Then Lucessi killed himself.
This was in the summer. I’d remained in Cambridge, staying at Mrs. Chodorow’s, and had resumed working at the lab. I hadn’t spoken to Lucessi since the last day of our freshman year—indeed, had barely thought of him beyond a mild curiosity, never acted on, as to his fate. It was his sister, Arianna, who telephoned me. How she’d tracked me down, I didn’t think to ask. She was clearly in shock; her voice was flat and emotionless, laying out the facts. Lucessi had been working in a video store. He appeared, at first, to have taken his expulsion more or less in stride. The experience had chastened but not broken him. There were vague plans about his attending the local community college, perhaps reapplying to Harvard in a year or two. But across the winter and spring, his tics had gotten worse. He became sullen and uncommunicative, refusing to talk to anyone for days. The low-grade muttering became more or less continual, as if he were engaged in conversation with imaginary persons. A number of disturbing obsessions took hold. He would spend hours reading the daily newspaper, underlining random sentences in wholly unrelated articles, and claimed that the CIA was watching him.
Gradually it became apparent that he was in the throes of a psychotic episode, perhaps even full-blown schizophrenia. His parents made arrangements to have him admitted to a psychiatric hospital, but the night before he was to leave, he disappeared. Apparently he had taken the train to Manhattan. With him, in a canvas bag, was a length of sturdy rope. In Central Park, he had selected a tree with a large rock beneath its boughs, flung the rope over one of the branches, put the noose in place, and stepped off. The distance was not enough to break his neck; he could have regained a foothold on the boulder at any time. But such was his determination that he hadn’t done this, and death had been caused by slow strangulation—a horrendous detail I wished Arianna had not shared with me. In his pocket was a note: Call Fanning.
The funeral was scheduled for the following Saturday. Under the circumstances, the family wanted to proceed quietly, with a brief service confined to close family and friends. That I was to be among them was ordained by his note, although I told Arianna that I didn’t know what to make of it, which was true. We’d been friends, but not great friends. Our bond had hardly gone deep enough to earn my inclusion in his final thoughts. I wondered if he intended this note as a punishment of some kind, though I could not think what sin I had committed to warrant it. The other possibility was that he was sending me a message of an altogether different nature—that his death was, in a way only he could understand, a demonstration for my benefit. But what it could mean, I hadn’t the foggiest.
Jonas was spending the summer on an archaeological dig in Tanzania; Stephanie had won a coveted internship in Washington, working on Capitol Hill, but at the time of Lucessi’s death was traveling with her parents in France and could not be reached. I did not think that Lucessi’s death had shaken me all that badly, but of course it had—my emotions, like Arianna’s, were blunted by shock—yet I showed the good sense to call the one person I trusted whom I could actually get on the phone. Liz’s family was on the Cape, but she was working at a bookshop in Connecticut. I’m sorry about your friend, she said. You shouldn’t be alone. Meet me at Grand Central at the main kiosk, the one with the four-faced clock.
My train got into Penn Station early Friday morning. I took the 1 train uptown to Forty-second Street, changed to the 7, and arrived at Grand Central at the height of the rush. Except to change buses at Port Authority in the middle of the night, I had never been to New York City, and as I ascended the ramp into the terminal’s main concourse, I was, like many a traveler through the ages, bowled over by the majesty of its dimensions. I felt as though I’d entered the grandest of cathedrals, not some mere way station but a destination in its own right, worthy of pilgrimage. Even the tiniest sound seemed magnified by the sheer size of the place. The smoke-stained ceiling, with its images of constellated stars, soared so majestically overhead it seemed to rewrite the dimensions of the world. Liz was waiting for me at the kiosk, wearing a light summer dress and carrying an overnight bag. She hugged me far longer and more tightly than I was prepared for, and it was in the shelter of her embrace that I suddenly felt the weight of Lucessi’s death, like a cold stone at the center of my chest.