Proof
by Noah Wilson
My grandfather carried a gun well after he lost his sight to macular degeneration. He also walked with a knife-cane around and around the block with his poof-of-a-dog, Tiger.
When I was fourteen, he taught me how to drive in the cemetery (before losing his sight altogether), cracking jokes along the way about running over mourners.
He was a fearful man. At fourteen, I understood that.
He stood on his head, chanted funny phrases, read the mystics, and announced his enlightenment at family events to indifferent cousins, eating brisket or kugel off a paper plate. This too, I understood as an expression of his fear.
When his vision became completely obscured, he gave me his car so I could drive over after school and read to him. My mom made me promise to yell my name as I knocked— Pop, it’s me, Ben, your grandson, Ben! Pop, it’s me! —so he didn’t shoot first. I never believed he’d pull the trigger, just wave the gun around like he did with the pizzaman who agreed not to press charges.
He chose a book called Proof of the Afterlife, as if it might be that simple. We got six chapters in before I started making excuses. The truth was the book frightened me. So, my mom hired his neighbor, but she only read the classics.
He never got to hear if there was any proof.
We still talked plenty, mostly about music. He insisted that music was a devotional practice: the purest kind. He also insisted that I understood him, that I was the only one, when I didn’t understand him at all.
___
Tiger went first, of natural causes. And that’s what they called it when Pop died soon after. But unlike Tiger, there were no natural causes to point to. No proof.
Once, after a driving lesson, sitting on a cemetery bench, he said: Some mystics choose when they die. Their will is so strong, their body surrenders: mind over matter. He tapped his bald head.
He wore his beard long then, like Whitman on the cover of the copy of Leaves of Grass that he gave me. He had those same eyes too, so wide and inviting for all they couldn’t see. They frightened me too, like the death book later would.
My family still thinks that the doctors couldn’t figure out what killed him. I tried to tell my mom that they couldn’t because he’d decided: mind over matter. She wouldn’t hear it.
I decided not to broach the topic with the others; I knew how they whispered about Pop. And so, I didn’t tell them either when I finished reading Proof of the Afterlife. Or, when it didn’t offer me any, that I read the rest of his books. That I started standing on my head, chanting, and making pilgrimages to the places in those books. That soon, the same fear thrilled me, as I suspect, it once thrilled him too.
Now, knocking on each temple door, I feel that same instinct to yell, Pop, it’s me, Ben, your grandson… ready to surrender my body, myself, to whatever lies on the other side.
Bio
Noah Evan Wilson is a writer, musician and comic creator based in Brooklyn, New York. His stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and published in Orca, Chautauqua, Electric Spec, and the forthcoming anthology, Ab Terra, from Brain Mill Press, among others. He is a graduate of the MFA program at Rutgers University-Newark, where he currently teaches creative writing and literature.