A Long Day at the End of the World Read online

  Obviously, there was a lot to worry about. Though other kids didn’t seem so worried.

  My sister laughed at me when I explained how, at bedtime, I’d casually asked God if it would rain the next day and he said no from my dark closet. If the answer had been yes, his deep voice bellowing from behind a rack of small coats, then I guess I would have asked about the weather for the next thirty-nine days.

  Water.

  And I never heard any playground talk about apocalypse, not a peep. Though I, inclined to research, pulled the family Bible from the shelf next to the row of World Book Encyclopedia and studied Revelation for some kind of clue. At the time I was terrifically afraid of that book of the Bible and could suffer only a few minutes of scouring the text, but over a period I gathered the basic idea. Blood rained from the sky and the sea turned to blood and all the creatures in the sea drowned in blood. One angel poured his vial of wrath into the rivers and they became blood, too. And a star called Wormwood (doubly scary for me given my mother’s morbid fear of death accompanied with worms) fell into the water and everyone, including all the animals, died from drinking more blood.

  Of course, this was all in conjunction with me playing the flood game in the backyard, imagining the black clouds of dust and rain approaching and then running indoors gasping—my young mind just a step ahead of the rising waters.

  Daddy. God. Missiles. Blood. Babel. Water.

  It was quite a burden for a small child, one that I bore silently and alone.

  And when as a teenager I finally arrived in my suburban Atlanta dead ends, my emerging rational self began to sort through these disturbing images, eventually discarding the idea of a literal God while translating the Great Flood into personal myth. As for Revelation, I soon managed to elevate its terror into high metaphor (the miraculous concept of metaphor acquired, I believe, from my tenth-grade Southern literature class featuring homegrown critics of the South such as Faulkner, O’Connor, and Lee), and suddenly I could build my own apocalypse from a wealth of real-world events. Not only did I pick up waves of a Confederate American nothingness from my invisible inner decoder as I prowled around the dug-out cul-de-sacs and half-built houses, I also received news, mostly from TV, of impending doom. Air pollution. Water pollution. Oil slicks and ozone holes. Rain forests—especially the one surrounding that giant serpent-shaped river called the Amazon—bulldozed and burned away, slashed and gouged. Radiation and chemicals and dead children. Creatures, like the dinosaurs of sixty-five million years ago, rapidly disappearing from the world as humans blindly dredged and paved, dredged and paved.

  And then how strange to cast these charged images of destruction against the nothingness of my vagabond corporate childhood, against the nothingness of my father’s inscribed life. How strange to sense something more than pure blankness, more than just a wind of zeros assaulting the air.

  In fact, by the time I left those desperate dead ends for college, everything around me appeared both empty and wrong. Not only was the suburban life alienating, but it was also the input and output, engine and product, of a runaway corporate capitalism—yes, I was beginning to get the lingo down—whose international machinations functioned as a catalyst for our new apocalypse. Of course I couldn’t neatly hook up all the causal factors for every strand of approaching destruction directly to my father, or to IBM, but I could try, and in the mid-1970s I could begin to make sense of the rebellion of the past decade, its critique of materialism as bad for the good earth. These were still oversize ideas for a high school kid, bluntly categorized and wielded, but they began to take hold. And as shown in my occasional late-night diatribes in a Portland bar, these concepts would be crystallized and refined over the coming years.

  * * *

  So it was not surprising that apocalypse rode with me that day.

  Originally, when I first approached the outskirts of Jasper, I wondered whether my father had also experienced an intimation of emptiness, a breach of nothingness deep down near those already disturbed plates of his own history. I wondered whether he’d vaguely sensed the meaninglessness of his own rampant materialism, as well as the culture’s, and so embarked on his second career as amateur photographer … ultimately a twisted one of gadgets and machines, distorted into just another form of materialism because he never acknowledged the problem to himself. He could never quite escape the power of his early indoctrination.

  Yet it was not until I exited the other side of Jasper on my pilgrimage day, the sun shining straight down, that I connected my predilection for End-Times to my father’s pictures. Instead of angels pouring vials of blood into the waters of the world, I had my own kind of vision … the weird kind that occurred only in my head.

  As I pulled back onto the highway, a hovering of just empty blue sky above my horizon, I imagined that each time my father took a photo of me, or anyone in my family going about some mundane suburban business, he was clicking another picture of the apocalypse.

  18

  DURING THE DAYS FOLLOWING the discovery of my father’s body at Tri-State, my family went about the business of the dead. Initially, we made arrangements for my father’s belated cremation, a thing done quickly and once more without ritual due to the exigencies of the circumstances. The Georgia Emergency Management Agency had possession of his body, and they needed to know what to do with it. A local funeral home took custody, and this time my mother received my father’s actual cremains by a trusted friend’s hand delivery.

  Within this volatile period, we all had to find a place for the news. My family’s collective response to the unfolding of events ranged across the emotional spectrum, with especially dramatic movements through horror, anger, and sadness. Again, we had no guidelines for such strangeness, no cultural markers for dealing with my father’s second death. It was a disorienting time, in which we all had to construct a new way to mourn.

  And soon we began to exhibit some individual tendencies. My sister appeared to focus particularly on the black comedy aspects of the situation—of which there were several, given the Gothic nature of the Tri-State Crematory Incident. Wasn’t it a little weird, she asked, that no one noticed the piling up of hundreds of bodies not so far from a main road? Was this a regular kind of occurrence for the hill folk of north Georgia? And how could a stupid mixture of concrete dust and whatever fool everyone, including all those funeral directors, for five years? And then there was our own collective story about the boots, which, though ultimately disturbing and graphic, seemed scripted from a mock horror movie. Our father, she kept saying, “would have laughed his ass off about that one.”

  And in response to the often-expressed belief that the Tri-State victims somehow possessed “restless spirits,” she proclaimed that when she died she wouldn’t mind if her own corpse was left out in the woods.

  “I don’t fucking care,” she announced. To her, in an expression of (unchristian) dualism, a body was just a body in death. It was a thing, disconnected forever from all but its thingness.

  In fact, her response was so emphatic that I wondered if she might be a candidate for one of the body farms set up in various parts of the country. In such places scientists studied the effects of putrefaction on bodies intentionally left exposed under a variety of controlled circumstances, in order to enhance the knowledge of biology, pathology, and forensics. Ironically, people were doing the same thing that Brent Marsh had done—scattering dead bodies in dirt, leaves, and pits—but in a manner sanctioned by the culture and state. The only real difference lay in the purpose behind the endeavor, and, of course, that the bodies once belonged to willing volunteers. In retrospect, my sister’s proclamation seemed a way to identify with her own father’s discarded body. She declared her readiness to step into his shoes (or boots). It was a way to lessen the trauma of his desecration.

  As for my mother, she began to express louder and more outlandish versions of guilt and regret. She was mad, too, calling Brent Marsh a variety of choice names.

  “They ought t
o throw that Brent fella down a big hole himself,” she yelled. “See how he likes it!”

  Regarding her remorse at having precipitated the event, having unearthed my father’s body from his first home in the ground, my sister and I tried to reassure her. Clearly the burial/worm phobia was a legitimate fear, and we’d both condoned the exhumation, even while choosing not to be present at it. Obviously she’d had no idea that her husband’s body would end up at the Tri-State hellscape, lounging in the woods those long years.

  And now my mother had the Shit Fairy. She could trace all her misfortune back to that personage, blaming it for everything from her own cancer to my father’s premature death to his body’s eventful stay at the crematory. Though she never experienced any real supernatural solace from the Shit Fairy, I believe its conjuring did provide some sideways comfort, some consolation in the very declaration of its blasphemous name. In other words, the deflection of trauma by the performance was real, even if the entity was not. And for her I think the Shit Fairy was essentially an expression of intelligent fate, an agnostic’s funny entertainment of the notion that things happened for a reason. Though she was hard to pin down on these matters, I think she leaned in the direction of some kind of soft determinism. Certainly the boots story, which the Shit Fairy orchestrated and then ultimately sat out, had the synchronous ring of fate.

  And finally there was me.

  Beyond bewilderment and the gamut of expected emotions, I immediately had a big problem. On the one hand, I shared my sister’s view that a body was just a body, a thing without any actual meaning after death except as a symbol of a person’s life. I did not accept as true, for instance, that my father’s shadow was troubled in the woods, haunting the banks of the Tri-State lake.

  Instead I considered human beings as simply flesh animated by a chemical consciousness—a consciousness that immediately disappeared into nothingness upon death. I had no belief in the sacredness of the dead form, nor did I believe that a corpse housed any kind of ghost or spirit. A body was just a body was just a body … It was a conviction that entitled me to a limited reaction to the desecration—perhaps confusion, anger, and some feeling of violation, but not much more. Within the confines of my unadorned belief system, there just didn’t seem to be room for a greater disturbance.

  And yet I did have more in the way of trouble … picture trouble …

  Essentially I couldn’t get away from the images of Tri-State.

  I couldn’t stop seeing the landscape of bodies strewn about the crematory grounds, piled up in vaults and tossed together in mass graves, scattered among the old mattresses, bottles, and pallets like more trash. I couldn’t stop imagining the eyes that were no longer eyes gazing up into an unconstellated firmament, where one day the angels would not pour down vials of wrath and blood because I didn’t believe in angels. I didn’t believe in that particular apocalypse. And I couldn’t help seeing that damn pool table with its nest of scavenged limbs and leaves.

  Strangely, these terrifying images were all fantasies—snapshots conjured by a fallow brain. Clearly no news organization, print or television, would offer graphic pictures or clips of decomposing bodies drawn from shallow pits or pried from old caskets. Such horrors were not fit for a general audience. Instead, I drew most of my images from the website of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which did not show much more in the way of pictures but revealed a great deal in the form of words. During those opening weeks, the reporter, Norman Arey, wrote in detail of the mass desecration, and using his descriptions as points of embarkation I conjured images that I then filed away under Disturbed. Eventually, I translated his stories into an entire album of Tri-State Crematory photographs, which I pulled down regularly from an internal shelf.

  Generally it worked like this: Arey would set a scene or describe a fact and I’d dress it up from there.

  One such fact I embellished in my head was the ghastly image of the “vaults,” which, I understood from Arey’s articles, had been stuffed with numerous bodies. These five metal vaults were found in the large storage shed, stacked one on top of another. From his description I deduced that Brent Marsh had used a single-body burial vault to hold multiple corpses that he failed to cremate. Normally a vault was used as a grave liner to keep the casket dry and to prevent a shallow depression at the cemetery. But Brent Marsh, in his innovative use of the container, slung in a single corpse and, as the flesh putrefied and fluids evaporated, he had room for more corpses on top. Given organic matter’s method of simplifying itself over time, he could then fill an individual vault with five or so “reduced” corpses, saving space for more bodies elsewhere.

  So I had pictures like these accumulating in my head, a gruesome slide show of the collective dead.

  And then, of course, I had more to deal with regarding my father himself.

  Though I wasn’t sure exactly where they’d found him, I knew his coffin had lain in the brush and trees not so far from the main crematory building. And I knew he’d been there for five years. So I wondered about his deadly state—his rate of molder and decay. Just how far gone were those feet lodged in his boots? Was he mummified or mostly bones? And was his face still recognizable, the face that so strongly resembled my own?

  Obviously—somewhere in the teeming backwoods of my imagination—a body was not a body was not just bones.

  And though I didn’t exactly think of it at the time, I know I was afraid. I’d been pushed toward the edge of dread, the black hole of oblivion.

  Without the protection of a supernatural belief, I was suddenly confronted with the finality of my father’s death—his animal death and my own. With all ritual displaced by Brent Marsh’s conjuring of alchemical concrete dust and bone, I was alone with death itself, as exposed as my father in the close woods. And I couldn’t just concoct a belief in the spirit, soul, or afterlife, ideas I’d discarded long ago. I couldn’t manufacture a faith in determinism—whether that offered by God, the Shit Fairy, or some guiding principle of the universe. In an excruciating way my body was too real, too transitory, and it was fading fast just like my father and those other fragile things left rotting at Tri-State.

  And so it was, face-to-face with my father’s dead self, with dread, I wondered what it was like—I wondered what it was like being dead. I thought of him and I thought of me. I thought of snakes crawling over and mice skittering through, coyotes gliding by and bees buzzing around. Stirring of body bags and murmur of lake, especially at night, with a little wind. And finally our eyes gazed together into a black casket sky that reflected the colors of a shifting world—red moving to yellow and back again to green.

  My father came alive—well, not quite alive but animated—a thing that could feel his death through all the human senses. It was a simple way to displace the terror of my father’s death—much like my sister’s declaring her own body could be thrown into the woods—by identifying with his plight and becoming more dead myself. The gesture seemed natural and was possibly even normal to some extent.

  But soon, as occurred with my excursion underground after his exhumation, the images grew uncomfortably close. I’d begotten a thing that could show me his death, allow me entrance into his discarded bones, his disappearing flesh—and too often I accepted his express invitations. These meetings began reactively and without premeditation, and then darkened with repetition.

  * * *

  Human beings are funny things. We go on small pilgrimages without knowing we are on them. We roam around in our daily lives and wish for something significant or special to happen. And then occasionally we embark on big pilgrimages that project an end point—a point that might be religious or spiritual, or in my case a razed and abandoned field in the north Georgia mountains.

  But we need a lot of luck and we need to follow the signs. And so it was that during those first days of Tri-State I had made my arrangements. I’d sown the idea of my father, animated and engaged, rising from the unhappy earth. From the beginning, and perhaps hidden fro
m view for his own protection, I’d endowed my father with the power of becoming—a thing that might bloom beautifully into himself. He was just the kind of ghost flower that might appear somewhere along my road.

  19

  ALREADY I WAS LOOKING for him as I passed by Taco Bell, Holiday Inn and KFC, Papa John’s and Wendy’s and AutoZone, Ruby Tuesday and CVS and Kmart and Wal-mart. In general I knew this was not the best habitat for real wildflowers, even of the disturbed variety, but maybe ghost flowers appeared anywhere—like those drowned shoal lilies along the Black Warrior River. The real blossoms of these flowers, once the largest stand on earth, would never return to this world. They had no home beneath that smooth-water postcard and fake lake, nowhere to go. But the ghost lilies had made it back. I’d seen their perfect white heads swaying clearly below the water when I considered turning down a county road just a couple of hours ago.

  Jesus … in the core of me I felt a wave of depression every time I came across this part of America, which meant I must have been depressed quite a bit. I felt we’d traded the real flowers’ home for another type of world. We’d dammed and dredged and channelized and paved and leveled and killed—and now we mostly had locations like this left to experience, dumb malls and big-box stores where people bought meaningless products they were told to buy, rows of shopping carts beckoning from parking lots, drive-thru lines reeling in oversize trucks and cars like silly fish. Mindless jobs to service all that moving, transacting, and devouring, and then mindless products to distract people from those jobs. A devastating cycle of prescribed and disembodied consuming, processing, and production that appeared only to accelerate as our age went on.

  Glancing across at my rumpled flag, I wondered why. Why me? Why did I see things this shadowed way? Decent people like my father, intelligent and good people, could drive through this stretch and see an entirely different picture. My father, for example, definitely would not have chosen to live or work around here, but he did like to consume in such places. He was always out for a bargain, even as he serviced his patriotic spending problem, and so would hit Kmart as likely as some high-end photography store. If questioned, he’d make the basic Adam Smith argument that commerce had a mind and intelligence of its own, which functioned fairly over time and more efficiently without government intrusion. And now, he’d say, commerce operated on a global scale, and opening up markets everywhere would help lift developing countries out of their extreme poverty. Didn’t I believe children in Africa deserved electricity and running water? In a more prosperous world, then, we’d be better able to tackle looming social and environmental problems. People had to eat before they saved someone else, much less a spotted owl or river mussel. And by the way, he’d say, all these folks out here were real people, too. Was I some kind of elitist? These were good working people, most of them kind people, who had houses and cars and families and children. And they were free to make their own choices about how to live their lives. Did I want to tell them how to exist in the world? Or maybe I just didn’t like the way it looked, a boring line of block-shaped stores and malls. Maybe my argument was ultimately aesthetic?