One day, two strangers will wander around a cemetery and chance upon our graves. They’ll glance down at our names and the dates, gloss over the slightness of our epitaphs. They’ll keep wandering, looking absently at all the headstones. They’ll think quietly, with such certainty: this will never happen to us.
Whenever I’m at Holy Cross, I get overwhelmed by thoughts, and one thought overwhelms all the others: I’m being deceived. Sure, I know that there must be actual people buried in the ground, people whose lives were composed of radically varying percentages of joy and disappointment, anonymity and fame; there must be corpses and skeletons concealed behind the names, but I don’t quite . . . believe it. I find it difficult to suspend my disbelief, just like I have trouble doing that when I go see a play at the theater.
It’s not like I haven’t tried to shift this perception. I’ve stood and crouched by so many gravesides, to see if I could . . . pick up on anything. I even put my ear to the grave of Sharon Tate, like that last photo of her, taken the morning of her death, where her hairdresser, who would also die that night, has his ear to her swollen belly.
I mean, it’s not that I expected to have some vision like Bernadette, to witness the voluptuous blonde apparition of Tate in her blood-spattered paisley bikini, breast-feeding her eternally hungry baby, but you would think, given the intensity of what happened to her, there might be some residue, some trace.
But all I got was dirt on the knees of my trousers and I didn’t sense anything. Same goes for the rest of the cemetery. The grounds feel sort of blank, sterile, as if every square yard has been disinfected, stripped of all distinguishing characteristics and shorn of all memory. Maybe death’s just more laid back on the West Coast. Or you need a special machine to tap into the energy of the dead, like those metal detectors people use at the beach. I should see if anyone makes such a machine, because I’ve never picked up on the slightest vibration. I can’t shake the feeling we’re being fooled and there’s nothing in any of the graves; the plots are all empty, like joke gift boxes with nothing inside.
I think it might have been easier for people in the old days, when death was more visible, on display, when they beheaded men in public then placed their heads on spikes.
Perhaps I should have become a grave robber, like in the books I read as a kid. I had great respect for these men who worked only at night, who were searching for rings and watches and jewels and gold—unless they were connected to scientific exploits, I don’t believe the skeleton was the primary goal. My esteem for this occupation was so strong, one day at school when the teacher asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said in all seriousness: I want to be a grave robber.
My ambitions have changed; even if you offered to help me and we dug up one grave, and the next and so on, until we had exhumed everyone, until our hands were scraped down to the bone and our fingernails broken, it wouldn’t get us anywhere. The names on the headstones don’t directly correspond to the bodies that have been so neatly packed away. Like all cemeteries, Holy Cross is a haphazard collection of raw data, printed matter, information to be mourned, information that may be used in a report to provide evidence, but of what? Not that these remains were once human. That’s way too open to interpretation. How would you begin to prove that?