Found
by Joe Baumann
Image: “Nature Morte 6” by Roger Camp
2006
I sit down on the futon beneath my lofted bed and turn on the television. The window in my fraternity house bedroom is open because our air conditioning is not working, and everything is a smeary swelter. Normally, the house is home to twenty people, but the semester has been over for a few weeks; I’ve just moved in after three years living on campus at my liberal arts school in the middle of rural Missouri, while most everyone else has just moved out. Only one other person, my friend Matt, is living in the house this summer. It’s the quietest it’s ever been. I’m staying in town to take a chemistry class not because I’m bad at or scared of science but because the required lab was always an inconvenience for the rest of my schedule in the regular term. I have nothing else to do with my days except wait tables at the restaurant where I’ve secured a summer job.
Tonight, I do not have to work. Class doesn’t start for a few weeks. I could go to one of the bars, but even though three years of college life and parties have made me more outgoing, I’m not the sort to walk to our town square by myself, even if the odds are good that I would know people there. Instead, I channel surf.
I land on an episode of LOST. I am familiar with the show conceptually, but I have never watched. It turns out that I’m tuning in to the second season finale, a two-hour shebang that will answer many of the questions the show has posed so far, solving several of its mysteries.
Not that I have any idea what those mysteries are.
Down on the sidewalk, a cluster of students wanders by, laughing. Their voices swirl through my open window. I watch them until they disappear behind a copse of trees.
I turn back to the television. A character I don’t yet know named Desmond is sobbing. Even though I’ve never watched a single episode, I decide to watch this one.
1992
The church is bathed in blood. At least, to my seven-year-old brain, and many years later, my memory, that’s what it looks like: kneelers covered in crushed red felt, hymnals a deep maroon with embossed gold lettering, the priest’s vestment Pentecost scarlet, the drapery along the altar and sacristy a glowing vermillion. Ruby curtains buttress the stained-glass windows. The younger of my two sisters wears a red dress: her favorite color.
We are sitting in the first pew. Everything is gaudy and shimmering, the candleholders and tabernacle and paten all plated in gold. I feel like I’m inside a Renaissance painting.
Most of Mass is a blurry memory, except for the priest’s message: we die because we sin. I decide that as long as I only ever do good, I will not grow old or infirm. I will live forever. I will not have to be laid to rest. This becomes the bedrock of my belief. Every other lesson I’ve been taught in PSR class—at this point, living in New York, I still go to a public school, but in only a few weeks we will move halfway across the country, and I will start attending a private Catholic school—slithers out of my head. This, eternal life without death, is all that matters, for now and for a long time.
2006
I spend the summer catching up, watching seasons one and two of LOST online; it is the first television show that I watch this way, and I am one of the nearly one and a half million people to do so in the two months that the first forty-nine episodes are made available. It is a strange experience to watch from the beginning knowing where things end up, with Desmond lighting up the hatch, with Henry and the Others capturing Jack, Sawyer, and Kate. With Boone dead and gone, with Ana Lucia and Libby shot by Michael. Shocking turns are not so shocking. I feel weirdly omnipotent, as if I have time-traveled, pushing against the normal flow and chronology of things.
The story is engrossing. I enjoy the character-oriented nature of each episode, the flashbacks filling in details and history. I think about how flashbacks function in the mediocre stories I’ve written in my creative writing courses. How the past and present can function together in my nonfiction, the essays I’ve promised myself I’ll work on over the summer. Instead of those, I focus on LOST and getting a good grade in chemistry. So much easier to watch and absorb than to study, than to write, so much more fun to become embroiled in the mysteries on screen, even if, for many of them, I already know the solution.
In the premiere of season two, Jack and Locke get into a heated argument; the episode is titled “Man of Science, Man of Faith.” Locke, who finds himself able to walk upon crashing on the mysterious island after four years of using a wheelchair after being pushed out a window, asks Jack, “Why do you find it so hard to believe?”
“Why do you find it so easy?” Jack, the spinal surgeon steeped in science and rationality, responds.
John, frustrated, shouts, “It’s never been easy.” His voice cracks, but it doesn’t break.
1994
Our church in Missouri is larger than the one in New York. The pews are hard-backed, and everything is brown or beige, swampy instead of bloody. My father serves as a lector or eucharistic minister most weekends, so which Mass we attend—Saturday at 5:30, Sunday at 8:30, Sunday at 10:00—is dependent on his schedule. We always sit on the left side, nearest the lectern. The central sets of pews are lit the brightest, so we always seem to be in shadow.
Every now and then, something unusual interrupts the ritual flow. This week, it is a presentation on abortion. I have never heard of this procedure before now and am horrified by the literature that’s been stuffed into the hymnal cradles: tri-folded pamphlets with illustrations showing how a doctor partially “births” the fetus and then uses scissors to pierce the skull and brain. My stomach does a little flip-flop, and I lean to my mother and whisper, as a bad joke, “I think someone must have done that to me.” She pretends to laugh but then shushes me.
For the time being, I don’t recognize that this information is, at best, a partial truth. No one in the congregation speaks up, no one says a word in resistance, no one calls out the lie. For a long time, I take this version of the abortion narrative as gospel, because there is no one around to make me see things differently. The tunnel I live in is narrow, with little space to turn around or see a different kind of light.
2007
I watch season three at my girlfriend’s house. Meg is a psychology major, while I’m studying English, and our interests overlap little when it comes to reading and entertainment. But when I tell her that I spent the summer—she was in St. Louis—catching up on LOST, she lets out a little yelp of joy and tells me how much she loves that show, and so we sit in the living room of her rental house, an airy two-story with white crown molding and squeaky stairs, and watch. At the end of “Tricia Takanawa Is Dead,” I call it a filler episode.
“But it’s classic LOST,” she says. “Character development.”
“It’s season three,” I say. “Shouldn’t the characters be developed?”
We keep watching together despite our disagreements about favorite characters—hers: Charlie, Sawyer; mine: Jack, Desmond—and whether the show slows down too much or is smart to take its time. We agree that a string of episodes near the season’s end, “The Brig,” “The Man Behind the Curtain,” and “Greatest Hits,” despite the latter’s wonky physics with water and air, are its best.
But we do not watch the finale together.
Threaded between episodes is the fraying string of our relationship, which has gone on for nearly two years. We get in fights more frequently; I leave her house earlier in the morning each day, barely saying goodbye. She becomes her sorority’s president after I lose the election for the same position in my fraternity, to my closest friend. At my spring formal, we argue after I drink way too much rum, and I wave my hands around the room at one point, saying, “See all these other couples? They’re having fun.”
During finals week, she breaks up with me, which I saw coming and agree is the right thing for both of us. Days later, when the flashforwards are revealed in the finale, I have no one to guffaw and wonder with. My theories and predictions echo nowhere but in my head. When Jack screams at Kate, “We have to go back,” a jumbo jet screeching overhead as it departs LAX, I hear his voice over and over in my head. But you can never go back, I want to say. You can only go forward.
2001
A kid at my high school has committed suicide.
I didn’t know him, not really. He is—was—a freshman, a year younger than me. I barely associate with three-quarters of my own class, so while this is a tragedy, I don’t feel the heavy drapery of grief that blankets so many of my peers. The hallways are solemn; students sniffle back tears. I go about my day acting somber but feeling nothing in particular.
It later emerges that Brother Jeremy, a monk who teaches theology, has told his students, classmates of the boy who has taken his life, that the boy will go to hell. That suicide is an unforgivable sin. If anything jolts me, it is this: even if Brother Jeremy believes what he has said, even if this is Catholic dogma, why burden students—children—with it while they are raw with hurt and loss? At what point is imposing and expressing your deepest-held beliefs worth the harm that it does to young people experiencing the tender cuts of grief?
Brother Jeremy doesn’t return for my junior year, amid grumblings that students and parents complained about what he said. I feel a hard coil of satisfaction at this when the school year begins, a little bit of icy vengeance that plants something in my gut, something that I cannot define nor extinguish.
2008
Season four of LOST is cut short due to the writers’ strike that burns down most of the 2007-2008 television season. I listen to friends and family members complain about the lack of new shows. They bitch about the greedy writers, who really just want fair wages for the work they do. As a writer myself—though at this point, I’ve only managed to be published one time in my college literary journal—it is hard for me to listen to people complain. I lose a little bit of respect and faith in people I’ve always admired, loved, trusted, believed.
I watch Ben in close-up as his daughter is unceremoniously murdered, his face contorted in shock. I watch Desmond remember himself, anchored by Penny when he calls her from the freighter; “The Constant” becomes one of my favorite episodes; to this day, I still listen to the music that plays over their reunion. I watch Jack and Kate and Sun and Hurley and Sayid—with Aaron—escape the island, knowing that surely, they must eventually return. Don’t we all circle back to the places we come from?
2002
At lunch, my friends Jeff and Laura complain about Father Henke, the priest who teaches senior theology. He’s just given them a bad grade on a presentation because they said they think animals have souls and can go to heaven. Jeff, between angry snippets of his story, sinks his teeth into a double cheeseburger, the bun cratering around his mouth. He chews, then lambasts the priest again. The cafeteria is loud, the eight-seater round tables jammed with noise and the smell of overcooked grade-C meat, so he has to yell.
“Like,” he says as he swallows, “how can anyone really know?”
Laura seems non-plussed, but that’s because she’s already told us that she’s an atheist, only attending our Catholic school because her parents insisted. “They think it’ll prevent teenage pregnancy,” she said the first time we met. I thought of my own move to Catholic school and whether I’d have wanted such an education had I been given a choice. When I was in seventh grade, our archdiocese changed practices regarding Confirmation; for years, students didn’t prepare for the sacrament until high school. For some reason, my seventh-grade class became the first to be confirmed in grade school. In theory, the choice was ours, but what thirteen-year-old would tell their parents and teachers they didn’t want to be confirmed into the faith they’ve been steeped in their entire life? Which parent or teacher would accept such an answer?
I rehash Jeff and Laura’s story to my parents that night, thinking they’ll be on my friends’ side. But my father shrugs and says, “But that’s how it is. They’re wrong.”
I want to argue, but I’m not sure how. What do you say when the response is just, “they’re wrong?” As if it’s always so simple.
2009
I find season five of LOST needlessly complicated and somewhat boring; everyone left the island, and now they’re all being dragged back. The time travel leaves me discombobulated, and I get the sense that several of the plot points—Who shoots at the survivors from the outrigger? Why was Walt so important to the Others? Where do the numbers come from?—will be dropped before it’s all said and done. Not much about the “Oceanic Six” keeps me captivated. Jacob doesn’t do it for me.
Still, when the thunderstorm that strikes Kirksville, Missouri, on May 13 leaves me without cable and access to the two-hour finale, I’m annoyed. Perhaps enraged.
I do not know that a tornado has touched town in the northern part of town; my roommate and I do not hear sirens. We step onto the card-table-sized front porch of our apartment and watch rain pour down in gray sheets. He’s studying for the CPA exam all summer; I’ve recently finished my MA in English but have no immediate plans: I was rejected by all the PhD programs to which I applied. Our lease doesn’t end until August, so I’m treading water. I think of Locke’s words in season five’s seventh episode, “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham”: “There is no one helping me; I’m a failure.” He says this when he is unable to convince any of the rescued Oceanic Six to return to the island with him. When rejection letter after rejection letter from graduate programs came in the mail, a pastiche of no heaped up on my desk, I told no one my results unless I was asked. I felt like a failure. I felt, for the first time, like I truly understood Locke, the man of faith.
I don’t know until the next day about the tornado, or that it killed three people. I feel a sharp stab of shame for caring so much about missing television while strangers were running, a trio of them unsuccessfully, for their lives.
A few weeks later, I see the finale, and Juliet’s death, and the explosion. The episode leaves me with more questions than answers.
2003
The Catholic Newman Center across the street from my dorm is also next door to my fraternity house, where I spend most of my Saturday nights drinking too much cheap beer. I didn’t drink in high school, at least not until after graduation, when I started hanging out with some of the people from the restaurant where I worked. My first hangover was hell; I spent the morning groaning in my bed, pretending I was just tired from being out with my friends the night before, but I’m sure my parents knew what was up. When I went to work that day for a lunch shift, I must have reeked of beer and the cheap vodka that someone kept pouring into my plastic cup until late in the night. I know a little better by the time I’m going to fraternity parties, but I still wake up dizzied and cottony often enough.
For a few weeks, I make the trek to the Newman Center for Mass. I leave right after Communion, skipping the recessional prayer and hymn because there’s no one to monitor me and no ride home I need from my parents. One Sunday, after a party during which I slam way too much jungle juice and barely remember the stumbling trip across the parking lot and through the doors of my dorm, making it to my room miraculously and managing to climb up to my lofted bed without falling and cracking my skull open, I sleep in. I skip church for the first time in years. I don’t feel bad. In fact, I feel something lift inside. Something formless, something wordless, but something right.
2009
My thesis advisor manages to secure me an adjunct teaching gig, two classes for the fall term. Paired with courses I teach for the community college in town, I am able to cobble together something of a living; rural Missouri is cheap enough. But then the classes at my alma mater dry up after the fall semester, and I move back to St. Louis, where I live in my parents’ basement and apply to graduate programs again. At night, I stare at the television that I’ve set up a few feet from my bed and wonder at myself: I’m another one of those millennials who hasn’t managed to branch away from his family, winding up right where he started instead of forging out on his own. I feel like I’ve spent six years away for nothing, accomplishing nothing except coming home. What, and who, am I?
I watch LOST, mucking through its confusing final season, the “flash sideways” storyline cumbersome. No one else in my family is a viewer, so I watch in the basement, surrounded by plastic containers of my clothes and the mattress I slept on as a kid. Like the characters on the show, I feel like I’ve turned sideways.
The finale is two hours of no answers. When the last commercial break arrives, I know that so many things will not be wrapped up or explained in the final twelve minutes. At the end of it all—six seasons—I’m left wondering why I started watching. What have I gained?
2016
My sister, parents, and I are sitting in a busy Mexican restaurant. For two and a half years I’ve lived, once again, in Missouri, this time a ten-minute drive from my parents’ house. As I finished my PhD in Louisiana, I managed to land a full-time teaching job at a community college in my hometown. After submitting application after application to jobs across the country, I’ve ended up in my own backyard.
Tonight, with snowflakes melting against the restaurant’s windows, I tell my parents, on our second pitcher of margaritas, that I will not be attending midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. I’ve gone every year since I moved out for college, even after I stopped going to regular Sunday services.
“Why not?” my father asks. He still serves as a lector on the weekends, but he attends alone. My mother sleeps in or watches television. But she dresses up for Christmas.
“It’s just not for me anymore,” I say. I don’t go into specifics, how the antipathy for queer people leaves me feeling out of place, how my shift to the left politically over the years has me at odds with so much of the dogma I was raised to take as truth.
They put up little resistance. My dad fills a tortilla with sizzling meat from his fajita platter. My mom sips her margarita. After dinner, Jamie, my sister, grumbles that I’ve left her all by herself, the last sibling to go to Mass with our parents (my youngest sister, Carrie, has moved to North Carolina). But a year later, thanks to her busy work schedule at the grocery store where she’s moving up the ranks, she, too, will bow out of Mass.
On Christmas Day, my dad is watching an episode of The Middle, in which, coincidentally, one of the kids—the teenage son, the eldest—tells his parents he doesn’t want to go to church on Christmas anymore. The mom is clearly upset by this. By the end of the episode, the son has changed his mind, recognizing that the gesture of attendance is for his family and not for himself.
I do not change my mind. I do not take the episode’s content as a sign, a signal, a guiding light from a god I no longer worship. I don’t return to church, not for my family, not for anyone. That well is dried out; I cannot bring myself to make the gesture that happens on television. That, there, is fiction. This, here, is real.
And so I don’t. Not then, not the next year. I do not go back.
Joe Baumann is the author of six collections of short fiction, most recently A Thing Is Only Known When It Is Gone, from University of Wisconsin Press, and the novels I Know You’re Out There Somewhere and Lake, Drive. His fiction and essays have appeared in Third Coast, Passages North, Phantom Drift, and many others. He possesses a PhD in English from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. He was a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow in Fiction and currently directs the MFA in Writing at Lindenwood University. He can be reached at joebaumann.wordpress.com.
Roger Camp is the author of three photography books including the award winning Butterflies in Flight, Thames & Hudson, 2002. His documentary photography has been awarded the prestigious Leica Medal of Excellence and published in The New England Review, New York Quarterly and Orion Magazine. He is represented by the Robin Rice Gallery, New York.