Bridge of Sighs

commencement address delivered by the very person who’d once beaten him into a coma. I myself had been willing to let bygones be bygones. If it weren’t for Sarah, normally the most forgiving of souls, and my mother, I probably would have attended. I never missed graduations, and I’ll admit I was curious to see what kind of man Perry had become. Sarah was willing to concede that he might’ve changed, but she couldn’t forgive what he’d done, and of course my mother was even more outraged by his triumphant return. It was she, when Gabriel was arrested out at Whitcombe Park, who insisted we make his bail.
    Poor Gabriel. He’d vomited in his cell during the night and did so again on the steps of the police station when we left. I remember how he sat there in the bright morning sun, staring at but not seeing or smelling the awful mess he’d made, as horrified passersby gave both of us wide berth. “What kind of a town we livin’ in, Junior, you tell me that?” he asked. By which he meant
How could any town so honor the boy who’d savagely assaulted his son?
Gabriel’s “setbacks” were often tied to such unanswerable questions. “What kind of a country we livin’ in,” he’d asked me two decades earlier when the news came of his son’s death. “Take a boy and send him halfway round the world to get killed. Boy that don’t never speak. Don’t say nothin’ to nobody. Ask him if he want to go over there and kill people, and he don’t say nothin’, so they send him over.” And of course, he frequently asked, as my mother had, what kind of people stood by while a boy got beat half to death.
    What kind of town? What kind of country? What kind of people? If my father had been on the courthouse steps that day, he might have been able to summon his deeply held conviction that ours was a good town, a good country, and that we were good people, but I couldn’t think what to say, and Gabriel seemed grateful that things made no better sense to me than they did to him.
    At some point, half in this shameful, sorrowful past and half in the thrall of my wife’s new painting, I feel a terrible confusion come over me, followed by that all-too-familiar vagueness, the sense that time itself has slowed. I finally realize I’m having a spell, that I’ve been flirting with one all day, maybe for the last several days. I should’ve paid attention this morning when Owen wondered if that’s what was happening, and later when I found myself standing ankle deep in the Cayoga with no memory of having slipped in. As always, knowing I’m “spellbound” isn’t nearly as helpful as it should be. It’s like knowing you’re asleep and dreaming, an awareness that should wake you up but doesn’t. In the throes of an episode I’m often peaceful, serene. I know full well that my life is “elsewhere,” that I should return to it, but “elsewhere” is such a long way off and I’m so very tired. Besides, where I am isn’t so terrible. That had been true even in the trunk.
    Eventually I hear Sarah calling to me. I turn toward her voice reluctantly, not wanting to refuse her anything she might want, even though I just now remember what I hid in my desk drawer and am terribly, terribly ashamed.
    “Lou,” my wife says. “I’m right here.”
    “Where?” I try to say, but I know this isn’t the sound that comes out. I turn toward the door, expecting her to enter the art room, but what I see framed in its tiny rectangular window is my uncle’s face. But this makes no sense. Uncle Dec hasn’t lived in Thomaston for years. Then when I blink, I recognize the face as belonging to José Ocariz, our junior high history teacher. He looks nothing like Dec, but his expression is the one my uncle wore the first time I had a spell in his presence: “This is some weird shit, Bub.”
    “This is some weird shit, Bub,” I say, or something like that, or maybe I’m only thinking it. I turn away from José to Sarah’s painting, since this must be where she is and I should join her there, so I do. Inside the Bridge of Sighs it’s dark and I’m alone, stepping carefully on the smooth stones. I hear Sarah call my name again, but now her voice is farther away. I try to resolve this paradox. If I’m moving toward her, if she’s here on the Bridge of Sighs, how can her voice be retreating? I keep moving, though her voice, each time she calls, is fainter and more distant. Should I turn around, return to the art room and await