A Long Line of Dead Men

"To look for special circumstances. You mentioned one man who died inVietnam. Were there any other combat deaths?"

"No, just Jim Severance."

"How about AIDS?"

He shook his head. "We had two gay members, although I don't believe anybody knew they were gay when the chapter was founded. I wonder if that would have made a difference. In 1961? Yes, I'm sure it would have, and when we stood up and recounted the most interesting fact about ourselves at that first meeting, that particular fact went unmentioned. But later on both of the fellows saw fit to tell the group about their sexuality. I don't know when those revelations burst upon us, but we were still meeting at Cunningham's then, I remember that much, so it was quite a while ago. In any event, neither of them died of AIDS. Lowell Hunter very well may, in the course of time. He's told us that he's HIV-positive, but as of our meeting last month he was still completely asymptomatic. And Carl Uhl died in 1981, before anybody even heard the word 'AIDS.' I gather the disease existed then, but I certainly hadn't heard a thing about it. In any case, Carl was murdered."

"Oh?"

"They found him in his apartment inChelsea. He lived just around the corner from Cunningham's, but of course Cunningham's was long gone by the time Carl was killed. I gather it was a sex killing, some sort of sadomasochistic game gone out of control. He was tied up and wearing handcuffs and a leather hood, and he'd been eviscerated and subjected to sexual mutilation. It's a hell of a world we live in, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"After I spoke to my insurance man, I spent a few nights sitting up late and trying to concoct explanations. The first, of course, is sheer chance. There might be long odds against such a high number of deaths, but any gambler will tell you that long shots come in all the time. In the long run you'll go broke betting on them, but what is it they say? In the long run we're all dead, which, when you stop and think of it, is one of the club's underlying principles." He picked up his glass, but he still didn't drink the damn thing. "Where was I?"

"Sheer chance."

"Yes. No way to rule it out, but I set it aside and looked for other explanations. One that occurred to me was that the group was composed of men with a strong predisposition toward early death. It seemed at least arguable that natural selection might have operated to steer such persons into our club. A person genetically destined for an early grave might be aware of his fate on some unconscious level, and might thus be more likely than the next fellow to accept an invitation to join a group preoccupied with death. I don't know whether or not I believe in fate, it probably depends when you ask me, but I certainly believe in genetic predisposition. So that's one possibility."

"Tell me some of the others."

"Well, another one that came to me is a little more mind-over-matter. It strikes me as possible that the club itself could have the effect of increasing its members' chances of dying young."

"How?"

"By focusing our attention on our own mortality to an unnatural degree. I'd hate to argue that a man can prolong his life by systematically denying his own mortality, but it's still possible that we can hasten the day by sitting around waiting for it, and getting together once a year to find out who caught the bus. I'm sure there's a part of me that longs for death, just as there's another part that wants to live forever. Maybe our meetings strengthen the death wish at the expense of the life urge. The mind-body connection is sufficiently established these days that even the doctors are grudgingly aware of it. People are vulnerable to illness because of their mental state, they become accident-prone, they make dangerous decisions. It could be a factor."

"I suppose it could." I wanted more coffee, and I'd barely raised my head to look around for the waiter when he hurried over to fill my cup. I said, "Homer Champney sounds like a fellow with a pretty strong life urge."

"He was a remarkable man. He had more energy and zest for living well into his nineties than most men ever have. And don't forget he was of a generation that didn't live as long as we do today, or stay as active. A man our age was supposed to be ready for a rocking chair, assuming he still had a heartbeat."

"What about the others in his chapter?"

"They died," he said ruefully, "and that's all I've ever known about them. I don't remember any of their names. I only heard them the one time, when Homer read the list and burned the paper it was written on. He made a real point of never mentioning any of their names again. As far as he was concerned, the chapter was closed, period. I don't know how long they lived or how they died." He laughed shortly. "For all I know, they never even existed."

"What do you mean?"