by Dave Eggers
We are still moving our mouths over each other’s mouths, and her eyes are probably still open—
and when I was sitting there, I wished for a minute that I had a picture of my dad, so I could hand it, like a detective, to the bartender woman, so she could say, “Yep, sure I know him. Came in every night...” But instead I just sat there. There were novelty mugs everywhere. A bumper pool table. “What a Feeling!” was playing on the jukebox. It really was “What a Feeling!”—
I open my eyes and Sarah’s are open again. It’s like she’s holding her breath. But who can blame her? She knows, she can tell. She knows that after the bar I went to a pay phone and called the Anatomical Gift Association, and found out where most of the bodies go, to the University of Illinois at Chicago Medical School, and then I drove there, to the West Side of Chicago, drove around, lost for an hour amid the blight, the blocks crumbling, the acres and acres crushed, as if walked on by giants. She knows that I finally found the school, and the building where the head of the anatomy department was, and how I parked down the street, and had to jump the fence of a construction site to get into the building, and how, once in the building, I was afraid that I would be found out, that they would see my eyes and would call security, so I skipped the elevator and went to the stairs, opened the heavy metal door and—
We move to her bed and we fumble, undress.
the stairwell was about eighty degrees. Ninety. It was withering, and I had to walk to the seventh floor, where the doctor was, the man I was going to confront about taking my parents and doing things with them. Why was the stairwell so hot? I was drenched by the fourth floor. Doctors walked by me, going down as I was going up, and I had to act casual, normal; I was a student, I had to look like a student. It was like being inside a heating duct, the heat like wind, coming from below, and by the time I got to the seventh floor I felt faint, and burst open the door, and felt the cool air sing into my lungs—
Sarah is saying no to something I am trying to do. I am fumbling with something, trying halfheartedly to do something, but feeling so tired, too, my head so heavy—
And when I found the doctor’s name on the listing, spelled with those white movable letters on the grooved black board, I walked to the corresponding door, and was going to confront this man, at least look into his face, have it do something, tell me something—
I am falling asleep, so exhausted, so I pull Sarah’s back to my front and fall asleep—
and then opened the doctor’s door. There was someone right there, a middle-aged man, right there, a man at a desk—only inches from my face, and it was the moment that I could finally— “Oop, sorry!” I said, and closed the door. Then I took the elevator down, tapping the walls on the way down, leaning toward the doors, vibrating, jumped out and then down the steps from the building, back through the construction site, walking quickly, jogging a little, then back to the car, in the car, with the radio turned up, back onto the highway, then back to Grant and Eric’s, where they were watching cable and I told them nothing.
In the morning I sleep to nine, ten, ten-thirty... and don’t wake up until Sarah begins to pointedly make noise around the apartment. The room is all white light, the bed so warm still. I have nowhere to be. I want to never leave. I have no plans. I want to chat. I look at her yearbook from her school. I look at pictures of her and her students. They seem to really love her, and this is so good, that we’re back here, in a different place, but together these years later, and it is perfect because now we are connected again, and this is some sort of bridge that was in disarray but is now rebuilt, redesigned, and new, pristine, wonderful— This is great, we’ll keep in touch, and when I’m in town we’ll get together, and when she’s in San Francisco—
Maybe we should go get some breakfas—
Then I’m at the door and I’m leaving. I do not know why I am leaving. Something happened. She tells me that she has to go to the school to do some things, or she’s meeting a friend for lunch, or her sister, her mother. It’s all hazy. I’m putting on my shoes at her door, feeling the winter air coming through the gap, looking up at her as she says something else, “Happy New Year” maybe, and then she has the door open, and we hug quickly and then I’m on the sidewalk, walking back to Grant and Eric’s.
I make the trip stiff-legged, cold, trying to remember the words she said. I run the last exchange through my head over and over. Was it: “Well, now that you’ve gotten what you wanted...” or was it: “Was that what you wanted?” It was something like that. What did it mean? I try to make the words work, to make them sound familiar, have them make sense. Gotten what I wanted? Was that what she said? Sure, I had, I thought I had, that we had been reconnected, all this time collapsed— Fuck, I don’t even know what I wanted.
Everything was tied together again and now this. I do not understand this. Are we bound or unbound? I have closed the loop, only to have it come undone again.
By the time I get to the beach, in Lake Forest, the next night, it’s dark, about nine or ten o’clock. I have to leave Chicago the next day. Last night, New Year’s Eve, was uneventful, quiet. We had all walked a few blocks to a party thrown by someone from Eric’s office, stood and talked to each other, ate their carrots and celery. We left before midnight and a few minutes later were back home, eating chocolate chip mini-cookies and watching The Nutty Professor— I park facing the water. I get out of the car and put on Grant’s coat, put the tape recorder in the jacket pocket. In the other pocket, I have a notebook and pen. I lean through the car’s door and get the box from the floor. Then close the door and put the box on the hood of the car.
I will do it now. This makes sense. This is the right thing.
I don’t want to see what’s inside. I check to make sure no cars are coming down the beach driveway. Of course I want to see what’s inside. I use my car key to cut through the clear packing tape on the top of the box. I am careful not to cut too deeply, for fear of puncturing the bag I expect the ashes are within; even so, I half expect the ash to billow out, it being light, like dust, and so I squint and turn my head so as not to inhale it. I open the box, spreading the flaps like skin. No ash breathes from inside.
Inside there is gold. A golden canister, the size and shape of a container one would keep on the kitchen counter, for cookies or sugar. I am overcome with relief. This is better than the cardboard box, more fitting, even if it’s only tin. Then again, there’s something about the gold canister, something sinister, evocative of the Ark of the Covenant, in the movie, with the ash within it—all the bad things that happened to the men who tinkered with the Ark, who disturbed its contents.. .what if—
Jesus, I’m no fucking Nazi!
But look what I’m doing, with my tape recorder and notebook, and here at the beach, with this box—calculating, manipulative, cold, exploitive.
Fuck it.
I open the canister. It comes slowly; there is some kind of suction from within. I remove the top. Inside is a bag of kitty litter, tied at the top.
Fuck. Someone switched the ashes with this fucking kitty litter. This is not it. Where is the ash, the ash like dust? This is not ash. I move the box to the hood of the car, to see it better. These are little rocks, pebbles, Grape-Nuts, in white and black and gray. I open the bag. Dust rises, a small amount, just for a second, the bag exhaling, its breath smelling—I am terrified of smelling its breath, fearing death? some faint trace of her smell?—but it smells just like dust, a simple dusty smell.
And then I sense her watching. I do not do this often, do not often have (submit to?) visions of her sitting atop some cloud, looking down, Family Circus-like, robed and beatific and drawn with a dotted line, but at this moment I see her suddenly, watching me, not from a cloud, but instead just there, or half there, superimposed on the blue-black sky just over me, and she is just shaking her head, disappointed, disgusted.
But isn’t it her fault? Surely it’s her fault. Did her eyes make me this way? The way she watched, stared, approved and di
sapproved? Oh, those eyes. Slits, lasers, needles of shame, guilt, judgment— Was it a Catholic thing or just a her thing? At the very least, it had something to do with me not masturbating until college. I figured that part out a while ago.
With the bag open the colors and shapes of the pebbles become clearer.. They are six or seven different colors—black, white, light gray, dark gray, gray-yellow, yellow-gray, creme— different shapes, smaller, bigger, mostly roundish but some oblong, some longer even, like fangs—nothing like the light gray fine ash uniformity I expected and wanted. Oh this is infinitely more gruesome. You can almost differentiate between the pebbles—what is the white? Bone? Are the black pebbles the cancer, or are they the parts that were burned more thoroughly? What do they use, anyway? An oven? An oven, right? So would it follow that parts of the oven were hotter than others? The white must be bone, clearly. Wouldn’t this all be bone? What else would survive the heat? Nothing, nothing, unless some parts, this or that organ, were simply burned to a crisp, like coal—coal is organic matter. The black must be the cancer.
Then what is gray?
I walk to the water, and across the sand, which, on this beach, largely man-made, is not really sand at all, but is—I see the correlation now—also like kitty litter, that being, come to think of it, what we called it as teenagers, when our decrepit and eroding natural beach was replaced with a many-million-dollar beachfront, with a promenade and jetties and protective barriers. Kitty litter is what we called the sand; we hated it because after a day of walking on it, or playing volleyball, your feet would be wrecked, sanded raw. I walk across the kitty litter, in my shoes, it crunching like gravel, loudly, and then to the jetty, a foot-wide girder of rusted steel, extending out into the lake, forty feet long maybe, until it is met by a low makeshift wall of huge white granite rocks, a pile of giant rocks in a half-circle, forming a wall protecting the beach from waves. I am holding the gold canister in front of me, like an offering. I do not know why I am holding it in this way.
I jump a few rocks, until I am on the outer part of the rock wall, facing out toward the water. It is a wet sort of gray and blue—foggy almost, the sky and the water smudged together no more than thirty feet out, the water murmuring quietly, its depth, even only fifty or so feet out as I am, seeming—
I will slip and fall, hit my head, pass out, fall into the quiet lake and drown. This is the kind of thing that happens. There is no one here, I will not be saved, I will be gone. Then they will find the rental car, and my—
At least the tapes will be destroyed, soaked in my jacket, with my notebook.
This is stupid, this throwing the cremains into Lake Michigan. Lake Michigan? Ridiculous, small, tacky. Why just a lake? A Great Lake, sure, but— I should be at the Atlantic. I should be on Cape Cod. That would be something. I could drive to Cape Cod. I have a car. I could drive to the last house we rented out there, the one with Aunt Ruth, before she died, when I saw her, Ruth, through a crack in the bathroom door, without her wig on, her fiery red hair gone— I’d have to call the rental company, confirm that I could rent here, drop it off there—I would drive to the Cape and then fly back to San Francisco—how long would that take, the drive? We did it dozens of times, Chicago to Cape Cod, we three kids, Mom driving, eight hours a day— fuck, the drive would take me at least two days, and I have to meet Toph at the airport tomorrow, he’ll be coming up from L.A., we timed it so we’d both be at the airport at the same time, fuck, I can’t do Cape Cod. Maybe if I called Bill... Fuck it, then I’d have to tell him about this, and he’d be disturbed and— Fuck it. It makes sense here, it makes sense to be doing this here, now, it makes sense. It is good. It is the first of the year, after all—
Jesus.
It’s her motherfucking birthday. I cannot believe that this happened again. Why do I not connect these things? Why do I know her birthday is approaching but do not remember on the actual day, do not remember until I am on a jetty in the lake with her— That does it, that’s a sign, screw it, that means this is good, no doubt. She loved the beach, her favorite place, loved to come and set up her chair near the water, her feet in the water, eyes closed, absorbing the sun, me behind her, in her shade, cool, with my blanket and bottle—
I put my hand in the bag and grab a handful it’s so light! I don’t know what I expected but this lightness I did not I cannot believe I am holding I am sick to be holding—
I throw. In the air it spreads out in a wide diagonal, and drops into the groaning lake with a series of pitititits. I throw again. Some spills. I should not spill. It’s spilled, right there, by my left foot, about eight particles—I’m stepping on them! Of course I am! Of course I’m stepping on them, how fitting! How expected, asshole! I lean over to pick up the particles but I already have a handful in the other hand and as I crouch down some of the other handful spills on my right side—Jesus! Jesus fucking Christ! Why can I not do this right?
I stand up quickly and throw, this time some of the cremains sticking to my palm, which is now sweaty—fuck! I try to kick the spilled cremains into the water, down below the rocks, through the crevices—what I need is a hose or something—
But should I really be kicking my mother’s ashes? I try to pick them up again, too many, too many and then I crouch down again— Fuck, maybe this is illegal. I had heard that this was not legal, that these cremains were not sanitary, that one needed permission or could only do it on the open sea— I turn around to see if anyone is here. No, no other cars. But someone’s going to come here tomorrow and find them and then report it and connect it to me, because the funeral home guy, Chad, with his ham radio, will be listening to a police frequency—
With the back of my hand I brush the fallen grains into the crevices—and am suddenly reminded of the way my mom cleared a fogged windshield, quickly, violently almost, with the back of her hand, her rings clicking against the glass, as we drove through some or other sudden storm, all of us in the Pinto, on our way somewhere, the mall, the Cape, Florida. And for a second I wonder if her rings will be in the bag. Oh shit. Her rings will be there, half-melted, like a prize in a box of Cracker Jacks. No. Beth has the rings? Beth has the rings. Of course.
How lame this is, how small, terrible. Or maybe it is beautiful. I can’t decide if what I am doing is beautiful and noble and right, or small and disgusting. I want to be doing something beautiful, but am afraid that this is too small, too small, that this gesture, this end is too small— Is this white trash? That’s what it is! We were always so oddly white-trashy for our town, with our gruesome problems, and our ugly used cars, our Pintos and Malibus and Camaros, and our 70s wallpaper and plaid couches and acne and state schools—and now this tossing of cremains from a gold tin box into a lake? Oh this is so plain, disgraceful, pathetic—
Or beautiful and loving and glorious! Yes, beautiful and loving and glorious!
But even if so, even if this is right and beautiful, and she is tearing up while watching, so proud—like what she said to me when I carried her, when she had the nosebleed and I carried her and she said that she was proud of me, that she did not think I could do it, that I would be able to lift her, carry her to the car, and from the car into the hospital, those words run through my head every day, have run through every day since, she did not think I could do it but of course I did it. I knew I would do it, and I know this, I know what I am doing now, that I am doing something both beautiful but gruesome because I am destroying its beauty by knowing that it might be beautiful, know that if I know I am doing something beautiful, that it’s no longer beautiful. I fear that even if it is beautiful in the abstract, that my doing it knowing that it’s beautiful and worse, knowing that I will very soon be documenting it, that in my pocket is a tape recorder brought for just that purpose—that all this makes this act of potential beauty somehow gruesome. I am a monster. My poor mother. She would do this without the thinking, without the thinking about thinking—
Oh fuck. I throw more. I do it as fast as possible. I crunch my hand
into the bag and grab a handful of the tiny rocks. I pull it out and they spill from my grip. I pull my arm back and more tiny rocks trickle between my fingers, falling down between the huge white rocks under my feet. I throw. The pebbles spread out and ditdtdtdtdt into the water. I consider specifics—should I throw them all in one place, or redirect the throws each time? Should I hold on to some for later, to deposit elsewhere? Yeah, yeah. This seems like the best idea—I can hold on to some, half maybe, and throw the rest elsewhere...in Cape Cod! In Milton! I can spread parts all over the country, at all of her favorite places! I can spread them all over the world! The Atlantic, the Pacific! But then the airport, the plane. I’d have to carry them on the plane, would have to explain the box to the airport security people. I’d have to put the box on that conveyer, and then— Do cremains show up in that radar machine they run your bags through? Maybe they’d ask me to open the box, demonstrate it like they do with laptops. Does it look like gunpowder? Maybe it does. I could check the cremains at the ticket counter. No, that would be bad. That would be worse.
I grab again and throw. This is good. Good enough. No, this is great, this is best. This is where she spent her last years, by the water. I start throwing faster and faster, grabbing and throwing, flailing almost, dust everywhere. My coat is snowed with dust. She is aghast. I am pathetic. This is what I’ve done. This is what it’s come to—winging her remains into the lake. No, she’s not watching me. She’s gone. She has an afterlife but I will not, because I do not believe. I’ll be exhausted by then anyway. I’m exhausted now, I am so tired. I’ll jump in the lake. Not to kill myself but just to do it— The drama! I won’t survive. If I took off my clothes I’d make it. With the clothes on I’d sink. My heart would seize up and I’d sink. I could do something else, something dramatic. I’ll drive the car into the lake with me in it. Maybe with me not in it.