Doors to the underworld

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.   

Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.   

In time the curtain-edges will grow light.   

Till then I see what’s really always there:   

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,   

Making all thought impossible but how   

And where and when I shall myself die.   

Arid interrogation: yet the dread

Of dying, and being dead,

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

— Philip Larkin, Aubade

Earl Fowler

The morning light was too bright, the kind that gets into your eyes and makes you squint like a man trying to remember where he misplaced his wild and precious future. The coffee was straight out of the Slough of Despond, crossed too many times by the boots of ghosts ripped from the machines, souls ripped from their bodies.

And as the steam curled up like the yellow fog that rubs its back on the interface, the interstice, the no man’s land between our workaday selves, mired in quotidian details, and our imminent transition into undifferentiated wisps of nothingness, I heedlessly resolved — with the dauntless intention of affronting my destiny (and yours) — to scan the day’s entries from the dead letter office nonpareil. (The phrase “undifferentiated wisps of nothingness” is from the author Kurt Vonnegut, sort of an expert since he’d been one himself before 1922 and reverted to this natural resting state in 2007. Nature adores a vacuum.)

Return to sender.

I pulled the newspaper toward me like it owed me money, and sure enough, there it was, nestled among the not-so-funnies, the puzzles and the weather: the obituary section.

I don’t know why I still read it. Maybe it’s the temporary respite it offers from the Dictatorship of the Bumptious Broletariat, those sore winners from the dark side of the 49th parallel, with their ever-intensifying enthusiasm for philistinism, perfidy, anti-intellectualism, ignorance, intolerance, racism, vengefulness, xenophobia, antisemitism, misogyny, larceny, violence, tribal sadism, mendacity and doublethink. (But enough about the news. And anyway, I forgot to mention scurrilous treason.)

Or maybe I read the obits simply because I’m getting older.

Either way, it’s always the same — names, faces, dates reminding us that we’re just another notch on the fast and loose cone pulley of time, another illegible scribble on a yellow Post-it note by the moving finger that writes and, having writ, pokes us six feet  into the ground.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse   

— The good not done, the love not given, time   

Torn off unused — nor wretchedly because   

An only life can take so long to climb

Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;   

But at the total emptiness for ever,

The sure extinction that we travel to

And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,   

Not to be anywhere,

And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

— Philip Larkin, Aubade

I flipped the section open and there he was, big as death — Len “Fingers” Marjan. I knew Lenny. I even had a drink with him once. He never could hold his liquor, but that never stopped him from trying. He had fingers like a pianist — long, delicate, the kind that should’ve been playing Chopin, but instead, they were forever picking locks and lifting wallets.

Lenny always said he’d go out with a bang, and I guess he meant it literally — a heart attack over eggs benny at some dive up in Sutherland. Didn’t even make it to the bar for his morning whisky. The man was a professional, though, even in death. He had it all planned: a funeral on a Tuesday, flowers on credit (good luck ever collecting on that one, FTD) and a pallbearer who owed him money.

The week before it was a retired bookie I recognized, Ralph “The Blue Pencil” Losie. He’d run a numbers racket until the scandalized government finally twigged to the lucrative business of ruining the lives of compulsive gamblers and their families. And took it over.

Ralph was famous for dangling unlit cigarettes from his mouth with debonair flair, like every day was his last day on Earth. Which, it turned out, last Wednesday was. His winning ticket turned out to be a losing ticker.

I hadn’t seen him for a few weeks, but that’s the thing about old age — people stop showing up, and you start asking questions like a gumshoe poking around a back alley. Only now, I was starting to find the same answer more often than I liked.

At the back of the paper.

This is a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die,

And specious stuff that says No rational being

Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing

That this is what we fear — no sight, no sound,   

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,   

Nothing to love or link with,

The anaesthetic from which none come round.

— Philip Larkin, Aubade

Thought of that old joke: Why do you see so many old people at church or the synagogue, the temple or the mosque?

They’re cramming for the final.

Because it’s a dangerous habit, reading the obits when you’re ready to slide into a spot on the pew. At first, it’s a simple curiosity. You look at the names, think to yourself, Well, I don’t know any of these folks, and go on about your day.

But then, the game changes. You see a name you recognize, one of the regulars from the corner diner or a face that used to nod to you at the liquor store. You start to recognize more and more names, learn to appreciate Tennyson’s dictum that a sorrow’s crown of sorrows is remembering happier things.

And then there’s the kicker — the name you don’t recognize, but the photo looks like someone you once knew. It’s a strange kind of déjà vu, or maybe the opposite, like peering into the mirror and seeing someone else’s reflection. Was that a face from high school? A neighbour from two apartments ago? Someone you’d brushed up against decades ago in a darkened corner of the Barry or the Albany?

You don’t know anymore, and you’re sure as hell not getting any answers.

And that’s the thing about obituaries — they don’t really tell you anything. With their cliché-ridden formats, they’re sanitized little blurbs, like a bad novel with all the interesting parts torn out. You’re caught in simulacrum of images, distorted lenses, hidden cameras and two-way mirrors. You’re digging and hammering above ground without ever breaking into the burial shrine bearing the priceless statues and figurines.

Obits tell you who’s gone, but they rarely tell you why they mattered. The bold type, cold as a morgue slab, tells you everything and nothing in four lines or less: name, date of peephole opening, date of peephole closing.

You realize that you, too, are just a few ancillary details away from some bold type of your own. Throw in a profession, a hobby, a spouse, five kids and dog named Sparky. A mention of an oncologist and the care aides down at Happydale, the immigrants underpaid to hold your sippy cup as your unknitted sleeve unravels into eternity.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,   

A small unfocused blur, a standing chill   

That slows each impulse down to indecision.   

Most things may never happen: this one will,   

And realization of it rages out

In furnace-fear when we are caught without   

People or drink. Courage is no good:

It means not scaring others. Being brave   

Lets no one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

— Philip Larkin, Aubade

Compulsive obit readers loot the past like tombaroli, Etruscan tomb robbers digging for shards of artifacts. We grab hold of the threads that lead us, Theseus-like, out of life’s confusing maze and straight through the hinged flap to the underworld.

So many. I had not thought death had undone so many.

And the older one gets, the more one can hear the dull thud of digging coming from above. Hell, the other day I was walking by a cemetery and two guys attacked me with shovels. Bobbing and weaving to avoid the clumps of sod, I eventually sold them on the notion that they also swerve who only read and wait.

What dreams may come.

By the time you’re done with the section, you’ve got that sinking feeling — literally — like you’re stepping into a pair of shoes that don’t quite fit. But they’re your shoes, Buster Brown, and there’s only one direction left to walk: straight down Stygian Boulevard, where the sun don’t shine and the gruff ferryman always expects a tip.

Declare the pennies on your eyes.

The daily death cavalcade is a crapshoot, a roll of the Eurydice. And we obit addicts keep making the same mistake as Orpheus. Looking back in angst. Looking back in languor. As Larkin says (and he’s been an expert since 1985), it makes no difference.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.   

It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,   

Have always known, know that we can’t escape,   

Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.

Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring   

In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring

Intricate rented world begins to rouse.

The sky is white as clay, with no sun.

Work has to be done.

Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

– Philip Larkin, Aubade

Back to work, then, with a last fleeting thought of what I’d say to my dad, who became an expert 30 years ago, if he were alive today.

Sorry about the cremation. We could have sworn you were dead.

Put down the paper, rolled another number for the road. Wondered how the words under my bold type would converge. And since I’m just another dick in the pall, wouldn’t need more than two.

“Anybody home?”