Twenty-Four

[probably be revising this through my birthday on sunday.  it’s obviously quite long.  my undying love to anyone who suffers through it]

I buried a body yesterday.

Initially, as the first murky glimmers of consciousness sucker-punched my eyes, I didn’t know where I was.  Quite frankly, I didn’t know who I was, either.  Just a clumsy, disjointed fight against the rearguard of sleep.  The man reposing next to me was silent.  Well, or course he was, because he was dead.  And I didn’t notice him until, searching for comfort, I rolled over onto my side, and came face-to-face with his sightless gaze.

I had dreamed.  A summertime dream, one in which you draw the curtains against the outside sunshine and direct your attention to the tchotchkes cluttering your indoors.  Many of the dream’s details were lost to consciousness, but I do recall that I toiled in a paper mill.  One of those integrated plants, where they not only press paper, but also produce the pulp.

When the flatbeds entered the loading dock, I supervised their unloading, as well as the insertion of the fresh logs into the industrial wood chipper.  While I don’t remember the exact sequence of horrific, visceral events that followed, I was suddenly fed into the interlocking swinging blades.  Faceless workers subjected me to the kraft process, dumping my finely-ground self into the digester, before treating me with sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfide.

The process took some time, but time has a remarkable propensity for squeezing itself sideways into places it’s too big to fit.  I don’t know if it was the confusion of having been casseroled, but before I knew it, I was a six-feet tall sheaf of paper.  A truck ride followed, and the subsequent stay on a Staples shelf lasted but a few days.  Before the week was out, a pen traced a thought across me like its words were an itch to be scratched.  In black ink: Rationality is humanity’s least convincing argument, and these are my wahnbriefe.  I looked up through the words–most words have eyes, you know–and saw that it was me with the pen.

The sunlight filling the room was too ruddy for morning, and I figured it as the mid-afternoon.  Sleep can sometimes be umbilical, I guess, and you don’t snip your own cord til the very last second.  I sat up in bed and shut the blinds.  The walls in the room–his bedroom, I assumed–were white and contained no posters, paintings, or photographs.  Someone had written on the walls; although there were a couple of drawings, it was mostly quotes from the likes of Thoreau and other dead writers.  On the short wall beside the door, though, was scrawled something I didn’t recognize: I used to play an instrument.  Not well, mind you, for I quickly learned it was I who was the trumpet.  I could emit no sounds by myself–no brazen notes, high or low–but if someone put their lips to mine and blew their hearts out, I knew I could fill the countryside with unabashed sound.  Below that, someone had written Twenty-Two.  

Stacks of books filled the short windows in the far wall.  When You Are Engulfed in Flames, by David Sedaris, Going After Cacciato, by Tim O’Brien, Poetics and Rhetoric, by Aristotle.  Shelves of movies surrounded the television; it was obvious this guy had a serious thing for Paul Thomas Anderson and Charlie Kaufman, with a few anomalies like Stardust and Boondock Saints thrown in for good measure.

I don’t know why or how, but I wasn’t frightened.  I didn’t necessarily have a rationale for it, but I knew that this was right.  This was nature.  This was inevitable, and viewed from the perfect angle, not only was it right, it was beautiful.  Even so, I knew that something had to be done about this man so recently dead.  I stepped out of bed, being very careful not to disturb the body.

Opening his dresser drawers, I found a white shirt, white shorts, and a pair of pristine white socks.  I peeled his tennis shoes off of his feet and slipped them on my own.  Grabbing him by his ankles, I tried to pull him out of his bed.  Rigor mortis had set in, however, and death has the irking habit of making things heavier than their actual weight, so he fought it.  Pulling him with all of my slender might, he slid out of bed.  His neck slinged his head into the ground, and I shuddered at the hollow thud. Tugging him down the stairs towards the back door, his hands caught against the steps and jerked his arms above his head, and he seemed to be yearningly reaching back towards his bed–that place where he was last alive.  His sunken green eyes, open in death and brightened by the contrast of his pallid face, unnerved me.

Canvas-backed lawn chairs were strewn about the yard, and a broken bird feeder devoid of feed dangled cockeyed by a frayed rope from a rotted pine post.  The garden was in transition; the columbine had wilted except for a few bedraggled blooms, and the thread-leaf coreopsis had yet to yellow its foliage. I dragged the body between them before collapsing next to him, gasping for air.  A fly landed on his eyeball.  Ugh, I said aloud, before shutting his eyes.  Sorry, buddy.  Don’t know why I didn’t do that sooner.  With some effort, I pulled his arms back down to his sides.  Although his expression was relatively peaceful, I pushed his lips into a wry half-smile–it just felt more appropriate.  Well, champ, I told him, looks like I need to find a way to bury you.  And from the condition of this garden, I’d say these flowers need to be fed.

Before the last word left my mouth, I heard the crash of a screen door.  A man, presumably a housemate of the dead guy to my right, was walking toward me with shovel in hand.  I jumped to my feet, ready to bolt, but he held up his hand to stop me.  Hey, hey, hey.  Don’t.  It’s alright.  This happens every June.  He marched up to the body, and right near its head, he jammed the pointed tip of the shovel into the soft earth of the garden.  And every June, some guy buries another in the backyard.  A few awkward moments passed.  You remember anything? he asked, and by his tone I knew the answer to be a foregone conclusion. 

His question prompted me into realizing that I had no memory of anything before the paper mill dream.  I could remember being pressed into paper, being written all over by myself, but nothing prior.  Just black shapes and and white sounds, the primordial and divine vacuum.  Before I could respond to his question, though, he barked a quick laugh.  Nah, don’t bother answering that.  It doesn’t matter.  He sat in a nearby lawn chair, waiting.  I began to dig.  The first few strokes were awkward, but I eventually settled into a nice rhythm.  An exhaustive rhythm, though; as any ditch-digger can tell you, the Earth prefers to move on its own terms.

After about twenty minutes of silence, the housemate spoke again.  You want a beer or something?  I pretended to think it over, before hesitantly asking, Oh, I think I’m good.  But I could maybe use some help digging.  He took to his feet, saying, I’ll go grab us a couple beers.  I shrugged, continuing to excavate shovelfuls of dirt while he walked back inside.  He returned a few minutes later with a six-pack of MacEwan’s Scotch Ale.  As he handed me one, I smiled politely at him.  Thanks.

Ha, don’t worry about it, he responded, nodding toward the body on the ground.  They were his.  I opened the beer and took a quick swig.  A rich, chocolate taste with a toothless bite greeted my tongue.  This is good, I said appreciably, before placing it in a tuft of grass beside the grave, and continued digging.  A fragile and uncomfortable silence developed, and I felt compelled to break it.  So.  How old was this guy?  He seems like he was pretty young.

Oh, he was pretty young, but I think he fell into the habit of forgetting just how old he was.  He was twenty-three.  Kind of a goofy guy, too.  Liked to get drunk at Denny K’s and dance with randoms, always claiming that he had moves like Jamiroquai on crack.  No one really knew what he meant by that, though, or who the fuck Jamiroquai was.

Wasn’t Jamiroquai the guy that did that Canned Heat song that Napoleon Dynamite danced to? I interrupted him.

Where the hell did that come from? he asked.  I though you didn’t remember anything.  Nah, don’t bother answering that, either.  You guys always pull it out of some murky black hole of information, some reflecting pool repository.  Yeah, now that you say it, I think he did do that song. 

The early June air is always ripe with rain, and the sky likes to promise it.  The humidity and heavy work slicked my arms and legs with a sheen of sweat, and the flying dirt stuck to me and turned to mud in the moisture.  My white clothes were filthy.  As the hole deepened, I had to throw the dirt higher and harder.  It tended to land on a gooseberry bush, the crumbly, alkaloid soil running down the heap and into the corpse’s hair.  I was waist deep in the ground, now, and figured I was halfway done.  Six feet is customary, although I’d personally rather be thrown into an erupting volcano, buried in shiny sheets of black rock.  The housemate yawned, stretching his legs straight out.  He was always afraid of answering his damn phone or opening his damn mail.  And he was a goddamn well of information, although he sometimes made people feel stupid.  I don’t think he meant to, but he did.

Sometimes, I interjected.  Sometimes, he agreed.  As the afternoon wore on, the conversations shortened and their interstitial silences lengthened.  He’d probably wanted to go inside hours earlier, but I assumed he felt obligated to stay and see his old roommate committed to the ground.  I reached six feet around seven o’clock.  Hoisting myself out of the hole with my exhausted arms, I considered the dead man sprawled before me.  Despite the sunlight and stifling heat, he hadn’t began to stink yet.  I reached down–I was going to pull him by the leg to the threshold of the hole, then push him the rest of the way in–when the roommate spoke.  Have you checked his pockets yet?  He might have something in ’em, and I don’t think you wanna be digging him back up.

I reached down and searched the pockets in his cargo shorts.  A cheap cell phone, beat up billfold, and a folded piece of paper lined by a careful cursive note.  It was addressed to "Twenty-Four."  As if preparing for a few minutes underwater, I took a deep breath and began to read. 

In order for some of us to come, some of us must go.  I know that now.  And in order for Twenty-Four to come, Twenty-Three must go.  There may not be one without the other, and for me, there is no preventing your arrival.  These twelve-months were not perfect, certainly, but I did the best I could with what I had, and I learned some lessons for you.  There are times when hope seems impossible, salvation improbable, happiness an unproven theory–but know this.  Stop trying to make sense of it.  Stop trying to understand the chaos, the entropy, the endless and nameless confusion.  There is little logic in hope, little probability in salvation, and only unsubstantiated rumors of intelligence in happiness.  Rationality is humanity’s least convincing argument, and this is my wahnbriefe.

With all my love,
Twenty-Three

P.S.  Don’t bury me near the shed unless you want to meet Twenty-Two.  And tell the housemate he’s an asshole for drinking my beer.

What’s it say? the housemate asked, his neck craning as he tried to read the letter.  I read it to him.  Ha.  That’s hilarious.  Twenty-Two pretty much told him the exact opposite.  Grunting noncommittally, I returned my attention to the dead man before me.  The body made a sickening crunch as it landed in an undignified heap at the bottom of the grave.  I gripped the shovel and began returning the soil to its home..

I finished in the heart of summer dusk, when every color shimmers blue like the light pollution in Starry Night Over the Rhone.  The housemate stood and stretched, before turning to me and asking, Hey, you need someplace to live?  Cause we need a new roommate.  Using the shovel as a cane, I took a few steps toward him.  I don’t know.  Is there a lease?  How long will I live here?  

He smiled.  I’m no Nostradamus, but I’d say we’ll need you til next June.  Studying the house for a few moments, I slowly nodded.  Yeah.  This place doesn’t seem so bad.  Sure.  I’m in.  The housemate–my housemate–walked through the humid fog of gnats and mosquitoes back into the house.  I patted the freshly disturbed earth with my shovel a few times, whispering, What’s one year? before following him inside.