Troy Weaver - Witchita Stories

Impermanence is a fact. Nothing lasts forever exactly as it is. Take my great-uncle. He’s ninety-four years old. He’s in great shape, he just keeps going. But recently he fell ill with pneumonia and was hospitalized for a couple weeks, and my mother flew into Wichita thinking this would be the final goodbye. It wasn’t, but still, things change, always. Nothing is ever the same. We all know it’s only a matter of time, for all of us, and everything — and I mean everything . Doesn’t mean time stops. In fact, that’s the issue. I always hear people complaining about death. I don’t want to die, I just couldn’t handle it. Thing is, though, you can’t experience your own death, you can only imagine it, and in my mind, that is the greatest fiction of all. Death is a fiction you edit and rewrite a million times in your mind, something you take home and sleep on — and then one day it happens to you, the manuscript is finished. But the beauty is, when it happens you won’t even know the difference. When my great-uncle dies, which will hopefully be in the distant future, I will always remember the time he let me ride on the tractor with him when I was seven years old. He was drinking a Coors, the breeze was cool, and we were one and alive in a world that is relentlessly spinning, a world whose memory can only be written. Like that, for instance — the tractor, the illness, the eventual death — and just knowing that it’s all a lie.

Christmas day, the annual call to my parents in Arizona, and it doesn’t feel the same. It isn’t joyful. There’s dread in their voices. And soon enough I find out, the dread I’m hearing is the dread of held secrets, a secret they know isn’t timed right but must come out because they know I would want it that way.

We start off with pleasantries. Merry Christmas, I miss you , and, What are your plans for dinner this evening? Have anything special planned? This goes on as long as you’d expect and then it staggers beyond. My dad asks about the weather. I tell him it’s cold, as it always is in Kansas in December. Finally there is silence — tension thick as gristle and bone — and then, finally, they come out with it.

Your brother’s in the hospital.

My chest feels like it’s been battered with a jackhammer. I can’t get any air into my lungs. By the time I catch my breath, I hear myself saying the words what happened even though I already know the answer.

He was out in the yard. Three guys jumped him. Beat him nearly to death.

Is he okay?

He’ll live, but one of his lungs collapsed and his face is so bad you wouldn’t even recognize him.

Just got in with the wrong crowd, is all.

How do you get in with the right crowd, when you’re in prison?

This is true.

Jeez.

We’re sorry to drop this on you on Christmas but we thought you’d like to know, you know. You get mad at us when we don’t tell you things. Anyway, don’t let it ruin your day. We love you. Can’t wait to see you next time we’re in town.

Love you. Bye.

I hang up the phone. All I can do is think about my brother spending Christmas in the hospital, all hooked up to machines, hoses and wires coming out of him, helping him breathe, monitoring his heart, all alone. I feel like crying, but usually don’t cry when it comes to him, so instead of being a normal human being, I sit in front of the computer and type out a small series of words.

I

Love

You,

You

Fucker

And right then, my eyelids well. I close my eyes, open them, see the words on the computer screen, glowing there, and wait the necessary amount of time to feel assured that they are etched onto my heart and had always been there. Then I left-click and hold on the mouse, scrolling upward over the words, making the background blue instead of white, doing over and over again until I feel sufficiently filled, like I don’t need to look at the words to make it any more real than it already is. I reach my pinky a full inch up and to the left and firmly press DELETE. The screen goes white. What’s next?

This is the only way I know how to love.

A few months back I was visiting a website of obituaries for the Wichita area because my uncle had recently passed and I needed something to concrete the reality for me, to help get me past an uncertain stage of mourning. But I got a lot more than I bargained for. In fact, I didn’t even make it to his obituary until a few days later, because I discovered the name of one of my adolescent love interest’s husband among the names of the recently departed. It really hit me. He was my age. He couldn’t have died of natural causes. Of course, he could have, but upon further reading it was quite clear that it was anything but natural — or maybe more natural than I’d like to admit. He’d served a tour or two or three in Afghanistan or Iraq, or both, and apparently, once he was back and safe at home, he still heard the screams and the bombs — saw the tracers zooming past his ears while watching TV at night. I stopped reading when I felt the smooth rounded edges of my heart become hard angles. I got onto Facebook and looked up my dear friend from the past. They had a child together. I skimmed through her photo albums — I’m going to ballpark the age of their son at around five years old. I found out that they had actually been separated or divorced for about a year, maybe it was someone who had told me that, or maybe I gathered it from the pictures and newsfeeds as I traced them back through time. Anyway, I don’t know why people do the things they do, but however horrific, selfish, and tragic they may be, nobody has any kind of right to judge them, because they know depths you have never even come close to feeling. You’re still alive, aren’t you?

Or are you?

One day, when I was about nine, my best friend and I were playing catch at the park when we heard a loud crash. We threw out mitts to the ground, let the ball roll through the grass, and ran the two blocks up to the main road. We were the first ones to arrive, and what we saw was too horrible for our young minds to fathom. An SUV had t-boned a little sedan, and the driver of the little car had been pushed all the way into the back seat. We circled around the wreckage, too afraid to do anything. The people in the SUV were fine, but, like us, they were too afraid of what they’d find in the other car to do anything either, so they just sat curbside with tears in their eyes. Finally, a lady came out of her house and said an ambulance was on its way. We approached the car, keeping a little distance, eyes wide, searching. The driver of the sedan looked really bad, completely unconscious, and I wondered what it even meant to die. Then the ambulance and firemen arrived. The police arrived too. They started cutting at the car to get the driver out. I got a better look and saw the driver was a teenager, just a few years older than me. The way he was positioned in the back seat, you could see his head arched back, facing up. He hadn’t moved once during the five minutes we’d been there. Then he retched. Blood shot from his lips, smacking against the headliner, and dripped back down onto his face. Drip drip, drip drip, drip drip . They finally got him out and onto a stretcher, but they didn’t pump his heart or stop the bleeding, didn’t do anything except for maybe mime-check his pulse. They covered him in a white sheet and filled out some paperwork. They were in no rush. When they finished with the paperwork, they rolled him over to the ambulance, started loading him in. A lady pulled up then, got out of her car, just left it running in the middle of the road, and rushed over, hysterical, maniacal, screaming: Nooooooooooooo! My baaaaaaaaabyyyy! She looked about forty-five, makeup running down her face, blouse loose and blowing in the wind. She must have lived close by. Maybe she had a friend who saw the wreck on the way home from the grocery store and phoned her. Hey, doesn’t Jonathan drive a… Or maybe it was her maternal instinct that told her something was amiss. I’ll never know. But I still have dreams of the blood dripping onto his young dead face, his mother screaming into the wind and collapsing onto the asphalt. For a long time I wanted to be a paramedic. I wanted to learn all I could about emergency medicine. I told myself the next time this happened, next time a person tried to die in front of me, I’d know what to do. I’d save them from the final kingdom and bring them back to earth. I’d be there, tapping my foot, waiting for the blood to start back through their veins — I’d bring them back the very moment the light takes them.