The Ancient Law
“It’s odd the things people cling to when they’re dying.” Theodore spoke the strangely morbid maxim into the smoldering fireplace, though it was hardly audible with his sound-system booming Bach’s Actus Tragicus into the woodsmoke scented room. There was an oboe solo too, weaving through the spaces of his sentence like counterpoint.
“Mm. Sorry—what?” Nathaniel had been watching the beginnings of a dream creep into his periphery.
“I said: it’s odd the things people cling to when they’re dying.” Theodore sipped a small mouthful of amber liquid from his tumbler.
“Ah.” Nathaniel forcefully blinked his eyes a few times and tried to pull himself together. Theodore was his girlfriend Tessa’s grandfather. He was supposed to be making a good impression, but for the last two hours or so Theodore had been silently resistant to Nathaniel’s efforts at light conversation; for the last twenty minutes Nathaniel had just stopped trying altogether. So when Theodore had said that sentence just now, it’s odd the things people cling to when they’re dying, Nathaniel wasn’t sure what to make of it. Leave it alone? Question it? Was this supposed to be a kind of test? After all, Nathaniel knew Theodore was dying of some pancreatic thing.
Tessa, Theodore’s beloved and only granddaughter, was at the dentist’s office getting a root canal and she’d dropped Nathaniel off at Theodore’s house in the meantime for some “bonding.”
“Just let him do his thing, Nate. He can be a little stuffy sometimes, but he’s harmless, really.” She’d said in the car before she kissed him goodbye. “He loves classical music. Just talk about that. I think you’ll get along.”
Nathaniel had tried to talk classical music for about two minutes before it became obvious that Theodore knew infinitely more than Nathaniel did about classical music—a difference comprised of about sixty years and a PhD in rare baroque instrumentation that Tessa had conveniently neglected to mention—and so their conversation quickly fizzled out. So quickly in fact that the remainder of conversation topics Nathaniel had planned out ahead of time all evaporated from his mind through a kind of ‘fight-or-flight’ response. After that Nathaniel resorted to asking Theodore about the weather and traffic, to which Theodore, again, was mostly silent, only sometimes offering brief and often patronizing responses.
The oboe quieted down and a tenor took its place: “Ach Herr, lehre uns bedenken, daß wir sterben müssen, auf daß wir klug werden.”
Still not knowing what to say, Nathaniel got up from his chair and huddled in front of the fireplace, trying to act preoccupied with stoking the fire. He placed a chopped log directly on top of the pile and pumped the bellow into the glowing hearth. With each of its breaths the logs pulsed red with heat. Tessa’s voice echoed in his head—he can be a little stuffy sometimes—and then his own voice responded to hers in protest: A little. Right. Nathaniel felt like Theodore’s ego occupied the room even more densely and intimidatingly than the stacks of books and CD’s along the walls. Even now, sitting silently in his rocking chair behind Nathaniel, he could feel the old man’s stifling presence creeping up his skin. It gave him goosebumps. After a minute or two of pumping the bellow Nathaniel had revived the dead blaze to life, and his excuse to avoid the question ran out. He moved back into his chair. Fine. He would ask the obvious. If Theodore were just trying to be obtuse then Nathaniel would catch him in his tracks. And if he was being genuine, then perhaps they could get into it, finally; Nathaniel hadn’t abandoned the idea of “bonding” quite yet, as much as Tessa’s grandfather had started to irk him.
“Well, what kinds of things would be odd to hold on to? You mean like money, right?”
Theodore’s voice was deep and well worn, as only an instrument used for eighty plus years could sound. “Money, hm. Every Hallmark movie and their mother could tell us that.” Theodore took another small sip from his glass and exhaled sharply. Nathaniel could feel the alcohol vapors in his own mouth, though he wasn’t drinking anything. “No. I mean things we don’t even know we’re holding on to until it’s too late.”
A chorus of voices now swelled into the room in a slowly turning fugue: “Es ist der alte bund. Mensch, du mußt sterben!”
“Like what?” Nathaniel asked curtly, this time though with genuine curiosity.
“Hope, for example,” he turned his head to the wall of books, “we hold on to until the very last second.”
“Hope?”
“Right. Hope that we’ll just keep on living. That there’ll be a cure and we won’t have to die after all.”
Nathaniel racked his brain for a less pessimistic response. “Well, you know that there’re a lot of new chemotherapies out there that—”
“Not a cure for cancer, Nathaniel. I mean for death.”
“Oh. Well then I suppose you’d be right. That would be odd thing to believe—a cure for death—you know, especially if someone actually were dying.” Nathaniel even chuckled briefly at Theodore’s seemingly redundant statement, momentarily forgetting the old man’s predicament.
Nathaniel noticed his gaffe too late and began to stutter an apology, but Theodore didn’t seem to notice or care. “Right. I used to think that I’d live forever too, you know. I was so sure, in fact, that I lived my whole life without even considering the possibility that it’d end one day.”
Nathaniel turned to look at Theodore now; the latter’s eyes were closed, and he continued to speak as if to an old friend.
“I just kept plugging along, day after day, as if the whole thing would just keep on going.” Theodore glanced down at his stomach as if he were seeing through his flannel and skin straight into his bowels. “Even now, I’ve got that silly old hope so deep in my bones that it’s nearly impossible for me to imagine the alternative. Or I should say, the truth of the matter.”
“But don’t we need that hope? I mean, how else would anyone get anything done?”
“I said it was odd, is all. I never said it was unnecessary.”
“Oh.” Nathaniel’s cheeks flushed.
The high tenor returned over a swirling mix of cello and organ as if to offer its answer: “Getrost ist mir mein Herz und Sinn, Sanft und stille. Wie Gott mir verheißen hat: schlaf worden.”
Theodore smiled. Nathaniel however, still thoroughly confused with Theodore’s last declaration and preoccupied with their failure to “bond,” had ceased to hear the music in the woodsmoke scented air.
The sound of keys twisting in the door caused them both to turn around. It swung open and there was Tessa with a mouth full of cotton balls. She smiled at the sight of them together, but then winced at the pain in her cheeks. “Jeshush fushking cshrist sthat hursht. I wahsh snot psreparsed for sthat.”