And with this he began seeking death, opening himself eagerly up to it, seeing it as the end of something difficult: not his whole life (which had been wonderful) but just this last phase of it, and not even this whole last day, no, just this evening, and not even the whole evening, just the part of it that began when Icame here and started filling his mind with doubts about who he was and what he’d done.
But that was finished now and the next phase was about to begin.
This fellow here—who once, though small, had been kind of wonderful-looking, with thick blond hair that went nearly white in summer and snappy little muscles—this fellow here (with a hump on his back now, and patches of terrible-looking eczema all over, and chest muscles that swung like sausages as he dried his feet with a towel)—this fellow here (with a tumor the size of a grape right here behind this eye, a tumor still growing, even now)—this ugly old conglomeration of flesh was going away (like the planks in the floor of his childhood home, like the glass in the windows and the shingles on the roof), and also going away was the flesh-wad in his noggin that had, all these years, been making the thoughts, feelings, and beliefs that had madehim,and soon there’d be nothing but a big empty field where his beloved childhood home had been and nothing but a stiff moldering hunk of irrelevant meat left of what had once been the great K.J.—
As for anything he might’ve done “wrong”—
Yes? I said.
I got swept up, he said.
In? I said.
Me, he said. Myself.
Goodness.
But what else could I have done, he said.
He was speaking, in his crude way, ofelevationitself.
True, it was only in his head (a mere idea, not yet visceral or urgent).
But his was a formidable intelligence and could cover vast amounts of ground quickly.
Don’t give up, I said. You’re on to something.
Am I, he said.
Say goodbye to it, I said. Goodbye to the self. That’s all you need to—
Not so fast, ladybug, he said.
There was something he needed me to know.
—
First off:
Nobody could know what it was like, being him.
Nobody.
How delicious, how perfect.
Nobody.
Though physically he might have been in Texas, he’d actually been everywhere. People in Paris knew of him, and Dubai and Berlin and Cape Town, and would refer to him by his whole name: K. J. Boone.
What’s K. J. Boone going to think of that?
We have to consider the whole K. J. Boone of it all. Don’twe?
They did.
They surely did.
To be him was to be always the biggest fish in a sea of substantial fish. At a shareholders’ meeting, or up at the Capitol, or out on a swanky veranda at some conference center in the Alps. All that power, all that money, all those massed experiences gazing up at him, awaiting his words. He had something to offer; they needed him. He spoke easily, with authority, was charming, in his way; he persuaded, left people feeling his way was thebest way. He presented powerfully (if humbly), but it was more than that. What he was, they were not, and would never be; where he’d been, they hadn’t been (and couldn’t go); what he knew, they’d never know.
