After ten months he stopped eating and drinking and late last Friday night she called Mark and said, “They’re saying it could be any time.”
Mark caught a morning flight out of Ithaca, arrived at the house and went straight on to the nursing home. Imogen, exhausted, took a nap. Vernon died minutes later, in Mark’s presence. Hard to know what he was aware of by then, but maybe he had been waiting for his son.
Mark has been helping with the funeral arrangements, and it’s wonderful to have him here for a few days. Neither she nor he give a shit about caskets and all that crap, they made that clear to the smarmy funeral director. But even the bare-bones option included a viewing.
Mark asked, “Should we invite anyone?”
“He wasn’t in touch with anyone for years.”
Which was true. But more important, frankly, Imogen couldn’t bear the thought of someone trying to say a single solitary word of consolation or understanding to her. Nobody knew, and they could all go fuck themselves.
She and Mark declined putting a notice in the local newspaper. Vernon was a private person, and so are they. So it’s just the two of them in the viewing room at the funeral home. They sit in the middle of the front row of the folding chairs in the stark white space. An empty table and two easels are backed against the wall. Those would be for bouquets and wreaths.
Mark goes up and puts his hand on Vernon’s and stands there silently for a minute. Then Imogen goes up, since that’s what Mark did. But she has no sentimentality about the body. This isn’t Vernon. The brow and nose are large and sharp. You can see the skull under the skin. Imogen returns to her chair and says, “He really looks dead, doesn’t he?”
Mark says, “Since they didn’t embalm him, gravity has pooled all the fluids at the back of his head.”
“Well of course I know that.”
They sit silently for a minute, then leave. They will return in three days to pick up the ashes. On the drive home, Mark says, “Now you can do some of that traveling you’ve always wanted to do.”
The thought fills her with something like panic, which she buries under a derisory snort. “I have so much to take care of first,” she says. Logistics related to his death. Nursing home and funeral home bills. Notifying the pension people. Life insurance policies, veteran’s policies. God knows what else. Vernon always took care of all that.
PART THREE
Friday, February 19, 2016
She stayed awake through last night and the following morning, then slept all afternoon between Billings and Missoula, when the bus was crowded. Woke up at 7:30 p.m. for the transfer. The bus leaving Missoula had fourteen passengers, of which six remained after the stop in Spokane at 1:30 a.m. (It’s “Spoke-ann.” Who knew?) Now it’s 3:00 a.m. and the other five are asleep, all quiet except for the hum of the tires and that vertical undulation like breathing that buses often do on highways, something modular in the construction of the roadbed. Her cone of light reminds her of her gooseneck lamp back home. She can almost believe the rest of the world doesn’t exist. So this is how to ride a long-distance bus—working the night shift. Maybe she could do it forever. In Seattle, buy a ticket for New York, repeat. Oscillate between the coasts like a cesium-133 atom in an atomic clock. From time dilation, she’d age slower than the rest of the population, gain maybe a millionth of a second over the course of her lifetime. Who needs love?
In Missoula she used the free Wi-Fi in the station to research tire hum. It turns out engineers use computers to randomize the size and placement of tread blocks on tires so that they (the tires, not the engineers) will generate, when rotating, a sound as close as possible to white noise. But as with light curves from stars, there will always exist a predominating frequency, however slight. It intrigues her that, of the six buses she’s been on since New York, the hum at highway cruising speed has always been somewhere between G and B-flat. As the tire model is probably standard throughout the Greyhound fleet, the differences in frequency could be the result of different amounts of wear on the treads, or different roadbeds, or different speeds at which the different drivers cruise. It’s true that the pitch drops when the bus slows.
Still no one has sat next to her. However, the buses since Chicago have been considerably less than full, so probably it doesn’t mean anything. How asymmetrical of her that she cares, since she loves pretending she’s the only person in the world. Asymmetry, thy name is human.
Remembering her gooseneck lamp, her nights of reading in her happier youth, she rummages in her pack and pulls out the first Newman volume. She turns it over in her hand. Impossible to describe how much comfort she gets from these books. The four volumes together weigh six pounds, fourteen ounces, the mass of a newborn baby, more fulfilling, less demanding. Slate-blue, full cloth, sewn bindings, a summation symbol stamped in copper on the front and spine, the title on the spine in gold: The World of Mathematics. The volumes are sixty years old, but the binding is tight, the pages seem new. Bravo, Simon and Schuster.
She still remembers opening the present. Her twelfth birthday. She and her mother were still living in that apartment in Astoria she loved so much. The present had been mailed from her father. He’d used Christmas paper—candy canes—at which her mother rolled her
