Friday, February 04, 2005
Like tears in rain
It's 1990. All this cold fall night we've been working hard on a joint Ed School project, Laura and Laurie and I, at Laurie's place in Lambeth. Near midnight we put the finishing touches on it and decide to call it a night. Laura asks me to walk her to her car on the U-Hall parking lot across the street. I do it, gladly and a little smugly, the big strong man escorting the woman through hostile territory. It isn't till nearly two years later I find out Laura had been attacked the year before. Her simple gesture of trust still touches me, to this day, in ways I can't quite express.
It's December, 1992. My first drama class at UVA is coming to a close, and after a performance of Chekhov's Three Sisters, we all go to one of the Pavilions on the Lawn for a Christmas party. There are a dozen-odd of us, and we've grown close in the course of the semester, which we've spent interpreting scripts, analyzing characters, and mounting scenes to be critiqued by each other and by our instructor, Dawn, a slight blonde MFA candidate who looks ten years younger than she is. Names in the class are not as numerous as students: there's Perry and Daniel and Tina and Tina and Steve and Steve and Steve and Robert and Heather, who's a no-show, probably because she's playing tonight for the Lady Cavs. After a dinner of calzone, cider is poured and Twister is played. The night blurs into early morning and I leave the warm house for a frigid walk across the grounds to my dorm, where other friends lie already asleep. I see the stars and think I'll never be this happy again. Thank God, I'm wrong.
It's 1982, and it's our last night in Mexico. The truck and the trailer are both loaded to bursting and we're still having to leave things behind. I don't care. Soon we'll be on the road for the United States. On the way out of the village, I'll try to etch every cobblestone and mud-brick wall and dim lightpost into memory; between towns, in the blackness of a Mexican highway at night, I'll annoy my parents with off-key renditions of Homer and Jethro songs. But all that's a couple of hours in the future. Now, the truck sits idling, yellow and orange running lights glinting on white metal, seeming as anxious to leave as I am. Maybe I wouldn't have been as ready to leave if someone had told me that all the promises my friends and I had made to keep in touch would be broken and that I'd never see some of them again in this life. But then again, maybe I would have.
1996. I'm being interrogated by a former FBI agent who thinks I had something to do with the theft of $5,000 worth of video cameras from the Wal-Mart where I work. I didn't have anything to do with it, but I could lose my job and be prosecuted anyway. This strikes me as singularly unfair. As she grills me, it also strikes me as practically inevitable. You were on when it happened. You didn't lock them up. It had to be you. Who was working with you?And I answer as calmly as I can, telling the truth: I don't know anything about it, I'm not working with anybody, no I didn't lock them up but nobody told me to. You're very articulate, Stephen, you know that? You're so articulate I think you're not really talking to me now. I think you knew what you were going to say when you came in. I think you've been thinking about your answers and I think you made up a story to cover yourself. Great; I'll be sent to jail because I can't help sounding like I've swallowed a thesaurus. In the end, though, she settles for forcing me to admit that my best friend might have done it. It's an admission that leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, but the devil of it is that she's right when she says I have no real way of knowing he wasn't involved. And for the rest of my life, every time I see him, I'll always wonder if he was.
It's 1985 and I'm in the Capitol Building on a class tour of Washington. The group leaves the Rotunda without me. I look around and see only Artie, fellow 8th-grader and a bundle of nervous energy and nervous tics. For the next hour or so, we try to rejoin our group, but manage to miss them (while they're looking for us) no less than three times. Finally, in despair and wondering whether we'll have enough money in our pockets to put ourselves up in a hotel for the night, we go outside. Artie chases a squirrel across a grass lot in full view of fifty or sixty assorted lobbyists and congressional staffers; I have to physically stop him from climbing a tree to get at it. I ask him what he thinks he's doing. We gotta eat, Tilson.
In 1986 I see Blade Runner for the first time. At the end, Rutger Hauer's android character Roy Batty confronts Harrison Ford's police-sanctioned killer, and with his artificially-shortened lifespan drawing to close, delivers a valediction and challenge and elegy on the fleetness of all life. He offers glimpses of the marvels and terrors he's seen, and concludes: All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. And he dies, his moments spent.
It's 1992 and I'm with my best friends in a darkened apartment in JPA. We've been telling ghost stories in celebration of upcoming Halloween; this is the first time I'll ever tell my Day of the Dead story in which a friend of mine and I go to an abandoned hut by Lake Patzcuaro and witness a ghostly reenactment of a double murder. But it's also the night Dave Robson tells his story of a man haunted by the loss of all he's known and loved, until he despairs of the permanency of anything; the story's central line, which still resonates across the years: Nothing is permanent; not even loss.
It's 1980. I'm watching people crawling across cobblestones on their knees. They kneel on the stones, hands clasped in prayer, and inch forward across broken glass. Blood stains the knees of their white robes. Fifty yards away, the door of the village's Catholic church -- in Mexico, a far more medieval institution than its American counterpart -- stands open, dark, and mute. I ask my dad why they're doing this, and he explains, but it isn't until years later that I understand how tempting it is to try to purchase for myself the forgiveness only Christ could afford, and which God offers for free.
It's December 2001. I'm in Charlottesville with Dave and Dave for a single day of company and reminiscence. We see a movie and have dinner (Dave Worrell putting down the biggest tip I've ever seen, and giving our waitress a story she's probably still telling) and shoot pool. And for a little while, ten years haven't passed. I take my leave of them near midnight, and I try not to say goodbye.
It's 1980 and I'm in a traffic jam in Mexico City. It takes three hours to move a single block. Hector, the doctor and family friend I'm spending the week with, and Irma, his girlfriend, keep up a steady stream of conversation, inlcuding me as if I were a grown-up. We go to a planetarium where they're staging a mostly-audio production of War of the Worlds. On the way home, we talk about whether life could develop in a methane environment, but all that night I'm haunted by the depiction of a world in ashes. In 1985, an earthquake strikes Mexico City, and we've never heard from Hector again, although I did once have a very vivid snippet of dream in which Hector stood wailing in grief outside Irma's demolished house.
It's 1995 and I'm visiting with my grandmother, whose ten-year battle with cancer is drawing to its inevitable end. The disease has left her a shell of what she was, and now there's nothing left but the husking breaths and the ticking of the nightstand clock. As I've done each day for the better part of a week, I stay by her for an hour and then, almost relieved, I prepare to go. For the first time this visit, she notices my presence and stirs, saying something.
Gotta go?
Yes, for now, but I'll see you later.
Goodbye.
I'll see you later.
No. Goodbye.
Although she hangs onto life for another week, it's the last time she speaks to me. But even if I'd known it at the time, I still would have said only what I did.
I'll see you later.
|
It's December, 1992. My first drama class at UVA is coming to a close, and after a performance of Chekhov's Three Sisters, we all go to one of the Pavilions on the Lawn for a Christmas party. There are a dozen-odd of us, and we've grown close in the course of the semester, which we've spent interpreting scripts, analyzing characters, and mounting scenes to be critiqued by each other and by our instructor, Dawn, a slight blonde MFA candidate who looks ten years younger than she is. Names in the class are not as numerous as students: there's Perry and Daniel and Tina and Tina and Steve and Steve and Steve and Robert and Heather, who's a no-show, probably because she's playing tonight for the Lady Cavs. After a dinner of calzone, cider is poured and Twister is played. The night blurs into early morning and I leave the warm house for a frigid walk across the grounds to my dorm, where other friends lie already asleep. I see the stars and think I'll never be this happy again. Thank God, I'm wrong.
It's 1982, and it's our last night in Mexico. The truck and the trailer are both loaded to bursting and we're still having to leave things behind. I don't care. Soon we'll be on the road for the United States. On the way out of the village, I'll try to etch every cobblestone and mud-brick wall and dim lightpost into memory; between towns, in the blackness of a Mexican highway at night, I'll annoy my parents with off-key renditions of Homer and Jethro songs. But all that's a couple of hours in the future. Now, the truck sits idling, yellow and orange running lights glinting on white metal, seeming as anxious to leave as I am. Maybe I wouldn't have been as ready to leave if someone had told me that all the promises my friends and I had made to keep in touch would be broken and that I'd never see some of them again in this life. But then again, maybe I would have.
1996. I'm being interrogated by a former FBI agent who thinks I had something to do with the theft of $5,000 worth of video cameras from the Wal-Mart where I work. I didn't have anything to do with it, but I could lose my job and be prosecuted anyway. This strikes me as singularly unfair. As she grills me, it also strikes me as practically inevitable. You were on when it happened. You didn't lock them up. It had to be you. Who was working with you?And I answer as calmly as I can, telling the truth: I don't know anything about it, I'm not working with anybody, no I didn't lock them up but nobody told me to. You're very articulate, Stephen, you know that? You're so articulate I think you're not really talking to me now. I think you knew what you were going to say when you came in. I think you've been thinking about your answers and I think you made up a story to cover yourself. Great; I'll be sent to jail because I can't help sounding like I've swallowed a thesaurus. In the end, though, she settles for forcing me to admit that my best friend might have done it. It's an admission that leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, but the devil of it is that she's right when she says I have no real way of knowing he wasn't involved. And for the rest of my life, every time I see him, I'll always wonder if he was.
It's 1985 and I'm in the Capitol Building on a class tour of Washington. The group leaves the Rotunda without me. I look around and see only Artie, fellow 8th-grader and a bundle of nervous energy and nervous tics. For the next hour or so, we try to rejoin our group, but manage to miss them (while they're looking for us) no less than three times. Finally, in despair and wondering whether we'll have enough money in our pockets to put ourselves up in a hotel for the night, we go outside. Artie chases a squirrel across a grass lot in full view of fifty or sixty assorted lobbyists and congressional staffers; I have to physically stop him from climbing a tree to get at it. I ask him what he thinks he's doing. We gotta eat, Tilson.
In 1986 I see Blade Runner for the first time. At the end, Rutger Hauer's android character Roy Batty confronts Harrison Ford's police-sanctioned killer, and with his artificially-shortened lifespan drawing to close, delivers a valediction and challenge and elegy on the fleetness of all life. He offers glimpses of the marvels and terrors he's seen, and concludes: All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. And he dies, his moments spent.
It's 1992 and I'm with my best friends in a darkened apartment in JPA. We've been telling ghost stories in celebration of upcoming Halloween; this is the first time I'll ever tell my Day of the Dead story in which a friend of mine and I go to an abandoned hut by Lake Patzcuaro and witness a ghostly reenactment of a double murder. But it's also the night Dave Robson tells his story of a man haunted by the loss of all he's known and loved, until he despairs of the permanency of anything; the story's central line, which still resonates across the years: Nothing is permanent; not even loss.
It's 1980. I'm watching people crawling across cobblestones on their knees. They kneel on the stones, hands clasped in prayer, and inch forward across broken glass. Blood stains the knees of their white robes. Fifty yards away, the door of the village's Catholic church -- in Mexico, a far more medieval institution than its American counterpart -- stands open, dark, and mute. I ask my dad why they're doing this, and he explains, but it isn't until years later that I understand how tempting it is to try to purchase for myself the forgiveness only Christ could afford, and which God offers for free.
It's December 2001. I'm in Charlottesville with Dave and Dave for a single day of company and reminiscence. We see a movie and have dinner (Dave Worrell putting down the biggest tip I've ever seen, and giving our waitress a story she's probably still telling) and shoot pool. And for a little while, ten years haven't passed. I take my leave of them near midnight, and I try not to say goodbye.
It's 1980 and I'm in a traffic jam in Mexico City. It takes three hours to move a single block. Hector, the doctor and family friend I'm spending the week with, and Irma, his girlfriend, keep up a steady stream of conversation, inlcuding me as if I were a grown-up. We go to a planetarium where they're staging a mostly-audio production of War of the Worlds. On the way home, we talk about whether life could develop in a methane environment, but all that night I'm haunted by the depiction of a world in ashes. In 1985, an earthquake strikes Mexico City, and we've never heard from Hector again, although I did once have a very vivid snippet of dream in which Hector stood wailing in grief outside Irma's demolished house.
It's 1995 and I'm visiting with my grandmother, whose ten-year battle with cancer is drawing to its inevitable end. The disease has left her a shell of what she was, and now there's nothing left but the husking breaths and the ticking of the nightstand clock. As I've done each day for the better part of a week, I stay by her for an hour and then, almost relieved, I prepare to go. For the first time this visit, she notices my presence and stirs, saying something.
Gotta go?
Yes, for now, but I'll see you later.
Goodbye.
I'll see you later.
No. Goodbye.
Although she hangs onto life for another week, it's the last time she speaks to me. But even if I'd known it at the time, I still would have said only what I did.
I'll see you later.
Comments:
Post a Comment
