4. The Final Dispatch, contd.

It is easy to forget what you are about, in the land of the dead. Then the scenery with its painted birds and thistles is jerked up into the flies, with a rattle whose associations it is better to ignore. The world goes white.

[Pause, sound of breathing.]

For the moment, I remember only that I am chasing a child. Apparently I must save her. She is not far ahead, on the next page, or the next but one, I hear the shushing of her feet. The dry air, by which I mean the page, carries sound, by which I mean these words in which I say that sometimes she skips, like the child she is, as I never was. Sometimes she stops, to rest, or to wait for me, or for some other reason, I don’t know why a child stops, I was never a child.

Setting down one word after another, I make my way to the end of the page, which swings open like a door, as it always does, and shows me nothing, as it always does.

Or something, why not. A clue to keep me going, a little shoe, say, one lace trailing, looping over itself, like the flourish of an old-fashioned signature, but I don’t believe it. The shoe is plausible; the lace, though, gives the game away. For when I said “the little shoe,” that “little” betraying a sentimentality I am surprised to identify in myself, what took shape was a faded red Mary Jane, a little worn, and yet a Mary Jane does not have laces, nor do we permit play shoes in the school, but only school-issued black leather oxfords, bought at discount, sturdy and unimpeachable, which the students must sign out from Supplies. Those do have laces, and yet the one who is ahead of me, if I know her, keeps her laces tied, as surely as she keeps her wits about her. So it is not her shoe. So it is not a shoe at all. So I made it up.

[Crackling] Save her!

As for my wits, never mind.

Save her!

Maybe a dropped handkerchief instead, one of many bought in bulk from a Hebrew gentleman from Brooklyn, New York, issued every Sunday, surrendered to Housekeeping every Friday. If your nose runs on Saturday you are out of luck. Today must be Saturday. There is no handkerchief.

Save her!

No shoe and no handkerchief. No matter. I may be fortunate. Suppose she dropped a hairbrush, like the witch’s daughter in the story. I could then expect it to spring up into a thicket or a mountain range. I should count my blessings and keep a weather eye out for personal grooming tools.

Or worse things. A doll made of— Are you receiving?

I race on. O’er the drifting sand, though it is not sand. It is not snow either, yes yes, that has been established. I race on. But for all my haste I have the impression that I am not moving at all, that I am sitting upright, eyes almost closed, in my heavy wooden chair, which is angled to face the window, though the shutters are closed, my legs planted like Lincoln’s, big hands stiffly crooked over the carved armrests, a small sedate pillow of minutely patterned oilcloth, stuffed to stiffness with horsehair, slowly sliding out from behind my back, and the stern black crepe of my high-necked dress quite, quite still over my chest. The lamp burns low. Light is coming through the cracks in the shutters, blueing the black of my old-fashioned leg-o’-mutton sleeve in soft stripes, so that it looks almost tropical, some jungle animal lying in wait beside me. My mouth is open a crack, but no breath moves through it; under my lids a crescent of eye is drying.

Or, another thought, that they have boxed me up, couldn’t wait, that the toes of my best kid boots are bent against mahag mahogany (cosmetically softened with silk), my hands folded, probably with the help of a mallet, into a semblance of prayer, my cheeks rouged (one slightly redder than the other) in the conventional transvestism of death, all my instructions ignored . . . my strongbox forced, my will¹² removed and burned to ashes . . . [Rapid breathing.]

In short, I have the impression that I am dead. That I am no longer a necromath, necrographer, necrologist, or necronaut, but only a corpse. That I have not been traveling, for hours, for what I count as hours, in death, but only for a few minutes, though long enough to have begun soiling my undergarments, and probably ruining the dress as well. So I won’t be buried in it, that’s a shame, I liked that dress, it was so ugly that everyone feared me in it, for none but a very powerful lady can resemble an eland in a horse blanket and still command obedience. Well, if I am going to ruin my dress I hope I shall ruin the chair as well, I should not like anyone else to sit in it.

But what am I saying, have I not taught that the dead and gone don’t go, that I in particular will not depart but will reign on in the person of other, weaker characters who will yield precedence to me, as is proper? And should they not sit, as I have sat and through them will continue to sit, on my chair? Of course they should. I shall try to hold my waste. But I am forgetting, such feats are beyond me now, if it is true that I am dead. When I aspersed you, dear listener, with the imputation that you were dampening your institutional underpants, I was perhaps projecting onto you a suspicion that was already making itself felt, but had not yet reached my conscious mind: that I myself was dribbling. That the great, the ultimate incontinence had come.

You, dear listener, are not even taking down these words, since by now you have noticed that I am dead, and have long since pulled the cord that rings the little bell downstairs. Someone has awoken with a snort in a room of suffocating blackness, windowless, such as my lowliest employees occupy, those who must submit to being woken by a little bell in the middle of the night, if it is the middle of the night, I can’t remember. Someone has pulled on his brogues and trudged upstairs, carrying a lamp, has approached the door outlined in light, which he knuckles timidly, no, I am mistaken, boldly, even more boldly than required, since he can place the blame for an interruption on you, listener, and is already looking forward to the punishment you will get for waking him from his sleep on such a stupid errand. Receiving no answer, he has knocked again, harder, and hearing nothing still, has begun to feel the justifiable excitement of finding himself witness to calamity, years of fruitless night-watchmanship rewarded at one stroke, and with unaccustomed confidence he has seized the door handle and walked in. He spots me at once. Stops short. Erect in my chair, I seem to be sleeping. Belatedly meeting your terrified, no, tranquil eye, he pulls his forelock, not literally, I merely conform to literary tradition, and takes a step closer.

Perhaps it is an odor that now alerts him to my real condition. How relieved he is, while nonetheless a faint, fine tremor besets his whole body. Disavowing it, he strides around the room as he would not dare to do at any other time, even touching, in this his moment of ascendancy, those objects that must seem to him the regalia of my power—my great inkwell, my stuffed crow, my ear trumpet, my lace mitts. Finally, he touches the very symbol of his servitude, his manhood thrilling in his trousers—no, not that, the great bell cord—and, curling his fingers around it, gives it a mighty tug.

After that, of course, the house rings with voices, all louder than their owners would have dared to pitch them, a day before. As if they wished me to hear, from wherever I was, and know that they still lived and did not fear me any more. Very foolish of them, for they ought to know that I shall return, more terrible than ever.

But if I am really dead, and only imagine myself a necronaut, then how do I know that I have not been dead for years, for decades? You, and my school, and little Eve Finster might be long gone.

Or [static] never have existed at all, for if I can invent a world for my shade to run through, surely I can invent a girl to flee me through it, and another girl at a typewriter, to write it all down.

But now I am frightening myself. In any case I am probably not dead, and all this is just a distraction and a hindrance—a thicket, you might say. (She dropped that hairbrush after all!) Yes, I must get back to—what was it? Winding road, muddy field—then the bird—the thistles—my boots are wet, green burrs cling to my sodden bootlaces, a nice detail, I’m beginning to believe this story, and so back down the bank to the road. Did I say I left the road? I left the road. In more than one sense. I stopped dead, you might say—

The worms! Would I feel them at their work?

I think not; I think all feeling would have ended, for me.

Let’s face it, there is no way to know for sure. I might be dead. You might be dead. We might all be dead, pushers of prams and their passengers, shiners of shoes and those whose shoes are shined, all of us unwitting necronauts, inhabiting through the naïve thaumaturgy of our incessant chatter a world as solid as we can make it. But not quite solid enough. Some knowledge of our real estate leaks through—a whisper, a wisp, a wandering light. We call these lapses “ghosts” . . . 

[Static, sound of breathing.]

The road!