buildings. There were whole cemeteries of them. In some places it had to do with flooding, she knew, low cities like New Orleans or Buenos Aires, but here at Forest Lawn the mausoleums appeared ostentatious, the opposite of holy.
It was in the lying-down figure of a man that holiness arrived. If a saint were interred standing up, his stone image vertical like a statue, there would be no grace in that. A man had to be lying down or he was not even an offering.
She had tears on her cheeks, felt the wet streaks cool the skin, but did not feel them in her eyes. She wondered how she had missed her own crying.
Hal had not given himself up, but someone else had offered him. The thieves, she thought at first, but they were only a proximate cause: the root cause was still and always her. The death might technically be a random event, sure, but she couldn’t stop there, the shape of her responsibility was too clear. She felt the struggle of trying to make death describe a single point, mean one thing that could be understood, but at the same time she knew she was spinning a tale out of physics, out of atoms. A bus lurching to a stop, a tree branch swaying and bobbing in the moving air, why, that was all that death was—a shifting of microscopic parts through time. The parts shifted and left you alone.
Hal might look good now but he would not stay good for long. From now on he was the property of the dirt and the water beneath the surface, the property of gnarled tree roots, grasses and microbes, larvae and slugs, rats, beetles, putrefaction, fermentation and dry decay. That was the allure of cremation, of course: when you thought of your body in future time you did not have to see it decomposing. Better to see yourself as ashes, ashes and rising smoke. But she had never liked ovens either. They had it right in India, where they wrapped them in white and lifted them onto pyres.
Hal had been good. Good friend, kind father and kind man.
And yet she had to think of herself. She always went back to her. Not even this dedicated moment could be selfless. Damn it! You had to see yourself there, where the loved one was, you couldn’t help it: because finally you too would be forced out, would have to let it all go. Finally she would be a dummy in someone else’s eyes, the living would look upon her from above. She would cease to be and join him, as was said. Join him in the sense of not joining him at all, in the sense of a parallel but utterly separate annihilation; join him in the sense of an eternal nonexistence that contained nothing.
Still they said join, they said join as though there was a throng there waiting, because that was their desperate hope, there was a throng there waiting with arms spread wide to embrace you—there they all were, all the ones you had known, cavorting on the alpine meadows green in stately, shining ballrooms.
It was unbearable that he should look so perfect, with what was coming to him next. Obscene. She leaned over the coffin and jerked his shirt up from under the pant waist.
The shirt cleared the belt line and she saw his stomach, a shade lighter than his face but still tan. What had he done there, down in the tropics? He must have been on the beach! She saw him walking into the surf, surveying the vast beyond. And there was the wound, the means of this ending. A small line. She reached out with fingers shaking and felt the bump of its lips against her finger pads. Life was a skin.
She would tell him she was sorry. Or no: too late. The body would not listen. It was a corpse, not him—but then it was him, it was. Wasn’t it? The last him she would know—the trace of him, the path he left. The raw materials. Or possibly all there was, all there had ever been. It was not hers to know; no one would let her in. The door of knowledge kept her out, her and legions, the masses of the undecided—the living ones, the ones who had been living and were not anymore—try as they might to look through the windows, they could not get in. You knew nothing of death, then you