He rings off, sits down at the desk, hooks up his laptop and gets online to check his e-mail. When he’s done, he makes another phone call, then fixes himself another drink.
It’s midmorning when he gets back to Greensville. Applewhite seems surprised to see him, but genuinely pleased. They shake hands, and assume their places, Applewhite on the bed, he in the white plastic chair. The conversation, tentative at first, starts with the weather and moves to the previous Super Bowl, then subsides into an awkward stillness.
Applewhite says, “I didn’t think I’d see you today.” 46
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“I said I’d come.”
“I know. And I believed you meant it, but I thought you’d change your mind after you left. You’d want to get home to your wife and kids.”
“No wife. No kids either, as far as I know.”
“As far as you know.”
“Well, who’s to say what fruit might have been borne of a youthful in-discretion? But there weren’t so many of those, and I think I’d have been informed if I’d been the cause of any abdominal swellings. In any event, nothing to draw me home.”
“Where’s home, Arne? I don’t think you told me.”
“New Haven. I did my doctoral work at Yale and never managed to get away from the place.”
Which leads them to college reminiscences, always a useful topic for men who have nothing of substance to say to one another. It serves now as it served yesterday, with the warden. He talks about Charlottesville—one might as well be consistent. Applewhite is a graduate of Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, and that leads them into a discussion of country music. It’s not what it used to be, they agree. It’s too commercial, too polished, too Top Forty.
There’s something that goes unmentioned, and it’s a matter of time before someone brings it up, and a question as to who it will be. He comes close to raising the subject himself, but waits, and finally it is Applewhite who sighs and announces, “Today’s Tuesday.”
“Yes.”
“Tomorrow and tomorrow,” he intones, “and tomorrow. Macbeth’s so-liloquy. ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow / creeps in this petty pace from day to day / to the last syllable of recorded time.’ Except that the petty pace runs out on the third tomorrow.”
“Do you want to talk about death, Preston?”
“What’s there to talk about?” He considers his own question, shakes his head. “I think about it all the time. I could probably find things to say about it.”
“Oh?”
All the Flowers Are Dying
47
“There are days when I almost look forward to it. To get it over with, you know? To get on to the next thing. Except, of course, that in this case there’s not going to be a next thing.”
“Are you sure of that?”
The man’s eyes narrow, and his expression turns guarded. “Arne,” he says, “I appreciate the friendship you’ve offered, but there’s something I have to know. You’re not here to save my fucking soul, are you?”
“I’m afraid salvation’s a little out of my line.”
“Because if you’re here selling fear of hell or hope of heaven, I’m not in the market. There’ve been a couple of clergymen who’ve tried to get in to see me. Fortunately the state gives a man a certain amount of control over things to compensate for the fact that they’re planning to take his life. I don’t have to see anyone I don’t want to see, and I’ve been able to keep the gentlemen of the cloth out of this cell.”
“I swear I’m not a priest, minister, or rabbi,” he says, smiling gently.
“I’m not even a religious member of the laity. I might be concerned with saving your soul if I were more nearly convinced that you have one, and that souls can be saved, or need saving.”
“What do you believe happens when you die?”
“You first.”
His words brook no argument, and Applewhite seems indisposed to offer one. “I think it ends,” he says. “I think it’s just over, like a movie after the last reel runs out.”
“No final credits?”
“Nothing at all. I think the rest of the world goes on, the same as it does when anybody else dies. Subjectively, I think it’s a resumption of the same nonexistence one had before birth. Or before conception, if you prefer.
It’s hard at first to accept the notion that you’re not going to exist anymore, but it gets a little easier when you think of all the centuries, all the millennia, when you hadn’t yet been born and the world got along just fine without you.”
“One hears of near-death experiences . . .”
“The tunnel, the white light? Some sort of hallucination, very likely with a physiological basis to it, and one that medical science will no 48
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doubt be able to explain to us at some future date. I won’t get to hear the explanation, but I guess I can live
