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THE FIRST THING I SEE WHEN I TURN ON MY
COMPUTER, and the last thing I see when I turn it off, is a picture
of my dead friend Deirdre. (She is not dead in the picture, stupid.)
Stolen off the Internet, it is an unusually good picture of a woman who
was notoriously camera shy, and catches her at work with her radio
headphones on, looking quite beautiful and wearing an expression at once
dreamy and engaged, which terms seem to me to describe her polar essence
exactly. It surprises me how grateful I am to have it; I used to change my
computer desktop fairly often, but I have awarded this image the permanent
chair. (The Permanent At Least Until I Get a Better Computer Someday Chair
is its official, rarely used title.) Having lost her from the actual
world, I won't banish her from the virtual -- it would feel sort of like
murder.
I WENT OUT TO MY PARENTS' HOUSE the other day, where my
mother offered me a big heavy pile of back issues of a big heavy magazine
I wrote for about a decade back. They had exceeded the limit of their
keepsake meaning; they were no longer as important to her as the free
space their removal would create. (I didn't take this personally. We can
all use a little free space.) Among other blasts from the past, they were
full of articles by my dead friend Bob, who was unmade at something like
the age I am now by a congenital bum ticker, and whose late being
flickered from the page. It was spooky and moving. Of course I am always
reading the words of the dead (Shakespeare, he's dead; Fitzgerald, he's
dead; Frank O'Hara is dead too), but the dead you know -- the local dead
-- are different. I used to see Bob five days out of seven; he was one of
the few people in my life I'd call a mentor, not so much in a professional
sense but in a kind of cool older-brother way: He'd seen Thelonious Monk
play, and told strange stories hilariously of the old radical underground
in Madison and the boho expat scene in San Miguel de Allende, from which
he was himself farcically deported. By the time I knew him, he was
relatively respectable -- well, practical might be a better word.
I'm not sure he was ever respectable. And then one day, with a phone call,
he was gone.
I have his picture taped to
my wall. It's one of those slightly embarrassing
sitting-with-a-bottle-between-the-legs shots most every man will have
taken of him sometime in his life, but I didn't actually notice that until
recently; I like it because he looks happy and relaxed and at home in his
body and on Earth. It was his birthday. Next to that picture, thumb-tacked
to the window frame, is my last communication from Deirdre, a post card
written, she notes, "old fashioned pen and paper style! How odd," and
signed, "Hope to see you soon." (Not too soon, I hope, given the state of
things.) Her writing is all swoops and swings. And below that, next to a
snapshot of my parents dancing in the living room in 1964, is a picture of
another absent Bob, my old school chum and sometime roommate, when he
wasn't sleeping on a couch at the student center. This Bob might or might
not be dead, but he is gone anyway, off the radar, traceless. I would
prefer he not be dead, but it is not impossible, it is possibly probable.
After college, he moved to the dangerous city of San Francisco, where I
took this picture of him -- mug in hand, head inclined toward the lens,
about to say something lightly caustic -- and from which he would send
occasional dispatches: "Saw Poltergeist, Raiders O.T.L. Ark
and The Thang all in the same wknd. Now I'm upset because my life
has no special effects." The sort of special effects he got into there are
what make me think he might no longer be a citizen of this plane.
THOUGH I AM STILL YOUNG ENOUGH OR LUCKY enough that death
is more a novelty, if that's the word I want, than a routine (memo to
self: knock wood), there are less dramatic if sometimes no less
final ways to lose your friends. There are the ordinarily missing, the
victims of time and space, of laziness, or misplaced pride, or plain
busyness. (You can see some of the people some of the time, but you can't
see all of the people all of the time -- which is the appeal of eternity,
if they do lunch there.) There is also on my wall, for instance, a picture
of Francine, who is only a continually unwritten letter away. Or I could
pick up the phone, you know. My computer is forever offering to locate my
old friends, for a fee, though that seems a little . . . dirty, like
hiring a P.I.; I do my own cyberspatial searches from time to time, but my
instincts, and the odd unrequited e-mail, tell me that not everyone wants
to be found. (Or, though it is hard to imagine, not found by me.) I
received a cordial invitation to my high school reunion the other day, but
for $85 I would want some guarantees: that the people I really want to see
will be there, and that they will really want to see, or will even
remember, me.
And I do want to be remembered,
and to remember. My friends have always seemed to me not just a network,
but a net: the thing that keeps me from falling into nothingness. I don't
think of myself as particularly sentimental, except as regards small furry
animals, and I'm definitely not religious in the religious sense, but
certainly these pictures I have taped and tacked up around me constitute
some sort of shrine. And there is the shrine in my mind, where the dead
and missing congregate in stray thoughts and dreams, by day, by
night.
There is another photo of Deirdre,
coming out of a café in the Place Contrescarpe with Mark and Kevin (who
are still alive -- and where's that wood?) after a long night out
in the City of Light a dozen years ago. It's a little bit of stopped time,
stuck up on the side of the refrigerator. But time outside of pictures
moves on; you keep ahead of it for a while, then it mows you down. There
are no survivors. Deirdre, unlike, oh, me, at least knew where she
was going, even if she never quite got there; she had a plan -- possibly
it was more of a dream than a plan, but it was a dream with documentation,
with maps and photos of a certain spot on the south coast of Ireland. I
prefer to picture her there, with her tea and her birds, watching the
cyclical sea: not dead but just hard to reach. Goodnight, Deirdre, IT IS
SAFE TO TURN OFF MY COMPUTER NOW, I will see you in the morning.
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