by John Gould
It was Tony who pointed out that there are five stages of decomposition and also five stages of grief (he’s been preparing, even though he knows you can’t), and they sort of line up. The first stage of decomposition is Fresh, for instance, and the first stage of grief is Denial, which is perfect. The second stage of decomposition is Bloat, and the second stage of grief is Anger. It goes on like that till you get to the last stage of decomposition, Skeletal (Nat’s best painting, an x-ray on magic mushrooms), which lines up with Acceptance. Basically the survivor running out of misery just as the dead person runs out of flesh.
What’s odd is that Nat’s suddenly sleeping. Three nights in a row she’s gone off at a decent hour and not come back. And I can kind of see it. If she were eaten she wouldn’t be off there alone anymore, separate from her mum (the self-absorbed bitch) and her dad and her stepmum and her aunt and her friends and the branch scratching at her window and the window itself and the sand the window’s made of, if that’s actually how it works. Just thinking about it I can feel the day’s dread start to seep out of me, a purple ooze.
Tonight, Tony comes back in from peeking at Nat. He nods — she’s still asleep. I take his hand and bite it, the meaty bit, the bit you pound down with when you want to make a point. Tony howls, play-whaps me. I bite him again, on the shoulder this time, and he bites me back, and so on.
Sunday Morning
Theresa could normally be counted on to ignore a person’s birthday, or at least to ignore the invitation to wish him or her a happy one on “sociopathic media,” as she called it. She delivered this quip each time with a chagrined shake of the head, at her own anemic humour and the fearfulness it barely camouflaged.
Simon! she wrote in the little text box. She was sitting up in bed with the tablet Manny had given her for her last birthday. Morning light eased itself in between the honeycomb blinds. Manny slumbered beside her, his apnea machine giving out a rhythmical wheeze. If you’re getting older, I suppose I must be too!! She couldn’t bring herself to insert a smiley or a sad or a startled face. She aimed to make up for this deficit with a profusion of exclamation marks. Have a whale of a day!!!! Without once reading this over she tapped “enter,” and nodded.
Manny breathed. He breathed again. Whale of a day? What had possessed her? What about her policy to tackle absolutely nothing until she’d got at least one cup of matcha down her in the morning?
It had been two decades since she’d last seen Simon. Three. Their only contact since then had been her click of the “confirm” button in response to his friend request. She imagined such a request to be prelude to further communication, but no. Even back in the day, Simon hadn’t been anybody much to her. A coworker — she chewed gum at the checkout at Loblaws for a couple of summers, while he stocked shelves — and, briefly, a crush. Simon was a bona fide activist, as Theresa then aspired to be. She managed to get a letter to the editor printed, decrying the humpback hunt, at about the same time Simon nearly got himself harpooned on an inflatable boat in the North Pacific. And then there was that trace of a French Canadian accent — odd, when he’d grown up in Toronto. There was a short period, between her first two boyfriends, during which Theresa regularly masturbated to the sound of Simon’s voice in her head.
Speaking of which, it had been too long, weeks at least, since she’d last “pleasured” herself. Dr. Leblanc, employing this icky euphemism or even, as he explained, going francophone slang on her — “tu te crosse, oui?” — urged her to persist in order to “keep the flow” while Manny sorted out his erectile issues. Maybe today, once Manny was off to see his daughter. Maybe with Simon in mind.
How would he look these days? Where his picture ought to be, at the top of his page, there was only a shot of his hand, buried in the coat of a spaniel. It was a lean hand, strong but delicate, mapped with veins as though fresh from some exertion. This hand might do.
Theresa scrolled down a bit. Others had already done their duty this morning — it must be a daily chore for habitual users, felicitating somebody or other. Simon seemed to have racked up 561 friends, so a good ten birthdays a week. Mind you, there must be others who, like Theresa, had declined to admit to having been born on any particular day. Miss you my friend, wish I could crack you a cold one wherever you are. Ah, so still a travelling man. Down the page a little further, Hope your blowing a joint with Bob Marley right now #onelove. Had he turned rasta? Sunk even further into his idealism, failed to mature? And then, Two years, my sweet, since that dreadful day. I knew nothing would be the same. Nothing is.
Oh.
She scrolled down further, and further again. Simon’s last post was indeed from about two years back. I don’t usually inflict this kind of thing on you folks but i’m a sucker for this one ha ha prost santé cin cin cheers. Followed by a video of an octopus uncorking a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. Either Simon didn’t know his life was almost over at the time, or he’d so transcended his egotism, his sense of himself as a uniquely precious and irreplaceable being, that he could carry on unfazed.
But seriously, what the fuck? The infernal thing kept sending out birthday reminders even after a person had snuffed it? Manny would get a kick out of that. It would confirm something or other for him, and he loved to have things confirmed. Then again, who didn’t? Theresa would share the story, starting out in a comical vein but modulating to sadness, and then maybe back again. She’d make it about technology, but about mortality too. Was the failure of the body actually a death at all, if the self continued to find means, however grotesque, of becoming manifest in other lives?
She sat up hard, sending a decent little shudder through the bed. She coughed a couple of times. Manny stirred, but resettled.
Oh well. She scrolled upwards, looking for more clues. From the comments, she couldn’t ascertain how Simon had died, which didn’t seem a good thing. The sheer plenty and variety of his friends instantly caused her to perceive her life as small and lacking in meaningful consequence. This tended to be the impact of online experience, whenever she got up the gumption to sign on to something. She’d get a little rush of fellow feeling, followed almost immediately by a great unaccustomed loneliness.
Another friend of Simon’s had chimed in now, up at the top of the page. Omg some people. Aimed at her, presumably. And another, How bout some effin respect. Oh dear. She must appear ignorant, insensitive. Was there any way to revise this impression? Should she bother? She once again clicked the “Write something to Simon …” box, noting beside it her tiny portrait. In her blue crew-neck sweater, she laughed and looked off to one side, such that she almost seemed to have a cheekbone again, unblurred by recent accretions of flesh. She recalled the day Manny lucked into this shot, even recalled what had amused her, or almost recalled it. They’d been to the Picasso exhibit, the one structured around his various muses. Their friends Pete and Saul had been along. Saul had wisecracked that “muse” meant “somebody an artist bonks, or hopes to.” Pete had tossed in something about Cubism and sadism, and then Saul had tried to piece together a joke he’d heard about a model posing, not for Picasso, but for that guy who did the big blocks of colour. No, it wouldn’t quite come back. Unless that was it, unless that was the whole joke?
Life gives you things for a while, Theresa tapped out on her tablet. Then it starts to take them away again. Cliché, and not true to her state of mind at the moment. Delete delete delete. She gave another couple of coughs, but still Manny puffed peacefully away. She’d come to love it, the look of him in his apnea mask. He wanted to be well. He wanted to be with her.
Rothko. Mark Rothko.
When I think about you, Simon, je me crosse. He’d be familiar with the Québécois expression, surely. And who knows, her little nudge might make him feel better about having perished. As for the rest of you, I don’t think about you at all.
Enter. There. Too late.
Monsters
There are errors in her note, fine points I wish I could take up with her now. For instance, she
claims it was Thomas Aquinas who taught that unbaptized babies will spend eternity in hell, and Augustine who taught that they won’t. It’s actually the other way around. According to Thomas Aquinas, unbaptized babies such as our Caitlin will never attain supernatural happiness, having died in original sin, but neither will they be subjected to unending punishment. They’ll be barred from the bliss of the beatific vision, but they won’t know there’s any such thing, so the lack won’t torment them. They may even be eligible for some sort of rudimentary peace.
Also, when I said I wished I could rip the faith right out of her heart, it wasn’t her faith in us I was trying to steal, but her faith in the men who think they know the universe and our place in it. When I offered, as an alternate religious view, that of the Wari people who liberated their dead babies by eating them, it wasn’t to deepen her horror at our loss but to shake her faith in faith itself. It didn’t work. It was a bad idea.
She ended her note with hope more than faith, and for this I wish I could express my admiration. Express it to her, I mean. The modern church, she argued — her note is three pages long, written in the same lean script in which she used to write “avocados 3” or “tired hon hitting the hay night night” — took a hopeful view of both unbaptized babies and suicides. There was no way to be sure God would spare either from eternal damnation, but there were grounds to imagine He might. Caitlin almost certainly wasn’t in heaven, but she wasn’t necessarily in hell either. By killing herself, my wife gave herself a shot at joining our daughter in the indeterminate nothingness to which she’d been consigned. I’d book my own place in the lake of unquenchable fire if I could be assured that it worked, that the two of them are together and okay.
Hope, yes, and mercy. Her note bears no trace of resentment for my standing in the way of our daughter’s baptism, my insistence that we wait at least until she’d healed from the first surgery. I’d have found another excuse after that — I’d never have consented to a baptism, or to any such rite I knew to be nonsense, and my wife recognized this. But again, her words betray no ill will. This is where I’d perceive the supernatural, if I could be persuaded that such a thing exists. In my wife’s ability to resist this rage.
And in Caitlin too, of course. How could something merely natural cause a man to love so helplessly, so irredeemably? With her sweet puzzled face and her organs bulging out through the wall of her belly she was sublime, and monstrous. Monstrous in the sense of the medievals who traced such deformity to the wrath of God, or to the unclean bodies of women. Perhaps I’m the one who should feel aggrieved. Did my wife make brutish love to me while she was menstruating? Did she conceive our girl while she had some silly or unsettling notion in her head? “It is not good that monsters live among us,” observed Ambroise Paré in the sixteenth century, for, entering a woman’s overheated imagination, any such disturbance may “spoil the fruit” of her pregnancy.
He was right. Monsters — men like him, men like me — should be extinguished. Silenced, at least, before we can do any further damage. Men who think we know more than we do, which is not a thing.
10 Things
To Mr. Pearce,
This note will be longer than it ought to be. Hopefully you’ll live long enough to finish reading it, ha, ha. Is it right to joke around? I don’t know. I’ve looked it up, but nothing definitive.
My plan was to find the perfect card and let it do the talking, let it express this peculiar grief. It’s been almost twenty years, after all, and we knew one another only slightly. There was no “Sorry To Hear You’re Dying!” section at the shop, so I had to scout around. Trouble is, most cards have a narrative to them, however subtle or implied. There was a baby polar bear adrift on a chunk of ice, for instance. The punchline, which I’ve now forgotten, was funny, but hinted at lostness turning back into foundness. In other words, its present implied a future, something of which you have very little, I understand. (I’ve been back in touch with another old student of yours, Owen McKnee. He’d somehow heard.) Any narrative at all is going to exclude you, correct? Carry on without you? The rest of us will be left behind too, someday. Does that make you feel better, or does it make you feel even worse?
So card-wise I was kind of hooped. I nearly settled for a cute cat one. A cat soaked down in the sink, a cat napping in a boot. Then I spotted a musical one, a blue autumn wind blowing ochre note-leaves over a treble clef. Appropriate (the melody looked as though it might be doable on the trombone, by somebody who’d absorbed your lessons), but it seemed to point in a too-heavy way towards silence. The narrative thing again. In the end, as you can see, I went geometric. This pattern reminds me of an early motherboard, the sort you’ll see in a kicked-in old PC, but hopefully it reminds you of nothing. My idea was that the card wouldn’t mean anything at all to you except, hey, this is a card.
Or should I say “To Robert,” as though we met just recently instead of back when I was a kid and you were a man about the age I am now? Robert or Bob or whatever, and you’d call me Greg, just the way you did then. As in, “Sit up straight, Greg, so that the chest may fill like a bellows.” (I was the skinny Italian-looking kid with the cheque-bouncing mother, by the way, in case you haven’t placed me yet. Though I’m mostly Romanian.) It would be an exaggeration to say I think of you whenever I breathe, but you did change my attitude to the air that moves in and out of me, and I suspect there’s nothing more fundamental. Mind and body are both breath, as it turns out. Perhaps that’s why I’m writing this note and stuffing it into this card, instead of just planning to do so, which is more my style. You had a much bigger impact on me than you probably realize. And on Owen, and on a bunch of other kids too, I bet. All these little twerps dragged in for extra lessons, and you receiving us as though we mattered.
None of us wanted trombone, but you must have known that. If our parents were going to make us try out for school band, please God at least assign us something a little less dorky, trumpet or sax or something. We got stuck with trombone because we failed to hum “There’s a Hole in My Bucket” as tunefully as some of our more gifted classmates. Which doesn’t particularly make sense, since with its slide the trombone is so hard, notes never staying put. After a few months of lessons, though, out in the middle of “Ode to Joy” — blat blat blat blat blat blat blat, blat blat blat blat blat blaaaat blat — something happened. I felt it, and Owen says he felt it too. This sense of blowing our way into something bigger and more beautiful than us, or at least a little less small and ugly.
I bought you one other card, a “Congrats On Your Graduation!” one, which I thought would be funny. And I added a kind of cool quote. “He who has learned to die has unlearned to serve.” That’s Michel de Montaigne. I looked him up, which is worth it, though you probably already know about him. My hunch is that you’ve kept learning much longer than most of us, Mr. Pearce. But unlearning? It sounds hard. And really, is dying something you figure out how to do? The fact that you’re dying doesn’t mean you’ve learned how to do it, does it? Any more than falling out of an airplane means you’ve learned to skydive? Ms. Green from grade ten would be pleased with that metaphor, I like to think. Metaphor, is that what that is?
Anyway, I nixed the quote, and I nixed the clever card, which leaves me to come up with words of my own to slip into this motherboard. These words. As I say, I’ve made an effort. I’ve done some research. There are a lot of helpful sites, none of which are any help. “10 Things Not To Say To Your Dying Friend.” You’re going to a better place. You can beat this. Everything happens for a reason.
Here’s a thing I read, though, on my ex’s Facebook page (for some reason it’s never occurred to her to unfriend me). She offered up this story sans emoticon or sappy commentary, which sort of singled it out. Seems there was an old Greek guy named Periander who wanted his body to disappear after he died. He arranged for two guys to kill and bury him. He arranged for four guys to kill and bury those two guys, and for eight guys to kill and bury those four guys. There may
have been even more levels to it than that, I’m not sure. Another good metaphor for something, right?
I often feel stupid these days. Is it possible I’m unlearning things? In a good way, I mean? Unlearning to serve, to slave — that would be a worthy project. If anybody’s up to it, if anybody’s ever given me the impression it’s something I might undertake, it would be you.
Thanks, Mr. Pearce. Robert. Bob.
Yours, Alex Petran
P.S. I’m going to come clean and confess that I don’t play the bone anymore. I haven’t since high school. Every so often I’ll YouTube one of the classic jazz guys you had us listen to, Jack Teagarden, JJ Johnson, Dicky Wells. One time I dreamt I was playing again, searching out those tones and finding them. There wasn’t any good reason for that dream to end.
P.P.S. No worries if you don’t remember me. I’m not the point. I rarely am.
Coosh
The book in the outhouse said a person’s last thought in this lifetime would dictate the kind of life they’d have next time around, how far up or down the Ladder of Being they’d go. This isn’t what Ruth should be thinking about right now, here in bed. What she should be thinking about is Claire and her pleasure, only that. Claire is close. If Claire gets close but doesn’t coosh (Claire’s ridiculous but kind of cute term) it’ll be a rough day for the both of them, especially since Ruth herself has already cooshed three times since noon when they crawled between these musty sheets together. Their relationship is only a few weeks old and it’s already something of a pattern, Ruth for sure and then Claire maybe, maybe, maybe. It’s partly just nerves — she’s young, and this is her first serious thing with another woman — but still. Ruth needs to concentrate.
