Looking for Alaska

I'm out of investigative tools.'

He flicked his cigarette butt into the creek, stood up, and left. We followed him. Even in defeat, he was still the Colonel.

fifty-one days after

The investigation stalled,I took to reading for religion class again, which seemed to please the Old Man, whose pop quizzes I'd been failing consistently for a solid six weeks. We had one that Wednesday morning: Share an example of a Buddhist koan. A koan is like a riddle that's supposed to help you toward enlightenment in Zen Buddhism. For my answer, I wrote about this guy Banzan. He was walking through the market one day when he overheard someone ask a butcher for his best piece of meat. The butcher answered, 'Everything in my shop is the best. You cannot find a piece of meat that is not the best.' Upon hearing this, Banzan realized that there is no best and no worst, that those judgments have no real meaning because there is only what is, and poof, he reached enlightenment. Reading it the night before, I'd wondered if it would be like that for me — if in one moment, I would finally understand her, know her, and understand the role I'd played in her dying. But I wasn't convinced enlightenment struck like lightning.

After we'd passed our quizzes, the Old Man, sitting, grabbed his cane and motioned toward Alaska's fading question on the blackboard. 'Let's look at one sentence on page ninety-four of this very entertaining introduction to Zen that I had you read this week. 'Everything that comes together falls apart,'' the Old Man said. 'Everything.

The chair I'm sitting on. It was built, and so it will fall apart. I'm gonna fall apart, probably before this chair. And you're gonna fall apart. The cells and organs and systems that make you you — they came together, grew together, and so must fall apart. The Buddha knew one thing science didn't prove for millennia after his death: Entropy increases. Things fall apart.'

We are all going,I thought, and it applies to turtles and turtlenecks, Alaska the girl and Alaska the place, because nothing can last, not even the earth itself. The Buddha said that suffering was caused by desire, we'd learned, and that the cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. When you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop suffering when they did.

Someday no one will remember that she ever existed,I wrote in my notebook, and then, or that I did. Because memories fall apart, too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow. In the beginning, she had haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else's, dying again.

The Colonel, who had driven the Investigation from the start, who had cared about what happened to her when I only cared if she loved me, had given up on it, answerless. And I didn't like what answers I had: She hadn't even cared enough about what happened between us to tell Jake; instead, she had just talked cute with him, giving him no reason to think that minutes before, I'd tasted her boozy breath. And then something invisible snapped inside her, and that which had come together commenced to fall apart.

And maybe that was the only answer we'd ever have. She fell apart because that's what happens. The Colonel seemed resigned to that, but if the Investigation had once been his idea, it was now the thing that held me together, and I still hoped for enlightenment.

sixty-two days after

The next Sunday,I slept in until the late-morning sunlight slivered through the blinds and found its way to my face. I pulled the comforter over my head, but the air got hot and stale, so I got up to call my parents.

'Miles!' my mom said before I even said hello. 'We just got caller identification.'

'Does it magically know it's me calling from the pay phone?'

She laughed. 'No, it just says *pay phone' and the area code. So I deduced. How are you?' she asked, a warm concern in her voice.

'I'm doing okay. I kinda screwed up some of my classes for a while, but I'm back to studying now, so it should be fine,' I said, and that was mostly true.

'I know it's been hard on you, buddy,' she said. 'Oh! Guess who your dad and I saw at a party last night? Mrs. Forrester. Your fourth-grade teacher! Remember? She remembered you perfectly, and spoke very highly of you, and we just talked' — and while I was pleased to know that Mrs. Forrester held my fourth-grade self in high regard, I only half listened as I read the scribbled notes on the white- painted pine wall on either side of the phone, looking for any new ones I might be able to decode (Lacy's — Friday, 10 were the when and where of a Weekday Warrior party, I figured)—'and we had dinner with the Johnstons last night and I'm afraid that Dad had too much wine. We played charades and he was just awful.' She laughed, and I felt so tired, but someone had dragged the bench away from the pay phone, so I sat my bony butt down on the hard concrete, pulling the silver cord of the phone taut and preparing for a serious soliloquy from my mom, and then down below all the other notes and scribbles, I saw a drawing of a flower. Twelve oblong petals around a filled-in circle against the daisy-white paint, and daisies, white daisies, and I could hear her saying, What do you see, Pudge? Look, and I could see her sitting drunk on the phone with Jake talking about nothing and What are you doing? and she says, Nothing, just doodling, just doodling. And then, Oh God.

'Miles?'

'Yeah, sorry, Mom. Sorry. Chip's here. We gotta go study. I gotta go.'

'Will you call us later, then? I'm sure Dad wants to talk to you.'

'Yeah, Mom; yeah, of course. I love you, okay? Okay, I gotta go.'

'I think I found something!' I shouted at the Colonel, invisible beneath his blanket, but the urgency in my voice and the promise of something, anything, found, woke the Colonel up instantly, and he jumped from his bunk to the linoleum. Before I could say anything, he grabbed yesterday's jeans and sweatshirt from the floor, pulled them on, and followed me outside.

'Look.' I pointed, and he squatted down beside the phone and said, 'Yeah. She drew that. She was always doodling those flowers.'

'And 'just doodling,' remember? Jake asked her what she was doing and she said 'just doodling,' and then she said 'Oh God' and freaked out. She looked at the doodle and remembered something.'

'Good memory, Pudge,' he acknowledged, and I wondered why the Colonel wouldn't just get excited about it.

'And then she freaked out,' I repeated, 'and went and got the tulips while we were getting the fireworks. She saw the doodle, remembered whatever she'd forgotten, and then freaked out.'

'Maybe,' he said, still staring at the flower, trying perhaps to see it as she had. He stood up finally and said, 'It's a solid theory, Pudge,' and reached up and patted my shoulder, like a coach complimenting a player. 'But we still don't know what she forgot.'

sixty-nine days after

A week after the discovery of the doodled flower, I'd resigned myself to its insignificance — I wasn't Banzan in the meat market after all — and as the maples around campus began to hint of resurrection and the maintenance