I followed tentatively for two blocks, wondering what I should do. Why should I have done anything? I do not know. I was gripped by the thought that if I did not follow then he would be gone again, with nothing changed. Just as I decided that there was nothing I could do that made sense after all the hurt and all the years that had passed, he stopped. I stopped too, waiting to see what he would do, trapped in place by the crowd that flowed around us. He turned slowly and faced me, just ten feet away. He registered no surprise, no curiosity. As he looked at me with empty, limpid eyes, I expected at any moment to see some sign of the fire that I knew he was capable of. But there was nothing. It was the same man – but it was not. I looked more closely and saw that he had kept his leanness but didn’t have the appearance of strength and unpredictability that he had once had. Instead he looked tired. I realized I was looking at a man who had been beaten. He was done.
With one movement, not quick but not slow, he turned and walked away. I stood there, unmoving, and before long he was swallowed by the crowd.
For days those images would not leave my mind. Question after question haunted me. What was his life like now? What further troubles had brought that vacuous countenance to his face? Was the emptiness I had seen a measure of peace, or was he still in pain? I was tortured by those thoughts for weeks, and then gradually and mercifully the experience began to lose its grip on me. I thought of him less often. After three or four months, my life had returned to its routine. And then, out of nowhere, his sister called. After all the things she had said to me and about me in our former lives, I had thought I would never hear from her again. That would have been all right with me but here she was, her small tired voice in my ear. “I thought you’d want to know”, she said. “He’s gone. It happened last night.” He had driven to a spot he loved. Even before she told me where, I knew well which spot he had chosen. He apparently lingered there a while. Was he savoring the place and the memories as was his habit? Or was he stalling, delaying the inevitable? And then, just like that, he was gone.
When I first heard the news, I felt a shock of incomprehension, as if I had learned that the moon had fractured in the sky and the pieces had plunged into the sea. It was impossible. But after weeks of turning through my mind all the facts and feelings, the memories and regrets, I realized that there had never really been any chance of any other end. During all those crazy years, we were hurtling as if through a tunnel towards the only possible outcome. Somehow that realization brought me peace. Perhaps it shouldn’t have. But the peace seemed real.
I wake in the night sometimes now and a restless fear overcomes me as I lie in the dark, a dull dark heaviness that smothers reason. I am only reassured when I step outside in the night air and confirm that the moon is still hanging in its place.