Dirk Stratton’s Last Will and Testament

I, “Dirk,” being of sound mind (the body being in dispute, given my status as a fiction) in anticipation of that event that comes to us all, now set forth my last will and testament. If I die there will be little doubt that the responsible parties will include my partners William Gillespie and Scott Rettberg. Despite this, I hereby appoint them as executors of my estate. Though I own nothing of obvious monetary value, if there be tangible gain obtainable, I direct my executors to donate all such proceeds to the Unknown (after deducting a reasonable 10% for each executor’s services. [Note: Scott will receive 10% of the original total amount, whereas William will receive 10% of whatever remains once Scott’s 10% fee has been removed.]). Since all I own is my name, the distribution of my assets will be brief. To my good friend and fellow murderer, Scott Rettberg, I leave the quotation marks to help keep the irony going both in the air, fingers like curled bunny ears flexing, and on the “page.” To another good friend and most excellent assassin, William Gillespie, I leave my ‘k’ because his first name lacks the hard consonant necessary to make it marketable in a movie ad. I imagine the following alteration: Wilkliam. My ’r’ will be freed: I can see no reason to keep it enslaved; finally, it will be able to pursue its interest in ontology. It was wrong to own another letter like that and I apologize. I fervently hope I will merit your forgiveness. My ‘i’ I bequeath on the very first child born after these words are first read by someone other than the author. Use it in peace; may it serve you well. Finally, the capital ’d’ I bestow to the moon. She knows why. This document was written and signed before this monitor on August 16, 1998.

Dirk’s Last Wish

We did not obey Dirk’s last wish. We did not have his head removed and cryogenically frozen, and then have his body reduced to a pile of cinders. We did not do that; it just seemed too macabre, and the head, to tell you the truth, did not really look worth saving, what with the eyeballs missing, the nose and ears cut off. Nobody would ever want to wake up looking like that. It wasn’t just that we didn’t want to go to the trouble and expense—our access to the body was fairly well restricted. Dirk was pretty much in a cooler at the F.B.I. evidence lab, for months. We buried him in a casket when the time came. This pleased his religious relatives. The casket, obviously, was closed, but I still think the whole head freezing and incineration option would have been more troubling to us all, in particular for his mother. She had to deal with his eccentricities in life, I thought, which must have been troubling enough. To extend his bizarre and troubling rituals beyond his death, I thought, would have simply been too much.

I believe this decision was the right one. Though we still have very little idea which chemical processes were involved, I’m all but positive that whatever freak accident brought Dirk back to life would not have occurred if there had been nothing left of him but a frozen head and some ash in a jar.

After His Death, Dirk Floated

After his death, Dirk shed his corporeal form, and floated, like a spirit, only not quite, like a soul, but he didn’t believe in that, like a shade, but more the kind you’d sit in under a tree than a ghost, like a, what, like a Jungian archetype, no, like the zeitgeist, that’s not it exactly, it is difficult to describe, this thing that Dirk was after he had been so brutally slaughtered, pureed on the altar of circumstance, made a sacrificial offering of, carefully excised from the map of human endeavor, no, that’s not it, that’s too much to say that, for indeed, if anything, his loss was his gain, as it were, in terms of the popular consciousness, in the way that these things happen to artists after they are dead, as had happened to William Gaddis, whose A Frolic of His Own began flying off the shelves soon after his life-force had expired, whose works were suddenly being taught in freshman composition classes the world over, yes, Dirk too, this had happened to, as Oprah had the rest of us on her show to promote the anthology and to discuss the latest Unknown title, The Teachings of Dirk, as women wearing black veils were gathering in town squares across this great nation and others to mourn, as old men were seen weeping in their steins of domestic beer, as Clinton, nearly out of office, himself offered words of reconciliation and condolence, as children everywhere, boychild and girlchild, born fresh unto the Earth, were newly baptized “Dirk” and “Dirkina” and “Dirkelle” and “Strat,” as an amateur astronomer, working late into the night, gazing at the stars in between line breaks of “The Bland Taste,” spotted a new comet in the night sky and assigned it the appellation of “Stratton’s Star,” so it went, and this was not a small breath of acknowledgment, this was not fifteen minutes of fame, this was hours of it, and it went on, and so it went, and he did not, he would not, fade from it, and his message was spread, and there were many in his tribe as they cried out in early hallucinogen-drenched mornings, “We are Dirk! We is one!” and it was as if the whole thing had been planned, or rather not planned, but according to a pattern which rose out of the chaos, and children were planting trees in his name, and I am not avoiding here the impossibility of life after death, I am embracing it, for who am I to say, who am I to deny, that Dirk’s was a living spirit, and one which traveled, and soared, and sank, through multitudes, in those earliest moments of the 21st Century, as Dirk was a pilgrim who had finally made it to Mecca, bowing before the great stone at the same time as he was a monk levitating inches in a monastery in Tibet at the same time as he was a banker watching his Internet stocks come crashing down at the same time as he was an electrician working twenty-four hour days for weeks at a time as the grids slowly returned to normal function at the same time as he was an Ethiopian with no shoes running across the cracked and barren earth, dreaming of distance, at the same time as he was a nun momentarily contemplating a man whom she might have loved had she not taken the vow at the same time as he was an angry teenager flipping burgers for a national chain and seeing no future in the world we had made at the same time as he was a note in a song that the whales made as they sang to each other a song of woe for their brothers who had passed, and were dying, in the devastated ocean, as part of Dirk occupied the taste buds on the tongue of a three year-old girl eating an ice-cream sandwich for the first time, and another part of him absorbing the pain of an eighty-five year-old woman as the explosion tore through her home in Kosovo, killing her husband of sixty years as the brick wall came crashing on his side of the bed, Dirk was in her wail, Dirk was in the streets, dancing with the half-naked crowds in Brazil, Dirk was a woman in the south of France who had just invented a new epistemology, who is to say that he was not there, that he was not in all of these people, that he was even in the lemurs in Madagascar, this is what he claimed, this is what he said, this is what he felt and I would be a liar if I said that I looked in his eyes as he told me these things and did not believe that they were true. There were no scars from pounded nails, there was no fingering of the slices in his side, but he said what he said with feeling, he said it once more, with feeling, and I know that what he said was true.