Kresten's great-grandmother died today. She had had
dementia. He said that it came as a relief when she died because he had
suffered long enough watching the part of her that he knew die each day. She's
had dementia for several years. She used to be the model Catholic: A kind soul.
Kresten wrote a song comparing her to Mr Rogers, saying "Mr Rogers died of
cancer." In her later years, her personality would change to its stark
opposite: Hostile and sarcastic. It was because she could not remember anything
from the majority of her life. She had even begun to use a different name.
When I got up to leave to go to his house today, I had our
band in mind. I had had it in mind all day. I had decided to confront him about
the band. I picked up the phone. There was a message from him, informing me as
to what had happened and how it had brought about a change of heart in him. He
wanted to jam.
Before leaving the house, I checked that everything was
turned off: The stove and the microwave. I would be leaving Pumpkin, my
Pekingese and a family friend of many years, alone. I locked all of the doors.
I took the key and locked the front door behind me. I then returned and checked
the stove a third time. I wiggled all three of the knobs. I observed the one
that was missing, where a bar sticking out filled its place. The two lights
that would have signified either heat or gas were out. I held them in memory as
I trudged with my best effort at heroic decorum to Kresten’s condominium. I had
a keyboard under my arm.
The house was locked. The stove was off, as was the
microwave. The gate was locked, and yet still I was terribly afraid that the
house would burn down.
Earlier that morning, Maria had shared the first dream that
she had intimated to me in a long time. It may very well have been the first I
can remember that she described in detail. Actually, it was a series of dreams
with one leitmotif: Houses burning down. One dream involved her setting fire to
a forest so as to destroy a cabin. Another, prior to that, featured our own
home juxtaposed with Hawaii, serving as though it were a hotel room. She could
see Hawaii from her window, but emerging into the backyard found her back home.
She saw a mushroom cloud that was gray go up in the air and rushed back to find
the neighbourhood on fire. A girl from a weblog on the internet was going
door-to-door, apparently, telling people about the fire. In Actual Life, the
girl had told them about a fire in her own neighbourhood. I’ll spare the
remaining details to preserve Maria’s privacy.
Kresten and I jammed for some time before he asked me to
leave. His mood was incorrigible, and he was intent on being as Alone as
possible, although he maintained a Stoic demeanour. I had seen Kresten cry two
times prior within my life, and the fortitude with which he maintained a blank
frown was disappointing. I was intent upon staying, however. Finally, Kresten
tapered into a kind of passive acceptance of my presence in his mother’s
apartment, though he made it clear that playing guitar was out of the question
for him at this point. He withdrew into the kitchen as I tried to recover, by
memory, a guitar riff that he had written several weeks prior. It had been his
failure to remember this riff, amidst other things, that prompted him to stop
playing for the time being.
When I found him in the kitchen a few minutes later, he was
a happier man. He had just texted Bianca, his girlfriend, so his spirits began
to retain a bit more of his characteristic edge. I asked if I should “amscre”,
(“scram” in pig-Latin), and he gave me an inconclusive response.
We began to watch an episode of “Breaking Bad”. We began it
at a point well into the episode. Soon afterwards, Bianca arrived. I asked
again if I should leave, exhausting little effort on my part to appear polite
but unapologetic, as had become habit for me. Kresten told me, absently, that
“it would probably be fine”, though the “fine” had a marked absence of
connotation.
When Bianca arrived, she was not thrilled to see me after
not having seen me in over a year. She remained silent and self-conscious
throughout an episode of “Breaking Bad”, which we watched from the beginning.
She sat in a loveseat directly across from the wooden chair that I occupied
leisurely, a small but rectangular table between us, and Kresten behind with
the couch all to himself. No one spoke with the exception of the television
and an occasional attempt at congenial humour on my part.
I could not tell what was happening in the room, except that
I could feel a tension in my muscles at moments. Whether the tension was in
response to the events portrayed on television or my friends’ emotional
responses, I never learned. It just seemed to escalate, as well as a certain
“broken” feeling in my left lobe which I now have the wisdom to identify with
Kresten’s “bad days”, exclusively.
At one point, Kresten got up, and the tension I felt was
markedly one of a fury that had not originated within my own being. He
paced the apartment diligently for one continuous but shortlived moment that
ended with him withdrawing to the ground-floor patio behind me with a cigarette
and a drink. He shut the glass door behind him. By this point, we had already
gone from watching “Breaking Bad” to the Korean film “Old Boy”. Somehow, I had
intuited that we would be watching this favourite of Kresten’s again. It was
over an hour into Bianca’s visit.
About fifteen minutes into “Old Boy”, marked by a scene
wherein the protagonist is masturbating whilst watching a television set within
an apartment wherein he is imprisoned, Bianca said, “Goodnight, Dmitry.” With
as marked lack of eros and emotion, she left the room like a gas flame on the
stovetop going out with the turn of a knob.
Disoriented as I was, I took that as my cue to inquire as to
what (the hell, though I did not say it) was going on. I opened the window
behind me and found Kresten in an admittedly refreshing temper, leaning over
the edge of the close metal rail with his elbows upon it and his head resting
against his wrists. The trees, in homely proximity to us, their grassy expanse
beginning just where the slight strip of cement that Kresten and I occupied
ended, diving into a hill that would sprawl into a desolate golf course, took
on the ecstatic vibrance of Kresten’s mind. He told me, very plainly, that it wasn’t
my fault, but that he wished that either Bianca or I would get over ourselves
when he was going through emotional turmoil. “I guess I just have shitty
friends,” he stated nonchalantly but frankly, not looking at me. I asserted,
but with absolute gentleness, that I would have left had she told me. I also
told him that part of the reason why I wanted to stay was to support him. I
wasn’t sure, though, if that was what he needed. He admitted that he probably
did.
Bianca returned, as had been planned, within a few minutes.
I watched “Old Boy” alone as I listened, not entirely observative of either,
but attentive, to Kresten reproaching Bianca firmly but fairly via cell phone
in the patio behind me. When she returned, she was more polite to me. She said
that she had bought “Raisinettes, Ferrero Rochers,” and something else at the
drug store nearby. She offered me some.
In the interim between the phone call and her arrival,
however, there were a good few minutes wherein Kresten rested on the couch. The
television was off. He was intent on rewinding the film to begin from the top.
He asked me if it was fine. I said that I did not mind at all.
The television must have been off when I saw Kresten cry for
the third time in his life. He recounted everything I mentioned in the first
paragraph of this chapter from his couch.
I meditated for some time in my seat, looking down at my
hands. I decided to finally say, “It makes you wish that people appreciated it
more, doesn’t it?”
Kresten was already on his laptop. “What, music?”
“No, Life.”
It was at that moment that I had the Kresten I always knew
and loved back for a few minutes. He was in tears, but with every sob an
iceberg seemed to rupture. He said that no one appreciated Life, as though the
fact were an obvious claim. He said that he could not understand people’s
fixation upon money. I assured him that some people probably do appreciate
Life. Maybe a good deal of them do, but our culture does not allow it. I don’t
know if it was what I said or his own thoughts that allowed his mood to settle
again. It had probably been a combination of the two.
Before returning home that night, I walked along every one
of the three floors of his condo complex, pacing the narrow corridors illumined
by glowing lamps that remind me now of Bianca’s original attitude towards me
that evening. I took several pictures of these lamps on my phone, sending
one to Kresten by text message. The message read, “Despite the ephemeral nature
of Life, a sense of accomplishment is important.”
When I returned home, the stove was still off. The
microwave did not catch my attention by any device. Everyone was safe and
secure. Yet I still felt that my house was burning down.
