The two daughters are horrified by the idea. Ashamed. They have no idea what’s wrong with their father. The sisters want their father to pass away at home. Maybe, periodically, he embarrassed them as they were growing up. He was a straightforward enough man — he was an OB-GYN, let’s say — but he was eccentric. His clothes were messy, always stained somewhere. They and their mother were neater. He occasionally drank to excess, worked obsessively on a Model T he’d bought in high school, and was the one who would get up in a restaurant and sing “Happy Birthday” to one of them, booming. He drove an old Trans Am until he was sixty, when he switched to a more fuel-efficient Hyundai. For years, he has collected cacti.
His son, a year out of college and a forest ranger/firefighter, understands what his father is talking about. He was always very afraid of the dark, for example. On the other hand, he’s a more solitary person than his father. He loves his patrols on Mount St. Helens — that’s where he works — and while he’s friendly and sociable, he needs much more time alone than does Basil. Does he have a beard? He does.
His name is Dennis. Or Daniel or Derek. He is enlisted to help his father with the project.
But what exactly is the project? They’re not sure where to start.
Basil calls an old friend, Helen, who he dated in his twenties. For decades she’s been a well-known organizer of events — galas, premieres, political rallies, debutante parties. She knows how to book a space and bring in a crowd. In appearance and attitude, she’s a bit like Ann Richards. Basil and Helen haven’t spoken in about twenty years, but they’re still friends, lazy friends.
They get back in touch. He arrives one day at her office, knowing he should call first. But he loves surprising people— another thing that annoys his daughters. He is ushered into Helen’s office and they look at each other and see something very similar there. It’s said that people who look alike are sometimes attracted to each other, and this happens here. They look alike in some fundamental way not affected by their being both older — maybe they both have close-set eyes and freckles. They embrace and she sits on a chair next to him and they hold hands — she holds his fingers. She is luminous, he thinks. He is crazy, she thinks. She agrees to help.
Derek comes back to Tennessee to help his father. He will stay until the end. He and his father and Helen gather one afternoon in Basil’s backyard. Basil has three dogs who fight constantly. They come into the house with new wounds every other day. Still, they all sleep in his bedroom, together and peacefully.
Helen knows this business, the business of events, so she floats some ideas. During halftime at a football game? The University of Tennessee? A Memphis State basketball game? A minor-league baseball game? The problem would be that the people attending wouldn’t all want to witness such a thing, and that would be unfair. Basil decides this, that he doesn’t want to foist his death upon anyone. Attendance must be voluntary.
But there’s something appealing about the distance, Derek says. Watching from the fifty-yard line of a football field, if Basil were in the center of that field, would be much more palatable than being in very close quarters. Derek has watched a firefighter friend of his stop breathing, in a pickup truck, after withstanding burns over most of his body. He was overwhelmed by how hard it was to watch the breaths stop, each one quieter, by half, than the last. It would be better, he insists, if there can be a comfortable remove.
They clarify what Basil wants: He wants hundreds if not thousands of people. He wants there to be distance if desired. He wants to be able to meet people. There should be an optional receiving line, where people can come to him and wish him well, touch his hand or shoulder. Much like at a wake, though this would be for a still-living person, which makes more sense, of course. A conversation between Derek and Basiclass="underline"
DEREK: Do you want to limit the receiving line to people you know?
BASIL: No, no. Anyone.
DEREK: So complete strangers should be able to come up and say hello, goodbye?
BASIL: Yes.
DEREK: But people are strange. Many people are strange. Aren’t you afraid there’d be some strange person out there?
BASIL: At a thing like this? It’ll be self-selecting, don’t you think? People are strange, but more than that, they’re good. They’re good first, then strange.
DEREK: I guess. But there’ll be Goth types, I bet. And evangelicals.
Should there be any kind of entertainment? Helen wants to know this. An orchestra? The event could be a concert. The whole departure set to music. This idea is accepted by all as a good one. Maybe the music follows a certain cycle, birth to death, music nodding to all the stages between.
Basil now is attached to the idea of music. Nothing too loud, though. No crashing cymbals.
They briefly consider simply having an event where they open a stadium and invite the public to come and say goodbye to a man named Basil.
The story could be called “All Say Goodbye to a Man Named Basil.”
Maybe they do a test run, at a smaller venue. They place an ad in the paper, with words like those above, and that’s all. They wait and wait and only seven people show up, and all of them quickly leave when they see only Basil, Helen and Derek.
They are getting closer to a solution. They know that the event should be large, and there should be music and perhaps some dancing, if relatively slow. No crazy dancing, Basil says. But slow dancing, waltzing, that kind of thing would be nice.
Basil himself is not so good at articulating why he wants this to be so, but his son and his friend Helen, in convincing others to help or attend, become the explainers. One sample conversation, between Derek and the Russian-born conductor of the Memphis Symphony, which Derek is attempting to get to play the event:
DEREK: I think he just really likes to be around people. Lots of people.
NIKITA: So why doesn’t he just shoot himself in the middle of a hockey game or something? Sorry, that’s not funny, I guess.
DEREK: He doesn’t want to foist himself upon people. He wants their attendance to be voluntary. We were thinking it would be a concert, and you could conduct.
NIKITA: It is almost Russian in its gruesomeness.
DEREK: We hope it will be beautiful.
NIKITA: There has not been a beautiful death in the history of mankind.
There is some talk about what kind of precedent all this sets. A conversation between Helen and her assistant:
ASST: I think it’s great, but what if everyone wanted to do this? The country would be sending off everyone with parades and parties and concerts.
HELEN: There’s nothing wrong with that. We already have Lifetime Achievement Awards — everyone gets one of those now. And besides, there aren’t that many Basils out there. I think this is seen as very strange behavior, and there are few people my age who go in for this sort of thing. For most, just the family around is fine, if that.
ASST: Aren’t there elephants who go away from everyone to die? They go find a quiet place?
HELEN: I think most elephants do that. Lots of animals do, I think. Cats. Rhinos.
ASST: But are there animals that do this, animals that want to pass away in the company of thousands? I don’t think so.