OCR Text |
Show 139 vacuum them. Laura said thanks and said I was welcome to anything I wanted of Blake's. Then she walked into the kitchen. I waded through Blake's messy room, feeling ambivalent at looking through his things without his having a chance to arrange or explain them. Miniature model trains that he had sent to graffiti artists around the country to paint and return sat on shelves along the perimeter of his room. Other than that it was mostly dirty laundry and old notebooks on the bed and floor. There were shelves of books and boxes of CDs in the comers. I grabbed the vacuum out of the closet and started with the flies on the bed. They vacuumed pretty easy but I was stupefied by how many there were. There were dead fly bodies not only along the windowsill and the surrounding area but also in open drawers and in the closet. After the bed and the windowsill were clear I decided it was time for a break. When Laura saw his body for the last time in the crematorium, all of Blake's reusable parts had been removed. He looked like a collapsed bunker, a shell on a rolling steel table under clinical lighting. The workers paused there for a minute and let Laura get a last look. She stopped them when they tried to move the body into the furnace. That kept happening for a while, then she let everyone go. |