The Essayist December 2011
In ‘that sullen hall’ which Owen calls ‘Hell’, the dead soldier from England listens as his ‘strange friend’ – the dead soldier from Germany – explores certain memories and regrets (‘For by my glee might many men have laughed, / And of my weeping something had been left, / Which must die now’), and speaks of war and ‘the pity of war’. Finally ‘that other’ gently confronts the poet with a grievous revelation:
‘I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried, but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now…’*
Sleep – death’s brother…Wilfred Owen was killed in action soon after dawn on November 4. He was twenty-five, like Keats, and already, like Keats, a poet of Shakespearean pith. His mother Susan – who was Wilfred’s one essential intimate – received the telegram while all the bells of Salisbury were wagging and tumbling in celebration of Armistice Day – November 11, 1918.
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At noon on December 15, 2011, as I walked out into the enclosed forecourt of Bush Intercontinental (its low roof dripping with the tepid sweat of cars), Michael Z was as usual waiting for me. He had a book spread flat against the steering wheel, and he started like a guilty thing when I tapped lightly on the glass.
I got aboard and as usual we embraced. Then he straightened up.
‘…This is a dreadful thing to have to tell you, Martin,’ he said. ‘But basically it’s all over.’
Come here about me, you my Myrmidons…I had a sensation of nakedness, including a sensation of cold. That lasted for three or four seconds. Then I managed to lose myself in a finical linguistic question prompted by Salman’s email a day or two ago, addressed to Elena, in which he asked her, ‘Is it true that Christopher has died?’ Not ‘is dead’, I noticed, but the slightly softer ‘has died’. Slightly softer? Actually very much softer; there seems to be an inherent metrical stress on the word dead, imparting something decisive: not a process but a fact…Elena wrote back, saying it wasn’t true, he hadn’t died. But that was a day or two ago.
The car moved through the Houston suburbs (Christopher, now, was sleeping, deeply, and wasn’t expected to reawake) and as we drove the slowly melting igloo I’d been living in – the one with its name, Hope (or Denial), on a little plaque just above the entry tube – turned to slush. Come here about me was a summons: to my myrmidons, my praetorian guard of hormones and chemicals. That was my strategy, it turned out – blind negation, followed by clinical shock.
‘I was up there this morning,’ said Michael. Now we were in the different forecourt, under the shadow of the high-rise. ‘So I won’t…I think I’ll just go home.’
After a moment I said, ‘Yes, go home and be with Nina. How is Nina?’
‘The truth is we’re both very numb.’
Numb was something I understood. It seemed I was almost legless with internal sedatives and painkillers, but I was awake, I was above all alive, and I got out of the car and I walked into MD Anderson.
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Christopher was lying on his back with his head at an angle, his face averted, his eyes closed. I went straight to him and kissed his cheek and said in his ear, ‘Hitch, it’s Mart, and I’m at your side.’ His lashes, his eyelids, didn’t flicker…When after a minute I turned, I saw that there were seven others in the room. I registered them one by one: Blue, Blue’s father Edwin, Blue’s cousin Keith, Blue’s daughter Antonia, Christopher’s other children, Alexander and Sophia, and Blue’s very old friend Steve Wasserman. No doctors, no nurses: help from that quarter was at an end. The death-adoring flies, too, had sizzled off elsewhere; their work done, they had moved on elsewhere, they had moved on to another bed in another room.
And so had Christopher – because this wasn’t the familiar wardlet on the eighth floor. His possessions were there, half stowed or half packed, but this wasn’t the billet of an active being, no books or papers, no keyboard on the meal tray, no work in progress. A halfway house, a waiting room.
I quite soon realised what it was we were there to do. So I went round quietly greeting everyone, took a chair, folded my arms, and joined the death watch.
How young and handsome he was. How calmingly young and handsome. He looked like a thinker, a hard thinker, taking a brief rest, his neck bent back – to ease the strain of prolonged and testing meditations…Now reason slept, now the sleep of reason; he looked like Keats on his white bedding in Rome; he looked twenty-five.
From what Michael Z had said (and what Blue had let slip), I was beginning to understand. The disease that Christopher’s death would cure was not the emperor of all maladies, cancer; it was instead ‘the old man’s friend’–that old tramp, pneumonia. Yes, yet another hospital infection (his fourth, his fifth?), and for this particular bout he had waived all remedy.
Entirely typically, it had always been Christopher’s intention ‘to “do” death in the active and not the passive sense, and to be there and look it in the eye’ (‘wishing to be spared nothing that properly belongs to a life span’). Had it worked? Had he, in some sense, already done the dying?
Well, he was insensible now, he was oblivious now. Which, I supposed, was a necessary condition for any death watch. How could it be effected otherwise? You could watch death come, but you couldn’t watch your own death watch. Not even
