The Last Samurai

You don’t understand. It’s not a question of what’s fair to expect. Some people do what they do because everybody does it and it doesn’t make them sick that that’s what everybody does it makes them feel trapped once or twice but better most of the time. If somebody says the magic words they wake up for a little while and go to sleep again. You think I should stop feeling sick if somebody does something because they hear the magic words, but it’s not a question of should, it’s a question of what happens. It doesn’t. That is it wouldn’t. It wouldn’t and that’s why I can’t say it any more, I just look at people. Sometimes I look at them thinking What are you waiting for and sometimes I look at them and say What are you waiting for.

We went into the house. We went back upstairs and he explained patiently that if he could go on waking people up for 50 years by saying Open Sesame you could probably say he should do it even if he felt sick but actually he couldn’t say it any more to anyone who was waiting for him to say it. So it just came down to what we had talked about before.

I said: Were you waiting for me to say Open Sesame?

He said: I’m not now, anyway. I’d better write those letters.

He sat down at the desk again and started writing, and I sat down in my chair. It was about midnight. After a while I fell asleep.

I woke up a couple of hours later. There were four or five envelopes on the desk. Red Devlin was sitting on the bed with his back against the wall; I could see the whites of his eyes. I turned on the lamp beside my chair, and now I could see that the pills on the dresser were gone.

He said

Are you my son?

No, I said.

He said

I didn’t think so. I’m glad.

He laughed and said

I didn’t mean that the way it sounds. I just meant you could do better.

That was the last time he laughed. He sat quietly, looking down, as if it tired him to look into a face. I didn’t say I didn’t think I could do better.

After a while his eyes closed.

I waited two or three hours until I was pretty sure there was nothing left but a thing in corduroy trousers and a blue shirt. The clubbed child and the weeping eye and the smiling chessplayer were gone. I took his hand in mine. It was still warm, but cooling. Then I sat on the bed beside him and put his arm over my shoulder.

I sat beside him while the body grew cooler. I thought at one point that if I called a hospital the organs could still be transplanted, but I thought his wife would be upset if she came home to find that even the mortal remains did not remain. In one sense, of course, it is absurd to feel better because the corpse of one’s beloved is anatomically complete; to embrace a dead body with a kidney.

I wished I’d discussed it with him. I did not think his wife would enjoy arriving at a more rational position immediately after discovering the fact of his suicide.

I tried to remember how long it took rigor mortis to set in. I put his arm by his side again and cried on its chilly shoulder. It was all right to do this now that it couldn’t make him feel he had to make an effort, maybe even that he had to go on being sick.

I spent the night beside it. I felt better with the dead thing beside me, reminding me that he had killed the clubbed child and the weeping eye.

In the morning his cheek was ice cold. It was about 5:00 when I woke up; the light was still on. I lay for a little while by the hard, cold thing on the bed, thinking I should get up and do something. I thought: Well anyway he doesn’t have to get up. He’d said once that he woke every morning at 5:00 and lay staring at the ceiling for two or three hours, hoping to fall asleep again and telling himself he might as well get up. After five or ten minutes he would see the smiling chessplayer for the first time that day, and tell himself he might as well get up, and lie staring at the ceiling.

I put on his denim jacket, and emptied the pockets. Then I took the letters from the table and went down the street to post them.

6

A good samurai will parry the blow

I got home one night about 9:00. Sib was typing Sportsboat and Waterski International.

I thought I could slip upstairs, but she looked up. She said: Is something the matter?

I said: No.

She said: So what’s not the matter?

I said: Well

I said: Somebody killed himself. I told him about Jonathan Glover and leaving your wife but he said that wouldn’t help.

Sib said: Well

She put her hand on my shoulder.

I thought: Why am I keeping her here?

I kept thinking that I had let Red Devlin go where he wanted to go and he’d never done anything for me. I kept thinking I should say You go right ahead.

I said: Do you ever think about Jonathan Glover? Maybe you should leave the country and get another job. Go somewhere where you don’t need a work permit.

Sib said: You mean go back to the States? But I don’t want to go back to the States.

I said: Why not?

Sib said: You can’t get Nebraska Fried Chicken. It’s too depressing for words.