by Dodds, Colin
And death—my death and every death—was always there, just waiting. But you could lose it pretty easily, like you can lose the late afternoon sun in the downtown of a city. You only had to turn a corner, and it was gone.
From the road, I saw the lights I was looking for, and turned.
Epilogue
64.
New Haven is the line. It separates the New England and New York spheres of influence, separates Red Sox and Yankees fans, separates the dour authority of the British Puritans from the avaricious free-for-all of the Dutch merchants, separates the winter that is a way of life from the winter that is an inconvenience.
I had made the New York-to-Worcester trip hundreds of times—in a car, a train, a bus—and I always felt the changeover. This time, I crossed through the Heroes Tunnel on the Merritt Parkway. It was a few weeks after Christmas, a year after Joe was killed. I knew it was going to be a triathlon of sadness. But sadness becomes less of a good reason to do or not do something as time goes on. I got the day off work and rented a car.
New Haven and Hartford sprang up and drifted by with memories of being a teenager, knowing nothing and acting stupidly, wanting love or transcendence and not knowing how to find them. I remembered how the Hartford bus station’s grimy possibility had stirred me, back when nearly every place in the world had seemed an improvement.
The intervening year had taken its toll. I lost Serena and gained twenty pounds. Dad healed. I went back to New York, and turned thirty. I held my tongue and took a job for less pay. The days rolled in and out, growing imperceptibly easier as they did. The months of living on an emotional diet of weeping, rage and exhaustion had passed, and had changed me. But I’d rejoined the living. At the end of the summer, I’d even met a special sort of girl, and I was thinking of proposing to her.
Joe was not altogether gone. He came now and then in dreams. Once I met him at Spag’s, which was still open in the dream. He was working at the garden shop, by the rear parking lot. They were holding a carnival there, just like they never did. Joe was angry with me, because I’d gained so much weight. I tried to joke it off, to say how glad I was to see him. But he wouldn’t let it go. After he’d harangued me for too long, I asked him what death was like.
“I can’t tell you that,” Joe said, his face in half a grin. “It’s against the rules.”
“Come on, man. It’s me. Anyway, you break the rules all the time,” I said.
“Not these rules,” he said, his grin flattening.
“You’re a dick,” I said, to which he gave me his big, confrontational smile.
I was only up for the day, and only up to see Joe’s grave. Dad’s job had transferred him to Florida in September. I’d seen Mom over Christmas in Framingham. Olive had asked me to call her the next time I was in the area, but I didn’t.
The grave was just a bronze plaque screwed into the lawn in the middle of nowhere. I had gone back because Joe mattered to me. And he still had to matter, dead or not, or else I myself would be lost. Maybe that’s not perfect logic. But I am a small man in a large world, and it is the best I could do.
65.
Marissa had moved into a three-decker on Vernon Hill. She shouted my name from the second-floor balcony, waving a Budweiser and a cigarette. I got my bag out of the rental car and climbed the stairs. Her ex-boyfriend had her daughter for the night and she was having some friends over. She hugged me hard in the hallway.
“Jim, I’m so glad you’re here. I miss him so much,” she said, holding on.
“Me too,” I said, not sure of what I meant. I’d been wary of maudlin outbursts and generally suspicious of my own emotions for a year by then. I never wanted to make mourning my vocation. But there I was.
The party started out fun—Marissa fought a guy on crutches and we all drank and drank. A Puerto Rican schoolteacher who was slurring her words got upset and ran off, leaving behind her purse and cell phone. Marissa gave me a folder of Joe’s old drawings of robots and war scenes to flip through. A drunk skinny blonde kept trying to kiss me in between her crying jags. Finally some guy in a backwards baseball hat, first called her ex-husband, then her husband, showed up.
There was a lot of talk about what a fun guy, a great friend, a unique soul Joe was. He had become the perfect excuse to get bombed. There was enough weeping and toasting that it seemed impossible that Joe’s grave would be so bare the next afternoon. And the grave—that was the reality. You can interpret and re-interpret what happens to you. But reality only lets you get away with so much.
After midnight, the cocaine arrived and the party got its second lease on life. People still talked about Joe’s death, but only as it referred back to them. His death taught them to do this and not to do that. Or he died because, unlike themselves, he did that. Or it was this noble virtue, which they also possess, that Joe died for.
I got tired, and curled up in the small, pink bed in Marissa’s daughter’s room. Below the Strawberry Shortcake poster, I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. But through the door, the party kept on. Marissa and a girl who’d shown up late yelled like a coke-fueled amen corner about how the girl was going to get Marissa a job at the rent-a-car company where she worked. Then Marissa’s boyfriend showed up and left with the girl to get more coke. They were gone far too long, so that Marissa started a big fight when he got back. None of it involved me, except that it kept me awake.
The next day, everyone left at Marissa’s was too fucked up or too busy to make it out to the cemetery. Everyone loves the dead, right up until it costs something, I thought, bitterly.
The roads and little towns looked different from a year before. It had been a warm winter, and there was no snow on the ground. But I remembered the route to the cemetery.
It was bright and windy in the graveyard. Mild as it was, January in Massachusetts was a haunted place, full of jarring similarities to the same time a year before. I put down my flowers on the bronze plaque Joe shared with his grandfather, grandmother and mother, whose death date was blank. By that point, I knew better than to expect catharsis or relief from even prolonged weeping. But there I was.
Glad to have gone alone, I searched for an appropriate thing to say to the ground, for a proper prayer to offer. I considered my girlfriend, considered the good times I’d found in the last year, even considered the tasty egg sandwich I’d eaten on the way to the graveyard. I said a prayer of thanks that I was still alive. I stood up and thought of the party the night before. The world seemed too threadbare to stand losing a person like Joe.
I put my knee back on the ground and prayed that the universe is more efficient than it looks.
I prayed that important parts of it are not so easily lost. I prayed hard, then walked back to my rental car. It was a long drive home.
THE END
May 18, 2009
Brooklyn, NY, USA
Colin Dodds' writing has appeared in a number of periodicals, including The Wall Street Journal Online, Folio, Explosion-Proof, Block Magazine, The Architect’s Newspaper, The Reno News & Review and Lungfull! Magazine. One of his screenplays, Refreshment – A Tragedy, was named a semi-finalist in 2010 American Zoetrope Screenplay Contest. Before he died, Norman Mailer wrote that one of Dodds’ novels showed “something that very few writers have; a species of inner talent that owes very little to other people.” He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife Samantha.
Other Books by Colin Dodds
Poetry
Last Man on the Moon
The Blue Blueprint
Heaven Unbuilt
Novels
Fun’s Monsters
Last Bad Job
What Smiled at Him
Screenplays
Refreshment — a tragedy
