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Show and listened to the rain fall on the red roof at night, making the sound of anxious fingernails tapping against a wooden desk. The house was quiet; Laura had a fire going in the fireplace and some papers spread out on her table. Letters, maybe. Before she showed me Blake's room, she warned me again about the flies, reminded me I didn't have to deal with the problem, she could hire someone to do it. I said I wanted to. She opened the door. She hadn't done much to change the room-there were still dirty shirts on the bed posts, books and records on the floor. The dead flies were all over the windowsill, falling onto Blake's bed below and covering it well past the pillow. They coated parts of the floor, sometimes two or three flies deep. I would 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 corners. 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 |