Aaron M. Fortkamp

I signed up for a Black Friday deal for Hulu this past shopping season and this week I remembered the last time I had Hulu a year ago (on a similar Black Friday deal) I’d been watching Law & Order from the beginning, and had made it up through season 8. Tonight after Abbey left I turned it on. I’m on episode number 4 of the evening now, I listen to it while I do chores, clean up.

This past weekend I went to a trampoline park with the family, current and future, and there was a disturbing lack of foam landing pits, which I discovered when I went down the big big slide face first and landed on some kind of air mattress instead of in the downy NERF arms I’d been hoping for. My face smashed forward and I got a small abrasion on my nose, which today I was worrying at while checking my email which contained some very unfortunate news. After a while I had to go to a meeting and went to my team lead to tell him where I was going and make sure we had coverage while I was gone. Then I went to the bathroom and saw I’d worried my abrasion to the point of bleeding some point in the distant enough past that the blood trickled had turned black. It looked like a small leech was feeding on my nose. My team lead had looked right at me and said nothing about it.

You have to tell people these things. I learned this lesson in elementary school, first or second or third grade, I don’t recall the teacher but I recall the friend of mine who while we were lining up to go somewhere, music or gym or something, he pointed out to the teacher what we’d all seen, which was the bright red smear of lipstick on her teeth. We were horrified, collectively, the class sort of froze, and the teacher immediately and with full awareness of her audience said “THANK you, Adam, that’s the only nice thing to do when you see something like that on someone that they can’t see, is to point it out to them. Thank. YOU.” And she got a tissue and wiped off the lipstick.

I’ll tell people this type of thing anytime, anywhere. I respect football players on television more when I see them fix each other’s shoulder pads or jerseys rent askew by the previous play. I so rarely look in the mirror, I avoid it whenever possible, sometimes I forget which pair of glasses or which hat I chose when only half awake and I challenge myself to remember, and can’t. It’s the least I can do, pointing out to someone they’ve got a bandaid stuck to their butt or they have spaghetti sauce on their lapel. I see it as vital to the social contract. We do so much to maintain decorum amongst ourselves (except while driving, or online), I don’t see why this exception slipped through. If I can hold a door for you to show you I respect you, why would I not tell you immediately about a wardrobe miscue you are most likely unaware of and would likely just as immediately rectify? To save myself the shared embarrassment I’ll see in your eyes when you realize the state you’ve been walking around in, in front of your peers, for god knows how long? I’m already feeling it for you, I may as well let you in on it, too. At least that way the situation may be brought to a conclusion.

The email I had been too focused on today which made me fail to realize I’d made my own nose bleed was informing us one of our coworkers had died. There were no ancillary details provided, just that he had died, and counseling services were being provided, why you may ask, because the death was sudden, unexpected, he was in his thirties maybe, by all appearances hale and happy. This coworker was one I’d counted as a friend. I never worked directly next to him, I was never in his organization, but our career paths were following similar trajectories, developing based on similar skills and interests, and these factors had brought us together again and again. He was more ambitious than I was, more carefully guarded of his work and receiving credit where credit was due, and he’d advanced further than I had in the past few years, and recently I’d begun to apply for positions directly in line with his, in his same organization. He wasn’t responsible for the hiring, but he was in my corner, regularly messaging me after interviews because he was on the inside, and he’d cheer me on or console me depending on what it looked like the outcome of the interview would be, before I even heard back from the actual hiring manager.

Point is, he was in my corner. He would’ve told me my nose was bleeding.

I have no idea how or why he died. The internet, as it has become lately, is entirely unhelpful, I could probably find my own AI obituary if I searched for it. What could it have been? He appeared healthy, surely it wasn’t an illness. I messaged the guy who worked closely with him for the past three years but haven’t heard back, in part because I was worried about him, too, because if this had been a car accident or something they could’ve been together, who knows, I don’t know if they were friends outside of work, he could’ve been there. I doubt it. But he hasn’t written me back yet, so.

We weren’t that close. I was probably in the same room with him no more than fifteen, twenty hours total altogether throughout the whole time I knew him, but he always made time for me whenever I asked, and I always tried to help him out however I could. Still, though.

It’s weird, unsettling even, how in this modern age it’s likely you’ll be able to track down the last thing you said to someone, given how frequently text messages are used to communicate instead of actual face-to-face conversation. I know the last thing I said to him was “thank you.”

One of the perks of this Law & Order revisit is seeing how many now-famous people had parts on the show before they were famous. I almost always know who’s guilty by the face I recognize first. How comforting it is, that instant recognition, that clear orientation of how things are, who is who, what is what.

I did not enjoy making dinner tonight, cutting the vegetables, holding the knife. I’m a little on edge. I don’t know how he died. You need to know things, you need to know the details when death comes this close. Was it an accident? That’s what the faux-internet obits were suggesting, “died sadly in an accident” and then a dozen generic platitudes about how he was close to his friends and family. What is the danger, what do I need to be leery of, was it suicide? In Law & Order they always figure it out, but me standing there holding a knife I don’t know if he was in that legitimately reported accident on I-95 wherein a fender-bender between sedans resulted in a 2:00 am argument that resulted in one of the two parties stepping out too far into the road and getting plowed by an SUV, I don’t know if he fell off a balcony, or hung himself, or if he cut his wrists with a knife just like this one.

Happy. Hale. Healthy. What happened.

He always seemed to know what my career future was, when I was interviewing for these positions in his department. I hope he wasn’t worried about me and my future at the time of his death, I don’t know what he knew about me, I put a lot out here on the ol’ blog, some of it isn’t too happy, some of it is pretty fatalistic. It would be a—oh look, there’s Ana Gasteyer, but she’s just playing a bit part, a bureaucrat, and appearing way too late in the episode, she didn’t do it, they already caught the person who did it, this is an Order-heavy episode, the Law already decided—it would be a pretty long shot he knew anything at all about me besides what I told him, I would hate to think he felt like he’d let me down, failed me somehow for not getting me hired. In my darker moments today I wonder what made him do it if he did do it himself, we do, or did, work for a very very large and soulless corporation after all, what is the point of all this, what are we furthering collectively to benefit individually. I need to work these thoughts out before I try to sleep, please bear with me. This lawyer, he’s a Law & Order regular, he has been the defendant on the show as often as the lawyer, appears like once a season in these early years, if you saw who I’m talking about you’d say I know him, he was… in the 90s. I don’t know. You know I’m a writer, right, you know narcissism is in the blood, please don’t judge me for the following but these thoughts have to be entertained and aired or else they fester like a nose-wound, it’s not possible right that I contributed to his death, the killer always confesses in the end, the druggie gets sober enough to confess in open court, their guilt beyond a shadow, and if for some reason it was in his head that I had tried and failed and tried and failed and tried and failed to advance my career in the same vein as him and he had literally congratulated me for a position that ultimately proved to be something I could not accept, he couldn’t have been considering that fact anywhere in his brain when whatever happened happened, I wish I wasn’t his friend, I wish there was no chance he had any remorse for how successful he was proving to be and how comparatively stuck I appeared to be, I wish I didn’t wish that, I wish for platitudes, I wish for easy truths, I wish for my friend to still be here and in my corner and rooting me on, I wish whatever happened happened quickly and he wasn’t in any pain.

I wish I didn’t have to go to work tomorrow.

I wish I didn’t have to post this to know it means something, to know someone might read it, even if no one reads it, doesn’t matter I just need to know someone could, that I am defiant of law and defiant of order, of chance, of luck, of unluck, of fate, I need to create another tendril to replace the one severed, whether someone or no one the potential must exist that they too could take me as I am and judge me and decide whether or not I’m important enough consider on the last day of their life.