As Simple as Snow (22 page)

“I haven’t seen it,” I said.

“You will,” he said. “In college, probably.”

Next to the photographs was a collage. It included a photograph of him in the middle of pictures of girls from school, stretching and arching their backs during gym. The expressions on their faces made them look as if they were in pain, and the collage was put together so that Mr. Devon, his arms folded across his chest and a stern smile on his face, appeared to be torturing them, or at least responsible for their torment and getting some satisfaction from it.

“Anna would have liked these,” I said.

“They cheer up the place, don’t they?”

“I really like this, though,” I said. The last piece of Mr. Devon’s was an aquarium with a wineglass, a pipe, old specimen jars, balls of cork, and other objects suspended in a clear, solid solution. Scraps of newspaper, maps, and postcards floated on the surface. It was called
Lycidas.

“I may not try to sell that piece after all,” he said. “I might be too attached to let it go.”

Mr. Devon said that he needed to hang out in the place for a while, so he suggested that I wander around outside. I had intended to do just that. First, though, I wanted to watch the film that was running in the theater, so I waited until the next showing. It was called
Window Fan Baby Moving
and was the view of a baby from its swing. The camera moved back and forth in slow motion, showing a fan in a window, and through the blades of the fan the leafy branches of a tree brushing against the window in the breeze. Everything was blurry, patches of colors moving slowly across the screen. I was sitting in one of the armchairs, and a few minutes into the movie I fell asleep.

When I woke up, I was disoriented, not immediately sure of where I was or what time it was. The baby was still swinging, the blades of the fan barely turning, the branches of the tree sweeping across the screen. I didn’t know whether it was the same showing of the movie, or whether another one had started. I got up and left the theater. As I entered the main room I saw Mr. Devon near the stairway, leaning against the wall and intently holding a woman’s hand near his chest, writing something on her palm. At first I thought it was Claire—she had the same straight dark hair, the same long, black overcoat—but when she turned her face away from Mr. Devon and started to laugh, I could see that it wasn’t Claire. She was about the same age, though, maybe a little older.

I tried to change direction and walk away from them, but it was too late. Mr. Devon saw me and immediately started walking toward me. “Back already?” he asked.

“I never left,” I said. “I fell asleep watching the movie.”

“It does that to everybody.” He looked at his watch. “Are you hungry? Let’s go get something to eat.” He got our coats and backpacks, and we walked a few blocks to a bar.

Mr. Devon didn’t seem to give a second thought to taking me in, and I didn’t say anything. It was my first time in a bar. It was disappointing. The place was gloomy, with a few groups littering the tables, and a row of men at the long wooden bar, hunched over their drinks and watching basketball on televisions crammed into the corners. We sat at a booth near the back, and Mr. Devon positioned himself so he could look out the front window at the street.

“Do you mind if I order a beer?” I asked.

“If they’ll serve it, you can drink it. Just know that I won’t take you home drunk and I won’t take you home sick.”

We each ate a hamburger and an order of fries, and I had two beers. Mr. Devon had five or six vodka and tonics. We barely made the train.

 

 

 

It was dark as the train pulled away from the city. The train car was filled with an antiseptic white light. I wished that I could turn it out and peer into the night outside. The seat had a hospital-bed smell, bleach hiding urine. The whole train was like a rolling hospital, quiet and sterile. Mr. Devon sat across from me again; he seemed nervous, agitated. He folded and unfolded his arms and shuffled his feet, unsuccessfully trying to get comfortable. His bottom lip jutted out in an angry pout, and he looked over at me and noticed me watching him.

“Did you have a good day for yourself ?”

“I did,” I said. “Thanks again for bringing me.”

“What was your favorite thing?”

“I thought your stuff was the best by far. I especially liked the aquarium piece.” We’d had this same conversation in the bar.

“It’s called
Lycidas
,” he said. “What did you think of the photographs?”

“Unsettling,” I said. “I’m going to have to check out that movie you told me about.”

He nodded quickly. “Let me tell you something I haven’t told very many people. I told you about my girlfriend and the fire. But what I didn’t tell you was that the official report didn’t say the fire was an accident.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I know you don’t,” Mr. Devon said. “That’s why I’m telling you this. There was some evidence that the fire wasn’t started by her falling asleep with a cigarette on the couch, but was set deliberately, with a match. Seems like a hard way to go about it, doesn’t it, especially with me asleep upstairs?”

“Does that make sense to you, that she would do that?”

“You never know what people are really thinking,” he said. “I try to tell myself that it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t make any difference. I’m not giving you advice, but it’s not bad advice either.”

“Do you think there’s a heaven and all that stuff ?”

“I don’t think I’m the person to ask about that,” he said. “But I’ll tell you that I don’t think this is the end of the story. I think that people, especially people who are important to you, don’t ever leave. And I don’t mean that as just memories, I mean those people stay with you in a physical sense. You might think I’m crazy, but there’s science behind what I’m saying. There’s a physical law that says that energy cannot be created or destroyed. It only changes form. It’s a biological fact that the human body contains energy. We’re little more than walking test tubes of chemicals acting and reacting with each other, firing off energy inside us. And once you’re dead, well, the physical body might be gone, but your energy has to go somewhere. It has to. It can’t be destroyed, so where does it go?

“Now, this is where we get a step away from the science, but just a step.” He was locked in on me; his eyes never left mine as he talked, in a measured, soft voice. It was hypnotic. “Now, follow me,” he said. “There are waves. There are frequencies. Light and sound exist along a spectrum, with only a small percentage of the light and sound within ranges we can see and hear. We have to use special instruments to see light or hear sounds out of those ranges. The periodic table is another spectrum, with elements arranged in a certain order, from hydrogen, with a single proton, to lawrencium, with one hundred and three protons. At that end of the spectrum, the one with lots of protons, are elements that could not be seen until recently, and some of those elements can only be observed for a very short time under laboratory conditions. There are also atomic particles we know exist today that they couldn’t see twenty years ago, and that they never imagined existed a hundred years ago.

“All of these things are true. There are aspects of our fundamental universe that we can experience for only very brief periods of time, under very special circumstances, or see with special instruments. No one would deny it. So why can’t this be true for ourselves? Why can’t our energy simply change to a different frequency, a different wave along the spectrum? Why can’t we continue to exist in a space in the physical world that can’t yet be seen or measured, or that can only be experienced in brief moments and under special circumstances, but is there all the time? If you look at an airplane propeller when the engine is off, you can see the blades of the propeller perfectly fine, but when the engines turn on, the propeller disappears. There are plenty of things that exist in this world that we can’t see, that we can’t hear. There are entire worlds around us that we never encounter. Why is it so hard to believe that this could be true for ourselves?

“Does any of this make sense to you?”

“A little,” I said.

“Well, it barely makes sense to me. Was I ranting?”

“A little.”

“I’ll stop, then,” he said, and folded his arms across his chest and closed his eyes. He leaned back in his seat, and before long his head was rolling back and forth with the motion of the train. I watched his body sag and slack into sleep. I imagined his girlfriend sitting on the couch, falling asleep the same way, with a cigarette in her hand. I couldn’t see how you could fall asleep with a burning match in your hand. There wasn’t enough time, and it would burn you awake, I thought. If she had done it on purpose, dropped the match on the couch with Mr. Devon asleep upstairs, it seemed like a difficult, painful way to kill yourself.

I used to think about the different ways I could do it: asphyxiation, gunshot, overdose, poison, hanging, jumping from a tall building (I’d probably have to get to Hilliker for that), cutting my wrists, drowning. There were a lot of easier ways than fire. I thought that people might think differently about me after I had killed myself, that they would wish they’d been nicer to me. And then I would think that if I killed myself they would be glad they hadn’t been friends with me; after all, who wants to be friends with somebody who’s going to kill himself? They wouldn’t feel sorry for me at all; they would make fun of me and even humiliate me after I was gone. I hadn’t thought about it for a long time, since before Anna, except for once in January, when she brought it up.

“Do you think it’s a sin to kill yourself ?” she said.

“You’re the one with the Bible in your room,” I said. “You tell me.”

“I don’t think the Bible says anything about it.”

“How about ‘Thou shalt not kill’?”

“But then look at all the killing in the Bible. And a lot of it God has something to do with. He’s killing people all the time. He even kills his own son.”

I started to say something, but she cut me off.

“And if you want to get technical, while you could claim that God murdered his son, you could also say that Jesus committed suicide.”

“Explain that to me.”

“Well, Jesus knew what was going to happen to him, and he let it happen. He could have stopped Judas, or simply gone away, or done something. This is a guy who performed miracles, right? He walked on water, turned water into wine, fed the multitudes. But he did nothing. He knew he was going to be killed and he let them kill him. It’s not that different from a guy who walks into traffic or lies down on the railroad tracks.”

“I think you could say that being a martyr is not the same as lying down on the tracks. It’s more like being a soldier in combat, on a mission.”

“I think they call those ‘suicide missions,’” she said. “That’s the name. You can call it being a martyr, but it’s just a different name for the same thing. He ended his life, instead of allowing life to take its natural course.”

“But that was his natural course,” I said. “That was his whole reason for being born.” I stopped. She was looking at me, her blue eyes shining happily in the warm light of the basement, encouraging me, getting a kick out of what I was saying. “This is why you’re never supposed to discuss religion with anyone,” I said. “You always end up splitting hairs or getting into issues that can never be resolved, like angels-on-the-heads-of-pins-type stuff. You wouldn’t think they would make it so complicated, with so many loopholes and contradictions.”

“It’s not very clear, is it? The Bible is full of contradictions and ambiguities and mysteries. That’s why I like it. That’s probably why it’s still around and still read at all. People want to try and figure it out, and there’s room for everyone to interpret it the way they see fit. If it was all crystal clear, if it all made sense all the time, nobody would care. It would be boring.”

She was ready to move on, but we hadn’t even started.

“Okay, then,” I said. “For the sake of the discussion, if suicide is not a sin, then what?”

“Then what do you do?” she said.

“What do I do? I don’t do anything.”

“Why not? You don’t think this is a horrible world with horrible events and horrible people?”

“I guess. I don’t really know, though. I haven’t seen any of the world.”

“But you know about it. Don’t weasel out of it. You know what goes on in the world. Is it a place you would want to bring a child into?”

“No. Absolutely not.”

“Well, you’re a child. So what are you doing here?”

“If I had my choice, I guess I wouldn’t have been born, but now that I’m here, I might as well see how it all turns out.”

“So you wouldn’t take the easy way out?”

“Not this second. No. I mean, it’s something you can do anytime, so why not wait?”

“Then you’ll always be waiting.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“You’re so practical,” she said. “It’s what I like about you. Really.”

“Your turn,” I said.

“My turn?”

“Yeah. What would you do?”

“I don’t know. I honestly don’t. Sometimes I think I could end it all, but it takes a lot of strength, or courage, because you don’t know what’s going to happen. Frank O’Hara said that he wished he had the strength to kill himself, but if he had that kind of strength he probably wouldn’t need to.”

“What happened to him?”

“He was run over by a dune buggy on the beach at Fire Island. I wonder, if he had known he was going to die young anyway, whether that would have changed anything.”

“Like what?”

“If you knew a car was going to run you over, would you end your life yourself, on your own terms, or wait for the car?”

“I’m not sure it matters.”

“I’m not sure either,” she said. “I guess that’s why you don’t know. Unless you have cancer or some other terminal illness, it’s a mystery. So you might as well stick around to see how it turns out, instead of jumping to the last page and spoiling it.”