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1998 october 22 the final frontierif, for one reason or another, john glenn dies when he is in space this time, do you think they should just push him out the hatch and let space be his final resting place? it is foggy here and if i look out the window of my 14th floor office, i can see nothing but white. i could be on the 1st floor, i could be on the 501st floor, i could be on a mountaintop in tibet for all my eyes know. truth be told, i would rather be in tibet than here at the office, but what else is new. so, i'm sitting here at the office, looking out into the great white void and i'm thinking about death and if you get to play afterwards and if so, where. this is partially because looking outside my window right now is akin to looking at clouds, those traditional bastions of angeldom, and partially because i was watching the telly last night and they broadcast a police artist's sketch of a suspected serial rapist and damn if it didn't look exactly like theodore. which is, of course, all fine and dandy, except there is no way it could be theodore, as we all know he died last summer. also, he wasn't a rapist, and would never have been a rapist, but that doesn't have much to do with this entry so we can drop it. i don't know what happens when we die. when theodore was still in a coma, i went to the hospital to see him one last time. his family had optimistically told me they were certain he was still there, that they were getting hand squeezes from him, that there were subtle changes in his pulse and breathing and eye movements in reaction to his being spoken to or poked or prodded or held. i wanted to believe them and i wanted to feel those things, but try as i might, i couldn't; i couldn't feel his theodoreness in the room at all. his hand was limp and swollen in mine, his eyes staring dully ahead when the nurse held back the eyelids, his breaths were shallow and regular. i had been afraid to go see him, because i didn't want my last vision of my best friend to be one of him wired and tubed and in one of those horribly unattractive hospital gowns. i needn't have worried, because i am still not convinced he was even there. his body was there, he wasn't. i don't know where he was, though, and i still don't. alan and kay think he hangs around their house; they find things moved, they feel as though they are being watched, once they took a picture in their bathroom (no, not one of those pics, one of alan shaving and his son pretending to) and there were strange purple spots floating in the background. i doubt it is theodore but there's a part of me that hopes it is, hopes he is floating around in the ether, jumping from friend to friend, looking out for them, fucking with them just a little, having a grand old time. if john glenn does die in space, i'd like the idea of him floating around up there too, popping in to say hello to the astronauts and cosmonauts, acting as a greeting committee should those aliens ever arrive. coming to you live and in person from that which is before the great beyond, claire
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