Michael had been indignant. "It means being true to yourself, whatever yourself is," he retorted. "And I like to think I'm true to myself."
"Mmmm," said the professor thoughtfully. "Well, cheat a little. A bit of adultery would do you a lot of good."
He had been sure of no one's honesty but his own and prided himself on the honesty with which he admitted the honesty of his reasoning. Now he wasn't quite sure. "For a wild minute there," he said aloud, "I thought I had the answer to death." He thought of the girl.
Remembering Laura Durand smiling on the grass of her grave, familiar and at ease with death, he felt tired and as sick of himself as he had ever felt after fighting with Sandra. I must be a bit of a manic-depressive, he thought wearily, and then descended into happy self-abasement as curiously as if he had been going down a stone stairway into a cellar nightclub he had never before visited. He decided, among other things, that he had not only been a fool to enlist in the Korean War, he had been something of a hypocrite to come out of it alive. He had about concluded that he would go and say good-by to Mr. Rebeck, whose patience he now regarded as Christlike, if pointless, and then find his own grave and let the straining muscles of his memory go limp, when he saw Laura walking slowly toward him.
First he felt like springing up and running to meet her. Then he thought he would wait for her to reach him and then say, "The bathroom's back near the entrance"—oh, real heavy, real Sinatra. Don't come sneaking around me, lady. This is Michael Morgan, as pure as mountain spring water, as unforgiving as God. Finally he sat where he was, looking at the ground as if he had lost something.
Her legs came gradually into his field of vision and stopped. She was looking down at him, he knew, and he waited impatiently for her to say something. He wondered if ghosts ever had nervous breakdowns.
"Hello, Michael," she said finally. He looked up and blinked in surprise. Admirable, laddy, admirable. These honored dead have not died in vain.
"I didn't hear you coming."
Laura smiled faintly. "The dead make good neighbors." She paused. He did not budge. Budge thee not, boy. As immovable as Kafka's doorman.
"I don't want to go to sleep right away," she said. "After all"—fumbling for words—"I've got time enough. I thought—if you weren't doing anything"—neither of them laughed—"we could walk a little. I don't know this place at all—" She faltered under what Michael fondly believed was an unwinking glare. "All right. I couldn't fall asleep. I'm still conscious and I might as well do something with it. Will you come or not? It doesn't matter to me."
Michael got up and began to walk toward the Old Rich section of the cemetery. "Come on," he said.
Laura came up alongside him. "Where are we going?"
Michael spoke so low she could barely hear him. "I know. I do know now. The dead can't sleep." He looked inquiringly at her, and she nodded.
"When I closed my eyes—it didn't make any difference. It was just as if I had them open."
"We don't sleep," Michael said. "We doze from time to time. The ones I talked to were just pretending to have been asleep. Pretending—to themselves more than me." He quickened his stride.
"Where are we going?"
"To see a man."
"A ghost?"
"No, a man. I wasn't sure till just now."
"Would you have believed me?" Mr. Rebeck asked. He sat on the steps of the Wilder mausoleum, looking thin and fine-boned in an old black-and-white-checked bathrobe.
"Probably not," said Michael. "You could have tried, though."
"Good heavens, you had enough trouble believing you were dead. And I didn't convince you of that—you convinced yourself." Mr. Rebeck hesitated, arranging his words as if they were a gin hand: "In our society, you have two choices, two possible beliefs. Either you go somewhere after you die, or you don't. Either you sing very loudly through eternity, or else you sleep quietly until the world crumbles away around you and you go sailing on through space, unwaking and unwakened. Neither belief is true, but you have to find that out for yourself."
"I was hoping for sleep," Laura said. "My last word on earth was probably 'Hurrah!' "
"You'll drowse," Mr. Rebeck answered, "and that's almost like sleeping. In time, sleep won't mean anything to you because you'll lose the concept. You won't know whether you're awake or asleep, and it won't really matter." He paused. "And you're still on earth. There's isn't any special world for the dead, only cold rooms the living grant them out of respect for their used bodies. There is only earth."
He realized that a certain oracular solemnity had been wedging its way into his words, but he could think of nothing to say to relieve its weight. Looking at the man and woman, he thought tiredly that things always became complicated in the end; webs became tangled whether the spider's intent was to deceive or not. He liked this man and woman very much, and he wished they wouldn't make him phrase things he himself wasn't sure of until he spoke them. He was neither God nor the First Gravedigger—and then there was Mrs. Klapper.
Laura was saying something. A mellifluous name, he thought. I wish she were far away, so I could call her.
"How long will it take?" Laura was asking.
Mr. Rebeck blinked. "I beg your pardon?"
"Forgetting. Disintegrating. Letting things go."
"Oh, I see." Of course, Michael would have told her. "It depends. A month seems to be about average."
"A month? What happens then?"
"I don't know." Of course I don't know. I'm not the Answer Man. He wondered if that program was still on the radio. Probably not. He should have asked Mrs. Klapper.
"I can wait," Laura said.
Michael laughed. "You'll have to."
Laura looked at him as if he were something half-eaten and discarded. "What a wonderful Messiah you'd have made."
"True. My first miracle would have been raising you from the dead. With a steam shovel probably."
"You're like an old man in a small town," Laura said, "who used to be somebody important and still hangs around the place where he used to work, making speeches on holidays and playing at still being important."
"Maybe," Michael said tightly. "But I'll sit on your grave each Christmas and sing carols to you."
"Oh, for God's sake," Mr. Rebeck thought, "shut up!"
Not until he saw the astonished looks on their faces did he realize that he had said it aloud. Committed, he charged on. "What difference does it make which of you remembers his name longer? You're both dead. That may be the only thing you have in common, but it's a big one. You make my head hurt. If you feel like bickering so much, go off and yap among the stones. Death ought to be a quiet, easy thing, like love. You spend your time yelling that you won't sleep or that you can't sleep, when you don't even know what sleep is."
He saw the childishly startled looks on their translucent faces and suddenly could think of nothing else to say. He had not shouted at anybody for a very long while, and his voice sounded echoey and cavernous. A crazy image of bats nesting in his cheeks and hanging head down from the roof of his mouth scuttled across his mind, and he very nearly giggled.
"I've been here quite a long time, you know," he added. Then he sat and looked away because he was finished speaking.
Laura started to say something but called it back. She made a small, meaningless gesture to Michael, who nodded and leaned forward, hoping that Mr. Rebeck would look up at him. "Why did you come here?"
Mr. Rebeck did look up then. "I died, like everybody else," he said; then, seeing Laura wince, added, "No, that's too easy to say and not really true." He looked at Michael. "I told you I used to be a druggist, I think."
Michael nodded.