Edge On The End

Lyrics from ‘Tragic Tragic Track Jacket’ by Heavy Heavy Low Low

It was the faulty foundation

Said the weeping eyes
The architecture bends under pressure
The architecture broke over lies

The moment you lose someone you love can be the moment you decide to lose yourself. Everyone claims that when they receive a piece of shocking news, they can remember the exact place, date, and time of when they received it. Nate Caulfield found this to be true, weeks after it had happened. He was driving in his car, at about 1 o clock in the afternoon, heading on his way to work. It was a Friday night, and he worked at a concert club, so they were bound to be pretty busy. Nate’s day before that had gone pretty normal, nothing to suggest to him that that day would end up being one of the worst and most important day of his life.

Nate was at a red light when my cell phone rang. He looked at the caller ID screen, expecting it to be from his girlfriend or one of his other friends. It was a number he didn’t recognize from an area code he hadn’t dialed or seen since he moved out of his dads house to go to college a year early, thanks to his schools early graduation program. Nate was a little iffy on whether or not to answer it, if it was his dad, it would most likely be that he finally ran out of money, and was calling him to spare him some for some booze. After it rang for the third time, Nate decided to answer it.

“Hello?” Nate asked, balancing the phone between his shoulder and his ear as he tried to steer the wheel, praying for good traffic downtown so he wouldn’t be late for work.

“Yes, is this Mr. Nate Caulfield?” Asked the woman on the other end of the phone. Nate raised his eyebrows in confusion, he didn’t recognize her voice. And a bill collector from his old hometown shouldn’t be calling him; he hadn’t lived there since he was seventeen, making it a little over a year.

“Yeah?” He asked, slamming on my breaks just in time before hitting the SUV in front of him at the stoplight.

“I’m very sorry to have to tell you this, but we need you to come down to the Grayon town morgue to identify a body we believe is your father, William Caulfield.” The lady said, not sounding the least bit sorry at all. Even in my shock, he couldn’t blame her. If he had to say the same thing to people about twenty or so times a day, give or take a couple words, he wouldn’t be too convincing either.

Now every person in this place will lose their lives

I am a burning building bringing everyone inside to the ground

“Yeah. Um. Ok.” Nate stammered, still trying to make sense of what this lady that he had never talked too before had just told him.

“When do you believe you’ll be able to get here?” The woman asked, an annoyed tone in her voice.

“Um. In about a hour and a half?” Nate said, looking from the traffic to his dashboard clock. Even though he had moved away, he made sure he stayed close in case something like this ever were to happen. It never really occurred to him that it would.

“I’ll tell the front to expect you. Goodbye.” The annoyed woman hung up.

In the time it takes
To make things right
Well make new memories
This feeling will have passed

He snapped my phone shut, tapping his wheel, still trying to process the information that had just been told to him. He didn’t know whether to cry, scream, or cheer in happiness. His emotions about his dad were mixed. He loved him, he was his father, but he also hated him for how much pain he put him through growing up and his mom while she was alive from his constant binge drinking. Since the time when he was 10 years old when his dad beat him in a drunken rage, Nate knew he would never become that way. In fact, he didn’t even drink at all. But he did smoke. And now was a perfect time as any to. And Nate did. He rolled down the window to his car, pulled one out of the carton in his pocket and lit it.

He kept contemplating how to react and handle this while he puffed away. The thought that maybe it wasn’t his father crossed his mind, but Nate quickly dismissed it. Grayon was a small town, where everyone knew everyone, and Nate’s dad was the town drunk. If the coroner said it was William Caulfield, there was a 99.9 percent chance it was.

The drive to the morgue in the town Nate had sworn he never would return to went the same. He didn’t cry, he didn’t laugh, he didn’t make a sound. The entire hour and twenty-six minute drive went by in complete silence, not even music was played. And the strangest part was, he thought about the most random things. A paper that was due next week, that cute girl that smiled at him when entering his Political Science class. Everything except that his father was dead.

He began to realize what he was doing when he saw the Grayon city limits sign pass by him. Nate drove through the familiar streets, pulling up to the hospital, which had the morgue in the basement. He silently got out of his car, locked the door, and headed into the hospital. He walked down the stairs leading into the morgue.

Nate saw a lady in a white coat walking around the cold metal room.

“Excuse me?” He asked, feeling goose bumps rising on his arm. He had left his hoodie in the car. Nate didn’t exactly spend a lot of his free time in morgues; he hadn’t counted on it being this chilly.

The woman turned around. “Nathaniel Caulfield?” She asked. This was the woman from the phone; her voice was about as icy as the air in the room.

“Yes.” Nate said, his voice clear and loud. It echoed off the metal walls, and bounced back between them, a hundred tiny Nate voices floating in the air.

“Great. We need you just as a formality to ID the body. You were listed as his emergency contact when he first entered the hospital.” The woman’s voice stayed one tone while she talked. She seemed bored. She walked over to one of the metal cabinets, and pulled out a drawer. Nate remained where he stood across the room.

“Come over please.” She said, her bored tone morphing into increasingly annoyed.

Nate nodded, forcing his Converse-clad feet to take him across the room to the metal gurney where his father’s cold, dead, motionless body lay. He looked at the face, and swallowed.

“Well?” She was definitely annoyed.

Nate nodded. “Yeah… It’s him. Can I ask you something?”

“What?”

“What did he come to the hospital for?”

She looked at the chart attached to the gurney. “He came and died of alcohol poisoning.”

Nate nodded.

“Since you’ve ID’d the body, we need you to fill out some paperwork…” She rambled on, but Nate wasn’t listening.

The body was still out. Nate couldn’t take the sight of his father laying dead on the gurney. He turned on his heel and ran out of the room, the woman calling after him but not following him thankfully. He just needed out. He couldn’t breathe in there. He ran to his car, getting in and starting the ignition. What would his father do in this situation?

Drink.

Nate decided that’s exactly what he would do. If it worked for his dad, it could work for him.

I’ll have said goodbye
You’ll have gone and went
I’ll turn my back on the only meaning in my past

He drove again among those memory-filled streets, pulling up to that old 711. It didn’t matter that he was underage, the people in this town never ID’d anyone anyways. Nate walked into the store, the person behind the counter was someone he didn’t recognize, a teenager a little bit younger then him, maybe a junior in high school. He went into the back of the store where the alcohol was kept, and got himself two six packs. Nate in high school was always a cheap drunk in the rare times he would drink, so he was fairly certain this would do the trick.

Nate went to the counter, paid for the beer, and then left the store as quietly as he came. He still yet hadn’t cried or made any sort of emotional response to his father’s death besides bolting from the morgue. He didn’t wait to get where he was going before he popped one open, he started as soon as he started driving.

He drove around the town, heading to the place he always went from 7th grade on when he needed to get away from his life. The waterfall.

Nate parked his car on the dirt road leading to the waterfall, and got out, not even bothering to lock his car. No one came up here, which was the main reason why he liked it so much. He could get away from everything and everyone. He carried the boxes of beer up with on the hill, where he sat on top of the waterfall to the side, watching the water rush past him and into the lake below. He downed the beer quick, going through one of the six packs within twenty minutes. And he was completely hammered, and he didn’t care.

He thought about his dad death, and finally, an emotion came to him. He stood up, grabbing an empty beer bottle and smashed it on the ground. Nate let out a yell of complete rage, shouting expletives he rarely ever used. After running out of beer bottles to smash, he decided to take it out on a tree. He slammed his fist into the hard damp trunk, splitting open his knuckles. Blood gushed from the gash, dripping down his hand and running along his arm. He dropped to his knees, holding his hand, wincing in the pain. The agony of the cuts sobered him up quickly.

Nate leaned back against the tree trying to stop the bleeding. The anger from his father turned into anger at himself. How could he let himself do that? He couldn’t become his father because of this. He couldn’t lose sight of himself because of his father’s death. He couldn’t let himself go on the same path as his father. He owed himself that much.

He grabbed the other six pack, opening the bottles up one by one, pouring them out, watching the alcohol get lost within the waterfall. After the last one was gone and the bleeding had subsided a little, he walked back down the path towards his car, his bleeding hand as his reminder of what he would never allow himself to become.

What destroys me
Will have saved my life
We are gone

I am a burning building bringing everyone inside to the ground