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By Root 2467 0

enough for me to join humanity, these things were all it took to nudge my soul into a state of rapture. Hilarious Larry, even if he had understood these things—though I do not believe he ever could have—would have found nothing in his heart to love them with. He would have preferred to spend his life beating his chest, sleeping in the trees, and fucking in the mud beneath an open sky, to move through the world in the sensory immediacy of nature. What could Van Gogh or Beethoven have possibly given to such a soul? Nothing. I cannot help but admire the obstinate purity of such an attitude, and although I do not share it, my reflections on it sometimes cause me to doubt the inner honesty of my own convictions on the fundamental goodness of art. And then, if I let them, my most pessimistic ruminations on this subject lure me to the thought that perhaps we must count all things of human artifice that outlast the very days of their creation as only so much pollution.

One evening, Lydia and I hiked the half mile or so between our peaceful little house and the big house that everyone else lived in, in order to join the others for dinner. Upon our arrival Mr. Lawrence informed us in solemn tones that Larry’s illness had taken a severe turn for the worse. A curtain of respectful quiet had fallen over the house. Mr. Lawrence sat with us as Lydia and I supped on a modest meal of bread and tomato soup. Then we went upstairs to the bedroom that Larry and Lily slept in.

There lay Hilarious Larry, in bed, surrounded by his friends, his adopted family. I had last seen Larry a week or so before, and I knew he had been ill for some time—but since last I saw him he looked to have aged thirty years. He had been so stalwart, so stocky and meaty and hale before, but now he was thin, frighteningly thin. He must have lost forty pounds. The spirit of the big fat dominant male had left him, and his life itself was soon to follow it out of his body. His body was an old house being rapidly vacated by the energies that had inhabited it. It’s a frighteningly awkward thing to stand around a deathbed. Does he want company as he breathes his last? What good is company?—give him the respect of space, let him die in the peace of his solitude. The blinds were drawn shut. It was dark except for a lamp in a far corner of the room. There was a sad foul odor, sewage, fetid water, rotten onions—which I supposed was the smell of a decomposing body, of death. Larry’s long and hairy hands lay weak and limp on the red sheet that was drawn up over his ghastly thin body. I could see the depressions in his chest between his ribs through the sheet. His false teeth were in a foggy glass of water on the bedside table, and his toothless face was caved and sunken. His eyes were each open a sickly slit, but they may as well have been closed for all they were doing. He wasn’t looking at anything in particular. He glanced at us through the thick veil of his fever when Lydia and I entered the room as noiselessly as butterflies, and then he looked away. Regina Lawrence, her white-streaked red hair knotted in a long braid dangling behind her, sat with Clever Hands near the foot of the bed, holding one of his hands in hers, and Lily sat beside Larry’s head, rocking her body methodically in her chair, which squeaked under her shifting weight, and she fondled the beads of a rosary in her long purple hands. No one spoke. Lydia and I sat down on unoccupied chairs and joined this somber company in the darkness, the silence, and the smell. I wondered how consciously Larry understood that he was dying. He did not seem to fear death.

We sat around his bed a long time. Regina went out and returned some time later with a cup of heated chicken broth. Chicken broth was something Larry liked. He liked the comforting warmth and saltiness of it. As he was too frail to lift it himself, Regina held the cup to his sunken withered lips. Larry submitted to take a sip of the hot salty liquid as Regina gently tipped the lip of the cup to his toothless mouth. He took a long sip and then gently pushed