The Death of All Things Seen Read Online Free PDF Page A

not aware he still possessed.
    He pulled up the Internet memorial site to affirm Helen had ever existed. Not a single person had signed her virtual memorial book. A question mark placeholder showed where a picture should have been uploaded and never was. An American flag wavered like a flag plangently planted on the moon, suggesting that the afterlife was somehow the province of an American holding.
    And yet, it somehow fit with a certain understanding that Helen had of the American experience – its striving greatness and sense of possibility pursued and then abandoned in the lunar grey of a destination reached and then forgotten – so he understood, the journey had been the point, and not the landing, not the conquest. It was the story of the moon and so much of everything else in life.
    Norman was suddenly glad now for the Internet, for the impersonal expediency of how all matters of life and death could now be so negotiated in a disconnectedness of connectedness. All a real funeral would have revealed was that there had been nobody in his mother’s life for a very long time.
    Helen had opted for an insignificant departure, a literal dropping off the earth into the depths of the great lake, seeking the fathoms of her own grave, taking with her the argosy of her dreams, the air pocket of her retirement, ending in the literal rising of a water line in the cab of her car. It fit her temperament, the attempted, self-contained death, the tight circle of her own thoughts and ideas, her immense capacity to withhold opinions, to stay in the orbit of her own existence.
    For a moment, his thoughts settled once more with the Titanic , on the sullen passing of life in the cold reaches of the North Atlantic far from shore. He hadn’t watched Titanic in a long time.
    In the falling snow, he thought, why not seal off the outside world for a lost day of tragic remembrance? Why not submit to this quiet reprieve, rerun history in the wavering stills, the opening sequence draped in the raiment of the dirge of Uilleann pipes against the siren’s lament of Celine Dion?
    He was, he felt, the Rose Dewitt of a lesser tragedy, but a tragedy nonetheless. Maybe he could dive as the submersible did, dredge back a history long sunken. Yes, maybe that is what he would do.

2.
    T O NATE FELDMAN , Helen Price was always just The Other Woman , so he didn’t immediately recall her name when he first read it in a letter sent to him by a law firm out of Chicago.
    *
    Nate snaked along a logging road against a pale luminescence of banked snow and out along a rut of iced road. His bladder ached from the grind of the snow-chained tires. He was at the age when the signs of mortality announced themselves. He edged toward the glow of Iroquois Falls, the world encased in a domed dark that in late January held past nine thirty.
    A storm was forecast. Nate had the radio tuned to the Canadian weather service. The barometric pressure was dropping fast, but he had errands to run and just this window of opportunity. He didn’t meet a single car on the road. His eyes focused on the funneling cone of his headlights, old growth pines running sentinel along either side of the road. There were times when he felt like the last human alive, as if only he had survived a great cataclysm, which, in a way, he had.
    The town was all but deserted, though there were lights on at various establishments. He shuffled through the mail in the cold vestibule of the post office. What struck him first was the airmail blue of the envelope. He felt an overwhelming sense of déjà vu, so he had to lean for support against the burnished patina brass of the PO boxes.
    He fingered the waxy weightlessness of the envelope, recalling a time when weight mattered, when the envelope itself was the medium on which one wrote, and when it was done, the letter written, the folding origami, making it an envelope again, the tongue running along the sweet bordering glue.
    He felt the stab of memory. His