its lid propped up to show a white satiny liner. She approached with her breath held—half-frightened, she realized, her hands shaking. She thought of crime shows on TV, procedurals with all manner of corpses. They used real actors first, then dummies for the grisly autopsy scenes—she recalled a bright crimson, the flaps of chests spread out like butterfly wings. Her parents had died and she had never seen them; Hal’s mother and father had died too, years since, and she had not seen their bodies either.
There he was.
She had expected waxy and limp—that was her expectation—but he was not. Like T. he was tanned, and his graying hair had lightened to blond at the temples. What shocked her was how good he looked—better than the last time she’d seen him alive. He almost looked young again. And it wasn’t makeup but the effect of real sun. With the contrast of light hair against the bronze skin he looked, in fact, healthy.
Briefly she entertained the notion of laughing. But the room was airless and resisted sound.
On the other hand, it might not be Hal at all. Where was Hal? This was a dummy, after all—the real actor was gone. They’d dressed it in a suit and tie, a dark suit she’d never seen before and a discreet tie over a white shirt. T. must have bought it and brought it to them. He had not mentioned this. Maybe, on the other hand, the suit was one of T.’s own. She could check, if she dared to reach for the tags, touch the back of the dead, still neck. She knew T.’s size and she knew that if it was his it would have to be Prada or Armani, since that was all he owned. Or all he used to own before he appeared at LAX in the threadbare garb of a street person, with Hal as his luggage.
She stood there beside the casket. Particles of air were touching both of them, touching Hal’s skin and then her own. His skin wasn’t living, she knew that all too well, but maybe energy subsisted there. Maybe there was silent movement within, particles sweeping down over the planes of her cheeks, the streams, the rivers of atoms, sweeping down over all of her and sweeping over him. This was the last time they would share a space, the last time their skins would be close. After this they would always be separate, on and on past the end of time, until the sun burned out and everything dissolved. And yet even if they were apart from now on, there must be others like them, shadows or mimics, unconscious reflections. People were not unique, surely: there were no anomalies in nature, were there? Individuals were permutations of longing, moments, tendencies. They were variations. So other shades of Hal and her, their many versions, crossed each other’s paths elsewhere, crossed over and merged, their cells swimming among the billions . . . Except for Casey. In Casey they were together. If Casey were to have children, if Casey could—possible, in theory; at least, no doctor had said otherwise—they would remain together there, the molecules of Hal and her, diminishing as time went on but never entirely gone.
Impossibly he was putting her to shame—complete, reposing there calmly while she was still amidst the chaos of growth and change, the mess of life, the stew and whirl of microorganisms. Although death too was disorderly, she conceded—simply delayed by chemicals as she stood here. Only the deathless were neat.
She thought of the stone biers of saints, of relics lying in state in ancient churches. They had seen one in Europe, a saint. Oh not the saint, but his image—graven in stone while his bones lay beneath. The church had been built over his dead body. Where was it? France? A church built over the laid-out saint, to house his sanctified remains. After you left that ancient church, in retrospect, you somehow confused the two, you thought the saint was in the stone—the saint was the figure itself, its contours smooth and pristine. A stone man, a stone virgin: people were always less beautiful than the images of them.
Hal was not stone. No one would build a church to him.
But everyone deserved a church, she thought, feeling naïve, feeling twelve again: all the tragic heroes that were dead men, once infants—each hobbled soul that wished and was undone. Maybe that was how someone had thought of mausoleums. Personal churches, skyward-pointing