Read My Life in Heavy Metal for Free Online Page B

foyer with flowers and wreaths and things. Then we’d pass into another room, a kind of chapel, with pews for people to sit and a raised area for people to speak. And we might wait there for a few minutes. And they might bring us coffee. Then we’d move along into this back room and that’s where they’d have the coffins. The bodies would all be neatly dressed and they would wheel Mary Martin over and I would look down at her, lying in this pink-padded coffin, and nod, and that would be it. I kept running this scenario through my head. The foyer, the chapel, the coffee.”
    â€œWhat’s that theory of Malraux’s? The assimilation of death?”
    â€œYes, the assimilation of death. The adjustments one makes, tries to make. That’s what I must have been up to,” Rodgers said. For a moment he saw Connie, saw her as she had appeared when he entered her study, lying under a blanket, her face set in the wax of motionless blood.
    â€œHow well did you know the student?” Ken said.

    Rodgers shook his head and steadied his hands on the edge of the table. He wanted more wine but worried that he would spill. “Mary Martin? Oh, I barely knew her at all. She was a quiet girl. Quiet. She looked a bit like that actress, the one in
Love Story.
Pretty. Dark hair. But quiet.”
    The conversation in the other room hit a lull. There was just the occasional snap of the fire that his son had built earlier. Rodgers had forgotten how to open the flue, and suffered some gentle teasing over this. He listened, now, to the fire, and sat back and stared at the orange shadows cast along the doorway between the two rooms.
    Mary Martin had spoken just once in his class. But he was alarmed to find the memory of this incident still very much alive. Rodgers had been lecturing on the Ik, an African tribe celebrated among cultural anthropologists for their meager standards of community. Mary Martin was in the back row, where she customarily sat. Gradually, as if with great effort, her pale face took on a disturbed animation.
    â€œYou mean they just leave one another to die?” she demanded.
    â€œOftentimes, yes.”
    â€œEven a relative, or a friend?”
    â€œI’m afraid so.”
    Mary Martin shook her head and glared at him, as if he were somehow responsible for the Ik’s behavior.
    Rodgers tried to soften his approach: “It is true that the Ik represent an extreme, an affront to our conception of compassion. But every culture operates according to what Mead referred to as a concentricity of love. We all make decisions about whom we can afford to care for. In essence, we choose who to love. We do this every day, without even thinking about it. We might feel bad for aperson, but that doesn’t mean we choose to take care of him, to love him. We might pass by him every day without a thought. If any of you have been to Mexico, for instance, or India, you know it is impossible to move about without beggars asking for help, people who are in real need.”
    â€œBut that’s different,” a second student said. “This tribe you’re talking about—”
    â€œThe Ik.”
    â€œYeah, the Ik. They leave their own relatives to die. Parents leave their
kids.
”
    â€œIn some cases, yes. I know it’s disturbing. But this is how they must lead their lives. They live in an extremely harsh environment and must make harsh decisions as to whom they can afford to love. Sometimes a father or mother decides there is only enough food for the two of them, and not for the children. Or they decide that a child is too sick to care for and, yes, they are left behind. But this is not cruelty. Weakness, perhaps. But not cruelty.”
    â€œYou’re saying it’s not cruel to leave a kid like that?”
    â€œNo. What I’m saying is that the Ik, all of us, really, we possess only a finite amount of love, a finite amount of the internal resources by which we