J. Reyes
Mr. Goebels
He wasn’t dead. But he obviously wasn’t alive. Byron’s still beating corpse left the police and other investigators with these two seemingly contrasted opinions. There was no traceable brain activity and his body was unresponsive, but his heart was still beating, verifiably (“His pulse is normal”). In the room were a few objects that became dead-ends, a pair of shoes that didn’t fit Byron, an empty syringe, and a note saying “All I know is nothing.” But we were all still left with this shell of a person inside the tiny apartment, daring the officials and definition-givers to come away with an answer.
Instead, they came to me. They said, “Do you know Byron Goebels?” And I said, “Used to.” And that’s where things got fishy. You see, not only was Byron’s catatonic, vegetative state a conundrum, but Byron himself was. It was hard enough to say you know of him than to truly know him. Byron Goebels was perhaps the greatest conundrum that I’ve encountered, or rather, who I’ve encountered. Not in the purposefulness in what made him tick, but in the sense that you saw his aim and never really understood how the hell he was going to get there, because no one had, unless you believed in that sort of thing.
We all went to school. At Kenyon. Me, Byron and Jeff. The first thing that you need to understand about Kenyon is that it’s very small. It only has about four hundred people in each class. It’s almost ninety percent white, high-class white, mind you, and though many of the kids were nice and seemingly artsy, a lot of times it felt like people just wanted to be interesting or different. The thing about Byron was that he took that twist and spun it into his life, where you couldn’t identify what was going to be a mere interest and what was going to be something that he would take for a wild spin at some different time in his life. Needless to say, when I met him I could tell there was something primal about him, but did not know that his life would take the spin it eventually would call to him.
We met at some off-campus party at a pink house where, after several drinks, in a more private upstairs room, a big-haired senior offered each of us a tab of some hallucinogen and we all took it. We listened to music and joked before the effects took hold and we decided the room was just too small for our overweight imaginations. We careened around the house, making fools of ourselves trying to talk to girls who clearly knew that we were up to something a little illegal. Everything was more vibrant and meaningful. Our ideas bit into each other and spawned obsession. A bit into the trip, Byron mentioned something about Jefferson Airplane and we all went back to his dorm room to listen to their album “Surrealistic Pillow” and talk about that scene in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas where Johnny Depp, who is Hunter S. Thompson, is lighting up a cigarette as the bassist of the Red Hot Chili Peppers frantically licks the acid residue off his arm. In that scene, a square of a man is coming in to urinate when he notices that there is a man who doesn’t look entirely different from a dog licking some white powder off another man’s red flannel shirt. “We are those guys!” shouted Jeff. We giggled and spun to the waves of the sixties, swaying our arms and hips in ellipses. Byron got up on one of the two desks in the room, took his shirt off and began belting the chorus of that transcendental anthem. “Don’t you want somebody to love? Don’t you need somebody to love? Don’t you want somebody love? You better find somebody to love.” He beat his chest, hollered, leaped off the desk and put up his dukes. “Who wants to fight?”
Jeff and I were sitting there, kind of shocked by the radiance of his performance: it was something so primal that it caught both of us unaware and in our heightened state of sensory puzzlement, we stared. And that’s when Jeff said it, kind of what summed up Byron completely. It was quick and quiet, like a falling star, but no less glorious. He rubbed his eyes and dropped his jaw before announcing “Wow.”
Byron laughed and tossed his hair, “I’m just kidding. I don’t hit girls. And it’s stupid to hurt people anyway. I just thought that would be something that Hemingway, or one of those other unstable drunk fuck writers would say.”
Jeff and I nodded, because it really didn’t make sense to fight, after all, we had really just met and I had never been in a fight before, so I figured it was best not to embarrass myself in front of my newly formed friends (and I did hope they were my friends.)
“I’m hungry,” said Jeff. So we ate ramen and listened to psychedelic music, while fighting the workings of powerful hallucinogens.
The rest was like that. College and parties and a lot of drugs, but Jeff and I never had the substance intake of Byron. Byron drank like a fasting monk and, like a fasting monk, only believed in the transcendence of the human mind and spirit. He called it being “unstuck,” and always used to say that our generation was neither a beat generation nor a lost generation. In his opinion, it was our duty to be a little unstuck. But it often felt like he was channeling a little too much beat generation, except, according to him, he was thoroughly disgusted with the beats’ behavior, in the sense that the beats were these people who were so enamored with breaking through the realm of humanity to something else, but it didn’t mean anything so they always returned to their illicit habits of drugs and sex and misery. The time I told him that he was doing the same thing he smashed his vodka bottle on the wall and told me to shut the fuck up through bleary eyes and stumbling words. I’m sure it hit a little too close to home for him, because that’s what Byron did in college. He would finish his work and drink or smoke a couple of bowls of cannabis or do a couple of lines of cocaine or ingest some sort of hallucinogen. It was unstable to the max and he was unstable, sure as hell beyond unstuck, and we were going to tell him that it really wasn’t healthy for him, and he was beginning to lose himself, but we never actually had to because his parents were both killed by a drunk driver.
The report goes that they were coming back from A Streetcar Named Desire, which had been so good, and were surely talking over the merits of disillusionment when a drunk man in an old purple Honda ran a red light directly into the side of his parents car, killing his father in the passenger seat instantly on impact. His mother was not so fortunate. She was cognizant of the rescue process. She saw the jaws of life tear her car apart. Her husband pulled through the car’s broken shell. Her limp and failing legs crumpling on the ground. (“That’s not my husband.” “Mrs. Gottlieb, your husband is dead.”) And she would almost remember this in her death. And that “almost” is key. The crater in the left side of her head was simply too much for her to live. So Byron’s mom died peacefully sedated with the help of strong opiates on the way to the emergency room, thinking she was the luckiest girl in the world.
And Byron never drank again. And he stopped doing drugs. He lost his luster, his original magnetic quality that we felt around him. His eyes glazed over and he got really quiet. He had nothing to say to us for a long time, except that he didn’t want to be there anymore. Aside from several trips home to work out what would happen because his parents were dead, he stayed pretty much in his room, alone. When he left for the funeral, we were quiet too. He came back damaged and different.
“Those bodies in the caskets weren’t them,” he said, staring at the ground. “They were dolls. Vacuums where my parents used to live. Ideas of the past. Done up like dolls.” And I remember this most specifically because he paused as a tear left his right eye and slid to the corner of his mouth. He shuddered and wiped his eyes, saying “I guess I’m a man now.”
It didn’t take too long for him to make up his mind as to what he would do. He packed all of his things, his hi-fi sound system, his records, his clothes, his posters, his sheets, and didn’t so much as leave a note. That day he left Kenyon and never came back as a student.
The only silver lining of the situation, and it was a hell of a silver lining in my opinion, was that he amassed a fortune incredibly quickly and had the ability to drop out of school and focus on really anything that he wanted to. Byron had no siblings so he was pretty much got all of the money his parents had. Naturally some of his extended family members had some perks given to them as well, but it put Byron in the unrestricted position of being able to do whatever he wanted for the rest of his life.
Immediately, Byron began to travel, and not in the highbrow sense of the post-graduate backpacking through Europe or doing some mission work in a third-world country: Byron put all of his money in an account that he could use for emergencies, but then began to travel with the bare minimum of supplies he would need, citing the guy from Into the Wild as the inspiration for it, (“That guy is a legend.” “Dude, he fucking dies at the end of the book!” “Fuck off.”), trying to focus on hitchhiking or ferrying from one place to the next. He kept contact with Jeff and me through physical mail since he’d got rid of his laptop, sending a postcard from each exotic locale detailing his adventures and the way that they had affected him.
“I’ve been living with a family of farmers in Guanajuato, Mexico. A little ranchito called ‘Porullo,’ it doesn’t mean anything in Spanish, but I think it’s close to ‘paradise’ in English. We till all day and harvest beans. We slaughter a hog on Saturday and cook it for the town on Sunday after church services. I stand at the top of the town and watch the lights flicker at night and watch the constellations and wonder which ones are my parents. I walk around the town square at nights with Coronas and hold hands with the local beauties (and they truly are beauties.) The men blast Ranchera or Norteña music from their cars, and make rooster noises at the local girls that never seem to work, and dissipate into friendly laughter. But life for the local gringo is good and my novelty is still far from worn, though they are still surprised to see a white guy work the fields. It’s kind of a guilty pleasure at this point. Haha. I love it here. But in a few months I may not. And I may move off and try something along the Ganges River in India. Or maybe I’ll make my way over to the rice paddies in Japan. Or just take a trip through the rest of South America, kind of like Che Guevara, but I won’t start any revolutions after, cause I don’t think those ever end well for the guy who starts them. I haven’t thought it through, but I’ll be okay. I’ll be okay. That’s what I know. That’s my prayer. I sing my song for America and look for ethereal lights in the sky, but you can only see them in the cold. So I’ll keep wandering. And wandering.”
These kinds of notes came from everywhere, and he did eventually end up spending some time in both India and the rest of South America, though he said he enjoyed South America much more. I assume it was because he was always a good Spanish speaker. Sometimes he included pieces of his work, mainly poetry, and sometimes he wrote about his adventures, but either way what he told us were only slices of himself that would always leave us guessing what he was really doing.
Happenstance by Byron Gottlieb
The water boils with silver churnings
Scales break the surface and fly into the air
We have our nets ready
But sometimes we forget
To use them
And find ourselves lost
Lost in insignificance
I lost myself today
When the fish flew
And knocked scales
And sense
Into my head
And I stopped caring
And smiled
The poem above is from one of Byron’s journeys with the fisher-people in different parts of Asia. It conveys the way beauty can make us lose ourselves, especially when it is something completely natural. Byron believed that there was beauty in everything, but you just had to hold yourself still enough to realize that there was a lot more going on in a single instant than you could ever fully process. He didn’t think that you needed materials to be happy or to be whole, but you had to have a life rich with experience just so you could really know what was out there.
Eventually Byron stopped mailing and though he dropped off my Earth, he didn’t drop off my mind. Longing or nostalgia for him rested in a small part of my heart.
What I’ve come to understand was that Byron wasn’t a part of this world. He was always trying to find a place deeper, more real. Discover the small pockets that could hold the largest amounts of beauty. He wasn’t disillusioned with the world. Instead, he loved the world more than he loved anything else, but found that there were always more crinkles in the fabric of our universe than could ever possibly be understood. So he looked to the people who didn’t care about the intricacies and found that there was a lot we couldn’t see because we didn’t keep our eyes and ears close enough to the ground.
After I was summoned to the apartment with Byron’s shell, I became curious. How does one even attain that state of nothingness, where you’re alive but not conscious. I immediately thought of Eastern religion, but my mind also fluttered to the empty syringe, on which the police office were currently running tests to find out what had been inside it, and also on the pair of boots that didn’t fit Byron. Why would those boots even be there?
I called in a favor from one of my friends who works at the department of homeland security to see where Byron had been before he reached whatever state he was currently in. It was a pretty wild look at a guy who had been to so many different places, most of which he had done illegally. The information said he was still technically a citizen of the United States, but I can’t see Byron going through the effort of getting naturalized in another country. Neither can I see him getting a new passport each time he needed to, which answered the question of why he had traveled illegally to other countries. He didn’t think it was important.
The trail of where he had been ends somewhere in Nepal, but it’s anyone’s guess from there on out. You can’t really track people inside of that country, and I didn’t think it would be too smart to wander around with a photo of some white dude and expect some stranger to know the guy and not expect them to rob someone who was lost.
Instead I went to the local bar and bought a round for everyone inside. It was only three in the afternoon, but it didn’t stop the crowd from being thankful. I lit up a cigarette before the bartender stopped me and said “you can’t smoke in here, pal.” So I told him “my best friend just died.” He shook his head and said “You can have a drink on the house, but it doesn’t change the law.”
“But what if it did?” I asked. “What if people were so in tune with each other that they would forget the government and do the humane thing?”
“It’s a nice idea, but you’re pissing me off. My dad just died. Think of what I’m going through. I said I’ll get you a drink, but you still can’t smoke in here. It’s my job we’re talking about.”
“Jesus, I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right, you didn’t know.”
“How you holding up?”
“I’m okay, he was sick for a long time. It was inevitable I guess, but then again, what isn’t?”
“All I know is nothing” I said and took the whiskey he gave me before downing it. “Any chance you could play any Jefferson Airplane?”
“‘Somebody to love?’”
“‘Somebody to love.’”
“It’ll be up next.”
“Hey, I’ll also take another whiskey.” I paused a second. “Matter of fact, just keep them coming.”
