Moving On

Every morning for the past few weeks, I've gotten up at 4 am. I don't really need to get up until 6:00 or so to be ready on time, but I decided I would make better use of my mornings. This started with exercising right at 4. However, then I still had an hour to be productive. Writing seemed like the logical solution, but I had nothing to write. Mark and Ralph had been in my head, of course, for they never really leave it, but writing about one and not the other hurts. I have explained that before. So I know what it must be like for Ralph. I figured, I have kept him alive in my mind, so wouldn't Ralph do the same to cope with a grief even more profound than mine? So he starts seeing Mark.

The face looked so perfect—so clear and lucid. His skin seemed to belong to the Harvard law student he had once been, not the President. It glowed vaguely with the simple brilliance of living, real living. His eyes sparkled as they hadn’t sparkled so marvelously that it thrust a stake in Ralph’s heart. Mark hadn’t looked like that in the last week of his life, he knew; the burdens of the wartime Presidency had sagged his face and dulled his eyes. Ralph knew the same was happening to him now, too. But Mark’s face was the most beautiful, idyllic image, possible only in death and in his own head. Oddly, it wasn’t the thought of being crazy and grief-stricken into delusions that frightened him so but that knowing that would mean accepting that Mark wasn’t there.

Death is deliverance. It is peace. It is relief. It is a great, gasping shrug just as one thinks his burdens will crush him. I feel a little less guilty about killing Mark off when I think of him so light and free and true. Speaking of true, Dead Mark says things Live Mark would never say. He is so much more candid and open to feeling irrelevant feelings.

“Why did you pick me for Vice President?”
“Ralph.”
He shook his head. “I had even less experience in government than Benny Dove, and I had never really demonstrated anything like leadership. All I had ever done was get too scared to go to med school the day after I got in. No one even knew who I was, outside of those who were so unlucky as to have me as the Baltimore DA. No one even thought I would run for any political office, let alone be elected.” And then Ralph’s expression changed, not to regret but to a profound sadness that he knew could not, or perhaps should not, be erased. “No one ever believed me corruptible,” his truthful eyes shimmered as they looked dejectedly at the desk, “and now here I am corrupted.”
“Stop it Ralph.”
Ralph met his eyes.
“Do you want to know why I picked you, Ralph? I’ll tell you, but first realize that everything you just said is false as water. Unlike Benny Dove, you worked your entire adult life in a real job. You led Baltimore’s crusade against common criminals. You served your country quite valiantly as a lawyer and saved countless lives—more than any doctor. You created a national reputation for yourself of placing law, justice, and morality above trifles; duty came before personal fancy. You could have won most any Maryland election, including Governor or Senator. Do you want to know why I picked you, Ralph? Because, for God’s sake, you got one thing right: you are incorruptible.” Mark had only paused for air, but the pain in Ralph’s face touched him; it was contorted with surety in wrong and the most torrid sort of guilt. He had wanted to flay it away—watch the doubt and sadness fall off in strips—but he seemed only to have made the wounds raw. He softened his tone, “You have not been corrupted, Ralph. The fact that we are having this conversation shows that you cannot be corrupted. You, Ralph, were always the best of us—better than Erikson, Davidson, or me. I was so dogmatic as to, at times, do foolish things for my ideals; I wanted too much to mold the world into my idyllic childhood vision of how it should be. You are practical and seek to make the world better in ways that are possible and don’t essay to raise the earth to the sky. That is why you and your type will win, in the end. The moral pragmatists and realists will beat out the idealists on both sides of the spectrum—libertarian and totalitarian, capitalist and communist. You will be the ones to save the earth from the fall that seems so inevitable. Oh, if anyone can, Ralph,” the smile faded from Mark’s pale visage, “you will be the one to save her.”
Ralph’s spine wriggled like a worm gripped in a bird’s claws. He shook his head and shut his eyes, “Then she won’t be saved, sir.”
Mark’s smile returned in part, “Have a little faith, Ralph; you are so much better than you know. Never think that you have been corrupted because, by God, you haven’t and won’t be. Just remember that, and you will be able to get along without me.”

That's what I keep thinking: if I write a little more of this, hold on a little tighter, I will be able to move on sooner. I will be able to stop writing about a Mark who speaks and thinks. I will be able to get past his story and tell Ralph's. I will stop thinking he means so much to me. I will write as any good writer should--with an element of detachment. But by God! I can't help answering as Ralph does after the last passage:

“What if I don’t want to?” he queried with crumpled face.