Chapter 37

Hans wasn’t the same after the funeral. He’d died too in some deep hidden place.

The past week I was gaining so much instruction on our walks but every morning he looked a little paler, a little weaker.

Hans drank wine every night and didn’t touch his food.

Hans wasn’t dying as much as he was making a conscious decision to leave his body as a gesture of his grief.

Perhaps he had dispensed all his knowledge into me as a receptacle. Which felt like an honor. Perhaps I am the VCO of the Arto family, the totem to pray his legacy into. Due to the disposal of Morgen, I am his heir by default.

There are many reasons people are plucked out of obscurity and not all of them are good.

I’ve decided to stay out of Hans’s wing of the East Estate, and while he sleeps I’ll start getting his affairs in order. 

Marcus is already in the office going through file cabinets. He looks put together except his eyes were dark and tired around the edges like they’d been chewed. Marcus opens a briefcase he has set on the desk and pulls out a contract that’s as thick as a Bible. Shows me all the places he’s marked that I need signed to make it official. The contract is bound in a strange from a source I don’t want to know about.

“Oh,” he says and flips to a page and holds it open. “Best part. No visual signatures required. Apparently Hans had it put in remotely by some lawyer named Les Butler. Guy has a million different titles. He’s done every job. Got paystubs back a hundred years.”

So I put the contract inside the back of my shirt. Marcus pulls out his syringe kit and spoon.

“Want any gum?” Marcus asks.

I do not partake.

I thought about asking about Lugnut’s recovery, but, best not. We sat mostly in silence until we could hear Hans entering the reading room down the hall.

“Best get on with it,” I said. 

In my hands are bottles of wine. Or that’s what they call it. I didn’t see it get made. There could be anything in there.

The fireplace had been burning for a few hours. Its rhythm undergirds our silence like boats on calm water.

After a good laugh about a comment he made about how small and weak he’s gotten, Hans and I slowly hummed our way into silence again. We listened to the acoustics of the fireplace. We shared that solitude for quite some time but it felt over before it started.

Is time passing fast again? It’s truly amazing every occasion when I’m reminded that it takes only one pure second of peace and silence to replay your entire life back from birth to this moment.

“This is natural,” he says unprompted. Elbows on his knees and fingers lazily laced, hammocking his chin. He rocks back to a more comfortable position. “What’s happening. It’s natural.”

I felt like he was trying to explain something to me that I wasn’t recognizing. I watched him talk to people who weren’t there. Bursting in and out of conversations with ghosts. Greeting them with hugs and laughter. He was hugging air. Like some performance art piece. This went on for nearly two hours.

I reach under my shirt and pull out the contract to update the will. Giving all of the money to me without any way to get it back out. Executive powers. Assets. Gone. Freedom. The weight of it all finally off his tired shoulders. Along with his possession of Joselyn, who by his signature be moved from an asset owned to a beneficiary, along with the heir growing inside her.

I just want to be free. To do whatever I want. To float downstream.

I click the VGV pen I stole on my first day at the coffee shop.

Cuh-click 

And I see the two triangles. Amazing the amnesia is so quickly erased when looking at a totem and all the things we thought we forgot feel new again.

I want to draw Hans’s attention to it. Tell him that he is dying. He’s passing as we speak. I start to feel minty-tingly. Does he know he is indestructible and at one with the universe? If he does I don’t want to bother him.

This is his crucial moment. That once-in-a-lifetime moment. Even though I stopped speaking, he could sense my thoughts were elsewhere.

He gives me a how-dare-you-interrupt-me face. He says, “I know what’s happening. Stop making a big deal about it.”

I say, “Then sign here, here, here, here, here, and here.”

His lips shivered gradually, into bigger and faster oscillations. I could feel him curl back away internally. He was losing his grip. He looked at me like I was trying to hurt him. A side I hadn’t seen.

I think our big, long walks in the garden were more for him than for me.

He says, “Wh-wh-what’s this for?”

Is this acting or is this for real?

It seems he no longer recognizes me.

I imagine all those poor people who signed something without a lawyer present. Accepting the terms and conditions of a new reality they would have never agreed to if they knew. One moment of weakness, being taken advantage of, has set them on a new course for life.

“This is how you get to heaven, Hans. This is Saint Peter’s book.” I press my fingertips on top of the contract. And I say, “Remember you bought it at auction? Joselyn fixed it up for you.”

Hans flipped through with a shaky voice. Speaking with his breath, “Oh. Yes. Yes, I remember.”

I sit next to him. I get my lips as close to his ear without touching them. I whisper, “That’s the secret. You sign your own name into heaven.”

“Wait. Something’s wrong,” Hans says.

I gently push my head back via propulsion with my nostrils.

He asked like I was Saint Peter himself, “I’m gonna go to heaven? I’m going to be fine. Y-you’re not trying to trick me? I’d happily stay here.”

I look in his small obsidian pupils. The unplumbed space where bottomless wells wait, vibrating the sound of a yawning gulf.

I gently put a hand around his wrist and metronome my thumb across the top of his hand.

Stroking right. Left. And right. Left. And right. Smile.

In his fear and trembling I tried to speak the way I think God does.

I say, “Yes. You can trust me. Good news, Hans. Everyone gets into heaven.”

And the last words of The Great Hans Arto were, “That is good news.”

And in that moment his head relaxed back and Hans Arto’s body was forever abandoned.

His shell shined a painful light on the material obsession with our own bodies. He kept his body in such a performance condition. And what will his perfectly toned, perfectly moisturize, expertly preserved body do now except feed the forest?

I sit there beside his body for four and a half days. I put my hand on his windpipe. And pressed hard to make sure.

I read the book Joselyn swore to have read to him. I read it the way Joselyn told me to read it.

I called out to him, “Hey Noble One!”

I watched him turn into stone.

I spun the contract around.

“Fuck.” I missed the last two signatures. The pages stuck together.

I look at him. I look at the contract. I look at him again. I look for the pen. Then I filled them in myself.

 

James Jacob Hatfield is a displaced engineer, a painter, and many other contradictions. His work has appeared in X-R-A-Y, Maudlin House, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Barely South Review, Chaleur Magazine, Havik, and others. His ekphrasis poem “torrents of lahar, No. 36” was anthologized by the North Carolina Museum of Art. He is a Sterling Fellow and a Weymouth Fellow. He is the creator and curator of the Gemini Sessions Substack. He lives in Durham, NC.

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