I’m not the right person to tell FB’s story, but I waited a year and no one else has volunteered to do so, which is odd. You might think the Tribune would have done something—a little note, a bemused Chicago-pride sort of piece. But there’s been nothing, not in the Sun-Times and not even on WGN, and all attempts to reach my former coworkers have resulted in pretty much no-replies, or auto responders, or in messages that wish me well in my new gig in the western suburbs.
We live in Oak Park, and the commute to work is short, and the public schools are excellent, but it’s not like we left the city behind. You can reach us. You can even take the el. It’s a short hop on the Green Line.
My former coworkers, however, have pretty much ghosted me and my four children and my wife, though they have children and wives and ex-wives of their own. They no longer show up at the family barbecues. We all lived close together, huddled mostly around Wrigleyville and Lakeview, and we gathered in the summers and hardly saw each other in the brutal winters and we said we don’t understand why people live here, and we meant Chicago, and we all swore we would leave, and I did.
I did leave. Some of them left too. The rest stayed.
They no longer respond to my Evites. They don’t seem to appreciate my hitting Like on their Facebook or Instagram updates. They never like any of the things I post. I suppose this is all normal. You stop being friends with the people you no longer work with. You no longer exist. I mean me. I no longer exist. But still.
Mysteries remain, the biggest of which—for me—is why they’re no longer willing to talk about FB even though that’s all we talked about, for a long while.
I suppose I understand. They want to pretend he didn’t exist either, or that his existence didn’t—briefly—overshadow our work at the branding agency where we worked hard to come up with names that stuck hard to the brains of potential consumers, and where we made too much money. and where we all felt vaguely dirty—all of us except FB, who genuinely seemed to enjoy his work.
He was a little older than us, maybe a decade older—maybe more—but his face was boyish, and though he had a bit of a beer belly, he seemed to take good care of himself. He was technically one of our supervisors, though the agency was trying to keep up with the tech start-ups and did its best to efface the hierarchies, so he just hung out in his khakis and sports coat and Cubs hat, and Averill asked me if I knew what was up with the hat.
I said, “Because he’s bald?”
Averill laughed, told me to look at the back of the hat next time he came around.
At the time I was like, whatever. Don’t make me work at this, Averill; I seriously didn’t care. I’m Colombian, a graduate of Andes University, and I didn’t land in the US until the agency poached me from the Erickson branch in Bogotá, so I always felt a little behind. People assumed I didn’t know a lot about the US, and that rankled, because how else would I end up here, at a company that pinpointed what Americans wanted, if I didn’t know at least a little? But people also assumed I did know a lot about the US that I didn’t actually know or care about, baseball being top on that list. So it was all a little irritating. I didn’t want to study someone’s baseball hat.
And besides, I wasn’t wrong. Whatever else, FB totally wore his hat indoors because he was going bald.
FB had just told us to help ourselves to the IPAs in the lounge fridge. He had brought them in from California. It was noon, too early for a beer, but Averill wanted one, and I liked hanging out with her, so I followed her up the terrace where we could see the glory of the river and the awfulness of the Trump sign.
Averill said, “FB doesn’t like the thing about the pigs.”
She opened her beer with my keychain opener, a gift from FB, a heavy leather-and-chrome dealio he’d given everyone for Christmas, each person’s name engraved. She’d lost hers. I liked mine. It was good for keys, and a group of us liked to have beers on the Metra after work, and we always drank the kind of beers you couldn’t screw off, so the gift came in handy.
I wasn’t surprised. I loved the pigs, and pretty much everyone I knew loved them, too, but I suspected that maybe FB didn’t—that maybe he was the kind of Republican who would hold his nose and vote for Trump, even if we’d talked about how jarring we found the sign (FB didn’t like it either; he loved the Chicago skyline, the most perfect skyline in the world, he claimed, until Trump insisted on peeing all over it). I’d read about the artist, how he wanted to float five helium-filled golden pigs to obscure the letters, and had even talked to my wife about maybe donating a thousand dollars to the GoFundMe. I could imagine FB coming up with something similar, maybe for one of our clients, but I could also easily imagine him not loving the idea, finding it uncool or obvious or not worth the effort. It’d only be worth the effort if he had been the one to come up with it. He was that kind of ad guy. Ideas were good as long as they came from him. He was getting to that age where you feel vulnerable, where you look behind you and everyone’s younger and hungrier, and I think he didn’t quite like us, or the world we were building, but I liked him well enough. I had been obsessed with the films of Whit Stillman, loved Metropolitan and Barcelona and had a thing for American preppie culture, and everything about FB exuded it: the khakis, the Bass Weejuns, his indiscriminate love of madras blazers and Patagonia fleece. Even the Cubs hat.
Averill said, “So you still haven’t seen it? You looked, yes?”
I had, but it’s not the kind of thing you can do discreetly, so I told Averill the truth, which is that I noticed the autograph on the hat—someone had taken a silver Sharpie and made a scrawl. I could read the name but it meant nothing.
She said, “Seriously?”
“He’s friends with a baseball player?” I said. “He knows the owner? He owns the Cubs?”
Averill chugged her beer in a way that didn’t raise any alarm bells at the time, but our office had a pretty liberal drinking culture, so it wasn’t like she was unusual. By the time I got home I was often a little drunk. My wife and I had had a few talks about that. I had promised her I’d cut down. I was worried about my own drinking, and I envied Averill’s cheerfulness. She had to do a shit-ton of aerobics, she told me, otherwise she got a belly, and what man would want her then? She had recently divorced, had no kids, had what I assumed was a lively and heady social life outside the office.
“Seriously?” she said again. “You don’t know John Hughes?”
“Who?”
“Hughes.” She was nearly done with the fancy IPA We had been on the terrace for fifteen minutes. The river glowed a bright emerald green. Three kayakers skirted an architecture boat tour. “You’re serious,” she said. “You never heard of John Hughes?”
I shrugged. I didn’t.
She said, “You’ve seen Sixteen Candles.”
I hadn’t.
She rattled off the other titles, the ones I’m sure you know and I didn’t: Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
“That’s him,” she said. “FB is the real Ferris Bueller. I mean, it’s an open secret. They were friends in high school, him and John Hughes. The movie’s based on his actual life. Like, that’s FB’s Winnetka.”
I said okay. Averill said I should watch it, and I promised her I would, but I didn’t, not that evening.
One of our kids had an assignment. She wanted to sync the audio from a song she’d made up to the movements of mannequin fingers, and we spent the better part of the evening working out how you could do it with the Legos. We eventually got it, my wife and I, long after our kids had gone to sleep. I asked her if she’d seen the movie.
She had. Of course, she had. Apparently everyone had seen this movie, had loved this movie.
“It turns out that FB is Ferris?”
“Really?” my wife said. She tested our kid’s project: the mechanical fingers snapped to life as the song came on. “No,” she said. “No way.” The fingers waved. “Save Ferris,” she said.
“What?”
“It’s a thing in the movie.”
I asked her if she wanted to split a beer. She said she didn’t, and that it was time for bed, that she never slept well if she had a beer right before bed and that I didn’t either. Just go to bed, she said. Skip the beer, just go to sleep. I couldn’t, I told her. I didn’t exactly know why.
We lived in Lakeview still, not far from the noise of the bars on Clark, in a two-flat that had been reconverted to a single-residency. The house was beautiful but dark. We had paid a fortune for central air and heating, which proved a mistake, because the cold trickled in no matter what we did. I was bundled in a blanket in the kitchen, my kid’s project on the table. It was finally late enough that the arguments of Wrigleyville would come in in full force. They never woke up the kids somehow. I decided to have the beer I had been planning on splitting, and to get on Facebook, and to check on my coworkers. Averill had posted a photo of a nice meal she had. Also a donut, a fancy one from a shop in Bucktown. At least two of my coworkers were apparently in this indoor soccer league to which I had not been invited, which was just as well, because I am the one Colombian who does not play soccer.
I had not been meaning to look for FB. It had never occurred to me that his own page would have anything of interest (he hardly ever posted), but he had: photos of the night sky in Winnetka, photos of dark leaves against the dark sky, each photo uploaded one right after the other. He was awake. He was posting photos of his night walk. There was a forest of new growth, barely visible, mostly a blur of black and violet. The photos arrived every few minutes, and I imagined FB taking a few steps, finding something of interest, taking a photo, posting it, and walking. He followed the curb of a suburban street, and I marveled at its width—everything was so narrow where we lived—and he finally remembered to turn on the flash feature on his cell, and he captured the crags and dells of his suburban forest, a narrow path leading down to a narrow brook, a startled deer. He took a photo of the running water, a close-up. It looked cold and silvery and clean. The next photo was of a bunny caught in mid-leap.
I clicked Like.
There were no more photos for a half an hour, but I stayed on his page and waited. I had a sense there would be more, that I needed to wait.
I realized that FB might find it strange for a coworker to like his bunny photo just as soon as he posted it, but I did not care, and then I realized that maybe it’d be less strange if I liked all of his night-walk photos, so I did that, while I waited: He had taken fifty-four photos so far. I had no doubt in my mind he would take more.
It did occur to me that it was not normal. That I was somehow intruding. It did also occur to me that what FB was doing was also not normal, that people didn’t leave their houses in early winter and go for walks, that they didn’t post what they could barely see. I thought, Maybe he’s blue. I also thought, What if he tries to kill himself? Do I know where he is? Could I ask for help? What do you tell 911 in cases like this? I could say, He’s by a brook close to his house; there’s a bunny.
I should reach out, I thought. I was pretty sure I had his cell phone. I could text him, or I could Facebook-message him.
That’s when he posted the photo of the house.
It was all glass, all glass on every side, and from the flash I could tell that the lawn was wide and full of trees, woody. He had walked deep into someone’s property to take the photo, which I’ve learned is a giant no-no in the States. You don’t walk on people’s lawns.
But the yard looked unkempt, and the front door had those sad little combination lockboxes on the front, and I imagined there was a For Sale sign up front. You could see a little into the house, enough to know that it was empty, that whoever was selling it no longer lived here. I imagined us living there. We were well-off, we could almost swing it, I imagined. Almost. We were well-off but not well-off enough to live in Winnetka. That was senior colleague territory, and besides, we didn’t want to, I didn’t want to, our kids loved their school, and I loved the city, and if we moved we wouldn’t move here, couldn’t imagine living here, in this sad house that was all glass. It must be so cold right now.
I waited for FB to post again, but he did not, so I eventually made it to bed. My wife stirred. I could not sleep: I didn’t sleep the whole night, and I thought of the brook, the startled eyes of the bunny, the empty glass house.
FB didn’t report to work at the office the next day. He texted me and Averill. He wanted us to meet in a Middle-Eastern bakery that was about to expand into a café.
The owner of the bakery was not our client. Our client was the maker of these new POS devices that accept the chips embedded into debit cards, and they had given the owner one of them to try it out, and we were there to observe, to see how it went.
The owner was flustered, worried about the expansion, about all the money that he had already sunk into it, and the worry showed in the tilt of his moustache, in the way he darted about the store, his usually kind eyes always fixed on a problem that loomed apparently right behind us, just out of sight. He worried about the permits too. He had hired an expediter, in the hope that the City of Chicago would be kind, or kinder, but we all knew the nightmare that is the city’s bureaucracy. Permits do stall. Investors are fickle. Signs that say Opening Soon are mostly operating on hope.
All the same, the owner was unfailingly polite. We heard him wish FB good luck; we heard him say that people hated the new POS unit: too small, too confusing, that people didn’t know where to put in their card, couldn’t see the chip reader, that the music to remind people that they’d left their card in was too annoying and too soft. You couldn’t hear it, and if you heard it, you didn’t want to.
“You’re not drinking that?” the owner said.
“No, of course not,” FB said. He had brought in beers from across the street. More IPAs.
“We don’t have a license,” he said, “not for BYOB. No liquor license.” His moustache quivered. “Maybe we should get.”
Averill said, “You think they’d hate the POS less if it had a cute name?”
The owner shrugged, left us to our work.
Averill and I shared an area of expertise, the giving of new names to new things. The new names must ring true and familiar, they have to sound like they’ve always been there, and the new things are often not new at all: they’re often slight improvements of an already-existing product. Until that year, we used to do this in our glass-walled meeting rooms, the expanse of the river and the skyline always in view. There was this idea, confirmed by several of our consultants, that the sky, that blue was conducive to creativity, but new consultants came in and suggested that it is far more useful to conduct fieldwork. To see how people interact with the product. To study and describe and provide an actual, honest narrative of their experience, and to come up with ideas not far from the spot.
The Mexican attendant came by with falafel. I’d talked with him the most, him and the owner’s daughter, and I always messed up his name. It wasn’t José, and it wasn’t Marcelo, but I kept forgetting, and we’d known each other long enough that it was embarrassing to ask, to admit I’d forgotten.
I thanked him in Spanish, and I asked him if people really did hate the POS unit. Everyone did, but it was mostly the customers. “Un bicho,” he said. A bug. He had a nightmare about it crawling around the store. Plus, people don’t quite know where to insert the card, and because they always want to swipe instead, and the place where you swipe is far more visible than the slot.
The attendant left. I translated.
“We’re not usability people,” FB said.
He was the senior colleague on the team, so it wasn’t like Averill or I could say, We know that. But obviously the frustration could have helped us understand the process—how we could better sell the new unit, what name to give it.
“It’s black and small and cute,” Averill said, “like a beetle. Like a little bug.”
“We can’t call it that,” FB said. “We can’t call it a bug. We certainly can’t call it a beetle.”
He looked intensely tired, bags under his eyes, errant strands of hair poking out of the Cubs hat. I could barely make out the signature on the back when he turned and asked for more falafel. I was taking notes, mostly, and thinking of the owner’s daughters—he has two, and they take care of the registers, and both are very beautiful, and one speaks fluent Spanish to not-Marcelo/not-José, who tends the counter and does kitchen work. I was thinking of my own daughters. The owner doesn’t live anywhere near here, he told me. He moved when it was time to put his daughters in school. It’s what we all do, apparently. I’d do it, too, and soon, but I could not even imagine it then.
Averill said, “What I’m thinking is that we think of it as some kind of slightly gross pet. People were treating it like that anyway. Like, Oh God, what are you, what do I do with you?”
FB shook his head, eyes on the beer he had assured the owner he would put away, and I thought, No, don’t even think of it. This man could lose his license, his permits could be delayed or denied. No. I kept quiet because any idea we put forth is going to be shot down. He was in a black mood. I thought, Maybe I’m wrong, maybe the night walks are good, maybe he’s actually cheerful; I somehow hoped the night walk had cheered him up. It had cheered me up.
It was Averill who reached down for a beer, Averill who used her FB-gifted keychain to open a bottle. Another IPA. She handed the opened bottle to FB, got one for herself, asked me if I wanted one.
The owner struggled with new shelving, the daughters with a difficult customer. They could see us on our little card table, if they were to turn to us. As could any pedestrian. Any city inspector. We were right by the window.
Not-Marcelo came around—he had been friendly when he brought us our falafel and was now back, furious. “No,” he said. “No BYOB.”
I’m trying to remember his name. I’d love to tell you I remember his name. I can’t. All I know is I’d seen him there every time, and that he and the owner have known each other for decades, and that daughter speaks Spanish because she’s dating the attendant’s nephew. I was impressed—I’m impressed still—with how they’ve all known each other forever.
FB was not impressed. He told the man that we’re trying to do work here, trying to help them.
“No BYOB,” the man said.
“We’re not even in the store,” FB said. “We’re technically in the restaurant, which hasn’t opened. We’re not breaking any rules. Comprende, amigo?” He drank half the beer with the attendant standing over him. “Do you speak any English?”
“I’m getting the owner,” the attendant said.
I grabbed their beers and tried to find a garbage can. I was at a loss, because we were in the area of the store that was going to be a restaurant, so everything was covered and boxes were open and there was packing material everywhere, so it looked like anything could be a garbage can. My coworkers said nothing. Maybe they reached down again, grabbed more beers. Maybe they were too shocked by what I did to react. I didn’t look back because I was blushing, hard, and I couldn’t even remember the last time I blushed, the last time I had to confront anyone over bad behavior. It usually doesn’t happen. And sure, we fought in the office, we fought all the time, but it was over work. Nothing like this.
“They’re not going to make it,” FB said. “Customer service like that. Fuck them.”
“Fuck them,” Averill said.
There were no garbage cans. I made my way to the bakery, thinking, I’ll ask the daughter. Maybe we could toss the bottles in the little can people keep by registers.
She thrust both hands at me, palms raised. A customer was about to buy a pouch of za’atar; they were halfway through the transaction, debit card about to go into the weird bug-looking device, but she didn’t care. She came right up to me.
“What are you doing?” She was so angry, I didn’t even have time to apologize, or to explain that these weren’t mine, that I was trying to help, that I don’t even like IPAs. She grabbed the beers and ran to the basement.
Again I was blushing. By the time I made my way to the card table I trembled, angry and ashamed and angrier still for being ashamed.
“FB figured it out,” Averill said. “While you were gone. Figured out the name for the thing. Genius.” She put on her hat, her coat. “Come on, let’s celebrate. Let’s hit the Hopleaf. Let’s go.”
There was something monstrous in seeing an old man act like a spoiled child. FB had this boyish look, these boyish eyes, but he was old, and the smile he gave me now reminds me of the glee I see in Trump: the same oblivious disregard for others, the same awful self-regard. I had not put on my coat.
“You should apologize,” I said, one finger tapping the card table.
“For what?” FB said. “For making them money? For making them rich? I’m not fucking apologizing.”
“You’re not well,” I said.
Averill said, “You don’t say that.” She sat down again. “You don’t say that about people.”
“People who are well don’t take walks at midnight in the worst of winter,” I said. “They don’t take photos of frightened animals. They don’t frighten animals.” It was much later that I realized my cowardice. I didn’t ask, What is wrong with you? How can we help you? Instead I said again, “You’re not well.”
FB pulled a thick scarf tight around his neck, and the scarf tilted his hat. He pulled the brim down, so I could no longer make out his eyes.
Averill said, “You don’t say that either. You’re not supposed to talk about what people post about their personal lives on Facebook. It’s a rule. It’s how you’re supposed to behave. How do you not know that?”
Here’s one thing I knew: If a man wears a hat indoors and out, it’s because he’s going bald and he’s covering it up. I imagined taking FB’s hat off. While I was actively resisting this impulse, while I was doing all I could not to take off FB’s hat and toss it, this stupid object he wore like a protective talisman—that’s when I realized that Averill had also followed FB’s night walk. She had not clicked Like on any of the photos. She had pretended she was not aware. But she was. Likely the whole office had. Likely the whole office was worried, or at least mildly concerned, but they had said nothing. Because it was what you did if someone in trouble was not family. You did nothing.
The owner’s daughter returned, still furious. “You need to leave,” she said.
FB put his palms up, smiled his awful boyish smile, told the girl we’re leaving, we’re all leaving, and I was so angry—because the girl totally smiled back at FB, totally bought his act, and the one she was still furious with was me, and I really did love their spinach pies, their Turkish Delights, and she’d be there whenever I came in. So buying stuff here would now be awkward: it was going to be awkward forever.
“There’s been a misunderstanding,” I said.
“There has been,” FB said. “We’re just trying to make your dad some moolah. This man’s a good man.” He gripped my shoulder. “Don’t hold his vices against him. He just made your dad bank, honey.”
I blushed. The girl gave me a look that suggested it’d be okay to return here, that I was forgiven for being a lush and a jerk, mostly. I didn’t know quite how to feel about any of this, and that’s when I saw the girl get a good look at FB’s hat.
“Is that John Hughes’s autograph?” she said. “You know John Hughes?”
It took days for me to let the whole thing go, and by then it was close to Thanksgiving, a time when the energy at the office took on a boozy, dilatory quality, when people just sort of stop showing up and worked from home, so I found myself alone at the office. I had to stay late to work on a different campaign. The kids had their own projects. So did my wife. They were going to town on pizza, and kept sending me photos. Our youngest had figured out how to use filters. She kept putting these little puppy ears and puppy noses on the pizza.
Our office had these blinds you operate with a single switch. They glided up and a good chunk of the Loop revealed itself: the slow churn of the Chicago River, the lobbies of lonely condos, you could even see a little bit of the Wrigley Building, the bridges that are sometimes raised but mostly stay put. I had been on my computer for a while, trying to figure out what to do, procrastinating on Facebook, when I noticed that FB posted a photo that was pretty much identical to my own view. At first I thought he had taken the photo earlier and was just getting around to posting it, but it was a late November afternoon, a dark blue, so you could see who had turned on the lights inside their office spaces and who hadn’t, and the lit windows on the photo matched the lit windows in real life. FB was here, with me, close by.
I found him on the balcony. He had that bizarre native Chicagoan tolerance for extreme cold: all he wore was a fleece zip-up and his Cubs hat. He smoked a cigar. He drank one of his IPAs. He photographed the city.
“What I tell people is how much it’s changed,” he said. He wasn’t surprised to see me, and he seemed almost happy.
“It’s pretty,” I said. “It’s wide and broad and the buildings are something else.”
He pointed at the Trump Tower, at the letters. “That fucker,” he said.
“I thought you were okay with him.”
“That’s what Averill thinks,” he said. “What they all think. That I’m this asshole hardcore Republican.” He flipped off the tower and finished off whatever was in his bottle. “I’m not.”
“That’s good,” I said. “That’s good to know.”
“I mean,” he said, “these dudes were something else back in the eighties, back when I was growing up.” He opened another beer and handed it to me. “Different politics. You could be a Republican back then; it was actually cool. The music was better. The Loop was rough, man, but everything was better. Simpler. You know they all think I got this job because of the movie, yes? Or because my dad?”
I didn’t. I had not realized that his dad had anything to do with our firm. No one had told me. I had not asked.
He said, “Or anyway, you think your life is going to go a certain way. You think you know where you are going. I mean, there’s this bit at the end of the movie where I’m like telling you everything that’s going to happen. And everything does. I mean, the movie doesn’t imagine how brutal it all gets. The me who is actually Matthew Broderick. How your first girlfriend has to get a mastectomy because cancer. How you don’t visit, you just send a card, how she never really forgives you. She still lives here, you know.” He jabbed with his freshly opened bottle at the city. “Also, the kid has no clue his best friend’s going to kill himself, though if you ask anyone—like, seriously, ask anyone who’s seen the movie; it’s totally clear the kid is going to kill himself. I mean, you’ve seen the movie, it’s clear.”
It was not a good time to tell FB that I had not seen the movie, that I was the only person who had somehow managed not to see this movie.
I said, “I’m so sorry about your friend.”
He shrugged. “Years ago. Because depression. He made it through college. We were all worried he wouldn’t. Good kid.” It was bitterly cold, and his ears were bright red, but he did not seem to notice or care. “You’ve seen the movie,” he said again. “Hughes knew, man. He really did. How sad it gets. How sad you get, when you know you’re living the best years of your life and are at the top of your game, how it’s all downhill from there, how no one tells you you’re pretty much going to be alone. How your wife will leave you. Your second wife too. Also, your third. How your kids won’t talk to you. How the best time to be alive is when you’re a teenager. and the rest is just shit, man. I mean it’s just shit.”
I should have told him about my own terrible time as a teenager. I had been very sick; I had almost died. This was back in Colombia. My parents went through some pretty excruciating years trying to keep me alive. How I was this weird sick kid with no friends, no one but his family, and how lonely and scary it was to grow up in isolation.
I should have disagreed and I should have shared, and I was thinking of doing so, but that’s when a party boat zipped by. Whatever I said was drowned by whooping and shouting.
“Those assholes,” he said. “They don’t know.” There was nothing left of his new beer. “They will.”
My phone did its little animal purr. It was another picture: the whole family with puppy ears and puppy noses.
I wanted to share, but I didn’t. I didn’t really know if it would make FB happy or sad, didn’t really want him to say something awful. For him to say, Like, just give it a few years. For him to say, Wait a few years and you’ll be me. These kids won’t talk to you. They’ll think you’re so lame. You’ll go bald. You’ll wear a hat, and you’ll tell everyone who recognizes the autograph about the hat. You’ll badger junior colleagues late at night when you’re drunk. You’ll do it all.
“I do love living here,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say. I think I wanted to say, I do love living. Being alive. I was supposed to die a long time ago. I had this serious defect in my heart. I wasn’t supposed to live. Even now, there’s an increased chance for some cancers, plus just a very real possibility of a drastically shortened lifespan. My wife and I have talked about it, though maybe not as much as we should. But thank God for the agency’s excellent health insurance, and for their excellent life insurance. We’ll be okay. I mean, They. I mean my family, should anything happen, which there’s a good chance it won’t.
FB was nodding all the while, nodding and trying to smile. “It is a hell of a city,” he said. “Best food, best people.”
“Worst weather,” I said.
“That too,” he said. “Doesn’t stop anyone.” Another party boat zipped by. “Doesn’t stop our brave crew. Why aren’t you out there, by the way?” He was pointing at the river, and so I assumed, for a moment, that he meant a party boat. “Why aren’t you with Averill and the others at the bar?”
I didn’t know. I hadn’t been invited.
Back then I didn’t make much of it, but after I left the job, after we moved, I realized that I had never quite fit in. That they knew. That they had already decided: I didn’t belong.
“Hey, it’s okay,” he said. “I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad we’re having this talk.”
“Me too.”
I thought I was lying, I really did, but I was also enjoying our time together. I couldn’t feel my hands. I was shivering. I didn’t understand how FB could just stand there in the cold, and I thought of him in his midnight walk, and I realized that he would have worn much the same thing, which is how they found him, and why it doesn’t feel at all like a suicide, why none of us believed he meant to do himself in. He was walking his old neighborhood, taking the same route he had taken before. Maybe he photographed the same rabbits, the same deer, the same frozen river. He had been walking and then apparently he stopped; he sat down. It wasn’t cardiac arrest. It was just exposure. You can’t do it. Your body can’t just keep generating heat. It shuts down. I don’t think FB meant to kill himself. I believe he didn’t really think, wasn’t really thinking. He was just taking a lonely walk; he was trying to revisit the distant, golden past where he’d been indestructible, where he’d been shielded from the world by youth, where restlessness was a source of energy and not dread. You could walk and you could move about your neighborhood, and your neighborhood was your whole world, and you thought, I’m going somewhere. I’m going to end up somewhere.
Juan Martinez is the author of Best Worst American, a story collection published by Small Beer Press and the inaugural winner of the Neukom Institute Award for Debut Speculative Fiction. He lives in Chicago and is an assistant professor at Northwestern University. His work has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, including Glimmer Train, McSweeney’s, Huizache, Ecotone, NPR’s Selected Shorts, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere. Visit and say hi at https://fulmerford.com
