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PSL: Quentin's Funeral
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.
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.
no subject
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.)
no subject
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."
no subject
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.
no subject
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."
no subject
"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.
no subject
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?"