The Leftovers

Tom wasn’t surprised by this announcement. Many of his friends had received similar notifications from their own schools in recent days. It was part of a nationwide effort to “Jump-Start America” that had been announced by the President a couple of weeks earlier. The economy had gone into a tailspin after October 14th, with the stock market plunging and consumer spending falling off a cliff. Worried experts were predicting “a chain reaction economic meltdown” if something wasn’t done to halt the downward spiral.

“It’s been nearly two months since we suffered a terrible and unexpected blow,” the President said in his prime-time address to the nation. “Our shock and grief, while enormous, can no longer be an excuse for pessimism or paralysis. We need to reopen our schools, return to our offices and factories and farms, and begin the process of reclaiming our lives. It won’t be easy and it won’t be quick, but we need to start now. Each and every one of us has a duty to stand up and do our part to get this country moving again.”

Tom wanted to do his part, but he honestly didn’t know if he was ready to go back to school. He asked his parents, but their opinions only mirrored the split in his own thinking. His mother thought he should stay home, maybe take some classes at community college, and then return to Syracuse in September, by which time everything would presumably be a lot clearer.

“We still don’t know what’s going on,” she told him. “I’d be a lot more comfortable if you were here with us.”

“I think you should go back,” his father said. “What’s the point of hanging around here doing nothing?”

“It’s not safe,” his mother insisted. “What if something happens?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s just as safe there as it is here.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” she asked.

“Look,” his father said. “All I know is that if he stays here, he’s just gonna keep going out and getting drunk with his buddies every night.” He turned to Tom. “Am I wrong?”

Tom gave a shrug of nondenial. He knew he’d been drinking way too much and was beginning to wonder if he needed some kind of professional help. But there was no way to talk about his drinking without talking about Verbecki, and that was a subject he really didn’t feel like discussing with anyone.

“You think he’s gonna drink any less in college?” his mother asked. Tom found it both troubling and interesting to listen to his parents discuss him in the third person, as if he weren’t actually there.

“He’ll have to,” his father said. “He won’t be able to get drunk every night and keep up with his work.”

His mother started to say something, then decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. She looked at Tom, holding his gaze for a few seconds, making a silent plea for his support.

“What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m pretty confused.”

In the end, his decision was influenced less by his parents than his friends. One by one over the next few days, they told him that they would be heading back to their respective schools for second semester—Paul to FIU, Matt to Gettysburg, Jason to U. of Delaware. Without his buddies around, the idea of staying home lost a lot of its appeal.

His mother reacted stoically when he informed her of his decision. His father gave him a congratulatory slap on the shoulder.

“You’ll be fine,” he said.

The drive to Syracuse felt a lot longer in January than it had in September, and not just because of the intermittent snow squalls that blew across the highway in swirling gusts, turning the other vehicles into ghostly shadows. The mood in the car was oppressive. Tom couldn’t think of much to say, and his parents were barely speaking to each other. That was how it had been since he’d come home—his mother gloomy and withdrawn, brooding about Jen Sussman and the meaning of what had happened; his father impatient, grimly cheerful, a little too insistent that the worst was over and they needed to just get on with their lives. If nothing else, he thought, it would be a relief to get away from them.

His parents didn’t stay long after dropping him off. There was a big storm coming, and they wanted to get on the road before it hit. His mother handed him an envelope before leaving the dorm.

“It’s a bus ticket.” She hugged him with a tenacity that was almost alarming. “Just in case you change your mind.”

“I love you,” he whispered.

His father’s hug was quick, almost perfunctory, as if they’d be seeing each other again in a day or two.

“Have fun,” he said. “You only get one shot at college.”

DURING THE Special Spring Session, Tom pledged Alpha Tau Omega. Joining a frat was something he’d wanted to do for so long—in his mind, it was synonymous with college itself—that the process was well under way before he was able to admit that it no longer mattered to him in the least. When he tried to project himself into the future, to envision the life that awaited him at ATO—the big house on Walnut Place, the wild parties and nutty pranks, the late-night bull sessions with brothers who would go on to be his lifelong friends and allies—it all seemed hazy and unreal to him, images from a movie he’d seen a long time ago and whose plot he could no longer remember.

He could’ve withdrawn, of course, maybe rushed again in the fall when he felt better, but he decided to tough it out. He told himself that he didn’t want to bail out on Tyler Rucci, his floormate and pledge brother, but in his heart he knew that the stakes were higher than that. He’d pretty much stopped going to classes by the end of February—he was finding it impossible to concentrate on academics—so the pledge process was all he had left, his only real link to normal college life. Without it, he would’ve become one of those lost souls you saw all over campus that winter, pale, vampiry kids who slept all day and drifted from the dorm to the student center to Marshall Street at night, habitually checking their phones for a message that never seemed to come.

Another benefit of pledging was that it gave him something to talk about with his parents, who called almost every day to check up on him. He wasn’t a particularly good liar, so it helped to be able to say, We went on a scavenger hunt, or We had to cook breakfast in bed for the older brothers, and then serve it to them in flowery aprons, and to have details at the ready to back up these claims. It was a lot harder when his mother grilled him about his schoolwork, and he was forced to improvise about essays and exams and the brutal problem sets in Statistics.

“What’d you get on that paper?” she’d ask.

“Which paper?”

“Poli Sci. The one we talked about.”

“Oh, that one. Another B+.”

“So he liked the thesis?”

“He didn’t really say.”

“Why don’t you e-mail me the essay? I’d like to read it.”

“You don’t need to read it, Mom.”

“I’d like to.” She paused. “You sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah, everything’s fine.”

Tom always insisted everything was fine—he was busy, making friends, keeping up a solid B average. Even when discussing the frat, he made sure to emphasize the positive, focusing on things like the weekday study groups and the all-night intra-frat karaoke blowout, while avoiding any mention of Chip Gleason, the only active ATO brother who’d gone missing on October 14th.

Chip loomed large around the frat house. There was a framed portrait of him in the main party room, and a scholarship fund dedicated to his memory. The pledges had been required to memorize all sorts of personal information about him: his birthday, the names of his family members, his top-ten movies and bands, and the complete list of all the girls he’d hooked up with in his sadly abbreviated life. That was the hard part—there were thirty-seven girlfriends in all, starting with Tina Wong in junior high and ending with Stacy Greenglass, the buxom Alpha Chi who’d been in bed with him on October 14th—riding him reverse cowgirl-style, if legend were to be believed—and who had to be hospitalized for several days as a result of the severe emotional trauma brought on by his sudden midcoitus departure. Some of the brothers told this story as if it were a funny anecdote, a tribute to the studliness of their beloved friend, but all Tom could think of was how awful it must have been for Stacy, the kind of thing you’d never recover from.

One night at a Tri Delt mixer, though, Tyler Rucci pointed out a hot sorority girl on the dance floor, grinding with a varsity lacrosse player. She was tanned and wearing an incredibly tight dress, leaning forward as she moved her ass in slow circles against her partner’s crotch.

“You know who that is?”

“Who?”

“Stacy Greenglass.”

Tom watched her dance for a long time—she looked happy, running her hands over her breasts and then down over her hips and thighs, making porn star faces for the benefit of her friends—trying to figure out what she knew that he didn’t. He was willing to accept the possibility that Chip hadn’t meant much to her. Maybe he was just a one-time hookup, or a casual friend with benefits. But still, he was a real person, someone who played an active and reasonably important part in her life. And yet here she was, just a few months after he’d disappeared, dancing at a party as though he’d never even existed.

It wasn’t that Tom disapproved. Far from it. He just couldn’t figure out how it was possible that Stacy could get over Chip while he remained haunted by Verbecki, a kid he hadn’t seen for years and probably wouldn’t have even recognized if they’d bumped into each other on October 13th.

But that was how it was. He thought about Verbecki all the time. If anything, his obsession had deepened since he’d returned to school. He carried that stupid picture—Little Kid with Sparkler—everywhere he went and looked at it dozens of times a day, chanting his old friend’s name in his head as though it were some kind of mantra: Verbecki, Verbecki, Verbecki. It was the reason he was flunking out, the reason he was lying to his parents, the reason he no longer painted his face blue and orange and screamed his head off at the Dome, the reason he could no longer imagine his own future.

Where the hell did you go, Verbecki?

A BIG part of the pledge process was getting to know the Older Brothers, convincing them that you were a good fit with ATO. There were poker nights and pizza lunches and marathon drinking games, a series of interviews masquerading as social events. Tom thought he was doing a decent job of hiding his obsession, impersonating a normal, well-adjusted freshman—the guy he should have been—until he was approached one night in the TV room by Trevor Hubbard, a.k.a. Hubbs, a junior who was the frat’s resident bohemian/intellectual. Tom was leaning against a wall, pretending to be interested in a Wii bowling match between two of his pledge brothers, when Hubbs suddenly appeared at his side.

“This is fucked,” he said in a low voice, nodding at the wide-screen Sony, the virtual ball knocking down the virtual pins, Josh Freidecker flipping a celebratory double bird at Mike Ishima. “All this fraternity bullshit. I don’t know how anybody stands it.”

Tom grunted ambiguously, not sure if this was a ploy designed to catch him in an act of disloyalty. Hubbs hardly seemed the type to play that sort of game, though.

“Come here,” he said. “I need to talk to you.”

Tom followed him into the empty hallway. It was a weeknight, still pretty early, not much going on in the house.

“You feeling okay?” Hubbs asked him.

“Me?” Tom said. “I’m fine.”

Hubbs regarded him with a certain skeptical amusement. He was a small, wiry guy—an accomplished rock climber—with scraggly facial hair and a sour expression that was more a default mode than a reflection of his actual mood.

“You’re not depressed?”

“I don’t know.” Tom gave an evasive shrug. “A little, maybe.”

“And you really want to join this frat, live here with all these douchebags?”

“I guess. I mean, I thought I did. Everything’s just kinda fucked up right now. It’s hard to know what I want.”

“I hear you.” Hubbs nodded appreciatively. “I used to be pretty happy here myself. Most of the brothers are pretty cool.” He glanced left and right, then lowered his voice to a near whisper. “The only one I didn’t like was Chip. He was the biggest asshole in the whole house.”

Tom nodded cautiously, trying not to look too surprised. He’d only ever heard people say nice things about Chip Gleason—great guy, good athlete, six-pack abs, ladies’ man, natural leader.

“He kept a hidden camera in his bedroom,” Hubbs said. “Used to tape the girls he fucked, then show the videos down in the TV room. One girl was so humiliated she had to leave school. Good old Chip didn’t care. Far as he was concerned, she was just a stupid whore who got what she deserved.”

“That sucks.” Tom was tempted to ask the girl’s name—it must have been among those he’d memorized—but decided to let it pass.

Hubbs stared at the ceiling for a few seconds. There was a smoke detector up there, red light glowing.

“Like I said, Chip was a dick. I should be happy he’s gone, you know?” Hubbs’s eyes locked on Tom’s. They were wide and frightened, full of a desperation Tom had no trouble recognizing, since he saw it all the time in the bathroom mirror. “But I dream about that fucker every night. I’m always trying to find him. I’ll be running through a maze, screaming his name, or tiptoeing through a forest, looking behind every tree. It’s got to the point I don’t even want to go to sleep anymore. Sometimes I write him letters, you know, just telling him what’s going on around here. Last weekend, I got so hammered, I tried to get his name tattooed on my forehead. The tattoo guy wouldn’t do it—that’s the only reason I’m not walking around with Chip Fucking Gleason written on my face.” Hubbs looked at Tom. It almost felt like he was pleading. “You know what I’m talking about, right?”

Tom nodded. “Yeah, I do.”

Hubbs’s face relaxed a little. “There’s this guy I’ve been reading about on the Web. He’s speaking at a church in Rochester on Saturday afternoon. I think he might be able to help us.”

“He’s a preacher?”

“Just a guy. He lost his son in October.”

Tom gave a sympathetic groan, but it didn’t mean anything. He was just being polite.

“We should go,” Hubbs said.

Tom was flattered by the invitation, but also a little scared. He had the feeling that Hubbs was a little unhinged.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Saturday’s the hot dog–eating contest. The pledges are supposed to cook.”

Hubbs looked at Tom in amazement.

“A hot dog–eating contest? Are you fucking kidding me?”

TOM STILL marveled at the humble circumstances of his first encounter with Mr. Gilchrest. Later he would see the man speak in front of adoring crowds, but on that frigid March Saturday, no more than twenty people had gathered in an overheated church basement, small puddles of melted snow spreading out from each pair of shoes on the linoleum floor. Over time, the Holy Wayne movement would come to be associated primarily with young people, but that afternoon, the audience was mostly middle-aged or older. Tom felt out of place among them, as if he and Hubbs had wandered by mistake into a retirement planning seminar.

Of course, the man they’d come to see wasn’t famous yet. He was still, as Hubbs had said, “just a guy,” a grieving father who spoke to anyone who would listen, wherever they would have him—not just in houses of worship, but in senior centers, VFW halls, and private homes. Even the host of the event—a tall, slightly stooped, youngish man who introduced himself as Reverend Kaminsky—seemed a bit fuzzy about who Mr. Gilchrest was and what he was doing there.

“Good afternoon, and welcome to the fourth installment of our Saturday lecture series, ‘The Sudden Departure from a Christian Perspective.’ Our guest speaker today, Wayne Gilchrest, hails from just down the road in Brookdale and comes highly recommended by my esteemed colleague, Dr. Finch.” The Reverend paused, in case anyone wanted to applaud for his esteemed colleague. “When I asked Mr. Gilchrest to provide a title for his lecture so I could list it on our website, he told me it was a work in progress. So I’m just as curious as all of you to hear what he has to say.”

People who only knew Mr. Gilchrest in his later, more charismatic incarnation wouldn’t have recognized the man who rose from a chair in the front row and turned to face the meager crowd. Holy Wayne’s future uniform consisted of jeans and T-shirts and studded leather wristbands—one reporter dubbed him the “Bruce Springsteen of cult leaders”—but back then he favored more formal attire, on that day an ill-fitting funeral suit that seemed to have been borrowed from a smaller, less powerful man. It looked uncomfortably tight across the chest and shoulders.

“Thank you, Reverend. And thanks, everybody, for coming out.” Mr. Gilchrest spoke in a gruff voice that radiated masculine authority. Later, Tom would learn that he drove a delivery van for UPS, but if he’d had to guess that afternoon, he would’ve pegged him for a police officer or high school football coach. He glanced at his host, frowning an insincere apology. “I guess I didn’t realize that I was supposed to be speaking from a Christian perspective. I’m really not sure what my perspective is.”

He began by passing out a flyer, one of those missing person notices you saw all over the place after October 14th, on telephone poles and supermarket corkboards. This one featured a color photograph of a skinny kid standing on a diving board, hugging himself against the cold. Beneath his crossed arms, his ribs were clearly visible; his legs jutted like sticks from billowy trunks that looked like they would have fit a grown man. He was smiling but his eyes seemed troubled; you got the feeling he didn’t relish the prospect of plunging into the dark water. HAVE YOU SEEN THIS BOY? The caption identified him as Henry Gilchrest, age eight. It included an address and phone number, along with an urgent plea for anyone who may have seen a child resembling Henry to contact his parents immediately. PLEASE!!! WE ARE DESPERATE FOR INFORMATION REGARDING HIS WHEREABOUTS.

“This is my son.” Mr. Gilchrest stared fondly at the flyer, almost as if he’d forgotten where he was. “I could spend the whole afternoon telling you about him, but it’s not gonna do much good, is it? You never smelled his hair after he just got out of the bath, or carried him from the car after he’d fallen asleep on the way home, or heard the way he laughed when someone tickled him. So you’ll just have to take my word for it: He was a great kid and he made you glad to be alive.”

Tom glanced at Hubbs, curious to know if this was what they’d come for, a blue-collar guy reminiscing about his departed son. Hubbs just shrugged and turned back to Mr. Gilchrest.

“You can’t really tell from the picture, but Henry was a little small for his age. He was a good athlete, though. Lotta quickness. Good reflexes and hand-eye coordination. Soccer and baseball were his games. I tried to get him interested in basketball, but he didn’t go for it, maybe because of the height thing. We took him skiing a couple of times, but he wasn’t crazy about that, either. We didn’t push too hard. We figured he’d let us know when he was ready to try again. You know what I’m saying, right? Seemed like there was time enough for everything.”

In school, Tom couldn’t sit still for lectures. After the first few minutes, the professor’s words blurred into a meaningless drone, a sluggish river of pretentious phrases. He got jittery and lost his focus, becoming intensely and unhelpfully conscious of his physical self—twitchy legs, dry mouth, grumbly digestive organs. No matter how he arranged himself on his chair, the posture always struck him as awkward and uncomfortable. For some reason, though, Mr. Gilchrest had the opposite effect on him. Tom felt calm and lucid as he listened, almost bodiless. Settling back into his chair, he had a sudden bewildering vision of the hot dog–eating contest he’d blown off at the frat house, big guys cramming their faces full of meat and bread, cheeks bulging, their eyes full of fear and disgust.

“Henry was smart, too,” Mr. Gilchrest continued, “and I’m not just saying that. I’m a pretty good chess player and I’m telling you, he could give me a run for my money by the time he was seven. You should have seen the look on his face when he played. He got real serious, like you could see the wheels turning in his head. Sometimes I made boneheaded moves to keep him in the game, but that just ticked him off. He’d be like, Come on, Dad. You did that on purpose. He didn’t want to be patronized, but he didn’t want to lose, either.”

Tom smiled, remembering a similar father-son dynamic from his own childhood, a weird mixture of competition and encouragement, worship and resentment. He felt a brief stab of tenderness, but the sensation was muffled somehow, as if his father were an old friend with whom he’d fallen out of touch.

Mr. Gilchrest pondered the flyer again. When he looked up, his face seemed naked, utterly defenseless. He took a deep breath, as if he were preparing to go underwater.

“I’m not gonna say much about what it was like after he left. To tell the truth, I barely remember those days. It’s a blessing, I think, like the traumatic amnesia people get after a car accident or major surgery. I can tell you one thing, though. I was awful to my wife in those first few weeks. Not that there was anything I could’ve done to make her feel better—there was no such thing as feeling better back then. But what I did, I made things worse. She needed me, and I couldn’t say a kind word, couldn’t even look at her sometimes. I started sleeping on the couch, sneaking out in the middle of the night and driving around for hours without telling her where I was going or when I’d be back. If she called, I wouldn’t answer my phone.

“I guess in some way I blamed her. Not for what happened to Henry—I knew that was nobody’s fault. I just … I didn’t mention this before, but Henry was an only child. We wanted to have more, but my wife had a cancer scare when he was two, and the doctors recommended a hysterectomy. Seemed like a no-brainer at the time.

“After we lost Henry, I kind of got obsessed with the idea that we needed to have another kid. Not to replace him—I’m not crazy like that—but just to start over, you know? I had it in my head that that was the only way we could live again, but it was impossible, because of her, because she was physically incapable of bearing me another child.

“I decided that I would leave her. Not right away, but in a few months, when she was stronger and people wouldn’t judge me so harshly. It was a secret I had, and it made me feel guilty, and somehow I blamed her for that, too. It was a feedback loop, and it just kept getting worse. But then, one night, my son came to me in a dream. You know how sometimes you see people in dreams, and it’s not really them, but somehow it is them? Well, this wasn’t like that. This was my son, clear as day, and he said, Why are you hurting my mother? I denied it, but he just shook his head, like he was disappointed in me. You need to help her.

“I’m embarrassed to admit this, but it had been weeks since I’d touched my wife. Not just sexually—I mean I literally hadn’t touched her. Hadn’t stroked her hair or squeezed her hand or patted her on the back. And she was crying all the time.” Mr. Gilchrest’s voice cracked with emotion. He wiped the back of his hand almost angrily across his mouth and nose. “So the next morning I got up and gave her a hug. I put my arms around her and told her I loved her and didn’t blame her for anything, and it was almost like saying it made it true. And then something else came into my mind. I don’t know where it came from. I said, Give me your pain. I can take it.” He paused, looking at his audience with an almost apologetic expression. “This is the part that’s hard to explain. Those words were barely out of my mouth when I felt a weird jolt in my stomach. My wife let out a gasp and went limp in my arms. And I knew right then, as clearly as I’d ever known anything, that an enormous amount of pain had been transferred from her body into mine.