PSL: Quentin's Funeral

[whatisay]

Capitol funerals are oleaginous with wealth. Today they assemble to commemorate Quentin Compson not just with tears, but with commissioned oil paintings, fireworks, an orchestra playing some lugubrious dirge, with wines ages two hundred years and flowers genetically engineered to have the deceased's initials appearing naturally on each petal. The young man's body is no longer a matter of sodden, lifeless flesh but ash compressed into a shimmering jewel, set at the middle of a wreath of designer oleander at the base of a portrait picturing him more present than any who knew him ever saw him. The painted eyes look aware, like they're taking in every detail around them, while in life Quentin always seemed a step out of time, thinking of something else, half-listening to the conversation.

Jason, fifteen years old, hasn't seen his father sober since the older Jason went to identify the wax-white, water-bloated corpse in the mortuary. This Jason, in a new suit with a tag on the back of his shirt that itches his neck, had stayed home with his mother, listening to her mewl about how could this happen to her, how could Quentin have done this to her. He'd expected to feel something when his father came home, either relief or grief, because everyone was supposed to feel something when a sibling died, but the only emotion that had surfaced was a strange sort of unease that he'd quickly choked off with disgust that his father didn't even bother to come straight home, and instead arrived drunk.

"Did you drive like that?" Caroline had asked. "Did you want me to have to identify a body today too?"

The older Jason's drunk at the funeral, too, trying his best to stand still and not sway next to his black-clad wife and eight-months-pregnant daughter and her new husband. Benjamin's been left home; his crying would be "upsetting". Uncle Maury's had a few too; Jason's starting to suspect that maybe he's the only sober one, sharing company with Caddy's fetus. When the eulogy ends, having described a person Jason's certain never actually existed, there's a reception with pay-per-plate seating and photographers and fireworks in the background.

His mother pretends to faint from crying, although her face is dry, and calls for Jason, her 'last remaining son', to come help her. Jason slips outside just out of her eyesight, not wanting to engage, hoping she just assumes he didn't see or hear her while Maury props her back up. He heads round the back, slouching on a bench in sight of the parking lot, reconnoitering every half hour or so to see if things have died down. His nose, fresh from a rhinoplasty, is straight now, but there are fading bruises under each eye, covered by slight makeup. He undoes his tie and unbuttons his jacket, then finally just flings the latter off onto the lawn somewhere.

At some point his father goes to a microphone and starts rambling about the nature of time and his daughter's wedding and then Jason's just done, incapable of anything but disgust with everything here.

He heads back to the bench and picks up some pebbles, chucking them at the pigeons just to see if the birds will fly away.

Comments

[whatisay]

For a moment, it pleases Jason to feel important for something, to be the gatekeeper for the horrible knowledge that he's carrying around like a weight in his chest. And then that pleasure goes sour and curdled because Jason doesn't want to be important right now, he wants to continue being the middle child.

"Your family's not going to want mine around any more because we're embarrassing now." As if to emphasize that point, he can hear his father wrestle the microphone back into his possession for yet another pseudo-eulogy at the dinner. "They're going to be polite and show up to the funeral and then watch, no one's going to talk about us anymore, no one's going to ask us to go places or show up if we ask them to things. I guarantee. You'll pretend we won't exist, and we won't even get the benefit of getting to have that be true."

He snorts, and it hurts his new nose, and then he turns the cigarette off and hides it in the covert pocket in his pants. He used to sew those pockets in by hand to smuggle candy or playing cards or razors or condoms or whatever else he could barter with the other kids in their little collective.

"Maybe our bad luck's as contagious as your pizzaface."

[currupted]

The sounds Jason's father makes fill up the silences between words and hang in the air through every pause. It makes Cyrus feel uncomfortable - not even on Jason's behalf, but in a pitying, secondhand way. He can't imagine his father behaving that way.

Julius Reagan pretends to drink more at parties than he actually does. Jason Compson pretends nothing when he's this way, and in the Capitol, eschewing pretense is the quickest way to get your audience to avert their eyes, embarrassed by messy, uncontrolled honesty.

But pity evaporates at pizzaface. Cyrus scowls, and he can feel his neck flushing red, and he hates Jason for it, hates him for making him show how much it bothers him.

"You're wrong," he says, and he resists the urge to touch his own face, forces his hand back into his lap, balled into a fist. He thinks of something sharper, and corrects himself-- "You're full of shit." Not a word he often dares to say around the Reagan manor, but here, there are only the pigeons to hear and Jason. Not like Quentin's going to mind anyone swearing at his funeral. "You were already embarrassing. My family didn't even want to come here."

He doesn't actually know his parents' honest opinions on the funeral. That's not something either of them would ever share with him. But he's willing to fabricate in the name of the Reagans to lash back against the insult.

[whatisay]

Maybe, if Jason didn't feel as if his brain were a living bruise right now, pulverized from each side by his parents and his parasite uncle and bitch sister and the looks, all the looks people give him barraging him ever since Caddy got pregnant - it doesn't even have to be judgment, because with his paranoia he's certain every glance is an accusation or worse, a bullet of pity - maybe he would be able to shrug off Cyrus' attack. But he can't.

"Shut the fuck up, Cy. Don't be such a baby about your pimples."

Unlike Cyrus, swearing comes easily to Jason now, and he's had a few years to perfect it. He was probably the one who introduced the terms to the Reagans, honestly - back in the day, when he was eleven and Swann and Stephen were six and five, it had been to the great amusement of the entire group to teach them both various curse words and watch them parrot it, excited to please their older peers only to get in trouble with their parents later.

"Your family came anyway. It's not about what your family wants, it's about what they have to do to keep their standing. And we're not part of that anymore. That's all."

Jason wants to think that maybe that's a good thing, that he won't have to deal with anyone, that he's going to be all but locked up in his house and away from all these people he hates, but at fifteen his mind is already turned in on itself and ossifying into something that looks inwards, unable to let anything good in, feasting on its own poisons.

[currupted]

They pass down bad habits like old clothes, the children of the Capitol (or would, if any of them had known in all their lives what it was to own things secondhand). They're born into power but too young still to wield it, and so they practice lording things over each other, and they can't know that the hierarchy they're unconsciously constructing will follow most of them through adulthood and beyond.

Cyrus certainly isn't thinking of it. What Jason's talking about is already further into the future than he's in the habit of looking.

He can hear Portia again in his mind-- Think of the family. He has a distant, instinctive understanding already that a family is nothing more than the sum of its parts, and he thinks of the parts of the Compson family, each an imperfectly-turning cog in a broken machine. He knows little more than he's been told about their various disgraces, of course, but he doesn't need specifics to know that the Compsons are different from the Reagans, about whom no one whispers, and whose secrets do not come up around other people's dinner tables.

He'd always assumed that that was how it would always be. That that was simply the inherent nature of the greater idea that was Compson, and that they would always have the same place at the fringes of their many interlocking social circles, just as the Reagans would always occupy the same place at the center. This is upheaval that no one consulted him about, and that makes him want to dig his heels in, to hold on to how it was out of spite.

"Whatever," he says, with a shrug that doesn't look remotely casual. That much future rests too heavy on him, makes him want to squirm out from under it. "I'll still invite you places. It's not your fault your family's--" Fucking crazy. "...Lost its standing."

It's an evening of new discoveries: He doesn't recognize what he feels as pity, not when it's wearing the face of spiteful indignation, but he will know it for what it is later, when he looks back on this. (Long after he has been taught that you always, no matter what, reap what your family sowed, whatever you did or didn't do to deserve it.)

[whatisay]

Jason snorts, almost nickers like a cooped up animal, a sound pantomiming humor. "I'm going to hold you to that."

Twenty years from now, that promise will hang between them, the opportunity on it rotten and congealed and inedible, and they'll both remember it and not speak of it. Jason will hold onto it even though he can't say it aloud, the childish you promised that he could apply not just to Cyrus but to the world, a world that told him that he would always be cared for and respected and meaningful. Cyrus will try to forget it and hope, vainly and knowing it to be so, that Jason has done the same.

Both will acknowledge it without letting the other see that that's what they've done, and then rather than cast it aside they'll tuck it into the pockets of suits of vastly difference cost.

Mr. Compson's slurs and meanderings trail through the air again like the ribbons of a kite. Jason's face burns (that same flush he'll carry into adulthood, a red undertint to his skin flashing like a warning light to the people around him, or the tip of a thermometer swollen with heat) and he jams his hands into his pockets harder and kicks a pebble towards the birds again.

"I don't know what we did to deserve this."

[currupted]

He might keep the promise. For a few weeks, or a few months. Jason might manage to cling to the edges of their nebulous social group for a year or two, even, before they finally let him go, before the internal alliances shift and a couple new hangers-on come and go and there is no longer a critical mass of people to give a shit whether or not Jason is there. The promise will decay, and Cyrus will turn his attention to brighter, less sentimental things, and for some years he will forget.

He can't know this now, of course. He believes, blindly and stupidly, that he will hold to this. That he will get to prove Jason and all his pessimism wrong. Maybe there's even something like heroism in it - an off-balance attempt to save Jason from his family. (Because even now, even at thirteen, Cyrus sees himself, instinctively, as leaning down to pull Jason up from a position of greater height.)

"It's not your fault." Your singular, or plural? He decides to leave it ambiguous, to let Jason make it about himself or his family as he sees fit. "It's Quentin's. You didn't ask him to die. No one did." He scuffs his shoe in the dirt (mentally daring his mother to comment), finds a pebble near his foot and kicks it as well; it goes wide, and the birds take no notice of it.

[whatisay]

"Don't I know it." Jason internalizes that 'you' into a word that can hold only him, because he can't and won't extend that shield from fault to anyone else. That 'you', that 'not your fault' becomes a lifeboat as he untethers himself from a sinking name, soul only because his body will never leave this place. Not Compson, not Bascomb, but adrift in their wreckage eternally and regardless.

It would be better to be nameless, but he can't even have that, can't have a word for himself that isn't laden with the baggage of his parents mother father uncle sister brothers. He has nothing to himself, not even a name, just a number appended to the end like an afterthought or a seal on a stamp. I. I say. Me.

And he sees without knowing that he's seeing it Cyrus' name floating forward on the sea, through the jetsam of the families like Jason's that have been dashed on the rocks, nudging debris out of the way of the prow absentmindedly. The Reagans. The Reagans might make it to shore yet.

"I would, if he were here now. I'm livid enough to. Better off dead than dealing with how angry we all are, what I say. It looks like grief but I tell you it's anger." He turns and looks at Cyrus again, eyes hard and sharp. "You would too, if it was your brother, if he did something to you that shows he doesn't regard you or the family worth a damn."

[currupted]

Cyrus feels that look in his gut - or, maybe it's not the look but the words it comes with, your brother as the focal point of that sentence (which is how Cyrus takes it, whether or not Jason means it that way).

"He wouldn't, though," Cyrus says, more hotly than he means to. "That's the difference. He wouldn't." Why is he defending Stephen? He's not even here, is off playing Tributes and Peacekeepers on the lawn (or Tributes and Tributes, which is just as popular and requires less arguing over who gets to die dramatically, fall over in the grass clutching invisible wounds). He wouldn't get what Jason was saying even if he were here, because he's eight and is still surprised when people say things because they know they'll sting.

It's only half about Stephen, though. It's also about the family, the coda and the theme of the whole statement. Stephen's not just Stephen-- He's a Reagan. And Reagans aren't like you.

[whatisay]

"He's eight. Who knows what he's going to do when he gets older." Jason gets up and paces around the bench, anxious about something more existential than he can wrap his head around, kicking at the grass and the curb. "You're what, thirteen? Who even knows what you're going to do when you're older?"

Jason, on the other hand, feels as if somehow all his life has been culminating into this expanse of responsibility he's about to step into as the oldest son, that it's been leading here inexorably but not in a way that's prepared him. The best years of his life are already over, he thinks, and he doesn't find that they were that good to start with. It settles; he fossilizes; something inside him stunts here, never to grow or expand again.

He jams his hands deeper into his pockets and sighs. "Do you think they'll notice if I don't go back in?"