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.”

<Chapter 42a

Chapter 44a>

Chapter 42a

 The blood was everywhere. 

Spattered over the tarp, the chairs. Darkening Rona’s skin like a spray-tan. Clumping in her hair.  Crusting on the faces of the artsy college students walking past them in the aisles, the ones who’d been sitting in front.

Gavin looked down at his shirt. It was like he’d been a bystander at a shooting.

Rona ran a finger along the fabric on his shoulder.  “Oil,” she said.  “Probably won’t come out.”

Of course it wouldn’t.  First they fucked up his play, and now his shirt.  Whatever.  He wasn’t uptight or anything. He could just let it go. Just a shirt. One less thing to take with him to Kansas.

Rona wanted to talk about the play, he could tell, but you couldn’t say anything in here, not in the middle of this blood-spattered audience, all filing out of the theater in silence, hushed and reverent.  She held it in until they were back in his car, door clicked closed and locked.  He was waiting to say something, too.  He hoped it was the same thing.

“Wasn’t that so amazing?  The way Mi was, he was so creepy in a way but—”

“They changed the ending.”

It had been bothering him since he saw it.  It was freaking him out worse than his shirt. Never mind how Liam Stump wrote it, how it was always done.  Just forget all that and make up your own ending. Evidently Rona hadn’t noticed it.

“What do you mean?”

Just what he said the first time. “They changed the ending.”  With more emphasis, like that would make his meaning more obvious.

“Really?”  She was detangling a bloody strand of hair, separating it half and then in half again. “But it was the same last line.  Yes, that’s right. Bloody kill me.”

Not the dialogue. It was that blue scene.  Gavin had seen more productions of The Divine Sharpness than anyone on the planet, and none of them, definitely not one, had ended like that.  They ended the way Liam Stump had written it. Bo and Mi continue tearing at the heart with teeth and fingers.  Beating heart slows, stops.  Fade to black.

“The blue scene,” he said. “At the end, when it went all blue and they floated into the sky.”

“Oh yeah, maybe that was a little different.” She gave up on that chunk of hair, moved on to another one. “I mean, of course it was. You’re the expert.”

It wasn’t a little different. It was totally different.  It was changing the whole meaning of the play.  He didn’t say anything more about it, though. If she couldn’t share his frustration, his indignation at this brazen display of directorial activism…well, there was nothing more to talk about. You can’t just change the ending of someone’s play.

Rona was off on something else already, something about the body and the mind.  He didn’t feel like following, just focused on driving.  The collar of his ruined shirt was itchy against his neck, and his hands were sticky on the steering wheel.  He tried to clear his head, stop thinking about the changed ending, but it was still there, lurking like a headache in the peripheral parts of his brain.

“Do you want to go to Café Firenze?” she asked, as soon as they turned off the state road and into New Buffalo.

“Like this?”

“Like what?”  She looked down, saw the spray of oil on her arms. It wasn’t  so bloody now that it had smeared in a bit, more like they were returning from a really rough week of camping. “That doesn’t matter.  Everyone’s cool there.”

Right, everyone was cool.  He imagined running into Randy Ledbetter there, surrounded by a six foot moat of doting students. Or what about Marjorie Mendelssohn, reviewing the dissertation of some graduate student she liked better than him. Saturday night, they won’t be there. Nothing to worry about. No, still. Showing up at the place where all his professors held office hours, on basically a date with his student, covered in rust-colored oil?  Horrible idea.

“Can we go to the other one?”

“You mean College Grounds?” He could hear her nose wrinkle.  “Why?”

“I just like it better.”

“Fine, I guess.” She pulled down the sun visor and smoothed out her hair in the mirror, like that was going to help anything. “We can go there.”

The place was packed with Kaylas and Bradens (that’s what they were called now) studying in their New Buffalo t-shirts and baseball caps and slutty shorts. Saturday night, they should be out drinking somewhere.  But no, they were here, filling every table with their crooked towers of books and file cards. 

Finals. They started in two weeks. Worst time to ever to try to have a conversation in a coffee shop.

Rona sighed, like why did you bring me to this awful place.  “I’ll find us a table,” she said. “Get me a coffee.”

“Just a regular coffee?” He had kind of expected her to get something weird like green tea or whatever a rooibos was.

“Yeah, black.”  She wandered towards the back where there were more seats.  A lot more seats, like the maximum number you could fit into the room.

Gavin wiped his face and hands with a couple napkins before he ordered.  There wasn’t a mirror anywhere, but he checked himself out in a spoon at the counter. Not horrible, but not good either.  Nothing like clean.  Plus his shirt still looked like he’d been rolling in a mud puddle. The barista squinted kind of funny at him, but he didn’t say anything, just handed him two medium paper cups so he could pump his own coffee out of a carafe.  

He found Rona way in back.  He had to shimmy his way to the table, turning his hips one way and the other to fit between the tables without spilling too much coffee.  The table lurched to one side when he set the cups down, but he was kind of expecting it.

“So, why not?” she asked, like the conversation about New York was just continuing, like The Divine Sharpness had never happened. 

She picked up her cup and studied it, skeptical.  Café Firenze used real porcelain for-here cups, which was a lot nicer for sure.

“You really want to be a professor?” she asked.

“I’m going to be a professor.”  That was just the fact of the matter.  He had accepted it now.  Want had nothing to do with it.  

“It just seems so, like, depressing,” she said.  “Like, you seem really depressed.”

Depressed?  No one had ever called him that before. He was way too normal to be depressed.

“Your energy.” She took a sip of her coffee, held it in her mouth. “You seem kind of weighed down, like you’re sighing all the time.”

Well, weighed-down, sure. Like the weight of the air around him was pressing down on him, squishing him towards the ground. That wasn’t depressed.  That was just the way things were. He tried to think of one professor, one graduate student who didn’t seem like that. Nope, nothing. Blank.

“That’s part of the job, I guess.”  

She turned the cup in her hands, smearing red-brown fingerprints over the white paper.

“You could do something else.”

“This is the only thing I know how to do.”  

“But you can learn something else.  You’re not that old.”

“I’ll be thirty in July.”

“Really.” Eyebrows raised, like she hadn’t realized.  “Well.  Age doesn’t matter.” Yes it does. It was obvious, right there in here eyes, the better-you-than-me tone of her voice. She was like, what? Nineteen.  “You can always start over. Nunca es tarde cuando la dicha es buena.”

He’d never heard her speak Spanish before.  It was kind of cute how it sounded, a little sassy, maybe a Miami accent or something.

“That’s like, better late than never,” she said, her cheeks flushing under the muddy red. “My mom always says it.”

Gavin hadn’t touched his own coffee yet.  He took a sip from the top, where an oily skin was forming over it. He felt squished into his seat, trapped. He tried to scoot back a few inches, but his chair bumped against the one behind him.  He turned around and a Kayla was glaring at him, all boobs and pink gloss.  He mouthed the word sorry and turned back to Rona.

“Here’s the thing,” he said.  “I’m gonna go.  It’s basically inevitable.”

She drank some more coffee, worked it through her jaws like she was chewing.  Even all sticky and dirty, she managed to look amazing, maybe more than usual.  Like an amazing person, someone who’d been through things. He wondered if he’d ever looked that amazing to anyone in his whole life.

“I want you to make me something,” she said.

He shook his head.  “I don’t know how to make anything.”

“But if you could make something. If you could make anything you wanted, what would it be?”

“Well.”  He’d never really said this out loud to anyone, or even to himself.  It was too embarrassing. But the way Rona was looking at him, the bigness and darkness of her eyes, made him want to say something she would approve of. “I always thought it would be cool to make a movie.  But you can’t just do that.”

“Of course you can.” She smiled, put down her cup so she could clap her dirty hands together. “Listen.  I’m going to let you move to Kansas.  But you’re going to send me a movie.”

“No, I didn’t mean—”

“It doesn’t have to be long or anything.  It can be five minutes.”  She pointed towards his pocket.  “You can make it with your phone.  Just a little movie. Something you care about.”

She reached out, put her hand over his on the table.  “You have to promise me.”

All right.  That was easy enough.  A five-minute movie with his phone. Maybe that would be a good thing to do in Kansas, learn to do a little video-editing, make a dumb little movie. He was going to have a lot of free time on his hands.

“I promise.” 

“Blood promise.”  She dragged her finger across his arm, smearing it with brown oil.  Then she held out her own arm, just a little browner than his. “Your turn.” 

He traced his finger over her skin.  It caught a little as it moved.  Maybe there was something else in that oil, something sugary like syrup. He could feel little hairs under his finger sticking to her skin.

“Okay,” she said, holding out her finger.  “I, Gavin Cheng-Johnson.”

He looked around to see who was watching this weird, witchy behavior, totally unfit for the fraternityness around them.  No one.  It was loud, nineties hip-hop blasting, girls complaining about their boyfriends and their professors.

He lifted his finger to touch hers.  “I, Gavin Cheng-Johnson,” he repeated.  

“Do solemnly swear.”

“Do solemnly swear.”

“By this blood of Bo and Mi.”

“By this—”

“Don’t laugh.  It’s serious.”

“By this blood of Bo and Mi.”

“That I will make a movie.”

“That I will.”  This one was kind of hard.  He swallowed, licked bitter coffee flavor from his lips. “I’ll make a movie.”

“And send it to Rona Gomez.”

“And send it to Rona Gomez.”

“There.”  Rona dropped her finger, left his hanging in the air in front of him.  “Now you’re free to go.  I release you. As long as you keep your promise.”

He looked at his own finger, hovering over the table, cuticles stained.  Something inside of him did feel sort of free.  It was like how you’d feel if you stepped off a cliff and suddenly discovered you could float on air.

“I’ll keep it,” he said.

When he dropped her off at the dorm a half hour later, she made him park so he could get out and give her a hug.  A goodbye hug.  Ever since she had dropped out of his class, each time he saw her had seemed like the last, but this was really it.  Maybe he'd see her in New York someday—Sinder would be living there, so maybe Gavin would find a conference to attend out there, or just go for a regular visit.  But it was just as likely that this was the end, that when she was going to unwrap her arms from his neck and be gone from his life forever. 

“I’ll be waiting,” she said, when she let go.  Waiting?  “For your movie.  Remember.  You took an oath.” 

He nodded, but she had already turned to leave.  He stood next to his car, watched her tangled hair bounce against her back as she pulled open the heavy residence hall door and disappeared. 

<Chapter 41a

Chapter 43a>