And so the argument against Kate was essentially one of agency. As it was again just one week later. And now, I think, it’s best we begin with the whole color discussion. No. No. Again, I apologize. Again, I’ve changed my mind. Allow me to elaborate for a moment on the nature of infinity, parts, and wholes. I believe I mentioned the infinitude of grandmothers, porches, sunshine, and pecans. I wrote, and this is, I believe, a direct quote, "We were each knocked flat by the information that the part was not less than the whole-that there were just as many odd numbers on the infinite planet earth as there were numbers themselves." I stand by both these statements. If numbers run on to infinity, and odd numbers run on to infinity, then neither ever stops, and therefore both remain functionally equal. But understand, when I speak of grandmothers, I speak of the general station of mother-of-mother. I allow that though the sunshine will eventually disappear, those alive in my cognizant moments will be dead when the bang goes boom. Porchness and pecanness, of course, are like our very own blood. And if they had been like Katie’s blood then maybe things would have been different. Maybe we could have added one more thing to the infinity list. Katie was part of our whole. And she was equal. [The theory that girds the praxis here is probably best enunciated by Bertrand Russell, see "Mathematics and the Metaphysicians." There are also, for your pleasure, some choice bits on Zeno and the moving arrow-and those will give you glowing references as to the nonexistence of motion (or, really, the redefinition of motion. Russell says this, "Motion is just a change in situation, babies," and I paraphrase: "If you and your brother and your sister are one day looking through blue buttons at the glowing sunshine and the gods above, you have no reason to expect that the following week, that verysame sister won’t be at the doctor. And that the doctor won’t diagnose. Won’t say, ‘Your blood, little Katie, will never be the same again. Do you know what platelets are?’
"And she’ll say, ‘No.’
"And then he’ll say, ‘Do you know what white blood cells are?’
"And she’ll say, ‘No.’
"And, finally, that doesn’t mean that she’ll come home, starting you and your brother on a yearlong drive through pills and machines and white rooms with the unbearable smell of clean that are possibly the farthest-of-far away from blue buttons on porches just two doors down from the infinite grandmother of us all.")] Of course, let me repeat, I paraphrase. Bertrand Russell hadn’t the foggiest notion in the world that Kate’s platelets and white blood cells weren’t right. He would have assumed, had he known there was a blue-buttoned Katherine Hepburn grasping at her optimistic perspective on perspective, that my sister’s blood was red. He would have assumed this to be natural. He would have spoken eloquently in a British accent.
And he would have been right. My sister’s blood was red. My brother and I saw it so much that year that it might as well have been Chutes and Ladders or football. My sister’s blood was red, and this, I think, is as good a segue as any into our final discussion of color-a discussion hinging on this question: Why were all those goddamned buttons blue? Or, perhaps, what perspective-what causal chain-could possibly lead one, whatever his or her theory of collection, to create a solely monochrome presence on the porch? Or, is it in fact related to one of the aforementioned theories of collection? And, finally, whatever answers we come up with, what does it tell us about the color itself? What is this blueness that has punched us in the face for the last 2,100 words? As with anything else, it’s probably best that we draw a functional map. Our elements are thus: red blood, blue buttons, white cells. This is an American death dream. We even have Chutes and Ladders, football, and the stoic Kate Hepburn. It’s death cartography in these united states, and we will mark each landmark with buttons, the holes allowing us to see just a bit more of the paper underneath.
My brother came to this conclusion after the death: Kate was somehow able to see more of the paper underneath. By that, I intend to inculcate his notion that upon the damming of her veritable blood flow, Kate’s collection theory became more valid, whatever more valid means. I bring it up for this sole reason: I know you were thinking it, too, and more than likely your reasons have something to do with a common sense of decency or a sense of the pragmatic Horatio-Alger-optimism that puts pounds around our citizens and makes us so unbearably cheerful in the face of our more obvious inadequacies. Right you are, but as I admitted in welcome-I would not and have not kept a promise to the dead. And I didn’t. And Kate’s theory would have, I believe, one of the following logical consequences: The secondary nature of the collection would lead the collector to (a) place blue buttons in the mason jar if and only if both a blue button and a mason jar were present and not demonstrably needed for anything else (qua drinking and or keeping one’s clothes on), or (b) the presence of only blue buttons was a simple freak of luck-a bump in the causal cosmic roller-coaster that somehow only let blue pass the jar’s open threshold. Neither of these I find completely acceptable, though your aforementioned empathy is dually noted. [I would remind you, however, just briefly, that admissions are offered in order to validate honesty (and therefore some sort of baseline goodness) rather than to clue anyone in to depravity or lack of feeling for the dead.] In light of this critique, the second theory of my brother and I would also fall by the wayside, for much the same reasons, leaving our original reductionist, nihilistically staring out from his or her porch at the world outside.
The most baffling issue for me (and, originally, until Kate’s passing, for my brother) was that the sparseness of the collection simply did not reasonably validate the non-presence of a, say, red button in the jar. And if there were in fact a red button in the jar, how would our perspective of the jar, the porch, and the collector change at the introduction of that fact? Impossibility is, I assure you, not an issue. We were visitors, you understand. There was never the fated and thick curiosity that would cause us to dump the contents of the jar onto a stranger’s porch. In theory, had we fished to the inner-middle, we might very well have found a paradigm-buster among the many. Surely each perspective would have changed with the presence of a red button, making the situation itself functionally new. These are the questions I have asked myself for years: Would the new situation have led to new perspective through each of the holes of the interloping red menace? Would its redness somehow warp our pecans and our sunlight and our daydreams of fame? Could I have turned that red button on my sister, grasped her countenance from each new perspective, and somehow kept her there, leaning on the porch and arguing for optimism with my intransigent brother? Or would its simple presence-its agency, rather than ours-have warped the business of motion enough to keep Katie from the doctors and the clinic and the grave? No. Or, maybe. I turned my answers counterclockwise every Tuesday evening throughout the final flow of my sister’s blood. Red it was, the hidden button within both my brother and I, turning our perspectives and arguing through its simple cessation that we were arrows, never going anywhere, inevitably changing without performing the normal human function of motion.
Doctors took the dirty blood from my sister every Tuesday night. I am tempted to make the argument that each Tuesday night became a buttonhole, each month a new rounded patch of red perspective as penance for our mason jar games. I am tempted to tell you I crept existentially around the pacer rims of each month, hoping desperately to attach to the optimism that allowed my sister to assume benefit. But I will not make these arguments, because they are not arguments. These are the metaphorical confessions of our darkest days, and I have never-even though I have pushed every rim with every honest conjuring of perspective-assumed benefit. My brother has learned to do this. He has used my sister’s blood flow as an aid to reflection, and he has become the tortoise. I remain Achilles, however, aching as I write this to make up halves as he fades further in the distance. And as I write this, I must honestly confront, by way of a closing admission, why I have even bothered. "Negotiablity," I mentioned at the front (and I quote), "in turn, or at least my reliance on it, is that thing that makes me feel American." But I do not feel American. I feel nothing but broken by the questions I have never been able to answer.
Finally, let me relate one other time, farther down the river of blood-and, truth be told, at the river’s very mouth. I sat, motherless, in the cold, clean room with my dying sister Katherine. I looked into her blue eyes, and I saw everything backwards from our afternoon with the buttons, and I promised God and myself that I was not going to be fallible in the picture-window moment of a brother and sister’s final embrace. She smiled as if to comfort me. She said, "Write something about me someday. Will you?"
I said I would.
"You promise?" she asked.
Yes, I said. I promise.
"Tell them I was pretty," she said, as her smile drifted off forever.
"I will," I told her. "I promise."
Then time continued continuing, whether or not it could properly be called motion. And each of those blue buttons, and each of their four ways of working with the world, has haunted my memory for years.
My sister Katherine was as pretty as the sunshine.
