What Didn't Happen

“Do you feel like a hypocrite?” Jay asked as they dressed in his bedroom. Jay Strickland had put on one of the old outfits he used to wear to school, dark blazer, black pants, white shirt, red tie. Michael was wearing a whole new suit Jay had never seen, and a thin tie hung in his hand.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I never really did funerals. Mom says we’ll be going to them for the rest of our lives.”

“I don’t plan on that,” Jay shook his head. “I’m tired of funerals.”

It had started junior year and far from them. Keith, one of the boys at Saint Ignatius, had lost his sister in a car wreck, and Jay had to negotiate the tricky ground of looking grief stricken for someone he had never known and feeling sympathy for a rude classmate who smelled like stale pancakes and syrup, and whom he had never liked. And then had come the phone call right before senior year from the class president that said Joe had died in the car crash. Jay was going to this funeral because he had not gone to that one.

That first night when he and Michael had hung out at the quarry lake was the first night Jay understood himself, so when the spiraling down and the exhaustion had occurred, he knew what it was and realized it had always been around. When he thought, “I can’t go on,” and he didn’t go on, at least he knew he wasn’t the first to feel it. What if Michael had never told him what he had gone through? He hadn’t even been able to pick up the phone which was just as well because by then Michael was back in the looney bin again. Call it the looney bin and take away its power, or rather take away the power of being shamed by those who never went. Jay did not go. In his mind the asylum was like some type of monastery and Jay, in the back of his parents house, doing nothing but losing his mind, thought of himself as a Third Order member. In this new faith, everything seemed crazy and everyone appeared to be mad. It was so clear that he was not the only one going crazy, but that no one else seemed to mind.

This afternoon, as they drove to Sacred Heart, Jay remembered the first uncloudy day. The first day he could move again, and how he didn’t know how long this would last. Just long enough to enroll in college, to make sure he didn’t stay home. When he made the decision to go across the river he thought, “Not too far. Just far enough. What if it doesn’t work? What if I have to go back home? What if I’m mad for the rest of my life…?”

And it sent him spiraling down for just a moment before he moved on. Moving on was almost impossible. There was no cheering up. There was just doing. It was like having a refrigerator placed on the bridge of your nose, and going forward because you had to. His enrollment happened through a great depression, and when the mood had cleared just enough, he got on the phone with Michael.

“Cross town? At Claremont?”

“If you’re up to it,” Jay said.

It would be good to go to school together, and yet, Jay was aware that Michael might not be up to it. He didn’t stay on campus, and he didn’t always come to class, and Jay began to think, “Well, in the end, I will have to be up to it.”

Can you be up to it?

“I don’t know,” Jay said.

At Tony’s funeral, Jay saw a lot of people he never planned to see again, and so did Michael. They sat side by side while the Mass went on, and Jay thought how the church was ugly and modern and the music was bad, and how odd the casket on the catafalque seemed. A casket for a nineteen year old football player who had called him a faggot.

He had heard, a few times, his Latin teacher, who talked about depression and mental illness say that Tony had it. But here his father, a famous attorney in town, wept about his son and his bipolar disorder and—he hadn’t expected this because Catholics didn’t admit it—his father wept about how his son had finally taken his life.

“He was just so SAD,” his father said.

Jay did not look at Michael. He didn’t look around at all. Sad was something teenagers felt all the time. It was a three letter word. How could anyone understand someone not being able to live from sadness? Jay knew. He knew what it was like to not want to get out of bed.

When the funeral was over and only a few people were in the church, Michael said, “We should have all been friends. If he was drowning like that, we should have known. I mean, we should have known each other. Helped each other.”

Jay looked around. There were only a few people scattered throughout the large, church with its beige brick walls and the thin, abstract stain glass windows. Where the mahogany casket had been was only the floor, as if a nineteen year old former football player hadn’t been lying embalmed there.

“He was such an asshole,” Jay said.

Michael stretched back and took a long breath. “Yeah…. He was.”

“I thought of him as my enemy. They always talk about dancing on the coffin of your enemy. He tortured me, and here I am in a church after his funeral.”

“In the end he saved me,” Michael said.

“What?”

“I don’t believe in Jesus,” Michael said, looking up at what Jay regarded as an unbelievable crucifix, elongated, emaciated, all of bleached and polished wood.

“I never believed that someone else could die in my place. That shit doesn’t make any sense. But if I tell you something I hope you don’t think less of me.”

“Alright?” Jay said, sounding uncertain.

“When you heard Tony was dead, what did you think?”

Jay opened his mouth, but then he closed it. He wanted to make sure he was telling the truth.

“I thought…. How I never liked him…. How I never knew he was in so much pain. I thought how I had felt that pain and…. How I didn’t even wish that on him, how with all that I’d felt, I’d never been to quite that place. I felt a lot of shit. And then I felt like I could go on. If that makes any sense, I felt like I could go on.”

Michael nodded very slowly while he looked closely at Jay, and then he turned away from him. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a note.

Jay unfolded it. It was very neat. Far neater than Michael usually was.

Dear Jay, I’m sorry. I couldn’t go on. You’re my best friend. Love never dies.

-Mike

“What the fuck is this?” Jay said.

Michael said, “It’s what didn’t happen.

“Remember that night, when we got high, and I came over and told you that I loved you and you were all weirded because I said I wanted you to know just in case anything should happen. That was my goodbye. When you called me the next day and told me about Tony, I had taken out a bottle of pills and my Dad’s Scotch. I was getting ready to do both and run a bath because I’d finally found one of those good old fashioned razor blades, like from the movies, that could cut a horse’s throat open. I didn’t want to leave anything to chance. I wanted to get it right, and it was about to happen. And then you called me and said it already had happened. That someone had just done it, so I felt like I couldn’t. Like I didn’t have to. If that makes sense, and I know it doesn’t. But we also know that I almost died, and now I’m here.”