“I want to cross the line between life and death,” he said, “back and forth, right to left, left to right, until the line fades in front of your eyes. . . . I want to disintegrate the line between life and death,” he said, “until that line no longer exists.”
In all my visits to Holy Cross, I’ve only had one proper conversation. It wasn’t so long ago. I was sitting on a bench when this guy came over and sat down next to me. He was small and pale with dark spiky hair, and he was clutching a skateboard. I had noticed him earlier, in his T-shirt and his black jeans, leaning up against the cemetery gates.
We got to talking, and, as it turns out, we had some shared interests. I was meant to head back to work, but the guy wanted to hang out. So I called in sick. I know it was foolish—my coworkers and students could see me from the university’s north-facing windows—but I don’t think they’re that observant, and anyway, as soon as I enter the gates, it’s like I become unseeable. I live such an orderly life; I needed some disruption.
The guy, who told me his name, but I didn’t catch it, pulled out a joint. He tucked his skateboard under his arm and we went behind the grotto to smoke. He had this lighter decorated with little skulls, each of the skulls wearing a crown. As we smoked, I told him how much I liked it. Here, you can have it, he said.
We began to walk, and as we wandered, we talked. For once, the weed, which was damn strong, had the opposite effect and loosened my tongue.
Although Holy Cross is, geographically speaking, a small pocket situated inside Culver City, I told him, hoping to impress my young friend by speaking in the voice I use when I lecture, I suspect the geographical relationship between Life and Death is the exact opposite: Life is a small pocket situated inside of Death, which is much larger than Life, and surrounds it, just like West Berlin was surrounded by the former East Germany, making it an enclave—one of the few terms I remember from geography—to that country, a territory whose geographical boundaries lie completely within another territory, to which it has no political connection. Similarly, Life is an enclave to Death, completely enclosed within Death’s alien domain, whose inhabitants are of a distinct and separate culture and nationality.
Or, I said, my voice acquiring a calm yet manic confidence, a rhetorical assuredness I had never experienced when broaching the subject of death, to borrow the only term I remember from math, specifically geometry, a discipline that seems more apt, the spatial relationship between Life and Death is one of inscription: Life, which is an abstract shape, is inscribed inside Death, a different abstract shape; their boundaries touch but never intersect. This would mean that Life isn’t as small, I said, wondering if I was even using the mathematical concept correctly. Life fits as snug inside Death as a corpse in its cozy coffin, but Death remains a closed self-governing system, under its own jurisdiction, outside any municipality.
These were just some of my “insights,” which probably make no sense now. But I was on a roll, and as the guy produced another joint, I began to tell him other things, things I hadn’t told anyone. Not even you. It wasn’t only the weed; he felt so familiar, like I had known him for a thousand years. He reminded me of someone, though I couldn’t put my finger on who; he reminded me of a bunch of people, crudely stitched together.
It was more an air about him than what he said; in fact, now that I think of it, he said so little, it was like he said nothing at all. He mainly listened while I rambled, giddy in his presence. Though the few things he did say really resonated with me.
We walked everywhere that day; I went to sections I had never been, in the far reaches of the cemetery, Holy Cross’s extremities: section CC, for the Holy Martyrs, where all the nuns are buried in their veils and the priests in their heavy black robes; and section BB, which has the tiniest headstones I’ve ever seen. With their lacy borders, they look like decorative pillows, bearing nameless epitaphs like Before you were born, I knew you and Now you are reborn, statements skirting the issue in the area for the Holy Innocents, for all the unrealized, unbaptized souls who won’t even end up in Limbo, though didn’t the Vatican cancel that intermediary space in the 1980s?
Then we found ourselves in that isolated area on the cemetery’s eastern edge, where there are literally no bodies, section DD, the Shrine to the Unborn, for those beings whose lives are annulled inside the womb. As we rested on the memorial bench with flames carved into its black marble, an image that wasn’t exactly comforting, I had what can only be called a revelation, as if my mind were also heading to its outer reaches: They say that first wail of newborns is due to the first painful intake of breath into our tiny lungs, which are like toy accordions, I said, as my friend pulled out a Swiss Army knife and began to carve into the marble. But perhaps, as soon as we exit the mother, in our infantile wisdom we sense what is happening, we know what we are in for, there is no being born without dying, we’re already dying before we’re even born, we feel it in our weirdly soft bones. Maybe we even know how we’re going to die. If we could, we would claw our way back into the womb, using our fingernails, delicate as mother of pearl. As soon as we were safely inside, we would grab that umbilical cord and hang ourselves from the womb’s pink gallows. But humans in green gowns and green masks are threatening us with their shiny surgical instruments—we’ve been forced into existence, at knifepoint—and the couple who tricked us, coerced us into actuality, are holding onto us way too tight, screaming at us in a foreign language. Bloody and inarticulate, we can’t communicate any of this, so we make our first wail, which can be roughly translated as “I’ve been fooled, I’m fucked, the only way out of this mess would have been not to be born at all!” I said to my friend who was still scratching away at the marble as my thoughts ignited in his presence.
The unborn were starting to weigh on me, the idea of un-being is remarkably heavy, so we trudged up the hill to the mausoleum, to the chapel, where we dipped our hands in the font with the holy water and made the sign of the cross, first on ourselves, then on each other—he even took a sip of the water straight from the font, like a dog drinking from a dog-bowl, he was just fooling around, but I found the gesture to be sacrilegious and fonts are a well-known source of bacterial infection—and we helped ourselves to an open box in a hallway, full of the crucifixes that are complimentary with every funeral package. Then we smoked yet another joint in the maintenance yard behind the mausoleum, where we saw an amazing thing: coffins stacked on top of one another; so many that if you kept on stacking them, eventually you would scrape the underside of the moon. The coffins appeared to be made of pale wood, but we went up to touch them and they were cardboard. They must have been for cremation, which requires a container that is highly combustible. You know how I am with weed; I started to ponder the notion of a cardboard corpse, which amused the guy to no end; we kissed behind those makeshift caskets and his mouth tasted sour and his breath smelled of burning leaves and in the tangle of our tongues I lost my complimentary crucifix and my sense of time and the day kind of shredded away.
It was getting late, time for the cemetery to close, to lock the gates, which they do with a big padlock like an oversized chastity belt. Needless to say, this only serves as a deterrent to the living, who could never slip between the gate’s bars, while the dead can just flutter through them. Do you want to stay here overnight? the guy said. I know another way out. He took me by the hand and led me to the western edge of the cemetery, where we walked along this open drain that runs down the edge, ending in this sort of deep circular concrete void at the cemetery’s boundary. I think it’s what they call a culvert. Look, he said, you can just slide under the fence here. He even demonstrated how to slip out, then slipped back in and looked right at me with these seaweed-green eyes, his gaze filled to overflowing with a vacancy I was ready for. So how about it?
Sure, I said. Tim was working somewhere in the Midwest, and I thought our dog would survive the night. So we hid down there in that concrete void, listened to the traffic going by on Mesmer, waited for the cemetery employees to leave. As it was getting dark the streetlights switched on, illuminating the tattoos on this stranger’s arms, a series of skulls heaped one on top of the other, that boy was a walking Golgotha, skulls climbing up his arms like roses on a trellis; some of the skulls were smiling, some were serious, some had roses blooming in their empty sockets. His jeans looked somewhat greasy in the light, as if they hadn’t been washed in weeks. Up close, I could see blond roots in his dark hair. My mind kind of . . . cleared and I told him, You know, I really should get home and feed my dog. Sorry, can we take a rain-check? Can I get your number? He kind of snapped. Fuck you, he said, and stared at me with this dark-green vacancy. As I scrambled under the metal fence, he leapt out of our little void, his skateboard still tucked under his arm. I stood up and watched from the other side of the fence as he ran off in the direction of the mausoleum, until he was just a silhouette.