A Long Day at the End of the World Read online

  As my friends and I shot baskets in the driveway, my father would roar in from the tennis club blaring a song from Nashville Skyline, maybe “Lay Lady Lay” or “Girl from the North Country.” He loved that beautiful, almost country record Bob Dylan made with Johnny Cash. But I had the other Dylan—the not-so-pretty-voiced prophet of End-Times divination who rattled through songs like “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” “Hard Rain,” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” To my father, Dylan was just another singer, another Johnny Mathis or Frank Sinatra; to me, he was the very sound of deliverance, the rising summons of apocalypse, whose words would someday empty out the emptiness, wash this whole fake place away.

  * * *

  I went to the University of Virginia. I did well. I was cocaptain of the tennis team and a decent major college player—All-Atlantic Coast Conference my last year.

  I went to law school and hated it. In both going and staying, I was probably trying to please my father.

  And weirdly, instead of Torts and Trusts and Property and Contracts—rather than the black-letter rules I should have been stuffing into my brain—I began to have a different kind of thought. A repetitive thought. A couple hundred times a day, like a ticker tape running across the inside of my skull, I’d say this to myself: “I wonder how the world’s going to end.”

  “I wonder how the world’s going to end.”

  “I wonder how the world’s going to end.”

  Now, the subject matter didn’t really surprise me—I’d always been drawn to apocalyptic-type things, beginning with my father’s floodwaters and those loaded B-47 Stratojets—but the step into full-blown obsession was a first for me.

  I don’t really know what brought on the loop. It was before the R.E.M. song with the great refrain: “It’s the end of the world as we know it … and I feel fine”; it was long after I’d read William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize address about “the end of man,” which my parents had framed in the basement next to the pool table; and though it was concurrent with the Strategic Air Command’s production of Reagan’s Peacekeeper MX missile, I don’t recall any special fixation about that bomb.

  Instead, I think I wanted to feel something in my body. The silent sound repeating. Like a heartbeat. A slowing down.

  It still hadn’t occurred to me that I didn’t love my father.

  11

  I HAD NOT BEEN THERE when my father was exhumed. I had not attended his exhumation “party.” And looking back maybe that was a mistake. Sure, it was a weird idea on my mother’s part—to unearth my father after so many years—but in not supporting her weirdness, her call for ritual, I became haunted by the images I didn’t see.

  The backhoe at its digging and devouring.

  Red clay opening beneath October trees.

  A muddy coffin lifted from dark to light.

  And not the scattered clumps of disturbed flowers I’ve talked about—not Queen Anne’s lace or sweet everlasting, not horrible thistle or passionflower, not the flowers I’d search for years later along the road in ditches or in that plowed-under field at the Tri-State Crematory. I pictured, instead, the daisies and roses left on more recent graves and the wild oaks changing color around the cemetery edge.

  Unfortunately, the uncomfortable event grew more unsettling without ritual attention. I felt restless and agitated, thinking a little too much about what had happened to my father’s body. I couldn’t help it; the picture seemed at once so supernatural and real—a new twist on all those old vegetation myths about the changing seasons, death and rebirth, played out by the traveling bones of my father.

  After a while, in the most peculiar manifestation of untended guilt, I even took my father’s place in the cold ground. Though an embarrassing admission in its own right, this identification would prefigure more such embodiments with Tri-State. And the phenomenon began without warning, the mirroring generally occurring when I couldn’t sleep, a common event for me in those days. Strangely, and with some alien comfort in my own bed, I’d catch myself imagining what it was like to be buried: days rocked by the slow shifting of continents, crust over hard mantle, deep shale sliding into an old rift valley. And breaking the peace of that state, the rumble of the backhoe coming. The clawing and tearing away from the earth. The changing into another thing.

  For four days Lazarus lay in the cave, before Jesus said, “Come forth.” And so my father arose, still wearing his seven-year grave clothes as he climbed from the ground. But unlike Lazarus, of course, my father did not walk away into the light of the New Testament. Rather, he was loaded onto a truck and taken to the Tri-State Crematory, where, with a gradually increasing number of rotting bodies, he would remain for five years.

  I’d failed miserably to picture his flesh and bones when he’d first descended into that ground. I’d tried to bring myself to open the casket lid and look inside. But I couldn’t do it. I was a coward.

  And likewise, years later—almost casually, like it was a joke—I didn’t go to see my father’s corpse pulled from the grave. I didn’t attend the ceremony planned for his exhumation. And I never made the link to my failed endeavor at this burial. I just didn’t want to think about his lost body anymore; I was done.

  And then my attempted suppression of the events entirely (and predictably) backfired. My imagination took over and my father’s bizarre rebirth into death, his second death, took on a troubled new life.

  When I first thought about the name “Tri-State” as it related to my father’s death, I thought of that other vegetation myth’s tripartite scheme; I thought of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. It seemed relevant in a way I couldn’t figure out. But after a while I realized that the word had a different meaning beyond the obvious proximity of a Georgia crematory to the borders of Alabama and Tennessee. It also described another state of being, a kind of purgatory.

  When my father was buried and then raised up into his second death, he really did enter a third state: the plane of restlessness that haunts the road between life and death. Tri-State.

  * * *

  Regarding that now-mythic field, I wondered what my father would think of the picture I carried with me. It didn’t show much. Razed ground and some trees. Tread marks of a backhoe or other big machine. But certain aspects seemed prettily arranged. The sky, for example, catching streaks of cirrus and a few heavier puffs above the leaf line. Or the strange limb shadows of hidden trees that edged into the bottom of the scene, where the photographer must have stood in shade. Though just a quick snapshot, the photograph had power, I thought: It documented what happened while also capturing an eerie atmosphere of blight and vacancy.

  And even the best photographer couldn’t show what wasn’t there, or what was there but couldn’t be seen. I knew for a fact the bones of the dead lay scattered in bits and pieces just below that scoured dirt. I knew because I’d read all about it.

  Just after the end of the official cleanup in 2002, the defense attorney for Brent Marsh invited a group of plaintiffs’ lawyers to walk the still-wooded crematory grounds. As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution explained, the visit was supposed to be a “goodwill gesture” to provide the attorneys with a better feel for the place. It did. According to Brent Marsh’s lawyer, the group found “several hundred human remains, small bone pieces, some large ones just lying around on the ground.” The county director of emergency services compared it to a Civil War battlefield; indeed, the bloody battle of Chickamauga had been fought only a few miles away, and there fragments of bones and other relics are still regularly unearthed today. So it made sense that this modern field—where Brent Marsh recently had cast so many bodies—would hold hundreds of pieces of bone, locked in the ground like the seeds of wild grasses. In the end it was this afterimage, not the cleared field, that told more of what had happened there.

  12

  THERE ARE SOME STORIES you tell so often, or have lived so intensely, that they slow down. You can call up sensory details and rewind them with great vividness and imaginative accu
racy—the difference between a breeze and a slight wind, for example, or the multiple shadings of dark, as if in the process of recollection and collection you hold a pile of photographs to guide your words, little triggers of memory and feeling that lead the tale onward. And erased by that greater subtlety is the usual distinction between telling and remembering; the performance is blurred together, collapsed in a fissure of smooth space and time—a story in which events move more slowly toward a purer wreckage, an assemblage that, given a certain point of view, seems to take on an unlikely order.

  Back in 2002, the question of what had languished in the black box on my mother’s shelf those last five years would have to wait another day. It was agreed that my mother would take the box to a local funeral home in Santa Fe the next morning to obtain a professional opinion as to its contents. If the cremains clearly were not of human origin, we would consider what to do next.

  As night came on, the rain—changeable only by degree in the Oregon winter—fell in soft drops against the porch roof. No doubt I was drinking a Pabst Blue Ribbon, my drink of choice in the Portland days. In that town people used the weather as an excuse to drink too much, the sky always low and close.

  I remember talking about my father with my wife, Kate, and how particularly strange it would be for his body to have ended up at Tri-State. Already his coming and going from this world involved a dramatic event, a dislocation of mock-biblical proportion: deluge, disinterment, and now—perhaps—resurrection.

  Heads spinning with Scripture, we decided to walk down the hill for another drink.

  At La Cruda, our neighborhood bar on Clinton Street, the light was too bright, the thirdhand tables precarious, the bathrooms frothy swamps. But it had become the place to go in the city because of the jukebox. The yellow beer remained a further attraction—“yellow” to distinguish it from the expensive microbrews offered at other bars—although its chief attraction was that it sold for a dollar a can.

  Locals of all kinds floated through. Mostly people in bands, people who wanted to be in bands, people who wanted to date people in bands. And intermingled with these customers were older writers and artists, waiters and coffee shop workers. Typically everyone smoked and drank too much, arguing too long about some arcane point of rock ’n’ roll history: “The most influential artist of the ’70s and ’80s? Definitely Alex Chilton … from power-pop to demented ’50s trash rock…”

  And always a core group of patrons had the best seats along the bar. These faithful were not there for the scene or for the music, at least that was not their primary motivation. They were there to drink. And they conducted their chosen ritual with a certain zeal, commencing every day in the afternoon and continuing beyond last call. I had known these people for a few years, but I could never maintain their fervor. They were all on the same mission. They had all come to this earth to sacrifice their bodies.

  That night I was intent on keeping up with them. It was one thing to hear the Tri-State story on television. It was quite another to hear myself telling it from a new position.

  “In the pines, maybe … maybe locked underwater in a vault.”

  As the night wore on—and as I told the story over and over—the image of my father’s lost body became increasingly vivid, while my own limbs felt less necessary, less important.

  “I’ll find out tomorrow”—I heard my faraway voice say—“we’re having the box checked to see if it’s human.”

  Eventually Kate got a ride home, and I stayed for an after-hours drink with the devoted. It was at this time of night when the hardest drinkers began downing mind erasers—a three-layered cocktail consisting of vodka, Kahlua, and soda. The soda was supposed to “oxidize” the alcohol more quickly into your system, an explanation that always seemed unlikely to me. But I did like the name, which the faithful found useful. If they could just empty their minds as they emptied their glasses, the overall program of ruination would be that much easier.

  My problem, however, was that the more I drank, the clearer my mind became. Or so it felt. On my occasional instances of real drunkenness, I was known to hold forth on numerous subjects, most typically my apocalyptic vision of things in which we humans, a marauding species hell-bent on devastating the world, would get what was coming to us. (This was a far cry from the finer points of rock ’n’ roll usually discussed at the bar and reflected, instead, my extended history of such imaginings, from floods to bombs to that obsessive thought from law school.) And I had a long list of grievances—the present-day holocaust of species; the modern holocaust of the Jews and Gypsies and homosexuals; the past genocide, beginning with de Soto, of Native Americans. Like a child practicing scales on a piano, I drew from a list that went on and on, up and down, backward and forward through our ignoble history. And in retribution for these sins, we humans would receive a well-deserved apocalypse by way of global warming, nuclear obliteration, plague, etc., etc. (my list here being also quite long). “Something is coming,” I’d say, my voice tightening with dread.

  And yet if I stayed just a little later, as I did this night, these fire-and-brimstone sermons predictably broke down into crying. The faithful knew me well enough over the years to expect this. They knew I was a weeper. I’d put my arm around someone and the tears would just fall. I was crying for the sadness in the world—the great love I saw and felt for everyone and everything. I was crying for the absurdity of existence, the suffering as well as the beauty. All those things wrapped together, mixed in with another mind eraser. Sure, maudlin, but it was the End-Times—a topic the faithful knew something about. And when I walked home up the hill, the rain sliding from the sky, I heard myself crying for what was already gone.

  13

  I WONDERED WHAT I WOULD SAY if I had to nail my thoughts to a roadside pine. I decided my own sheets would have to be blank at this stage of my travels, just fluttering white ghosts fastened to wood. Or maybe I’d hammer that picture of the razed field at the Tri-State Crematory every few miles along my trail. Maybe that was my personal revelation. Because I did think I was onto something here. The pieces of bone and the pieces of lives. The hundreds of fragments and the thousands of photographs. Everything hidden and locked away. And there was some connection to the pictures themselves, the stolen moments in time, and my father’s heavy overinvestment of parental capital in me. There was something revelatory about his fractured approach to both of these things.

  On the west side of the road, I saw another Confederate Battle Flag standing weirdly alone in a small mowed field of ragged grass, and a sign below that read LT. COLONEL WILLIAM A. HEWLETT CAMP, SONS OF CONFEDERATE VETERANS, JASPER ALABAMA. I supposed the flag marked the local chapter of the Southern “heritage” group, a not-so-innocuous organization still active in these parts. Surrounded by suffocating sheets of kudzu over pines, the dirty white pole and cheap sign looked tawdry and vacant.

  Entering the outskirts of the old coal town, I passed through a poor black enclave not so removed from a Walker Evans photograph. A paint-peeled boardinghouse with a rickety balcony stood down a side road. Men sat in rusted chairs on dilapidated front porches. Children played in a ditch with sticks, poking at some small yellow flowers I didn’t know. Black folks and white folks lined up at Bayou Fresh Seafood & Deli. More trucks pulled in for lunch.

  My father had grown up poor. His father worked in the oil fields. And given the chance like so many others in the 1950s, he’d wagered everything on a utopian corporate vista that the world waved in front of him; he’d bought in completely. And urged on by those phony advertisements of that period, with their promise of accumulated horizon, he thought he’d feel better with a wife, two kids, two cars, a big house, a big yard, a big TV, four tennis rackets, ten suits, custom golf clubs, a Leica, a Hasselblad, and a Nikon. He thought he’d be happy in his sought-after managerial job that transferred him all over the country, uprooting him from where he was born and landing him in a dredged and gouged suburb in Atlanta. But when he wasn’t, and when he still had to
play like he was, simply because he’d bet the farm, bet his life and our lives, it fueled a simmering disturbance. And this was a guy who seemed destined for upheaval from the beginning, when that smooth water drowned his first home. This was a guy whom fate (dressed up as the Shit Fairy) had marked for special and afflicted treatment, whose bones would later lie muddled in a blighted place, where honeysuckle and thistles bloomed seasonally along the banks of a fake lake.

  14

  FOR THOSE WITHOUT SPANISH, the bar’s name, La Cruda, means “the hangover.” And I had a big one. After staggering drunkenly home up that Portland hill, I woke to find myself fully dressed on the bed, clothes radiating cigarette smoke. Rain fell heavily outside. And where I lay, images rose thickly from the exalted sadness of the previous evening. All those tears, I thought, and shook my head.

  As I slipped back safely into dream, another image split the dark: a pile of skeletons drowned in a narrow vault. When I opened my eyes to drab noon and stumbled to find a phone, a distant voice spoke from the message machine, a voice I could hardly recognize. My mother was crying a cold and muffled cry. And though I couldn’t decipher her words, I knew what they meant. My father was nowhere to be found in that black box on the shelf, the one she had talked to every day for five years.