2.
Another philosopher was killed while smoking on a veranda. It was after the war. Or it is thought the philosopher thought it was after the war. Or that the war, recently not over, was now over and the precautions one takes during a war, such as staying out of sight and not calling attention to your position by the glowing ash tip of your cigarette, were, now that the war was over, not as pressing as they had been only days before. I should mention that this philosopher was not a combatant, not a soldier, but an ordinary civilian albeit a modern philosopher of some notoriety. And it was night. And the war was over. It was a pleasant night, warm, not humid, comfortable. An air of sadness attaches instantly to this incident's gesture of joy. The act of smoking in the open after the war is over! Lighting up under the stars after years of smoking in blacked-out interiors. I imagine, as he was shot on a veranda, that the philosopher emerged onto said veranda by means of large French doors, the glass of their mullions miraculous survivors of the same said war. The opaque curtains billow in the doorway as the philosopher strikes a match, drawing the attention of a nearby nearly invisible partisan sniper. However, we can never be sure. Some would argue the recklessness of the act, that though the philosopher knew the war was over he would surely also know that not everyone would know the war was over. There was still a risk at showing oneself. And there is this final mystery: One survives by one's wits for so long and then survives only to the moment of one's not surviving any longer.
3.
In the movie we will be making about the deaths of modern philosophers not all the deaths we hoped would be of the nature above. Not all deaths of modern philosophers can be the results of freak accident or chance, can they? Not all can be hit by milk trucks while crossing the street or be shot while smoking on verandas a few days after a war is over. Some must die of natural causes or, at least, diseases that, in a way, are natural and, in a way, are not natural. In our research we have asked living philosophers how dead philosophers have died. Invariably the living philosophers tell only the stories of the deaths of the dead philosophers that dramatize these ironies or paradoxes. These anecdotes are certainly visual, which is a necessary ingredient as we are making a movie, but we would like to have uncovered a death of a different sort to give relief to the pattern of deaths that was emerging. There was the report, mentioned by several philosophers, of the philosopher who was preserved and stuffed after he died, and kept in a closet at a college. But this, strictly speaking, wasn't so much the actual death of a philosopher but the way death, for this particular philosopher, was being spent. There was a question also as to this philosopher, while he was living, living outside the range of what we meant as “modern,“ though his body, in death, has definitely survived into the period we are now calling “modern.“ We did see the potential in the possible scene. The camera panning around the perfectly still philosopher. He has been posed seated and affixed to a wheeled chair. The antique quality of his clothing is, perhaps, a shade more bizarre than his own taxidermy. Perhaps, too, we could, during this moment of contemplation, add to the film another level of contemplation, i.e., the filming of the filming of the dead philosopher, the two cameras using the same track circling the body and in the final shot, the one shown to an audience, employing footage from both cameras. There would always be a camera in the frame with the stuffed body. We haven't ruled this out yet.
4.
A third philosopher thinks he dies on the operating table. An arthroscopic instrument has been inserted into his body. He has been lightly sedated for the procedure so that he might watch the progress of the camera through his gastrointestinal tract, which he now contemplates as a single hole coring his body. A television monitor floats overhead. His doctor has encouraged him to watch. The drug administered to the philosopher is categorized as an amnesic. The immediate discomfort of the operation will never register in his memory. The doctor tells the philosopher what he, the doctor, is doing, what he, the doctor, is seeing on the monitor. The philosopher, though he is there for those moments, forgets them instantly as the drug scrubs away the arriving memories. This philosopher, the one who will think he has died, finds himself, at first, thinking of another philosopher, a colleague, who did actually die while he, the philosopher now forgetting what he has seen of his slick colon, watched the philosopher, his friend, die of pancreatitis there in a hospital bed. That philosopher's diseased pancreas secreted its enzymatic fluids indiscriminately. His body was digesting itself. That is what he said. “My body is digesting itself.“ All of this was happening on the insides of the philosophers who looked, on the outside to all the world, as if they were lightly sleeping. This is death, the philosophers think, or this is what death is like. One philosopher wants to remember the way it feels. But then he dies. The other wants to remember the way it feels. But then he forgets.
Four Susans
LAZY SUSAN
Susan took him home to meet her parents. Her parents had kept her bedroom exactly the way it had been when she was in high school. He was lying on the four-poster bed looking through her yearbooks, The Cauldron. He turned to the back of one from her senior year. The freshman pictures were minuscule, cells in a hive. The pictures enlarged as he paged through the classes, sophomores and juniors. The seniors, finally, stamp-sized and autographed. Susan's portrait, an embarrassment of hair, a string of studio pearls at her neck. He could see in it the Susan he knew, though shadowed by age and an airbrush long ago.
“Susan,“ he said to her, “a lot of Susans.“
“Tell me about it,“ she said. “Just as many Michaels.“
She was standing at the foot of the bed watching Michael as he flipped through the pages. On every page three or four Susans at least. Susan, Susan, Susan.
Her parents had turned on the television in the family room. They had all eaten dinner together in the breakfast nook. The table was a round maple thing with heavy turned legs. The whole house was Colonial with milk-glass lamps topped by frilly shades, hardwood chairs with spoke backs and curving arms, talon feet and and pinecone finials. In the corner, a Franklin stove boiled over with philodendra. The television was shuttered in a cabinet originally carpentered by Jefferson. On the table was an ancient lazy Susan. Her father had made the same old joke about it and his daughter's name. It rotated slowly on its own as they removed and replaced the dishes and plates, condiments and seasonings. It was a function of gravity and balance, the frictionless slide of ball bearings, but it appeared motorized like a display at a grocery store or museum. After dinner, they did the dishes at the sink while her parents rocked in the glider on the porch. Susan spun the lazy Susan like a wheel of fortune, a spinner from a board game. It twirled and twirled.
Susan stood at the foot of her bed watching him skim through her high school yearbooks. They had been lovers for years now, though they were maintaining the illusion that they were not for her parents' sake. During the visit, he would sleep in her brother's room. Her brother was an actuary in Milwaukee. She looked around her old room at its clutter of souvenirs, every innocuous object emitting its own secret life. She pressed herself against one of the bedposts, the one she had used as a child. The post had been lathed, swelling and contracting, cut with channels, knobs, and grooves. The wood was stained and distressed on its corners, the cherry color worn away. It wasn't until she moved out of this room that she started to touch herself. This was always better, but she had thought, back then, that her rubbing right here, again and again, had worn off the paint, had smoothed it finer than the finish on the rest of the frame, its polish another kind of stain.