Quicksand (31 page)

—Who was selling umbrellas in the rain? Mimi?

—It is a reliably awkward displeasure to unexpectedly run into students in the outside world, I wrote in my second letter, but there was something especially depressing about the sight of you drenched to the bone with cheap black umbrellas hanging off your arm. I had feared that you were mistreating yourself into an early grave, though you certainly wouldn't have been the first highly gifted student to make a garbage dump of your life. “How long has it been?” you asked me in a voice that sounded hoarse from singing. Normally it is the student who knows how long since she left school, and not the teacher, and I said as much, adding that time moves so fast there are not even discernible
epochs anymore, and I knew people five generations apart with only twenty years between them.

I stood speechless, frozen by the strange manner of repeating his own letter verbatim like some arcane party trick, and I was reminded what a weird and amusing and eccentric man he was. Morrell went on:

—I remember you remembering me, I wrote Mimi, and you laughed, but then your face became a disquieting mask of what I took to be the deepest unhappiness, and after an awkward good-bye I remember smiling as I walked away, because in truth it is often a more sincere pleasure to see a depressed former student than a happy one, because in the happy ones I can see the disheartening process by which they became happy: high ambition, repeated failure, discouragement, eventual giving up, settling for less, reluctant acceptance, and finally contentment with the little things, somewhat beautiful in the individual, but depressing when it occurs by the thousands year after predictable year.

—Did she write back?

Morrell shook his head sadly. He looked totally depressed.

—Oh well, one gets used to ingratitude, he added, and as he walked away, I thought: That's perfectly right, one does.

The salesgirl at the third bookstore I tried suggested the local branch of the public library. I know what you're thinking, bailiffs, what is this, 1996? I raced through the streets as if through a time tunnel, to the bland underwhelming brick building behind the train station. My heart sank when I came across an island desk with twenty computer terminals, leather couches and espresso machines, but upon asking, the librarian directed me to the appropriate shelf. It was there,
The Fussy Corpse
, written by Elliot Grass, illustrations by Mimi Underwood. I took it to a leather couch beside loud-whispering students.

The striking, eerie cover featured a charcoal sketch of two burning eyes peering out from a crack in a coffin lid, yet inside, as Morrell had indicated, instead of the expected drawings, the accompanying illustrations were stark black-and-white photographs that I browsed without understanding their context—haunting photos of an empty field, an elegant fir tree veiled in mist, a vermilion sunset, vines tangled around an oak box, dazed eyes smeared with
mascara, a plume of smoke over a small hill, an ornamental jar on a stone-tile floor, a white shroud, two bodies facedown in the snow, a pair of bagpipes, a brick chimney, a sturdy pile of rocks, and an empty child-sized suit laid out on a bed. I would like to submit
The Fussy Corpse
into evidence as exhibit B.

This is how it begins:
Four exhausted and irritated pallbearers were carrying a fussy corpse across half a dozen cemeteries when their arms got tired.

Understood. If we're time sensitive, Your Honor, in summary, the book tells the story of a recently dead boy who doesn't want to be buried “just anywhere,” and the four pallbearers who carry this disenchanted corpse to every continent, into teeming cities and small towns, into rural and urban communities, into remote tribes and off-the-wall cults, where he is offered every type of funeral that is conducted in human civilization, but nothing appeals. He does not want camphor placed in his orifices and armpits while loved ones wail and scratch their faces and wear their clothes inside out; he does not wish to be mummified or to be buried with soldiers or under a tree or in his own garden or in a low-ceilinged cave cut into stone or in an unmarked grave or along with his belongings or with family members or with a sacrificed ox or with his knees drawn up to his chest or in a sand dune or with a corpse bride. Nor does he want his body covered with rocks nor to be placed in a three-humped rectangle-shaped casket nor on a bed of sweet-smelling spices, and he does not wish to be dusted with talcum powder or dressed in a suit or placed on a mat or covered with yellow cloth, and he has no interest in hearing chanted verses of scripture or bagpipes or love songs, and he is not inclined to have his internal organs removed and the body cavity filled with salt, and he does not wish a rope to be wrapped around his legs and neck and pulled tight to make him into a ball; nor does he want to be dumped at sea nor shot into space nor cremated and his ashes placed in a mausoleum or on someone's mantel or immersed in running water or scattered in a rose garden, and he has little interest in facing the setting sun or Mecca or Mount Kailash, and he does not want to be embalmed or tied to a stake on a hilltop and eaten by animals or vultures or carried on bamboo poles or placed on a pyre of sandalwood, and he especially does not want those flames aroused by clarified butter or to have his skull broken with a long pole or for his body to be covered in flowers or uncut hair or steel bangles or a short sword, and he does not want to be swathed in a white cotton sheet or placed in an unlined coffin or in a simple pine coffin with
holes drilled in the bottom or in a purified room with or without an untasseled prayer shawl—

In
short,
he turns his nose up, is ambivalent, and outright refuses every human method of disposing of a body. Eventually, with a heavy heart, he decides it is much less hassle to remain alive. And that's when the story takes its surprising turn! The reveal at the end of the book is that the corpse is not a real corpse but a young boy with leukemia, his ghostly pallor due to his prolonged sickness and iron deficiency, and the pallbearers are his brothers who have broken him out of the hospital and put him in a coffin to help the young boy confront the stark reality of his inevitable death.

I closed the book and felt like I had been shot with an arrow and slung across a saddle and galloped into hell. Perhaps due to the frankness of Mimi's photographs and the unsentimental manner in which the prose tackled the subject, the tale was almost unbearably poignant and weird. The library had grown calmer, the students had ceased their loud whispering, having retreated to their respective smartphones. I couldn't understand my oppressive, mixed overreaction; everything paltry inside me bristled and throbbed repulsively. It was as if I had recognized myself in the fussy corpse, in that boy's attitude and overall dilemma. Absurd. I left the book on the table, but then came back and returned it to the shelf. I didn't want any children to happen upon it.

That night, I dug out the pornographic poster of Mimi Underwood and sat on my bed looking at her dark, large, distended nipples and her exquisite—or in her mind, revolting—birthmark, that I found at the worst lovely and at the best incredibly erotic. About midnight, staring out of my window into the black sky and a misty halo of moon, I called the number on the poster. Your Honor, because in this era I recorded all calls to women for education and training purposes, I submit exhibit C, the following recording dated March 31st, 2013:

Hello?

Hello, Mimi Underwood! What's that I'm hearing?

I'm brushing my hair.

Sounds knotty.

What do you want?

It's Aldo Benjamin. The guy from the—

I recognize your voice. What do you want?

You recognize my voice? I'm flattered.

Don't be. It's unforgettable for all the wrong reasons. What do you want?

You didn't change your number.

I'll say it for the last time.

This
is
the woman who beat me with a car antenna, isn't it?

An apology, then?

I find it almost inconceivable that you didn't change your number.

You've called at a bad time. I'm having the worst week of my life.

That's what you said last time! I bet you have a lot of worst weeks. Did you know we went to the same high school?

Which one? I went to a few.

Zetland High.

The one with all the pigeons? Yeah, for a few months about twenty fucking years ago, so what? Thousands of people have been to that high school.

So what is right.

So I'm hanging up now.

I read
The Fussy Corpse
.

(silence)

That makes twelve of you. Did you buy it?

I read it in the library. Sorry. I have to say it was really something. It should come with a warning to emotionally or psychologically buckle up. My heart has been beating irregularly ever since I finished it.

So you didn't buy it, and you didn't even borrow it. Now I'm really hanging up.

I understand.

(long silence)

Mimi, are your eyes closed or open?

Closed.

Mine too.

(more silence)

Mimi, I want to tell you something.

What is it?

(silence)

I've never been angry in a dream.

So?

You know what I hate most in life? When someone says to me, “You know who you look like?” Then they name some overweight and unattractive character actor.

Why would you think I care about this?

I've always wanted to live in the type of old world-y culture where it's rude not to marry your brother's widow.

Did you want to tell me something more important?

Yes.

What?

I want to kill myself.

I see.

Yes.

You'll miss New Year's Eve.

I don't mind.

And the lunar eclipse.

When's that?

Stick around and find out.

What's so great about a lunar eclipse?

And crawling into fresh hotel sheets. And afternoon naps. And crying in a sad movie. And hearing a new language spoken for the first time. And wandering in the desert unable to find your tent at night.

That sounds terrifying.

Meeting a new person and watching them form judgments of you as you speak.

You
like
that?

Waking up on a boat to find you've drifted into a new estuary. Watching a sunrise with a beautiful stranger who may or may not have stolen your wallet. Crawling into the marital bed after cheating. Having your earlobes kissed and your toes sucked at the same time.

How can one person kiss your earlobes and suck your toes at the same time?

Who said anything about one person?

Mimi. I have nothing of substance in my life. All I have are my friendships and my love of God—how superficial. It's all about me, me, me!

That's no reason to lose the will to live.

And I've no real job. I don't even have a trade, or some kind of skill set.

What are you interested in?

Well, recently I have become obsessed with people who were mauled by their own dogs or whose children were mauled by their own dogs and who thereafter kept or defended those dogs.

That doesn't sound like a trade to me. How old are you?

Old enough to miss slamming down a rotary phone with enough force to hurt someone's eardrum.

What are you afraid of?

I'm a talented loser. The worst kind. Talented losers become self-aware madmen.

Aldo, I think I'll go back to brushing my hair.

And when I was in my twenties, the girls I knew were having abortions. By my thirties, they had moved onto stillbirths. I'm almost forty. Where's it all going to end?

You know where it ends.

I don't. I don't know. Do you think the inability to die could amount to a disability?

What kind of a question is that?

You asked me what I'm afraid of. That's my fear. That there'll always be some obstacle that prevents me from dying, from removing myself from the earth.

What are you saying?

I don't know. Maybe I'm just overtired. I've no energy these days, I'm always distracted, and am often staring into space. Literally—I have a telescope.

I don't think we're at the heart of things.

Strange things happen to me.

What kind of strange things?

It's hard to explain.

Try.

If there's a foot-sized
crack in a thousand-kilometer pavement, my foot will find it.

Lots of people are clumsy.

I'm clumsy, sure, no doubt. I had a stubbed-toe and head-lodged-between-banisters type of childhood and I
still
need to apply special concentration on escalators in regards to foot placement. I have an accident-prone personality. And I can identify with some but not all of the indicators: impulsiveness, cognitive drift, aggression. But this is something else. You know what Freud said?
Accumulation puts an end to the impression of chance.
I agree. This shit is not coincidence. Have you ever swallowed a fly?

Once.

Well, I've swallowed
bees
. And at least twice a year a bird flies into my head. I
always
fall over when I'm in the middle of yelling at someone. When I play a piano, the lid invariably closes on my fingers. I can never cross train tracks at night without a train screaming out of nowhere or traverse a lawn without the automatic sprinklers coming on. A rung has been missing on every ladder I've climbed. I inevitably get sick on my birthday. Whenever I travel I arrive in town the day after the fiesta. And how many overweight women can one man congratulate on being pregnant?

Quick! Tell me something positive about yourself. Without thinking. Go!

I'm good at buying presents.

What else?

I can pretty much befriend any cat.

What else?