There is something eating him from the inside out. Dark and prickly, it begins as a tickle in the lungs and then unfurls like a weeping willow tree into his arteries. His spinal cord is a freeway, the fastest point between spokes of tissue, so it scurries up into the brain. Close to the scalp, what is killing him settles and swells. It slithers under the door into the place where memories are kept, a room full of glass jars filled with silver slivers of meaningful moments. These are what make a thing a person, what make a person a human: our collective experiences, our scabs and skipped heartbeats, our well-worn attempts at bravery, all tucked away in this cave of jars.
What is killing him kills him slowly, consuming those brilliant jars, swallowing them whole. Memories are knocked off one by one: the first to go is the way his father’s voice sounded, coarse and down-home, on the way to a Mets game in the summer of 1988. The second is the brightness of her hair, how it fanned out like reeds around those delicate cheeks, an ethereal crown of hay-colored strands he couldn’t keep from burying his face in.
What is killing him consumes these memories first, then moves on to less important ones: the time he skinned his knee against the bathtub drain and turned the water red, the word that caused him to lose the 4th grade spelling bee (“effervescent”), the scent of curry that spilled from the Indian restaurant below his apartment in Madison. That winter in Wisconsin was crueler even than typical Midwestern winters. He had no money for heat, so wrapped in every sweater he owned he bought a five-pound bag of cotton balls at a discount store and spent a Sunday afternoon stuffing them between the cracks in the floorboards.
What is killing him also claimed the folds of brain where words live. He can use his hands but can’t describe what they do; he can picture her face but can’t remember what to call the color of her eyes. He used to say they were amethyst—he was always so precise with language—but he can’t anymore. When words come out they are sputtered and cracked in the middle; he has forgotten prefixes and how to move his mouth to convey the roundness of vowels. He wants to say, “My memory jars are breaking.” He wants to say, “I love you, but I can’t remember the curve of your thighs or how to spell your middle name.” But his mouth is a frozen field, his tongue a useless batch of crumbled crops, so he doesn’t say anything at all.
It’s his brain that’s broken, not his body; what’s killing him will take his knowledge and memory and wit before his muscles or his bones. He cannot describe the color of her eyes but he can see them as her face hovers close to his, those delicate cheekbones creating friction against his gruff ones, the spring scent of her breath. Not all of his memory jars are shattered: the deepest, most important ones are on the highest shelves, and what is killing him can’t reach there yet. He remembers the pattern in which her freckles spray the bridge of her nose; in the summer they march across her cheeks like a stubborn trail of ants. He remembers his brother Max, that sly smile, and the scream his mother shot into the universe when Max hit his head on a rock in the ravine. There was blood trickling from his skull and caked between the web of his fingers. He needed eleven stitches.
He clings to the memories he still has, watches their precise outlines fade into patched, blurry scenes. He cannot recall the pattern of his mother’s kitchen tablecloth, but he remembers her doughy fingers and the regal arc of her eyebrows. He remembers the day he married Audra, how the lace of her gown swooped across her ankles. He is thankful for these small graces.
She knows where to take him; they talked about it when words could still escape the trap of his mouth. It is February and they are holding hands at the end of the dock. It’s freezing like it was during his first winter in Madison, but what is killing him took the memory of his favorite sweaters, the days of curry and cotton. She is crying like she promised she wouldn’t. “I’m sorry,” she says, and buries her own face in that hay-colored hair. He shrugs—the only response he is capable of now—and squeezes her shoulders. She is grateful for this small show of familiarity. What is killing him has made him a stranger to her, their shared silvery memories now survived only by her own cave of jars.
There is no pomp and circumstance to this ceremony, no painfully crafted last words or drawn-out goodbyes. It is just he and she on the dock in Madison, two wisps against the graying sky. She squeezes his hand three times, sending a telegram through her fingers – “I. Love. You.” What is killing him weakens its grip for a brief moment, granting him the dignity of this last act. He looks into her amethyst eyes and squeezes back four times: “I. Love. You. Too.”
As it hits the water, the husk of his body, so emptied of meaning now, doesn’t even make a sound.
The descriptive language is so precise and insightful, beautifully crafted, though tragic.