I don’t want to disturb the dead. I don’t want the dead to hear me; they’ll hold every word against me. Is that why I’m talking this quietly?
I was planning on reading the newspaper, but let me put it away.
The Los Angeles Times is not an especially good paper, but I like the California section. It amounts to six pages, folds up nicely in my back pocket, yet it’s very informative. It’s where they have the stories of local interest, which are for the most part violent little stories of the intentional or accidental ways people died. You only have to read the titles to get the gist of them: Train Kills Woman in Tunnel; Boy Mauled to Death by Dogs; Man Swept out to Sea. Or if you’re like me, you can read further.
You can learn about the guy who went hunting in Riverside County on New Year’s Day. He caught some geese, but one fell into a frigid pond. The man dove in to retrieve his goose. His body was found at the bottom of the pond, weighed down by too many rounds of ammunition, but his red hunting cap was floating on the surface.
Then there was the homeless man who was sitting at the corner of Third and Berendo in the Mid-Wilshire District, in front of one of that neighborhood’s prestigious art deco apartment buildings, when a stranger came up to him, poured gasoline on his head, and set him alight, the motivation appearing to be personal dislike of the homeless. The gasoline can was red, just like the hunter’s cap. The victim was rushed to the hospital, where he was listed as death-imminent.
And take the boy arrested by the Lost Hills Police Department. His story came in installments. Released from the station at midnight, wearing only a thin T-shirt and a pair of cotton shorts, he wandered off into the dark; disoriented, he fell down a ravine. Investigators didn’t locate his remains, a skull and a ribcage, until a year later. It took more time to unearth the rest of his skeleton, which had been scattered over an area of five miles in seemingly random patterns by the bush’s disparate collection of wild animals.
You can keep on reading and marvel at all the ways people can die. The poor guy who was trying to climb into the grounds of the Playboy Mansion and fell from a tree —or did the branch break from his weight?— managed to enter the grounds but was pronounced dead at the scene. The grandma in Echo Park who stopped to talk to a neighbor on a Sunday morning—she was asking if she could borrow some sugar—and was promptly crushed to death by the crown of a rotten palm tree; she became debris pressed beneath debris. The corpse that was minding its own business in the trunk of a taxi impounded for parking violations in a tow yard in downtown LA, until an employee noticed something seeping from the trunk. Bound with duct tape, the victim appeared to have suffocated. The well-traveled professor in Marina del Rey who had been sitting out on his balcony for five days, dead with a self-inflicted gunshot to his eye. Neighbors mistook him for a Halloween display, until they heard popping noises and some goo dripped onto the balcony below.
On the next page are the military deaths, young men with bright smiles and tight fades killed by fanatics bearing weaponry of idiosyncratic designs or blown to bits by improvised explosive devices that are either sophisticated or crude. After that come the obituaries, those brief reports on individuals who died peacefully or unexpectedly from old age or God’s long list of diseases. The word obituary comes from the Latin obitus: departure, encounter, a going to meet. The word Deaths is at the top of the page, in a Gothic-style font, but the obituaries themselves are in plain script that’s so tiny you have to squint.
As I read it strikes me that there are only so many ways to be born.
But when it comes to death, God is at his most imaginative; death is where he gets creative. Although dying has its methods and its categories that reoccur, the range of death on offer to us is plentiful: natural or unnatural, gentle or violent, at the hands of someone else or by your own hand. The options are as varied as the weather—local, national, global—that appears on the back of the California section. The options seem to be infinite.
Though of course death’s not an option. It’s a condition: The individual hereby agrees that God or Death can come along any time he or it wants, in any guise, by any means of transportation, and, depending on their mood, destroy us swiftly or in a more leisurely fashion. The inevitability of death, your death and mine, is laid out in a hidden clause in the contract of existence that is binding, a clause written in God’s handwriting, which is even tinier than the obits, so everyone overlooks it.
Usually, by the time I’m through reading—the newspaper, I mean—I feel dizzy with possibility, and I’ve got black newsprint all over my fingers.