Page 107 of The River Is Waiting

The Old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position: how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or…

I still don’t get it, but instead of crumpling it up and aiming for the wastebasket, I skip to the second part.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

So maybe Idoget it. The plowman, the sailors, the townspeople: everyone goes about their business, unfazed about a boy’s falling from the sky into the sea and drowning. Maybe the poem’s about dying alone.… It makes me think of that guy Billy, whispering into the phone and waiting for Manny to come. And about all the other gay men taken by that disease. And about the victims of this new plague that’s on its way.…

I think about Lester Wiggins, who died alone in prison because he was denied the compassionate release that would have returned him to his family. And about that prisoner, Hogan, who committed suicide during my first year here—how he made a noose out of ripped bedsheets and jumped into the stairwell. And about how, in desperation, I might have suffocated myself with my head inside a plastic bag if those two COs hadn’t caught on and stopped me.…

Finally, I think about Niko, my precious boy, suffering and dying alone in the back of an ambulance as it sped toward the hospital. How could I ever have expected her forgiveness when I can never forgive myself?

At lights-out, I lie on my bare mattress, twisting and writhing from the sad truth that Bruegel painted and Auden wrote about: that to live means to suffer, then to die alone. At first, I don’t know where the strange sound I hear is coming from. But then I feel it traveling up from my gut to my diaphragm, moving past my throat and out my mouth. I’m wailing and I can’t stifle or stop it. From the top bunk, Manny tells me to let it out, to release the suffering inside of me. Then he’s down off his bunk and standing next to mine. His hand cups my shoulder. “Let it out, Corbs,” he keeps saying. “Let it go.”

“I’ve lost everything! She’s finished with me and she’s going to keep Maisie from me, too!… I didn’t tell that doctor I was a benzo addict because I wanted those pills! Needed them! They warned me that if I said anything, they’d do it again.… And I was weak and scared and I just needed a way to block what they did from my mind and get some sleep! And now I’ve lost everything! Everything! It was a setup. Anselmo rammedthat aluminum baton into me and Piccardy came out of nowhere and laughed. They raped me, Manny! They fucking raped me!”

He tells me to push over, and when I do, he gets on my bunk with me, pushing up against me. Puts his arms around me and begins rocking me like I’m his child. “You’re not alone, Corby,” he says. “I’m here. You’re not alone.”

PART FOUR:Butterfly Boy

CHAPTER FORTY

Dr. Patel

June 2020

“Beena? Beena, darling? Time to wake up, sleepyhead.”

“Oh.” I open my eyes and there’s Vikram, already up and dressed. I am back in the living world.

“What would you like for breakfast? I’ll make it for you before I go.”

“Just tea and toast, please.”

“With ghee and lemon curd?”

“Yes, that would be lovely.”

When he leaves our bedroom, I try to bring back the strange dream I just had, but the details are leaving quickly. I reach over to Vikram’s night table for the cover of the DVD we watched last night. “Monster’s Ball,” it says. “Billy Bob Thornton, Halle Berry, Heath Ledger.” Before Vikram started the film, he said the actor who played the tragic son died before he was thirty from an accidental overdose of prescription medicines. I was struck by his resemblance to Corby Ledbetter. Perhaps that’s why I dreamed about Corby. Of course he’d be on my mind. I learned just yesterday that he died in prison, a victim of the coronavirus.

When I join Vikram at the breakfast table, I tell him about my odd dream. “I was dead, but I was alive, advising the newly arrived in the afterworld about reincarnation.” His smile says he is more amused than intrigued. He goes over to the counter to check on my toast.

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