There’s a storm drain at the cemetery, not far from my bench. After it has rained, it sounds like the drain is singing, like the dead are singing. Can you hear it? Do the dead ever sing to you?
I heard she died of ocular cancer. I heard she said some very strange things. I heard she looked directly into the sun.
I heard her eye was bothering her; that’s how it begins.
I met Sandra not long after I moved to LA, sometime between Mike and Robert. She lived in the Venice canals with four other women. The arrangement was . . . complicated. There was a Brazilian woman who was Sandra’s ex and now had a new wife. I’m pretty sure one of the women in the other couple was the wife’s ex. The two couples were in the main house, which had two stories and was painted bright yellow with green trim. Sandra occupied an adjacent unit on the same property: one story, painted dark crimson.
This was back when Tim was living by himself on North Venice Boulevard. On Sundays we used to walk his old dog Buddy in the canals. Sandra was often on her patio or in the front yard, so we would stop and say hey.
The first time I met her, I complimented the color of her house. “It’s Blakean crimson,” I told her.
“What the hell do you mean?” she said, her lips crinkling into a smile.
I explained the reference, the Blake poem about the sick rose, the invisible worm howling through the night, bent on destroying the lovers’ bed of crimson joy.
“Where did you find this one?” she said to Tim, laughing. “Blakean crimson. I love it, that’s wild,” she said, staring at her house and forgiving the pretensions of a nervous young man. “That’s wild.”
In my memory, those walks in the canals were always a bit too sunny, but I can see Sandra through the glare. Her face was craggy and lined; she didn’t wear makeup. She usually wore shorts and had these sturdy legs. Barefoot or in flip-flops, her toenails were gnarly, black with fungus. Sometimes they were painted with this brown, gooey homeopathic solution. Her voice was scratchy, like something was caught in it. Or a pubescent boy’s voice on the verge of breaking.
If Sandra was inside and noticed us, she would come out, but she never invited us in. I only went inside her house once. I had started an MFA, to learn how to write, and a friend of mine from school, Sarah, who lived on an island off the coast of Washington, was looking for a sublet during one of our residencies. Sandra knew about this; Tim must have mentioned it. She was going out of town and offered to sublet her place. Sarah and I went over there to pick up the keys.
Sandra must have showed us around, but I can’t visualize the layout or the furnishings. She gave Sarah a few instructions, most of which were regular, except for this business with the doors and the cats. Sandra had three cats; I forget their colors. I had caught flashes of them before, but they made themselves scarce during our visit. She was very clear that the sliding doors had to be kept open at night, so her cats could move freely.
“Are you sure that’s safe?” Sarah asked. I think we were all standing about; we never sat down.
“Oh yeah,” Sandra said. “It’s hard to explain, I just . . . know that this place is protected.”
Sarah, who is a reasonable human being, suggested that perhaps she could let the cats wake her up whenever they needed to go out; the thought of sleeping by herself in an unlocked house made her anxious. But Sandra was having none of it; she didn’t want to mess with the cats’ night patterns.
“I really don’t want the cats to feel disoriented by your presence,” Sandra said, eyeing Sarah. “I know this sounds weird but the cat thing is kind of a deal breaker.”
Things got slightly tense for a moment, but Sarah said sure and they exchanged cash and keys. As we walked back to Tim’s place and talked about how intense Sandra was, Sarah said no way was she going to sleep with the doors open; she would just let the cats paw at her and mewl to be let out.
Sandra had been so insistent, as if she felt the cats were guarding her home, defending the perimeters; if they were trapped inside it might tamper with the magic, leave her house open to evil spirits. She did have four cats, but one had just died and I remember her telling me one Sunday that she kept seeing the cat flickering past her, out of the corner of her eye.
Though she may just have been one of those crazy cat ladies, there was something witchy about Sandra. If she had been around in previous centuries, she would have been a target for people’s suspicions. Neighbors would have gossiped: I saw her shape-shifting into a feline form; I overheard her cats speaking grammatically perfect English, taught to them by their demonic mistress. Those toenails of hers would have been seen as undeniable evidence, a weird witch marking.
Sandra looked even more witchy later. Her hair was short, brown with streaks of gray, but she grew it out, until it was long, so long that it curled down her spine in all these dappled shades of gray and silver.
The change in her hairstyle corresponded to a change in her life. Sandra had been a lawyer—I’m not certain what area of law she specialized in—but she began studying psychology. Eventually, she stopped her law practice, became a therapist and professor of psychology.
I’ve known many other Californians like her, who’ve undergone a similar midlife career change. They all had a crisis in meaning, I suppose, wanted to be doing something more authentic, more worthwhile, and psychology appeared to solve this dilemma.
I don’t quite get it, these humans committed to working on themselves up until the grave. I don’t believe I’ll work out anything about myself until I’m in my grave, tucked in neat and tight.
However, I appreciated Sandra’s passion for her subject, even envied it. One time as we chatted in her front yard, we got to talking about our classes. I had also graduated and was teaching at the same school as her, the one I’m still at today. She was teaching a class on psychological theory, and I asked if she was enjoying it.
“Oh God, yeah,” she said, with her crinkly smile. “I love that stuff. With theory I’m like a pig in muck.”
She asked about my class, which was on lit theory. I said it was fine, but my ambivalence must have come across. Sandra looked at me sternly. “You know, you should only do what you’re passionate about.”
The trouble is, then and now, I’ve never been that passionate about any form of work. I have to fake it.
I hope I don’t have a midlife crisis and feel the urge to switch careers, to do something more meaningful, because I have no idea what that would be. I may have an obsession with you-know-what, but that fixation has nothing to do with passion.
Sandra was into dreams; that was the main thing, perhaps the only thing, we had in common. We both valued their obliqueness, their insoluble beauty.
One evening I was walking by myself in another section of the canals and I came across Sandra. The night was windy and her hair was tousled and straggly. She was wearing this big gray shawl that kept billowing behind her. I could tell something was . . . weighing on her, but I didn’t want to ask if she was okay. In the abstruse branch of psychology in which she was immersed, it was taboo to ask this question.
As we walked together she began telling me about this dream she had had the night before. In the dream, her mother was in a hospice in Florida and her cat Jackson was at the vet’s in California and Sandra was having to fly back and forth to look after them. But her mom and her cat were sort of . . . shifting and blurring. Sometimes the cat was in the hospice, its weak, puny body in a huge bed, hooked up to the intricate breathing apparatus her mom had been connected to, and sometimes her mom was at the vet’s, in a cage that was far too small for her. Tired of all the air travel, Sandra arranged to have a long IV tube join the mother in Florida to the cat in California, circulating blood and a mysterious healing solution. The infusion seemed to work: by the end of the dream, all three were in Sandra’s apartment, and everyone was feeling better. Sandra was lying in bed, her mother beside her, the cat purring on her chest, all three sleeping peacefully.
“Oh, has your mother been ill?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Sandra said. “Actually, she died. I just got back from Florida.
I told Sandra how sorry I was, but she said not to worry.
“I doubt this will be as hard as the death of my cat a few years ago. Mothers are one thing, but I’m still torn up about Jackson. Smell that,” she said, pointing to the canals, the mucky green-brown water, slimy with duck shit. “That’s what the unconscious must smell like.”
She turned to me and laughed. She had a gleam in her eye and a deranged look on her face, reminiscent not so much of a witch as a prophet from the Old Testament, one prone to rages and gnomic, enigmatic statements, recently returned from the desert.
I think that was the last time I talked to Sandra. Tim and I had moved in together, to another part of Venice, and his old dog had died—put to sleep with 80 ml of Nembutal—so we weren’t walking as much in the canals. When we got our new dog, we walked her a different route. I might have seen Sandra once or twice in the elevator at work and said hello, but nothing more.
Basically, I . . . lost track of Sandra. Like I lose track of everyone.
And then Sandra died. Sandra had ocular cancer. Cancer of the eye. I didn’t know there was such a thing. I guess there’s a cancer for every section of the body, every subsection, every organ.
She went to the doctor one November because her eye was bothering her; that’s how it begins. She received her diagnosis, was given nine months to live, and was dead by August, within nine months.
I must have really been out of the loop because I didn’t know about any of this until after Sandra’s death. I don’t recall an e-mail from human resources. I was at work and saw a flyer for her memorial. The event was scheduled for a Saturday night, which made me reluctant to go but Tim said we needed to show up.
At the front of the room—A1000, a cavernous, nondescript space—a red and blue silk scroll hung above the stage, forming a backdrop. Apparently Sandra had this scroll over her bed: the bed she dreamt on, the piece of furniture, typically a framework with a mattress and coverings, that would become her deathbed.
On the scroll there was an image of a Tibetan deity. I don’t remember her name; she had a third eye, but don’t they all have third eyes? Bright red, she held a cleaver in one hand, a cup carved out of a human skull in the other hand, filled with blood. There were miniature skulls adorning this deity’s forehead, and she was dancing against a background of thousands of eyes surrounded by flames. As she danced she was crushing some tiny guy beneath her left foot. By the look of things, she was a Dakini of the wrathful variety.
As people came up on stage and spoke of Sandra, their relationship to her, the microphone hissed; I didn’t take much in. At memorials, when the living attempt to invoke the dead, I become very aware that language’s primary function is to conceal, like the clouds of black ink that octopuses release to shield themselves from danger. The more we describe the dead, the less we can see them and the further away we get from them.
Though after the speeches, I heard and overheard some interesting notions.
Sandra’s doctor, whom I used to be quite friendly with, told me that she didn’t take any medication for a long time because she wanted to learn about death, and for that, she felt she needed to be lucid.
But when the pain became too much for her, she said, Okay, give me the morphine.
And from her morphine haze she began to speak in a shrill voice, like a little girl’s. Her belly had swelled and she kept patting her stomach, like an expectant mother, asking the doctor when her baby was due.
“When people die,” the doctor told me, “they say strange things. People habitually say strange things, but as they’re dying, the things they say, and the way they say them, get even stranger.”
I heard that Sandra thought she got the cancer from not wearing sunglasses. She was superstitious about dark glasses, hiding her eyes from people. She liked to sunbathe with her eyes open, staring straight into the sun.
A former student of mine and Sandra’s told me that Sandra had called her and left a message on her voicemail, saying that she was dying and could she come over. Sandra was worried all her knowledge was going to die with her, and she wanted to pass that knowledge on. So the student visited Sandra once a week and sat by her bed with a tape recorder.
But she said Sandra couldn’t articulate any of it; she couldn’t put her ideas into words and it all came out scrambled, disconnected, incoherent, like Father Zossima’s talk with Alyosha—that is, before Zossima gained some clarity and poured out his heart on the last day of his life in an unclouded and intelligible manner. Denied this clarity, in the end, Sandra asked her student to read to her; she just wanted to hear other people’s voices.
I heard that Sandra spat and screamed at some friends who came to see her: Get out! You think you’re watching me dying, you think I’m here, but I’m not.
I heard that Sandra’s ex shaved her head and, per Sandra’s instructions, saved her long gray locks and used them in a spell.
And I heard Sandra kept a journal, documenting those nine months, from the first day almost to the last, a chronicle of her . . . experience.
During the memorial—was it at the end or the beginning?—they played a song from my adolescence, by a band synonymous with the musical genre known as MOR, Middle of the Road. I understand this genre is popular for services, perhaps because it is so unlike the music bodies play on their deathbeds: they say it sounds like an entire brass band is marching inside of you to a gaseous, wheezing rhythm; as if every organ is part of an orchestra conducted by your soul, producing a screeching, rumbling racket that is not unlike feedback, the audio phenomenon that occurs when a fraction of the output of a machine is returned to the input of the same machine and retransmitted in a loop that is in some instances, like death itself, a self-corrective action.
I had never liked the song, but as I sat there and listened I became . . . overwhelmed with emotion. I believe this is the desired effect. It was a love song, and I thought of Sandra when she was young, the life she dreamt was ahead of her. I remembered Sandra’s prickly kindness and it struck me that this was no longer the case because the dead are incapable of being kind. I had that tight, constricted sensation you get in your throat when you’re about to cry, what they call a lump in one’s throat.
When the song ended, someone came over to talk to Tim and me, and I didn’t speak. I didn’t talk until it was safe to do so; I waited until that tight sensation in my throat was gone.
In the weeks after, I had trouble sleeping. I would wake up in the night and think about Sandra. Clearly this was nothing new. How many hours have I spent in my life lying awake in the dark, directing my mind toward the departed, using this human capacity to form connected ideas about the dead?
After Sandra was presented with her diagnosis, after a man in a white coat handed down her death sentence, she must have had trouble sleeping too, trying to figure out . . . how to die.
What was it like, those nine months? Did every action and conversation take on a certain weight, a certain . . . significance? Or did the routine of dying become mundane, like everything else?
Early on, Sandra must have thought, I feel normal, I don’t feel any different, I’ll be the exception. But gradually, and then swiftly, her body must have acted so inexplicably she knew this was it.
One particular night, as my mind whirred, I tried to figure something out.
Just a month or two before I was riding my bike along the Grand Canal, on my way to the beach. I heard this . . . terrible noise coming from the direction of Sandra’s house. At the time, I took it for one of her cats. It sounded like that god-awful yowl cats make when they’re in heat, a vocalization that’s not quite animal, not quite human, as if they’re trying to speak, but their rough tongues end up deforming language, shredding it. Yet there was a quality to the sound that was not feline.
I did the math; this would have been late June or early July. The noise may have been Sandra prior to the morphine, shrieking as the pain was intensifying, as death was shredding her, deforming her into an organism not quite human, not quite animal.
Or was it Sandra and her cats, yowling, caterwauling along with her?
As I lay in bed, twisting and turning, I recalled Sandra’s strict directives about the doors and the cats, her conviction that thanks to her pets, her home was secure. Sandra was right. Ocular cancer either originates in the eye and spreads outward to diverse locations in the body, far-flung regions, or stems from another internal organ and makes its way to the eye. There was no threat from anyone or anything outside. Her death came from within.
Unless Sarah, by locking the sliding doors, somehow broke the spell; the cats were unable to get out and the spirits clawed their way in, bringing death with them.
In the dark I was beginning to see that cats and the dead share specific characteristics: they are both nocturnal creatures; night is the time in which they are most active.
They both have superior night vision. Just as cats have those mirror-like layers at the back of their eyes, the dead’s eyes must have some facet that allows their irises to dilate to such an extent they can let in all possible darkness and turn it into light.
But who inherited Sandra’s cats? I wondered, tugging on the sheet that had coiled around my legs and pulling a blanket up to my neck. Perhaps they all died of grief; I’ve heard animals do that. Or did they burn the cats when they cremated Sandra, like they used to burn cats at the stake with their witch? Were the felines’ ashes disseminated with Sandra’s throughout the Santa Monica bay?
All my fidgeting woke up Tim, who retreated to his office. I grabbed my laptop, crawled back into bed, and looked up ocular cancer again, just to make sure I didn’t have it.
On a site run by some eye institute, there was an illustration of an eye by itself: no face, no socket. There was another larger image of the eye from an interior perspective; it resembled a bloody red ball.
It seems if you catch eye cancer early enough and it’s confined to the eye, you can do something about it, radiation therapy and a procedure called enucleation, which is the removal of the eye, but Sandra was beyond that.
I didn’t appear to have any of the symptoms, but that’s where it gets confusing, because the symptoms run from bulging eyes to a change in the color of your iris to poor vision to seeing flashing lights and shadows to a red painful eye to a tiny defect on the iris to no symptoms at all.
Still not sleepy, I searched for Sandra, for information on her. There was the usual disparate selection.
I skimmed the sites dealing with her professional achievements until I came to an article about her house in the Los Angeles Times. Sandra had been interviewed; she said when she went to inspect the property, her unit was gray, a gray box, but as soon as she saw that gray box she knew she needed to live there. She painted it crimson to reveal the house’s true character.
I couldn’t help but think that Sandra, given her propensity to the irrational, to all things magical, had viewed the premises not only as a good investment but as an augury; she had painted the walls a color to match the intensity of what awaited her. She had found a place suitable to die in, a house in which she could comfortably howl her way to death.
There was data available on an assortment of Sandra Golvins: names, like deaths, are not unique. Names are interchangeable, a dime a dozen. Sandra could have used this to her advantage: No Death, it’s not me you want, it’s that other Sandra Golvin . . .
I even tracked down a blog written by Sandra herself, but when I clicked on the link there was no text; the screen glowed white and I was informed you have reached your viewing limit.
Just as it was getting light, and the birds were stirring, I fell back to sleep.
At first I dreamt of what I had just been doing: staring at a screen. I was examining that eyeball from the medical illustration, but it looked more like one of the eyes from that Tibetan scroll. Instead of eyelashes, this eye had delicate flames fanning out from the rim. This eye was on fire. The flames began to singe and melt the transparent protective layer of the LCD monitor, the computer’s own cornea and aqueous humor. I could smell the burning plastic, I could feel the heat, so I closed the laptop and fell asleep a second time, fell more deeply into the dream.
I found myself in a cave; it was pitch black. As my eyes adjusted, like the eyes of the dead are forced to adjust to the afterlife, I was able to identify three figures: Sandra with Robert and Mike. All three wore black rags and were long-haired, huddled over a cauldron like the witches from Macbeth; I was only in the cave a moment, but I knew these were my weird sisters, muttering something pertaining to my fate, prophesying at a volume so low I couldn’t hear the words . . .
And then suddenly I was in Sandra’s house, sitting up with her in bed. Medicines and potions cluttered the bedside table, along with a dog-eared copy of As I Lay Dying. On the cover was a German Expressionist painting of Sandra in her death throes.
Propped up by satin pillows, she was writing and drawing in that journal of hers, at a pace that was furious. She paused and showed me her work. Her handwriting was childlike: huge crooked letters, jagged and florid, a baroque scrawl. Her drawings were childlike and jagged as well: monsters with fangs and eyes stretched wide enough to take in death’s horror, accommodate death’s darkness.
Sandra was flicking the pages too quickly, and I couldn’t read what she had written, so I tried to take the book from her, but that made her angry; she held onto the book tightly, clutched it to her breast, and then this black tarry stuff started to leak from her eye . . .
Sandra died three summers ago. Her place was sold last year. I don’t know if her death was a determining factor, if the four other women were driven away by her raging, indignant ghost, or if it was simply a good time to sell. Surely the latter—real estate values in Venice continue to rise.
I’ve seen the guy who lives in her crimson box, lounging shirtless in a hammock in the front yard, drinking a beer, strumming a guitar. He sings softly, a song whose words only he can hear. Whenever I pass by, I want to ask him: Do you ever sense her, do you ever catch her flickering past you out of the corner of your eye?
To say that I was devastated by Sandra’s death would be an overstatement. That itch in my throat at the memorial was just a Pavlovian, physiological reaction to that stupid song. I was much more upset when Tim’s old dog died; when the vet applied the saline solution prior to the actual injection, I lost it. But Sandra’s passing definitely . . . affected me, more than say Mike’s or Robert’s. Unlike their deaths, Sandra’s somehow managed to . . . penetrate me.
Emotionally, I mean. Not metaphysically; there was nothing even faintly supernatural about it like that business with Eun Kang.
Though the frightful wailing that must have been Sandra—a distorted song, nothing middle of the road about it, erupting from her mouth like lava as she lay dying—was that a somatic expression of pure pain, or her calling out to me, reaching out? As she lay on her deathbed, did she really perform a kind of vanishing act; did her mind leave her body and fly around like a witch on her broomstick, capable of flying anywhere, at any desired speed, at any height?
And the dream where I was with her, where I was sitting so near I inhaled her death stench—that’s the only dream I’ve ever had where my olfactory senses were working. When I recounted the dream to a mutual colleague Alma, at a faculty dinner where martinis were involved, she was impressed: “That wasn’t just a dream, baby, that was Sandra trying to get back in touch with you; that was a vision.”
I’ve since been unfaithful to Sandra; I’ve dreamt of others who have gone—as long as the dead are willing to inhabit my dreams, my sleep will always be troubled.
I wish I could train my unconscious and pay Sandra a return visit, so I could get another look at that book of hers, her death book, so I could . . . understand what it’s like. Dying, I mean. Of all the books in the world, that’s the one I most want to read. Would you like to read it with me? We could read it together. Someone must have inherited it; I should ask around. I would do just about anything to get my hands on that book.
Or maybe not. If I read what’s in those pages, it would surely have a detrimental impact; I might never sleep again.