There's Something I Want You to Do

Glory, gloriousness. During my life, I never had the time to look closely at anything except Wes, when he was a baby, and my husband’s headstone after he was gone. Now I’ll have all the time in the world. Nothing will bore me now. My obliviousness will sink into my past history. Henceforth my patience will be endless, thanks to the brevity of time. Stillness will steal over me as I study the world within. When I look down into my lap, I’ll see in this delicate object the three major parts, with their branching veins, and the ten points of the leaf, and the particular bright red-rust-gold color, but it’s the veins I’ll return to, so like our own, our capillaries. I’ll finger the maple leaf tenderly and wonder why we find it beautiful and will answer the question by saying that it’s God-given.

“There’s that nice Dr. Jones, way over there,” Corinne will say. “Lucy’s doctor, out on a stroll.” She’ll pause, then say, “He could lose some weight.”

“They’re doing a Katharine Hepburn revival at the St. Anthony Main movie theater,” I’ll say, gazing at the marquee listing Bringing Up Baby.

“I always found her rather virile,” Corinne will reply.

Thus will our days pass. You need a companion for what I’m about to do, and she’ll be mine. Once I’m in bed, and then in the hospice, she’ll read to me: Pride and Prejudice, my favorite book after the Bible, and she’ll read from the Bible too, in her haphazard way, wandering from verse to verse. I wonder if she’ll read from the Book of Esther, which never mentions God. Slowly I’ll depart from this Earth, medicated on morphine as I will be, mulling and stirring the fog descending over me, over Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, over daytime and its dark twin, night, while in the background someone will be playing Mozart on a radio. What is that piece? I think I’ll know it. Eine kleine Nachtmusik, is it…? Then I’ll know more pain, and darkness. And then the light won’t go on ever again, here.

—

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 — music — 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.

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