shame, for she had no knowledge of the animal or its provenance.
“That’s what everyone says,” said Andrea, “And it’s pretty inevitable when you think about it.”
“I couldn’t help thinking …” he started, but no further words came. The pair sat in silence for a while.
“What is the point of knowing so much?” he said finally. “I mean in the end it makes no difference whether you understood the workings of the universe or not. You’ll still be just as dead.”
Andrea took his hand.
“Of course that’s true my love,” she said, “But most people won’t ever work everything out. I don’t think we’re meant to.”
“But you could,” Nathan said. “If mankind lives long enough as a species –“
“Humanity,” she corrected with a smile.
“On a nearly infinite timeframe …” he could not bring himself to say the rest of it. What had Jeremy said?
“This isn’t some kind of a thought experiment, this is our lives,” he whispered.
Andrea said that made no sense. Nathan agreed and sipped his drink.
“You always over-think things, Nathan,” she said. “I wish I could take the top off your head and let some of the pressure off.”
“That is called trepanning,” he said wryly, “And was practised by some ancient cultures as a means to release evil spirits.”
She took his hand.
“It’s enough for me to be with you tonight,” she said. “I’m spiritual and wonder about things, but you can’t let it dominate your thinking. Then the here and now will always suffer.”
“My love, someone has to be obsessed about it,” he said. “I know you don’t want me to, you worry about me, but I’ve been giv-“ he stopped.
Andrea pressed his hand to her lips.
“Gifted? Is that what you were about to say?” Andrea teased. “I agree a hundred per cent. You are a perceptive man, Nathan. You see things I never could.”
She should use the past tense there, thought Nathan, but said nothing. There was a long pause. Nathan reflected how perfect she was for him, how she respected his silence at times at this, knowing well his propensity to stop mid-conversation when his mind overwhelmed his capacity for expression.
“It’s too much sometimes, being perceptive I mean,” he said.
Andrea laughed, saying that her appreciation of his talents did not extend to indulgence of them.
“You can’t mope around with a brain full of cool stuff,” she said. “You have to express it.”
Nathan nodded. He instantly pictured a modern art installation comprising a ramp swept by revolving blades down which the frog would be slid, blunting them as it went.
“Death isn’t something to fear,” said Andrea. “If there’s a heaven, do you just sit on a cloud praising God for the rest of eternity? Or is there something else?”
“I think because we’re experiential beings - I mean that we only can conceive of what we can experience - it’s impossible to imagine what heaven would be like.”
“That’s a bit of a cop out, isn’t it?” said Andrea. “I mean to say that time will somehow have no meaning and there’ll just be a cascade of God’s love forever or something. Well not for me, I still want to be me, not to give my identity away to be absorbed into some amorphous lump of the grateful dead.”
“That’s disgusting!” laughed Nathan. “Also kind of cool too. But I know what you mean. It’s too horrible to imagine the abyss and too awful to imagine singing Kum-by-yah for eternity as well.”
“So I hope there’s something else,” said Andrea. “And my love, I’m spending the rest of my life worrying if there’s not.”
Nathan said that they should have a blood-pact to that effect. They talked for a while longer and then went to bed.
Later that night Nathan awoke as if shaken so. Ferment was upon him, his very thoughts like a river of starlings; he could merely grasp at their meaning as they traversed his consciousness. He retrieved the frog and composed himself by the rapid expedient of plunging his face into a laundry sink of night-water. He dusted a towel across his face, only conscious of the car keys in his hand when they brushed his nose. An image spun free of the vortex: their trenches under the Summer sun.
His childhood home was a half hour away, and he submitted to the thought-haze as he drove there, let it descend about the ears like a hedge’s cloying leaves might enfold his rising head. Nathan found himself on the site of their trench works. He was ashamed to admit he could not find them; the intervening decades had thrown brambles and ferns up around the trees so thickly that even the moonlight pooling at their branch-tips was no help.
“I don’t know where that coal bunker is,” he said to the frog. “We’ll need to come back.”
The words threw the mantle from his brow, and he knew in that moment he intended to drop the frog into that void. He sat and closed his eyes. He wanted to open them and see the Knight there, to walk the traces of their ramparts like the veterans Ian said they were. There was nothing there, of course; Nathan wanted to call for Death also but lost his nerve.
There’s your damn paradox for you, Nathan thought, the bastard will gladly come now, take the frog and me into the bargain and I’ll never know why we were chosen, only the abyss-
He shook the notion free from his head and stood. Their experience, unique as it seemed in the entirety of human existence, was no more a bulwark against mortality as ….
As anything else mankind might do, he thought. Oh Christ, this is really it, isn’t it, the billions of people who have lived and are yet to live, all sliding into Death’s arms with their last scream or stoic smile or lover’s kiss an irrelevance.
The Knight did not appear as Nathan hoped he would then. He imagined the book’s gothic font and he laughed, for in his memory he always heard the Knight talk to him. Six words he had committed to memory.
Thus I call mortality a gift, read the page.
“What comfort is that?” he asked the frog, answering himself a moment later that it was absolutely none.
“Of all animals, we are the only ones that appreciate the finality of death, yet our vast perception only really gives us doubt and pain and the need to invent Gods or wonder about damn computer simulations and Multiverses …”
The words ceased. Nathan was aware he was projecting them to the spot where he imagined the Knight might appear.
“You would, you know,” he said. “If this were a movie, you’d be right there and you’d reveal Death’s great secret and the meaning of the frog to me like a Deus Ex Machina or every good plot device that ever was.”
He picked up a rock to toss; even as he grasped it he could hear the ringing collision with the Knight’s visor. Finally it fell from his hand. He pocketed the frog and picked his way back down the hill.
The years passed. Andrea and Nathan did not have another child. Their daughter, Jane, grew to be independent and strong of will, and watching this transformation gladdened her parents’ hearts immeasurably.
When she was five, her goldfish died, and father and daughter stood regarding the fish solemnly. Nathan had seen this very moment depicted in innumerable books and movies, but still found himself unprepared for his daughter’s quiet distress.
“Where will it go now, daddy?” Jane asked. Her bearing was stoic, yet the occasional sniffle still escaped her.
“Well, Death will come and take it,” said Nathan. “He comes and gets everything, in the end.”
By her intense stare at the goldfish, Nathan surmised she was internalising this fact.
“Can you hide from him? Dig a hole in the ground or … or behind the sun?”
She gently tapped the glass pensively.
“Once,” said Nathan, “A frog crawled into the earth so deep and far he was forgotten about by all living things in the world, and eventually even by Death.”
Jane’s finger ceased its motion.
“Daddy, what happened to the frog?”
&nbs
p; Nathan smiled and ruffled his daughter’s hair.
“He felt sleepy and it just so happened there was a nice log he found in a cave underground. It must have washed down from a stream in the upper world. He looked inside, and sure enough it was snug and warm. So he crawled inside and went to sleep.”
Jane asked what happened next.
“He slept and slept and slept like no frog has ever slept before. After a while, the log turned into coal around him.”
“Was Death still looking for him?” asked Jane.
“He sure was. He had never lost anything before, ever. You know how mad you get when you lose one of your toys? Like that time you couldn’t find your paint set?”
She nodded sagely.
“A hundred, a thousand times worse. He wasn’t mad so much; he was just wanted to find it so bad, like an itch he couldn’t scratch.”
“Did Death get him in the end?”
Nathan kneeled, and tapped on the glass of the fishbowl.
“Well …. no, he never did,” replied Nathan. “Death found the frog, but didn’t take him away. He left him here.”
Jane’s question was why this would be.
“That’s a para-“ he smiled. “That’s a mystery. Maybe Death found he didn’t want to take alive things away with him any more. Maybe the frog was so special he found that he couldn’t.”
“Mummy and you and me are special too,” she said while folding her arms. “If he ever comes around here I’ll tell him so and he’ll have to leave you alone.”
Nathan knew a child’s logic was immutable.
“Thanks honey” he said, and found his eyes brushed with a skein of tears. “I hope you