* * *
We are able to navigate the world knowing these things happen. My chaplaincy supervisor once told me, “Children have always died. It is natural.” That may be true, but I can’t accept it. I couldn’t accept it sitting in the windowless family room, and I can’t accept it now, as a father myself.
* * *
When the kid finally went upstairs to the ICU and his parents followed, I walked to the break room to get a cup of coffee, and the doctor was in there, her face hovering over a trash can that she’d been vomiting into. “I’m sorry,” I said. “You did good with them. Thanks for being kind to them. I think it helped.” She dry heaved for a while and then said, “That kid’s gonna die and I know his last words. I know the last thing he’ll ever say.” I didn’t ask her to tell me what it was, and she didn’t volunteer.
A week later, I finished the chaplaincy program, and decided not to go to divinity school. I told everyone it was because I didn’t want to learn Greek, which was true, but it was also true that I couldn’t cope with the memory of this kid. I still can’t cope with it. I thought about him every day. I prayed for him every day, even after I stopped praying about anything else. Every night, still, I say his name and ask God for mercy. Whether I believe in God isn’t really relevant. I do believe, however tenuously, in mercy.
As an inveterate googler, I knew I could have just looked up his name, but I was too scared. To google would have been to know, one way or another. I’m reminded of that great line from Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men: “The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can’t know. He can’t know whether knowledge will save him or kill him.”
* * *
The months of not knowing became years, then more than a decade. And then one morning not long ago, I typed the kid’s name into the search bar. It’s an unusual name, easy pickings for Google. I hit enter. The first link was to a Facebook. I clicked over, and there he was. Eighteen years old, a decade and a half removed from the one night we spent together.
He is alive.
He is growing up, finding his way in the world, documenting a life that is more public than he probably realizes. But how can I not be grateful for knowing, even if the only way to know is to lose our autonomy over our so-called selves? He is alive. He likes John Deere tractors, and is a member of the Future Farmers of America, and he is alive.
Scrolling through his friends, I find his parents’ profiles, and discover that they are still married. He is alive. He likes terrible, overly manufactured country music. He is alive. He calls his girlfriend his bae. Alive. Alive. Alive.
It could’ve gone the other way, of course. But it didn’t. And so I can’t help but give the practice of googling strangers four stars.
INDIANAPOLIS
INDIANAPOLIS IS THE SIXTEENTH LARGEST CITY in the U.S. by both population and land area. It is the capital of Indiana, and I guess it is now my hometown. Sarah and I moved to Indianapolis in the summer of 2007. We drove a U-Haul with all our worldly belongings from the corner of 88th and Columbus in New York City to the corner of 86th and Ditch in Indianapolis, an extremely stressful sixteen-hour drive. When we finally arrived in Indianapolis, we unpacked our stuff and slept on an air mattress in our new home, the first place we’d ever owned. We were in our late twenties, and we’d bought this house a few weeks earlier after spending maybe a half hour inside of it. The house had three bedrooms, two and a half baths, and a half-finished basement. Our mortgage payment was a third of what our New York rent had been.
I couldn’t get over how quiet and dark the house was that first night. I kept telling Sarah that someone could be standing right outside our bedroom window and we wouldn’t even know, and then Sarah would say, “Well, but probably not.” And I’m just not the sort of person who is effectively comforted by probablys, so several times through the night I got up from the air mattress and pressed my face against the glass of the bedroom window, expecting to see eyes staring back at me but instead finding only darkness.
The next morning, I insisted that we buy some curtains, but first we had to drop off the moving van. At the U-Haul return place, a guy handed us some paperwork to fill out, and asked us where we’d driven in from. Sarah explained that we had moved from New York for her job at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the guy said he’d been to the museum once as a kid, and then Sarah said, “So, what do you think of Indianapolis?”
And then the guy standing behind the counter at the U-Haul place paused for a moment before saying, “Well, you gotta live somewhere.”
Indianapolis has tried on a lot of mottoes and catchphrases over the years. Indianapolis is “Raising the Game.” “You put the ‘I’ in Indy.” “Crossroads of America.” But I’d propose a different motto: “Indianapolis: You gotta live somewhere.”
* * *
There’s no getting around Indianapolis’s many imperfections. We are situated on the White River, a non-navigable waterway, which is endlessly resonant as metaphor but problematic as geography. Furthermore, the river is filthy, because our aging water treatment system frequently overflows and dumps raw sewage directly into it. The city sprawls in every direction—endless mini-malls and parking lots and nondescript office buildings. We don’t invest enough in the arts or public transportation. One of our major thoroughfares is named Ditch Road, for God’s sakes. Ditch Road. We could name it anything—Kurt Vonnegut Drive, Madam C. J. Walker Way, Roady McRoadface—but we don’t. We accept Ditch.
Someone once told me that Indianapolis is among the nation’s leading test markets for new restaurant chains, because the city is so thoroughly average. Indeed, it ranks among the top so-called “microcosm cities,” because Indianapolis is more typically American than almost any other place. We are spectacular in our ordinariness. The city’s nicknames include “Naptown,” because it’s boring, and “India-no-place.”
When we first moved here, I would often write in the mornings at my neighborhood Starbucks, at the corner of 86th and Ditch, and I would marvel at the fact that all four corners of that intersection contained strip malls. Although I lived less than a half mile from that Starbucks, I often drove because there were no sidewalks. The land had been given over to cars, to sprawl, to flat-roofed soullessness.
I was disgusted by it. Living in a tiny apartment in New York City where we could never quite eradicate the mice, I had romanticized home ownership. But now that we actually had a house, I hated it. Indianapolis’s favorite literary son, Kurt Vonnegut, wrote that one of the flaws in the human character “is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.” Home ownership was all maintenance. There were always window treatments to install and light bulbs to change. The water heater kept breaking. And most of all, there was the lawn. God, I hated mowing the lawn. The lawn and the mini-malls of 86th and Ditch became the two poles of my resentment. I couldn’t wait for Sarah to get a job somewhere else.
* * *
Vonnegut once said, “What people like about me is Indianapolis.” He said that in Indianapolis, of course, to a crowd full of people from Indianapolis, but Kurt Vonnegut really did hold the city in high esteem. Toward the end of his life, he answered an interviewer’s question by saying, “I’ve wondered where home is, and I realized, it’s not Mars or some place like that. It’s Indianapolis when I was nine years old. I had a brother and a sister, a cat and a dog, and a mother and father and uncles and aunts. And there’s no way I can get there again.” Vonnegut’s greatest novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, is about a man who becomes unstuck in time, and how time conspires with consciousness. It’s about war and trauma, but it’s also about not being able to get back to before—before the firebombing of Dresden, before the suicide of Vonnegut’s mother, before his sister’s early death. I believe that Vonnegut loved Indianapolis. But it’s telling that from the time he could choose where to live, he did not choose to live here.