Death Kit

by Susan Sontag

  Hester fell back from his arms. Can she have fainted? Anxiously, he puts his cheek to her breast and listens to her breathing: the slow, regular inhalation and exhalation of someone deeply exhausted, who’s mercifully fallen into a vast, much needed sleep. Asleep, then. Let her rest. Diddy draws Hester’s nylon underpants back up her legs and around her hips, pulls her torn dress down to her knees; stuffs her cotton bra into her coat pocket; pushes her limp arms through the sleeves of her coat, and buttons it. Then, grasping Hester in his arms, he carries her several feet to the nearby shelter. Just inside; at the very mouth of the shelter, sets her down in a sitting position. Propped against the wall, near the heap of stone blocks that had once been part of the barrier.

  Occurred to Diddy that it could be dangerous to leave Hester here. Safer, surely, to carry her out of the tunnel altogether, and lay her on the slope by the track. After depositing her there, Diddy could return to the tunnel again.

  But he was afraid to leave the tunnel, even for a few minutes. He might not want, or not be able, to return. And it’s only for a little while that Hester must lie here. A little farther that he must explore; while curiosity, the sensations of physical well-being, and the mood of orgiastic fulfillment still run at high tide in him.

  Should he move Incardona, too? Hell, no. Let the bastard lie there in his filth.

  Diddy should dress himself (now) before proceeding any further. But feels an aversion to putting back on those creased and ripped garments; like Hester’s, spattered with Incardona’s brain juices and blood; further stained with mud, grease, dirt, sweat, and sex. Of course, he would have put them on if he’d felt cold. But he’s not, as it happens. Not only not cold, but feeling somewhat flushed and overheated. Perhaps Diddy has a fever. No matter. All that matters is that, for the present, he lacks all desire to dress.

  Then thinks of a better use for his clothes. Hester’s head, which he’d set against the shelter wall, has already slumped down in an awkward-looking position that must be uncomfortable. And the hard wall must hurt her spine. She’ll ache when she wakes up. Folding his boots, trousers, shirt, and sweater into one bundle, Diddy pulls the unconscious girl forward for a moment, then arranges the bundle pillow-fashion behind her; after leaning her back again, drapes his windbreaker over her torso as a blanket. Much better (now).

  Why keep anything on? Diddy stoops down, removes his socks and then his T shirt. Placing these just beside Hester.

  (Now) he’s free to go.

  Diddy lifts one naked leg, then the other, over the incompletely dismantled barrier. Of course. Just as he’d secretly suspected all along. What lies beyond it isn’t just a tame continuation of the tunnel and its two tracks. The tracks end only a little farther ahead, some twenty yards beyond the barricade. After that, the walls widened. (Now) widening still farther.

  Why not? “There is another world but it is inside this one.” Diddy no longer walking in a tunnel but, rather, through a long, wide, damp gallery. Once again, reminded of a mine. Except that this chamber is powerfully lit. By naked bulbs, set in fixtures on windowless walls at fairly close intervals. The lighting even powerful enough, perhaps, to produce a perceptible increase in the temperature. How else can one explain why Diddy, walking about naked in late January, isn’t chilled? Can’t be simply the odd climate of the gallery, the curious heat-producing dampness, can it? But whatever the cause, Diddy is (now) never less than warm. And occasionally close to sweltering; he could wish it a good deal colder.

  Diddy, naked, with his seamless sense of well-being. The narrow toes of his highly arched feet grip the dirty stone flooring as he walks. His testicles, drooping in the warm air, fall pleasantly against the inside of his thighs. His arms swing freely at his sides. His shoulders are relaxed, not tensed; his head held erect. And the entire surface of his skin seems coated with an effulgent smoothness, as if rinsed in sleep.

  The harsh, almost brutal lighting leaves Diddy in no doubt about the details of the enclosed space through which he’s walking. And about its marked difference from the space of the tunnel. In contrast with the hard-packed earthen bed of the tunnel, here was a genuine floor. Paved with dark-gray stone; perforated at intervals of thirty feet or so by square drains, covered by heavy iron grilles. The walls were of the same dark-gray stone.

  Diddy half expected, at any moment, to come upon an elderly guard dozing on a cane chair, from whom he could ask directions and thereby begin to orient himself. Imagined this functionary so clearly. An unkempt man about sixty, with sagging cheeks and a wen on his forehead, who hadn’t shaved for at least two days. Who wore a shiny blue-serge uniform with frayed cuffs peeping out of the sleeves of his jacket; whose pockets were littered with old gum wrappers, canceled stamps, torn ticket stubs, and dirty Kleenexes. Who had a paunch, and suffered from bursitis. Who went home each night to a furnished room where he slept on a horsehair mattress with a picture of his dead wife above his bed.… Diddy wanted to ask this old guard, tilted back against the wall on his chair: Where am I? The man would make some lazy reply. It would suffice. For Diddy doesn’t expect much information. Grateful for what he can get. But, despite the modesty of his projected demands, doesn’t find even a decrepit custodian—either at the start of the long gallery or stationed anywhere throughout. Only finds on the floor, washed to the edge of one of the drains, a straw hat, size 7¾, which might have belonged to such a man.

  The long gallery through which Diddy is walking, naked, is virtually empty. Except for numerous odd, nearly valueless items, which Diddy discovers at widely spaced intervals and which seem lost in the grandiose dimensions of this space. Objects that are abandoned? Lost? Hidden? Arranged here in sequence to convey some cryptic message?

  First, the straw hat already mentioned.

  Some yards farther down the gallery, along the wall, a Zenith radio circa 1930. All of whose tubes proved, upon examination, to be burnt out.

  Still farther down, a large stack of 78 rpm records. Diddy stooped down for a moment, with the thought of rapidly sifting through them. But the records, all opera arias, were so dusty; and after looking at ten records, and dirtying the tips of his fingers, he had still to recognize the name of a single singer.

  Farther, a crate of coconuts. Diddy picked one up, and shook it to listen for the sloshing sound of the milk. Felt thirsty. If only he had a small screwdriver, he could open one and take a drink. Such a small screwdriver—on his Swiss Army knife—lies in the pocket of the pants he left back in the tunnel.

  Farther yet, a box of cigars. The Cuban kind that Reager liked. It might be fun to smoke one (now), if they aren’t too dried out. Unfortunately, the box doesn’t contain any matches.

  Still farther, along the spigotless wall, a long length of orange plastic garden hose plus three different kinds of nozzles.

  And still farther: a pair of rusted garden shears; a chamber pot decorated with a green, brown, and white curvilinear pattern and with the words “Minton” and “N° 12” stamped on the underside; a bale of magazines, mainly Popular Mechanics and Science & Mechanics; a legal-size envelope containing a dozen stills from Mexican movies of the 1950’s featuring Dolores del Rio; a worn-out automobile tire; a tattered Barbie doll, with no Ken in sight; a spool of brown thread; a neat small pile of autumn-colored leaves; a wooden hanger labeled “Hotel Luna”; an empty fifth of Smirnoff’s Vodka; a tube of dentifrice used for cleaning false teeth; and an incomplete deck of plastic playing cards. Diddy counts forty-nine.

  Diddy appears to have stumbled into a world of things. A few, maybe, can count as collector’s items; if somewhere there exists a taste odd enough to want to collect things like these. But granted that things are all that’s native to this world, and even restricting things to objects of such a marginal or out-of-date character, what’s also remarkable is how widely distributed the things are. An uncommon problem for Diddy: that of too much space. What would be clutter if dumped into most rooms, apartments, or houses is barely visible when spread about in a space as l
avish as this.

  Therefore, also a world of the absence of things. Apart from the aforementioned items, of a nature less plausibly described as “contents” than as “litter” or “debris,” the gallery is devoid of furnishings. Bare.

  Excepting, of course, what’s on the walls. For what this extremely long, relatively narrow space lacked in the way of objects to fill it was partly made up for by the quantity of messages posted on both walls. A lengthy, unremitting pageant of quotations and mottoes.

  For the first several hundred feet of the gallery, these were posted at irregular intervals and heights, rather casually. Sometimes simply painted or chalked on the stone wall. Or crudely lettered on cardboard, acoustic board, or plyboard; and then taped up or nailed on the wall. But the farther Diddy walks, the more densely they proliferate; and the more costly the means of mounting them. Some were printed on placards; and of these, many had elaborate multicolored initial letters and border designs. Some were incised on metal plates. Still, one couldn’t discern among the styles of typography, printing, and metalwork represented—whether primitive or naïve—any unifying or even dominant tendency or period. A wholly eclectic assortment of graphic styles and plastic standards.

  Something similar might be said of the texts themselves, all relating loosely to the theme of death. A hodgepodge of lines from poems, of homiletic quotations, a few intact but most of them a truncated sentence or phrase, and of popular wisdom. There seemed to be no ethical, temperamental, or cultural consistency in these messages and mottoes. As if many randomly chosen people had been invited to contribute their favorite bit of wisdom, and done so. With no thought to the harmony of the whole.

  “It is better never to have been born at all” was set alongside “The wages of sin are death.” Which follows “Order, calm, and silence.” Which was followed by “Gather ye rosebuds.”

  Others that Diddy noticed, among which are a few he might even have jotted down, if he’d carried a pad and pencil:

  “I despise the dust of which I am composed and which speaks to you. I give it to you.”

  “‘The world has not promised anything to anyone.’ Moroccan proverb.”

  “Easy come, easy go.”

  “O grave where is thy victory?”

  “E dietro le venìa sì lunga tratta/ di gente ch’io non averei creduto/ che morte tanta n’avesse disfatta.”

  “Out of sight, out of mind.”

  “Et in Arcadia ego.”

  “‘The question is, is there a life before death?’ Hungarian saying.”

  “That tossed the dog/ That worried the cat/ That killed the rat.”

  “Death and taxes.”

  “Enkidu, my friend, whom I loved so dearly/ Who underwent with me all hardships/ Him has overtaken the fate of mankind!/ Six days and seven nights I wept over him/ Until the worm fell out of his nose.”

  “When you gotta go, you gotta go.”

  “Because I could not stop for Death — He kindly stopped for me—”

  “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

  “My only regret is that I have but one life to give for my country.”

  “Wir Geretteten/ Aus deren hohlem Gebein der Tod schon seine Flöten schnitt/ An deren Sehnen der Tod schon seinen Bogen strich.”

  “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”

  “I am that which was, which is, and which shall be. And no man hath lifted my veil.”

  “Better Red than dead.”

  “And death shall have no dominion.”

  “Où sont les neiges d’antan?”

  “Dead men tell no tales.”

  “This thought is as a death which cannot choose/ But weep to have that which it fears to lose.”

  “I went down to the Saint James Infirmary.”

  “Or discendiamo ornai a maggior pièta;/ già ogni stella cade che saliva/ quand’ io mi mossi, e ’l troppo star si vieta.”

  “And death comes as the end.”

  “In the palace of the troll king.”

  Passing from inscription to inscription. A surfeit of wisdom: harmless or blunt or antiquated or tactless. Interchangeable wisdom. Carrion wisdom. The plaques on the wall are thinning out (now). Before one of the last, two lines from a Donne sermon, Diddy pauses; almost tired. Lays his flushed cheek against the cold stone for a moment. His strength quickly returning, continued on his way. Diddy’s nostrils suffused with the odor of lava, the stench of the sea. And just one layer beneath these, something unpleasant that smelled like vomit. His fingertips brushing the grimy granite walls, as Diddy walked slowly. The slurred sounds of his steps echoed in his lonely skull.

  Then Diddy saw a spacious vaulted archway. Beyond which a room, four times as wide though less long than the gallery in which he’d been walking. Antechamber, rather. Of the room he (now) approaches. And at the end of this room, was there still another doorway? Perhaps. Diddy’s view, from here, too obstructed to permit him to see. Nevertheless, has already occurred to him that both the long gallery and the room he’s about to enter are only the start of a series of connecting, underground chambers.

  Through the doorway, Diddy passing into a vast squarish basementlike space with a high vaulted ceiling. A room, except that it was windowless, eminently suitable as the interior of a church. A church in some poor, pious Balkan country.

  But worship wasn’t the use to which this space had been put. Diddy has entered something like a huge burial crypt. One which is extravagantly ill-kept. Although the central aisle in which Diddy walked was fairly clear, everywhere else coffins are lying about in the most careless profusion. Hundreds, perhaps more than a thousand of them. Aslant; or tilted on one end; or turned over on their sides; or precariously piled up, six or seven high, like logs for a fire. Looking as if they’d been heaped, tossed, thrown by someone in a state of exasperation and rage; or, maybe, fallen into the room. Rather than having been placed or even stacked. Nowhere giving the impression of any care or forethought. Too many of them, surely, even for this large space. But thus haphazardly disposed, disregarding every rule for the economical use of a limited space, the room appears far more crowded than it need have.

  Maybe this wasn’t a burial crypt in the ordinary sense, a place in which the dead were reverently placed, and periodically visited by grieving relatives and friends. Rather, a storage place for surplus bodies. Which would explain the shameless flouting of minimal standards of upkeep; as well as the absence of flowers, fresh or wax, and any of the other tributes that customarily decorate the resting places of the dead. Most of the coffins lack even a small plaque giving the name and birth and death dates of the deceased. Impossible to imagine this place being visited by anyone. How distressed any memory-burdened survivor would be to see the remains of someone he loved so ill-used, so negligently housed.

  For it wasn’t only the manner in which the coffins had been disposed. The coffins themselves in great disrepair. Diddy could see that fairly good wood had been used for some of them. But whether mahogany or oak or cheap pine, the wood was usually scratched, scarred, chipped. Even gouged—a peculiar, fairly uniform chunk about the size of a half dollar taken out. On the side of some coffins, the scratches were deeply incised and continuous, suggesting cursive writing. Nothing that Diddy could read, though. Illegible graffiti. And where wood had been painted rather than left in its natural state or simply varnished, the paint was peeling and discolored. In some cases, the very frame of the casket was coming apart; boards separating off from each other. Diddy, walking about in nothing but his tender flesh, has to keep an eye out for protruding rusty nails. Also, stay alert for the occasional warped board or partly loose lid jutting into the aisle that could scrape his ankle or shin or thigh. And since the lids of many coffins had been completely pried off, and then, sometimes, laid diagonally across the open coffins, Diddy had to be careful not to bump into one of these. Especially when he left the aisle, as he did several times, to clamber among the dense forest of death chests on either side. If he didn’t watch hi
s step, he’d quickly be spotted with blue and yellow bruises. Must also watch out for his bare feet. The danger of nails on the floor. And of wooden splinters from some of the coffin lids that had been ripped off and, neither placed diagonally across the coffin itself nor simply carried away, had fallen on the floor.

  One selfish advantage in the deplorable condition of the coffins, though. Diddy could see inside. The entire contents of those without lids, just by looking down. And many of those coffins whose lids remained in place, firmly nailed down or fastened with bronze hasps, featured a small square window in the lid. Just by bending over and, when necessary, pushing some debris off the top, Diddy could see inside these coffins as well. Faces, at least.

  The corpses he examined were of both sexes and all ages. Fully and rather formally dressed. And remarkably well preserved. Often, the face and hands—all that was visible of flesh itself—had a full sheath of dry parchmentlike skin. These faces were clearly human, mostly belonging to the white race, and, in many cases, recognizably American. Though overexpressive. Often badly distorted. Shrinkage of the skin, as it dried out under what was evidently a very superior embalming process, produced some painful grimaces and smiles. And not only was the skin mostly intact. Frequently, a full head of hair as well—in a color recognizably analogous to the original brown, blond, black, gray, or white as the case had been. And on about half of the men, beards and mustaches.

  At first, this frequency of beards and mustaches puzzles Diddy, who recalls how few American men, either in his generation or in his father’s, grew them. Until he realized that most of the bodies were much older than he’d assumed. All were decades, some even centuries, old. Diddy wouldn’t have been able to guess their age simply from the color of the preserved skin, a strong sallow brown. But there were other clues.