THE KENT STATE massacre. May 4, 1970. The lives of five students were taken when the National Guard opened fire on a group of peaceful protestors, the first time in American history that the government has knowingly executed its citizens for practicing their First Amendment rights.
There was no light around us, just traces of moonlight through the trees.
The long, open quad created a funnel for wind to whistle directly to the clearing where we stood. Leaves brushed across the sign, the monument, the bell at the bottom of the hill and the statues at the top of it.
“Do you . . . do you think . . .” Mara was breathless. “This protest . . .”
I nodded.
“Five . . . five people died.”
I nodded again.
“And he was there. He watched five people . . . he watched what he did get five people killed.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Do you think that’s why . . . he had to come back? Because he watched someone die?”
“It wasn’t just someone.”
I nodded to a smaller stone behind the memorial, inscribed with the names of the deceased. The first name on the list:
Jeffery Kopek.
The weight of my grandfather’s life, both hidden and apparent, his trauma and loss and loneliness and disease, crashed onto both of us. At once, it made sense.
Jeffery was the protagonist of his novel. Jeffery was the hero of his Green River short story. Jeffery Kopek was the name next to my grandpa’s on the wall in Denver. Jeffery Kopek was Sue’s son, for whom my grandpa had been responsible.
Jeffery Kopek had been more than a passing character in my grandpa’s life. He had been my grandpa’s life. When my grandpa wrote of great love, and great loss, great guilt and great pain, his great angel, finding what he was looking for, and letting it go, and making it back, it was Jeffery that he was writing about.
And my grandpa had watched him die.
I remembered Dr. Patterson’s description of trauma: the internal forgetting, the way our brains choose to block the things they couldn’t bear to remember. My grandpa hadn’t just forgotten Jeffery dying; he’d forgotten Jeffery’s existence, Great Purpose, his train trips, and his friends along the way. He’d forgotten everything, left it behind in a novel, and started a new life. But it never left him.
“Do you think when he said ‘my great angel’—”
I nodded.
Mara sniveled loudly, holding herself together and squeezing tears back into her eyes. I put my arm around her and pulled her closer to me. She was warm, and her hair clung statically to my jacket. “‘Full speed to you.’ This was who he was looking for.” I paused for a moment. “This is who he was writing to.”
She squeezed my chest. “Are you okay?”
I thought about the question.
This was the answer I’d been searching for, and I knew, face-to-face with the monument, that it was the only answer. There wasn’t a prize at the end of the maze. It hadn’t been a puzzle, set up to reward me for being brave enough to follow my grandfather’s clues; they hadn’t even been clues. They led to nothing but a terrible realization, a cry mourning the loss of a person and a love that I could have gone my entire life without ever knowing existed.
When I thought he had been writing to me, he hadn’t—he’d been writing to Jeffery. When I thought he was describing a great treasure, he wasn’t—he was chasing a memory, something that was forty years behind him.
And still, I felt full.
“Because this is what he wanted,” I said, and I knew it was true, whether he knew it or not. I thought about Dr. Patterson’s assurance: It’s time to remember now.
I pulled the small red Bible from Omaha from my bag and set it atop the stone memorial. Mara smiled back at me, light reflecting off one damp circle below her left eye. I looked out over the field, and imagined it flooded with students, eager to change the world. I imagined my grandpa, standing atop the hill where I stood now, looking down across the beautiful resistance that he had created; the movement that he had built. I imagined his terror and his guilt as the National Guard showed up, his steel-willed activists looking like children next to the barrels of the soldiers’ guns. I imagined him screaming as the bullets began, running across the field to find Jeffery, holding him as life left him.
“I wonder if this is where he died,” I said. “In the same spot where he saw Jeffery . . .” His words filled my head. The world is a circle, and what I thought was ahead of me is actually behind . . .
“Oh, this is too perfect.”
The voice wasn’t Mara’s or mine.
“Okay, both of you, drop the backpack, hands on heads.”
Fifteen feet behind us, Jack stood tall against the side of the hill. It was too dark to see details of his figure, but it looked like the white Great Purpose scarf was his only non-black clothing; a beanie was folded up over his forehead, just above his eyes, and his right hand fidgeted anxiously, a metallic surface catching and reflecting distant streetlights. He was holding a gun. And he was alone.
“I knew it was just gonna be the three of us.” He took a few casual steps up the hill toward us. “I knew. Right when I met you, I knew.” He stopped less than ten feet away. “With or without each other, we were gonna end up here together. Like a . . . sign. From the divine. Right? The prodigal sons; isn’t that how the story’s supposed to go?”
We were close enough to see the lines of his face, balanced and dangerously casual as his right wrist twirled and twisted absentmindedly, and his head twisted with it.
“Well, truthfully, I didn’t see it just like this. I knew it’d be the two of us. You—” He nodded to Mara. “You’re just . . . what? Yoko?” He rolled his head around to smile past me. “Was that the game? Play both of us, stick with whoever gets here faster? I mean, I trust you told our dear friend Arty here about us, right?”
He motioned toward me with the gun and I felt its impact twice: the threat of the deadly weapon in front of me; the woozy heat of jealousy from behind me. I wanted to turn my head back to her, but I couldn’t take my eyes away from Jack’s right hand.
“Arthur, he’s lying.” Mara’s voice stumbled frantically from behind me. “I swear I—”
“Oh, Jesus, Mara. Relax. This isn’t about you. We have more important things going on, don’t we, Arthur?” He used his left hand to straighten his scarf, glanced to the monument behind us, and then found my eyes in the dark. “Where is he?”
For a moment, with the overwhelming presence of Jack and the gun, I’d forgotten where we were standing, and why we were all there. Jack still thought my grandpa was alive. My face must have broken; my eyebrows must have lifted; my cheeks must have filled with a terrified almost-laugh, because Jack’s lips curled and he raised the gun to Mara’s chest.
“He’s dead,” I told him.
“Arthur.” He made a show of clicking something into place behind the trigger; removing the safety, I assumed. “Now is not the time for being shy, or cute. Where is he?”
“I’m not lying to you,” I said, trying to balance my voice. “He’s dead.”
He paused, scratching his head with the butt of the gun, then smiled. “Do you know who Sir Kay was?” He waited for a response, but I ignored him. “Of course you don’t. Don’t feel bad about it; no one does.” He took a step toward me. “He was a knight; sat at the Round Table; supposedly he was a legend on the battlefield. No one remembers him, though, because the most famous thing he ever did was be the last person to try removing Excalibur from the stone before King Arthur.” He took another, longer step toward me. “If you think lying to me will prevent me from claiming what’s mine”—he took another step—“you’re wrong. If you think”—another step—“this is a negotiation, you’re wrong. If you think there’s any way I don’t already know—”
“You couldn’t figure this out?” I cut him off. It was strangely peaceful in my chest. We’re all on death row, I thought. Some of us just have a schedule. “You don’t get why this spot might have mattered?”
“I’m familiar with the fucking Kent State massacre. I’m Hunter S. Thompson’s son, for fuck’s sake.” I heard the first waver in his voice, noticed the way that fuck had timidly slipped its way into his vocabulary. “You still don’t get it. This is my whole life. You can pretend you know something about this but . . . I fully comprehend why he may have chosen this spot, I know exactly what he was doing here; the only thing—the only thing—you know, and I don’t, is where.” He stared me down, but I held my ground, eye to eye on equal footing. “So tell me. Or I will shoot her. And that’ll be on you, not me. I wouldn’t want to have to live with that, if I were you.”
I raised myself by an inch, and smiled. “Where are your friends, Jack?”
He didn’t respond, but took another step.
“Supposedly righteous force,” I continued. “Threatening violence against innocent people?” I jerked my head back toward the KENT STATE SHOOTING plaque. “You’ve gotta be able to appreciate the irony of this, right?”
This time, he didn’t smile back. “I’m a patient guy, but—”
“There’s nothing.” I shook my head. “I told you. I’ve told you everything I know, actually. There’s no secret hiding place, no library, no—”
“Bullshit!” It was the first time he’d raised his voice, but rather than sliding upward to a scream, it fell downward, booming across the lawn and nearly ringing the bell below us. “That’s bullshit and you know it!”
“It’s not bullshit. There’s nothing.”
He shifted the gun from Mara’s chest to mine. “Say it again.”
“There’s nothing.”
The gun shook once in his hand.
“Look.” I spoke quietly. “You don’t have to believe me. You can go ahead and keep looking. I hope you do, actually. Because when you look back in forty years and realize you wasted your entire life searching for something that was already gone, it’ll actually be a fair punishment for you.”
His eyes dropped to the ground, and the gun dropped from my chest as the wrist and elbow holding it went slack. He took a step back from me.
I took the chance to step up into him, building steam with every word. “But I’m not lying to you. There’s nothing here, other than the last chapter in the story of a guy whose life was ruined”—I raised a finger and held it to his chest—“because people like you decided to answer some fucking call, for them.”
Jack didn’t lift his head, instead swinging it loosely back and forth, shaking. “There’s more than that.”
“Jack, you’re wrong,” Mara said.
“There’s something else here—”
I felt her hand against the small of my back. “Time to let it go now.”
“He left something for me,” he said quietly, rolling his head around to come face-to-face with me again, and my stomach dropped.
“He . . . as in Hunter Thompson?” I could feel my strength coming back as Jack’s wavered.
It was as if the color had left his skin, and the fire behind his eyes had died. “She told me, he left this for me. He wanted me to—”
“He probably wasn’t even your dad, Jack.”
Jack stood unraveled in front of us, an unassured and abandoned boy where a confident man had once been, the gun dangling recklessly from his right hand, running up the side of his body, alongside the Great Purpose scarf.
A blue light scanned the field, breaking only against the outline of Jack’s figure, and with it came loud voices and the slamming of car doors. My father must have seen us. Someone must have called the police.
“This is it, Jack. This is all there is.”
“There was supposed to be something for me,” he said, unaffected by the world closing in behind him. He stopped the gun as it reached his heart, where the Great Purpose logo, the bold, black-and-green fist of his father was embroidered, and rotated the barrel. “There was supposed to be more.”
I saw what was happening a moment too late, too scared to notice his hand squeezing the handle, his finger sliding around the trigger, his eyes deciding to stop fighting back, and his face mirroring the look I’d seen on my own in every dream, the empty acceptance I wore in the driver’s seat as I sank to the bottom of the lake.
I threw myself against him. I felt the ripple and recoil of the machinery as I fell forward against his arm and threw both of us backward, red exploding before my eyes as we collapsed and began to roll down the hill.
The sound of the gunshot was so loud that the rest of the sound in the world disappeared in its wake; Mara’s scream was watery and distant; the sirens were inaudible. I couldn’t tell what I was feeling around me, the wet leaves of the ground intertwined with the wet blood on his chest, the warmth of his body molding with the warmth of my own. He wasn’t moving, and I didn’t want to see what I knew was waiting for me, so I held my eyes closed and laid my head back onto the grass.
Noises began to filter back in; I heard the sirens droning up from the ground. I heard the voice of my father calling out for me. I heard the voice of my grandpa, swimming through the chaos, at once clear enough for me to understand, and finally, the ringing of the bell, reverberating across the grounds as I lay in the wet dark, the edges of my vision collapsing into blackness.