We both took a drink of coffee.
“There are no shortcuts,” she said. “You have to do the hard stuff before it gets any easier.”
19
Things I’m Seeing Without You:
Me: A completely dark bedroom in Minnesota. All I have to do is turn on the bedside lamp, stare at it intently for ten seconds, and then switch it off, and I can make everything go away. Poof! When the afterimage has wobbled off, there is nothing there but complete blackness.
Me: Even with my eyes open, I can see nothing. And it feels, for a moment, like I’m part of that nothing. I can’t help asking you, Jonah: Is this what being dead feels like? Is it really as dark and empty as we think? Or is it silly for me even to pretend I can know?
When I was young, I used to pray every night.
My family’s not religious, so it was kind of a dirty secret. And my prayer was not the regular kind. It was more of a neurotic laundry list. I decided at some point that if I didn’t mention all of my family members and friends inmy prayers, they would come to some harm in the night.
A falling piano would come crashing through their ceiling to squash them. Or God would pick them up and flick them into outer space with his enormous fingers just to punish me for my lack of devotion. I also had to bless the room I was in, object by object (“And bless you, clothes hamper”) or I couldn’t get to sleep.
At some point I stopped all of this—I can’t remember when—but the habit of chatting with someone in the dark is a hard one to break. Which is why I was still talking to Jonah in my head, I guess. Even though I could create total blackness in my room, my thoughts always seemed to glow in the dark. And sometimes the only way to get them to dim was to tell them to someone else.
Which is probably what led me to dig out my phone and dial a number that had been sitting in my “recent calls” box for a few days. I listened to the ringing, so loud in the silence of the night, and when I heard an answer, I didn’t say hello. Instead I said:
“Tell me what he was like.”
And though it had been days since we had last spoken, and though it was three in the morning, Daniel did not seem angry. He just seemed a little confused.
“I thought we weren’t going to talk again,” he said.
“Did you hear me?” I said.
Daniel sighed.
“I heard you,” he said. His voice sounded tired. “But I’m not sure I can tell you.”
“Because you don’t want to?”
He dropped one of his signature pauses.
“Because I still don’t know which was the real Jonah. The first one or the last one.”
I knew by this point that just because Daniel was done speaking for the moment, it didn’t mean he was done speaking for good. And sure enough, this time was no exception.
“I’d like to think that when he was on his medication, that was the real him. That was the best version. But later, when he was off it, I can’t really deny that was him, either. It’s hard to separate them.”
“Okay then,” I said. “Start with the one I met.”
“The one you met,” said Daniel, “was the closest thing I’ve ever had to a best friend.”
He paused for longer than usual this time, so long that I asked: “You still there?”
He was and he started to talk.
“On the first day in our room together, move-in day, Jonah sensed that I was nervous and... not very social.Which was true, I guess. I’d never really been in a place like MIT before. My dad was in the air force. My mom got a trade degree.
“So, he took me out of our dorm room and we went around knocking on every door in the hall, like Jehovah’s Witnesses. And when people opened up, he said, ‘This is Daniel Torres. He seems really cool. You should probably be his friend.’ I honestly don’t think I would have talked to anyone if he hadn’t done that. And it was so easy for him.
“He didn’t even think of it as doing something nice for me. It was just what he thought he was supposed to do. That night, we played video games until two in the morning and made a frozen pizza. And he told me that he’d had some problems in high school, but he had decided to forget about all that and have an incredible year. And he asked was I willing to join him in that endeavor? That’s what he said ‘endeavor.’”
“Sounds nice,” I said.
