The Stain

The Stain


When I was still a kid, a man was shot in front of our house. I saw it out the window, BAM, and then his brains were on the sidewalk and the driveway. I never knew his name but whoever he was he wasn’t much of anyone after that.

The police took the body away but they left the blood. They couldn’t have taken it; they were too slow and it had lots of time to spread and seep into the concrete. I remember it was bright cherry red at first, and once it stopped being that color it was just brown. The police couldn’t take it, not any more than my parents could wash it away with the garden hose. No matter how many times we sprayed it or washed the car and let the soap run down over it, the shape of a man who’d been shot in the head never went away.

Before it happened I had been standing at the window, looking out. It was a nice day and I don’t remember why I was inside, but I think I must have been waiting for something to arrive. A friend. One of my parents. The mailman. I don’t know. It’s not really important.

I always wondered whether it was something he’d had coming or if it was just wrong place wrong time, somebody fucking around with a gun while driving through a residential neighborhood just for shits and giggles. I’d been too young to read the papers and my parents never talked about it when I was around, so I never knew, and after a point to look it up would have spoiled the question. Sometimes, when I was older, I would go out at midnight on nights when I couldn’t sleep, match my arms and legs with where his limbs had fallen and imagine who he might have been. It had been a long time ago but I could still remember his features, waxy and smooth except for a neat little hole just to the left of center on his forehead, staring up at the cloudless sky of what had been a very sunny day. In my memory there is a glow from the brightness of the sun falling on him and the contrast of his white clothes and the darkening blood that left its mark in front of our house, and I know enough to imagine the crater in the back of his head where the bullet must have left, taking parts of his brain and skull with it.

On the nights when I’d lie there I’d try to imagine what it must have felt like, what his last thoughts were. The idea of not being anymore both fascinated and terrified me. I didn’t know why until I read a book by a woman in France who’d once loved her cousin and also loved her best friend, though she never wrote it plainly. She wrote somewhere, I can’t find the page now, about a mermaid who’d fallen in love with a fisherman but for some reason couldn’t be with him, and turned to sea foam and was washed away. As the mermaid dissolved, she could hear the little voice inside her that had always said “Here I am” going quiet. And that was it, that was what was bothering me. You can go through your whole life surrounded by people assuring you that you’re really there and really experiencing something instead of dreaming, but all you can really count on is that little voice inside you: “Here I am.” You don’t leave anything behind that says “Here I was” except other people, and who can be sure about them?

There are some external things you do leave behind. A person who says “The man I shot was there,” a bullet that whispers “The man I killed was there,” a blood stain that screams “The man I used to be a part of was there.” But the person dies too, and the bullet gets lost or smashed up and recycled, and the stain… the stain is expected to wash away. The man that was shot might never have existed except for that stain, which is the only thing I know about him.

Kids, and teenagers and most adults as well, like to think that the world stops spinning if they so much as scrape their knee. I never thought that; I knew better. Example taught me early that the world just ignores and forgets. If I were to die right now, tomorrow, next week, my cries of “Here I am” would end, but everything else would keep going and eventually forget all about me. And then I might as well have never existed.

So I didn’t think too much about what the man’s last thoughts were. It only made me feel depressed.

Instead I would try to imagine what he had been before he was shot. Because he had a name, you know. Well, you don’t, because I don’t either. But he had one, that’s a fact. He had parents, and he may or may not have had to go to their funerals before his own death. He may or may not have had an apartment, may or may not have had a roommate who may or may not have been his lover. The lover may have been a man or a woman, it may have been serious or casual, they may have been unmarried or married (or the equivalent), they may have had kids or had the place to themselves. They may have lived in a nice neighborhood or a bad one, with quiet neighbors or the kind of people that stomped around and played loud music every night at one in the morning. He may have still been in college studying for an advanced degree, the lover may have been a professional playwright, and they may have gone to see every opening show together. They may have argued sometimes, maybe dramatically sometimes, maybe even violently sometimes, but they also may have made up without being the worse for having fought. They may have been very much in love, and they may have each admitted it to themselves and surrendered completely to the sometimes smothering, sometimes comforting feeling of never being alone.

But I didn’t know any of that. I was making it up as I went, and it was different every time I stopped to imagine it. A human being is a mass of cells that reproduces (or tries) through the mechanics of sex, and once a person is dead all you can prove is their physical existence from the evidence of their remains. A soul can’t be proven and you can’t remember what you don’t know.

Still, my conclusion always is: the lover, if there was one, must have been heartbroken at the news. Or if there wasn’t a lover, someone must have been. What kind of crap world would it be if you could get shot in the head, BAM, leak brains and blood all over some stranger’s driveway, and no one would care? So for each corpse there must be one person who cries. Maybe more than one, but I grew up half convinced that was too optimistic.

My parents sold the house and bought another one while I was at college but I bought it back without telling them, because by then we weren’t really in touch anymore. The stain was still there and at midnight when I couldn’t sleep I still went out to lie on the driveway, where he did that sunny day back when I was still a kid, and imagined things.

Sometimes I imagined that time is a farce and that we were lovers, that he was there with me. When I went out to lie on the driveway he was there holding me, the comforting arms that I had never managed to find anywhere else. He reassured me that it was okay if I didn’t know what to do with my life; he had, and we both knew how that had turned out. In the morning he would pick up the newspaper for me and bring it inside, and I would put two pre-made waffles in the toaster because neither of us could cook. When I didn’t have work he would tell me stories that he just made up on the spot. Some of them didn’t make any sense because they were too rushed, but I could listen for hours and hours. He coaxed me into telling him stories too, because, he said, that was only fair, and I roamed through the empty house murmuring imaginary anecdotes to myself. At night he would kiss me on the cheek and roll out of bed and go back to the driveway, where he always slept and where he was always standing waiting for me whenever I came back home.

It was nice because I didn’t have many friends and was otherwise alone, and he didn’t mind because when I asked him he said, Hey at least this way I get to exist. I told him my secrets and what I thought about life because to prove you exist you have to say “Here I am” to more than just yourself. You have to prove it. And if you can’t when real, living people are around, because they make you nervous like they made me nervous, you at least have to prove it to yourself and the dead man that somehow manages to convince you that life is worthwhile. People do that all the time; they conjure up faceless companions and daydream of how their lives could be a little more complete if. At least mine had a face and a possible past.

I lived there for a year and then, when I decided I was tired of living with the daydream of a dead man, rented it out and went back to school. The first time I had taken mainly philosophy and biology classes; the second time I dove into creative writing, theater, art. The man who had been shot in front of my house was in every story, every performance, every sketch. I made a few friends and told them what I thought about death, and fell in love with the first one who disagreed with me and argued with conviction:

Everyone dies, but everyone lives first and that’s what’s important. The point of life is to throw as much of yourself as you can into the world and enjoy it as much as possible, and then even if you die you won’t really end because everyone will remember. But it’s hard to do that if you’re always thinking about death. It’s better not to think of it and live, not as if you’ll go on forever but towards a goal that you decide for yourself and force into being. That’s what a life is, that’s all that’s important.

Yes, was my reply. But people are always concerned with the result of their actions. The proximate result is the impression you make on your future and on the people around you. The ultimate result is death and how those impressions form a memory that reflects evidence of your existence. So really, any decision you make in life, no matter how you live it, has something to do with death, and memories of you only last as long as the people you made an impression on. To say otherwise is to deny an inescapable truth.

The problem, I added, is exactly that you don’t go on forever. You have to decide what to do that will make everyone remember you; to decide that you have to figure out who you want to remember, keeping in mind that you can’t get everyone in one go; to decide that you have to decide how you want to be remembered; and to decide that you have to think about how and when you’re going to die.

And so on and so forth. If you want to hear more I’ll give you a quick overview: I went to my parents’ funerals, which were within a year of each other, shortly after I finished college for the second time. I sold the house to a friend on the condition that the concrete on the driveway wouldn’t be replaced and lived in an apartment with my lover, the one who’d disagreed with me. The two of us lived in an okay place with neighbors that stomped around and played loud music at one in the morning. My lover wrote plays while I figured out what to do with my advanced degree in literature, and we went to see every opening show together. We argued sometimes, dramatically sometimes, even violently sometimes, but eventually we made up without being the worse for having fought. We were very much in love and very much aware of it, and we were alone when we needed to be and together when we needed to not be alone. I lived out more or less exactly what I had imagined, or imagined more or less exactly what I lived out.

It had never been about the man who was shot in the head in front of my house when I was a kid. He was dead, you see. It was about me. It was the question of a kid inside on a sunny day, staring out at the front lawn and driveway but not going outside. Everything I cast on him was a reflection of what I was and needed. I was alive, I was alone, I had to reconcile death with life and figure out what to do with mine. I needed to go outside. I did, and I’m happy. Not ecstatic, but fine. It’s the question that’s the important thing; it’s life. The answer, because there must be one by necessity of balance, is death. No one can really know death in its details because it would spoil the question. That doesn’t mean you don’t ask, because you must. You ask with every fiber of your being, or soul if you believe in such a thing, up until the moment where there’s just empty space where your “Here I am” used to sound. A person may or may not consciously ask, but it’s always there. What “Here I am” really means is, Am I here? Death is the affirmation. Yes; you were.

Sometimes I think I had it easy. Everyone has to think about life and death at some point another, but most take a roundabout way. They acclimate to the reality of these things so smoothly that they can’t look back and find the exact moment they first learned about death, because it was too gradual. I’ve spent a lot of my life contemplating the facts of death: I know what it looks like, I’ve thought about it happening to me, and if I’m still afraid of it no one could say that it’s because I never tried to face that fear. And it’s because of the stain on my driveway where a man was shot in the head, just left of center, and thought his last thoughts as the little voice inside of him saying “Here I am” got quieter and quieter and, finally, went out.