We Could Be Heroes

    The holidays can be a rough time if someone you love has recently died. I don’t think this insight is really going to blow anybody’s mind, but I’d never really experienced it first-hand until last year, when Christmas marked the one year anniversary of the moment when I realized my foster brother, Jesse, was in the midst of a manic episode — a manic episode that was followed by a bottomless depression that resulted in his dying in a murder-suicide, in which he killed his five-year-old daughter, as well. Now, two years later, I’ve hashed through the events that followed so many times that I can type them without really feeling the whooosh that I’m sure you just felt when you saw the words “murder-suicide” on the page. It’s not okay — it will never be okay — but it has become normal, in its way. How I feel about it changes from day to day. Lately it’s been rage. The rage is omnidirectional and it’s been destructive to my personal relationships. I think it’s made me a harder, less forgiving person, which I don’t like but can’t change.

    Lately, I was deposed as part of a lawsuit stemming from Jesse’s death. I suppose I probably shouldn’t talk too, too much about that, because it’s still pending. But it was a destabilizing experience. To have a stranger ask you, again and again, for details about a friendship that you can barely bring yourself to think about (or stop thinking about), is disorienting. I said things aloud that I’d barely allowed myself to think before. I was legally required to say those things out loud, in a room full of people I neither knew nor trusted. Afterwards, I managed to contain my tears almost until I got on the elevator. For some reason it seemed really important that I not let any of the lawyers see me cry.

    I guess because it’s the holidays, and because of the deposition, I’ve been thinking about Jesse a lot lately. His final months have tended to color my memories of everything about him with a tinge of nihilism. I think about driving him home from school one day nineteen years ago, a gray Portland afternoon, the day we became friends, and it feels meaningless, ugly. I think about making a ceremonial bonfire of his old notebooks on a bridge over the Clackamas River, and then stomping it out in fits of laughter, and it feels meaningless, ugly. I think about his wedding day, the first Christmas after he moved into our house, and especially the day his daughter was born — meaningless, ugly. This is where the rage comes from, I think. I no longer feel sad, I no longer see the tragedy. I just see the pointlessness of our whole friendship, of the love I poured on him and his daughter, of the time we spent together, and it pisses me off.

    And so, because I do not wish to feel this way, I’m going to tell you a story about the two of us that, no matter what happened after, mattered. It’s not a big story, but it’s a true story. This is a Christmas gift to myself, to remember this.

    I can’t remember the year anymore, or even the month, though my memory is that it was the kind of cool, gray, but dry day that you only really get in like October or maybe April. Jesse and I were driving down a road on the west side of town, out towards Beaverton — much more his part of town than mine; before his father died and he moved in with us, he’d lived out close to the Portland-Beaverton line, while I had spent nearly my whole life in urban Southeast Portland. That side of town is ribbed with high green hills, which are in turn lined with winding busy roads that stream down toward the basin where Portland proper lies gridded over the flats. I can’t remember anymore what we were doing over there. I can’t remember what we were talking about. I can’t even remember which one of us was driving. I can remember, with vivid acuity, gazing through the windshield as we approached a curve in the road. Car after car glided left, around the curve — but the car in front of us didn’t. It just kept going straight, as though its driver had decided to release the wheel and see what would happen. What happened was that it disappeared over the lip of the road. I remember thinking to myself that the most remarkable thing was how unremarkable it was — it happened soundlessly, slowly, almost as if it were the most natural thing in the world for every tenth car around that curve to slip into oblivion beyond its edge.

    We pulled over, along with many people both in front and behind us. As I got out of the car, I took in the situation below: beyond the lip of the road lay a steep, ivied slope studded with Douglas firs; the car that had gone over had slid sideways down this slope and smacked into one of these trees with its passenger door, pinning the car’s frame heavily against the trunk and leaving the wheels spinning ineffectually at ground upon which they couldn’t quite gain purchase. Just visible through the driver’s side window was an elderly woman, who appeared to be helpless to shove the door open against the pull of gravity.

    I remember Jesse peeling off his jacket and saying to me, “Dial 911.”

    “What are you going to do?” I had been busy coming up with excuses not to go down there — the one I’d landed on was that she might have done something to her spine and it probably wasn’t a good idea to move her.

    But Jesse was already gone, sliding down the uneven slope on his huge feet. I watched him for a second, and then pulled out the little flip phone I had in those days. For the first time in my life, I called 911. It made me unaccountably nervous. When the operator answered, my voice quaked. I told her an old lady was down in a gully in her car and might need rescue. The operator asked me where we were. I couldn’t quite remember. I think I told her we were at 17th and Taylors Ferry Road. Once we had hung up, I went back to the lip of the road to watch what was happening.

    Jesse had reached the old lady’s car, pulled open the driver’s side door, and stood against it, propping it open with his back as he heaved the woman out of her seat. Then he hoisted her over his shoulder, more or less like a sack of potatoes, and began climbing up the slope toward the road. I could hear him apologizing for the indignity of it even as he did it.

    Before he reached the top, a siren sounded, and a firetruck appeared up toward the top of the hill — but then, before reaching us, it veered off onto a side street. I realized, suddenly and with complete certainty, that I had given them the wrong location. It would be a few minutes before they realized it too and followed a daisy chain of other 911 calls back to the actual scene of the accident.

    Before they got there, Jesse had hauled the old woman up to street level and set her down on the hood of our car. He was asking her a series of questions that I suspect were meant to test her for concussion — though he was by profession an operations manager for a mortgage company, Jesse had always had the aspect of a cop or a military person, and cultivated many of the skills needed for those professions. These included hand-to-hand combat skills and a strong grasp of human anatomy.

    They also included the instinct to approach disaster in an attempt to help. I have long held a theory about human beings, one that is crude but, I think, true. This theory posits that there are basically three types of people: people who run towards a fire, people who run away from a fire, and people who stand and watch a fire. Most people, for sound evolutionary and psychological reasons, fall in the latter two categories. I am, I have discovered repeatedly, of the stand-and-watch school, often of the stand-and-watch-and-try-to-remember-how-I’m-going-to-phrase-it-later school. But Jesse wasn’t one of us. Jesse was the sort of person who ran towards a disaster, to see if he could rescue anybody from it. The truth is that a lot of the actions Jesse took in his life fall under an aegis that we name heroism. He was proud of that.

    On bad days, I let that taint how I feel about heroism. I’m already cynical about such concepts, and if Jesse hadn’t been such a regular example — this was not the only time I saw him do this sort of thing, though it is the most dramatic — I probably wouldn’t believe it was a real thing. I already have a tendency to think that our ascription of moral virtue to the performance of heroic acts is a bit . . . generous. But then maybe I’m just resolving the cognitive dissonance involved in the fact that I am the protagonist of my own life, but certainly not the hero.

    I’ve been reading Amanda Ripley’s The Unthinkable, about how people respond in various disasters and why. Toward the end of the book she starts digging around in a database of heroes — the sorts of people who run toward a fire in hopes of helping. They have some things in common: they tend to be male; they tend to come from small towns; they tend to have good relationships with their parents; they tend to have friends from all walks of life. Jesse and I each had two of these things: we were both male; he had friends from all walks of life, and I have a good relationship with my parents. But there’s another variable that he had and I don’t: he believed that he could control what happened to him. He had a romantic, almost mystical image of himself as a powerful person — powerful physically, mentally. His childhood had been traumatic, and I think his adulthood was largely about wresting control away from those who held him captive as a kid. Me? I’ve been riding the waves my whole life, just trying not to drown. No one really hurt me as a child. But I also don’t really believe I can change anything. I believe in basically immutable systems.

    There are several facile readings of those alleged insights that could lead one to explain the manner of Jesse’s death. But that would be reading life like a novel, and if there’s one thing I believe above all others, it’s that life is not art and attempts to make it so are destructive. This is just a story about two young men, one of whom is dead now.