Benjamin, You Brave Fool, You've Killed Us All

At eleven in the morning a sluggish and tragic existence came to a halt. I suppose if it were someone famous, it’d have been on the news or in the papers. Maybe someone in some office room in a far off part of the nation would have spoken of it, would have pursed his name out of their lips. But hardly anyone spoke of it, and no one remembers it, although more people turned out to say their goodbyes than I could have possibly expected. All in all, he was nothing. He was no one. And he would not have had it any other way. After all, being someone is difficult, and most people manage to avoid ever being anyone at all. They manage to be born and die, with lifespans stretched out in the middle between both ends, and avoid ever the sincerity required to be a real person. While others would long for remembrance, he would not have given his approval that some stranger should use his name in any way. He would not have wanted to be so grossly misunderstood. He’d have said that it is better for him to never enter into anyone’s mind, also. He thought of himself as an unpleasant thought. Even though he was no longer around us, he did not want to be remembered. I understand him in this particular desire to be forgotten. He felt like a bad memory, one which even he did not want to remember. He wished to forget himself. He was a novel which he hated reading, but with every day of his life he inadvertently added chapters, added twists and turns, all to this disheartening novel. He could not bear to read another page, how much more was it an unbearable title, to be called, ‘author’. In every way, he wanted to be forgotten, any recollection of him he desired to be emotionless, not heart-felt, calculated, like recalling one’s water bill from a few months ago. He wanted nothingness. And so this is what I gave him, nothingness, except the most basic kind of analysis I could give him, just to understand. I analyzed what had happened, without any bias or plea whatsoever that the outcome be any different, just with a soft inquiry into it. “At eleven in the morning?” I thought. Something about this left me uneasy for quite some time. How dejected must a person be to die at such an awkward time? And how inconsiderate! I had plans to talk to him on the bus ride home, by the college, where we always met. I had just bought him a little knife he’d like, for our camping trips. I wanted to tell him so much of the girl I had just met. All morning I was instead of doing my work, thinking of ways to tell him, thinking of which way might be the most impressive, that a beautiful girl in my class had become so attracted to me. In this town in the Midwest beautiful girls were hard to come by, and this was to be a huge announcement. I could see him nodding in approval, lighting a cigarette, looking at me just before he inhaled, and nodding again. I could see him last night as well, clear, without those damned ripples that memory is so keen of. I could see him waving me goodnight. I could see his hands trembling so much that he could hardly clutch his cigarette, and trying so desperately to light it. “This is why he was trembling.” I thought. He wanted to say goodbye, I’m sure, to his father and brother, no doubt, to me, at least, his little brother. He wanted me to hug him, and he wanted me to talk to him about the future, about how we were going to own a farm, and make jam, and put it in jars and sell it, with a piece of hay in our mouths. He wanted to be comforted by me, and held, so deeply that it transcends an embrace. Inside of him was a quivering little creature, longing to be soothed. But there was absolutely no way that he could ask for that. If he had we might have caught on and tried to stop him, or worse yet, pleaded with him to wait, to let things get better. No, things wouldn’t get better for him. Not for him. Tonight, he was to prepare for departure, and in the morning, he was to set sail. I did not cry, and I didn’t know that more than a year later, I still wouldn’t cry. I felt as cold as the morning air. My father stumbled into my classroom wearing shorts and a rainbow striped shirt, and a priest followed behind him, and I thought to myself, “This has got to be a joke.” My father’s eyes were red and his hair was a mess. He made a bee line to my teacher while the other two teachers who were standing nearby looked on in horror. He whispered into her ear something and she looked at me with a swelling sadness in her eyes. We walked into a small room in the back, everything was white with lights so bright, that they stung. I couldn’t find the justification to have such powerful bulbs in a place which is used mainly to isolate problematic students for a little while at a time, until they return to their senses. Here there was only a table and three chairs. We sat. First me, then my father, then the teacher, and the priest stood, like a monument, towering over me. My father looked at me, in a way no father should ever look at his son, in a way which is terrifying and eternal, and said, “Your brother is dead.” I looked at him and asked, “How?” He told me. I looked up at everyone and said, I want to be alone, not understanding the gravity of what I had just requested. There I was in this small white room, in a way which I only now understand. I was present, but not really. I was there, but not really. I was living, but not really, so I could someday die, I realized, but not really die, and it dawned on me that most people never die, because they have never lived, that you cannot snuff out a candle that has never been lit. Suddenly I saw that no one in this room was alive. Not my father, not the teacher, and not the priest, who preached life, but who was a foreigner on its shores. One by one, they exited, slowly, in procession, like a makeshift funeral, right then and there without the casket, or the body to be carried, like some hideous ceremony, of which I wanted no part of. Until I was entirely alone, I allowed myself to begin to process it, and I understood death immediately. Here in the room, I sat alone, at first with others, but they exited in procession, until I was all alone, and this is death.”