Free You Are My Heart and Other Stories by Jay Neugeboren Page A

hesitated to state aloud for fear of being thought pompous, or overly sentimental: that he was once again, as he had been when the AIDS pandemic erupted two decades before, doing the work he believed he had been put on earth to do.
    When he let his mind drift back to his three visits to South Africa—a mere seven weeks, in all—and when he saw himself walking across a valley lush with tropical greenery, heading with Zhuthula and two other health care workers to a Zulu compound near the Tugela River—what he could not make sense of was how such a phenomenally beautiful landscape could be home to such a phenomenally deadly disease.
    He saw himself in a Zulu compound—one located in the Valley of a Thousand Hills—and he imagined that Jennifer was with him. He imagined that she was explaining how to take the antiretrovirals and how many to take each day and when to take them. He pictured the two of them leaving the hut and being shown, with pride, a stone-fenced cattle crawl in which there was one large cow and a scattering of chickens, and when he recalled the manner in which the people, some holding infants in their arms, had expressed gratitude to them—one hand holding onto the wrist of the hand that, palm upturned, was receiving medications from their hands—he imagined strands of hair falling from their skulls and drifting into the air, skin falling away from their bones in patches, teeth dropping from their mouths and landing one at a time, in soundless puffs of dust, on the dirt of the cattle crawl.

A Missing Year: Letter To My Son
    â€œAnd so, if the world consisted only of me and you (a notion I was much inclined to have), then this purity of the world came to an end with you, and, by virtue of your advice, the filth began with me.”
    â€”Franz Kafka A Letter To His Father
    Â 
    D earest Charlie,
    If you are reading this, wherever you are, it will mean, of course, that I am no longer here (there?)—a shame, since when all is said and done, and here I paraphrase Orwell, I find that this world does suit me fairly well. And wherever I am, and unless we’ve both arrived simultaneously in some universe designed by Calvino or Borges, what I’m certain of is that there is no ‘I’ there. I never thought to persuade you of that—that when we’re gone, we’re gone and that’s all there is to it, so that the only immortality, as our people (mostly) believe (Jews, but not only Jews—cf. Shakespeare’s sonnets), lies in our children, in the memories others have of us, and in whatever work we may have left behind: literary stuff, of course, but anything made by one’s mind or hands that has tangible existence: music, furniture, boats, paintings, sculpture, jewelry, clothing, houses…
    Consciousness is fine—much studied and celebrated in recent times—but much overrated too, in my opinion, for even were it to survive in some way—were we, as in typical tales composed about such after-lives, to wake from death and find that,
detached from any bodily being, mind and thought are, miraculously, still ongoing, I would doubtless spend whatever timeless time this ‘I’—this consciousness recognizably me and no one else—had been given, lamenting the loss of senses. Taste, touch, sight, sound, smell—smell above all!—how ever, ever, ever undervalue them ?
    I.e., the grave’s a fine and private place, as Marvell famously wrote, but none, I think, do there embrace. Other articulations of this notion, along with its innumerable carpe diem corollaries about prefering the sybaritic, now accelerate within, creating a rather sweet traffic jam, yet I banish them at once, even as I ask forgiveness for my literary excesses, references, and airs, yes? These musings are—of course, of course—my somewhat arch way of avoiding telling you what I’ve decided to tell you about what I’ve always thought of as my