The only law I’m interested in breaking is the law of death, but there is no way to defy this law. There is no way to keep death from you and me and the handful of people I’m actually close to, too close to, closer than is humanly possible.
I like that idiom, at death’s door. I don’t know where the turn of phrase comes from, and I don’t think it’s meant to inspire hope, but I like its intimations: if there is a door between life and death, even if the door is open, it is conceivable we can shut the door, ignore anyone who knocks at the door; we can lock the door and lose the key.
In The World Book Encyclopedia, between “Death Adder” and “Death Cup,” there is a short entry on the legal term “Civil Death,” or “Death, Civil.” As I remember it, when someone has not been heard from for a period of time, say, seven years, although this individual might still be alive, he can reasonably be assumed to be dead. The guy’s wife can remarry her chauffeur or her gardener; his heirs can divide up his things. But if that person turns up, the law will make every attempt to restore what is his, as far as this is possible.
I was unable to fit civil death into my book report, but this designation continues to intrigue me.
If you can undergo a civil death, perhaps you can elude natural death and all its accoutrements—unconsciousness, decomposition, nonbeing, the void, etcetera. Isn’t there a loophole in every contract, even the contract of existence? If you can disappear from the law’s circumscription, perhaps you can also . . . disappear from God’s field of vision, until he can no longer see you with his bloodshot all-seeing eye, and, after a period of time, say, seven years, he will reasonably assume that you are dead and order the Destroyer to just . . . forget about you.
I need to find another individual who will really stand in for me. Would you want to do it? I’m looking for someone truly selfless who will serve as my stunt double, my body double during the tedious, dangerous business of dying, so while the scene is darkening I can be off . . . somewhere else.
If there were an actual hole we went through when we died, it would make things so much simpler. Imagine if we could pin down its location, in a region that’s remote but can still be identified on a map. Then we could go there, just like Charles Manson took his Family to Death Valley, to look for this hole that he believed led to the other side, a black land where the rivers run upside down. When he sent out his followers to search for the hole in their black ’58 Chevy, he made them wear these black capes, which looked like cheap Halloween costumes moms would rustle up for their kids at the last minute.
Manson thought they had found it when they came across Devil’s Hole, a geological formation east of the Funeral Mountains; this geothermal pool leads to all these underground caves that are hundreds of thousands of years old. He sent some of his Family down into the hole, but the water was too hot and too deep: apparently Devil’s Hole is bottomless, more or less, no one knows exactly how deep it is, divers have gone in there and never come out, their skeletons are still diving.
Maybe you and I should go on a quest for this hole. I’ve always wanted an excuse to go to Death Valley, which is listed in The Encyclopedia after “Death Penalty” and “Death Rate”: a treacherous region that is not a valley at all, but a very long, very wide ditch called a graben; a popular winter resort area that used to be full of mining towns, where today only cluttered debris remains.
Manson failed, but perhaps we won’t. My goal is relatively easy. He thought paradise, or his warped goth-hippieish version of it, was waiting for him and his friends on the other side, but paradise does not entice me. If I found the hole that leads to the afterlife, right after I took a peek to see what’s going on inside, I would cover it with some of that debris, planks of wood or a piece of sheet metal that matches its circumference, no matter how narrow or how wide. The thing Manson and I do share is we both want to keep some people safe. With your assistance I would board up that hole, nail it shut.
Is there a false panel between the world and the afterlife, like the false bottom in the upright black box a magician employs in his vanishing act? With regard to our vanishing act, we have to locate or construct this false panel. We have to figure out how to trick decomposition. We haven’t perfected the routine. We have to keep practicing.
At school we had to memorize those trippy lines from that more reputable self-styled prophet, the ones about everyone dying yet living forever and never ever dying even if they die. His words were confusing, like a tongue twister, and in my mouth they came out all wrong.
In my head the Resurrection remains unavoidable, irresistible yet vague. The Son of God comes back to life, floats through doors, then vanishes. Though I just remembered another part of the story I enjoyed, where Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb and it’s empty and she cries and then she turns around and Jesus is there, but she thinks he’s the gardener! Then she realizes he’s not the gardener and goes to embrace Jesus, but he won’t let her touch him. Mary Magdalene thinks he’s acting kind of distant, but it’s nothing personal; it has something to do with the conditions of the Resurrection.
Essentially, I’m still confused. The Resurrection complicates things, clouds our judgment. There is the possibility lurking in the back of my mind—faint as lead pencil—that when someone dies, they’ll rise up from the dead. If I mistrust what I’m seeing, they will take my finger and insert it into their gaping side.
When the sun hits the side of the mausoleum at Holy Cross, the whiteness is blinding. It makes me want to graffiti its spotless surface. Something like, Immortality doesn’t exist, just ask Lazarus. He knows the void. He remembers the void, its contours. He knows he has to return to the void. Or something more straightforward such as Immortality is necessary, it keeps the void at bay.
I seem to recall another book from childhood. There was one story in that book I especially loved, and I would ask my mother to read it to me, to help me go to sleep. A story about a king who was granted a wish, I don’t remember why. Anyway, the king wishes for eternal life, and he gets it.
At first he’s elated, but pretty soon he finds immortality isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Everyone around him, everyone the king loves, withers and dies, filling him with sorrow. Although immortal, his physical self ages; that’s one of the sneaky clauses of the wish: he seeks out company, but he has become so gnarled and hideous, covered in sores, that no one can even look upon him.
I forget how the story ends. I’d fall asleep while my mother was reading. I think whoever gave the king his wish finally reverses it and he dies and it’s a weirdly happy ending. Or he endeavors to kill himself, employing a variety of methods, but none of them work—that’s the hitch to deathlessness—and the king just goes on and on and is unbearably lonely.
Do you know this story? Did your mother read it to you? Am I getting it wrong—was the wish a curse endowed by some witch? Regardless of the story’s form or its outcome, let me speak candidly: I would welcome the opportunity to experiment with immortality, whatever the conditions or the cost or the loss or the penalty, whatever the side effects.