The man who swam the bay with Nancy 's mother had arrived at where he'd never dreamed of being. It was time to worry about oblivion. It was the remote future.
One Saturday morning less than a week before the scheduled surgery – after a night of horrible dreaming when he'd awakened struggling to breathe at three A.M. and had to turn on all the lights in the apartment to calm his fears and was only able to fall back to sleep with the lights still burning – he decided it would do him good to go to New York to see Nancy and the twins and to visit Phoebe again, who was now at home with a nurse. Normally his deliberate independence constituted his bedrock strength; it was why he could take up a new life in a new place unconcerned over leaving friends and family behind. But ever since he'd abandoned any hope of living with Nancy or staying with Howie, he felt himself turning into a childlike creature who was weakening by the day. Was it the imminence of the seventh annual hospitalization that was crushing his confidence? Was it the prospect of coming steadily to be dominated by medical thoughts to the exclusion of everything else? Or was it the realization that with each hospital stay, going back to childhood and proceeding on up to his imminent surgery, the number of presences at his bedside diminished and the army he'd begun with had dwindled to none? Or was it simply the foreboding of helplessness to come?
What he had dreamed was that he was lying naked beside Millicent Kramer, from his art class. He was holding her cold dead body in bed the way he'd held Phoebe the time the migraine had got so bad that the doctor came to give her a morphine shot, which suppressed the pain but produced terrifying hallucinations. When he'd awakened in the night and turned on all the lights, he drank some water and threw open a window and paced the apartment to restore his stability, but despite himself he was thinking about only one thing: how it had been for her to kill herself. Did she do it in a rush, gobbling down the pills before she changed her mind? And after she'd finally taken them, did she scream that she didn't want to die, that she just couldn't face any more crippling pain, that all she wanted was for the pain to stop – scream and cry that all she wanted was for Gerald to be there to help her and to tell her to hang on and to assure her that she could bear it and that they were in it together? Did she die in tears, mumbling his name? Or did she do it all calmly, convinced at long last that she was not making a mistake? Did she take her time, contemplatively holding the pill bottle in her two hands before emptying the contents into her palm and slowly swallowing them with her last glass of water, with the last taste of water ever? Was she resigned and thoughtful, he wondered, courageous about everything she was leaving behind, perhaps smiling while she wept and remembered all the delights, all that had ever excited her and pleased her, her mind filled with hundreds of ordinary moments that meant little at the time but now seemed to have been especially intended to flood her days with commonplace bliss? Or had she lost interest in what she was leaving behind? Did she show no fear, thinking only, At last the pain is over, the pain is finally gone, and now I have merely to fall asleep to depart this amazing thing?
But how does one voluntarily choose to leave our fullness for that endless nothing? How would he do it? Could he lie there calmly saying goodbye? Had he Millicent Kramer's strength to eradicate everything? She was his age. Why not? In a bind like hers, what's a few years more or less? Who would dare to challenge her with leaving life precipitously? I must, I must, he thought, my six stents tell me I must one day soon fearlessly say goodbye. But leaving Nancy – I can't do it! The things that could happen to her on the way to school! His daughter left behind with no more of him for protection than their biological bond! And he bereft for eternity of her morning phone calls! He saw himself racing in every direction at once through downtown Elizabeth's main intersection – the unsuccessful father, the envious brother, the duplicitous husband, the helpless son – and only blocks from his family's jewelry store crying out for the cast of kin on whom he could not gain no matter how hard he pursued them. "Momma, Poppa, Howie, Phoebe, Nancy, Randy, Lonny – if only I'd known how to do it! Can't you hear me? I'm leaving! It's over and I'm leaving you all behind!" And those vanishing as fast from him as he from them turned just their heads to cry out in turn, and all too meaningfully, "Too late!"
Leaving – the very word that had conveyed him into breathless, panic-filled wakefulness, delivered alive from embracing a corpse.
He never made it to New York. Traveling north on the Jersey Turnpike, he remembered that just south of Newark Airport was the exit to the cemetery where his parents were buried, and when he reached there, he pulled off the turnpike and followed the road that twisted through a decrepit residential neighborhood and then past a grim old elementary school until it ended at a beat-up truck thoroughfare that bordered the five or so acres of Jewish cemetery. At the far end of the cemetery was a vacant street where driving instructors took their students to learn to make a U-turn. He edged the car slowly through the open, spiked gate and parked opposite a small building that must once have been a prayer house and was now a dilapidated, hollowed-out ruin. The synagogue that had administered the cemetery's affairs had been disbanded years ago when its congregants had moved to the Union, Essex, and Morris County suburbs, and it didn't look as if anyone was taking care of anything anymore. The earth was giving way and sinking around many of the graves, and footstones everywhere had tumbled onto their sides, and all this was not even in the original graveyard where his grandparents were buried, amid hundreds of darkened tombstones packed tightly together, but in the newer sections where the granite markers dated from the second half of the twentieth century. He had noticed none of this when they had assembled to bury his father. All he'd seen then was the casket resting on the belts that spanned the open grave. Plain and modest though it was, it took up the world. Then followed the brutality of the burial and the mouth full of dust.
In just the past month he had been among the mourners at two funerals in two different cemeteries in Monmouth County, both rather less dreary than this one, and less dangerous, too. During recent decades, aside from vandals who damaged and destroyed the stones and the outbuildings where his parents were buried, there were muggers who worked the cemetery as well. In broad daylight they preyed upon the elderly who would occasionally show up alone or in pairs to spend time visiting a family gravesite. At his father's burial he had been informed by the rabbi that, if he was on his own, it would be wisest to visit his mother and father during the High Holy Day period, when the local police department, at the request of a committee of cemetery chairmen, had agreed to provide protection for the observant who turned out to recite the appropriate psalms and remember their dead. He had listened to the rabbi and nodded his head, but as he did not number himself among the believers, let alone the observant, and had a decided aversion to the High Holy Days, he would never choose to come to the cemetery then.
The dead were the two women in his class who'd had cancer and who'd died within a week of each other. There were many people from Starfish Beach at these funerals. As he looked around he could not help speculating about who among them would be killed off next. Everyone thinks at some time or other that in a hundred years no one now alive will be on earth – the overwhelming force will sweep the place clean. But he was thinking in terms of days. He was musing like a marked man.