My mother checks the graves beside that of her father, wants to see who he’ll be seated next to in the afterlife. I wonder if it’s too late to swap, she says as I drive her back to the hotel. Because Dad never liked men with a first name for a last name, she answers when I ask why. She’s an adherent to a form of transcendental idealism, even if she’d never call it that: that whatever you believe happens does happen.
So what is she imagining? A gaggle of graved men speaking through the soil? A cocktail party or after-hours bar or bull session of acquaintances—camaraderized only by proximity—like neighbors drinking canned beer listening to baseball on the radio staring off into the last lights over cotton fields? Your life is built out of your people, not of the people you wish you knew, Grandpa said once when I didn’t want to play ball with the kids on the block because I wanted to stay in instead—reading about Kant reading about Rousseau.
I ask Mom, did he know the men buried around him? One from Korea, she says, they’ll have a lot to talk about. I daydream him foxholed with another—aged, for some reason: skin wilted as it was in the open casket. And it terrors me to think of him eternally talking to a compatriot in such a state. Why would you want to think that’s how he’s gonna live out forever, I say to her, louder than I mean to, the car lilting over the shoulder divotting into margins. She looks at me as if I’m insane when I say the word want, and gives me her Schopenhauerian paraphrase: I can’t think what I want. Yeah well, I say with nothing to say, What did he think happens to us after we die? She looks forward in a way that I can tell she’s seeing not the road but the windshield itself, I don’t know—I never asked him.
Will Pewitt teaches global literature at the University of North Florida. When he is not reading or writing, he is watching Shakespeare productions with his new daughter–who may believe that televisions can only broadcast The Globe (which he thinks is a wonderful dream).