The next day, Tamarvan and I sat across from one another and it felt less like I was sitting with a horrible man who I probed for justification for horrible acts committed. We weren’t friends, but our meeting the day before had definitely humanized him. He wasn’t a rabid terrorist who only wanted to murder people. He was a human being who had been shaped by difficult things in his life, and those things had boiled over in an act of violence that he viewed as revenge for the death of his friend.
“When you left Ladoga,” I asked him, “did you think you would come back? Did you already have a plan for how you’d avenge your friend?”
“Not at all,” Tamarvan said. “When I left, I didn’t see any reason why I would go back. I didn’t hate the town then, that came later, once I stewed over the whole thing and decided that it was the town that killed my friend.”
“Did you go back because of Viv?” I asked. “When did you first meet her? Did you keep in touch with her and Roger after you left for college?”
“I didn’t really meet her until after Yusef died. I don’t think she knew him very well, but she was upset like me and Roger. I hung out with Roger less because he didn’t like to come around the neighborhood where Yusef had died, it made him sad. But Viv lived near me and, I don’t remember exactly how we met, probably at the playground. You asked when I came back after I left Ladoga, and I’m pretty sure the first time I came back was for the ten year high school reunion. I wrote Viv an email because I wanted to see her.”
“You relocated to Ladoga after that?”
“Yeah. I think coming back, seeing Viv, brought all that pain and anger back, and I was older, smarter I thought. And nobody remembered him, Yusef was just something from the past and that made me mad.”
“Did Viv know?” I asked Tamarvan. “Did she help you?”
Tamarvan shook his head.
“She was good.”
He was quiet and he looked away from me.
“So, after the reunion…” I stared, but Tamarvan interrupted.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I’ve been thinking a lot about Viv since yesterday. I shouldn’t have asked you to contact her. I should leave her alone. I’m sorry to do this, I know you came a long way for this, but I think I’m done talking for today. I’ll make it up to you, just write me when you want to come back, but I don’t think I can talk about all this right now.”
I was definitely disappointed, but pressing him probably wouldn’t end well. I was encouraged that he promised a meeting in the future. I asked if I could read the email he had sent to Viv, and he did something very surprising. He gave me his email sign-in information. He said he hadn’t used it in over a decade, but if it still worked, I was free to read whatever.
I left the prison, left the mountains of Virginia feeling very good about my trip and my time with Tamarvan. I pulled up his email as soon as I was home and I found only one email that he had sent to Viv.
Hello:
If you do not remember me, my name is Tamarvan Barnes and we attended Edwards Elementary School, Ladoga Middle and High schools together in the city of Ladoga, NC. I am sure that you are my former classmate, having been reassured by our senior class president via Facebook that you are now a graduate English student and instructor at VCU. Congratulations by the way on your success. It is always a good thing to hear that old friends are progressing towards their life’s ambitions; it reassures one that they too, can achieve the things they dreamed up in their youth. I myself am furthering my studies in philosophy and anthropology. I have been struggling with my thesis, hopefully we will have the chance soon to discuss my ideas. I understand that this correspondence may be somewhat odd to you; though you were one of very few people from my childhood that I would call a friend, we have not talked since I left Ladoga. I’m reaching out to you in hopes that I can persuade you to return to Ladoga for our high school reunion which I learned is scheduled for the fall, during homecoming weekend. Admittedly, I have very little interest in seeing the majority of our classmates; I never had any real connection to anyone back then and to see them now will be like meeting perfect strangers. And I feel that maybe you share my apprehensions in returning. It is possible though that you have already RSVP’d to the Facebook invitation, in which case, I am excited to see you there, but if your fears of reuniting with people who made us feel like outsiders have overcome any desire to attend the event, I hope this letter will persuade you to return. Do you remember our senior year? When everyone else left school as often as they could get away, when most of our classmates took light schedules to cut the school day short. But there the two of us were, toiling at Calculus problem sets, fetal pig dissections, and long essays that I imagine you would have written even if no one asked; I could sense the joy you derived from close readings and analysis from your papers that I was lucky to read. You were not as different from the others as I was, I remember that you were well liked, but you were focused on the next four years when we were seniors and that set you apart. I don’t think I ever had a chance in high school, my disposition since Yusef Hassan’s murder was always been off putting to young people who could not understand my preoccupations. I will never forget our discussions in the library during our lunch period (did we ever eat any meals back then?) and you helped me realize that I was not an alien among all of my peers, that at least one other person knew of a world that existed outside of Ladoga and actually cared to see it. It’s funny to me that as a native son of Ladoga with so much of my lineage being birthed there and living there, that I never felt comfortable with a majority of the people there. I think my speech was off putting. My attention to pronunciation was out of place in the Bottoms when I was younger and everyone was quick to accuse me of putting on airs I had no real awareness of. I was only ever trying to be the best, or what I perceived to be the best in light of successful people that I looked up to. And this made me unpopular or the subject of derision in my very own neighborhood. It hurt because I loved my neighborhood back then. I know that as a West Ladogan, East Ladoga was probably the physical location of hell to you and your family, but I have only fond memories for the place. Even though I had very few friends in my youth, I had my brother and we were constantly outside exploring things that would have infuriated my mother if she had found out. I loved the field behind the housing near Big Jim’s pond where we lived that was filled with honeysuckle and the spring air had a sweet scent that could lull one to sleep if they were not careful. Little did I know that field was the most unseemly place at night, where destitutes did drugs and at least three women were raped. I don’t know if you ever visited the sandlot in East Ladoga but I would go with my brothers and neighborhood kids often and even though I never played baseball games with them, I enjoyed being there, playing around on the bleachers. One afternoon we were there, one of us kids discovered a handgun under those bleachers. They all played around with it while I sat watching the clouds hanging over the rusted fence in the distance until someone was shot and police and ambulances arrived. The sandlot was never the same after that, but we all went anyway. Maybe we all knew that as long as we continued to go we could still play with the spirit of our fallen friend. I realize as I write this that despite whatever tragedies I suffered in Ladoga, I will always go back because it is the land that knows me best, it is the place that made and shaped me. I wonder if you had the same notion that I had when I left? I was sure that the only real measure of my success after high school was the distance that I could put between myself and the town of Ladoga (also the number of degrees and accolades I could accumulate, but to a lesser extent). I think that everyone from a place like Ladoga must feel that way. But I realized that the further I got away from Ladoga, the closer I was coming to it. There is tragedy everywhere, no locale is a retreat from that. I realized too that if I was too occupied with getting away I could never do anything else, I would be doomed to a life of running. Maybe this is all nostalgia for a place i no longer see very often, but if it is just nostalgia, it is for more than just the town. It is for the things that no longer exist there, the dead things, and I want to go back, faithfully so that I can resurrect the past in the spot where it perished for me. I hope to see you soon and if you are not too exhausted by the length of this letter, or by the rigors of your academic endeavors, I hope that you will have a look at my work and we can have one of those rousing discussions that we used to share. Always your friend and peer; Tamarvan B.
PRL Serials 