Above and Below — Hugh Sheehy

Enough, someone from college writes on social media. I’ve had enough. His message appears between a video of kittens tussling and a cousin’s photo of her ancient mother. Sorry if I stung you with my sarcasm and bad faith, goodbye. 

I have to read the note a second time, maybe because it’s dark and late in my childhood home, where I’m the only one awake. Or maybe I’m remembering the friend who wrote these words, someone who remade himself reading Philosophy while the rest of us fooled around. Maybe I’m remembering his rampant hair, black as coal, and his pockmarked cheeks, his moody entrances and pithy mumbles, his thrift store suits and threadbare Chucks. Maybe it’s because the suicide note feels rushed. It has a cartoon background, an oasis where personified palm trees cackle hysterically; off to one side, a pouting cactus leans. And the sky is lemonade pink. At first these images seem lighthearted, giddily parodic, but possibilities creep in, the longer I look. Are the palms a statement about people like me? Is the cactus my old friend? Is this what the onetime Philosophy Major with genius hair saw in these figures, or was he only trying to catch the eye? Did he even think about the background he chose? 

I should say my friend’s name is David. This is not his first social media suicide note. David has written and published many such posts over the years, at least a dozen I count on eaten fingertips, and he has published them at varying rates, including three in a month one sweaty season. The letters have all been longer than this new one I’ve enlarged to examine, thousands of words and rich in detail, efforts I’d expect from the former honors student whose thirty-pagers gave our professors fits. Which is what makes me wonder now.

Of course, David might have posted other short suicide notes. I can’t be absolutely sure he didn’t. I’m not always online, contrary to what my father says and what my mother quietly affirms. And the algorithms can be fickle, sometimes the message doesn’t get through. Also, he might have written short ones he deleted right away. He might have written short ones he decided not to publish.  

And maybe I’m exaggerating how many I’ve seen. We all know now how memory likes to backfire, how it tends to multiply the single instance. How wishes sneak in and confusion takes place, how the vault is never sealed or really even a vault. Even data-gorged websites and databases, so-called external memories, cough up something different with every little search. Nor am I, in trying to think now, without my flaws of character and sense. I am highly unreliable, a man in his forties who moved home, a person without lasting professional or romantic connections—a failure, if I’m being honest, of the highest order.

I wonder if David will go through with it this time. The post being a short hour old, I suppose he might have already. 

I try to imagine how my old friend would kill himself, given the city of dangers at his disposal, buildings and bridges from which he might let himself fall, strangers he might tempt to assault his weakling’s frame, dirty drugs he might shoot into his arm. I think of the underground tunnels and their darting trains, middle-aged David in a packed station, one more stony rush hour face until the train screams in and he steps off the ledge. I think of the engineer watching a sad and perhaps unshaven David tip into his windshield, I think of all the people on the platform, the cavernous station echoing their cries, everyone thinking you can never know or tell. I imagine adult hands hiding children’s eyes, fingers frantically typing on screens. I imagine people staggering to street-level, hugging themselves and each other, evening plans canceled or radically changed. I imagine the engineer taking some officer’s questions and the likelihood the engineer has feared this moment from day one on the job. I imagine the engineer has sometimes wondered, driving into stations, Have I finally arrived? I imagine the engineer knows blame lies elsewhere or maybe everywhere in this fallen society but suffers troubled dreams and thoughts anyway, having seen close-up my friend’s last unforgettable expression. I imagine the engineer finding David’s name and accounts online, maybe learning he studied Philosophy and combining this fact with others to form a theory of the person whose life broke open on the other side of his windshield. I imagine the engineer recovering, affirming quietly, Better to have been conscripted into aiding suicide than homicide. I imagine the engineer moving on, still an engineer or perhaps in a job with less responsibility, thinking less and less often of my friend and finally not at all. I imagine David’s remains, his crumpled body and probably smashed face and the bone fragments embedded in it, the tattered Chucks he laced up before his arguably cowardly but undeniably gutsy act removed by the fatal impact, I imagine his body’s spilled fluids and awful new geometry. I wonder if my friend suffered in the instant of hypothetical death and whether he had time to think a last thought, something distinctly David or maybe something pedestrian and Oh shit-like, or if it would be more fitting to imagine sensation alone, the briefest instant of pressure escalating to rupture unto nothingness. I try to imagine being dead but cannot imagine experience without imagining a mind to talk to itself.

I’m aware this is all speculation as I sit at my screen in the only lighted room of the house to which I have returned in middle age, a once-promising child who disappointed everyone, my thoughts and daydreams perhaps those of a classic failure compared to the social media suicide note I continue to read as if it might tell me what’s happened since my college friend published it, which is to say the recent past repackaged as a future I will not remember long unless David has in fact gone through with it.I will look back on this night and wonder if I could have done something to change his course of action. If a comment or message from me might have made a difference. How I thought it wouldn’t, but how I also hoped dimly it would and still did not comment or send a message. How all this reveals more about me than about the college friend who liked making scenes but valued irony too much to ever step in front of a train while unsuspecting strangers watched. 

I click through the comments and the replies to the comments. There are a good number of them, at least there’s that, at least people care about David or feel like they should. Many of the commenters seem like high quality people, too, people free of the desperation that sullies so many social media users. I imagine composing a social media suicide note everyone ignores, or, worse, a suicide note that only attracts comments from low quality people, the people one is embarrassed to know but must by some dint of social arrangement. I imagine all the low quality comments would make me want to kill myself even more, maybe enough that I would decide to stay alive after all, just to prove something to the high quality people who didn’t reply.

The comments tonight run the gamut, as they usually do with social media suicide notes, with many high quality people asking if David is okay or demanding to know where he is at this very moment, while others instruct him to call certain emergency numbers or to go to specific locations. Still others share hopes the self-styled philosopher who blushed at displays of affection is okay, and some of the people have used the comment section to declare their love for him, some, possibly, for the first time. Others use the space to talk to each other, sharing what they think and maybe know could be used to find the tortured person who mocked displays of virtue and prevent him from harming himself.Some of them are making plans of their own.

***

I decide to take a drive, pass the time, let things happen. Eventually, there will be word of my college friend’s condition, and I have better things to do than sit up waiting to learn whether a onetime Philosophy Major who sometimes threatens to kill himself has finally done it. That’s what I tell myself, anyway, that I have better things to do, though I suppose that’s a constant, one could always choose to do something better, none of us are saints, and the phrase is a balm to quell the pain of release. 

It’s been a month of snow in the suburb where I’ve come home with my failures and shame. I don’t like this place or the surrounding fields and towns, but I am out of money and life here is cheap, by which I mean inexpensive, though the other sense applies, too, particularly these days, though maybe it always has. I’m no historian. I’ve grown used to telling locals who ask why I’m back that I’m caring for my elderly mother and father, an explanation which happens to be true, if utterly disconnected from what happened in Chicago, which I don’t care to think about, let alone discuss.

I sit in my mother’s car, having recently sold my own for cash, and knowing my father would be upset if I took out the bulky sedan he races down quiet streets and which he refuses to let me operate as long as he can drive, though he can only do so, one could argue, in the legal sense. I shiver in the used up winter coat I cannot afford to replace, smelling the just as used up snow that is everywhere and the sharp perfume my mother applies too freely and waiting for the defroster to clear the windshields. I chose not to add a comment to David’s social media suicide note, but I am thinking of him still, wondering what the news will be. I do not hope, one way or the other, but feel a low needling anxiety, having been too dulled by repeated exposure to his social media suicide notes to feel outright dread about this one. And like anyone I think of the shepherd boy who lied about the wolf coming for his sheep until the day the wolf finally appeared, at which point the villagers refused to heed the shepherd boy’s cries. A cautionary story, people say, though I wonder if what the story cautions is not against lying but how people will find ways to blame you for the bad things that befall you. I wonder if the story is a warning that people cannot help blaming you, so busy are they fearing and fighting off their own wolves, so to speak, in homes and schools and workplaces and minds et cetera. I wonder if the story warns people will see the person crying for help as just another wolf. 

With first five or six suicide notes, I did comment, each time differently, for instance by once writing the tormented man who hated himself for eating meat and wearing sweatshop clothes bore no outsize blame for circumstances in which we were all trapped, and another time writing that my college friend needed to stop what he was doing at once and seek help, and another time that I had many fond memories of our school days, especially the unseasonably sweltering spring afternoon I drove him to the Indian mounds miles from campus and how we hiked all day in stifling wet heat, my dear friend with coarse black hair in his eyes panting in his steel gray thrift shop suit and filthy red Chucks, both of us mashing bugs on sunburned faces and necks but never any less enchanted by thoughts of the vanished civilization that built the monumental graves rising and falling around us like hills. How we ended up at a Mexican restaurant where other white customers said crass rude things to the brown people who ran the place and who served us pails of Mexican beer without asking for ID and how it was a miracle we made it back, drunk and dehydrated as we were, and how miraculously reborn we felt, cruising drunk at dusk into a college town where bars and parties were hitting their stride. I did not mention how we laughed in wonder. Nor did I mention our reason for going, which was that I’d known David was feeling dangerously sad and possibly thinking of killing himself. Nor did I mention how I longed for him in ways for which I had no words when we were alone in my car. I did not mention that I’d never wished to feel that way, or that I’d sensed the friend who conjectured we were creatures of complex desire understood this, or how we thus didn’t speak for a long time, only listened to CDs and looked out respective windows, mine the windshield, his the one in the door beside him, relieved there would always be some distraction to save us. Nor did my comment mention how as we drove into the college town at a mercifully cool dusk where the fraternity lawns overflowed with people tipping red cups and the bar patios roared with awful songs and the conversation of coeds in sunglasses that I saw David perk up and brush the thick black hair from his young eyes and reach down to straighten his supposedly ironic collar, his spirits lifting now after being restored to the life he had taken for granted and briefly left. Nor did I write how I knew then he would abandon me that night and every night, and though this was something I had always known, I felt it more acutely, and I said the three words that made my friend shudder and go on staring out his window at our happy-seeming fellow students, after which shame engulfed me so fully I cleared my throat and coughed as though I had been making unintelligible sounds when I said the words I knew had dealt our friendship a fatal wound. I did not need to write all this to the intellectual giant who remembered everything he read and heard, knowing the merest allusion to the trip would trigger his memory of the time I said I loved him and he pretended not to hear.

The time I told David the Indian mound trip story was the last time I commented on one of his social media suicide notes. I ended the account which stood out in a wordy clump on that long thread of brief statements of alarm and hope and fear and love by saying I was flooded with a happy warmth when I thought of that day, which was a lie, because I almost never thought of that day without recoiling painfully when I recalled the words that had escaped my lips as my car’s wheels rolled over the brick street and student laughter teased outside, but it was only half a lie, because I’d felt flooded with happy warmth as I’d written my long comment beneath his incredibly detailed social media suicide note. No one replied or reacted to my lengthy recollection, but I admired its strangeness on my college friend’s post anyway, the way I have admired ballooning silences in the apartment I have shared with the person I failed to love. Not even David replied to my comment, at least not publicly, not to do more than assign it the same neutral heart or thumbs up or star he assigned all those comments eventually, though he later sent a private message, this after days had passed since he’d spent the night in a hospital and had gone back, as he said, on his meds. My old friend wrote he was grateful for my support and that it was reassuring in his time of need to know people still listened, and initially I was gladdened and even flattered to have received his personalized attention, though the feeling faded as I noticed how generic his message seemed and how it mentioned nothing of the memory I’d conjured, how it was almost as if his message had been copied and pasted into a series of personal missives in a bid to individualize an indiscriminate sentiment. Then I felt humiliated, dwarfed, dismissed, relegated, possibly even forgotten. The next time he published a social media suicide note, I refrained from touching the keyboard and only read what others wrote, and the time after that I did the same, at which point I noticed others stopping, too. I realized people were always ceasing to comment, that commenters fell off with each subsequent note, which is to say that each suicide note attracted a new and unique group of respondents, and these people I took to be the latest individuals to have come into David’s life. Combing through the comments and replies tonight, I saw only one person I recognized from the first social media suicide notes, a woman named Rebecca, someone I’ve never met but who was engaged to my friend for a while.

It is after eleven now, a weeknight in the suburb I have hated since high school, meaning the houses are dark and silent and throw their shadows on the bluish white flatness of what were once fields for corn and soybeans and in some places remain fields for those crops or simply fields abandoned in wait of the whatever housing developers will convert them to cul-de-sac neighborhoods of generic suburban homes. The roads, plowed and heavily salted, run straight through this winter landscape, all laid out in a grid conforming to the four cardinal directions with a devotion to order that predates my understanding of this place and the people who dwell in it. I follow the roads as I did in high school, though now I leave the radio off, forgoing the small comfort of songs I know by heart to listen to the night’s enormous silence—the noise of my mind talking to itself. And as in the days of my childhood, which I tend to think of as the old days of a fixed time but which are in fact relatively very recent and were surely characterized by an instability all their own, stars fill the black sky, stacks upon stacks climbing into the upper darkness until they vanish. As in those days, there is a moon, huge and lamplike, and, as in those days, I know each house and yard, each snowy playset and buried inground pool. Though I do not give myself a destination, I sense I will eventually arrive at the place I have always gone without thinking on these drives because it is the logical final destination.

I think of Rebecca, the woman who commented on David’s social media suicide note, the one to whom my friend was engaged before he presumably somehow destroyed the prospect of their marriage. Though we’ve never met, I feel I know Rebecca’s beautiful face and personality from all the things she’s posted about David since they connected on social media. I imagine a voice for her, something richly musical and strong, and wonder how far off I am. I feel confident she is a good person, both because of things she has written to and about my old friend and from how she appears in pictures with him. There is something in her youthful face, with its searching eyes and vulnerably parted lips, and in her playful and easy embrace of conflicting feminine styles of dress and hair that radiates empathy and good humor. She seems an odd match for David, whose physical appeal derives from the distinct ugliness of his narrow face and his strangely savvy neglect of his whiskers that sprout unevenly around his mouth. Photos of them capture a sense of comic disparity, as if some great beauty holds hands with a hobo. People were surprised enough by the social media engagement announcement to comment on how lucky David was, how the woman who’d agreed to marry him was out of his league, how she might need to get her vision checked or her head, all such statements meant to flatter her and him both but also to rebuke the aging hipster who’d made welcoming the contempt of others into a strength.

I was not surprised, however. Not when I saw in the photos the hopefully sorrowful dimension in Rebecca’s otherwise smiling face, the sidelong eyes as she held David’s fragile-looking arm. Not when I saw the self-assurance in his unsmiling stare. Something registered in how they stood together, him pulling a little away, her waiting for him to acknowledge she was waiting, possibly asking, for him to close the visible distance between them, perhaps by becoming some better version of himself, perhaps simply by admitting he loved her after all.  

Because I could imagine the onetime Philosophy Major who pissed us all off, saying nobody owed anyone anything, waiting Rebecca out, playing a long game in which he allowed her to propose and later, finally, to call the thing off. He could have done this easily, without trying. My old friend had never been one to try.

I’ve driven my mother’s car to the county line and the start of the extension road that runs through twenty-odd miles of fields and woods to the next town south when the sheriff’s deputy stops me, his lights flashing blue and red across the surrounding darkness and snow before I look back and see the cruiser which has seemingly materialized out of the night to follow close on my bumper. After a few panicked seconds, I regain control of myself and steer my mother’s car onto the shoulder, driving it up onto plowed packed snow to get off the road, though not so much I’ll get the wheels stuck. I try to slow my breathing, telling myself to be reasonable, for I have done nothing illegal or even wrong, that my fear is the sum of a very average fear of cops plus memories of crimes too tiny and old to have been recorded, plus guilt for my many perfectly legal failures of character. I roll down the window halfway and stop the engine and wait with my hands gripping the top of the wheel, breathing the crystals of snow that blow in with the smell of car exhaust and cold. When the officer arrives, having walked slowly and with hands ready to draw his weapon, and shines his flashlight on my hands placed close enough to cuff together, he is satisfied I am ready to follow his instructions and relaxes palpably. He speaks in a neutral-sounding voice captive to the local accent, requesting different kinds of documentation, which I produce promptly and commence waiting for him to tell me this is not my vehicle so that I can tell him he is free to call my parents’ home and wake my mother if he does not trust my word that I am allowed to drive it. Of course, he could take me to jail and sort everything out later, but the likelihood of such an outcome, in this suburb where people are angry about everything and nothing happens, seems almost nonexistent.

Still, I am unprepared for him to laugh as he turns my license to make the holograms flicker. “I didn’t recognize the last name on the registration. You’ve changed, you know.”

I squint up to see if I might be able to say the same thing or its opposite about this deputy, but he holds his light in a way that leaves his face shadowed. “It’s been a while,” I say, because it could mean so many things, and because it sounds like a concession. “Didn’t know you were cop now.”

“Had no idea you were in town.” Something in the faceless officer’s voice reminds now of several low quality boys I knew growing up. “What brings you back?”

I think of my true motive for coming home, the faces of the people I’ve fled and one above all, and blink and smile into his light. “I’m back at my parents’, keeping an eye out. They’re getting up there, you know.”

“I do know,” he say darkly, and it clicks, my recognition of a boy who belonged to a larger group I ran with, a commonly indiscriminately hostile boy I gave rides in my old car, the one I still had when I drove my college friend to the Native American mounds, the car which somehow held on until I moved back and sold it for a quick little pile. The officer turns his head and nods and sighs. “Yeah, my mom’s in a home now. It’s so hard.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, though I don’t know his mother and only want him to return my license and say I can go back to the safety of my childhood home. “It’s very difficult.” 

The officer I knew and still think of as a low quality boy and who surely remembers me as someone who saw him that way says nothing. He seems to consider my face and keeps my license in his hand, as if it is his simplest means of keeping me from driving off. His hesitation suggests he has something to tell me. “Last I heard, you were in Chattanooga or someplace. Or was it Charlotte? I thought you had a whole different thing going on. Most people who go don’t come back. It’s nice to see someone come home for a change.”

I do my best to hide the pain his words inflict, remembering all the times I knew I was failing the person I failed most and did nothing to help her. All the times I could have simply said something kind or taken her in my arms. All the times I ignored her in her grief. And I remember this deputy holding me here as the low quality boy he was, how social circumstances often forced me to endure him as a passenger in my car, how when we reached this point along the county line where the extension road runs south to the next town over, he would insist we keep going, would do so every time, even as the other passengers groaned and told him to shut his fucking mouth already. “Well,” I say. “Here I am.” 

“Goddamn,” he says. “What’s it been? Fifteen years? Twenty? You know I got a wife and kids? You should come by Sunday, watch the game.”

What he wanted in those days, I remember, was to see the other town, and one time I said yes and took him there out of pity and boredom and the smallest hope we would find something else. I hoped the boy in my passenger seat spitting tobacco juice into an empty plastic soda bottle might for once in his life be onto something, broken clocks being sometimes right and all, that there might be something to see that made that town south of ours superior to this terrible place. It was a dead night, and we were the only two in my car, and I could see how he looked at me, how it was with a desire he did not wish to feel and for which he had no proper name, a desire I did not feel in return, and something in me cracked. I felt such pity for this stupid boy and his vague and nameless wanting. It was evening in the farmland I hated, and I said, Sure, why not? and we drove with the windows down, radio blaring and him singing badly and filling the foul spitter with tobacco juice, his child’s face gazing dreamfully at passing fields, so wrapped up in the experience of being carried where he’d only imagined he didn’t notice the car that passed in the opposite lane, one with a license plate from the county south carrying two boys our age heading north toward the suburb we had fled. Didn’t see me look at the driver of that car at the moment the driver looked at me, didn’t see us recognize each other as the same boys we all were. And if he noticed how quiet I became, he never said.

The officer I know as that onetime low quality boy pinches my license between thumb and forefinger, holding it back by his belt with all its gadgets. He has settled into a casually bullying stance. “Sunday after noon. We can pregame a little. I’ll show you the place. What do you say?”

“Sounds good,” I say, because it is required of me, though it is all that is, and I will make efforts to avoid him after this. “It depends on my parents. But probably.”

“We’re going to have a great time.” It’s not clear if he’s failed to hear what I’m saying or if he’s chosen to ignore it. “An amazing time. All the guys will be there. You remember.”

“Sounds great,” I say. “Really amazing.”

“You remember where my parents’ place,” he says, holding my license just out of reach. “I’m just two houses down. New construction. Can’t miss it.”

“Right out by your parents’?” I say. “Two houses down?”

“New place,” he says, and now he gives the license back. “Can’t miss it.” 

***

My parents’ house is as I left it, dark but for the lamplight in the family room where my computer remains logged into my social media account. My college friend’s suicide note has seen much activity since I left. The number of comments has tripled or even quadrupled, and for a moment I am hesitant to resume my reading, even as my eagerness to know what happened surges to my outermost extremities. I close my eyes and consider the verge to which I’m come.

I open my eyes and read. David has not gone through with killing himself. This according to Rebecca, who has continued to look after him all these years since their breakup. She has written a number of comments and replies, and she has composed them in a confident voice, the voice of someone thoroughly familiar with the onetime Philosophy major who pissed everybody off, saying you could never really know another person. The entire post, suicide note and seventy-two subsequent comments and replies, her tone says, now belongs to her.

We have located David, she writes in the climactic comment to the whole thing, and he is safe. He is on his way back to the hospital. He is grateful for your support and concern. Thank you all. He will be in touch again when he can.

There are the usual reactions and replies to this sort of comment.

I sit back with the relief I should feel and the disappointment I shouldn’t. I look over the parts I have read and the parts I haven’t and won’t, including the comments that people I don’t know and likely never will. I am feeling a kind of fatigue, an exhaustion that is also an impatience, seeing it has been years since I saw my college friend, almost half my lifetime now, and while I’ve known this, it occurs to me I no longer know what David looks like, or if I would even recognize him in the flesh. His profile photo is more than nine years old, and he hasn’t posted other pictures since before the days when he occasionally updated it. He and I have not spoken or corresponded, not counting the generic message he sent the last time I commented on one of his suicide notes, since shortly after college. I acknowledge much about my old friend might have changed. That his black hair might be losing its color or have lost it entirely, that the high quality boy I knew might have aged poorly, gone fat and soft and prematurely old. That sadness and drugs might have dulled him, rendered ordinary the brilliant boy who used to leave me awed and jealous. Or that the opposite might be true, that he might be thriving, occasional social media suicide notes notwithstanding, that he might be bright and quick as ever. 

I click on Rebecca’s profile, hoping to find a relatively recent photo of them, to see at least a little more of what has become of my friend and know something of the person I knew still exists. I sort through her images, the ones unrestricted to the public, but the only recent pictures are of her, alone or with a new man I gather is David’s replacement. This new man seems, by looks alone, a high quality individual, someone who makes an effort to look presentable and who returns Rebecca’s loving looks with a matching intensity, someone who appears, at least in pictures, a suitable partner for a creature of her caliber. She is as beautiful as I remember, I see, but now there are age lines around her eyes and mouth, and she wears more makeup than in past photos. The outline of her face has softened, and I can see how it will look when she is old. I see the timestamp from last year and close the page with a shudder.

My own painfully familiar reflection flashes on the momentarily dark screen, the faint and stretched and expressionless face befitting someone who abandoned the only person who ever loved him, though at least I took the trouble to find out she recovered. I know where she is, and, if I’m being honest, what she’s doing. I think I should look in on her, see if she’s feeling better, though I know I won’t. It would give her the wrong idea, and, besides, this isn’t about my failure or guilt.

This is about David, whom I knew when I was young and whom I loved and tried to save, and who did not love me back. Who might no longer consider me a friend or even think of me at all, except to see on social media, a name and photo that recall a low quality boy he knew in college and hung out with, both for lack of a better alternative and out of pity, someone he wouldn’t miss, were that low quality boy to delete him on social media today. 

The house behind me is quiet. The heater runs, my parents sleep. This night will for them have been like any other so late in their ancient lives. I keep scrolling, reluctant to let the day go, looking at all the posts that have nothing to do with David’s suicide note and the theater that surrounds it. I read minor announcements and admire photos of babies and beach vacations, I read drunken and possibly drug-addled posts that will disappear by morning. I comment, I assign stars and hearts, I shower my love and approval. Look at all these people, I think, look at all these wonderful people I know, all these companions in life who will never know or care about some depressed boy I knew college. Look at all of all of these good people, all these people just like me, all of us who have better things to do.

***

Hugh Sheehy is the author of two collections of short fiction, Design Flaw (Acre Books) and The Invisibles (University of Georgia Press). He lives in the Hudson Valley and teaches at Ramapo College.