Nova

The funeral home is a cold and lonely place. I spent last night with four people, who like me, are lying stiff on cold metal slabs with only a white sheet over them, up to their chins. The fluorescent lights make a high-pitch squeal as I stare up at them, like fat bees in a tin hive. My eyes aren’t open, they will not open, but I could see those lights and I wondered if they were the lights of Heaven until I looked around and realized I was where I am, still in the basement of the Autry-Swain Funeral Home in Terre Haute, Indiana, waiting for a mortician to do his work. Or her work, I suppose.

I don’t feel any pain, anymore. Neither in my heart, nor in my body. I don’t feel anything, really, but I am able to observe my surroundings and think, just as I had been when I was living. But unlike when I was living, I think clearly and I feel an overwhelming sense of peace and self-satisfaction. The way I felt after graduating from college, but without the dread of looming college debt. I don’t have any anger, or guilt, or sorrow. Nor is there any sense of happiness inside of me. I feel the way I imagined fish in a fishbowl feel that had never known the ocean, or a larger tank. Those that had been put in an aquarium straight from a plastic bag.

I step outside of my body and stand beside myself and look down upon what is left of me. I never imagined I would die at forty-one. I always thought I would have been married and have lived a long and happy life. I saw apple trees and grandkids in my future, neither which came to pass. But I don’t feel bad about that, it is merely an observation, a difference from that which I expected to be and that which was.

The hair stubbles on my chin are only recently gray, and my brown hair on top was just starting to thin, but I could still style it. I suppose, I had aged much over the past year, but I am still a good-looking man. I deserve better than I ever got, than that which I allowed myself to have. In many ways, I was much like the stripped-down ’68 Chevy Nova SS 427 in my garage that I had never had the time or the money to restore. That is what I would say to me if I was still alive to say or to hear it. I died in need of restoration.

They have yet to embalm me, to drain my dead blood and fill me with show chemicals and to wax my face, sew my lips shut, glue my eyelids, that sort of thing. That which they gloss over in the movies and TV will be happening to me very soon, I suppose. I am only sleeping, really. That is how I think of it. Sleeping without an alarm clock. With an excuse from work. With a permanent doctor’s note and an empty calendar that doesn’t recognize any day as a day of more, or less, significance.

Sleeping next to me are the four others, I mentioned. They, too, are standing next to themselves looking down at their meat. There is an elderly lady who looks like a long lump of gray mashed potatoes on the slab, but her soul, that who is standing over her, is young and very pretty. She wears a long, charcoal-colored wool skirt and a white cashmere sweater. She looks a lot like Marilyn Monroe, but less worn. I hardly notice the other three because of her. They are quiet in every way a person, or a soul, can be quiet. 

We don’t say anything to each other. Perhaps, it is the shock of being here, or the suddenness of it all. Maybe shock makes one devoid of emotion, I think. But no, I think again. Maybe it is just the tranquility of death that has finally washed over us. I think of all those bland sympathy cards in the gift shops for people who lost loved ones. Watercolors. Swans. Clouds. Lilies. I cannot explain the peace. It feels like I am a wind or the sunshine, and that I am bound not to just one thing or purpose anymore. Chained not to the skin and bone of a single body, but rather that I float upon thousands at once and my reach is that of all the waters of the ocean in one hand.

The mortician comes in wearing heels and listening to music through earbuds. I am first, so she wheels my meat to another room and I follow because I haven’t anything better to do. She looks indifferent to me, as though I am not a real person, and I think maybe that is how she manages to do her job. She chomps on spearmint gum. She locks the wheels of the table that she parks near a sink. She puts on gloves and massages my arms and legs, almost affectionately until she starts humming the song she is listening to. She then glues two flesh-tone-colored eye caps to my eyes. She carefully wires my jaw shut, but doesn't glue my lips. They stay shut.

She fixes my face with her hands like someone shaping a snowman when someone comes into the room. They laugh about some movie they had both watched, not paying much attention to me. Her earbuds dangle from her ears and I can hear the music she listens to. Tom Petty. The guy that came in the room jams a needle in my arm that doesn’t feel like anything and my useless blood flows and swirls out into a steel receptacle that swallows it. She inserts another tube and some solution from a bag replaces my blood. I just lie there like good meat lies and take it.

I spend the next few days talking to Margaret. Margaret is the lady who looks like a young but less worn Marilyn Monroe. I tell her that, but she doesn’t smile or laugh because we don’t have it in us anymore to smile or laugh, or to cry, or anything. I ask her if she watched her embalming and she says she did. She mentions that she thought they would take her organs and throw them in the trash and I said so did I. It was pretty easy, she says. I ask her what she is going to do now and she says, “I don’t know what I am supposed to do.” She tells me she died of heart failure in a nursing home like someone tells someone that they had meatloaf for dinner last Tuesday.

She asks how I died and I say I hung myself, casually. She nods her head. Where did you hang yourself, she asks. In the garage. She nods her head again. Why did you hang yourself, she follows. I was in love with someone who didn’t love me, who left me. She shakes her head and says that it happened to her, too, after she no longer looked the way she looks now. After three babies and cancer. “But the worst part,” she says, “is that he stayed.”

I had never thought of it that way. I suppose it would have been worse had she stayed. Instead of being killed all at once, I would have been killed slowly over a few decades until something gave out because something’s always got to give when someone doesn't love someone. She asks me if I ever heard the old story about boiling a frog. I said no and she says that if you put a frog in a boiling pot of water it will jump out. But if you put a frog in a pot of cold water and slowly boil it, the frog will acclimate itself to the water and it will boil as the water boils. “You hopped out of your pot,” she says. “I boiled.”

Maybe she said so to give me solace, but I don’t need solace because I am at peace. I ask her if she feels the same way and she says she does. I ask her if she is going to go to her funeral and she says she isn’t. She doesn’t plan on leaving the room until someone from upstairs or downstairs tells her where to go next. Until some door opens and she can leave to go to the next room, she says she is staying put. Despite being able to leave our bodies, we aren’t able to walk through walls, or through closed doors. And when a custodian left the door open, we learned that we weren’t able to pass through an open door, either.

She asks how I am going to go to my funeral when we can’t leave the room through an open door and I say I will show her as though it is some great magic trick. I feel myself get a little excited about showing her, but it washes away and I just look at her and she looks back at me as though she doesn’t care if she ever finds out the rest. We sit there for two days talking about our lives. We talk about things one of us knows that the other doesn’t. Movies we had seen. Books we had read. Places we have been. I tell her about my '68 Nova and she says she always wanted one.

She tells me she looks like she did in 1957, and I say that was a long time ago and she agrees. I say I look like I did when I first met my girlfriend in 2014. She corrects me and says my ex-girlfriend and I say back, yes, my ex-girlfriend. The one that doesn’t love you anymore, she says. Yes, I say, the one that doesn’t love me anymore. She asks if I know where her love for me went. I don’t reply. She snaps her fingers and says, “Poof. That’s where it went.”

And I say, “Yeah. Poof.”

Then she smiles. It isn’t a seemingly significant thing, but it is significant for us. Neither of us had smiled in two days because we simply hadn’t the emotion to do so. Those emotions were left in our meat. And I look at her perfect white teeth and I smile back. But it fades from her and it fades from me and we sit there contented, back where we started. Like two frogs. Neither of us in cold or boiling pots.  

A day later it is time for my funeral. My big day. Margaret is sitting in a swivel office chair and watches me from across the room as I walk over and climb back onto the table and into my meat as two men start to wheel me out of the room. I look at her as they do, unsure if I will ever see her again and she waves, slightly, and I wave back. I wonder if she is thinking the same thing. Then I think of a line I could have used, what’s a girl like you doing in a place like this. But it’s awful, and I shake my head and almost laugh. But with that thought, with that laugh, I realize I am starting to heal. Though I am dead, my broken heart is not so broke anymore. I can’t feel it. It was my biggest fear when I killed myself. That I would carry my sorrow perpetually on the other side like the chains of Jacob Marley.

The men get me dressed in a suit my mother brought, a dreadful blue thing, a size or two too big, that she bought at Sears-Roebuck. I could just imagine her buying it and telling everyone what it was for, like the way some moms tell everyone their son is getting married. It’s still a special occasion, she would probably argue. She would have cried at either. She probably told everyone who would listen that I hung myself in the garage because I had a broken heart as though it were something to be proud of. Like I had made the junior high honor roll.

I lie in the casket as everyone I know strolls by and looks down at me and says something or another. Some are kind and sincere, but others seem rehearsed and bland, as though they are saying it just so the person behind them will hear them. My ex-girlfriend shows up in a short black dress, a black veil, and heels. She saunters by and says, “Well, you really did it this time, didn’t you? You just couldn't get over it, could you? It's been months!” 

I think she called me a selfish bastard, but I don’t know for certain because she did so under her breath. My mom gave her a big hug because my mom loved her more than me, though she hadn’t called my mom after she announced that she didn’t love me anymore. She didn’t love my mom, either, I guess. I suppose though, there is some kind of female bond that binds through thick and thin. Some estrogenic comradery. I don’t understand it. My death was simply my ex-girlfriend’s excuse to buy a new black dress and to wear a veil.

“He loved you so much!” my mom pours it on. “I loved him, too,” she replies like she is reading from a sympathy card. Tears don't dare mess up her mascara. They are still hugging when I climb out of the casket and have a look at them. I sit in a seat and as the funeral begins, my ex-girlfriend sits in an open seat beside me. Halfway through the eulogy, delivered by a pastor I had admired but was never particularly close to, she is texting on her phone. Some guy named “Jake.” Some police officer her friend fixed her up with. They went on a double date. 

She tries to be subtle, but after a while she doesn’t seem to care and the phone vibrates as soft music plays and I have all I can stand of her so I go and sit by my brother who is famously emotionless. The usual flowers are spread about. The bouquets picked and clicked online that will get carried to my mom’s apartment and that will wilt in their wicker baskets or glass vases like graves. Baskets and vases that will get stuffed in a cabinet and will never be used again. There are cards, those lifeless cards. Watercolors and swans. Ponds and clouds. 

Where were you all, I ask them all, standing at the podium between people saying rehearsed things. Where were you when I needed someone? Friends, family, people who said they loved me. One or two words may have made a difference to me. One smile. Something! Anything! No one replies.

I get back into the casket to get loaded up in the hearse to go to my burial. I resign myself to be buried with my meat and just lie there forever waiting for the worms to devour me. The feelings of tranquility are gone and I feel like I did dangling there in the garage. Or as I tied the rope to the rafter. Or as I pushed my stripped-down Nova out of the garage to make room to hang myself, realizing it will never be restored.

The last memory I had living was the feeling of a bloody nose and watching the black drips of blood fall to the gray of the garage floor. Hearing them splatter like my ex-girlfriend’s thumbs on her cellphone. I’m at this thing, Jake. Relax. I’ll meet you out tonight. K? I regret killing myself suddenly as they lower me into the hole. As I think of her. As I hear the chains turn over the big metal spool of the machine, the grinding of the gears of its motor. It was never worth it at all, not one single tear, but it is too late to have my life back now. All things, they say, happen for a reason. That is the only bit of clarity I got. And it’s like bathing in sorrow and drying off with a cocktail napkin. 

I push myself through the casket and manage to climb out after some struggle. My mother throws a handful of dirt over me and I frown at her. I somehow successfully separate myself from my meat and I don’t know how, or where I will go next. And then from darkness, Margaret bursts in my mind. I have spent the past two days getting to know her soul and it is the most beautiful soul I have ever known. And standing there looking at my friends and family, who never called, or cared to visit while I was living, who look down into my hole like people looking down into a lake at their own reflection, I jump into the hearse before it leaves and I watch them scatter as the hearse pulls away.

At the funeral home I follow the men back inside and I make my way to the basement where Margaret is watching two other men load her meat onto the same kind of portable table to go get dressed and then to be laid into a casket. She is just staring, but as she sees me come back she smiles again for a split-second, though it quickly fades.

“Are you going to your funeral?” I ask her again.

“No,” she says. “There will be no one there.”

“We will be there.” I take her hand and she resists at first but I give her a tug and she says we can’t leave the room. But we walk right out of the door and up the stairs and there are her kids and grandkids and cousins and some friends. We sit in the backrow and watch everyone paying their respects. And I hold her hand and I can feel it, as real as any hand I had ever held, even more so. I can feel her soul through her hand. There is a warmth to it and she squeezes my hand from time to time and looks at me and smiles before her eyes go back to a pastor she was close to later in life. And he says, “Margaret lead a long and meaningful life.” And he goes on to say, “And she is in a better place now. Receiving those gifts that she could not receive on this Earth, all that there is that awaits us, the faithful, in Heaven.”

We don’t go to her burial. We aren't burying anything anymore. We walk to a nearby park and look up at real clouds, a real pond, and a beautiful swan that gently glides across the emerald water. There is no reflection looking back at us as we look down, we are locked in a profundity that seems to be of infinite depth. And the first of the angels come in an old 68 Chevy Nova SS 427, perfectly restored green and black, and she takes us to the next place as we hold hands in the backseat like a couple of happy honeymooners.