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Authors: Jonathan Carroll
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the narrow corridor behind me. I heard his footsteps. India held her cup up to him and said, “ Prosit , pardner!” He kept walking. “Anyway, to get back to what I was saying, I would like to propose that we all drink to a truly wonderful life.”
Paul echoed her words and nodded in total agreement. They turned to me and held their Dixie cups up to be toasted. I was afraid my heart would break.
Sometimes the mail in Austria is very slow; it can take three days for a letter to get from one side of Vienna to the other. I wasn’t surprised when I received a Tate postcard from the town of Drosendorf in the Waldviertel section of the country a week after I’d returned from Frankfurt. That night on the train during our party they’d said they were going up there for a few days of rest and relaxation.
The card was written in India’s extremely neat, almost too-tight, up-and-down script. Every time I saw it I was reminded of the sample of Frederick Rolfe’s handwriting in A. J. A. Symons’s fascinating biography, The Quest for Corvo . Rolfe, who called himself Baron Corvo and wrote Hadrian VII , was nutty as a fruitcake. As soon as I knew her well enough to be able to kid her, I’d made a point of pressing the book on India and instantly turning to the page to show her the amazingly similar scrawl. She was not thrilled by the comparison, although Paul said I had her dead to rights.
Dear Joey.
There is a big church here in the center of town. The big attraction inside the big church is a skeleton of a woman all dolled up in a wedding gown, I think. She’s behind glass and has a bouquet of dead flowers on her.
Little hugs,
Mr. & Mrs. Little Boy
The postcard was interesting only because neither of them liked to talk about anything that had to do with death. Several weeks before, a man in Paul’s office had keeled over dead at his desk from a cerebral hemorrhage. Apparently Paul was so shaken by it that he had to leave work for the day. He said he’d gone for a walk in the park, but his legs were shaking so much that after a few minutes he had to sit down.
Once, when I asked him if he ever saw himself growing old and dying, he said no. Instead, he said, he envisioned an old man with gray hair and wrinkles who was called Paul Tate but wasn’t him.
“What do you mean? There’ll be another you in your body?”
“Yes, don’t look at me as if I’m goony. It’s like working a shift in a factory, see? I’m working one of the middle ones — the thirty-five to forty-five shift, get it? Then some other man checks into my body and takes it from there. He’ll know all about being old and arthritic and that sort of thing, so it won’t bother him.”
“He’s got the old-age shift, huh?”
“Exactly! He comes in for the midnight-to-seven spot. It makes good sense, Joey, so don’t laugh like that. Do you realize how many different beings you are in a lifetime? How all your hopes and opinions, everything, change every six or seven years? Aren’t all the cells in our bodies supposed to be different every few years? It’s just the same. Listen, there was a time when all India and I wanted was a saltbox house on the coast of Maine with lots of land around us. We wanted to raise dogs, can you believe it? Now just the thought of that kind of permanence makes me start to itch. Who’s to say the little guys in our bodies who wanted to live in the house haven’t been replaced by a whole new bunch who like to travel around and see new things? Apply that to who we are at the different times in our lives: You’ve got one crew that takes you from one to seven. Then they’re replaced by the group that steers you through puberty and that whole mess. Joe, are you going to tell me you’re the same Joe Lennox you were when your brother died?”
I shook my head emphatically. If he only knew …
“No, no way. I hope to God I’m miles down the road from that me.”
“All right, then, it just goes along
Paul echoed her words and nodded in total agreement. They turned to me and held their Dixie cups up to be toasted. I was afraid my heart would break.
Sometimes the mail in Austria is very slow; it can take three days for a letter to get from one side of Vienna to the other. I wasn’t surprised when I received a Tate postcard from the town of Drosendorf in the Waldviertel section of the country a week after I’d returned from Frankfurt. That night on the train during our party they’d said they were going up there for a few days of rest and relaxation.
The card was written in India’s extremely neat, almost too-tight, up-and-down script. Every time I saw it I was reminded of the sample of Frederick Rolfe’s handwriting in A. J. A. Symons’s fascinating biography, The Quest for Corvo . Rolfe, who called himself Baron Corvo and wrote Hadrian VII , was nutty as a fruitcake. As soon as I knew her well enough to be able to kid her, I’d made a point of pressing the book on India and instantly turning to the page to show her the amazingly similar scrawl. She was not thrilled by the comparison, although Paul said I had her dead to rights.
Dear Joey.
There is a big church here in the center of town. The big attraction inside the big church is a skeleton of a woman all dolled up in a wedding gown, I think. She’s behind glass and has a bouquet of dead flowers on her.
Little hugs,
Mr. & Mrs. Little Boy
The postcard was interesting only because neither of them liked to talk about anything that had to do with death. Several weeks before, a man in Paul’s office had keeled over dead at his desk from a cerebral hemorrhage. Apparently Paul was so shaken by it that he had to leave work for the day. He said he’d gone for a walk in the park, but his legs were shaking so much that after a few minutes he had to sit down.
Once, when I asked him if he ever saw himself growing old and dying, he said no. Instead, he said, he envisioned an old man with gray hair and wrinkles who was called Paul Tate but wasn’t him.
“What do you mean? There’ll be another you in your body?”
“Yes, don’t look at me as if I’m goony. It’s like working a shift in a factory, see? I’m working one of the middle ones — the thirty-five to forty-five shift, get it? Then some other man checks into my body and takes it from there. He’ll know all about being old and arthritic and that sort of thing, so it won’t bother him.”
“He’s got the old-age shift, huh?”
“Exactly! He comes in for the midnight-to-seven spot. It makes good sense, Joey, so don’t laugh like that. Do you realize how many different beings you are in a lifetime? How all your hopes and opinions, everything, change every six or seven years? Aren’t all the cells in our bodies supposed to be different every few years? It’s just the same. Listen, there was a time when all India and I wanted was a saltbox house on the coast of Maine with lots of land around us. We wanted to raise dogs, can you believe it? Now just the thought of that kind of permanence makes me start to itch. Who’s to say the little guys in our bodies who wanted to live in the house haven’t been replaced by a whole new bunch who like to travel around and see new things? Apply that to who we are at the different times in our lives: You’ve got one crew that takes you from one to seven. Then they’re replaced by the group that steers you through puberty and that whole mess. Joe, are you going to tell me you’re the same Joe Lennox you were when your brother died?”
I shook my head emphatically. If he only knew …
“No, no way. I hope to God I’m miles down the road from that me.”
“All right, then, it just goes along
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