“He should have moved a long time ago,” Tom said, throwing a bundle of old clothes into the Goodwill pile. They appeared streaked with blood, or feces. But that couldn’t be—he knew that sort of thing would have been washed, or burned. Maybe it was just plain old mud, as if they’d been used to dam a flood.
“I was telling him all the time he should move in with me. But he wanted to stay independent. Sometimes you see someone close to you doing something, or living a certain way that you know isn’t good for them, but what do you do? Even if you know you know better, they have to make their own decisions, right?”
Tom dropped the clothes and rubbed his hands briskly against his jeans. “Unless they’re dead.”
John turned his head, a puzzled set to his lips. “Beg your pardon?”
“I say unless they’re dead. They can’t make their own decisions if they’re dead, and even if they’ve already made them those of us still living can just pretend we never heard, and do what we want.”
“What are you talking about?” John rubbed his scalp in irritation. Tom had seen the gesture before, when Willie was being particularly stubborn about something.
“He wanted to be cremated, John. And you went ahead and buried him, you and your friends. Because that’s what you wanted.”
“Where’d you get that idea? Willie never said …”
“He would have told you—you were his lover. You were responsible for the arrangements. He must’ve just told me because he wasn’t sure you would do it. But I was a coward, I admit it. I couldn’t deal with it—I couldn’t deal with you and Willie’s other friends. But you should have done what he asked for, John. Christ, it was his last … “Don’t let them bury me,” he said.
“You stupid fool.” John stared at the bed, and the piles of clothes. Tom could see red dust drifting out of the empty sleeves and pant legs. “It wasn’t in the will. He told you because he wanted to spare me. In him I saw not only the one person who’d ever loved me dissolving into nothing, but I saw myself and all our gay friends. Disappearing like everyone had always wanted us to. He told you so that you could tell me. He trusted you to carry the message.”
Nothing more was said until all of Willie’s things were packed and sorted. Tom found the enormous size of the pile going to Goodwill vaguely upsetting. But he trusted John’s judgment. John knew that Tom was a fool, and John was correct.
“It goes too fast,” John said finally. “A lifetime of things and they can haul it all away in hours. I’m afraid of disappearing like that. Like Willie.”
“I’m afraid, too,” Tom said.
Over the next few weeks Tom immersed himself in scattershot, seemingly aimless research. When the secretary asked which client to bill his hours to, Tom gave Willie’s name.
His hands shook as he ran them through a large volume on the meat industry, counting off the steps involved in butchering cattle in a meat packing operation. He made notes and compared these steps with the standard operating procedures used by pathologists during an autopsy and morticians during an embalming.
He buried himself in the pictures in a book called Techniques of Forensic Investigation. They made his head feel as if it was about to split (gunshot wound? axe?) but he persisted, wondering if these techniques and procedures might have some sort of theological significance. (The rate of discorporation is inversely proportional to our impatience to arrive in heaven, all our sins tattooed onto our naked backs.)
He dug up the geological surveys for his part of the city, for the emptiness next door. He carefully examined the figures concerning the composition of the soil, looking for something of Willie there, and, finally, something of himself.
The next day he was in bed, quite unable to climb up out of the gritty darkness.
Don’t let them bury me.
Poe would have understood such a request. Back then, Tom thought, many people might have been buried alive. Or embalmed alive—he supposed that still came first. Filling your body full of inert chemical was the logical preparation for your own eternity of inertness. Without advanced medical procedures, how could they have been sure? Maybe in a hundred years, Tom thought, we’ll discover how many we’re still burying alive today. We, the living. Always making decisions for the dead. But was there really such a clear distinction between us and them? A breath of wind, a drip of moisture, a vague presence of heat—not much more than that, certainly. Walking dirt and dancing clay.
Under his feet, under his building, the dead were swimming vast distances underground, endlessly seeking rest.
He was out of bed now, but he had not been back to work. He could not bring himself to go out. Outside his apartment, the giant hole in the earth grew bigger every day, a grave that swallowed larger and larger chunks of his world.
It’s coming to get me, too, Willie.
A portion of the neighboring streets had buckled and collapsed. The city had rented out the parking lot of his apartment building and moved the homeless statues from the park as a precaution. The workers had conducted this operation in haste, however—nobody liked working too close to “the hole”—resulting in considerable damage. Several of the metal statues had massive splits, arms and legs had separated, and one of the stone statues had been reduced almost to powder. They lay on the pavement below his apartment window, a jumble of disinterred body parts, the dark, rich soil still clinging to their secret surfaces.
Several days of alternating intense heat and wind served to loosen the dirt that was now omnipresent in the neighborhood. It had spread out from the massive hole, dark and reddish as blood, to creep down the streets and alleys, filter into the cracks and mortar that held the walls together, staining stone, metal, and glass with its rich color.
Tom was reminded of childhood days spent in the sandbox his father had built in their back yard: four walls of rough timber holding back a foot-deep mound of sand whose look of sparkling cleanliness seemed impossible, given its constant use. He and his brother Rick would play in the sandbox for hours, even on days when the sun was so intense the crystalline specks in the sand sparked like bits of broken glass and by late afternoon had begun to burn them, and then the grit of it irritated the oval patches of burn that had formed above their waist bands and on the backs of their legs.
Tom remembered that sand as having remarkable powers of adherence; he’d find traces of it in his clothes, in his bed, drifting in narrow ridges through his toy box for days afterward. Sometimes there’d be enough of it pressed into his pajamas and bedclothes that his dreams that night would be about endless days at the beach, lying half-buried with the crabs creeping up on his small face. He’d never quite understood the reason for the terror in those dreams, since he’d always loved burying himself in the sand. Rick, too. Sometimes they’d be “tree men”, the larger part of themselves rooted deep inside the sandbox, only their small, growing heads exposed. Tom and Rick had seen their dad dig up roots out of the back yard—the roots had gone all soft and crumbly like they’d become part of the ground. Rick told him that would happen to them, too, if they stayed buried too long. That’s what happened to dead people, he’d said; they fell apart and fell apart until they were the ground.
Rick died in Vietnam. Later Tom found out from his dad that they’d sent back only part of the body. The rest was part of that big overseas sandbox.
By the time Tom had decided he couldn’t take another day of staring out his apartment windows at the ever-widening hole—now wide enough that he was beginning to think the hole surrounded his building, making an eventual trip outside compulsory if he was to accurately evaluate his current living conditions—a renewed vigor of excavations in combination with high winds solved the problem: his windows became so caked with red-brown dirt he could no longer see out of them.
The building owners no longer provided window washing—there would be no point until the project had been completed. Tom also suspected it would be difficult to get anyone willing to wash windows with that kind of emptiness yawning
below them, like working over the edge of the Grand Canyon. On the other side of the glass he could hear the thick rumble of machinery as it chewed still deeper into the earth—he wondered if they had changed the plans to permit more stories underground. Tornado or perhaps hurricane protection?
Or maybe the workers were simply feeling the kind of frustration he’d been experiencing all along: the project seemed simply to refuse to get done. Now they were expending all their energies in a day and night marathon of desperation, attempting to finish off the hole before it could turn and swallow them, bulldozers, backhoes, and all.
Don’t let them bury me.
One morning Tom awakened to no gas or electricity, no phone. Only a trickle of water from the faucet to refresh him, to keep the dust out of his eyes and off his hot face. He didn’t bother to check with the super. He strongly suspected that in their rush to completion the workers had accidentally severed the service lines leading into the building. He was tempted for the first time in days to go down to the front door and out to the parking lot to see how things were progressing next door (and to check on the condition of the statues, whose broken images had filled his dreams many times of late), but he resisted. He could wait until all power was restored by the professionals.
That night in his dreams Tom was in an elevator rocketing deep into the earth’s core. He woke up suddenly with his eyes burning, his mouth tasting of sand.
The windows had become so filled with dirt that almost no light got through. His mouth was sick with its own taste of dirt and dry flesh. He spent hours staring at his dirt-packed windows, imagining that he was looking into a kind of aquarium, the dead swimming slowly through the dirt on the other side of the glass. But because the dead had been there so long, and because there were so many of them, they had become so like the medium they swam in, so much a part of the dirt, that he could not tell the difference between the two.
Don’t let them bury me.
Finally he had no choice but to take that elevator trip he had dreamed of. Several days of minimal food had left him weak. As he staggered down the corridor to the elevator he imagined himself falling into his own shadow, but there was no light to cast a shadow. Confused, he thought he might be the shadow cast by a self who was always behind him, whom he could not see even if he turned around quickly.
He sank into the cool, earthy darkness of the elevator, pressed the button for the lobby, and let it drag him down.
He must have fallen asleep, because he could clearly see the elevator taking him down through millions of years of strata. When he woke he could hardly breathe because of the pressure. His lungs felt on the verge of collapse. The elevator coughed him out at the bottom of the run.
Down here the walls were mud. And flesh. Mud becoming flesh and flesh becoming mud. Willie and anyone else Tom had ever loved was a whisper lost somewhere within the movements of the ground.
He could smell body odor and the mingled scents of cooking, the blossoming odors of human beings working and meeting and loving, millions of such smells buried deep underground.
He suddenly realized he was naked—he’d left his apartment without bothering to put his clothes on. But the mud had smeared so thickly across his chest and thighs he actually felt modest.
He wanted to tell them he loved them all. He wanted to say things he’d never been able to say before. He wanted to speak to the mud and have the mud speak back.
When he’d been in his sandbox with his brother the sand had been like love to him, warm and caressing, insinuating itself so quickly into every part of him.
And yet here, as he began to speak of his regrets and the mud began to melt and the dark earth pushed into his throat to meet the words, he knew there was no love here. He had gone past love completely, to something far more elemental.
Tom tried desperately to hold on to his body, the soft bleeding slide of his own flesh, but his body was gone.
Dark Shapes in the Road
It was dark when Victor reached his mother-in-law’s house. He hated driving in the dark—he hated it. But this had to be done in the dark if it was going to be done at all.
The fact was: Victor hated driving any time. It was a fear of the automobile that had come so early in his life he thought he might have been born with it. Maybe it had become, since the car’s first invention, a universal, almost a genetic fear. He was sure that most people experienced this anxiety at one time or other, after being in bumper-to-bumper traffic, after witnessing a terrible accident. The car had established its martyrs: James Dean, Albert Camus, Jayne Mansfield, Isadora Duncan, Teddy Pendergrass, Jessica Savitch. And even its own version of ultimate hell: the gridlock. Victor found it easy to theorize about the nature of the automobile. Or, rather, he found it necessary; it kept the machine at a safer distance. But he knew that in the final analysis the theories were irrelevant. He knew that all his obsession with automotive safety was ultimately futile. The bottom line was that the automobile killed.
He cut the lights as he turned the station wagon into the driveway. Then he killed the engine and let the car drift. It rolled forward: huge, dark, almost silent. Like a great shark. Without the lights it was hard to see, and for a moment Victor imagined the wagon drifting over an embankment in the dead of night, or into a concrete pillar. All because he had forgotten to turn on the lights.
His wife had never understood his fear. She didn’t drive herself, so she had no conception of the risk involved, and Victor believed that made her a danger to their children.
“It’s not safe, Rachel.”
“You worry too much. Other people let their kids ride like this all the time. You can overprotect kids, you know.”
“This is a station wagon. Children shouldn’t ride in the back of a station wagon with no seat belts. What if there’s an accident?”
“Oh, Victor. You just like to make rules …”
“How are you going to feel if we’re rear-ended and their little heads go smashing through all that glass? How are you going to feel to see your own kids ripped open and lying in the road?”
Ann and Timmy were crying softly. Victor wondered if it was just his shouting, or if they understood what he was talking about. He hoped they did; he hoped they got afraid enough to always be cautious.
“See now … you’ve scared them! You’re sick, you know that, Victor? You’re really a sick person.”
But Victor had only the vaguest notion of what she was so upset about. He was too busy imagining his children’s deaths, underneath the inexorable wheels or behind them, and already he grieved for them. How could he stand it? How could he ever bear up under the weight of those awful wheels?
Thoughts of Rachel’s carelessness angered Victor even now, when he needed to concentrate. There was too much at stake. Leaving the lights off as he entered the driveway was incautious, but necessary. Victor bit into his lower lip and let the car drift on. He turned the wheel when he figured he’d reached the spot at the corner of the house where the driveway curved around back. Almost immediately he was beneath the window he wanted. He got out of the car and climbed up on the hood, then onto the car’s roof.
This had originally been Rachel’s room, and the kids always slept there when they visited. He was in and out within minutes, Ann bundled sleepily into his arms, Timmy staggering as he dropped from the window sill on to the car. Timmy began to whimper.
“Shhhh.”
“But my feet hurt, Daddy.”
“It’s okay—I’m sorry, son,” Victor whispered. “You can go back to sleep once we get into the car.” They climbed down and Victor put them both into the back seat.
“Is Mommy coming? I’m scared.”
Victor gunned the engine and raced backwards out of the driveway. “Don’t be afraid. Daddy’s here.” Ann was awake now, crying. Victor gripped the steering wheel until his hands hurt. The car squealed on to the street. It can’t happen now. Lights were going on all over the house. He could hear his wife and mother-in-law shouting. “Da
ddy’s here and it’s going to be fine.” He could barely control the tremor in his voice, but he didn’t want his kids to be afraid of him. “We’re all going to have a good time.” He sideswiped several trash cans as he roared down the street. He could hear Timmy starting to giggle. Then Ann joined in.
When Victor was a child the road itself had delivered up to him the perfect image for the true horror of the automobile. The highways around his home town were mostly gravel, and a trip down the mountain was a steadily increasing series of bone-rattling shakes and dancing auto parts. Victor was terrified, imagining the car careening off the edge of the road and down an embankment at any of a dozen different curves. The fact that the accident had never occurred just made it seem all the more inevitable.
On one such trip into town the family came across an accident at a narrow place in the road. An old pick-up had tried to squeeze past a larger truck with a load of dead horses for the rendering plant. The rendering truck turned over. A dead horse sprawled over the hood of the pick-up, pink and grey entrails decorating the radiator. Corpses covered the road and leaned against the wreckage. They looked uncomfortably like huge human corpses, dead giants dropped from the sky. The two drivers climbed over the mound of bodies, shouting at the top of their lungs. The dead had been forgotten. Victor imagined that the road and the automobile must make things like this happen daily.
He watched as his mother-in-law’s house finally vanished from his rear-view mirror. Rachel would be frantic. He hated to put her through the worry—Lord knows, Victor could identify with that kind of desperate worry for the kids—but she’d given him no choice. What finally finished things was a shopping trip Rachel had insisted they make the day after Thanksgiving, the busiest shopping day of the year. He’d argued for two hours. But she’d insisted—they would save money.
Traffic was bumper-to-bumper to the shopping malls. People were sticking their heads out and screaming at the drivers ahead of them. One man was ramming a car that had cut him off.
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