The Book of Resting Places

by Thomas Mira y Lopez

  Now it sits by her living room window, weighing down the record player I gave her for Christmas. This is not theft to her, but an act of reclamation, something her own mother would have wanted. “She knew I appreciated these things more. They just don’t have an eye for them,” she says of her sisters as she says of me. “Did you see that awful rug Abby spent $500 on? It looks like a python regurgitated its prey!”

  When my mother finds an object she loves, she will say she’s bonded with it. It’s an attachment—to bond is to be bound—but it’s also something more. A bond is a covalence. Electrons shared, atoms stabilized, the life of one body tied to another. Possessions become both vocation and evocation. If her house is to be looted, she’ll at least have the satisfaction of knowing how impressed everyone will be with her accumulations and arrangements, how at-home that print of her mother-in-law looks hung on the wall or how the iron bull on the record player catches the afternoon light. Her objects retain an objectivity; she displays them and they display her. She remains, as she likes to call herself, a picker, a salvager of the neglected and underappreciated.

  This is the fate of the old widowed woman: to fade into the room she’s spent her life arranging.

  The ba, the second part of the soul, was an avian sphinx, a bird with a human head. It rose from its burial chamber each morning to fly through the mastaba’s false doors and sun itself in the open air. The Egyptians believed birds’ chirping to be the conversations of bas, gossiping and flitting their day away in idle chitchat like two old friends over the telephone.

  When days or weeks slip by and I feel guilty for not having called her and it remains a mystery what she does with all her time in the house alone, no company save the over-vigilant poodle, my mother will tell me the next time we talk that she feels invisible. She forms these words slowly, as if a child puzzling over a new sentence. “I feel like I could just float off into the air and nobody would notice,” she says. Now, to fill her time, she holds conversations with the dead. She tells me she summons her parents into the room. I ask how she does it and she says, “I just open the door and invite them inside for a cup of tea.” Then, after a pause, she adds: “I ran into something I wrote a while ago. It was called, ‘I Only Talk to the Dead and Animals.’ Wouldn’t that be a good name for a story?”

  My mother visited Egypt in the late 1970s. This was with her niece Sarah, after Sarah’s high-school graduation. Sarah was in a bad place, my mother says, so she took her on a trip. My mother was thirty-four, Sarah seventeen. “Did you have a good time?” I ask. “Oh, we had the best time. We laughed and laughed. I’ve never laughed so much.” “About what?” “Well, Sarah had a mean camel. It tried to bite her. He had to wear a muzzle. And then Sarah’s stomach was acting up and she kept drinking Pepto-Bismol and so she had a Pepto-Bismol mustache. And did I ever tell you about ‘Tombstone Tooth’?” My mother wrote a book of short stories about a woman named Dinah, a character remarkably similar to her creator. “Tombstone Tooth,” an entry in the chronicles, was her elegy to a molar lost in Egypt. The stories were never picked up, though she likes to point out she had an agent who loved them. “I was in the garden of a restaurant on the Nile. I took a bite of pita bread and thought, ‘Why is this hard? I’m never coming back here again,’ and then I started to chew and realized I was missing a tooth. I was chewing on my own tooth!” And what else did she eat besides the pita? “I had a pigeon-egg omelet.” How was it? “It was quite gamey.” What was inside it? “Shit, Tom. What do you think? Pigeon eggs!”

  When I ask her to send me a copy of “Tombstone Tooth,” she hesitates. She has only the one, the file lost somewhere on an ancient computer. I say she could bring it the next time she visits. But when she lands in Tucson and unpacks her meticulous suitcase and sees a library copy of The Penguin Guide to Ancient Egypt in my bookcase, she exclaims she forgot to pack it. I believe her about as much as she believes Abby didn’t take the bull.

  She’s right to be suspicious. I do actually have a good eye for stuff. I write down her lines, her jokes, the little acts she puts on. I enter a conversation with her as she enters a room: immediately on the search for treasure to glean, for what nugget or object would look good if used for myself. I know that if I’m there to help her preserve her tomb, I may also be the one who robs it.

  Eventually, the Egyptians believed words and images could replace the possessions stored in mastabas. The deceased would be painted at a banquet table, surrounded by friends and family. Small stone statues called shabtis replaced sacrificial pets and servants. I imagine Celso breathing a sigh of relief. One could even summon the akh, the third part of the soul, by writing a letter to it. This was called se-akh: to make the dead live again. Hieroglyphs stood in for actual objects; if you wrote it, the word became the real thing.

  When I fly home for Christmas, my mother has the story’s pages laid out for me. She doesn’t explain why she changed her mind and I don’t question the gift. I hold the only copy in my hands, the flimsy three pages she clacked on the computer’s keyboard fifteen years ago to write. I know this will be all I’ll have left one day and so I read of alter-ego Dinah’s being dragged off to the Met with her family, “scooted past all the statues of naked Romans” by a mother trying her best to deny her knowledge of the male anatomy. And the “hard as a rock avocado salad” in the Met garden, and the realization, upon biting down, that “something was amiss in my mouth.” I read of the horror as she recognized the broken filling, and how Dinah throws this into the cafeteria fountain, wishing that her tooth feel no pain.

  This wish appears over and over again: when Dinah visits the dentist, the improbably named Dr. Needle, and he clamps the anesthetic mask down on her face; when Dinah samples the infamous pita-and-pigeon omelet in Egypt and exclaims, “They put teeth in their bread!”; when she loses the tooth a third time in Brazil, eating “shrimp and garlic” with her husband. And after she last visits Dr. Needle, who amputates the root with “what appeared to be wire cutters,” and she walks to the Hudson and tosses the tooth into its waters.

  “Tombstone Tooth” is, in part, self-parody. It’s another mastaba—self-deprecation as false door, a way to conceal the point where one can be hurt. But it also hides an underlying wish, a plea masked within the inane: to feel no pain in what remains of a life.

  I read up on Ancient Egyptian dentistry and learn my mother’s wish was not unfounded. Egyptians quite literally lost their bite, dieting on a grain that wore away their teeth’s surface and exposed raw nerves. A modern dentist describes their various dental ills as a “pain beyond words.” Mummies are found with mouthfuls of cavities, abscesses, and worn-down teeth that caused gangrene and sinus infections so severe they killed.

  The remedies for toothache were limited. For a loose tooth, there was honey, ground barley, and ochre. For gingivitis, celery, gum, and sycamore fruit. No real solution existed for cavities, at least no such thing as fillings or drilling tools—only linen soaked in fig juice and cedar oil, packed into the hole to reduce the pain. When no other options were available, the Egyptians used magic. On a few mummies, prosthetic work is found—a loose molar reattached to the mouth by a gold bridge after the patient’s death. This was done so that the body would become whole again, the tooth an amulet for the afterlife.

  When my mother tells me she summons the dead into her home, she doesn’t mention if my father is one of them. She doesn’t tell me if she moves over to the couch and invites him to sit once again in his green chair. She never says whether she welcomes him into her bed. When she asks if I ever dream about him, I don’t say that I do. I don’t say that in these dreams, he is alive and better but she is never there, as if I could only choose one or the other, and in this life I chose her, but in the next I chose him. I don’t tell her my memories of them together are disappearing. That while I remember them being in love, I no longer know what that means. That I’m afraid I’ll forget her as well when she dies. I too build
my mastabas.

  Instead, we discuss how much we love her stuff: The desk that belonged to Senator Sumner. The architectural vignette her mother gave her. The Alfonso Ossorio painting. The silver and gold cigarette cases, the rock-and-gem collection, the copper ball I brought back from Arizona, the size and weight of a musket shot. The enameled clocks she makes from scratch. The pictures of the three of us. The iron bull. How many flecks of skin, how many breaths must coat these objects microscopically, ready to unleash a mother of a curse on anyone who doesn’t heed her doormat or respect the years her hands must have worried over the fragments that have become her life?

  Or her afterlife.

  When it comes down to my mother’s existence, it depends on which one we’re talking about. Consider the old widow, asked to fill out her days within the rooms that were once shared with husband and son, biding her time in an apartment turned mausoleum. The possessions she loves don’t provide for any future survival, but her survival right now. They’re sustenance not for a hypothetical, storage-unit afterlife, but for the afterlife she’s currently within. They are her bond: what keeps her to life, what keeps her alive.

  Over the phone these days, her voice slows and occasionally slurs, the same way my father’s did in the months before he fell sick. She confuses names as often as she gets them right: I become my aunt, the dog, my father, or my grandfather, based on whatever spirit, animate or inanimate, she’s spoken to last. Now I know what her laugh hides: that her voice finally sounds, after all these years, like it could one day die.

  There’ll come a day when I enter her apartment, lock the door, and search for her in vain. This I know. I’ll pick up the phone and scroll through my contacts to call Home or Country and then finally Mom’s Cell. And I’ll realize she won’t pick up any of these, that she’s too far away to even regard the flip phone as extraterrestrial.

  And when this moment comes, I will open the door and invite her inside. Disregard the doormat, I say, and have a cup of tea. I’ll motion to the green chair and she’ll sit and her feet will bounce out the same rhythm on the same footstool. She’ll drum her hands on her lap and whistle “Celso! Celso!” for the dog. She’ll appraise her walls and they will look a bit threadbare. She’ll glare—aren’t I supposed to be caring for her? I ask what she takes in her tea and, before she can say, “Lots of sugar!” I dust a little ochre, give a squeeze or two of honey. I soak the tea bag in fig and cedar. She takes another look around and spies the cardboard boxes in place of end tables. She’ll ask, “My stuff? What have you done with all my stuff?” and I’ll tell her truthfully that I let the family in. I had no choice. And that after the plunder, I called Doyle Gallery and arranged a silent auction and many pieces were met with great appreciation. I say if you bind yourself to a substance, then some part of you remains with it. I say look at her and all her dead, how her fingerprints must now ghost so many homes. She seems a bit sad, clapping her hands again for the dog, and so I tell her I have a plan for everything. The house in the country will fetch a good haul, but before it hits the market, I will gather everyone’s ashes and find a nice spot out in an open field where there are plenty of birds to talk among themselves and where we will all be happy, no matter who digs us up. I tell her I will keep the iron bull. “And Celso?” she asks, slapping her hands on her thighs again, straining to hear the clatter of incoming toenails on hardwood. I reach down toward my feet and give the black lump a pat. I tell her I’ll keep the damn dog. I tell her he and I feel no pain, that we only speak to the dead and animals, but se-akh, whenever I miss her, I’ll just write down her name and there she’ll be.

  Overburden

  The story is almost always the same. Every six months or so, I make the trip from Tucson back to my old neighborhood in New York and discover yet another childhood landmark gone. Some landlord or other has forced a beloved store out of business, the rent raised a thousand percent, the real estate handed over to any number of bland chains—a Starbucks, a Janovic Plaza, an HSBC. Worse yet, the building itself has been torn down, or gutted and renovated into condominiums.

  I scurry away the names of these lost sites: The Movie Place, its sawdust floors and ladders reaching up to stacks of VHS; Meridiana, where the waiters served children a glass of red wine as long as they were with their parents; La Picola Cucina and its sandwiches drizzled with both olive oil and mayonnaise. With each disappearance, I feel my home reconstitute itself into something I no longer know. These places once formed the texture of a city so that their disappearance signals something perhaps obvious to many: a city loved is a city lost. With enough time, I fear, we become strangers to our own lives, as forgotten as those old stores, serving only as a backdrop for what will become the memories of others who now call our home home.

  As a result, I’ve become someone who hates to let things go. Friends tell me I linger. On the street, after dinner or a movie, the light changes from red to green to red, pedestrians curl around our small group, and still I babble on, drawing out goodnights to exasperating lengths. In my free time, I seek the places where you never have to say goodbye. Cemeteries, I’m always hopeful, may prove the one permanent place in a city. Where better for someone like me than a place filled with what we can’t bear to leave? Who would ever build a bank or condo or coffee franchise on top of that?

  When I moved to Tucson a few years ago, I thought things would be different. Here was a dry and dusty sprawl of a city, so slow-moving and sun-scorched that older laws of geology seemed to hold sway. The strip malls were stuck in the 1970s, peppered with the type of bizarre novelty shops long extinguished in New York: Ken the Bug Guy’s Exotic Pet Shop; the Tucson Map and Flag Center; Metaphysics World, a specialty store for “psychics and astrologers.” The IHOPs still served pancakes in 1950s A-frame chalets. The city’s unofficial motto rallied residents to “Keep Tucson Shitty.”

  But the longer I stayed, the more this stasis proved a mirage. The downtown underwent its inevitable gentrification, to which I surely contributed. This was deemed a much-needed development. A light-rail opened, university high-rises popped up, and the cash-only dive bar downtown, sandwiched between a World of Beer franchise and a gourmet olive oil shop, announced its closing.

  Prior to this in 2004, Pima County decided to build a new courthouse. Its presence would catalyze the downtown’s renovation: at seven stories tall and 258,000 square feet, the courthouse would be easily distinguishable from the surrounding warehouses, manufacturing plants, and parking garages. Gone were Coconuts Nightclub, Boyer Motor Co., and Old Pueblo Billiard and Bowling Parlor, long-standing establishments demolished to make way for a new monument to progress and justice.

  But the suggested location—the four-way stop where Stone, Alameda, and Toole avenues formed a right triangle—was one of the oldest inhabited sites in the city. Here, traffic lurched its way downtown as the Union Pacific foghorned by every quarter hour on the tracks parallel to Toole, carrying freight for El Paso or L.A., graffiti bubbled across its red and yellow cars. A 1990 Arizona state burial protection law mandated archaeological testing on any site deemed culturally sensitive, and so in 2004 the county hired Statistical Research, Inc., a cultural-resources management firm, to examine the area where the courthouse would now stand. What SRI found was staggering: the remains of National Cemetery, unmarked and undesignated, containing over 1,300 human remains to parse, remove, and repatriate.

  In 1864, U.S. government agent J. Ross Browne arrived in Tucson and sniffed his nose at it: “A city of mud boxes,” he wrote. “Dingy and dilapidated, cracked and baked into a composite of dust and filth, barren of verdure, parched, naked, and grimly desolate in the glare of a southern sun.”

  Browne was one of a wave of white settlers to arrive in Tucson at that time. After the Gadsden Purchase made Southern Arizona a United States territory in 1854, men and women flocked to the predominantly Mexican outpost, categorizing and dividing the land already inhabited by Native America
n tribes for over a millennium. Between 1848 and 1880, Tucson’s population shot from 760 to more than seven thousand.

  With this increase, certain necessities arose. One was a space for the dead. Just before the Civil War, residents began digging graves in a plot of land bordering Stone Avenue; from 1860 to 1881, roughly two thousand burials formed National Cemetery.

  National also wouldn’t have suited J. Ross Browne’s tastes. The Sonoran caliche made digging a maddening task. Proper burial custom required only that the body rest deeply enough that its bones were not visible. Adobe walls ran around the cemetery to keep out wild animals and deter inhabitants from abandoning corpses without proper burial. Civilian graves were dug inside and outside the walls, edged up against public outhouses and trash heaps. The Arizona Daily Star called National Cemetery “the general dump ground of the city,” a place filled with everything from dead rats to a dead horse, the ground so littered with half-dug graves that “if a pedestrian happens that way after dark he is likely to fall into one of the numerous pits and get his neck broken.” Charles D. Poston, the state’s first congressman and the so-called Father of Arizona, attended an officer’s funeral at National in 1881 and lamented that it “gave the people a sad opportunity to witness the neglect and desecration which rests upon the mural monuments of the brave dead.” “Cannot something be done?” he asked.

  Something was. National’s civilian section closed in 1875 and its military section in 1881, shortly after Poston’s visit. In 1884, a notice ran in the Daily Star that a Dr. W. J. White would exhume the remains and move them to nearby cemeteries. The neighboring real estate had been sold to the railroad, and the city anticipated a more profitable use for the land than a graveyard. For those families who could afford it, the dead were transported north to Court Cemetery. For those who couldn’t, the dead stayed put. Like any constituency of voiceless residents, cemetery occupants fell victim to zoning. By 1900 the land became residential, and then, over the next sixty years, businesses took over piece by piece. No external signs of the cemetery remained, though the number of accidental exhumations—the spades that struck bone in service of foundation and latrine—spiked.