She is embarrassed that a stranger brings her father’s lunch. It looks bad.
Messenger believes they don’t know anything about him.
Mr. Mead, the old farmer, the old sailor and river cook, the ancient, if Louise is right, birthday boy — Mr. Mead, on this ordinary afternoon in St. Louis, has a moment of special clarity, brighter and more exciting than the routine orientation and simple daily legibility of his life. His body, which these past — How many years had he been an old man?
“Is it really my birthday?”
“Of course, Dad.” The woman nods almost imperceptibly in Cornell’s direction.
“Is it?” he asks the man who has brought his lunch.
What’s going on? Cornell wonders. Are they having the old-timer on? Didn’t he just have bakery in his mouth? How old he must be. Cornell raises his fork toward Mr. Mead. “Happy birthday,” he says.
Louise is a little irritated with her father. They’ve never been separated — the trips on the river were business — but they were not really close. His fault. He was independent always. Even old he is independent. People in a family shouldn’t have to woo each other. She’s always sent him cards, brought gifts, kept track of his anniversaries and celebrations, kept score on his life. Now he asks a stranger if it’s really his birthday. She’s not sore because he doesn’t trust her — he’s old, it’s easy for a person her father’s age to become confused — but because all his confidence has not been blasted. Some remains. He appeals to strangers, outside authority.
He remembers now. Not because Harve’s father has wished him happy birthday. He remembers.
He’s going to die. It isn’t a premonition. No Indian instinct commands him to cut himself from the herd. He is under no compulsion to be alone, to be anywhere but where he is. His knowledge of his death doesn’t even come from outside himself. And now he pinpoints the exciting clarity, the special orientation. It’s his body which has had the first inkling, his skin which cannot feel the bedclothes or register weight. His toenails which no longer slice back into his flesh, and his bones which no longer harbor pain, the gray blaze of years’ duration which has served as a sort of measuring device. (I am as tall as my pain.) His teeth which no longer have dimension, their honed edges and the bump of gums and the false-scale depth he has plumbed with his tongue. His stubble which he no longer feels when he draws his lower lip into his mouth. He is neutral as hair. And though residual movement remains — he can draw his lower lip into his mouth, he can open his eyes, shut them — and at least the minimal synapses which permit him his speech, he can no longer feel it resonate along its dental and aspirate contacts and stops, his voice as alien to him as if it came from a radio. (How can it even be heard?) His nervous system is shutting down, fleeing its old painful coordinates as if a warning had been given, like the blinking of lights, say, that signal people to leave a public building. He is dying.
And now he can’t speak either. Or close his eyes. And death has come to certain emotions. He means to be afraid, is certain he is afraid, yet he feels no fear, his mind and body not up to it, unable to accommodate it now that his resources are so depleted, as if on the occasion of final things, in emergency conditions, life entertained only that which was still essential to it, like a level-headed victim, like a clever refugee. Though he should be surprised, the nerves of astonishment have been cut.
Though he can no longer see or hear her — just now his ears have turned off — he knows that his daughter is beside him. Probably she is holding his hand. And he tries, helplessly, uselessly, to return the pressure. He could as easily fly. (Is he flying?) And now affection is deadened too, all the emotions tapped out as his skin. He knows what he should be feeling — and now italics leave him — as he had known seconds before that he should be afraid, that he wanted to be afraid, but it is all impossible. He may only — blinded, deafened, without italics — witness his death, less involved, finally, than the man, what’shisname, the lunch guy’s pal, who was going to have his wife committed if she didn’t cheer up. He’d be grateful if gratitude were any more available to him than fear or sight or the weight of his bedclothes.
Now he is almost used up. Denied physiology, he regards his Cheshire decline with what? With nothing. What should have been of interest, the most personal moment in his life, is now merely consciousness, knowledge, the mind’s disinterested attention. He is like someone neither participant nor fan who hears a ball score. Like a man in Nebraska told it’s raining in Paris. He watches death with his knowledge and no money riding on it.
He is alone in the map room, cannot perceive the quadrants of his being as his sectors succumb and are obliterated and do not, for all their pale, attenuate traces, seem even poignantly to flare in the face of their extinguishment. Typography and symbols fail him, all the niceties. He cannot read the signs and illuminations, the channel buoys, all the white lines in the road, all the lodestars and mileposts, vanes and windsocks and load-line marks that could show him boundaries or indicate how low he rides in the water. (And now even the circuits that make analogies have been discontinued.) He is almost history, narrative, gossip.
He knows he cannot see. Has he eyes? He knows he cannot hear. Has he ears? He knows he cannot feel. Has he flesh? Is his sphincter open? Has he still a body? Is it turned to bruise? Does it run with pus?
All that is left to him finally — and he could use his astonishment now if he were able — is what he will become when he no longer knows it. Nothing sacred is happening here, nothing very solemn, nothing important. There is almost certainly no God. He would tell George Mills not to bother about his salvation if he could, but it doesn’t make any difference that he can’t. What could he use now if it were still available to him? His amazement? No. His fear? Certainly not. His old capacity to care for them? Useless. Any of his feelings? No. Useless, useless.
He remembers — peculiarly, memory still flickers, and a certain ability, probably reflex, to muse, to consider; all this would be something to share if he could, to tell them that memory is the last thing left in the blood when you check out, that you die piecemeal, in sections, departments, and it’s memory goes down with the ship, though it might be different with different people; maybe it’s important sometimes, maybe it’s sacred once in a while, and God might come for some but not for others; Christ, he’s dying like someone stabbed in opera, stumbling around with a mouthful of arias (Jesus, is there hope? Where did the images and italics come from? He isn’t sure but certainly there is no hope. He does not hope.), and maybe that’s why death was so long-winded, why disease took as long as it did — to give the systems time to wind down, but that’d be different for different people too; maybe some went with a great flaming itch they couldn’t get to — his first large woman.
Well, woman. She was fourteen years old and weighed one hundred and seventy-four pounds. Lord, she was big. It wasn’t fat, circus lady fat, jinxed genes and a broken pituitary. What was merely chemical — he imagined cells in geometric replication, like a queer produce that laced some glandular broth — did not become human for him. It was never just weight which tickled his fancy, great boluses of flesh which draped their heavy arms and thighs like a sort of bunting. Great heavy asses so big their cracks seemed like surgical scars. Immense bolsters of breast that piled and rolled on their chests like tide. But some idea of heaviness, of mass and strength and density which sent out a kind of gravity.