Original Disposition

In the beginning, there was chaos.

Our philosophy class was a terrorized, perilous alternate universe smothered with villains with superpowers who were draped in the clothing of liberal arts students…and Jamie?  Jamie was Superman, striding through the door, cape flying, with a single bound he’d leap on top of the desks, and with x-ray vision and undefeated strength, he incinerated the apathy of our classmates, who thought philosophy sucked and that everything was relative – and who were mostly there because it was a required course.  Jamie had a giant, Gold “T” burning on his chest, and that T stood for Truth.  Jamie, more than our teacher, cut through the fog and cleared a shining path to the best qualities inside of us, that reminded us of what makes us good, what makes us human, and our classmates loved him for that.

He was the most courageous person I’d ever met.  He would slice your argument to the bone with the one question he knew you couldn’t answer, and it would defeat you.  And you’d either love him for it, or you’d hate him (and most people hated him).  But if he knew your argument was superior, he’d gesture with his arm, as if to say, “You…YOU deserve to go ahead of me”, and he’d praise you, with genuine kindness, and say, “That’s excellent.  I never thought of that.  That’s very good.”  And if the truth was unpleasant, and no one wanted to go near it, Jamie could deliver it. This was why I worshipped him: because he could do something that I admired, and that no one else had the strength to do. 

Jamie had another super-human ability.  See, I have this, ultra-intense, hyper-affectionate way of conducting myself in a relationship, and Jamie was the only man I’d met who could withstand hundreds of kisses in a single day, excessive petting and small headlocks in public (where I’d throw my arm around his neck, tightly, and say “I love you so much I’m gonna fucking kill you”) and phone calls on the hour asking “whatcha doin?”; it’s an infra-red type of attention, which no mortal man could digest.  Jamie not only absorbed this radiation; he’d kick back, underneath it, and toss on a pair of shades and smile.

You know those photographs of deep space that are taken with the Hubble Telescope?  With those yawning gases that are blue and pink and bright orange, stretched like gaping webs across stars and galaxies?  In my eyes, there is nothing more beautiful.  Black holes, dark matter, comets, spiraling galaxies, I think you can look to all of these, and use them to explain and understand not only life, but human behavior.  I have this book that Jamie gave me a month after we met.  We smashed ourselves on the bed together to look at it, flipping through each page, and when we were done, I kissed him square on the nose and I said “You got it.”  

The first time I got Jamie to myself was at a lounge, near school, where the drinks are 10 bucks, everyone speaks Russian, and the lighting makes your teeth a matte, white-blue.  He sat right next to me on the leopard-print couch and while I’m holding my glass, that has glowing ice cubes, I’m trying so hard to be still, I’m determined to find a way to lock myself down to the furniture, or just contort myself, over my knees, all while I’m trying to face him, because I’m vibrating SIMPLY because I’m CLOSE to him. 

I day-dreamed about an evening like this, I actually visualized it, like, creatively visualized this, while I sat in class.  I imagined blue lasers shooting out from my forehead and into Jamie’s frontal lobe, and the lasers had a ticker-tape message that said, in capital letters: COME GET A DRINK WITH ME - YOU WANT TO DATE ME - THIS COULD BE GOOD.  And now, his arm and thigh are edging in on mine, it felt awkward to be sitting next to him, because I should have been in HIS LAP.  The darkness and the black-lights have made everything contrast, our clothing, and our skin, so we are bright blue and dark magenta blobs, floating among the black, and neon.  And the alcohol?  And his body right next to mine?  And we’re talking about things we both felt we’d die to defend?  This combined to form a certainty replacing the marrow in my bones, the certainty that my life was now different.  All of it was swirling, and spiraling, and it was pulsating with a heartbeat. Jamie and I were going to leave, eventually, and we’d leave together, and we were going to combine somehow, and anything less than that would have gone against nature.

Four years later, in a café, over eggs and pancakes that we’ve barely touched, Jamie is making a face.  It’s the face you make the moment right before you vomit.  Where you can feel the bile rising?  And your mouth is turned down, as if you’re trying to hold it back, but you know you can’t, because nature is, in fact, stronger than you, and it’s going to take over; and your eyes are lowered, because anything above the ground is nauseating.

          And then his lips parted: “that’s it,” he said, and then he was silent. This is his reaction to the confession I’ve just made, about something I’ve done, that I have to tell him about, because every cell in my body that can witness something cannot bear to leave him in the dark.  Jamie’s silence is unnatural, and it causes everything around me, in the café, to shoot forward at light speed, and pass me in a blur, and only Jamie remains still, and in focus, but he won’t even look at me.

Life, and dating, after Jamie, is goal-oriented:  Search, and destroy. This is not so much a thought, as an instinct.  Develop a laser-like focus for the type of guy who is Jamie’s opposite.  Disappoint all of them – and there are many - in a uniquely devastating way, like, by getting another guys’ phone number…at the party they brought you to… while you know they’re watching.

Because you’re no longer in a relationship, you now have time to focus on yourself, so in addition to new mating habits, your hair color changes, your uniform disappears, its replaced by abbreviated clothing, you start wearing high heel boots, and one day when you look at your reflection, you actually say, out loud, “that’s not even my face.”

One year after Jamie and I dissolved, I’m standing in front of this bicycle shop that has closed for the evening, and I’m watching these gliding spots of light on the window in front of me that reflects the traffic behind me, but it’s the kind of looking where you do it to settle something inside of you, where you don’t actually care about what your eyes are resting on, but they have to rest on something, because they’re open, only you wish, in that moment, that they weren’t, because you have just heard, over the phone, that Jamie’s body has been found in his apartment, and that he had hung himself.  And that it had been days before he had been found.  Someone that you didn’t even realize you were STILL taking for granted, has just been torn out of your life…again.  

Because Jamie is gone, you desperately need everything that reminds you of him.  You search frantically through old boxes in your basement, and tears are streaming down your face because you threw away presents he had given to you, and you would trade everything to get them back.  You are not sure if you threw away love letters he had sent to you, after he broke up with you: Did he really write those?  You remember walking down the hallway of your old apartment building, reading a letter he had written you, but was it real? Or did you dream it?  You keep searching, because if it’s true, if he wrote to you, saying “I’m sorry, I changed my mind, I miss you” then you’d have to find it, because it would exist, because you wouldn’t have thrown that away, right?  You couldn’t have been that angry, and that cold, right?  But you never find the letters. 

         I’m standing at the window of my bedroom, and I’m watching this radiant, hot-pink sun setting behind the trees across the street, and I’m on the phone with a friend of mine who knows quite a bit more about physics than I do.  And we’re talking about neutrinos.  Neutrinos are these subatomic particles that are so small, that if an atom is the size of a football stadium, a neutrino is smaller than a dust mote passing over the field.  They carry the energy and momentum that results during a chemical decay, and they have this partner, called the anti-neutrino, which is it’s opposite; It’s like a negative energy.  These random chemical decays, which rarely happen given the nearly infinite amount of neutrinos in the universe, are essentially the anti-neutrino, trying to break through. 

“Neutrinos are so small, and they’re everywhere, there’s so many we shouldn’t even bother counting, we may as well just shift the decimal and look at them as something greater, or singular, like a force.  What if they physically represent something metaphysical, that we can’t control, like the existence of decay, or death?  What if they’re like a scientific metaphor for why things end?  I mean, why do things have to end?  Why do we have to die?”  At this point, I feel like I’m really onto something, like, the people at Fermilab have nothing on me.

My friend digs in.  “So you’re saying, if most humans are like neutrinos, then Jamie was like an anti-neutrino…his composition in this life was essentially an anti-neutrino trying to revert back to it’s original state, or it’s original disposition, which is the energy that we come from, but we just can’t see…by taking his own life, he returned to something that was home, because he had never felt right in this state.”  “Yes, that’s basically it.”  “Huh…” he said. “That’s…pretty good.”

My ice cubes are glowing and rattling in my glass and I have to rest my head in my hand to stop my arm from shaking.  Jamie leans into me, his highball cocked in his hand, right next to his chin.  He’s glancing around.  “You know what made Stanley Kubrick a genius?  He had the balls to say NO.  When he wanted to light a film using only candles, what do you think happened?  Someone fucking created a new camera lens for him!  When he said  ‘No’, studio executives, who would have told God to go screw himself, would say ‘Okay, Stanley, that’s fine.  YOU tell US.  We’ll just be standing over here.’  He’d do 67 takes of people walking down stairs…just walking down stairs! – to get it perfect.  It’s true!  You can read interviews with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.  They were pissed. 

He knew what was at stake, and he never compromised.  He was an artist because of this, because he pursued, perfection: he pursued the truth.  It’s so intense, I LOVE IT!  You know, if a man like that defeats you in a debate, you’re a better man for it. Always, always, pursue the truth, if you’re going to be an artist, you can’t afford anything less.  And surround yourself with people who do the same.  I need another cocktail.  Let’s go.”