I don’t adore you now.
Well, that’s not very nice! I’m going now.
Turning away from him, Victoria sank under the grass. The last he saw of her was her beautiful blonde hair.
He had forgotten that she had sent him more than one photograph. As he sat in his study that afternoon, too unwell to consider going to the cemetery, he withdrew a letter from his father’s desk; on the back of the envelope she had written amusing enclosures and Inside are pictures!!!!! Lions + tigers, monkeys, cats and zebras and she had drawn a heart dripping two drops and then she had written: If I wrote you in French could you understand it?
For a time he held the letter in his hand, smiling. How many pictures had she sent him, after all? (The more he read, the more she was winning him over.)
She was at the zoo, and her lovely hair was blowing. Perhaps her sister, who might still be alive, and if so perhaps a grandmother, had clicked the shutter. She had lowered her head and closed her eyes when she smiled. In a high-necked white blouse and a paisley skirt, she stood before a giraffe, which cocked its head at her, its neck at a rigid near-horizontal, while she held a small blue balloon at her left breast, clasping her pretty long fingers together across her waist, the string wound around them. This photograph had not decayed so far into the red as the other; the sky was purple, the phony rocks reddish, the animal perhaps a bit more red than brown, but Victoria had barely begun to flush; her hands remained as fair as ever, and her blonde hair scarcely intimated red. He turned it over. On the back she had written that she loved him.
My mother is fine — no complications, no cancer. Help me. I know you are. Love me.
Victoria, he cried out, help me; love me!
No one answered.
There remained to him this sweet world of unread letters; perhaps it was better to guard them as if they were the future, rereading only a few; they were his treasures, or possibly the verdict against him. The true horror, much worse than that of the death which already drooled at his shoulder, was the fact of who he had been at seventeen. The reason he had clung like death to Victoria was that hardly anyone else would come near him! In high school he finally began to have friends, for the hormonal allurements at puberty can be so irresistible that we learn to disguise our faults in hopes of losing later rather than sooner; the shy girl parts her hair over what her mother helpfully assures her is the uglier side of her face; the farmboy takes more showers, and the boy who loved Victoria learned to hide his kinship to ghouls, skeletons and rotting corpses; in his summer nightmares the graves flipped round like lazy susans to fling death in his face! He always woke up smelling it. Years later, when he witnessed death without dreaming, he found that it smelled quite different — more vomity when fresh, more like garbage later on — but the death in his dreams intermittently continued to exude a sulphurous vileness, perhaps because he had once believed in hell, not to mention his own badness; certainly something about him was wrong, and when he was young his schoolmates would tear at him in a frenzy, children scratching at their common scab; he never should have existed at all! Later he disguised this fact; hence women loved him. Was it because he focused the lens of his own so-called love upon pleasuring them, so that, lost to his expert ministrations, they mistook procedure for soul? Give the devil credit; he’d had a knack; even Victoria, his first patient, appeared to enjoy the operation as far as it went. Better yet, he performed it sincerely. But certain natures are born in the shadow. In his first grade art class he was already drawing pictures of lightning-storms, carefully coloring the sky black and purple. Why are some people like that? I repeat: He should never have seen the sunlight. Nor did he mean to see it. When Luke and Raymond departed on that final hike, the reason that the moon-gazer stayed behind was that he’d spoil everything otherwise; he’d never been able to live among others; he slimed over everything he touched! No wonder Victoria fled him! What he should have done upon receipt of his fatal diagnosis was to remember all this, in order to begin to answer the question: Why am I this way? Some creatures are shadow-born, yes, but why? And who are they? Were death oblivion and could he rush into it, like a child darting under the bedclothes at night before the monsters come, then there might be scant interest in hunting this subject, but Victoria’s postmortem consciousness unfortunately proved that avoiding or denying one’s identity is not so easy. Once upon a time there had been that witch who loved him, the one who mixed green potions; why hadn’t he loved her? She knew who he was (he supposed), and even liked it. But Victoria, who rather than being noble was possessed by a selfishness as ordinary, healthy and therefore as good as the movements of her bowels, intuited who he was and knew that she had to get away. He said to himself: To begin to see myself I must diagram the movements of the living ones whom I repel. Death had struck Victoria, shattering her skull and cramming fistfuls of worms inside her brainpan. She had sought to run from death, which had begun with a kiss, sucking those round pale breasts with which he had played in his seventeenth summer, then insinuated itself within the glands, clawing into her armpits, nibbling here and there until her strong young bones were breached — and she screamed, wept, vomited, perhaps prayed or pretended to for the sake of those children to whom she clung as he once had to her; she would have done anything to be selfish and move her bowels a little longer. Now her bowels pulsed with moonlight; to him she was more beautiful than ever. But she had gone over there, to this other man whom she had married. And when he was a child, the other boys, punching him a few times, had then kicked him into his place, which was westward of here, where the moon rose. Had he stayed hidden on the lunar surface (or at least concealed between broken marble urns), no one would have troubled about him — but perhaps the moon was another of those localities which were too good for him. Waiting for the school bus, in one of those winters before Victoria wrote her first note to him, he stood by himself, and then a girl in a ski parka grappled him, having fun, bullying him but also being sexual with him, and of course that excited him; he didn’t know how boldly to grapple her back; it lasted but a moment, and then a strong, healthy boy, who hated cancer, came and punched him in the face. He had never told Victoria, who felt his unwholesomeness anyhow, sure enough. The fact that he later learned to love himself because women loved him is evidence that evil things need not find trouble in continuing to exist. — But why was he evil? It kept coming back to that. Had he asked the other children, and had they been able to articulate their loathing, they might have said: Because you’re different. — And why was he different? Why does the rat seek out putrescent flesh? Rats aren’t evil, are they?
He had just begun to nibble at a can of salmon when his cancer thrust a skeleton hand up his windpipe and his breastbone groaned with pain; no, that was him groaning. For a long while he bent over the sink, struggling to vomit. (If it were only true what the statues of angelic harpists promised: ASLEEP!) Finally the fish came up, streaked with black blood. Eased and exhausted, he lay down on the sofa.
In a rage he snatched up another of her unread letters: Now she was the one who demanded to know the future! I always need to know everything for me to be comfortable. She was just like him! Meanwhile he was everything he had disliked in her: suspicious, withholding, prissily critical, even nasty — while the poor girl timidly hoped for his approval, and even worried that she might be bothering him — how could he have not seen it? Again and again she worried that he would leave her; she reread his letters with foolish minuteness comparable to his — she was a darling, really; his badness must have driven her away.