A Matter of Life and Death or Something (21 page)

Francis exploded with laughter.

“A vegetarian. That kills me—a vege
tarian.
Now, that one's new.”

I thought about it and I laughed a little bit, too. I never realized how silly that one was.

“Arthur, what do
you
think of me?”

I thought for a minute.

“I guess you're probably just a really nice guy.”

“Why thank you.”

I thought some more.

“Okay, so if none of the bad rumours about you are true, why don't you just send around a letter to the neighbourhood that says ‘Hello, I'm not a cannibal or anything, I'm actually just a really nice guy?' I could deliver it to everybody.”

Francis chuckled again, I don't know why.

“I appreciate it, but that wasn't the point. If they want to, they can believe whatever they want. They
will
believe whatever they want.”

“Who's Sarah?” I asked sneakily. I was getting curious.

“Hmm?”

“You talked about a Sarah. Is that her?” I asked, pointing to the smiling lady in the photo.

“That would be Sarah's mother,” Francis said. “That's Olivia.”

Francis smiled the type of smile that old people always do when they're remembering something amazing. The kind with the eyes that sparkle. Then he turned his head around and gave the same smile to the photo. I quickly pieced it together in my head: he seemed to think Olivia was amazing. Olivia was Sarah's mother, and I was about 90% sure that Sarah must be Francis's daughter. So Olivia must have been Francis's girlfriend or wife or something. Maybe he met her when they were really young. They met in school and they were best friends so they got married and now they were really old. But where was she now? Who knows. Maybe she divorced him and ran away? Was she in a wheelchair too? Francis turned back to me and I thought that his eyes looked just slightly more sparkly, like maybe they were a little damp. I couldn't tell if he was happy or sad; he looked both at the same time. I realized something. I suddenly knew that those were the kind of eyes you get when someone amazing isn't around anymore.

“Now Arthur,” Francis said, “I doubt there's anyone in the world who can convince you of this, but I mean it, alright? Simon is not boring. He's certainly a heck of a lot less boring than everyone else.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, seeing a kid like you, and to not snatch you up. To not see the absolute
bargain
they were getting. Now that's boring.”

“But...”

“Hmm?”

“I just wish I could know who they actually were.”

As soon as I said that I felt kind of funny. I was really letting my guts spill out to Francis. He had a way of giving me a serious look exactly when I needed him to give me a serious look, and giving me a smile exactly when I needed him to give me a smile. Things weren't just coming out of my mouth by accident and mixed up. It was like he had a way of making me say things on purpose that I never knew I wanted to say. It made my stomach feel funny. I wished people never had to bring knives with them anywhere.

“Simon must've told you that even he doesn't know.”

“Yeah, I know. I just mean like, but why? I just want to know
why.
”

“I hear that. Boy, do I hear that. We all want to know that, Arthur.”

I didn't know what the heck he was talking about. Francis went quiet again and picked up Phil and held him in his hands.

“How does it make you feel?” Francis said.

“Simon?”

“
Phil.
How does he make you feel?”

My throat instantly got all lumpy but I tried to talk through it.

“I guess I just wish there was something I could do. I've been trying to figure it out but I've gotten nowhere. I obviously wish it didn't happen. I wish I never found the stupid book, because all I've been thinking about every day is Phil and it made me so angry because I couldn't even tell for sure if he's really gone. But now I just
know
he is, somehow, and also because why did everyone just leave him alone, or did he leave everyone else alone? Why was no one around? I can't stop thinking about him all alone and sad and what are you supposed to do about someone who was always sad and now they are forever?”

Francis didn't say anything. He breathed in a lot of air and filled his entire lungs and then let the air out slowly. He sat there shaking his head.

“I don't know what to tell you,” he said. “I haven't got that answer. All I know is, some things, we could ask them our whole lives. Maybe we've gotta make sure we don't.”

“What do you mean?”

Francis sat up straighter and looked me in the eyes. He looked curious. He reached and picked up his field glasses, put them to his eyes and looked at me. I must have been a huge giant Arthur to him, bigger than any Arthur ever was. He lowered his field glasses for a second and smiled. He held them tight in his hands and nodded at me and I knew he was telling me to use mine too. So I took the lens caps off my almost-great-grandfather's field glasses and held them up to my eyes and looked at Francis.

It was really dark and blurry, looking through them in Francis's house in the middle of the night. Once I got them focused I saw Francis's head, really huge. It filled my whole vision. All I could see was his scribbly grey hair and his puffy nose and the wrinkles beside his eyes. Then his eyes became shiny black circles because he was looking through his field glasses back at me.

“Pretend I am your problems,” Francis said.

“What?”

“Pretend I am everything wrong. Look at me, I am every problem you'll ever have.”

“Okay...” I said. We were still magnifying each other.

“So you look and you look and you look,” he said. “Right?”

“Okay...?”

“You look at the problems very closely, and you wonder about them, and they just get bigger.”

Francis became bigger because he was leaning a little closer to me.

“You look closer and you try to shrink them, you do all sorts of things but it's no use—the closer you look, the bigger they get.”

“And blurrier.”

“True. And so after a while, you can't even very well move, you see? Suddenly they're enormous. Bigger than planets.”

“Okay?”

“So,” Francis said. He took his field glasses away from his face and I just saw his gigantic watery eyes. I put my field glasses down too and looked through my regular eyes.

“So, what else can you do?” he asked.

“I don't know.”

“Hmm,” Francis said.

“Keep looking?”

Francis smiled and his eyebrows magnified a bit. “Is that all?”

“Uhhh,” I said. “Maybe look at something else?”

“Aha,” Francis said, “let's-see-let's-see.”

He started moving his field glasses from one hand to the other and looking at the ceiling.

“So maybe you start asking yourself some other things. Something different. Maybe you start looking at other stuff besides just the things you can't answer. You don't ignore anything, of course. You
don't
start ignoring. But maybe you look at—well I don't know. Maybe you look at something you
can
answer. Or maybe just something nice. There's gotta be
some
thing nice around, right?”

“I guess.”

“So maybe you ask yourself what you
do
have, for certain, and you look at that instead.”

“Like a clue?”

“Like a fact. Yes, and you
really
look at it too, you spend a long time and don't give up. Okay, and then maybe eventually—so now what do you see?”

“I don't know?”

Francis took his field glasses and turned them around with his hands and then looked through the other side of them, the big side. I took mine and did the same thing.

“Everything is so small,” I said.

“And beautiful!” said tiny little Francis. He was so far away he looked about the size of an atom. He was all the problems in the entire universe and he wasn't even as tall as an apple slice.

“Now I'm not saying there's no answers,” Francis said. “The binocular thing's a bit silly. But I'm not saying there's no answers, it's just, sometimes you stop
looking,
and there they are.”

My thoughts started bouncing all over the place in my brain and I couldn't really tell what was going on in there, and my eyes started watering.

“‘Where did I come from?' is a pretty good question,” Francis said, “but how about ‘Where do I belong?'”

My throat was a complete lump and my eyes and nose got all prickly. The corners of my eyes felt heavy and got wet. I put my head down on my knees and I started shaking. I felt Francis's hand patting me on the shoulder, and I shook even harder. I cried for a long time, but I didn't even notice I was acting like a complete baby.

“Ohhh boy,” Francis said quietly. “Ohhh boy.”

After all that I sat up and wiped my face. I told Francis I should probably go home and sleep. He said it was after 3:00, and he should sleep too. I pushed STOP on the tape recorder, packed Phil back into my backpack and went to the door. Francis told me to come back and visit any time I wanted; I said that I would and I meant it.

As I walked out onto his porch, Francis started talking again.

“I guess it's really up to you what to do with it. The journal. I mean,
you
found it. As far as we know, it may well be his will and testament, first of all. I mean, it's up to you. Sorry I'm not more helpful.”

“That's alright,” I said. “I'm sorry I came over so late.”

“Don't mention it!” Francis flapped his hand around.

“Goodbye,” I said.

“Take care of yourself, alright? You're only what, eleven?”

“Ten.”

“You're only
ten,
first of all.”

“Okay.”

Francis smiled and shook my hand, then watched me from the door as I walked down the porch steps into the night.

“And Arthur,” he said.

I turned around.

“Nice cape.”

I looked down at my bright green shoulder.

“Thanks.”

You fell asleep with your hand resting on my back. We'd always try to stay tied together for as long as possible, but we could only ever fall asleep lying apart.
(This is love: for both to give themselves over, wanting to fall into the same body together, some new body, some common home, but to be confronted always by one's aloneness. To find one's self ultimately only one's self.)

To bridge this endless gap, you just fell asleep with your hand resting on my back.

In that calm pulling space between world and sleep, as things started to slip and fall out of your universe, your hand tensed up and grabbed at nothing. Its small violent energy entered my back like a burst of miniature lightning, like a spark—like
you,
like this one searing instant of you—and I could feel the bolt move farther into your body—your elbow, your shoulder, your lower back, a kick of your leg. This was the most enchanting moment I'd known, this seeing you—this
feeling
you—so completely seized by the peacefulness you drifted towards. And I was the only witness to that little sensation leaping into you, so precisely shared through only your hand. My eyes were closed but I knew every one of your motions and in the dark I could see you. I saw you. And this was when I felt it. And this was what I needed even though you didn't. And
this
was when I wasn't embarrassed to delight in something. And
this
was when I saw you and understood what they meant when they said: to love is to be entirely vulnerable at the height of your strength. That to love is to never know whether you are vulnerable or strong. And this was when I wasn't alone.

Today Phil didn't crawl outside and over to the university and take a growling elevator three floors up to the chemistry department. He didn't meet a high school friend up there in the chalky concrete hall and he did not hold his breath and smile and nod through five interminable minutes of the most tedious small talk and he did not behave well and catch up on what was new in the old friend's life. He didn't invent things about his own life to sound busy—he did not say he was still animating and doing design on the side, he did not use finger-quotes to frame “on the side,” eventually Phil didn't get down to business and ask if the old friend had found what Phil had not inquired about via email two days ago. The friend didn't accept the catching-up to be over like the kind self-assured angel Phil always knew him to be, and he didn't hand Phil a paper bag and ask what he wanted to use it for again, a flash of vague suspicion crossing his face, concern, Phil didn't smile to reassure and chuckle and tell the angel he needed to dissolve some gold. For animation. Phil wasn't lying. His hand was not palsied as he reached for what he could practically already feel inside him in the bag, the friend didn't laugh and take pleasure in this long lost gold-dissolving artist friend and let it make his day, didn't say it was “nice to see” Phil and then ask no further questions and tell him to be careful and Phil said no form of thank you and didn't say goodbye.

No because instead what he did was come home and have a steaming coffee on the front stoop with E and it wasn't freezing because it was almost summer again today not November and leaves were in bloom and the whole gang was there Phil and E and Small Phil on the bottom step and the real her the indescribable her the inevitable her and the vanished her and God was there too actually and they all just sat on the steps having a fucking great time and talking about how great of a time they were all having, and Phil talked to E and didn't even bring up the disappointment of the day at the beach in the summer when they walked all the way to that private beach in the funny little suburb in the forest to skinny-dip because they were together for once and they wanted to and that was reason enough and about how when they got there she didn't actually want to get in. And about how he had tried with every shred of self-control he had to just be patient with her and not get angry and panic and not try yet again to understand but it was impossible and the day became the day of the impossible and about the disappointment of everything, not just the skinny-dipping, but his entire tormented being and the shame inside everything whether it was for or against him and how he could destroy anything and she left him stranded on the beach, she had no patience, had already spent her patience on him a thousand times before and he couldn't make it back from the beach or into the woods and sat on the beach crying holding himself in a trembling ball like always—today Phil and E sat on the stoop and didn't make a list of everything they hadn't done together that they said they would and this list went on and on and it had no end and every day now is another addition and Phil just
let her be
did not argue or check her email or grasp at anything and he was doing a good job.

Then he walked her home like he does every day and he saw her for the last time again with tree and streetlight and her glowing hair against the dark spaces between leaves and the twilight and the beginning of the end and
I love you
and no answer. In the massive silence she disappeared again.

He thought maybe he finally should too

On the way home he thought about all the things he himself separate from her because she doesn't DEFINE him wanted to do but never did

He remembers everything he once naively thought he was and when there were things he could be and he starts making his own concise list and tomorrow at dawn he brings it with him and will cross EVERYTHING off ONE BY ONE SHEDDING EVERYTHING AND LET EVERY WORD WASH AWAY TO BLANK WHITE TO PURE NOTHING BECAUSE NOT LIVING IT WOULD BE TO LIVE THE MOST CONSTANT LIE AND TOMORROW IT ALL FINALLY BEGINS