Burial of the Dead

MERITON

MERITON

LaPorta was all set to bring Matthew in, cuff him, put a bag over his head, throw him in the back of a van with hookers and the wild men who were tossing trash cans through Bergman-Dorff-whatever windows. But even LaPorta had underestimated the power of a mob when word of the Apocalypse sweeps through a place and resolves itself in movement – not directed movement, not purposeful movement – just movement, seeking its own boundaries with its own conformities to fibonacci spirals and an architecture loosely grounded in the golden mean. Whatever it was, it wasn’t military, it wasn’t quality, it wasn’t even early-German-fascist. If anything it was late-empire Norse, Eurasian, Slavic, an invasion without source or terminus, and the danger was in the acceleration and the uncaring that accompanies speed.

It swept LaPorta away first, and Matthew became a mollusk, a clam, a crab, a burrowing-thing, digging, burying himself by the exposed roots of an oak tree, placing himself so close to the base of the tree that he avoided feet and legs as the mob split like torn fabric to pass by. Some people yelled, some people screamed, some people whispered, but the words were subject to filters, and people heard what they wanted to hear, expected to hear. Crouching by the tree Mathew heard terrorism and dirty bomb, and rumors fed the panic, and panic spun through the park down main streets and side streets where it broke up and unraveled in the way hurricanes unravel when land scrapes the undersides of cloud banks, shreds eye-walls, dissipates focus, dissolves momentum and force.

It was after midnight before the worst of the crisis passed and Matthew left the park and returned to Billy’s. The house was empty, so he waited for somebody to show up. But nobody showed, not Billy, not Darren, not Orpheus. He ate some food from the fridge and felt things begin to slip again. It had been awhile since he took his meds and the absence of people became its own problem.

***

It’s almost dawn and there’s a band of light under a blanket of purple just visible beyond the yard by the house across the street where the old woman sweeps her porch everyday. Matthew sits by the window and remembers that he’s off the leash, AWOL, missing-in-action, because he escaped the hospital three days prior when he saw Billy drive up the hospital driveway in the O’Neal hearse. Billy was there to pick up a body from the far end of the complex where wealthy patients died from normal things. Matthew saw him through the window near the main entrance and waited for the temp-receptionist to take one of her three hundred cigarette breaks. Then he walked out a side door and crossed the parking lot, all the time waiting for somebody to stop him. But nobody stopped him, Matthew walking the whole way like he owned the place, knowing people don’t stop people who walk like they own the place.

When he got to the hearse he said: Hey, Billy, and Billy said Hey, Professor, as if it were nothing. But it wasn’t nothing, and Billy had to think about all of it. You sure you can just up and leave like this? Billy asked, and Matthew said he wasn’t sure about anything. Then Billy said: Well, if I ask myself what’s better, as regardin’ you being locked-up or not being-locked-up, I guess there’s little contest between the two. So Billy told Matthew to get in the back of the hearse and lie down next to the coffin that housed the late Mrs. Johnson. Keep down till we get to my place, Billy said, and he started the hearse and drove back to Hartford.

The sun gleans the underside of morning clouds and breaks through. Matthew fingers the short stack of cassette tapes on the table by the window. The tapes are Billy’s library, his oral history, scheduled, indexed, identified with his very own system of numbers and letters. Matthew picks up a cassette, slaps it in the walkman and listens to Billy talk about the day he and the Professor sat in the Police Station with the halogen lights. Matthew remembers Talmadge and how pissed off he was about everything, and how Moraski tried to be hard nosed like Talmadge, but couldn’t hide the fact that he liked Matthew, found him interesting and innocent and rushed the interview because of it.