—It's all just fear, he said, —you think of three quarters of the people in this country actually believing Jesus is alive in heaven? and two thirds of them that he's their ticket to eternal life? fingertips running light as breath down skirting the top of the rift, tracing down its edge, just this panic at the idea of not existing so that joining the same Mormon wife and family in another life and you all come back together on judgment day, coming back with the Great Imam, coming back as the Dalai Lama choosing his parents in some Tibetan dung heap, coming back as anything—a dog, a mosquito, better than not coming back at all, the same panic wherever you look, any lunatic fiction to get through the night and the more farfetched the better, any evasion of the one thing in life that's absolutely inevitable…his fingers searching the edge of the rift and down it, deeper, desperate fictions like the immortal soul and all these damned babies rushing around demanding to get born, or born again, easing the rift wider to the moistened breadth of his hand, —I'd come back as a buzzard Faulkner said once, nothing hates him or wants him or needs him or envies…
—Oh! she pulled away, up on that damned elbow again —have you read Faulkner much?
—A long time ago. If then.
No comments:
Post a Comment