Half a Life: A Memoir (2 page)

Heading to the multiplex, the weirdness of being out, of not being under house arrest, settled on me like ash. (Shouldn’t I have at least considered visiting Celine’s hospital room?)

Before
Stand and Deliver
had even started, in the lobby I came across a guy from my town. (Why visit her hospital room, though? What could I offer?)

In one of those coincidences that life hands over more realistically than fiction can, the guy in the lobby was my good friend, Jim.

Jim jogged up to me on line at the ticket booth. “Heard what happened,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I didn’t see her until it was too late,” I apologized.

“Holy shit,” he said. Was there something
off
about his facial presentation? Where was the concern, or even a little solemnity? I sensed something weird in him right away—mockery nibbling there at the side of his mouth—and now he raised his hands, palms out. Next, a high-pitched “Ahhh!” Then: “Please! Don’t run me down!” And then more comic squeals, little darts tossed in the air.

Dave showed Jim an eloquent frown, quit it, quit it.

But next, an even nastier sound: Jim’s slashing laugh. He was cracking up at me.

Dave’s appalled stare, the shuffling feet of a conversation breaking down. Then Jim said, “No, you’re upset? Really? Come on, hey. Nothing wrong with a joke. What’s wrong with a joke?”

Everything. I felt panicky and bright and swollen: hugely sad, acutely
seen
. I slouched away, tucked myself into the theater’s dark, and had a sense of being extinguished.

The letup in perception, the no-input cluelessness—that’s the kind of shock everyone’s familiar with. But shock is not a one-time event. That system-junking you experience at the start goes away, of course. But then a lesser shock keeps showing up, to hurl a big muffling blanket over you. And when you push out of
that
, you feel it almost as a sudden blinking exposure to light. I’m talking about how your mind behaves after the broken circuit
appears
to be back up and running. I mean, why did I feel half-okay there in the multiplex parking lot, and why had I continued to feel that way until Jim’s cackle? The truth about shock, and about our bodies, is that they don’t want us to feel things deeply. We’re designed to act, react, forget; to be shallow. I knew I was normal—I had been a normal, normally embraced person twenty-four hours before. But would a normal person feel even halfway okay, as I seemed to feel now? Was it as if I’d somehow
forgotten
the accident?

Well, I remembered, of course. I remembered without end. In fact, one
me
kept remembering how another
me
from a second ago had just remembered the maybe life-destroying horror on West Shore Road (destroying, perhaps, two lives). And I’d remember how I’d just been enduring
that
a second
ago—and catch myself remembering it. And
then
I’d remember her reflector scuttling up the windshield, the sensation of my working to swerve, the surprise of her being so close and detailed. It wasn’t really
me
feeling it at any one time—rather, I was remembering those other mes, and we each shared it together, and all of us were overly compassionate to one another.

And here’s a cruel truth: the more accurate thing is that I kept
sort of
remembering without end. My brain persisted—as any bodily organ would—in trying to heal what was in effect a bruise. The bruise was the memory. And to remain what I thought of as human, I had to keep fighting against my basic, animal, healing response. That’s what the first day was like. The sensation I was fighting is maybe close to denial. But it’s not exactly denial.

My fear now is that all of this sounds over-aestheticized, and vague. There were times when the size of what had happened felt like a kind of nauseated grin: I’d done something this incalculably big, and here I was, still alive. I was okay. I’d hit a girl with my car, but the way the world worked I wasn’t in jail, I wasn’t hurt; I was free to indulge in a movie. It was this thought that made me leave the movie before it ended. The part of the brain that isn’t automatic is an imagining machine, feeling all possibilities of feeling: it keeps pushing its way into this marshy, pleasant terrain. You struggle against that push, and start to feel your stomach protest. It’s not so much even a type of consciousness as it is a circumstance, into which you pass by
slow degrees. I’ve never seen this sufficiently examined. It mutates into a less-unreal reality that still seems different, somehow, than being fully present. Self-hate is rarely unconditional. I don’t pretend it’s all right that I felt even half-okay.

At home in bed that first night I had patchy, mundane dreams about normal things.

It would be nobler and less uncomfortable to write that I tossed sleeplessly. Or that I woke with a scooped-out pain in my gut. Or that I sat down in my underwear at my desk that had moonlight on it and I had the terrible sense one gets, after something irrevocable, of being in the wrong place—of having awakened into a new and cramped world. (This is the sense I would have, on many nights, later.) I ended up scouring through details of the day: those EMS guys talking about cardiac arrest, about loss of blood, about not liking her chances. I homed in on that word—“chances,” with its promise of upside—and not on how the paramedic’s voice had tightened, the odds seizing his throat.

So few of our days contain actions that are irrevocable. Our lives are
designed
not to allow for anything irrevocable. The school part of our lives continues to be the school part for eighteen years, the work parts stay the work parts, and if we’re lucky nothing disarranges them; the small inconsistencies get buried under talk, explanations, rescheduling. If everything couldn’t continue as planned, no real plans could be made. But the breakfasts and TV afternoons and band
practices of teenaged life had been disrupted by something irrevocable, and I was new to it. And how did I handle this? What I want to write is that I lay there until morning, with tear-stained eyes, a tear-stained pillow, a tear-stained life. What can one do with levels of gloom and guilt, fear and disbelief, of bewilderment above one’s capacity to register?

I slept soundly.

A police officer called the next morning to say that Celine had died in the hospital. It was unclear whether her parents, who had been on vacation, had been able to see her.

My father answered the phone. The officer never asked for me.

My surest memories of that day are the reflector running up the windshield and the sunshine in the cracks as Dad got me home. I can
imagine
the flash of impact, of course. Even if I’m unable to really call back much about it. But it’s not hard to guess at the terrible, scratched-out details.

The truth is, anyone with a TV can fill this scene, taking snippets from the editing floor, plug-ins from the visual and sound-effects library we all carry. Pretty girl on bike, a shy little thud, hysterical windshield. And I’m somewhere in there too, trying to swerve, trying to disappear.

The police, Celine’s biking companion, and the recollection of five cars’ worth of eyewitnesses all conspired to declare me blameless. No charges were filed. A police detective named Paul Vitucci later told the newspaper, “For an unknown reason, her bicycle swerved into what you might call the traffic portion of the street, and she was immediately struck by the car. There was no way he”—meaning me—“could have avoided the accident, no way whatsoever.”

I remember coming down to breakfast, and my parents showing me that article. I remember thinking two things. 1) I am fine. The sweet, marshy part felt—
You made it
. And the other part said 2) Well, that’s it, I’m in the paper for the world to read about, there is no hiding from this. And I was right. After the story appeared in the local paper, everyone did find out. One friend of mine who lived about an hour north was startled awake by his mother with the news.

I’m sure my parents worried about me, but I don’t remember what they said, and I don’t think they tried to make contact with Celine’s family.

Very soon I got to the article’s denouement: Vitucci, eyewitnesses, unprovisional absolution. Society was clearing
me. But how could any reporter be so certain? If I hadn’t been with my friends, felt them next to me and in the backseat—if I hadn’t tried to point all of us toward something fun—maybe I would have focused on Celine, or driven slower. Or honked sooner. (Though I was positive that I had honked, when I’d first seen her inch away from the shoulder and into the right lane.) Any of ten different actions on my part might have led to an alternate ending. Maybe I hadn’t felt the right amount of alarm, just before the girl jumped across two lanes.

On a map Long Island looks like a tailless crocodile with its mouth open. Its far shore yawns into a pair of peninsulas a hundred miles east of New York City, and the crocodile’s hind-end nestles right up against Manhattan. Not too far up the crocodile’s back sits Glen Head, my town: the patch of low, paved swampland where Celine and I went to school, at North Shore High.

Manhattan casts a thin shadow onto Long Island. For most people, life in Glen Head verged on total disconnection from the city—ours could have been any suburb, anywhere—though when traffic was easy it took us just a half hour to reach tall and shaded Midtown.

As you drive the Long Island Expressway toward North Shore High School, the city relaxes its grip on the land. Soon you’re in the middle of wide suburban ho-humness. Though western Long Island differs from a real country milieu in all kinds of major ways (traffic snags, no silos), it’s true that North Shore High—only a public school despite the upscale name, largely middle-class Italian and middle-class Irish—was small enough for everyone to know everyone else’s business.

Which meant many uncomfortable things. This wasn’t
close to first among my worries and sadnesses, but it would be a lie to pretend it wasn’t somewhere in my thoughts: I’d violated the primary rule of junior and senior high—
don’t get people talking about you too much
. This was wearing the brightest shirt on the playground. This was Mom giving you a kiss in the lobby. The thought of returning to school made me feel swollen and incandescent again. I was disgraced, I was blessed (alive and journalistically absolved). I would be cafeteria news, the object of a discreetly pointed finger or nod. I would be the heavy dark ingot from the adult world—the world of consequences—introduced into the nothing-counts ethos of adolescence.

So here’s the next stage of guilt: when it’s about to become social. There were two parts of me that I wanted to keep above water: a respect for Celine, and a concern for her family. That seemed right and maybe even selfless. But the water that kept lapping over was this: how would people see me?
How do I keep the accident from being the main thing about me forever?

Immature, offensive thoughts—someone died.

I stayed away from school for almost a week. (I’d already gotten into college, and so was pretty sure I was risking absolutely nothing by skipping all those classes.) The days after the movie-theater mistake and the announcement of Celine’s death I spent behind my bedroom door, talking to no one in particular. I was more parrot than person—a parrot in underpants and socks, repeating his one cry. “How seriously will
I
be messed up by this?”

Which is
itself
, I don’t have to tell you, a pubescently egocentric thing to wonder. My concern about Celine, in those first days, was in large part really for that future version of myself—that he not become a shadowy and impaired figure. A week before I’d been eighteen and getting ready to push off for college, for love (I’d imagined) plus adventures with friends, then some cool and genial job. When my brain focused on losing all that, I became twitchy and frightened and horrible. At the same time, this anxiety triggered a new guilt: I should not be thinking about something so self-centered. I would concentrate on Celine’s parents, and next (after the shiver passing through who I was; after the cold squeeze in the throat) on nothing. The muffling blanket would fall over my thoughts. I’d hear something distinctly: the hinge sound of a book I opened, or my own breath.

One morning—Monday?—I left my room and went downstairs. A silent planet. Parents away at work, younger sister at school. I walked through the numbed rooms, stopping to read—because I was still allowed to take pleasure in magazines, right?—a
Sports Illustrated
. (Companies kept printing them, which meant time was still trudging ahead.) A photo of Danny Manning driving to the basket. How to face down a Nolan Ryan fastball. Can anyone fill John “The Wizard of Westwood” Wooden’s shoes? I’ve already read this stupid issue. And it was this second thought that cleared everything out. I was the kid I’d been three days ago. The morning passed with the sluggish, dusty feeling that comes to people when they’re loafing. But then, at the
fridge, I was stopped by what struck me as a presentiment. Maybe I’d be okay right now if I could only get myself to remember—what? To remember or realize
what
? And I stood in the kitchen with a glass in my hand and tried to figure out what that what was.

“We need to have you over at the accident site in a car,” said the Shrink. “What say you?”

He was middle-aged, a gray and not very fit fifty—thrown together, it seemed, from sausage meat and behaviorism classes.

“No, seriously,” he said, “that’s what you need today, is to drive that road again.”

“Um,” I said. How could I just pop over to where I’d killed Celine? (This was, I think, four days after that nightmare morning. It also happened to be my first therapy session ever.) “Okay,” I said. I was blushing to the edge of tears. “Sure, I guess.”

The Shrink—“Let’s do it!”—smacked the arms of his chair. And he sought, with quick vanity, the reflection in a big mirror opposite him. Just as fast he turned away. He appeared to have reached that situation of health where vanity meant you
didn’t
risk your face in the mirror.