“Where’s his ashes?”
“We’ll hold them for a while to see if anybody claims them. Then we’ll dispose of them.”
“Can I claim them?”
“Why would you want them?”
“So I can dump them in a toilet somewhere and piss all over them.”
DeMarco thought for a few moments. “You going to let me drive you up to Erie?”
“I don’t know,” Moby said. “I might.”
“In that case… In a way, you’re sort of the brother-in-law, right?”
Something like a smile came to Moby’s lips. “Seems to me.”
“So we give it thirty days,” DeMarco told him. “If nobody has claimed the ashes by then, they’re all yours.”
Seventy-One
Now came the emptiness. A deep hole that if not soon filled would make a perfect home for the birds of sorrow. DeMarco could sense them circling already, twittering shrilly, eager to move in. But DeMarco did not want to accommodate them this time. Why must his heart be always a nest of sadness? Unfortunately he had little talent for making it otherwise. He lacked Thomas Huston’s gifts for creation, for imagining himself as something other than he was.
So he sat on the back porch a long while that afternoon. For a long while, he stared at the unkempt yard and the unfinished path, but they registered on his optic nerve only as backdrop to what could not be seen. He understood the cause of his sadness. The source of all sadness. The loss of what had once been but was now irretrievable. The loss of what had never been and could never be.
For the past many years, he had filled that emptiness with his work. One case of tragedy after another, puzzle after morbid puzzle to solve. Is that all you have to look forward to? he asked himself now. Just sit here and stare at the grass until another catastrophe occurs? Live a life that can find meaning only in other people’s mistakes and misfortune?
The air was crisp and clean and cool as only a day in November can be. Three weeks before Thanksgiving. Seven weeks before winter. He did not want the birds of sorrow taking up residence in his heart again. They were small, black, noisy birds, and they would add nothing but darkness to the dark days and long dark nights ahead. But he did not know how to keep them out. Work silenced them only during the daylight hours. No amount of whiskey could drown them.
? ? ?
At the end of Thomas Huston’s novel, the one Huston had signed and presented to DeMarco in appreciation of the lunches they had shared, the novel’s protagonist says, “What I have to do now is that which is not easy. That which I most fear. If I keep accommodating my fears, I can only move in reverse. That would be fine if by moving in reverse I could move back through time, but the past is a wall, a solid and impermeable wall. The past is a fortress that cannot be stormed.”
DeMarco remembered the first time he had read that passage, and how, when he'd read the first line, he had thought it a grammatical error. Years earlier, back when Laraine was pregnant and he had decided to try for a promotion to station commander, he had asked her to proofread the short essay he had been required to submit. What he remembered most about her critique was the lesson on the difference between that and which. The difference between nonrestrictive and restrictive modifying phrases. A comma preceding which, no comma before that. Then, years later, alone in a quiet house, with no wife or teacher or proofreader to explain things to him, there on the final page of Huston’s second novel was that which is not easy. No comma. What had initially puzzled DeMarco was that the error was repeated in the next sentence too. That which I most fear. So, he had concluded, Huston must have had a reason for that awkward construction. DeMarco studied those two lines. He read them out loud. Listened to them. And finally heard the hesitancy couched in an awkward formality. The hint of exhortation. Yes, of course, DeMarco had thought back then. Huston wants the sentences to be awkward. Because the narrator is screwing up his nerve here, trying to talk himself into something. Trying to force down his terror of what he knows he has to do. Of that very difficult thing he knows he must do.
Now, in a house whose silence he had grown accustomed to, DeMarco reread the paragraph in full. Then he laid the book against his chest as he leaned back in his recliner and stared at the ceiling and asked himself, And what do you fear, DeMarco? What is that which you must do?
He thought about it a very long time. Despite his efforts to do otherwise, he could come up with only one answer.
Seventy-Two