by Steve Toltz
Brett laid out in his coffin, hair combed back. Odor? Hair gel. Expression molded on his half-bled white face? Peaceful slumber. I thought: This is your unblinking eclipse. The long frozen plunge. Your soft awkward stutter cured by oblivion. So what’s to be sad about?
The morning of the funeral was bright and sunny. A gentle fragrant wind made everything seem frothy and not worth worrying about, almost suggesting that grief was an overreaction. The whole class had the morning off; students in other years could come too, but it wasn’t compulsory. The cemetery was conveniently located only a kilometer from the school, so we all walked together, about one hundred students and a few teachers who were there either to mourn or to supervise—both, if they had it in them. Most of the group wouldn’t have said hello to Brett while he was alive, but now they were lining up to say goodbye.
We all gathered around the grave waiting for the priest to begin, standing in the kind of silence that’s so silent the clearing of a throat can frighten you to death. I thought our school uniforms made us look like postal workers congregated to mail a colleague back to God. I imagined “Return to Sender” stenciled neatly on the casket.
The priest began. His eulogy reached me as though through a coffee filter. I got drips. He described Brett as “weary of this world” (true), “mortal and weak” (also true), and “eager to join his Lord, Our Savior” (unlikely). Finally he said melodramatically that “suicide is a mortal sin.”
Now hang on a sec!
OK, Brett took his own life, but he also answered Hamlet’s question without tearing himself all up inside, and even if suicide is a sin, surely decisiveness is rewarded. I mean, let’s give credit where credit is due. Brett answered Hamlet’s dilemma as straightforwardly as ticking a box.
To be
Not to be
I knew this sermon was just an ancient scare tactic that had survived intact through the ages while practices like draining someone’s blood with leeches when they have a runny nose had long ago been dismissed as old-fashioned. If there is a God, I doubt he is such a hard-liner. Rather, I imagine him greeting the men and women who take their own lives like a police chief surprised when a wanted criminal turns himself in. “You!” he might say, not angry so much as slightly disappointed that he won’t get the credit or the satisfaction for the capture.
The casket was lowered, and the sound of hard clumps of dirt hitting its lid made it sound empty. Brett was thin. I’d told him that no one hates a thin man. No one, I thought now, except hungry worms.
Time passed. The sun like a golden lozenge dissolved as it slid across the sky. I watched Mr. White the whole time. He stood out as luminously as if he’d been highlighted in yellow fluorescence. He was suffering the ultimate public humiliation: through neglect or faulty parenting, he’d lost his son, as surely as if he’d put him on the roof of his car and driven away without remembering to take him off.
After the sermon, the principal, Mr. Silver, walked over and placed his hand on Mr. White’s shoulder. He twitched violently and shrugged off the hand. As he walked away, I thought: Well, Brett, there goes your father, there he goes to pack away your hollow shirts and your empty pants.
That’s what I really thought.
Back at school, a special assembly was held in the quadrangle. A counselor stood up and talked about youth suicide. He asked us all to reach out to our wobbly peers and be on the lookout for signs. His description of a suicidal teenager sent little shockwaves through the crowd. He had described every person there. That gave them something to think about. The bell rang and everyone wandered off to class except our year. The decision from above was that we were just too sad to learn calculus. I felt understandably unsettled. I could feel Brett’s presence. I saw him on the podium, then his face in the crowd. I was certain that pretty soon I’d be seeing his head on my own neck. I knew I’d have to abandon that place, just leave it behind and not look back. I could see the school gate was wide open, tempting me. What if I made a run for it? Or even better: what if I walked?
My reverie was interrupted by the sound of some metaphysical finger-pointing. Several students were discussing the possibilities of Brett’s current location. Where was he now? Some said he was in heaven; others supposed he was back where he started, in the subarctic darkness, wondering when he’d move up in the reincarnation queue. Then someone with Catholic tendencies said, “His soul will burn forever, you know,” and I couldn’t let such a nasty thought sit there without spitting on it, so I said, “I think you should find whoever does your thinking for you and ask them to update.”
“Well, what do you think happened to Brett’s soul, then?”
“Nothing. Because he hasn’t got one. Neither have I. Neither have you.”
“Yes I do!”
“No you don’t!”
“Do too!”
“Do not!”
“You don’t believe in the soul?”
“Why should I?” I asked.
You should’ve seen the looks I got! When you say you don’t believe in the soul, it’s hilarious! People look at you as if the soul, like Tinker Bell, needs to be believed in in order for it to exist. I mean, if I have a soul, is it really the kind of soul that needs my moral support? Is it as flimsy as all that? People seem to believe so; they think that doubting the soul means you are the Soulless, the one lone creature wandering the wasteland without the magic stuff of infinity…
III
So did I quit school out of some sort of magnanimous allegiance to my dead friend? A symbolic protest prompted by my heart? I wish.
It didn’t happen that way at all.
I suppose I’d better come clean.
The afternoon of the funeral I received a package in the mail. It contained a single red rose and a short letter. It was from Brett, my cold dead friend.
Dear Jasper,
There’s a tall, beautiful girl with long red flaming hair in the year above us. I don’t know her name. I’ve never spoken to her. I’m looking at her right now as I write this. I am staring right at her! She’s reading. She’s always so engrossed in reading, she doesn’t look up, even as I sit here mentally undressing her.
Now I have her right down to her underwear! It’s infuriating how she just keeps on reading like that, reading in the sun. Stark naked. In the sun.
Please hand her this rose and tell her I loved her, and will love her, always.
Your friend,
Brett
I folded the note and placed it in the bottom of a drawer. Then I went back to Brett’s grave and laid down the rose and left it there. Why didn’t I give it to the girl he loved? Why didn’t I carry out the dead kid’s final wish? Well, for one thing, I’ve never been a big fan of the idea of running all over town dotting i’s and crossing t’s for the deceased. Secondly, it seemed to me unreasonably cruel to implicate this poor girl in a suicide, this girl who never even knew he was alive. Whoever she was, I was sure she had enough on her plate without having to wear the guilt of the death of someone whom she couldn’t have picked out of a crowd of two.
The next day I went up to the plateau above the school—the flat, treeless patch of parched earth where the eldest students loitered arrogantly. That’s how they were. They held themselves above the rest of the school, as if making it all the way to the final year was comparable to surviving a third tour of duty in Vietnam. I went out of curiosity. Brett had taken his life while in love with a tall girl with red hair. Was she the cause? Who was she? Did he really die, not from the torment of bullies, but from frustrated desire? Secretly I hoped so, because every time I saw Harrison around school it made me sick to think that Brett had died because of him. I was eager to replace him with a worthier cause of death. That’s what I was searching for. A girl worth dying for.
Unfortunately for me, I found her.
While I’ve got a pretty good memory, I’m the first to admit that some of my recollections should be called in for questioning. The fact is, I’m not above deluding myself and get
ting away with it, which is why, as I visualize the girls from my high school, I can only guess that I’m romanticizing. In my mind’s eye they look like sexy-celebrity-hooker-fantasy-music-video schoolgirls. That can’t be right. I see them wearing white unbuttoned shirts with exposed black lacy bras and dark green miniskirts and long cream socks and black buckled shoes. I see them floating on pale legs through narrow halls, their hair billowing behind them like flames in a strong wind. That can’t be right either.
This I am sure of: the girl Brett loved was tall and pale-skinned, with flaming red hair falling down her back, shoulders as smooth as eggs, and legs as long as an underground pipeline. But her dark brown eyes, often hidden behind an unevenly cropped fringe, were her secret weapon: she had a look that could have toppled a government. She also had a habit of running her tongue around the tip of her pen. It was very erotic. One day I stole her pencil case and kissed every last biro. I know how that sounds, but it was a very intimate afternoon, just me and the pens. When Dad came home he wanted to know why my lips were stained with blue ink. Because she writes in blue, I wanted to tell him. Always blue.
She was half a foot taller than me, and with that flaming red hair she looked like a skyscraper on fire. Thus I called her the Towering Inferno, but not to her face. How could I? That beautiful face and I hadn’t been introduced. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen her before—maybe because I took every third day off school. Perhaps she did the same, only on alternate days. I followed her around the school grounds at a distance, trying to see her from every conceivable angle to get the three-dimensional mental image my fantasies deserved. Sometimes, as she moved lightly through the grounds, seeming to weigh only slightly more than her own shadow, she sensed I was there, but I was too quick for her. Whenever she turned I’d pretend to be looking at the sky, counting clouds.
But shit! I could suddenly hear my father’s grating voice telling me I was looking to deify the human because I hadn’t the stomach for God. Yeah, maybe. Maybe I was in a bid for self-transcendence, projecting onto this tall succulent woman in order to release myself from my solitary carnival of despair. Fine. That was my right. I just wish I could’ve been oblivious of my unconscious motivations. I wanted just to enjoy my lies like everyone else.
I couldn’t think of anything other than her and the components of her. For example, her red hair. But was I so primitive I let myself be bewitched by hair? I mean, really. Hair! It’s just hair! Everyone has it! She puts it up, she lets it down. So what? And why did all the other parts of her have me wheezing with delight? I mean, who hasn’t got a back, or a belly, or armpits? This whole finicky obsession serves to humiliate me even as I write it, sure, but I suppose it isn’t that abnormal. That’s what a first love is all about. What happens is you meet a love object and immediately a hole inside you starts aching, the hole that is always there but you don’t notice until someone comes along, plugs it up, and then runs away with the plug.
For a while the roles in our relationship were easily definable. I was the lover, the stalker, the sun-worshipper. She was loved, stalked, worshipped.
A couple of months passed in that way.
After Brett’s suicide, Mr. White went right back to teaching. It was a bad decision on his part. He didn’t do what everyone should do after a monumental personal tragedy—run away, grow a beard, sleep with a girl exactly half your age (unless you are twenty). Mr. White didn’t do anything like that. He just came into class, same as before. He didn’t even have the sense to order the removal of Brett’s desk—it just sat there, empty, tipping his scales of grief all the way over.
On his better days, he looked like he’d been woken from a deep sleep. Mostly like he’d been exhumed from his own grave. He didn’t yell anymore. We suddenly found ourselves straining to hear him, as if trying to pick up the beat of a weak pulse. Even though he was obviously suffering to the point of becoming a caricature of suffering, he got (not surprisingly) little empathy from his pupils. They only noticed that before he had been industrially furious and now he was utterly remote. Once he lost the essays the class had written. He pointed listlessly to me. “They’re somewhere in my car, Jasper, go look for them,” he said, throwing me the keys. I went to his car. A Volkswagen covered in dust. Inside I found empty food containers, wet clothes, and a prawn, but no essays. When I went back empty-handed, he gave the class an exaggerated shrug. That’s how he was. And at the sound of the bell, when the students rapidly stuffed their books into their bags, wasn’t Mr. White packing up his things faster than anyone? It was almost like a competition, and now he always won. Yet for some reason he stayed on in his job, day after miserable day.
On day after class he asked me to wait behind. All the other students winked at me to signify they thought I was in trouble and it pleased them to know it. But it was only that Mr. White wanted the recipe of the chocolate cake Brett and I had made that day. I told him I didn’t know it. Mr. White nodded for an unnaturally long time.
“Do you believe in the Bible, Jasper?” he asked suddenly.
“In the same way I believe in ‘Hound of the Baskervilles.’”
“I think I understand.”
“The problem is most of the time when God’s supposed to be the hero, he comes across as the villain. I mean, look at what he did to Lot’s wife. What kind of divine being turns a man’s wife into a pillar of salt? What was her crime? Turning her head? You have to admit this is a God hopelessly locked in time, not free of it; otherwise he might have confounded the ancients by turning her into a flat-screen television or at least a pillar of Velcro.”
From the look on Mr. White’s face, I could tell he wasn’t following the lucid argument I was, not proudly, plagiarizing from one of Dad’s midnight sermons. Anyway, what was I talking about? Why was I haranguing a man who looked like the rotting stump of an old tree? It seemed I was able to do anything for a suffering man except be nice to his Deity.
What I should’ve said was this: “Why don’t you quit? Get out of here! Change schools! Change jobs! Change lives!”
But I didn’t.
I let him go on thrashing about in his cage.
“Well, anyway, I guess you’d better get to your next class,” he said, and the way he fiddled with his tie made me want to burst into tears. That’s the problem with people who suffer right in your face. They can’t so much as scratch their noses without its being poignant.
Not long after that, Dad came to pick me up from school. That wasn’t as rare as you might think. After exhausting his daily activities—waking up (an hour), breakfast (half hour), reading (four hours), walking (two hours), staring (two hours), blinking (forty-five minutes), he’d come and get me as “something to do.”
When I arrived at the school gate, Dad was already waiting for me in his unwashed clothes, his face carelessly shaven.
“Who is that grim man gaping at me?” he said as I arrived.
“Who?”
I turned to see Mr. White peering at us from the classroom window in a trance, as if we were doing something strange and fascinating, and I suddenly felt like a monkey to Dad’s organ grinder.
“That’s my English teacher. His son died.”
“He looks familiar.”
“He should. You harassed him for about forty minutes one day.”
“Really? What do you mean?”
“You came into the class and abused him for no reason. You don’t remember?”
“Honestly—no. But who keeps track of things like that? You say he lost his son, eh?”
“Brett. He was my friend.”
Dad looked at me with surprise. “You didn’t tell me that.”
“He wasn’t my best friend or anything,” I said. “We were just, you know, hated by the same people.”
“How did he die? Drug overdose?”
“Suicide.”
“Suicide by drug overdose?”
“He jumped off a cliff.”
Dad turned back to Mr. White’s sad face peering out
the window. “I think I might go and talk to him.”
“Don’t.”
“Why not? The man’s grieving.”
“Exactly.”
“Exactly,” Dad agreed, though to a totally different idea from mine, because the next thing I knew he was striding over to the classroom window. The two of them stared at each other through the glass. I could see it all. I could see Dad tap on the window. I could see Mr. White open the window. I could see them talking amiably at first, then seriously, then Mr. White was crying and Dad had his arm through the window, resting it on Mr. White’s shoulder, even though the angle was awkward and unnatural. Then Dad came back over to me, his lips pursed as if whistling, though he wasn’t. He was just pursing his lips.
After this shadowy conference, Mr. White went crazy in class. Of course, after his outburst, no matter how much they made short gasping sounds and said things like “I don’t believe it!,” no one on the staff was really surprised, and they couldn’t even see what I could see all over Mr. White’s sudden eruption: Dad’s influence.
It happened like this: One morning Mr. White came to class with the face of a thumb that had soaked too long in the bath. Then he commenced the lesson by staring wide-eyed and penetratingly, singling out students with his eyes without letting up, then moving on to the next student. No one could match him. You couldn’t sustain eye contact with a pair of peepers like his. All you could do was lower your eyes and wait for him to pass over you, like the Angel of Death. He was leaning against his desk, this hollow man with the X-ray eyes. It was morning and I remember the windows were open; a layer of milky mist wafted in, and the air was so thick with the sea you could almost taste the plankton. There was an oppressive silence, just the sound of the ocean rising up and falling on the shore. The students watched him in breathless suspense.
“It’s funny that you need training to be a doctor or a lawyer but not to be a parent. Any dolt can do it, without so much as a one-day seminar. You, Simon, you could be a father tomorrow if you wanted.”
Everyone laughed, and rightly so. Simon was not someone you could imagine fucking anyone, ever.
