who wrote that?
thanks, big brother.
i wouldn't say no to a new car.
shut up, chris. seriously, i'll pay you back.
when we were little, chris was very to himself. he wasn't anti-social, he always had friends, and everybody liked him - but he could go off and entertain himself for hours, he didn't seem to need toys or friends. he could be alone without being lonely. the secrets our parents kept, though unknown to chris and i, led to bouts of rage and even violence between them that we had been forced to witness since we were very young. it seemed like they never fought without us. i remember the first family meeting to let chris and me in on their plans for getting a divorce. they wanted us to choose which of them we'd live with. i cried my eyes out. but the divorce never happened, though the threats and meetings never stopped. it wasn't long before chris and i shut off -- we would tell mom and dad to go ahead and get the divorce. chris and i just wanted to get away from their fights and mom kept promising to get out and take us with her as soon as their company made enough money. dad had been the young genius nasa enlisted to do designs for the american satellite radar systems that would be our answer to the russian sputnik. and mom and he later started up a consulting firm combining her get-up- and-go resourcefulness with his wealth of knowledge. by the time the company actually made its first million, the careerism and money seemed to erase her memory of the promise she'd made us.
i think this is when chris began to see "careers" as a diseased invention of the twentieth century and to resent money and the useless priority people made of it in their lives. he'd begun planning to "slay the beast". to make himself free.
toward the end of june, chris had mailed our parents his final grade report.
almost all a's. "a" in apartheid in south african society and history of anthropological thought; a- in contemporary african politics and the food crisis in africa; and on it went. clever boy, my brother.
but by the end of july we hadn't heard anything from him and my parents were getting very worried.
chris had never had a phone, so they decided to drive down to atlanta and surprise him. cut to:
when they arrived at the apartment, there was a "for rent" sign in his window, and the manager told my parents that chris had moved out at the end of june.
when they got home, i had to hand them all the letters they had sent chris that summer which had been returned in a bundle.
chris had instructed the post office to hold them until august 1st so that mom and dad wouldn't know that anything was up. some part of me understood what he had done. that he had spent the previous four years fulfilling an absurd and onerous duty in graduating from college.
and now, at last he was unincumbered. emancipated from the stifling world of parents and peers. abstraction, security, and material excess. those things that cut chris off from the raw truth of his existence. i only hoped he was safe. and i missed him.
if chris were trying to disappear, it would have been a pretty uncharacteristic lapse for him to give the police his real place of residence. though my parents had already contacted the annandale police with their initial concerns, this ticket arriving from california made them frantic.
my father called one of his old government friends who put him in touch with a private investigator, someone who'd done work with the dia and the cia. using the willow creek ticket as a starting point, the investigator began chasing down leads. most of them led far afield -- to europe and south africa. ultimately turning up nothing. what my dad couldn't believe was that he'd given up his car. he seemed to love that datsun so much. it sounded just like chris to me, though. he was very much of the school that you should own nothing except what you could carry on your back at a dead run.
in early september, mom and dad got a call from the annandale police notifying them that chris' abandoned car had been identified by the arizona highway patrol after a group of rare flower hunters stumbled upon it in the desert. there were no signs that chris had intended to return to it. but there wasn't any evidence of struggle. the police said they thought chris had chosen to leave it behind and not that it had been taken from him. nonetheless, the initial comfort that gave mom and dad, quickly turned to their realization that chris was actually trying not to be found.
the year chris graduated high school he bought the datsun, used. he wanted to drive it cross-country and visit our old neighborhood in california. the day before he left was my dad's birthday. chris made a speech.
jesus, you must've had a lot to drink.
the day after the party, chris left on his trip and ended up staying away most of the summer. it was nearly three months before he walked back into our house in annandale. he had a scruffy beard, his hair was long and tangled, and he was rail thin. as soon as i heard he was home, i ran into his room to talk to him. in california, he'd looked up some old family friends who still lived there. he'd found out that long after he had been born, our dad had continued a relationship with his first wife marcia in secret.
and that one lie had led to another. that two years after chris was born, dad had had another son with marcia. worse yet was that it was marcia to whom he was still legally married at the time. and it was chris and i who were the bastard children.
dad's arrogance made him conveniently oblivious to the pain he caused. and mom, in the shame and embarrassment of a young mistress, became his accomplice.
she and my dad had decided to bend the truth about this other child saying that dad wasn't the father and they maintained that their fraudulent marriage was real.
chris was quiet when he told me this. he said it made his "entire childhood seem like a fiction"; that "the truth had been dying everyday." if something bothered chris, he'd usually keep it to himself. and he made me promise to do the same.
he never did tell mom and dad that he knew. but chris measured himself and those around him by an impossibly rigorous moral code. he loathed what he considered mom and dad's hypocrisy and resented what they considered guidance. chris submitted to dad's authority through college but i knew he raged inwardly the whole time. it was inevitable that chris would rebel. and when he did, he did it with characteristic immoderation.
my father is a brilliant man. but he had made some terrible mistakes. and to some extent, it seemed chris was making him pay an awful price.
it would be christmas in a couple of months. and the last news we'd had was about his car being found. i woke up a couple of days ago, and for the first time, i was surprised to realize that it wasn't only my parents who hadn't heard from chris. i wondered why he hadn't tried to call in case i might answer. he could've hung up if it wasn't me.
but why he didn't send a letter, maybe through a friend. i got mad. but i told myself it was good. it made me remember that there was something more than rebellion, more than anger that was driving him. chris had always been driven, had always been an adventurer. when he was four years old.
he once wandered six blocks away from home at three o'clock in the morning.
he was found in a neighbor's kitchen, up on a chair, digging into their candy drawer.
whatever drawer he was opening now must have something sweet in it.
who do you think you are? god?
in the nine months since chris' disappearance, my parents went through enormous changes. guilt was giving way to pain. and pain seemed to bring them closer. my father had humbled dramatically. and what had always been a sort of curt arrogance, the kind of man who actually thought he could cancel christmas, had given way to the vulnerability of a father's heart. even their faces had changed. it made me sad that i couldn't share with chris the new closeness i felt toward our parents.
i close my eyes at night sometimes and imagine where chris might be.
was there beauty around him? was he hurt? was he alone?
was he having the great adventure that he wanted?
could he feel the changes here at home? by some kind of supernatural osmosis? chris once wrote to me from college saying he wanted to talk to me about all the problems he had with mom and dad.
he said i was the only person in the world who could've possibly understood what he had to say.
in those silent moments, with my eyes closed trying to picture where chris might be at that very moment, probably climbing some scary mountain, i want to reach into that picture and bring him back to see what mom and dad, what our family might become.
but instead when i open my eyes, what i see is my mother, sitting at the dining room table, sifting through photo albums and pictures of chris. it's all she can do to examine the snapshots. and, though she breaks down from time to time, she studies them with a sort of hungry intensity - like looking at food you can't eat, or into a window at a family around a table that you were once a part of and can be no more.
she convinces herself it's chris; that it's her son, whenever she passes a stray. and i fear for the mother in her.
instincts that seem to sense the threat of a loss so huge and irreparable that the mind balks at taking its measure - i begin to wonder if i do understand what chris is saying any longer. but i catch myself in doubt and remember that these are not the parents he grew up with. that in the forced reflection that comes with loss, indeed everything chris is saying, has to be said. and i trust for him that everything he is doing has to be done. this is our life.
in high school, chris became captain of the cross-country track team. they called themselves the road warriors.
he'd take them on what he loved to refer to as "epic" runs. the whole point was to run until they were completely lost and so exhausted that they were on the verge of puking. then they'd slow down a little, somehow he'd find their bearings, and lead them home again at full speed. this was my brothers idea of fun.
a year and a half into chris' disappearance, each day that goes by now feels like two. dad calls it "suspended animation." i kept telling myself that he had to get lost to prove his independence to himself. but this was no day run for the road warriors and after so much time, i could no longer keep out the haunting thoughts.
in many ways, my life and even my parents had begun to move in new directions. i'd fallen in love. and mom and dad had even ventured out on a brief vacation. but, when a search of tax records uncovered chris' contribution to oxfam, the weight of his disappearance just seemed to lie down on us full length.
about a month short of the second anniversary of chris' disappearance, i had gotten engaged to my boyfriend jerry ray and was moving in with him.
when i stumbled upon the book chris had given me on his graduation day. for some reason, it was the last line of the poem he read that really stuck out.
i asked chris who had written the poem.
who wrote that?
what would he tell about now? what did his voice sound like now?
i realized that the words to my thoughts were of less and less meaning. chris was writing his story and it had to be chris who would tell it.