“Yes, sir, I’ve been aware of it for a while. I was just, you know, overcome by a sense of the unknown.”
“What unknown, Mr. Thomas?”
“The great unknown, sir. I’m not a particularly vulnerable person. Little unknowns don’t disconcert me.”
“How does lying on a garage floor console you?”
“The water stains on the ceiling are lovely. They relax me.”
Looking at the concrete overhead, he said, “I find them ugly.”
“No, no. All the soft shadings of gray and black and rust, just a hint of green, gently blending together, all free-form shapes, not anything that looks as defined and rigid as a bone.”
“Bone, did you say?”
“Yes, sir, I did. Is that a bearskin hat, sir?”
“Yes. I know it is not politically correct to wear fur, but I refuse to apologize for it to anyone.”
“Good for you, sir. I’ll bet you killed the bear yourself.”
“Are you an animal activist, Mr. Thomas?”
“I have nothing against animals, but I’m usually too busy to march on their behalf.”
“Then I will tell you that I did, indeed, kill the bear from which this hat was fashioned and from which the fur came for the collar and cuffs of this coat.”
“That isn’t much to have gotten from a whole bear.”
“I have other fur items in my wardrobe, Mr. Thomas. I wonder how you knew that I killed the bear.”
“I mean no offense by this, sir, but in addition to the fur for various garments, you received into yourself something of the spirit of the bear when you killed it.”
From my extreme perspective, his many frown lines looked like terrible dark saber scars. “That sounds New Age and not Catholic.”
“I’m speaking metaphorically, not literally, and with some irony, sir.”
“When I was your age, I did not have the luxury of irony. Will you get up from there?”
“In a minute, sir. Eagle Creek Park, Garfield Park, White River State Park—Indianapolis has some very nice parks, but I didn’t know there were bears in them.”
“As I am sure you realize, I hunted the bear and shot it when I was a young man in Russia.”
“I keep forgetting you’re Russian. Wow, librarians are a tougher bunch in Russia than here, hunting bear and all.”
“Everyone had it tough. It was the Soviet era. But I was not a librarian in Russia.”
“I’m in the middle of a career change myself. What were you in Russia?”
“A mortician.”
“Is that right? You embalmed people and stuff.”
“I prepared people for death, Mr. Thomas.”
“That’s a peculiar way of putting it.”
“Not at all. That’s how we said it in my former country.” He spoke a few words in Russian and then translated: “‘I am a mortician. I prepare people for death.’ Now, of course, I am a librarian at the Indiana State Library opposite the Capitol, at one-forty North Senate Avenue.”
I lay in silence for a moment. Then I said, “You’re quite droll, Mr. Romanovich.”
“But I hope not grotesque.”
“I’m still thinking about that.” I pointed to the second SUV. “You’re driving that one. You’ll find the keys tagged with the license number in a wall box over there.”
“Has your meditation on the ceiling stains ameliorated your fear of the great unknown?”
“As much as could be expected, sir. Would you like to take a few minutes to meditate on them?”
“No thank you, Mr. Thomas. The great unknown does not trouble me.” He went to get the keys.
When I rose to my feet, my legs were steadier than they had been recently.
Ozzie Boone, a four-hundred-pound best-selling mystery writer who is my friend and mentor in Pico Mundo, insists that I keep the tone light in these biographical manuscripts. He believes that pessimism is strictly for people who are over-educated and unimaginative. Ozzie counsels me that melancholy is a self-indulgent form of sorrow. By writing in an unrelievedly dark mode, he warns, the writer risks culturing darkness in his heart, becoming the very thing that he decries.
Considering the gruesome death of Brother Timothy, the awful discoveries yet to be revealed in this account, and the grievous losses forthcoming, I doubt that the tone of this narrative would be half as light as it is if Rodion Romanovich had not been part of it. I do not mean that he turned out to be a swell guy. I mean only that he had wit.
These days, all I ask of Fate is that the people she hurls into my life, whether they are evil or good, or morally bipolar, should be amusing to one degree or another. This is a big request to make of busy Fate, who has billions of lives to keep in constant turmoil. Most good people have a sense of humor. The problem is finding smile-inducing evil people, because the evil are mostly humorless, though in the movies they frequently get some of the best lines. With few exceptions, the morally bipolar are too preoccupied with justifying their contradictory behaviors to learn to laugh at themselves, and I’ve noticed they laugh at other people more than with them.
Burly, fur-hatted, and looking as solemn as a man should who prepares people for death, Rodion Romanovich returned with the keys to the second SUV.
“Mr. Thomas, any scientist will tell you that in nature many syste
ms appear to be chaotic, but when you study them long enough and closely enough, strange order always underlies the appearance of chaos.”
I said, “How about that.”
“The winter storm into which we are going will seem chaotic—the shifting winds and the churning snow and the brightness that obscures more than it reveals—but if you could view it not at the level of a meteorological event, view it instead at the micro scale of fluid and particle and energy flux, you would see a warp and woof suggestive of a well-woven fabric.”
“I left my micro-scale eyeglasses in my room.”
“If you were to view it at the atomic level, the event might seem chaotic again, but proceeding into the subatomic, strange order appears once more, an even more intricate design than warp and woof. Always, beneath every apparent chaos, order waits to be revealed.”
“You haven’t seen my sock drawer.”
“The two of us might seem to be in this place, at this time, only by coincidence, but both an honest scientist and a true man of faith will tell you there are no coincidences.”
I shook my head. “They sure did make you do some pretty deep thinking at that mortician’s school.”
Neither a spot nor a wrinkle marred his clothes, and his rubber boots gleamed like patent leather.
Stoic, seamed, and solid, his face was a mask of perfect order.
He said, “Do not bother to ask for the name of the mortician’s school, Mr. Thomas. I never attended one.”
“This is the first time I’ve known anyone,” I said, “who embalmed without a license.”
His eyes revealed an order even more rigorous than that exemplified by his wardrobe and his face.
He said, “I obtained a license without the need for schooling. I had a natural-born talent for the trade.”
“Some kids are born with perfect pitch, with a genius for math, and you were born knowing how to prepare people for death.”
“That is exactly correct, Mr. Thomas.”
“You must have come from interesting genetic stock.”