Dear Lad,
° "Will I die if I eat it?"
° How my heart went out to you as I presented you with the torso of Chico L. Muerto, over whose left pec each of us in turn had placed the right hand--you, Coz, Piers, I (forming the Intention); Chico, so intuitively and ritely sacrificed by Coz last Sunday--I wish you could’ve seen his Skellington chasuble and Death’s Head mitre. My heart went out to you, I wanted to shelter you under my wings and dry your tears.
° "Well of course you’ll die!" I replied.
° For indeed, so you shall. As shall Piers, as shall Coz, as will I.
° Not because we ate Chico, our misstep was being born.
° "Will I die if I eat it?"
° How my heart went out to you as I presented you with the torso of Chico L. Muerto, over whose left pec each of us in turn had placed the right hand--you, Coz, Piers, I (forming the Intention); Chico, so intuitively and ritely sacrificed by Coz last Sunday--I wish you could’ve seen his Skellington chasuble and Death’s Head mitre. My heart went out to you, I wanted to shelter you under my wings and dry your tears.
° "Well of course you’ll die!" I replied.
° For indeed, so you shall. As shall Piers, as shall Coz, as will I.
° Not because we ate Chico, our misstep was being born.
§
° Do you remember how I dreaded rereading Madame Bovary? I always thought it perhaps the most perfect novel ever written (only the operatic reappearance of the eyedangling, fleshrotted beggar whistling Dixie at the exact moment of Emma’s death mars the spare, unsentimentalistic Realism). But when I first read it, when I was a little younger than you, it provoked a nearpanick depression. Not that I was quite sensible of Emma’s manic-depressive disorder, and didn’t know, till recently, of Flaubert’s.
° But I felt every degree of Emma’s entrapment, The Nightmare on Elm Street-ness of her punishment.
° And yet, that wasn’t what I really dreaded.
° For Emma doesn’t just die, immediately after singing ten verses of "O terra, addio." For fifty pages she dies. In such dispassionate, scientifically observed detail--replete with discolourings, oozings, tics, temperature change, rattle--that one might as well be reading the last chapter of a Hospice Caregivers’ Manual.
° For at your age I was deeply afeared of Death Most Holy.
§
° Julja still is. Deeply afeared of Death Most Holy.
° You are.
° Piers is professionally sceptical--he thinks I didn’t read his mind as he fumbled in placing his hand on Chico’s panettone heart, "You act like you’ve never done this before," I accused him.
° And Coz is a gypsy, so Death is one of the family, Mlle Cousine Tarot.
° America is terrified of Death Most Holy. Jeb Bush and the Florida Legislature outlawed her:
° And 9.11! The whole country just bepissed itself, was still dribbling on Election Day, as if those 3000 were somehow deader than we all shall be, than all others up to now have been.
§
° Although since my visit to the Shrine in Chico Mexico I have had no fear of Death Most Holy, it doesn’t mean I’m all that crazy about the dying itself. Such a lack of rehearsal, such a lack of control. Such an opportunity to mortify oneself with a Dialogues of the Carmelites sort of "Dio mio, Dio mio, perchè m’hai abbandonato?!"
° And that is why each of us should prepare a witty little exit joke, like Oscar Wilde’s about the wallpaper. Or something mystocryptic, like Rosebud.
° My tombstone, if I weren’t having myself sprinkled on the Pet Sematary out back, would read, "It doesn’t hurt, Paety." A macabre jest, stolen from Young Pliny ((Litterae, Liber III:xvi)), Sandy gets it.
§
° No, eating Chico--and he was surprisingly tasty, a triumph of the Sri Lankan Mexican Pasticceria--will not buy off Death. Death Most Holy is not a cheap floozy like some deities I could mention.
° Chico honours Death Most Holy. And perhaps, if so it please her, she will be gentle.
° Perhaps not.
§§§§§
° No matter. For not a one of you thought to wonder, not even Coz, what Intention I was forming as I held my right hand above each of yours in turn. Innocent innocent little lads as y’all are. Trusting, mighty trusting.
° Yes, of course, I explained why you received the crossed arms, why Coz received the extra leg, why I ate the notorious right leg, and why Piers got the head and brain--and no, it wasn’t just so the firstborn could have the raisins, while you two younger had to make do with--.
° Innocent innocent lads, tutti e tre.
° For what eating Chico has done, under my silent Intention hovering over each of y’all’s right hands, is to open a conduit from one to the other. Coz’s righteous and wrathful indignation--what a human rights lawyer he’d make; your Buddhalike silent teaching, unsuspected, unresented by the student; Piers’s astonishing organisational skills, his ability to plot a course and negotiate it (he’s just back from singing Vespers and Benediction at one of the most prestigious Churches in the Western hemisphere). My--uh, my--uh, my--well I’m wizard with feral She Cats, the Chapel Black is finally accepting stroking, didn’t even bite me last time.
° As you think of this and that--and right now, under the influence of the quadruple occultation, you are thinking of this and that--you have available to you, if you passively notice it, whatever you need from Coz or from Piers or--if you’re thinking of going to Las Vegas and replacing Roy--from me.
° The same for Coz.
° The same for Piers--for the stars will change, and another year he will be drawing current, not supplying only.
° Admire your brothers.
° Honour Death Most Holy.
° Sink your psychic teeth into Chico’s warm palpitating flesh . . . .
° Carnivorously, Giac.
P. S. Wish I’d read Victor Hugo’s tract against capital punishment before Hallowe’en, such a list of gruesome French misexecutions . . . the woman of Dijon whose neck the blade did not quite sever, so the executioner’s servants had to grab her legs and pull. Plunk!
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