But it doesn’t bother Lenore. The fact is, she has a tough time even acknowledging an idea of the supernatural. Stories about ghosts, demons, ghouls, vampires, zombies — they all strike her as stubborn remnants of a more primitive time. Useless, superstitious fear. A throwback that society can’t seem to shake. Generation after generation of people clutching onto memories of these shadowy myths that, like the appendix, we keep being born with, though their use is so far gone we can’t even recall it.
There are things to be frightened of in this life. She’d be the first to acknowledge that. The average person should probably be frightened of a guy like Jimmy Wyatt. No question. A mute sociopath known to veer into rage. A guy who could conceivably come at you across a crowded coffee shop some dull morning and jam his fork into your throat. Jimmy Wyatt is a tangible force. He can be seen, touched, smelled. He has a verifiable history of random violence. There are odds that he could cause you long-lasting trauma. A person should fear a Jimmy Wyatt.
The average person should have a rational fear of cruising Bangkok Park at night. Of finding the lump under the skin. Of the bomb raining down on urban centers across your country. Of the banks bolting their doors and your money long gone. Of losing your ability to control the crank, or the men around you, or your hold on a dicey and cold philosophy that you’ve staked a lot of faith on, that you’ve used as a reason for moving.
For the last half hour, Lenore’s body has been having small seizures of some kind. It’s like her nervous system gets this surge of too much juice, too many signals. Her hands flail out to the side. One foot starts to tick in spasm. A corner of her mouth tugs downward. Her shoulders shoot back like a wave has hit her chest.
She has feared this all along and now it’s finally arrived. She thinks she should be experiencing at least some slight relief that what she’s dreaded is here. The waiting can end. The subconscious, ongoing anxiety can cease. The worst has happened.
She thinks suddenly of Hitler on the last day of his life, deep in the bunker below the Reich Chancellery. She’s read that at the end, the Führer was out of it, heavily sedated by his personal doctor, maybe not even completely aware that the ball game was just about over, the Russians just a quarter mile away, their shells arcing that distance and bursting on the ravaged streets of Berlin above his head.
How different. It’s just the opposite for her. There’s no sedation, but rather a siege of input, a blitzkrieg offense against a tangled, overused system of nerves, so raw from six months of nonstop overload that the nerves are perpetually hyperstimulated, they no longer know any other mode of perception. I don’t need the receiver, she thinks, just my own ear. I don’t need the binoculars, just my given eyes. Take everything in and then take some more. Which is the worse fate, she wonders, the bang or the whimper?
It’s like being in a bunker. Only smaller. The Führer’s digs were a penthouse suite compared to this hole. Looking at the wall of dirt to her left, she can see earthworms frozen in mid-burrow. Something about this strikes her as wrong, a primal violation of some obscure law of nature.
Still, she likes the location. She’s only yards from her parents’ grave and it begins to occur to her that this waiting period is a perfect time to speak with them, to send her thoughts into the ground, a simple straight line through the terra.
Isn’t this funny, folks, I want to say it’s your firstborn. But there was Ike, and though I know one of us had to come first, right now I can’t remember who that was. I’m sure you told us. I’m sure we would have asked. The thing is, this makes me wonder what else I’m destined to forget before I join you guys. The thought doesn’t bother me as much as I’d have expected. Forgetting, I mean. You know, really, there’s a peace to it. Forgetting. There’s a consolation in forgetting.
When you die, do your memories cease? I’m betting they do. I just have this feeling. Do you guys have any memory left? Does it leave you instantly, the brain waves cease and zap, that whole lifetime pool of images is excised? Or is it a gradual thing, a fading, a leakage, until there’s only one image left, one utmost picture? What would the picture be for each of you? Ma? Dad?
It’s so goddamn, excuse me, but so weird what I suddenly flashed on. What the last memory would be for me. What would you guess? Ma? Dad? Listen, it’s not what you’d think. You’d expect something significant, right? Something that changed or shaped a lifetime, some event or moment that altered a course, changed a direction, made an impression so pervasive that you grew into a different person. Something that provoked evolution.
But that’s not it at all. No way. I’m sitting here, in a cold, empty grave in St. James Cemetery, waiting for God knows what to happen to me. To take a life or two. To end my own. But what I’m thinking about, what I’m recalling, picturing, bringing up, so clearly, so unbelievably clear, in my head is our kitchen in the old house. Our museum-piece kitchen, an exhibition out of 1950s American Television Sitcoms: Linoleum greyand-red-checked floor, those four metal-legged chairs with the smooth, cool, dull-white Naugahyde backing, the metal-legged table with matching dull-white Formica top, the overstuffed, paisley-covered rocking chair that was Gramma’s, wasn’t it? And next to it, a little, black, wiry magazine holder stuffed with Life and The Saturday Evening Post. The silver-scrolled radiator in the corner that really pumped out the heat — remember Ike huddling next to it, mornings in the winter? That old white Norge refridge with the heavy pull-out handle. I built my first muscles opening and closing that monster. Mounted on all the walls are those old cream-colored real-wood cabinets with black handles, the inside shelves all lined with left-over wallpaper, that blue and white Colonial design, an early American man and woman sitting at a table having tea. Or I always thought it was tea. And, though I doubt I ever told you, Ma, I always thought the couple was George and Martha Washington.
I see the whole scene in the dim light of a late November evening, like this one. It’s five, five-thirty, and you’re waiting for Dad to get back from the corner market, you’d run out of milk, I think it was. You’d run out in the morning and the milkman wasn’t due for another day. Remember milkmen? Dad comes through the door, whistling, carrying a brown paper bag filled not only with a gallon of milk, glass bottle, but some Corncakes and Old Fashioneds for later on in the night. And as you take the unexpected treat out of the bag, you give him this mock, scolding smile. So endearing. That’s the only word that fits now. Endearing.
Ike’s at one end of the kitchen table, scrunched up in the chair, reading, lost as always, deep into, what was it — yeah, a Hardy Boys book, The Sinister Signpost. And I’m at the other end, supper plate pushed to the side, doing my math homework, printing numbers, with a pencil, on a white, lined piece of paper pulled from a black-marbled-cover spiral notebook, all those confetti-ish scraps running down the left-hand margin.
Dad sits in the old rocker, spreads The Spy open in his lap, the sports page, as you go about the last preparations for dinner. This is what I remember. This would be my last memory to fade at my death: You turn from the stove, casually, whipping potatoes, and ask Dad if he’s heard anything yet on the supervisor job that opened up last month down at the station. He doesn’t look up from the paper, but answers that, yes, they offered it to him, and he turned it down. I look up from my math homework, I instantly launch into a study of your face, Ma. You pause, then nod, your head bobbing for an extended few seconds, in time to the rhythm of the potato-whipping motion that your hand and arm are making. Dad, you add the last comment, one you’d probably said before: No better way for a man to lose his friends than to become their superior.