THE COMPLETION OF MY FIRST interviews for this case since the inquest excites me and agitates me both. Weeks have passed, but I find I can’t concentrate. I look at the calendar and realize we’re in June already: Summer is flying by. I leave work early, go home and change, and head out on my bike despite the fact that the sky looks threatening.
The sun won’t set until after eight, so I’ll have plenty of light. I never ride after dark, having had to fill out too many accident reports from my years on the campus beat. But I got a new bike from Peter for my twenty-eighth birthday, so I’ve been riding a lot lately, even though I don’t even understand how to change the gears; it’s so fancy. I take it down Palm Drive to Campus Drive, and under the 280 overpass, back into the Alpine Road loop. For some reason, squirrels know enough to stay out of your path there, it’s only on campus that their brains are addled enough to commit hara-kiri.
As I pedal, I barely notice the landscape. I’m sweating profusely, and it’s not because of the heat or the exercise. This case is getting to me. Last night Peter came out of the bedroom at 3 AM to see where I was, and found me facedown on a diagram I’d drawn under the label, the usual suspects, but which made absolutely no sense to me the following morning.
I’m on a popular bike route. Passed by dozens of riders, outfitted in identical uniforms, looking fierce and determined in their helmets and wraparound sunglasses. The men, in particular, disturb me when they’re dressed like this, it seems so aggressively sexual, the tight black pants with the genitalia outlined front and center. A bunch of them are lounging outside the Alpine Inn, drinking beer, strutting in and out of the pub, pelvises outthrust, in their special clip-on shoes. I ignore them and keep going. I’m not dressed appropriately in their eyes, they scorn me as the amateur I am, I’m wearing some old cutoff sweats and a PAPD T-shirt, and despite my angst over the case I feel strong as I pump my way into the countryside and escape from suburbia. But just as I hit the Portola-Alpine junction, the sky opens and I’m drenched. Ten miles from home and the rain seeming here to stay, pouring down, soaking my hair and clothes, which now hang heavily off me. I decide to keep going. I’m not going to get any wetter, and it’s a warm rain, so I’m not uncomfortable. And the drops splattering against my face and neck, the dark clouds overhanging the hills exhilarate rather than depress me, seem to open up something in me that has been stubbornly closed lately.
I catch a flicker of a memory. Playing in the rain at my grandmother’s house on the Jersey Shore. The warm wind gusting through the open windows, the rumblings of distant thunder, the spattering of rain as the storm descended, my grandmother pushing me out the door to get the laundry off the line before it got wet, then staying outside myself once the clothes were safe inside. The house doesn’t exist anymore, it was destroyed in one of the mega storms that have been plaguing the East Coast over the past few years, but it was my favorite place in the world when growing up. We always spent at least a couple weeks there in the summer, my parents, my younger brother Gregory, and me. I lived there with my grandmother the entirety of one summer, when I was eight. That terrible and wonderful summer. Those days were genuinely glorious: the salty sea, and the sun, the cold ginger ale waiting for me when I got back from the beach, the sharp tangy scent of the Noxzema my grandmother would spread on my sunburned face to cool it down. Me having her all to myself, my parents back at home in Brooklyn tending to Gregory. Although they hadn’t told me yet, they knew he was dying, and they sent me off to miss as much of it as possible.
When I got home that September, there was Gregory, on the hospital bed in the living room where he would spend his last days. He’d been an annoyance and an infuriating shadow on my life for years, the snot-nosed younger brother always wanting to bust up my games of dress-up with my friends and bother my parents with his aches and pains and bruises and, eventually, visits to the doctors and stays in the hospital. I was home in time to witness his horrifying end. Never a large boy, he was wasted and waxen, tubes snaking around his bed, into his mouth and wrists and under the covers. Then one day I got home from school and it was over. My parents must have been all cried out by then because they were simply sitting in chairs next to his bed, quietly talking. I think they were even laughing as I came through the door and stopped at the sight of that poor limp body, so clearly not Gregory any longer. He had been there, in all his infuriating physicalness, and then he wasn’t.