Dignity - a novel - 19. Chapter 19: Death

Chapter 19: Death

It is another perfect day. The window is open; birdsong and soft breezes waft in to tease my mom's yellow drapes.

The shower runs, the curtain is drawn, and I stand before the sink of the bathroom on the second floor of my home in Cincinnati.

I sweep aside some steam frosting the surface of the mirror. In reflection, I can see my blue-green hair is gone. In its place, I have a shorter cut to admire in my natural color. My bangs are gone, but I smile and cock my head this way and that. I look kinda good.

Also in reflection, I see the shower curtain has disappeared. Linc with his perfect jock body is soapy and slick. My lips part in deep admiration and love. He looks different now, it's – I don’t know – that he seems not exactly 'older,' but more mature, and even more confident and self-settled, if that's possible for him.

My beautiful Lincoln Oliver raises his arms with bent elbows, and hands on his head. He steps beneath the showerhead, completely wets his hair, and then arches his back so the stream of water glides down his chest and front. He notices my attention in the reflected reality of the mirror. He slicks back his blond hair and holds my eyes, and then, he smiles.

Oh God, I do so love him.

I put my hands on the sink and lean over it a bit. I bend my head and rack my brain for a moment to think what it is I am doing here. My brass ring on it cord sways lightly away from my chest.

Tired and confused is all my poor brain has to offer me right now.

I don’t know what to think, so I gaze up at me again. Something odd is noticeable about my likeness. I come in close to the mirror and open my mouth. My front tooth is hanging low. I tug at it – it comes out and drops with a metallic clink into the porcelain bowl. I look again. A stream of blood comes from where my top left incisor had been. I spit into the basin, and peer in horror after I hear more clanging in the bowl. Half a dozen teeth are swimming around the drain in a swirling mixture of water and blood.

Linc's voice calls calmly to me from the shower. "Are you ready, Jack? You know, you don’t have much time left."

The sound of water stops.

I spin around, and the shower is gone.

The confines of the bathroom on the second floor of my Ohio home slowly bleach out – the walls shimmer like a veil for a few moments, the floor dissolves into a featureless white sheet, and the ceiling rises up like colorless smoke.

Flashes of color appear – columns of a surreal and beautiful blue, and then others of deep purple, and with them are many in all the shades that join those two primary hues as if seen through a prism.

Amongst these columns of infinite height and healing calm, some shadows lurk at the height of a person.

They seem counseled and wise, featureless save for the definition of a form, and a presence informed from having been in my position once.

One of the shadow figures steps out from the vertical rods of color, and without warning, approaches me.

This one frightens me. I really do not want to see him, but where can I go?

Suddenly I am standing in my mom's bedroom. I feel like a kid again, for I know who lies in bed.

My father is shriveled, emaciated and weak. He rolls over and his gaunt cheeks seem to flush to see me standing here.

He extends a faltering hand towards me.

"Do you forgive me?" he asks.

"You did nothing wrong."

"I left you, Jack – but, I did not want to."

"I know that, Dad. Please, why say you are sorry?"

"Because, you need to know that I am, and because you need to forgive yourself."

To my right stands the shadow figure that had frightened me. It too is my dad, but not the pale and dying man from the bed, but the dad I remember of health and fullness of spirit. This man, this shadow, he does not frighten me anymore. I guess the words from the dying man in the bed have changed how I feel about him. Wordlessly, the figure by my side lets me know that everything can be all right, and that there is something worthy of trust.

The columns of color return, and this room dissolves like pixels from a screen. Soon, the blue and purple fade too, and I float in an all-white space whose floor, walls, ceiling, and atmosphere has the iridescent lightness of a soap bubble.

From where I drift, I can look down and see a chair, a lounger in those ugly tones of 'puce,' 'mauve' and 'plum' that I hate so much. I feel a slight detached curiosity about what it is doing here, so I let myself descend in a controlled gliding motion towards it. As I approach, I see the seatback is in a reclined position, and that this chair is occupied by a person sitting with closed eyes, and draped with a geeky hospital blanket in the same awful colors; the colors I associate intimately with pain.

The lower I get, the clearer it is. The person is me. My bald head is covered with a knit cap, as if that were enough to keep me safe and warm. But is does not, for I shiver and seem to try to focus on the music coming through my earbuds.

IV's go into my left arm.

Chemo.

I float down so that our noses almost touch. The me in the chair is as pale as death, and I can hear the faint strains that an outsider would of neo-folk striving to keep me grounded in the world of Nature and life and hope.

Funny though, gliding above my wracked and tormented vestige of corporal flesh, I do not feel connected to 'him.' That Jack, poor boy in the reclining chair, I cannot feel what he feels, for I do not associate this freedom that lets me glide over him with his being sick and scared. For him, ultimately and despite the drip, drip, drip of poison seeping into 'our' blood, the chemicals meant to 'treat' the bad tissue with death, must inevitably kill healthy life along with it.

I don’t feel sympathy for him; I don’t think I understand him; I do not comprehend a 'why' to any of it.

Lying there, pitiful and pathetic is the "Jack" I ran from. That's him; that's the "me" forced to be on the receiving end of everybody's 'poor kid' comments. He's the one whose name I have hated, and who I hated being. Enough of pretend pity. See, am I not in this chair alone? Am I not in this ill-defined hospital place by myself – and why? – cuz the others ran away in fear. The ones who are too cowardly to say the truth; tell me they don’t want to be around me, because they might 'be infected.'

But I don’t pity him. I don’t feel anything for "Jack." Truth is, I don’t get him, and I do not know what he is fighting for.

My focus is momentarily drawn to the earbuds, and suddenly the music he hears fills this white voidless void.

I recognize it instantly as the smooth longing of Yoann Lemoine's voice. The Woodkid song Lincoln Oliver introduced me to on the rooftop.

"We are glowing in the sunlight,

we are sailing in the azure, and I gaze upon you,

where boy, your look reveals

what glows within."

While I listen to the music, I wonder if I am supposed to connect it to something relevant.

"Is there any way

That you could love me too,

For I really love you…"

Am I supposed to connect to the closed eyes of the young man below me? To the ever-slight way he shifts in his seat? To that barely suppressed tremble of his limbs? Or, to that expression of dogged determination and willful conceit of hope this music writes across his face as plain as God's writing on the temple walls for Daniel to interpret? Who is less attuned to the message, him or me? But – that poison, yes, that poison he can feel it. It makes him not want to go on, and yet – he does. Why?

The music changes, and gradually so does his expression. A faint contentment seems to wash over him, and peek through his pain as a dim smile.

I do not know classical music, so I cannot say who wrote this piece, but strings and an organ come with a soft beat, and sigh. Yes, that's it – these opening bars seem to sigh in breathtaking serenity and the confidence that what will follow has the force of truth behind it. Now a woman joins the orchestra. That first word – it floats across my vision letter-by-letter, although I do not know what it means – "Laudate."

But I feel good, and here, as the music continues in its sublime tranquility, I slowly connect with the figure in the chair.

All the words are there as I listen; as I need them, they are provided:

"Laudate Dominum omnes gentes;
Laudate eum, omnes populi.

Quoniam confirmata est
Super nos misericordia ejus,
Et veritas Domini manet in aeternum."

Then a choir joins her with a message of oneness:

"Gloria Patri et Filio et Spiritui Sancto.
Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper.
Et in saecula saeculorum."

And through a pause, the woman's voice soars back in with the long and supremely beautiful vowels of:

"Amen."

As silence imposes itself, I lose all connection to that figure – I cannot see him anymore, I cannot perceive his torment – but I am still linked with him through this feeling of serenity. Though separate and discrete entities, we still share this feeling, and maybe always will.

The light turns to gray.

I stand in a gray field where grow colorless grass and weeds. The desolate waste stretches boundlessly to the horizon, where it is only broken by a bleak sky with clouds. Some shadowy and placid water, the presence of which reminds me of molten lead, edges the near-distance.

The spirit of my father stands beside me, and off to the area on his left are gathered many more like him; they are my relatives.

"Are you ready, Jack? You don’t have much time left."

"What about..?" I find I cannot say his name. Instead, I reach up and touch the brass ring around my neck.

The shadow-robed arm of my father clears a path beneath me.

I look down and see sand.

Lincoln is plopped down among the wet and darkly dank posts under the Santa Monica pier. He cradles my lifeless form in his arms.

He cries, and lets his tears fall on my face, but he smoothes my hair and mutters some soft words I cannot hear.

I look up from the image and swallow down hard. It is difficult for me to tell myself what I once did – that he will be all right without me.

Through the gray environment around me, a beacon appears like a headlight.

It is dead ahead of me, but staring into it makes me tranquil. There seems to be something profoundly beautiful on the other side of it, something intimate and expansive at the same moment – something like a refined and indescribably pure form of the familial. The light, it is love.

"So, this is it?" I ask my father.

He gestures towards the source. A tunnel opens up, and its edge becomes as near as where we two are standing. I have to take just two steps, and I am in it.

But, while I feel magnetically pulled towards that all-forgiveness at the end of the light, the image of Linc from when this experience began, comes to me with questions.

Why was he in my house? Why was he so calmly relaxed in my bathroom? There was nothing dreamlike about his presence there.

So, that means that smile he gave me, was not a fantasy, nor was it a memory. It was not a composite of past glances he has given me. No, it was real. And if not one from the past, then maybe it was a glimpse of a smile that is yet to be.

"Dad, will Lincoln Oliver be all right? Will he be ok without me?"

The spirit of my father casts glances to the light. In his eyes is sadness. He tells me bluntly: "He won't be the same. That much I can tell you."

"No, Dad. Help me then."

I start crying. I am hopelessly confused. The butterfly in my dream that I had thought of as Lincoln set free was the fantasy, and I had willfully made myself negate the enduring nature of his love for me. I had selfishly wished to set him free simply because I wanted to make my peace with that last cord that tied me to the earth. All the others, although not done in perfect good faith, I had taken care of. I love Dawn, and she forgives me. I know my mom will suffer, and has suffered immensely because of 'Jack' and his condition, but I removed myself because it was easiest that way. In my belief I know one day she will understand, and then come to forgive me too. But, Lincoln, oh God, Lincoln Oliver, he deserves better than me, and my lousy lack of faith in his love for me. Now I see it. Now I see it all mirrored in the tunnel before me, and that insight comes to warm my face like sunshine mingled with hope.

My fingers mindlessly reach up and press the carousel brass ring into my flesh. It feels warm, and although made of some base part of the Earth, I can be free of in a blink of an eye – but, I don’t think I want to. It is because of what the ring represents; a chance in life with Linc. Suddenly, I cannot leave him alone in the world where he will only be confused and saddened as to why I chose not to resist my own death, and think I did not find him worthy enough to fight for.

I can't run away from the Jack that everyone pities, even me, anymore. Lincoln won't run from me, so how can I?

I swallow down hard, and slowly shake my head and wipe my tears.

"Dad, help me. I'm scared again."