When she died, Betsy was surprised. She was only sixty-three and as far as she knew healthy, still a practical nurse, still a decent squash player. She had been on a mile-long jog the day before though toward the end it had been more of a rueful walk. Her phone had whistled and she had answered it: an excuse. “Hi, Jan,” she said. Jan was her sister, four years older, immodestly proud when people said they looked like twins. Jan was a poet or had become one after she had stopped being a tech executive. “It’s one of the things I like most about poetry,” Jan said. “All the money in the world can’t make me better at it.” No: but it could make people say you were. Betsy kept that to herself for a while but when she finally told Jan she was rewarded with a gale of laughter. “Why didn’t you say that earlier?” Jan said. “It’s truer than true. An editor took a poem of mine recently and then hinted un-hintingly that maybe the journal could use a sizable donation to continue discovering new talents such as myself.” “What did you do?” said Betsy. “I paid,” Jan said. “It was only a hundred thousand dollars.” She laughed again. But when Betsy answered the phone call that downshifted her jog, Jan was crying. Martin had left her. “Again?” Betsy said. Martin had been a loyal husband for thirty years, to the point where even his storm-outs were predictable. They happened every two years or so, always with aggrieved hand-wringing about how they were not complete without children. “I think this time it’s for real,” Jan said. “And I thought you were smart,” Betsy said. Now Jan laughed, a little. “I just need to do something to take my mind off of him,” Jan said, and Betsy agreed. “You should write a poem or sleep with a shopkeeper or something. What you shouldn’t do is feel bad on the phone with me.” “Talk to you tomorrow,” Jan said. Hanging up, Betsy had felt a twinge in her chest that she assumed was a mix of pity and fury toward her sister. She had gone home to take a nap but felt agitated and instead had a glass of wine and went to bed. Now her side ached a bit. If she had still been married she would have complained more but solitude suited her. “I’ll just nod off now and wake up in the morning feeling fine,” she said. She was wrong. Dead wrong, she thought, laughing at the joke because no one else was around to do so. Her body was not gone but attached to her consciousness more in the manner of a suggestion. She felt light in the limbs, with an almost erotic charge that ran up the center of her like a thin hot cylinder. She was in a white expanse, dotted with yellow, which was her favorite color. She wondered if other people saw other colors. Was death a state of mind that fed back to the subject a personalized and thus comprehensible version of an ineffable experience? She heard a voice singing, and made out that it was singing “Waters of March,” and that clinched it. It wasn’t possible that everyone got her favorite song. This was not the Jobim version or Susannah McCorkle’s, her favorite. It was even better, which was impossible. So was her environment an articulation of her inner state, her preferences, her comforts? Is that what death was, for everyone? Was she being rewarded for a life well-lived by being given more of herself? Frankly, it seemed like a punishment. She became aware that she was in not in a boundless expanse but rather in a room decorated, if that’s what you could call it, in pure flat white. She was sitting in a chair. A dresser was off to the right, maybe against a wall, but she couldn’t fully sense a wall. On top of the dresser there was a mirror, reflecting back only flat white. She knew she had to go look in the mirror. Her legs were starting to extend. She tried to stop herself. What would she see in the reflection? It was times like this when she wished that she was the poet and the billionaire.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
No comments:
Post a Comment