And what kind of friend is Paul, if he’s just letting Arthur sit there, alone in it?
They murdered my son.
I step inside. It’s all dim lighting, the lull of old country music floating from weak speakers. It has the hum of a place that’s seen some shit and with a bunch of journalists working directly above it, I’ve no doubt it has. I head to Arthur’s booth, where he’s slumped forward, head down. Once I’m in front of him, I regret whatever it is I think I’m doing. I don’t really know Arthur that well, all things considered. He knows my name and takes a slightly-more-than-perfunctory interest in my life by asking how I am when he sees me, or asking after things he might have remembered from the last time we talked. Likes to give Paul shit on my behalf on their way out of the office. (“When you gonna promote that one, huh?”) They went to college together and he’s always promising me some devastatingly embarrassing stories about my boss “for leverage” but they never come. He looks up at me at the same time I’m wondering if I shouldn’t just walk back out, no one the wiser.
He squints.
“Lo?”
I clear my throat. “I just wanted to say I’m really sorry about Jeremy.”
“Oh. Thank you. I…” He pushes his pint aside, grabbing a crumpled napkin to wipe away the ring of condensation left behind. I don’t know why he does it; maybe for something to do with his hands. He doesn’t seem drunk. Just defeated. “I appreciate that. I’m sorry you had to witness…” He gestures feebly above us. “But thank you.”
I hesitate. Arthur’s sadness is confronting, brings the gravity of carrying his son’s last moments to the fore. It makes me feel like I owe him something less than what I know—but more than leaving him like this.
“What was he like?” I ask.
“Jeremy?”
I nod and it seems to rouse Arthur as much as it undoes him. He straightens, but his eyes get bright. An impossibly important question, now that he’s keeper of his son’s memory. He looks pointedly at the seat across from him. I slip into the booth.
“He was a good kid. And a … a hard kid. My girlfriend and I, we were twenty-two when we had him. Didn’t plan for it. But we were going to make it work. Well.” He laughs. “She walked out about a month after having him and then it was just me and Jeremy. But we did it, we made it work.” He pauses. “Would you like to see a picture?”
He digs into his pocket for his wallet. It’s worn, held together by mere threads. Arthur notices me notice this and says, “This was … it’s Jeremy’s wallet. It’s all he had on him when he died.” My stomach turns as he opens it up and points to one side with a few IDs. “That’s his side.” It’s so fucking sad.
A small card, a little bigger than a business card, catches my eye.
“What’s that?” I ask, pointing.
Arthur blinks, confused, then pulls it out and shows it to me.
“A Bible Tract,” he says.
There’s a blue sky on it. A verse in the center. But the Lord is faithful, He will lend you strength and guard you from the evil one.—2 Thessalonians 3:3.
Jeremy was using it as scrap paper, it looks like. There are scribbles across the front, shaky-looking handwriting with a time scrawled on it: 3:30.
Arthur swallows, offers a guess without my asking: “I think he had an appointment … somewhere. And why would he have that in his pocket, reminding him, if he was gonna end it?”
I don’t point out that the card lacks a date—that maybe the appointment had passed. He’s turned his attention to the main event: a photo tucked into the billfold. It’s a high school graduation photo, the Jeremy in it younger than the one I encountered. He has the kind of face that wouldn’t be worth another look if I hadn’t already seen him before, but because I have, there’s something about it. Jeremy doesn’t look happy, but he doesn’t look sad. There’s an absence of intensity. I could believe a smile on his mouth goes all the way up to his eyes. My throat tightens as I hand the photo back to Arthur.
“You never mentioned him,” I say.
Arthur purses his lips.
“We’ve been estranged a few years. We rarely spoke.”
A cold feeling settles over me.
Do I know you?
Arthur shifts, misinterpreting my sudden tension.
“Because—he was complicated. Jeremy. He suffered from major depression. He attempted to take his life a few times and sometimes I had to intervene against his will. He never quite forgave me for that, so … so as soon as he could get away, that’s what he did. And that was just fine with me as long as he was—as long as he was here.”
“I’m so sorry, Arthur.”
“He got in with this real bad crowd.” He closes his eyes and then, just as quickly, opens them. He takes his phone from his pocket. “Look at this.” He angles the screen so I can see. “They kept him from me. They wouldn’t let me see my son.”
He opens the gallery and starts swiping through pictures of Jeremy. All of them have been taken in public, and in all of them Jeremy is surrounded by a small group of people of varying ages, races. Real bad crowd wouldn’t be the first words they called to mind. Jeremy wears the smile I bet on before, the one that goes all the way up to his eyes—but this is a much more recent Jeremy than the one Arthur keeps tucked in his wallet. There’s an unsettling, watchful distance to the photos themselves.
“Did you take these?”
“I hired someone.”
He keeps moving through the gallery, going further and further back, the change of seasons evident by each shot’s surroundings. Jeremy is the constant, unaware and seemingly happy in these small, captured moments. I can’t even glimpse his future in this past.
“See?” Arthur asks. “Do you see?”
No, I think—but then a woman appears on Jeremy’s right, her arm around his shoulder, her face close to his. My heart stops completely and everything around me seems to fall slowly away, the sounds of the bar buried by the buzzing in my head …
I know you.
I grab the phone from Arthur and as soon as it’s in my hands, my heart starts up again, beating wildly. The sounds in the bar come rushing back louder than before. I stare at the picture for a long moment and then I swipe back through time, and there she is again … and again …
“He was in The Unity Project?”
“How did you know?”
I shake my head, the answer to Arthur’s question residing in a place beyond my voice while my eyes stay stuck on the screen, on a face I haven’t seen in …
“Lo?”
Years.
“Sorry,” I finally manage. “It’s just so…”
“I know,” he says, but he doesn’t. Arthur takes his phone back and I have to let him do it, even though everything inside me wants to look a little longer. Forever. I raise my eyes to meet his and he stares at me intently. He reminds me so much of his son, I have to look away.
“I just don’t understand,” he says. “Why would he jump? Why?”
The edges of the storm have found their way inside and the air thickens with the musty, almost metal-tinged scent of rain and pavement. That musty, metal-tinged scent of rain and station. I close my eyes and I see Jeremy, but it’s different now.