The rest of Support Group is torture: Patrick drones on about battles won and lost, "inspiration", and what is supposed to be comforting words. Neither Hazel nor I speak until Patrick asks me a question: "Augustus, perhaps you'd like to share your fears with the group."
"My fears?" I ask, a bit startled by the suggestion.
"Yes," Patrick answers.
"I fear oblivion. I fear it like the proverbial blind man who's afraid of the dark."
"Too soon," Isaac says.
"Was that insensitive? I can be pretty blind to other people's feelings," I ask.
Isaac is laughing, but Patrick says, "Augustus, please. Let's return to you and your struggles. You said you fear oblivion?"
"I did," I answer.
"Would, uh, would anyone like to speak to that?" Patrick asks, looking like he's lost.
She tentatively raises her hand. I wonder what she' s going to say.
"Hazel!" Patrick says relieved.
She looks at me without flinching. "there will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no more human beings remaining to remember anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this, will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that's what everyone else does."
I can sense that she's trying to hurt me-or scare me. But it doesn't.
There was a long period of silence. I smiled. "Goddam. Aren't you something else."