“Because we’re going to fucking die?”
“We are, yes, I am, I understand that now. And I understand that I needed to, that I always needed to die, for me to get where I’m going I couldn’t live, and I just wish you didn’t have to—”
If my consciousness had been a symphony, this next phase would have been the work of an experimental composer, someone shunned by the academy, someone whose pieces included things like musicians snapping their instruments over their knees and tearing up their sheet music. Bodily, I was now lying on my side, against the wall, every so often dipping my fingertip in the mouth of the water bottle to moisten my lips, but mentally, or anyway in the parts of the body that experience things invisibly, I was in hell. “Life flashing before my eyes” doesn’t describe it, because flashes are brief, and because this wasn’t my whole life, or even particularly important parts of it. It was more like someone had filled a row of buckets from the lake of my life, and now that person was dunking my head in them, one after another, until I nearly drowned.
One bucket:
I saw my mom sitting at the head of our kitchen table in Baltimore, eating soup from one of our chipped white bowls. The sky outside was silver; there was a sound somewhere of an airplane or an air conditioner. On the table in front of her, spread out under her bowl, was one of her health magazines. She had a big pale spoonful of broth and she was blowing on it in this way I would never have thought I remembered: the exact pattern of the wrinkles around her lips when she puckered, the precise little shushing noise. And for some reason the me in the memory was in agony; the sense was that I’d been told I had to wait for something, or that, as a punishment, I wasn’t allowed to speak. There was a willful-ignoring quality in how she was blowing on the soup, I think, a kind of defiant unconcern. How old was I when this had happened? Six? Seven?
Another bucket:
I was in seventh grade, new to Dupont, and I was sitting in Principal Weaning’s office, watching her pull the door shut. What had I done? I felt as if I were trying not to cry. One of the venetian blinds was bent. I could hear the phone ringing and then the secretary’s voice out in the waiting room. There was a stringy half-dead plant on the windowsill. Now I remembered what I’d done: I’d lied that my real dad had been killed in a plane crash over the weekend in California. In homeroom, thinking it would be a joke, I’d leaned over to Scott Owens and whispered it, and then it had become too late: Justin Durand, Mrs. Nusk, shaky-handed sympathy hugs, a disastrous sense of being pinned in a trap. I was crying, wiping my nose with one of the thin and scraping tissues from the box on the desk, while Principal Weaning, her hands crossed in front of her, leaned toward me with a self-satisfied yellow smile and said, “Now, why did you lie, Adam? Why would you lie about something like that?”
On the floor of the cave, now, I was crying too, and shaking as if the ground beneath me had become electrified. Apparently drug addicts, in their first days of withdrawal, sweat out their substances; they writhe and scream and soak the sheets. “I hate you, Thomas,” I heard myself saying. “I wish I’d never met you. I wish I’d never come.”
“I’m sorry. I wish it had been someone else, I really do. I’m going to pray now, OK? I’m sorry, I need to, I’m sorry.”
Another bucket, only it wasn’t my life, it wasn’t my memory:
It was the middle of the night and traffic lights were flashing and crickets were making a high hum, and I was standing alone on the curb of a familiar street. Everything had a kind of electron-microscope clarity: the glossiness of the asphalt, the ticking of the lights, the smell of the mulch, the reflections in the glass of the bus stop. I looked left, then stepped off the curb in a fluid hop. As I crossed the street I could feel, like a plunging thermometer, a car rolling out somewhere to my right. I couldn’t turn my head but I knew it was there. The other car came more as a blaze of light than as an object; it wasn’t there, and then it was.
At this point the memory, or whatever it was, branched in two, or maybe I branched in two. I was in my body and I was watching it. A piece of music with two parts.
The impact of a head against pavement is, when it happens, so ordinary; that’s maybe the worst part about it. The laws that govern watermelons dropped from overpasses, pumpkins thrown from porches; they apply to our most precious possessions too. I can’t say whether I jumped or screamed or what; I can only describe the feeling, which was pain, yes, the worst sort of ripping, brain-bursting pain, but also something much worse and much harder to explain. A kind of sinking into an icy ocean, maybe. The sort of falling you do in dreams but without the bolting awake: just down, down, down.