Chicago, Illinois
Just Past 4:00
Coffee Shop
Name Unknown
I am at a really nice coffee shop in downtown Chicago.
I don’t know its name.
Ben is at the top of a skyscraper.
It’s ninety degrees.
I am waiting.
My mother brought Bobby and me to Chicago one summer—the summer we moved to St. Helens, before school started, when both he and I were complaining about the town and sulking about our new lives, friendless. She took us to the planetarium and then the aquarium. We loved both. Everything was better. Moms.
And so this morning at the hotel, when Ben was getting ready for his meeting, I thought of that feeling and I told him through the shower curtain that I was going to see outer space. I told him where he’d be able to find me when he was through—I’d done a long study of the downtown map and had located the ideal coffee-shop location.
“It’s called Argo Tea.”
“It’s like our project,” he said from the shower. “From high school.”
“The space. The outer space. Not Argo Tea.”
“Oh, you’re right,” I said. “It’s also space.”
I took a cab to the lakeshore, paid my donation, and wandered through the dark tunnels of that place, looking at the cross-section models of planets and stars, learning fusion, trying to land a moon probe with a joystick while a pair of nine-year-olds watched and criticized.
That winter and that spring after we’d returned to St. Helens, I went back and forth for a long time about what I was going to do. Ben was distracted in the spring and in the summer after he decided to talk to the police, and I was lonely, I will admit. There were many times when I came close to leaving him; there are stories for all of those moments; life has been life—because he and I both got to know each other, really, and that descent is a different kind of moon landing. It’s not a manic weekend. It’s not that feeling. It’s a different feeling. Both are crucial, I guess. And it took almost a year before the haze of Madison, and Will, had finally lifted and I could look at him and say honestly that I knew Ben now and saw his flaws and loved him and wanted to be with him.
My nose healed; Ben healed; what happened stayed; old nightmares came back, as well as new nightmares, nightmares about Will in that cabin, about what he said to me, about what had happened in Africa, about later. And I was depressed, I think, for that whole first year. I thought of Will often. He was dead, and he had obviously had a psychotic break, I don’t know, and no one who recounted the story ever thought about it in sympathetic terms. Clinical? Yes. Figurative? Yes. Just not sympathetic. Not even his family did—I know because they sought me out to apologize for him when Ben was in the hospital. We’re sorry our son tried to kill you. We’re sorry he wanted to burn you in a bonfire. Ben never talked about him. Nobody did. Nobody talked about how that was not him, not really. How something had fundamentally gone from his mind. How I didn’t understand, when it came down to it, where that particular thing goes when it goes, and what is left behind, and what happened, how one person can become another, how the seeds are in us to be almost anything. Some of the seeds grow. What does that mean?
So I struggled; I didn’t go to his funeral. Ben didn’t want me to, I didn’t want to. But it didn’t make sense and I doubt it ever will.
I applied to the Madison vet school after all, despite what I’d told Ben’s father at Christmas, and was accepted in the spring. I went back to work for Dr. Hendrix and started taking classes the next fall, and life went forward in spite of all the worries. It did what it does. I finished last month and am taking over the clinic in September. I am happy with this. I am happy with myself.
Ben does work around St. Helens when he can find it. He painted the Jankowitzes’ house in May and he retiled Mrs. Kane’s bathroom two weeks ago. He also convinced the St. Helens Beacon to let him write a column. He is known as “the Puzzler,” absurdly, and every week he submits a new riddle that gets published on the back page. They are too hard and nobody ever solves them. Sometimes it seems as though Ben is most satisfied by thinking that they can’t be solved. The editor hates him. People submit answers during the week. They pay him twenty dollars for his services and I imagine he’ll be fired soon. And meanwhile, he seems indifferent when I point out to him this or that new success Jeremy has had with his company and how the success of the first game, the one Ben helped make, was nothing compared to the cheaper, smaller, simpler, not-beautiful, irritating games that came next, pollinating the feeds of my Facebook page every time I log on to check in with the forty-seven people I know. It’s garbage now. Jeremy’s company, Jypsum, is in the news all the time. He has become one of those internet people. Looking off into the distance. I believe he and Allie are still together.
Without Ben, the games’ content is not good.
I point this out. I say: Look. Hint hint hint. Do something. Ben shrugs. They have not talked, I don’t think, since Jeremy came to see him in his hospital room. And here we are, in our lives in St. Helens, having nearly run out of money after my years of school, after Ben’s years of doing… well. I worry that he only drifts.
Three weeks ago, down in the basement, I found Wayne’s poem and asked Ben why he’d framed it if he was never going to put it up. He told me he’d done it before he knew any of the story, which changed things for him, but as he said it he took the frame from my hands and looked down at the nonsense words for a long time.
I said, “Please, no.”
He looked up at me and said, “What?”
“Please don’t go down into some rabbit hole now,” I said. “Again.”
“I won’t.”
But he didn’t put it back in the box.
Instead, he brought it upstairs, and for a few days I would find it out on the kitchen table or on the table in the living room, and beside it, I would find pages of Ben’s notes and sketches and guesses about what the poem meant. The grids that he makes. I knew what Ben was thinking, even though I didn’t understand the grids. Somewhere in there, somewhere behind those letters, beneath the jumbled mess of text, of disordered information, Wayne was still talking to him, offering an explanation for his actions, detailing his plan, saying what was on his mind, what vision of evil he had seen and couldn’t shake. And that would be one more piece to make it all real, or a way for Ben to be haunted less. Of course I suppose it’s possible, but I pointed out to Ben that codes didn’t really sound like his cousin’s way of doing anything. He wouldn’t listen. For a week or so. And I started to get scared that Ben was not ever going to stop.
One time he said to me: “Do you think there’s any difference between what my cousin did and what I did?” He meant Michael Haverstead and Will.
“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
He nodded and didn’t respond.
What I thought—not that Ben asked—was simple. Just that Wayne was a smart person who was too smart for himself, and that he had the wrong vision of people.
Ben was something else.
Finally, though just last week, he stopped.
I found the poem, still in the frame, in the garbage.
I asked him why it was there.
He looked up from his book.
“It actually doesn’t mean anything.”
He is up at the top of the skyscraper talking to lawyers. His parents are up there too. Haley’s lawyer is there, but Haley is not, as things between her and Ben are still not right. It’s better with his parents now, but only lately. And there are new problems. They are doing the paperwork of death, the paperwork of the future, and they have continued to hold out hope that Ben will have a change of heart about his refusal to take their money as his own once they are both gone. They are in fine health, they say, everything is okay, but Ben’s father has been furious with him since he heard this pronouncement, which Jack must also take as a condemnation. Of course. After months of arguments between them, and between Ben and his mother, Ben finally agreed to come to Chicago and to see it all laid out and listen to what they have to say, at least. I have never in my life heard of a person trying to hold out against the inheritance of great wealth, and not just once but twice, and I’ve told Ben I think he’s in denial about who he is and where he comes from—that there is something self-righteous and blind about it, something even more privileged about saying no than saying yes—but yesterday, starting when we woke up and continuing through the whole drive to Chicago, he kept saying what he’s said all along: It’s not about being self-righteous, it’s just that all that money would destroy us. That’s what it always does. We have a house, we have a place, we have each other. Live a simple life; that’s all I need. Isn’t that what people need?
That’s some of what people need, I said.
So I don’t know what he will say to me when he comes to get me here. I don’t know what will have happened. Maybe he’ll walk in and say that he changed his mind. Maybe he’ll walk in and say that he didn’t. Maybe there will be a third version.
We will be okay, whatever he decides. I can’t tell him what to do.
I don’t want to.
The easiest way to drive from St. Helens to Chicago is to go east to Milwaukee and go south from there, but yesterday morning, we were up early with nothing to do, and Ben suggested we take the back roads down to Lake Geneva and have lunch by the lake, then go on to Illinois. I had only been to Lake Geneva once. My mother always suspected there was something snotty about it. When I told this to Ben, he laughed. “It’s nice,” he said. “You’ll see.”
On the drive we listened to the radio. WPR was doing a retrospective about Madison in the sixties—first the protests, then a piece on Sterling. I knew those stories, and Ben said something about the sandwich shop that one of the bombers had owned years later. We started to talk about it, and I asked him if the sandwiches were good, I’m not sure why, but the radio show took an unexpected turn then, and a new piece discussed a murder that had happened near Sterling a year before the bombings. Ben didn’t answer me and instead turned up the radio.
We heard about a series of murders that went on all through the seventies. The Capital City Murders, the piece called them. There had been ten in all, all of them in and around Madison, all of the victims young women, stabbing victims. All of them unsolved. Nobody remembered them because the bombing had washed everything else away.
I looked out the window. We were passing a lumberyard, and I looked at the long triangles of lumber stacked up all in a row. The pyramids of the woods.
“What are you going to say to them?” I asked him. “When you’re up there?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “What should I say? Do you know?”
“You should say what you think is the right thing to say.”
“I don’t know what that is,” he said. “I guess I’ll see what I say when I’m up there.”
We crossed through Kettle Moraine on 12, not talking then, listening to the classical music WPR was playing, and connected to 67. We turned south toward Lake Geneva.
When we were fifteen miles away from it, Ben said, “Is it better to know everything or to know nothing?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Or whatever.”
I could describe now the long debate, which we’d had before and which extended through the rest of the drive, through our time in Lake Geneva, and for the rest of the way to Chicago, but I think it’s easier to just say that there are different ways of looking at it and that different moods push us this way or that way, so we see in different ways, and that the answer to the question, to me, is a moving thing that changes when you try to see it.
I remember a nice moment, though, near the shore of Lake Geneva, down the road from the pier and the strolling people, boats, children, noise. I was sitting on a patch of grass, and Ben was standing closer to the water, looking out, eating one of the saltine-and-peanut-butter sandwiches he had packed for our drive. The sun was out and the water looked inviting. Ben watched a sailboat with an orange and yellow flag.
I leaned back and put my palms in the grass. “So what are you going to do, sailor?” I said. I thought that it was a funny thing to say. And I don’t even know what I meant by the question; it could have meant any number of things. I just remember feeling that the world seemed new in that moment, and for once I felt okay.
He put the last of his cracker sandwich into his mouth.
He chewed, looked back out at the water, swallowed, looked at me in the grass.
“I don’t know,” he said, and he wiped his hand on his shirt. “Something, though.”
“What?”
He smiled at this. He thought something was funny. Then he reached to me.
“First let’s swim.”