47

YOU: You must know everything.

ME: Is that a moral command or a sarcastic comment?

YOU: You think you have to be a polymath in order to succeed.

ME: I just want to know stuff. History, religion, physics, math.

YOU: But you know only the names. You want to talk about Fermat’s equation, Riemann spheres, the Mandelbrot set, and the rest, but you can’t even take the time to learn elementary calculus.

ME: I like the metaphors. Hedonic calculus. Moral arithmetic. Irrational numbers.

YOU: But they’re just metaphors.

ME: And the clarity. The finalities. When you spend your life playing at questions that have no final answers, it’s a relief to know that ten times three is thirty, or thirty squared is nine hundred.

YOU: There’s something sick about a playwright wanting to do numbers instead of words. Anything to avoid actors, huh?

ME: Words are so sloppy. I want to be precise.

YOU: If you knew some real math, you’d understand there is no deep truth in numbers. It’s a closed system, a tautology. You’re like those literary critics of forty years ago who went gaga about quantum physics, thinking it proved everything was subjective, which it didn’t. Your discussion of fractals in Chaos Theory was pure nonsense, you know.

ME: Not that anybody noticed. They were too busy hating my drama to catch the mistakes in my math.

YOU: You made a botch of my dementia too. I was your model for schizophrenia. All the absurd, irrational things said in my fevers?

ME: And witty things too. “The tune goes round the tangent, but it comes out the cosine of bliss.” That was a direct quote.

YOU: You turned my dementia into lyrical schizophrenia: theater madness.

ME: Would you rather I told the truth?

YOU: No. The truth was awful. The truth was boring. Just a sick man in a hospital room. Sleeping, sleeping, sleeping. Then waking up and talking paranoid shit about his doctors or his family. Or getting well, but only for a month or two, and only well enough to hate his body for betraying him. Or hate his brain for abandoning him—

ME: Or hate his life partner for going on in life.

YOU: I never hated you.

ME: But you didn’t love me. You withdrew from me. You shut yourself off. I remember sitting beside your bed in Intensive Care in the last days—

YOU: No hospital porn. Please.

ME: And you told me to go.

YOU: I didn’t.

ME: You did. You whispered, “I don’t want you here.”

YOU: I didn’t want you to see me die.

ME: You were embarrassed by your death. The way you used to be embarrassed about being seen on the toilet. You did not want me, who loved you most of all, to see you suffer that final humiliation.

YOU: I looked awful.

ME: I was used to it.

YOU: I wanted to protect you.

ME: You wanted to die alone. You were ashamed of dying. Or bitter over my being alive. Or something, I don’t know what. But I was hurt that you could not share your death with me.

YOU: Why’re you so angry? I’m the one who’s dead.

ME: Only the dead have a right to be angry?

YOU: Yes.

ME: You have all the rights and I have none?

YOU: You could always join me here.

ME: Don’t think that I haven’t considered it. But there’s nothing like the death of someone you love to spoil the cozy fantasy of death.

 

Caleb stared at what his pencil had just scratched on the page. Here was the crux of his sadness and pain, in the unfinished business of Ben’s death. Ben could sleep with all the guys that he wanted, and Caleb could accept it. But then he wanted to die alone, and that hurt.

 

YOU: You sound like you’re depressed.

ME: I am.

YOU: You should see a doctor.

ME: I am seeing a doctor.

YOU: What can I do to help?

ME: I don’t know, Ben. I just don’t know. I don’t know anything about anything anymore. (Pause.) But thank you for the offer.