The Inherent Problems with the Present Tense

There’s no laundry left in my house to wash or to fold. No dirty dishes. No toys to put away. The kitchen countertops are sparkling clean. Every floor in every room has been swept. I even scrubbed the bathroom sink. The boys are taking a nap right now. I know when they wake up, they’ll start spreading the sticky, crumby mess little kids somehow create out of thin air, but for now there’s nothing left to clean here.

Obsessive housekeeping isn’t one of my compulsions. I count to and divide by four. I replay the last sentence I hear spoken over and over again until someone says something else. I don't clean.

This is how I know I’ve gone into a tailspin. This goes beyond binge drinking and having mini-breakdowns while singing along with “Last Dance with Mary Jane” (both of which I’ve done in the last twelve days). Cleaning everything in my world as if never slowing down or sitting still will keep my mind off of what happened reads too much like a literary shortcut some pretentious tosser (the kind of tosser who was born and raised in the US, but who says things like “tosser”) would use in a New Yorker-bound story. And then at the end, the tosser would deliver “the big reveal” or “the emotional payoff” by having the housewife break down in tears when there’s nothing left to clean and finally let you, the reader, in on what happened.

This is what happened: My friend shot himself.

Now I’m going to jump back in time to give you a picture of the person who died, to make you understand why his loss should hurt so much. Another literary device used almost exclusively by tossers.

Casey was the first person at Pratt to be nice to me. Freshman Week, when I was drowning in homesickness, loneliness, and a growing sense of intellectual inadequacy, Casey absorbed me into his sphere. I don’t know why he even bothered talking to me. I wasn’t cool enough or smart enough to hang out with him or his friends. Maybe because I seemed like a stray and because Casey never in his life met a stray cat that he didn’t have a full conversation with.

However it happened, he and I got to talking about Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, and Casey said he had a comic I had to read.

That set the tone for the rest of our friendship. Comic books and graphic novels functioned as a faux glue, holding us together over the years. Even during the times we fell out over the real glue, one of us could email the other and ask, “What did you think about Incognito? The end of the war would’ve been a more natural ending point for Fables. I Kill Giants made me cry. Did you see this Francesco Francavilla joke?” and suddenly we would be back to normal.

I wish I could’ve told him about this tweet I saw the other day: “Cool Batsuit, Daredevil!” I know he would’ve appreciated it. Daredevil was Casey's favorite corporately-owned superhero. (I have to say it like that, with specifics because he was also dead-set against the principals of the corporate comic book companies and preferred to buy creator-owned whenever he could.) He thought Daredevil would adapt perfectly for television—a blind lawyer who fights crime in the courtroom by day and on the streets by night.

I wonder where this post is going. It feels like it’s started to wander. But if you’re going to talk about Casey, you have to talk at least a little bit about comics. That might be the only facet of him that I can halfway capture. There were sides of Casey that I never saw, and sides of him that were so complicated that I can’t possibly put them into words, but I want to get as much of him written down here as I can, so that someday I can look back on it and not cry.

I wonder if that will ever happen, the not-crying.

What really sucks is that for all of his openhearted kindness and weirdly Connecticut brand of humor, Casey carried a lot of darkness and pain around inside. He didn’t think he deserved to get rid of it, but he couldn’t stand to let someone else hurt like that.

One weeknight, a few years after we graduated, Casey talked to me into the wee hours of the morning, until he had convinced me not to take the rest of the painkillers from my son’s birth and wash them down with the rest of the scotch in my house. “Don’t get down with the darkness, eden,” he said. There were other times, days when I begged Casey not to run his car headlong into traffic, nights when I tried to talk him out of hanging himself.

I wanted so badly to convince him that he was more good than bad. I bet a lot of people wanted that. We just couldn’t. If someone ever got too close to that truth, Casey would either ignore them or tell them something awful in attempt to push them away. I don’t think he ever realized that those confessions just underscored how amazing it was that the light in him could shine through in spite of the world’s attempts to destroy it in the worst possible ways.

Maybe that’s where this post is going. One of Casey’s favorite complaints was how unfair it was that he’d made it to his twenties without ever manifesting superpowers. But he did have a superpower—that goodness inside of him refused to lay down and die, even in the face of insurmountable evil.

I think under normal circumstances, I would want to get some distance and perspective before I wrote about something like this. I’d want to see what new light six months would cast on his decision to leave. It would be nice not to feel this—whatever this is. Even though I knew somewhere deep down that it couldn’t end any other way, I hoped and prayed that it wouldn't. Like, seriously, Casey? The expected unexpected? That’s literary wankfiction and we both know it. You should’ve turned into a zombie or gotten eaten by a T-Rex.

More than anything, I feel like I failed Casey. I thought we were both going to make it out of the dark. I thought somehow, by the grace of God, we would both be okay. I thought if I prayed hard enough and loved Casey enough, that if I was a good enough friend to him, if I convinced him that he wasn’t alone…

If I'm completely honest, I'm angry with God. I know Casey doesn’t hurt anymore. I know he’s finally able to enjoy all the things that were stolen from him in this life. And I know this is an irrational and selfish and short-sighted way of looking at things, but right now it feels like God put Casey in my life and in my heart just to tear him out.

I can’t keep writing this. Mostly because I can’t stop crying. I think I only have a certain amount of real emotion I can express and feel each day—thus the obsessive cleaning—and Casey’s death has put me well over my limit for the next several years.

In the last few months before his death, Casey and I had broken down to an email every couple weeks, punctuated sporadically with godawful jokes by text. The last text he sent me was, “What does a fat nerd call his stomach? Middle Girth!” I sent him, “That was worth the weight.”

I keep seeing and reading things I wish I could talk to him about. Then I remember that I was going to email him the day before he killed himself to tell him I started reading The Shining (one of two King books he gave me because he thought it was ridiculous I hadn’t read them yet) and finally saw Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but I put it off. The next morning I got the call. How’s that for a lesson in not procrastinating?

This is maybe one of my favorite stories about Casey. It makes me laugh every time, so I think it’s a good place to end this monstrosity of a post.

One day in studio (I think it was junior year), Casey was asked to start the workshop on my story. This came immediately after he slammed another classmate's story for everything from poor verb choice to illogical sentence structure. Everyone had tried to contradict Casey and tell him he was being too harsh on our classmate's story, that he was nitpicking at technicalities, that he wasn’t even acknowledging the positives. Eventually he just said, “Fine,” and sat back in his chair. Not in that way people do when they mean “I agree with you” or “Okay, you have a point.” He did it in that way people do when what they really mean is “I know I'm right, but you wankers won't see reason, so fuck it.”

So, on the heels of this, our professor asked Casey to start my workshop. Maybe our professor did it to see if Casey would take the easy way out after having been forced to defend his last critique until he was exhausted. Or maybe our professor just enjoyed the last fight so much that he or she wanted to see what would happen with this one. Other than inter-studio tension, there can’t be that much interesting in the world of teaching writing to pretentious undergrad douchebags.

As Casey shuffled my manuscript to the top of his (always coffee- and food-stained) pile of papers, you could feel the anticipation hanging in the air. Everyone was preparing to jump all over the first thing he said.

Casey looked down at my first page and sighed. “Where to start? Well, aside from the inherent problems with the present tense—”

“I love you, Casey,” I interrupted.

He laughed—everybody did—but I meant it. I still do. I love you, Casey. Thanks for never pulling any punches. Thanks for trying to make me a better writer. Thanks for introducing the phrases “literary wankfiction” and “pretentious tosspots” into my life. Thanks for being my friend. I could go back and tighten this post up, fix the problems and try to string a unifying theme through, but I don't think I will. Sometimes it was really funny to do the opposite of what you considered good writing. I love you.