This news is so bad it won’t stay in your head. Every second you’re afraid
you’ll forget it. You’ve always been a terrible messenger, a bumbler, a conduit
for trouble. After your alarm about forgetting passes, you become
afraid you’ll laugh while trying to pronounce the words. You worry the same
giggles that afflict you during the eulogy at funerals will seize you the minute
you moisten your lips to speak. Then a more rigid panic grabs you. You’re
afraid the person you’re telling this grim tale to will also begin to laugh,
louder and louder, till his voice completely fills the room, and you can prac-
tically see the huge black HA HA HA’s scrawled in the air, vibrating like violin
strings, just as in cartoons. Eventually the other person will stop laughing
and twist your head off.
Delivering awful news is like having to eat a knife, tearing the blade off in
bites and chewing it up as if it were only a piece of the thin silver foil chocolate
mints come wrapped in. Action slows down to a crawl. It seems you’re suddenly
underwater. You walked down the hall under your own power and
stuck your head into your father’s study. But because of what you saw, a
current clumsily ushers you back into the kitchen, where your mother’s un-
loading groceries, a can of stewed tomatoes in each hand. Your mouth opens
and closes like a sea creature’s, but no plankton swim in. She says, "what’s
wrong?" Then centuries go by: a blur of summerfallwinterspringsum-
merswintersfalls. Leaves color, shrivel, and plummet to the ground.
Branches bud, and the flowers gape and drop off… over and over. All in the
space of the eight seconds it takes you to answer your mother. This is why it’s
said tragedy ages you prematurely. It causes the little movie of your life to run
through the projector at fast forward till you can get the right words out of
your mouth and stop the runaway film. You want to believe you saw wrong.
Maybe you only dreamed you poked your head into Dad’s study and his
slumped body with its head and hands on the messy desk had its back to you.
You dreamed you tiptoed up from behind and read the note on the blotter in
his well-tailored handwriting. The problem is, you’re wide awake as you
take the canned tomatoes out of your mother’s hands and set them on the
counter next to the toaster. Then you pull her down the hall by her sleeve.
You force her into your dream. You stop short of the door, and point, so she
has to push you, gently, out of the way. "I haven’t got time for your shenani-
gans," she says briskly. When she enters, nothing happens for a few seconds,
but you know she sees, because she sags a little, knees buckling slightly, as
though a huge hand had dropped her there from a great height. She puts her
arms around him from behind and one of his arms falls off the desk and dan-
gles like a doll’s. Then she lays her head on his and closes her eyes. This is your
fault. You led her right to it.
If you slip out into the backyard after the cars start pulling up, no one will
notice your absence. Your mother answers terrible questions, bears every-
thing–the clumping boots muddying the carpet, interrupting voices, the
constant use of the phone. A committee of neighbors is out on the lawn, con-
sulting each other. Maybe they’re shading their eyes.
There are blinding bright patches and dead cold spots in the air, and what-
ever light’s there buries you. When it gets dark, a long slow fuse is lit in you by
the stars. You smolder and feel you’re dissolving, like the contents of some
sarcophagus thousands of years old that’s been dug up by grave robbers.
You’re nothing but a mummy who’s been preserved inside four elaborate
airtight coffins, the innermost of which is covered with writing–every sa-
cred phrase your dead language ever possessed. The overeager, sweat-
drenched marauders don’t wait till they get back to the hideout. They pry
open your box right then and there. Your bones turn to dust instantaneously,
as soon as the air hits them. But your reduction to dust provides no moment
of clemency, no flash in which you are vaporized so your residue can mingle
with the mineral elements. Consciousness takes many forms, all of them
obstinate. Ground to powder (for the first or your trillionth time?), the hiero-
glyphics composed specifically for you still sing of the long and difficult jour-
ney you must make in utter darkness to have your heart weighed.
– Amy Gerstler
from "Bitter Angel"
