recursion and redirection

"Of all the death masks I have seen, Pascal's is the most jarring."

"Why?"

A squirrel barks at the metronomic tail of a beagle and the world continues to calculate with its creaking cogs.

"Because he doesn't look dead, he doesn't look old."

"Well, he was only thirty-nine.  And he had just turned."

 The espresso ebbs away from the eggshell island of milk foam.  I frown and swirl my cup to just sink it all in a tsunamic darkness.  There is no retort and nothing dramatic to serenade the topic's ending.  I mean, besides the combed profile of the scooting post-oak leaf viewed from beneath a sun-backed awning or the way the old woman sniffs every time she pencils in a crossword answer like it's a mathematical proof, hastily and illegible.

"Is this the part where we delve into the specifics of his contributions, the lavish intellectual bequests that have befallen us?" 

"Lector, Si Monimentum Requiris, Circumspice: Reader, if you seek his memorial, look all around you."

I bury my words behind my tongue, prod at them, then finally push them back, where they lay astride my bottom right molar.  I lift the small espresso cup to my ear, the foam hisses softly like snow on prairie grass.  But it looks like those minuscule air bubblets that encircle the surface of wet plaster mix in the bottom of a broad bowl.  I imagine it over my face, sealing it, nestling into my pores, and settling there as it hardens into the shield capable of reflecting all but that that matters.  Light, words, the innumerable things that appear again and again, smaller and smaller, until we think that they are gone.