Mr. Treadwell's sister died. Her first name was Gladys. The doctor said she died of lingering dread, a result of thefour days and nights she and her brother had spent in the Mid-Village Mall, lost and confused.
A man in Glassboro died when the rear wheel of his car separated from the axle. An idiosyncrasy of that particularmodel.
The lieutenant governor of the state died of undisclosed natural causes, after a long illness. We all know what thatmeans.
A Mechanicsville man died outside Tokyo during a siege of the airport by ten thousand helmeted students.
When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Fouryears to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident thanwhen we use them to speculate on the time of our dying. Sometimes I bargain with myself. Would I be willing toaccept sixty-five, Genghis Khan's age on dying? Suleiman the Magnificent made it to seventy-six. That sounds allright, especially the way I feel now, but how will it sound when I'm seventy-three?
It's hard to imagine these men feeling sad about death. Attila the Hun died young. He was still in his forties. Did hefeel sorry for himself, succumb to self-pity and depression? He was the King of the Huns, the Invader of Europe, theScourge of God. I want to believe he lay in his tent, wrapped in animal skins, as in some internationally financedmovie epic, and said brave cruel things to his aides and retainers. No weakening of the spirit. No sense of the irony ofhuman existence, that we are the highest form of life on earth and yet ineffably sad because we know what no otheranimal knows, that we must die. Attila did not look through the opening in his tent and gesture at some lame dogstanding at the edge of the fire waiting to be thrown a scrap of meat. He did not say, "That pathetic flea-ridden beastis better off than the greatest ruler of men. It doesn't know what we know, it doesn't feel what we feel, it can't be sadas we are sad."I want to believe he was not afraid. He accepted death as an experience that flows naturally from life, a wild ridethrough the forest, as would befit someone known as the Scourge of God. This is how it ended for him, with hisattendants cutting off their hair and disfiguring their own faces in barbarian tribute, as the camera pulls back out ofthe tent and pans across the night sky of the fifth century A.D., clear and uncontaminated, bright-banded withshimmering worlds.
Babette looked up from her eggs and hash browns and said to me with a quiet intensity, "Life is good, Jack.""What brings this on?""I just think it ought to be said.""Do you feel better now that you've said it?""I have terrible dreams," she murmured.
Who will die first? She says she wants to die first because she would feel unbearably lonely and sad without me,especially if the children were grown and living elsewhere. She is adamant about this. She sincerely wants to precedeme. She discusses the subject with such argumentative force that it's obvious she thinks we have a choice in thematter. She also thinks nothing can happen to us as long as there are dependent children in the house. The kids are aguarantee of our relative longevity. We're safe as long as they're around. But once they get big and scatter, she wantsto be the first to go. She sounds almost eager. She is afraid I will die unexpectedly, sneakily, slipping away in thenight. It isn't that she doesn't cherish life; it's being left alone that frightens her. The emptiness, the sense of cosmicdarkness.
MasterCard, Visa, American Express.
I tell her I want to die first. I've gotten so used to her that I would feel miserably incomplete. We are two views of thesame person. I would spend the rest of my life turning to speak to her.
No one there, a hole in space and time. She claims my death would leave a bigger hole in her life than her deathwould leave in mine. This is the level of our discourse. The relative size of holes, abysses and gaps. We have seriousarguments on this level. She says if her death is capable of leaving a large hole in my life, my death would leave anabyss in hers, a great yawning gulf. I counter with a profound depth or void. And so it goes into the night. Thesearguments never seem foolish at the time. Such is the dignifying power of our subject.
She put on a long glossy padded coat—it looked segmented, exoskeletal, designed for the ocean floor—and went outto teach her class in posture. Steffie moved soundlessly through the house carrying small plastic bags she used forlining the wicker baskets scattered about. She did this once or twice a week with the quiet and conscientious air ofsomeone who does not want credit for saving lives. Murray came over to talk to the two girls and Wilder, somethinghe did from time to time as part of his investigation into what he called the society of kids. He talked about theotherworldly babble of the American family. He seemed to think we were a visionary group, open to special forms ofconsciousness. There were huge amounts of data flowing through the house, waiting to be analyzed.
He went upstairs with the three kids to watch TV. Heinrich walked into the kitchen, sat at the table and gripped a forktightly in each hand. The refrigerator throbbed massively. I flipped a switch and somewhere beneath the sink agrinding mechanism reduced parings, rinds and animal fats to tiny drainable fragments, with a motorized surge thatmade me retreat two paces. I took the forks out of my son's hands and put them in the dishwasher.
"Do you drink coffee yet?""No," he said.
"Baba likes a cup when she gets back from class.""Make her tea instead.""She doesn't like tea.""She can learn, can't she?""The two things have completely different tastes.""A habit's a habit.""You have to acquire it first.""That's what I'm saying. Make her tea.""Her class is more demanding than it sounds. Coffee relaxes her."'That's why it's dangerous," he said.
"It's not dangerous.""Whatever relaxes you is dangerous. If you don't know that, I might as well be talking to the wall.""Murray would also like coffee," I said, aware of a small note of triumph in my voice.
"Did you see what you just did? You took the coffee can with you to the counter.""So what?""You didn't have to. You could have left it by the stove where you were standing and then gone to the counter to getthe spoon.""You're saying I carried the coffee can unnecessarily.""You carried it in your right hand all the way to the counter, put it down to open the drawer, which you didn't want todo with your left hand, then got the spoon with your right hand, switched it to you............