Victoria, Victoria! he whispered.
Slowly then she oozed back out of her grave, her face sparkling with silvery tears. He bent down low to kiss her, and as he approached her face he grew overwhelmed again, as he had at seventeen, by its loveliness, with the long blonde hair flowing over the blurred skull in semblance of a waterfall photographed in a lengthy exposure so that the impression of droplets and foam was retained in a statistical sort of form although there was only white haze; she smiled at him, and her bone-claws reached up through the dirt to rest lightly upon the back of his head as she drew him down to her, her wormy mouth widening until he drowned in her face.
Close upon dawn, exhausted, joyful, sad and nauseous, he seated himself on Mrs. Emilia Woodruff’s headstone and said: Did you like it?
I found it very satisfying, thank you. But listening to the moon eats me up. Can you hear it?
No.
I shouldn’t scorn you for that, but I can’t help it. Does that hurt your feelings?
On the other side of Victoria’s grave, the ghoul lay on its belly with its arms and legs splayed like a lizard’s, and it watched him grinning and breathless. He felt something between pity and affection for the thing; doubtless they would soon become better acquainted. Perhaps it knew where treasure lay (another broken pot with tarnished ovoid coins).
Remembering Victoria’s question, he replied: Not anymore.
Then I won’t tell you what the moon says.
The ghoul fawned on him, grinning ever more widely until its rotting lips began to split. It smelled even worse than she. He said: Victoria, I’m not feeling good—
Well, you don’t have much longer. I’m grateful that you choose to spend so many nights with me.
And after I—
Will you please stay until sunrise?
If you want me to. Do you see that thing over there?
Don’t speak of it.
Maybe you don’t care…
No, I enjoy these conversations, she whispered. But I feel at a loss.
Why?
What you said to me last time, I cherished that, I really did. But I don’t know you!
What did I say?
Actually, right now I’m so bored and tired; I wish I could retreat farther down, deep down under the clay. I could…
You could what, Victoria? Victoria, is there something you’d like me to do?
Don’t come anymore. Now that we’ve—
All right.
Why did you agree so easily? I wanted you to say—
I won’t say it. As you reminded me, I don’t have much time left. If you want me to go, I—
I’m sorry; I get cruel when I’m bored.
Then shall I go?
She did not answer.
Smiling wearily at her, as if he were the dead one and she a child exciting herself with grief and anger over an imaginary injury to her favorite doll, he asked: Victoria, why are you that way?
What do you expect? I’m thirty-six going on seventeen.
He began to shiver; he was only feverish. Dawn came.
I don’t need anyone very much, she remarked. It’s a cold feeling, a feeling where I know I should be crying and I can’t.
Victoria, he said, I wish, I wish…
Well, goodbye, she said.
Bitterly he rose and turned his back on her. The sun was in his eyes.
In his last year, just before he declined to undergo surgery again, Luke had said: Sometimes I want something just because I used to want it. And if I think that through, then I don’t have to want it anymore.
He had doubly cheated his witch lover, firstly by not using the green liquid to call her back, and secondly by saving a few drops of it, just in case. Now that he had no use for it, he poured it idly and thoughtlessly upon the earth-eater’s grave. This is what he heard:
I can’t forget Mama and Papa going away. Dear Jesus, help me forget! Papa had his new top hat on.
They prayed over me and he stood up, and he was leaning on his cane as if he’d turned much older; I was always his favorite. Every time he sobbed in his throat, I thought my heart was beating. What was that hymn they sang? It used to be my favorite. Carry on the Calvary, but I disremember the rest. He was holding Cornelia’s hand; she was learning how to walk again, after her polio. And Mama had to keep telling Susie not to tease her. I don’t know why she didn’t just… Mama looked just like a black waterfall in her veil. And she turned her face away from me. Then they went walking together down that gravel path; I was hoping that Papa would look back at me, but he never did. He was too sad. The path’s gone and so are the trees.
Not a word came from Victoria’s grave. That was how it usually was when someone abandoned a lover. She had withdrawn from him absolutely. As for him, he was leaving her alone to be dead forever. When he died he would not see her. His stomach hurt. At the gate of the cemetery he wished to fall to his knees like a seventeen-year-old boy, but thought better of it — for now he felt angry with her for leaving him alone with the burden of life. Then he went home and unlocked his desk beneath the setting moon. All was silent. He took her letters in hand. They were very much out of order. The last one said: So that’s the bad news, but I won’t die. I’m getting aggressive chemotherapy. I’ll lose my hair. I just cut it really short. I’m still blonde. Something will grow back. I’ll live because I want to live. I’m doing everything I can to live.
IX
THE ANSWER
I asked the grave why I must die, and it did not answer.
I asked who or what death was, and it kept silent.
I asked where the dead I loved had gone, and its earthern lips did not open.
I begged for just one reply, to anything, and then its grassy lips began to smile. Moistening itself with its many-wormed tongue, it opened. Too late I realized the answer.
GOODBYE
With a heart full of hope, I look forward to the time when Jehovah God will deliver us from this painful system of things and lead us into an earthly paradise.
Every man, asserts a German psychotherapist, passes through a critical age in which he bids farewell to youth and love. This age begins at death. But I, arrested in my thanatosexual development, unceasingly relive my life, to which I do not care to bid farewell, not yet. I am a young ghost. Throughout this critical age (the deceased psychotherapist resumes), unsatisfied desires haunt us. What haunts me is my longing to breathe.