Dear Mr. You (12 page)

You live as a free man now. “Free man” might be a relative term for some men, but not you. There is being kidnapped, brainwashed, and tortured, and there is escaping that. There is stowing away in a truck that you hope will bring you to safety, and when that truck is overtaken, the canisters of paraffin that you hide behind are pierced and the wax inside burns you so severely that your skin bleaches white. You are disfigured but it is temporary, more important that you run, and are free. You go looking for a distant relative who takes you in and gives you a mat to sleep on. There is a roof over your head and no gun acting as your pillow. You are free to work, and work is now freedom, even though you carry buckets through the slums for pittance and for more hours a day than most people are awake. Working your fingers raw is a
privilege, because you have the sovereign right to be the boss and the slave, and you go back to school with your earnings and you graduate. Freedom is holding your diploma in your hands.

One morning you wake to hear that your hometown was taken over. People you knew, guys you went to school with were hacked up and set fire to, their bodies left to boil by the side of the road. You’ve already lost your beloved brother and now there are more children hiding, running. An idea comes to you that will bring massive work and responsibility but you don’t hesitate. You will build a safe place for those children, a school, and you won’t quit when reason tells you to.

It’s been a cycle of having your arms tied only to liberate yourself again. This grew you an enormous wingspan to rise above the bitterness anyone would expect you to have. When your hands are tied now, it’s not a surprise or an obstacle. Who needs more than a brain, and decency, you think. Wings.

•  •  •

Do you remember when we went to hear Adam sing? I couldn’t stay because I had to be up the next morning at dawn to work. Watching you hear live music was so sweet that I would have stayed but you said no, you must go back to the hotel to sleep.

For some reason parking was easy but leaving was a pickle. Three parking attendants came out, each giving us different directions and each time we ended up somewhere we had to back out of. Getting out of the garage took so long that when we finally exited, people were starting to leave the show. I was agitated but at some point I grew mesmerized by you. You did not panic. It didn’t even seem like you were suppressing frustration, you just didn’t let it in. Each time there was another dead end you only got
calmer, including when the parking attendants were downright rude to you. The only change in mood came when we were out on the street and you high-fived me, laughing and turning up the radio, saying, “Okay, give me a cigarette, please.”

You are a reminder of how things could be if they were actually awful, and the unabashed face of joy when things are better than I realize. As I get older, things that were never interesting are alternately fascinating and thrilling. I’m sure that I never exclaimed over the grain of wood in a doorframe when I was in my twenties, or sat down to stare at a tree. I was afraid there would be a deficit of fun as I got older, but when I think of us being friends in twenty years, having pie on the porch while I beat you and Hunter at Rummikub, I don’t know. That sounds pretty damn exciting to me.

Someone asked you about our relationship. You put your hand on my back and said

She and I share the same soul

Pretty sure I am not worthy of that but it’s something I can strive for, having been already awarded it. I wish I could singlehandedly support your school, but I am humbled that you trust me to help. I know you feel like a family member in our home and that is both an honor and really freaking lucky, because, who else can build a fort out of sticks with my kids, and who else jumps in my pool with me at midnight and then sits on the porch while the crickets harass each other and we play records. Talk about family and theater. Drink red tea with honey.

One night in California we were on the deck having a beer. I
know there are things you don’t like to remember but I wanted to know how you stayed positive. I asked if you ever got angry and you said, oh yes. You said, “When someone is bad to a child,” and I said is that all, and you said, “Well, also if someone interferes with my performance on a stage.” Then I asked you what you did when you felt so low about yourself that you couldn’t go forward. You were silent long enough for me to think you might not respond and then you said

I go far out, maybe in a field somewhere quiet. I think of things I have done in my life that people tell me are good. I remember that I have done good

You’ve seen me be irascible and flawed and I don’t fear you judging me, but I have worried you might do something so heinous that I’d be forced to erase you. It’s entirely a product of my looking so far up to see you, knowing you occupy a place on earth higher than I will reach. In the past my doing that has been a fatal error. I forget that we are all made from ether and instinct. We’re all missing parts and orbit the same moon.

I’m going to take you off that pedestal and I want to ask you to do something stupid right in front of me, so we can have that shock of human fallibility thing past us. I will look forward to that disappointment like I await next Thanksgiving, the day you now celebrate with us. You can help the kids to find branches for the thankfulness tree again and help Kenneth cut up paper for the haiku. I promise no more scavenger hunts, that was insanity, but if we need to have a break from all that, your gin will be waiting, and we can make dancing and singing mandatory.

As we crossed the street we saw you. You were covered in debris and white soot that flaked off of you with every weighted step. With all of those protective layers you loomed enormous, like a weary snowman trudging home from an apocalyptic winter. There was a buzz on the streets of downtown New York right after 9/11. Walking outside was like entering a comic book world with no gray area. There was only horror and heroes.

We’d taken duffel bags of steel-toed boots down to Ground Zero, walking home with nothing to say. You were trudging in the opposite direction, still wearing the remains of the World Trade Center on your body. Some people passing by held up a hand in acknowledgment or called out encouraging words. No cars were honking and there was no shouting to be heard for weeks after, it seemed.

That night it was still being called a rescue and everyone was holding on in a stasis, some people postponing what was too
unbearable to process. I wonder how long you kept digging after you knew there was nothing left but buried screams to unearth. I try to imagine you alive today. Maybe you are? You are getting out of a taxi, or playing catch with your son. Writing a book.

About you: you weren’t the only firefighter who made a stain on my memory. Six years later, I gathered my three-year-old son in my arms and marched down Sixth Avenue, sure that at Ladder 5 there would be someone to convince him that the small fire he’d seen across the street wasn’t still going and perhaps on its way to swallow him. Ritchie was on duty, I said hello, and asked, “Has that little fire over by MacDougal been put out?” mouthing the word
scared
and pointing at my boy, who was still trembling. Ritchie kept his eyes on my son the whole time and calmed him down. He made him laugh and showed him how he’d brought the fire down. Did you have little boys like that come into your station, too? Come back the next day with their mom and bring you a batch of brownies when you were out on a call? Leave you a crayon picture, like my son did, and sit at attention for years whenever he heard a fire truck go by, searching each face aboard to see if he could recognize his friend?

You never had any next-day thank-you, or cookies waiting. I never knew your name, and your face I wouldn’t recognize if I had only three to pick from, it was so thick with ash when I saw you. You didn’t even look in my face as I saw you across the street and ran into your arms, but you saw me running and opened yours, lowering your head. Your eyes were closed, not weeping but not without weeping either and I rushed in, holding you tightly while
your soot fell onto me like dandelion seed. I went on tiptoe to whisper to you while you nodded and answered back like we’d been talking for hours. It must have been impossible to tell from the outside who in our dance was leading who, or to hear that bell that rang for our ears only, telling us when to stop.

Sorry. I’m sorry for repeatedly stating that you were a massive misuse of tax dollars and basically an oversized playground for those who like to wear antigravity suits. I realize you haven’t stopped the launching of shuttles on my behalf but I’m apologizing. Anyway, I didn’t know what I was talking about.

Shamefully late, I began to understand that your research, directly and derivations thereof, resulted in: the artificial heart pump, the surface that protects the Golden Gate Bridge, the handheld jaws of life that save victims from car wrecks, and those invisible braces that Tom Cruise wore when no one knew there was anything wrong with his teeth. The FDA has you to thank for the drop in salmonella cases, as does everyone who got to read those charred Roman manuscripts from forever ago, A.D. Also anyone who rides a school bus in Chicago.

NASA, you were for me a bunch of geeks who lived on Hot Pockets and looked for E.T. while people on earth starved to death or couldn’t
afford health care or college. I get that this is asinine, that famine and an illiterate populace were not your fault. I am dim when it comes to a whole lot, but what I realized is that

Space is entirely poetic.

Listen. I read about stars that wander the galaxies. Some end up with their bright sides in the face of some dim unlocked planet who neglected to deal with its issues. With their volcanic air of refusal, those tidally locked stars never show their dark half and all the junk in their trunks where nothing grows. It is the baldest metaphor I can imagine. The white dwarf star, once so carefree, starts sucking the life force from its stingy blue companion, and a mutual thievery ensues until a supernova rolls up and obliterates everything they shared together. Somehow the white dwarf limps onward, meekly blinking, its space tag now reading, “Hi! My name is Zombie Star! Ask me about codependence!”

•  •  •

One Christmas I traveled somewhere with a sky that didn’t stop. The night view of the planets would have made you weep. It was a romantic time and evenly divided; there were no scores kept. I loved someone who loved me back, that’s all. We went far away to somewhere covered in snow, and the mountains outside our hotel window were magnificent and unscalable. As I recall it now, they seem glued there as a backdrop with no real world behind them. I question sometimes if I was taken there as a trick, since any proof I have of it existing is less than worthless. It can’t be cashed in for anything but another battle. The view was not something you could take in properly without turning around to
see where it began, so maybe there was someone behind it rotating one piece of scenery whenever I pivoted left or right? It was clearly too sweet and pure to be real so maybe someone painted it there, I don’t know, but it was winter and I believed it because I’m a sucker for possibility.

On Christmas Eve we gave each other things and one gift was supposed to be something you couldn’t hold in your hands. I had a poem for him, typed on plain white paper. Before he read it he wanted to give me my gift.

“Here, wear this, it’s outside,” he said, putting his coat over my shoulders. I followed him outside. It was fifteen below zero and the mountains and snow were maybe the most glorious I’ll ever see, but up? That sky. It isn’t worth grappling into metaphor.

He said to look up and he pointed, I wasn’t sure at what. He said, “Do you see that one with the stem? Okay, to the right?” and then he said, “Now below, where there are three in a row, but one a bit off,” and I did, and he said, “That one is, if you see it this way, it’s an ‘M’? Do you see that?” and I said, yes, I do see, and he said

It always will be there, in our lifetime, I will see it and that will be you above me, whenever I look up, forever

Would you have told me, NASA, what I know now, that the “M” is actually not? Would you have said that you have to look at things from the proper angle to give them a name? I’m glad now that I know what it actually is and glad I did not know then. I had that moment of believing that he and I were looking at the same thing. I know what the actual constellation is now and it wasn’t me.

I don’t know if you feel conflict when you hear the phrase “new reality,” or if it makes you want to throw in the towel. When you realize that the only thing to be counted on is the shifting and reestablishing of proximity, do you ever feel like,
why did I bother searching in the first place?
We have to rewrite ourselves again and draw all new maps.

What burns off into the blank and what persists despite everything, is what I fall asleep wondering. Is there something? You must know something about the answer to that.

Of course you know the phenomenon with astronauts called “the overview effect,” where the experience of seeing Earth from space can produce a kind of ecstasy. Apparently the view is so devastating from out there that the euphoria it induces alters you forever, and there is a scrambling within your brain to catch up. You can watch night wave across Earth from its baby beginning notes. A whole orchestra of arrivals and departures: imagine seeing Iowa disappear, when what surrounds it has been extinguished to black, or when the bodies of water on Earth are lit up to a blue that we can only guess at with our crayons and pens.

I wonder what they feel connected to when they are between the out there and here? Does it come with sound? I love the idea of watching the galaxy from far away and hearing being the same thing as remembering. Memory and fantasy could blend, coming in on clouds of song. Everything hard, all that earthly pain could be dumped out millions of miles away, becoming useful by feeding itself to the constellations. No shame, no need to be understood, just a floating about while listening to some entirely different and lasting kind of music.