Laura Levenson

He Had A Good Run

The scent of him no doubt remains, just above the range of sensation. If her senses were keener she could still detect him in the living room, in the bathroom.

She is almost not even ashamed to be relieved, rejoicing in some corner of her soul, not hidden, though of course not spoken. Speaking at any rate irrelevant, the murmured platitudes collapsed under constant rehearsal. Well, yes, it’s hard, yes, I know, time will, I know, it must be, no, no, fine really. Fine. A procession of sad faces or not truly sad just acting as if sad to comfort her, as if the mask of another’s sadness could assuage whatever it is inside that’s roused and seething. A few were wiser and just stood nearby or watched from a distance and didn’t try to do anything except maybe wash some dishes or sweep. There were tears, naturally, genuine in their way, as if others knew how to grieve, mystery this thing grief, fickle. So she was prompted to say, there there don’t cry why are you crying but then she’d remember. She’d march along sturdily when suddenly her trick knee would give out and she’d fall in a heap, wheezing in wonderment. Because until today everything moved so fast, exigencies of each moment each requiring a particular action which she performed proficiently without losing her head because someone needed a head, there seemed a shortage and now one fewer.

Now the exigencies have ended. The last aunt has taken the last plane and the remains of the last pot of coffee inky black have been poured down the inky blackness of the drain. Where the souls go, into the infinite inky blackness of the heavens, blackness shuttered for certain hours when a near star scalds the eyes but waiting behind the scrim at all times, waiting, infinitely patient because in the end infinity outlasts everything that isn’t infinite, no matter what.

At moments she finds herself humming, as if nothing had happened. Not that she expects him home any minute but that she never needed him in the first place, feels quite content with the current arrangement. Cereal for dinner, wash a bowl and a spoon and that’s the end of it. Turn on the television, watch a comedy, but when they kiss and make up suddenly the trapdoor opens and the earth falls through. Falling, falling, a real vertigo makes her grip the arms of the chair, clutching at reality to fend off reality, breathless. Oh! she cries out Oh! as if it were a surprise and it is, each time, a surprise, surprise at the vacant seat, surprise at the pain that swells and mutates like a botanical monster growing large and strong and vicious just below consciousness to lash out suddenly like in the horror movies except it’s too late, isn’t it? Hasn’t it happened? Hasn’t the worst already happened?

This is the deeper mystery, how the worst, which has happened and is fulfilled, can linger. It sprouts shoots and tendrils, wraps around her days, threads the fibers of her muscles, plaits her hair and shades the faces of her friends. She thought the worst was an event but that’s naïve, it’s a vine rooted in infinity that winds round her very finite viscera and squeezes. Death rips the scrim and opens a portal through which inky blackness enters the living room. There’s no collision of worlds but a slow eerie invasion, as if this modest event—well, modest in the big scheme—the modest, everyday passing of a given individual (oh! she cries) could cause or is the next opportunity for the intersection of finite and infinite, where Maple Street meets Blue Skyways.

She orders her thoughts. It is childish to imagine his death opened a portal. No. The portal is always open, merely cloaked by ignorance. It is ignorance that is ripped open to admit the presence that is always present, haunting us without letting us know we are haunted and what’s the point of that? No, it takes a death to make the point. Point taken, she chuckles, as if laughter were possible as apparently it is.

So, then, think rationally. The inky blackness always resides in the living room, overlooked by the great collective elective myopia. He is now gone, which vacancy leaves uncloaked a tiny peek into infinity, it takes such a huge gash in this world to allow the least peek into the other, not other, get it right, not other but this world, the larger truth in which the familiar world is embedded. Well now, that’s not exactly a secret, is it? What do you expect? One or the other, sooner or later, better or worse, in sickness and in health, parted for good after all that.

(Oh! she cries, the surprise only that she can contain so much pain, like a clown car, Oh! and Oh! gasping out of her and yet there is no lessening, pain multifarious, twining and winding and wringing and persisting into whatever forever awaits her, despite the platitudes of time heals and put one foot and a year from now. She has heard of women smelling the clothes of their beloveds but she doesn’t dare even inhale deeply, such courage beyond her ken.)

So. The whole point, apparently, is a lesson in humility, that inevitability overruns love or need or children or myopia or life insurance—curious pair of words. Forcing her unconditional surrender to the infinite like forcing a puppy’s nose in its pee. Though the more basic point is that ordered thought breaks down, that a rent in the fabric of private spacetime exposes a self-effacing inky blackness whence grows a tropical vine that daily crushes but does not devour her viscera and that the whole tragic farce is staged solely for her personal spiritual improvement.

Yet it is still necessary to wash the dishes and file papers with the insurance company. Someone must glance through the mail. The finite exists within the infinite without surrendering one iota of its specificity. She breathes whether she will or no, whether breath nourishes pain or hacks at its root through the wild insistence of life upon life. The point of all this is lost on her at the moment. Instead she will plant her sturdy purpose in her own finitude, not overcome by inevitability just yet, she will take a shower and try to get some sleep and tomorrow is another and if her spirituality is not vastly improved very soon she’ll have to elect ignorance because who can stand to look but then what a waste of infinity.