A Matter of Life and Death or Something

by Ben Stephenson

  “Okay, you have to read this page,” I would say.

  Francis would read and bite one of his knuckles and say “Ohhh. Ohhh.”

  “This part’s weird,” I would say.

  He would fold his arms together and hunch over and read for a while. “Hmm... Hmm!”

  “And this is my favourite part. It’s about creating the universe.”

  He bent forward even farther like he was looking through a special microscope that was built for looking at Phil.

  We sat together like that, reading Phil. We read about when he made a masterpiece in the snow, and when the universe was nothing, and when he believed in God, and when it seemed like he sometimes didn’t, and when he built filing cabinets in his brain, and when he became tiny, and when he was a library that didn’t make sense, and when everything good that happened to him felt embarrassing, and when E was the love of his life but then she ran away, or their love did, and when his life was amazingly painful and things never got better and he was alone inside a cage, and when he never wanted to exist in the first place.

  After we read for a long while I said, “So he just kind of wrote his life down, but he wrote it in all these weird ways. Sometimes it makes me laugh but sometimes it doesn’t,” I said. “And then he talks about himself like he’s not himself, like he’s not really there. Sometimes I wonder if he wants to be sad or something.”

  Francis nodded.

  Then I turned to the next page which was Page 43. My throat lumped again.

  “Then there’s this page,” I said.

  I sat back a little deeper into the red couch. Francis read Page 43 in silence and I felt nervous for him and I listened to the gently roaring woodstove and I looked at all the paths in the carpet. I looked at another photo with the beautiful lady in it where she was wearing a really pretty white dress and sitting under a tree on some grass in a park somewhere. She had the nicest smile, not just the regular kind that means you’re happy, but the kind that makes other people happy too. I wondered what kind of smile I had, and if it was that kind or just a regular one. I wondered what kind Phil had. He must have had one. Was it a special kind that made other people sad?

  Francis turned over Page 43 and saw that the next two pages were blank. He quickly flipped the rest of the pages which were also all blank. He said that’s the last page and I nodded. He closed the book, sat quiet for a second with his eyes looking down, then wheeled himself very slowly to the turtle tank. He stared at the little turtles inside, swimming over and under each other and flapping their green flipper feet, climbing and sitting on the little island, then diving in again. He watched them for a long time. Then he came back to the table.

  “So what are you going to do with it now? With the book?”

  I shook my head slowly, to say that I had no idea. “I mean, what am I supposed to do? I can’t do anything. There’s nothing I could do.”

  Then Francis said, “Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

  “Uhhh, sure,” I said.

  “Okay.” He drank his coffee and rubbed his finger in the corner of his eye. “First of all, did you tell Simon about this?”

  “About Phil?”

  “Yes.”

  “No way. I didn’t tell him anything, but he sneaked around my room and he found it anyway.”

  “Why didn’t you tell him?”

  I was starting to get a little bit unpatient with Francis because we were changing the subject and also because I felt like he was interviewing me instead of the other way around like it was supposed to be.

  “What does that have to do with anything?” I said.

  “Oh, nothing. Maybe nothing. I’m just doing my own investigation over here I guess. It’s just that, the very first thing you said about Simon, if I remember correctly, was that he certainly wasn’t your real father.”

  “Well he’s not.”

  “Surely. Yes, I know. But the way you said it was as if—”

  The tape recorder made a loud click noise because the tape ran out.

  “Hold on,” I said, and I popped it open and pulled the tape out, flipped it over and put it back in. I pressed RECORD. Then I picked up my field glasses and held them in my lap to have something to fidget with.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “As I was saying, the thing about Simon is—”

  “I just think Simon’s so boring.”

  Francis looked at me for a second.

  “Why?”

  “What?”

  “What’s so boring about him?”

  “He just, well... you don’t really know him.”

  “I certainly do. Simon’s over here quite often. He’s a good man.”

  I made my face look so confused.

  “Surely. When he first moved in, he came right up here to meet me. He sees me, in all my glory, exactly as you see me now, and can you guess what he says?”

  “No.”

  “He says, ‘If you ever need anything, you’ve got me.’ And you know, I took him up on it too. There’re plenty of times when I need something, even just some groceries, what have you, and Sarah’s not in town, and sure enough your father, I mean, your Simon goes and brings me a roast or a bag of sugar, some small thing. Just last week, he wouldn’t even let me pay him.”

  “He never told me that.”

  Francis shook his head and smiled. “He wouldn’t. He’s not the type of guy to give someone a hand and then go around talking about it. Boring? I can’t think of anything farther from it.”

  I didn’t say anything for a second.

  “I know how they feel about me, Arthur. I’m surprised you even made it up my God-awful driveway, first of all.”

  “I heard you were insane, and you might be a thief, or a crack dealer, or a murderer, or a cannibal or a vegetarian or...”

  Francis exploded with laughter.

  “A vegetarian. That kills me—a vegetarian. Now, that one’s new.”

  I thought about it and I laughed a little bit, too. I never realized how silly that one was.

  “Arthur, what do you think of me?”

  I thought for a minute.

  “I guess you’re probably just a really nice guy.”

  “Why thank you.”

  I thought some more.

  “Okay, so if none of the bad rumours about you are true, why don’t you just send around a letter to the neighbourhood that says ‘Hello, I’m not a cannibal or anything, I’m actually just a really nice guy?’ I could deliver it to everybody.”

  Francis chuckled again, I don’t know why.

  “I appreciate it, but that wasn’t the point. If they want to, they can believe whatever they want. They will believe whatever they want.”

  “Who’s Sarah?” I asked sneakily. I was getting curious.

  “Hmm?”

  “You talked about a Sarah. Is that her?” I asked, pointing to the smiling lady in the photo.

  “That would be Sarah’s mother,” Francis said. “That’s Olivia.”

  Francis smiled the type of smile that old people always do when they’re remembering something amazing. The kind with the eyes that sparkle. Then he turned his head around and gave the same smile to the photo. I quickly pieced it together in my head: he seemed to think Olivia was amazing. Olivia was Sarah’s mother, and I was about 90% sure that Sarah must be Francis’s daughter. So Olivia must have been Francis’s girlfriend or wife or something. Maybe he met her when they were really young. They met in school and they were best friends so they got married and now they were really old. But where was she now? Who knows. Maybe she divorced him and ran away? Was she in a wheelchair too? Francis turned back to me and I thought that his eyes looked just slightly more sparkly, like maybe they were a little damp. I couldn’t tell if he was happy or s
ad; he looked both at the same time. I realized something. I suddenly knew that those were the kind of eyes you get when someone amazing isn’t around anymore.

  “Now Arthur,” Francis said, “I doubt there’s anyone in the world who can convince you of this, but I mean it, alright? Simon is not boring. He’s certainly a heck of a lot less boring than everyone else.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, seeing a kid like you, and to not snatch you up. To not see the absolute bargain they were getting. Now that’s boring.”

  “But...”

  “Hmm?”

  “I just wish I could know who they actually were.”

  As soon as I said that I felt kind of funny. I was really letting my guts spill out to Francis. He had a way of giving me a serious look exactly when I needed him to give me a serious look, and giving me a smile exactly when I needed him to give me a smile. Things weren’t just coming out of my mouth by accident and mixed up. It was like he had a way of making me say things on purpose that I never knew I wanted to say. It made my stomach feel funny. I wished people never had to bring knives with them anywhere.

  “Simon must’ve told you that even he doesn’t know.”

  “Yeah, I know. I just mean like, but why? I just want to know why.”

  “I hear that. Boy, do I hear that. We all want to know that, Arthur.”

  I didn’t know what the heck he was talking about. Francis went quiet again and picked up Phil and held him in his hands.

  “How does it make you feel?” Francis said.

  “Simon?”

  “Phil. How does he make you feel?”

  My throat instantly got all lumpy but I tried to talk through it.

  “I guess I just wish there was something I could do. I’ve been trying to figure it out but I’ve gotten nowhere. I obviously wish it didn’t happen. I wish I never found the stupid book, because all I’ve been thinking about every day is Phil and it made me so angry because I couldn’t even tell for sure if he’s really gone. But now I just know he is, somehow, and also because why did everyone just leave him alone, or did he leave everyone else alone? Why was no one around? I can’t stop thinking about him all alone and sad and what are you supposed to do about someone who was always sad and now they are forever?”

  Francis didn’t say anything. He breathed in a lot of air and filled his entire lungs and then let the air out slowly. He sat there shaking his head.

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. “I haven’t got that answer. All I know is, some things, we could ask them our whole lives. Maybe we’ve gotta make sure we don’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Francis sat up straighter and looked me in the eyes. He looked curious. He reached and picked up his field glasses, put them to his eyes and looked at me. I must have been a huge giant Arthur to him, bigger than any Arthur ever was. He lowered his field glasses for a second and smiled. He held them tight in his hands and nodded at me and I knew he was telling me to use mine too. So I took the lens caps off my almost-great-grandfather’s field glasses and held them up to my eyes and looked at Francis.

  It was really dark and blurry, looking through them in Francis’s house in the middle of the night. Once I got them focused I saw Francis’s head, really huge. It filled my whole vision. All I could see was his scribbly grey hair and his puffy nose and the wrinkles beside his eyes. Then his eyes became shiny black circles because he was looking through his field glasses back at me.

  “Pretend I am your problems,” Francis said.

  “What?”

  “Pretend I am everything wrong. Look at me, I am every problem you’ll ever have.”

  “Okay...” I said. We were still magnifying each other.

  “So you look and you look and you look,” he said. “Right?”

  “Okay...?”

  “You look at the problems very closely, and you wonder about them, and they just get bigger.”

  Francis became bigger because he was leaning a little closer to me.

  “You look closer and you try to shrink them, you do all sorts of things but it’s no use—the closer you look, the bigger they get.”

  “And blurrier.”

  “True. And so after a while, you can’t even very well move, you see? Suddenly they’re enormous. Bigger than planets.”

  “Okay?”

  “So,” Francis said. He took his field glasses away from his face and I just saw his gigantic watery eyes. I put my field glasses down too and looked through my regular eyes.

  “So, what else can you do?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Hmm,” Francis said.

  “Keep looking?”

  Francis smiled and his eyebrows magnified a bit. “Is that all?”

  “Uhhh,” I said. “Maybe look at something else?”

  “Aha,” Francis said, “let’s-see-let’s-see.”

  He started moving his field glasses from one hand to the other and looking at the ceiling.

  “So maybe you start asking yourself some other things. Something different. Maybe you start looking at other stuff besides just the things you can’t answer. You don’t ignore anything, of course. You don’t start ignoring. But maybe you look at—well I don’t know. Maybe you look at something you can answer. Or maybe just something nice. There’s gotta be something nice around, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “So maybe you ask yourself what you do have, for certain, and you look at that instead.”

  “Like a clue?”

  “Like a fact. Yes, and you really look at it too, you spend a long time and don’t give up. Okay, and then maybe eventually—so now what do you see?”

  “I don’t know?”

  Francis took his field glasses and turned them around with his hands and then looked through the other side of them, the big side. I took mine and did the same thing.

  “Everything is so small,” I said.

  “And beautiful!” said tiny little Francis. He was so far away he looked about the size of an atom. He was all the problems in the entire universe and he wasn’t even as tall as an apple slice.

  “Now I’m not saying there’s no answers,” Francis said. “The binocular thing’s a bit silly. But I’m not saying there’s no answers, it’s just, sometimes you stop looking, and there they are.”

  My thoughts started bouncing all over the place in my brain and I couldn’t really tell what was going on in there, and my eyes started watering.

  “‘Where did I come from?’ is a pretty good question,” Francis said, “but how about ‘Where do I belong?’”

  My throat was a complete lump and my eyes and nose got all prickly. The corners of my eyes felt heavy and got wet. I put my head down on my knees and I started shaking. I felt Francis’s hand patting me on the shoulder, and I shook even harder. I cried for a long time, but I didn’t even notice I was acting like a complete baby.

  “Ohhh boy,” Francis said quietly. “Ohhh boy.”

  After all that I sat up and wiped my face. I told Francis I should probably go home and sleep. He said it was after 3:00, and he should sleep too. I pushed STOP on the tape recorder, packed Phil back into my backpack and went to the door. Francis told me to come back and visit any time I wanted; I said that I would and I meant it.

  As I walked out onto his porch, Francis started talking again.

  “I guess it’s really up to you what to do with it. The journal. I mean, you found it. As far as we know, it may well be his will and testament, first of all. I mean, it’s up to you. Sorry I’m not more helpful.”

  “That’s alright,” I said. “I’m sorry I came over so late.”

  “Don’t mention it!” Francis flapped his hand around.

  “Goodbye,” I said.
/>
  “Take care of yourself, alright? You’re only what, eleven?”

  “Ten.”

  “You’re only ten, first of all.”

  “Okay.”

  Francis smiled and shook my hand, then watched me from the door as I walked down the porch steps into the night.

  “And Arthur,” he said.

  I turned around.

  “Nice cape.”

  I looked down at my bright green shoulder.

  “Thanks.”

  THIS

  You fell asleep with your hand resting on my back. We’d always try to stay tied together for as long as possible, but we could only ever fall asleep lying apart. (This is love: for both to give themselves over, wanting to fall into the same body together, some new body, some common home, but to be confronted always by one’s aloneness. To find one’s self ultimately only one’s self.)

  To bridge this endless gap, you just fell asleep with your hand resting on my back.

  In that calm pulling space between world and sleep, as things started to slip and fall out of your universe, your hand tensed up and grabbed at nothing. Its small violent energy entered my back like a burst of miniature lightning, like a spark—like you, like this one searing instant of you—and I could feel the bolt move farther into your body—your elbow, your shoulder, your lower back, a kick of your leg. This was the most enchanting moment I’d known, this seeing you—this feeling you—so completely seized by the peacefulness you drifted towards. And I was the only witness to that little sensation leaping into you, so precisely shared through only your hand. My eyes were closed but I knew every one of your motions and in the dark I could see you. I saw you. And this was when I felt it. And this was what I needed even though you didn’t. And this was when I wasn’t embarrassed to delight in something. And this was when I saw you and understood what they meant when they said: to love is to be entirely vulnerable at the height of your strength. That to love is to never know whether you are vulnerable or strong. And this was when I wasn’t alone.