little already, after getting my first spoken words out to the listener-strangers. Getting it done, then getting relieved by the other guy, is a combination of up-and-down swoop of excitement I would not have predicted. It was even kind of fun before I got relieved and I was still dangling precariously.

  “Although if I’m not mistaken,” George adds, over the beginning notes of some piano and guitar bits fighting for the singer’s attention, “Mr. Sarafian forgot to tell us the part he was supposed to tell us about what really bothers him about this recording. Mr. Sarafian, you don’t have to be shy or diplomatic on this show, certainly not at this hour. . . .”

  Happening just the same as the show, live as we speak, I’m getting overwhelmed by the realization of what seems possible here. A guy could, if he got this right, hold the attention of who knows how many people. He could shape any discussion on any subject according to whatever happened to move him that day, that hour. And he could get away with . . . was even encouraged to get away with . . . talking know-it-all nonsense even about things he knew nothing-at-all about. Meanwhile remaining an unknown person attached to a known persona if he wanted to.

  There could be something to this.

  “Oh yes, you’re right. Sorry, George. The only part that really bothers me about listening to this record is that I was promised good strong coffee to go with it. And, George, management seems to have lied to me about the coffee.”