“You know,” said the skeleton, “that at this point I can’t actually talk.  You’re aware that this conversation is taking place in your own mind, that it’s imaginary.  The dead cannot really speak, you know, outside of the little remembered voices they leave behind in the souls of those they’ve acted upon.  I’m not talking about voices we imagine we can hear after reading a hagiography of a guy like Gandhi, you know, the Mahatma, the Great Souled myth man, I’m talking about the remembered voices the actual man left in the minds of those two nieces he slept with naked to prove he was finally beyond sexual desire.”  

Whoa, slow down there, bonester.

“There’s a darling I look forward to watching bleed to death on the editing room floor,” said the skeleton.  “This dialogue you are engaged in with me now, you are aware that you are creating it?”  

Well, I could hardly not be aware of it, as you know if you think about it for even a second.  

“Human memory is a famously feeble and selective thing.  What I think you’re trying to do is construct a healthy dynamic where we could have actually had the conversations you are trying to have with me now.”

We are just now capable of having the conversations you wished for as you were dying, you might say.  If we’d started fresh that next morning in the hospital after our long chat, with another chance to have a real exchange, and the day after that, I think the realizations you were struggling toward would have become more than the irreconcilable regrets and self-lacerating apologies you expressed as you tried to explain your life to me during that last night of it.  

“Well, I don’t know about that.  I would have liked a few more chances to actually exchange ideas, you know, but at that point, it was a bit late in the game for me.  It’s hard to die knowing how badly you’ve bungled key things that people with any shred of human insight know to do naturally.  I was lying there thinking of all the damage I’d done to the people I loved, and it all seemed senseless to me, my entire embattled life, a great waste of the potential I didn’t even know I had until I got into the Army.”  

Exactly why I am struggling to put these things together now.  I can feel the end beginning to reach for me and I need to say the things I haven’t managed to say, in this little hiatus before the segment ends and the beaming little cartoon pig stutters “th-th-th-that’s all, folks!”.  I remember laughing off my sister’s concerns about turning forty, almost twenty years ago, whew.  I told her how the numbers are just milestones, arbitrary round milestones.  Yet now that my sixtieth birthday is advancing towards me on rocket-powered skates I’m feeling those six decades.  At sixty you actually begin to think in terms of decades.  Literally, decades, ten year chunks of a life gone by, seen in the rear-view mirror of life.  And as the cliche has it– they rush by in those chunks.  A blink ago I was forty, still thinking I had a lot of time.  Now I am aware of the time I no longer have.

“That’s the nature of this ‘merciless arrangement’ as Joseph Conrad had it– go look it up, Elie, it will make you sound smart, google will give you the actual quote in five seconds.  ‘Droll thing life is– that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose.  The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself– that comes too late– a crop of inextinquishable regrets.’  There you go, the old Polack could really string the words together, n’est-ce pas?”

Fuck, he could have written those words for you, dad.

Do you remember, when you turned sixty mom had me make an invitation to your party, which was in the back yard on 190th Street?  I made collages from old photos, you at all different ages, your head on cartoon bodies.  I had a drawing of mom, with her beaming photographed face as the head, holding you like a struggling puppy, with your face from an old photo.   You stood nearby in an army uniform, with an 8 mm camera to your eye, filming the goings on, the several variations of you I had cavorting on the card.  You remember that?

“Yeah, it was a great invitation.  You had me saying ‘be there or be square’ and the RSVP card had several boxes to check; I’ll be delighted to attend, I’ll attend but I won’t be delighted, I won’t be there, please take my name off your mailing list.  Funny shit, my man.  You did have a sense of humor back then.”

Well, we grow out of these things, dad.  Now I’m serious as one of these undiagnosed cancers that are slyly nipping at me.  

“Why don’t you make an appointment with a fucking dermatologist?  Didn’t I also have several of them removed from my nose, while I was dying of the liver cancer they first diagnosed six days before I died?  Don’t fuck around with this.”  

You’re right, and it’s a long story, and there’s no excuse, even though there’s a complicated and aggravating reason I haven’t been able to make the appointment the last few months.  But, anyway, I have to wrap up here for the moment, I missed a call from your grand-daughter, we’ve been playing phone tag, and I want to get back to her.

“What’s that little redhead up to?” asked the skeleton with a smile.

“She texted me just now: Omg completely forgot to call yesterday don’t kill me :(((“

“Tell her you’re sorry you got her text a moment too late, fuck, if only she’d texted you a few hours earlier.  Tell her that the hit men are already on the way.  Hasta la vista, man.  Back to my dirt nap.”