I audibly gulped. “So, you’re saying it is. Necessary. Suffering for art.”
“What?” Startled. You put the pages on the desk. You winced and looked at your fingertip. “Oh, yeah. I think so.” You swept your other hand through your hair. “Yeah, time and pressure makes diamonds from coal. Similarly, art is a by-product of life. We’re a carbon life-form. Squeeze some of us just right and you get art.” You chuckled through your nostrils.
As I say this to you, I think of Mom humming a Crosby, Stills, and Nash tune and singing the refrain while folding laundry dumped on the living room floor—we are stardust, we are golden, we are sixty-billion-year-old carbon…
Goddammit, dear reader, I miss her. I miss you, Mom.
“And then there you are at the end of the dream, sitting here talking about it, as we are now,” I said.
You nod curtly once, re-erect your steeple of fingers, that one finger shying from the pressure. Then I saw a droplet of blood roll down your finger. You collapse the steeple and put the finger in your mouth. You wait. There’s more, you know.
I said, “Then you saying to me what… you said.”
The steeple was quickly back; collapsed, erected, collapsed like the eensy weensy spider dancing on a mirror. I wanted you to fill it in for me. “You know what you said in my dream, don’t you, Mr. English?”
You didn’t answer right away, and that’s when my pulse kerthumped in a chaotic time signature.
You shook your head, cleared your throat with an air of annoyance, bored yourself up and donned a professional demeanor. “All I can say is what I said to you in my dreams. What I said was, sitting there at the end of my desk—you with the backpack—‘they leap from high places with smiles on their faces.’”
To hear this dream-phrase uttered in the conscious world… I’m sure I looked at you hanging fire and pin-eyed.
“That line was in your story. Not in dialogue, as I recall. In a passage of narration.” You perfunctorily shuffle my story pages as if seeking the phrase. “This is why I’m fascinated, Kevin.” The look on your face didn’t say fascination. It projected bald fear.
I hung my head and found myself muttering almost with shame, “You said it to me in my dream too.”
I mean, Mr. E? The blood fell from your face. You struggled to keep your lips clamped together. You started to say something but your voice was a crack of air. You stood and smoothed out your shirt absentmindedly. “Stranger than fiction, huh Kevin?” Your look just totally haunted, eyes howling and dark against a blanched canvas.
You were out for the next week, nobody knew why, and then I didn’t see you again until Coach Numbnuts brought me in. You sat behind your desk. The framed photo was gone. You pretended for Coach Numbnuts. I was any other punk on the wrong path.
Exiting your office and walking down the hall with the coach, I remember looking back at you. Your face fought itself. You attempted to give me the smile you’d wanted to give your unborn child, but your eyes failed you. Your mouth spread out in the mechanics of that smile, but the eyes didn’t follow. They were hollow.
That was the last time we saw each other.
And now I think that fake smile is the dark, glistening one overfull with teeth.
Turning my head back down the hall, my eyes snagged on the wet new tag across lockers, A Pox on Yo Lips. Gravity still pulling down lines of the paint.
We’d shared portions of a dream. Grandma Lucille, I know what you’d say.
To share a dream like that… I’m with you. Can’t believe that’s coincidence. No such thing as luck.
How did you go, Mr. E? Did you walk out into the gray of that morning before the sky evolved that awful blue? Choke and fall in your bedroom, public radio pledge drive purr looping? You and that hot, barren wife of yours, are you lying in your house together now, she in your too-big T-shirt, you caught mid-shave and shirtless, the spumed white hardened? Or did you both get that holy-rolling look on your faces and then do it together in a gleeful improv suicide pact? Did you seek out a high place from which to leap? Or something more local and brutal?
The way you dragged your finger pad along the edge of my page.
Ah, hell.
“You okay, Kev?”
I plopped down to ward off vertigo. I breathed. Bass said, “It’s going to be okay. It’ll get better. The shock is wearing off, reality settling in. I figure we got to push through it or we’ll never make it.”
With his bottom lip pooched out, he bobbed his head to these general terms like one might a funeral litany.
We made quick work of it then, tossing the stones off of her—clack! clack!—lifting her stiff, heavy, bug-riddled body into the back bed of the Bronco next to her husband. Somehow, loading the Flemings into the Bronco made us feel like maybe the world could be cleaned up, if not literally every body interred, at least we could envision the old world coming back. We extrapolated from these moments the rebirth of the world as we knew it.
I got the shovel from the garage.
The earth came up easily in the place Mr. Fleming had described in his note. Two guys digging, our breath visible fog in the chilling evening, silence but for the sniffing and the breathing and the scratch of the shovel and the sound of loosed dirt landing in a pile.
We made one hole. It wasn’t six feet, but deep enough. I got in the hole which came up to my waist and pulled them in. I hated to see how they lolled and flopped. Once they were both in, I situated them side by side and then we covered them without words, as this is the oldest of human tasks and no annotation was needed.
At night it began to rain. The patter comforted us, this sound of the world still living. Kodie opened a window. When we finally got in bed together, I flipped on the recorder.
I erased our conversation, most of it being too far away to hear. She whispered and cried, said she felt she was dying. Her fever spiked again and I nursed her all night, barely slept. Her coughing became so intense that she couldn’t stop for minutes at a time. We had to sit up. I brought her green tea nuked in the microwave. I thought of Bass’s mom as I did it, how he used to do this when her asthma got bad. Kodie could hardly speak. The worst of it was just before dawn, when she said, “I take it back.” She had grabbed my wrist hard and searched my eyes frantically, hers toggling back and forth between mine as mine did hers, neither of us able to alight on the other’s gaze. “Will you do the same for me as you did for your neighbors?”
At dawn, the wheeze slackened. She slept propped up with her mouth agape. I let her sleep. After a night like that, she can do what she wants. Though we have so much to do, all I want to do is take care of her, my Eve of the new world.
Though I erased this night’s conversation,[15] I remember uttering, “please, God, don’t let her die” at dawn. The agnostic in the foxhole didn’t last long.
I’ll say it again now, in case she’s alive. God? Please don’t let Kodie die.
There. A little supplication can’t hurt.
Frankly, it’s why I’m even doing this book. Because now I think God might really be there and that I’m meant to do this. If I feel I’m meant to do this, then there must be meaning.
For I was feeling stronger as all around me grew weak.
Obvious with Kodie, but I also saw it in the oncoming gauntness of Bastian’s face. His shoulders slumped and he wheezed. They’re winding down like windup toys having lost the kinetic energy twisted into them.
15
Somewhat incorrect. Everything was erased but those remembered, uttered words, the first words of this transcript.