The first time Noelle said she was going to harm herself, her parents called the police in a panic. The hospital held her for 72 hours, which is standard practice for patients who arrive in a suicidal crisis. It would be the first stay of many. Over the next couple of years, Noelle returned to the psych ward every few months. Last January, not long after Noelle had moved a few hours away to attend college, Sara and David received a call from a hospital near her school. Their daughter had attempted suicide.

Kevin Sampsell | Longreads | September 26, 2023 | 23 minutes (6,342 words)

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This essay deals with suicide and suicidal ideation. If you or someone you know is suicidal, please, contact your physician, go to your local ER, or call the suicide prevention hotline in your country. In the United States, call 988 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

In September 2019, I lost my close friend, Arthur, to suicide. In summer 2020, I began writing a book that centered our friendship. In May 2021, every folder and document vanished from my computer.

This mass disappearance included the unfinished book about my friend: all 39,548 words. The only evidence of it is a notebook where I tracked its growth.

I searched every nook and cyber cranny, and then spoke with Apple technicians for several hours, watching them take remote control of my cursor to dig into my hard drive, finder, cloud, trash bin, and something called the Wayback Machine. Like an amateur, I had not saved a backup of the book or even emailed it to myself. I hadn’t shared it with anyone.

Until the document’s disappearance, the words had been flowing and I was excited about how much I was getting onto the page. Not just about Arthur and the times leading up to his death, but also about my own depression and my mother’s Alzheimer’s. I was also using the book to explore bisexuality, polyamory, aging, and a 1991 book about assisted suicide called Final Exit by Derek Humphry.

I’d put it all in there—uncomfortable truths that I called autofiction in case I needed to hide from my own reality. Writing “fiction” often gave me that out. If someone said they felt seen by a novel or short story I’d written, I would confess to its real-life truth, but if someone was bothered by a detail in my “fiction,” I could just say it was invented, whether it was or not.

Other documents disappeared too. A Word doc of essays. Two hundred pages of short stories. Another novel I’d finished recently after eight years of work. But those were things I could piece together from other files and sent emails. It was the loss of the suicide-Alzheimer’s-bisexuality novel-in-progress that felt insurmountable. Something I couldn’t recreate.

The experience made writing feel futile. You could call it writer’s block, but writer’s depression is probably more accurate. In sports, they might call it “the yips,” which is when an athlete cannot perform a simple task they’ve performed thousands of times. I couldn’t open a blank document without the fear it would disappear when I closed it.

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The advice I’ve sometimes given to people about getting out of a writing rut is to write an I Remember list. It’s easy to do and sometimes helps you locate a lifeline into something bigger than one simple memory. Poet Joe Brainard famously published a beautiful book full of them in 1975.

I remember meeting Arthur in New Orleans at an art festival in 2018 and discovering that we both lived in Portland.

I remember Arthur dancing in the streets of the French Quarter and saying he found his people.

I remember a woman grinding on Arthur and how much he enjoyed the attention even though he was into men.

I remember flying back to Portland with Arthur and waiting at the baggage claim for the suitcase full of clothes he bought in New Orleans and were probably too flashy for everyday wear in Portland.

I remember seeing Arthur’s band, Milk Bandits, play a bunch of times, and his sexy voice and stage presence.

I remember spending days collaging together and taking turns playing records and music videos for each other.

I remember watching Alex Cameron videos with Arthur and how he was so into it we bought tickets to Cameron’s show at the Doug Fir in Portland on Valentine’s Day in 2019.

I remember walking to dinner with Arthur one night and he asked to borrow my coat because he was always cold. He called it my old man coat and it was too small for him, but he wore it anyway. He was four inches taller than me. I looked at him as we waited for a crosswalk light and chuckled at how scrunched over and comically awkward he looked, but he didn’t care, as long as he was warm.

I remember when we watched The Fits and how we tried to figure out the meaning of the movie. I remember my mother’s quilt over us, his head on my shoulder.

I remember telling Arthur once that I wanted a boyfriend to do manly things with and he laughed and held my hand.

I remember how he rarely called me by my first name and I wondered if it was a way for him to distance himself or a funny endearment. His messages always started, “Hey, Sampsell.”

I remember how excited he was by the way I described his band’s music. He wanted me to write it down so they could use it in their press packet. But then the band broke up.

I remember his text messages to me, explaining why he seemed gloomy one night: “I just realized, my melancholy was the mourning of my old life, before I infused joy into my passion of creating and performing and songs.” “I was sad getting used to being happy.”

This list of memories is an attempt to figure out something about my friendship with Arthur, and why it still has the lingering mystery of a failed romance. I’m also searching for clues to his depression.

I found out about his death several days after his suicide. I was at the bookstore where I work, in the breakroom, when I glanced at the newspaper and saw Arthur’s face. He was smiling, exuding the warm and eager kindness he regularly wore like a halo. My first thought was, “Oh, hey, Arthur.” But instead of a headline about his band or something else he might have done, there was just his name and under it, “1983-2019.”

I missed my bus after the bookstore closed that night and walked home, in the dark, in a daze. I looked at our last exchanges. I had asked him to go out a couple of times that month, but he said he had other plans. I realized that I didn’t know Arthur’s other friends very well. I had met some of them at his shows but didn’t have any way to get in touch with them. The last sentence of the obituary implied suicide: “Arthur struggled throughout his life with depression, which lead to his early death.” I called Arthur’s phone number to hear his voice. I left him a message. Something like, I wish you would have talked to me. How come you didn’t tell me?

The next day I looked for more about Arthur. I thought about what could have been weighing on him. He’d had a couple of boyfriends while I knew him and though he seemed disappointed after a breakup, he never seemed crushed. He’d be on dating apps shortly after, messaging new guys. Even when I first met him in New Orleans, he was excited about all the men he could meet in a new city and would show me some of the messages. He didn’t seem to lack attention. He was not only tall, fit, and perfectly cheekboned, he was also kind, smart, and open.

I wondered if being black and gay in a predominantly white city like Portland made him feel isolated. There were times when he told me stories about feeling othered in his circle of gay friends. One time, maybe four months before his death, he told me that he had been drugged and possibly assaulted by a man he knew. The man was in a circle of his friends that sometimes partied together. It seemed like the man had a lot of money, a nice house, and a lot of power in this friend group. Arthur talked to other people in this group, but they were dismissive and didn’t want to believe him. I could hear the pain in his voice, and I wasn’t sure what to say except the usual rote responses: I’m sorry that happened to you. Thanks for telling me. Do you feel the need to tell others, or maybe even go after the guy somehow? You can talk to me about this any time.

He quickly stopped talking about it, wary of feeling like a victim, though it sounded like he was deeply hurt, in many ways, by the experience. There was a sting of sadness in our silence for a few minutes, and then I sensed that he was angry—not at me, but at the fact that he had this pain inside his body, maybe stuck there for life.

The only other time I saw him angry was after his band broke up. He felt like the only one with real ambition. He was constantly setting up shows, looking to meet other musicians, and hoping to record an album. When one of his bandmates wanted to do fewer shows because of back problems, Arthur felt betrayed. I can’t remember what he said exactly, but there were a few F-bombs.

Arthur would sometimes post videos of himself on the Milk Bandits’ Instagram page. He called them the “PINK ROBE” videos. In them, he’s sitting in a room in front of a blank white wall, wearing a fluffy pink bathrobe and holding an acoustic guitar. As if recording a demo tape, he strums and slaps the guitar while singing in his memorable falsetto. His register blended the vulnerable quaver of Thom Yorke, the sexy confidence of Prince, and the growling despair of Robert Johnson. I always wondered if he recorded these at night in his bedroom, perhaps working out some ideas just before bed, maybe restraining himself a little, so he didn’t wake up his roommates.

In one of the videos, he sings “I ain’t never known my daddy, I ain’t never known that man.” The words Happy Belated Father’s Day floating over his left shoulder. In another video, a month later, the words An ode to my family’s unrequited love are on the screen, and then: It’s a daily struggle.

One thing I learned after Arthur’s death was that he grew up using the name Bobby. That was the name his mother and sister called him until they became estranged. All his friends in Portland knew him as Arthur, which was his father’s name.

Arthur had not spoken with his father in years, but he mentioned him once to me, that summer before he died. He had just lost his job as a security guard and was telling me that he might go work for his dad in California and then “disappear to France and write poetry.” I wasn’t sure what to make of these ideas. I wasn’t sure what kind of work he’d be doing with his dad. Arthur did not seem like the kind of person who came from money (or had a secret stash somewhere), but maybe his dad would help him. The France thing sounded more like a fantasy than anything else. I knew he spoke French, so maybe it was a real plan. I probably should have encouraged him more. Instead, I remember feeling puzzled and I probably asked him questions about the logistics of it. My demeanor probably discouraged him.

But now I like to imagine him in Paris, sitting at a café, drinking an espresso, his notebook open, full of notes and poetry. It’s easy to picture in my mind. He’d look perfect there.

Maybe France was just his code word for the afterlife.

In Donald Antrim’s 2021 memoir, One Friday in April: A Story of Suicide and Survival, he attempts to show a difference between depression and suicide, describing depression as “a concavity, a sloping down and a return.” He believes suicide is “a natural history, a disease process . . .  an illness with origins in trauma and isolation, in deprivation of touch, in violence and neglect, in the loss of home and belonging.”

The way Antrim disconnects depression and suicide felt confusing to me at first. He even states, “I will refer to suicide, not depression.” But the more I read into Antrim’s story, the easier it seemed to comprehend. Depression is an emotional state. Suicide is in the blood.

Though I had battled depression for nearly two decades, I did not feel it was serious enough to acknowledge or talk about with others. In my worst emotional states, I’d feel uninspired and think fleetingly about suicide. But instead of suicidal ideation, it was more like intrusive suicidal daydreaming. This kind of depression might last a few days, but it always went away before I asked for help or reached a breaking point. I never felt like I was depressed enough. Besides that, I felt a foolish pride in that I was one of the few people I knew who did not take any kind of daily medication.

After getting divorced in 2016, my depression became compounded by anxiety attacks and crying jags. By summer 2019, I knew I needed help. I spoke to one of my friends, who recommended that I talk to my doctor honestly about my emotional state. I was wary of the effects an antidepressant would have on my body but decided that Wellbutrin sounded like the best option.

A few days later, on August 7, 2019, one of my favorite songwriters, David Berman, ended his life. He was the same age as me. The new band he’d started, Purple Mountains, had just put out their first album and I had tickets to their Portland concert the following month. Of course, the show did not happen.

If you listen to the Purple Mountains album, it’s painfully apparent, in hindsight, that Berman was suffering. The lyrics, though sometimes spiked with sardonic wit, are like suicide notes: The dead know what they’re doing when they leave this world behind. Berman sings later, Nights that won’t happen / Time we won’t spend / Time we won’t spend / With each other again / With each other again.

Wellbutrin proved to be extremely effective for me. Instead of lying in bed for as long as possible, putting off projects, and not feeling excited for anything, I would wake up and start my day quickly, surprisingly focused on chores. I moved through my days with quicker, happier intentions. My energy felt so amped that I would sometimes start to freestyle rap or belt out made-up songs while driving in my car.

I remember telling Arthur that I had started taking it, but I never had the chance to really talk about the positive influence it had on me. I know he had been on other antidepressants, but I don’t think he was taking anything when he died.

The day after I found out about Arthur’s death, I called his mother. Her phone number was listed in his obituary. I knew that Arthur had not talked to her in a long time, so I didn’t know what she’d be like. When she answered the phone, her voice warmed with gratitude. “Thank you for calling and thank you for being a friend to him,” she said.

She lived a couple of hours north, in Olympia, Washington. I asked her if I could come visit. She said I could, and I might be able to visit Arthur at the funeral home before he was cremated if I came right away. I took the next day off work and drove up.

I went to the funeral home first, where a soft-speaking man in a suit was expecting me. They had Arthur’s body on a gurney waiting for me in a private room.

I stood over my friend silently after the man left, admiring his quiet beauty, even in death. He was dressed in a sweater and dark slacks. He had penny loafers on his feet and the newsboy-style cap that he sometimes wore. I watched his chest for movement, for breath. My silence felt like a dumb dare. Who would make the first sound, the first move?

I touched Arthur’s leg. It was cold. I touched Arthur’s chest. It was cold. I stayed with him for 20 minutes and then walked out. I did not see anyone in the lobby when I left. I wondered if the man in the suit was watching me on camera. I sat in my car, in the empty parking lot, and imagined the man going back into the room with Arthur. I pictured him pushing Arthur on some wheeled contraption into an elevator and down to another room, into a refrigerated slot in a wall.

I went to Arthur’s mom’s house after that. I brought grocery store flowers and a condolence card. She welcomed me into her small house and started showing me old photos and things that Arthur had made when he was a teenager. We sat down in the living room and talked, with flowers, cards, and gifts looming all around us. I found out it had been about 10 years since Arthur and his mom had seen each other or spoken. She had met a few of Arthur’s friends in the days before my visit, so she was caught up on what was happening with his life, but she obviously wasn’t able to fill in the gaps of their disconnected years. 

Arthur’s sister came over soon after I arrived and said that she too had been estranged from Arthur. She told me she used to visit him in Portland and they would spend a day or two together, going to movies, museums, or restaurants. Then, in fall 2011, as she was driving back to Olympia, Arthur texted her and said he didn’t want her to visit anymore, and not to text him. Baffled by the message, his sister pulled off the freeway and tried to call him to see what was wrong. Her calls went unanswered, and she never heard from him again. With no memory of any kind of argument or tension that weekend, she is still confused by this sudden end to their sibling relationship.

Arthur’s mom listened sadly to her daughter’s story and then blamed  herself, suggesting that she was “probably abusive” to both of her children. She said her military career may have influenced her parenting style. Arthur’s sister shut down that line of thinking though, saying to her mom, “You were tough, but not that bad.”

I asked Arthur’s mom if he left any kind of note, and she said his phone was nearby, as well as a backpack with some clothes and his computer. She said there was one other thing and pointed to a book sitting under a magazine on the table between us.

It was a copy of Derek Humphry’s Final Exit, which became the first New York Times bestseller about suicide. At the time of its release, it stirred controversy and was considered, by detractors, as merely a manual on how to end your life. Despite (or because of) this, it has sold two million copies worldwide. It felt more familiar to me in that moment than at any time before.

Subtitled The Practicalities of Self-Deliverance and Assisted Suicide for the Dying, Final Exit has been controversial in the Right-to-Die movement for a long time. Many saw Humphry’s early organization, The National Hemlock Society, as being cult-like, while others point out the painful methods of dying specifically described in the chapter, “Bizarre Ways to Die,” which include freezing, rattlesnake bites, and ingesting household chemicals. To be fair, the author prefaces these methods as “unnecessary for the serious reader” and “truly weird.”

But reading and considering the entirety of Final Exit and watching films like 2011’s How to Die in Oregon have made me better understand why someone in an incurable predicament would want to end their life on their own terms. There is a sense of beauty, dignity, and closure to it, not to mention control.

A newer book about assisted suicide is Anita Hannig’s The Day I Die: The Untold Story of Assisted Dying in America, published in 2022. It’s a much more empathetic and humane glimpse into the personal stories of suffering people who have led otherwise satisfying lives. Hannig’s book demonstrates the evolving language around its subject matter. The word suicide is rarely used and the “assisted” aspect is sometimes referred to as “hastened,” as in to hasten someone to an ending sooner and more peacefully, than one that would be prolonged and painful.

I’m not sure what to think of depression as a reason for ending your life. Though this was Arthur’s decision, the Right-to-Die community has mixed views. It’s much harder to gain assistance for those people unless a doctor can prove that their depression or mental illness cannot be cured and is causing suffering. One Amazon customer comment about Final Exit, which could be extended to legalized assisted dying, says, “I disagree with (the) premise that only people with incurable physical diseases are allowed to end their lives. Perpetuates the notion that psychiatric disorders and mood disorders are easily treatable.”

I’m not sure if I believe in ghosts but I sometimes wonder if Arthur didn’t want me to write that book about him. I wonder if he haunted my computer so I wouldn’t publish it. Was he a ghost in the machine? Can I blame him if he took his own story back?

I think everyone who has ever walked across a high bridge has thought about what it would be like to jump from there. Even if you don’t want to think about it, you will. Look over the rail and see how far down it is, to the water, or the ground, or the traffic. The thoughts just come. The frank reality of the moment is you could end your life in seconds.

One friend of mine, an author, told me, at their lowest low, they edited their own Wikipedia page to say they were dead. They put a date in there. They didn’t engage with the world for a couple of days after that. No one noticed their Wikipedia death. They wanted to see what it felt like to be dead to the world. The following week they took the death date off their Wikipedia page and came back alive.

There is a place in Seoul, South Korea, that holds mock funerals for people suffering or close to death. Participants are led into a dim room where they sit beside a casket and write their final testaments. Then they put on burial shrouds and lie down in the coffins. The coffins are nailed shut, and the person stays for ten minutes in darkness. Then, finally, they are let out of their casket. Many of the participants say they feel a renewed appreciation for life after this.

I admit that I have ghoulish tendencies. When I hear a celebrity has died, I almost can’t wait to tell someone. But first, I need to find out how they died.

Once, when a cat that an ex and I owned died a horrible death, my ex told me that she didn’t want anyone to know how the cat died. I said, “What do we say when people ask?” She said, “People won’t ask.” I didn’t believe her at first, but she was right. No one asked. But I could tell that the question was there, whispered among friends. How did the cat die?

Now, when I talk to someone whose pet has died, I remember not to ask how, but a part of me is anxious to know. There are so many things that can kill a human or animal. I want to know what to fear.

In Miriam Toews’ 2014 novel, All My Puny Sorrows, the narrator’s sister dies by suicide. The mother later states that “the pain of letting go of grief is just as painful or even more painful than the grief itself. It means goodbye.” Toews, who is one of my very favorite writers, has said the book is autobiographical, a way to better understand the real-life grief of her sister’s suicide. Another one of Toews’s most moving books is her 2000 memoir Swing Low: A Life, which she wrote in the voice of her father, who died by suicide in 1998. It’s a remarkable feat, with Toews fully embodying her father’s depression.

As much as I hate to say it, I was the one who sold Arthur his copy of Final Exit, about three months before his death. I was working at the bookstore when I spotted him near the health section. It felt odd to see him unannounced since he usually texted me when he was coming in. I snuck up and tried to surprise him. He seemed a little annoyed, like he was in a hurry, so I offered to help him find what he was looking for. We didn’t have it in stock, and it was unusually expensive online. I saw in the description that it was something about the ethics of suicide. Arthur said it was something he wanted to read for a class, so I didn’t question its subject matter. I thought of Final Exit and asked him if he knew about it. He did not. I found a used copy of it for him on the shelf. He went to the cashier and paid less than $10 for it. I think I gave him a discount coupon. It was, at the time, probably the most forgettable 10 minutes of our friendship. His hug was quick before he went into the night.

Earlier, I mentioned the friend who edited their Wikipedia page to say they died. But I lied about that. It was me who did that.

My Wikipedia page, my death, my resurrection.

I keep in touch with Arthur’s mom. We haven’t seen each other in person the last three years, partly because of COVID, but we text each other every couple of months. I send her photos of my cat and ask how she’s doing. She routinely responds in a positive fashion, with an abundance of exclamation points and emojis, usually flowers, cats, hearts, rainbows, stars, and black praying hands and a thumbs up. She adores my cat and loves all things cute and joyful.

I tell her that I’m writing about Arthur. In my head though, I’m worried about what she might think.

I also wonder what Arthur would think of me being friends with his mom. I would like to think that if he were still alive, they would have ended their estrangement and patched things up. I like to imagine all of us having dinner together. I wish that his mom and I could sit in theater seats somewhere and watch Arthur on a stage, singing with his band. Arthur would do some kind of ridiculously slinky dance move, and his mom and I would look at each other and laugh.

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Two of my favorite albums since Arthur died have been Sarah Mary Chadwick’s Me and Ennui Are Friends, Baby and Sharon Van Etten’s Remind Me Tomorrow. On the title track of Chadwick’s album, she sings about suicidal thoughts. She even gives the exact date of her last attempt: August 11, 2019. Midway through the song, singing with pain in her voice, over a stark piano refrain, she sings, And maybe I should chill / Out on blaming my parents / Forgivable at 25, it’s not cute at 37.

Van Etten’s album opens with the song “I Told You Everything.” The first lyrics:

Sitting at the bar, I told you everything / You said, “Holy shit, / You almost died.”

One of the first times I heard about suicide was the 1980 Queen song, “Don’t Try Suicide,” which is highlighted by a casual bassline and a catchy vocal style that almost sounds like doo-wop. Freddie Mercury sings the lines:

Don’t try suicide nobody’s worth it / Don’t try suicide / Nobody cares
Don’t try suicide / You’re just gonna hate it / Don’t try suicide / Nobody gives a damn.

Arthur’s mom once told me that she’d been listening to 528 Hz. It’s a frequency in the range of a high C note that induces testosterone production in the brain. Frequency of 528 Hz, according to various videos and claims, also has the power to transform your entire DNA, heal sore body parts, help you sleep, and treat cancer. I found a YouTube video called “528 Hz |  DREAMSCAPE for POSITIVE TRANSFORMATION.” It’s over nine hours long. I’ve listened to it while working on parts of this essay.

The computer and phone Arthur left behind do not reveal his state of mind. His sister told me they found poems, songs, and other writings on the computer, but nothing like a suicide note, or journal. They never figured out a way to get into the phone. His sister says it’s locked by a pattern password. She has ten attempts to unlock it and has tried to do so seven times. She tells me she’s afraid to attempt those last chances because the phone might lock up permanently if she gets it wrong. But she still has the phone in case she ever figures out the way into it. Or as she says, “In case of a miracle.”

I try to imagine Arthur’s thoughts on his last day. Though he had obviously been planning his death for at least six months, I wonder if he fluctuated with his decision. Don’t try suicide. Nobody’s worth it . . .

He started the day riding a bus from Portland to the coast.

I envision him looking out the bus window, the roads on Highway 26 to the coast lined with forests, then hills and cliffs, and more forests. It’s a movie only I can imagine. His face in the window, reflecting like a mirror. Was he looking for something out there? Maybe he wasn’t looking out the window at all. Maybe he was watching someone else across the aisle and wondering what their life was like. I wonder if he already felt like a ghost, like someone passing through, knowing he would wake up the next day and get in a warm shower and wash his body with the magic of soap, dry his skin, put on clean clothes, and walk somewhere to spend $10 on a coffee and pastry. Maybe he thought he was escaping, no longer in need of warm water on his body, suds in his hair and on his chest, clothes to button up around him, and the comfort of food and drink.

Maybe there is something unburdening about knowing these things are the last in your life. The last walk on the beach, the last rock you throw in the water, the last splash, the last sunset, the last stranger you see, the last song you hear, the last words you say to someone.

Arthur had checked himself into a room at the Sunset Surf Motel in Manzanita, Oregon. He said something to the front desk person about meeting friends later, but he was probably just trying to distract them, in case he was acting nervous or peculiar.

At some point that night, he took the nitrous tank that he had brought with him and sat in the bed with it. This method, using inert gases, is described in Final Exit. I would like to believe the book when it says that it’s one of the most “effective” and “painless” methods for “self-deliverance.” I would like to think that it was as simple as falling asleep. I would like to think that he was so at peace that he could possibly even dream as he was dying. Maybe dreaming of France.

I always wondered how hard it would be to make yourself disappear. You would have to shed your traceable belongings. Throw your phone away or smash it. Burn your credit cards. Ditch your car. Never commit a crime. Pray that nobody has your fingerprints.

I can’t imagine how damaged a person must become to want to disappear. Not just without a trace, but without a mark on anything or anyone.

No past for anyone to remember.

No ego.

There are around 600,000 people who go missing in the United States every year. According to National Missing and Unidentified Persons statistics, 4,400 unidentified bodies are found each year. Those numbers mean that only 0.7333% of people who go missing are found and unable to be identified.

Outside of his motel room, Arthur taped a note to the door. It said: if you don’t want to see a dead body, don’t go in.

I spoke with Arthur’s mother and sister on separate phone calls as I was finishing this essay. They still have very few clues as to why he did what he did. They both expressed lingering pain and sadness.

His mom tells me that when she attended the memorial for Arthur in Portland in November 2019, hearing his friends speak about him felt comforting. She was happy and relieved to hear that his friends loved him so much. I can imagine that talking to his friends and listening to their stories that day was bittersweet and nourishing. I was there as well, in the living room of the house of one of Arthur’s closest friends, and I remember how hard it was to speak when it was my turn. How I could barely make it through the sobbing.

Although my sadness has started to abate the past almost-four years, writing this has triggered an odd sense of frustration and even a sort of anger. There are times, sifting through the memories of our friendship, that I have wanted to throw something or scream. If you know me, you know that I am not prone to anger. I am quicker to break down in sadness than to lose my temper. The only time I ever scream is when I’m having a nightmare. Maybe I’m falling through the air, without a parachute, and I start to scream. Because the sound is coming from a dream dimension, it is usually shrill and hoarse, like a Chewbacca cry. It usually wakes me up and then I can’t help but laugh about the sound. And then I laugh at the quiet dark because I’m still alive.

Arthur’s mom and sister both go to suicide support groups. Arthur’s mom tells me that she suffers from depression and anxiety and that her own mother was schizophrenic. She tells me, more recently, that reading Mark Wolynn’s It Didn’t Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle has been helpful to her.

While genes and behaviors sometimes pass down in families, suicide is, in fact, not hereditary. People can, and should, and do seek help every day.

A depressed person often finds comfort in being down. I felt that in my depression. I would feel it weighing me down to a point where I basked in the gloom. I’d become a stubborn grump. It could almost become a dark perversion if I let it.

But I also knew what it felt like to be happy and satisfied and to strive for those kinds of feelings. I could seek out the dopamine like a freaking dopamine hunter! If I could simply trick myself into thinking positively and to see the pleasures in living, maybe I could find (and hold) happiness. Maybe my happiness would make others happy. Can happiness spread? Will it catch on?

At the performance that never happened, Arthur’s mom and I are seated there in the crowd, close to the front. It’s an outdoor show somewhere, with a river breeze cutting through the warm summer air. We’re watching the show, smiling, bopping our heads to the beat. Arthur’s band is not breaking up. They are writing more songs and getting ready to record an album. Arthur and I have even made a collage for the front cover.

The band are on their fourth song now, and as always happens at their shows, those in the audience that are not familiar with them are starting to pay close attention. It’s a raw, infectious funk. There’s a snarl to it, like the songs are somehow primitive. People are nudging each other and nodding to the stage, at Arthur, like, Holy shit, he’s good.

Arthur commands the stage, on the front lip of it like a balance beam. His long arms swim upward like he’s about to fly away, and when he sings, his face defines every word of his emotional lyrics. I turn my camera on and try to capture the moment. He quickly turns his head and sort of blocks his face dramatically, as if he’s suddenly shy. I can tell he knows it’s me trying to take the photos though, and I can see him trying not to laugh. It feels like both a flirt and a challenge and I take a few more photos. His impish behavior catches up with him by the end of the song and he’s cracking himself up. The band has to wait for him to stop laughing, but the crowd loves it. The audience already loves Arthur.

They start their next song and I look at the photos on my camera, expecting the blurry worst. And that’s what I get—smudges of fabric, skin, and glaring stage lights. But there is one stunning one. It looks crystal clear and perfect. I can see his sharp cheekbones and dark eyes angled upward as if watching his lean, muscular arm and outstretched hand trying to snatch a star out of the sky.

Kevin Sampsell is a writer, editor, collage artist, small press book publisher and bookseller living in Portland, Oregon. His books include I Made an Accident: Collages and Poems, the novel, This Is Between Us, and the memoir, A Common Pornography.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Jason is now 46 and married, with children of his own. He still manages the farm in Bowersville, where twice a day—every day of the year—those cows need to be milked. Other chores: mix feed rations for milking and dry cows (pregnant or about to deliver), water and feed the animals, care for those that are ailing, deliver new calves, manage manure, monitor herd health and nutrition—and, depending on the season, prep, plant, or harvest fields. Since 2019, Jason has made multimillion-dollar investments in the business. He borrowed money to build an upgraded barn and become the second dairy farm in the state to use robotic milkers. He bought four of the machines, at about $250,000 each. Jason often worries that to ensure the farm’s future, he could have endangered it—that the debt he’s taken on might lead to the farm’s failure. “I’ve taken all that 70-something years’ worth of effort, and I’ve risked it all,” he says. Having witnessed the aftermath of his brother’s death, Jason never considers dying by suicide, but he’s honest about how tough running the business can be. How does he manage the pressure? “Some days are better than others.” Jason lives too far from Blairsville to participate in the Shed program there—he’s about a two-hour drive east—but he’s the type of farmer Haney would love to reach.

The officers told Dibble not to bother with bagging the victim’s hands to preserve DNA evidence or sealing the body for the autopsy—standard protocols for a potential homicide. Dibble did anyway, but by then police had covered the woman with a dirty bedsheet, possibly contaminating the body.

“They had already made their minds up that her death was a suicide,” Dibble said in an interview. “And I had no indication of that at all.”

The woman’s name was Heather Mayer. She was 33 years old and worked as a policy specialist for a Twin Cities insurance company.

Dibble would revisit the scene of Heather’s death many times as she lay awake nights or paused at a stoplight. She waited for the day police might deliver the investigative findings that would make the rest of the pieces fit into place. It never came.

Nearly four years later, the circumstances of Heather Mayer’s death continue to remain a mystery. South St. Paul police have informally continued to call it a suicide, or possibly a “tragic accident,” and the medical examiner records still list Heather’s cause of death as “undetermined.”

Dibble wasn’t the only one who wondered if there was more to Heather’s death than what police said. When one of the officers called Heather’s mother, Tracy Dettling, to say her daughter had hanged herself, Dettling’s mind flashed to her grandkids still in the house. She jumped into her car and sped toward the Twin Cities. Then she called the officer back from the road.

“Did he do this?” Dettling demanded.

*Trigger warning for intense descriptions of domestic violence.

They brainstormed responses to the argument that gender-affirming care reduces suicide — an assertion that is backed up by research. Peer-reviewed studies have repeatedly found that trans and nonbinary youth with access to gender-affirming care are significantly less like to seriously consider suicide than those who did not receive such care. A larger analysis, using online survey data from over 11,000 trans and nonbinary youth, found using gender-affirming hormonal therapy was associated with lower rates of both depression and suicidality. Yet one team member called the argument that gender-affirming care reduces suicide “abusive”; another argued it was a way for doctors to coerce parents to consent to gender-affirming care for their child. 

Van Mol, the doctor, suggested Deutsch reply to the suicide prevention argument with a rebuttal published on a defunct anti-trans blog: “Why weren’t the 1950s a total blood bath for suicides if non-affirmation of everything is the fast train to offing one’s self?” Van Mol asked, paraphrasing the blog post. 

Another doctor in the working group, California endocrinologist Michael Laidlaw, had gained attention for his writing against gender-affirming care after parents at a charter school in his region raised complaints that they hadn’t been notified before kindergarteners were read a children’s book, I Am Jazz, about trans teenager Jazz Jennings. Last fall, when the state of Florida called on Laidlaw as an expert witness in a lawsuit over its anti-trans Medicaid policy, a federal judge concluded that he was “far off from the accepted view” on how to treat gender dysphoria, in part because Laidlaw had said he would refuse to use patients’ preferred pronouns. In his South Dakota testimony, Laidlaw compared gender-affirming care to Nazi experimentation and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. In emails to Deutsch and the group, he railed against doctors who prescribe puberty blockers — which are used to delay unwanted physical changes in gender-diverse kids and give them more time to explore whether or how to transition — accusing them of “willfully harming” children, even if kids and their parents consent to treatment. “The physician is the criminal in these scenarios and must be prosecuted by the law,” he argued.

In December, as Western holiday shoppers were preparing Christmas presents, Foxconn renewed efforts to rev up its iPhone 14 Pro production. To attract a new crop of workers, the company again raised its pay. One contract seen by Rest of World promised a monthly bonus of 6,000 yuan ($885) if recruits worked at least 26 full days in December and 23 days in January. On social media, people described the proposition as the “60-day Foxconn challenge.”

Hunter had planned to return home once his quarantine ended, but the bonus made him reconsider. Going through a routine he was well familiar with, he lined up at the factory’s recruitment office, had his blood taken as part of a mandatory health check, and carried his belongings into an eight-person dorm room. The next day, he completed a mental health questionnaire, which asked whether he had insomnia or relationship issues — a practice that dates back to the spate of suicides in 2010 — and spent eight hours watching orientation videos on his phone. A frequent pop-up asking for a facial scan made sure he was paying attention. After three more days of quarantine, he started his most recent role — working the screws on the iPhone 14 Pro assembly line.

Inside the workshop, Hunter said he felt a kind of oppression he had never experienced in his previous Foxconn jobs, which were away from the factory floor. With no windows, he said that it was impossible to tell day from night without checking a clock. Managers required such a high tempo that he felt he could not stop for a second. Hunter even witnessed one colleague getting his pay reduced for spending too long drinking water. The constant scolding was humiliating, he said, even though he was rarely the target. Colleagues broke into tears under the stress.

Anyone lucky enough to have a pet in this lifetime understands the pain of having to put that beloved down when the excruciating time comes. But, did you ever consider how repeatedly euthanizing sick and old pets takes its toll on on those trusted to provide a painless demise? At Slate, veterinarian Andrew Bullis helps us understand the high personal toll exacted on those burdened with offering the final compassion.

So, I’m left with euthanasia or no euthanasia. No euthanasia will lead to more suffering and more trauma for Lacey before she inevitably dies, likely a slow and agonizing death at that—or one done by her owner with a gunshot.

There in the clinic, Miller’s words come crashing back: “Do it flawlessly.” Lacey deserves that, at the very least. Despite her owners’ decision, she at least deserves to die in peace. “You will do it painlessly,” I tell myself.

Gosh, this job breaks you.

He didn’t tell anyone where he was going that day and never returned.

Anthony died on September 23, 2013, a few months after Matthew Greene disappeared.

Grief, we’re told, has distinct stages. We expect to pass through each one, like a doorway, from denial all the way to acceptance. I expected that too. As the months wore on, a sense of guilt metastasized inside me. Friends and family said I tried my best with him. I had no special power, they said, to keep him alive. I rejected those words and turned inward. Grief warped my ability to love, and to accept it, too. I spent a lot of time in bed, barely present with my kids. I sobbed in my car during commutes.

The flower I took from the Minaret trail was wilting on my hat. The colors still blazed burnt orange but it would never be this bright, this beautiful, again. So I left it there, draping it over the post at Matthew Greene’s campsite, and said goodbye.

“I hate the saying, ‘Everything happens for a reason,’ or ‘It’ll get easier,’ because it doesn’t,” Ellie said. “It doesn’t get easier. Grief and loss never do. I think they just get different. You learn where some days you’re an emotional wreck and others, you don’t think about them as much. Or you think about them with a smile.”

Oct. 2, 2013, was not the day the drug epidemic reached Greenville. But beginning with Jackson’s death that day, a group of at least 16 young men and women who grew up together in this small, eastern North Carolina city would succumb to overdoses of opioids and other drugs over nine years. More of their peers became addicted or overdosed but managed to survive.

“It was almost like a generation that went to war didn’t come back,” said J.D. Fletcher, whose son died in 2019.

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William Torrey| Longreads | October 2021 | 30 minutes (9,100 words)

I: My Protector

Our brotherhood begins with me in a blindfold, one that’s been on for what feels like forever. I’m 18 and pledging a fraternity, and to be a pledge, I’ve learned, means you’re a constant disappointment. You have not properly mopped the bathroom after chapter dinner. You have not properly memorized the Greek alphabet. You have not attracted sufficient pussy to the Gameday tailgate. 

On this night, a hot one in late September, we’ve been summoned to the house for a meeting, one that at first seems promising, in that it involves Natural Light, but soon enough begins to get weird. The Actives line us up and tie rags around our faces, then shove us into rooms with music blaring. “NONE OF Y’ALL BITCHES SAY A MOTHERFUCKING WORD!” someone with beer breath shouts at my face. Then he slams the door so hard I’m sure it’s broken. We sit and wait for God knows what. 

In time — Twenty minutes? An hour? — they lead us out back, where we’re stripped of cigarettes, cell phones, watches, and wallets. A very drunk Active screams that we are, in essence, complete losers, unworthy, a bunch of faggot-ass pieces of shit who ought to be thrown into the Mississippi River. “That’s a great idea!” another Active yells, and before I know it, I’m in a car, still blindfolded, lying in the backseat, “so the cops don’t see,” and we’re zooming to the levee. “Torrey?” someone keeps asking. “Does your bitch ass know how to swim?” My heart pounds so hard I worry I’ll faint. I’ve been in college a month now, and until this moment, I’d fooled myself into believing fraternities weren’t that tough. But now I’m facing danger. I’ll be sodomized with a broomstick or forced to eat shit. I’ll sink to the bottom of the Mighty Mississippi. I picture my mom, asleep in Texas, getting the call in the deep dark night: Pick up your boy at the Baton Rouge morgue. 

The car stops and they line us up again, somewhere that could be anywhere but sure seems like the levee. The whirr of cicada song, the stink of refineries. Wet grass sogging our Sperrys. More yelling. Who’ll go in first? Who’ll sink and who’ll swim? I shift my weight, try not to shake. 

“Repeat after me!” a drunk Active calls. “I love my big brother!” (We repeat.) “My big brother’s better than me!” (We repeat.) “My big brother’s gotta bigger dick than me!” (We repeat.) “My big brother can fuck my date!” (We repeat.) It goes on like this, this litany, the fear inside me cooling to confusion and finally relief.

Then off comes the blindfold, and he’s there, beaming at me in the shadows by the river, my big brother: Mike from Chalmette. I blink as he hugs me. Pressed tight there against his chest, I am, for the first time in hours, not afraid. I am cared for. I am safe.  

“Come on, baby bro,” he grins, “let’s get fucked up!” 

*** 

Hours later, after we’ve won a game called Beer-a-Minute, Mike somehow drives us back to campus. Sitting in his old green Chevy, watching the first bands of dawn push through the black, he tells me he could’ve had any pledge as his little brother, but the only one he wanted was me. 

“There’s just something about you.” 

“What do you mean?” I ask, feeling special.

“I don’t know.” He shakes his head. “But I do know we’re gonna be more than just fraternity brothers. Me and you, we’re gonna be real brothers. Me and you, we’re gonna be great friends.” 

“Okay,” I say, and that’s what happens.

***

In many ways, we are brothers. “Fraternal twins,” we joke, separated by a state line and precisely 13 months. We’re both silly and sensitive dreamers. The kind of guys who can’t help but push the bit, who once they’re going, can’t stop until everyone’s doubled over. The kind of guys who egg each other on until they can’t even breathe. Whenever we run into somebody Mike knows but I don’t — at Reggie’s in Tigerland, smoking Camels in the LSU quad — he never fails to introduce me as his real little brother, and more often than not, never mind that we look nothing alike — he’s short and tubby; I’m tall with a sharp-lined face — people believe him. He’s that charming.    

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And then there’s where we’re from. I grew up in a fancy San Antonio neighborhood called Alamo Heights, where everybody’s dad is in oil and gas and lots of moms live in yoga pants. My grandfather was the president of a bank, and my dad, who divorced my mom when I was 2, is a lawyer. My mom and I weren’t rich, at least not compared to the kids in my grade who got BMWs at 16, but I drive a new Mitsubishi, and college is covered.

Ask Mike where he’s from, and he’ll tell you, New Orleans. But that’s not true; Mike is from Chalmette, in St. Bernard Parish — a place just east of the Industrial Canal that real New Orleanians call “Da Parish.” Early on in college, I get that Da Parish isn’t exactly the place you want to be from. These are your blue collars, your Y’ats, people who say axe instead of ask. My fraternity brothers from well-to-do families on the North Shore and Lafayette give Mike constant shit about it, but he takes it in stride. Chalmatians, as they’re called, are used to such jokes.

I like to think I always knew Mike was coming from less than me, but in truth, it wasn’t a subject I gave much thought. Back then we were just two guys eating frat house jambalaya, drinking cheap beer and Ten High. His cash came from waiting tables at a Mexican restaurant off I-10; while mine showed up like magic in a bank account set up by my dad. And anyway Mike never said much about Chalmette. I knew only that he was the first in his family to go to college. His dad’s some kind of mechanic and his mom’s some kind of secretary, and his little sister, who’s my age and not going to college, is expecting a baby. During freshman year winter break, just a few months into our friendship, Mike drove 500 miles to visit me in San Antonio, but it took a whole other year before I saw where he grew up, never mind that it was an hour from campus. In those days, it never occurred to me that maybe Mike didn’t want me to see where he was from, that maybe he was hiding something. But even if he was, and even if he’d told me so, I wouldn’t have understood. Of course, in those days I didn’t understand anything. 

 II: Bourbon Street Knockout

Every Mardi Gras, our fraternity fills a U-Haul with busted couches and kegs and claims a spot beneath the Pontchartrain Expressway. For days we sit in the false dark and watch parades and drink and drink and drink. Sometime on the Monday before Fat Tuesday, both of us blind with hangovers, Mike tells me he’s got to go by his parents’, and if I ride with him, I’ll get a free meal, a shower, and a clean bathroom. I’m caked in street mud and very tired of holding my breath in the St. Charles port-a-potties, so I hop in his truck without thinking. I didn’t know New Orleans well then, but as we whizzed past the Superdome and the city seemed to vanish, I knew we weren’t headed Uptown where our other friends lived.

“Where are we going?” I ask.

“Chalmette.”

I roll my eyes and think, Da Parish.

“Well, how far’s that?” 

He shrugs again. “Fifteen minutes.”

The little house on Rose Street is just that: little. It seems too small for Mike, let alone for Mike, his mom and dad, his sister, and her new baby. His mom greets us from the cramped front porch. She’s got a tattoo and wears a Rolling Stones shirt that’s been washed a thousand times. All I can think is how young she seems.

In my memory, we don’t stay long. There’s tension, the source of which I don’t get, and everything starts to feel rushed. We don’t eat. I don’t see his dad or sister. Mike gets what he needs, we shower and go. 

“How old are your parents?” I ask.

We’re crossing the bridge back to Orleans Parish. Mike tells me.

“Jesus,” I say, “so your dad was like … 16 when you were born?”

“Yep.” He stares straight ahead. “How old was yours?”

“I don’t know, man, like 38.” A year older than Mike’s dad is now. 

***

That night, sipping a Bourbon Street Knockout in a camp chair under the overpass, my mind won’t stop spinning. How is that where Mike grew up? How was that his mom? How did she have babies in high school? How could our lives be so … different? Da Parish, I think, what had I expected? I brood there until I’m pass-out drunk, waking with a start when my cigarette burns me. 

Days later, I call my mom and tell her about Mike’s. She listens while I ramble on about the tiny house in the neighborhood filled with other tiny houses, about his mom’s tattoo, the old shirt, but after a few minutes, she breaks in. 

“Honey, don’t you get it? 

“Get what?”

“Mike,” she says, “he’s poor.”

“Oh,” I say. 

My eyes go wide. I see it now. She’s just ripped off the blindfold. 

“Well, I don’t know …” I trail off.

I knew it already — I had to — but couldn’t or wouldn’t accept it. Mike was from a place where poor people lived, and yet he wasn’t poor. Not my big brother. Was he leery that day, to show me his house? Was his mom flustered to host me? Will whose dad’s a lawyer? Will in his short shorts and his Brooks Brothers shirt? 

“Now don’t get me wrong,” my mom breaks in, “Mike’s got a heart of gold. It doesn’t matter.” 

“Right.” I snap out of it. “Of course. It makes no difference.”

“Right.” 

Six months later a storm hits, and I see that it does.

III: A State of Emergency

Katrina won’t stop changing her mind. She’s coming right at us, then she’s not, then she’s bouncing back from Florida, en route to kill us all. In my two years in Louisiana, every hurricane that was ever supposed to destroy New Orleans has petered out into a thunderstorm, and I’m sure this one will do the same. But not Mike. Mike is freaking out. 

The morning before landfall, he gets me up early to help him raid the fraternity’s ice machine. I’m annoyed. Fifteen minutes ago, I was in bed with a naked Theta. Now I’m hungover and sweating while we lug a huge cooler. 

“Why are we even doing this? Even if the storm hits New Orleans, won’t we be fine in Baton Rouge?”

Mike says we might lose power, then he tells me his parents have to come to stay with us.

“In our apartment? Can’t they just get a hotel?”

As soon as I ask this, Mike gives me The Look. It’s the one he uses when I brag about backpacking Europe. Or when my dad, out of nowhere, mails me an envelope containing not one, not three, but five hundred dollar bills. Or when I pressure him into giving up his Friday double so he can get smashed with me and be my protector. It’s a look thick with envy and contempt, one that asks the big question without saying a word: Why does your life get to be so easy?    

“I didn’t mean it like that,” I backtrack. “I just meant, like, wouldn’t they be more comfortable?”

“It’s a mandatory evacuation,” Mike tells me. “There won’t be a hotel from Baton Rouge to Houston.” What he doesn’t tell me: Even if there was, his parents couldn’t afford it.

*** 

Late that night, Mike and I drink Bud Selects in the bed of his Chevy. Upstairs, in the apartment, his parents sleep in his bed. The storm’s just hours away. The sky above us: a grey-black swirl. 

“This is gonna be fucked,” Mike says.

“I still think it’ll be okay.” 

This is the lie I’ve told myself all afternoon, one born of a nagging question: If the storm does destroy Mike’s parents’ house, will they move in with us permanently? And, if so, how might this impact my liquor, cigarette, and TV intake? After showing up this morning in a tiny black Civic, Mike’s mom spent the entire day cleaning our shithole apartment. His dad, after arriving in a truck packed to the hilt, immediately went out and bought a generator and has otherwise barely spoken. Mike’s parents are quiet generally, but when I’m around they’re practically silent. I don’t see then what’s so plain to me now: On top of worrying they might lose everything, they don’t want to be in my hair.

“I mean, it could still turn and hit Texas,” I say, lighting a Camel. 

“No,” Mike says. “It’s coming right at us. This whole thing’s just gonna be…”

“…Fucked?” 

“Yeah,” he says. “It is.”

***

And he’s right. 

The next morning, I wake to find Mike and his parents in front of the TV. The national news is on — Special Report — and they’ve been watching for hours. Apparently, while I snoozed like a beer-drunk baby, one of the worst hurricanes in history made landfall and destroyed the Gulf Coast. The Mr. GO canal has flooded Lake Pontchartrain; the wind has shoved the water onto land. Much of New Orleans is underwater. Canals and levees continue to breach. We are, I learn, in a State of Emergency. 

Not knowing really what any of this means, I ask what they’ve heard about their house. Mike stares empty-eyed and mutters something that sounds like OK.

“It’s OK!?!?” I ask.

“No.” Mike sighs. “It’s underwater.” 

I’m standing in our apartment. The power’s on. Outside it’s barely raining. 

“Underwater?” 

The little house on Rose Street. Chalmette high. His dad’s shop. Da Parish. Thirteen feet.  

“Underwater,” Mike says again, the word already too familiar on his lips. 

***

As the day drags on and the big ugly picture gets bigger and uglier, I start to feel strange. On the one hand, I’m thankful I’ve escaped disaster. A devastating storm has struck within an hour of where I live, but I’m totally fine. On the other hand, I can’t help but notice my being totally fine is all I can think of. I’m surrounded by people who are newly homeless, people who happen to be my best friend’s parents, a man and a woman who cleaned my house and bought me groceries, and a generator we never had to use. I’m staring into the face of human suffering, yet all I can think of is me. 

Not that they’re complaining, these refugees. Life’s hard, but they can take it. That tired old phrase: It is what it is. I don’t like to imagine how I’d react, at 20, to the news I’d lost all my earthly possessions. The tantrum. My God. Even picturing it makes me sick.  

***

LSU shuts down and the Whole Foods where I’ve started to work, just part-time, operates on a come-in-if-you-can basis. I call my boss and say that, while I’d love to get ten bucks an hour to make free-range turkey and aioli wraps, I’ve got my roommate’s parents with me. They’re from Chalmette, so I need to help out. “Just focus on your family,” he tells me. I should correct him but don’t.  

For the next week, instead of helping, instead of telling Mike’s parents they’re welcome to stay, I ghost and pretend Katrina didn’t happen. While poor blacks are herded like cattle into the Superdome, I fart around my fraternity house, playing MarioKart and shooting Jim Beam. While people too sick to move die horrible deaths in a hospital without power, I apathetically text the sorority girls I’m constantly leading on, until one of them tells me to come over for sex. While my big brother has to process that not simply his home but everything he’s ever associated with home — his childhood, his community — has been destroyed, I grow impatient waiting for everything to go back to normal.

After a few days, Mike gives me a call.

“Are you gonna sleep at the fraternity again?” 

“There’s a bunch of people here,” I tell him. “I’ll crash on the couch.”

“Who’s there?”

I say the names, all New Orleans guys, but not from Da Parish, so their houses are fine. We both pause to inhale smokes.

“My parents are gonna go soon,” he says. “In case you’re worried.”

“Worried? Why would I be worried?”  

***

And then they do go, just as fast as they came, only leaving behind a cleaner apartment.

As to where they went, I have no idea. It has to be someplace, but the details didn’t matter. I’d had my fill of tragedy and victims. Once they were gone, they were gone. At last, Mike and I can get back to being drunken goofballs, a couple of flat-footed dreamers. We can resume our fraternal twinhood, keep pretending we’re precisely the same. 

And we can, so long as my blindfold’s on. And for the next few years, it is, tied tight. Because, for me, the storm’s over. But for Mike, it’s only just begun. 

***

Mike and I live together another year-and-a-half, a time during which he declares a theatre major, hardly attends class, declares a general studies major, basically fails out, and then decides to “take a break.” A time during which I declare a creative writing major, get a girlfriend, study in Spain, and finish college on time. A time during which Katrina’s barely mentioned.

My last summer in Baton Rouge is a bacchanal of self-congratulation, one fueled by graduation checks and the insane presumption that I’m on my way to fame. Over the past few semesters, my fiction professors have given my stories way too much praise. Praise I rolled in like a pig in shit. Praise I’ve turned into a smug certainty that I’m destined to be some literary darling. And while I’ve spent hardly any time actually writing, the universe has nonetheless rewarded me with a full-ride fellowship to an MFA program. I’ll have the next three years to read, dream up stories, and surely win the Pulitzer.

Mike is waiting tables. 

But we’re still raging, still cracking everyone up, still staying up late on the porch drinking Franzia and smoking Camels. Still brothers. And yet, in these waning weeks, as I pack my room, things feel out of sync. I’m off to a cool new life. Mike’s staying right where he is. He’s the big brother, but he’s fallen behind.

***

On my last night in town, in August of 2007, after boudin balls and Jack and Cokes at The Chimes, a group of us heads to a friend’s for one last whatever. Once we’ve rid the fridge of Natural Lights, once we’ve told our stories — the time Mike motorboated a friend’s big sister, the Halloween I evaded arrest while dressed as a Twinkie — once we’ve stretched the night as long as we can, my girlfriend yawns and looks at her phone. 

“Time to get moving,” she tells me. 

“Guess so,” I say.

Mike and I light Camels in the courtyard while she gets the car. It’s a moment. We both know it. Not goodbye forever, but goodbye to this. We hug and cry. Mike tells me he loves me, says I’m gonna write some beautiful book. For graduation, he gave me a Royal Deluxe typewriter with a page in the spool. A two-word message: Good luck. I tell Mike I love him, too, and as we sway there beneath a flickering floodlight, I feel a pang of guilt. For the first time, I have the urge to say sorry. Sorry the storm fucked up your house. Sorry the last few years have been so tough. Sorry I never asked if you were hurting. But the moment passes. Our hug ends when my girlfriend honks the horn. 

“You’re my brother,” he says, and I tell him he’s mine. 

“Wow,” my girlfriend says as we drive off. “Mike’s really broken up.”

I tighten my blindfold and say, “He’s fine.” 

IV: Trapped in Fantasyland 

Years pass.

“I feel like I just gotta move to France,” Mike tells me. 

We’re on the phone, on a summer night when I’m home from grad school. I’m smoking on my mom’s front porch, drunk on cheap vodka. 

“And do what, exactly?” 

“I don’t know, man. Work at a cafe. Learn cuisine.”

Mike’s obsessed with cooking. He watches the Food Network religiously, loves Bourdain and Michael Ruhlman, wants to work for Thomas Keller. 

I sigh. “You don’t speak French. You don’t have a visa. You don’t have the money to get to France, let alone rent an apartment.” But at this point, I’m barely listening to myself. 

I’m starting to see that Mike might be terminally stuck, starting to worry he’ll burn his entire 20s fantasizing over dream lives. Last we spoke, he was moving to Austin to be an indie rock drummer. Before that, it was Second City in Chicago. Now it’s the CIA. And while everyone’s allowed to dream big, what’s all the more crazy-making is that Mike can actually do the things he dreams of doing. He’s a wonderful actor, has performed Shakespeare with LSU Theatre. He’s a talented chef, has a knack for flavor, can pull loose ends from the fridge and whip them up into something fancy in no time. He’s a good drummer, too, and has been in a Baton Rouge band that makes cool music. And yet, when the chips are down, he never commits to any of these dreams; he commits instead to dreaming up new ones. 

In the years since I’ve left Louisiana, Mike’s kept waiting tables and now has a side gig as our fraternity’s House Dad. He lives in a little apartment in the back, a five-second walk from the restaurant. When he told me his plan to move in, it seemed less than ideal, but House Dads get free room and board, and he’s got debt, so I figured he could pay it down. He’s back in school, too, part-time. So maybe this will end up good. Maybe he’ll snag a girlfriend, graduate, and get back on track. Maybe. But, of course, that doesn’t happen. What does happen is Mike finds himself, at 24 and 25, surrounded by out-of-control college kids, at the restaurant, at the fraternity, all over campus. What does happen is he drinks away his tips at the bar, gains weight, keeps ungodly hours, saves no money, never goes to class, and while the rest of his buddies get advanced degrees, buy houses, and get married, he lives in the bowels of our fraternity house, hiding. 

“Just finish school,” I tell him, incredulous. Me, the little brother who’s never been out of school. Me, whose harrowing experience with Hurricane Katrina is fodder for stories at cocktail parties.

“Easy for you,” he could’ve said but never did. Mike never called me out on a single thing. 

***

Whenever I come to Baton Rouge, I stay with Mike, and by the end of each visit, booze-whipped and bloated, I’m amazed that my deeply indulgent nostalgia trip is to some degree his normal life. But when I show up at his apartment just before the start of my last year of grad school, in August of 2009, I’m no longer amazed; I’m alarmed. 

A plumbing disaster has occurred — and, by the looks of it, not recently — destroying the room where he used to sleep. The place is a wreck. Half the ceiling is gone. Mold and mildew all over. 

“What the fuck happened?” I ask.

“Oh,” he waves it off. “Some shit with the pipes.”

“Well right. But is it getting repaired?”

Mike tells a story that can be boiled down to: He owes a guy money but won’t pay the guy until he fixes the leak, but the guy who’s owed won’t fix the leak until Mike pays.

“So it’s a war of attrition?” 

“Basically.”

“But you have to live here,” I say. “So … you lose.”

“Yeah, well. I’m not livin’ here much longer.”

“What are you gonna do?”

He shrugs. “Cooking school.”

“How? With what money?”

“I don’t know, man.”

The rest of the trip is unpleasant. We hole up in the dank apartment, drink oceans of Early Times and watch Top Chef. We play beer pong with college kids we don’t know and don’t really like, guys who get blackout drunk, take Percocets, and fight. We take Percocets ourselves one night and wake up the next morning on the deck. 

What’s going on, I wonder. The last time I saw Mike, at summer’s start, we had a blast. We went Tiki Tubing down the Amite River, played putt-putt, ate crawfish. We got stoned and drank Abitas with his bandmates and laughed until our sides hurt. Why does this trip feel so different? 

Back then, Mike kept a LiveJournal, one that’s still online. In an entry made after my first visit in May, he writes on his “dilemma.” His bandmates — the friends who replaced our crew when we graduated — have just graduated themselves and will soon move to Austin. Mike wants to go but feels like he can’t. The entry, posted at 4 a.m., is titled “What is and What Should Be.” Here’s how it ends: 

 As I’ve come closer to the day my bandmates leave, I find myself staring at nothing and thinking of everything.   

…[E]very day I spend not … doing the things I know in my heart I need to do, I die a little. I’ve known for some time now the path I need to take and yet, I’m afraid to take that leap. I do nothing to help myself.

I want to go. I need to go. Why can’t I?  

I want to cut my losses and start fresh. I want to be happy.  

The opening line of Twelfth Night reads, “If music be the food of love, play on …” 

I want to play. I want to cook. I want to eat. I want to go.

I want, I want, I want. But he never did. And over the summer, while his bandmates settled into new lives and I finished my thesis, he stared at nothing and thought of everything. He died a little. He began to fall apart. 

***

As I pack to go back to school, it dawns on me that, ever since I’ve left Baton Rouge, it’s become my Fantasyland, a place where I can pretend I’m still the crazy drunk I was in college. A guy who’s yet to dream of becoming a writer, to feel the pressure of expectation. A guy who doesn’t fret constantly about what comes next. Usually, when a visit ends, I’m sad. But this time, I’m thrilled. There’s a danger in idling. You’re not supposed to be in college forever. Mike had a similar realization back in May, but he’s still here, trapped in Fantasyland. Since Katrina, he’s survived on the idea of starting over, the idea of escape. Now he’s come to the end of the line. He’s got to do something, but he doesn’t want to disappoint anyone, so he locks up and disappoints everyone, most of all himself.

Like the leak in the roof, it’s a war of attrition. 

***

Before I leave, I tell him I’m worried. 

“You need to get out of here, Mike. This is no way to live.” 

What I don’t say: This is the home of a depressed person. 

“I know,” he says.

We hug in the grim fluorescence, and I head off to school. Looking back, I can’t help but wonder how Mike felt as he watched me drive away. Was he happy to get back to hiding? Or did he feel more lost than ever? I remember precisely how I felt: equal parts guilty and relieved. And as my Honda hummed east along the Gulf Coast, and the endless green swathes of Alabama became the slow sweeping hills of Georgia, as I got farther and farther away, I relied hard on the bad brother’s mantra: He’s at rock bottom. Things can only go up from here.

V: The Very Worst Thing

Another year. Another call from Mike. Only this time, I don’t answer.

I’m hammering away at a fresh story in my new apartment in New Orleans, where after a summer of living with my mom in Texas, of writing, manual labor, and endless nights of abject drunkenness, certain I’ve fucked up my life — I’ve somehow landed a job as an adjunct at a commuter college on Lake Pontchartrain. My students are mostly poor — black and Vietnamese kids from Gretna and Kenner, white kids from Destrehan and Da Parish. Compared to my fellow MFA grads who work as shopgirls and movers, I’m lucky to have this low-paying gig. I’m starting to see that a so-so writer with delusions of grandeur, and a penchant for blackout drinking, can end up in an unglamorous place. I’m starting to get why people study medicine or law. Starting to see that life takes money, and the more you’ve got, the better it is. Through all of grad school, I’d presumed my degree from an unheard of regional program would automatically yield a slam dunk job at a liberal arts college in the Berkshires: But lo and behold, here I am, desperately thankful to escape my mother’s, to net $20,000 a year “teaching” freshman comp in sad classrooms with overflowing trash cans on a campus so ghostly it seems like Katrina’s surge hit last month, not five years back. This is not where you’re supposed to be, I tell myself while I freak out about barely making rent and grade essays with mistakes so basic I don’t know what to say. You’ve got to live up to your potential. You’ve got to write yourself out of this mess! 

Which is what I try to do — write — unless of course, I’m busy carousing the Marigny or the Quarter, resuming my college persona, undoing the maturing I did in grad school, getting kicked out of Cooter Brown’s and Tipitina’s, and Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club … and maybe moving to America’s booziest city wasn’t my best move. And look now: Mike’s calling again, and I’ve put in a solid 20 minutes today, so I may as well power down the old laptop and see what he needs.

“Yello?” I say. 

“Will!” he says like he’s fucking choking.

“Mike? What’s wrong?” 

“My father” — again that choking sound — “My father’s. Killed. Himself.”

I stand and spin in a circle. That’s what I remember: saying “Oh my God!” then standing and spinning in a circle. Like I had to confirm I was still in my room. That I was still Will Torrey, still 25, still a man alive in the world. “Where do you need me?” I ask, and Mike tells me: his parents’, right away. Then I hang up and call my mom. 

“Why does this keep … happening to Mike?” I ask.

“I don’t know, sweetie,” she says through tears.

But, of course, we both know that’s a lie.

***

The hours and days and weeks that follow are a whirlwind of strangeness. 

I’m in Mike’s parents’ yard, in Lacombe, surrounded by his buddies from Da Parish. We pinch our lips and nod as this or that uncle or cousin goes in to be with Mike and his family, all of us just waiting there, simply existing as we try to grasp that, just after dawn this morning, Mike’s dad — a month shy of 44 — drove out to some bayou and put a bullet in his heart. That is all Mike can say when I get there, all he can cry into my ear as he hugs me so hard my back cracks: “He shot himself in the heart.” My mind goes to the morning after Katrina. “He shot himself in the heart” — the delivery, so matter of fact. It may as well be, “Our house is underwater.” 

Days later, I’m up at 3 a.m., on the phone with Mike, whose mom has just shown him the shirt his dad wore when it happened. “The hole,” he says, breathless and sad, “I saw it.” 

Later still, I’m beside Mike at a funeral home in St. Tammany Parish, staring down at the body that used to be his dad’s, a body that now seems small, his coat and tie almost juvenile, like he’s a kid getting dragged to a Sears family portrait. Mike lays a hand on his dad, and I lay a hand on Mike. I try to recall the last time I saw Mike’s dad, I’m sure it was Katrina, the day he and his now widow left our apartment. 

***

What follows is a lost time. Mike is okay but not. Sometimes, cracking jokes over hurricanes at Lafitte’s, he seems like himself. Other times, calling me from Bourbon Street, drunk off his ass with friends from Da Parish, crying and screaming, he does not. He tells me he’s worried his mom’s losing it, that maybe there’s money from a will that may or may not exist, money that he and his sister and her son should get, and could I maybe call my lawyer dad? I tell Mike to go to therapy, and he says he can’t afford it, but even if he could, I know he wouldn’t go. He shaves his head, gains weight, lets his beard puff out until he looks like Zack Galafinakis in The Hangover. 

I write. I publish. I teach. I take pretty girls out to bars in New Orleans.

I drink and drink and drink and wonder why I never feel good about anything.  

That is all Mike can say when I get there, all he can cry into my ear as he hugs me so hard my back cracks: ‘He shot himself in the heart.’

At some point, the restaurant where Mike’s waited tables for what feels like an eon opens a new place on the North Shore, and they pick him to run the kitchen. When he tells me the news I’m so excited I can hardly contain myself. This is it! I think. An actual dream come true! Get out of Baton Rouge, make money, grow up! 

Which he does, sort of. Mike scores a great place in Covington, starts his new job. But then he calls and says he can’t afford where he’s living. I ask him his new salary and his new rent and then tell him he absolutely can. “I dunno,” he says and sighs a long sigh.

I visit soon after and the place is half boxed.

“Please tell me you’re not moving out.”

He cuts his eyes to the floor. Standing with him there in this gorgeous apartment, with skylights, new appliances, exposed brick — a place that’s the precise opposite of the ruined House Dad Suite — I lose my patience.

“Why the fuck would you do that?”

He throws up his hands. “I can’t afford it!”

“Yes, you can!” My cheeks are hot. I want to grab him and shake him. “And you can’t just walk away from an apartment, Mike! Where the fuck are you gonna live?”

Mike tells me some story about how he never signed a lease, that he’ll eat the deposit, load his shit into his new pickup, the one that belonged to his dad, and drive off into the night. He says he’ll move in with a buddy from Da Parish, a guy who needs a roommate because his crazy wife just left him. What he doesn’t say is that the buddy’s mom will live there too. And what he doesn’t know is that having been shuffled around after Katrina, she’s grown bitter. That she’ll treat Mike like an unwelcome guest. He won’t be allowed to cook and “smell up the kitchen,” won’t be allowed to play drums. What he doesn’t see is, after just a taste of life as a grownup, he’s trading it all to live on the margins of a house that’s not his, to live by the rules of a mom that’s not his. He doesn’t see it — or he pretends not to — but that’s what happens, and in the months that follow, when he vents about it over the phone, I have no sympathy. What did you think was gonna happen. What the fuck did you think?  

I don’t recall what we did that day in Covington, but whatever it was, it was ruined by my annoyance at Mike. Why can’t you just live in an apartment like a normal person? I wonder. You’re making progress. Why sabotage yourself? What I don’t see then: Mike’s terrified of being by himself, alone with his thoughts, his ghosts. What I don’t see, too, is how tight I’m still wearing my blindfold. I’m angry at my friend because he won’t accomplish what I’ve accomplished without the touch of my privilege. I’m angry at my friend because his life’s so hard.

Why can’t you just be like me? I wonder, sitting up at night, getting drunk by myself.

Why can’t you just be like me? Lazy, but bitter that I’m not rich or famous.

VI: Off the Grid

More years. 

I keep teaching, publish stories and essays, and get a better job at LSU, where I go out for beers at the Chimes with the same professors who, years back, told me I had what it took. I live in a funky yellow house in Capitol Heights with the woman who’s now my wife. We take jogs through the neighborhood, walk to Calandro’s to buy wine, go to Radiobar with the editor of The Southern Review, have lively dinner parties with all our lively, literary friends. Life’s perfect, but that doesn’t stop my complaining — about making bullshit money, about never getting an interview for a tenure-track job, about always getting the runaround from agents, about my failure to finish the novel I’ve wallowed in for the last three years. I’m doing most of the stuff I set out to do, but all I can think of is how little I’ve done. I’m making it, I guess, in a failing kind of way.

Mike in the meantime has gone “off the grid.” He’s still running the kitchen at the restaurant, still doing mostly fine, but he’s bought a house way out in the sticks. He builds a chicken coop and talks about farming. I don’t see him much, and when we do talk, he pinballs from one new dream to another: He’ll open a vegetable stand or his own barbeque joint or a food truck or he’ll move to Colorado to grow weed. By now, this stuff washes over me, yet I can’t help but worry that, in getting this house, he’s found a new way to hide: a little compound in the middle of nowhere, a permanent home where the world can’t find him. And why don’t you want to be found? I wonder. Who do you think’s coming to get you? 

Over the summer of 2014, two of our best friends get married, and Mike skips both weddings, each time coming up with a half-cocked excuse. Can’t get off work. Can’t afford gas. 

I’m engaged now myself, and after the second missed wedding I send Mike a text.

If you pull this shit when I get married, I’ll kill you.

You know I won’t, he writes.

We need to hang. Been too long.

How would you feel, he writes, about doing some yard work?

***

I head up the Causeway the next afternoon, Lake Pontchartrain spreading out alongside me like a giant, brackish bathtub. I remember the day Mike’s father died, zooming up this bridge from my old place in New Orleans, trying to understand the pain he’s in, trying to imagine what it’d be like if my dad had done what his just did. My dad calls himself “the absent father” — and I don’t know him well — but he’s always had a knack for being there when I need him. When I finished grad school and couldn’t find a job, when I was sure I was a failure, moving back in with my mom, I called him. “You’re a white man with an education,” he said, almost laughing. “The world was made for you.” Then he mailed me a Treasury bond for $10,000.

The next morning, after a night of grilling pork chops, getting drunk and high, and watching “No Reservations,” Mike and I rise early, eat Adderall, buy mulch and shovels and rakes, and embark on a monumental day of work: mowing, trimming, pruning, weeding, pulling jasmine from his fence. At lunch, we break for Budweisers, and Mike gases up a chainsaw. It growls to life as he yanks the cord. He hoists it overhead, revs it with a laugh.

“What are we doing with that?” I ask.

Mike smiles, teeth bright against his dirt-caked face. 

“We’re gonna cut down a fuckin’ tree.”

***

The most important thing we know about the tree we’re cutting down is that if it falls the wrong way, it’ll destroy Mike’s house. The most important thing we don’t know about trees is how to dictate the direction in which they fall. Either way, we know that when it falls, it’ll fall fast. Either way, we know that this, like everything, is an act of faith.

Mike saws until the tree’s about to tip, and then — employing some silent brotherly language and a panicky series of moves that are at once like dancing and not — Mike pivots one way and I the other, and then, gasping for air, we push, step back, and … womp! Just womp! A sound like I’ve never heard before. A thud, a sucking, the inverse of sound. 

We are alive. The tree is felled. The house stands undestroyed. 

Mike and I blink there in the yard and share a look of wonder. Then we race over to one another and holler as we hug.

***

Late that night, drunk as skunks, sitting in the pale glow of his porchlight, Mike looks up at the moon and says, “almost four years.”

“I know,” I tell him. “Hard to believe.”  

I start to form a thought — how proud I am of him, how sorry I am, for all this shit, for always being so hard on him — only I’m too drunk, so what I say, instead, out of nowhere, is, “I’ll never forget, Mike. That day. The sound of your voice when you called.” And then I double over in a sob. It’s the only time in my life I’ve ever cried without warning. 

Mike gets me up and holds me. “Don’t worry, baby bro,” he says. “It’ll all be OK.”

***

Hungover the next morning, I remember Mike’s dad’s viewing. A gang of us went out after and got wasted. At some point, those of us from New Orleans figured we’d better head back, but Mike asked me to stay. “I’ve got all these people crashing at my house,” I told him. He said he got it, but as I left and he lingered with friends from the Da Parish, I could tell he was sad. 

“Wish you coulda hung the other night,” he told me days later on the phone.

“What’d y’all do?” 

“We cut down a tree.”

***

The next summer I get married, and on my wedding day, as I sip scotch in my tux and gaze upon the scores of guests, all gathered to celebrate the love I share with my wife in a beautiful library on King Street, in Charleston, South Carolina, I feel a pang of fear. I’m 30, make no money, have nothing close to a book deal or an agent, and will never get a tenure-track job. I’m a faker, a fuckup, a whiner, a bitch. 

“I’ve got to figure out my life,” I mutter to myself, paranoid, and realize I’m drunk. “I’ve got to figure out my life.”

Two weeks later, thanks to the magic of cronyism, my wife and I are both hired at a prestigious boarding school. Campus like a country club. Huge raises. Free housing. Smartest kids.

When I call Mike to tell him we’re moving, he’s genuinely thrilled.

“Damn, Will,” he says, “You’ve got the best life.” 

VII: Helpless, Happy, Confused, Content

I see Mike next in New Orleans, and he meets my son. In the fancy condo owned by my friend’s parents, where we’ve stayed for free while savoring long strolls through the Lower Garden District and eating ourselves sick at Clancy’s and Cochon and Bacchanal, Mike holds up my boy and kisses his belly until he squeals that perfect laugh that belongs only to infants: helpless, happy, confused, content.  

Chatting after, smoking cigarettes on Coliseum Square, Mike asks what it’s like to be a dad.

“Pretty great,” I say. “Intense, but you get the hang.”

What I don’t say is how terrifying it is, how, when the midwife pulled my son out and I locked eyes with his swollen purple face, I felt not love but pressure. How night after night, as he screws his lips into the shape of a lemon and screams like a pterodactyl, I feel the stinging sense that I’m not cut out for this. How throughout my wife’s pregnancy, I made myself believe that being a dad would cure me of all my bullshit — the drinking, the depression, the anxiety — but none of that’s happened, and now that it’s too late, I get that kids aren’t some panacea; they’re a spotlight for your flaws. They’re needy little puzzles that can fucking break you. How, in my first weeks as a father, as my wife sank into postpartum as she struggled to breastfeed, I hid in the shed behind our house, inhaling Marlboro Reds in the bitter cold, certain I’d squandered my life’s easy years, that the person I was — a writer, an artist — was gone forever, that I may as well fucking vanish.

“You’re gonna be a great dad,” Mike tells me. 

“We’ll see,” I say, and we both light new ones. 

“You think you’ll have kids?” 

Smoke creeps from Mike’s nostrils as he smiles. “No,” he says, “I don’t.”

***

That night, we meet two friends at Patois. We drink martinis and eat steak frites. We remember college, how our fraternity rented whole floors of a Holiday Inn on Dauphine Island, where we’d smoke blunts and finger girls in the hot tub, how I once broke a girl’s nose during sex and then she wet my bed — and I see then that the whole of New Orleans is my new Fantasyland. The place where I can pretend I don’t have to work to be a good teacher at a great school, where I don’t have to fret about never writing enough, where I can get crazy drunk and not have to get up at 5 a.m., hating myself for being angry at my child. Where I can eat dinner with people who don’t read books and feel like the serious intellectual. In a few days, when my family and I fly back to reality, and I’m too fat to fit in my pants with a throat scorched from a hundred cigarettes, I’ll feel ready to run away from the old me, but for now nothing is real.   

After we pay our tab, drunk on gin and nostalgia, we plot our next move. We decide on Avenue Pub, but just as we get moving, Mike gets wishy-washy. He needs to drive home, he says, needs to head back to the North Shore. The rest of us are up in arms. 

“What!?! We never get to see each other! You can crash with us!” 

“I don’t know,” Mike squirms, “I gotta work.”

“When?”

“I gotta be there for noon.”

All of us laugh. “We have babies! We’ll have you out the door by dawn.”

Mike says he’ll think about it while he drives us to the bar, but he’s quiet all the way down Magazine, and I know he won’t stay. This, I see, has been his plan all along: to check in from his hideaway, then hurry back off the grid. When we get to the bar, Mike asks me to stay while the others go in. I stand beside him in his idling truck. It’s a moment. We both know it.

“I gotta go,” he says. There’s fear in his voice, like the world will end if he doesn’t. 

“Why? We’re all here. Why are you so obsessed with leaving?” 

He stares out the windshield and starts to cry. 

“I don’t know,” he says. “It’s just everything. Just stuff with my dad.” So rare, this mention of his father. So often I wonder, but I always fail to ask. 

“What is it?”

“I’m just so … angry.”

“I know,” I say, even though I don’t. He looks right at me. 

“Why did all this have to happen, Will?” 

A streetcar rattles by. Cars whisper along the Pontchartrain Expressway.

“It was the storm,” I tell him. “And depression. And …”

He nods.

“All of this happened to you,” I say. “It wasn’t your fault.”

After the suicide, Mike told me he wished he could knock his dead dad to the ground, to pin him there and ask him flatly if he was satisfied with what he’d done. “What do you think he’d say?” I asked. “That killing himself,” Mike said, “was the worst mistake of his life.” 

Whenever I think of Mike’s dad, I don’t see him in that casket, his face all stunned and made-up. I see him alive, stock still on our ugly couch in the Baton Rouge apartment, watching the news, saying nothing, but knowing for certain he’d never be the same. I see the storm surge. I see the waterline and the mold. I see a day years after his death when on a drive through Da Parish, Mike and I turned down his grandparent’s street and happened upon his dad’s dad just sitting there, drinking Budweisers alone in a camp chair, broken. And when you shot yourself in the heart, I wonder, in that final beat before it all went black, did you get one last second to know what you’d done? Did you see the hurt you’d cause? Could you see your son the way he is now, afraid of a world that’s been so cruel? And what if Katrina had missed? What if all this belonged to someone else? 

“I just feel like y’all have all made it,” Mike says. The engine’s running. He’s still in the truck. “You’ve got houses and kids —”

“We haven’t had to deal with anything,” I say, and the truth of this feels good. 

I tell Mike he’s gotta get help, gotta talk to somebody, and then I see that’s what he’s doing right now.

“I’ll get better,” he says. “I promise.”

“I know,” I tell him, thinking so will I.

Mike gets out and hugs me. We don’t worry about food trucks or book deals or fathers or sons. We just sway there, two brothers, connected forever. I think of that night by the levee, that litany: I love my big brother. My big brother is better than me. What did you see in me all those years back? What made me so special? Who would I be if I’d had your life? What would you say if you wrote about me?  

“You’ve still got the best life,” Mike says and gets in his truck. 

I shake my head. “I’m just lucky.” 

“Maybe so, baby bro,” he says. “Maybe so.”

And then he pulls away. 

I stand alone there on Polymnia Street and watch Mike’s tail lights disappear down St. Charles. The night air is hot. The moon a faint ghost. In a few minutes, I’ll go into the bar to get drunk. But in this moment, I feel a whirl of emotions that leaves me unmoored, like I’m hovering over my shoulders. I’m outside of myself, I think, and then I say to no one, “This is it. This is the end of an essay I’ll write.” 

William Torrey’s writing has appeared in Salamander, Boulevard, River Teeth, Colorado Review, and The Florida Review, among many others. 

* * *

Editor: Carolyn Wells