THE WALLS

by Jay Fox

  The heart of the matter seems to be that there is no barometer with which to gauge our ignorance, there can only be the recognition of areas where knowledge is absent. Successive to that revelation, there comes the discovery that these knowledge vacuums do not diminish with age or study; instead, they augment. Sean cannot admit that some of these holes will never, can never, be filled. As a result, he denies that many exist. Paradoxically, I am more conservative when measuring the dimensions of human ignorance. All that is left is recourse in the F word, the word that provides the only defense against both agnosticism and solipsism. Without it, it would seem that all is lost but the lucent sparks of the mind.

  The waitress walks back towards the door and gives the tables a once over. The tabby, meanwhile, prowls the wall, a half-eaten brunch plate and starvation in its eyes. I believe I am the only one acknowledging the curious feline. We lock eyes for a moment, a mutual recognition of what is perhaps more imminent than necessary. I nod, almost as if giving my consent.

  The cat finally descends upon the table next to ours, sending greens and fish and half-eaten pieces of bread into the air. Coffee cups and mimosa flutes plummet to the unforgiving concrete below. A clamor of indomitable laughter and bewildered cursing erupts from the surrounding tables.

  Sean looks to me with a kind of vapid disdain; I, meanwhile, have stood to get a better look of the scene. The waitress cannot contain herself, which the unfortunate couple at the epicenter of the disturbance view as inconsiderate and horribly offensive. They stand to leave as the cat continues to eat the remnants of their meal. The waitress turns to the busboy—a suddenly cataleptic youth with confusion tattooed on his face—and demands he do something, though this order is neither importune nor entirely direct.

  “Can you believe that fucking cat, man?” I chuckle as I sit back down.

  “I think it sad,” he laments as he stubs out his cigarette. His words tumble out with an exhaust of derision and paraquat. He gnaws at a long nail, but doesn't bite. It's more of a cleaning exercise, I guess. “So what are you going to do? You have two weeks to track down Coprolalia, and you've accomplished nothing to speak of. You need to think of something; otherwise…well, there doesn't seem to be an ultimatum for you, now does there?”

  “I was thinking about paying Willis Faxo a visit,” I respond. I pick up my coffee mug. The waitress, synthetic embarrassment and restrained laughter, looks to me for empathy or sympathy or really anything human. I smile. She smiles back.

  When she comes to our table, I don't know if asking if we need anything else is a pretext or if it is sincere. Sean asks for the check. I ask if the drink special is still going on.

  11.2

  After leaving a message on Faxo's machine, I decide to call Daphne. She is also unavailable. I hang up after leaving a message, and feel that unique type of remorse one feels after leaving a message on the machine of a minor acquaintance.

  I really have no idea where to go. Sean became eager to leave once I ordered a second bloody mary. “It's buy one, get one free. Where's the sense in getting only one?” This logic didn't exactly persuade him. He quickly left for reasons that were apparently unrelated.

  It seems as though I've dug myself something of a hole. Just about all of the people with whom I have been associating are beyond reach. I don't even have Aberdeen's number. I'm guessing that Tomas is still sleeping off last night's conquest. Most of the acolytes are probably just getting to bed. Patrick and the rest of the citrus artillery are probably still going at it—unless they’re out of ammunition, of course. The old college crew is either still away or preparing for interviews in the morning. Jeff…well, the gun's not to my head quite yet. I wonder if Connie is in town, but figure that it's unlikely. She always did love the City on Sundays, especially during the autumn months, which are so conducive to those conversations that can be measured in miles even if they contain so little in substance. Sean probably won't return my calls in the future, and it's possible, if he's the spiteful type, that he will reject any interview I submit to the magazine as a pitiful fabrication.

  All in all, it seems as though I have the choice of either a desultory ramble around the city or going home. The latter option seems more enticing. While I am well aware of my self-imposed duty to continue looking for new pieces done by Coprolalia, exploring neighborhoods at random hasn't been particularly constructive. I feel as though it's time to finally face the unfortunate fact that I have been avoiding for the past few days: I am not going to reach any type of epiphany, nor am I going to discover anyone with any worthwhile information concerning Coprolalia while downing cheap pints of beer in the soiled taverns adjacent to equally soiled tenement buildings and bodegas. And let's not forget the logistics of the whole endeavor. Coprolalia may have been in the Village last night. It is equally probable that he slept by Columbia after visiting College Point, City Island, Pelham Park, Bowling Green, and Breezy Point. There's no algorithm to calculate; there is no hunch that will provide anything more than disappointment or, at worst, another series of faulty assumptions.

  Perhaps my goals have been misguided and tarnished by vanity, not mere quixotry. When I began this search, I prided myself as being more intelligent and more insightful than average. I was confident that I would be able to see what others had overlooked, and, consequently, that I would discover the identity of Coprolalia with relative ease. I couldn't have provided a worthwhile reason as to why it seemed natural for me to be endowed with such a gift; then again, I can still feel that same narcissistic effluvium contaminating my thoughts—even if it has diminished in potency. This isn't a riddle, nor is it a puzzle with pieces that others have not been able to fit together. No one has even been able to accrue enough pieces of the puzzle to be confounded by the way its assembled.

  The fact of the matter is that there is a certain degree of luck to this process that I grossly underestimated. True, the ability to ask the right questions was obviously assumed to be a prerequisite for the job, but it seems as though the various trails that have appeared came about as a consequence of chance, not due to any knack for investigative research.

  I have never been one to doubt in exception, especially when the exception in question concerns some type of boon for myself. It's the same basic premise upon which the lottery operates, one that very quickly leads to chagrin and resignation. And yet it seems as though there will be no exception here; I have used my time unwisely (wasted it, as the idiom goes, though how can one waste time if all moments are either meant to be or valueless or part of that long stretch of eternity that really has no meaning beyond consequents or (to be less objective about it) posterity?). I don't recall if this feeling is anguish or despair. It's unpleasant—that's for certain. And as I wallow in this rather fatalistic quagmire, my anticipation falters; I see tonight's effort to find Coprolalia as nothing more than a generalized recollection of the past few weeks: I'll meet people who delude already baseless aggressions in pints of overpriced beer, listen to stories about fading ambition, meet the ersatz avatars of Sidney Carton, who drunkenly let their one great opportunity of heroism come and go, and watch the more educated classes condemn the stupidity of people who don't think or vote the way they do. I'll proffer nothing more than head nods to misanthropes as they explain that their loss of faith has proven to be a discovery of wisdom. Evangelicals and hard-core Marxists—two sides of the same coin, really—will proselytize about the advent of a new society at the expense of rational thought (Nazis could fall into this foolishly optimistic trap, too, but most Nazis are too stupid and violent (in the most vulgar sense of the term) to understand that Nazism was initially an optimistic movement, and that its broad appeal was primarily due to its push for an elitist revolution—which is certainly a reactionary thing to propagate, not on par with commit-genocide-in-the-name-of-Germanic-purity reactionary, but reactionary nonetheless). Groups of men with thick accents and thicker necks will bitch about the Yankees and the mourn for the Mets. But then there are the more i
ntense mourners, the mourners of sisters and brothers and fathers and wives and mothers and husbands and friends and those relations that get subsumed by etceteras, though the relation, no matter how seemingly distant or previously meager, always becomes so much more profound now that he or she has gone, has become was in henceforth discourse, has been converted into an idea, perhaps even something akin to a Form. And the grief-stricken repeat themselves over and over until the sentiments they convey seem almost juvenile, perhaps because they are not used to expressing earnest sentimentality unless it is quickly amended to appear facetious. We all do this; so, too, do we all make things out to seem serendipitous or mildly miraculous or even retroactively portentous when reflecting upon our interactions with the suddenly dead. But it's strange how it affects you as an outsider, one who is estranged from the dead, a spectator of no relation. Yet you are related to the mourners because you have been there. And you begin to think of the individuals to whom these panegyrists relate; you take on the attribute of mourner and proceed to imagine or remember a mournee. (But you don't call the dead by first name or even surname; you utilize those cognomens that were created as jokes that they hated but eventually grew to love. You refer to them this way, and everybody else does, too. And suddenly I'm back to the night after the burial, here with the whole group of friends who haven't been together in a number of years (animosity, maturity, entropy, etc.), circling a fire, passing around a handle of Jim Beam, listening to “California Stars” on repeat, not awkward, no longer crying at the very mention of the name of the departed, genuinely happy to see all of the other sleep-deprived faces as well as the well-rested apologists who couldn't catch a plane in time to submit another friend to the indifferent earth. People are getting atrociously drunk, but there are no indecent incidents—partial nudity, no full-frontal. And each person laughs shallowly as they tell those within earshot about “this one time…” and events in which “…you were there, you remember.” There aren't those reprisals of silence—complete with eyes that seem almost viscous, not only because they shimmer, but because they want to leak even if they no longer can—that had been so prevalent the day before. Several days were filled with maudlin laughs, which sound like coughs or exaggerated implosives with a certain Pérotinian dynamic and sense of cadence. You drink a lot. Everyone drinks a lot. No one looks attractive in mourning, but you don't know if this is due to an inability to achieve tumescence on your part or if it's because most people actually look as though a gorilla has slapped them around. You remember these quick, insignificant moments that, for whatever reason, are now being exhumed from some dusty corner in that big, gray organ of yours. And you begin to share them. And those around you share incidents no less mundane. And as they come out, it's high school all over again, replayed now like some highlight reel from a football game that has become a thing of legend for only those who were lucky enough to have been there. You are told of that run from the police after braving the blistering cold to drink stolen liquor in a park, an incident you haven't thought about for years. And as the story unfolds, fear of being arrested ceases to be salient. What the interlocutor wishes to convey is inconsequential because it's now imagery lacking the tenebrous cataract it did only days before—of insectile silhouettes leaping in and out of vast nacreous fields of snow as barren as a moonscape—; of ursine masses lumbering in clumsy pursuit. And these images cascade through your consciousness—one door leading to two more, and those two to four, and so on, and so on—until the memories that are being resurrected from obscurity fill out with greater and greater detail—of walking together under the brutality of the summer sun, idly talking about how insignificant the day itself is, and how you said “In two years we won't remember this exact moment,” even though it's five or six (eight or nine) years later, and yet here you are, almost able to touch her sienna skin, which on that day, was contrasted by that incandescent, not-white-not-yellow-hued shirt that she always wore, and you can still see her thick eyebrows at clement angles, and her smile wide and earnest because it was always wide and earnest (then), so innocent and childlike; and she responds in the affirmative, that the day will be lumped together with others that are similar to it, but, when she speaks, her voice is that of the jaded and weary woman she became, not the little, cherubic girl in the relatively early stages of puberty—even though this is not how you would have referred to her then because the word, puberty, was never uttered—it was summed up in all of the adolescent dramatics that were so important at the time, the dramatics that probably dominated most of the conversation that day, even if they have by now peacefully died so long ago that even the question of when seems absurd to you—you, a nineteen your old kid watching through your own eyes: the past you (fourteen or so, awkward in his skin, gangly and pudgy at the same time) and her paired off within a larger group of friends all feeling the burden of the mid-summer doldrums and walking through a construction zone, kicking at pebbles and chunks of gleaming asphalt that almost melt in the imperious presence of the summer sun, thinking 'The air smells of freshly cut grass and truck exhaust'—; of that one midnight tryst, which begins with a silent and serpentine escape from a bedroom window, the one that ends at some park—on a structure that was called just that (a structure), as if the people who decide the names for these types of things in this case went with the obvious or were too tired or were militant acolytes of Grice's theory of inference—with the full moon coating the dew in a milky luminescence, and her face now a ghostly sepia swimming in the clouds of smoke that burn off the cigarettes she stole from her mother; you smoke the contraband with her, and you feel sick, but you keep smoking anyway because you're telling her about the girl(s) that you like (not just like, but “like-like”), because you don't want to use the word “infatuated,” and you tell yourself it's because you're not entirely sure whether you're supposed to be infatuated with ______ or infatuated by _____, or if the two are actually grammatically distinct (whereas you are either elated by the presence of the person because of some carnal/spiritual/emotional/whatever desire or damn near intoxicated by the very idea of that one special someone, who you are too spineless to approach in earnest, respectively; but yet there you are, not only approaching, but with them, the like-liked, and you can't tell her that you like-like her because it would be an act of temerity, one that might jeopardize whatever it is you have going; so you extol Option B—the girl by whom you are intrigued more than infatuated—and predicate upon her all of the desirable qualities you see in the person in front of you in the hopes that there be some kind of tacit understanding, that there will be some revelation on her part, that she will see that the whole exercise is a charade, a kind of acrostic foreplay). We sit on the structure for more than an hour, and I keep thinking, how do you kiss someone? In the movies, it begins as a shared silence, a consenting smile. But there's none of that. She tells me to just tell the girl that I like her, but it's not that easy. I may only be twelve, but I already know that it isn't that easy. Maybe when you grow up you can do that. Maybe in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles you can walk into a nice bar or a coffee house and order a drink for a girl and then talk to her and then go back to your house and just do it. And as you continue to exchange stories something strange happens. The death—the moment when a person ceases to be past, present, and potentiality, and becomes shared past and inanimate present—cases to be something abstract; it becomes more real. You realize that you cannot grasp mortality or infinity or eternity; all you can understand is loss, which is something of a Kantian way of going about things. And you know that the images and memories have become the person's identity. And yet you wish to fight it. Because she was more. And you fear that some will construct that person, that 'her' whom you love and cherish, out of the eulogy and the obituary and the pale, stiff corpse animated only by half-truths. You fear that her progeny will now define her, and that her progeny will be limited to the memories the community has and will have of her. Not only will you lose her in life, you will lose her i
n death, too. Because there's so many excisions, so much that is omitted. —We are not here to manufacture a god, I think. The casket is lowered into the Earth. My suit doesn't fit quite right. Looking around, I notice that everyone else my age is wearing ill-fitting suits and what appear to be cocktail dresses that were thrown on simply because of their dolorous color. And yet you said nothing. You just gripped the one memory, warts and all, that much tighter. It was the first thing you thought of when the call came. It seemed as though it was almost there with you, that imposing chimera. You remember the walk to the apartment on Eckford Street before the subsequent day's ride down to Baltimore: The city is silent, but the City is magically illuminated in the distance: illustrious steel and pale concrete. There's a six-pack of beer in each of my hands, and I know they will both end up in the same place before ending up in the place all liquid rentals go. This one striking image of her continues to resonate in my head; it appears each time I blink in a way no less vivid than those phosphines that pulse and dance whenever you rub your eyes too diligently. I can't understand why it's taken primacy over all of the millions of other moments that her and I shared, many of which seem to be so much more significant. It's not even that it best describes her; it's just there, haunting me not quite to the level of apparition-grade shadowing or Chopin-nocturne harrowing, but there. Unavoidable. And because it's there without the conscious desire to put it there, it seems only natural to revere the memory and focus upon it in the hopes of making it that much more vivid, perhaps so vivid that it is granted the ability to converse and explain the reason why the “off a building” was not preceded by “slipped” or the passive “was pushed,” but instead is that single invidious word that everyone seems to avoid, to eschew, to replace with ellipses. Everyone is thinking it, though: me and Dave (one of her ex-boyfriends, whom I had met once or twice before) up here in Brooklyn, those back in Baltimore; it resonates with the Boston contingent, those who have gone to state schools in Pennsylvania and Ohio and Michigan, even the nocturnal and talpidic creatures who seem to have retreated into obscure and cavernous regions unknown to all but the most hermetic. “Jumped” (as in willful, as in preventable, as in why were you not there?). And it's inching close to midnight now, the only sounds being the echoing and flatulent choppers sputtering toward the Pulaski and the sirens in the distance and the dogs that speak in aggressive tones like drunk old men roused from sleep. The phone is finally in disuse, but the twenty or so conversations that have taken place over the course of the previous hours continue to occupy my thoughts. Five or six of the people I phoned I haven't spoken to in years. Some of them have changed; some of them haven't. No one has said anything all that profound as of yet, though plenty have made the attempt. It's not raining, but it would be better if it were. It would be more fitting, more dramatic. But there's no need for enhanced dramatics at this point, for those histrionics that need to be contrived by the truly narcissistic. And then you're back on the street. You are walking to get cigarettes, even if you don't smoke. There is a multitude of Polish men on stoops, jake-walking guys who can remember the feeling of sobriety only slightly better than the feel of a tight vagina or a solid stool, couples walking to recently purchased condos, cyclists on those old Schwinns that are as prevalent as Converse All-Stars up here in these vinyl-sided parts, where people have nostalgia for pasts they haven't actually lived, that may have only existed in spurious elegies. Most of them produce no sound until they are within a few feet. For whatever reason, my Adam's Apple suddenly feels as though it's being inflated. I'm absolutely powerless and I know it. The surrounding world goes mute as I wince, choke, and feel bathwater warmth in my eyes. I don't know where I am, or, perhaps, it doesn't register that I am anywhere specifically until the B61 speeds down Manhattan Avenue two blocks away; and then it all comes back: the distant conversations, the car alarms, the ubiquitous traffic that hisses like the static of a 33 that has nothing more to offer. And you find yourself smoking one of those cigarettes on the threshold of a set of French doors that leads to one of those balconies that doesn't protrude more than a few inches from the building. It's later now, deep into the infomercial hours. You're staring at a moon that bleeds pale tallow nimbus onto an inky sky that's neither gray nor black nor purple. It is almost colorless even though it is opaque. The burning of the cigarette, which produces that brittle snapping of brittle wood sound, somehow manages to overpower the volume of everything else for that moment. And there is only the moon and the cigarette and me. In this moment. But it's an ephemeral, perhaps ersatz serenity. Her face will reappear; that one insignificant moment you shared with her will be replayed. It is doomed to play in syndication, just like all of her life. And at some point—when the sitcom reruns from decades past have been usurped by the morning news—; once the first six-pack has been separated into six empty bottles and the empty cardboard case that carried them—; once the second sixer would be lopsided if you tried to pick it up—; once you're through half the pack of smokes and looking to a now moonless sky without clouds or stars, just an expansive ceiling the color of a wool sock—; once you don't know if it's the beers or the many moments that now separate the first call from the present—you find that the pain has become less potent; it has become simply an absence. And it's not that you've become inured to the tragic elements that operate like some spinning gizmo in the mind of Archimedes; you just know it—the loss, the absence—is going to be there from now on. The negative has been replaced by a positive: the void has taken on an existence all its own. So maybe it's that you've become inured to the idea of your individual loss. And I feel desiccated, hollow, harrowed; the night has been nothing but nostalgia and the recognition that the I of the past is distinct from the I of the present; and I feel as though I'm trapped in a prelude to the life that I want to live, and that there is a good possibility that this prelude will continue until I am too old, and that I will have to sing not of anticipation but of regret. And so it becomes about yourself. It continues to be about yourself and your loss until you realize just how selfish such thoughts are. And then you return to her. I've been over that last time we saw each other so many times that I feel as though the chasm that separates is not static; it yawns like a teething infant. And suddenly you realize—and here's the weirdest thing—that the only person not affected by the death is the deceased. They are either worm food, or circling a throne for all of eternity like some haloed bowel movement that defiantly refuses to vacate the premises of the toilet or being punished for not adhering to a morality that has been passed down by a group of pedophiles and reactionaries and people who don't seem to understand that humans have a proclivity for ingratitude, or no long conscious as an individual with a past, or a ghost, and maybe there next to you, wondering —Why the fuck are you still awake? You realize there is nothing you can do about it anymore besides remember the dead and offer solace to the bereaved who haven't yet come to the point where you are—like Dave, with whom I stayed that night; he finished off more than half a liter of vodka that smelled like bleach by ten-thirty and passed out by eleven, even though it was a Tuesday, and we had both agreed to wake up early for an eleven o'clock class for the sake of sanity-via-routine. I cursed him for his lack of foresight, but the ashen pre-dawn sky quoted my mother: —Every time you point a finger at someone, you point three back at yourself. You go back to the brisant call, the bowel-tightening-holy-shit-this-can't-be-happening sensation that comes in tandem waves like an adrenaline rush; you remember how you sputtered out nonsense while the other line remained almost stoic because there's not much more to say at the moment. And then you begin to speak more, and you both open up; and you ask when, and you ask how, and you then proceed to run through metaphysical arguments and produce whys via armchair psychology. Some people begin to conduct research while on the phone; others begin making databases of emails and phone numbers to make sure that the whole community knows of the tragedy with maximum efficiency—not because there is some desire to spread the Bad News lik
e some Bizarro Paul; there's just an inherent need, within certain personality types, to begin doing inane tasks to avoid the real issue at hand. But this comes to an end, and then it's the party after the wake—everything that can be done has been done, everyone who was meant to come has come—and they finally let go and abandon the facade of comportment; they are cry on your shoulder, sobbing hysterically and uncontrollably, apologize for snotting on your shirt, and then laugh that maudlin laugh because it's the only thing that anyone can do given the circumstances. So you remember it: from the call to the wake; the wake to the service; the service to the burial; the burial to the lunch or brunch or whatever it is where drinks are served—even though no one seems to drink more than that one, perfunctory drink that is indulged in for reasons that no one really understands or bothers to contemplate—and where all of the petty shit that had accumulated for the better part of decade is abandoned—and then the eruption of (still somewhat maudlin) laughter that comes when people begin to remember a person as opposed to a saint; this party to the party later that night, which seems to prove that death is a force far stronger than entropy, circling a fire, passing around a handle of Jim Beam, listening to “California Stars” and “Misunderstood” and conversation on repeat, not awkward, no longer crying at the very mention of the name of the departed, genuinely happy to see all of the other sleep-deprived faces they had seen only a few hours previously, as well as the well-rested apologists who couldn't catch a plane in time to submit another friend to the ever-hungry earth. You even recall the night after this, the solitary hours spent riding your old bike through the silent, suburban roads that reared you, listening to Photo Album and Being There over and over again, asking yourself —Was she Guinevere? even if you are guiltily thinking of what's-her-name back in New York, wondering if you're that type of person who only wants what he can't have, drunk, almost running into parked cars that materialize only a few feet in front of you. You wonder if the parents of friends you haven't spoken to in a while still live where they used to as you traipse the ruins of youth. Maybe they moved out to allow new families to help in the destruction of a past that's already destroyed. And you end up in that park that has so many memories. And you're there, under the structure, taking nips from a pint of cheap whiskey that I purchased with a fake I.D. I am thinking about thinking about the time I thought about the bust of the party that followed junior prom, and how we came here: how Adler drove his Pathfinder all the way to the structure I'm sitting under. The Ozomatli album was/was/was/is playing because Adler couldn't/couldn't/couldn't/can't help the fact that he plays every album he likes until no one can stand it anymore, not even him. The keg in back was/was/was/is…and I'm not there; I can't remember it. I can't remember if I remembered what it was. It was probably MGD because kegs were always MGD unless we were dealing with Hill, the prick who would pick up Natty or Red Dog or Natty Boh, and pocket the remainder. The police never showed up that night to pursue the few boys sitting in rented tuxes that didn't fit or the girls doing cartwheels in getups that were purple and pink and too tight. And I am on the bike again, laughing my shadow, tearing through a softball field with abandon, howling at the sight of the moon light some Ferlinghetti rooster, alone again because everyone is too hungover to once again embrace the bottle in lieu of the departed, dipping again after a three-year hiatus, feeling my legs ache and pulse, watching the celestial furnace fire up one dim star at a time, all-too cognizant of the fact that every street that led to this idyll is rife with arcane memories from my adolescent years; and I am going through the non-fictional account of my boring existence thus far, suddenly struck by a feeling that is neither anguish nor spite: no, it's gratitude, gratitude for having the capacity to feel and remember again. And I'm riding in circles, laughing, out of breath, going faster, reducing the circumference of my path, taking another nip, hearing, feeling, intoxicated (by) the wet grass licking the bike tires, going past the event horizon, spinning, on my back, laughing, sinking into the Earth as the midnight dew soaks into my clothing, laughing, laughing.) The second or third night after the burial everyone is at the bar. It's the same anywhere you go. And so you can identify the mourning party, and you can tell who's having the hardest time with the death even if the faces are unfamiliar. Because you've been there. Yes, you've been there. You know the people closest to the deceased just from the infrastructure that has been established in a predictable but not premeditated way: how the parents and the older members of the family have to walk around with faces that move around as though no longer connected to their skulls, and every song and every person and every drink makes them remember, even if these remembrances are not voiced; but they don't breakdown because they have to continue thanking people for the support and walking in circles as though they're trying to find their prom date even if they just want to surrender to a nothingness not as definitive as death, but similar (hence the pharmaceuticals that are handed out like candy). You see the best friends sitting around a small table breathing heavily as they receive quick condolences from those who approach the moment with either bathos or the senseless conviviality that would be appropriate if it were a reunion; and maybe, you think, it's just an untimely and incomplete reunion. And these table-dwellers stare gravely to pints of beer that become warm over hours of silent meditation and arcane reminiscences and anecdotes that seem mundane to the people who never knew the now future-less; but to those at that table (that table like an altar set up to conjure and remember the idea, the imago, the Form, the eidolon, now dead), they are immutable from the identity of the departed. And you're there, and you're explaining to them—the table-dwellers—that, yes, you've also lost somebody at some point in time; and, yes, it was too soon; and, yes, I just can't help but think of the family; and, yes, indulging in all of these morbid platitudes is normal because real grief can't be vocalized: it is internalized more than perhaps any other emotion, and you only end up having that epiphany of GONE! once you stop consciously mourning and one day pick up the phone to recount some pedestrian occurrence only to realize that no one will ever pick up on the other end again, and then it really sets in—not simply the fact that there is an absence, but that the absence is almost as eternal as the soul is supposed to be—it's corporeal life that's the negligible/ephemeral part. They—the table-dwellers—are quiescent, all nods and torpid blinks. They smile, almost acknowledging that there will be a day when they can appreciate whatever the people at the other, more jovial tables are celebrating: a raise, an engagement, a son's or daughter's engagement, the birth of a child—a change in the pattern that had hitherto been lacking something, though the routine was by no means cumbersome. And let's not forget the birthdays, which always seem to end up producing some type of drama caused by either an unexpected appearance or an unexpected absence.