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DEATH—NOT SOME SPOOKY or religious or abstract idea of it but just the practical everyday ingredient in nature—is everywhere close, everywhere a comfortable, cool medium to thrive in, right against the skin as it is. At an age that struck him as premature (forty-two), a certain nondescript, unremarkable ordinary person (named Mark Perdue, an academic physicist who happened to be visiting Los Angeles) was having this surprisingly serene, commonplace realization, that when death does come—if not right this minute, then someday—it will turn out to feel rather like the solution at the end of an old math problem; it won’t necessarily be a wrenching experience, or even an unhappy experience. At the point of finally giving up oneself (one’s most cherished so-called self), it will come perfectly naturally for a man to—like water droplets appearing out of nothing—resolve again into the elements.
He opened his palm in air combing atmosphere. Death abides always there in constant contact, right at one’s fingertips, in the form of the Periodic Table of Elements’ basic, cool powders and metals and crystals and colorless odors, while the sensation of “life” is merely the rarest, briefest tingle, throughout all the galaxies’ endless tonnage. Great, cold womb. Mineral of all germination. Death is oxygen, it’s not only cobalt and zinc, it’s also nitrogen and carbon. Death is the clear sky of an ordinary day, nitrogen blue at wavelength 475 nm in the visible spectrum. Brilliant death, structural death, life is death: “consciousness” can’t even string together the pebbles and dusts of this universal ore, not really. At every motion of “consciousness,” mortality intervenes, eternity intervenes, in every moment, too quick for the eye, in a billion consecutive brainflashes, like a deck-of-cards shuffle, so time and consciousness may seem to travel continuously and fluidly. As if there were no blackouts flickering between. As if there were no new personalities incarnated between. As if there were always a consistent “self,” or “soul,” freestanding as a Doric column.
These were the panoply of commonplace old facts that whirled in the face of “Mark Perdue,” physics professor visiting from out of town, while he pressed his elbows in farewell upon the wooden armrests of his auditorium seat in L.A. At this moment, his overriding practical interest was in distinguishing between a heart attack’s genuine symptoms and its imaginary symptoms—because there might be an unavoidable short bit of pain or embarrassment on the way out. It is common knowledge that a sharp little discomfort precisely in the area of the heart isn’t necessarily a coronary. Real coronaries involve more widespread signs. All he had was the chest pressure. He had no arm pain, no shortness of breath, no cold sweat. And forty-two is too young, too young for anything but the imaginary sort of heart attack, envisioned in such detail that the idea can get a grip. And ever since his one big bout with Lyme disease, he has been borne up, regularly, by a bouncy fizz of bizarre nervous twinges and zaps and clanging sensations that, if alarming, or sometimes truly stupefying, amount to nothing.
Nevertheless, the pure idea of a heart attack does, suddenly, lift a man upon a pinnacle. Because death, one thing to be said for it is that it’s a sure thing. It’s foolproof. And given the circumstances, here in L.A., an efficient little heart attack (a basically thrifty little heart attack if it succeeds) could make sense: Los Angeles is a fatiguing, jarring place, during a hectic weekend for a visitor to be deprived of his accustomed daily routine, far from his usual comforts, far from the assigned parking place in the faculty lot in Berkeley, far from his regular pastry while he hides out at Cafe Med off-campus and afterward his own office’s tarnished sticky doorknob, far from the pervasive campus air of eucalyptus, the smell of blackboard-eraser talcum in the corridors: all are familiar daily medicines preventing heart attacks, all habits to keep a man on paths in life veering from any heart attacks.
Instead, now, here was Mark Perdue physically, bodily, in faraway Los Angeles sitting in row 7, seat GG, in a very loud concert hall—his daughter had at last mounted the stage, and she’d cued the band with a wink and gone straight into her song—which ought to have been a moment of accomplishment, and lapse, and relief. But that was when he started to think the fixed feeling in his ribs could be the onset, the sensation of an anvil, taking shape inside his chest. And he thought back to the beginning of the weekend, boarding the plane, when he’d felt this exact same discomfort in the heart and might have foreseen this. In a way, he did foresee it.
He and his daughter, among the SFO–LAX commuters Friday morning, had been shuffling along dragging their carry-ons inside the drafty, dirty telescope that connects terminal and airplane, when he’d felt in his chest the first sigh, the first dilation, the immortal sadness, and he did foresee this whole thing (if only in the misty way one foresees