Mono No Aware

t/w: murder, slight homophobia

The last time I saw Cole was September 11th 2001. A date which would become one of the most infamous in American history, synonymous with people falling from the sky like the announcement of the end of days. A new age of fear was ushered in. Or perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps instead the delusion ended, the delusion we could ever escape from an age of fear. Every year, when the anniversary of that day rolls around and the speeches are made, the victims’ names are read out, the Star-Spangled Banner is played to damp eyes, the town of Wallingford, Connecticut observes an anniversary of its own, though the number of observers is dwindling. The anniversary of the disappearance of Cole Montell. 

*** 

Cole and I set off early that day. Six a.m. I had to drag myself from bed to stop my alarm clock’s shrieking. Cole was already outside my house, leaning against his bike. We’d just entered our last year of high school so before our studies started to weigh us down, we were finally going to do what we’d talked about for years: cycle to Massachusetts, via the old canal trail. We were skipping school that day, for the sheer hell of it. It made our quest all the more daring, our goal all the more enticing. 

The fresh light of dawn filtered through the leaves as we left Wallingford and met the canal trail. Squirrels raced up trees as we passed. The quiet hum of power lines was punctuated by the calls of migrating swallows. Fall had started but the trees and shrubs hadn’t yet shed their leaves and with the mild weather, it felt like spring. The stirring of nature all around, the faux awakening of an incessant earth. 

We made good progress, getting to Southington earlier than expected. By then the sky was endless, unsullied blue. Sweat glued my shirt to my body, Cole took his off. He could do such things without an inkling of shame. I snatched glances at him as we cycled, the way his muscles flexed powerfully under his skin. We passed the odd few dog-walkers, hikers and fellow cyclists. The trail was much quieter than we imagined, but this seemed serendipitous, not sinister. 

We stopped for lunch. Cole had brought beers; we sipped them in the shade of maple trees. They were luke-warm and I never liked the taste of beer, though I didn’t mention it. Cole, his shirt now on, leaned back and spoke, his words almost an afterthought. 

“Any girls caught your eye since we came back?”

I shook my head. 

“Not even Nora Clark?” he teased and prodded me.

I swore, batting him off. “She’s just my lab partner.’”

“Isn’t she hot?”

“I don’t know, is she?” I said, reddening. 

“You’re always like this. Are you blind or something?”

“I guess.”

“Weirdo.” I ripped up grass and flung it at him, decorating him with shards of green. It felt like something a child would do so I stopped. I wondered if I should have tackled him to the ground, if that would have been the more normal thing to do. Cole just hung his head back and laughed. 

We cycled on keeping a steady pace, our legs gnawed by lactic acid, our lungs greedily gulping air. About an hour after we’d set off again, a man walking the trail came into view. He was in a daze, staring straight ahead, almost limping. He was a surreal figure. Wearing a suit and a half-unraveled tie, he looked like a businessman out on a hike. He jolted to life as we passed. 

“Boys!” the man shouted at us. “Boys!” We thought he was mad and cycled on. Only when I got home that night did I remember him and realise why he tried to stop us. 

Around four hours later, we made it to the trailhead. We’d reached Massachusetts. Dismounted, we whooped and fist-pumped, patting the trailhead sign lovingly. Once our brief celebrations concluded, we continued to the nearby lake, traipsing through foliage to get to the water’s edge. 

We sat and looked across the lake, alone but for a great blue heron stalking the west shore. For a moment, everything was perfect. What came before seemed drab and dull. Here instead was life in all its richness and depth. The lake teeming with trout, eels, frogs and strange-looking insects, a universe contained within that water. The photosynthesis in thousands of leaves’ chlorophylls. The blood in a constant rush through mine and Cole’s bodies.  

We sat like that for a long time. Just listening. We didn’t need to speak. I didn’t try to grasp on to the moment. To clench my fist around it and dispel it. Instead I held that moment cupped in my hands, and watched it bleed through. 

When restlessness began sneaking in, I stood up and brushed the debris of grass and dirt off my jeans. The afternoon was well under way. We’d planned to hitchhike back to Wallingford so we’d get home before dark. Cole got to his feet. As I walked over to our bikes, he lingered. 

“I can’t come back with you,” he said. “I’m meeting someone.”

“You’re meeting someone?” I repeated dumbly. I assumed I’d misheard. 

“Yep.”

“But…” I considered if he was joking, but he’d said it without a hint of irony. “Why didn’t you mention this earlier?”

“I didn’t see the need to,” Cole said, though he avoided meeting my gaze. 

“Who are you meeting?” 

“Just someone.” 

“Is it a girl?”

He shook his head. 

“Oh sure. Come on, who is it?”

“You wouldn’t know them,” he said, adding a little sheepishly, “I told my parents I’m staying round yours by the way.”

“Alright, if I’m covering for you, I have to know why.”

“Do you?” 

“I mean I could always let your parents know you’re no–” 

“Blackmail!” He flung his hands up in mock surrender. “Fine, whatever. I’ll tell you. Tomorrow.” 

I pestered him to tell me now, but he refused so I gave up. We exchanged goodbye, see you, you better tell me goddammit and I started with my bike towards the trail. A few metres away, I glanced back. Cole was facing the lake but sensed I was watching him. He turned and grinned. The sun haloed his hair, transforming it from fair to radiant. He raised his hand in farewell. When I think of him now, this is what I see. Him forever captured in the light of the sun. 

I cycled to the road, some instinct was tugging me back to Cole. I ignored it. I was mad at him. For not telling me who he was meeting. For not coming back with me. I peddled faster with frustration and waited by the side of the road, thumb out, flustered and annoyed at every car which didn’t stop. It took maybe half an hour until a pickup truck pulled up beside me. I put my bike in the cargo bed and opened the car door. I didn’t even have time to say thanks before the driver asked me if I’d heard what happened in New York this morning. 

*** 

I always pick up hitchhikers, though there's a lot less of them now than there used to be. I only pick up one or two a year, and I drive a lot. Not just to and from work in the city, but at night too. Since I turned thirty, I’ve gone from night owl to insomniac. When I can’t sleep — most nights — I get up and drive. Just drive, no destination in mind. It’s better than lying awake in increasing frustration. My favoured route runs parallel to the old canal trail and Connecticut River. 

Early August, an unwelcomingly humid night, I was out driving. It was late, past two a.m. Along a tree-sheltered stretch of road, my car headlights illuminated a solitary figure. I stopped even though they hadn’t stuck their hand out. Against my better judgement, given the hour and ambiguous threat of such a wanderer. It’d been half an hour since I’d seen another car’s headlights. But I felt I couldn’t drive on. 

“Hey,” I called out after rolling down my window. 

The man didn’t move, but turned — he hadn’t acknowledged the car stopping — and stared, expressionless, at me. “Hey,” he said. 

“You need a lift anywhere? I’m heading to Wallingford.” I saw now he was around my age, that he had straw blonde hair, a bulky rucksack strapped to his back. 

He stared at me for a time which became rapidly uncomfortable before he said, “Okay.” He didn't get in the passenger seat, but in the back, slinging his rucksack off beside him.  

I drove on. “It's a little late for a hike,” I said. I’d meant to say it jokingly, but it came out flat, sounded like a reproach. 

“I suppose.”

He said nothing after that, but I could feel him watching me, the growing pressure of his surveillance an itch on my neck. When I looked at him in the rear-view mirror, he glanced away. His face wasn’t a stranger’s face. He had stubble now and his features were harsher, rougher, sculpted and sharpened by time. Lines had crept under his eyes. But he was familiar. I studied him as intensely as I could, but every time I focused back on the road, I felt the ridiculousness of that half-formed thought. I felt his eyes back on me. 

Silence became a third occupant of the car. What’s your name? The question soured on my tongue. What’s your name? I didn’t ask. Our eyes met for the briefest moment. I wish I held that moment longer, but instinctively I looked away. 

Cole’s house is on the outskirts of town; I pass it when I come into Wallingford. Only his mother lives there now. Sometimes I visit. As we approached Wallingford, I tensed and kept my eyes on the road, ready to steal a glance at Cole’s house. I always do, a pointless ritual. 

“Drop me off here,” the hitchhiker said. 

This sudden intrusion into silence nearly made me flinch. I parked by a row of unlit, lifeless houses. Wordlessly, he got out. I watched him as I drove off, a humanoid shape quickly swallowed by darkness. A minute or two later, I passed Cole’s house. Already I regretted leaving him without saying more. The urge to turn back grew and half-way to my house, it was too strong to ignore. But by the time I’d returned to where I’d dropped him off, he was already gone. 

*** 

In the following days, I trawled through old photos of Cole and me. I dug out newspapers from the time of his disappearance and a stack of crumbling missing posters. If I imagined him, the age he’d be now… I let that thought ferment until I was intoxicated. It’d been dark, but I’d gotten a good look at his face. Even after a decade, wouldn’t I know that face?

I felt overwhelmed. I felt ecstatic. I felt sick, sick with the thought of him there then gone, left on the side of the road. I’d recognised him, but at the same time dismissed the very thought. Why didn’t I at least ask for his name? If it was him, why didn’t he say anything? Did he recognise me? Why had he never come back to Wallingford until now? I went to his dad’s funeral, six years back. The empty chair where Cole should have sat made the day even more sombre. 

But I didn’t know what happened the day Cole went missing. All kinds of ideas flitted through my head, each more absurd than the last: eloping, kidnapping, human trafficking, amnesia. The stuff of spy films and thrillers. I tried to cast all that aside and return to the man who’d sat in the back of my car. I needed something more, something definitive. Into the small hours, I researched missing persons, trying to find cases of those who came back, years after they’d been written off as lost forever. 

That same summer, as the twelfth anniversary of Cole’s disappearance approached, the police announced they were reopening the case. Cole’s mother had been campaigning for it for years. Then in June, a body was found, a hundred miles up the Connecticut River. It was Jamie Adams’, a boy the same age as Cole, who’d gone missing in 2002. His skull had been caved in. The police said there could be a link between the two cases. 

After Cole’s disappearance, there had been a sense, unspoken but tangible, that he brought it on himself. The police believed he’d been liaising with an older man. My classmates traded whispered jokes and slurs attached to his name. I hated that school. Cole had been the only good thing about it. I was glad to leave it, but I never left Wallingford. It wasn’t a conscious decision; I always thought I’d leave. Perhaps there were opportunities to do so, if I’d chased them, or perhaps not. The investigation into the disappearance went cold and by graduation, it’d effectively been dropped. There were bigger things on people’s minds. A war on terror had been declared. Another attack seemed likely. Americans killed in Afghanistan were shipped back in coffins draped in the red, white and blue.  

I didn’t expect anything to come of the case being reopened. The Adams case and Cole’s had similarities, but they could easily be coincidences. By then I’d started trying to track down the hitchhiker. I asked if anyone had seen a man of his description. First people I knew around town, then in bars and shops, then door to door on the outskirts of town, even asking if they had CCTV footage of that night. Those who were willing to help couldn’t. I started thinking about going to the police. They’d have far better resources to find the hitchhiker. But I hesitated, assuming they wouldn’t believe me.

The police paused their search of the river on September 11th. Many of them took part in town commemorations. I went but couldn’t pay attention. I knew I should, but instead I scanned the crowd for the hitchhiker. I kept expecting to see him walking down the street, or through a shop window, or waiting at the side of the road. I knew I wouldn’t, but I couldn’t get rid of the idea. 

Laying in bed waiting for sleep, I tried to picture his face. It was slipping away from me. I’d forgotten the colour of his eyes. Weren’t they green like Cole’s? The idea of going to the police became more insistent. I imagined two different sketch artists, one drawing an aged-up Cole, the other the hitchhiker from my memory. The portraits, placed side by side, the resemblance between them unmistakable. 

Then on the 15th September, buried in the woods beside the Connecticut River, human remains were discovered. They were confirmed by DNA analysis to be the body of Cole Montell.