Livvy struggled near the end. Breathing labored. Fluid filling her lungs. Without a doctor or hospital, all of those normal courses of action to relieve pain were inaccessible for us, and this was the one time having taken to the dimness of our family cave seemed to be an act of selfishness more than survival. Had we stayed behind, with all of the crumbling society around us, we were close to the hospital, there were bound to be some people who had once been a nurse, maybe we would have had simple access to a drug.
‘The pain, David. So much.’ Livvy trailed off far too often when attempting to speak because it just took too much strength for her to string more than two or three words together.
‘Shh,’ I whispered softly. She was clammy as she struggled. Softness. That is the way I remember her, though. Her forehead, sweat no longer dripping as her sweating, much like someone who had undergone sun stroke, ceased.
‘Take. Me. Sunshine. Please.’
Simple words as she could not make a full, complex sentence which should have been sad. Livvy was once so lucid, so vivacious, so loquacious, she was, after all, the daughter of two college professors and her ability to speak was something to behold. While she was not a public speaker in that traditional sense of giving speeches, or making herself known, when she talked, especially about those things which brought her joy, her voice was so strong, so confident, she was not full of life, she was the example of life. She was something to look up to for all, and it was the way in which she commanded a conversation. Strength. Beaming eyes. Hands confidently placed, and only moving for any particular effect she might be caring to express. Livvy would have been a wonderful orator at any level, but she simply wanted to live life and be an example.
‘You can be smart without being obnoxious about it,’ she had once assured me. ‘I don’t need to be on television, or in movies, television or any other look at me medium. I just need to help those who can make a difference do what they are supposed to do.’
That’s why she wanted to be the person in the background, helping the powerful orators, those men and women who had ideas, charisma, a future, the future of the world, become better speakers. A speech coach, she called it, but really she was a magician. Taking the least capable person and turning them into brilliant speakers. It’s what made our word play so interesting those early days in Portland. We were falling in love with more than a face, more than a body, more than any individual part, we were falling in love with something beyond even a soul. A soul leaves this earth behind and all of its inhabitants. But there is something more, a special connection shared by a few that survives death, and she was that kind of remarkable.
To see her struggle with something that used to be such a simplistic, taken-for-granted, basic conversation was more than heart-wrenching, but we were touching the sky together.
‘David, why don’t you just let me go. It gives me such pain to see you like this. You look so defeated. The tears, they have etched into your cheeks leaving a permanent scar along their path.’ Livvy loved to make things easier for everyone. But I could not walk away.
‘Livvy, we are to be together beyond this life, and to join you, I have to know where you are, where you go. I have to be here with you, side-by-side, to share your journey. I do not want to hide from you. I don’t believe in ghosts, which you fully know after all these years, but I do believe in the human spirit, it is a condition with which we are all blessed, but few ever embrace. We leave this earth and simply vanish. But a few, a select few, know love so deeply that it never leaves.
‘You will be the wind on the back of my neck on a cool morning. Or the soft kiss of the suns dying light each night. And I need to be there, to feel those things, to know that you will still be there with me.’
‘But, you are in pain. You are so sad. I cannot bear your sadness.’
‘Livvy, my love, my sadness is not for myself, and it is not even for you, it is for this world which will never have the chance to experience the spirit of someone like you again. So many people, so many idealists who were so wrong. Us included. But your spirit, your love, that is something that was never wrong and it seems a cruel hoax by whatever god exists that the universe, not just this planet, but the universe, will be stripped of something so beautiful.’
‘it won’t be.’ Livvy had gained a moment of lucid clarity. The end was too close. As we looked up at the sky, we could not help but smile, it was more of a melancholy smile than in a previous life, or in another parallel universe, but it was a smile between the only two people in that desert that evening as the sun began to set.
‘I have a secret to tell you.’
‘What’s that love.’
‘I read your book. City of Hope, the one that I told you was fake, that someone was trying to piggyback off of a famous author, that it was an illusion of a bygone author created to trick those who wanted desperately to believe in their own discoveries.’
‘So. The skeptic of all the world succumbed to the temptation, I see.’ Livvy had told me City of Hope was my fantasy. The author, J.J. Faulk was a pseudo-nym, but many had tried to speculate it was the work of William Faulkner, who had gone by his own fake name of ‘Junius Junior’ and that it was his own attempt to write without having to make it one of his works. The truth was that I had thought it never the work of Faulkner and more likely the work of Ken Kesey, who had idolized in his own way the works of Faulkner. It was Kesey who had written the quintessential Northwest story Sometimes a Great Notion. It was he who I thought had created the pen name JJ Faulk so he could write this shorter novella without the need to stay within some expected boundaries of prose.
‘Weary is the man whose path is unknown for he must travel in the darkness of life.’ That’s a brilliant line. I really liked the book. But, David, you do not have to travel int eh darkness of life. You do not have to be weary. Those days are over, and you have found a path no longer dark and lonely. Cold and weary. With me or without, I think you would be in a spot where you had put that all behind you. You’re better than Anthony. You always have been, you just never saw it until you came to Portland.’
She really had read the book. I was impressed with the return, no matter how brief, of Livvy’s acuity in these waning moments. It was like the light of where ever she was going had taken away all of the pain, all of the anguish, and had made her whole again. For whatever amount of time she was whole, I would revel in her beauty.
Drifting clouds, fading light, colliding from nothing into the brilliance of a fire raging in the minds of children. Sunset brought out the magnificence of the sky for a too brief moment of perfection which could remain so only in my mind. It was gone too soon, yet her beauty would live forever. She smiled. The wind blew.
