“Doug, got a minute?”
“Sure.”
“I’m having a little problem with God.”
“What’s up?”
“Life after death.”
Two brothers nearby, Simon and Henry, also reading, apparently, Christian History and Theology, glanced up at this, peered in our direction, listening in. Larry did not seem to mind or notice; he said, “Lately I have this feeling that life is very short, Doug.”
He took a deep breath. His face was not clean and wore the drained, unsettled expression of a man needing sleep.
“How old are you, Larry?”
“Thirty.”
“I see.”
“Everything’s rushing by, you know?”
“I do.”
“I thought by now I’d have some idea how to not feel so afraid,” he said, and grinned. Was this one of those occasions for prayer? A brief and silent prayer for the happiness and well-being of a troubled younger brother? I asked him, “How afraid are you?”
“Very afraid.”
“Insomnia?”
“Yes.”
“Loss of appetite?”
“Yes.”
“Inability to concentrate?”
“Yes.”
“Dry mouth?”
“Yes.”
“Intermittent hyperventilation?”
“Definitely.”
“Frequent urination? Persistent suicidal ideation?”
“Mmn.”
Overhead lights flickered off, on, off. It is forever like night in the stacks. Larry’s unclean face hovered close to mine. His voice sounded weak, sickly, and his breath smelled like milk.
“Do you ever have these feelings, Doug?”
“No.”
Why did I tell him this lie? Now he would suppose his problems were unusual and grave, rather than ordinary and average, and he would feel alone with them. He looked stricken. It’s best to try not to cause pain, but pain seems to happen despite the most friendly intentions. Suddenly I was glad I had Barry’s syringes in my coat pocket — though I am not sure why I thought of the syringes at that moment.
“Oh,” Larry said sadly. And closed Bartlett and Gibson’s Infralapsarianism in Everyday Life, gently because like so many of our best-loved volumes, its binding was cracked and splitting. He replaced it on the shelf, between The Puritan Ordeal and The Mirror and the Lamp. Our misshelving problem was clearly reaching a crisis point.
I should say right now that I am not, as a rule, as a general rule — and by general I mean that for the most part the rule holds, though isn’t it true that rules are, as they say, made to be broken? — I am not, as a rule, much of a drinker. So I am always mystified when I consider that, at least among certain of my relations in this room, I have a reputation as one. And for what? A few broken chairs and the odd pointed remark late at night?
In this way are we, in our most emotional, our most vulnerable moments, our moments of comradeship, of celebration and even passion, misunderstood.
My “reputation” aside, I felt that the bar would be a safe haven — our sole refuge from the incurable hopelessness lurking inside so many of us in this scarlet place, lurking, as it were, in the room itself. With this in mind I said what I needed to say to make Larry feel a tiny bit confident about the likely afterlife prospects for his soul. “Look here, friend. You don’t need to worry too much about the Doctrine of Predestination, because you’ve got the Doctrine of Good Works to go with it. The chosen few are known by their actions on earth. If you’re so damned nervous about the everlasting future, why not try being a better person?”
Next I manufactured some justification for leaving. Maybe I spoke truthfully and said I was getting a drink and it’d been nice talking but really I was in a hurry. My chest felt tight and I could not stop biting my lower lip and my mouth tasted like chalk. I could not see the bar — Archaeology and Anthropology of the Near Middle East obstructed the view to it. I heard men crying out their orders for whiskey sours, imported beers, vodka tonics, dry martinis. I could hear Clayton’s ice pick stabbing ice, and then that thrilling, unmistakable clatter: Clayton’s perfectly hewn ice chunks dropping into tumblers set up on the bar and ready to fill. Ping! My throat tightened when I heard that reverberant, beckoning sound, our Waterford highball carillon rousing us from chairs and sofas, rousing us and distracting us from, I suppose, the stressful discussions we had, that wintry night, gathered together to undertake.
I mean about the missing brass urn. The urn and the ashes deposited therein.
No one was altogether certain who’d last seen the urn. Jason, once, long ago, reported a sighting over near where maps of the world are stored in drawers, but it wasn’t, it turned out, there. And sometime back Paul suggested looking in the gloomy alcove packed with patriotic music-hall songs in their archival boxes: a thorough search turned up nothing. A while later suspicion fell on Siegfried for possibly melting the urn and incorporating it in one of his biomorphic sculptures. This was unlikely. Siegfried does not work in brass; he prefers steel commandeered from the derelict mills in the valley — it’s the political part of his artistic vision. Of course there were those charcoal drawings hanging in the tower, where Eli keeps his drawing studio. These illustrations are brittle with age, and slightly fanciful in that the “urn” depicted in them wears no handles and is embellished with pornographic reliefs. It has long been agreed, among most of us at least, that the genuine article features no lurid ornamentation, and it is therefore held that Eli’s childhood still lifes in black and white say more about our solitary brother’s oedipal struggles than about any “authentic” funerary object — a shame, since pictorial representation might’ve helped sort out all the confusion over what the urn looked like. Don’t get me wrong. We had a pretty good idea. It stands a foot in height, approximately. Above the pedestal the urn has a width of two or three inches. The vase gracefully widens as it rises, growing in diameter before again narrowing, as urns do, beneath the lip. An opposing pair of angular “coffeepot” handles are the only elements on this modest vessel that show appreciable detail work; they’re cast with a shallow, free-form motif resembling engraved paisley. The lid is unadorned and the base also is quite plain. Total weight with contents: ten pounds. Tarnish colors it.
“It’s nice to have everyone together again, isn’t it?” a voice near me said. I turned and saw, in the shadows, a man bearing flowers. This man said, “All the old faces. All the familiar voices.”
“Hello?”
“It’s me, Doug. It’s William.”
“William!”
“Don’t be frightened. I brought these,” he said, stepping partway out from darkness with pale flowers held before him. “Lilies brighten a room.”
“Yes,” I agreed.
“Take them.”
“Me?”
“Put them out on a table, somewhere in the light where people can enjoy them.”
“Are you sure?”
“Why not?”
“You brought them, William. Wouldn’t you like to find a spot for them? Let everyone know you brought flowers. I’m sure it will mean a lot.”