When it happened, the first thing he noticed was the sound–or rather, the absence of sound. No more bleeping. No more whirring, no more of that other clatter you got in even the most expensive hospital. God knows he’d heard enough such noise to know when it was gone. No more ticking, as if he were an inert part in a room-size explosive device, wired to go off the way that chunk of brain had the other day in the kitchen. He’d set the Pellegrino bottle on the counter, said something to the housekeeper, and collapsed like a worn-out lawn chair. Since then there’d been no rest, even as the swelling bulged and bulged inside his skull and he’d begun to feel the blossoming serenity of a man with a living will, a DNR order, and a paid-up mortgage.
The words boomed in his mind’s ear. That was a surprise, hearing himself for the first time as others had heard him. Now he understood the origin of those crappy impersonations, the ones that always involved some jerk-off ducking his head and shaking his cheeks and waving V-for-victory signs with both hands. Sock it to me? Your president is not a crook. Are you running for office, Mr. Rather? Pray with me, Henry; get down on the floor and pray with me.
Ha ha ha. After I died, I was feeling pretty lifeless. He’d have to save that one for the next place. A guy really should have a joke ready to break the ice in new situations. People liked it when you came up with something, funny or not, as long as you tried, although he was the first to admit he’d never had the knack, not the way Jack Kennedy had, or Lyndon, or even Ike. Watching them work a crowd was like seeing lions among antelopes. He’d always felt more like a stag standing alone in the deep woods, wary, waiting for the sound of a bolt being shot into the chamber.
Funny how he’d attracted that sort, since he wasn’t that sort himself. Buchanan, Liddy, what’s his name, the Jew who set up the kitchen debate with Khrushchev, Safire maybe, a whole long list of acolytes and adulators, the little people he couldn’t stand to be around. If he had been a pharaoh or a T’ang emperor they’d have marched into the ground behind his body.
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It was time to go; he sensed it quite clearly, even though no one was telling him. But where? He looked in the mirror on the back of the door and saw nothing. He decided to let himself float, the way he had seemed to float out of his body there under the sheet, the way his old strategic reserves of anger had seemed to float away, and see where the floating took him.
It’s good to be dead, he thought, remembering hard-ons past with the same distant reverie that had neutralized his old angers. Then he realized she could be his granddaughter, and the reverie gave way to shame. But the shame, which once would have burned through him like electricity through shorted wiring, smoldering at a point just short of combustion, was as distant, in fact was about the same sensation, as the puerile joy of catching a flash of panties beneath the streetlights. He smiled, and it was not the rictus grin of life but an easy curve of enjoyment, one he knew from boyhood but had abandoned along the way.
