Ensemble

by S. P. Elledge

back of that taxi, a taxi creeping as far as he could tell only further into a tunnel of snow so clean, so pure, and yet shutting out all light.

  At Beth Israel Hospital, Simon was forced to wait outside the emergency room, where there lay scattered on the vinyl couch—like symbols abandoned to the elements, he told me later, all meaning worn out of them—only an illustrated children’s Bible, a pamphlet on the dangers of STDs, and a year-old Time magazine. He chose the book, opened it at random to the middle of someone else’s apocalyptic nightmare, but found naturally enough he couldn’t read, and then he nodded off, and then somewhere in the snow-blinded limbo of a dream it was my brother’s voice calling out for him… Though by then he had been accepted into the emergency room, after all, and there were my brother’s blind blue eyes staring, rheumy, stupidly, and his dry mouth open, dry tongue trying to form words, a phrase, nearly inaudible above the breathing of the oxygen machine: Did you eat? was all he could make out.

  Third Meditation

  Another proposal for contemplation: that the one called “the leper” had faked the entire thing. This is perhaps both easier to accept and harder (when considering motive) to understand. Profound boredom or utter despair, they could be the same, especially to a sick man, a man deep in sorrow. Suicide is difficult and painful, but to fall into death as if into a good soft bed, so tempting, and he might have been in many ways a very disillusioned, very embittered man, as well. Leave me alone, I’m dead, go away, let what’s left of me rot. Summon leaves to fall and cover me, let the frost hold me fast and the sun scorch my bones, just take care to step gently over my grave, please… Still, how could he hope to fool them so long? Still, by asking so persistently to be forgotten, wasn’t he guaranteeing that they would remember?

  It is unclear how long his family and friends would have believed him or humored him or left him that way before they heard him, one day, some moment, unquestionably, indubitably laugh in a dream or turn over in his sleep, stirring a few leaves. At what point then would they have called in The Doctor?

  But The Doctor, too, might have been in on it all. As with any itinerant faith-healer with a steady trade in crooks and canes, such “arrangements” only help prove the parable. We could pause if we like to consider their cunning plot, the props assembled, the timing rehearsed down to the precise second: How long can you hold your breath? Slow your pulse to a standstill? Though it is shameful to say this, as uncharitable as it might seem, we must inevitably take into consideration the possibility that a few coins might have crossed palms.

  In the end, everyone, believers and unbelievers alike, would have had to agree it was a good show. A few converts made, possibly, others at least impressed by the showmanship… Then somewhere outside the gates of town, at sundown when dust and flies sting your eyes and nothing is as it seems, both men wrap their burnooses tighter and exchange one last slightly guilty farewell. Impossible, of course, in that light, to distinguish a smile or frown…

  Fourth Meditation

  Simon had been reading us Mary Shelley earlier in the afternoon, here on Cape Ann. You know how Frankenstein’s monster must have felt, my brother says, sitting up in his cot across the screened porch from me and throwing down both his thick trifocals and the mildewed paperback. In their place, he takes up an ugly little Wedgwood cup which he’d found that day in a shop on The Neck (he’s burning up his savings on antique ceramics), stares into the Poland Spring as if it were from Lourdes, and prepares to speak: The monster raged at the doctor for patching him piecemeal from the dead and murdered, you see, so that now he bore the burdens of not just one lifetime, but several. Something so hideous from so many beautiful parts, and all those migraines! At least that’s the way I see it. He gulps down a tiny saffron-yellow pill. He never asked to be reborn, and Herr Doktor Frankenstein’s greatest sin was not in creating life, but re-creating it.

  My brother is a lawyer, or was a lawyer, and he loves to argue to an audience, even of one. He continues to do so, between breaths and sips, as he sorts his pills, which are white as well as yellow, and blood-red, too, and powder-blue and purple and off-white and sea-green and black—and they are worth their weight in platinum and he is sick of taking them every eight hours, every four hours, every two hours. He has always been thin, but now he is so thin that in this diffused light he looks almost translucent. His eyesight is deteriorating faster than the new prescriptions can keep up with it. We do not know if he will walk again without assistance. Certainly he will never swim or run. Often he can barely even sit in a chair without sliding slowly down it to the floor, like a marionette whose strings are snipped one by one. Not one of his siblings will speak of death or disease, but he speaks of nothing but, it seems. Oh, see that my grave is swept clean, I have even heard him sing to Simon in a mock-spiritual voice. It is late summer, almost as cool as autumn, and Simon has rented this cabin for us near Folly Cove; we have just returned from fried clams and then a swim in a quarry in the woods, where my brother watched us with royal disinterest from the granite cliff side. This is not to say he is not cheerful; he is exasperatingly so, and that provokes and disturbs us all the more, especially when he speaks “of graves, of worms, and epitaphs.” (Lots of Shakespeare on Tape from the village library. For your majesty’s edification, Simon told us.)

  There was no tunnel, no light, none of your goddamn baby angels strumming little harps, no radiant face of God, my brother has already told me. But he won’t doesn’t say what there was, if anything. From this porch I can see slivers of ocean between the already thinning leaves, the surf is just a murmur, the air amber-gold. It is one of those hours you think might last forever, all is so still and perfect, and yet which you lose so quickly when trees swallow the sun and blue shadows dissolve all this gold. Who even asks to be born, yet alone reborn? my brother says of the Monster, of himself, cheerfully, and I know some stubborn part of him is back there still, on the cold seat of a taxi, in a swirling blizzard.

  Simon and I work hard to match the speed and spirit of his wit, and we both know how he loves being indulged with everything from eiderdown comforters to Messaien CDs while pretending to be annoyed by it all. But sometimes “his majesty,” as Simon now likes to call him, goes too far. Oh, I’m still dying, you know, my brother said to us yesterday morning over Simon’s special crabmeat omelets served on cracked delftware. We’d been talking about recipes and opera and books, anything but death. Suddenly we were quiet. I’m still dying, just more slowly…

  Fifth Meditation

  The one we call The Lazar wants to find the man who cured his disease and raised him from the grave, it is said. The man is gone, down that road, someone mumbles and points to nowhere in particular. The Lazar looks exactly like someone just raised from the dead: his eyes filmed over like a cat’s; his hair and beard in filthy tangles; his bandages blood-smeared and tattered; his bare legs scabrous and muddy. Besides, he smells like a dung heap. No one he has met in this province where he was once a respected citizen wants to have anything to do with him anymore; he is constantly wandering; at night he must sleep outside town walls, and he must fight with the dogs for scraps of food; everyone, even the other lepers, shun him. When it rains, he just wallows in a ditch and laughs, and when it is hot, he lies naked on an anthill, staring glassy-eyed into the sun.

  Now, some say he wants to find the man who raised him to thank him, for giving him the kiss of life, for restoring his health and filling his lungs with the breath of all that is holy. He is so happy now to be alive, to have entered the Kingdom of God while still on this earth, that even at its most abject life is nothing but everlasting joy; to watch the weary sun rise for the thousandth time, to see a fly feasting on pig-slop, to feel both smooth pebbles and sharp flint under bare feet, is almost too much to hold within oneself without bursting, without burning up with this newfound love for all things, all people, all the miracles of the ordinary world.

  That is one school of thought, perhaps the m
ost popular. Another has it that The Lazar seeks out the man we call The Doctor not to thank him, but to curse him. For, it is said, once someone has had a glimpse of paradise, a paradise such as only a few of the holiest men have dared describing, to return to this earth is indescribably painful—all things look pallid and parched and putrid, all flesh abhorrent, all sound, sensation, and nourishment completely unsatisfying when compared to the marvels of the afterlife. Imagine the once-richest of men forced to prostrate himself in the mud outside his very own gardens, utterly alone, weeping endlessly, brought lower than low—when once he had only to dip in his well for a cupful of diamonds, when once he ate off plate of vermeil and drank from the ivory horn, commanded an army of slaves, and had wives and children as numerous as the pearls in a strand as long as the Nile. Wouldn’t you, too, be angry at being banished from such a paradise, when you had done absolutely nothing wrong, and moreover, never asked to leave? So, some do say, The Lazar wants to seek out and find that unwise doctor, to smite him full in the face, to spit at his feet and curse him with all the