Will I see you at the funeral? I called out, even though I had no idea what time the funeral was.
He kept running farther away. I watched him exit the park, then he made a turn and disappeared past a bus making its own turn. Sweating and exhausted, I threw myself down on a different bench underneath a weeping willow. After I gathered myself, I took out my phone and performed a quick search. There was a Professor Kim who taught at the Marquette law school, with a specialty in criminal law theory and race. My hands trembled as I typed out an email to her. To put it plainly, I informed her of my adoptive brother’s suicide. I closed the email by asking her when we might meet for lunch, my treat. The word suicide itself no longer had much meaning; its meaning had been sucked out and now it was simply a husk of a word that I used in relation to my adoptive brother. Utilizing the word suicide in a conversation instead of the phrase died unexpectedly emphasized the violence against the self; it cut through the bullshit and brainlessness of talking to strangers about my adoptive brother’s death. I pressed send.
Then I paused a moment and responded truthfully to my supervisor’s message. I typed that I did not keep good records, but I did remember one day taking my troubled young people to Central Park to play basketball. We borrowed a basketball from someone at the park, and it’s possible we lost it. I apologized. Then I apologized for possibly damaging the paper-towel dispensers. I considered calling my supervisor to see how everyone was doing, but I decided it wasn’t wise to draw attention to the fact that I was missing work, especially considering I was under an internal investigation. The problem with an investigation is people will continue to investigate until they have found something, anything, and only then, when they have found something, will they close the investigation. And what would the investigators uncover about me? I wondered. Would they find out that every day was an internal struggle to not destroy the lives of my troubled young people? Would they discover that when I went into my place of employment, unlike all of my coworkers who took the elevator up to the facility, I, as far as I knew, was the only one who walked up ten flights of stairs in order to inhale sharply the aroma of the rubber-encased steps because the smell transported me more lucidly than a dream back to the first grade of Catholic school and how I hid from the nuns in a very similar if not the exact same rubber-encased stairwell simply because I could spend minutes, hours inhaling the delicious fragrant rubber smell? I was very curious about what they would find out about me, in fact one might say I was perversely curious.
32
As I left the park, I noticed a crowd of people had formed around the bus where Thomas had exited and turned. The bus was still there. An ambulance pulled up and a police car. Then another. The bus driver was talking to the police. People stood around nervously and looked down at something. I saw their mouths open, and their fingers pointing. It appeared the bus had hit a pedestrian.
Instead of investigating the scene, I focused on the status of my own investigation. In order to investigate something, you need to talk to people and you need to get them to say things, helpful things, confessions, etc. I left the park and went in the opposite direction of the bus and the ambulance. I turned onto a busy street, and I walked in the shoulder, right next to cars driving at 50 miles per hour, when some people honked at me and rolled down their windows and screamed at me to get a car. Instead of going home, I headed toward a café.
No one liked to tell me anything, I despaired. Thomas no longer wanted to talk to me. The Moons had nothing to say. Why didn’t people like to tell me things? I needed more witnesses and more components. I needed to put his life into an arrangement that made sense. When I arrived at the café, I was dehydrated and exhausted from yelling back at people. It bewildered me, all the people inside the café, sitting and sipping quietly, everyone with a life doing things. The café could move two feet to the left, and everyone would continue their sipping. I ordered a skinny half-caff latte, then took my drink and sat down at a table near the bathroom and began to collect my thoughts. A tall thin woman walked by and then walked back.
Helen? she said. Helen Moran?
Me?
Don’t you remember me? She smiled. It’s Elena.
I looked at the woman. She seemed familiar, she reminded me of someone from the artistic group, and I shuddered.
I’m not sure who I am to you, I said.
You look exactly the same, she said. I walked by and I said to myself, that’s Helen Moran, there she is, after all these years, she’s sitting right there in a chair, looking around at things.
Thank you for noticing, I said.
You left Milwaukee, right?
I moved to New York.
It’s been a long time since we saw each other, she said. I’m sorry we lost contact.
I never come back here, I said. Not even for holidays.
I’m sorry, she said. Milwaukee has missed you.
I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else, I said.
Oh, that’s not possible, she said. You were unforgettable back then! I’ll never forget that performance in the nude with you, Peggy, and Teresa. Or what about that night of absurdist theater? You were in a cardboard boat while two brothers played instruments behind you. You took pictures with a Polaroid camera, then you carelessly threw the pictures into the audience and hit someone in the eye, the picture tore a man’s cornea.
I never sat in a cardboard boat, I said. I never tore a man’s cornea.
Yes, you did, said Elena. Back then you were an emerging artist and you made assemblages out of boxes, a hundred boxes from a dumpster stacked on top of one another, then someone started that silly rumor, well, I know it’s not good to stir up things from the past…
No, I said. Sometimes it’s necessary.
She patted my arm.