The Boy on the Bridge: A Short Story
I. gennēthē
It was in the sweet month of April that Calvin popped his head into the world, and with him came the return of the grass from its snowy covering, the return of the squirrels from the ash-trees on the boulevard, and the return of men and women and creatures of all kinds from their dreary holes to their true home the earth. And in the happy domicile of 1517 Van Buren Avenue a little boy grew up.
Every morning he would look himself in the mirror and think: What a joyous thing it is to be alive, and then he would run out into the little, fenceless backyard and turn the ground beneath him into great mountains or mysterious glades, seaside ports or sandy wastes, and with the neighbor boy Wesley by his side, they would traverse these far realms as soldiers, as heroes, and as men. For there were dragons to be fought and people to be saved, lands to be reclaimed and foes to be vanquished. And at the end of every day, after Wesley went inside, Calvin would build their experiences in his little sandbox, makeshift memorials to inform the passing stranger of the adventures of the day.
His imagination was really something remarkable, but sometimes it got him into trouble. He could still remember September 11, 2001, for example, when he had only been three years old. On that day, his mother had put him in the car and driven him to the Cathedral in Downtown St. Paul for a prayer service. And the boy had never been inside such a massive building. And seeing the blue light flood in through the stained glass windows had filled him with awe. His mother had shuffled into an uncomfortable wooden bench with him by her side, and a big bearded man had spoken for a long time in front of all St. Paul’s people, and the gathered had bowed their heads in sorrow and clasped their hands together as if they had been clapping for some great performance only to be frozen in the middle of their applause.
All of this interested Calvin, but nothing had piqued his curiosity more than the statue in the front of the cathedral. It was a statue of a man hanging from a piece of wood. He wore an uncomfortable crown upon his head, and this caused him to look quite regal and yet quite tortured at the same time, Calvin thought. And his arms were outstretched as if he were about to enclose all the gathered people in a wide embrace.
It struck Calvin suddenly that he wanted to know this man’s name. And so he had turned to ask his mother. But her eyes were closed and her hands clasped together. His mother was one of the frozen, her eyes shut like one of the gathered dead.
“Mommy?” He had whispered.
She had shaken her head.
“Mommy please...who is he?” the boy had whispered, a little louder.
And then she had looked up, confused. “What, Calvin?”
And then he had pointed with his little index finger at the statue of the man. “That sad man, Mommy. Who is he?”
And then she had smiled in relieved recognition. “Ohhhh...That man. That man is Jesus, Calvin.”
Jesus. So that was his name. Well hello, Mr. Jesus. What are you doing up there? We’re down here, Mr. Jesus, and we’re all ready for you to give us a big hug. But the statue had stayed in place, of course. Unless...perhaps...it’s you who needs a hug. He looked over to his mother, whose eyes were closed, and then he looked back to the frowning man. Okay, Mr. Jesus...this doesn’t seem like the best time, but if you really need a hug, I understand.
And then Calvin had snuck up the aisle, past all of the frozen people, straight to the altar at the front of the church. And he had stood on his tippy toes and embraced the man’s feet. There you go, Mr. Jesus. I hope you feel better. And he had felt very good about himself for a long moment, until he had realized that every person in the whole cathedral was looking at him, and then he had felt very silly. But the feeling had not lasted very long, for his mother had stormed to the front of the cathedral, snatched him up and taken him out to the car, and with that, she had driven him home in silence. And he had spent the whole ride home wondering why on earth anyone should be punished for loving someone else.
Calvin’ mother was named Ava. She was a young woman with sandy, blonde hair and deep brown eyes. She had grown up on a farm in a little lakeside town in Northern Minnesota where the winters had been brutal, and after going to school for History in Bemidji for four years, Ava had busted out of her countryside world and moved to the city, where she had soon found a teaching job and a man to love.
The man to love was named Joseph, and the two had met when she had moved to the Hamline-Midway neighborhood, when she had been living in an apartment on University. They had dated for six months, and then he had proposed to her on the Stone Arch Bridge by the light of the moon, and there they had kissed as snow fell. And they had walked back to the car in the gently settling snow.
Nineteen years later, Ava still thought about that night in the snow. But nineteen years later, she couldn’t remember the feeling of his lips upon hers. Nineteen years later, he was a silhouette in her memory, a shadow of the glory of youth. She tried to imagine embracing him under the lamp post, tried to imagine his arms closing about her waist like a clasp, but all she could think of was open air, open air and gently settling snow, and she, herself, Ava, standing alone on a bridge in the night.
II. erémos
“You enter a wide cavern with a huge domed ceiling made of glass. You look up to see the moon and stars hanging cold and unforgiving in the sky. Ahead, on a pedestal in the center of the room, is the ancient tome you sought. Around the pedestal, a pack of massive wolves slumber, picking their teeth with the bones of the dead. You hear the door lock behind you, and the sound of it echoes loudly through the cavern. The eyes of the sleeping beasts snap open immediately. They rise to their feet slowly and bare fangs as long as knives. Roll for initiative.”
The group of boys sit gathered around the basement table. They live by the light of a single bulb. And by that dim light, a tenseness can be seen in their faces. Here are the faces: One with brown eyes, pale skin, and a freckled nose crowned with wide Ray Bans. Another with blond hair and a sharp jawline; little acne geysers scatter across his white forehead. A third with tousled black hair and yellow skin - a hyphenated mouth. A fourth with purple-dyed hair, handsome cheekbones, and aviator glasses. The faces stare out of the dark, emerging from it into the dim light as if sculpted in relief from the raw granite of the void.
There is a clattering of dice hitting the table. A collective murmuring of two digit numbers between zero and twenty. And then the voice of an impatient mother careening down the basement stairs and bursting into the light.
“WESLEY! Time for DINNER!”
Groans all around.
The kid with the purple hair and aviator glasses speaks up: “Can’t we just finish this ENCOUNTER?”
“No more stalling! I’ve called you six times! You’ll have to finish some other time!”
Wesley looks at the others apologetically. “Sorry, guys…”
There is a shuffling of chairs and a thumping on the staircase as the boys head upstairs. They mutter “Thank you”s to Mrs. Feldon and head out to their cars.
“Seeya, Jack.”
“Yup. Seeya Curtis.”
“Later, Calvin.”
And the boys drive themselves away into the night. But Calvin lives just next door to Wesley. He walks home in the warm night air. He unlocks the gate and started up the walk to his home. It occurs to him in passing that he can’t remember when the fence was built around the yard.
Calvin walks into the entryway and kicks off his shoes. From the entryway he can see his mother wearing an apron making dough into loaves. She hears the door swing open and turns to greet him.
“Calvin! How was it at Wesley’s?” “Oh, it was...it was good.” And he begins to head up the stairs.
And she squints at him, and after a pause that is too short to indicate a conversation’s end and too long to feel quite natural, she speaks, quieter and somewhat stilted: “How...How was your day?”
The footsteps pause tentatively on the staircase.
“It was good...”
“...Well, what made it good?” She calls back.
He takes a moment to respond. “Mom...I’ve got a Language Arts paper to write, can we-”
“Talk later,” She says. “Sure. I understand. Sorry. Go on. Do your homework.” And she looks down at the pale dough and she shakes her head, and in her eyes is a keen awareness of failure. I swear he’s isolating himself. He knows we can’t live the same lives we once did. I’m trying to talk to him about it. Heaven knows I’m trying. He’d tell me if something was wrong, wouldn’t he?
And Calvin heads up the stairs to his room and closes the door. He flops onto his bed with a sigh. He pulls out his phone. He taps on the Instagram icon vacantly. He scrolls. Geez, Sophie. You post a selfie like four times a week...Jess, not another dance video. No one cares about your dance videos. He taps the ‘like’ button anyways. ...The Grants went to Canada over Christmas break. What a pretty place Canada must be. Look at those pine trees. They’re massive. And the Northern Lights. They’re just matchless in beauty. It makes you think of those haunting ballads your Grandfather would read to you from that old “Best Tales of the Yukon” book.
Calvin puts his phone away and from his bed, he peers out his bedroom window at the descending stars. I think I’d like to move to Canada. Work on a fishing boat. That would be a life. Anything to get away from here...But then there’s love. You’d need love. That would keep you rooted. A pang of loneliness sounded through the depths of his heart like the tolling of a bell in a hollow cathedral.
---
Calculus class. His teacher is a tall, thin man with black hair, a pointed nose and a nasally voice. He is droning on and on about limits, about lines that try to touch and yet never meet. Calvin can’t help but stare out the window. Not far off, he can see the Schmitt’s Brewery tower pumping out vapor into the sky, and past that, little houses, houses that dot the greening earth all the way up to the Capitol building whose dome towers over St. Paul like the Northern Hemisphere of a manufactured world. North of that is Cathedral Hill, upon which sits St. Paul’s Cathedral. It must be visible from anywhere in the city, Calvin thinks.
Off to the South is the Mississippi, and to the East, on the edge of Downtown St. Paul, there is a construction crew on the Smith bridge, all of them in white hard hats, working jeans and bright red vests. He can see big cranes reaching to touch the domed sky. The bridge was old. It had fallen into disrepair over the years. And now people were refurbishing it, some starting on the South side of the river, others on the North, and they were building toward the middle, reconstructing the great bridge that rose from the sandy banks, reconnecting the world of St. Paul to the world of the West Side.
“...Calvin?” The nasally voice pierces the bubble of imagination like a needle.
Crap. “Uh…sorry could you repeat that question?”
Through his thick glasses, the teacher glares. “See me after class please.”
Dammit.
When the lunch bell rings, he sits with Jack, Curtis and Wesley. The boys set their food on the table and share.
“Wanna fruit snack? I hate these. They’re like the healthy veggie kind, you know?”
“I’ll trade you a banana for those.”
“Well, taste them first...”
And Wesley is just smiling. He is the quietest one of all of them. He has his hair in a bun, and it strikes Calvin how long it must be. He has a slightly swollen eye. He got that mark from the baseball team...Rumors about him in the locker room...Had to quit, the team was so mean to him.
“...Man, did you see Frankenstein’s Monster today? He was a mess...” Says Jack.
“Who’s that?” replies Calvin.
“You know...that nutso kid in our Social Studies class? The kid with the stupid glasses?”
“Oh yeah! He was off the rails today…” Curtis interjects.
And Wesley glances across the lunch room. He waves to someone. He gets up and walks over to a table of girls across the lunchroom.
Jack and Curtis quit talking.
“Hey,” Jack says. “Where the hell is he going?”
Calvin looks over. Wesley is sitting next to Anna, the pretty girl with the Golden State Warriors tote bag, and she has her head on his shoulder. His arm is around her, and he is laughing with the other girls at the table, enthusiastic, joyful. A pang of jealousy rises in Calvin’s heart.
He really didn’t know very much about Anna. He rarely spoke to her, but something drew him to her. Sometimes Calvin thought he simply projected onto her the good things he wanted. Perhaps she was really a very boring person. But to him, she seemed a pure blooded Romantic, carrying around her books, quiet, patient. She was asymptotic, a form of beauty that his mind believed he could only reach in dreams.
He remembered the first time he saw her. It had been at a talent show some years ago, when she had gone up in front of the school and recited Walt Whitman’s Crossing Brooklyn Ferry in its entirety, and then she had stepped down from the podium with her Golden Gate Warriors tote bag by her side. He had wondered: What kind of a person recites Walt Whitman in front of a crowd?
Perhaps Calvin was strange, but he approached people like puzzles, and she was one he couldn’t crack. It drove him mad, laying awake wondering what the Hell happened behind those glasses, wondering what that mind clung to in its deepest moments.
Wesley whispers something to Anna, and she looks back at Calvin across the lunchroom, her gaze meets his, and she grins. Is she blushing a little? I can’t tell. He grins back awkwardly. And he feels a familiar pang of longing, and wonders if she feels it as well. In the second that their eyes meet, a book could be written, a universe formed. In one second there are a hundred tomorrows; in a gaze between two souls life is distilled life itself and every reason for living, the whole world pressurized into a temporal grain of sand...That sounded quite poetic, now didn’t it? You should write a poem, Calvin...
She’s going off to...where? New York for college? You don’t have dreams that big...Well, you do. Of course. Anyone does. But you’re stuck. She’s not. Plain and simple. The world is shrinking before you Calvin, shrinking, till one day it’ll suffocate you. You got into the U, but do you really want to spend four more years in the Twin Cities? And in a single moment, he feels the future in full force, a dark power seizing him by the throat.
Grandfather never went to college. He knew how short life was. How little living most people did. “The only thing you really need,” he had told Calvin while they were hiking in the woods by the farmhouse one day, “is someone to love. The rest falls into place. The heart’s lonely, Calvin. It wants to love and be loved.” If it can only love, or if it can only be loved without reciprocating, it isn’t a heart at all. And without a heart, you’re dead...Let me tell you something: There are a whole lot more dead folks who walk than living ones. And that’s the truth.”
And all of a sudden, Calvin feels the need to sob. It’s a strange feeling, and it sneaks up on him like a panther. The lunch room seems to him smaller now, more constricting. The world outside seems bigger. It seems to taunt him through the high windows.
---
The next day, two boys sit by the bank of the Mississippi skipping stones on the placid water.
“High school’s almost over, huh, Calvin?” Wesley says. And he squints through his glasses at the beach below him. He squats low and searches the sand for rocks.
Calvin nods. “It’s crazy…” And he looks out at the river, at all that water flowing by, and he is conscious of time passing in every detail, in the crickets chirping in the tall prairie grass, in the fluttering noise of a dragonfly’s wings upon the water. And a wave of the river of time hits him in the gut. He wants to cry. Why do you have to feel such extremes? He thinks to himself. Is that how others think too? You have to be either overjoyed or ready to kill yourself. You can’t be somewhere in the middle. He throws a rock and watches it skip over the water.
“I’m gonna miss this,” says the boy with the dyed hair. And he smiles gently.
“Miss what, Wesley?”
“...You know...running by the river...chatting with you...the works. I’m gonna miss it all…”
And the sky is fading pink as the sun sets.
“I’m gonna miss it too...God, it’s gorgeous,” Calvin replies. What a pretty world it is, and yet what a damned hard one it is to live in. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to leave it... The white coffin flashes upon his memory, the corpse lowered into the ground of the Birch County Cemetery. He throws another stone, and watches it bounce carelessly across the water. Damn you, Calvin. Quit being so morbid. You don’t have to think about death all the time. There is reason to be glad.
“Coach will be wondering where we are pretty soon,” says Wesley. “We’d better head back.” And he smooths his hair, pulls a hair binder off his wrist and puts it up into a bun on his head. And he looks to Calvin very thoughtful for a moment, and there is a sad quality to his eyes, and he stands up, brushes sand from his running shorts and begins to jog up the path. Calvin watches those toned legs pump in heavy, equal strokes. Wesley is your best friend, now isn’t he? When can you say that you know folks? The other boys...you don’t really know them. But Wesley...if there was anyone you could say you knew - really knew - it would be Wesley.
And Wesley stops jogging and turns around. “What are you waiting for?” He yells.
“I’m coming.” And Calvin heads down path into the pinkness of the enveloping sky. Why do you always have to dwell on life? He thought to himself. Why can’t you just live it and go on like a normal person?
---
First track meet of the season. Calvin finishes the mile and then rushes to the sidelines to cheer Wesley on in the 800. The gun goes off, and the boys are going. A storm of legs. Panting.
And as Wesley speeds past, Calvin screams his lungs out, but as he does, he hears the voice of another right beside him, another person cheering the boy on.
He turns to see Anna standing a few feet away. She is wearing a light red blouse that leaves the shoulders bare and she wears faded jeans. She carries her tote bag in her left arm and clutches a large book to her chest.
“Hey.” He says a little too enthusiastically. His heart leaps around in his chest just at the sight of her. She turns in surprise and then smiles in recognition.
“Hello Calvin. Here to cheer on Wesley?”
What is she thinking right now?
“Uh, yeah! I just ran my race actually-”
“I saw….Second place isn’t too shabby.”
“Thanks,” he coughs, and there is an awkward pause. “...What-what’s that book you’re reading?”
“Oh this?” She replies, and holds the book out to show him the cover. “For Whom the Bell Tolls. I just started it this morning.” Calvin is amused to see that the bookmark sticks out from a page about halfway through the large novel. Is she just a bookworm then?
“What’s it about?” He asks her.
“It’s set during World War I,” she explains, “and the world is rife with division. And these Spanish revolutionaries have to blow up a bridge to stop their enemies from crossing it into friendly territory…”
She’s talking, but he can’t pay attention to what she’s saying, not because he is uninterested but because of how fascinating she is. He looks at how she turns her head, how even her eyes smile, how the sunlight complements her blithe demeanor.
“...and it’s all about time, and how little of it we have, and how we need to make the most of our lives,” she finishes speaking.
Sounds like the Gospel to me. Does she believe that?
And Wesley reaches the finish line, and the two run to congratulate him. First place. He could go to State at this rate. And Anna runs to congratulate him, and Calvin feels a familiar pang of jealousy. And then from the sidelines, Wesley’s father waves, still in his business suit and tie. And the father smiles at his son, and Calvin sees this and feels a second pang in his heart.
---
At home, Ava reads on the couch waiting for her son to come home from his track meet. But she can’t focus on the words. How big the house had seemed when she and Joseph had bought it. How excited she had been to entertain guests, to fill the house with people. And for a few years, it had been like that, hadn’t it? Old college friends would come down from up North every once in a while, and around the holidays it wasn’t uncommon to have a guest or two staying the night in 1517 Van Buren Avenue.
There had been nineteen beautiful years in this home, years filled with joy and laughter, evenings upon which the snow had fallen over the backyard, and the family had gone out on long walks in the muted world. And little Calvin and Wesley the neighbor boy would go out in the backyard no matter the weather and pretend to be knights or superheroes or anything except themselves. Now, when she looked out the window, she saw an empty backyard. The two boys were still close, but they were getting older. Back then she had been able to hold Calvin when he cried. Now he was standoffish, moody, unwilling to talk to her.
Joseph. Joseph had always been closer with Calvin than she had. Joseph had been the link between the mother and her son. And with Joseph gone, she felt cut off from her son. The river of time was passing so quickly between them, and all she wanted was to draw him close. That boy used to live inside of you, she thought to herself. He was a part of you. Now that your child is a man, it feels like a part of you is missing.
She hears the garage door open as Calvin parks the car. If he would just open up...give you some indication that he needed you...And she hears laughing as Calvin and Wesley unload the car. There is an ache in her heart for closeness. She longs to open up to someone. Don’t fool yourself, Ava...if you’re going to make it through this...he might need you, but you, without a doubt, need him.
---
“Calvin. It’s Prom season. What do you mean you won’t ask anyone?” Wesley looks his friend in the eye sternly. The two boys sit on the front steps of Calvin’s house wearing running shorts and t-shirts. Their foreheads glisten with perspiration. The sun teases the horizon, pretending it will drop below it, only to stay in the sky just a little longer.
“Well...I mean...who would I ask? No one wants to go with-”
Wesley is laughing. “Oh, shut up. You know who to ask. Have some fun.”
“It’s senior year, though...I don’t want to start something-”
“Excuses, Calvin! Quit it with the excuses! I shouldn’t need to tell you how to live your fucking life!”
The zeal of Wesley’s response startles Calvin. Is he angry with me? There is silence for a moment. A Fiat hums down Van Buren.
And then Calvin speaks, mildly irritated: “Wesley...why the Hell don’t you ask someone to Prom?”
And then Wesley’s smile disappears. His brow furrows. His face loses color. The eyes behind the aviator glasses are wide and timid, and Wesley looks away.
“...Wesley...what’s wrong?”
The boy’s shoulders tremble, but he is silent. Calvin hates the sight of it. It is like seeing a knight stabbed through the chest without his armor on, exposed and pathetic.
“Wesley...Listen...I know you like Anna. You two get along. Why don’t you ask he-”
“You think I like Anna?” He turns around sharply, and there are lanes of tears down his face, and his eyes are red.
“Well yeah...I mean you guys sit together at lunch, you talk all the time-”
“Calvin!” Wesley exclaims. “Knock knock! Anybody home? How dumb can you be, Calvin?! I thought you knew me!”
“Wesley, I do know you-”
“No. You don’t.” And the boy turns and walks home. And it is only as Calvin watches the boy walk home trembling, only as he sees the boy with the purple hair enter his little white house, that Calvin realizes: How close we can get to one another without even glimpsing the soul.
---
For the next few days, Calvin and Wesley avoid each other. At lunch, Wesley sits with the senior girls every day.
“What’s wrong with Wesley lately?” Asks Jack at lunch one day.
Calvin says nothing. He simply stares down at his food and pushes it around with his fork. Curtis signals to Jack to change the subject.
“So…” Jack clears his throat, “You asking Anna to Prom?”
“...Come on guys-”
“Why not? You have nothing to lose,” voices Curtis.
“No one would go with me to Prom.”
---
“Of course I will, Calvin. Even though your sign is cheesy.”
She smiles up at him with her little book bag slung over her shoulder. He holds a sign in his hand that reads: “You that shall cross from shore to shore are more to me than you might suppose. Prom?” It is an abridged excerpt from Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, and with Calvin’s handwriting being as large as it is, and with Walt Whitman being as long winded as he was, the phrase barely fits on the sign. It had been a cringe-worthy gesture, and both people had known it, but somehow that had made it all the better.
It had been so easy, Calvin thought. He had agonized for days over how he would ask her, lost sleep at the thought of it, and then she had said yes in one second. It had seemed too easy to Calvin. But he was in a stupor now, a dream-like haze, and all he said in response was: “Oh.” You idiot. Think of something to say. But his body ignored his mind, and he galloped off to class with glee.
---
That Saturday, Calvin texts Anna and asks her if she wants to go out. She texts back “Sure” in under five minutes. And so Calvin takes the Civic over to the old Rondo neighborhood right after lunch to pick her up. She lives in an old red house with blue siding, and he barely idles for two minutes before she walks out. She is wearing the same jeans she wore to that track meet not so long ago. She wears black and white sneakers and a blouse with floral patterning. She carries her bag by her side.
“I like your shirt,” he says.
“Thanks…” She smiles. “Where do you want to go?”
“It’s a beautiful day. How about the Sculpture Garden?”
“I’d love that.”
And so they drive down I-94 into Minneapolis and walk around the garden.
“So you’re friends with Wesley?” She asks him as they walk down the grassy lawn.
“I’ve known him since birth,” he says. Longer than you have.
“So...why aren’t you guys talking?” She asks.
He is taken aback by her forwardness. “We...we had a misunderstanding...”
She stops walking. They are standing next to a Calder piece. Red and blue geometric shapes seem to float above their heads like unspoken thoughts.
“Calvin...Give him another chance.”
“I-Okay-”
“He’s a great friend, Calvin. He’ll be there for you in your joy and your grief. He’s one in a million, Calvin.”
They walk around the garden for an hour more and then they walk to a little coffee shop and sip lattes on the sunlit patio. She says her favorite sculpture is still the Cherry and the Spoon. Calvin says his is the big blue rooster on the pedestal. He drives her back to the old Rondo neighborhood and cruises across the I-94 bridge with a light heart.
---
Prom arrives in a flash. Calvin takes Anna to dinner in Downtown St. Paul. She wears a muted rose-colored dress, and he wears a suit coat with a tie of the same color. And the day is bright and warm, and the world has committed itself to the season of Spring. The two eat at a French restaurant with waiters in tuxedos and they chat over seafood and French bread.
“Your dress is really pretty,” he tells her.
“Thank you,” she says.
“So what do you like to do in your free time?” he asks her.
She thinks for a moment. “Umm...I like to read...I go hiking a lot. My parents own a cabin on Lake Superior near Grand Marais, so we go up there a lot. It’s really nice to get out of the city. Watch a few sunrises. Read a few novels. You know...What about you?”
“My mom really likes the city...but I love the State Parks...back when, well back when my Dad was around —”
“Oh, I’m so sorry —”
“Don’t worry about it. It was a while ago now.” It was eight months ago, you liar. “Anyway, he liked to take me up to Afton State Park. It’s only about forty minutes away, but it’s all prairie and it’s so peaceful…”
A memory flashes in an instant upon Calvin’s mind: The hike under the blood moon. You were eight years old. You got lost in the dark, and when Dad found you, he held you, and he whispered to you: “You’re never alone, Calvin. Remember, no one is.” And Calvin’s heart drops into emptiness for a moment. The plague of the void haunts him for a fleeting moment.
“That’s beautiful,” she replies softly. Stay present, Calvin. Don’t dwell so much on the past. And he looks into that beautiful girl’s eyes, and he sees something new. Is there a dreaminess there, or is he making it up?
They chat for two hours or so, and then he drives her up to the Indian Mounds Regional Park not far east, and they sit in his old Civic convertible with the top up and watch the sun linger in the pensive sky, watch it turn the world into something golden. They watch the grass burst verdant and the Mississippi River shatter into diamonds below Dayton’s Bluff. And she lays her head on his shoulder, and he wants to stay there with her drawn close to him until the sun rises again from the Burial Mounds.
Why can’t it be like this every day of your life? He thinks to himself. Can’t you just leave the unwanted things behind? You want to live your damn life as well as you can. Not like Dad. Dad was dead before the cancer even got to him. You can’t blame him, of course. No one survives pancreatic. But still...That wasn’t a life. He lived and died in Minnesota. Barely budged an inch. You could never stand doing that. You want to live. You want to leave this cage-like city with this girl beside you, and you two can travel the world and walk up mountains under the pink of a sunrise with her by your side, and you want to just chat for hours in a valley until the sun lowers back into the ground, and then you want to do it all again the next day. And the next.
All you crave is intimacy, and day after day, the world taunts you with just enough of it to convince you to live a little longer. Sure, you’ve wanted to kill yourself. Bad. It doesn’t matter, because you love the world, or at least your idea of the world, and you love people even more, or at least your idea of people, and you can’t help but live. Because the world is miserly, stingy in its dispersal of transcendent moments. Moments ebb. Life beats in the veins of the mantle. We cannot help but live because of how damn gorgeous we find the world, because of how damn awful it would be to leave it.
Sunbeams caress the cell phone tower. Sunset in St. Paul. And you’re trapped. Trapped by convention and doomed to live a half-life, doomed to be an isotope of a human, decaying in your resolve, fading in your ability to dream, fading, until one day you have no body, no world to call your own. For you are a shade now, and then you want it all back. Then, even that half-life would suffice;
Dear God, give me a long life. Give me time enough to fall in love with the world you gave me.
“Calvin...what are you thinking about?” Her voice is hushed, dreamy.
“Nothing and everything, all at once.”
“I like that,” she giggles softly. She never giggles. “But what does it mean?”
“It means I’m thinking about how this will end.”
“How what will end?” There is a bit of concern in her voice.
“This moment.” And two hearts beat quickly at the notion of anything so beautiful as this ever ending.
“Oh don’t think about it, Calvin. Just enjoy it.” And she grasps his hand.
And they stay there till the sun drops into the burial mounds, until Downtown Saint Paul lights up with the corpse candles of people groping forward in the night, and then he drives her to the dance, and they dance till the stars furnish dwellings in the sky. And afterward, he walks her out to the car and kisses her under the light of a lamp post. He brushes her cheek lightly with his hand, and it is like a wall of glass shatters between them. She is warm. She is present. She is fleeting. She is human. And the two stand there looking each other in the eye, and not for a moment does either one look away.
“Thank you, Calvin. It’s been a wonderful evening,” she whispers.
Calvin nods. “A pity it should end.”
And then she is silent for a moment, thoughtful, and then she replies: “Why should it be a pity that it end, Calvin? Everything ends. Does that make those things any less beautiful?”
And she draws his face toward hers and kisses him there, and then they head to the car, and Calvin drives her home back through the silent world and listens to her breathing beside him over the low hum of the Civic’s engine. And he drops her off at her home in the old Rondo neighborhood, and flies across the I-94 bridge home. And he stumbles up to his bed in the dark, and for some reason, he begins to cry.
III. anōthen
Graduation day. The blue sky breaths cirrus clouds and bathes itself in the vapor. Students in red graduation robes flood the earth like insects, mingling, hugging, sobbing, and yet never mixing with the sky. Hats thrown up in the air. Cheers all around. Sobbing with joy. Sobbing with grief. And an instant gone. They said this moment would be significant. They told us we stood at the thresholds of our lives, but they were liars. This moment is just like all the others. In processing it, we kill it. In experiencing it, we hasten its demise...You should really write a poem, Calvin.
Jack and Curtis are arguing about something stupid:
“It’s san-script, isn’t it?”
“No, you dummy. It’s San-skrit.”
“But it’s writing, isn’t it? Like script. It’s script.”
“No no no…”
Calvin’s conscious journeys elsewhere. Where is Anna? He searches the crowded lawn for her, but she is nowhere to be seen. And then Calvin blinks, and it has been four days. He is laying on his bed when Anna sends him a text message: “I need a little space right now. I know it will hurt to tell you this, but be honest with yourself: You only loved me because you were lonely. I think it would be best for both of us if we took a break.”
The text hits him like a gunshot. And time slows down. The days are long and uneventful. Calvin spends his time indoors playing video games. Wesley calls him a number of times, probably to apologize, but for some reason, Calvin never picks up.
Calvin’s mother begins to worry. She tries to goad him out of his bedroom, to get him to go running or go to the movies. But Calvin only gets angry at her when she does these things, and he yells frequently. And afterwards, he always feels bad for yelling, though he never feels bad enough to apologize.
One day, his mother comes into his room while he is watching the news. She sits beside him on his bed, and it strikes her how pale he looks, how thin he is. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him look worse, she thinks.
“...Unarmed black man was fatally shot by an officer just a few days ago,” a newscaster explains. “The accident occurred just up in Falcon Heights, right on Larpenteur Avenue near the fairgrounds.” Dear Lord, Ava thinks.
She looks at her son, but his face is emotionless. “Calvin?” She says to him. “How-how are you?”
Silence. Why must you make my job so difficult?
“Calvin, what’s wrong? Tell me.”
“Nothing,” he says.
“Come on, Calvin. You have no reason to keep me in the dark.”
His voice rises slightly, but when he speaks, his voice is low, his phrases are short and perfunctory. “I told you. I’m fine. Now can you please leave my room?”
Ava doesn’t go anywhere. Silence for a moment. The newscaster rambles on: “...As the community tries to understand what has happened here…”
“Calvin, is this about your father-”
“I don’t KNOW what it’s about, okay?!” He is almost yelling now.
“Calvin, I’m just trying to help-”
“Well STOP, OKAY?! STOP trying to help. And if you won’t leave me alone, I’ll leave by myself!” And Calvin rises from the bed like a great ocean wave, rushes down the stairs and out the door into the settling night.
Ava sobs and shakes her head wearily. There is no one to hold you. Not even your parents. Why did you have to cut them off?
“In light of this tragedy, community activists wonder what to do next,” the newscaster says.
---
Calvin ran for almost half an hour through the vibrant night. He passed through the residential neighborhoods, crossed Lexington and then ran up to University. He ran past Abra Auto Body and the Thong Auto General Repair. He ran till he reached the Rondo Community Outreach Library, and then he bent over in exhaustion. You had no right to treat your mother like that, he thought. You need her.
By this time the evening was late, and the sky was a dark shade of purple. People were flocking to the highway in dozens with signs in hand. They must be protesting that man’s death, he thought. What will happen, I wonder… So Calvin walked to the I-94 bridge and watched the people flood out onto the highway.
And standing on the bridge, he saw how like a great gash through the world that highway was, how like a great wound at the slash of a whip, a great bloody gash on the back of a martyred world. It was not God who took out the houses, not God who sent men and women to their tombs. But neither was it wholly people. It was something else entirely, something vague, something shifting, something dark. It was something that resided within all people, and yet was not of them. And it made men and women forget to love and be loved. Calvin knew how to love. Now he had to let himself be loved.
And as he watched the protesters flood in from both sides of the highway, he felt a part of something, as if the veil between his soul and humanity had been lifted just a little. He would never know discrimination, had never experienced a cruel gaze because of his skin color like many of these people had. These facets of life were foreign to him, truths he could never truly grasp, emotions felt only within the closed vessels of other humans, unreachable to him.
And yet in some strange sense he knew and he felt with them a sense of unity he hadn’t felt before. A man had been shot, murdered in the heat of misunderstanding by the very institution which was meant to protect him. This was something Calvin could grasp: the paradox of all things human, the necessity of the world and its beauty coupled with a deadly poison that dwelled in the very oxygen that he and countless millions breathed; you could plod along behind fences, in gated communities, in walled cities, but to truly live, you had to die.
How truly unfair that was, he thought. Your father was not a man who deserved to die. But then...does anyone really? He had never really grieved the man. The world had spun on, life had continued, nothing had changed. It had all been so anticlimactic.
But here, watching the people flood onto the highway like blood cells onto an open wound, Calvin finally felt that maybe someone - maybe even all these people - understood. Death always means something. You’ve isolated yourself for far too long, Calvin. If you don’t open up, you’ll break.
And then he heard someone calling him. And he looked off to his right, and saw his mother running toward him, her teary face flashing red and blue in the siren light. By her side ran Wesley, the boy he hadn’t talked to in two months. You have a choice now, Calvin. You run away or you open up. He braced himself to run the other direction, but the sight of his mother’s upturned brow, her watering eyes, and the sight of Wesley’s solemn but hopeful gaze, made him stop a moment. For the first time, it occurred to Calvin that maybe they needed him. “You’re not in the world alone, Calvin. Remember, no one is.”
Below the bridge, the protesters began to sing “Purple Rain,” 300 voices chanting in protest, 300 faces flashing red and blue.
Go to your mother, you dumbass. Go to Wesley. Those two - they are your reasons for living. And he ran to them, and as he did, his eyes flooded with memories, and they manifested themselves as tears - tears of deep grief and tears of great joy, mingling on his face like the light of the sirens.
His mother embraced him. She was crying too. They hadn’t yet cried together for Calvin’s father. The mourning was long overdue.
“I love you, Calvin.”
“I-I do too, Mom. I’m-I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry too, Calvin...We’ll make it through. We’ll make it through. We’ll make it through…” She whispered, almost chanting, to herself and her son alike.
And then Calvin noticed Wesley standing off to the side unsure of what to do, his face turned to the ground so that his purple hair hung like tears, his hands shoved deep into his pockets.
Good old Wesley. Think of all the life you’ve lived with Wesley. And Calvin saw his life in moments like grains of sand on a beach, fleeting, multitudinous, and stronger than iron. What do you do with the sand of experience? You build a cage, or you build a bridge. And Calvin ran to Wesley and embraced him. It was a little awkward at first, since neither boy was really expecting it, but Wesley laughed momentarily.
“I’m sorry, Wesley. I’ve been awful,” whispered Calvin.
“No no no,” laughed Wesley. “It was a stupid fight. I’m just so damn dramatic is all. It’s my fault. Now can you let me breathe?”
And Calvin laughed and freed Wesley from his embrace. And the two boys walked over to where Calvin’s mother stood looking out over the protest, at the flood of people singing “Purple Rain” and raising signs in the siren light, at the police standing statue-like, frozen in a sweeping line.
And Ava felt her soul rising like a balloon, rising from the dead landscape of winter into its true home somewhere in the heavens. You’d be proud of us, Joseph. We’re moving on. Together, we’re moving on.
After a while, Wesley spoke. “It’s not a fantasy world like the ones we made as kids,” he said, and he watched Calvin’s face for a reaction.
But Calvin was thoughtful, and it showed in his upturned brow. “No,” he replied. “It’s not a fantasy world. But maybe...maybe it’s something much more beautiful than that.”
And Calvin turned to the East, wondering if he would be able to see the cathedral from the bridge, and sure enough, there it stood, triumphant on the hilltop, ever-watchful, like a guardian. And he turned back to watch the protesters and marveled at how poetic the world was, marveled at the I-94 bridge, how it embraced all the hurting people of St. Paul and the countryside beyond, embracing the dead and resurrecting them into new lives of human connectedness, lifting them up and rescuing their souls from a lonely, desert world.