of the most serene kind, but still the Buddha sensed that he was there, and so the Buddha reached out one small delicate hand, around whose wrist jangled a silver bracelet hung with tiny bells, to grasp his own hand gently and reassuringly.
He was surprised to find the Buddha’s hands so soft, so fleshy—and his were fingers which surely had never worked any tool cruder than an ivory paintbrush. It was the moist hand of a spoiled child’s. As would be expected, he knelt and kissed the back of the Buddha’s hand, and he tasted strong scented honey where his lips had touched flesh, honey which had been mixed with rare oils and smelled of heaven. The Buddha stretched himself further in his recumbent posture, still contemplating the lotus, and he smiled his placid, enigmatic smile, eyes still closed.
“So this is how I am to, to… depart?” he asked the reclining figure, but of course the Buddha would not understand English, and merely smiled.
“I mean, is this all there is to it? Is it really so simple?”
The Buddha smiled even wider and opened his enormous, dark, lovely, almond-shaped eyes.
Seeing such beauty, lost in such unutterable beauty, he—or that ghost of himself, his avatar in the game—could only collapse into mirth, could only dissolve into the merriest laughter one can imagine. If this was all he had to fear!
He exited the program, shut down his laptop, and sat for a long time in the dark staring at nothing at all.
The Flight
So this then is death (think, think hard!), a sudden death under these leaves; it happened when you closed your eyes and did not hurt a bit. They’ve buried you deep and run off to play— hear them shrieking now out by the burning refuse pile, like blackbirds, like schoolgirls, fading now fifty feet now ten thousand miles away. (Think harder still!) Death you have found to be still warm moist with the smell of leaves drying dying curling brown in November. This is after all peace and coolness, yes it would be fine to sleep here forever and a day like time in a storybook. Feel the grass bristling under you, and above you pinpoints of gray autumn light through the leaves, like summer in the hayloft, dusty light between the rafters. That was a different kind of death lying there in the straw—sunnier, dizzier. No dancing no singing Have you seen the ghost of Tom long white bones with the skin all gone—Mary and Elizabeth and Daniel and Lee and Ellen around and around and merry-go-round this pile of leaves, then gone (gone? think!), the world gone away with them.
So think—death! To be dead and buried, tasting the earth soft and black and bitter in your mouth for all time. Sinking deeper deeper year after year endlessly—first flesh then bones then earth itself. Think: thinking nothing dreaming nothing you are nothing. Nothing at all so we must become nothing at all. Like an empty room an empty glass just a breeze that came and went in the dark empty sky. Not even a breath not a sound nor song. Only silence and silence and silence.
They went away without you, then: Have you seen the ghost of Tom.... Though your ghost is still inside you, afraid to come out to show them—trapped like the Holy Ghost in the golden box at church. Still it is better this way, to be dead and no one to know, trying all the same not to breathe in that sour wet dead smell, that sad lost smell which is autumn which is the year stamping The End upon itself. Months will have to pass, the snow will bury you again, rains and spring come, sending weeds winding up through your hair, and summer sun, bones powdering away in the heat. By then they’ll have all forgotten, gone away with the world. Years will pass and things will change out there, too: everyone will be different or dead themselves. For good. They will forget sure enough; you will forget them. That’s reason to cry, but there will be no more crying now. The dead don’t anything. Too tired too cold too hungry for crying or even thinking (but still you will) now.
Mary and Elizabeth and Daniel and Lee and Ellen used to take turns locking each other and you into the hall closet when Mom and Dad were away—that was a close space, a confinement like this (more inside the mind than out there). Among the tree ornaments and shoeboxes and smelly old mothballed clothes and rattling hangers, cobwebs and must in the eyes and nose and throat, trying to think nothing nothing, of nothing. Outside they’d count the minutes—who would last longest? Squeeze your eyes shut tight—don’t want to see what or who’s (here in the darkest dark—and if your eyes are shut ghosts can’t scare you. Blind as a mole buried deep underground, like now, the victim unable to stand or stretch or, finally, breathe. A little rehearsal for death it was, learning what it’s like in that box, that coffin they shut you up in sooner or later. Then they expect you to fly sunward toward heaven—but how could anyone nailed tight shut like that? Just think, though, of God’s Holy Ghost in that golden tabernacle in back of the altar at St. Paul’s, a smaller space by far than a closet or a heap of leaves, yet God is the biggest thing in the world is the world and heaven both (hell you never believed in, or tried not to). He sees all with eyes sealed and knows all within that puzzling little box. The same with the priest who knows all your sins, especially your deepest ones, even in the dark when you can’t see his face or your own hands. He shines his flashlight into the blackest depths of your soul: no place to hide. Which is why they make you sit in that box in the first place. Inside there is like this, under these leaves, no place to hide, trapped, dead.
But they say you rise again anyway. Imagine rising up out of the leaves like smoke from a bonfire, the soul toward heaven. Enough to make you dizzy-sick like on a merry-go-round. Leaves in autumn smell like burning tobacco; you long for the smoke in your lungs like Mom and Dad’s cigarettes. Which they say will be the death of them. So think of them: going from lap to lap as they sat and smoked in the backyard last summer, watching the bats rising from the chimneys at dusk, following them up and up into the farthest invisible, or with sisters and brothers out on the fence-rails, craning necks to see the most distant clouds or fireworks over the drive-in or satellites or falling stars, knowing that is not even half the way to heaven. Once you thought you might see that far, however—late at night on your back on the cold metal roof of one of the junked cars in the yard, staring into deepest blackest space, trying somehow to penetrate with bare eyes as far as possible between and beyond those stars those distant lost galaxies. Getting dizzy then, too, a little queasy in the stomach, feverish in the head. Yet space goes on and on and on and on for all eternity like death. And only like death.
That’s what we’re told but you always come up against a kind of wall out there—and never never can you see over it or through it to what’s on the other side, though it might be heaven; there must be a heaven. (That’s what they tell you in church, that’s what you want most and can’t have, at least not now.) Thinking after all is really only remembering, so you try to remember back back as far farther than you can go. All those years went whirling down somewhere; they might be revealed again with strong eyes searching. Try, but you can’t. Only an emptiness is there, space without space, darkness without the dark, not even silence. Before memory before birth, then—death or something like it. And the future—trying to think of it only shows the same, a void. Things are spliced up in life into past/present/future, but in death of course they’re all the same and impenetrable. Think think think but you can’t you’ve reached the limit—and failing that, the farthest thing you can remember, the last thing before it all drops off into the unknown, is a bed. Yes, that’s right—sleeping in a big cool bed in a strange room with the curtains of tall windows (ghost curtains) and a white face outside looking in or maybe it was the moon. You drifted out to sleep on that big boat of a bed, hit a rock in your dreams, washed ashore at an odd hour, terrified, wondering where am I? who am I? what was I? A snail clinging to a rock at the lake or a god as broad and blue as the sky? Right then you got an idea of what life before birth is like, or after death—neither snail nor god. Things stop at that point, though, at the brink. But there’s no reason now to try to remember and know, not now when death washes all the you in you away. (An
d they look at you, asking what you must be thinking when your eyes look away—such a serious growing strange boy but no wiser no more talented than the rest.)
Brothers and sisters crying to each other like blackbirds over the fields have run through the pasture among the horses among the cattle and out again into the barnyard still louder. Please please please someone’s trying hard to be dead, though noises shouldn’t bother you; they should everyone and everything remain on the outside of it all, like when you’re falling asleep, ear pressed to another, becalmed world. If death is like sleep, then, the dream to come will be filled with blackbirds, red-winged blackbirds.... Walking through the fields early last summer to the woods, you came to a space a darker shadow within the trees, an opening in the darkness into a deeper darkness, where a black storm-cloud of birds had descended with a roar a great whirring of wings—you walked into the jet-blackness, the heart of the flock, felt yourself being lifted up into their twittering screeching midst, up and up like madness into deafening restless thousand-eyed blackness, thinking
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