OLD HABITS DIE HARD, I REALIZED AS I SETTLED into bed. Harder, alas, than people do.
Kathleen had been dead for a decade—more than a decade, in fact—but I still slept on “my” side of the bed. Actually, for the thirty years of our marriage, “my” side had also been “our” side: no matter where she started out (usually in the middle), Kathleen had always ended up crossing the midline, and I had always ended up on the edge of the mattress, sometimes hanging partway off.
For years I had grumbled about her Territorial Imperative. Now I would have given anything—everything—to feel her crowding me, nestling me, spooning me in her sleep. “Don’t it always seem to go,” I serenaded myself, pulling up the covers, “that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” Truth was, though, I had known what I’d had with Kathleen. I’d felt lucky beyond all deserving to be with her, and bereft beyond all reckoning when I lost her.
Since Kathleen’s death I had slept with only two women—just one time apiece—and both those women were dead now, too. It wasn’t as if I were responsible for their deaths, any more than I’d been responsible for Kathleen’s, but all the same, I sometimes wondered if I might carry some sort of jinx, or bad karma. Could it be that immersing myself, day after day, year after year, in death, dismemberment, and decay, had somehow tainted me? That I had steadily absorbed, and now subtly emanated, mortality—and not just its faint odor of it, but its essence as well? That I was a carrier, like Typhoid Mary? Mortality Bill, I thought.
The absurdity of it almost made me smile. Almost, but not quite.
As I reached for the switch on the bedside lamp, my eye happened to light on a card that lay on the nightstand. It had arrived in the previous day’s mail, sent by a California woman whose father’s remains I had identified a few weeks before. His skull had recently turned up on a riverbank a few miles downstream from Knoxville, years after he’d gone missing. The man had long struggled with depression, and the general consensus, once we’d identified him, was that he had probably committed suicide by jumping from the Gay Street Bridge, Knoxville’s favorite suicide spot. “Thank you for giving me closure at last,” she had written. “It saddens me to know, once and for all, that he’s dead, but it helps me, too. Not knowing was worse. I know I speak for others when I say how much I appreciate the work you do. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
“No, thank you,” I whispered as I snapped off the light, grateful for something—anything—that could counter my sense of being a jinx. “And good night.”
I HAD A DREAM, AND IN MY DREAM, I WAS WALKING, slowly and heavily, as if I were wading in waist-deep water or weighted down. After a while, I realized that indeed I was weighted down. A heavy chain wrapped around my neck and trailed behind me. Despite the difficulty, I kept walking, but soon I realized that I was walking in a circle, covering the same ground again and again. So I stopped.
As I rested, uncertain what to do next, I became aware of someone nearby. It was a young man—a boy, really—and like me, he was wearing a chain and walking in a circle. After he had made several turns around the tree to which he was chained, I noticed that he was being followed by an immense black bear. I opened my mouth to warn the boy, but I found myself unable to speak.
I tried to reach him, so I could turn him around, show him the bear, but my chain was too short, and he remained just out of reach. He kept walking, faster and faster, and then he began to run, as if he sensed danger even though he had not seen the bear. And then, as he ran, he began to scream, louder and louder, until his shrieking woke me.
As I lay in my bed, my heart pounding, the sheets soaked with sweat, I realized I could still hear the boy shrieking.
But the shrieking was not from the boy in my dream; the shrieking, I finally understood, was from a fire truck—a rare sound in my quiet neighborhood—and as the pounding of my heart subsided, so, too, did the wail of the siren, and I was left, awake and alone, on my side of a bed that felt as empty as a black hole in space: a void so vast and dense, not even light could escape.
CHAPTER 5