Let us not unman each other; part at once; all farewells should be sudden.
—Lord Byron
Easter Monday, April 21, 2003
On the Monday evening, Ernest got up to urinate in the makeshift latrine at the back of the now-darkening hut. After he zipped up and pushed open the old door, he saw that Johan had prostrated himself on his scabby old mattress.
Johan’s voice grew weak, as if his last burst of energy, his fifth wind, had been exhausted. There was nothing left in him. He believed in his delirium that he’d had his catharsis.
The vision of Bill had absolved him. Johan could live the rest of his time (relatively) unburdened. He then started to mumble, in tongues.
Ernest told me that Johan spoke of a Yorkshireman called William Atticus Forsythe Cartwright, slaughtered on the morning of July 1, 1916, on a French field called the Somme, within hours of the start of the battle. He said of Bill, “A shadow can never claim the beauty of the image.” There were silences during this tale, but they were never uncomfortable.
He remembered the smell of a thousand ancient books in a cool, dark library in 1913 as the summer sun tried to melt the Southern European roads outside.
He remembered playing chess as a seven-year-old against a supremely talented old fleabag.
He remembered a sick, young boy with dark-ringed eyes giving him a crucifix, somewhere near the Adriatic.
He remembered a dog, emanating very ripe smells and bouncing out a furry welcome on an Italian beach; just a fraction of a memory of an irretrievable past.
He remembered a Portuguese friend, brave men and women in Spain, and waking up naked on a London street.
He remembered his best friend, a blind, legless soldier, dying in an icy stream, and a beautiful Spanish girl facing death next to the whitest of white orchids.
He remembered Franz and Sophie, their bullet holes, and the realization in some sick, spluttering wretch’s crossed coffee-brown eyes of the error of his ways.
He remembered his mother. His father. And smiled.
He remembered a line he had once read, and spoke it aloud.
“When I despair, I remember, that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been murderers and tyrants and for a time, they can seem invincible. But in the end, they always fall. Think of it always!”18
He remembered searching for the Blue Rose of Forgetfulness, even as he realized that he was just seconds away from finding it, which made him smile more.
He remembered angels in stiff white cotton floating around his white starched linen, saving him once, twice, thrice. He imagined their tears when he had broken free with a reincarnated, dark-eyed, skeletal, ex–Roman emperor and fine future foot soldier against evil. He remembered Cicero again, this time as a two-legged youth with vision.
He remembered being in a cart with his mother, staring at the stars, pondering a game of chess that he should have won.
He remembered Blanche and her pal Stanley, and how they had helped him to survive with their benediction, generosity, and love. Ming of the Red Mist and Qi Chu, the Saintly Abbot from the White Cloud Monastery, too, of course, the degenerate and quite marvelous planet savers and drug fiends.
He thought of his beloved Bandita across the blue shrubs.
He remembered having lost the love of that one woman. The smile turned at a tangent.
“There but for the grace of God . . . goes God,” Johan Thoms whispered.
Ernest recalled hearing the words heretic, blasphemer, infidel, and degenerate. And then: “What a joy!”
“It’s time I went, my friend,” Johan Thoms mumbled to my grandfather. “Out of my way, spirits!” His right hand went to grab the cream-vellum tome one more time, in one ultimate attempt to find his portal back to a time when he could change it all.
In doing this (and this was his undoing), he seemed to be in a hurry, and succeeded only in knocking an old glass paperweight, perhaps over a hundred years old, from the top of the pile of books down onto the bedside table. It shattered into what seemed to be a million or more shards around the old man’s right hand. That same right hand which had not been able to find a reverse gear had committed one last crime.
Thus, close to his last breath, Johan Thoms destroyed his one true portal. It had been there all along. The wormhole opened. Then it closed.
A trinity of flaws to take down ANY man.
Johan had even rushed into his own death, a fraction of a second before his portal would have finally been exposed to him.
Then Ernest saw an old man death-rattle through his final breath.
Silence fell, minutes long. Ernest did not move until, finally, he picked up the leaf of paper that had been freed from the paperweight. It had been swept away on a released thermal, had slowly fallen, and had floated to the grubby deck, like a burnt-orange maple leaf on a far-too-late bruised October afternoon.
Johan was now gliding on his own magic carpet ride toward a light as white as an orchid. He was inhaling the Blue Rose of Forgetfulness for the first time, breathing in the ecstasy of knowing no pain. The smile of his youth returned to his face.
His beloved Blanchita sensed this, and screamed his requiem from within the remnants of the house, where the now dead, yet finally contented man, had been born, grown up, which he had deserted, returned to, rebuilt, and then partly destroyed.
My grandfather squinted and checked both sides of the message on the paper. He thought he should be finding more than was initially apparent in the gathering blue gloom.
The scrap of paper, however, contained just five words, the final resting epitaph of Johan Thoms.
GLIDE GENTLY.
THUS FOREVER GLIDE . . .