Negative delta G.

This is the beginning of a novel I am writing.

No lips. His teeth are showing. His glasses form seeping pools into the eyes of the universe. There are black holes where life should be. Every aspect of life is turned into zeros and ones developing systematic approaches to iteratively discovering the meaning of life. The string of numbers looks like this:

0 0011011100101011

The answer is negative. Why? Kinetics of the reaction, that’s why. What reaction you might ask? The sum of all the chemical reactions going on in the meat tube that is your body, that’s what. Your change in free energy is negative.

……….

I’d seen a dead body before. In fact, I have seen many. Both my grandfather and father are ministers. As a child I was dragged to more funerals than I can remember. I always had a morbid fascination with looking at the body. I always wanted to leave something in the casket. I wanted a piece of me to go down with them.

My grandfather and father had been to more funerals combined than the local funeral home director had taken part in. It seems like funeral home directors and ministers are in the same business. They both profit from someone’s death. Funeral home directors take money to fill a dead body with formaldehyde and put make-up on said body’s face. Ministers make money from “love offerings” because a man named Jesus died.

Now I was looking down at my grandfather. He was filled with formaldehyde and had make-up on his face. It didn’t look like him. Apparently a drug he was taking for his heart reacted with the preservative they pumped him full of and his lips were puffy.

I hadn’t seen him in a while. I found out 7 days before the funeral that he had died. He had a stroke. The last words he said were, “I love you,” to my grandmother. My mom and grandmother held his hand in the hospital. They sang his favorite hymns and prayed for him until his body reached the lowest energy state.

As I was about to turn away from the coffin, it hit me. A wall of tears poured from my eyes. I hadn’t cried in years. I hadn’t cried since my junior year at Cornell. I found a box of tissues, wiped my eyes, and stuffed the tissue into the coffin. A piece of me went into the ground later that day. I loved my grandfather. He understood. He knew what my thoughts were from looking at my face. He said, “Son, never be afraid to fall flat on your face.” Oddly enough his stroke was caused from a fall. He had fallen on his face. He had hit his head.

……..

My friend Eli and I went out that night. I needed to feel something. I had to experience horrible agony or nothing at all. I chose the easy way out, drinking. He has been a brother to me. It had been 3 years since I had seen him last. We went to the Jolly Sailor pub, sat at the bar, and were both instantly accused of having put a roofie in a fat 55 year old drunk women’s drink. We left almost instantly.

We have been to funerals together before. The last time it was for a man called “Coach.” He had been a strong proponent of children’s sports in my town, hence the name. I played baseball. I shook his hand once when I was on the All-Star team. Coach was a friend of the family. I didn’t want to go to his funeral. I was dragged by my mother. Eli came to keep me company. We decided to go up for the viewing. When we got up to the casket, I whispered to Eli, “Help, help. Let me out of this box!” We both started laughing quietly like in school when you are laughing but trying to hold it in so you don’t get busted by your teacher. Luckily it is hard to discern whether it is laughter or heartbreak when you have your back to an audience. We both turned around and pretended to cry, but not before I put a coin from my pocket into the casket. I didn’t laugh when grandpa died. I just stared.

We would have gone to a funeral just prior to my grandfather’s, but we weren’t invited. Our friend Tim, a saint, died of a rare genetic disorder called Ehler Danlos syndrome. His body didn’t produce enough structural proteins to maintain itself. His inefficient meat tube was even more inefficient than my grandfather’s. He took chemicals to stay alive much sooner than my grandfather did. Tim died almost exactly when the doctor’s told him he would when he was a kid. I found out three days after he died. No one was there to hold his hand. No one was there to sing him songs. I threw up for two days when I found out. You tell me it is because of sin. Why should two people over 6000 years ago get to make a choice for Tim? Why could they make a choice for me? I never had a chance. Tim never had a chance. None of us ever had a chance. There are no choices.

I have to go back to New York tomorrow. The ceiling is going in and out of focus. Some water fell into my ear. I was crying.

“Gasp!” I woke up sweating like I had been running all night, not sleeping.

“Donnie? Donnie honey? How are you honey? Sweety, do you want some coffee?”

I floated past my mom right out of the door. I had to go back to the grave site. I got into my car and started driving. I was driving in a place that I didn’t recognize anymore. Hurricanes and shopping malls made that place unrecognizable. I saw the freshly broken ground. The sand was fresh. I never realized how many pieces of shell were mixed with the sand. It made such an impression on me that I can still see the pattern in my mind. Everything is sand there. Everything. Apparently, my grandmother will be buried next to him someday under the sand and shells. I wanted to leave so badly. I turned around and stepped in dog shit.

………

Flying on the plane back to New York I was stuck between a French woman who smelled like bologna and a huge fat guy who was sweating on me. He had a cowboy hat and a blue suit on with a bolo tie.

“You go to Cornell? My name is Dave. I saw your shirt and figured, hell wonder what he does there?”

I started to say, “I’m a…”

When Dave interrupted with, “What’s your major?”

“It’s uhh…”

“Wow, it’s like sittin’ next to a celebrity!”

“Well, I’m not a…uhh…”

“Ivy league! Ivy League!”

“Well it’s…”

“State school myself. Two thousand dollars a year ain’t bad! What’d you pay?”

“About fourt…”

“Figured that much. Ivy league my ass. I got a B.A. for eight grand. I’m successful and the sports teams are a hell of a lot better!”

“Yeah, I…”

“Well, I’m gonna nap now, it was nice meetin’ you. Do me a favor and get me one of those tiny bottles of vodka when the stewardess walks by will ya?”

“Okay.”

The pilot’s voice came on over the loud speaker. “Folks you can see the Atlantic ocean to your right if you look out of the window.”

Bologna lady pushed past me to see out of the window that Dave was sitting at. She said something to me in French. I simply smiled and felt sad. I couldn’t communicate with anyone.