Sound inside

The Sound Inside 10/16/19 50
In late December, while campus is quiet, Christopher’s mother comes to
identify the body and take it back to Burlington, where he would be buried in
some minor cemetery near Lake Champlain.
It’s strange considering a winter burial during the holiday season. A pair of
anonymous men shoveling through a hide of heavy snow only to break the
earth and shovel more.
Christopher Corbit Dunn, interred in the cold earth.
In January, I begin chemotherapy treatments.
I take the spring term off and watch my hair fall out in clumps.
Six months later, at my bi-monthly checkup, my oncologist informs me that
the tumors in my stomach have all but disappeared. My cancer has gone into
remission. He says he’s never seen anything like it. He sounds disappointed.
I walk home. Over three miles. I walk past houses and lamp posts and trees
and office buildings with big glass windows.
It feels as if I’m made of yarn.
I spend the next week eating like a horse. Oysters and sardines and cold
ravioli right out of the can.
I devour a whole chicken and lick the bones dry.
Everything is a feast.
I feel as though I will live forever.
For the better part of a month I read and re-read Christopher Dunn’s novella.
I carry it around from room to room in its stationary box like some perfect
woodland creature that should never be touched. I sleep beside it. I wake
with it. When I take a bath I place it on the top of the toilet tank.
He failed to number page 78. It goes 77, then nothing, then 79. He was so
caught up in the writing that he forgot to enumerate a page.
It’s one of the most honest things I’ve ever read.