A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me (47 page)

“That's why you'd be doing me a favor,” Frank said. “And why you wouldn't be doing the easy thing. When I was about your age, I was supposed to go to college on a scholarship. The scholarship was contingent on me being valedictorian of my high school class. Which I was, except that I didn't have a suit. I was supposed to give a speech at graduation, and I didn't have a suit, so I couldn't give the speech, so I couldn't be valedictorian, so I couldn't get the scholarship. And there was a man I knew who found out about my situation. And he bought me a suit. And he told me that when he was a young man, someone had done something similar for him. And that all I had to do to repay him was to do something similar for someone else someday. So, you see, you'd be helping me settle my debt. And all you'd have to do to repay me would be to do something similar for someone else someday.”

“Frank,” I said, “you've done enough for me.”

“No,” he said. “It's only enough if it gets you out of here.”

“What are you getting out of this?” I asked him. “I don't understand why you're doing this.”

“I told you,” he said. “I'm repaying a debt.”

“Yeah. I don't know about that story, Frank.”

“If you take on the debt, and repay me someday by doing something similar for someone else, does it matter if the story's true or not?”

“I don't know. I'm not used to thinking about things on this scale.”

“Everything has to happen for a first time. How do you make other hard decisions?”

So I thought, what would Han Solo do? When I put it like that, the answer was obvious.

 

75

Kris helped me move my stuff to Olympia in September, but I never got all of it. The apartment was always there, waiting. The Section Eight payments happened automatically, and they were apparently enough to keep the landlord happy as long as Dad was alive. So I kept going back, to get a few more things.

I got the impression, from talking to Ryan and Brandon and people I knew from school, that most people my age were excited about this part. They were looking forward to freedom and adventure. I wondered what they were picturing when they thought about living on their own. I had no picture of where I was going, or what was going to happen to me. Even actually doing it—being in Olympia, in the dorm room I shared with some other first-year college student who'd been assigned to me by the housing office—didn't help me understand how any of this was going to work.

I had a tacit assumption that I was going to die. That wasn't what I told people. I told people I was going to get a teaching degree and come back to teach at my old high school. I told people I'd graduate from Evergreen when I was twenty-one, and get a head start on the rest of my life—which was going to be awesome. I told people I was excited about my future. And all of it was perfectly plausible. Like Alexis's plan to move out on her own: it was mathematically possible for atoms and molecules to arrange themselves in such a way that I'd be a young adult with a college degree and a good job. But from my perspective, I may as well have been describing the house I was going to build in the mystical land of Narnia. I didn't know what a happy ending looked like. I'd never seen a happy ending any more than I'd ever seen a fucking unicorn.

On the other hand, I'd seen bunches of young men die in the prime of their lives, alone, with nobody to take care of them or mourn their passing. That was what had happened to Alexis's mathematically possible happy ending; that was a future I could picture really clearly.

I went through the motions of living my new life. I got Kris to adopt Dad's dog, Thunder. She'd been taking care of him for most of the last year, so it wasn't much of a reach for her. I said my goodbyes to people in Seattle. I got a work/study job in the campus metal shop at Evergreen, and registered for classes and went for walks in the woods. I attended get-to-know-you events, orientations, and mixers on campus. I was pretending this was my life now—at the same time I kept finding excuses to go back to my old one.

 

76

In November of my first year at Evergreen, my dad sent me a letter:

The irony, from my perspective, was that I'd tried to forgive him a bunch of times. I'd tried to forgive him for lying to me, and for hitting me, and for terrorizing and abusing me. I'd tried to forgive him for letting me down. I'd tried to forgive him over and over again by having an honest conversation with him about any of the shit he'd pulled, and trying to get him to accept some responsibility for any of it. Or at least admit that any of it had happened. He only ever got angry; told me I was making it sound worse than it was, that my childhood had been great, and that I never appreciated what a good parent he was because I didn't have a basis for comparison. His parents lied to him about everything, he said. They didn't respect him enough to tell him the truth—about sex, or drugs, or “the system.”

“I never lied to you about anything!” he'd shout. “Ever! You can accuse me of a lot of things, but I always told you the truth!”

Now here he was, delirious and dying, and asking me to forgive him for something he'd never done—for lies he'd never told. As far as I knew, Dad hadn't shot speed in ten years. The only time since he'd had AIDS that I'd “cought” him shooting anything was the time I walked in on him shooting sedatives into his PICC-line in the kitchen. I hadn't given him the chance to lie to me about that. I hadn't asked him a single question about it. I hadn't confronted him, or accused him, or questioned what he was doing. I knew there was no point.

Speed had been his drug of choice when I was little, back in Eugene. I assumed his reference to it was just some kind of drug addict's Freudian slip. A guilty echo. The incident in the kitchen was a proxy for all the other lies I'd caught him in. All the lies he wanted me to forgive him for now.

I called Frank and read the letter to him over the phone.

“What should I do?” I asked.

“What do you want to do?”

“I don't know. I don't want to tell him I forgive him. If he wanted that, he had plenty of opportunities. Now he's trying to blackmail me into absolving him for all the shit he's done over the years. I don't even see why he'd want that. He knows it'd be bullshit. What good does fake absolution do him at this point? If there's a time in a person's life when I'd think truth matters more than appearances, this would be it.”

“Those are good points,” Frank said.

“So what should I do?”

“What do you want to do?”

“Why do you keep saying that?” I asked.

“Because the only thing that matters now is what's good for you,” he said. “Your dad's story is over. In six months or a year, this will be done for him. He won't be dealing with the consequences of what you choose to do now. You will. So you make this decision based on what you need.”

“I don't know if I can do that.”

“You're not understanding me. If what you need, in order to feel good about yourself later on, is to show him some mercy—then show him some mercy. If you need to tell him the truth, do that. But try to look at it in terms of what you're going to be able to live with ten, twenty years down the line.”

It was on the tip of my tongue right then to tell Frank about getting Dad's blood all over me. I couldn't bring myself to do it. He'd worked so hard to get me out. I couldn't bring myself to tell him I might have screwed it all up—that I might have killed myself by being stupid and careless. Or by just not caring about myself enough to avoid a lethal mistake.

“All right,” I said. “Thanks, Frank.”

“Good luck,” he said.

*   *   *

I went back to Seattle again a few days later. I didn't seem to be able to help myself. I visited Dad in Swedish Hospital, where he was staying while he waited for a spot in an AIDS hospice called Rosehedge House. I had no idea what I was going to say to him. I hoped he'd just forget, but as soon as I walked into the hospital room he looked at me with his dull eyes and bared his teeth in something that was supposed to be a smile. That same dull, give-me-a-hand-here smile he'd used when I found him in the kitchen covered in blood.

“Did you get my letter?” he asked.

His hopeful tone made me sick.

“Yeah,” I said. “I got it.”

“Do you have anything to say to me?” he asked.

I was breathing deeply, like I had when he threatened to have me committed. I stared into his eyes. They'd changed so much in the past five years. It was almost as if they'd gotten lighter; gone from dark brown to a kind of muted yellow. His face had collapsed in on itself. His skin hugged the bones of his face, like a damp washcloth draped over a skull. Only his eyes showed any life, and they were full of a slow-burning anger. Not the rage I'd seen on his face a thousand times, when he hit me or screamed at me. This was something deeper. More like hatred.

There was nothing in there to tell me what I should do.

“We can talk about it later,” I said.

“No. I need to hear it now.”

I could have the fight, I could leave, or I could give him what he wanted. Whatever else happened here today, I could see it wouldn't be a catharsis. He'd only ever let me forgive him for things he was ready to admit to, and he'd only admit to things that had never happened.

“I forgive you,” I said.

“What?” he said.

“I forgive you,” I said again.

He reached for my hand and held it in his.

I'd never hated anyone as much as I hated him then. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to crush him. I wanted to climb onto the bed like a rabid ape and jump up and down on his chest until his ribs burst out like a little nest, like a boat I could kneel down in while I wrapped my fingers around his neck and squeezed until the meat pushed out between my fingers like putty, until I was crushing his spine in my hands and screaming in his face. My guts cramped, pushing and pulling, tearing like something had torn loose inside me. I didn't know what.

I just knew I'd made a horrible mistake, and that I'd never be able to fix it.

*   *   *

I slept on Kris's floor that night and called Brandon to hang out the next day. He and Maria were sharing an apartment up on 15th, five blocks east of Broadway. I never saw Maria when I went over there to visit him. I'd run into her on the bus once, and she'd said he made her leave the room whenever I was coming over. He also didn't like her to call me or talk to me. Brandon and I still talked, but this had been a thing between us for months.

In my brief time at Evergreen, I'd learned a sort of problem-solving approach that I thought would help Brandon and me come to some kind of settlement on Maria. They did a thing there where they talked about their feelings as issues that needed to be addressed. Like “I'm finding your demeanor really threatening.” And then whoever that was said to was supposed to dial it back. Maybe even apologize. Where Brandon and I came from—at Garfield, on Broadway, and in the houses we'd grown up in—admitting that kind of weakness was a death sentence. But at Evergreen, it was almost a kind of religion.

“So listen,” I said to Brandon when I saw him. “We need to work this thing out. About Maria.”

“I'm not sure what you mean,” he said. We were sitting in his living room, which was only slightly less messy than his bedroom had been back when he was living next door to me. He and Maria already had a lot of pets, and the smell of them was strong in the apartment. But he had a couch, a few chairs, and some lamps. A few end tables. I could see the idea of a home underneath everything else.

“I mean I want to talk about this thing,” I said. “Where you're mad at me for having been with her. And where you tell her to leave the room whenever I come over. And a million other little things you've done and said since you guys got together. It's like you hold it against me, how things went, but all I ever did was the stuff you told me to. Asked her for her phone number. Broke things off when she said she loved me. I was just following your rules.”

He smiled at me, but it was a smile I knew. It was a smile I'd seen him practice in the Guardian Angels. It was meant to project professional distance. It was appraising. Patronizing. The silence stretched out between us until he leaned forward and braced his elbows on his knees, like he was going to tell me a secret.

“You know,” he said, “I'm glad you brought this up.”

“You are?” I said.

“Yeah. I am. Because there's something I've been wanting to tell you since school ended, and I think this is a good time.”

“Okay,” I said.

“You … use people, Jason. You use people, and you take from people. And you whine, constantly. You hear what I'm saying? The thing I'm trying to get across to you is, you're just not a very good person. Maybe it's not your fault. You've had a hard life. But I have to tell you, I'm just sick of it. For years, you want to get together at night and talk about your problems. You want my advice about every girl you have a crush on. You're afraid of being poor, but you're crap at holding down a job. You never make any of your own decisions, about anything. The whole time I've known you, all I do is give—and all you do is take. And now you come in here talking about Maria—it's like you're trying to make me feel guilty for being in love. On top of everything else. So here's what I'd like you to do. I'd like you to leave my apartment. And I'd like to never hear from you again.”