Chris Adrian - Gob's Grief

“Listen,” he said to her. “Do you know how you are undying? Do you know how Heaven waits for the faithful? It’s the good news, that a person is such a piece of work that there can be no end to her.”

“Hush,” she said.

“Do you doubt it?” he asked. “Do you?” He held her wrist, finding her pulse and reading her perfect health in it. “You do doubt it, don’t you? You callow, doubting girl! You are afraid to die!”

“Stopper it up, Gramps,” she said, placing a soft hand over his mouth, but Tomo pushed it away. He stood up and left the church, not caring how his slow, heavy tread rang out in the air and marred the lovely, sad music.

“Was it a good day?” his wife asked him. It was the question she asked every night as they got into bed together.

“Good enough,” Tomo said. He’d spent the afternoon in Central Park, eaten ice cream on Madison Avenue, and bought an armful of daisies for his wife, enjoying, for a while, how they drew the stares of everyone who passed him.

“My feet are aching,” his wife said, after they had been lying side by side for a while in the quiet dark. They had been dancing, that evening. They were neither of them very good at it, so they did it in the privacy of their home, in the empty bedroom that had once sheltered their second daughter.

“I’ll heal them,” Tomo said, sitting up and peeling back the covers so he could get at his wife’s big feet. They were very pale, and as he massaged them they seemed brighter than any other thing in the room.

“Shall I reach under the bed?” she asked him, after he had been rubbing on her for a while, and after his hands had started to wander up her body.

“I think you had better,” he said. Even as he worked her with his hands, she reached down under the bed and brought up a little porcelain bowl. It was too dark for Tomo to see it clearly, but he knew how it was painted in blue with birds, tall herons and egrets. It made a grating, ringing noise as his wife removed the top. Age required her to augment her natural charms with petrolatum.

With his creaking joints and his crooked back, his cloudy brain and his obstipated bowels, it always seemed to Tomo that physical love should be beyond him, but it was not yet, and sometimes, as on this night, it took a supreme effort of will to keep from spending himself like a naive boy. He did surgeries in his mind as he kissed his wife and whispered her own name into her face. It made him think of hernias, what they were doing, of organs invading cavities that were not their usual homes, and so to keep himself in order he went through the Bassini repair, sewing, in his mind, the conjoined tendon and the iliopubic tract into a forbidding wall that said to the protruding viscus, Stay where you belong.

When his time came, he imagined the futile sutures bursting, the tendons ripping and breaking to release a tumbling mass of bright confetti that ignited in his brain, becoming the millions of stars that had fallen around the bridge on that distant past night. He called out his wife’s name, “Phoebe!” It was a distinct and equal pleasure, to shout it as loud as he could, in a house emptied by time, where no one could hear the name but him and its owner. His wife, a singer, answered him with a perfect C in an octave that told him he was doing well for her this evening.

He got a terrible pain in his left eye, and if his arms had not been locked around his wife, he would have clapped a hand to his face. It was painful, like being stabbed, and painful because it brought with it searing, lucid remembrance. Just for an instant, Tomo knew it was not Gob who had died at Chickamauga. His wife, he was sure, must take his screaming as a manifestation of unbearable pleasure.

But the knowledge, like the pleasure, passed in an instant, and he collapsed, still crying out softly, against his wife. There was a confused mess of flame where his mind ought to have been, and he did not know why he was crying. “There now,” his wife said, putting her hand on the back of his neck, and stroking him there. “It wasn’t all that bad, was it, my love?”

“No,” Tomo said. And then he said it over and over, “No, no, no.”

“Go to sleep, now,” his wife said in reply to his continued protest. Tomo became quiet, but the word still echoed in his head. He rolled onto his side and held her even closer, thinking how she was undying, and how he himself was undying, how Heaven waits for the faithful, how a man is such a piece of work that there can be no end to him, and how he wanted to believe that.