Fear Nothing

starburst hemorrhage.
        How that eye mesmerized us.
        As death-blind as the painted eye of a doll, it nevertheless saw through us to the core.
        Sometimes in a silent rapture of dread and sometimes whispering urgently to each other like a pair of deranged sportscasters doing color commentary, we watched as Frank and his assistant readied the cremator in one corner of the chamber. The room must have been warm, for the men slipped off their ties and rolled up their shirtsleeves, and tiny drops of perspiration wove beaded veils on their faces.
        Outside, the October night was mild. Yet Bobby and I shivered and compared gooseflesh and wondered that our breath didn't plume from us in white wintry clouds.
        The morticians folded the sheet back from the cadaver, and we boys gasped at the horrors of advanced age and murderous disease. But we gasped with the same sweet thrill of terror that we had felt while gleefully watching videos like Night of the Living Dead.
        As the corpse was moved into a cardboard case and eased into the blue flames of the cremator, I clutched Bobby's arm, and he clamped one damp hand to the back of my neck, and we held fast to each other, as though a supernatural magnetic power might pull us inexorably forward, shattering the window, and sweep us into the room, into the fire with the dead man.
        Frank Kirk shut the cremator.
        Even through the closed window, the clank of the door was loud enough, final enough, to echo in the hollows of our bones.
        Later, after we had returned the teak bench to the patio and had fled the undertaker's property, we repaired to the bleachers at the football field behind the high school. With no game in progress, that place was unlighted and safe for me. We guzzled Cokes and munched potato chips that Bobby had gotten en route at a 7-Eleven.
        “That was cool, that was so cool,” Bobby declared excitedly.
        “It was the coolest thing ever,” I agreed.
        “Cooler than Ned's cards.”
        Ned was a friend who had moved to San Francisco with his parents just that previous August. He had obtained a deck of playing cards-how, he would never reveal-that featured color photographs of really hot-looking nude women, fifty-two different beauties.
        “Definitely cooler than the cards,” I agreed. “Cooler than when that humongous tanker truck overturned and blew up out on the highway.”
        “Jeez, yeah, mega-degrees cooler than that. Cooler than when Zach Blenheim got chewed up by that pit bull and had to have twenty-eight stitches in his arm.”
        “Unquestionably quantum arctics cooler than that,” I confirmed.
        “His eye!” Bobby said, remembering the starburst hemorrhage.
        “Oh, God, his eye !”
        “Gag-o-rama!”
        We swilled down Cokes and talked and laughed more than we had ever laughed before in one night.
        What amazing creatures we are when we're thirteen.
        There on the athletic-field bleachers, I knew that this macabre adventure had tied a knot in our friendship that nothing and no one would ever loosen By then we had been friends for two years; but during this night, our friendship became stronger, more complex than it had been at the start of the evening. We had shared a powerfully formative experience-and we sensed that this event was more profound than it seemed to be on the surface, more profound than boys our age could grasp. In my eyes, Bobby had acquired a new mystique, as I had acquired in his eyes, because we had done this daring thing.
        Subsequently, I would discover that this moment was merely prelude. Our real bonding came the second week of December - when we saw something infinitely more disturbing than the corpse with the blood-red eye.
        

    * * *
        
        Now, fifteen years later, I would have thought that I was too old for these adventures and too ridden by conscience to prowl other people's property as casually as thirteen-year-old boys seem able to do. Yet here I was, treading cautiously on layers of dead eucalyptus leaves, putting my face to the fateful window one more time.
        The Levelor blind, though yellowed with age, appeared to be the same one through which Bobby and I had peered so long ago. The slats were adjusted at an angle, but the gaps between them were wide enough to allow a view of the entire crematorium-into which I was tall enough to see without the aid of