The Last Dinner

Fear and Death are being too intimate in public again; he can barely keep his hands off her. Not that Simon Bellamy cares. He’s well into his fifth drink and can manage only a slight sneer at their PDA. I, myself, am a little uncomfortable, but there you are. I’ve managed by swirling my pasta around on my fork, but there’s only so long you can watch thin fingers creep into the space where chin meets throat — tap tap tap, light as giggles, as a single heart breaking — and not lose your appetite for pasta carbonara altogether. My pulse, repulsed. 

“Now,” says Fear, a finger to Death’s lips, shushing him; he makes as though to nibble on it and she shies away with a grin. “Now, we’re here for an occasion. That’s why you’re in town, Simon, isn’t it?” 

“Your father,” I prompt, because Bellamy looks a little dazed. He smiles at this, but not nicely. 

“Your father’s dead,” says Death — who, after all, would know. 

An uptwitch of the eyebrows. 

“When?” 

“This afternoon.” Death shrugs, apparently not bothering himself with the specifics. 

“Painful?” 

“That’s not my department.” 

“I’m glad we could be there,” says Fear, “So you didn’t have to.” 

Bellamy considers. I can tell he is thinking, employing a brain used to death and love and rage and revenge, but primarily through a literary lens — trying to overlay a template onto real life, albeit through a foggy cloud of inebriation. 

“I’ll drink to that,” he says finally, and does. 

“Simon.” It slips out before I can clamp my mouth shut. Three pairs of eyes on me, now. Death is always a little glamorous, with his lidded gaze; Bellamy poses a challenge. Fear doesn’t blink. 

“I mean,” I set down my fork, giving up a futile fight. “He was your father.” 

I used to pretend, actually, that he was my father too. I wasted far too many of his office hours with pointless questions, badgering him over little flaws in my papers. Pedantic, he’d call them, and me, but he never kicked me out. There must have been something about me, then — something a gruff old classicist, a military man, one of the ruthlessly tenured types — must have liked. 

“Mmhmm.” Again, I am gifted with Bellamy’s sardonic smile. “I suppose so. My very presence made him my father. And, in revenge, he made me into what I am today.” 

“A charming domestic melodrama,” says Fear approvingly. She’s gone back to touching Death; she’s practically draped over his shoulder. “And a suitable zinger in the enduring tragicomedy of Simon Bellamy.” 

Chin tilted humbly, Bellamy raises his glass to them. 

“I wonder how it ends,” Death says musingly, and for the first time all evening Bellamy’s glare isn’t directed at me. 

“Don’t be stupid, Hector, you know that already.” 

“Hector?” I feel stupid. Maybe I like that — maybe that’s what I liked about Professor Bellamy, the first Professor Bellamy, too. Maybe that’s why, even after the father was through with me, I stuck with the son. 

“Oh, it’s an old nickname. Sort of an inside joke, I suppose. You get to a certain point — out-patient, in-patient, impatient — and they always tell you to name your fear, so I thought, why not name Death too? I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” with a wry look under his eyelids, “But you tend to come as a pair.” 

My friend, I think, this man who has inside jokes with Death. And what am I supposed to do with that?

“So did you name your Fear?” I ask dutifully. I’m wondering when this conversation (outpatient, inpatient, impatient) first took place. There was a period, I think, of crash-and-burn not long after college; a group of clever, staggeringly arrogant humanities grads with our newly-minted BAs (myself included) had planned a trip to Singapore. Simon was on the plane, I know that, and I saw him stumbling along behind through the terminals — but by the time we got to the hotel, he was nowhere at all. I learned later that he’d reached baggage claim, turned around, and gone back home on the next available flight. He’d been in some program for a while after that, I think —he told me about it a few months later, in-between blithely-uttered terms like temporary melancholia, a slight nervous disposition, and black bile. I must’ve been too polite to remember the specifics. 

“No. I was contrary. I did shit with the depression too. Nameless and forgotten, to this day.” 

Fear sniffs. “Depression, Simon, is a condition. It’s not an entity.” 

“Be that as it may, Fear-” a little slurred, “I don’t care. It’s mine, is what it is. MINE. I told them that. You can ask me to look inside myself until I’m ready to scream — you can want me to fix and- and- and to change- but you can’t take it from me.” 

(But then, I reflect, I’m quite sure that there was a rough patch after his divorce as well — Teena, her name was, and I barely knew her; their marriage didn’t even last a year. The few times I’d met them both for drinks, I watched as her jaw twitched in response to his witticisms; she stared at him like an insect she’d properly understand, if only she could stab it through the middle and pin it to a board.) 

“You have ownership of your feelings,” says Death. “It’s valid. It’s yours to feel. The worst ones most of all.” 

“Yes.” 

Fear snaps her fingers appreciatively. 

As long as I’ve known him, Bellamy has read, and written, and criticized (viciously), and danced, and drank, and argued (waspishly, and often to the point of collapse) with an almost frightening fervor. He never talked about his life in high school, but he threw himself into college as though, if he pushed hard enough, he could break the matter of the air around him and topple into some other world. His father was the same way, really, but more deliberate — the force of his gaze, his cutting comments on my essays, were both cold and crushing: the unholy child of a glacier, and, say, the military-industrial complex. He would’ve found that, I think, a stupid metaphor. Simon would too. 

And now I’m almost afraid to ask. “So… when you looked inside yourself, what did you see?” 

It isn’t the first time he’s looked directly at me — but it’s the first time he really sees me, sitting at his side, and it seems to trouble him. His long, thin smile fluctuates as he tries to collect and make up his mind. 

“I guess-” he points with a wavering hand across the table- “I found them.” 

“Interesting,” I say. “So did I. I think.” I must have, really, though I try to keep that portion of my life an isolated little segment, to not let it touch what I’ve become since. But I, too, am not unknown to Death and Fear. I’ve been offered a seat at this table, haven’t I?

What I’m really deciding now, though, is that Simon Bellamy is like a very spiteful phoenix. Incapable of living as a beautiful bird, he is both too ready to burn and too stubborn to remain in the ashes. He must rise, he must regenerate, if only to torment himself (and others, often others, occasionally me) again. I’m not sure who taught him this wrong kind of resilience; I’m not sure who’s to blame. The man whose death he’s just toasted? Himself? Or his favorite friends, even now beaming as one threads a hand up the other’s neck and into her hair?

And what would it take for it all to stop? Who could it be, to hold him as he combusted and combusted and combusted until he realized that it was time to let go?

It’s no longer, I think, just a matter of relief. It’s a matter of freedom. 

And then a solution occurs to me — at least, as close to a solution as I can grasp. And it’s sitting in front of me, planting a kiss on the temple of a humanoid something-or-other called Fear. 

“I hate to cut this short,” I say, “But I do have work tomorrow. Simon, you can stay with me. I’m sure you’ll have paperwork to sort out in the morning. Estate business… something.” 

“I’ll scatter his ashes over the nearest landfill,” Bellamy says viciously, but he wavers a little in his seat, doesn’t seem to want to stand, to leave. 

“No, we should be going too,” says Death. He tugs Fear to her feet. She gives Bellamy a mock salute and me a hug. 

“The bill?” I ask. She knows, of course, but I’ll give nothing away. 

“We’ll pay it,” she assures me. “Don’t you worry.” 

Bellamy and I snort at the irony, then are both surprised. I say nothing as I let him keep his hand on my arm, steering him through the restaurant and out the front door. He can manage an impressive eloquence when drunk, but movement doesn’t come so easy. He slides into the passenger seat of my car and immediately closes his eyes. 

My house is more than an hour away; Fear and Death picked the (inconvenient) location for our little dinner-date. Volume low, I play an old standard from our college days: Paul Simon’s Graceland, over and over, the song where the archangel sings: 

“I don’t want no part of this crazy love

I don’t want no part of your love…” 

Simon sleeps. 

I plan my route precisely. We’re bumping and clattering along a road that hasn’t seen care for decades when Bellamy wakes with a start, panic in his eyes, a hand flying up to cover his mouth as he gags. I pull over. I don’t like to watch suffering, but I observe long enough to make sure he’s well in the throes of being sick behind a tree to back the car up. 

I’m suddenly nervous. I don’t want gore. I don’t want blood. Where’s Fear when you need her, I wonder, a little hysterically. But I will get this right. 

And I do. He reemerges, looks one way, then the other — now, I am speeding forwards — and he sees something he recognizes, though I’m not sure it’s me. I see no betrayal in his face, the split second before impact. I don’t see any emotion at all. He just looks tired, tired and pale. 

Then the collision, the sound of the thing. I wince as it makes however much of my meal I’d managed to ingest writhe back into my throat — but I do not panic. I turn the car off. I stumble over to where he has landed: it’s an impressive distance, quite a flight. His body is twisted, but one hand works well enough to clasp my own when I lower myself to my knees beside him. His pupils are all strange, too, but they’re doing their best to focus on me. Can he hear? I’d planned to hoist him into my arms, to hold him, but I don’t want to get any mess on myself. I also don’t want him to be in any more pain before he dies, trying to move. So instead I do what Death and Fear were doing at the restaurant: I walk my fingers up his throat to his chin. Tap-tap-tap — sleep-sleep-sleep, I think, a little human contact at last — and this way I can also feel when the pulse stops and he’s gone. 

I’m doing an admirable job of not crying; the only thing I want to avoid thinking about is how miffed he is/would be/would have been to have died without any proper last words. He’d studied — and mocked — enough novels where the protagonist got a page and a half of their death speech to have a proper desire for his own. I’m sure it would have been pithy, and this is where I really have to wrinkle up my face before my eyes manage to get too wet. I sit back; I don’t want my tears on him, even if it might be fitting. 

When I look up again, Fear and Death are there. 

“I wonder how it ends,” says Death, and I would have thought there was genuine sorrow in that cool, sharp face if that wasn’t such a ridiculous idea. Fear is looking me over. I’ve never liked her much. She’s my personal Uncanny Valley, pretending too hard to be human until it’s obvious that she isn’t — but now I latch onto her, let her pull me up and support me and help me dust off my pants. She is the only real thing in the world. 

“Is it over?” I ask her. “Is he free?” 

She looks to Death, helpless. 

“Also,” he says, “not quite my department.” 

“I just wanted to save him,” I say. I’m cold now; it’s November, it’s nighttime. I’m very cold. “I just didn’t want him to hurt anymore.” 

“Walk with me,” says Fear quietly, and she puts her arm around my shoulders to steer me away. I look back once to see Death bending over the body, and then Fear’s grip tightens into a chokehold at my throat and I have to turn back around, gasping for breath. 

“Can I go home now?” I ask. “What’s the safest option?” 

“Now that I’ve got you- again,” she says, “I’ll never let you go.” 

“A promise?” I’m very, very tired. 

“Just a truth.”

“I’ll drink to that,” I say, stupidly, beverage-less, but we both laugh. Mine is high and wound and fumbling, while Fear’s arcs like a fountain through the air — and in that moment I know that I will not go home. I will not go back to work, to the funeral of either Bellamy: old dead enemies, my old dead friends. I am with her now, and I will let her walk me as long as she desires, over the horizon and into the night. 

About the Author

Julianna Reidell is a Senior English and French major at Arcadia University. Her work can be found in Moss Puppy Magazine, Roi Fainéant Press, For Page and Screen, Cathartic Youth Literary Magazine, and former issues of Quiddity, among others.