Looking for Alaska

onjust the two of us, like in the first days of the Investigation.

'There's nothing more we can do.'

'I want to drive through it,' he said. 'Like she did.'

We couldn't risk leaving campus in the middle of the night like she had, so we left about twelve hours earlier, at 3:00 in the afternoon, with the Colonel behind the wheel of Takumi's SUV. We asked Lara and Takumi to come along, but they were tired of chasing ghosts, and besides, finals were coming.

It was a bright afternoon, and the sun bore down on the asphalt so that the ribbon of road before us quivered with heat. We drove a mile down Highway 119 and then merged onto I-65 northbound, heading toward the accident scene and Vine Station.

The Colonel drove fast, and we were quiet, staring straight ahead. I tried to imagine what she might have been thinking, trying again to see through time and space, to get inside her head just for a moment. An ambulance, lights and sirens blaring, sped past us, going in the opposite direction, toward school, and for an instant, I felt a nervous excitement and thought, It could be someone I know. I almost wished it was someone I knew, to give new form and depth to the sadness I still felt.

The silence broke: 'Sometimes I liked it,' I said. 'Sometimes I liked it that she was dead.'

'You mean it felt good?'

'No. I don't know. It felt..pure.'

'Yeah,' he said, dropping his usual eloquence. 'Yeah. I know. Me, too. It's natural. I mean, it must be natural.'

It always shocked me when I realized that I wasn't the only person in the world who thought and felt such strange and awful things.

Five miles north of school, the Colonel moved into the left lane of the interstate and began to accelerate. I gritted my teeth, and then before us, broken glass glittered in the blare of the sun like the road was wearing jewelry, and that spot must be the spot. He was still accelerating.

I thought: This would not be a bad way to go.

I thought: Straight and fast Maybe she just decided at the last second.

And POOF we are through the moment of her death. We are driving through the place that she could not drive through, passing onto asphalt she never saw, and we are not dead. We are not dead! We are breathing and we are crying and now slowing down and moving back into the right lane.

We got off at the next exit, quietly, and, switching drivers, we walked in front of the car. We met and I held him, my hands balled into tight fists around his shoulders, and he wrapped his short arms around me and squeezed tight, so that I felt the heaves of his chest as we realized over and over again that we were still alive. I realized it in waves and we held on to each other crying and I thought, God we must look so lame, but it doesn't much matter when you have just now realized, all the time later, that you are still alive.

one hundred nineteen days after

The colonel and I threw ourselves into school once we gave up, knowing that we'd both need to ace our finals to achieve our GPA goals (I wanted a 3.0 and the Colonel wouldn't settle for even a 3.98). Our room became Study Central for the four of us, with Takumi and Lara over till all hours of the night talking about The Sound and the Fury and meiosis and the Battle of the Bulge. The Colonel taught us a semester's worth of precalc, although he was too good at math to teach it very well—'Of course it makes sense. Just trust me. Christ, it's not that hard' — and I missed Alaska.

And when I could not catch up, I cheated. Takumi and I shared copies of Cliffs Notes for Things Fall Apart and A Farewell to Arms ('These things are just too damned long' he exclaimed at one point).

We didn't talk much. But we didn't need to.

one hundred twenty-two days after

A cool breeze had beaten back the onslaught of summer, and on the morning the Old Man gave us our final exams, he suggested we have class outside. I wondered why we could have an entire class outside when I'd been kicked out of class last semester for merely glancing outside, but the Old Man wanted to have class outside, so we did.

The Old Man sat in a chair that Kevin Richman carried out for him, and we sat on the grass, my notebook at first perched awkwardly in my lap and then against the thick green grass, and the bumpy ground did not lend itself to writing, and the gnats hovered. We were too close to the lake for comfortable sitting, really, but the Old Man seemed happy.

'I have here your final exam. Last semester, I gave you nearly two months to complete your final paper. This time, you get two weeks.' He paused. 'Well, nothing to be done about that, I guess.' He laughed. 'To be honest, I just decided once and for all to use this paper topic last night. It rather goes against my nature. Anyway, pass these around.' When the pile came to me, I read the question: How will you — you personally — ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering? Now that you've wrestled with three major religious traditions, apply your newly enlightened mind to Alaska's question.

After the exams had been passed out, the Old Man said, 'You need not specifically discuss the perspectives of different religions in your essay, so no research is necessary. Your knowledge, or lack thereof, has been established in the quizzes you've taken this semester. I am interested in how you are able to fit the uncontestable fact of suffering into your understanding of the world, and how you hope to navigate through life in spite of it.

'Next year, assuming my lungs hold out, we'll study Taoism, Hinduism, and Judaism together—' The Old Man coughed and then started to laugh, which caused him to cough again. 'Lord, maybe I won't last. But about the three traditions we've studied this year, I'd like to say one thing. Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism each have founder figures — Muhammad, Jesus, and the Buddha, respectively. And in thinking about these founder figures, I believe we must finally conclude that each brought a message of radical hope. To seventh-century Arabia, Muhammad brought the promise that anyone could find fulfillment and everlasting life through allegiance to the one true God. The Buddha held out hope that suffering could be transcended. Jesus brought the message that the last shall be first, that even the tax collectors and lepers — the outcasts — had cause for hope. And so that is the question I leave you with in this final: What is your cause for hope?'

Back at Room 43, the Colonel was smoking in the room. Even though I still had one evening left of washing dishes in the cafeteria to work off my smoking conviction, we didn't much fear the Eagle. We had fifteen days left, and if we got caught, we'd just have to start senior year with some work hours. 'So how will we ever get out of this labyrinth, Colonel?' I asked.

'If only I knew,' he said.

'That's probably not gonna get you an A.'

'Also it doesn't do much to put my soul to rest.'

'Or hers,' I said.

'Right. I'd forgotten about her.' He shook his head. 'That keeps happening.'

'Well, you have to write something,' I argued.

'After all this time, it still seems to me like straight and fast is the only way out — but I choose the labyrinth. The labyrinth blows, but I choose it.'