Psychosomatic:

A Requiem

 

            I don’t know what exactly was the matter with him, only that the fleshy mound of malignancy was suppose to be dying. I think that was his point, glassed over eyes whispering thoughts he continually agued against. Physically, he just laid there with his head back and eyes closed contemplating something which, if I had asked, he would have simply said had nothing to do with death. He was the perfect example of trying not to die. He assured me, when first I was informed, that he was definitely not afraid of dying. Perfectly beautiful teeth, those supposed alignments of excellent health, were kept aligned by the perfectly aligned braces; Eighteen and pumped full of positive disposition, a sedative of zeal. Part of me wanted to smack him, remind that simple bastard that the world, tomorrow, would not look so bright, and the sun would set, so to speak, without him reassuring himself. Of course, alone as we were, the objections in my mind were so outspoken, I felt even worse for thinking them. Funny. You wonder what you would do if you knew you were going to die, and, assured as I was that he was dying, I knew that he was resolved; yet, the confidence in him was something of spectral mockery. He had pitched his tent on the faith that he’d be dead before faith itself dissolved from the revelation of sun’s rays.

            “You know what’s funny,” he asked.

            “What,” I responded.

            “I’m not worried about dying as much as I am worried about how my parents will feel,” he continued with a sigh. I held back the vomiting sound my body—gagging as it did—urged me to make. Instead, he forced the bile down my throat with more sympathetic Lifetime shit: “Like, you know, let down or something.” The dribble which exited his mouth, former poetics forgotten, made me feel all the worse that this was the image I was stuck with, this dying façade of former splendor. “I need a few more years, you know, to put something famous down on paper,” he looked over at the black and white, cheap notebook, some pharmacy brand he picked up for a notepad and used continually there after. “I want to be quotable,” he assured me, “but time’s just one of those things.”

The profanations of a dying mind, problematic to the fucking failed sleep I worked on, fell on only my cynical appreciations. He was dying and so fucking afraid, that he wouldn’t even remember his own self. If he was going to live past tomorrow, which he wasn’t, he would have begged me to have drowned him.

“You ever wonder why they put you in those robes? Why can’t you wear pants under those things anyway?” I asked him. If he was going to die, he could at least go back to being the way he used to be, instead of acting like some salted slug dragging itself across the final wet branch of a wintry tree.

            “Just because I’m in bed with a sheet covering my dick, doesn’t mean I’m a damn doctor,” he jived. “I’m sure they reuse these things and it’s better to use one sheet than a bunch of multi-sized skirts,” he sat up and grimaced at his arm. “This fucking thing is pulling at my skin again...” the blood rushed straight to his eyes. I’d never read it, but I was certain that the Red Death couldn’t have done a better impersonation of burst capillaries. With a grimace and some sickening hack that resembled drowning geysers, he laid his head back down.

            I looked at him sure that he was healthier than the disease let on. I couldn’t help but wish this to be some elaborate ruse where I could punch a camera man in joyous relief when they surprised me. The ruse curtains never rose. His disease, his whatever, was some fluke that they identified too quick far too late. “You’re looking better today,” I assured him. Sarcasm, that sickly eel, usurped my sincerity.

            He looked at me, “Don’t bullshit a bullshitter,” he paused dramatically, “I’m dying.” He blinked at the long tubes running from the various machines around him. “Truth be told, I’m not quite certain what exactly any of this shit does. You’d think, with my condition and all, they’d have told me,” his voice grayed and he closed his eyes. “Do you know where my parents are?”

            The father was, as I wish I was, drowning somewhere in a bottle. The mother, well, his mother was far luckier than either of us were anyway. Who knew where the hell she was, “They’re at home, of course,” I didn’t finish the sentence. I’m sure, somewhere in the house, there was a pamphlet lying in waits to be discussed. As it was, I knew nothing about grave plots, funerals, and the death of my closest friend. “How’s the book coming?”

            He tilted his head from side to side, eyes tight and lips compressed. “I couldn’t finish it. I was close just, well, couldn’t quite see the ending.” The pillow beneath his head seemed comfortable enough, despite the pain in his head. “You’ll finish it?” he asked. “I have notes in my notebook, characters and the such…just, well, don’t have them put that I’m dead in it yet,” he urged. “In fact, just name a character after me or something…”

            I was confused, to say the least. “What are you talking about?” and that little white lie that is reserved for the brink of death immerged, “You can finish it tomorrow.” The most prominent vagary of life ticked its morbid, elliptical orbit about the planet earth and the chair beneath my ass seemed to stretch to a taut point of annoyance. Needles marched up and down my spine in some organic objection to his condition.

            He opened his eyes and smiled, “I told you, I’m not worried.” I figured he’d bring up god eventually, but he didn’t. He had the attitude of it, some reassured lie they pound into your head even after death. “I’ll be fine. I just, well, I thought I’d get allotted more time at it. It makes you wonder.” I knew what he was talking about. Some chick flick movie beat to the drum of this drama, explaining safely all the things that needed said without actually having the connection, that fraying line, between the two of us. “I don’t want to die,” he told me at last, that briefest of pauses.

            I sat back and thought of something important to tell him, some little encouraging anecdote which would open his eyes, revitalize his lungs, and get me out of the hospital. There, at the breach of my mouth, he waved his hand innocently, “just give me a few seconds to sleep and think of something to say.” I couldn’t tell that he was sleeping or wanted to sleep or anything. His life, to me, was at best a sleeping cycle anyway.

            You wonder what people cared about, when you are in this spot with eyes focused as they were. Should I feel gracious he died quickly and I, so morose in my cynicism, would die of some strange STD? There, the didactic, scholarly part of myself lay with him: a pedantic misery of misappropriated funding, unpaid scholastic loans, and an unconditional middle finger to his own concrete plans of world domination. When they had told him he had whatever it was he had, the first thing to die was his Ego. He wanted, I suppose, to be hated like Pound or Yeats, referenced and quoted like Goethe or Shakespeare, or even torn by some hack writer trying to make it further than their own world. Such ambitions, rapped nicely next to Ego, were tossed in a river in its burlap bounded grave.

            Now, part of me wanted to think back on the grand images which paraded about our lives, the vivid and lucid paintings of our childhood experiences, but I didn’t. I couldn’t think of anything at all. Fuck, I couldn’t even begin to wonder what the sun on the greenish purple hills would look like. He was there, in bed, naked, and I was there, broken and clothed. I think that was about the extent of our observant behaviors, those poetic over-exaggerations designed to fuel ones monotony. Other than that, we were two people that knew each other and could predict the time line of each other’s lives. So different was our relationships. His hair, once a vibrant brown of health now lay in some sickly blond, a malnourished looking hue signifying his body’s poor digestion. The IV bread of life fueled his vibrant spiral, like tree sap on bow saw.

            Shaking my head violently, I scooped up his notebook and could see the scribbled scrawling of his weak hand. There were the fine scrawls of his pen, though characteristically creating the horrible hand writing so easily characterizing him. The early pages contained the ever dull notes on classic mythology, the brief and sleepy handling of his history classes, and, from what I can determine, some type of coffee stain surrounding a horrible stanza from Elliot. I couldn’t help but think he did that as a sign of revenge. After those glances at his monotonous academic career, there was a small and eloquently written poem. Not in his hand writing though. A beautiful blue swirl followed by the reverberant poetics of a most definitely female penmanship. Here, with small black stanzas written about it, was something of an oddity.

            Now, I knew the poor bastard well enough to know that this untitled poem was, if anything, not a famous poem. Oh no, this was an amateur pen printing its first opus. The writer and poet I saw dying before me would never, ever, and most definitely never associate himself with some female poet, especially not of such a superior—to his own aptitude—abilities. No, this captivating author was a foreign invader upon the morbid and sullen disposition of the misogynist I knew. With a smile, I observed this carefully ornate attack on his sanctity. It was free form, it was unmetered, it was modern and it was, in other words, good. Not the classical bastardizations which infected his soul. This was the postmodernist attack on his formalist estates. There, about his iambs and trochees, next to all the other poetic crap he had fed me over the years, next to the broken stanzas and Greek references, was the piercing pathos he would have hated most.

            I wondered if he had seen it; so simple, the purloined stab into his heart sat open like a broken mirror. I wondered if he waged some war in his head to ruin her image or, if like some cliché knock off of a Shakespearian comedy, would this Benedict attempt to be in love with this Beatrice. The broken, dying writer before me breathed his only response to me at the moment; a long, soft sigh like air escaping lungs.

            Inside I pondered the babble written on the page. There were, of course, always pearls amongst his poetry: a word choice here, a phrase there, enlightened eloquent alteration, etc. But here, he strained to make it perfect. The blue poem amongst black urged him up and onward. The Greek references became retellings, their stories marching with Victorian poets torn in morbid entropic misery. There, they’d meet with the roman cathedrals of Yeats, and the spiraling denizens of Dante turned frozen hells of Milton. Each and every line uniformly marched its way like wafting souls of Becket, bled into some deeper and darker desires of the retellings of Walker. He penned the dark heart and broken eyes of his mind, those observations he felt lost in some sunken world moving gradually away from his soul, the ghost from another age. Pater’s green gem burned deep in his eyes, a pulsing loathing Ruskin put shackles on (when his babies weren’t about).  He worried via meter of the world and the funeral he had never seen coming, some grand hallucination which was promised yet unforeseen. Like Oedipus, he claimed, had he known and yet could not believe. Like the sphinx, his hubris was unquestionable, marching as it were on Bethlehem. Each line, ever word, matched and demanded from this prose narrative poem what bravado, what audacity, had it to confront and conflict him as anything but the chief among pathos, the god of sullen demise. Like Cerberus, he proclaimed, would he guard the halls of eloquence and beauty, aesthetic guardian against sloth’s careening, mundane poetry. Usurped throne, he had argued, now long beneath the weight of his convictions, dogma, and resilience, boiled him into the same vat he openly desired. He wanted, so to speak, to be in the bed and dying. More than that, he wanted some classical hand to pen him into eternity:

Time, since brought low, was now my enemy

And, for what sake, so sought was our plight:

 Must we, so alone at last in bright night,

Stand together for all eternity?

 

            The poor bastard lay in front of me. His poetry seemed ineffectual, as always. I never urged him either way when it came to that. No more apt to point out the benefits than the flaws. The truth is, the public was too unromantic for his visions. No, there was no middle ground between the romanticized version of reality, the fantasy clouding his vision, and the tragic humor of his soul. His laying almost dead on the bed made for a more apt acceptance. A pity he didn’t write about the sickness inside now; sympathy sells, my friend.

            No, the female who broke your heart, that muse that cursed your poetry book, will sell. She’ll be pushing pen to paper when you’re busy producing nothing but hair and dust. Why? Your rigid respect gets you nothing but the backward, slant rhymes, attempted meters, and broken verse of a society to anti-intellectual for your sake. Better dead then unread, I suppose. I sat there, looking at his slowly decaying body and realized one little unimportant aspect: I was losing a friend tonight. But this thought came only after all those conditions I predisposed against him, maligned into his worst interests.

            With avarice, I thought of stealing the poetry book. The poked-marked structure of his face expanded as he breathed the ever slightly inhaling and exhaling of shallow belly breathing. I watched. The sun outside had since gone down and my friend lay there still. There were poems, grand prophetic visions of his own demise, which penned the attitudes towards the setting suns, stanzas about the condition of the world as it turned onward: “What sails set when you die and arise again,” poor bastard and his Helen metaphors.

            He blinked opened his eyes, crust of unwipped condensation tearing with the force of his eyelids. He looked at me, “where are my parents?” his heart was pounding beneath his chest, I could see it through the skin shirt he wore, through the woven cotton of the sheet. “Are they here?” No, my friend, they aren’t. I am here, “You should tell them to come,” he said.

            “They’re at home. They’ll be in tomorrow,” I didn’t want to cry, but I was on the verge of it. What horrible pumping of emotions stirred just behind my eyes, dykes breaking in damnable contempt and pity, “You’ll see them tomorrow,”

            He smiled those prefect teeth, “I’m going to say something very pretentious. I want you to remember it and tell S_____ I said it after the funeral. She’ll get the humor,” dry coughs promenaded his pretension, “You don’t have to write it down, its from Oedipus on my shelf,” which one he didn’t elaborate, but I felt certain I could, would, locate it easily enough. Knowing him, it was underlined or stared, “Now cease lamentation, nor further prolong your dirge, all of these matters have found their consummation! Tell her it’s from me. She’ll understand.” He closed his eyes and the silent health monitor beeped.

            Well, he wasn’t dead, I thought. That little beepy thing would have flipped out by now. He must still have been alive, though encased in his mucous prison. I wanted to touch his neck, feel past the graying face and detect a pulse. I knew it was there, though, under the already decaying flesh. The fever in his head, the engine of perspiration beneath his eyelids, had yet to consume his spirit. Sentimental moments were gradually passing by as I thought of things to say. Time, violent enemy, agreed to wait a few more moments, even as sand filled his eyes.

            I tried to think of something to say in that moment of respite. I wondered, almost openly, what words I could comprise and say to him. Something more than just straight, something provocative and awe-inspiring enough to keep him here a few more decades, or, at least, remind him of who he was before he was the dying writer on the bed.

            Opening the journal, I flipped to the earliest pages and read the poems of his teens, poems of girls and scars, memories and agonies. I quickly flipped past all the bad stanzas and poorly composed sonnets—notes on novel ideas, names for short stories, and stories without characters—until I came across the page with the blue ink. I turned it over one last page, and, hauntingly, came across his final poem.

            Here was his requiem, I suppose. It was a sad little two lined stanza with a blue box about it, blue ink again foreign yet inviting all the same. It was the ball point pen of a modern writer circling the inspiration of her dying muse; He, likewise, placed x’s on corner, crosses to remind him of her. I suppose it was fitting, martyr that he thought was, muse that she thought he might be. Two little lines signifying his lifetime, his grief, and his compassions: “To conflict and dismal recognition/ to solitude, and brief respiration.” What sad little balloon he floated that moment. I could see the pen dots on the sides, moment he burnt off, bleeding the helium from his own stem, and protecting that simple little line. Nothing fancy, I thought. It was, after all, the dying lines of a writer not yet important, and a longevity snuffed out before some disaster could immortalize him. What the world needed was a “one riot, one writer” policy. No, the world, so simple minded, could not see past the blood and guts of the pumping muscles within their chest.

            I said to him, “They don’t understand you at all,” but he understood them. He knew what pen he placed every day, and what the words all meant: The confusion, the violence, the rancor. It all locked itself in his head. The drugs they forced into his stomach purged those aspects for brief hours a day, but he would lock himself with the tower of his own self-determination. “Be miserable a few minutes more and pen your grace,” I told him. He didn’t move; he was immobile and I reached for his arm. “Please, don’t die until you do,” I urged. “They don’t understand the misery, that cross, which you bear!” I knew it was about as melodramatic as a whirlwind at a parade, but I wanted him to hear, to revel in the inspirations he conjured. “This state of affairs,” the disease inside his body, “has nothing to do with you, you know that right!” I questioned.

            He had given up, it was obvious enough. There was very little response. Opinionated people are despised because they open their mouths, I thought. This dying writer, his voice so strong normally and so quieted now, had yet to offend the right people and now, in this bed with catheter in, he lays in wait for some finalization of his life. How silence now seemed so vulgar; I suppose, in a way, I idolized that aspect. That brief light burning to burn. You got to burn it bright, all right, but there seems to be too much of the push for the world. Here, my friend, do we find the consolation, god’s bombastic cachinnation.

            He rolled his eyes in his head, final gears within the clock, and he snap his eyelids open, “you still here?” the voice broke upon the emperor’s avarice, constructed artifice, those Byzantine walls, and he blinked in a compassion that I couldn’t help but believe was meant for something besides me. That energy spent was meant for some Muse, or some Capital letter with underscores following, some grand poetic convention lost on laymen; this hidden compassion burnt like backfires—Oxygen’s bright burst blew out his retinas— I felt backwards and distant.  Personally, I had rather have been anywhere outside of that pedestaled throne I had unconsciously usurped, the reserved seat for an ambiguous persona unknown to me except through a blue ink.

            A gasp of wind excited his lungs and that hum erupted through the silence of the room. No great angels heralded, no lamenting requiem caressed his demise, a softening note to ease him into oblivion. What was left was the physical pinnacle of eloquence, a hollowed husk hollowed out at the chest and bled so wretchedly dry. I don’t know if I felt more or less lost or found; when I reached for his poetry book, I found my fingers already tightly crushing the blacking binding. But, with spirit, I scooped up his book, and slowly touched the two fingers of my right hand—the two which caressed writing instruments—and to lips then to head and left. As my feet hit the pavement, I could have sworn there was something bright about the room I was leaving.