When he enters these phases I become exhausted. Sometimes, I admit, I flee. He doesn’t seem to need me to fulfill his conversations with the dead, if indeed they are conversations. They seem more like inhabitations. And they’re harmless enough, if disorienting, though this morning’s remark disturbs me, perhaps because his mother, my wife, had just made her unnecessary appearance. Really, why would she return only to hack wordlessly at our little tree? It seems so unlikely.
“Sorry?” I say.
“We are here to prepare for not being here,” he says in my mother’s soft, rather stroke-fuddled voice.
It’s as though he is answering the very question posed at Come and See! I took him there once. Sometimes someone brings a child or grandchild, it’s not unheard of. He listened attentively. No one expected him to contribute and everyone found him adorable. “Don’t ever take me into that stupid room again,” he later instructed me.
He may be right that it is a stupid room and that of all the great rooms he might or will enter, attentively and with expectation, it will on conclusion be the stupidest.
I study Colson. My dear boy is skinny and needs a haircut. He rubs his eyes the way my mother did. Don’t rub your eyes so! we’d all exclaim. But I say nothing.
Colson says, “Then you’re in the other here, where the funny thing is no one realizes you’ve arrived.”
He sits down heavily at the kitchen table. “Would you like a cup of tea,” I ask.
“That would be nice,” he says in my mother’s voice of wonderment.
But I can’t find the tea. We haven’t had tea in the house since they died. We’d keep it on hand just for them when they visited.
“I’ll go out and get some right now,” I say.
But he says not to bother. He says, “Just sit with me, talk with me.”
I sit opposite my boy. I notice that the clock on the stove reads 9:47 and the stovetop is dusty, as though no one has cooked on it for a long time. I vow that I will cook a hot, nourishing and comforting dinner tonight. And I do, and we talk quietly then as well, though nothing of import is being decided or even said.
I find it easier to be with my father when Colson brings him. Though he always seemed rather inscrutable to me he now doesn’t sadden me so. He would not accept an offer of tea that he suspected was unlikely to be provided. He was able to confer with the animals in a way my mother couldn’t, and felt that great advances would soon be made in appreciating and comprehending animal consciousness, though these advancements would coincide with the dramatic worldwide decline of our nonhuman brothers and sisters. Once, I’m ashamed to say, I maudlinly brought up the Tank of my childhood, and my father said he had been shot by a sheriff’s deputy who thought he was a stray, and that the man had also shot a woman’s horse in winter, making the same claim, and that he had been reprimanded but neither fined nor fired. Yes. And that they had lied to me, my mother and father. It was Colson who told me this in my father’s voice, Colson, who had never known Tank or felt his “happy fur,” as I called it as a child. Bad, happy Tank. He ate his dinner from my mother’s Bundt pan. It slowed him down some, having to work around the pan. He always ate his food too fast.
But this was the only time a disclosure occurred, and I am more cautious now in conversation. I find I want neither the past nor the future illuminated. But my discomfort is growing that my boy will find access to other people, people we do not know, like the woman the next town over who died in a fire of her own setting, or even one of Jeanette’s unfortunate customers. That I will come home one evening and that Colson will be not himself but a stranger whose death means little to me and that even so we will talk quietly and inconsequentially and with puzzled desperation.
The week passes. Colson has a tutor in mathematics for the summer who is oblivious to the situation and I have the office I’m obliged to occupy. Colson wants to be an engineer or an architect but he has difficulty with concepts of scale and measurability. The tutor claims he’s progressing nicely but Colson never talks about these hours, only stubbornly reiterates his desire to create soaring nonutilitarian spaces.
At the end of the week I return to Come and See! My passage through the construction zone is much the same. I suppose change will appear to come all at once. Suddenly there will be a smooth six-lane road with additional turning lanes and sidewalks with high baffle walls concealing a remaining landscape soon to be converted to housing. The walls will be decorated with abstract designs or sometimes the stylized images of birds. I’ve seen it before. Everyone’s seen it before.
Jeanette is the only one there. I feel immediately uncomfortable and settle quickly into my customary chair. There is the paper clip, as annoying and meaningless a presence as ever.
“There’s a flu going around,” she says.
“The flu?” I say. “Everyone has the flu?”
“Or they’re afraid of contracting the flu,” she says. “The hospital is even restricting visitors. You haven’t heard about the flu?”
“Only in the most general terms,” I say. “I didn’t think there was an epidemic.”
“Pandemic, possibly a pandemic. We should all be in our homes, trying not to panic.”
We wait but no one shows up. There’s a large window in the room that looks out over the parking lot, but the lot is empty and continues to be empty. The sky is doing that strange thing it does, brightening fiercely before dark.
“Why don’t we begin anyway?” she says. “ ‘For where two are gathered in my name…’ and so on. Or is it three?”
“Why would it be three?” I say. “I don’t think it’s three.”
“You’re right,” she says.
She has a round pale face and small hands. Nothing about her is attractive, though she is agreeable, certainly, or trying to be.
“I’m not dying,” I say. God only knows what possessed me.
“Of course not!” she exclaims, her round face growing pink. “Goodness!”
But then she says, “On Wednesday, Wednesday I think it was, it was certainly not Thursday, I was in this woman’s room where the smell of flowers was overwhelming. You could hardly breathe and I knew her friends meant well, but I offered to remove the arrangements, there were more than a dozen of them, I’m surprised there wasn’t some policy restricting their number, and she said, ‘I’m not dying,’ and then she died.”
“You never know,” I say.
“I hope they let me back soon.”
“Why wouldn’t they?”
“Thank you,” she says quietly.
“I meant to say why would they?”
She stands up but then sits down again. “No,” she says, “I’m not leaving.”
“It’s disgusting what you’re doing, you’re like the thief’s accomplice,” I say. “No one can be certain about these things.”
Suddenly she appears not nervous or accommodating in the least.
We do not speak further, just sit there staring at each other until the sexton arrives and insists it’s time to lock the place up.
At home, Colson is watching a television special on our dying oceans.
“Please turn that off,” I say.
“Grandma wanted to watch it.”
He has made popcorn and poured it into a large blue bowl that is utterly unfamiliar to me. It’s a beautiful bowl of popcorn.
“You have another bowl like that?” I ask. “I want to make myself a drink.”
He laughs like my wife might have when she still loved me, but then returns to watching the television.