The Listener (10 page)

“You could die in your sleep.”

“All the better, for Emily.”

He went to the office every day, as usual. If he spent an hour or two now and then on the couch in his office, there was little comment. He had told his partners, “I have some kind of anemia. I have to take liver shots for them. Nothing serious, but I need considerable rest. Now, the latter part of October — we have the Hadley case coming up, and I won’t be here.”

I won’t be here.

Sometimes he thought of killing himself, in a way that would appear to be an accident, for Emily’s sake. But he was a lawyer, and he knew all about the clever probings of insurance companies. And there was the police, too.

He had nowhere to turn. He had no hobbies and few friends. He tried to read, for reading had always been his best pleasure. But he would find himself staring blankly at a page for five or ten minutes at a time, unaware of it. Emily was busily preparing her wardrobe. She would put on a smart dress and turn about for his admiration. Then he would take her hand and kiss it quickly, and put it from him as quickly. Oh, God, he would say in himself, but with blasphemy.

A less disciplined man would have broken down. He almost did when Emily insisted on his buying some clothing for the cruise. “I love this dark blue twill,” she said. He bought it. He almost remarked in his desperate rage, “Bury me in it.”

He tried to drink. His drinking had always been sparing. But he could take no more than two drinks, for then he became nauseated and he was afraid of vomiting and precipitating a fatal hemorrhage. Four weeks. He was still alive. “Still holding our own a little,” said the doctor. “For how much longer?” The doctor did not answer.

Then he read of a certain blood specialist who was doing some excellent work in prolonging the lives of leukemia victims. He told Emily that he must take a short trip. “I will be back on Wednesday,” he said.

He had seen the specialist. The doctor could give him no hope. He was dying. He could die any day now. He thought of Emily waiting for him in their pleasant suburban home. His strength became less. He must tell her, prepare her. Then while waiting for the time to leave for the airport he took a short walk in the late August sunlight in this city where John Godfrey had built his marble temple.

Eugene stopped to look at the gardens, then he saw the building and remembered the story of it which he had read some time ago. His white mouth trembled with disgust. He found himself walking up one of the winding red gravel paths, and then he was in the sitting room, waiting with these placid, uninteresting people. Waiting for what? The specialist had told him to come here; he had forgotten the advice almost immediately. But subconsciously he must have been drawn to it.

If I can come to this, he told himself, then I’m pretty far gone in my intellect.

He had a habit now of falling into brief dozes. He heard a chiming and he started, awake. He was the only one in the room now, and he knew it was his turn. The Man who Listens. Eugene stood up, then looked at the outer door and took a step toward it. He stopped. He had nothing to lose. And he might find some amusement here.

He entered the white room with its marble chair and curtained alcove. What? he thought. No crystal ball? No swami? No mystical lights and floating trumpets? And why all this light? Weren’t they afraid their fakery would be discovered?

He hadn’t put a note in the box. That would give ‘them’ a clue for ‘the spirits’, so the properly muted answer could be returned.

“I don’t,” he said to the curtain alcove, “believe in spiritualism. I don’t believe in any life after death. I’m dying, and I know that when I am dead I am finally, thoroughly, dead.”

He did not sit down. He walked about the gleaming white room as he walked about a courtroom, outlining his case, his hands in his pockets.

“I don’t know who you are behind those curtains,” he said. “Moreover, I don’t care. Doctor, clergyman, psychiatrist. There is nothing any of you can do for me now. I am dying. I may be dead tonight, tomorrow. But I will certainly be dead within a month. I don’t know why I’m here. All my affairs are in order — ”

He paused, swung about, and stared at the curtains. All my affairs are in order. “What did you say?” he demanded. Was his mind playing him tricks now? He thought he had heard: “Are they?”

“All in order,” he repeated. It was hot August outside, but here it was as refreshing as a garden filled with fountains. It was as pleasant a place to wait as any. Or he could walk in the gardens outside; he had noted, even in his cold anguish, that they were beautifully cared for, and the trees had been exceptionally lush in this August heat, and the paths were evidently thoroughly raked at least once a day, and there had been, along some paths, a suggestion of cool green arbors waiting. Emily would like these gardens. He would — he would be dead before the first leaves fell from those trees outside. He would never show Emily these gardens, or any other gardens, anywhere else in the world.

“If I have ever had any hobby at all, it was helping Emily in the gardens at home,” he said aloud. “And on Sunday afternoons. I never could understand how she could contrive to have such a massed effect at the end of the lawn, a cypress effect, with heavy shade, and a stone bench to sit on. We would go there together, to rest, to have a drink, and smoke. Sometimes when it was too hot to sleep we’d go there, and it was cool. It reminds me of a garden somewhere. I can’t remember. It was a picture of some garden with cypresses, in the moonlight, and a large flat stone — I think there were some figures in the background, sleeping. And someone — ” He shook his head. “I was only a child then. It must have been in some book.”

His heart jumped then, as if suddenly startled or struck, and he put his hand on his chest. His logical mind assured him quickly that this was not a physical symptom but an emotion. He could not remember having this emotion before, as of sorrow for someone deeply loved and understood and vanished. The very taste of sadness was on his tongue; the sickness of grief was heavy in his body.

“Now what is wrong?” he muttered. After a moment he began to pace again. “I don’t know why I am here. I am forty-nine years old, married, a successful lawyer, and I have two handsome children, a wife who loves me, and money, and a charming home. But now I must die. I have leukemia.

“Why are we permitted, all our lives, to prepare only for life and not for death? Why do we evade the very thought of death? Our friends, parents, wives, husbands, children never talk of it. It’s like an obscenity, a subject not mentioned in polite company. Yet it’s around us all the time. Perhaps I wouldn’t feel this way about it — this furious rage — if I had been taught from childhood to know that it was everywhere. I knew it was everywhere, of course, when I became a man, but like everyone else I had been sedulously protected from its presence. I was never permitted to see my father in his coffin, when he died when I was eight years old.

“People died all about us, and it was hushed up, like a terrible scandal. When my children asked about it, I grinned at them and hugged them comfortingly. What a fool I was. I should have said to them, ‘You were born so you can die’. ”

He stopped and looked challengingly at the curtains. “The child psychologists would disagree. The children must never be ‘hurt’. They must be protected until they are men. And then they are suddenly pushed out of the nursery, unprepared not only for living but especially not for death. Well, I’m going to do some good with this thing I have. I am going to call my young son and daughter to me tomorrow and say, ‘I am dying. Look at me very carefully and remember what a dying man looks like. Remember that he hates death, and fears it, and is enraged at it. It’s an ugly thing to happen to a man. It will happen to you, sooner or later. It isn’t glorious and beautiful and it doesn’t inspire spiritual thoughts. It’s hateful, and it’s the end, and there’s nothing more, except darkness and silence and never thinking again, or laughing, or working. Prepare yourselves for it and accept it. You have no other choice.”

He clenched one fist and slapped it hard into the palm of the other hand. “No choice! We had no choice to be born, we live without a reason for living, and we die as ignorant as the day we were born. But at least if we accept it from the time we can first walk and speak, it will lose some of its terror. Do you agree?”

He thought there was a movement in the room, a flash of light or an increase in light. He shook his head impatiently. And then with wonder.

“I’m not a man of words, except in the courtroom. Why am I talking like this to you, a stranger, in a strange city? I haven’t even told you my name, and I don’t intend to. I am nothing to you; worse than nothing, for I am dying, and I can’t stand the thought of it. For just when I can afford to live and know life, it is taken away from me. But why should I tell you?”

He waited. There was no answer. “I think,” he said almost kindly, “that it’s damned decent of you to sit behind that curtain and listen to any stranger who wants to come in and whimper his little tale of woe at you. At least I get paid for it!” He laughed. “I assume, of course, that you are doing this out of charity.”

He heard no movement, no breath. He walked to the curtain and looked at it curiously and read the plate near the button. “Well, I will certainly not push the button and intrude on your privacy,” he said. “Besides, it would embarrass me. I’d rather be faceless to you, as you are to me.”

He walked again. “I don’t know how old you are or how young. But, good God, do you know what it feels like to be sentenced to death? Irrevocably sentenced to death, without hope of appeal, without hope at all? No, you can’t know. My mind accepts the fact, but something in me refuses to accept it, repudiates it as if it were a lie, a subornation of the truth, the blackest falsehood ever uttered by any man. That is what I can’t understand. I say to myself, ‘You are dying. Very shortly you will be dead and in your grave, and that will be the end of hoping, loving, life. And light’. And then something answers me as angrily as if I had another self in me and it won’t even listen to reason. If there was all acceptance in me, then I could feel more peaceful, more resigned. But something won’t accept the irrefutable fact that I will soon be dead and that that is the end.”

“Of course,” he said thoughtfully, “I suppose that is the old will to live asserting itself in the very face of fact. It can’t be anything else.”

Up and down he paced, echoing step after step. He was very weary; his bones ached, and he could feel his life seeping from him drop by drop, like inner tears.

“If only there was some way to avert this, to stop it!” he exclaimed. “If only I didn’t have to face this! If only I could have it taken away!”

Once again his heart was startled and struck, more deeply this time. It appeared to have a sound, reverberating, so that it filled his body as if a strong voice had spoken. And then, without any reason at all, he saw the picture of the garden he had seen as a child, a colored picture of dark cypresses against a half-hidden moon, a spread of dark grass, a stone, sleeping men wrapped in cloaks. And someone near the stone — kneeling? His mind became confused.

“If only I didn’t have to die just now,” he muttered. “If only this — cup — could — be — taken — from — my — lips.”

He stood very still, yet rigid, trying to remember. His struggle was so intense, so concentrated, that he burst into sweat, and he felt an unendurable anguish and sorrow and fear. “I’m afraid,” he whispered to the curtain. “I’m only a man, and I’m afraid. Not the actual death, but the pain of it, and the last agony. Because after that Do you understand how it is to feel this way, this fear, this rejection of death, this hope of life, when you know you must die? But no, how could you know that, unless you have experienced it yourself?”

He had no desire to approach the curtains again or touch the button, but he found himself moving swiftly, and his hand was reaching forward.

The curtains swung aside at once, and the light gushed out. Eugene fell back rapidly and looked. And looked again. And could not stop looking.

Then he sighed, and there was no more pain in him, no fear, no terror, no anger, no despair. Only peace and a sense of releasing grief.

“Yes, yes, of course,” he said in a low voice. “You do know how it is, the rejection of death, the hope that you will not have to accept it — and the sentence of death. The loneliness of it; the horror of it.

“Yes, of course. Now I remember the whole picture of the garden, and you were kneeling, and your companions, the ones you hoped would pray with you, slept. They, in a way, were hiding from your death, as we all hide from each other’s deaths. Denying it, in sleep.

“I’m terribly sorry. I haven’t thought of you since I was a child, not honestly or deeply thought of you. There was too much work to do. Work. As if it were an end in itself, as if we had all the time in the world to live as well as work. All the time in the world. But we have hardly any time at all, have we? Only enough to know why we were born, what we must do here, and prepare for our leaving. I’d forgotten that. In a welter of work that prevented me from knowing what is of the only enduring value in the world — what a waste of time! How I wasted my time!

“I know you hear me and that you brought me here. Give me a little more time, three or four weeks. So I can tell my children what I really know now, so I can comfort my wife and assure her of the real truth — that there is no death.”

He came closer to the man who looked so piercingly at him, and he smiled. “The truth, the one great truth we have — that there is no death.”

He had made a few spontaneous gestures in his life. He hesitated, then he bent awkwardly and kissed the man’s feet. “I have all the time there is,” he said. “I have eternity.”