Wednesday, September 29, 2004

Somewhere Out There

I

Somewhere out there, someone’s dying. Giving those last breaths, and their life’s leaving them.

His name’s Bobbie Sanders. He’s a teacher, in New York City.

Her name’s Lindie Miller. She’s a nurse, in Dallas, Texas.

I can feel them, all of them. I can see them dying, like they’re doing it right here in front of me. Like Bobbie’s lying in his sleep, his heart slowly scuttling to a stop. Like Lindie’s right here, in the hospital, wearing white, cancer getting the best of her. I can hear the EKG going off the line, going to that beep, beep, beep. . .then nothing.

Silence.

How ironic, a nurse dying from cancer. Someone who’s out there to help the sick, the ill: she dies from what she fights herself.

When you think about it, every second, someone’s dying, somewhere. Maybe it’s right next door to you. Maybe it’s that shitty neighbor you always hated, who you never talk to – who you’re enemies with. Maybe it’s that bitchy-ass teacher you’ve got at college, the one who never shuts the fuck up about anything, and talks about nothing, and promptly yells at students when they don’t do jack shit in her classes.

Maybe who’s going to die next, that’s you.

We’re all mortal here on this plane of existence. We live from one moment, to the next.

One moment you’re a peachy, preppy happy little creature. The next second, you’re walking across the street, a drunk driver speeds by, runs you over, you die.

One moment, you’re having sex with your hot girlfriend – she’s got a nice ass – and you’re stradling her so hard, you get a heart attack, since your poor heart couldn’t handle it. And you die.

One moment, you find a sore on your arm, and you find out it’s skin cancer, and you find out it’s metastasized already, and that you’re going to die from cancer. You go through Chemo, but you die.

One moment, you’re a ninety-something reject in a nursing home, and your weak-ass heart, it just fucking quits on you, and you eat the big shit up in the sky.

One moment, you’re skinny dipping out in the river, then you fall into the oncoming rush, and you full under, run out of breath, and you die from where you once came from – where once upon a time, there were simple cells, weird-ass fuckers who turned into many life forms – one being humans, you.

One moment, you’re being a jackass with your friends, jumping off this cliff’s edge. You fall and land on your spinal cord, and sever the goddamn thing all the way in half, and you’re fucking dead as doornail.

One moment you’re alive, and another you’re dead. That’s the way it works, the way it’ll always work, probably, even as much as we try to find that fountain of youth – that immortality.

I can hear them. Moaning, groaning, spasming. I can feel the heart’s thuds get shorter, shorter, and so fucking gone. I can feel the winding in of breath, can feel it like it’s on my lips. I can feel it getting weaker, weaker, so fucking gone. I can feel the blood stop flowing. I can sense the oncoming decay. I can smell death. I can lick it with my tongue. Kiss it with my lips. See it with my eyes. Feel it tingling on my fingertips. Feel it numbing my toes.

This one guy. Jessie Davis, he’s dying right now. The poor fuck, his heart’s clogged to shit. Too much cholesterol, too much going to all those buffets, all over America like a plague of death. Too much going to McD’s, Burger King, Arby’s, Wendy’s. Too many cows he’s eaten, too many hamburgers. He must’ve eaten one hundred full cows, with all that fat he’s got. With those arteries he’s got, clogged to hell. He should’ve laid off the fries for a while. Maybe had some salads. Maybe went for some jogs. But now, he’s so screwed, there’s the only fact of the matter that he just has to not be a virgin. That’s how screwed he is. How fucked. How utterly, completely.

You have to wonder, how many ways. How many ways are there to die?

You could do suicide. That alone has so many ways. You could do a homicide. So many ways there, too. Execution. Natural causes. Cancer. Diseases. Viruses. Illnesses. Accidental deaths. It goes on, just goes on and and on and on. Endlessly.

Now, how many ways are there to be born?

Only one. Uno. That’s it.

The only way you’re born, is when your parents fuck each other. Give into the lust, the love – whatever it’s called to you. It’s still sex, pure and simple.

The only way you’re born, is when you come out of that womb, pure and simple. When your mom pushes one out. Pops one out.

The sperm, the zygote, they come together, coalesce. Then there you’re on the way to coming into this hellhole.

It’s unfair. There should be almost limitless ways to be born, too.

What’s even more unfair is, you should have a choice in the matter – you should be able to choose if you want to be born – if you want to come to this fuck-ass place.

The question is, how would you be born?

Would you appear out of thin air? Would you drop from the sky, bump your head, get taken by someone?

Me, I’d make it all fucked up. I’d fuck with it. What I’d do is, I’d make dying like being born. I’d make it so that it’d be like being reborn. Like inhabiting someone’s dead body.

Right now, Lisa Tanner, she’s dying. A gunshot to the head, point blank. A burglar did it. The fuck face. I mean, Jesus H.

Lisa Tanner, she’s got these nice, perky breasts. What I’d do, is I’d take her body. Just somehow, come in there and take it, make it come back to life. It’d be a real miracle. And then, I’d be born. It’d be like grafting my mind into hers – I’d have my personality, but none of my memory. It’d be all erased.

I’d think I was Lisa Tanner, for all I knew. A pretty, well-asseted voluptuous goddess.

Wouldn’t it be good to be so selective? To actually be what you wanted to be?

Death just seems like so much more fun than being born ever will be. With death, you can do what you want, if you take it into your own hands. If you do what you want with it.

I know, so many ways to die, so little time.

One moment, you think you’ve got control. The next, you don’t, your whole life’s gone as hell, and you’re some old bat, and you’re dying.

Hopefully, I’ll die young. Isn’t that the way to do it these days? Be something like Jim Morrison, or whatever else you’ve got. Die when you’re young so everyone remembers you young, so you become immortal, so you don’t have to suffer through this useless rent of existence.

I mean, those who die young, I think they’ve got it lucky. They’ve got an advantage.

II

Tonight, the sky’s blackest bleak. The stars do shine, but I might as well not see them. The moon, it’s out, and full. Looks like that face that it isn’t. Those two eyes that’re craters, that mouth that’s probably craters, too.

She steps out the door with me, Laurice. She’s this girl I know. Met her at college.

Laurice, she’s a brunette. Black hair, black as the sky tonight. It’s long, waves in the night air. She’s got a thin nose, pouty woman lips, black eyes. She’s the way I like women, black hair, beautiful.

We step in my car, I put the keys in.

She says, “So we’re going through with this?”

I tell her we are. We’re going to the cemetery, and we’re going to look up at the black menacing sky, we’re going to listen for ravens, we’re going to read the epithets on the tombstones, the forgotten names, the dates. I tell her, “What’s there to be afraid of, Laurice?”

Maybe there’s sarcasm in my voice, maybe there isn’t.

She gives me a you-know-what look, but manages a grin on that pretty face. I grin back. We’re grinning at each other, now. I say, “Well, the engine’s running, our grins’re grinning – let’s get this show on the road, kids.”

She says, “Beam me up, Scotty.”

We drive off.

Half an hour later, we pull up to the cemetery. It’s way out of town, like you’d expect. All dark, gloomy, morose, as you’d expect. It’s named Helphenter Cemetery, and as we drive up, on the dirt road, dust whichway all over, I brake, and we come to a halt. I say, “Here we are,” my hands still clutching the wheel.

She says, “Yep.”

I take off my hands, and open the door, step out. She follows me, and we stand outside the gate, a while. Just look at it, listen.

I say, “I can hear the dead moaning.”

She says, “I can hear you moaning.”

I give a startled chuckle and say, “Aren’t you perverse as hell.”

She says, “Why of course,” and I tell her that’s what I’d expect from a girl such as Laurice is.

You can see shadows, out there. See those gravestones jutting up, as something hidden. You see crosses, rectangular blocks, arches. You see some flowers all around, gray in the night. You get to thinking, and you realize there’s bodies all over this place, only concealed.

Then there’s the gate.

I say, “Let’s go, shall we?”

She says, “Okay. But you lead.”

I say, “What, scared?”

She says, now in a whisper, “Yes, I am.” Then, “Because I’m scared for my big, strong man’s life.”

I say, “Oh, you bitch.”

She says, “Oh?”

I say, “Well, I take it back. How’s ‘sexy bitch’ sound?”

She says, “Just go already.”

So I do. The gate, with Helphenter Cemetery on it, I open. It creaks, loud.

When it stops creaking, I say, “The thing could use some lubricant.” I say it knowing she’ll probably give something back, all perverted. I figure it’ll help keep me from running away like a little baby. Plus, who can beat flirting with a hot dame?

She says, “Sounds like what you could use.”

I give a grin, say, “I knew that one was coming.”

“Some other thing is going to be coming, soon.”

I say, “You’re just sick.” And I grab her hand, and say, “But even if you’re sick, I need you by my side, Laurice.”

“As do I,” she says. I tense my muscles, pushing hard, on and off, squeezing her hand.

I say, “We’re going to die here.”

She says, “That makes one of us. Just walk already, and stop squeezing my hand.”

“Yes queen,” I say. And walk over to the nearest gravestone, not squeezing her hand.

“That’s right. You’re my slave.”

We bend down, together. Read this first tombstone. It’s a dull rectangular block, and through the full moon’s light, we can read it.

I say, “Thomase Went, 1920 – 1996. R.I.P.”

She says, “He sure died an old bastard.”

I say, “What? Seventy-six is ‘an old bastard’? I’d say, no.”

”I’d say, yes.”

”Well fuck you.”

”Eventually,” she says, and we’re looking each other in the face, now. She says, “But first, let’s look around some more.” Her hair’s all over, barely seen in the blackness. Her face is pretty.

I say, “Come hither, queen, hie in haste. Thou shalt be rapt whence we view more.” I take her hand again, lead her over to the next tombstone, and the next one after that, and the next one after that.

At one tombstone – it’s Donald Moller’s – I say, “Donald’s such a lame name. But, you know what Shakespeare said about names.”

She says, “They don’t matter.”

At one tombstone, Lyod Franfer’s, I say, “Really, I can hear the dead moaning.” I squeeze her hand.

She says, “You’re such a liar. I bet you’re imagining me moaning, in your head, right now.”

I say, “What if I am?”

“I guess that would make me dead, then? Since you said you hear the dead moaning?”

Eventually, we get tired of looking at the tombstones. We sit down on Ronald Downy’s tombstone, he died 1987. It’s a big tombstone, big enough for us both to sit on, if we squeeze in a bit.

In the distance, there’s crickets making that noise, the one that’s so familiar.

I say, “That noise, those crickets. That’s the noise of night.” I say, “It just goes along with night, doesn’t it?” I look over at her, she’s looking up at the sky. Her eyes look beautiful. She looks beautiful. Her hair, it’s flat and moving a bit on the tombstone’s surface. Her legs hang a bit over the edge. Her breasts push up against her shirt, since she’s lying down, giving them more tone.

Her lips moving, she says, “Yeah, it does.” Her voice sounds like a dreamer’s. It sounds with fragility.

She says, “It’s so beautiful out here.”

I say, “Yes it is. And, you’re beautiful.”

She leans over to me, we’re face to face, some of her hair’s touching me. I grab her back, she puts her arms around my nape. I feel her breath when she says, “You’re beautiful, too.”

I say, “Not as much as you.” I say, “I’m a crazy bastard, anyway.”

“But since you’re a crazy bastard, that makes you so beautiful.”

I say, “Guess so, doesn’t it?”

She leans in, for a kiss, and I accept. The lips, they’re one of the most sensual parts of the body, and I feel it, when she kisses me.

The rest of the night, it swirls around, it’s all a blur.

We do it atop that tombstone, her with her perky breasts, her beautiful brunette hair, her pouty lips, her thin body. Me, a crazy bastard.

When we’re done, we lie atop the tombstone, in each other’s arms, and stare at the sky together. I stroke her hair a bit, while we’re lying there. I say, “I love the night.” She says, “Yes, it’s so serene, and peaceful.” Both our voices must sound like dreamers’ voices.

We don’t say much else. What’s unsaid, it’s conveyed in other ways. Just by the look in her eyes, when she looks at me, when I look at her. The way we hold each other, I stroke her hair.

We fall asleep, there, in each other’s arms, naked.
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