Giving Up the Ghost (17 page)

Shortly after I started the class, Laura and I drove up to the Flats in Cleveland to see a band she’d heard on a mix tape, the
March Violets. Laura was driving home afterward because (a) she loved to drive but didn’t have a car, and (b) I had shown up at her house so fucked up that I passed out in the three minutes between arriving and her opening the passenger door to jump in. The only thing I remember about the show was that the March Violets were fronted by a woman with huge hair who was not wearing a bra (and really should have been). When I mentioned the bra thing to Laura after the show, she refused to unlock the car door until I took it back.

We continued to argue about the piggishness of my boob observation as we drove out of the Flats and through a neighborhood of empty warehouses overlooking the Cuyahoga River.

“Stop the car!” I yelled, leaning toward the window and fixing my attention on one passing building.

“What? No,” she replied.

“I need you to stop the car right now,” I said.

“Are you sick or something? I’m not going to …”

I reached in between us and pulled up the emergency brake. Luckily, we weren’t going that fast, and we quickly skidded to a dead stop in the middle of West Ninth Street. A car honked and swerved around us.

“What the fuck was that?” she asked.

“We have to go in there!” I shouted back, annoyed that I had to explain my instant obsession.

“Where? There is nothing here.”

“Right there,” I said, grabbing a small flashlight from the glove box, opening the car door, and walking toward a dilapidated warehouse. Laura parked the car and followed. By the time she caught up with me, I had already broken off the padlock from the front door. It was barely held in place by rusty
screws embedded in the weather-beaten frame. It came out with about as much effort as it takes to pry a pit out of a ripe peach.

“How are you sure that we aren’t going to get caught?” Laura said.

“I’m not sure we won’t get caught,” I answered, turning on the flashlight, handing it to her, and walking into the cavernous space. I saw a metal staircase off to the side and started to climb four stories to the top. The floor was one large room with a small, cheaply built office against the far wall. The space was flooded with moonlight through six-foot-square windows of small glass panes. It was almost bright enough that we didn’t need the flashlight.

“Why are we here again?” she asked.

“Because I think we should live here,” I said.

“Live here?”

“Yeah,” I answered. “We could move in here and clean it up. It would be amazing.”

“Live here,” she repeated flatly.

“Yeah, together,” I answered.

“We’d live here together? Why would we live together?” she said.

“Don’t you think it would be cool?” I asked.

She paused and looked me in the eye.

“I don’t know,” she said, turning the light away to find the stairway back down.

Once outside again, I grabbed a bottle of cheap wine from the back of the car and we sat on the loading deck of the warehouse. I decided to drop some philosophy on her.

“Well, as you know, Socrates was like Jesus, he didn’t really write anything—it’s all told to us through others,” I said, making
it sound like the most obvious thing in the world, even though I had only learned it myself twelve hours earlier. “Plato was just one of them.”

“Really,” Laura said.

“You have to break things down into a series of questions. Then you will find the ultimate truth you seek.”

“Is that so?” she said.

“Socrates felt he’d be better off dead than have to conform to society’s expectations,” I said. “He’d rather die than live on his knees.”

“You try to make that sound so noble,” she said.

“Are you mocking me?”

“Yes.”

As we lazily walked around the warehouse’s loading area, I started quoting the Socrates passages I’d copied into my notebook, reading them to Laura by the light of my Zippo. Passages about the evils of piety, the virtue of sacrifice, and quotes about the gods, beauty, and wrongdoers. I still have that notebook, though for some reason just a few random pages remain in it. It was cheap—more than likely the binding got loose and disintegrated over time.

“No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils. And surely it is,” I read.

After that, I stopped reading, mainly because I simply couldn’t read what I’d written. My letters and words started to morph into scribbles and random shapes, less and less legible as they stumbled down the page.

I looked a few pages further into my notebook. All scribbles. Not a single legible word. It went on for at least a dozen pages.

The final few pages contained just wild loops, scratches, and thrashing lines. I had pushed so hard that I’d dug the pen into the page, putting small random tears into the paper. I must have broken the pen, or it had run out of ink, because it just suddenly stopped. Then the writing switched from black ink to blue for one final quotation, one that I’d copied repeatedly over several pages, written neatly and precisely:

“But it is clear to me that it was better for me to die now and to escape from trouble. That is why my divine sign did not oppose me at any point.”

As I stood silently staring at the pages of my journal by the light from the Zippo that was about to burn my fingertips, I realized that I had no recollection at all of writing any of this. Seeing the progressively manic scribbles was just as shocking to me as it would have been to a stranger.

We got into the car to head home. By this time, I was sober enough to drive. As we got onto I-77 and headed out of Cleveland, Laura thumbed through my notebook. She eventually laid her head down in my lap, took my hand, and placed it across her collarbone. We sat there in silence for a few minutes.

“Am I pretty?” Laura asked.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You know,” she said. “Do you think I’m pretty?”

“I thought you didn’t believe in conventional beauty,” I said. “You are probably the last person I’d ever expect to hear that question from.”

“Just answer it,” she said. “Is that so hard?”

“Yes,” I said, pausing. “I think you are pretty.”

She wrapped her fingers around mine and closed her eyes for a few minutes.

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” she said.

I hesitated.

“Why don’t you want to live in the warehouse?” I asked. “With me.”

Laura slowly sat upright.

“It isn’t that …,” she said.

“What?” I interjected.

“Eric, I have no interest in living in Cleveland,” she said.

I just stayed quiet.

“I mean, is that what you want?” she asked. “Downtown Cleveland? Some rat-filled warehouse?”

“We could clean it up,” I said.

“That isn’t the point. Don’t you want something more?”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Eric, there is a whole world out there,” she said. “Don’t you want to be a part of it? Don’t you want to see what’s outside Ohio?”

“In a world full of ignorant fucks who hate you, what difference does it make if they’re in Canton or Amsterdam?”

“You wouldn’t know, would you,” she said.

Laura started paging through my Socrates quotes until she found what she was looking for. “ ‘The most blameworthy ignorance is to believe that one knows what one doesn’t know,’ ” she read.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

“You tell me,” she said. “You wrote it in your amazing notebook of truth.

“And what is the deal with this one?” she continued. “You highlighted and underlined it four times: ‘Now the hour to part has come. I go to die, you go to live. Which of us goes to the better lot is known to no one, except the god.’ Huh?”

“I guess I thought it was important,” I said.

“Plainly,” she said, leaning her body against the passenger window.

Recently I dug through that weathered journal filled with Socrates quotes, which I’ve managed to hold on to all those years, and my heart almost stopped beating when I came to that quote. I remember reading it for the first time. I remember how clearly it seemed to express my feelings about wanting to end my life. I remember copying it from my textbook and underlining it again and again. I remembered Laura’s reaction to reading it. But none of that is why it affected me so much to look at it again today. I underlined it because I had felt it applied so clearly to my life, when clearly it had applied to hers.

Neither of us said a word for a while. I drove and kept turning up the music. Laura thumbed through the notebook.

I pulled over a few blocks from her house. I turned the lights off on the car and reached for my book bag in the backseat, fishing around for something to write with. I wrote on a blank notebook page, “Don’t you want anything normal out of life?”

She looked at me for a moment, slightly puzzled by why I would write this instead of saying it aloud. She took the pen and notebook from me.

“What do you mean?” she wrote, handing them back.

“You always talk about exploring places and roaming around the world looking for something,” I wrote. “But don’t you want a normal life at some point? Like having a family and stuff?”

She visibly shuddered when she read it.

“I can’t think of anything more repulsive than the thought of having a baby,” she wrote. “The idea of something growing inside me, it’s just … SICK.”

Everything was quiet for a moment, then she grabbed the notebook back from me and continued to write.

“So if you are asking if I want to be happy, and happy means being somebody’s wife and somebody’s mother and somebody’s neighbor or somebody PINNED DOWN to some warehouse because it would be cool … then NO. I guess I don’t want to be happy like that.”

Everything stayed silent for a moment.

“And you are wrong,” she said aloud. “That isn’t happy.”

“I never said that,” I answered. “I just asked if you wanted that.”

“You asked if I wanted normal,” she snapped. “And I don’t have any idea what normal is, though I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t care for it. And I wouldn’t be hanging around with you if I thought you had a clue about normal, either.”

I didn’t know whether to take that as a compliment or not.

As much as I found myself battling against convention and rules regarding everything else, having a relationship with her was one area where I decidedly longed for “normal.” Perhaps it was because everything else in my life was such chaos, but I wanted to make sure my feelings weren’t in vain. I wanted to know that this one thing in my life was real and had meaning. I wanted to know it was true.

When we reached her house, I slowly leaned over to try to kiss her good night. Laura softly shook her head and reached for the door.

I was spending an increasing amount of time in my car, basically because I had nowhere else to go. I could go home, but that would mean dealing with my parents. I could go to class, but that would mean explaining why I hadn’t attended most of them in weeks. The only place I didn’t feel any pressure to explain myself was work, where few people seemed to notice
me at all. But I only worked twenty hours a week, which left me with about a hundred and fifty-odd hours to fill.

So I just drove. Drove around Canton. Drove to my favorite hidden places. Drove nowhere in particular—just around.

One of the best parts of driving was being able to listen to music. I’d added an amplifier to the tape deck in my car, which turned the volume inside the vehicle from loud to obscenely loud. I liked it loud enough in the car that I could feel the music rattle against my body, throb inside my sinuses, and pulse in waves along the hair of my arms.

It isn’t that I loved what I was listening to as much as I loved the way it made me feel. Listening to music that loud has a way of blocking out your other senses. You start to taste music and smell music. It makes you numb to your emotions and the world around you.

A few nights after the March Violets show I was driving around after work, trying to burn off enough time so that I could go home after my parents had gone to bed. I’d just bought some Burger King and was driving up and down Cleveland Avenue, eating fries and listening to Gang of Four.