I was way out of town by the time I began to tire and knew I’d have to stop soon or I’d have no energy left to get home. There were few people that far out, and I started looking for a place to rest. The path next to the water there is rough. Huge trees and wildly overgrown shrubs are everywhere. No one lives there. People venture out that far only to take long Sunday walks or fish.
Suddenly I saw a big group of sunflowers planted in the middle of nowhere, and for some reason the sight heartened me. The only way they could have been there was that someone had purposely planted them for no good reason other than beauty. It made me like that person very much, and it seemed a perfect place to lie down a while and maybe take a little nap. I fell fast asleep.
I awoke when I felt something warm on my face. It was a hot day anyway and I’d really worked up a sweat on the bike. I’d also fallen very deeply asleep, so the heat on my cheek must have been great. When I came to, the first thing I saw was an enormous penis. It was resting on my cheek and besides being terribly hot, it was also very heavy. I’ve known my share of dicks, but this one was shocking in its size and weight. Imagine coming up through the fog of sleep to see a thing like that an inch from your eye. You try to jump up, but are held down by an iron hand that you cannot move, no matter how strong you are. Imagine these things. And the shock and fear explode, because a second after sleep clears you know who it is up there, looming over you, the sun over His shoulder. You can see enough of His face to see He’s smiling.
“I don’t think you heard me the other night. I said, ‘Death has a cock that is already erect.’ I’m here, honey. We’re out in this sexy glade and your big chance is now. Don’t you want some?”
I pulled away. He let me pull away, I guess. I stood up but He stayed squatting near the ground, smiling, His thing still sticking out the front of His jeans. “You looked like Sleeping Beauty, Arlen. I thought I’d do a little twist on the tale and let it kiss you awake.”
I didn’t hurry. I was proud of myself for that. I only picked up my bicycle and started to push it away, never once looking back. I wouldn’t give Him the satisfaction. He yelled at me, but I wouldn’t turn around. He yelled, “I stole all those lines. Everything I ever said to you was someone else’s. Did you really think you deserve anything original? Did you?”
I got on the bike and slowly pushed off. I almost fell once, but I wouldn’t hurry. I refused to hurry away from Him. Somehow, somewhere that mattered very much.
Nothing more happened after that, and we did not see Leland. A few days before Wyatt was to fly back to America, I convinced him to go with me to the children’s hospital. What else was there to do until the end? I believed that Wyatt’s leukemia would now set in in earnest, while my fate would come from something outside—an accident or a sickness too. But besides the confusion and fear that ran wild through all the halls of my heart and mind, much more quickly than I would ever have thought possible, hate had also been born. Hate such as I had never experienced before.
What right did Death have to strip us bare of everything that mattered, and then kill us? Whether it was the failure of our bodies to the point of absolute weakness and humiliation, or the total loss of anything that mattered or had the simplest value. To reduce most of us to concentration camp victims standing naked, with our heads newly shaven, in front of leering soldiers before being sent off to our deaths. It was not only wrong, it was unnecessary.
So Death turned out to be like the Greek gods—resentful, playful, hideous. I had never liked the Greek myths for that reason alone. If those gods had such awesome powers, why did they need to come to earth and sleep with unsuspecting women or torment a decent man who was utterly helpless against them and their might. Why bother?
I told all of this to Wyatt, but his mind was constantly in ten places at once and it was hard to get him to hear what I was trying to say. I told him we should see it like this: Leland will kill us, sure, but until then we go forward for no reason other than to use the last days the way we want to, rather than letting him have even them by beating us into submission with fear. Wyatt said that was bluffing, that Leland would know we were just making busy work to try to keep our minds off the inevitable. Maybe that was true, but my way was better than nothing, and he finally agreed.
I arranged with the hospital to give us a large room so that Wyatt could put on a kind of small, multilingual Finky Linky Show for whatever kids were well enough to attend. On the morning of the performance, he came into the kitchen looking very wan and tired. When I put some breakfast down for him, he took my arm. Smiling, he said he had a feeling this would be the last Finky show he ever did. I said off the top of my head, “But you never thought you’d do another one anyway, so you’ll be one up on Him, won’t you?” He liked that and said, “I guess that’s true.”
We stopped at a trick store I know in Vienna. He bought hundreds of dollars’ worth of rubber balls, masks, colored scarves, card tricks, and other things I didn’t understand, but he and the store owner hit it off beautifully once the old man realized he was talking to a real master of the art. He even went into the back of the store and the attic and twenty other strange places to bring out things only Wyatt and he knew how to use. Both of us were loaded down with packages when we got to the car. Once there, he turned to me and said, “Thank you. I forgot how much I loved doing this.” I wanted to cry but knew that would upset him, so I made the only funny face I know and told him it was purely selfish on my part—I wanted to see him perform as much as the kids did.
No one at the hospital knew who Finky Linky was, but they were glad for the diversion and did everything Wyatt told them. A few of the nurses spoke good English, and between us we translated whatever he said to the others and thus had little problem getting him set up.
As I so desperately hoped, he was magnificent. The minute the children came into the room he was “on,” dancing from one to the other, pulling rubber creatures from their ears and hair and then giving them to the kids, singing songs in a nonsense language and making the children sing silly with him. He changed costumes and masks, made fire appear in his hand and float up in the air before it turned into multicolored smoke with special shapes and sizes. He pulled razor blades out of his mouth and grew a flower in the middle of his open palm.
The children were ecstatic and clapped for encore after encore. He never failed them. He juggled balls and used me as his ventriloquist’s dummy at the same time. He did brilliant pantomime and coin tricks… He stopped only when it was obvious that the stimulation was tiring the kids out.
He finished with a line I had never heard before which he then repeated in three different languages. “He whose face gives no light shall never become a star.” When I asked him about it afterward, he said it was from William Blake and that the only other time he had ever said it to someone was the love of his life. I asked what happened to him and he said only, “He went away. But to this day I’m still hoping he’ll come back.”
We had a glass of wine with the nurses and doctors who’d attended and then it was time to go. Just as we were on our way out, I suddenly remembered that one of the kids I had always read to when I visited the hospital hadn’t been at the show. When I asked a nurse about the girl, her face fell and she said, “She’s almost gone.” Why should I be startled by that, here in a place where there was so much death every day? But I was. I asked the nurse if it would be possible to see her for a short time. The woman went to check, and Wyatt sat down and took a deep breath. “Are you sure you want to do this, Arlen? It’s not going to make things any easier.”