Philip's Award-Winning Story

People have asked if they could read this story.  Thank you to Philip Butta for permission to reproduce it here.

HE JUMPED, I FOLLOWED

by

Philip Butta

 “Little brother, little brother. have you interviewed the whole city yet?”

This was the first and last text message my brother, Maris, would send me.  I received it October 26, 2009 at 12:50AM in Evanston, about 6:50PM in Hawaii, where my brother was stationed at Hickam Air Force Base.  I was asleep at the time. When I checked my phone the next morning, I didn’t think of anything of the message, other than that it was odd for my brother to communicate via texting, especially for something as trivial as what he’d written.  I sent a joking return message while I ate breakfast: “I sure did.”  I went to class.  I went to work. It was a normal day. 

My brother never sent a response, but at that point the only things I was thinking about were midterms.  I didn’t realize until 4:00PM, when I returned my mom’s vague but urgent phone messages telling me to call her, that Maris never received my text.  He’d jumped off the top of a seven-story parking garage two hours before I’d sent the reply.  In the days that followed his death, I always wondered where Maris’ phone was when the text finally reached him.  Was it in his pocket?  Had it been smashed to pieces during the fall?  Was it in a police inventory bin?  An autopsy room?  Did it ring when my message arrived?  I had no idea what had happened at the other end of the line.  A phone could only do so much to traverse the 4,000 miles between us.  We might as well have been living in different worlds.

My brother had left Chicago immediately after graduating high school in 2006.  He enlisted in the Air Force, finished technical school, and ended up serving as a Senior Airman in Hawaii near Pearl Harbor.  I was nonplussed when I first heard him talking about signing up.  Saying my brother was a non-conformist, an anti-authoritarian, might be an understatement.  He went through a phase in eighth grade where he carved the anarchy sign on everything, including the back of his hand.  He wasn’t a delinquent, but he kicked over his fair share of newspaper stands as an adolescent.  He bought chemistry sets just to make combustible reactions that destroyed half the stuffed animals from our childhood.  The other half died at the end of a BB gun.  He was Fight Club’s Tyler Durden, improvisational napalm and all, except he wasn’t a figment of my imagination. 

Maris was three years older than me, and three years younger than our oldest brother, Alex.  The middle kid.  He was always quiet, smart too, and funny as hell. And we looked alike.  Brown hair, brown eyes, tall, thin, and lanky.  But unlike me, he never did his school work, so the teachers told our parents he was a bad student.  Our elementary school expelled him in eighth grade after he brought a pen-knife to class.  Around this time my mom had him committed to the psych ward of a hospital for four days, while she dealt with her mother’s—my grandmother’s—declining health and eventual death.  While he was there, he wrote in a journal about the other kids he saw there.  They were screwed up, on drugs, and many had tried to kill themselves.  He promised he would never end up like that, do what they did to themselves.

I didn’t believe he would either.  The first thought that entered my mind when my mom broke the news to me was that he had accidentally drunk himself to death, or that he’d been consumed by an explosion of his own conception.  That would have been the Maris way to go, as far as I was concerned.  When I found out what actually happened, my voice cracked uncontrollably for the first and only time I can remember in my life.  All I could say was “what?” over and over.  With morbid curiosity and something akin to hopeful desperation that this was all a terrible mistake, I logged onto Facebook and clicked his profile.  Someone had already posted on his Wall: “wtf man…”  Two posts below, about two weeks earlier, someone had written, “whats up man? coming home for the holidays?” My brother had replied, “yep yep, will be home dec 16 thru jan 6.”

The Air Force shipped Maris back to Chicago five days after he died, on Halloween.  On November 1, I went to the funeral home with my family to view the body.  He looked like he might have been sleeping, but I looked closer.  “Just be careful not to move his head…” the funeral home director trailed off into silence.   My mom gently touched the sides of his head and kissed him on the mouth.  I saw his hands.  They had small scratches on them from the fall.  They were wrinkled and twisted from the embalming fluid.  I kept staring at them until I became nauseated.  I walked outside to drink some water, and my brother, Alex, came too.  “That’s fucked up,” he said.  I nodded.  That’s all he needed to say.  The person in that coffin was not the person I knew for 19 years, and I didn’t know why.

As the funeral approached, I only became more confused.  I spent the preceding days sifting through dozens of photo albums, creating a slideshow montage for the wake.  Maris flying a paper airplane, holding an Easter basket, graduating from basic training, smiling.  Every time I had talked to him on the phone, he told me something he was excited about: climbing Mauna Loa, seeing The Misfits, using his newly bought rice cooker for the first time.  The stupidest little things made him happy, and made me happy.  The Air Force had done him well—he was responsible, disciplined.  He wasn’t staying up until 4am playing Call of Duty anymore.  He had a rough time when he was younger, but now he was mature.  He was doing something with his life. He talked about getting a university degree after his enlistment was up, becoming a medic or ambulance driver.  My brother had become a stranger in one night.  He had abandoned our family, leaving nothing behind but a two-line message. 

These were the thoughts that held precedence in my mind for the next two months.  There was no way to explain what happened to my brother, so I contented myself with the belief that the best solution was to ignore it. I would acknowledge his memory, but disregard how he died.  It was my denial stage.  But this state of idiotic forced unawareness only lasted so long.  I still had nightly dreams in which I convinced my brother not to kill himself.  I hypothesized situations in which I’d been awake to answer his text, to change his mind.  Curiosity gnawed at me continually, especially as bits of information trickled in over the following months.  Up to that point, my family knew only a basic, incomplete outline of what had happened that night at the parking garage, which we learned from a quartet of Maris’ friends who flew in from Hawaii for the wake and funeral: Samantha Piper, Kristi-Lee Gibson, Jonathan Moore, and Lennie Cruz.

That night, my brother had gone to Samantha’s house to hang out.  He was unusually quiet, and after a few hours, he left without saying anything other than, “I have to think about some things.”  Several hours later, his friends received texts from him saying that he wished them good lives, telling them goodbye.  Samantha, Kristi, and Jonathan called and texted him repeatedly, eventually tracing him to the parking garage of a nearby airport.  They called their commanding sergeant to inform him of the situation.  Several police officers had reached the top of the garage before they did.  When the officers approached him, my brother jumped.

If anything, this sequence of events mystified me further.  My brother sounded like a lunatic who had gone off the deep end for no apparent reason.  There had to be more that I wasn’t seeing, that I wasn’t allowed to see.  The Air Force had deemed the events of that night confidential information, pending further investigation.  Any details beyond what we already knew were floating out of reach in bureaucratic limbo.

Or that’s what I thought.  In mid-November, my parents had flown to Hawaii for a memorial service for Maris, bringing back some of his belongings, including his cell phone.  My dad was planning to use it as his own from now on.  On my way to bed one night, I saw the phone laying on the coffee table in our living room.  I opened it, scrolling through the message inbox.  I found the messages I thought I would: Maris saying goodbye to his friends, that he needed to think things over.  There was also a series of texts between my brother and Kristi.  I remembered Kristi from the funeral.  She was pretty, with a round face, straight brown hair parted at the side, and square-rimmed glasses.  Like Maris’ other friends, she wore her dress blues the whole time.  We  barely exchanged glances.

The messages went back several weeks.  The earlier exchanges were friendly—jokes, encouragements, commiserations.  The later ones were more intimate.  A few days before he died, my brother told Kristi he felt like she understood him, that he liked her as more than a friend.  She responded that she didn’t know if she could be with him, that she had problems.  My brother said he didn’t care if she was fucked up.  The night he jumped, Kristi pleaded with Maris to tell her where he was, that he could sleep at her place that night if he wanted.  He responded that he was at the airport.  Several minutes later, he sent a one-word text: “Goodbye.”

I grasped onto this one strand of logical explanation.  I still didn’t know the full extent of what had happened between my brother and Kristi.  But I felt like I was closer, that my brother hadn’t gone insane, that maybe his death wasn’t an inexplicable act.  There was a trigger.  He had broken under the strain of emotional duress, but he wasn’t crazy.  It didn’t make me happy, but I could apply reasoning to his death.

In February, the Air Force informed my mom that Maris had left behind a suicide note.  Among other things, he wrote, “I wasn’t meant for this life…My mind is terrible. I am evil inside.”  Within seconds of reading the note, I felt like I was back where I had started in November, no closer to understanding his death, and now feeling like I never would.  These were the ramblings of a depressive, psychologically unbalanced person.  The brother that I knew couldn’t have thought this.  If he did, how could he have hidden it from the world? If his family didn’t know, could anybody?

In eighth grade, Maris dated a girl named Elizabeth Pritts for about a year.  Like Maris, she was tall and thin, but with shortish blonde hair and brown eyes  She now sports an ear-length bob with bluish streaks.  Still, her face is almost just as I remember when I was a 6^th grader trailing the two of them around during morning recess.  Maris had understood her, she said.  He was the first person she’d fell in love with, and the hardest to get over.  They both had “problems,” and would commiserate over their common side effects of taking Zoloft.  “Do your hands shake? Yeah, it makes me sweat too!”  They shared a journal that they would both write in—how they hated their lives, how they felt like killing themselves sometimes.  But it wasn’t serious, not then.  They had each other to confide in, and that was enough— to have someone to listen to and be understood by—to keep going.  But Maris’ teachers had tried to convince Elizabeth to break up with Maris.  “You’re a good girl, Elizabeth. You shouldn’t be dating him…Peter likes you…He’s going to ask you out.” 

She did what they said.  She broke up with Maris towards the end of eighth grade, and she immediately regretted it.  Maris refused to talk to Elizabeth for months.  After they had gone their separate ways in high school, though, Maris began to write to her again.  He’d send her e-mails, telling her he felt like shit, that he didn’t trust his thoughts.  She’d send a reply asking to meet, but he never responded.  Still, she was there for him when he needed it.  She thought he would be okay because he had her as an outlet.  Elizabeth was the first of Maris’ friends that I told when he died.  She couldn’t believe it and almost immediately needed to hang up the phone after I’d called her.  She still doesn’t believe that he intended to kill himself that night on the garage. Why else would he have sent text messages telling others where he was? And the suicide note, she said, sounded like the letters he would write her from time to time.  He had survived his thoughts up until now.  He was strong enough to do it again, she thought.

As I drove home after talking with Elizabeth, I felt like I had just been reacquainted with Maris, that he had been entirely reconstructed in my mind as someone new.  The person I saw each day was not the person he actually was, was not who he could be with Elizabeth.  Before, this thought had terrified me—the possibility that the brother I knew for years was disintegrating before my eyes.  Now, it wasn’t a fearful thought.  I felt like I was accomplishing something, and I needed to keep going.  Maybe I would never interview the whole city, per my brother’s query, but I damn well would interview everyone that mattered to me at that moment.  When I got home, I left Kristi a voice message asking her to call me.  She did.  After an awkward greeting (I had never conversed with her face-to-face, even at the funeral), she told me everything that happened the night Maris died, things even my parents didn’t know—they had just filed a Freedom of Information Act and were waiting on the official police report.     

She and Maris had been friends for several months.  They’d spent the night together, were on the verge of dating, but she felt like she wasn’t ready for a relationship.  The night my brother came over to Samantha’s house, Kristi was there.  She couldn’t see him.  She went into the bathroom and wouldn’t come out.  My brother wanted to know what was wrong.  Samantha told him it would be better if he stayed away for now.  So he left.  Kristi followed in her car and texted Maris as she drove.  He said he needed to think about things, that he didn’t mean to hurt her.  She saw him pulled over to the side of the road, texting her, but she couldn’t stop and kept going past him.  Later, she received his text saying goodbye.  She called their sergeant, informing him of the situation.  When she finally got Maris on the phone, she asked him where he was.  “At the airport,” he said. She thought he was booking a flight and leaving Hawaii.  Then he said he was on top of a parking structure.  When she told him the sergeant knew, he freaked out.  He didn’t want his commanding officers involved.  They would force him to go to a shrink, and he might get discharged.  She made him promise he would stay where he was until she came alone. They would drive all night and talk and figure it out.  He told her okay; he would wait.  A few minutes later, she was on the phone with him again.  The last thing he said to her—maybe the last thing he ever said—was, “Oh shit, it’s the cops.”  He hung up the phone.  Two minutes later, she received a call from their sergeant telling her Maris had died. 

Kristi had started crying on the phone.  When he was drunk, Maris would tell her what he told Elizabeth.  His thoughts were evil.  He was evil.  He always had a feeling he would die young, “by his own hand.”  Whenever he did this, she and her friends would tell him to shut up, that they loved him.  Now he had died at his own hand, she said, and it was her fault.  Her voice became garbled as she apologized to me and hoped my parents didn’t hate her. I told her not to worry.  She wasn’t responsible.  I still don’t know if I was lying or telling the truth.  Would Maris have jumped if Kristi had gotten there before the cops?  If she had pulled over next to him on the side of the road and held his hand?  There are always going to be things I cannot fathom.  It’s been more than a year since his death, but I recognize my brother on a different level, the part of himself he was so hesitant to show anyone when he was alive.  I still don’t understand it or like it, and knowing it now doesn’t help at all in accepting his death and moving on.  That’s never going to happen, as long as I live.  But it makes Maris complete in my mind.  And for that one small kernel of satisfaction, I am grateful. 

This November 16^th, my brother would have turned 23.  My family threw a party for him, and several of his friends from grade school and high school came to our house.  Each person put a candle in a cake and lit it.  We sang “Happy Birthday.”  I can honestly say it was the weirdest party I have ever attended.  Oddly enough, it wasn’t a somber, formal memorial.  Everyone laughed, telling stories about the time Maris accidentally set his pants on fire then rolled in the snow to put it out, or when he buzzed his hair in emulation of Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle.  Everybody had acknowledged his death but no one tried to explain it anymore.  It had become a part of our lives, a weight on our shoulders that for some lightened a little bit every day, and for others would never disappear.  I don’t know if anybody else had come to the same conclusion I did or felt what I felt at that moment.  Still, everybody was there because of Maris.  Because even if we didn’t understand him and never could, we wanted to.  And if the most we could do on that front was to embrace him for what he was—to love the things that he hated about himself—then we would.  Everybody went outside into our backyard.  It was past nightfall, cold and drizzling.  We had found a handful of old firecrackers on a shelf in my brother’s room, the tiny red dynamites with green wicks.  We lit the wicks and threw the firecrackers high into the air, laughing and exhaling puffs of steam.   The firecrackers exploded with loud, echoing bangs and sulfurous flashes.  It was a Maris way to go.