Look, they’re about to lock the gates. But there’s one last thing I want to tell you. Why don’t you come closer? Why don’t we have a race to see who can disintegrate first?
Obviously I’m not at the cemetery. Obviously, I gave in. I didn’t want to—this book almost destroyed me, I came this close to destroying the book—but I felt . . . compelled, as if someone really were whispering in my ear, as if the dead were singing: We’ll let you write this book, but on one condition, that you listen to us, that you let us in, that you let in the disintegrations.
I’m not sure where you are, but I’m at home, at my desk, applying some finishing touches, touching the desk’s wood for the thousandth time, hoping I got the spell right and the book’s rotten odor will throw Death off my scent. I’m checking that the measurements are correct, so this book’s dimensions will match the circumference of the hole in the world and seal the hole and protect you and me and the people I love. I’m making sure the hidden clause is buried so deeply even God will overlook it.
Far from the order of the cemetery, I’m surrounded by the disorder of my office. All my files and death clippings are scattered about me. That book I assembled on Eun Kang is around here somewhere . . .
Closer at hand is Aino’s hourglass, the one she cradled in the palm of her hand. I forgot to mention she noticed me admiring it and gave it to me. I won’t need this where I’m going, she said.
Okay, okay; she didn’t exactly give it to me. She left that meeting early and left the hourglass on the table. The meeting ended, and as the room emptied, I lingered and picked up the tiny object, with the intention of giving it back to Aino the next time I saw her, but I don’t think there was a next time and by then I had grown attached to her hourglass. I keep it on my desk, despite my grandma’s warning about the dead coming back for their belongings; so far Aino hasn’t and I’ve made good use of it.
I’ve been sitting here for years, playing with that hourglass as I write, turning it up and down in the palm of my hand. I don’t feel like I’ve been writing so much as ingesting the dead, their lives ground down to a fine powder, like a cannibal engaged in a solemn ritual, striving to gain the dead’s attributes and powers of immortality, but all I’m left with is a bitter taste in my mouth.
I feel dazed, as if I’ve been knocking my head against the desk, like the brownish beetle that goes by the name of “deathwatch,” which has the peculiar habit of knocking its head against wood, producing a ticking, rapping sound. When heard in the dead of night, this causes superstitious people like you and me to believe the sound foretells a death in the house, hence the insect’s name. That insect evokes real feeling in other humans; it gets its message across clearly and succinctly, without any ambiguity.
By comparison, my attempts at communication are inferior; every day, with death, language reaches its limit. It has taken me this long to see that it is not a question of translation: the dead are a distinct species from us. A species so alien we cannot talk to them or write about them just as we cannot breed with a corpse or a skeleton; we cannot exchange genes or ideas.
But the book is nearly done and lately, I’ve been flicking that lighter, a memento from my encounter with the guy at the cemetery; I keep it next to the hourglass. I’m flicking it right now. It’s relaxing. The little crowned skulls are a reminder that death is sovereign.
When I got home that night, I had a strange sensation, as if a feeling dark yet light as a black ribbon had fluttered through the gates, followed me home, and pinned itself to my chest. I ignored the feeling until I fell asleep and dreamt, not of the young man from the cemetery but the boy from UCLA. Inside the dream nothing happened—he didn’t say anything, he just stared at me—but I woke up to an awareness that something unspeakable had happened to him, as well as an awareness of something sticky on my belly. My first wet dream since I was a teenager. There was no connection between the content of the dream and my nocturnal emission; it had more to do with the dream’s intensity, an intensity that needed a way out . . .
Wide awake, I went to my office and looked up the UCLA case. It had been awhile since I’d last checked, and there had been some new information. The boy had never been found. The tests were wrong. The detectives got confused; those ashes belonged to some other boys. The case remains open. I have that picture of him on my pinup board; I never took it down. He’s still looking at me; over the years his smile has turned into a scowl. He’s still not talking to me, unless he’s talking at a volume that’s deafening . . .
I know what you’re thinking so let me be clear: I don’t believe there’s any link between the two boys, apart from a passing resemblance that incited the dream—the guy from the cemetery had a similarly fine bone structure. I’m not trying to suggest anything mystical. If the dead do return, regardless of the form, I doubt they would return whole; souls are way too intricate to enter unbroken into one body. I would wager souls multiply, divide, and subdivide, split like atoms into unsuspecting bodies, which would explain why we all feel so scattered, ’cos we’re made up of the splintered bits of former human beings . . . Though if the kid isn’t dead and somehow showed up at my door, naturally I would make every attempt to restore what is his, as far as this is possible . . .
The most troubling aspect of that encounter with the guy was my own reaction. I haven’t been back to Holy Cross since then. I decided it wasn’t in my interests. Not only had I failed to understand the dead, but I was getting too comfortable around them. The living have never put me at such ease. These days, I leave the house only when necessary. As long as you lay low, stay quiet, don’t let D___h hear you, It might just . . . glaze over you, go off in search of all the other names.
Of course you’re free to go to the cemetery yourself during visiting hours. Maybe you could convince me to meet you, we could retrace our steps, I’d show you the message the guy carved in his unintelligible scrawl; it’s actually on the bench where I always sat, by the grave of the Tin Man. He made me promise not to tell anyone what he wrote, and I plan to keep that promise, but you could try and decipher it. Maybe I would even go through with staying there all night. We could hide out in that concrete void until they lock the gates. My mind could be changed if you made the right offer.
Until then, I’ll avert my gaze. At work, I make a concerted effort not to look at Holy Cross. Like it’s not even there. Three hundred acres of nothing. Alistair, I tell myself, don’t look at it; look away.
Though sometimes, on the bus, I do catch myself gazing at the hearses on the way to the cemetery. I know I’ve been rambling, giddy in your . . . presence, but that’s what I wanted to tell you about.
The hearses slow the bus’s progress down, but that’s okay. The hearse driver is going to work, just like me. The corpse is going to work too. The hearses are shiny and black and luxurious, like limousines.
Driving a hearse is probably not that dissimilar to driving a limo. Both hearse drivers and chauffeurs are required to wear black—black suits and black gloves and black caps—and the relationship between the hearse driver and his client is formal and stiff, similar to the relationship between a chauffeur and his rich client.
Yet in some situations, the rapport between the hearse driver and his corpse must be easy-going, like the rapport established between a cab driver and his paying customer. The driver probably asks the corpse lots of questions, such as, how did you die? Did it feel weird being sucked through the hole in the world? And, so what’s it like exactly, tell me, how dark is Death?
I’ve observed that hearses provide different levels of visibility: some hearses have tinted windows and black paneling on the sides, so you can’t see inside at all. These models remind me of those windowless panel vans that were around in the 1970s. Shaggin’ Wagons, we called them: vehicles in which teenagers got drunk and stoned and had sex.
Shaggin’ Wagons were distinct from hearses, in that they were typically spray-painted with lurid designs, customized to showcase the driver’s personality. Hearses tend to be fairly plain, as if the designers of these automobiles are intimating that death destroys the singular, the idiosyncratic, a corpse has no personality, or that death is ornate enough and there’s no need for embellishment.
Distinctions aside, and contradicting the lack of visibility, just like when you spied someone climbing into a Shaggin’ Wagon—you knew why they were entering the vehicle—when you spot someone being carried into a hearse, you know the exact reason they’re going in. So perhaps the relationship between the driver and the corpse is as carnal and amorous as the charge between two lovers.
Other hearses have windows with clear glass, so you can see the licorice-black upholstery, but the windows in the rear of the vehicle always have curtains. The curtains are drawn to varying extents.
Some are drawn partly and some are drawn fully, obliterating the view. I’m uncertain of the degrees of symbolism—fully drawn, half-drawn, quarter-drawn—but I know I respond most strongly to those hearses where the curtains are almost drawn completely, open just a few inches.
That glimpse of the coffin, the sun illuminating a fraction of its surface—in the sun’s rays, a coffin built from polished red wood glows like glace cherries in a liquor-drunk fruitcake—makes me want to know what’s going on inside the hearse even more. Sometimes I look so hard trying to see, I get a crook in my neck!
At times I fantasize about biting the bullet, getting my license and becoming a hearse driver. This might satisfy my curiosity. But what’s the point in learning how to drive if you can’t drive yourself from the morgue to the cemetery? Anyway, I’ll get to see a hearse firsthand, close up, one day.
On that day, my corpse, my last possession—life is just a long list of possessions: my cradle, my name, my grave, yet does my corpse truly belong to me?—the corpse bearing my name, the corpse that is imitating me and is therefore an impostor, will be placed in a coffin of a style that is yet to be determined and loaded gently or clumsily into the back of a hearse. The hearse will be shiny like the ones I’ve seen; no, this hearse will be shinier, so shiny I would be able to discern my own reflection in its glossy blackness, if I could still see; no, not just me, everyone will be able to discern their own reflection in the exterior of my hearse, yes, mine.
I imagine this last ride will be like those long drives we went on as kids with our parents. I had to sit in the back of my dad’s station wagon, with his gardening tools that were not incompatible with the tools of a gravedigger, his shovel scraping against me, resting my head on a big bag of fertilizer, a hint of the fertilizer I will become, an indication of the stink from inside my coffin that will creep into the hearse’s deodorized interior. Time inside a hearse will have that dragged-out quality it had in childhood; there’ll be the same distorted sense of space and time converging into something . . . endless.
Just like a kid, my corpse will be excited, overly so, but will soon grow bored. Curtains or no curtains, I won’t have the option of looking out the hearse’s back window. Unable to lie there quietly, my corpse will fidget in its coffin and call out to the hearse driver, who, dressed in his skintight uniform, will be unable to hear me:
Are we there yet? Are we there?