If It Bleeds (Holly Gibney #2)

by Stephen King

As that August burned away, I sometimes thought of an African proverb I’d read in one of my classes: When an old man dies, a library burns. Victoria and Ted hadn’t been old, but somehow that was worse, because any potential they might have had was never going to be realized. All those kids at the funeral, both current students and recent graduates like me and my friends, suggested that something had burned, and could never be rebuilt.

“The human brain is finite—no more than a sponge of tissue inside a cage of bone—but the mind within the brain is infinite. Its storage capacity is colossal, its imaginative reach beyond our ability to comprehend. I think when a man or woman dies, a whole world falls to ruin—the world that person knew and believed in. Think of that, kiddo—billions of people on earth, and each one of those billions with a world inside. The earth their minds have conceived.”

As he passes the place where Jared set up his drums, those two questions recur: why did you stop to listen, and why did you start to dance? He doesn’t know, and would answers make a good thing better? Later he will lose the ability to walk, never mind dancing with little sister on Boylston Street. Later he will lose the ability to chew food, and his meals will come from a blender. Later he will lose his grip on the difference between waking and sleeping and enter a land of pain so great that he will wonder why God made the world. Later he will forget his wife’s name. What he will remember—occasionally—is how he stopped, and dropped his briefcase, and began to move his hips to the beat of the drums, and he will think that is why God made the world. Just that.

The universe is large, he thought. It contains multitudes. It also contains me, and in this moment I am wonderful. I have a right to be wonderful.

It’s the truth even though Uncle Henry is a pain in the ass. Love is a gift; love is also a chain with a manacle at each end.