Youth and Young Manhood
By Conor Christofferson
Winter, Six
The thought came to me in a flash. A deep, resonant emptiness, a swirling black void. It’s funny how that works. Thirty seconds earlier I had been prone on my bed, envisioning my future as a Chicago Bear – juking and stiff arming like Walter Payton – and in the space of a breath I was paralyzed with dread.
That was the night I discovered death – the permanence of it, the finality.
I hadn’t been completely naïve to the concept, of course. My box turtle, Steve, slipped his mortal coil earlier that winter, so I was vaguely aware of what it meant to expire. But it wasn’t until that night that I fully digested the extravagant horror of no longer existing.
That was the night I realized I was going to die, my mom was going to die, and everyone I had ever met or would ever meet was going to die. And worse yet, that death was just an infinity of nothing. It was the absence of everything, forever. This understanding appeared in my brain, fully formed, through some dark magic. It wasn’t there, and then it just was, covering me like a shroud. My head swam. I was six years old, tucked inside my safe and warm home as a brutal winter storm churned outside in the dark.
Decades have passed, but I can still manifest the sweeping terror I felt that night. I was dizzy as I stumbled upstairs to find my mom, to share my burden with her. I wanted desperately for her to explain that I was wrong, that death was not lying in wait. But she didn’t do that. She hugged me, sat me on her lap and rubbed my back.
“Sweetheart, death is just part of life,” she said.
That didn’t help. I was crying hysterically. I remember Unsolved Mysteries was on TV. Mom was drinking boxed merlot and eating plain rice cakes.
“I don’t want to die,” I said between sobs. “I don’t want you to die.”
“You don’t need to worry about that. I’m not going to die for a long, long time. Neither are you. It’s all going to be okay,” she said, kissing my cheek.
I will always remember the tenderness in her eyes.
“Everything’s going to be okay,” she whispered over and over again, gently rocking me until I fell asleep on her lap.
Summer, Sixteen
This would have been the summer I decided to perform wild, nonsensical feats of stupidity for reasons that are not entirely clear to me now. As best as I can recollect, these outbursts weren't meant to impress or inspire or even startle. It was simply a matter of poor impulse control, of surrendering to intrusive thoughts.
I remember eating an ashtray full of cigarette butts and washing them down with the hand-warm remnants of an Old English 40. I remember leaping – entirely unprompted – from the roof of my house at three in the morning, my size 42 JNCO jorts fluttering through the night sky before landing somewhat safely in the canopy of a bushy oak tree. I ate things and chugged things and took off my clothes. I stole things and swore loudly and vandalized anything in my way. I was sixteen years old. I was alive and momentarily convinced I would stay that way forever.
That summer we cruised Main Street in a baby blue El Camino, bumping Wu-Tang Clan CDs from comically poor car speakers. We hollered at girls cruising Main in their mom’s Camry or dad's pickup. They hollered back in between drags of Parliament Lights.
“Hey,” I’d say, my head lolling from the passenger window at a stop light.
“Hey,” she’d say.
It was the summer of girls. They were suddenly everywhere. It was the summer of masturbating to Janet Jackson videos on MTV, the television muted so you could hear if your mom was getting home from work.
My personality that summer was raw and malleable. At home I was surly, mumbling three or four barely audible sentences to my parents each day. I was a wildcard with my friends, sometimes a gregarious wiseass and others a vicious dickhead prone to unleashing atomic wedgies and purple nurples. I remember feeling a sensation of wanting to cry and punch walls and scream with joy all at the same time. Teenage boys truly contain multitudes.
I know now that nothing is forever. I know that pain and sadness lurk around every corner. I know our bodies are conspiring against us, that mornings hurt and ankles hurt and heads ache for no damn reason. I know that bills are due and appointments are set and colons must be inspected. I know that life is as ephemeral as a blown kiss. But that summer, when I was sixteen, there was no past and no future, only the vast magnificence of now.
Fall, Twenty-Six
She asked me to spread her ashes in a peaceful river. Maybe. I can’t be certain about that. I wasn’t in a great headspace to remember instructions. This was in her gleaming white hospital room after it had been made clear that the bloodthirsty tumor would not be leaving her body. She had been in the hospital for less than a week. Three weeks earlier she was diagnosed with liver cancer. Two weeks before that she felt happy and healthy, enjoying what would be her final Halloween.
Now she was being told by a group of pitiless doctors that there was no more action to take. The tumor had grown so large and unruly that it was pushing against other organs, causing them to sputter and fail. Her skin was creamy yellow with jaundice, and the chemo gave her unbearable, bleeding sores in her mouth. Her body was throwing up the white flag, surrendering to the inevitable.
I had been back home for just two days and hadn’t yet acclimated to my new reality. I was in a daze, stumbling from one sterile room to another with the heavy-footed clumsiness of an anxiety dream. I sat at her bedside and held her frail hand, which felt cold and papery.
“You’ve always been so kind to women,” my mother slurred at me. She tried to smile, but it didn’t quite take shape and a dollop of drool slid down her chin. I remember thinking: At least the drugs are working.
The family decided dying in the hospital would be too depressing, so we took her home. We huddled around her bed, waiting. I was there, next to her, when she took her last wheezing breath. In an instant, the most important person in my life became a lifeless body.
For years, I thought back on this moment and looked for the poetry in it. I needed it to mean something more than what it was – more than just another life being extinguished. I needed it to illuminate something deeper about the world, about myself.
It’s just that the fragility of it all sometimes feels like more than I can take. The improbability of surviving even a single day inside these tender, exposed bodies is preposterous. A careless step into traffic, an aneurysm, an armed incel, a few mutated cells — just about anything can snuff us out at any moment.
In the end, all we can do is wait for the barbarous tide to come in and wash us away.
Spring, Thirty-Six
Charlie was blue the first time I saw him. Blue like the dawn sky. Blue like a baby Smurf swaddled in white linen under bright incubator lights. He was on display, this tiny blue boy. My tiny blue boy. We could look, but they wouldn’t let us hold him yet. We being my wife and I. They being the doctors.
“He’s so … blue,” I stammered, thinking I should say something. I was drunk of course, which partially dulled the indescribable horror I felt as I pressed my face against the neonatal ward glass.
The young, aloof doctor told us Charlie was afflicted with something called Blue Baby Syndrome which, as it turns out, is a real diagnosis and not something he made up on the spot because he didn’t know what was happening to our child. You see, Charlie wasn’t getting enough oxygen in his blood. This could mean any number of things, we were told. The doctor said it could be nothing of note, an unexplainable phenomenon that straightens itself out without intervention. Or it could be a congenital heart defect with an abysmal survival rate.
I remember thinking: My god, what an absurd reality we share. I remember thinking: I need a fucking drink.
I mention I was drunk that day only because you don’t know me. If you did, this tiny piece of the story would be superfluous. My intoxication would be a given. To know me at that time was to know me drunk. I suppose it was my attempt at smoothing out life’s razor sharp edges. I don’t drink like that anymore, but I still struggle with what you might call existential dread.
If I indulge these feelings, which I often do, say, when I’m all alone at night, in bed, gazing up through the tenebrous evening light to a solitary dark splotch on my white ceiling, I can easily conjure my 6-year-old self, panicking at the unfathomable totality of death.
How do I bring myself back from that abyss, you might ask? Simple. I think of Charlie. Not blue Charlie in the incubator, but Charlie today. Charlie the rosy cheeked 16-year-old with a curtain of floppy hair covering his eyes, usually bloodshot from hours of staring at some videogame. Charlie gives me hope. He keeps the wolves at bay through his very existence.
You might think this is all a bunch of navel-gazing. You might think there is no point to dwelling on the enormity of existence. You might be right.
Right now I am breathing crisp April air. Right now the sun is warm on my face. Right now I am alive, and I will stay that way until the moment I am not. I am alive. So is Charlie. So are you.
THE END
Author Bio: Conor Christofferson lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest. His journalism and short stories can be found in Rolling Stone, Seattle Weekly, Muleskinner Journal, Literally Stories, The Atlantic's CityLab, and more.