Jason said, “But why is it good to go against the instinct for self-survival?”
“You don’t think I can say.”
“No,” he said.
“Because the instinct for survival loses in the end. With every living creature, mole, bat, human, frog. Even frogs who smoke cigars and play chess. You can never accomplish what your survival instinct sets out to do, so ultimately your striving ends in failure and you succumb to death, and that ends it. But if you love you can fade out and watch—”
“I’m not ready to fade out,” Jason said.
“—you can fade out and watch with happiness, and with cool, mellow, alpha contentment, the highest form of contentment, the living on of one of those you love.”
“But they die, too.”
“True.” Ruth Rae chewed on her lip.
“It’s better not to love so that never happens to you. Even a pet, a dog or a cat. As you pointed out—you love them and they perish. If the death of a rabbit is bad—” He had, then, a glimpse of horror: the crushed bones and hair of a girl, held and leaking blood, in the jaws of a dimly-seen enemy outlooming any dog.
“But you can grieve,” Ruth said, anxiously studying his face. “Jason! Grief is the most powerful emotion a man or child or animal can feel. It’s a good feeling.”
“In what fucking way?” he said harshly.
“Grief causes you to leave yourself. You step outside your narrow little pelt. And you can’t feel grief unless you’ve had love before it—grief is the final outcome of love, because it’s love lost. You do understand; I know you do. But you just don’t want to think about it. It’s the cycle of love completed: to love, to lose, to feel grief, to leave, and then to love again. Jason, grief is awareness that you will have to be alone, and there is nothing beyond that because being alone is the ultimate final destiny of each individual living creature. That’s what death is, the great loneliness. I remember once when I first smoked pot from a waterpipe rather than a joint. It, the smoke, was cool, and I didn’t realize how much I had inhaled. All of a sudden I died. For a little instant, but several seconds long. The world, every sensation, including even the awareness of my own body, of even having a body, faded out. And it didn’t like leave me in isolation in the usual sense because when you’re alone in the usual sense you still have sense data coming in even if it’s only from your own body. But even the darkness went away. Everything just ceased. Silence. Nothing. Alone.”
“They must have soaked it in one of those toxic shit things. That used to burn out so many people back then.”
“Yes, I’m lucky I ever got my head back. A freak thing—I had smoked pot a lot of times before and that never happened. That’s why I do tobacco, now, after that. Anyhow, it wasn’t like fainting; I didn’t feel I was going to fall, because I had nothing to fall with, no body … and there was no down to fall toward. Everything, including myself, just”—she gestured—“expired. Like the last drop out of a bottle. And then, presently, they rolled the film again. The feature we call reality.” She paused, puffing on her tobacco cigarette. “I never told anyone about it before.”
“Were you frightened about it?”
She nodded. “Consciousness of unconsciousness, if you dig what I mean. When we do die we won’t feel it because that’s what dying is, the loss of all that. So, for example, I’m not at all scared of dying anymore, not after that pot bad trip. But to grieve; it’s to die and be alive at the same time. The most absolute, overpowering experience you can feel, therefore. Sometimes I swear we weren’t constructed to go through such a thing; it’s too much—your body damn near self-destructs with all that heaving and surging. But I want to feel grief. To have tears.”
“Why?” He couldn’t grasp it; to him it was something to be avoided. When you felt that you got the hell out fast.
Ruth said, “Grief reunites you with what you’ve lost. It’s a merging; you go with the loved thing or person that’s going away. In some fashion you split with yourself and accompany it, go part of the way with it on its journey. You follow it as far as you can go. I remember one time when I had this dog I loved. I was roughly seventeen or eighteen—just around the age of consent, that’s how I remember. The dog got sick and we took him to the vet’s. They said he had eaten rat poison and was nothing more than a sack of blood inside and the next twenty-four hours would determine if he’d survive. I went home and waited and then around eleven P.M. I crashed. The vet was going to phone me in the morning when he got there to tell me if Hank had lived through the night. I got up at eight-thirty and tried to get it all together in my head, waiting for the call. I went into the bathroom—I wanted to brush my teeth—and I saw Hank, at the bottom left part of the room; he was slowly in a very measured dignified fashion climbing invisible stairs. I watched him go upward diagonally as he trudged and then at the top right margin of the bathroom he disappeared, still climbing. He didn’t look back once. I knew he had died. And then the phone rang and the vet told me that Hank was dead. But I saw him going upward. And of course I felt terrible overwhelming grief, and as I did so, I lost myself and followed along with him, up the fucking stairs.”
Both of them stayed silent for a time.
“But finally,” Ruth said, clearing her throat, “the grief goes away and you phase back into this world. Without him.”
“And you can accept that.”
“What the hell choice is there? You cry, you continue to cry, because you don’t ever completely come back from where you went with him—a fragment broken off your pulsing, pumping heart is there still. A nick out of it. A cut that never heals. And if, when it happens to you over and over again in life, too much of your heart does finally go away, then you can’t feel grief any more. And then you yourself are ready to die. You’ll walk up the inclined ladder and someone else will remain behind grieving for you.”
“There are no cuts in my heart,” Jason said.
“If you split now,” Ruth said huskily, but with composure unusual for her, “that’s the way it’ll be for me right then and there.”
“I’ll stay until tomorrow,” he said. It would take at least until then for the pol lab to discern the spuriousness of his ID cards.
Did Kathy save me? he wondered. Or destroy me? He really did not know. Kathy, he thought, who used me, who at nineteen knows more than you and I put together. More than we will find out in the totality of our lives, all the way to the graveyard.
Like a good encounter-group leader she had torn him down—for what? To rebuild him again, stronger than before? He doubted it. But it remained a possibility. It should not be forgotten. He felt toward Kathy a certain strange cynical trust, both absolute and unconvincing; one half of his brain saw her as reliable beyond the power of the telling of it, and the other half saw her as debased, for sale, and fucking up right and left. He could not put it together into one view. The two images of Kathy remained superimposed in his head.
Maybe I can resolve my parallel conceptions of Kathy before I leave here, he thought. Before morning. But maybe he could stay even one day after that … it would be stretching it, however. How good really are the police? he asked himself. They managed to get my name wrong; they pulled the wrong file on me. Isn’t it possible they’ll fuck up all down the line? Maybe. But maybe not.
He had mutually opposing conceptions of the police, too. And could not resolve those either. And so, like a rabbit, like Emily Fusselman’s rabbit, froze where he was. Hoping as he did so that everyone understood the rules: you do not destroy a creature that does not know what to do.