Burial of the Dead

MATTHEW'S CATALOGUE

MATTHEW’S CATALOGUE

Moraski left the hospital around five and Charlie’s still on call. Matthew takes a broom and sweeps dried chips of clay in the corner of the crafts room where he works on his Bernini. Then he unloads the pieces from the cardboard box – clay sculptures of everyday people doing everyday things. He lines them up and considers them a company, a troop, an ensemble. He places them on a shelf in accord with a chronology known only to himself, and he imagines that someday, maybe a hundred years from now, when this empire’s a subject for history and the Chinese rule the world, somewhere in Taiwan or Hong Kong or Beijing, at a new Christie’s or Sotheby’s, they’ll take out his little sculptures and raise their ping pong paddles and bid outrageous prices in their decadence as we’ve paid outrageous prices for bottled water ostensibly drawn from melting ice shelves in the Antarctic. He imagines how there will be a full color catalogue with four color separation and a short biography of America’s Utrillo, all of it designed to confirm the escapade, to affirm the prices paid, to salve buyer’s remorse.

LOT 1, Item 1: “Untitled” - Clay sculpture, baked, hardened, shellacked: Two men sitting in a booth in a diner; one holds a coffee cup, one holds a fork.

And Matthew remembers:

Yes, Mrs. O’Neal was upset after her birthday party. Yes, she cried on the ride home. Yes, The Amazing Levon only made it worse, waltzing about, telling people’s secrets, talking about children who’ve never been born, a dead husband and the divergence between the way things are and the way things are supposed to be. And, yes, I walked her to her door while Billy the driver stayed behind in the car, and it was painful when she shed her armor, when her sadness made her a person and not a type of person, the pleasant aristocrat, the often generous, but always guarded character I’d known for months.

Billy and I drove around for awhile. He asked if I wanted to go for coffee and I said that would be good. We stopped off at a diner and sat in a booth and ordered coffees, and Billy had a piece of pie. The lights inside were bright enough to turn the windows into mirrors and I saw myself, clearly, the face I’d always wanted – thin, drawn, with that cowboy squint and the heroic grimace of the drifter riding forever into a sun that will never set.

What are you starin’ at? Billy asked, and I said nothing and watched him as he cut the pie with the edge of his fork and ate it. Then he held the fork in his fingers and poked the air with it.

Who was this psychic guy? He asked.

I don’t know, some guy. Deacon somebody.

He was a deacon?

That was his name.

I thought his name was Levon.

That’s his stage name.

Stage name.

That’s right.

You know who he is?

No, yeah. I mean, what do you mean?

Who invited him to the party?

I don’t know.

What’s he doin’ in New Haven?

Some paranormal shrink’s been studying his brain. She’s at Yale.

So you don’t know, then.

Know what?

How they’re connected.

Who?

This Deacon-Levon and Mrs. O’Neal.

What do you mean they’re connected?