For a time, the idea of him--for what is memory but idea enhanced by prejudice--persisted, haunting those left behind. He was the topic of gossip, of rumor, of speculation. In the gesture of his death, he became the Everyman, the Anti-hero; like a fairy tale monster or the vague outline of the title character in some moody French film, our imaginations coalesced around him, turning our fears, our loss, our fascination, into twisted projections that did neither justice to the complexities contained in him nor to the complexities contained in ourselves...
Suicide. It was that word. Always half whispered, delivered into the conversation in a puff of smoke that woke the nostrils, shook the senses; it made the whole body alive while simultaneously permeating one's' being with a slow soaking novocaine. The numbness is something like death. Creeping. And that is just the word...
The act is something different. It is first a solution; it is somebody's idea of a resolution to a minor--but not trivial--chord. And after, when the sustain has drained the last color from the notes, there is nothing, just silence. Silence cowers. Silence doubts. Silence aches for the sound that could fill it, the percussion and honey, the music undone.
They say, "Absence is invisible." It reassures us of the imperfection of the eye, reminds us of the risks that arise when we believe our senses. But, in this one case, in the case of the dead, absence is obvious and brooding. Absence is phosphorescent and loud. Ghost, be proud of the hole you have ripped in the story...
Once, on a cool day in late April, nineteen seventy something, a quarum of Colorado teens were standing in various postures on the grassy bank of a stream glutted with the Spring run off. Here, there was a bend in the river, and the water enlarged into a lazy, wide-mouthed, muddy miracle. The kids marveled, laughed. "Dive in!" someone instructed. "I bet its fucking cold!" There was that momentary silence, then the pulse pulse pulse before the (im)patience was answered with an act: somebody pushed you, quick and hard, their splayed fingers and flattened palms knocked the wind out of your down jacket. Your hands scrambled, and each found a body to cling to, briefly, before pulling these others in behind you. The flailing limbs, the muffled screams, then the bodies--falling like angels, one-two-three--into the murky aftermath of this latter-day deluge...
