16

The cloth ripped, and my fingernails tore at the surface of the wood, dug into it, my blows and kicks altering the pressure of the air.

The shallow walls of the place were ruffled, a quality of wedding gown finery about the drapery around me and the pillow beneath my skull. I felt my hands grow powdery with residue, damp dusting my flesh. I lay still.

There was a stony quality to the damp that held me, a smell of wet earth. That was exactly what it was, I told myself. I was buried in the ground. I had a sketchy but emotionally vivid sense of what such internment entailed. There was, of course, a wooden box and its contents. Then I imagined a concrete vault, a box of man-made rock. And then I imagined the proverbial six feet of earth, clay, sand, roots, sod, and living grass all topped off with a headstone.

I tried to imagine that I was having one of those nightmares that involve a dream of waking. You dream that you are awake, but the nightmare has merely reached a new chapter. Dreams end eventually. Actual consciousness would break, and I would be in a bed, among the living.

I tried to deceive myself, but it did not work. I argued with myself, picking apart my despair. I could not remember my life very clearly. If I could reason, then, I could think of a way out. Panic would confuse me further, and might use up the oxygen in the small space.

I recalled funerals I had attended, sunlight, date palms and a gray hearse rolling slowly ahead of black limos. I recalled Easter Sunday afternoons, florist’s paper crackling around wet stems. I recalled bank upon bank of marble plates, with names chiseled into the stone.

As a child I had wandered through the place, looking upward at stained-glass windows and feeling the sense of awe one might discover in a vast library, but this was not a library. I tried to take some solace in the belief that I must be close to the remains of my father, my mother, but the thought gave me no comfort.

When I cried out there was only a loud whisper, a sound like someone learning to whistle. Beating against the lid of the casket was futile. I was too close to the lid to be able to strike a resounding blow. All I could do was squirm and kick. It was more satisfying to kick against the foot of the casket. I could hunch myself, like a woman in labor, and then kick hard with my heels at the butt of the coffin. That made noise, a thudding, cloth-muffled bumping.

I had an urgent, nearly surreal fantasy of what I hoped would happen. A caretaker or a family of mourners would pass by and hear what had to be the sounds of someone trapped. An ear would be pressed, and others called to listen to the commotion behind this brand-new marble plaque. I imagined the disagreement, the disbelief, the scurrying to get help, the consternation.

I stopped and listened. I stilled my breath, and discounted the rubber ball of my own heart, and listened to everything around me. I strained to hear distressed whispers, weeping silenced, ordinary conversation hushed. I pictured a boy, a youth awkward in his dark suit, leaning, sure he was right, afraid he was, certain no one would believe him, gesturing to an older sister. Two or three more people would be here now, listening to the two half-grown children explain that they heard something, and no they weren’t joking.

Why hadn’t I learned Morse code, I asked myself, kicking with both feet. Was SOS two long, two short, and two long? Or should I give in to all-out panic, make a noise that could not possibly be misunderstood by mourners with, understandably, some reluctance to realize that what could be lost in such circumstances might insist on being found.

I tried to calculate how long it would take for an assistant manager to be summoned, someone with a fist full of keys and a brisk sense of what to do in cases like this. Surely this happened sometimes. There must be procedures to be followed, workers skilled at levering open what they had a few days before sealed shut.

I braced myself, and kicked, repeatedly, furiously. I stopped and listened to the quiet. There was no one coming.

I wanted to sleep but knew I would wake only to sleep again, and if I woke after that I would only repeat the page after page of waking and slumbering until it was all over. I could feel it already, the long weariness I would never shake. The exhaustion was more than a condition of my body. It was a fact of nature, like gravity, and it had me.

I kicked again, driving downward with both feet. I was not dying yet. I was ready to return to whatever mistakes I had made, and do it all over again but right, this time, bringing justice and humor where before I must have hurried past on my way to—what?

This time when I kicked there was a difference. I heard a change in the note my heels struck against the heavy wood. I kicked again, and heard a high, fine tune, the sound of a seam in the wood parting.

I hunched, seized whatever I could find to steady myself, and kicked again, and kept driving my feet downward until the cracking sound could not be mistaken. I had hoped that as the casket weakened I would see light, but there was only further darkness. In a panic, I kicked harder than before, and the wood shattered, and something else gave way, too.

I scrambled halfway down the broken coffin, and kicked against a concrete seal. This time I did not stop to listen. I knew strength, something in me that would not weaken. The concrete slab was shifting, a low, deep note, nearly bell-like, solemn, a door of stone working outward.

It must have taken a long time. Perhaps I stopped and drifted into sleep, to wake and work again. That would explain why I was not aware of how long it took. At times it seemed that the stone trap fought against me willfully, sealing itself tighter than ever.

One moment there was dark. And then it all changed.

One edge of the concrete seal was gilded with light. The light widened into a wedge, a painful spear of illumination. And then as I kicked once more it fell away.

The sound was so loud, and the light so bright, I cringed involuntarily for an instant. And then, to my frustration, I could not easily snake my way down and out. I was held by the white satin fabric, gripped by the narrow box. I wrestled, straining slowly, out and into light so complete it was nearly blinding.

I fell. My perch was higher than I expected, and the fall much farther.

I spilled out onto a floor, and lay there and told myself that I didn’t have to move, ever. I could stay right where I was. They would find me. I had done enough. My joy was so thorough that I barely noticed the pain, the weight of so much light making me sit up, blinking, covering my eyes.

I was nailed into place, pinned by the light. It cascaded from above, and I crouched on a flat, polished surface trying to recover my vision. There was no moment in which I mistook this illumination for the sun. It was unmistakably artificial, tight, tiny coils of filament radiating this flavorless light.

I could not wait. I had to hurry. I was in a hall, in a building with a high ceiling. I was reminded of a post office, one of those mornings as a child when I had gone with an adult and seen the wonder of the post office boxes, the rolled sheafs of mail behind the small windows, eash message yet to be discovered, the whole veiled secret of one’s business and personal life.

My knees were weak. I took a step, and felt them buckle, one foot out, the other dragging. I fell.

I wanted to laugh. The clown returns from the lost! I stood again, and kept myself upright only by leaning heavily on the gleaming surface of the wall. As the wall supported me, I could feel the imprint of letters, words pressed against my skin through my clothes. A name was cut into the face of the marble, and a date of birth and a date of death. A tarnished metal vase held dying flowers.

The fragments of casket, the chunks of concrete and marble, lay behind me in a glaze of fresh dust. The concrete grit whispered beneath my shoes. What a mess, I chided myself, trying to make a joke of it. A hiker in the wilderness is supposed to pack out what he packs in.

I sensed the discarded husks, the earth-cold members of this assembly, all around me. There was an odor, concrete and spent flower petals underscored by the refrigerator-aura of old flesh.

Was there a moment just then when I was aware of being watched? I crouched. I was aware of an intruder. Or perhaps it was help, happening upon the scene at last. I tried to call out, attempting to call hello, like someone arriving home after a vacation to find the apartment not quite right.

I could barely raise a whisper. There was no sound, no movement I ran, and fell. My body slid, carried by momentum, and then I worked myself slowly upright. My need to flee this place insisted, and I felt my way along the empty vases, the impervious names and dates, sometimes disturbing with my passage a withered rose.

I saw the darkness of night, outside, beyond a hall. There was a desk, a large, empty executive-style block of furniture, and beside it a metal folding chair, left partly hitched-up, as though someone had started to fold it up and heard a phone ring.

A cord ran across the oak floor, into a desk drawer. I hooked my finger around the door handle, and pulled. There was a white, compact telephone, tucked away so the bereaved would not be troubled by the sight of such an ordinary object.

I suddenly saw what a piece of stage craft this mausoleum was. What a story I would tell. What a mistake you made, I would tell my—

My what? My family, my wife, my children, my friends? I was a man who had just that moment forgotten the right word.

Then I began to feel anger. This couldn’t be blamed on one physician, or on a mortician. The whole array of medical professionals and undertakers, everyone involved, had made a huge blunder.

I recalled my wife, but I had trouble actually seeing her in my mind. Her name was Constance. Connie. She had been deceived by people she trusted, medical authorities. It must have been terrible for her. My career, my associates—it was dim, but I was beginning to see it all now.

But there was another, more important woman. Rebecca—I wanted to call her, to tell her I was back again, it was all a mistake. I lifted the receiver to my ear. The dial tone was hideously loud, and I held the instrument away from my head. I tried to remember my own phone number. I struggled to remember Rebecca’s. I tried to make the numbers on the telephone make sense. I had trouble recognizing the characters as meaningful symbols.

I pushed the O. Something would happen. Some voice would respond. It was then, as I depressed the one button I was able to recognize, that I saw my hand.

My skin was mottled with discoloration, the way the mattress of a chaise longue dapples, when it is left out for too many rainy nights. I was mildewed.

I could not answer the steely muttering of the telephone. My voice was too soft, too broken. And besides, I was paralyzed by a question I had to ask myself, one little point of order before we resumed after this recess.

How long had I been asleep?

I slipped the phone back into its cradle, and shut the drawer, carefully, quietly. I was eager to cross the floor, eager to be outside, and so I hurried unsteadily.

I reached for the frame of the glass door, and when I had a decent grip, I pushed. Nothing happened. I pushed again, my weight behind the effort, and the door was solid. I turned my head, listening.

Surely there was movement, back there, behind me. Someone used this desk, a caretaker. He heard me. Sounds echoed in this place, and I had not even tried to keep quiet. There were footsteps.

I turned to listen, and then with desperation, and revulsion, I pushed again, and this time I felt something surrendering inside the lock, a catch showing its age. I leaned heavily, something snapped, and I was out.