deleted
name had told him to do it.
deleted
name: Send him with her and she’ll have a companion for the journey.
his
use of such classical allusion giving pause to Brother Skunk, hauling him back
through the past year to his finding her in the street soaked with rain and her
own blood, sifting from out her mouth that totemic boatman’s fee itself to end
up squandered with inebriate hope into the wishing pond of the hotel where her
last days had been spent.
Had
he granted that notion any heft at all, he now thought, would he not have
chosen to accompany her himself? Rather, he had agreed for E.T., who had known
her affection long before him, to go in his stead, the little stuffed doll
consummating her suttee tucked in underneath her arm and that sum contour of
their bodies so familiar to him from those initial hospital visits on out
become at least a little more bearably abstract in its makeshift winding sheet
and his own utter intoxication.
This
thinking resurgent upon his ambush by a magazine photograph of the child Drew
Barrymore, herself clutching the exact same E.T. doll and his wondering what
became of it: whether kept by its owner and treasured, or bought and sold
amongst collectors of such, or it too gone forever, burnt from off the surface
of the earth.
