The Natural Order of Things (34 page)

“He won’t last the night,” they concur.

They kneel beside his bed and speak to their creator, the greatest librarian of them all, but God, while capable of retaining and synthesizing vast amounts of information, has perhaps learned that in the end, it is best to ignore the pleas of mere mortals, who too often request that he radically re-write the final pages of this absurd melodrama for their personal benefit.

Sensing God’s indifference, the old man raises his head and speaks to his colleagues as though they are acolytes at the feet of a master: “Each of us is a character in some facile and purposeless tale. And just as we are fictions, so too is God a fiction. This is the essence of the one true gospel.”

The priests drown him out with their humble petition to heaven: “O Lord, grant Thy healing, that the soul of Thy servant, at the hour of its departure from the body, may by the hands of Thy holy angels be presented without spot unto Thee!”

When darkness falls, the Jesuits, in their desperation, decide to use some of the books as fuel and select those titles that have contributed to the old man’s apostasy, first editions of scholarly tomes that have long been out of print, books about the Black Death, the Gnostic gospels, medieval heresies. Without compunction, they cast these contentious books into the flames, and the old man, gasping for breath, endures this final vision: the secret songs and sermons of Cathars and Manichaeans and Borgesians smoldering on the popping and hissing embers, vanishing from this world forevermore in a conflagration of human folly.

Destroying his books, some will argue, is the worst thing they do to him. But even this is not the very worst thing.

A government desk clerk, with small nervous hands and thinning gray hair, completes the necessary paperwork and has it signed in triplicate by the principal. An ambulance comes for the body and transports it to the county morgue where the coroner performs a routine and rather perfunctory autopsy. From there the body is taken to a public cemetery where a mortician prepares it for burial. His assistants place the corpse in a cheap balsawood box, hammer down the lid, and then leave it beside several other unremarkable caskets that await burial.

Through the tree-lined lanes of the sprawling necropolis, past the improbable skyline of rain-worn obelisks and the aberrant architecture of marble monuments, two gravediggers convey the body to a hilltop that overlooks the expressway. The men remove their hats, trade a few dirty jokes and, having muttered obsequies of damning indifference, hastily lower the casket into the hole. They take up their shovels, fill the pit with clumps of frozen soil, then make their lazy way back to the basement of the small stone building near the cemetery gates to collect the next box.

The old man’s family and dearest friends have preceded him into death, and no one comes to his final resting place to say farewell or to scatter flowers over his lonely grave—no colleagues, no intercessors, no former pupils, no one at all. No vigil is held for him in the school chapel, no mass said in his name, no mournful requiem played on the organ, and in the ensuing years no priest appears from out of the rain or snow or dazzling summer sunshine to say a simple prayer for the forgotten dead.

And this, let it be known, is the worst thing they do to him, the very worst thing.