—
On the other side I’ll float for a while, between worlds. The pain will be gone, the pleasure, too, those categories neutralized. On all sides the boundary markers will have softened. Instead of coming from a single source, sound — musi
c — will come from everywhere, and I’ll hear it with more than my ears. I’ll see with more than my eyes. Faces, I think, will pass me in corridors that are not corridors. The old vocabularies will be useless. They will name nothing anymore. This is the afterlife: we will be headed everywhere and nowhere, and we will drink in light, swallow it, swim in it. We’ll hear laughter. And then — but “then” has no meaning — my dear Michael will find me, without his former shape but still recognizable, and he’ll take my hand and lead me toward two rooms, and he’ll say to me, “Oh, my dearest, my life, there is only one question, but you must answer it.” And I’ll ask him, “What is that question? Tell me. Because I love you…” I’ll want to answer it correctly. What has this to do with the two rooms? But for that moment, after he puts his finger to his lips, he dissolves into air, he becomes pollen, and is scattered.
Somehow I am led into the first room. I’ll be in a chamber of perpetual twilight. No one predicted this twilight, or the shabbiness, the feeling of a beggar. How richly plain this all is! Something wants something from me here. My attention. My love.
Now I’ll enter the second room. And all at once I’ll be dazzled: because here on the richest of thrones, gold beyond gold, sits this beautiful man, the most beautiful man I have ever seen, smiling at me with an expression of infinite compassion. His hair will be curling into tendrils of vibrating color. He will be holding up his palm, facing toward me, and in that hand I will see the world, the solar system, and the universe, rotating slowly. Behind him somehow are the animals, the great trees, everything.
It will be a test, the last one I will ever have. Which room do I choose?
The beautiful man clothed in light will ask me, “Do you admire me? Care for me?”
And I will say, “No, because you are Lucifer.” And I will return to the room where it is always twilight, where all that is asked of me is love.
Gluttony
Immediately after the accident, the doctor thought: Stupid pain. Stupidity itself. Below the knee, thanks to a fractured tibia, pain sent its dull, insistent neurological message upstairs. Pleasure never works that way. Pleasure’s vague fog spreads underneath the skin in a warm narcotic glow — a fog that lights up the soul. Then it fades. You try to locate its source, and when you do, you crave more of it. The bottle. The drug. The woman. The meal. Especially the meal.
—
He found himself in the car eating beef jerky and the contents of a jumbo bag of potato chips. He didn’t remember buying either one, but he must have purchased them when he stopped at the gas station. There, under the buzzing fluorescent lights, everyone had the doughy complexion of figures in a Hopper painting. Now, lying voluptuously on the front seat next to him, the bag of potato chips had been slit open in a kind of physical invitation into which he inserted his hand and withdrew food. Who had opened these packages? Someone had. He had, the doctor, Elijah. Who else? He didn’t remember opening them; they had commanded him to make the first move, like the cake in Alice in Wonderland with the note attached: “Eat me.” The food carried some responsibility for his excesses. It had desires, especially the desire to be consumed.
As he chewed and swallowed, he piloted the little car homeward through the dark. The steering wheel, however, was greasy with salt and cooking oils and saturated fats transferred from his palm, and although he wiped his fingers on his trouser leg, he couldn’t get the grease off his skin. He felt drowsy. A literate man who entertained himself by reading Shakespeare, the doctor thought of Lady Macbeth: “What, will these hands ne’er be clean?” No, not these hands.
Against his own obesity, he had concocted his own diet plan, the Jones Plan. It was simplicity itself: every time you go into a restaurant, you order an entrée you do not want to eat. You don’t like the taste of pork? You order pork. If the very sight of lobster disgusts you, you order lobster. You search the menu for an unpalatable culinary miscalculation, and then you request it. You ask your wife to prepare distasteful meals. The whole point is to be presented, day after day, with the unwanted. Naturally your wife is horrified and insulted by these ideas, when she does not regard them as comical. So far, however, no weight has been lost by anyone, thanks to the plan.
He pulled up into the driveway and wiped his hands again but this time on the car’s dashboard. The lights were blazing inside the house, so Susan would still be up, vigilant about his arrival. When he stepped out of the car, he stood for a moment underneath the linden in the front yard and thoughtfully noted its seeds scattered on the lawn, pale green against the darker green of the grass illuminated by the streetlight. He felt a pain in his chest, and its attendant breathlessness. Ah, he thought, it’s that again.
Inside the house, dressed in her blue bathrobe, Susan put down her book, a history of the Armory Show, and rose to greet him. Her perfume preceded her. She kissed him, her eyes still on the door through which he had entered, a kiss both perfunctory and ironic, gestural in its well-meaning sweetness. “Your lips taste of salt,” she said.
“Snack food,” the doctor said. “I didn’t really have dinner.”
“Well, I could always heat up something for you. Are you still hungry? There’s some leftover roast in the icebox.” She enjoyed using antiquated words. “Or I could throw together a salad for you.” She refused to follow the Jones Diet Plan and had said so. He shook his head. “Hey, guess what’s going on here?” She gave him a brief and almost unreadable smile.
“I have no idea.”
“We need to go to the basement.” She waited. “We have to go down there if I’m going to tell you what’s going on here.” She cocked her head at the ceiling. “He might be listening.”
“Rafe?”
“Who else?”
The doctor smelled a trace of gin on his wife’s breath. She gave off an air of late-night melancholy elegance, an effect always intensified by alcohol, both the melancholy and the elegance. As she made her way toward the basement door entrance, her slippers shuffled on the linoleum, and her hips under the bathrobe swayed a little, a touch of womanly swagger intensified by the gin. Her expensively cut hair was streaked with gray, and her hair swayed with the same rhythm as her hips. He didn’t want the younger version of Susan back — he did not desire younger women and despised men of his age who did — because a younger woman would leave him alone and untended in middle age, and he wanted to share the process of aging with someone, and not just anybody, but with her.
He felt his love flaring up for her: he remembered exactly how beautiful she looked when they first met years ago in San Francisco and saw how she appeared to the world now, the result of what their lives together had done to her, and the two versions of her, the young and the…well, she wasn’t old, exactly, weathered was maybe a better word, touched him with an electric intensity that made it hard for him to breathe. How he loved her! He even loved her sadness. But loving your wife’s sadness was a soul-error. Everyone said so.