Another Broken Wizard (38 page)

There was a lot of talk about what a fun guy, a great friend, a unique soul Joe was. He had become the perfect excuse to get bombed. There was enough weeping and toasting that it seemed impossible that Joe’s grave would be so bare the next afternoon. And the grave—that was the reality. You can interpret and re-interpret what happens to you. But reality only lets you get away with so much.

After midnight, the cocaine arrived and the party got its second lease on life. People still talked about Joe’s death, but only as it referred back to them. His death taught them to do this and not to do that. Or he died because, unlike themselves, he did that. Or it was this noble virtue, which they also possess, that Joe died for.

I got tired, and curled up in the small, pink bed in Marissa’s daughter’s room. Below the Strawberry Shortcake poster, I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. But through the door, the party kept on. Marissa and a girl who’d shown up late yelled like a coke-fueled amen corner about how the girl was going to get Marissa a job at the rent-a-car company where she worked. Then Marissa’s boyfriend showed up and left with the girl to get more coke. They were gone far too long, so that Marissa started a big fight when he got back. None of it involved me, except that it kept me awake.

The next day, everyone left at Marissa’s was too fucked up or too busy to make it out to the cemetery. Everyone loves the dead, right up until it costs something, I thought, bitterly.

The roads and little towns looked different from a year before. It had been a warm winter, and there was no snow on the ground. But I remembered the route to the cemetery.

It was bright and windy in the graveyard. Mild as it was, January in Massachusetts was a haunted place, full of jarring similarities to the same time a year before. I put down my flowers on the bronze plaque Joe shared with his grandfather, grandmother and mother, whose death date was blank. By that point, I knew better than to expect catharsis or relief from even prolonged weeping. But there I was.

Glad to have gone alone, I searched for an appropriate thing to say to the ground, for a proper prayer to offer. I considered my girlfriend, considered the good times I’d found in the last year, even considered the tasty egg sandwich I’d eaten on the way to the graveyard. I said a prayer of thanks that I was still alive. I stood up and thought of the party the night before. The world seemed too threadbare to stand losing a person like Joe.

I put my knee back on the ground and prayed that the universe is more efficient than it looks.

I prayed that important parts of it are not so easily lost. I prayed hard, then walked back to my rental car. It was a long drive home.

THE END

May 18, 2009

Brooklyn, NY, USA

Colin Dodds' writing has appeared in a number of periodicals, including
The Wall Street Journal Online
,
Folio
,
Explosion-Proof
,
Block Magazine
,
The Architect’s Newspaper
,
The Reno News & Review
and
Lungfull! Magazine
. One of his screenplays,
Refreshment – A Tragedy
, was named a semi-finalist in 2010 American Zoetrope Screenplay Contest. Before he died, Norman Mailer wrote that one of Dodds’ novels showed “something that very few writers have; a species of inner talent that owes very little to other people.” He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife Samantha.

Other Books by Colin Dodds

Poetry

Last Man on the Moon

The Blue Blueprint

Heaven Unbuilt

Novels

Fun’s Monsters

Last Bad Job

What Smiled at Him

Screenplays

Refreshment — a tragedy