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Sunday
My hometown of Gordo, New Mexico, is isolated in the middle of the desert, roughly two hours from Roswell, which is best known for being ground zero for a 1947 flying saucer crash rumored to have been covered up by the government. The popular belief among UFO enthusiasts and conspiracy chasers and people whom until recently I would have considered to be paranoid schizophrenics is that the U.S. Air Force recovered the remnants of the saucer, as well as the bodies of a few dead aliens, and then whisked the evidence away to Area 51 in Nevada for research. Never been, can’t tell you if it’s true.
I can’t stand my town. In every direction, it’s nothing but sand and rocks and the occasional horned toad shooting blood out of its veiny eyes--they actually do that--and this horrid landscape is a significant part of why I wanted to go to Princeton. I’ve never seen a tree-lined campus, or experienced snow in winter, or had to layer my clothing to keep warm, or had the chance to wear interesting reindeer-printed scarves. I’ve barely ever had to own a jacket, and certainly never one stuffed with goose down or some such functional, heat-preserving lining that cradles my body like a soft mother koala, holding me, loving me.
The fact that Roswell is so close to my hometown is something of a saving grace. Even if Gordo is terrible in all ways--and it is--it’s interesting to live near a spot where an event as bizarre as a UFO crash might have occurred. In keeping with the UFO element, I own a telescope that my father brought home from a yard sale years ago, and for a long time I used it every night to search for strange lights, though I never saw any. Millions of stars up there, not a lot of aliens. I kept looking, as you do. What else is there to do in life but look.
The Gilkey family has lived next door my entire life. Mr. Gilkey was my childhood dentist, but in my opinion he did a less-than-remarkable job capping my two front teeth, which I broke after Rollerblading over a sewer grate when I was nine. They’re still a bit crooked, and I feel like they could be whiter, but that’s probably just my insecurity talking. Mrs. Gilkey was my third-grade teacher, and taught me how to multiply and divide numbers. In retrospect, I should have paid more attention during the arithmetic part of her class, given my imperfect SAT math score eight years later, which was no doubt an important factor when it came to Princeton’s decision to put me on the wait list instead of throwing open its sacrosanct doors and letting me in.
Sometimes I have a hard time wrapping my head around the value of math and physics, because I know I’m never going to create a new theorem, or discover a new law of motion, or be honored for figuring out the last digit in pi. Because I know I’ll never be able to push the field of study forward, it always just seems a bit like advanced regurgitation to me. Which isn’t to say I’ll be able to make any sort of significant contribution to any other academic discipline either, but for some reason, math hangs me up.
Finally, the Gilkeys’ daughter, Sophie, was my unobtainable crush, the most attractive girl I had ever seen. Long black hair. Vintage dresses. Cool belts. Great shoes, always. Shiny. Though I wouldn’t consider myself a fashionista by any stretch of the imagination, it’s hard not to appreciate her eye for detail. Sophie is destined to be a famous actress, or appear on the covers of upscale lifestyle magazines, or marry the leader of a European nation, though in all honesty it will probably have to be a minor country like Macedonia or Luxembourg, because the one thing Sophie has working against her is that she isn’t very tall, and over the years, newspaper photographs have indicated to me that world leaders like statuesque women. Sophie is more of a small, beautiful woodland creature with the soul of a guerrilla commando.
In our senior yearbook, Sophie was voted Most Likely for Everybody to Still Be Thinking About in Ten Years--a category that, in my role as yearbook editor in chief, I created for the sole purpose of being able to run another picture of her. She swept all the nonacademic yearbook superlatives--Most Attractive, Best Smile, Most Stylish. And Worst Case of Senioritis, which likely had to do with the fact that--I’m not joking about this--she owned a motorcycle and seemed more eager to get out of our desert wasteland than anybody in the school, myself included. I may have desperately wanted to leave, but I wasn’t able to outwardly express this desire as well as Sophie did. Nobody could.
The only yearbook superlative I won was Most Awkward, a category I didn’t realize the rest of the yearbook staff had plotted to include in the final edition behind my back, as a prank. It was a cruel stunt, to be sure, but in the interest of professionalism and to show I was a good sport, I dutifully ran a picture of myself. I had the photo editor take the snapshot while I was sitting down so the yearbook wouldn’t permanently record how gangly and almost pipe-cleaner-ish my body had become. Even my parents thought I was looking strange, and I noticed they rarely took photographs of me anymore, though maybe that happens naturally as one gets older and the cuteness of childhood dissipates with every tick of the minute hand.
Please allow me to break from my story for a moment to talk about my parents. Though I love them very much, I’m not going to mention them too often, for the simple fact that they weren’t around for what happened to me.
During that fateful week when my life changed, my mother and father were on vacation, spending several days trekking across a remote part of northwestern Vietnam, and had left me to my own devices, knowing full well I didn’t have enough friends to throw a party or get into any serious trouble. Their leaving me behind shouldn’t be seen as a reflection of their parenting skills, but rather as a new embrace of international travel, combined with the fact that cheap tickets had fallen into their laps via an American Airlines promotional deal. They had actually left me alone the year before, when I was seventeen, while they traveled to Chile, and I had used the time as a chance to work on my music all over the house and eat quadruple-layer nachos.
Because my parents were in a far-flung region of some Southeast Asian jungle, they weren’t able to check in by telephone, which meant--simply put--that what happened to me couldn’t have occurred at a better time, if being killed at least once in deep space can be considered a good time. But I’ll get to that.
Anyway, I loved Sophie, but I barely knew her. I’m not sure anybody did, at least in our high school. At the time this all took place, our graduation was approaching--at the end of May, for the record, for the sake of narrative grounding--and our prom was one week away. From what I had ascertained through the rumor mill, Sophie was going to prom with a twenty-one-year-old linguistics student from the University of New Mexico. While I didn’t approve of their age difference or the fact that they were at different points in their lives, she was eighteen, so in the eyes of the law, their dalliance was legal, if a little sketchy.
I was planning to spend prom night in my bedroom, crafting a song cycle about loneliness on my acoustic guitar, though I knew I would never finish it due to my permanent case of malignant, chronic, soul-crushing writer’s block, which I suppose made the fact that I was trying to complete a song cycle even lonelier. I knew I wouldn’t even manage to get one song done, never mind an opus. But ambition is important.
I honestly didn’t understand what kind of crumbling sinkhole I had in my brain that prevented me from being able to finish something as outwardly accomplishable as a three-minute song. I constantly had hundreds of ideas firing through me, I had dozens of little pieces of paper containing fragments of lyrics scattered around my room, I had tape recordings of riffs that I thought might lead to something interesting . . . but as soon as I tried to start putting it all together, I seized up.
I’ve never been to a psychiatrist, but if I had to self-analyze, I’d postulate my failures had something to do with the fact that my guitar had always been my escape. I’d come home from school, I’d do my work, I’d fantasize about getting out of New Mexico, and I’d play music to calm myself down. Routine.
But if I actually finished a song, it might mean I would feel the obligation to put that song out into the world, which would open me up to criticism, and if people then rejected my work, my guitar might no longer feel like such a vacation for me. This psychological labyrinth meant that every time I would get close to finishing a song--I could have the melody polished, the lyrics down, and nothing left to complete but the bridge--I would abandon it as not good enough, and move on to the next one. All that I had to show for my years of composition was hundreds of orphaned ideas sitting around in the gray matter of my mind, biding their time in the hope that someday I would get up the confidence to do something with them.
Anyway, the working title of the never-to-be-completed song I planned to compose on prom night, in lieu of dancing, or touching a girl, or feeling momentarily handsome, was “Sophie and Me Up in Those Trees,” though I knew that appellation was likely to change during the songwriting process, because there was no good reason that Sophie would ever want to hang out with me in a tree. The whole scenario didn’t seem believable.
I have to say, it’s strange to grow up next door to a girl, see her jogging around, share a bus with her--though Sophie was always in the back with the beautiful people, while I was in front trying to forge a conversation with the driver because nobody else wanted to talk to me--listen to your parents talking to her parents about the two of you when they got together for cocktails, be completely in love with her, and have no clue what she’s like as a human being.
I know Sophie better now, so I’m going to do the best I can to describe her here. She will never again be as fresh in my mind as she is in this moment, and I want to remember her in Technicolor detail. I will relay our conversations as well as I can recall them, I will attempt to do justice to how profoundly excellent a human being she is, but I’ll tell you up front that I’m probably going to fail, because she has always seemed beyond me, and still does in many ways, even after everything and all of it.
Forgot something. Before I go on, here’s what I look like, in case you’d like to know. Even though I’m eighteen, I only recently hit any sort of real puberty, and I’ve been growing taller without putting on sufficient weight to counterbalance my new height, giving me the appearance of one of those long, thin needles witch doctors stick into voodoo dolls. I think my face is fairly well proportioned--I don’t suffer from the affliction of having one eye higher than the other or some such asymmetry, and since I’ve never been in a fight and I’m terrible at sports, my nose has never been broken and is unremarkable but straight. I currently lack the testosterone to grow a beard, but the hair on top of my head grows wildly, in waves that are impossible for me to do anything with except occasionally hack down to a less offensive height.
Anyway, on that Sunday when everything came together and then was obliterated so swiftly, it was early evening and I was looking through my telescope at the sky, checking for meteors. There was no activity in the south, so I swung the telescope to the west, and in the middle of that sweeping motion, I caught the briefest glimpse of Sophie kneeling in the Gilkeys’ driveway, where she was fixing her motorcycle with a wrench. And she was crying.
To be clear, I have always made a point of not using my telescope for the purpose of peeping--I’m not sure if I would consider my teenage years a great success, but at the very least I’ve made it through them without ever turning into a stalker--so I promise you that the lens of my telescope landing on Sophie was purely accidental, and that I only looked at her for the minimum amount of time it took to determine with certainty that she seemed to be having a mini-meltdown.
It was shocking. I had never seen Sophie cry. For my whole life, she had been like this godlike representative of the concept of cool made human and sent to earth to unwittingly torment me simply by existing in the same place at the same time, which was not her fault and not something for which I could reasonably hold her responsible.
But there, next to her motorcycle, she seemed to be having a legitimate break. Tears. Eye gunk. Snot. Sweat. A weird splotchy patch on the side of her neck. I watched her put down her socket wrench and bury her head in her hands, which were shaking. It was strange to observe her when she seemed so alone, so I stopped. I might have been a bit of an outcast, but I tried to not be creepy, which I don’t think is such a radical code by which to live one’s life.
Because I had nothing planned for that evening--I’d already spent a few hours with my guitar, failing to finish a song, creating nothing, improving the world in no tangible way--I decided to walk over to Sophie’s house to investigate. While she and I weren’t close, we were neighbors, and checking on her seemed like a neighborly thing to do.
When I got to her driveway, she was still crying, her automotive tools scattered near the front wheel of her motorcycle.
“I . . . saw you crying,” I said. “Are you okay? Hi, by the way. This is already weird that I’m here, isn’t it? Crap.”
She looked up at me, face wet, bubbles of spit collecting at the corners of her mouth. Still beautiful.