Of men (and mice)
I keep trying to place him.
Maybe because he has kind eyes, maybe because he looks like someone I went to school with, who was on the climbing team, or smoked American Spirits outside the library, or was in one of my writing workshops.
The parade of death that follows Americans who cross the paths of the wrong representatives of the US government strikes something common in all of us.
I thought that was it. I thought it was just because this is what we do – we personalize it, we try to make sense of it; a stranger becomes our friend in their martyrdom. We see our brothers and sons in his face. His name is even familiar: Alex. Didn’t I know him? We try to to take the frayed ends of a chaotic world and braid them together. This one is like this one, we think, parsing some meaning through religion or magical thinking.
I sit in our kitchen, first looking out at the bird feeder filling up with sparrows, then hunched over and fixed on the New York Times app. I read the articles analyzing the killing. I look at his face. I get up, walk the dog, look out at the freezing lake and the Alps beyond, feel the cold air in my lungs, try to trade in my despair for gratitude.
But then my confidence grows - he does look familiar. He has the face of the young poet I knew from grad school (if he’d had the chance to get older, stop the chemo, and grow a beard). The very young very talented poet that everyone watched in awe as he briefly floated along the hallways, something otherworldly about him. We were friendly, but he wasn’t really my friend. We were classmates, but we weren’t in the same classes.
He was only 25 and publishing in all the journals we pored over, winning prizes between rounds of treatment, his pale skin and bald head rendering him into the image of a monastic genius, when he was simply a smart, nice guy – and cool, with clever t-shirts, a quick wit - who was dying. Max. When he disappeared from campus, and then Earth, the hallways took on the heavy sense that it was not magic after all.
But now it feels as though something about him is resurrected ten years on and killed again in the shape of Alex Pretti. Alex, another young man with kind eyes, a strong narrow nose, that loping grace, as he holds a hand up, moves around the perimeter of the skirmish to check on the woman who is on her knees. The video of him standing over the body of his patient, paying tribute the dead man’s military service in even, tender tones: In this solemn hour, we render our honor and our gratitude.
I keep hearing Max’s voice, reading his work aloud in his older-than-his-years, matter-of-fact, future NPR correspondent voice: I don’t know onto what uncertain ground I might fold like a sack.
But it’s not just them – the lovely young dead men - it’s also me, trying to make connections, both to my dear murderous country that appears to be burning from across the street, and to our mortality.
Giving birth opened a trap door in my heart that before, I didn’t realize existed. It is was as though my capacity to love suddenly and surprisingly expanded, like one of those snakes who unhinges her jaws to eat an antelope. My heart is the snake jaw; the antelope is the world – the broken world and all the Maxes and Alexes.
How quick I am to cry while reading the newspaper. How thin-skinned I am to the routine tragedy of the world that I’ve lived in for over forty years. I grieve the mouse frozen in the garden, the lone baby sock on the sidewalk, the ice cream cone turned upside down in the parking lot. And then sing to my children: Uh-oh, someone lost something!
Alex’s parents wrote a post that ended: He was a good man. And how much must be concealed in that simple sentence, the inner swell as he walked across a stage or into a party or said Thank you. How many gut worries they carry from when he had the flu or bashed his head when he fell off his bike, how beautifully muted they were, pouring their hearts into those empty “o”s – good, he was good, our child.
Before I was a mom, I could read these scraps of nightmare in the news with some intellectual distance. But as a mother, you are attached – not just to your own children, but to humankind, by some invisible universal umbilical cord. That’s a little gross, Mom, I imagine my children saying when they get a bit older. Being a Mom is gross - the proximity to body fluids, the constant, slightly embarrassing state of selflessness like a stink.
I looked up Alex Pretti’s parents and had a strange urge to call them – And tell them what? I found Max’s mother, who still looks young and pretty and has common followers on Instagram. For what? There is some extra pain in discovering these young men have mothers, as though it’s a discovery. Looking at these mothers, my face gets strained, and I hug my little boy too tightly until he wriggles a bit, and I set him down with his dinos and go put a pot of rice on the stove.
Nobody pitied Max, if anything, we were a little jealous, because he was a strange breed of celebrity. Adored by the professors, revered by his peers. When he published Poem to My Litter in The New Yorker, about the mice that had been implanted with his cancerous tumors for experimental treatments, I read it over and over again.
We watch each mouse like a crystal ball, Max wrote ten years ago, as he and his team of doctors hoped that the mice would lead them to his cure. He names the mice “Max” – all of them – reasoning that he won’t have children, so he might as well, No playing favorites. I watch the video of Alex being shot as Max watched the mice, as though it might divine some future outcome. Will we find a cure to this?
And then I get on with it, and unload the dishwasher, and scrub off the kids’ boots and make myself a cup of tea. Put away the newspaper. Look out the window. Take a breath – that’s it, there it is, what’s that feeling called? Being alive.
Max wrote to his mice two months before he died: If a whole lot of nothing happens to you, Maxes, that’s peace. Which is what we want. Trust me.
Read more of Max Ritvo’s poetry at The Poetry Foundation.