“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.
From: <Adam Sanecki>
To: <Thomas Pell>
Date: Sat, Jun 6, 2009 at 11:14 PM
Subject: ahoy-hoy
Hey. It’s been much too long, and I just wanted to see what you’re up to. Things have been the baddy with me (girl stuff, job stuff), but I just moved into a new place and now I’m trying to figure out what to do next. Write back if you get a chance. I go pretty much whole days without talking to anybody other than the front-desk guy at work. With superlative gut-bombs, Adam
His response came at four in the morning my time, which I didn’t have the brainpower to translate into India time. I was on my way to the bathroom, standing in my boxers, not at all sure that I wasn’t still asleep.
From: <Thomas Pell>
To: <Adam Sanecki>
Date: Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 3:58 AM
Subject: re: ahoy-hoy
You ask what I’m up to but I know this question isn’t yours, I have an image of a hired hand waving a treat in front of an animal’s burrow. Know that I do not need trapping or rescuing (interchangeable) whatever S or R have said, I am not happy but I am not unhappy, I am where I should be. I know you can wash guilt from your face like dried mud, I can’t, S and R know about Owl Creek, they won’t admit it, I write to you rather than them because I know you understand, you suffer, and most important, whatever you pretend, you remember.
For the next couple of hours I lay in bed wondering how you knew if you were having a heart attack. And the next night, after a sleepwalking day at work, I wrote to Thomas again, and again he wrote back at four in the morning. He’d been in India for just over a year, but he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, explain what he’d been doing there, except occasionally to ramble like someone dictating with a high fever. Mostly he just wanted to talk about his past, particularly the parts related to our friendship and to the accident, as if he were fact-checking an encyclopedia.
Over the next few weeks, even if it probably wasn’t what Sally had in mind, I don’t think you could have said that I didn’t care. I was having my highway dream again, only now instead of praying to be run over I was praying not to be. Thomas and I were writing emails, sometimes three or four a day, that were as strange and as personal as any interaction we’d had since we’d exchanged boxers in eighth grade, for solidarity.
As the summer wore on, I figured that this might be the extent of it; that I’d keep writing to Thomas and keep talking to his parents and keep lying in my apartment at night thinking about being fifteen, and in this way I’d pay my debts. Wrong. At the beginning of July, Thomas wrote to his parents to say that if they didn’t stop trying to get him home, they’d never hear from him again. Around the same time he stopped responding to my emails, and at first, despite Richard and Sally’s mounting panic, I felt relief. He’d moved on to some other obsession, I figured, some other long-lost correspondent, and I’d be free to resume my life in the present. But after a week or two, by which time I’d begun to drift back toward pretending he didn’t exist, another email came from him, just one line long: