coming to his eyes, trickling out his nose, his ears, down the corners of his mouth. He felt tricklings from his rectum, his penis, old friend, and knew those too were the yellow. He turned his head and saw the yellow coming out his wounds, on top of his congealing blood. He had known the yellow would come, for he had been at the edge before. But he always failed to understand the why of it. The wisdom of equality, the Book of the Dead said, but that made no sense. Death did make sense. It was a gift. The dead thanked you with stupid eyes.
'Do you think I worry because I'm dead?' Jack asked aloud.
The yellow oozed its curious answer.
The press of death was deranging. He was fully aware of the pressure, like earth sinking into water. Yet there was time left for certain visitors who were crowding into the room. Rothstein stepped out of the crowd and inspected the crown of Jack's head. He fingered that bloody skull like a father fondling the fontanel of his infant son-and who with a better right? He pulled out two hairs from the center of the scalp.
'What odds that I find the answer, big dad?' Jack said. Rothstein mulled the question, turned for an estimate to Runyon, who spoke out of a cancerously doomed larynx.
'I've said it before,' said Damon. 'All life is nine to five against.'
'You hear that?' A. R. asked.
'I hear it.'
'I must call against.'
'Then up yours,' said Jack. 'I'll make it my way.'
'Always headstrong,' said A. R.
I took Jack by the arm, guided him back from the mirror to lie on his right side, the lying posture of a lion. I pressed my fingers against the arteries on both sides of his throat.
'It's time, Jack,' I said. 'It's coming.'
'I'm not sure I'll know it when it comes.'
'I'll tell you this. It looks like a thought, like a cloudless sky. It looks like nothing at all.'
'Like nothing?'
'Like nothing.'
'I'II recognize it,' Jack said. 'I know what that looks like.'
'Say a prayer,' I suggested.
'I did.'
'Say another.'
'I knew a guy once had trouble cheating because his wife was always praying for him.'
'Try to be serious. It's your last chance.'
Jack concentrated, whispered, 'Dear God, turn me onto the Great White Way.' He felt the onset of clammy coldness then, as if this body were fully immersed in water. He remembered Rothstein's prayer and said that too, 'O Lord, God of Abraham, keep me alive and smart. The rest I'll figure out for myself.'
'Perfect.' said A. R.
'Dummy,' I said, 'you're dead. What kind of a thing is it, asking to stay alive?'
I eased the pressure on Jack's arteries and pressed his nerve of eternal sleep. Then I knelt beside him, seeing the water of his life sinking into fire, waiting for his final exit from that useless body. But if Jack left his body through the ear instead of the top of the head where Rothstein had pulled out the hairs, he might come back in the next life as a fairy musician.
'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.'
