bed in the neighbor’s guest room smelling of carpet cleanser, and has shared each second of his father’s nightmare ordeal while lying between clean sheets and staring, wide-eyed, at the slowly moving bands of light on the neighbor’s guest-room ceiling as passing cars hiss by on wet pavement. It is more than twenty years later, after he has married Gail, that Jeremy realizes this. In truth, it is Gail who realizes it—who interrupts Jeremy’s bitter telling of that evening’s events—it is Gail who has access to parts of Jeremy’s memory that not even he can reach.
Jeremy did not weep when he was four, but he does this night twenty-one years later: he weeps on Gail’s shoulder for almost an hour. Weeps for his mother and for his father, now gone, who has died of cancer un-forgiven by his son. Jeremy weeps for himself.
I am not so sure about Gail’s first telepathic encounter with death. There are memories of burying her cat Leo when she is five, but the remembered mindtouch during that animal’s final hours after being struck by a car might be more a mourning for the absence of purring and furry warmth than any real contact with the cat’s consciousness.
Gail’s parents are fundamentalist Christians, increasingly fundamentalist as Gail grows older, and she rarely hears death spoken of in any terms other than “passing over” to Christ’s kingdom. When she is eight and her grandmother dies—she has been a stiff, formal, and odd-smelling old lady whom Gail rarely visits—Gail is lifted up to view the body in the funeral home while her father whispers in her ear, “That’s not really Grams … Grams is in heaven.”
Gail has decided early, even before Grams’s passing over, that heaven is almost certainly a crock of shit. Those are her Great-Uncle Buddy’s words—”All this holy-roller stuff, Beanie, it’s all a crock of shit. This heaven and choirs-of-angels stuff … all a crock of shit. We die and fertilize the ground, just like Leo Puss is doing out in the backyard right now. The only thing we know that happens after we’re dead is that we help the grass and flowers grow, everything else is a crock of shit.” Gail has never been sure why Great-Uncle Buddy called her Beanie, but she thinks it has to do with a sister of his who died when they were children.
Death, she decides early, is simple. One dies andmakes the grass and flowers grow. Everything else is a crock of shit.
Gail’s mother hears her sharing this philosophy with a playmate—they are burying a hamster who has died—and Gail’s mother sends the playmate home and harangues Gail for over an hour about what the Bible says, how the Bible is God’s Word on earth, and how stupid it is to think that a person simply ceases to be. Gail, stubborn, stares and listens, but refuses to recant. Her mother says that Great-Uncle Buddy is an alcoholic.
So are you
, the nine-year-old Gail thinks, but does not say aloud. She does not know this through her mindtouch ability—that will come under her control four years later when she enters puberty—but has deduced it through finding the can opener under the towels in the bathroom, from hearing her mother’s usually precise diction slurred and loud late at night, and from listening to the voices rising up the stairs from the parties her parents throw for their born-again friends.
Ironically, the first person close to Gail to die after she comes into the true birthright of her telepathic ability is her Great-Uncle Buddy. She has taken the bus all the way across Chicago to visit Uncle Buddy in the hospital where he lies dying. He has been unable to talk, his throat catheterized for the breathing tubes that keep air flowing past the cancer-ridden throat into the cancer-riddled lungs, but fifteen-year-old Gail remains there for six hours, long past visiting hours, holding his hand and trying to project her own thoughts to his through the shifting veils of pain and painkillers. There is no
Jeremy did not weep when he was four, but he does this night twenty-one years later: he weeps on Gail’s shoulder for almost an hour. Weeps for his mother and for his father, now gone, who has died of cancer un-forgiven by his son. Jeremy weeps for himself.
I am not so sure about Gail’s first telepathic encounter with death. There are memories of burying her cat Leo when she is five, but the remembered mindtouch during that animal’s final hours after being struck by a car might be more a mourning for the absence of purring and furry warmth than any real contact with the cat’s consciousness.
Gail’s parents are fundamentalist Christians, increasingly fundamentalist as Gail grows older, and she rarely hears death spoken of in any terms other than “passing over” to Christ’s kingdom. When she is eight and her grandmother dies—she has been a stiff, formal, and odd-smelling old lady whom Gail rarely visits—Gail is lifted up to view the body in the funeral home while her father whispers in her ear, “That’s not really Grams … Grams is in heaven.”
Gail has decided early, even before Grams’s passing over, that heaven is almost certainly a crock of shit. Those are her Great-Uncle Buddy’s words—”All this holy-roller stuff, Beanie, it’s all a crock of shit. This heaven and choirs-of-angels stuff … all a crock of shit. We die and fertilize the ground, just like Leo Puss is doing out in the backyard right now. The only thing we know that happens after we’re dead is that we help the grass and flowers grow, everything else is a crock of shit.” Gail has never been sure why Great-Uncle Buddy called her Beanie, but she thinks it has to do with a sister of his who died when they were children.
Death, she decides early, is simple. One dies andmakes the grass and flowers grow. Everything else is a crock of shit.
Gail’s mother hears her sharing this philosophy with a playmate—they are burying a hamster who has died—and Gail’s mother sends the playmate home and harangues Gail for over an hour about what the Bible says, how the Bible is God’s Word on earth, and how stupid it is to think that a person simply ceases to be. Gail, stubborn, stares and listens, but refuses to recant. Her mother says that Great-Uncle Buddy is an alcoholic.
So are you
, the nine-year-old Gail thinks, but does not say aloud. She does not know this through her mindtouch ability—that will come under her control four years later when she enters puberty—but has deduced it through finding the can opener under the towels in the bathroom, from hearing her mother’s usually precise diction slurred and loud late at night, and from listening to the voices rising up the stairs from the parties her parents throw for their born-again friends.
Ironically, the first person close to Gail to die after she comes into the true birthright of her telepathic ability is her Great-Uncle Buddy. She has taken the bus all the way across Chicago to visit Uncle Buddy in the hospital where he lies dying. He has been unable to talk, his throat catheterized for the breathing tubes that keep air flowing past the cancer-ridden throat into the cancer-riddled lungs, but fifteen-year-old Gail remains there for six hours, long past visiting hours, holding his hand and trying to project her own thoughts to his through the shifting veils of pain and painkillers. There is no
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