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I Was Happy The Animals Came Back
A suicide:
She killed herself the migraines got so bad. The relief that must be, to hang oneself when one’s head mutinies like that. It was like the head wanted her to do it. To separate itself, to make the whole body hover in the air like something angelic, unmoving and timeless. I didn’t find her, someone else did, a cleaning lady or something. But i imagined her, in white, the beams of sun cutting her soul out of there like scalpels of god. In actuality it was a dark room, no light. Migranes abhor light, she isolated herself in blackness. I went to the service. Of course i did. The speeches were moving. There were tears. I wished she could have been around to hear the sentiments, i wish it all could have happened before her death. I imagined her hiding behind one of the curtains, listening to the whole thing. Faking her own death, just to hear the sermon. People always think that, at funerals. I went in one of the black cars. I wore a suit. It was stiff, my limbs felt stiff inside it like a straw man. It was a closed casket. I wanted to see. I wanted to see the rope mark, the blue and purple like a snake, in the place where once i laid my hands. I wanted to see the porcelain and bloodless skin. I wanted to see her eyes, her caramel eyes: i wanted to see them unblinking, and frozen onto the beyond, in the way they used to look at mine but now the heaven toward which all dead eyes stare. I went to the reception. At the family house, a grand, victorian affair with windows clear through to sky. I stood near the parents. Their pain and need seemed to me a linkage to the deceased, a route; they were like transistors to which i tried to attune but couldn’t pick up the proper station. I envied them their particular misery, their access. The photographs were an abomination. To invoke the dead with the mementos of their life: it can only be described as a form of resuscitation. Ghastly. Not only futile, but necrophilic. I was not necrophilic; i eyed the sister, the exes: i wanted to fuck someone who had fucked her, or had been close to her. In this way i wished to touch her, but not her corpse: her soul, or more specifially, the echoes of her soul that might linger on in the bodies of those who had once been inside her. I recognized that this would be using them, that it made of them a means. But this urge was of a higher order, it superceeded such dignities. Inappropriate, you might say, to think such things at a funeral. But it was not. It was the most natural thing in the world. I didn’t sleep with anybody. The casket was in the ground, the olives and cheeses were nibbled, the toothpicks thrown away. It was time to say goodbye. Goodbye to the hosts, the parents, the nephews and nieces, goodbye to the big house with its unseeing windows. Goodbye. Goodbye.
