I don’t know how much time passes. I start to think that maybe the pot has altered my sense of duration, that Seung has been out of view only a few seconds. I call again, louder this time. Now I am sure that time is passing. It finally occurs to me to look at my watch. Eight forty. But that doesn’t tell me anything. I don’t know what time it was when I lost sight of his black hair skimming the water. I squat down on the ground and try to breathe. Either Seung is hiding in the woods right now or he’s treading water very quietly in a darkened spot that I can’t see. I stand up again and shout out that he’s a motherfucker, that I was only telling him the truth, that I’m leaving now. My voice is unsteady. I take Seung’s discarded shirt and sneakers and I throw them into a mucky stretch of bank where the woods come thickly right up to the water.
“Have fun walking back!” I shout. As I leave the Bog behind I dwell on the image of Seung making his way to
campus barefoot, shirtless, slapped at by dark branches. His punishment for scaring me, playing with me. Wonder how that will look, Jung, you arriving at Mr. Glass’s door soaking wet, bedraggled, obviously stoned. Guess they can’t do anything more to you now, though, can they?
Do I believe all of this bitter, gloating talk that keeps me company as I head back toward civilization? Do I believe Seung’s feet are on the ground?
They are not. He’s descending now, going deep as I zigzag this way and that until I find the path out. For a minute, ninety seconds perhaps, Seung’s body instinctively struggles against the liquid filling his lungs, but then, abruptly, the fear disappears. He’s dissolving into the living, breathing substance of the water. There are no obstacles. He’s nobody’s son, nobody’s lover. Fleetingly he catches sight of Aviva’s face, not Aviva herself but an image of her, an image captured in a mirror, a broken shard, that drifts past and slowly sinks below him. He is a broken shard, too; they are both shards descending in a sea of shards: meaningless, glittering, lovely, dangerous; this is the world’s design and he accepts it as he goes down.
They start the search for Seung around ten thirty. Sterne checks in at ten and realizes that Seung isn’t in their room. He stops by Giddings’s room, but Giddings hasn’t seen Seung since their dinner. The two head down to Mr. Glass’s apartment, thinking maybe Seung slipped in to talk with the teacher. Mr. Glass tells them Seung checked in shortly after seven. He asks them to find their friend and report back to him.
The two boys inspect the bathroom on each floor, calling sharply. By ten twenty Giddings is at my door, asking questions. David is hunched over his biology book, ignoring me. He waited forty-five minutes at our rendezvous spot and then headed to the library. I told him I chickened out and went into town for ice cream. The expensive cognac is now hidden in a suitcase at the back of his closet. I told him his underwear drawer was a stupid place to keep it.
You can hear Giddings and Sterne knocking on other doors, low conversations.
At ten forty Mr. Glass calls an emergency dorm meeting and says that Seung is missing. He’s already phoned the Dean of Students, who in turn has notified security. There isn’t a whole lot they can do in the darkness. My lower year, there was a kid who disappeared before his disciplinary hearing—he’d been caught smoking pot. One evening he never showed up for check-in, but the next morning, he was back, cold and subdued after a night alone in the woods. He’d just flipped out temporarily, scared of what was coming. But Seung’s already been kicked out; what would be the point in running off? Might he be frightened to return home to his parents? Sterne and Giddings emphatically say no to this conjecture. Seung is the type to face up to things, to tough them out. He wouldn’t run from his folks. And then the room falls silent, as everybody thinks of the same alternative at the same time. Seung has crept into one of the closed buildings and found some way to hang or stab or gas himself. Mr. Glass waits, in case someone possesses some hint, some clue. . . . No one does.
Finally, Mr. Glass tells us all to get some sleep, but I doubt many of us do. I don’t. I lie in bed and when a truck goes past with blazing headlights I instantly wonder if it’s going out to search the Bog. Then I remind myself that there are hundreds of places to search, and no reason anyone should think of the Bog in particular. Besides, it’s nighttime; they wouldn’t be going to the Bog at night. Be quiet, I tell myself,
don’t worry, just be patient. Seung could be walking back to Weld right now, cutting his feet on protruding tree roots, cursing me for hiding his shoes.
But Seung doesn’t return that night, and he doesn’t return the next day. The search goes on, and I watch David for signs that he connects my failure to meet him with Seung’s disappearance. The thought doesn’t appear to have entered his mind. I keep myself distracted with the hypothesis that Seung slept in the woods and then hitchhiked to the nearest bus station. But without shoes, without money? And to go where? By the end of the first day my speculations are getting frantic and frankly absurd. That night, during a few hours of sleep, I dream of Seung lying in a water-drenched coffin, a fat fishing hook through his mouth, my class ring—my ring!—on one grotesquely oversized pinky, and I wake knowing he is dead. And that I will be punished. The ring was never inscribed, but I am convinced that if the searchers find it, they’ll eventually find me.
The police are a visible presence on campus, not just the Auburn
PD
but the county police too. Every student knows a different part of the story. Some parts you can get by buttonholing faculty who are willing to talk (Mr. Glass, for the most part, is), some by reading the local newspaper, the
Auburn Banner.
The police send out missing-person bulletins to the two local cab companies and Greyhound and Amtrak. They talk at length to Giddings, who eventually breaks down and admits to having given Seung two tabs of acid. Sterne refuses to confirm this or to say anything
at all but that the three of them had dinner together and that Seung did not seem depressed and that he had given no indication in recent weeks that flight or suicide was on his mind. The waitress at Waterlilies reports that all three of the boys seemed intoxicated; one of them, she can’t remember which, broke a glass. Giddings is sent home where, for almost a year, he works a job at a local record store and studies for his high school equivalency exam. He is scheduled to appear in New Hampshire court on felony charges of distributing a Schedule I substance, but at some point—so the grapevine reports—the charges are dropped. I once heard that Giddings eventually went to medical school. Sterne does something in finance out in LA.
On the third day, having had no luck tracing Seung to another location, the police step up their search of the Auburn grounds. It is not they but a student, a kid hanging out with a few friends at the Bog after finals one afternoon, who notices something in the woods near the bank, a green slightly different from the green of the foliage, something that could be a piece of clothing. It proves in fact to be a shirt, and there’s a pair of sneakers lying nearby. The police have checked the Bog before but now they come back and bag the objects, and Seung’s friends confirm that he wore a green shirt when they went out to dinner that night. The fourth day is the one on which the body is brought up. Since then I’ve learned what a human being looks like when he’s been four days drowned. I won’t go into detail here about the bloating and the discoloration, the start of
decomposition. It would have been awful to behold. I force myself to envision the details now, but I avoided them then, and even after the search ended and the mystery was resolved, there was a part of me that did not believe Seung was dead. For someone to be dead, you need to have a dead body, and the last I’d seen of Seung was his strong arms in motion as he plowed through the dark water, lit up with pain and rage.
My class ring never comes into the story at all. It must have been found on Seung—naturally I did not ask—but no one connected it with me; how could they have?
Someone has died, but certain things cannot be altered. There have to be finals and graduation for everyone who is still alive. The finals schedule is shifted and compressed to leave time for special services at the Academy church. Mr. Bonney, the chaplain, holds open houses at his apartment for students who want to come and mourn and talk. Rumors circulate: Seung’s pants had stones in the pockets; Seung slashed his wrists before he entered the water. A widely voiced opinion has it that Seung was essentially killed by the administration, by its brutal suppression of, its hatred of, the natural act of sex. People forget how much they disliked Seung and Aviva’s exhibitionism, how much they resented their pleasures. There is talk of staging a protest during graduation ceremonies. No one has ever heard of any sort of campus protest, not even in the old hippie days, and no one knows quite how to go about it. Some students argue that disrupting the ceremonies would be unfair to parents and
that graduation should be a day of celebration. The truth is that everyone is so relieved and delighted to be successfully graduating that there isn’t much traction for the protest.
What is odd is the coexistence of a mood of disbelief and horror and the absolute forgetfulness that comes with worrying about test results, packing up, dressing up, and the arrival of family. Graduation takes place on a warm and cloudy June Sunday, on a platform set up in front of the Assembly Building. We seniors sit in folding chairs facing the platform, in alphabetical order, while the underclassmen sit behind us and the parents in chairs set up at the sides, except for Dak-ho Jung, who occupies the seat that would have been his son’s and who will be accepting Seung’s diploma for him. They are apparently giving Seung one after all. Seung’s father has yet to receive the autopsy report, which will tell him that his son had a potent combination of alcohol and
THC
and lysergic acid in his system when he died. I look around to identify where my parents are located—I am hoping they can’t readily see me—and my eyes pass over Aviva, who is on the other side of the aisle and a few rows behind me with the other uppers. She stares at the ground, as if she intends never to look straight at anything again.
I grasp the proffered diploma in my left hand while allowing the principal to pump my right, and then it is all over, these four years of study and play and fear and resentment and wanting, wanting, wanting. There’s an old Auburn tradition of clapping softly for each classmate as the procession begins, increasing the volume as the middle of the alphabet
is reached, then drowning out the final names with stamping and hollering and general lunacy. But today nobody makes noise. We watch Seung’s father as he gets up with his row of students and gradually makes his way to the podium. He is no taller than Jonathan Joyce-Haverford ahead of him or Andrea Kallas behind. No one can remove his eyes from the drab brown jacket Mr. Jung wears or the pants that puddle over his neatly polished black shoes. His face betrays no expression, but students begin to cry quietly as he moves closer to the stage and finally mounts the steps to take the diploma. He nods stiffly when he receives it. I cry, too, believe me. I can’t help it, when people are weeping all around me, and, guided by the gaze of others, I seek out Seung’s mother and brother in the parents’ rows. I truly miss Seung then; his absence hurts me and seems inconceivable. Inconceivable that a living person should be snuffed out. I turn to look at Aviva again, wondering how she is taking all this. She is dry-eyed, silent, still staring into the grass.
After the last name is called and the awards are given and our commencement speaker has finished, the clouds shift and sunlight spears down into the crowd. People put on sunglasses and begin to drift toward the graduation picnic. Someone hovers near me and I realize it is Seung’s mother. She is short, plump, solid. Her hair is pulled back in a simple bun. She is dressed in a dark suit and carries a small dark purse. She looks at me curiously. I think she recognizes me from around Jordan but can’t quite place me. I can’t bear to hold her gaze, and I make sure, as I put a hamburger
and chips and a couple of brownies on my plate (I always have an appetite; nothing ever stops my appetite), to stay far away from wherever the Jung family happens to be.
A kid named Charlie Bradley has a family farm—hay, goats, and Christmas trees—about twenty miles northwest of Portsmouth, and he’s hosting a big graduation party there. Carlyle and Lena urge Aviva to go, even though neither of them will be able to join her. Carlyle’s parents have booked her ticket to Dulles for the evening of graduation, precisely so that she won’t attend any parties, and Lena has to rush home for a state piano competition. Aviva—her friends say—needs to be around other people, especially Seung’s buddies. They don’t know that Aviva broke things off with Seung the night he died, that when she sees Sterne and Giddings and the others all she can think of is that she murdered their friend. Yet she lets them be good to her; she can’t bear for them or anyone to know the truth, what she did and what she said. They take their meals with her and walk her to her finals, and Giddings gives her Seung’s copy of
The Doors of Perception,
filled with
his notes. There’s been talk of Charlie Bradley canceling the party because of what happened, but in the end people agree that Seung, if he could pronounce on the matter, would want everybody to have a kick-ass celebration.
Aviva doesn’t want to go to the party. She doesn’t want to go anywhere. During finals she mostly stayed in her room, studying for long hours next to her roommate. Carlyle has invited her to stay at her home in Virginia for a couple of weeks, but Aviva can’t imagine being in the midst of someone else’s family life, having to eat their food and join their conversations. She can’t bear the idea of being
watched,
studied for signs of grief and distress, or their absence. On the other hand, she dreads the thought of returning to Chicago and that deeply silent apartment with its creeping shabbiness, where even the presence of Marshall seems no safeguard against a slow, clotting despair.