The Death of Mozart

I'm sick. Can't write, can't eat. This eulogy is killing me. The doctors are all baffled. Those snake oil peddlers have no idea what is wrong with me. "It almost seems as if all your organs simultaneously decided to just quit functioning," said the last specialist I saw. That's when I quit going to doctors, and decided to go home and die. That's when the Masked Man came and asked me to write a eulogy. He wouldn't tell me whom the eulogy is for, but I know whom it is for. How many people get to write their own eulogies? Oh it is a rare and sweet thing. Or it would be rare and sweet were it not such a disaster in its composition. I have written dozens of books--none were popular, none were appreciated, none were understood. And yet I have written a million words that already sit in the landfill. This eulogy is my last, best chance; and yet it is complete garbage. It has turned into some ludicrous story of a world where north is up and south is down. I remember years and years ago, in a geology class at the university, when the professor said, as we studied the topographical maps, that rivers can flow north as easily as south. It's just so natural looking at a map to think that all that water must flow from the top to the bottom of the page, that it must flow down. Of course it is childish to think so; but the professor felt an especial need to point it out, it comes so naturally to think that south is down. But in this absurd eulogy I'm writing everyone is journeying to the north, and must climb up the sides of the earth to get there as if it were a cliff face. Just a ridiculous globe floating there where in some bigger, larger world there is something with enough gravitation to pull human beings and oceans and beasts down its sides unless they are standing right on its top. And so all of humanity tries to reach the peak of the globe, climbing up and up, north and north. That is what my eulogy is about so far. It's garbage, absurd nonsense. And it is my last, best chance. I'm sick; can't write, can't eat . . . must sleep; oblivion is better.

What dreams do the dying have? I always wondered about this before I was dying. I'll tell you, and the answer will hardly enthrall you. I always dream of grids and graphs, matrixes, geometric lines & patterns. Little dots running along grids and creating more complex designs every second. These dreams are not in the least frightening, are utterly devoid of meaning for me, and completely lacking in emotion. I feel nothing, I care about nothing; and all I can see are designs & patterns & complicated series of dots & lines. I wake up to the pain in my abdomen and shake my head and say, "So this is what the dying dream of; it is so commonplace and senseless." I hardly sleep anyway, because of the pain.

I've got to finish my eulogy before it's too late; I've got to write; I've got to . . . sick. Can't move, can't sleep.

Who is the Masked Man? Certainly he is one of my friends who heard about my state and wished for me to write my own eulogy. But I have no friends . . . I haven't had an acquaintance for years. I don't even know who will arrange for my funeral, who will attend. He must be someone I knew a long time past, in days that now seem ancient & meaningless. Perhaps he is an angel, and I will have an audience of angels to hear my eulogy, once it is finished and I have passed into a realm so Beyond I am lost even to angels.

I sit through the long evening, lying in bed, muttering to myself in bed, unable to sleep because of the pain; and I think to myself, "If only some gracious surgeon would cut my frontal lobes, or make me retarded, or take away all self-awareness, so that I could be pleasantly unconscious of this terrible fact that I will soon be dead." And then I rebel from such thoughts, and say to myself, "No, no, I would still be dying, only I would be insane also; only an extra burden & cross." Ah, to suffer is not the worst thing of all--to die is not the worst thing of all--the Lake of Fire is not the worst thing that could be--but no, worse than this is to suffer and be completely unaware of what one suffers, to have no ability to contemplate the realities one is in. Yes--to live forever unaware of Truth, even the truth of anguish--that is the ultimate suffering; and Truth is the god by whose separation we are cast into hell. The ones who recline in the gardens in the stars--those fabled & impossible tropics in some faraway land--they suffer and weep also--but they have Truth, and are aware of the awfulness of existence--and this is also the supreme joy, the one boon existence has for us. Truth, yes--and the lunatics, the senile, the ones in pleasant unconsciousness of Truth & Reality--they are the ones pleasantly asleep, dreaming nightmares that aren't comprehended, blissfully in hell & the suffering of ignorance. Yes, even to be dying, to be convinced we live and die but once, and experience & even savor this miraculous experience--that is all I have left. Ha! I can't believe I just said it! I am glad to be dying, and to know it & mull it through & sit with Death a long while in his care--and I came from nothing at all; nothing I had to begin with, and so I lose nothing by passing again into the unlimited void; and yet for a season I can sit and witness this miracle, my death, know it, love it, sense it, taste it. But this pain I cannot bear; and the briars entangle my every sensation & emotion. Oh, this is a repulsive thing, to be dying; it is like becoming a mass of butchered meat--I am passing out of what it is to be "man" and becoming some ugly matter I saw hanging in a butcher's window--a Thing, an It--lifeless meat, a corpse. A corpse! Think of it! Everything I have held so dear for so long--my hands, nose, lips, genitals--all of it will soon be shoved into a grave and cast away like trash, to be eaten by beetles, to rot, decay, grow foul with mold--ah, this is a terrible thing, to die; and I am knowing and knowing its every aspect & feature--and I am only grateful, yes, grateful now that I know the truth of dying.

My eulogy is becoming more absurd with every passing hour. I was working on it today and suddenly it seemed words had become impotent. What I was trying to say was suddenly too big for words to convey--or was it too small?--in any case, I picked up a little sketchbook and started drawing in pastel chalks--I was drawing what I wanted to say, unable now to say it even to myself. I'm not sure what it was, something about a lonesome Sasquatch having lost all his family & tribe due to loss of habitat, wandering the unpeopled regions of the Pacific Northwest, pondering his own existence, even questioning it. He wandered and wandered, knowing he was dying, wondering which was the greater mystery--life or death? Oh it was such nonsense. I don't know why I bring it up. I'm not sure what this has to do with the beginning of the eulogy, where north is up and the sides of the earth are like sloping cliffs. One of the commonest questions the ancients pondered was why the earth didn't fall. It took Newton to ask the contradictory and counterintuitive question--why does anything fall in the first place? I'm not sure why I bring this up either. Perhaps it has something to do with death or birth or that ridiculous Sasquatch questioning his own existence all his lonesome days. Did I really have anything to begin with, that I am now losing something? Oh it is an absurd proposition that anything ever existed at all--that there was Something rather than Nothing--that I was born--oh it is an absurd proposition that any one of the infinite number of souls that aren't yet born will ever be born--and yet they will all be born, every last one of them, a grand array of contradictions & impossibilities living and breathing and dancing up upon the stage of an Existence that could never be, and yet was, and yet is; and still, as it goes on existing and existing, it is impossible for it to be, as impossible as a circular square.

I wake at 3 a.m., unable to sleep any longer, and swallow three morphine capsules; the pain is especially bad this morning. I peck away for a few minutes at my eulogy, which only becomes more ridiculous by my effort, and then I realize I am in too much pain to do anything but lie back down on my bed and hold my sides and think. What was it the doctor said, the last specialist I saw? No, he said, it isn't cancer, it isn't due to immune deficiency, it isn't an autoimmune disorder, it doesn't have to do with metabolism. It's as if, he said, each and every one of my body's cells up and decided to do whatever they pleased, organ function be damned. What an absurd way to die. By a disease so rare I am the only one who ever had it. Could my luck be any worse? In my youth I smoked heavily, and when I got sick I returned to the habit. But then, once I got sicker and sicker, I quit again. It wasn't difficult this time. It was just that I was in too much agony to get any pleasure out of cigarettes. I had resigned myself to die by 65 when I was a young, heavy smoker; I figured that, notwithstanding all the hype, I'd have to be pretty darn unlucky to die from cigarettes before then. Now I haven't reached forty, and it's not smoking that's killing me (should I say "has killed me"? Yes, that would be more honest,); no, it's not smoking that has killed me, but a one in ten billion chance disease, one that has never killed anybody in the history of the world. You tend to think of things that are this unlikely as being impossible, but they are not impossible; there are thousands, tens of thousands of people that have died from things no one has ever died from before.

But I'm rambling now. What I wanted to write has to do with the Masked Man. Perhaps I'm wrong; perhaps he isn't someone from my past, nor even an angel. Perhaps he is a demon, or the devil himself. Perhaps I am already dead and in hell. You know the feeling. Or maybe you don't; most people who are busy with work or activities or school don't normally get this feeling. But when you live as I have lived for the past 20 years, needing to be nowhere at any particular time, going to bed anywhere from one in the morning to one in the afternoon as fatigue dictates; waking up sometimes at 4 a.m. and sometimes even 10 or 11 p.m.; when you live like this, half the time in dreams, everything begins to become unreal, like you can't trust your memories, like you can't rest assured that there is not some important, awful thing you have done recently that you do not remember. Everything becomes dreamlike, so that waking life becomes a blur in between dreams; and you begin to question what you have come to know as reality. Descartes questioned such things in his "Meditations"; but while many students will acknowledge his epistemological arguments, they do not on every level feel them, understand that all that we take to be real can be doubted. If you ask them they will say, "Yes, yes, memories and sense perception are subject to doubt," but they will never actually doubt these things in the slightest. But now I am beginning to doubt everything. I think that I died a thousand years ago, and am condemned to live my life as a fading light in a false reality; condemned to die and die forever, with false memories of false lives and unreal perceptions; and the Masked Man is the devil, master of the dream, bearer of the light we see in dreams; and Lucifer will not wake me and snuff out the light I see in this dream till he deems I have been tormented enough for crimes I know nothing of, and sins that would only anguish me the more could I remember them.

Sick. Sometimes I wonder what it would look like if I could cut myself open and see what's there, slice straight through my body and somehow still live and look at the gore I have adored as my most intimate self for so long. Right now it feels like everything in there would be black, sticky & deteriorated, every organ having rotted and melted into everything else, like some ripe black stew that has been sitting in the sun for a week. It's a wonder I'm still alive. The eulogy sits on my desk, waiting for the attention it will never get. The Masked Man awaits my final masterpiece, my last, sweeping, insane vortex of a requiem. He was here again last night. He is the only human being I have seen this past week, as I am too sick to go to the store, and too sick to eat should I become well enough to go shopping. The Masked Man wanted to know how the eulogy was coming along. What could I say to him? That it was complete nonsense? That I sit down to write and the fairies start to dance through my head and the eulogy takes inevitable turn after inevitable turn, until it is worthless drivel that I can't control? My eulogy is sixty-one pages so far. Right now it's about a massive fungus that lives under the surface of Africa, a single organism that covers over a thousand square miles. I'm not sure just when it took that turn. But it did, and I'm not sure how to stop it now. At least south is no longer down; at least the Sasquatch has finished his odyssey. Did I tell you how the part about the Sasquatch ended? He wandered and wandered the Pacific Northwest forests till he found a hidden city. The city was so far into the unpeopled wilderness that it just spontaneously became a city, just as the positive electrical charge seeks out the negative. Too much wilderness that is too densely through-and-through wilderness and boom, a city will suddenly appear. And far away, in some other zone of the earth, a man went looking for his suicided mother, went looking through the labyrinth streets of some awful urban grid, went through an alley and perhaps climbed over a chain-link fence or went through a door; and the wilderness opened up before him, the urban landscape having become so dense that it collapsed into itself, and the wilderness could not but unfold itself in the very heart of the city.

Why did he request a eulogy? He could have requested a thousand things--a poem, novel, short story, an essay. I have written all of these in the past, after all, and I have never written a eulogy. It is obvious why he requested it--and obvious whom it is for. If only my last work weren't such a disaster. How can I face him when he visits me next? It is too late to start over now. But what inane place will my eulogy drift into next?

Sick. Can't write, can't eat, can't sleep. Pain. Like I'm being stabbed to death--only I don't die but live on that I may be stabbed to death again. I don't know how this is going to turn out. After I'm dead, I mean. I still have no idea who will attend my funeral, who will read my eulogy, the last desperate act of a mediocre man. Can't write. Can't face it.

My grandmother once told me a story. A man who was born out of wedlock went searching for his father once he had come of age. He sought his father for twenty years--he forewent a university education, a career, a wife and family of his own, all so he could simply seek out his father. His father had left the country, and was in trouble with the law; he had changed names many times, and was very difficult to locate. This man searched and searched for him through half a dozen nations--he got a lead here and there, just enough information to keep him going. All the while he scraped up whatever money he could working shit jobs--my grandmother didn't use that word--yes, he dug ditches, picked fruit, bused tables. Finally, he found the man. His father was somewhat happy and somewhat perplexed when they met--they sat and talked, drank beer mostly in uncomfortable silence, smoked cigarettes together. There was really not very much for them to say to each other. Then the man went home and . . . wait, is that how the story ended? I can't seem to remember what happened after that. Sick. Can't writ

End