978-1572305441

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Zachary 47
she was a worry to Zachary’s mother, who relied on her a great deal to
help out around the house and to look after her son.
“I call her Alice,” Zachary piped up.
“Do you?” I asked, adding, rather stupidly, “Is that her name?”
“No,” his mother interjected. “Her name isn’t Alice at all. That’s the
name of the housekeeper from The Brady Bunch, another one of his favorite
shows.” I was trying very hard to keep this straight.
“At the same time his grandmother was ill,” Angela continued, “the
movie Titanic came out.” He was not allowed to see it, but this has always
been another favorite topic of Zachary’s. He has read everything he
can about the sinking of the great ship.
“It hit an iceberg,” Zachary said, and made the sound of the ship’s
hull crashing into something. Zachary cannot listen to the movie’s popular
theme song without crying, his mother added. Then he became
worried about all the main characters in his favorite TV shows dying.
He scoured the newspapers, especially the entertainment section and
the obituaries, and watched all the newscasts, looking for death notices.
He constantly asked his mother who would replace so-and-so in the
show if there was a death. Curiously, he never asked his mother if she
would die and who would replace her.
I asked Zachary if he was afraid of dying. He has nightmares, he admitted.
“I had a dream on a night about me having to go underground.
What would happen to my spirit?” he asked his mother, but then answered
himself with a rather grand theatrical gesture of the hands upwards:
“My spirit goes up into the sky and goes in everyone’s heart.”
This is an explanation his mother had given him to comfort him, but
this was the first time she had heard of these nightmares.
“Does everyone get sick before they die? Not always. They die in
their sleep.” He continued to answer his own questions.
What began as an initial concern about the health of a family member
had now grown to include all Zachary’s interests and preoccupations.
But his obsession with death extended only to those individuals
of direct and immediate interest to him. He was not worried about the
war in Serbia or the famines in Africa, and the death of Princess Diana
had left him cold.
“What about Louie Brown?” he asked. “He died in 1845.”
“What about Louie Brown? Who is he?” I asked.
“He was the man who invented Braille,” his mother informed me.
Braille was another one of Zachary’s interests. He learned all about it in
school many years ago, and it still carried an intense interest for him,