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Authors: Saul Black
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being unzipped.
She tried to come out of the blackness to make sure it was her mom but the blackness wouldn’t let her. It was a soft weight, like warm dark water.
The hands – no, it wasn’t her mother; the smell and touch were wrong – pulled her panties down over her legs and there was the sound of wood popping in a fire. Maybe the Devil undressed you when you arrived in hell? In a picture of hell Josh had shown her all the people were naked, stuck on skewers or big wheels or being stabbed and burned by little demons with pitchforks. The weird thing was all the naked people looked unconcerned, as if they weren’t even aware of what was happening to them. She was only mildly concerned herself. The hands undressing her were a sort of annoying distraction, stopping her from falling properly asleep. She was very tired, and the warm blackness promised deep, restful sleep. She tried to speak:
Hey, stop that. Leave me alone
. But her mouth made no sound. The words went around under the skin of her face instead of out into the world.
She came back again and saw the same old man, still on his hands and knees, still with his face twisted (by crying, she thought; there were tears), crawling away from her on a wooden floor she didn’t recognise.
Then the warm dark water closed over her head. Her last thought was that she didn’t want to dream. Because the last dream she’d had had been a nightmare, in which her mother had been lying at the bottom of the stairs in a pool of her own blood, telling her to run.
SEVENTEEN
Irony, thought Angelo Greer, waking in breathtaking pain from a dream of an earthquake to discover he’d passed out on the cabin’s mouldy floor, was immortal. Or if not immortal, then a guaranteed last survivor. When the world ended, the final vestige of the human presence on earth would be a whiff – like the odour of spent gunpowder after a firework – of irony.
The two and a half years since his wife Sylvia’s death had been an incrementally expanding demonstration of the fallacy of grief. The fallacy of grief was that it passed. The fallacy of grief was that when someone you loved died, you suffered, you went to the underworld, you found the measure of yourself in the small hours’ darkness, and eventually (because the commitment to life overrode all else) you found that the measure of yourself was enough. Slowly, you raised your head. You began to look about you. You saw that the world – via cloud formations and product labels – was reinsinuating itself. You understood that the world was still enough. You understood that the will to live was a thing of benign slyness. You began to
get over it
. You were changed – enlarged and deepened by your loss – but you accepted the renewed contract. You knew you were going on. You discovered that this thing had not, as it had threatened to, killed you.
That was the fallacy, and he was the living proof.
He’d stopped writing, of course. Of course, because a novelist had to be amorally in love with life, all of life, even death – and he was not. Not any more. He’d believed it was art’s job to imaginatively accommodate the world, to find room for everything. But after Sylvia’s death he had room only for her absence and his own stubborn presence.
They had been married for thirty years when the diagnosis arrived: grade 4 astrocytoma. Inoperable. Radio- and chemotherapies until she’d said: Enough. She died in the late afternoon in their bed at the apartment on Twenty-third Street. Angelo had been lying with her, spoons fashion, in the bed’s oblong of sunlight, his arm wrapped around her. He’d fallen asleep for perhaps twenty minutes and when he woke up she was gone. Eyes closed, facing away from him. Facing away from him. Towards elsewhere. Towards wherever the dead went. Which was maybe nowhere. She’d been fifty-six years old. A year younger than him.
Since then his orientation had gone.
Things fall apart
, as the poem said. He
She tried to come out of the blackness to make sure it was her mom but the blackness wouldn’t let her. It was a soft weight, like warm dark water.
The hands – no, it wasn’t her mother; the smell and touch were wrong – pulled her panties down over her legs and there was the sound of wood popping in a fire. Maybe the Devil undressed you when you arrived in hell? In a picture of hell Josh had shown her all the people were naked, stuck on skewers or big wheels or being stabbed and burned by little demons with pitchforks. The weird thing was all the naked people looked unconcerned, as if they weren’t even aware of what was happening to them. She was only mildly concerned herself. The hands undressing her were a sort of annoying distraction, stopping her from falling properly asleep. She was very tired, and the warm blackness promised deep, restful sleep. She tried to speak:
Hey, stop that. Leave me alone
. But her mouth made no sound. The words went around under the skin of her face instead of out into the world.
She came back again and saw the same old man, still on his hands and knees, still with his face twisted (by crying, she thought; there were tears), crawling away from her on a wooden floor she didn’t recognise.
Then the warm dark water closed over her head. Her last thought was that she didn’t want to dream. Because the last dream she’d had had been a nightmare, in which her mother had been lying at the bottom of the stairs in a pool of her own blood, telling her to run.
SEVENTEEN
Irony, thought Angelo Greer, waking in breathtaking pain from a dream of an earthquake to discover he’d passed out on the cabin’s mouldy floor, was immortal. Or if not immortal, then a guaranteed last survivor. When the world ended, the final vestige of the human presence on earth would be a whiff – like the odour of spent gunpowder after a firework – of irony.
The two and a half years since his wife Sylvia’s death had been an incrementally expanding demonstration of the fallacy of grief. The fallacy of grief was that it passed. The fallacy of grief was that when someone you loved died, you suffered, you went to the underworld, you found the measure of yourself in the small hours’ darkness, and eventually (because the commitment to life overrode all else) you found that the measure of yourself was enough. Slowly, you raised your head. You began to look about you. You saw that the world – via cloud formations and product labels – was reinsinuating itself. You understood that the world was still enough. You understood that the will to live was a thing of benign slyness. You began to
get over it
. You were changed – enlarged and deepened by your loss – but you accepted the renewed contract. You knew you were going on. You discovered that this thing had not, as it had threatened to, killed you.
That was the fallacy, and he was the living proof.
He’d stopped writing, of course. Of course, because a novelist had to be amorally in love with life, all of life, even death – and he was not. Not any more. He’d believed it was art’s job to imaginatively accommodate the world, to find room for everything. But after Sylvia’s death he had room only for her absence and his own stubborn presence.
They had been married for thirty years when the diagnosis arrived: grade 4 astrocytoma. Inoperable. Radio- and chemotherapies until she’d said: Enough. She died in the late afternoon in their bed at the apartment on Twenty-third Street. Angelo had been lying with her, spoons fashion, in the bed’s oblong of sunlight, his arm wrapped around her. He’d fallen asleep for perhaps twenty minutes and when he woke up she was gone. Eyes closed, facing away from him. Facing away from him. Towards elsewhere. Towards wherever the dead went. Which was maybe nowhere. She’d been fifty-six years old. A year younger than him.
Since then his orientation had gone.
Things fall apart
, as the poem said. He
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