I have this recurring thought that I don’t want to even think, let alone say out loud, but here goes: for most people, the problem of death is one of excess. For me, it is an issue of scarcity. My predicament is a little different; actually, it’s reversed: it’s not that there has been too much death in my life. The problem is there hasn’t been nearly enough.
Every so often I wonder if I’m looking in the right direction. A cemetery might not be the best place to comprehend death. After all, the dead aren’t exactly effusive when it comes to conversation. They keep their cards close to their bony chests. It’s possible I’m looking too far. I could just stay within the confines of the university, which reflects the cemetery in its glass surface.
I won’t bore you with the details of my work there, but as soon as you open the tinted glass-plate doors, ignoring the sign in the lower-right corner that states this building is cleaned with cleaning agents that may contain chemicals known by the state of California to cause cancer, birth defects and other forms of reproductive harm, you sense there’s more than enough death to go around.
Within the building’s overly air-conditioned environment, which gives you a sneak preview of algor mortis, that postmortem escapade in which there is a steady decline in a corpse’s body temperature until it matches the ambient temperature that surrounds it, the students, they tell me things. Most of the time I’m like you; I’m so quiet people feel the urge to . . . confide in me.
Take Rose. Back in Georgia, her best friend Kate was kidnapped at gunpoint by two meth-heads. The men made her drive to an ATM, then on to another, and another, forcing her to make withdrawals, promising to let her go, then reneging on their promise. Here in LA, Rose’s other best friend Maria leapt from the observation deck in the tower of City Hall, whose thirty-two stories made it the tallest building in the city until 1964 and whose art deco architecture is widely admired.
Stacey was declared clinically dead not once, but twice: OD’d from too much coke and crystal and speed. I’m surprised she survived; she’s such a slight thing. She told me she didn’t see anything while she was dead, and that coming back to life was nothing to write home about; she didn’t like receiving mouth to mouth from a stranger.
After Ryan had a stroke, he lay unconscious on the floor of his apartment for two days until a neighbor found him. He was in a coma for a month. He’s doing better now, though he says he feels like he’s moving underwater and his speech is noticeably slurred. His range of vocabulary is returning, but he still misidentifies words. For example, he calls an incinerator a disintegrator.
And what about Carlos? He went whitewater rafting with his father down some river in Northern California. He was stoked, it was such a rush, but the boat turned over. Carlos watched as his dad went under, got stuck beneath some rocks, and was washed away in gushing foam.
There are plenty more stories where these come from. It’s as if being on intimate terms with death is an unwritten prerequisite to be accepted to the university.
Don’t get me wrong. The students are spacey, hyperdistracted. We blame this on technology, and in class they hide behind their laptops, like glowing headstones of the upright variety, but I suggest that it’s hard to concentrate on what’s going on in front of you when there’s another zone to think about, where your friends have gone, where we might be heading, where something is or isn’t happening.
And despite their abstractedness, these students, they’re so real and pure. You can hear death in their voices, see it in their faces; you know, I can see death in your face. They’re all so frail, emotionally, like you could touch any one of them gently on the shoulder and she or he would crumble into fine powder. I don’t envy my students—but actually, I do.
Somehow they’re less . . . self-conscious than me, more open, more sincere in their hopes and their dreams. Carlos, Rose, Stacey, Ryan: they speak straight from the heart. When I try to do that my words get snagged on the walls of my arteries, washed away in my bloodstream; the sentiments are lost long before they leave my mouth. After forty years, I’m still under the impression that I’m not quite real and, as a consequence, I’m not going to die. The student body’s . . . proximity to death makes them more connected to life than I’ll ever be.