Boxcutter
It’s a shame, he thinks to himself. Such a beautiful night otherwise. He’s always loved winter in Southern California, the crisp, clean-tasting air. The dogs are quiet tonight, as are the neighbors themselves, and despite what’s just happened, Georgy senses that the neighborhood is at rest—the worst has passed for tonight. As the dark clouds above him are finally passing to reveal a sliver of the glowing half moon, he develops a very sudden understanding. An animal instinct tells him that if he wants to, he can die right this moment. It is not that he’s dying—he’s confident he can cling on until morning—it’s that he can simply allow himself to die. He’s certain that if he closes his eyes right now and surrenders himself, he will be dead in a few minutes.
*
Georgy’s lifelong fear of death was so extreme that as a young adult it started to manifest as a fear of life. Every single ache, pain, cough, twitch and irregularity would send him running to the hospital for a consultation. His physician Dr. Berman often joked that Georgy should rent a room at the hospital full-time.
He put off learning to drive until he was thirty-two years old, too scared of crashing and burning to death in a smoldering pile of steel on the highway. His wife Mitzi had to twist his arm for years before she finally got him to enroll in driving school. After he got his license, it took another year to get him on the road. Though he eventually warmed up to it, he still sometimes drove forty-five miles per hour on the interstate, and Mitzi had to explain to him that it’s actually quite dangerous to drive that slow in busy traffic.
For a long time, flying was out of the question. Mitzi didn’t get Georgy on a plane until they were both forty-five years old. Their daughter Nona was in her freshman year of college out in Austin and Mitzi insisted on flying out for a visit. At the airport, Georgy just barely managed to stave off a panic attack before boarding the plane with his eyes shut and white-knuckling it through the three-hour flight.
He kept close track of which foods and products on the market were newly suspected to cause cancer. He monitored his heartrate obsessively using a special watch that he wore on his wrist at all times. He would not go into direct sunlight without a sun hat or umbrella and would not step foot in the ocean. He avoided large crowds, exercised compulsively, checked and re-checked the smoke detectors every morning, bought a firearm to keep the house safe, got rid of the firearm to keep the house safe, tensed up around large dogs, had a survival plan for every possible cataclysm …
Then, death finally asserted itself to Georgy—by taking Mitzi from him. On June 3rd, 2014, she died of a sudden brain aneurysm while waiting in line to mail a package at the post office. In the long period of grief that followed, during which he hardly left the house or even the bedroom, Georgy sometimes found himself yearning to join his wife, wherever she was now. He’d been so distracted in their 48 years of marriage, and he never had quite found the words to express exactly how much it was that he loved her, but he had the words now, and he very much wanted to tell them to her.
Nine years later, Georgy has come as close as he’ll ever get to accepting the loss of his wife. He’s also found that his lifelong fear of death and dying seems to have lifted. Things have been simplified for him now: Mitzi is dead, it’s his turn next, and refusing to accept it would be selfish—almost childish. To speed it along would be a sin.
His children are grown, and despite some false starts, they’ve made a home for themselves in this world and Georgy is sure the future will be kind to them. Nona is out in Austin with her second husband and his kids. She’s been working as an X-ray technician at St. David’s for about twenty years now. And his son William—bless him—is close to figuring things out. He was always a stubborn kid, so sure he’d find some kind of shortcut to fame and fortune, but the last time Georgy spoke to him on the phone, William sounded like a man who has finally been made humble by the world. He said he was considering the Civil Service exam. Georgy likes that for him.
All three of the grandchildren are either off to college or recently graduated. Georgy has trouble keeping it all straight, but: one of them is studying social work at a small university somewhere out in West Texas, and another has got something going with computers, and the oldest is in her first year of teaching English at public school in Boulder. Georgy doesn’t suppose it will make-or-break the grandkids if they stop getting birthday cards from Grandpa every year.