Chapter 43a

Act III, Scene II

The lights rise on Thomas McGrew III, alone on the slide.  He sits motionless, bible open on his lap, staring left past the proscenium. His face is very thin. He is so still that the audience might think he is a statue.

TMGIII (looks down at the bible, murmuring): “Take courage, and be strong.  Be strong: For so will the Lord do.”

He clears his throat, drops his forehead to his hand. Lifts his head back up.

TMGIII: “Fear not.  Neither be ye dismayed.”

He looks left again and recites from memory.

TMGIII: “And when this mortal hath put on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: Death.”

Sighs.  Looks down at the bible.  Up the slide to the right.  He studies his surroundings, as though he has lost something he might find there. He smiles a large smile, as though spotting an old friend. He holds the smile for a few moments, scanning the slide up and down. But slowly, his cheeks sink, as though too heavy to hold up. He looks back down to the left.  Stillness.

TMGIII: “Death is swallowed up.  In victory.”

He looks down at the bible, closes it with a loud smacking sound. Looks up and down the slide again, then down to the left.

Very slowly, so gradually that it is barely perceptible at first, a ripple travels the length of the slide. The center begins to droop.

TMGIII (speaking slowly, his voice dry): Now that I come to think of it.  I don’t understand.  How this thing. 

Five minutes pass. The spot where he is sitting sags low, then lower under his weight. It  is beginning to buckle under.

TMGIII: Stays up.

He continues to stare offstage, towards the spot where Thomas McGrew IV disappeared. There is a creak, a loud grown, a snapping noise.  The slide cracks in two.  A great avalanche of rubble crashes downwards. Thomas McGrew, still seated on his stool, hovers, suspended between the halves. The bible flies out of his hands and up into the air, past the top of the proscenium.

TMGIII: Some help you were.

He drops straight down into the abyss below.

Lights shine for five minutes on the ragged halves of the broken slide.  One small chunk of concrete rolls slowly down the upper section, until it falls off the edge.

Fade to black.  The show is over.

* * *

“These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit.”

—Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror.

* * *

Really nice to see you.

Yes, sad circumstances.

Important that we can come together at times like this.

He would be so happy you’re here.

It felt weird for sure, being back in New Buffalo, in that giant room on the top floor where they held all the big English department events like job talks and yearly welcome receptions for new graduate students. But that’s how it was supposed to feel, right?  Weird, surreal, you know, given the circumstances. He hadn’t gotten around to visiting since he moved away three years ago, and now he really wished he had, at least once.  It was only an eleven-hour drive, or a two-hundred dollar flight, but he was too tired for anything out of his routine, and anyway, who was there to visit?

Well, nobody now.  He should have come back sooner.  The email from Marjorie Mendelssohn showed up in his inbox last week.

I am truly sorry to report the passing of our colleague, Dr. Jeremy Frick.  The University of New Buffalo English department invites you to a memorial service celebrating his life and work .  We hope you are able to attend.

So that was that.  Like when you come back to your house to eat dinner only your house is on fire. An emergency.  You might have had expectations, your normal routine.  But today things weren’t gonna happen that way.

Time to get in the car and drive to Indiana.

It was weird when he got there, all those people whose opinions used to have actual consequences for his life, and now he had pretty much forgotten they existed. All shuffling around the meeting hall looking subdued and mournful.  He tried to look that way, too. Maybe if he looked sad enough, nobody would try to make small talk.

Marjorie led the service. She was all about a great tragedy, a fine teacher and scholar, even though the two of them had pretty much hated each other.  And then every other speaker—yeah, literally all of them—started and/or ended with the requisite Romulus Keener pun. Funeral of a giant indeed.  We find ourselves at the funeral of a true giant in Irish literary studies.  Stuff like that.  So trite, and anyway this was a memorial, not a funeral. 

There was a reception after, with wine and crackers and cheese and strawberries.  He didn’t feel hungry, not even a little, but he hadn’t had any lunch and his stomach was growling all crazy.  He put a couple crackers and slices of supermarket brie on a paper plate. He couldn’t really get a bite in though.  All these people he barely remembered were patting him on the back, hugging him, talking about how sad it was. He nodded, shook his head, avoided calling anyone by name so he wouldn’t mess it up. Yeah, so sad.  Yeah, so young.

He walked over to a wall and pretended to read the bulletin board while he shoved a couple crackers in his mouth. There was a newsletter describing department accomplishments for the last year: a few books, one by Marjorie, articles, keynote addresses. Frick had one thing listed, a section of his Funeral of Giants book, reprinted in some new Keener anthology.

Someone touched his shoulder.  He gulp down the dry cracker in his mouth, sputtered some of it through his lips as he turned.  It was Marjorie Mendelssohn, in an olive green jacket and matching flowy pants. Her arms were open, her hand on his elbow.  He couldn’t figure out what she was doing at first, but then he realized she wanted a hug.

Okay.  He stuck one arm around her without really touching her, balancing his plate of  plate of cheese in the other, trying not to spill anything on her.

“Oh Gavin.”  Her voice was like a sigh.  “It’s so good to see you.”

It is?

“I’ve been meaning to get in touch.”  Her hand was still wrapped around his upper arm like they were old friends.  “To congratulate you on your article in New Irish Modernism Studies.  Your career really seems to be taking off.  We’d like to do a spread on your upcoming book in the next department newsletter, if you wouldn’t mind.  I was meaning to write and ask you, but then, you know, all this.”  

She waved towards the center of the room, at professors in serious brown outfits, hands crossed over their chests as they talked in little groups. Graduate students were drinking wine out of plastic cups, looking all exhausted in their rumpled clothes.  Kat was there, tottering on high black heels, her hair glossy like cherries, Some guy from the history department had his arm around her, consoling her. It was like a photo you’d see in a brochure for a school you’d never been to.  And you would think, is it possibly to be so generically collegey? Are those even real people, or were they generated by computers?

“You must feel horrible,” Marjorie said.

He wondered how she knew, but then, no: she meant about Frick.  Was that what was making him feel so crappy? The situation was sad, definitely. Like, Jeremy Frick has finally officially dropped dead of a heart attack, how sad.  But not sad in a surprising how could this happen way.  More like some kind of sad end to a sad movie. Like maybe you didn’t know all along it would end this way, but once it did, you were like, yeah, that makes sense.

“I’ll be okay.”

“Of course you will.”  She squeezed his arm a little harder.  “You’re resilient.”

He smiled a little, sort of bravely, and waited for her to move on to the next person. When she was gone, he popped a little cube of brie into his mouth, chewed, swallowed.  He wished he had something to drink, but all they had was wine.  What he wanted was water, or something sugary would be even better, lemonade or punch.  He cleared his throat, tried to clear the food residues out of it.  He couldn’t work up enough saliva to get a good swallow.

Get some wine.

And maybe a little more cheese.  Now that he’d put some food in his stomach, he realized he was starving.  Back at the table, he reloaded his plate with a stack of crackers, two of each cheeses.  One strawberry, so it would look like he was eating something healthy. Then he filled a plastic cup with Chardonnay.  He usually drank red wine, but white was more water-like.

Someone clapped him on the shoulder. “Go easy, fella.”  It was Randy Ledbetter.  “You can’t drink him back to life.”

“Oh, um.”  Gavin studied Randy’s meaty cheeks, the smirk on his lips. It was a joke, Gavin was pretty sure. “Just thirsty.”

“You look good,” Randy said. Which was a lie.  Since Kansas, he’d put on thirty pounds, grown one of those fat-guy necks that puffed out under his chin.  There was a gym on campus, but he couldn’t get motivated to go.  Couldn’t get motivated to do anything but teach his four classes, grade his giant stacks of essays, edit the book that was his ticket out.  Plus the one time he did go he saw at least four of his students, even had to run on a treadmill next to one of them, a big strapping girl who looked like a rugby player or something.

“Sad news,” Randy said. He was holding a plate that was even more full than Gavin’s. He popped a giant strawberry into his mouth.

“Very sad,” Gavin said.

“Though hardly unexpected.”  Randy leaned in towards him but didn’t lower his voice. Gavin could see the wiry beard hairs poking out of his pores, the strawberry juice clinging to his lips.   “All those pills.”

“Uh huh.” Gavin looked around to see if anyone could hear.  It’s not like he was Miss Manners or anything, but it seemed rude to be talking shit about a guy at his memorial.  The only other people at the food table were some grad students refilling their wine cups, way too tired to notice.

“It wasn’t Kat who found him,” Randy said. “It was some other girl.  An undergrad. This girl just showed up in the afternoon, opened the door and found him all blue and cold.  No one knows what she was doing at his house.”  He shook his head, kind of smiled. “Poor guy.”

Gavin wasn’t sure what to say, so he took a tiny bite of his own strawberry.  It was big and juicy and red, like a strawberry was supposed to be, but it didn’t taste like much of anything.

“You in touch with Sinder?” Randy asked.

“A little.”  As in, they had chatted online a handful of times.  Last Gavin had heard, Sinder and Rona had broken up again.  Actually, that’s always when Sinder messaged him, right after a breakup with Rona.  Whether they were together or broken up, they still shared the same apartment in Brooklyn, along with four other roommates even though the lease said three-occupant maximum.  

Rona’s performance piece about the trees had just been staged for the first time.  Everyone fucking loves it, Sinder said.  He was working in a coffee shop, making espressos and whatever. Gavin still had his philosophy dictionary.  He took it off the shelf once in a while, when he was having trouble sleeping, thumbed through entries on Descartes and Foucault until he got drowsy.

Rona texted him once in a while, too.  Always the same thing: Where’s my movie.

And Gavin always texted back: Working on it.

Which was a lie.  There was no way he had time to think about a movie. 

The only thing he was thinking about was abjection and time in the works of Liam Stump.  That was it.  Well, that and how to get out of Kansas, but that was basically the same topic.  He got up at eight every day of every week, was in his office by nine, working on his book.  If it was Monday/Wednesday/Friday, his classes started at eleven, and if it was Tuesday/Thursday they started at noon, and if it was Saturday/Sunday he just sat and wrote until seven.  Then he went home, microwaved some food and watched a little TV to unwind, went to bed. Every once in a while he went out to the bar with Lee, ostensibly trying to meet women. But there weren’t any women, at least not any that didn’t look like soccer moms or rodeo queens. That was okay; no time for women. The sooner the book was written, published, celebrated as a game changer by a small roomful of Irish Modernism and theater scholars, the sooner some other university would hire him.  Hopefully some university someplace better.  Like basically anywhere.

“Well, send him my regards,” Randy said. “I always thought it was too bad he left.  Talented guy.  He could have been one of us.”

“Okay, yeah,” Gavin said.  “I'll tell him you said hi.”

“So.”  Randy popped a cracker and a hunk of cheese in his mouth, talked while he chewed.  His eyes twinkled for a minute under the bushy gray eyebrows.  Twinkled. It reminded Gavin of something he couldn’t quite place. “I assume you’ll be going out for the job? I mean when they open it up.”

What job?  

Oh.  Gavin hadn’t thought about that. The idea made him dizzy, kind of sick like he might throw up. He set his wine on the table so he could brace with one hand.

“Open position in Irish Modernism,” Randy said. “It’ll be stiff competition.  Better get that book out.”  He patted Gavin on the arm, winked one dark, twinkling eye.  “I’m sure Frick would have wanted you to have it.”

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Chapter 44a>