The Road Narrows As You Go by Lee Henderson Page A

featuring delicate drawings of gnarled little trees spilled out around him. He didn’t look at anyone. He said, Where is he? Took me ten days. I’m too late, aren’t I?
    Ten days? He’s only been— Yes, since Friday, but—. Where have you been, Jonjay? Wendy said and started to cry. He died on Friday.
    Jonjay’s eyes went black as they fixed on the master bedroom, and he walked straight past Wendy in a kind of zombie daze. He was sufferingfrom sunstroke and dehydration but we didn’t know that yet. He made his way down the longtable running a hand over the surface for balance, almost as though he was blind, nodding to himself and whispering until he was in front of the entrance to the bedroom, where he paused and wondered aloud about his next step before going forward.
    Bonjour hello, came a girl’s voice.
    Jonjay hadn’t arrived alone. With him was a girl of nineteen or twenty, also sunbleached blond and a deep summer tan for so early in the season. Her petite figure had big curves; she was swinging a set of keys around her finger distractedly. Her attitude and face were familiar—the disinterested pout, the glassy focus. She told us her name was Manila, she picked up Jonjay on the 395, three hours south of Yosemite. Thought he was a dead animal, she said. I pulled over and rolled down the window. He lifted an arm and groaned at me. I almost died.
    Manila saved my life, Jonjay cried out from the darkness, and pointed back towards her as he proceeded closer to the body. Someone fix her a drink.
    I told him he needs help, he needs a hospital, Manila said, but he told me he had to come straight here. He was raving. Visions of this. Someone get him electrolytes or he’s going to die. What’s the scene here?
    She was not surprised to learn this was a wake. Not after Jonjay had told her about the intense field of psychic energy that told him to make his way home. She believed him because she believed psychic energy flowed through everything, especially her body. She was not surprised she saved Jonjay’s life, since he was born under the hour of the dragon and she was a Taurus ascending. She came to the conclusion he was the one artist on earth who understood her soul.
    Jonjay leaned over the wicker basket and saw the waxed skin and stitched-together lips of the boy and no, even he denied this emaciated dome was Hick’s. But he fell to his bare knees, then stood again as fast, unaware he’d fainted or not wanting to be seen praying. These gruesomealmost robotic or bestial rites of grief, no one was free of this truth, a revulsion to death. We watched Jonjay’s shoulders flinch with discernment at the hollowed-out face of his dear friend, white with mortuarist chalk to conceal as much as possible. It was Wendy who had put the pen and pencil in his hands resting on his chest. Yes. But just to see him now you could tell this knight’s body weighed less than a small child’s. A skeleton enrobed in a thin veil of powdered silk.
    Jonjay embraced the body, kissed the sewn lips, then lifted himself away with a loud exhale. Actually a dryheave. Then he turned to the curtains. He tripped on a leg of the longtable as he left the master bedroom backwards in a hurry and started to speak. Candles trembled, nothing fell. He talked to Biz and then to Wendy, that is, if his monologue was directed at anybody at all, other than himself:
    This one. This one used to churn his brains to make art. Hick climbed out of the mud of the Tenderloin to flip comics on their head. You read his comics. He spoke in that argot. He was no intellectual. He drew damn good pictures. And last time I saw him feels like yesterday. It was more than a year ago. Instead of time, he passes. Soon is not a fair promise to a best friend, I realize that now. And now. I’ve learned now doesn’t exist as time. Now is a muscle. You can train hard of yourself to live for longer and longer periods of