After the agony in stony places
The months of texts went by as fast in memory as they had in their living. Philip couldn’t remember if he had tried to make plans to see Alex again, or if he had only thought about it, but he did remember a lot of talk about interviews and applications for jobs and loans and house hunting and a few mentions of doctor’s appointments he hadn’t pried into.
Later, he would try and find something in the words he could have caught, some sign, because the possibility that there had been none was indistinguishable in anguish from the idea that there had been one he had missed.
But after all his digging, only a single exchange stood out.
May 1st, 2011
“Holy shit they got him.” Philip had reworded his text fifty times. Alex’s response came almost instantly.
“They dumped him in the fucking ocean for some reason. Should have paraded his corpse through Manhattan.”
“Maybe they saw a really big shark and just improvised.”
“They said it was to give him a Muslim funeral. Makes zero fucking sense.”
Their last exchange was completely unremarkable.
May 4th, 2011
From Alex:
[image, empty lot, Irving Texas]
“They knocked down Patrick’s house!”
Reply:
“Don’t get all excited bro. He probably wasn’t home when they did.”
Alex had laugh reacted. Three days later he was dead.
He had parked his car inside a self-storage unit he been renting since he moved back. A prescheduled text told the manager to call the authorities. No paramedics or cops, he had said, just the coroner. It was like that all the way through. Trying to step out with as little inconvenience to everyone as possible.
He told them not to request any military honors at his funeral. His organs were donated. His body cremated, eventually. Apparently he had discussed it with his mom one day while deployed, and she had “freaked out” and told him she wanted an open casket funeral no matter what.
“What if I’m blown to bits?”
“For God sakes Alex! And anyway, I’ve seen what those guys can do with plaster and all of it. Please, for me.”
So, there was an open casket viewing, but only his close family was allowed. Philip was reminded of a conversation with Alex that night, which seemed to fall out like a rabbit from a hat, the time they had spent together revealing itself to be paradoxically infinite, so that if he stood all the moments end to end, it seemed impossible that they could have ever fit inside those slim hours.
They had been discussing the theoretical attire of actual zombies, and Alex had been talking about how much of what you see at a wake is just plaster and make up. He had eased into the question so naturally that it hadn’t seemed out of place.
“If some crane falls on you at work, would you still have an open casket funeral?”
“I don’t think I would care.”
“I mean for like your family.”
“They barely want to see me now.”
“Shut the fuck up dude. Your brother loves you.”
“He loves pissing me off.”
“For real though.”
“I don’t know. Personally, I never saw the point in that. I saw my dad’s. He was very clearly not there. Might as well have his empty shoes on display, you know?”
Philip had thought he had worn out every memory of Alex before the war, but one slipped out of the broken wreckage after his passing. The two of them, with Chris and Anthony, exploring the tunnels under UT, and Alex joking that he wanted his ashes scattered down there so he could haunt the place forever and play Doom monster with the freshmen.
But in his note, he told his family to scatter his ashes in the fucking Maldives so his mom and sister would be forced to go on vacation. Philip had to assume it was for the benefit of his nieces. Hard to imagine Alex thought his mom and sister would be smiling in the sun with his ashes floating in the atoll. But maybe he really had been that out of his mind. Though some other things were painfully prescient.
“Sorry I couldn’t give you a grave,” he had told his mom in the note. “If you want a place to visit me, look for me in the kindness you show other people.”
He wrote letters to everyone. Had his will already in order. Funeral expenses and plans already covered. Prepared it all as meticulously as he did everything else. Like slowly plunging a knife into his own heart.
Philip had read his own letter only once. It had thanked him for the time together, told him how smart he was, how he could do anything he wanted, how much he had saved Alex, how much his friendship had meant to him, and a final fucking apology for “doing this”, and that he had “no excuse for my actions”.
You mother fucker. What did I say about apologizing? And “no excuse for my actions”? You son of a bitch, what am I, the fucking teacher who caught you snapping Bailey’s bra strap?
But there was no one there to laugh. No one to hear. Nothing to say.
He who was living is now dead. We who are living are now dying. Life goes on, mercilessly.
And much like Alex’s favorite poem, the funeral was a broken heap of images. The timeline dissolved in memory and Philip never cared to put it together. Some things simply stood out.
He had hyperventilated in the car. Alex’s sister Jessica and his best friend from the army gave the eulogy. Philip couldn’t remember a word of either. He had spent the entire time staring at the coffin, waiting for it to smile. Alex was in there in a pine box that would be taken out of the 30 grand rental coffin and placed in the incinerator after the service, or maybe he already had been and they just left the casket to give the mourners something to look at besides the smiling picture that made it all feel like a prank. Like a bad cartoon. The Coyote grinning as he hovers above the trench. Would Alex have laughed at that, or just smiled and shook his head in that, ‘nice try’ way he did sometimes. Oh, but not anymore.
During the eulogies, the guy, whose name Philip couldn’t remember despite his brain repeatedly trying to tell him it was Chris (that couldn’t be right) had cried. Jessica had choked but the tears had streamed without sobs. From her dry cracked voice, Philip guessed she had given all her crying in private.
Alex’s mom had found Philip somewhere in the brown carpet colored fog. After asking how he’d been, hugging him, and while holding his arm tightly, she had told him,
“Thank you for seeing him when you did. He was throwing a fit about getting the place perfect. He was so excited to see you.”
If it had been available, he would have jumped in the incinerator right then.
Somewhere in the parking lot, a group of guys in close haircuts and suits that were trying hard to stand in for dress blues approached him and invited him out for drinks. He could have sworn he remembered declining, getting in his car, even crying at a light at the nearby underpass, but he also remembered meeting them at the bar, and a good number of questions they had asked him about Alex in college, in high school, and that they had all seemed shocked by the answers.
Philip had asked if Alex ever did anything with computers, and they had laughed. Not till he was about to get out, man. Unless you count setting up our PCs.
Again, it was mostly a broken blur. He learned things about Alex’s ten years away, but most of it he had no context for, not to mention all the jargon, and the alcohol.
At the end of it, not-Chris had to be carried out. He walked one foot after the other, sobbing as silently as anyone Philip had ever seen, just a grimace and tears, and it felt like it took him an hour to make it outside. Philip must have said goodbye to everyone, but looking back, it seemed he had fallen right through the bar and dropped into his house, collapsing on the floor and squeezing his keys till his palm bled.
A few years later, Alex’s sister messaged him. Not-Chris’s funeral this time. He didn’t have to ask to know how he went.
The avoided, pointless, and disgusting question that never left was, of course, why. Everyone had their theory.
His mom told everyone her son had been killed by PTSD. Begged everyone to check in on the Vets. Posted links to programs and charities.
His army friends, from what Philip gathered at the funeral bar crash and in some conversations later, mostly felt that he just couldn’t deal with all the bullshit of regular life, the boredom, the disrespect. The bankers and hiring managers and mortgage writers and agents who didn’t give a shit about where he had been or done besides the numbers on his VA loan, and he had “no idea how to live for himself. Doing shit just for him, for Alex, would have felt pointless”.
Jessica was sure the “truthers” had gotten to him. Some guy he had met at the VA or through some veteran’s program Philip couldn’t recall had been posting conspiracy shit as Jessica called it. She had confided in Philip like the old friend of the family he had almost forgotten he was, while glaring at the old guy in the black construction paper suit, silver hair pulled back in a ponytail. Philip had asked just to make a kind of dark small talk, anything to keep her off the main subject.
“What do you mean? Like holographic planes and the statue of liberty shooting laser beams?”
It was the kind of joke Alex would have caught, but Jessica took it completely seriously, and Philip felt like a piece of shit.
“No, not like it was fake, but like the government let it happen, on purpose, and all the guys who signed up were just stupid and being used and all that shit. I feel bad for him cause he was in Vietnam but don’t dump that shit on my brother. Alex is too nice—”
She had stopped like her vocal chords had collapsed and excused herself after one last hug. When Philip had asked the guys at the bar about the old dude, they had said that Alex was always doing that kind of charity work for people and never took the guy seriously.
Philip was sure, for a while, due to the timing, that it had something to do with Bin Laden’s death. He could see, vividly, Alex sitting at his dorm PC, glaring, talking about getting the mother fuckers who did it. And after all that, he had done more tours in Iraq then Afghanistan, the masterminds had slipped into the shadows to be droned or detained, Mohamed Khalid sitting in a cell long after Alex was gone, and the son of a bitch himself, a fifty something year old on a CPAP machine gunned down by guys Alex never even met.
But that was too neat. Too final an equation. He accepted, eventually, that he would never know, and that the secret was something he would leave in Alex’s hands, the only thing he could now or ever give him.
A few months after the funeral, Philip loaded up his gaming PC and still-in-the-box 360 and dropped by his brother Nico’s house. Andrew, his nephew, was thrilled. Nico stood by without saying a word. He had asked Philip why he was getting rid of all his “Nintendo shit”, and when Philip had told him “too distracting for me right now”, he might as well have told his brother leprechauns were after his console. Nico read him like a book any day of the week, and after they were done with all the set up, ten minutes into Andrew’s first game, Philip turned to leave, and Nico had demanded he “hang out for a bit and watch the kid play the damn things”. Philip gave excuses. Nico caught him at the front door.
“I know you’re hurting.” It had sounded almost like an accusation, but there was love in it somewhere. Philip had done everything short of scream, and Nico had finally let him go.
There was no chance in hell he would ever tell his brother why he had left so soon.
When Andrew had gotten his first kill on Battlefield, as Philip stood there cheering him on, for a moment, 13 year old Alex Casebolt had returned to the earth and sat before him, smiling at the screen.
