25
I sleep it off in my bunk. When I wake up, we’re still driving, on Interstate 90, jumping off onto 94 toward Minneapolis. We play a show there that night, then follow the interstate up into the great stretches of nowhere, past Fargo, across North Dakota and Montana, where the country just becomes horizon for days on end. A succession of sunrises and sunsets with no obstructed views. God’s country. You meet the mountains just past Bozeman, climb up into the clouds, your cell phone merely an afterthought at this point, a stop in Missoula, Wild West Cowboy College Town, then through Idaho within hours, into Washington, down into the valley, Spokane on a Saturday night. Across the great green expanses of the state, barreling down on Seattle, the glimmering emerald in the bosom of the mountains. Mount Rainier over our left shoulders. Then 90 expires, and we head down 5, along the coast, Tacoma, on toward Portland. Trees for miles, patches of bright red clay, God’s dirt, the best there is. So clean and fresh, I almost consider shipping some back to the kids in the skyscrapers of Chicago, because they don’t know what they’re missing. Because words will never do it justice.
I love the long stretches between conversations best. The quiet is like blue waves running between screaming, tourist-filled islands. It doesn’t feel forced; it feels okay to just be breathing, to just be riding up front with the guys, our little family band. I cool my cheek against the window, watch my breath fog the glass. At night the sky is lit with a million jumbled stars, scattered across sheets of velvet. The stars out West are jokes on city kids like me. They make you feel insignificant, they put you in your place. The rain and the fog are almost invitations to slip this bus off the road, into the trees, the sounds of glass shattering and metal bending, one wheel still spinning and the smell of pine cutting so hard. I’d be okay with dying in the woods just off Interstate 5.
There is nothing but days of driving now, a lull in the schedule. Oregon at a leisurely pace, National Forests around every turn. Into California, like another world up north, just redwood trees and mountain peaks. We are bound for Sacramento, the odd-fitting capital city, like Albany, only more depressing. It seems like an afterthought, something they decided to give the people there because all the good stuff had already been handed out to LA and San Fran and San Diego. A consolation prize. A show there and then two by the Bay and then home again for a few days, then flying out East to begin another tour, different bus, different driver, the same eternally shifting world. Our video is in the top five of TRL; we will be doing appearances in Times Square. Our album is selling more and more copies every week, and the label thinks that, with a second single, it will go platinum. We are a priority now. The shareholders have freed up more funds; we will be shooting another video, going to the UK and the rest of Europe. But all of that is still months away. Right now, we are stopped at a rest area outside Willows, California, sitting on the picnic tables out by the pine trees. Right now I look out at the traffic headed north, feeling the fleeting summer breeze on my neck, almost like a kiss or a caress. A wave good-bye. Right now I get a call on my cell phone, from a Chicago number I don’t recognize. I answer. It’s Her roommate. Right now she is crying on the other end of the line. Right now I hit the ground.
26
There was an accident. She was apparently driving drunk, hit a guardrail. No one knows where she was going. No one knows where she was beforehand. None of that matters much. She’s in the hospital, a tube going into Her mouth, helping Her breathe. Tubes in Her arms are keeping Her alive. The remaining dates of the tour are canceled. I am on a plane bound for Chicago.
She’s in the same hospital that Her mother was in, only a different wing. The bad wing. I tell the nurse at the desk that I’m here to see Her, and she looks at me with sad eyes. I take the elevator up with an orderly and a kid in a wheelchair. His stomach is distended with cancer. They get off on a different floor. I walk down the hallway to Her room, feel the sickly warmth of illness, the slightly sweet odor of feces. Hospitals always smell the same. I am numb. When I get to Her room, Her mother and father are there, Her sister too. They all look up at me, and you can tell they haven’t slept, have been keeping vigil by Her bedside. Her parents are wondering why I am here, but they don’t say it. Her sister asks if maybe they’d like to go get some coffee, and they begrudgingly say yes. Her father wheels Her mother past me, and she looks up at me with tired, angry eyes.
She was on the interstate when it happened, Her sister tells me. She has a lacerated liver and a punctured lung, massive head trauma. The doctors don’t know if she’ll ever wake up. Her head is battered and bandaged, turned to the left. Her eyes are both black. Dark red cuts peek out from beneath the gauze. The tube in Her mouth is held in place by tape. She looks so small and broken in the bed, Her thin arms resting at Her sides, black nail polish still on the tips of Her fingers. Machines surround the bed, whirring, hushed things, helping Her breathe. The dainty drip of the saline in the plastic bag. The chart hanging by Her feet. The thick hospital blanket tucked into the mattress. She is never going to wake up. She is going to die. Everyone knows it.
Her parents are gone for a long time, so I sit in a chair in the corner of the room, looking at Her bashed-in face, Her wondrous eyes tightly shut. Occasionally Her lashes flutter, but Her sister says that’s just how these things go. She’s probably gone already, she says, and we’re looking at Her body. Her sister is brave. Braver than me when I was her age. Braver than me now too. A doctor comes into the room and looks at Her chart. We both stand up to greet him, and Her sister introduces me to him as “Her friend.” I shake his hand because that’s what you do in situations like this. Eventually, Her parents come back into the room, and Her father wheels Her mother next to the bed. I give him my chair and stand by the window. No one says anything. The hours drag on. The curtains flutter slightly. Eventually, visiting hours are over, and I leave because I am just a visitor. I cannot offer these people any comfort. I cannot change the situation. I feel stupid and small. I can tell I’m not welcome.
I go back to my apartment and the Disaster is already there. The room is filled with awful silence. The kind of silence that only happens when someone dies. He leaves and comes back with a bottle of Jameson, sets it on the table, and we drink it in silence. Nothing can possibly be said. I wonder if this is what he did when his baby died. I don’t say it because I already know the answer.
The next morning I am back at the hospital, sitting in the cafeteria. The room is full, but no one looks up from their table. I drink coffee from a paper cup. I wander the hallways, wondering how many ghosts are walking alongside me. I am putting off going to see Her because I don’t want to see Her like this. For the first time, the thought occurs to me that perhaps this is all my fault. That she was coming to find me. I remember our last night together, how awful I was to Her. I cry in the chapel, say a prayer to God, who decided two nights ago that Her number was up. I go up to Her room, and Her family is still sitting there, only now they’ve multiplied to include grave-faced aunts and uncles and weeping grandmothers. I don’t know any of them, and they do not acknowledge my presence. Because I have no place here.
The day goes on. Her sister and I have hushed conversations in the hallway about a funeral because Her mother doesn’t want Her to hear us talking about death. We don’t bother telling her that she can’t hear us anymore. Her sister tells me that she always knew she loved me, and that she would be happy that I am here. Later, as Her family is down in the cafeteria, I sit with Her and tell Her how sorry I am for letting Her down, for hurting Her. She can’t hear me. I watch Her chest rise and fall softly. Sometimes there are long gaps between breaths, and my heart pauses and a lump grows in my throat, and I’m begging Her to breathe again, and then she does, and everything returns to the way it was.
That night, as visiting hours are coming to an end, she is surrounded by doctors. Her family is crying and holding hands, telling Her they love Her and it’s okay if she wants to go. She dies at 9:50 p.m. Wednesday, the seventeenth. No trumpets sound or angels descend. She just stopped breathing, and the machines went silent. She is already up in heaven or wherever, turning in Her time card. Maybe she is trying out Her new wings right now, afraid at first, but after a few tries mastering barrel rolls and graceful loops. That night, she doesn’t come to me in my dreams, probably because she is too busy getting used to Her new accommodations.
The next few days are a blur. I tell Her father to call me if they need any help with any of the arrangements, but he never does. My parents send flowers. She is buried on a Saturday, but I can’t bring myself to go to the funeral. In the morning, I had got dressed in my only black suit, but when I looked at myself in the mirror, I couldn’t help but think that I looked like a giant phony. I couldn’t imagine going through the motions, sitting in some church with my head bowed, listening to some priest talk about “the infinite wisdom of His ways” and “calling His flock home” and shit like that. So I didn’t go. It’s okay though, I don’t think Her parents would’ve wanted me there anyway. My mom said it was a lovely service.
27
Still in Chicago. I spend my days in my bedroom, squinting my eyes and trying to make the shapes look like Her. It doesn’t work. I spend my nights hoping she’ll come see me, only she never does. I begin to think that maybe she’s waiting for me to come to Her . . . after all, she was on Her way to me when she died. I wonder if killing yourself is the only thing you can control in your entire life, and that’s why it’s a sin. Because you’re beating God at his own game.
I take the bottle of pills off the kitchen counter. Look at Her pack of cigarettes, still sitting there just as she left them. I smoke one in the living room because I don’t care anymore. The sun is just breaking over the city, filling the apartment with soft white light. I take a cab to my parents’ house, sneak my brother’s car out of the garage, and start driving. I pull into an empty parking lot, turn the car off, and sit there for a while. She is in the car with me, I know it. I swallow the entire bottle of pills, sit back, and wait. I wonder what it will feel like. I turn on the radio. When they find me, I want there to be music, and I want the car battery to be just as dead as I am.
Sometime around eight, things are getting hazy. I am lilting between this world and the next. My breathing is slow. My eyelids are fluttering. It feels like there are insects buzzing through my veins. Eight blue ones will do that to you. Her hand is holding mine, guiding me through to the other side. I am ready. But then, I get scared. I call my mom and mumble something to her. She is asking me where I am, what’s going on, and telling me to drive to the emergency room. Somehow I turn the key, and somehow the engine starts, and now I am on the phone with my manager, and then the dangly-earring shrink in California, telling them that I want to die but can’t bring myself to do it. I am crying and swerving all over the road. I love to hate attention. It’s so predictable.
I tumble into the ER and they have me fill out forms. You should see my handwriting. They call my mom and then she is there with me, hugging me and telling me it’s okay, hushing me as I sob. We sit in the waiting room, time dragging on into infinity. My mom laughs nervously. The thing inside my head bothers her far more than it bothers me. A fish tank is on the right side of the room, just between the bleeders. The fish are all a brilliant blue. I am mesmerized.
An old woman with a bandage wrapped around her head stands right in front of me, obscuring my view. She needs them more than I do. They call my name and take me into the next room. A security guard is by the door. He looks at me glumly. They say undress and put on the gown. I want to call Her up because she knows just how to get me out of my clothes.
“You can’t have those in here,” the guard says, pointing at my shoes. “The laces are considered a suicide risk.”
I take off my shoes. The lights are bright and the door is open—nothing is going on here. I’m not getting away with anything. I ask the guard for a pen and paper because I’m bored and I want to write Her a letter. They are also considered a suicide risk and are denied. They make everything the whitest possible shade of white in the hospital. The lights are so white they burn your skin, or maybe that’s just me imagining things. It makes me feel more alone than I ever have before. I am lying on a gurney that hundreds of people have died on. I lift myself off it quickly so none of their memories seep into me. I look around to make sure that no one saw me do this, no one saw me acting “crazy.” The security guard is staring at me with the just-give-me-a-f*cking-reason look, but settles back into the monotony.
• • •
The crisis counselor comes into the room and shuts the door, but she asks the guard to open the blinds and watch through the window. Now I am the brilliant-blue fish in the tank. The crisis counselor is a f*cking amateur. If she had her shit together, I suppose she’d be in some nice building in the suburbs with a receptionist, not sitting here in a white cell, talking to me. She’s out of her league with me, in too deep. I have read The Pill Book from front to back. I could talk my way out of anything. But I’m too busy swimming for the guard. She asks me why I’m here and if I’ve ever tried anything like this before. I know what this means. She jots my answers down on a pad of paper, sighs, and says she won’t admit me to the hospital if I’ll sign a contract saying I won’t hurt myself. I actually laugh out loud at the thought that anyone depressed enough to kill himself would be stopped by a piece of paper. It’s like slitting your wrists over a sink so you won’t make a mess.
“I’m gonna have to go over this with my lawyer. And send back some markups,” I joke. She doesn’t laugh. Eventually she leaves the room and is replaced by a second counselor, a touchy-feely guy in a terrible sweater. He asks me the same questions, and it’s getting difficult for me to keep my story straight. I feel myself bending it just to keep things interesting, adding bits about “God talking to me” and the like. He is nodding and taking notes. Then he looks up at me and asks why I wanted to hurt myself, says that someone “in your position” could make a difference. I tell him it makes no difference. I was proud of that one.
He leaves too, and I am alone in the room, the security guard watching me through the glass. I go over to the table and call the one person who matters, tell Her, “The Capulets and Montagues don’t have shit on me and you.” I am pretty sure I got Her voice mail. I call back and apologize for leaving the first message. I am talking into a phone that doesn’t exist to a girl who doesn’t exist anymore.
It turns out that I couldn’t even kill myself the right way. The medication takes time to get out of my system, so there is nothing else for me to do but sleep. My dreams are sterile and uninfected. I can’t control the inside of my head right now. I feel paralyzed. My blood cells are pixilated. My pupils dilated. But I am alive. Alive and unwell. After three days, my parents come to take me home. No one talks in the car. My dad clears his throat. I sit in the backseat and stare out the window, at the last few moments of summer. Nothing will ever be the same again.
I float through a week at my parents’ house like a ghost. My mom won’t let me out of her sight. If I am in the bathroom for longer than five minutes, she knocks on the door and asks me if I’m all right. She doesn’t understand that I’ll never be all right, that it’s beyond my control. She doesn’t understand that I’m broken. A second week rolls in like fog. I go to visit Her grave. I stare at Her name carved in the granite, at the date of Her death. I don’t want to leave Her but it’s getting dark. I tell Her I’ll see Her again, but I don’t know when that will be. I want to die but just can’t do it, no matter how hard I try. On the way back home, I call our manager and tell him I’m ready to tour again. I’m not sure why.
We have meetings. The guys are concerned. It’s only been two weeks, after all. I tell them I’m fine, joke that I didn’t even punch a mirror this time. I tell them that I need this, that I am drowning in Chicago and want to get back on the road. I am lying but they believe me, and the tour is scheduled to resume in a week’s time. A doctor will be traveling on the road with us, “just in case.” I leave Chicago and fly to Philadelphia, pick up where I left off. The first few shows, I am tired and weak, and the guys have to carry me through the set. Kids hold up signs with my name on them. I tell them that I love them all.
The tour heads south, through Jersey, into DC. The shows aren’t getting any better. I can’t be bothered to try any harder than I already am. Everyone knows this is a mistake, but they’re all afraid to tell me. I’m too fragile. They are finishing this tour in spite of me. At night I lie in my bunk and wonder if tonight will be the night I get to see Her again, but she never visits. She probably can’t forgive me. I am so tired but I can’t fall asleep, so the doctor teaches me an old trick—try to be perfectly still, close your eyes, and attempt to locate the sound of your pulse. It may take a few minutes, but you’ll hear it, it will be there. It will grow stronger. It will envelop you. You will eventually fall asleep. Sometimes it actually works.
Maryland rolls by, Virgina, the Carolinas. Such great sadness. Cities stop mattering. They are just names on a spreadsheet. I check them off one at a time. We head through Georgia, and I begin taking girls back to my hotel rooms. Meaningless sex to fill the void. We shoot down I-95 to the Disaster’s hometown of Jacksonville. His parents and brothers come to the show that night. They all look like fatter versions of him. He is beaming and showing them around backstage, pointing out all the guitars that he’s in charge of, picking them up and tuning them as they watch in rapt silence. It makes me think of that show back in Chicago, when I grabbed Her and frightened Her. I want to go back to Her grave and apologize. But there’s no time. There never will be.
We cut across I-10, long stretches of swamp and nothingness. Alligator farms and air force bases. Through the great, sweaty South—Interstate 10 is a dire road. Show in Mobile, along the Gulf of Mexico. It never ends. I miss Her and she is never coming home again. It is beyond my control, and I have resigned myself to that. Someday my number will be called, and all I can do is hope she’ll wait for me up there until it is. I am not optimistic about my chances.
We leave Mobile in the middle of the night, bound for New Orleans, on the brown banks of Lake Pontchartrain. The guys are screwing around in the front of the bus. I am in my bunk, trying to sleep. I press my head against the pillow, close my eyes, and listen for my pulse, but the engine is too loud. We barrel through the darkness. The road hums beneath my head. The wind whistles against the window. Eventually, my heart stops racing and I drift away.
Somewhere in Mississippi, I can feel Her floating above me. I open my eyes and she is there, inches from my face yet still miles away. Infinite space and time are between us. Her hair is long now, the color of honey, and slowly waving in the night air. Her eyes are greener than they’ve ever been before, like pastures after a rain, and Her skin is the purest white. She glows softly in the dark, magical and ethereal, like lightning bugs in a jar. Just out of reach. She is the first ghost I’ve ever seen, but I am not afraid. I want to feel Her on my fingertips one more time. I want to tell Her that I love Her. But I am afraid to move or make a sound because I don’t want to frighten Her away, so I just lie there. She understands, and she smiles down upon me. Everything else falls away. I close my eyes and mouth the words I can’t bring myself to say. She can read my lips. We head toward the sunrise, together.