Random

by Lesley Choyce

  But this wasn’t really about fathers. This was about me. And, of course, it was about the boy on the bicycle.

  So what else? After the note, I left the house, caught the now familiar bus to Riverside. I don’t remember anything at all about the bus ride. Honest. No faces, no sounds. Nothing. But I did know where to get off.

  I got off at the exact location where my mom and dad were killed. I knew where it was. The corner of Memorial Highway and Silver Street. After the accident, I never once went to visit this place where they died. I’d driven past there with Will or Beth, but no one said a word, and I would turn my eyes up to the sky rather than focus on that corner.

  The Memorial part of the highway name had to do with dead soldiers, I think. I don’t know why Silver Street was named that. Why silver? Why not gold or platinum?

  I got off the bus and just stood there on the sidewalk. The highway was busy. Cars were moving pretty fast. There were a lot of trucks. Silver Street had a stop sign. I stared at that for a while, wondered how long it had been here. Cars were supposed to stop on Silver Street and wait for a break in traffic before getting onto Memorial Highway. You could only turn right. If you wanted to go left on Memorial, you would have to approach on another street. This did not look like a particularly dangerous intersection.

  Time seemed to have stopped. I looked up at the sky first. It was empty and pale blue, like the color of a robin’s egg. I looked around at the houses. Perfectly ordinary houses. There was a tree in the yard of the closest house. A maple tree, dropping those little helicopter seed pods that were spinning down from the leaves. I decided I liked the maple tree. It was an old, solid-looking tree and it would have been here the night they died. One of them might have noticed it, I thought, although it was getting dark then and maybe they didn’t see it at all. I just like to think that they did and that now I was admiring the same tree. A connection.

  I stared at the links in the chain-link fence along the sidewalk. The fence that separated a small, rather shabby baseball field from the highway. The fence was somewhat rusty and bent down a bit in places. It looked like people must have been climbing over it, but I don’t know why anyone would do that, when you could just walk around it easily enough there, at the corner of Silver Street.

  The sidewalk took my attention for a while. Concrete. Chewing gum smushed into it in places, by people standing there waiting for the bus. No one else was standing here now, waiting. The next bus was probably a long way off.

  There were cracks in the concrete—random patterns.

  Nothing special. Nothing important.

  I started to wonder how long I’d have to stay here. What exactly was I expecting to happen?

  I took a picture out of my wallet. Henry, Seal, and me. I must have been about ten in the picture. The sun was in my eyes and I was squinting. Henry and Seal were looking at the camera. I don’t know where the photo was taken. I just remember that my mom had asked a stranger to take the picture. The two adults in the photo seemed very familiar and very close to me. What I mean is that it seemed like I’d been with them yesterday or the day before. Like they had never gone away. But the boy in the photo appeared to me as a complete stranger.

  Had I ever really been the boy in that photo? Maybe the kid was just a stand-in. Two adults asking a random kid to have his photo taken with them. Maybe.

  An older teenage couple walked by me then. They were holding hands and laughing. Boy and a girl. Pierced lip on the girl. Pierced eyebrow on the guy. They looked at me and nodded. Maybe they thought I was waiting for the bus. I was inconsequential to them, and suddenly I thought it amazing that people could look at me, right here, at this important moment in my life, this powerfully significant location, and not know what was going on in my head.

  I looked at the oncoming traffic. A constant flow. Cars passing. All flowing smoothly. Nobody on Silver Street seemed the slightest bit interested in driving to the stop sign and then entering the highway. Silver Street was quiet and empty. I peered down this empty street and suddenly caught the glimpse of something shiny. A little kid on a bike—just a split second image of him turning into a driveway, and then he was gone.

  And then I looked back at the stop sign. I felt myself being swallowed by a cold wave of something that consumed me from head to toe. The boy on the bike. They had said he was about eleven or twelve. My age at the time. There had been, the police said, this boy on a bike who must have gone through the stop sign, recklessly heading out into the traffic, directly in front of my parents. And as Henry had slammed on his brakes, the garbage truck driver behind him did not react quickly enough. There had been no brake lights. Nothing.

  The boy had been spared. He had veered quickly away and then left the scene immediately. Vanished. He did not want to be blamed. I’m guessing at this but all the police could say was that someone had seen a boy on a bike, had witnessed him ride quickly away. Quickly away, I assume, into his own ordinary life, with his two ordinary parents. Quite possibly he did not tell them. He kept his secret, lest he be blamed.

  Now I know this next part is going to sound crazy, totally insane. But hear me out. I had arrived in my mind at my destination. Not just Memorial Highway and Silver Street but at the very time of the accident as well. But the perspective was wrong. I needed to be there on the highway, not just here on the sidewalk. I’d seen the photograph. It had appeared in the paper. It had been taken after the bodies had been removed. A rear-ended car. Crushed from behind. Glass all over the highway.

  My father must have kept his foot well planted on the brake pedal. The car had not been pushed very far—just across the width of Silver Street—and it stayed there right on the highway.

  But directly in front of me was where the impact would have occurred. There was a break in traffic and I stepped out onto the asphalt of the right-hand lane. I looked directly ahead now and envisioned the boy on the bike. I imagined him approaching in the dim light of evening. He was going way too fast and he was reckless, for sure. What was he thinking about that would allow him to ride right out into the traffic? Did he think he saw an opening between cars that he could have slipped through? Did he think he was going to ride right across the highway and not get hurt? I tried to get his face into focus by squinting my eyes like the boy in the wallet photograph.

  And then I recognized who it was. The boy that I imagined on the bike was me.

  And what had I been thinking, stepping out into the flow of traffic myself just then? Did I think the drivers would just steer around me? But time had stopped. And I was seeing what my father and mother had seen just before the garbage truck made impact. I was looking at the swerving boy on the bike.

  One driver lay hard on his horn, slipped over into the passing lane and never slowed at all. I tried to move my legs. I honestly tried but they would not move. I could twist my neck around and see the oncoming cars. It was an open, straight stretch of highway. The driver of each speeding car seemed to take the lead from the one before it, realize something or someone was in the lane ahead, and they inched their way over and just kept going.

  I could turn now, fully around, facing the traffic, strangely fascinated by the fact that I had this power to make all those drivers move over. I heard their car horns and saw their angry faces as they passed. More than one driver yelled something but I couldn’t make out the words.

  But there was one car that was different. It did not move over into the passing lane and it was headed straight toward me. A woman was driving. She was talking on a cell phone. She was distracted. I could see her face clearly by the time she saw me. She dropped her phone and slammed on her brakes. I watched the car hurtling toward me but it was like in the movies—slow motion. I tried again to make my legs move, but they did not. I heard the squeal of the tires. I smelled the burning rubber.

  And then it stopped.

  I fell to my knees and lowered my head.

  The woman got out of the car and began to scream at me. No one else stopped. The
traffic continued to simply move over into the passing lane and kept going. “Get up!” the woman shouted. “You could have been killed. Are you crazy?”

  I looked up at her then and watched her angry face shift ever so slowly to something else. She saw something in my eyes. She looked frantically around, realizing the danger we were both in. She grabbed my arm with a fierce grip. “Get in the car,” she said, lifting me.

  I did as she said. I got in the car. She turned the corner onto Silver Street and pulled over to the side of the road after we were well away from the highway. Without saying a word, she got out of the car again and sat down on the grass by the curb. When I got out and walked over to her, I said, “I’m so sorry.” But I could not begin to explain to her why I’d done something so crazy. I just kept repeating, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” She had her head down now and was crying. My own tears did not come.

  A few neighbors were watching, but no one seemed to want to get involved. I knew the smart thing to do would have been to get away from there before someone phoned the police. All I had to do was run. Just disappear. But I thought about the boy on the bike again. So I stayed.

  I sat down on the curb beside the crying woman and I put my arm around her. She didn’t pull away. I felt responsible for her pain and expected her to get angry at me any second and start screaming at me. But she didn’t.

  Eventually, she turned to me, wiped away her tears, and just looked up into my eyes. She must have seen my own fear, my confusion, and my pain. “Are you all right?” she finally asked.

  “Yeah. You?”

  “I will be,” she said, her whole body shaking now. “You want to tell me what that was about?”

  I figured I had no choice. I owed her that much. I told her my story. Then she said her name was Marie and she asked me where I lived. I told her. And then she offered to drive me home and I accepted. She was maybe forty years old, a mother of twin boys who were eight. But she said her third child, a girl, died not long after she was born and she’d never been quite the same since. She didn’t tell me her last name or where she lived. When she dropped me off at my house, she asked again if I was going to be okay. I said yes and I apologized yet one more time.

  And now I’m back in my room. Will and Beth have gone out food shopping. I will probably not tell them any of this. Just for the record, I, of course, was not really the boy on the bike that day. I was home working on my homework, as you recall. But for a long, long time, I must have dreamed it or imagined it and lived with it in my head. I identified with that damn kid on the bike. And I had blamed myself for the death of Henry and Seal. And when I discovered I could not live with the ferocity of that blame, once I had moved on to new parents and a new home, I had said goodbye to Joey-1, to Joseph One, and become Joe—Joseph Two. And, quite possibly, that had been a mistake.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I have a theory. And the theory is this. For every theory, there is an equal and opposite theory. And I know you are probably more interested in hearing more about the boy who was standing in the highway than the one sitting here talking into the microphone of his digital diary right now, but my diary days are numbered. In fact, I think they are just about over. But the Joe Campbell sitting in this room now is tossing about a few ideas. Tossing about futures. Tossing about visions of his past.

  In ancient Greece, according to my Mom’s old OED, a theor was an ambassador sent to a foreign country to consult an oracle. An oracle was someone who could see into the future. The theor would go find the seer and bring home the news to his king, be it good or ill. A theory was a whole delegation of theors, since apparently it sometimes required more than one man to carry the weight of the future back to the homeland.

  Later, in English, a “theory” grew to mean a possible explanation for why things are the way they are. Sometimes the theory is based on hard empirical evidence, upon experiments and rigorous testing. Sometimes a theory can be pure speculation. In either case, sometimes a theory proves true, sometimes false. Sometimes it appears to be true for hundreds of years until a new explanation comes along. A better one, a more provable one that will again, one day further into the future, be deemed untrue.

  Sometimes, an open-minded person (like myself, for example) can hold two opposing theories in his head at the same time. Possibly even believe both of them, despite the fact that it is illogical to believe in A and also in its opposite, B, at the same time. I still believe that I myself have been conjured up by this random universe through a random set of events, and yet, as I have traveled back into resolving the crisis of the two Josephs, I discover odd linkages, patterns, if you will.

  And therein lies, possibly, meaning.

  The boy on the bike is still me. Is now and forever more. I cannot fully forgive myself for the death of my parents. (Don’t tell me this is not logical. It’s just the way it is.) But I’ve reconnected with the twelve-year-old. (And yes, I realize it was not really me but some other cowardly, unnamed boy who sped away that day on his bike, unscathed but not, I dare say, unwounded.) And both boys remind me that there is another pilgrimage I must make soon. To the gravesite where I have not been since the day of the funeral. I think I’ll give that some more time yet. I’ve gathered up the courage for Charlene, for the living room, and then for the corner of Memorial Highway and Silver Street. I need a bit more time yet for the journey to their resting place. And once I am there, I want it to be a beginning of something, not an end.

  I never did get the full story of Marie. I expect I will never see her again. But there was something that happened there that meant something to her. My stupidity had an effect on her life, possibly a life-changing one. She knows where I live. Perhaps someday she will stop to tell me what else went on in her head that Saturday. Perhaps not. I just know that there will be other strangers in my life who will help me. And I will be on the lookout for them.

  Whoever you are, reading this, fear not. I will not go looking for another close call with death again. I didn’t really go looking for that at all. Let’s say that it just happened. I am through with standing in highways. Been there. Done that.

  Back to my two theories. Nothing happens for a purpose. Everything happens for a purpose. Equal and opposite. I’m sorry, but that’s the way I see it. Even when something has no meaning, no meaningful directed series of events, there is a result.

  I thought that last entry would be the final one. But I guess I was wrong. It’s been a while since then, but tonight I had this feeling I should make one further report.

  I told my parents I want the hyphenation of my name. Maybe not right now. But the year I graduate from high school. I want to become Joseph Campbell-MacDonald and then travel around Scotland for the summer. I’m curious to see how people in Scotland will react. I’ll take a guitar with me and a book or two of poetry. And if all goes well, Gloria will join me. I’ve already told her about the plan. She’s skeptical but I have time yet to convince her. I’ll make sure we eat well as we travel, stopping to buy organic food from health food stores and farmers. And on occasion, if I can get up the courage, I’ll stop on a city street and read poetry out loud as I play guitar, and people will throw some change in my guitar case. Gloria and I will sleep in hostels and visit ancient pagan sites of standing stones.

  But that’s a long way off.

  I’m working with the random clues now. I open my mother’s old OED to any page and let my eye fall on whatever word is there. Today it is the word “comprehend,” which once meant to overtake and now means to “grasp with the mind,” or “to know a thing as well as that thing can be known,” as the poet John Donne says.

  And there is certainly a lot of grasping going on in my mind. A lot of holding on.

  I am still holding on to Gloria. She is out of the hospital but still taking medication. Her parents are attempting to live together. Dad in the basement, Mom upstairs. Gloria is, I think, being held as an emotional hostage between them. She’s back in school but not out of the woods yet,
as they say. She comes to my house and sleeps with me each Saturday night. I hold her and, no, we still don’t have sex. But someday. Maybe. Not now.

  I’m sure that appears very odd to those that know that we are sleeping together. My parents seem to have adjusted. Gloria’s parents are confused by it, uncertain. But Gloria insists.

  I miss the old Gloria. I miss the spark. I’m hoping it will return. These things take time.

  She works with me at the health food store on weekends. (Yes, we’re even open Sundays.) I’ve counseled her in glucosamine and amino acids, flax seed oil, and luten. She’s learned the ropes quickly and we make a good team.

  But I know what you are thinking.

  This all seems a little bit too tidy. And that is not necessarily the way life is.

  X marks the spot. At any given moment in our lives, we are at a crossroads, an intersection of past and present. This is where I am now, digital diary. I am still a boy of sixteen years of age. Confused but purposeful. The story so far, as they say, is now contained. It is an artifact. It will end soon (as you can tell). I’m trying a bit too hard to end it, to leave it with an ending. But there is none.

  If all the audio files were etched onto a memory chip and sent into deep space, what would those potential sentient aliens who decode it think of me? What would they make of my life? Would I be the hero with the thousand faces, or just an orphaned and adopted boy, floundering in his own life?