A Long Day at the End of the World Page 9

  Yet this was no time or place to engage my father in economic debate, especially when he still hadn’t materialized beyond that plastic flag case. This was not a pilgrimage into the dismal science. Obviously I thought the foundations of his argument to be off the mark. But the more pressing and interesting question was why I felt like this. Not the sinking feeling at coming upon an ugly swath of American retail—I think a lot of people experience that now to varying degrees. It was completely normal among the people I knew, though I did appear to have an acute case. But the other feeling, the End-Times one, my recurring leap from here to apocalypse.

  I supposed I might have the apocalypse gene: a predisposition to prophetic revelation and doomsday excitability. Just as the alcoholism gene floated out there in my family genetic waters, maybe the Last Days gene did, too. Nature and nurture. Maybe I was born with an inclination for cataclysmic thinking, drawn like gravity to those incantatory sentences of the Bible’s last chapter, and then my life had pulled the trigger. A loaded gun, so to speak. For someone with the A gene, a childhood in the first-ever nuclear age coupled with impending signs of environmental collapse (global warming, species holocaust, etc.) certainly seemed enough to manifest the predisposition. And then on top of it, I’d personally experienced fantastic events of small apocalypse such as the drowning of my father’s farm, my father’s more recent rising from the dead like Lazarus—no, like the dead in Revelation!—and then all those bodies left rotting in the woods at the Tri-State Crematory.

  Ahhh!—it was more like Revelation …

  Of course my father’s unburying had always made me think of Lazarus, Jesus calling forth the four-days-dead body, but really it was the End-Times resurrection that the exhumation more strongly resembled. A failed resurrection without redemption.

  Not the Rapture—that was a nineteenth-century invention and most popularly conceived today as occurring before the seven-year Tribulation and emergence of the Antichrist—when all breathing born-again Christians would be yanked straight up to heaven. (Terrifically, as a kind of signing bonus, by this interpretation born-again Christians got a free pass from the unimaginable violence and horror of the Tribulation.) But by Revelation I meant the more traditional yet still literal version of that apocalypse—when Jesus would come again to fight the Battle of Armageddon and establish a thousand-year rule of God’s Kingdom on earth. Upon his return, Jesus would raise the righteous dead in their “resurrected and glorified bodies” to dwell forever in eternal heaven. I loved that phrase, “resurrected and glorified bodies”—I’d seen it on the Southern Baptist Convention website.

  Through the lens of the Second Coming, then, my father’s exhumation could be seen as a prelude to that great uplifting, a failed test case, in which his unglorified body got resurrected only a little ways into the air, his casket door malfunctioned, his wings fizzled, and finally his still-putrefying body was dumped in the woods at the Tri-State Crematory. Too bad.

  And so my self-revelation was at hand.

  I had the A gene and then my life experiences had brought my apocalyptic predisposition to fruition. My switch turned on, I was always thinking about apocalypse in one way or another, or at least it simmered just below the surface. And that was the reason—thank you, Jesus!—a relatively benign length of American commercial real estate made me jump to End-Times thinking. Just as I had all along my pilgrimage, I sensed, in such places, signs of the Tribulation and called forth evidence of the evil that had led us into catastrophe.

  I followed a logging truck as it turned off the commercial strip and pretty soon I was back in the country, still on Highway 69, whizzing by abandoned farmhouses and lived-in mobile homes, a few well-kept brick houses scattered here and there. The Tribulation was everywhere? Had I lost my mind? As if in answer, I passed two real signs (with real letters)—one signaling Smith Lake lay just ahead, a massive fake lake built not so long ago, and another advertising a house of worship called the Church of Reconciliation. A third reply came from the symbolic world—a clutch of those small yellow wildflowers I couldn’t identify, lingering like hitchhikers by a roadside ditch.

  What was this trip really about? On a certain level, I supposed my busy brain functioned like a good lawyer’s brain, compiling and employing only the best evidence to push an argument—slavery and its hangover of long-standing prejudice, Native American genocide, religious bigotry, environmental ruin. These were all signs of my kind of Tribulation—an unsupernatural turmoil involving human violence and violence against the earth—culminating in my kind of apocalypse in which the world would be humanly undone either with a bang (most likely nuclear) or with a whimper (most likely climate change and its slower degradation). And though these threats were real—very real—mine was a selective version of history, a one-way parade leading always and only to the brink. In other words, I needed to feed that part of me, my addiction to cataclysm, and so I saw signs of the Tribulation everywhere. Everything was disturbed ground.

  Another person, for example, could have embarked on my pilgrimage road and reported back somewhat less dire sightings: a downtown Tuscaloosa trying to reinvigorate itself by demolishing some decrepit buildings with run-down businesses; some Confederate Battle Flags, sure, but only a fraction of what flapped out there during the civil rights era; and then the land itself, torn up in spots but beyond those a lush landscape burgeoning with oaks and pines and a broad assortment of pretty wildflowers.

  As I steadied my hands on the wheel, my mind wandered back around to de Soto, my fellow traveler in a different Age of Discovery, who himself had no map and whose exact path to this day remains blurred. Though there’s clarity on the sequence of states—Florida, Georgia, South and North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia again, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas, and then back to an escape route along the Mississippi River—the trail itself often fades away into the fields and swamps.

  I had a clearer destination to the east, but now I wondered about that. And I wondered who I was without my obsession and predisposition, my apocalyptic way of seeing and being in the world.

  Maybe I was simply converted, one of the blessedly born-again for whom the veil had been lifted. Or, even less desirable, maybe this was some kind of additional craziness I’d inherited along with the A gene. Just as Brent Marsh hoarded those bodies and stuffed them everywhere and anywhere he could, I likewise hoarded my Last Days pictures as I went along, gathering signs of the Tribulation as obsessively as he gathered bones. And then there was the other guy, my father. Didn’t all three of us—the alchemical Brent Marsh, my father, and I—lead secret lives of disturbance? Weren’t we all strange prophets of disorder? And, given all this, couldn’t I raise my father up and make him alive, lift up his glorified flower body into a brilliant new raiment whose brighter glow would shine the way?

  Wow, I was pretty fucking crazy. I shivered giddily. I felt the Shit Fairy’s breath sliding coldly along my neck.

  20

  BY THE END of February 2002, local authorities had charged Brent Marsh with hundreds of counts of theft by deception and abuse of a corpse. He offered no statements about the case and appeared blank faced as police shuttled him back and forth to the courthouse. Rumors quickly filled the vacuum. A report surfaced that for years the crematory incinerator remained inoperable due to a bad timer, suggesting, as a primary cause of the desecration, that Brent Marsh had simply failed to order a replacement part since 1997. More elaborate accounts proposed that Brent Marsh practiced necrophilia, offering photographs of compromised corpses on the Internet. Some speculated he trafficked in body parts.

  Acting swiftly, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation managed to dismiss these rumors, except the suggestion of a faulty incinerator. In fact the machine did fail to function when authorities descended upon Tri-State, but agents simply hotwired the defective timer and the burner switched on. And though no one knew the duration of the timer’s malfunction, apparently Brent Marsh had also simply hotwired the mechanism when necessary. After
all, the man had cremated some six-hundred-plus bodies during that same five-year period, and thus the bad timer had little or nothing to do with his dereliction of duty. We all waited for a better answer: family members and the public as well. Unfortunately, in a pattern that continued for years concerning the Tri-State Crematory Incident, a veil soon dropped over the evidence. In early March, to prevent jury prejudice and protect Brent Marsh’s rights, the judge in the criminal case slapped a gag order on the proceedings, forbidding authorities from providing fresh information to the public. Legally it was a sound move. Suddenly, however, regarding the worst mass desecration in modern American history, a near blackout of important news occurred.

  In short, the families knew only the approximate number of desecrated bodies (somewhere in the 330s) but nothing regarding the final count of unidentified bodies and had no information whatever as to how many bodies lay rotting together in pits or the particular number of corpses desecrated each year. And officially there was nothing—absolutely nothing—regarding Brent Marsh’s state of mind.

  * * *

  It was during this time that I made the leap from Brent Marsh the crazy crematory operator to Brent Marsh the alchemist. On the one hand, I knew I’d never escape from Brent Marsh the crazy crematory operator, the sad and sordid figure who’d left my father’s body outside for five long years. On the other hand, recast as an alchemist, a practitioner of an ancient art who strove to transmute base materials to a sacred substance, he offered some relief from the grisly circumstances.

  Yet how was this connected to my penchant for tumult, my newly discovered tendency to foreground apocalypse in the day-to-day world?

  I recalled stumbling across a precursor of Revelation, an early writing called The Book of the Watchers, composed by Jewish scribes in the third century BCE. To my surprise, a number of apocalypses existed outside the two included in the Bible, the Book of Daniel and Revelation, and in fact the apocalypse was a popular literary genre across the Holy Land. As told in some translations of The Book of the Watchers, copied and interpreted over the years, it was a cadre of fallen angels who taught humans the forbidden knowledge of alchemy, an esotericism intended for divine use only. It was a detail I’d noted with interest, given my proclivities, one that now seemed laden with heavy correspondence: Apocalypse and alchemy shared a mythic relation across the millennia.

  Equally compelling, for alchemists, everything in nature existed upon a hierarchy of purification, with lead, copper, and silver simply stepped-down versions of gold. Thus in de Soto’s age, it was accepted as “scientific” fact that depleted gold mines rejuvenated over time, grew more gold nuggets like living things. So an alchemist’s job was to bring forth higher, more perfect fruit, hasten the process of nature, and ripen lead into silver and silver into gold. Again, at the time this seemed a matter of some interest, but now the images glowed with significance. Wasn’t I attempting to summon my father’s glorified body along the road, to bring forth his full flowering and raiment? And in my inclination to emphasize Tribulation-type events, wasn’t I seeking the ever more perfect fruit of our reckoning?

  And what about a recent theory offered by McCracken Poston, Brent Marsh’s attorney, suggesting that mercury poisoning had contributed to, if not caused, his client’s desecrating behavior? According to Poston, the contamination resulted from the incineration of old dental work in a poorly ventilated crematory building. In sum, Poston claimed that Brent Marsh was a “mad hatter.”

  Though dismissed by the state medical examiner as scientifically unsupported, the mad-hatter hypothesis was not unreasonable. A test-kit sample of Brent Marsh’s hair had revealed suspiciously high levels of arsenic, aluminum, cadmium, lead, nickel, and tin—substances that were the very signature of mercury poisoning. Even the doubting examiner suggested further testing, an act that never occurred. Yet without scientific confirmation—as a primary cause, at least—the theory simply didn’t hold up against the weight of evidence. The theory didn’t explain how Brent Marsh could act normally in the public arena—including serving on the board of the Walker County Division of Family and Children Services—if he suffered from a severe neurological disorder. Could one really be a mad hatter in only one aspect of life? It didn’t seem possible to me.

  Moreover, the theory failed to consider Brent Marsh’s suspected hoarding disease, as well as his brilliantly analytical deceit in creating his alchemical mix of concrete dust and bones. Still, for all its inadequacies, Poston’s theory did provide another layer of complexity to the question of Brent Marsh, to the underlying disturbance that haunted the man.

  When Poston presented his theory, I immediately did my homework on mercury’s connection to alchemy—whose practitioners, I should note, often trolled the symbolic pronouncements of Revelation for new formulas. And I found that mercury, known as quicksilver due to its color and semifluid state, obtained an exalted place in alchemy because of a most dramatic act: When it’s combined with nitric acid, the chemical reaction produces a smoky red gas and red crystals. Mesmerized, alchemists came to consider quicksilver the key to transformation itself, transcending the basic dualisms of their cosmological reality: solid and liquid, death and life, heaven and earth.

  For me, that magical experiment conjured first an image of hell (redness all around) and then my father laboring in the cloudy light of his darkroom, stirring his chemicals and eventually pulling my image—which uncannily mirrored his own—from a series of red-tinged baths … whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire …

  And now—after everything—it was I who struggled to write my own version of apocalypse, suffused with symbolic sightings. It was I who had become something of a mad hatter on this day.

  * * *

  Through the cloudless light of northern Alabama, I swerved off Highway 69 and followed the way to Lewis Smith Lake, to view one of the hydroelectric dams up close. The steep terrain was a sign that swift river water once cascaded down these slopes. Today there was a road and a long metal fence belonging to the Alabama Power Company.

  When I broke into the open, a red-tailed hawk drifted above a grassy field. An earthen dam stretched beyond. It was the largest such dam in the eastern United States, but it didn’t look that big to me. Heavy gray stones buttressed the line and dark water lapped against it. A sign said DANGEROUS CURRENTS, though none were visible.

  The lake was vacant and loud with wind.

  From the boat launch tilting beneath me, I raised my camera and took a few quick shots: panorama of the earthen dam, a fancy house on the far bank, the deep water. I realized these were only the second photographs I’d taken on my trip, apart from the Velasquez-type metapicture of dueling flags and faces. In contrast, these images were almost empty, like pictures of the wind itself.

  I didn’t know the exact number of species that perished forever because of this particular dam—unlike the infamous Coosa River die-off about sixty miles southeast of here—but lost creatures were part of the deal. As if on cue, ugly and symbolical, two bony-faced vultures circled the parking lot. On the way out I stopped the car again to click a picture of a dead kite tangled in the power lines along the green field.

  21

  WITH THE GAG ORDER STILL IN PLACE through the summer of 2002, no new information appeared about the specifics of the case, and as the shock receded, I began to think more closely about the plight of others beyond my family. In the most significant way, of course, our position was anomalous—my father had been dead for twelve years. Although I remained besieged by the images of Tri-State and my father’s original digging-up, as well as my own apocalyptic imaginings, I was not racked with the sorrow of his immediate passing.

  Like my mother, some families had received no human cremains at all, instead acquiring Brent Marsh’s special mixture of concrete dust and bone. And although this sleight of hand left my mother distraught, angry, and perplexed, the distress was magnified for those who’d more recently experienced the l
oss of a loved one, some just a few weeks or months before the case broke open in February 2002. These poor people had to process not only a fresh death but also the added anxiety of a very fetid desecration—whether the bodies were rotting together in pits and burial vaults, or sprawled by one another in the tangled brush, exposed as prey for foraging animals.

  Yet within this group who received fake cremains, a smaller group experienced an even greater affliction. Some families, devastatingly, had failed to find a body at all. This meant either another party (or parties) had received the family member’s cremains, or the body could not be identified because of its degraded state—a sad commingling of flesh, bone, and DNA. Again, with the blackout on information, the number of such frustrated families remained a mystery, though their suffering was clear: They had lost both a loved one and that loved one’s body; no earthly connection remained to the living past.