You Shall Know Our Velocity (32 page)

When I first read this part, about getting his
ass handed to him
in Oconomowoc, I was deeply confused, and at first thought there was something I didn’t know. Had this really happened? I forget things every so often, and so wondered if…. The scene is so vivid, so I asked around, to other people who knew him, and no dice. No one beat up Will; Will went to Africa with a face as clear as could be, while still bearing a distant resemblance to Herman Munster.

Thus, this beating nonsense is one of two major devices he’s used—the other one concerning Jack—to, I guess, thicken the plot a bit, to give it some kind of pseudo-emotional gravitas. But
why would he find it necessary to have himself, the narrator, get beaten up? And by three men in Wisconsin, no less. It makes no sense. I’ve been thinking about this, and a few times in the last year I’ve understood why he might do this, why he’d have himself beaten up, traveling the world with a face showing pain in the most obvious way, all bruises and scabs.

I read Will’s account of his trip to the storage unit shortly before I had to do the very same thing—only in this case, I was retrieving Will’s stuff, after his own death. I had never done that kind of thing before, but there was no one else to do it. Will was an only child, and his dad was never around, and with his mom gone, too, it fell to me. (Another piece of news I have to unceremoniously dump in your lap, for lack of time and suspense: Will has no brother named Tommy. The name was likely taken from a mutual friend of ours, Tommy Wells, a year older, who we’d both liked but who moved away just before sixth grade. Will always wanted a brother, though, and envied those with larger families, and I suppose then it’s natural that he, when creating this semi-fictional backdrop, would throw in—unnecessarily, I think—an older brother, a Tommy, a guy who likes cars and mustaches. It wasn’t the only wishful fabrication in the book.)

It was up to me to clear out Will’s things, most of which had been there for a long while, though he updated its contents once or twice a year. I did the drive, which I’d done of course a thousand times before, on a good day, clear and bracing. It was March. I got there to find that the place does sit between Wall and Industrial streets, a fact I’m sure Will relished mentioning in a book in part about economic disparity (for it was, aha!, an area in great need of repair). The place was really just a decrepit parking lot cut by three parallel buildings set into the uneven pavement. I pulled in, my tires licked puddles and then gravel, and I stopped next to the Citgo.

When the door of No. 503 rolled upward, I saw boxes. They
were crooked, all of them, because Will was organized but never neat. I’ve never seen so many bent boxes, leaning every way, for some reason evoking a forest of mushrooms. There was moisture in there, and the cardboard was soft. I thought of graham crackers left outside, at a picnic, half-spoiled, chewy.

Will never expressed to me any sort of idea that when he was leaving for South America—I think he started in Guatemala—that he would not be coming back. And his storing of his possessions leaves the question open. On the one hand, I know that before he left, he did give up his apartment. On the other hand, the range of things he decided to store, and the recent visit he’d obviously made to the unit, would indicate that he was storing things not for my probing afterward, but for safekeeping until he could get back and better edit his belongings. I knew that I couldn’t leave anything in this unit. I stood before everything Will had left, knowing I couldn’t leave until this steel container was empty. I was hoping that there was enough that could be remorselessly thrown away, and that the rest would fit in my car. I went to work, though my heart had moved up eight inches and was thrumming against my chest. This was sorrow.

There is a sensation when you’re looking at the physical remnants of a person’s memory when you are sure that you shouldn’t be there. I’m of the opinion that secrets kept in life should be honored in death, that nothing changes simply because you’re not there to defend yourself. So I decided quickly that I would not read or open anything looking private—would only sort between those things I should dispose of, and those I would bring back to Chicago with me, to be stored in my basement. I wasn’t thinking far ahead, really, though I vaguely recognized how strange it would be to be keeping his possessions, and to be storing them in my own place, and had no idea what would eventually become of them—the best I could hope for them, I acknowledged, was that they would be kept safe and dry for a few more years, but that when next I moved,
I would dispose of a few more boxes, until eventually there was very little left of his things, and that someday, far in the future, they would either be confused with my own things by my own decedents, or be sold at estate sales or thrown away by strangers. There is no dignity to these things, and their destiny is invariably grotesque. Memory, perhaps, should have no physical shape.

Thankfully, the first boxes I opened were the easiest—anonymous and disposable. There was a dumpster beside the building, and I knew great satisfaction in heaving boxes over the green steel wall and inside the empty container, where they thumped or clattered.

There were three boxes of coat-hangers. Clatter.

There was a box of blankets. Thump.

A box of very old and unusable sheets and pillowcases. Thump.

There was a box of plates and glasses and cutlery. Clatter.

I should stop here and tell you that everything, absolutely everything, was covered in mouse droppings. I assume that’s what they were, though I saw no mice. I thought for a second that the tiny hard pellets, smooth like Tic-Tacs but black, could be the result of bats, but then remembered guano, and guano doesn’t come in pellet form.

Every box I picked up, to move or inspect, rattled. Sometimes there were thousands of pellets in one box. I knew there was no food in any of the boxes, so I was baffled as to why the mice not only chewed their way into each and every one of forty-one boxes in that storage unit, but why they stayed there, perhaps
lived
there. There was nothing to live on in that room.

But let me back up. Opening the door to the storage unit gave me that immediate acidic taste on my tongue—I last got it when I saw a man on Navy Pier kick another man in the head; it appeared in the nanosecond between when I knew the fight was getting out of control and when I knew the victor was going to
throw his foot into the back of the man’s skull. The door was padlocked, and fittingly enough, the guy on duty had to break it open; the metaphorical clarity of the action didn’t escape me. Immediately after the broken lock dropped to the floor, the door rose up, rolling into the roof of the room, and I cried immediately and didn’t stop for five minutes. What a strange fucker he was. There was a box full of bathroom and shower things—shampoo, conditioner, scrub brushes, a loofa, a six-pack of Dove soap, more shampoo, two empty bottles of some kind of body wash. In the same box, combs, a pair of brushes, an electric razor, a bunch of brand-new hand towels. Three boxes of books, paperbacks mostly, some legal textbooks, from when he thought he could pass the bar without law school. His few college textbooks. Mattresses, a bedframe, end tables, lamps, posters, and yes, a giant cardboard cutout of Jack Sikma. An antique globe, before Israel, with a lightbulb inside.

I began throwing the clothes into garbage bags I’d brought. For some lucky reason I didn’t recognize a lot of them, and this made it easier; I didn’t need to stop. But every so often, something would come up, a CB jacket or a woven belt, and for a second Will would inhabit that thing. His old backpack, still with the word FLAMER written and crossed out in Sharpie, sat flattened at the bottom of one soft brown box, and when I took it up I could see it moving on his shoulders, could see it sitting under his desk, could see him throwing it into the backseat of my car, could see his strange grimacing smile and his dark eyes, his dark lashes. He had scars all over his knuckles. Did he ever mention that?

I was trying to get the task done, but was fighting too many fronts. I was all too aware of the strangeness of actually doing something that Will had described, fictionally, in the book about us, and it was scaring me. I felt like I was being watched, like it was all too neat and circular to be happening randomly, unplanned.
And he’d gotten it right, in the strangest way, that feeling of being attacked by shadows, on every side, of breathlessness, of being beaten. I stuffed the clothes in four black garbage bags, and tossed the books, but I took a number of breaks, walking over to the Citgo for snacks, hiking around the area, up to the National Guard building, which indeed exists, just where he said it did.

There was a small box of maps and tickets and money from our trip, and I kept that.

There was a bass guitar, with no strings strung.

There was a box of puppets, all of them ancient, certainly something he’d inherited himself. Their heads were large, the size of a cat’s, and their clothes were made of silk, harlequinned but filthy. I’d never seen them or heard anything about them. I put them in my car, the box of them.

I was there for three and a half hours, but I don’t know why. There wasn’t any reason for me to stay, really. I came to the conclusion that this was just punishment, that no good was being accomplished. I had my memories of Will already—I had a hundred pictures, easily, and a thousand objects that brought him back—and this was just unnecessary. I should have left everything there, should have allowed the owners of the storage facility to empty the room; no one could have objected. My going up there was doing nothing for anyone; it was a suffocating afternoon for me, when I felt the air become thinner, the breathing more difficult; I didn’t trust my hands, and wanted to become an animal. I didn’t like being a human, and thinking this was something humans should do, and though part of me had wrapped this up somehow in the idea of fairness and rightness and dignity, it was more correct to see this as the opposite, as playing in the slop of a dead man’s past. Dignity would be to incinerate this stuff without a look, and to then rely on my own memories to do Will justice. I just hate all this work in the physical—the funerals, the clothes,
the caskets and makeup and pulling of flesh! The writing of checks to those who handle the dead! I refuse. I will not do it again.

Will’s possessions filled my car. The dumpster next to the unit was full, too, of mattresses and frames, Jack Sikma, pillows and cardboard. I would recycle some other day. I drove off, feeling a hollow around my eyes, knowing my hands were fists, wanting to swim, wanting to watch a lot of TV, wanting to masturbate for days, wanting to watch basketball on cable while drinking from a mug, wanting to have someone waiting for me at home, wanting a dog at the very least, wanting to go deep-sea diving, wanting to be seventeen again, before we left a time when our hands didn’t know how to pack up the possessions of the dead, wanting Will to rise, to refind human form in the thicket of his things in my backseat, to speak again so I could knock his fucking head off.

On the way home that day I thought about the perfect parallel of Will’s experience at Oconomowoc and mine, his fictional and metaphorical, mine so mundane and worthless. It’s my guess that what Will was describing was his packing up of his original house, the one he and his mother lived in until her death. I’m not sure there was a storage unit involved, but my guess is that he was extrapolating, using his own unit as a model, and because he couldn’t describe the shame in the disposal or sale of his own family’s heirlooms and incidentals, he created a stand-in setting, and for his mother, another stand-in: Jack.

For there was no Jack. As long as I have known Will, there was no Jack. Throughout the book Will talks of Jack, and the death of Jack, a death that in some circuitous way leads to both the beating at Oconomowoc and to this trip. But both of those things are fictions. I have addressed the second fiction, and now will address the first.

I can’t tell you how confused I was when I read that first paragraph, with all that shit about Jack. He’s in the first sentence, and he’s a lie. I thought at first that it was another cute little device by
the ghostwriter,
*
like the implication that Will is writing from the grave, but then found all the references to Jack within, and was shaken to my core. Will and I had always been a duo—there is comfort in a mutually acknowledged and exclusive duo—so you can imagine my frustration when I see this manuscript and throughout there is this third person, missing but present, named Jack, who is painted on glass, with the sun forever shooting through. He’s a saint of some kind, better at everything—basketball, drafting, romance—and why the fuck why? I can’t understand it. He is, like any creation of friend-fiction, an amalgam of a bunch of people we know, and then an idealization of that amalgam. Worse, Will gives him more than a few of his own Will-characteristics, like the tendency to drive slowly, checking the speedometer by giving a double thumbs-up.

I don’t know why he would begin the book with such a premise, with the death of this third friend—or rather, I understand it all too well, and I’m disappointed in him. It’s my opinion that the book didn’t need the lies. This is something Mark Twain wrote, or Samuel Clemens wrote, or whatever: “To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art.” And I like that—it invites Will to have just put the truth down, in order, and let the facts underline the absurdity in the situation, our motives, the results, everything. But Will chose instead to set things up in a more conventional way, and I guess it makes more sense, to some, to provide this kind of motivation for our trip, it thus seeming like a kind of fleeing.
But the fact is that it wasn’t. There is no correlation between the trip we took and any particular death, I don’t think, but then again something must have given him that sense of urgency about things, and probably inspired the idea of such a quick but potent trip, with such tight parameters but with the outward gestures of his inner mix of confusion and love, the outward expression of an inward grace … but that’s another issue, the issue of the sacrament. More on that later.