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.”
“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.”