Dinner another vacant exercise. Venison, from the most recent kill, five months ago in the fall. Jim was there. Gary firing on the run, in the trees just above the reservoir. Huge scars left from his boots, soft dark earth and pine needles, and that little .243 up to his shoulder, the stock taped together, puny but accurate. Gary hit the deer with three out of four shots, peppered him. The buck tumbling and exposing more dark earth in a long slide.
That day was overcast, cool, later in the season, late October. All of them wearing brown jackets, disappearing against earth and trees. Jim will miss hunting. From whatever void or whatever happens after, he’ll miss that return each fall, and Gary will be thinking about him. No void can be empty enough to take away all that we longed for or loved.
“What do you think happens after?” Jim asks. Surprised to hear his voice out loud, and wondering about the suitability of this question in front of his children. Not the model father lately.
“What’s that?” Gary asks. He’s at the other end of the table, looking subdued, head low, wearing a clean flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up his thick forearms, a lumberjack.
“The afterlife, or not. What do you think it is?”
“Well,” Mary says. “God has prepared a place for us, and Jesus will welcome us.”
“But what happens?” Jim asks. “Step by step.”
“We don’t have to worry,” Mary says. “All is taken care of for us.”
“Like a resort where someone grabs your bag right from the taxi.”
Mary looks uncomfortable. “Something like that. Yes.”
“Who grabs the bag, and how did they get stuck in that role? If there’s all this great service, someone has to provide it. Do they draw from the elf heaven?”
“Oh Jim.” Mary smiles as if he’s just being silly.
But there’s no point in talking about heaven anyway. Suicides don’t go there. Jim considers pointing this out, but he decides to hold back, because of his children. He can be appropriate still. He hasn’t completely lost it.
In the past, suicide was considered a crime. Maybe it still is. Very funny, really, since the criminal can never be prosecuted. But family used to be responsible, at least for debts in debtor prisons, and maybe also for suicide. His son would have to pay the IRS, or go to prison if he couldn’t manage to earn 365K at thirteen years old, and maybe he’d be hanged for the crime of suicide, an eye for an eye. At the moment, all law seems entirely fucked. Could be just his state of mind, but he can’t think of a single law he believes in. Most of them come from the church. And why the sudden interest in law?
“What’s the drinking age in heaven?” Jim asks. “You’ve got Europeans there, who are used to sixteen, and Americans used to twenty-one, so how does that get sorted out? Heavenly elixir must be powerful stuff, so you couldn’t let just anyone drink it.”
“Let’s enjoy the food,” Gary says. “It’s a nice casserole, Mary.”
In fact the casserole is incredibly salty, a pan of chicken and cheese goop with tortilla chips thrown in.
“I wonder about the architecture too,” Jim says. “Some people say there’s heaven and hell, but others add a purgatory, and I’ve even heard of a kind of waiting room for heaven, which would make four places. It’s a crowd-control problem, like parking at a Giants’ game, and where are these places, and how do you get from one to another? And what can you call you? If there’s no body, how do you know what’s you and what’s not?”
“We have our souls,” Mary says. “Each one special and not the same as any other, and the soul can never die.”
“And it’s okay that we can’t feel the soul now, and don’t know what it is? That will all be cleared up immediately afterward?”
Mary smiles, condescending, really as if Jim is eight. “Your soul is your goodness. You can feel that. You just have to let yourself.”
“But what about the souls that go to hell? Are they also made out of goodness? And I don’t even believe. What happens then, when you don’t believe but you’ve been given plenty of instruction and had every opportunity and therefore are supposed to believe? What happens if the nutcases are right and there is an afterlife? I’m fucked if that’s the case. Sorry about the language.”
“Don’t call Mary a nutcase, please,” Gary says.
“It’s okay,” Mary says. “All you have to do is accept Jesus’s love, accept that he died for your sins, to save you. That’s all you have to do. You don’t have to think about anything else.”
“What?”
“What are Jesus’s views on suicide? Does he still love us then and save us? And what if we take others with us? Aren’t there some limitations to Jesus’s love? Or does he consider his own death a kind of suicide? I guess that could make him sympathetic. He did have plenty of warning signs and willed it to happen anyway, so yeah, I guess Jesus was a suicide like those guys who walk up to cops pointing a gun, but with a grander plan for the purpose of that suicide.”
“Wow,” David says. “I didn’t know Jesus committed suicide.”
“He didn’t,” Gary says.
“He did, in a way,” Jim says. “And he wanted an attention grabber. No pistol to the head or pills or car exhaust in the garage or yanking the wheel on Highway One. He went for a long, drawn-out torture, a slow suicide that would be remembered.”
Mary stands up. “You have to leave,” she says. “You have to leave right now.” And then she walks quickly to the hallway, toward the bedrooms.
“It looked like she was crying,” Jim says. “Like she had tears.”
Gary is already up and following her. “Yeah,” he says. “Nice one.”
Jim looks at David and Tracy and shrugs. “Let this be a lesson, I guess. Remember how weak the religious are. They’re denying so much about the world they can’t handle any contact with it. And I’m not going to apologize. Fuck her and her faith.”
Tracy’s face is crumpling, so he leans to the side and puts his arm around her. “It’s okay,” he says. She starts to cry, and he tries to console her, but he feels tired. He doesn’t have the energy for this. And what is the crying about, anyway? Kids are such a pain in the ass.
David is upset, too, even though he’s older. He’s staring at Tracy across the table and getting some sort of crying contagion from watching her face.
“If we could stuff a hundred people in here, everyone would be crying soon,” Jim says. “Why can’t we have our own emotions? Let Mary cry alone. There’s no need to join her. She probably cries whenever a piece of macaroni falls off one of her crap decorations.”
“Why are you being mean?” David asks, and then he’s crying too.
“Fuck me,” Jim says. “I’ll just go wait outside. Try to eat a few more bites so you don’t show up at home hungry. I don’t want to get in trouble there too.”
He rises and leaves them to it, and everything in the room seems brown. The dinner table, the card table, the casserole, the doilies, the rug, various pieces of wood. All the wild color gone somehow, only brown left.
Outside, he’s happy that the air is cool and the sky clear. He can see stars and the moon so bright. Even without a spotting scope, you can see there are huge craters and seas. He’d like to visit, but that seems unlikely. So limited what we get to experience. NASA should sign up suicides as volunteers. Jim would gladly get in a capsule that’s not coming back. He could reach as far as Jupiter or even Pluto, be of some use to others and transcend a normal life. Why does that never happen? Why don’t we send out capsules that won’t return? Why are we so chickenshit and limited? What do we think we’re preserving? Do we really believe one life is valuable? If we think about our experience for even one second, we know it’s not. Heart attacks, car accidents, natural disasters, gun deaths, war: we’re flicked away like ants in every moment. Clearly we have no value.
To pass through the rings of Saturn, to see them up close, that’s what he wants, and to step on some other planet, with no spacesuit, just his jeans and a T-shirt. The video running and radio on so he can say what it’s like, what it’s really like, how the air feels, the temperature. He’ll go barefoot and say what that feels like too. And it doesn’t matter if he only lasts two or three minutes or even a few seconds in some burning place, because everyone else on Earth and all who are born after will know something more, everyone made richer through the sacrifice of nothing. Some will cry for him, some will have stupid ideas that he’s a hero or an idiot, as if it matters what he is, and the religious will go off in twenty new directions of imbecility, new talk of how Jesus is fire resistant or doesn’t need oxygen to breathe or Jim is the devil, vanished on Jupiter to reappear in all our bedroom closets that very night, but all will be made richer, and Jim will know more intimately what heaven and hell are like, because both must be airless places, and sound might not be the same, unable to travel, and though we believe hell is both on fire and freezing, who has ever said what the temperature of heaven is? Tropical for those who like the heat, but breezy and low seventies for those who prefer a mountain summer? Jim will be the first to report back, and others can follow. Some should go beyond radio range, starting out as children, because why not? Why shouldn’t we see farther things?
What Jim would like is some use for his despair. Why can’t his fucked-up state now be perfect for something?
But all he can think of is walking thousands of miles or traveling to space, one of them useless and the other impossible. He should pull a Mother Teresa, but the problem with the lives of the good is that everything moves so slowly, and he just can’t bear it. Going out with a bang is much easier to imagine.