JD (37 page)

The major was still nodding when I turned back toward him. Then he stopped, closed his eyes. I'm sorry about your boy, he said
.

I was tempted to look blank and say, My boy? What about him? For the major had never actually done his job, made his solemn announcement. As if the angel Gabriel had come to give Mary the big news and got sidetracked into some anecdote about the last celestial choir practice. But he looked sorry. I put my hand over his, soothing
.

He opened his eyes. I mean, it'd almost be better if he'd died in action or something
.

Uh-huh, I said. I could hardly see him, my own voice seemed to me to be coming from far away. I prompted. If he'd died in action instead of…

I dunno. I can see how guys get down, you know? I could never. I mean, I guess I kinda roll with the punches. But I can see how you, how you might just not know any other way out
.

He looked at me. So grave, so moronic. Inside me the abyss, loss within loss. At the same time all but choking with indignation. This brutal affectless vacuum trying to console me
.

So you're telling me he—what, he killed himself?

Alarmed, he wasn't supposed to tell me anything. No, shit, no. It was heroin
.

I started shaking, held myself still. He babbled. We got this problem, lots of guys doing it now. Don't worry, it ain't gonna say heroin in the record. It looks bad for the CO
.

I didn't know what that meant then, heroin. Since then I've read up on heroin overdose. While I could still read. Spasms, shallow breathing, heart slowing and stopping. I didn't know then, it was just a word. The only heroin symptom I knew about was shrunken dick
.

The major waited for me to say something. I didn't. Soon he was just staring in my direction, not at me. Slumped a little, no idea who I was or where we were
.

I said, You look kind of done in. Probably ought to get you a room at the Albion. The Albion, little dive hotel on 14th Street where I used to take tricks sometimes. Somehow got him the three blocks to the hotel, upstairs to the room
.

I fucked him the way I want to fuck America. So hard he bit the pillow to muffle his own screams. Like the condemned man in Kafka's Penal Colony, biting down on the felt gag. As the terrible machinery of death engraves in the flesh of his back the name of the commandment he has broken
.

I punished the major for the commandment I broke, broke in my heart. God's command to Abraham as he stood with the knife raised above Isaac. I read it over so many times, while I could read. Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him. Lay not thine hand upon the lad
.

So I find that I am ending this journal almost as I began. With Kafka. They say when he read his stories to friends, grim terrible stories, he laughed uproariously. Until tears came to his eyes
.

When Kafka was dying he told his executor to destroy every word he'd ever written. The guy ignored him
.

The phone is ringing again. I heard it yesterday, about this time, but didn't get up from the daybed. Where there is no trace of Mickey, not even the memory of his shape in the mattress.

The first day or so after I staggered home from the library, I thought only: you bastard, you have made Mickey die a second time, you've taken him from me one final time. Then I tried to think, not about Jonathan—I swore, never more about Jonathan—I tried to think instead about Mickey. Tried to make myself focus on him, as an obligation or devotion. And I would find, half an hour later, that I had torn that week's
New Yorker
into a million little shreds or that I had,
so neatly and systematically, pried off every single layer of a Bermuda onion. That's what I did in lieu of meditation, took things apart.

For what was there, really, to
think about?
Whatever misery had led Mickey to his end, what torment or shame or just tedium was finally unendurable—no matter what I imagined, I was left only with that feeling in my breast, at once burning and hollow: the sensation I had when he cut himself or had the measles or when he came home crying because some rough boys teased him. I know, my baby, I know. And I cannot help you.

Until at last, this morning on the daybed, I closed my eyes and made myself just … look at him. Mickey, my scared baby thousands of miles from home, no one to hold him, trying to blot it all out. Mickey, confused, sweating, dirty, short of breath, his muscles jerking, Mickey gasping, jerking, Mickey fading away. If I cannot love
that
boy I never loved him at all. Mickey at rest. I have him back finally, Jonathan gave him back. And told me what to do.

I know the phone calls are from Philip Marks. Almost Christmas, the fall term over, a few weeks' break when he could be working. And you will, Philip. I won't get up now, but I will answer next time. I will let you see everything, everything but a few sheets of paper misfiled in the 1958 correspondence folder. I stuffed them in my purse the other day. Nobody will miss them, they were for me only.

The real Mickey, beautiful fading Mickey, is mine, mine only now. Philip—if he even mentions Mickey, I must try to see that he mentions Mickey—will write about a brave boy who died a hero. His name scratched, MICHAEL A ASCHER, with the other names, on that wedge-shaped scar on the Mall where Jonathan's dreams are buried. And mine.

And our country's.

I must remember to make up the daybed for Philip Marks.