Disclaimer…I don't own anything. The quotes are obviously by Shakespeare, in 'Hamlet.'
Author's Note…I hope you can all follow this…
"To be or not to be,--that is the question:--
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles"
Religion, in his house, was always somewhat of an afterthought. First came groceries, then doctor's appointments, then taxes, then yearly trips to Florida, then G/d. He supposed that his family would not have celebrated anything at all, if not for the rest of the kids on the block that celebrated Christmas and the rest of the kids on the block that received presents and the rest of the kids and the rest of the kids and the rest of the kids and keep up with the Jones.
And, on the High Holidays, they had always gone to temple. Mike always shifted in his seat and Bryan was a chronic fidgeter, but he himself had always found a curious sort of solace in it. But Yom Kippur was his enemy; the Day of Judgment; the Day of Atonement.
In his mind, on that day G/d would sit up on His throne, surrounded by angels and spirits and prophets, and open a worn, leather-bound text, not too unlike an accounting book. In this book, there would be columns and columns of names, the names of everybody in the entire world.
And, next to each name, there would be a list of sins, a whole year's worth of sins. And G/d would look at each name and judge and decide who gets to be forgiven and who must carry their deeds on their back forever, until death parts body and soul.
He wouldn't be last, but he would be towards the end. Bryan would go before him, and next to his name there would be a few, insignificant mistakes. Whatever injustices Bryan had commited were trivial; forgivable.
But next to his own name, there would be a long list, with tiny letters cramped painfully into the very margins of the Book of Records, for he is bad bad bad and the time for repentence has come and gone and trying to be good is pointless.
These are his nightmares, routine and so perfectly detailed that they have been etched into his brain as reality.
"And by opposing them?--To die,--to sleep,--
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to,--'tis a consummation"
As time trudged on, moving at a deliberate pace, magnifying every miniscule event and worsening every grievence, the need to be great dwindled away. What little wholesomeness he had left was cancered and what little faith he had left was eaten away by the darkness.
And, mere as these intangible things may have been, they had still been. What was once in existence was gone gone gone, and it had be replaced.
He did not want to bring others down with him, although selfishness was already on the list. At first, he tried to fill the deep cavity in this chest with food, saturated and greasy, and when that didn't work and the weight slipped off like love, he moved onto to the bigger and the better.
Women. They were the smooth, gentle light to his rough, black surface: They would reflect in from the heavens and, like clockwork, he would absorb it, let it sink into his skin, and send a minuscule amount back.
And when the aching crater returned, he used the same remedy to fill it up. And this is how he came to have so many wives. They are his chemo, destroying everything in their path to salvage.
They came on his last day perhaps because of the hate in their hearts, or perhaps in spite of it. The three women had never before seen each other and they would probably never again, but on this day they united as a barricade against the sorrow and the regret threatening to suffocate and kill them all.
And then they would be with him again, which, despite their sentiments, was exactly what they didn't want.
"He was just so…good," one woman sobs to another.
Her newfound companion nods sagely and wipes a tear from her own face. "We shouldn't have let him go," she agrees.
The third woman beside them hiccups loudly, ignoring the tears on her own face. "Who c-cares what he did? We cou-could have worked through it."
The three women are not the only ones there though; rather, the place is full of people bleeding grief. Everyone is tightly packed together, as if their own body heat will protect them from the beyond that one of their own has already succumbed to.
And there is one man there that stands apart from the crowd, leaving heavily on his cane and shaking his head. They are wrong, he knows. They are wrong wrong wrong about him and they don't deserve to be here and they don't understand, not one little bit and they need to leave because he needs to be here and he needs to be alone with him.
But his desperate, telepathic pleas do nothing to drive the crowd away. So he waits for the rabbi to finish speaking and the dull clang of the simple wood against solid Earth and the supposed loved ones to shovel dirt onto him, burying him deeper and deeper into the ground, fertile for corpses. His friend is so deep that the man worries that, if by some miraculous way his friend is given the opportunity, he won't have the ability to dig himself out.
And he waits and waits and waits. It seems he has been waiting forever for him.
And it seems as though waiting is not worth it anymore. Let him rest in peace.
But even he does not know what the peace his friend wants--or wanted--is. So he will simply tell himself that whatever he desired, he got. He will tell this to himself as many times as it takes for him to believe it.
It takes him over a decade to do so. But, for the first time in his life, James Evan Wilson has beat House to the punch; he believed he had achieved Heaven the moment he looked in that Book of Records and saw his name had been cleared. He had been freed.
From himself.
"To sleep! Perchance the dream:--ay, there's the rub;
For in the sleep of death what dreams may come"