Brett was buried in tan slacks and a blue shirt. Smart casual. Mr. White had bought the clothes two days earlier. They were on sale, but I heard he wanted to pay full price. I heard the clerk had argued with him. “Ten percent off,” he’d said, and Mr. White refused the discount and the clerk laughed as Mr. White threw the full amount on the counter and ran out, demented with grief.
Brett laid out in his coffin, hair combed back. Odor? Hair gel. Expression molded on his half-bled white face? Peaceful slumber. I thought: This is your unblinking eclipse. The long frozen plunge. Your soft awkward stutter cured by oblivion. So what’s to be sad about?
The morning of the funeral was bright and sunny. A gentle fragrant wind made everything seem frothy and not worth worrying about, almost suggesting that grief was an overreaction. The whole class had the morning off; students in other years could come too, but it wasn’t compulsory. The cemetery was conveniently located only a kilometer from the school, so we all walked together, about one hundred students and a few teachers who were there either to mourn or to supervise- both, if they had it in them. Most of the group wouldn’t have said hello to Brett while he was alive, but now they were lining up to say goodbye.
We all gathered around the grave waiting for the priest to begin, standing in the kind of silence that’s so silent the clearing of a throat can frighten you to death. I thought our school uniforms made us look like postal workers congregated to mail a colleague back to God. I imagined “Return to Sender” stenciled neatly on the casket.
The priest began. His eulogy reached me as though through a coffee filter. I got drips. He described Brett as “weary of this world” (true), “mortal and weak” (also true), and “eager to join his Lord, Our Savior” (unlikely). Finally he said melodramatically that “suicide is a mortal sin.”
Now hang on a sec!
OK, Brett took his own life, but he also answered Hamlet’s question without tearing himself all up inside, and even if suicide is a sin, surely decisiveness is rewarded. I mean, let’s give credit where credit is due. Brett answered Hamlet’s dilemma as straightforwardly as ticking a box.
To be
Not to be
I knew this sermon was just an ancient scare tactic that had survived intact through the ages while practices like draining someone’s blood with leeches when they have a runny nose had long ago been dismissed as old-fashioned. If there is a God, I doubt he is such a hard-liner. Rather, I imagine him greeting the men and women who take their own lives like a police chief surprised when a wanted criminal turns himself in. “You!” he might say, not angry so much as slightly disappointed that he won’t get the credit or the satisfaction for the capture.
The casket was lowered, and the sound of hard clumps of dirt hitting its lid made it sound empty. Brett was thin. I’d told him that no one hates a thin man. No one, I thought now, except hungry worms.
Time passed. The sun like a golden lozenge dissolved as it slid across the sky. I watched Mr. White the whole time. He stood out as luminously as if he’d been highlighted in yellow fluorescence. He was suffering the ultimate public humiliation: through neglect or faulty parenting, he’d lost his son, as surely as if he’d put him on the roof of his car and driven away without remembering to take him off.
After the sermon, the principal, Mr. Silver, walked over and placed his hand on Mr. White’s shoulder. He twitched violently and shrugged off the hand. As he walked away, I thought: Well, Brett, there goes your father, there he goes to pack away your hollow shirts and your empty pants.
That’s what I really thought.
Back at school, a special assembly was held in the quadrangle. A counselor stood up and talked about youth suicide. He asked us all to reach out to our wobbly peers and be on the lookout for signs. His description of a suicidal teenager sent little shockwaves through the crowd. He had described every person there. That gave them something to think about. The bell rang and everyone wandered off to class except our year. The decision from above was that we were just too sad to learn calculus. I felt understandably unsettled. I could feel Brett’s presence. I saw him on the podium, then his face in the crowd. I was certain that pretty soon I’d be seeing his head on my own neck. I knew I’d have to abandon that place, just leave it behind and not look back. I could see the school gate was wide open, tempting me. What if I made a run for it? Or even better: what if I walked?
My reverie was interrupted by the sound of some metaphysical finger-pointing. Several students were discussing the possibilities of Brett’s current location. Where was he now? Some said he was in heaven; others supposed he was back where he started, in the subarctic darkness, wondering when he’d move up in the reincarnation queue. Then someone with Catholic tendencies said, “His soul will burn forever, you know,” and I couldn’t let such a nasty thought sit there without spitting on it, so I said, “I think you should find whoever does your thinking for you and ask them to update.”
“Well, what do you think happened to Brett’s soul, then?”
“Nothing. Because he hasn’t got one. Neither have I. Neither have you.”
“Yes I do!”
“No you don’t!”
“Do too!”
“Do not!”
“You don’t believe in the soul?”
“Why should I?” I asked.
You should’ve seen the looks I got! When you say you don’t believe in the soul, it’s hilarious! People look at you as if the soul, like Tinker Bell, needs to be believed in in order for it to exist. I mean, if I have a soul, is it really the kind of soul that needs my moral support? Is it as flimsy as all that? People seem to believe so; they think that doubting the soul means you are the Soulless, the one lone creature wandering the wasteland without the magic stuff of infinity…
III
So did I quit school out of some sort of magnanimous allegiance to my dead friend? A symbolic protest prompted by my heart? I wish.
It didn’t happen that way at all.
I suppose I’d better come clean.
The afternoon of the funeral I received a package in the mail. It contained a single red rose and a short letter. It was from Brett, my cold dead friend.
Dear Jasper,
There’s a tall, beautiful girl with long red flaming hair in the year above us. I don’t know her name. I’ve never spoken to her. I’m looking at her right now as I write this. I am staring right at her! She’s reading. She’s always so engrossed in reading, she doesn’t look up, even as I sit here mentally undressing her.
Now I have her right down to her underwear! It’s infuriating how she just keeps on reading like that, reading in the sun. Stark naked. In the sun.
Please hand her this rose and tell her I loved her, and will love her, always.
Your friend,
Brett
I folded the note and placed it in the bottom of a drawer. Then I went back to Brett’s grave and laid down the rose and left it there. Why didn’t I give it to the girl he loved? Why didn’t I carry out the dead kid’s final wish? Well, for one thing, I’ve never been a big fan of the idea of running all over town dotting i’s and crossing t’s for the deceased. Secondly, it seemed to me unreasonably cruel to implicate this poor girl in a suicide, this girl who never even knew he was alive. Whoever she was, I was sure she had enough on her plate without having to wear the guilt of the death of someone whom she couldn’t have picked out of a crowd of two.
The next day I went up to the plateau above the school- the flat, treeless patch of parched earth where the eldest students loitered arrogantly. That’s how they were. They held themselves above the rest of the school, as if making it all the way to the final year was comparable to surviving a third tour of duty in Vietnam. I went out of curiosity. Brett had taken his life while in love with a tall girl with red hair. Was she the cause? Who was she? Did he really die, not from the torment of bullies, but from frustrated desire? Secretly I hoped so, because every time I saw Harrison around school it made me sick to think that Brett had died because of him. I was eager to replace him with a worthier cause of death. That’s what I was searching for. A girl worth dying for.