At the Bottom of Everything (11 page)

And the only answer I can give myself, which might not make particular sense, is that I think it did wreck my life, but maybe only in the way that the collapse of an underground water-pipe system would wreck the life of a city. Which is to say: thoroughly but also, for a while at least, invisibly. So yes, I was back at school just a month after the accident, asking my history teacher smart-ass questions, playing with the new pitch speedometer the PE department had bought, and looking, to anyone who cared, like just the same ordinary, obnoxious fifteen-year-old I’d been on the last day of school the June before. But I was also having my first panic attacks (I woke up one night drenched and freezing, and when I was finally able to walk I went and took a Valium from my mom’s medicine cabinet). For the first time in my life I was forgetting to eat. And sometimes in class, when I didn’t even know I was feeling
especially nervous, I’d look down and see that my leg was shaking, and the only thing I could do to control it was to press down on my thigh as hard as I could with the corner of a book. So, all was not OK.

One thing that was visibly different, once we were back at school, was that I couldn’t be friends with Thomas anymore. I usually hate it when people say that they “couldn’t” do things like that (“I just couldn’t tell him,” “I just couldn’t leave the store without it”), but in this case I mean it physically: to keep going over to his house, talking to his parents, lying on the floor in his room, would have been like forcing myself to eat a human finger. I couldn’t do it. I needed our fates, whatever they were, to be untangled.

It took Thomas a month or two to realize what was happening, and it may have taken me some time too. He’d stand waiting for me near the front steps where we usually met to walk to the bus stop and I’d wait inside, talking to baseball people in the lounge, until I’d see him leave. Or he’d call my house at night (I had my own line, so it only rang on the flat red-and-black phone in my room) and, after some number of tries, I’d just turn the ringer off. I did go over to his house a handful of times that fall, but I’d do everything I could to steer us away from talking about what had happened. I told him (I made sure, when we took walks now, that we walked up Macomb, away from Connecticut) about a girl named Ellen who I was starting to date. I had him explain to me in as much detail as he could what his mom’s case against a real estate developer was about. Once in the middle of something I was saying about baseball (Thomas pretended, periodically, to be interested in learning what all the statistics meant), he said, “Just so you know, I looked her up the other day.”

“Who?” I said. Inside me a hundred knives flew from their knife blocks. He ignored me.

“She went to Sidwell. Her parents live like five houses from Amy Crowley. Her brother’s in med school at Hopkins.”

“Why would I want to know this?”

“I think it’s important. We can’t just pretend that …”

I told him I absolutely could just pretend and, as soon as we were back in front of his house, I told him I had to go.

Another afternoon (it must have been the weekend, because his parents were home) we’d been up in his room and I went downstairs to pee, which meant walking past Richard’s office. Richard usually spent his weekends at his desk, wearing reading glasses on the end of his nose, staring at his ancient gray computer. As I walked past I heard him say, “
Psst
, Adam, hey, come in here for a minute.”

If robots ever become capable of meaningful communication with people, I think tone of voice, the density of information in it, is going to be one of the last things they master. I understood right away, by a kind of overheartiness, that Richard was embarrassed about whatever he was going to say to me, and, by the suddenness of how he called my name, that he’d been looking for an opportunity to have this conversation for a while. I also knew he didn’t know anything about the accident—that would have been in his voice too—but still my legs went cold.

I sat down on the same corduroy armchair where I’d sat on a dozen other weekend afternoons getting help on English papers, under the white-framed window and the picture of Sally lifting baby Thomas onto a hay bale. On those English-paper afternoons Richard would sit reading, cross-legged, the tip of his pen hovering over the page, and I’d count rooftops through the window, feeling as if I were waiting for a wizard to cast a spell on me. Now he sat forward in his chair, his hands on his knees, and he’d just started to say “So” when he stood up to push the door shut.

“Do you think—there isn’t, ah, any way I know not to feel a bit as if I’m accosting you here—but do you think there’s anything
going on
with Thomas, from your vantage point? I know he’s always going to present to Sally and me with the humble-scholar routine, but lately I’m getting something else, as a kind of bass line, maybe an angry vibe? Or shame?
I don’t want you to feel under the Stasi’s lamp here—if you’d rather not talk about it just say so and I’ll go back to agonizing at my desk, which maybe I should have done from the beginning.”

No, I said, I hadn’t really noticed anything. Maybe it was just that there was more pressure now at school (as sophomores we’d started having monthly meetings with college counselors), or maybe it was just social stuff (by which I knew Richard would understand that I meant girlfriends and parties). As I was sitting there I thought: I’ve never lied to one of Thomas’s parents like this before. It’s so easy and so sad.

“I’d wondered how the whole ascetic thing was playing at school,” Richard said. “And the trouble is I know where it comes from—you see old pictures of me and I’ve got this scowl, this kind of one-pointed,
I’m-much-too-serious-for-happiness
look, and now here it all comes again and I just don’t know how somebody gets out of it except to grow up. Which seems OK until your kid’s the one suffering. Well, he’ll figure it out. Thanks for indulging me. And look, without getting too concerned-adult-putting-his-arm-around-you here, think about trying to convince him to come along to a party or something the next time you go. He’s not as set in stone about all this as he thinks he is. He could really use you.”

I walked out and back upstairs to Thomas’s room, not quite believing that Richard was really sitting there in his office now thinking that everything would be better if only I invited Thomas to Roy Donnelly’s next party. Sally called out good-bye to me that afternoon the way she always did (asking if I was sure I wouldn’t stay for dinner, telling me to give my mom a hug), and I went along with it, singing my little part in our duet, standing in the doorway to the kitchen, but I just knew, as sure as if I’d been leaving for college the next day, that I wasn’t going to be back.

And I wasn’t, really (there may have been another time or two, but no more than that). First I stopped going over to
the Pells’ house, then I stopped looking for Thomas between classes, then I stopped saying hi to him in the halls completely. It was weird but it was also, once we were started on it, impossible to reverse; you can’t go from ignoring someone to saying hi without some sort of conversation in between, some fight or explanation, but there was nothing I was willing to fight about, nothing I was willing to explain.

That summer Thomas worked again for the professor friend of his dad’s; I went to a three-week baseball camp in Florida and spent the rest of my time going to the kinds of parties that I’d spent the summer before avoiding. At some point junior year Thomas seemed to accept that we weren’t friends anymore. A couple of times, on parent-teacher nights or at awards assemblies, I’d see either Sally or Richard, and Richard would just give me a tight smile, but Sally would say, “You just
have
to come see us. We miss you!” But everyone understood, or seemed to think they understood: best friendships ended all the time.

My mom said to me sometimes (it was one of her handful of subjects, along with whether I thought it would be fun to go on a beach vacation once I graduated) that she’d always thought Thomas and I were a strange pair. And, she said, even though she never would have wanted to say it before, she always got the feeling that the Pells thought they were better than everyone else. Did I know (yes, I did) that she’d once left Sally a message asking if they’d come over for dinner and she had never even called her
back
? Oh well, she said. I’m sure he’ll go on and get very good grades somewhere.

At the end of our senior year there was a class dinner out on the soccer field with caterers and round tables and a white tent; all the guys wore jackets and all the girls wore dresses and had their hair done up like ribbons (the end of senior year at Dupont is like the grand finale at a fireworks show: a dozen overlapping ceremonies and honors and farewells). By that time in the school year pretty much all the barriers between
teachers and students have broken down; teachers let us call them by their first names, and they’d spend their class periods leading dreamy, what-does-it-all-mean discussions about how even though this particular group would never reassemble, we’d always have this shared experience to look back on, etc.

By bad luck, or by some parent-teacher committee’s bad planning, Thomas and I were seated at the same table. We were a couple of chairs apart, and I spent most of the dinner talking intently to Philip Shailes on my left, who was the most boring person in our class, and who was telling me how he was planning to buy all his lamps and blankets at Bed Bath & Beyond now because they always jacked up the prices in August.

This was the kind of dinner where people drift away from the table as soon as the food is done to sit with their actual friends or to have heartfelt conversations with people they’ll never see again. So there were a couple of minutes after the last of our table-mates had stood up, when Thomas and I were left alone. We looked at each other like a deer and a hunter, but I’m not sure who was who. Looking directly at him for the first time in a while, I could see that his skin was less delicate than it had been; now there was stubble on his chin and above his lip. He wore a light blue shirt and black pants that Sally must have bought him for graduation. “So,” he said, “how’re the wife and kids?”

“Oh, good, good. Yours?”

“Can’t complain, can’t complain. Actually,” he said, breaking into his normal voice, “can complain pretty easily.”

I nodded.

Thomas and I, who’d seen each other naked in the aquatic center locker room, who’d woken up a hundred times on side-by-side mattresses, who shared a secret more serious than any married couple … now we were awkward together. Awkwardness is like crabgrass: leave anything, anything at all,
untended for long enough and it will grow until you can’t see the concrete underneath.

“I heard you got into Penn,” he said.

“Yup. You’re going to Columbia?”

“Yup. Maybe you’ll come to New York some weekend.”

I nodded and shrugged.

“This has really been the Arc of all Arc de Triomphes, huh?” he said.

I nodded and did something with my face that looked like a smile but that said:
Don’t try it, we’re done, it’s too late
.

He leaned away from the table in a way that meant he was about to stand up, but before he did he pulled a pen out of his pocket (one of the same blue pens that Richard always used on my English papers) and, on the bottom edge of my “A Banquet Under the Stars” program, he wrote two things:

Gut-bomb
(which is what we’d used to sometimes say instead of good-bye); and, underneath that, in smaller writing:
Remember Owl Creek
. And then (did he smirk?) he was up and out of the tent, off to the bathroom to congratulate himself on having gotten through to me.

And he had, for a few minutes at least. I felt like I’d swallowed the point of his pen.

Sometimes as an adult I’ll see one of those garbage trucks that they send out for special pickups, the ones with giant compactors built into their backs; they go around grabbing and crushing things like couches and car bumpers and wooden banisters, little landfills on wheels. And I always think, when I’m watching one work its way down the street,
No way, not that, it couldn’t just swallow that
, but then it does, gulping down the refrigerator or whatever with just a little pause, and then off it goes.

There would have been about a dozen points, if you’d come to me when I was twelve, when I’d just arrived at Dupont with my green braces and my Redskins hat, and told me all the things that would happen over the next few years, when I
would have said,
No, I won’t be able to handle that. Sorry, I’ll have to die
. But I could handle it, as it turned out, or I could live with it, or anyway I could live with it so far.

I tore off the bottom strip of my program, ripped the strip into confetti, and dropped the confetti into my water glass, and, before I got up to check if all the cake was gone, I dumped the whole mess in the grass under my chair.

I did finally write to Thomas, not the night of Sally’s email but the one after. There are limits, it turns out, to how much guilt even I can cart around.