The Death of All Things Seen Read Free

her head.
    *
    Helen felt the dull ache of her insides. Shouldn’t she turn now and head toward Dr Marchant, face the coming realities? And yet she didn’t, circling again her former life, passing the burnished brass revolving door of her old office building, casting back to a time before Mr Feldman’s suicide, re-aligning life again, finding her way to earlier memories.
    She tried to find that essential old happiness, to inhabit an early freedom as a newly liberated woman of the late sixties. She had such fond memories, rising in the morning in a hustle to get Norman to the school bus on time, leaving the utilitarian suburb of a modest house in a car financed on affordable down payments for the throng on the commuter train platform. She remembered it all with absolute clarity, parking her car amidst the gleam of other new cars, proceeding in the push of life, venturing toward the stenciled ceiling and frescos beyond the revolving door of her office building.
    Even now, she could see in her mind’s eye the gold-leafed topaz and onyx tiffany mosaic in the building’s lobby, the entire pageant of Midwestern history captured in a series of stylized mosaics, the collective first landings rendered in a two-dimensional flatness suggesting an uncomplicated arrangement of bringing a Christian God to the natives – a sharing of gifts between frocked French missionaries, Bibles in hand, with olive-skinned natives in ceremonial headdress offering a peace pipe at some appointed canoe portage.
    No matter the real history. She could almost hear Norman in her head shouting, and she wanted to scream back at him, for who now didn’t know the true history!
    ‘Yes, Norman, the ravages of smallpox and measles, the internment of natives and the Trail of Tears... I know ... I know ... you are so damned right...’
    And yet in the mosaics’ audacious simplicity, set before the people as artifact, it had served as a stylized myth of life as a system of exchanges, of deals, where the only underlying principle was the decorum and manner of how one negotiated.
    It was in these early first landings, these ceremonial exchanges, that the glory of a new world was founded – from a humble barter of animal pelts to the glorious reach of skyscrapers in a span of mere centuries.
    No single history could account for such progress. It was all too vastly complicated, and yet so manifestly real and literal, the inner chamber of the lobby a crypt holding the sacred transactional truth of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations . It had all come together so beautifully once-upon-a-time, the perfect inning, the improbable no-hitter of American dominance, and all of it coinciding with her youth.
    *
    Helen turned east on Jackson toward the lake in the evening traffic, intent now on what needed to be done. Snow had threatened all afternoon. It fell now in drifting flakes of a snow globe. This was the contained reality of her life, or how it had once been. It had passed.
    In retirement, for the better part of a decade, she had huddled in a housecoat in her basement inhabiting a remote history of distant lives and times, re-enactments on the Discovery Channel – entire eras and civilizations compressed into hour shows – the Crusades and the Dark Ages, the spectre of plague and famine, the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, and on through the plundering conquests of the Norse, Vikings, and Vandals, all of it a tumbling distraction of dates and events. This had been the sarcophagus of her hours, days, weeks, and years.
    She thought of Cancer as blithely unaware of her absence; Cancer, taking in a mid-morning Western before getting up to torment her in the toilet in late-morning agony, the cloud of blood in the bowl after she went. She imagined Cancer, slovenly, up-to-date. A reaper in a college hoodie and sweatpants, shuffling out of the den; Cancer standing in the grey light leading up to the first floor; Cancer whining for her, in the way Norman had over the years. It