When you die, and your earthly self begins turning into your disintegrated self, you radiate an intense current of energy. There is always energy given off when a thing turns into its opposite, when love, for instance, turns into hate. There are always sparks at those extreme points. But life turning into death is the most extreme of extreme points. So just after you die, the sparks are really stupendous. Really magical and explosive.
I’ve seen cadavers shining like stars. I’m the only person I’ve ever heard of who has. Almost everyone senses something, though, some vitality. That’s why you get resistance to the idea of cremation or organ donation. “I want to be in one piece,” people say. Even Matt, who claimed there was no soul and no afterlife, wrote a RS. in his suicide note that he be buried intact.
As if it would have made any difference to his energy emission. No matter what you do—slice open the flesh, dissect everything, burn everything—you’re in the path of a power way beyond your little interferences.
I grew up in a nice, normal, happy family outside a small town in New Jersey. My parents and my brother are still living there. My dad owned a flower store. Now my brother owns it. My brother is three years older than I am, a serious, remote man. But loyal. When I made the headlines he phoned to say that if I needed money for a lawyer, he would give it to me. I was really touched. Especially as he was standing up to Carol, his wife. She got on the extension and screamed, “You’re sick! You should be put away!”
She’d been wanting to tell me that since we were thirteen years old.
I had an animal cemetery back then. Our house was beside a woods and we had three outdoor cats, great hunters who tended to leave their kills in one piece. Whenever I found a body, usually a mouse or a bird, I took it into my bedroom and hid it until midnight. I didn’t know anything about the ritual significance of the midnight hour. My burials took place then because that’s when I woke up. It no longer happens, but I was such a sensitive child that I think I must have been aroused by the energy given off as day clicked over into the dead of night and, simultaneously, as the dead of night clicked over into the next day.
In any case, I’d be wide awake. I’d get up and go to the bathroom to wrap the body in toilet paper. I felt compelled to be so careful, so respectful. I whispered a chant. At each step of the burial I chanted. “I shroud the body, shroud the body, shroud little sparrow with broken wing.” Or “I lower the body, lower the body…”And so on.
Climbing out the bathroom window was accompanied by: “I enter the night, enter the night…” At my cemetery I set the body down on a special flat rock and took my pyjamas off. I was behaving out of pure inclination. I dug up four or five graves and unwrapped the animals from their shrouds. The rotting smell was crucial. So was the cool air. Normally I’d be so keyed up at this point that I’d burst into a dance.
I used to dance for dead men, too. Before I climbed on top of them, I’d dance all around the prep room. When I told Matt about this he said that I was shaking my personality out of my body so that the sensation of participating in the cadaver’s energy eruption would be intensified. “You’re trying to imitate the disintegration process,” he said.
Maybe—on an unconscious level. But what I was aware of was the heat, the heat of my danced-out body, which I cooled by lying on top of the cadaver. As a child I’d gently wipe my skin with two of the animals I’d just unwrapped. When I was covered all over with their scent, I put them aside, unwrapped the new corpse and did the same with it. I called this the Anointment. I can’t describe how it felt. The high, high rapture. The electricity that shot through me.
The rest, wrapping the bodies back up and burying them, was pretty much what you’d expect.
It astonishes me now to think how naive I was. I thought I had discovered something that certain other people, if they weren’t afraid to give it a try, would find just as fantastic as I did. It was a dark and forbidden thing, yes, but so was sex. I really had no idea that I was jumping across a vast behavioural gulf. In fact, I couldn’t see that I was doing anything wrong. I still can’t, and I’m including what happened with Matt. Carol said I should have been put away, but I’m not bad-looking, so if offering my body to dead men is a crime, I’d like to know who the victim is. Carol has always been jealous of me. She’s fat and has a wandering eye. Her eye gives her a dreamy, distracted quality that I fell for (as I suppose my brother would eventually do) one day at a friend’s thirteenth birthday party. It was the beginning of the summer holidays, and I was yearning for a kindred spirit, someone to share my secret life with. I saw Carol standing alone, looking everywhere at once, and I chose her.
I knew to take it easy, though. I knew not to push anything. We’d search for dead animals and birds, we’d chant and swaddle the bodies, dig graves, make popsicle-stick crosses. All by daylight. At midnight I’d go out and dig up the grave and conduct a proper burial.
There must have been some chipmunk sickness that summer. Carol and I found an incredible number of chipmunks, and a lot of them had no blood on them, no sign of cat. One day we found a chipmunk that evacuated a string of foetuses when I picked it up. The foetuses were still alive, but there was no saving them, so I took them into the house and flushed them down the toilet.
A mighty force was coming from the mother chipmunk. It was as if, along with her own energy, she was discharging all the energy of her dead brood. When Carol and I began to dance for her, we both went a little crazy. We stripped down to our underwear, screamed, spun in circles, threw dirt up into the air. Carol has always denied it, but she took off her bra and began whipping trees with it. I’m sure the sight of her doing this is what inspired me to take off my undershirt and underpants and to perform the Anointment.
Carol stopped dancing. I looked at her, and the expression on her face stopped me dancing, too. I looked down at the chipmunk in my hand. It was bloody. There were streaks of blood all over my body. I was horrified. I thought I’d squeezed the chipmunk too hard.
But what had happened was, I’d begun my period. I figured this out a few minutes after Carol ran off. I wrapped the chipmunk in its shroud and buried it. Then I got dressed and lay down on the grass. A little while later my mother appeared over me.
“Carol’s mother phoned,” she said. “Carol is very upset. She says you made her perform some disgusting witchcraft dance. You made her take her clothes off, and you attacked her with a bloody chipmunk.”
“That’s a lie,” I said. “I’m menstruating.”
After my mother had fixed me up with a sanitary napkin, she told me she didn’t think I should play with Carol any more. “There’s a screw loose in there somewhere,” she said.
I had no intention of playing with Carol any more, but I cried at what seemed like a cruel loss. I think I knew that it was all loneliness from that moment on. Even though I was only thirteen, I was cutting any lines that still drifted out toward normal eroticism. Bosom friends, crushes, pyjama-party intimacy, I was cutting all those lines off.