A corpse is a dead body, usually human. Though in Middle English it just meant body, human or animal, alive or dead.
I’ve only laid eyes on one corpse. The corpse of Jill Yip. Jill was a dancer. A dancer is someone whose body moves.
Jill’s body stopped working. She died from an intestinal obstruction. This is when an abnormality blocks the intestines and the digestive system stops functioning and then everything breaks down. You can see X-rays of this condition on the Internet. There is a soft and hazy quality to the images: the bones, the dilated loops of bowel, the obstructions in question.
From what I heard, Jill had been experiencing pain, cramps, spasms. She thought the pain would pass. She went to the emergency room, near her apartment in Alhambra. They didn’t x-ray her. They must have been busy that night. They looked her over and gave her some pills and then sent her back home.
I imagine Jill tried to get some sleep. The pain woke her up; it will pass, it always does. But this was a new form of pain and she sensed something was wrong as her body went . . . haywire.
I believe Jill’s roommate was out at the time but was the one who later discovered her corpse.
There was some speculation that the harsh discipline of dancing had led to Jill’s death. One of the definitions of dance is to bring to a particular state or condition by dancing; e.g., she danced herself to exhaustion.
Dancing is hard on bodies and on the internal organs. Dance forces the body to do things it isn’t necessarily designed to do.
I’m increasingly aware that death forces language to do things it was not designed to do. Language breaks down; it experiences cramps, spasms.
I saw Jill dance a handful of times. She danced with a company, but once I saw her perform a solo. Her only solo. I think it was called Pirate Dance. It was one of those dances with talking; Jill talked as she, her body, moved. She told a story about her past. A story is a series of sentences that move.
When Jill was a small girl, her family fled Vietnam on a boat. The journey was long and arduous. Pirates came on board and raped the women and children, threw some men overboard, left them to drown or to be eaten by sharks. Jill had to drink seawater. You could tell she was leaving all sorts of things out.
For the performance, Jill wore a pirate’s hat made out of newspaper. She wore a black eye patch, a belt around her waist, with a silver plastic pirate’s knife in a gold plastic scabbard: a child’s Halloween costume. She said the men who came on board wore fake paper hats, like they were pretending to be pirates, but that everything they did was real.
Jill and her family survived the journey and reached America.
At school, Jill said, wielding her fake knife at members of the audience, when my teacher asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I told her I want to be a pirate.
The dance ended with Jill intoning these lines again and again: I want to be a pirate. I want to commit atrocities. I did not succumb to the pirates. I escaped them.
I have no memory of the actual dance, the steps, the gestures, and even if I did, I would be unable to explain it to you, because it’s my belief, a belief that borders on the category of the spiritual, that the body moves outside of language.
There was no music, I can say that. Sometimes Jill would stop talking and dance silently, with a delicate and controlled violence. She would start to talk about what happened to her on that ship, but her words would sort of . . . drift off, and she would replace them with the ragged sound of her breathing and the clomping sound made by her feet.
When I learned of Jill’s death—Tim told me, one of the other dancers in her company had called him, he came into the kitchen to convey the news—it struck me as very . . . unjust.
What bothered me was not that Jill was twenty-nine, a month or two older than me, not even the hospital’s oversight, but the manner of death. Jill had overcome all those dangers as a child, made herself sick from salt water, come all this way, only to die . . . like this.
Somehow, I thought, staring at our kitchen walls, which are a bright Mexican blue, it would have been better to die at the hands of those pirates.
Jill’s cool, clipped voice ran through my head: I did not succumb to the pirates. I escaped them.
Jill Yip’s corpse was situated in a funeral parlor in Alhambra. Tim and I drove out there with our friends Danielle and Tre. Danielle’s a redhead; Tre has jet black hair. Though apart from Jill, who cares what any of us look like.
We all dressed in dark colors. The car was cramped and the day was warm and dusty.
The funeral parlor was on a street lined with factories—bed manufacturers, primarily—and other funeral parlors. A funeral parlor is a kind of factory; it makes death on a mass scale, through a process of maintaining. A parlor with a crematorium is also a factory, one that doesn’t produce anything but destroys things.
Yet reducing a body down to an urnful of ash—you’re still making something.
When we arrived at the parlor, the foyer was filled with people, mostly Jill’s young dancer friends, who were also dressed in dark colors. There were all these photos of Jill, prints of various sizes, pinned to the walls.
Like death, or dancing, beauty cannot be described, but the photos provided evidence that Jill was small and pale with dark hair and eyes so dark I would call them black. She was fine-boned. She had amazing cheekbones, like God had stuck those compasses that are used to draw circles and arcs in geometry beneath her skin. Hers was an exquisite, severe form of beauty.
I was about to say the event in Alhambra was a funeral, but it wasn’t. This was a viewing. I’ve never been to a funeral, but as I understand it, that event is a formal affair; there are eulogies and choreographed actions and the body is positioned in its final resting place.
A viewing is an informal affair; its main purpose is to perceive the body.
There are no eulogies, which, in my opinion, is preferable. Language only obstructs our ability to see death.
Without words, it gives us a chance to have a more . . . immediate relationship to the corpse.
We sat down for a while in the chapel on hard wooden pews and then Tim got up to view the body.
As he walked down the aisle toward Jill, her corpse, he made a distressing sound.
He began wailing at the sight of his student. Tim rarely shows his emotions, but when he does, they spill out violently. It’s as if he becomes someone else. I’m the same; that could be why we get on.
I didn’t know what to do so I sat there as Danielle went up to comfort him. He wept into her red hair. His grief, or its demonstration, was so extreme, localized in his body yet immense, it was like watching a twister, from a distance I had wrongly assumed was safe. I thought this grief might destroy him and Danielle and me; it might flatten everyone in its wake.
His emotions appeared suddenly, as if out of nowhere, then disappeared just as quickly.
When it was my turn, I went up and got as close as I could to Jill, her corpse, without touching her.
She wasn’t in an open casket. Her body was wrapped in a rumpled gray cloth. There were oranges placed around her, flowers, burning incense.
I looked at the corpse of Jill Yip. I gazed upon her.
In Christian settings, it is strongly recommended that the body on view be embalmed and that the cosmetic services of a mortician are used. The goal is to create a lifelike representation of the dead, by draining the corpse of its blood and injecting the veins with chemicals as well as erasing any sign of sickness or violence, in an attempt to make the deceased look healthier and more presentable than when they were alive.
Jill’s family is Buddhist and did not observe these recommendations.
Jill’s skin was paler than usual and slightly blue gray. I knew there were parts of her body beneath the gray cloth that would be more purply and red, thanks to livor mortis, the fourth stage of death, when the destruction of blood cells creates discoloration in lower or dependent body areas, a stage she would have already gone through. There was no odor; perhaps it was masked by the sweet scent of the oranges, incense, and flowers.
She still resembled . . . herself. Though unpainted, unadorned, she reminded me, paradoxically, of a high school kid who has the role of an old person in a play, that stage makeup they wear that looks so tacky.
There was something unconvincing about Jill’s corpse. She . . . it . . . seemed fake. I didn’t quite believe her in the role she was playing.
Jill’s death would ultimately be classified as death by natural causes, in that it was due to an internal malfunction of the body not directly influenced by external forces. Yet her corpse reaffirmed an opinion I still hold, that the distinction between natural and unnatural death—the latter including deaths as eclectic as homicide, suicide, accidents, and the intriguingly named death by misadventure—is dubious, false: all forms of death strike me as unnatural, artificial.
She seemed to have been drained of an element more essential than blood, that immaterial component we call the soul.
However, there was a trace of life. I felt like I was staring into the mouth of a volcano that wasn’t extinct, merely dormant.
I would not have been shocked if Jill sat up and stood up and danced.
What’s interesting is that we’re meant to be terrified of the very idea of a reanimated corpse, and by the many varieties of the undead—beings who, although deceased, thanks to supernatural or demonic forces are capable of movement and in some instances of speech—at the very least, they can moan.
But I’m confident I would not have been the only one happy to see Jill rise up and dance. Even if we were alarmed by the sight of someone we thought was dead behaving as if she were alive.
I guess what I’m trying to say is we long for what would also horrify us.
Jill’s corpse did not move an inch. She was so still. That’s what struck me the most. Her stillness. And her silence.
Jill was exhibiting rigor mortis, the stiffness of death, quite literally: rigor (stiffness) mortis (of death). If I remember correctly from my book report, this stiffening of the limbs and joints is caused by the death of the cells in the muscles that move the skeleton, including the tongue, which is also a muscle, making speech and motion impossible.
A corpse is a body that does not move and does not speak.
A corpse is a body that does not see. Jill’s eyes were closed so she did not, could not, return my gaze. Obviously, even if her eyes were open she would have been unable to: the dead’s eyes no longer work; they’re incapable of receiving images or recognizing light, of sending messages to the brain.
We shut their eyelids manually, with the same glue that is used for false eyelashes; this is considered a mark of respect, like drawing the shades in a house where someone has died. Then we look upon the dead, without their permission; we surreptitiously observe them as they are otherwise . . . engaged in a private activity. All mourners are no better than voyeurs, a bunch of perverts.
So we force the dead’s eyes shut, not because they cannot see us but because we’re concerned their eyes are accepting images from . . . elsewhere and they can see us when they stare at us in a fixed yet unspecified direction.
Jill’s eyelids were thin and patterned, like lace curtains. Was she still seeing something? My thoughts . . . went haywire.
Finally, I broke the ice and spoke to Jill’s corpse. I spoke silently. As if she could hear me.
I won’t tell you what I said; that’s a personal conversation.
Her lips were not quite closed, just like mine, and I may have been imagining it, but I thought I smelled her breath, or lack thereof. Like mulch deep in a forest. I wondered if there were stray words caught in her mouth, things she didn’t get a chance to say, decomposing along with the rest of her. I swear I heard a whistly, echoey sound from inside her body slip through the crack in her lips.
I spoke to God as well. I’m not sure God exists; he could be a fiction, like the undead, but I converse with him regularly. It’s a habit I acquired in childhood and am yet to shake.
I asked God to look after Jill, to keep her safe.
My back was turned to everyone else in the chapel, so no one, except for maybe Jill or God, could see my expression.
There I was, talking to God and a corpse, talking to two voids.
Tre went last, then we all lingered in the lobby. We did not discuss our time with Jill. I don’t know how long I spent with her, a couple of minutes? It’s hard to say, because a corpse is outside of time.
Actually, that’s wrong. Although the dead are no longer subject to time—they’re on their own time, death standard time—finite duration continues to work its bad magic on a corpse, whittling it down from something recognizable to something grisly to something that is, in the end, relatively elegant. A corpse is both inside and outside of time.
In their dark clothes, huddled in small groups, like on a playground, Jill’s friends seemed very . . . self-aware; they knew they all had a role to play. Tim and I spoke to the roommate, the one who discovered the corpse, and as she spoke I searched her face to see if it revealed anything. Her face was not forthcoming. There were so many questions I wanted to ask her, but I bit my tongue.
While Tim chatted with his colleagues, I eyed one of Jill’s handsome dancer friends who had these plush red lips and appeared to be completely devastated. He was standing in a group nearby; they were conferring together, softly, but feverishly.
I began to eavesdrop.
They were talking about Jill and her dreams.
It seems Jill had a recurring nightmare. Ever since she was a little girl back in Vietnam, she had dreamt she was in a forest and was being strangled by trees. She had the dream once or twice a year. She drew pictures of this dream in her journal; since her death, the book was being passed around. In her drawings, the trees looked like tangled internal organs, strangulated bowels.
Jill dreamt of her own death, someone was saying. Everyone agreed. The guy with the lips nodded, then caught my eye.
For all we know, a corpse could be a body that continues to dream but refuses to tell us these dreams, and gives no indication that it is dreaming.
Jill’s friend held then broke my gaze. He went to the restroom next to the chapel, and I followed him. Normally I’m clumsy with flirting; I don’t pick up on signals and make the procedure more circuitous than it needs to be, but on this occasion I acted with unusual ease. He was waiting for me in a stall, its red door cracked open, and I locked the door behind me and we coupled quickly and with a certain intensity, which was partly due to the circumstances—that is, there was a corpse a few feet away from us on the other side of the wall.
They say that life and death can be regarded as a process where the hormones build to a point, then gradually decline, until just before death, when a swell of hormones, a constellation of the weird secreted things, which I envision as miniscule black stars swirling through the bloodstream, suddenly and violently surge through the body of the dying man and . . . explode as he is urged on into an a-hormonal nothingness. When I closed my eyes in that bathroom stall, for a moment I could see those little black stars.
And it occurs to me now—it did not occur to me then—that we got the equation wrong, I mean in terms of sex and death. Maybe it’s sex that’s huge and death that’s small; maybe death will bring only a miniature oblivion, a modest shattering of the self compared to the mind-blowing, self-dissolving oblivion offered by a regular orgasm.
I hope I haven’t said too much, though I feel as if I have. You’re looking at me in such a curious way. I’ve heard such behavior at death-related rituals is quite common. I hope I haven’t misconstrued your silence for an ease between us that isn’t ease at all.
As Tim and I and the others left, we passed a large black-and-white photo of Jill that was on an easel next to the door. I took in the image, or attempted to. The image captured something of her . . . essence? She was laughing, but also stern, skeptical, as if she were saying: All these photos obscure who I am. They have nothing to do with me. Destroy them.
Afterward, we went to an Italian restaurant in Los Feliz. Tim ordered lasagna; Tre had spaghetti Carbonara with several kinds of mushrooms; Danielle and I both had seafood pasta, though she ordered hers without scallops. I asked her why.
They’re bottom feeders, she said. They eat the garbage of the ocean.
As I ate, I thought about how the dead can’t eat, not because they don’t want to but because they can no longer digest; it was an obvious notion, but it filled me with dread.
As does this thought: when we have lost our capacity to break food down into substances that can be absorbed into the body, and the body begins to digest itself, it’s time for us to be absorbed back into the world, which digests us, then shits us out, into the soft and hazy depths of the underworld.
We toasted Jill, finished our meals, then we all went back to the repetition of our everyday lives.
Jill has moved on to the repetition of death. Dying is simply exchanging one form of repetition for another. Her death was . . . untimely.
A slim obituary came out in a weekly paper, consisting of 106 words, I’ve checked. That’s the only thing about her on the Internet. No images. Which is as it should be. As if Jill were saying: There is no death image. Death is the obliteration of all images.
Nowadays there would be all sorts of online tributes, anecdotes and snapshots and marginalia about Jill, floating around in cyberspace, like electronic ash. But Jill died a little too early—the summer of 2001. Not long after Mike and not long before those two planes crashed intentionally into the Twin Towers—right before we started documenting every single useless thing.
And before she left her mark. Jill was just coming into her own as a dancer. That’s what it said in the obituary. I think the word they used was electrifying. This was not hyperbole. Jill shone that night she did her pirate dance, but it’s better not to shine so bright. That makes it way too easy for death to find you. Safer to give off a dull steady glow.
In private, before our entanglement dissolved into nothing, that guy from the viewing told me Jill’s roommate had gone up to the Zen monastery at Mount Baldy. She needed to get away. It was not clear if she was coming back.
As we lay in bed he told me about a dream of his. He was at the funeral parlor, looking for me. You weren’t there, he said. He wandered into the restroom and even though the room was dark, he could see Jill in the corner; her corpse was giving off its own light.
If I want to go against Jill’s wishes and perceive her image, all I have to do is sneak into Tim’s office. He has an old smoking cabinet, which functions as an altar. Its shelves are cluttered with icons to the dead, his dead, who are not mine to talk about. There’s a four-by-four photo of Jill on the top shelf, a reduced version of the one at the viewing. I look at it every time I go in there. I stare at that photograph of Jill, which like all photos is lifeless, no better than a corpse, drained of all substance.
I never shared with Tim what I did when I slipped away at the viewing. How could I explain that instead of comforting him, I seduced one of his grieving students, who, during the course of our passion, blacked out for a second when I inadvertently knocked the guy’s head against the restroom’s marble wall. The young man didn’t seem to mind, and nor did I.
Though it’s possible I’m focused on the wrong behavior. The indiscretions, Tim might understand. But if he knew the dark thread of my thoughts, not just about Jill but about everyone, how much time I spend at the cemetery, would he want to be with me? Would anyone want to even speak with me, if they knew?
Seeing a corpse, even once, has allowed me, over time, to come to these conclusions:
A corpse is the most substantial yet the most abstract thing in the world.
A corpse is a kind of receipt, confirming that a product has been paid for, a product has been received. A corpse makes it clear that a transaction has occurred.
A corpse is pure matter, more matter than we can deal with, more matter than we know what to do with.
In that it is both on view yet receding from view, a corpse is a quiet optical illusion.
But what of Jill Yip, whose corpse is a fact that outshines all the facts I have heaped upon it. Whose corpse, I must stress, did not get up and dance that day in Alhambra. I don’t want to mislead you.
If I had hung around, waited for everyone to leave, once the doors of the parlor were locked, she might have put on a show. Rigor mortis only lasts for a day or two. The limbs loosen up and the dead revert to the serene state of secondary flaccidity, where the muscles relax until a corpse has the grace of a jellyfish.
Or perhaps as I watched her, as Jill lay there in her gray shroud, suspended between death and rebirth, she was dancing, with all those ferocious dakinis of manifold classes from The Book of the Dead, the sky dancers who carry parasols sewn from human skin, burn incense derived from human flesh, and wear necklaces of intestines snatched from unburnt corpses; those celestial beings who play trumpets fashioned from thigh bones and drums stretched taut on the skulls of boys, creating a music so intense they say it can split open a man’s head.
According to different strands of Buddhist theology, reincarnation takes anywhere between one second and seven years after death. Jill must have been reborn by now. I’m inclined to think she came back as a dancer; she’s condemned to die and return as a dancer, again and again, until her feet are ruined, her ankles shattered, until she has perfected her technique and fulfilled her promise.