I'll Let You Go Read Free Page A

irresistibly charismatic. In his presence one feels like a strop, a worn leathery thing waiting to be rubbed against, the more for Mr. Trotter to hone or drop his quills. His ability to enlist fascination continually surprises—he mesmerizes, for while changing constantly, he remains unchanged. Paid underlings and blood relatives alike journey roughly through the seasons, hanging on for their lives, for
his
life, renewing themselves each day so that
he
might be renewed, willing the old man to be cozily predictable, as one wills the same of all one’s fellow men. (He nearly gives them what they want, and in so doing binds and grafts those close, addicts them, even minor players—and sometimes, too, by another eccentricity: he is a perversely lavish tipper.) The minions swig morning lattes, already beginning their time-clock day by dreamily nudging him toward Good Boss and Benefactor, Good Father and Mentor, but it is
their
dream and theirs alone, dreamers trying to undream something that they, with inferior twitching animal noses—why, they can’t even properly chuff!—sense is not quite right. All efforts come to naught and the strop gets its workaday workout; he will not be tamed. To make things worse, he’s something of a dandy. His bald-faced buck-toothed mien, hovering above faintly absurd ascots and greatcoats, could not be more touching and inscrutable.
    Mr. Trotter likes it here. Nothing showy: no Gardens of Ascension or Harmony Hills, Whispering Glades or Resurrection Slopes, no Babylands or Vales of Memory. He sees someone looking but takes no mind. Sling Blade and Dot, the park’s chatty, efficient manager, have watched him pace his plot for almost two years, himself a movable monument, pharaonically obsessed by a single thought: who would build his tomb?
    The old man has spent a decade quietly researching locus and method. He considered cremation but felt it too forced, too sudden; as big a fan of fire as he was, he wished a slower, less radical denouement. He consulted with Buddhists, who could arrange to dice him up, mixing crushed bones with barley flour and the milk of the dri, the more easily to be digested by vultures on Tibet’s rock-strewn plateau—the idea being that buzzards, those infernal landlords, would expediently ransack the house, tossing soul-tenant out onto street, “perforce accelerating reincarnation.” The Parsis did the same in India,
sans
plateau; the dead played hide-and-seek within round stone dokhmas called towers of silence.
    It had all been great fun, hell of an education for an unschooled man, but in the end Louis Trotter decided to go the way of the Jews (he’d always admired the Jews) and be laid out in a plain pine box. But where? For the first time in his life, he was daunted. The irony was that his fortune came from waste management—quarries and fills were his métier. In the trade they called him a geomancer, legendary for his sixth sense of the land. He chuffed aloud and mordantly sniggered:
having a bit of trouble with the eighteenth hole
.
    He found an architectural book on Tallum, a cemetery in a forest south of Stockholm, and impulsively flew there on his son’s BBJ. The memento mori above chapel portico was worth the trip: a Brothers Grimm oak zealously overtook the plinth of a columned temple, and between its pillars was carved HODIE MIHI CRAS TIBI (
Today Me, Tomorrow You
) … yet so far away, in the cold Swedish ground! What could he have been thinking? Besides, all those ramrod trees and open spaces reminded him of the freakish cloister he had made for Katrina as a gift on her wedding day. Fifteen years had passed since he’d created the storybook meadow, with its perfect replica of the famed folly of Désert de Retz—La Colonne Détruite. He sometimes wandered there, but made certain she never knew.
    A gypsy, a nomad, a vagabond of death, Mr. Trotter had loitered thetwenty-six