Previously: Your body hurts right now but you can move it … My God, look at those thumbs! … People will help you if you ask … I must have had some influence, because I can see that you are going to get up off that floor.
Last Week:
Take it from the top:
fernweh (fern-way) n.
1. An ache for distant places
2. Being homesick for anywhere but home
Four years after the phone call with you aunt, we got a letter. She’d been squatting with some artists and wanderers in a cabin somewhere between Santa Fe and Albuquerque. No heat, no electricity, no running water. She froze to death. Two others froze that same night.
Her partner was one of them. One of the other squatters found my name and address in Stephanie’s things. He wrote and told me what had happened.
You tried to help someone and you got hurt. It’s a family tradition. I’ve searched through Jeremiah Barger’s life — besides you and your brother and your father, he’s the person I’ve visited most often — looking for a reason or explanation or at least a batch of information that would help me understand. He was born at 2:32 am on February 19, 1974. His mother had that mix of exhaustion and relief and love and awe. His father stayed in the waiting room until the boy was clean. When he held his child for the first time, he looked in the direction of the boy, but it was clear he was really looking for a way out.
Father left before boy turned one. Jeremiah Barger’s mother was trying to rock him back to sleep in the middle of another restless night when she heard the pickup’s motor turn over. She carried her baby to the window and watched the truck back out of the driveway. The headlights stayed unlit until the truck was on the road, pointed towards the highway. His mother went back to the rocking chair in the corner and held her baby close to her chest and tried to take as much comfort as she gave.
When you were ten, your dad took you to your first baseball game. When Jeremiah was ten, his cousin Ed took him to a meeting of men who said they were going to set the country right. They shook his hand and said they were glad to meet him. Nobody had ever been glad to meet him before. They remembered his name when he came back the next month, and they invited him to keep coming even after Ed had to leave town. They told him he was special, and that the Good Lord had put him on Earth for a reason.
I watched his execution one time. I don’t know what I was looking for or what good, if any, I hoped it would do. I guess I was looking for symmetry; I’d watched him be born, I’d also watch him die. His last meal was a hamburger, fries, and a Coke. He tried to send the Coke back and get a glass with less ice because his teeth were sensitive to the cold, but his request was denied. Before they strapped him to the table, they asked him if he had any last words. He thought for a moment and said, “No, I believe I’ve said everything I wanted to say.” He laid down on his own and closed his eyes. The tied him down and gave him the drugs. He shook and died. After he died, I was still dead. And you and your brother and father were still sad. And nobody, it seemed, felt better about anything.
A ghost is a continuation of the conscious mind, carried by waves that physicists haven’t found yet. Someday, far in the future, after you’re gone, too, maybe they will, and the living will be able to hear the dead. Until then, ghosts are alone with their thoughts and feelings and memories. We think our thoughts to feel normal, to pretend we’re still alive.
Thank you for reading. Next week will start like this:
You, Jackson, are going go back to Chicago after deciding not to press charges against the boy’s father.