There is a conversation they do not have. In it she wants to know he knows (he consciously puts the phrase ‘she is dying to know’ under erasure) what happened at the last, why—when she felt herself slipping into the syrupy and only somewhat hallucinogenic terminal sleep, felt the pain and cold easing a little to fires in the marrow of the long bones, to metal in the aching joints—she woke.
She wants to know, as he constructs it, why he did not let her die. Why he did not, as he had promised, help her gain what she so ardently desired: release from the pain and a long leap into whatever.
It suddenly strikes him (this is the advantage of fiction) that she cannot have known that she would not wake into death. That none of us do.
He thinks of how it is waking in another’s house, lying there learning the morning light in this new place, guessing or noticing the time and trying to discern the noises and their significance. Who has risen and whether the bathroom is clear. If the faint, dark odor of coffee comes from the kitchen below. You listen for footfall, slipper or bare foot upon the deep pile of the guest suite, the hardwood floor of the stairwell corridor, distant flushing of a toilet, the shower’s hiss, china being set out. (Occasionally the intimate and distant music of delight: the hostess cries like a bell, the host’s muffled grunting. Sometimes there are two hosts or twin hostesses and they sing together. It is good to hear love in the morning when you are a guest of friends.) If there are children in the house, there are sometimes muted echoes of artificial glee and the synthetic music from cartoon programs. If there are pets there is the possibility of invasion, a cat purring like an engine and slowly toppling to offer its upturned belly or an amiable but stupid dog rooting at the sheet round your armpits or genitals. Sometimes children will enter likewise, leaving behind the television, their scent always talc or cereal at that age.
Why didn’t you do as you promised?
He has often thought (who hasn’t?) of the logic we try to work out in anticipation of the awful possibility that death brings nothingness. Yet no matter how often he attempts this terrible arithmetic, each time he ultimately becomes lost in it: If there is no afterlife death cannot matter to the self who has died but only to the self who dies and so the fear of death is not something which the self who has died will any longer experience. Thus the fear is located in this present moment and not in the death we will inevitably experience.
He recalls (as freshly as if it were the present moment; which in some sense it always is when he recalls it) a helpless panic at the wheel of a car in the midst of a summer trip through rural West Virginia. Coming around a hairpin turn in the center of a small town there was a white-sided funeral parlour with folding chairs and a Coke machine on its long porch. No one was there on the porch. His wife and children were laughing in the car at some joke and they didn’t see. The porch was shaded and the Coke machine was polished, an older machine with rounded red shoulders.
I will die. I will actually die. They were laughing. You could see where the Coke machine was plugged into the fixture on the porch. It would be a hot day. There was no escaping time. The road headed up into the green, buzzing mountains.
“Have you noticed how this story is filled with mentions of birds and the word, mother?”
Now that she says so he does.
“What are you thinking?” she asks.