"Jesus," Jack said when I told him, "imagine that?"
"Easy, now," I said, "easy. Out through the top."
Then he was out, just line, standing in front of the mirror, seeing no more blood, no more yellow.
"Am I completely dead'?" he asked, and knew then his last human feeling: his body being blown to atoms, the feeling of fire sinking into air. He looked around the room, but could see no one any longer, though we were all there, watching. He felt his absent pupils dilate to receive the light, which was his own light as well as everyone else's. When the light came, it was not the brilliant whiteness Jack expected, but a yellowish, grayish light that made no one blink. The motion of the light was perceptible. It swirled around Jack's neck like a muffler, rose up past his eyes and hairline like a tornado in crescendo, spun round his entire head with what was obviously a potentially dazzling ferocity, reduced in effect now by the horrendous life-tone of Jack Diamond. It was obvious to everyone that given propitious conditions it could centripetally slurp the entire spirit of Jack into the vortex and make off with it forever; but now it moved only like a bit of fog on a sunny morning, coiled by a frolicsome breeze, then gone, with not enough force to slurp up a toupee.
As Jack's awareness of the light peaked, he was already falling backward. Though he had no arms, he waved them frantically to right himself, and as he fell, twisting and flailing against this ignominious new development, he delivered up one, final, well-modulated sentence before he disappeared into the void, into the darkness where the white was still elusive.
"Honest to God, Marcus," he said going away, "I really don't think I'm dead."
Legs Page 30