by John Gould
I can’t blame my mother, because how can you blame someone until you’re that person in that situation? I like to think I’d let my daughter live, but how do I know? Maybe I’d sew a little outfit for her, and put flowers in her hair. Maybe I’d drown her in a bucket, like the woman next door did with me when the oleander took too long. If I’m born a girl again maybe I’ll grow up to be a woman and have a daughter, and I’ll find out.
I don’t blame my mother, but I worry about her. How many million lives of being good will it take her to undo this? Unless it turns out to be okay to throw out baby girls, but then I don’t even know what to say about that.
What I really want is never to be born again, but of course that’s what everyone wants. Wanting it isn’t enough, in fact wanting it shows you need to keep on being born so you can learn not to want it. Being alive gets you nowhere, but you have to live long enough to figure that out. Then you can let yourself seep away into everything and stay there forever.
A girl, I think. Yes, I’d like to be a girl again but grow up, and that could happen. So many girls aren’t allowed to live that there aren’t even enough of them anymore. Before long women will be rare, and rare things are valuable things, so women will be wanted for wives and prostitutes and slaves and so on. A slave would be good, in fact a slave would be best because to see that pain is an illusion you have to be in pain. I’d like to be born a girl and grow up to be a slave and suffer and find liberation and never come back.
Or a boy, but I can’t remember what that’s like, assuming I’ve been a boy before, which I suppose I must have been. Your true self can’t be one or the other, can it? But imagine, you’re a boy and you grow up as though it’s the right thing to do. How do you hate yourself, I wonder? How do you learn?
No, I’m hoping girl. Girl, girl, girl, but I bet I’ll be an elephant or something, for having cried when my mother gave me to the woman next door. I’ll be an elephant, and I’ll live in some other place where elephants are kept in cages and stared at as though they’re strange, and no one can make any sense of the sounds that come out of them.
First Kiss
To get to the cemetery you had to drive along our street, under the dark archway of chestnuts and maples. It must have been enchanting for the mourners, or depressing, or something. And then the thonk of plums as we pelted the procession.
Our theory was that people would be too grief-stricken to come after us, or too worried about their good clothes. This is when we were twelve or so, too old for such idiocy, but anyway. We’d load an apple basket with plums fallen from the Barfoots’ tree, and we’d duck down behind the foundation wall in the abandoned lot next to Shithead’s house a few blocks down from mine. There’d be Shithead, and Dunk, and Kev maybe, and me. Somebody would yell “Fire!” and we’d fire. The plums were soft and slippery, half-rotten, so you couldn’t really pitch them, more like catapult them, cupping them in your palm. Most of them would miss, but not all of them.
I don’t know how many funerals we bombed that year, it seemed like a lot but it was probably only a half dozen or so. Mostly the vehicles would just keep going, crawling along like a battalion of tanks in a movie. The hearse (you got double points if you hit that, though we never actually kept score), then a limo or two, and then a bunch of just normal cars, a line of variable length depending on how much the person had been loved, I suppose, or by how many people.
But this one time a limo stopped, the limo right behind the hearse. The hearse kept going — maybe he didn’t check his mirror, or maybe he didn’t feel right hitting the brakes with a dead body in back. But the limo stopped, and the whole procession behind it. Out of the limo crawled this guy. Like my father, that sort of age, but smaller and more angular, and dressed head to foot in black. He looked over our way — we’d neglected to duck back down, too surprised I guess. And he came charging.
We had a plan, which was to split up. That was our whole plan. I don’t know where the others went but I took off for home, down the back lane. When it occurred to me how stupid that was I cut through a couple of yards over towards the school. The mourner had singled me out — I was the stoutest and slowest of our miscreant little gang — and he was coming hard, I could hear him. At one point the nerve just went out of me. The mourner found me sitting in a patch of leafy greens in somebody’s garden, crying like a five-year-old.
And what he did was he comforted me. He assured me that he too had been young once, young and senseless. He was still huffing from the run, and he patted my arm and told me to go ahead and cry, that there was no shortage of things to cry about in this world. He asked me if I minded if he had a little cry too, and he had one, a few dry-eyed sobs which turned into a laugh. “Is that really the way I weep?” he said, and he wept some more, and laughed some more. He had a beard, which he gripped as though to keep his face from slipping off.
By this time my fear had deepened to the kind you don’t cry about. I sat still while he told me about somebody named Neil, a friend from his childhood. It may have been Neil’s body in the hearse, but I’ve never been sure of that. What I do know is that Neil had a major overbite as a boy, and that he was crazy about birds. He could identify a bird from a silhouette in flight, or from a snippet of song. Warbler, thrush, you name it.
After a while the mourner came to himself, remembering about his funeral, I suppose. “Yep, that Neil,” he said, shaking his head. Then he gave me another pat, stood up and trotted away.
It was dinner time but I took the long route home, past the park. There was a girl named Yasmin, an almost-cute girl from my grade, just saying goodbye to some friends at the baseball diamond. “Wanna walk?” she said, and she came up beside me. We only half knew each other and hadn’t much to talk about. Mostly she kept staring at me, and finally she said, “Have you been crying?”
I wiped my face and said that somebody had died.
“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry about that. Who died?”
I said, “I don’t know.”
Yasmin laughed. I remember her laugh sounded like some people’s bawling. I stepped in front of her and turned and kissed her on the mouth, which I’d never done to anybody before. Yasmin kissed me back, or at least she didn’t pull away. She and her friends must have had cigarettes, because she tasted like my mother’s breath after she’d been out on the porch by herself. I put my hand on her cheek, Yasmin’s cheek, a hand still sticky and sweet with overripe plum.
My wife, Gina, doesn’t buy it. She refuses to believe that what happened that day is at the root of what she calls my “problem.” Why call it a “problem” in the first place, if it isn’t actually a problem? That’s what I keep asking her. And she keeps laughing, which I love (Gina laughs like a cat after a bird it can’t quite reach). All that matters is that I want her, and that I’ll never stop. I’ll never stop.
Word of Mouth
Stan’s first career was inspired by the swoop of a heron past the window of the family cottage when he was a kid. Fish were floating to the surface of Long Lake that year, and talk was that soon birds and other predators too would be succumbing to the chemicals that had been allowed to seep into a feeder stream. Stan was already disturbed by this thought, and by the fact that he and his brother had been barred from the water, but it was the thrill of the heron’s heavy flight that truly got to him, the notion that something so alive could soon be dead, and dead because of people. Ten years later he emerged from school with a degree in marine biology. Thirty years after that he cleared out his desk at Rant Cow Hive.
Fired, laid off, whatever — the agency (actually Envirowatch, but Stan and his colleagues diverted themselves creating various anagrams) was being eviscerated, middle-aged, mid-rank characters such as himself being set unceremoniously free. A trauma, not because Stan loved the job (he resented it, the long slow fiasco it made of his life), but because he’d just ended his marriage, and vacated his house, and was running short on things of which to be dispossessed.
Stan’s
second career was inspired by Mr. Neziri, the man across the hall from his mother at the hospital, where Stan spent more and more time in the aftermath of his sacking. Mr. Neziri and Stan’s mother were both doomed, but they were going about their deaths in radically different ways. Stan’s mother, for instance, was deaf and almost mute. Save the odd noisy non sequitur (“Won’t you stay for dinner?!?” when she was being fed through a nose tube), she held her peace about her predicament. Mr. Neziri, on the other hand. What was that sound he made? A sob, a moan? A sob-moan, a yowl-howl, a wail-whimper. It was nothing, there was no word. Actually, there was what sounded like a word once, out in the middle of one interminable jag, in a language unknown to Stan. And then back to the meaningless caterwaul once more.
Meaningless, that was the key. To mark death you had to make a sound that transmitted no meaning at all, that was in fact a constant obliteration of meaning. Mr. Neziri was mourning himself, articulating his oblivion before it descended upon him. But what of those, such as Stan’s own mum, who hadn’t the sagacity or the fortitude for this task? Who would cry out for them? Didn’t there used to be professional mourners? Why shouldn’t there be once more?
Stan’s old boss Bernie (who’d also been axed) had been sending Stan links to articles called things like “Second Time Around” and “Age as an Asset” and “Repurposing the Middle-Aged Man.” What you didn’t have any more was energy. What made up for that was wisdom, worldliness. Your first career had been about duty. Your new one would be about love. You were done with obligation, time to follow your bliss.
Love? Bliss? Well, demand, at least there’d be lots of that. Stan was one of about a billion people soon to be robbed of somebody. His fellow boomers for a start, with all their ailing parents and friends.
He began his rehearsals at “home,” the not-quite-wretched bachelor suite out of which he kept on not moving. He’d knock back a half-mickey of vodka (a poor man’s peyote, is how he thought of it, opening him to shamanic energies), bring the lights down to a funereal gloom and get started.
The idea was to have no idea. Stan’s sound needed to be free of all influence and intent, each act of mourning incomprehensible in its own unique way. He’d made the mistake of starting with online research, and now needed to erase the memory of other wailers (the Yaminawa of Peru, the Nar-wijjerook of Australia), along, of course, with the memory of every other human utterance he’d ever witnessed. To be meaningless, a cry needed to be innocent of all allusion and all shape. Free jazz but freer, no key, no time signature, no consistency of tone, tempo, timbre. Stan had a decent voice (he’d rated a solo on “Softly and Tenderly” with the boys’ choir back at St. Joe’s), which was both a blessing and a curse. What he was singing now was scat but more so, a series of sounds denuded of history and prospects, a pure racket. At every moment he needed to say nothing.
There was a dry spell, sure. Stan ran a few ads (“When it’s for eternity, you want the best!”), but he knew it was personal contact that usually got you your start. And so it was. A first nibble came from his brother, who wrote to say that he’d be staying on with his firm in Fukuoka for another year because of a death one rung up the ladder. Stan replied with an update on his new career, hinting that he’d be open to a contract abroad, to which his brother came back with, “You need help, man. Seriously, I love you, but you need help.” Promising. Any real insight was bound to be met at first with dismay, no? How had people responded when they first learned the fate of the natural world?
And then the breakthrough. When the police showed up a third time in response to complaints from neighbors (whose wall-pounding served as accompaniment many nights), Stan got chatting with one constable while the other wrote up his warning. An almost frighteningly empathetic individual, this guy turned out to have a sick sister who was busy planning her own gala funeral. “A professional mourner,” he mused. “Hey, she might just go for that!”
The audition took place in the sister’s hospital room. On another ward, in another part of the city, Stan’s mother and Mr. Neziri were still at it. Stan had two months of daily practice under his belt by this time, and was beginning to feel some confidence. Indeed, the audition went well. One little phrase from “All Along the Watchtower” snuck in, but his bellowing was otherwise bereft of sense, of any discernible pattern or meaning. The siblings were perfectly devastated, as were the mourners at the sister’s funeral a month or so later.
From there, things just sort of took off.
Red Giant
Other than turtles — I must have had ten of them, one after another, all failing to thrive despite the plastic palm tree under which they lounged in their little plastic bowl — Stranger was the first pet I ever lost. He’d come to us old, a West Highland terrier with a bit of Chihuahua in him. “Howdy, stranger,” Dad said to him when he crept into our yard one day, and when he stayed the name stuck. He had bad hips, an unfortunate skin condition, and a dyspeptic temper. Dad warned us not to get attached to him, me and my brothers, or rather he warned us we would get attached, so we’d get hurt. Dad was an almost pathologically realistic man. His idea was to keep things in perspective, the bigger the perspective the better.
Which is why he got us into astronomy. He had a telescope through which he invited us to peer on clear weekend nights. It wasn’t a particularly powerful one: you were lucky to discern a couple of Jupiter’s many moons, a fine halo around Saturn where you knew its rings must be. The tininess of these magnified objects did convey a sense of scale, and Dad added to this impression with mythic-sounding tales about heavenly bodies. He told us, for instance, that almost everything in the universe was invisible. “Dark matter,” he called it, explaining that astronomers knew of its existence only because of the gravity it exerted on visible objects. “Everything you see,” he said to us, “is dictated by things you don’t.”
When Stranger died, I took it particularly hard, perhaps because I was the youngest of us three boys. I was eight. I’ve looked it up, and that happens to be the age at which a child finally gets the hang of death’s trickiest aspect, its universality. Everything dies? Dad reinforced this point, the day we buried Stranger (in the yard where he’d first appeared, next to the big spiky bush), by describing to me the death of the sun.
“What can help at a time like this,” he said — we were tamping down the sod over Stranger’s corpse — “is to broaden your view. Take in the bigger picture. For instance …” Here he gestured at a smear of tangerine just fading from the western sky. “The sun. It’s a long way off, right?”
“Ninety three million miles.” I was eager to demonstrate that I’d been listening, that his efforts to enlighten me had not been entirely misplaced.
“Correct.” He gave my shoulder a gentle punch. “But it won’t always be so distant. As it runs out of fuel, the sun will heat up and expand. Eventually it will be so big we’ll be inside it.”
“Inside the sun,” I said. It sometimes helped to repeat Dad’s outlandish truths out loud.
He nodded. “Inside the sun. A red giant, you call it, a star that expands at the end of its life.” He allowed an imaginary sphere to inflate between his hands, then squeezed it down to almost nothing. “At the very finish it collapses and cools to become what’s called a white dwarf. The sun will end up about the size of good old earth here.” He patted the ground with the ball of his foot.
“What about …?”
“About …? Oh, us? People? No, this isn’t for billions of years yet. The sun’s still got half its life to go. We won’t be … that won’t be a problem.”
I can’t say this comforted me, exactly, this vision of a post-human world burned back to its original nothingness, but it did help. My grief was intact, but it no longer quite consumed me. Or perhaps it’s just that I was smaller, so my grief was smaller too.
I used this technique to deal with other trials as a kid, and I use it today. I find I have more frequent recourse to it as time goes on. Like the sun, I’m middle-aged now, my
fuel beginning perceptibly to dwindle. A sort of low-grade grief is with me a great deal of the time, even though I’d describe myself as happy. This is what Dad was preparing me for, I think — for this, and for the losses yet to come. I still have him, and my mother, and my brothers, and my wife, and so on. There’s a great deal for which to brace oneself.
I sometimes wonder if even the scale of the solar system will do. In the dentist’s chair yesterday afternoon, for the third session of a botched root canal, I tried going bigger. I told Dad about my new innovation on the phone last night, my lips burning as sensation returned to them. “I’ve been brushing up,” I said. “Remember the heat death of the universe?”
“Heat death,” said Dad. “Heat. Death. Remind me?”
It’s hard to tell, these days, if he’s just humouring me again, giving me the pleasure of putting something into words, or if he’s actually forgotten. “Entropy,” I said. “When you expend energy there’s always a little of it lost, right? Made useless? So things run down.”
“They do.”
“So the theory is, that applies to the whole universe. It’s like a cup of tea cooling in the kitchen. Eventually the tea and the kitchen come to the same temperature, so nothing more can happen. That’s the end.”
“Of everything.”
“Of everything.”
There was a pause. There’s often a pause when Dad and I chat these days, an open sort of silence, each of us leaving space.
Ghost
Veronica Swit, our restive Ronnie, who for two decades penned obituaries for this very page, salvaging individuality time and again from the annihilating mire of oblivion, has died of asphyxiation at age fifty-three. “The idiosyncratic self,” she once wrote (in her obit for novelist David Foster Wallace), “comes into being at the moment of its first secret, its first lie, and has no choice but to keep existing until it no longer does.” Yet elsewhere she spoke of death as the lie. “Nina Simone is still singing,” she said. “If you can’t hear her right here, right now, well then that’s just sad.” Ronnie, too, still sings, still answers to our longing.