The Time Capsule
By Eric Bennett
A milestone birthday, a college party house, and an eighteen-year-old time capsule.
Everybody had turned forty or was about to, so, even though the time capsule had been in the ground for only eighteen years, not a significant number, we decided to dig it up. William called that shot. William’s fortieth would be the last, and William had stood at the heart of things back in college. By things, I mean a house on the University of Michigan campus and the people who lived there. The house had no academic affiliation or any athletes attached to it. Only men signed the lease, but women came around, some eventually as girlfriends. The inhabitants called it the International House of Debauchery. By the time everything was over with, the I.H.D. had, to my ear, all the legitimacy of an established acronym.
My mother still recalls in vivid detail the fifteen minutes she spent in the I.H.D., in 1998. For some reason, she had occasion, poor woman, to use the bathroom there. The sink had been clogged for four months and would be clogged for seven more. Anders, hairy, shaved over it each morning. William, Rory, Paul, and Michael brushed their teeth in the bathtub. The bathroom, like the rest of the house, was subject to more addition than subtraction. Dander and urine and hair and fuzz and tissue and spilled beer and spilled sauce and fake blood accumulated on surfaces everywhere.
Other additions to the property were intentional and ostensibly aesthetic. Rory and Paul stuck plastic sconces to the living-room wall in homage to the Middle Ages. Everybody enjoyed saying “sconces.” Anders nailed fifteen hubcaps to the porch in homage to some imagined Appalachia, and curated a sculpture garden in the front yard. It included a birdbath, a guitar neck, and a half-buried television set with a bowling ball dropped through the screen.
I never attended the University of Michigan or lived at the I.H.D. I visited a few times, and always arrived with a desire to be at college college. I attended Deep Springs College, a ranch in the desert in California, whose all-male student body—twenty-six white boys in overalls and ponytails—abstained from alcohol, herded cattle, read Heidegger, held naked lunches in honor of William S. Burroughs, and sometimes dressed in drag. The drag expressed not fluid gender identities but feelings of guilt for being a heterosexual male in 1993. After two years, I transferred to Harvard, also not college college. I had applied out of high school and been rejected, and was thrilled and scared arriving in Cambridge.
Deep Springs had prepared me for Harvard-type books, but not for Harvard-type people. My new classmates had attended prep school and knew what coxswains were and how to pronounce “gnocchi.” From ten to two each Friday and Saturday night, they wore nice clothing and drank fine alcohol. Some occasionally inhaled heroin from burning spoons. Then they resumed training for Congress, Random House, “Saturday Night Live,” and/or Goldman Sachs. They had begun this training in 1985, as I was worshipping Optimus Prime with an open mouth before an ancient television set. Instead of joining the training, I did my homework and worried about getting good grades, like the other slow learners at Harvard.
At the I.H.D., the sculpture garden and imitation sconces served as decoration for parties. Parties involved the men on the lease, four or five close friends, ten less close friends, and a dozen random passers-through. In a pinch, booze did what numbers did not. Retrospect has established Halloween, 1997, as the party to end all parties. Anders’s friends, including someone called “The Swiss,” drove up from Ohio. Anders wanted the evening to culminate in an exorcism of “The Swiss,” and doused him with a bucket of fake blood. A candle fell from a sconce and set the sofa on fire. After that, things get fuzzy.
At this party or another, William fell in love with Lynn, now his wife.
At this party or another, Paul fell in love with Edith, now his wife.
Before, during, and after parties, the I.H.D. endowed random artifacts with cultivated lore. A wheelchair stolen from the university hospital held the keg, whenever there was a keg. Once, the wheelchair rolled off the porch and sent a keg flying. There was also a toaster oven that William treated like a pet. Except for Golden Grahams, everything the I.H.D. ate got microwaved for heat and toasted for texture.
On three consecutive weekends one semester, the I.H.D. planned three parties, each themed. The first was the Good vs. Evil Party, at which Anders blessed people in the corner so that they could sin throughout the house. Nobody remembers the second party, and the third never happened. Then, at once, before you knew it, the time for the Time-Capsule Party had arrived—a last hurrah.
William told me recently that the Time-Capsule Party was sombre. Thoughts of a chastened future were already creeping in, dimming the glory of a glorious summer evening. The I.H.D. drank hard and waited for guests to arrive with stuff with which to fill the metal box. Not many stopped by, and the faithful were pretty far gone by the time the vessel entered the earth, so details were lost from the start. A flowerpot held turf from Michigan Stadium and dirt from the field at the Rose Bowl. Someone scraped grime from the kitchen floor and put it in a plastic bag. Beneath the time capsule, the I.H.D. buried a shellacked fish or piece of meat, an art project that Anders had been working on. But what else? Eighteen years later, nobody seemed to know.
Like William, my main connection to the I.H.D., I grew up in Adrian, Michigan, an hour’s drive from Ann Arbor. Harvard’s weird calendar, with exams after Christmas, meant that I saw the I.H.D. in term-time action, although I missed the parties, including that last one. I heard tell of legendary nights but never lived one. Hearing about them fed my ambivalent envy. But so, too, did those relatively uneventful weekend visits. Three nights a week, the I.H.D. dwellers formulated what they considered to be brainstorms, strokes of genius. These involved sprinting, burning, stapling, hijacking, or yelling. Miraculous destinations were purported to lie just over yonder, through a drunken blur, somewhere across an icy campus. I remember stumbling for miles, numb with cold, auditing the laughter without adding to it. Needless to say, the brainstorms did not seem like strokes of genius to me.
Repeatedly I was drawn to the flame, but when I reached the flame I found either no flame or a flame more risky than alluring. I marvelled at the hours that these friends let pass without training for Congress. And, whenever we set out from the I.H.D., I worried that I was about to be arrested. Were you allowed to steal wheelchairs from hospitals? Nail hubcaps to rental properties? Be drunk in public? I was always looking over my shoulder with hot ears. For a long time, I assumed that I never experienced a legendary night because I was so prone to worry. Worrywarts tend not to be very legendary.
When, last October, in anticipation of his birthday, William broached digging up the time capsule, I felt a familiar pang of self-consciousness. Should I really be on the e-mail list? Wasn’t I kind of a drag? But in the chain of messages, as a plan emerged, my presence seemed natural enough. Perhaps it helped that I volunteered to kick in for a hotel room and offered rides from the airport. Or perhaps you’re an outsider only as long as you insist on being one, and I had finally stopped insisting.
One Saturday in late December, I picked up William from Detroit Metro. I was driving my father’s good car. “Good” is relative. It was better than my father’s past cars and better than my car, a Nissan Altima that predated the war on terror. I had paid cash for it six years earlier, when I got my first real job, but to save money I had stashed it in a barn during sabbatical. I was on sabbatical! Since college, almost without meaning to, I had become an English professor, and this year of post-tenure freedom felt like existential parole. Driving to the airport, I was overwhelmed by nostalgia. I had watched these fields roll by a quarter century ago, when William and I, then in our teens, were best friends in a concrete, daily sense.
William descends from the Dutch Calvinists who settled western Michigan—the home of clean streets, Netherlandic bodies, and formidable prayers. As dinner cooled on the table, William’s father would pray with positively athletic stamina. Dr. Dykstra loved celebrating one set of things and damning another. He celebrated Tom Petty, our small-town symphony orchestra, his Peace Corps experiences in Thailand from 1970 to 1972, cheap deals on gadgets at Big Lots, and Lydia, his beautiful Dutch Calvinist wife. Meanwhile, he damned Bill and Hillary Clinton, the Smurfs, Woody Allen, a fear of carcinogens, and lawyers.
William, now a lawyer, shared his father’s height, large hands, penchant for tanning, and straw-colored hair. But he had a heart as light as his father’s was heavy. Before puberty, at the beginning of our friendship, we would lie in the darkness in parallel sleeping bags, on the third story of the Victorian house that his father had renovated to splendor from shambles. At these sleepovers, I would confess to William my fear of carcinogens. I also would confess my ambivalence about my love for Rachel Rand. William, at eleven, was good at laughing off heartbreak and metastatic carcinoma. “Oh, don’t be so melancholy,” he would say. As with “sconces,” later, he savored that word.
Two days shy of forty, William emerged from the arrivals area looking tired and carrying only a backpack. He would fly back to Washington, D.C., twenty-four hours later. He had climbed the ranks at a left-wing nonprofit, and work and family made it hard to get away. His wife had agreed to handle the toddler and the seven-year-old so that William could wrest a piece of the past from Michigan soil. At the curb, he brightened as he climbed into the Avalon, but he had a cough.
We checked into a suburban hotel and waited for Anders to arrive. It’s safe to predict that if you’re short, heavy, and hairy in college, you won’t be taller, lighter, and less hairy twenty years later. Anders compensated for his height by lifting his chin, giving the impression of trying to keep his head above the water of tall people. When he arrived, he was as I remembered him.
Anders bore a cellophane-wrapped gift basket full of Pepperidge Farm cookies that his mother had sent along in honor of the exhumation. He set it next to the TV. William ripped off the wrapping and munched blithely. Anders disappeared into the bathroom and talked to us through the door as he moved his bowels. We together bewailed the fate of “Star Wars.”
If I was William’s best friend in junior high, Anders was his best friend in college. During my visits to the I.H.D., he intimidated me. He experimented with altered states of consciousness in a methodical, philosophical way, asked hard questions, and waited with unnerving patience until he got an answer. I could never tell if he was really high or really thoughtful. Now he was a psychiatrist who worked with bipolar, schizophrenic, and clinically depressed teen-age boys. He had a wife with red hair and some red-haired children.
We drove to campus in Anders’s S.U.V. The back seat contained compelling proof of the existence of new life: beads and books and sparkles and markers and crumbs and construction paper crumpled and trod on. Since the Clinton years, I had slept most nights without interruption. Never had a crying baby disturbed my slumbers. I was callow, lucky, stunted, relieved, and, above all, hale and bright-eyed.
The fact that I had reached forty without marrying or having children felt exhilarating or ghostly, depending on the day. Looking back, I could count two serious girlfriends and seven intermittent years of happy domesticity. Looking ahead, I don’t know what I saw. I had always been hyper-cautious about raising life’s stakes, which seemed too high as it was.
We parked a few houses down from the I.H.D., no longer the I.H.D., and retrieved shovels from the back of the S.U.V. Anders, in Cleveland, had packed two. He had also packed a three-foot-tall Mexican skeleton made of wood, a totem from the house. Posing before the open hatch, we took a selfie with the skeleton and the shovels.
Then William and Anders hesitated. They stood before the house, scanning the windows for signs of life and surveying the foot traffic on the street. Should we ring the bell? Or just start digging? I read the names on the mailbox: Jenna, Karoline, Erin, and Aubrey. I tried to picture just how old we would look to them. It was not news to me, but I felt again an ever-truer truth—that my time for finding a wife at the I.H.D. had passed. William rang, then knocked. Nobody answered. So William and Anders began digging.
The suspense built as we barked questions and hypotheses and attacked the ground. How close to the steps had the capsule been buried? How deep? Did it lie parallel to the porch, or perpendicular? Did the porch look the same, or had repairs been done that might have unearthed the capsule? William, unprepared, wore no gloves, and he shook and blew on his freezing fingers. I took a turn digging. Almost at once, I felt resistance and heard metal strike metal. I handed the shovel back to William, and soon the box appeared. William and Anders nearly broke the shovel hafts prying the oblong thing from the earth.
The self-conceptions of youth are lifelong forces. So, that afternoon, I was slow to notice what should have been obvious. As a stranger, I would have seen it instantly. William’s mood, and Anders’s, too, which initially seemed like excitement, had surpassed excitement, and even gleeful jitteriness, to become real fear. It was in fear that we had opted to dig before Rory, Paul, and Michael arrived. Darkness would have made the digging look even sketchier, possibly criminal. But even in the afternoon light—from the hurried movements, from the shame with which William and Anders fixed their eyes on their feet as they worked the shovels—the anxiety was visible at a glance.
What were they afraid of? Getting caught? But by whom? Jenna, Karoline, Erin, and Aubrey? The Ann Arbor police? No doubt the cops have bigger problems than three forty-year-olds with two shovels and a totem.
The Bar Association of the District of Columbia had certified William as a lawyer. Three souls depended on him. Anders practiced psychiatry by the grace of a board in a Midwestern state. Four souls depended on him. Meanwhile, my biggest concern was returning my dad’s Avalon. And it was hard to see how an encounter with Ann Arbor cops would hurt the career of a writer and English professor—especially one with tenure. Had I ever before been so free of care? Watching them dig, I marvelled not so much at their fear as at the absence of my own.
The relief was palpable as we loaded the time capsule into the S.U.V. and drove up the hill for a drink. We had not waited to dig, but we would wait for more alumni to explore the long-forgotten contents. By six, Paul and Rory had joined us for round two. Michael was yet to show, but four charter members, with me as their witness, had the feeling of a quorum. We were happy—so happy! The fleetingness of my ties mattered not at all. Everything in life is fleeting. Anders apologized to Paul for stealing his Led Zeppelin boxed set, back in 1997. We talked about health care and sabbaticals. The waiter had to deal with four men who subscribed to the innocuous legend of themselves.
Michael finally arrived, having driven up from Indianapolis. After William, he was my closest friend at the I.H.D. In our high-school garage band, Scarecrow Boat, he had played guitar and I had played bass. After college, Michael moved to Los Angeles with a degree in sound engineering and worked for movie studios. It was good for a while, but an ill-timed real-estate purchase, credit-card debt, and the unreliability of the entertainment industry had caught up with him. With a wife and two daughters, he had recently returned to the Midwest for a fresh start. They were staying temporarily in a house owned by a relative, and he said it smelled like cigarettes.
After dinner, we trundled in a pack down to Anders’s S.U.V., took hits from a bottle of Dalwhinnie Scotch, and hefted the cartridge box from the back. It shed dirt as we jostled it. Heading back to the strip of bars and restaurants, Paul and I held it horizontal between us. A kid in a Santa hat stopped us on the street and asked about it. William lit up. College as he remembered it! Youthful gregariousness!
At a brewpub, we slid the crate under the table and explained it to the staff. Our young waitress could not possibly remember the nineties, but from the kitchen she brought us four pink rags, which we set the box on when we lifted it to the table.
By the time the lid came off, half a dozen drinks coursed through us. As smartphones caught murky footage, we dug and yanked and peeled and brandished. Mostly, we wondered where everything had gone. Nothing more than duct tape had been used to seal the folded metal carton against the power of the freezing, thawing, rain-soaked dirt, and not much seems to have remained. Changes in season had exploded the beer can and the beer bottle. The beer itself must have steeped the copy of the Michigan Daily and the Girls of the Big Ten issue of Playboy. Each existed now as gradations of resistant texture in the soil. Plastic survived: the dimmed shininess of a compact disc; the still-bright fuchsia of panties from the Déjà Vu strip-club franchise; a Sylvester the Cat mask, rotted to festoons of dirty fur. Faring best was William’s I.D. card for the rec facility—astonishingly low-tech, a scrip of laminated cardboard, not even with a photo.
The temptation for a writer is to liken the decay we discovered to the decay we embodied. And, sure enough, the spectre of how utterly a mere eighteen years could efface the integrity of solid objects would haunt me the next day, as I nursed a hangover. Only being alive was keeping any of us alive. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, skanky dreck to skanky dreck. Yet I was not there as a writer but as an outsider bearing witness one last time. I had put nothing in the time capsule eighteen years ago; I could expect nothing from it now. And all it contained for others was hopefulness and curiosity, and those things vanished as soon as the lid came off. Arguably, the most enduring legacy of the I.H.D. lay elsewhere—asleep in bed, tucked in hours ago by mothers and wives.
Spectators, people we didn’t know, who had been drawn by the novelty, returned, underwhelmed, to their booths. To the waitress, our table was more or less like all the others, except more of a mess.
“All the surprises, from now on, will be bad ones,” I said to William during a silence on the drive to the airport the next day. At which point he was supposed to say, as he would have said from his sleeping bag as a boy, “Oh, don’t be so melancholy.” But he had turned in even later than I had, drunk more, and was about to board a plane back to his job and family. His fifth decade on Earth would begin the next day. And his cough had gotten worse. So he stared at me as if stricken and said, “My God, you’re right.”
I hadn’t meant it! It wasn’t so! Sleep-deprived and dolorous in nostalgia, I’d reverted to my old role as the gloomy one. Which was stupid, because I felt pretty great. I tried to take back my prediction, but his exhausted face had hardened into grimness.
I called the next day to wish him a happy birthday, but really to apologize and redeem the tone. Dialling, listening to it ring, I reflected on the role reversal. At long last, I got to be the lighthearted one. But when William answered he sounded happy. The trip, he said, was perfect: “Totally how to turn forty. The day before, you wake up destroyed. You’ve slept three hours. Your head is a mess. You feel like utter death. Then, on the day itself, you wake up feeling twenty years younger.”
My Friend Sam
If you’re trying to tell the story of a friendship, do you start when the two of you met? Or with the day everything changed?
By Curtis Sittenfeld
Between Solitude and Loneliness
Now and then, especially at night, solitude loses its soft power and loneliness takes over. I am grateful when solitude returns.