Things I'm Seeing Without You Read online

  This is what my body feels like when I think about you.

  Who sent it? It had arrived in my in-box right around the three-month mark.

  No-man’s-land.

  But it’s important because I responded, at the time, by sending the first naked picture of myself I’d ever taken. I know. I get it. Spare me your judgments. It just seemed right at the time. I let my dress fall to the floor along with my tights, bra, and underwear, and I snapped the picture by holding a phone to the mirror on my closet door.

  I made no attempt to hide the stuff about my body I hate. My outie belly button. The constellation of moles on my right thigh. A half-moon scar over my hip from a bicycle accident. My noticeably uneven breasts. I wrote back:

  This is what my body looks like when you think about it.

  I knew I shouldn’t be sending it even as I did it. I’d heard all the warnings. But what no one ever tells you is that the risk itself is the point; it’s the thrill of making a mistake on purpose. The only problem is that I thought I was making that mistake for someone in particular. Someone I knew.

  Honestly, though, the sex stuff didn’t bother me as much as I thought. Worse were the things I told him. Stuff I hadn’t told anyone else. The way I used to shoot baskets in my parents’ driveway in junior high, telling myself that if I could just hit ten free throws in a row, I would no longer be ugly. My fear of the dark, all the way into high school, and the way I used to leave my blinds open so I could see the light from the neighbors’ TV.

  The time I got my first period at a pool party and had to call my mom to bring me home. The time I watched all my friends make fun of an overweight girl in gym class until they brought her to tears, and I did nothing to stop them. And the admission, absolutely true, that I’d never had a boyfriend until him.

  Some of these things made it to Jonah, I know. We spoke on the phone occasionally at first, and I remember his low voice saying “it’s okay,” and “but you were just a kid.” He hardly ever returned the favor, though. He wasn’t good at revealing. The only time I can remember clearly was when he told me about being hospitalized for a weekend when he was sixteen.

  “All I can tell you, Tess, is that I felt worse than I ever had in my life. And I wasn’t sure what I was going to do if I was left alone. My mom found me staring into the knife drawer in the kitchen, and when she asked me why, I couldn’t answer. She called my doctor and he helped make the arrangements at a place nearby.”

  I asked him if he’d ever felt that way again.

  “No,” he said. “But I have to take a pill every day. Probably for the rest of my life.”

  It might have been the last real thing I found out about him. Soon after that, he wasn’t interested in the phone as much. He wanted to text and chat, claiming he felt “more like himself” that way. And who was I to deny him? I liked the way he sounded in writing. I imagined us as a famous intellectual couple from history, exchanging “correspondence.” I had still never read anything as sexy and strange as Flaubert’s letter to Louise Colet in 1846.

  Mr. Barthold had mentioned something about these letters when we were reading Madame Bovary for A.P. Lit, and I had quickly looked them up. What I found was better than I could have imagined.

  “I will cover you with love when next I see you, with caresses, with ecstasy. I want to gorge you with all the joys of the flesh, so that you faint and die . . . when you are old, I want you to recall those few hours, I want your dry bones to quiver with joy when you think of them.”

  Damn, Gustave!

  I wanted to be written to in that way, and Jonah came close.

  Daniel, I suppose, came close, too.

  I stayed away from Facebook for a week after that first exchange with Daniel. When I finally logged back on, I found a single message sitting in my in-box. It was not from Jonah’s account this time. It was from someone that I wasn’t friends with. The profile picture was not a face. It was a white silhouette with a light blue background, a template for a future image.

  The message read:

  Hello, Tess.

  First of all, I don’t expect you to get in touch with me again.

  This isn’t a plea for that to happen. I just wanted to explain some things to you in case you are curious about them in the future. Then, I promise I won’t contact you again.

  Here goes.

  First: I believe Jonah stopped communicating with you because he didn’t want you to know what was going wrong with him, psychologically. He didn’t want anyone to know much about that. I didn’t fully understand this at the time, but now I’m sure about it.

  Second: I started using his account because I wanted him to break up with you the right way instead of just shutting down. That was my plan. To break up with you as him in a gentle way. I know this doesn’t really make sense, but at the time I thought it did.

  Third: Once we started writing to each other, I was not able to break up with you. Either as him or as me.

  That’s all.

  I’m not sure what I expect you to do with this information. I just wanted you to have it. You have plenty of reasons to distrust me, but I still feel the need to tell you that I have never done anything like this before. And I’m not quite sure how it all happened. I do know that I have made a terrible situation much worse and I hope you can forgive me someday.

  Okay,

  Daniel.

  P.S. I think Jonah would have been in love with you if he was capable of being in love with anyone. But I’m not sure he was when you met him.

  I read the message twice. The first time my eyes skated over the sentences, not really taking them in. The second time, I read them carefully. I looked at the white space where Daniel’s photo should be, the face-mold sitting empty. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. I didn’t know if any of it was true.

  The smartest thing to do, I thought, might be to accept these sentences as possibilities and leave it at that. I could take Daniel at his word and never contact him again. But there was this damn word stuck in my head. The woman at Maxine’s funeral had used it and I kept hearing it over and over.

  “Rupture.”

  It was the closest anyone had come to describing how I felt when I learned of Jonah’s death. Something inside me had burst apart suddenly, and I was still willing to try anything I could to put it back together.

  So far, things had only grown more confusing, but if there was even a small chance that some of the pieces could snap back into place again, didn’t I have to try to make that happen? An idea came to me, and the fact that I was a little scared by it, made me think it might be the right one.

  I quickly typed a message. It was short, but there was no chance of misinterpreting it. I watched it sitting there in the text box, the cursor blinking at the end of the final line. Then I hit Reply and let out a deep breath.

  It read:

  No more computers.

  612-555-0491

  15

  I canceled my Facebook account later that day.

  I went to the Delete Account page, entered my password, and when asked if I was sure I would like to permanently delete my account, I clicked yes. I cleared my history. I did not back up my data. All my preferences disappeared along with the version of myself that I had so carefully made.

  I killed the things that defined me. Every band. Every movie. Every witty quote. Every video. Every flattering photo. Gone. I deleted Jonah’s girlfriend. I was still that person in a server somewhere, but other than that, I had disappeared. When I was done with all this I felt a little better.

  Then I went to the bathroom and threw up.

  Instead of looking into the toilet, I closed my eyes and tried to remember all the things from Jonah/Daniel that I had just erased. I flipped through them in my head. Song playlists, including one that just looped “Thirteen” by Big Star over and over because it was “the purest love song ever wri
tten, seriously.”

  Other playlists disappeared too, including: WEEN + THE BEATLES = TRUE LOVE, SONGS MY GRANDPARENTS PROBABLY HAD SEX TO, SONGS WITH QUESTIONABLE METAPHORS, and IF YOU DON’T CRY WHEN YOU HEAR THIS THEN YOU ARE A COLD COLD HUMAN WITH AN ICY ICY HEART.

  I lost the links to the videos, too. The Starlings. The supercut of Bollywood dance scenes. Sloth and Chunk from The Goonies. A Ted Talk about the neuroscience of love. And a barrage of strange homemade happy birthday videos scavenged from the junk heap of YouTube.

  The messages were gone, too. All 788 of them to be exact.

  Some of them were just a line or two. Others the equivalent of twenty typed pages. Late night manifestos full of bad jokes and melodramatic vows. Some of them from Jonah. Some of them . . . not. I could remember a few phrases from early on.

  Just write me two more words and I’ll be happy forever.

  This was never supposed to happen to me, didn’t anyone ever tell you that?

  You have me in a wild way, Tess Fowler.

  And always an allusion to seeing me “soon.”

  Soon was always coming. How soon? So soon. When school was over. Over Spring break. Summer break, for sure. “We’ll work in the same place. It’s going to happen soon.” But soon never showed, and eventually even the assurances ran out.

  His messages went next.

  For two entire days there was no communication. No videos. No songs. No links. No chats. I wrote. I called. I got nothing in return. Then eventually, Jonah’s wall came alive with messages again. But not the kind I wanted to see.

  At first, I couldn’t believe they were real. They had to be a joke. The worst joke in history. “Sweet, Jonah, I had no idea your soul was hurting so much.” “I will never understand this. Never.” “Come back. I miss you already.”

  I contacted MIT and was passed from administrator to administrator until I screamed into the phone at a woman who sounded like a friendly grandmother.

  “Just tell me if he’s really dead,” I said. “Please!”

  And the woman said, “Yes, honey. He is. I’m so very sorry.”

  And then I hung up and walked away from Quaker school without a coat on a cool early spring morning in Iowa. It had been weeks since the last frost, and the corn was just beginning to come up in the fields around me. I walked along the highway, following a line of barbed wire as it sliced across the pegs of a wooden fence.

  There were tire ruts in the shoulder of the highway from ATVs, and I walked in their grooves. I walked for hours, blinking away hot tears and wiping my nose with my shirtsleeve. My only nice pair of boots soaked up the wet mud. Eventually I came across a sign for Model Train Land, a hokey roadside stop a few miles in the distance.

  I first saw the signs when my dad drove me to Quaker school in the fall. We’d joked about stopping, about it being a cultural embassy for my new state. THE LARGEST MODEL TRAIN RAILROAD EVER BUILT! ONLY 2 MILES! YOU’RE JUST 1 MILE AWAY FROM MODEL TRAIN LAND! ALL ABOARD!

  I walked until I reached it: the smallest museum in the world. It was just a ranch house, painted red, fifty feet from the freeway. The place was open, but it was a weekday, so it was empty when I stepped inside. I scraped together the entrance fee from a wad of small bills and coins in my pocket and I paid a red-nosed old man in a striped conductor’s hat. He smiled a gummy smile and handed me a wooden whistle. Then I stepped inside the cramped space and stood in front of the glass enclosed train world.

  The track was bright silver and it crisscrossed an elaborate diorama of scenery from all over the country. Snowcapped mountains. A calm ocean. Winding rivers banked by flowering trees, their leaves made from green toothbrush bristles. There were old-fashioned telephone poles and farm windmills with tiny spinning blades. The trains zipped in and out of tunnels, making their way over the entirety of their circular world again and again.

  At first I was soothed by it. Everything was so carefully placed; there was nothing disorderly about this toy universe. The small homes next to the rows of shops on Main Street reminded me of places I’d stopped on the way to visit grandparents when I was a girl. Places I’d imagine living in for the time it took to drink a creamy milk shake at an old-fashioned soda fountain.

  Train Land was a peaceful, easy land. But, the longer I stayed there, the less comforted I felt. Something about it was bothering me. It took me another minute or two to realize what it was. Although, it was a flawless place, there were no people in it.

  It was emptied of souls.

  I got up from my knees in the bathroom now and flushed the toilet. I splashed handfuls of cool water on my face, and swished some mouthwash that made my gums burn. I heard my father coming up the stairs behind me, and as I wiped off my face with a towel, I was already trying to look normal again. I took a few deep breaths. And when he knocked on the bathroom door, I opened it with a look on my face that I hoped betrayed nothing. He stepped back from the door, his hands in his pockets. Then he cleared his throat and looked me in the eyes.

  “I made some dinner,” he said. “And I want to talk to you about something.”

  16

  It was true. My dad actually cooked dinner that night.

  It felt like the first time in years. Back when my parents were still together, he was head chef of the household. He’d spend his idle mornings (which was most of them) at the farmers’ market downtown, picking out the perfect deep purple eggplants for his parmigiana. After the divorce, though, it was all Lean Cuisines and Lean Pockets. If it didn’t have Lean in the title, he wouldn’t eat it. Yet, he was still a couple pounds overweight. Go figure.

  Tonight, he made a roast chicken with potatoes. It was simple, but after a week and a half of takeout, it tasted like a revelation. We ate in silence for a while before he set his fork down, brushed the hair away from his face, and rested his hands on the table.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he said.

  For a second, I thought he really did.

  “What?” I said.

  “I know you’re thinking this funeral planning business is just another bad idea of mine. I have a track record. I understand that. And some of my other . . . projects haven’t exactly worked out, at least by conventional standards. But, I want you to understand. This one is different.”

  I stabbed a potato and avoided eye contact. I should have known that dinner wasn’t going to be free. It came with a lecture. When he spoke again, the tone of his voice had shifted.

  “Do you remember when Grandma died?” he asked.

  “Of course,” I said.

  My dad’s mom had died two years ago of a rare degenerative lung disease, and Dad spent most of the last days with her in hospice. I visited a couple times, but the place was too sad. By the end, we just sat in silence, listening to the hiss of her breathing machine.

  “I let your aunt Ruby handle most of the arrangements for the funeral,” he said. “I don’t know why I did that. I was unnerved, I guess. All the coffins sounded like luxury cars, and every step of the way people were trying to upsell me. I couldn’t make all those decisions while I was grieving. It was too much.”

  He took a sip of water.

  “But I knew everything was wrong when we showed up to that huge church for her funeral. Remember that place? It was like the Taj Mahal. And they put that fancy purple cloth over her coffin. Grandma was never very religious. In the hospice she told me to stop the priest from coming around. She said he looked like ‘death in a nightgown.’ Then, at her funeral, she got a priest whether she wanted one or not.”

  “He was awful,” I said.

  “And that service was so self-righteous and boring! My mom wasn’t like that. I heard most of my dirty jokes from her. She liked to sing in the car, remember? That old Chrysler? And she loved those kids at the school cafeteria where she worked. She had life! That place. The tone. None of it was right.”

  H
is eyes were widening now.

  “And so I started thinking that day. Why do funerals have to be this way? Where is the real sense of the person you knew? Where is the joy along with the sadness? Would it kill someone to make a joke? The worst has already happened, right? I couldn’t stop worrying over these problems. I was obsessed. And I wanted to make a change.”

  “So you started cremating dogs?”

  “I started making coffins,” he said. “A week later. People thought I had lost my mind. Your mom was gone by then, but even she was concerned. And maybe she should have been. But the first thing I made when I knew what I was doing was a replacement coffin for Grandma.”

  “Holy crap. You dug her up?”

  He sighed.

  “Just listen, will you? I worked on the thing for months. She kept a postcard of Monet’s poplar trees near her bed at the hospice, so the wood was an easy choice. I sanded that poplar until it was smooth as sea glass. I finished it off with bronze handles, and an intricate woven pattern on top. Finally, I carved her name on the lid.”

  “Joy,” I said.

  “Joy,” he said, and smiled. “It was too late to give it to her obviously. So, I went to her house and I filled the casket with her stuff. Some of it, anyway. The old FM radio she used for listening to baseball games. Some photos of her as a girl, tan and smiling on a dock in Northern Minnesota. That sparkly green sequined sweater she wore. Then I dug a second grave in her backyard and I laid it to rest there. It’s like a time capsule now, I guess.”

  “Whoa,” I said. “You buried it back there?”

  “It took me all afternoon.”

  “That’s actually pretty great,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “But it still didn’t seem like enough. People need to rethink all of this stuff. We need a new culture around death. And why can’t I be the one to help start it? Somebody has to. Maybe this is what I’m supposed to do.”

  He got up and walked over to the fridge. He pulled out a can of beer and cracked it open. Then he looked at me.