The Truth About Death

by Robert Hellenga

  “You’re only upsetting yourself.”

  Hannah, who had been lying down in the bedroom, joined them at the old-fashioned table that was too large for the dining alcove. The smooth planes of her freckled face had been redefined by the non-Euclidian geometry of grief; parallel lines were beginning to meet around her eyes. “ ‘The Lord giveth,” she said, “and the Lord taketh away.’ We’ve got to celebrate this death just like we did Daddy’s.”

  “Jesus Christ, your daddy was seventy-five years old.”

  “It’s God’s will, Julie.” Father Neumiller held out a trembling hand to her. He was a tough old bird, a whiskey priest with a few good years left. He took pills that kept him off the sauce, some of the time anyway. The pills dried out his mouth as well as his liver, and his tongue flicked out unpredictably from between his heavy lips. Hannah had brought him home one night from the library, and the three of them had tied one on. In the middle of the night they’d gone up to the fortieth floor to have a look at the lights of the city. “The City of God,” Father Neumiller had mumbled into a Waterford tumbler full of yellow whiskey. He held the tumbler close to his lips and waved his free hand vaguely in the general direction of the sky: “ ‘Seek him who maketh the seven stars and Orion.’ Isaiah.” Together they gazed up at the great constellations wheeling above them—Canis Minor, Taurus, the great bear—monsters grazing across the Chicago sky as they had grazed over the ancient civilizations of China and Greece, imaginary configurations by which mariners still navigate, as if the universe were in fact a system of concentric spheres and not a mathematical description of a finite curve with unimaginable coordinates. They were too far gone to notice Boötes the herdsman rising over Lake Michigan.

  “Dinah. Dinah. Dinah.” Hannah was calling softly. Julian turned and entered the room behind him, which was windowless and small, barely wide enough to accommodate the narrow hospital gurney that she was lying on, her arms and legs restrained by canvas straps. Her face glowed with a terrible flame that illuminated Julian’s inner darkness—Dinah’s sparkling gray eyes peering up at him through her first pair of glasses. “Papa, papa. I can see them. I can see the stars.”

  Hannah did not look at him. “Yes, yes, yes,” she said; “He will understand. If only I could make you understand, Julie.” Her voice, slow and measured, as if she were reciting a poem in Latin, began to pick up speed, a broad river flowing into a narrow channel. “How anxious I’ve become. My skin is crawling, and when I look at the lamp it’s like looking at the sun, but the sky around is all dark and I can see little lights, circling, counterclockwise around my heart, unwinding the center like a ball of twine, undoing everything. We must go at once before it’s too late. Can’t you hear her crying?”

  Julian listened. A door closed. Someone was crying. There was a strange buzzing in his ears—life-support systems humming steadily in distant wards. Were there life-support systems for the soul? For Dinah’s? For Hannah’s?

  She was still wearing her silk breakfast dress. She had been gone when he returned with the Times. The thin material of the dress had been sewn with the fabric reversed, muting constellations of pink roses. Julian pulled the hem down over her legs.

  “There’s no grieving in that land,” she said, “but oh, Julie, I can’t bear to her crying so. It’s kept me awake all this time, and I’m so tired, Julie. I didn’t want to tell you, but I’m so tired now.”

  In what land? In what land could they meet again as man and wife, two bodies with one soul inspired? Julian did not know where to locate it on the map of the future. Confused and conflicting reports taxed his powers, just as confused and conflicting accounts of the New World once taxed the powers of Renaissance cartographers.

  “It’s terrible to lie there all alone. My baby, my baby, Mama hears you. Don’t struggle so. I’ve packed your new jumper and Penrod.”

  The fierce jaws of Penrod, a stuffed alligator, protruded from Hannah’s oversized handbag, propped against the lamp on a small table that also held a water pitcher and a box of tissues. Julian’s deepest fears condensed into a shower of pain, and he struggled to find his way through the pain to a place of shelter beyond the present moment. But wherever he turned he was met by Dinah running to greet him, her thin arms outstretched, her glasses slipping down her nose. In his eagerness to embrace her he started forward, but like a dream she slipped through his arms, and he stumbled, more desolate than before. He was falling from a high place, and Father Neumiller was waiting to catch him. But Father Neumiller was falling too. Julian had caught his arm just in time to prevent him from stumbling down the steps at the funeral parlor.

  Hannah began to struggle against the canvas restraints. She thrashed about like someone who has been thrown overboard, bound hand and foot. What bold swimmer would plunge in and rescue her? Those seas were too heavy for Julian; she was too far from shore. He was about to call for help when the doctor entered. He was too large for the little room and for the white hospital jacket that lay on his huge frame like snow on the sloping sides of a mountain. Julian, unable to conceal his relief, smiled stupidly at the yellow papers that the doctor waved at him, as if the papers contained whatever explanation was necessary.

  Hannah’s name had already been typed in capital letters at the top of the form, which the doctor placed on the table next to the handbag containing Penrod. The table was slightly damp and the papers stuck to it. Julian waved aside the doctor’s ballpoint and with his own broad-nibbed Italic pen began to check a series of boxes affirming that he was an interested person, eighteen or older, seeking the respondent’s admission in order to prevent him/her from inflicting serious physical harm upon himself/herself or others in the near future and that he had no financial interest in this matter and that he was not involved in litigation with the respondent. At the bottom of the second page he signed his name, Julian R. Dijksterhuis—a ripple of anxiety on the calm surface of the official document.

  Hannah, he learned, had been searching for Dinah at the Old Town School of Folk Music on Armitage Avenue when she was picked up by the police.

  “I take it,” said the doctor, “that you attended a program at the Old Town School on the afternoon of your daughter’s death?”

  “Yes.”

  They had gone to see Maurice Jenkins’s popular one-man enactment of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Jenkins, one of Julian’s colleagues at the Conservatory, was a versatile and accomplished musician who’d charmed the children in the audience onto the stage, hopping and skipping like Danny Kaye and brandishing a fourteen-string German lute. Dinah had been the first to join in. And even Sara, who considered herself too grown-up for such antics, couldn’t resist the pull of the strange medieval sonorities, consecutive fifths and octaves, both melancholy and gay. She’d danced with the rest, three times around the rows of folding chairs, bringing up the rear. And when the children disappeared through a narrow curtain at the back of the hall, it was she who had reappeared to explain that the others had gone to live under the mountain and would not be coming back.

  After the program was over, children had exploded into the hall; but Julian had to fetch Dinah, who had wandered up the back staircase and had been drinking a Coca-Cola with Jenkins himself. She was having trouble breathing.

  “Get her to a doctor, for Christ’s sake,” Maurice had said to him.

  “It’s her asthma,” said Julian. “And she’s allergic to a million things. We’ve just got to live with it.”

  She died that night—asthma complicated by a sudden bacterial pneumonia. Massive doses of sulfadiazine had been administered, but too late to check the flow of pneumococci that had cascaded over the mucus secretions and cilia that line the respiratory tract, on into the air sacs of the lungs, drowning her in her own inflammatory exudate.

  Hannah began to murmur in a low voice. Familiar biblical phrases bobbed up and down on a tumbling stream of nonsense.

  “Glossolalia,” Julian explained. “She gets it from the priest. He’s a charismatic. A drunk, t
oo.”

  The doctor’s eyes moved from Julian to Hannah and back again. “The human mind,” he said, “is absolutely astonishing—a biochemical maze more intricate and ingeniously constructed than any other cubic half-foot in the universe. Our crude analogies—the telephone exchange, the binary computer—don’t begin to suggest the complexities.” He waved his hand in front of his face, as if to brush aside the complexities. “But for all that we’re groping our way to the inner chambers. Like the King Tut people, eh?”

  Julian handed him the yellow form. “What do you expect to find when you get there?”

  “Perhaps the self-reflections of our own thought processes, perhaps nothing.”

  “What do you mean, ‘nothing’? There’s got to be something.”

  “That remains to be seen.”

  “And in the meantime?”

  “In the meantime we have at our disposal a powerful pharmacopoeia, not just a series of isolated medications, but whole families of drugs that take effect along quite different neurological pathways. The first step is to isolate one that will silence the voices she’s been hallucinating.” The doctor looked down at Hannah.

  “It’s the little girl’s death that causes them,” explained Julian.

  “More likely a lithium deficiency or an excess of tryptophan amines in the bloodstream.”

  “It came at a bad time.”

  “I’ve gathered as much, Mr. Dijksterhuis; but one time is much like another, especially in the case of a child, which can’t be reconciled with any metaphysical system, much less your wife’s. The strain has precipitated an acute psychotic break, a chemical imbalance that will have to be redressed.”

  Better a chemical imbalance, thought Julian, than the hand of God. But he did not want the doctor to have it all his own way either. “Surely, a metaphysical system is like a cup,” he said; “it may be larger or smaller, but it will hold some truth.” He was repeating something he had heard from Father Neumiller.

  The doctor frowned. “If I may alter the metaphor,” he said, “I should say that a metaphysical system is like a sieve; however large or small it is, it won’t hold water.”

  “But you can’t get on without some metaphysical assumptions, whether you articulate them or not.”

  “Well, perhaps so, but at least you can abandon the claim to occupy a privileged position, one outside the natural order of things. That’s where the mischief begins. How presumptuous we are. It’s astonishing, really. We shut ourselves up in our studies and imagine existences that transcend the writhing life of the planet, when in fact we are firmly embedded in nature. The oxidative energy that enables the profoundest metaphysician to lift his pen is released in the cells by mitochondria which are themselves derived from migrant prokaryotes—primitive bacteria. These in turn … But why go on? It’s our most persistent illusion. A shooting star on the horizon”—the doctor gazed upward at an imaginary shooting star—“inflames our imaginations, and we envision a bright land beyond the world’s end. But in the struggle to maintain the vision, even the strongest natures are exhausted and lose their hold on reality.”

  Julian raised his hand, like the doctor’s profound metaphysician, and laid it on Hannah’s forehead, a simple gesture that filled him with wonder. His arm tingled. He thought of himself as a colony of cells, colonies within colonies of microorganisms pursuing their appointed tasks independent of his will, links in a chain that bound him to foxes and wolves in distant forests, on the slopes of distant mountains, and to the forests themselves, the whole kingdom of becoming.

  “When I went out this morning,” Hannah said loudly and clearly, “I heard someone say, ‘It’s the handmaiden of the Lord,’ but I couldn’t see who it was.”

  “Try to keep her quiet,” the doctor said.

  “I have to tell you something.” Her forehead crinkled under Julian’s hand. “There were people at the bus stop, and I thought that one of them had mistaken me for someone else. I couldn’t be sure, so I got on the bus, and then I heard it again.”

  “Mrs. Dijksterhuis, I’m going to give you something that will help you sleep.”

  “You’ll have to let me go first.”

  “Just try to relax now.”

  “I have to go to the toilet. I’ve had to go for a long time.”

  The doctor turned to leave. “I’ll be back in a jiffy,” he said. “Don’t undo her whatever you do or we’ll have the devil to pay. I want to give her a sedative and a dose of Thorazine. Keep her quiet—that’s the main thing. Talk to her; tell her a story; anything.”

  The doctor’s broad back filled the doorway.

  “What have I done?” she wailed. “What have I done? Everyone on the bus stared at me as if I were drunk, but I wasn’t drunk. I was in great trouble and I had to pour out my soul before the Lord.”

  “Why don’t I tell you a story?”

  “Yes, Julie, but I have to tinkle. Badly.”

  “Is that all?”

  “I think so.”

  Julian closed the door.

  “Once upon a time,” he began as he loosened the straps on the near side of the cart, “there were two little girls named Seremonda and Duva.”

  “They told me,” Hannah interrupted, “that the children had gone away.”

  “You have to listen.”

  “I am listening.”

  Hannah swung her legs down over the side of the cart and stood up unsteadily. Julian helped her squat over the wastebasket, casting about in his mind for a suitable adventure, adding familiar landmarks one by one as he did so—the schoolhouse, the churchyard, the baker’s great stone oven, and of course, the great highways that bound east and west, north and south. The north–south highway was the geographical axis of the children’s adventures; invariably they set out north to the mountains or south to the sea. It was bisected, in the center of the village, by the east–west highway, which provided a sort of metaphysical axis, though this was never defined very precisely. The westward road, which led through rolling meadows and fertile valleys to the ancient city where the king held his court, was kept in good repair, and every now and then some of the villagers, either to seek their fortunes or to escape from sickness and trouble, would pack up their belongings and set out for the city, never to be seen again. But the highway that led to the east disappeared into a dense forest and was said to be impassible.

  Hannah let loose a noisy stream of urine. “A river bordered the kingdom on the east,” continued Julian. “Hardly a trace remained of the bridge that had once spanned it; few of the villagers cared to venture even that far into the forest, and no one ventured any farther.” Not even Julian.

  “But where did the children go?” asked Hannah.

  “Are you through?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Are you listening?”

  “Yes, I’m listening. They were under the mountain, don’t you remember? Tell me about it, Julie. They wouldn’t let me go there. They shoved so and held my arms.”

  “You couldn’t see the mountain from the village itself, because of the forest, but you could see it from the churchyard, which was on a high hill. It was cold and white even in summer, and on holy days at night you could see little lights, like fireflies, just where the top of the mountain should have been.”

  “I saw them too, Julie, dancing round the lamp. What are they?”

  Julian wasn’t sure, but the schoolmaster said they were only shooting stars in the sky beyond the mountain, and the priest said they were fairy lights dancing on the mountain itself. The villagers were divided, but there was no way of settling the questions because there were no longer any travelers on the eastern highway.

  Someone will have to set out eastwards, thought Julian. Tonight.

  The door opened and Hannah stood up suddenly, her skirt concealing the wastebasket. Sara ran to her mother. Father Neumiller was silhouetted in the doorway, his briefcase in one hand.

  “Papa’s telling a story about Seremonda and Duva.” Hannah kissed
Sara’s teary face.

  “Are you all right, Mama?”

  “Of course I’m all right. You must come and listen. But didn’t you bring Dinah?”

  “No, Mama.”

  “You mustn’t leave her all alone.”

  “Mama, she’s dead—don’t you remember?”

  “Then we must fetch her.”

  Hannah stepped out of her underpants and looked around, as if to see who was going to accompany her. No one moved. A look of pain swept across her face and her knees buckled. Julian caught her and with Father Neumiller’s help lifted her back onto the gurney.

  Julian poured some water from the pitcher into the wastebasket. He raised his arm again, renewing the strange sense of wonder that had come over him earlier, and let his hand rest on the side of his wife’s face.

  “No one ever ventured eastwards. Never even thought of it.”

  Sara looked up at him.

  “Except.” Julian took the plunge. “No one ever ventured eastwards except the wandering minstrels and jongleurs who came out of the forest in the fall, dressed like wild animals, bound for the west.”

  “Why did they dress like wild animals?” asked Hannah.

  “The animals were their totems.”

  “Oh. What did they do in the west?”

  “They spent the dark winter months entertaining the king and his court.”

  “Where did they come from?”

  “Listen to the story and you’ll see. You’re worse than the children.”

  But her question prompted him.

  “Did they come from the Mountain of Lights?”

  “Well, they told stories about it; they said that although the side of the mountain you could see from the churchyard was always covered with snow, on the far side it was always summer; and that spring lay to the north, and autumn to the south.”

  “Shouldn’t it be the other way round?”

  “That’s the way it was.”

  “Did the villagers like the minstrels?”