Requiem
by Sergey Bolmat
In the end, I think that we should dispose of our dead in some easy, practical, pragmatic way. Ultimately, we are all just walking bags of dust, aren’t we? Why so much fuss then? What is it all about? Certainly, it’s not about memory because it stays with us, generally. And all those graves and tombstones – what do they have to do with our memories? They are the opposite of our memories. They are grim and depressing, and our memories are always bright and poignant. I mean, they are just an old obsession, all those holes in the ground full of dead bones, a fetish that keeps going on and on for centuries for no reason whatsoever, like some superstition.
We should probably throw the dead away with the rubbish. I know, I know – this idea is nothing new. But it is amazing how we are still not doing this. Like many painfully obvious things (take, for example, parachutes for passengers on commercial flights, which could literally save hundreds if not thousands of lives), this one has been totally overlooked.
What could be easier? People die, we pack their dead bodies in special heavy-duty bags and just place them outside our houses. And call the collection service like we do when we need to dispose of an old mattress. The local government could do that, couldn’t they? We all pay taxes. It’s not too much to ask. Hospitals could also collect the bodies and use them for organs or medical experiments. Or just burn them together with their medical waste. They have the facilities.
Or they could make diamonds out of those bodies. I read about it online. They make diamonds out of dead people now. Because, as we all know, ashes and diamonds are basically the same thing. Carbon – same as coal. The difference is just density, as far as I can understand. Apply some pressure, and you can have a diamond made out of your dead spouse. A diamond in the rough – if you’ll pardon my joke. Cut it, set it in an engagement ring; wear it to your new wedding. The possibilities are endless. An average body yields a four-carat stone. Prices for such a gem range from 1500 to 50000 quid and higher, depending on the cut, quality, clarity and colour. This is probably the best way to dispose of the corpses. Some of us could have their utility bills covered for years.
And imagine – no more of those horrid vultures circling us all, making their money out of our misery. No more of those awful funeral services. No more of those lugubrious wretches selling you overpriced coffins and urns with fancy names. “In this antique white finish Justinian casket made out of 18 gauge steel with briar rose interior in a French fold design and a high security digital locking mechanism, your granny will be perfectly safe from any intruders”. No more those ridiculously pompous resting places with all those hypocritical, sorrowful maidens and cupids, and stupid portraits of people who invariably look like they are waiting for a border control official to check their documents. And also, no more of those mind-numbing stories about the people buried alive. No more of that horrid stuff. The local services just collect the bodies, and you don’t hear about them anymore.
Because what difference does it really make? If we are all about to be recreated at some point in the admittedly very distant future by some hyper-intelligent being into which we hopefully should evolve after billions of years according to de Chardin, Frank J. Tipler and all those Omega Point billionaire dudes – how does it matter if someone was buried under a huge slab of carved stone in a wooden box dressed like a waiter or cremated, or simply drowned at sea? That super-brain must be able to reconstruct you from something else apart from your bones, or hair, or photos, or even DNA. It must be something like quantum mechanics, or gravity, or pure information. Otherwise, it doesn’t make sense. We only need this super-intelligence if it can restore the entire history of humanity down to the last aborted foetus and make all the people who ever lived or attempted to live immortal, and connect their interrupted consciousness of the past seamlessly with their new-born intellect. If not, who cares? If human evolution is not about it, we shouldn’t even bother with progress. But we do, we advance, and it means that we do believe in our collective rebirth. And if we do, how does it matter in the long run in what way we dispose of our dead? Just place them somewhere outside of your house. Put some ice in that bag if you do it in summertime, and make sure that foxes or raccoons don’t get to them. That’s it. Now you can mourn your beloved in the privacy of your own soul.
Only he couldn’t. He tried hard, but he couldn’t do that. He didn’t miss Pam at all. He just didn’t feel it. He didn’t miss his wife. All the time he tried to think about her, to remember her, he could only find the most abstruse, awful, meaningless ideas circling his brain like flies buzzing inside a lampshade.
It wasn’t that he didn’t love her. He did, very much so. Impossibly so. He loved her at first sight when he caught a glimpse of her in that café in Soho, typing away on her laptop with a huge bowl of latte macchiato on the table to her right and a stack of printed paper to the left. And he started visiting that café almost every day, and he saw her a couple of times more. And then he stalked her a little around, and then he knew that she had a boyfriend, and that she was a lawyer, and she was writing a novel, and then he couldn’t just wait anymore. He also started writing a novel, sort of. Later, he was able to connect with her online, having subscribed to the same creative writing tutorial, visiting the same discussion groups and, finally, meeting her at a signing event in a book shop and later at a reading in a pub, and then at another reading in another pub. He knew she loved Erica Jong, Olivia Laing, and Chris Kraus. They talked about literature. He learned that she had recently broken up with her boyfriend. They started dating. He met her parents. He proposed to her. They married.
And it wasn’t some mental issue either, his apathy. He didn’t feel anything about her death, but he could feel many other things. He could feel shame, for example, for his apparent coldness; he could feel anxiety about it. It did appear to him that he didn’t care at all, only about her death – and it scared him. It was strange, like he did it on purpose. He knew this wasn’t true. It freaked him out.
He tried hard to miss his dead wife. And then he suddenly understood why he couldn’t do that. Because she wasn’t dead, he realised. She was still very much alive. She had never drowned. They had never found her body on the beach. He had never identified it. He had never buried it. She was still alive. He kept talking to her. He kept discussing things with her. In the middle of a conversation with someone else, he would stop and wait for her to finish her argument.
At night, he would have sex with her, almost every night, sometimes twice, sometimes wide awake, sometimes while he was asleep, in his dreams. In his dreams, she could be an entirely different person, sometimes a man, but he knew that it was his wife straddling him, talking dirty, her eyes shining in the dark. He could hear her every word, feel every breath. Weirdly, she was twice as alive now, he realised, as she was when she was alive. Their lives became one in a sort of transcendental, metaphysical marriage, he thought, truly made in that Medieval illuminated heaven full of colourful abstractions and gold symbolising infinite light. If happy, she became twice as happy after her death; if sulking, she became twice as grumpy. Every sensation became insanely sharp, shared between the two of them. I am losing my mind, he kept thinking.
He understood now that in order to properly miss her, he had to make her disappear. She was too much alive for him to continue like that. And she was always near. He could always feel her presence at all times. Every moment now, she could become more alive than he was. She could become him. This possibility scared him. He had to do something about this transformation; he had to protect his identity. He had to continue with his life.
He had to start meeting other women, he thought. He tried. Nothing helped. He couldn’t really talk to anyone with her sitting at the same table, listening to them with her lips pressed into a sorrowful little smile. A single nod from her could make all those women look really bad, a single remark. Oh, she could be funny when she wanted to; she could be really sarcastic in a very insidious way. He couldn’t do anything about that. He could have sex with another woman and see his wife watching them, hear her making jokes. Not a single living woman, he thought, could survive a dead woman.
He tried hard to keep his wife away from his dates, but she kept reappearing no matter how much he tried. He tried drinking hard and taking drugs to keep her away, but it only resulted in all the women he tried to meet avoiding him. He couldn’t stop laughing during sex. No one wanted to go on a date with a drug addict. Only she was always happy to see him. She didn’t care if he was drunk or if he pissed himself after sniffing some speedball.
Eventually, he decided that it was time to end it all for them both. It was time for him to join her in the afterlife, he decided. He wanted to jump from a motorway overpass into some approaching articulated lorry. But he couldn’t do that because, once again, she was near and she was waiting for him to do just that. She was actually expecting him to do that, to jump from that overpass into an approaching vehicle at night. She kind of dared him to do that; she kept challenging him. She made clear that she doubted he could do that. She was sure he wasn’t tough enough to jump. Do it already, she kept saying – or just walk away and don’t be ridiculous. Don’t be such a wuss. Do it.
And he did it and landed on the top of the lorry trailer and rolled off the roof down onto the tarmac, and some cars swerved wildly away and honked, and in his shock, he was even able to stand up and walk to the shoulder and collapse near the guardrail. He was diagnosed with a broken arm, several broken ribs, a crack in his femur, and a crack in his skull; he remained in hospital for three weeks. His dead wife kept mocking him for his failed attempt, and one night, all of a sudden, he knew what he had to do. He understood that she wasn’t his wife anymore. She had become a stranger; she had become someone who wanted him to die, too. She mutated into a really bad undead creature, he thought. Probably because she missed him terribly, he thought, and she was angry that he didn’t miss her back enough. She became a really different person, a person he had never known. She lost her mind, he decided. He really had to make her disappear now because this new woman wasn’t his wife. She was a monster, a ghoul. He had to kill everything about this monster, this impostor, this wretched double destroying his life. He had to kill every memory of his wife, he understood. He had to destroy everything, like in a huge bonfire inside his head. He had to burn each and every one of those madly vivid pictures of her picking a shuttlecock up from the tall grass in their garden, or reading, or working; each and every one of those inner videos of her walking their dog, or discussing a film with him, or adjusting her hair. He had to annihilate all those little gestures, all those glances, all those words and intonations one by one.
And he did that. He started with her eyes. Her eyes were dull, he thought. They expressed nothing. They were just two globes of protein or collagen or whatever tissue those mammal eyeballs were made of. He used to see a lot in her eyes, but he always saw himself, he decided. He always saw whatever he wanted to see in her eyes, nothing else. He saw his own reflection in those eyes, his own desires, his own thoughts. Her legs were average, truth to be told; he couldn’t really remember anything specific about them. Her ankles were just normal. If I had to say something about them, I could hardly say anything, he thought, could I? Honestly, what was so special about her ankles? Nothing. Her mind was average, and her brain was nothing remarkable about that part of her, too, just a standard brain shaped with boring childhood and uneventful youth, tamed with education and some timid social climbing, riddled with trifles and trivialities. Her tits were kind of uninspiring, barely passable, and those nipples were unmemorable. Her lips were too thin, her mouth was too wide. Her neck was also thin and kind of graceless. Her habits were pedestrian. Her vagina was nothing to write home about. All he could remember about her vagina was that it reminded him of an illustration for a Wikipedia entry, generic. Everything just in place, all those folds and crevices, with a bit of carefully trimmed hair above, of a nondescript colour. The vagina of an ordinary decent human being. Her bottom was second-rate, another item of a common or garden variety, maybe even flat, yes, flat and rather square, but not too much, not enough to make it noticeably square. Her smile was plagiarised from her best friend Lynn, who used to flash a smile suddenly and unexpectedly, like headlights at night, and then to hide it quickly behind her overly serious, pointedly business-like, blank façade. Her jokes were flat, too, truth to be told, like her bottom. In retrospect, they had only seemed funny because he had wanted them to be funny. Analyse them a bit, listen to them carefully, and they become dull, too careful, too safe. Her fashion taste was plain. Her interests were regular, the same as those of any other person. Her career was unexceptional.
He looked around. Disassembled, his dead wife occupied half his mind, a heap of random bits and pieces. He glimpsed her eyebrow, her elbow, her toe. He heard the receding echo of her voice. He didn’t like himself for what he had just done. He didn’t feel comfortable at all about it. If anything, he felt miserable. He felt like a serial killer who had to kill and dismember the same person many times over and over again. Limbs everywhere, her chest, her neck, her lips, her brains, her eyes, her hair, her smile – all reduced to mere leftovers, to waste, to litter. And it wasn’t her, he thought, it was me. I am the monster. She’s just dead. I’ve made my dead wife a monster, he thought, I’ve made her an impostor, a ghoul. It was me all along. It was all the bad stuff in me personified as her. I made it look like her, but it was all mine. And she didn’t just drown, he thought. How, he thought, could you know that? No one could. But I know, he said to himself without moving his lips, his face numb with tension. We had a fight. We had a fight, one of many, and then she went swimming. And she knew about the riptide at that time of the day, in the afternoon, when the wind changes. She knew about that – they had those signs on the beach everywhere. She just didn’t care anymore. She was a good swimmer, but the sea was pretty rough. And I didn’t stop her because I was angry. I didn’t stop her. That’s the truth. I made her drown. That’s the undeniable truth.
He understood that he was alone now, completely, entirely alone in the whole wide world – his wife dead, the monster inside him destroyed. The only thing left now for him to face was the tedium of his life. This is how I did away with them both, he understood. I infected them both with my own drabness, with the interminable dull routine of my life. It was his own life, he understood, that made everything around him insipid, dreary, bland. Not her eyes, he thought, mine. And now I don’t even have that monster within. I erased it, suffocated it, unscrewed it into pieces, littering my vapid self. Vacuous, he thought, monotonous, tiresome. Not her life, mine. It has always been like that, he thought, my life, for as long as I can remember, from early childhood; I’m not even sure that my memories are really mine – I could as well easily borrow them all from somewhere. From that repetitive onslaught of information, he called his life. Because there was nothing worth remembering in my life at all, he thought, apart from that moment when I first saw her in that cafe in Soho, typing away on her laptop with a huge bowl of latte macchiato on the table to the right and a pack of printed paper to the left. That was mine, he thought. That was real, that moment alone. Everything else was just lifeless background noise.
This is what I should miss, he thought, that moment. She brought an entire world with her, an amazing, extraordinary, phenomenal world as unique as a distant exotic continent, and she opened this world for me, and I infested that land with my ordinariness, with my monotony and boredom. It was me, not her. This is what I should miss, he thought, that territory, still undiscovered, and that moment before I touched it. I destroyed that place and forgot about that first sight. I should miss it all so much that my breath stops. This is how I should do it. I should miss it so much that I blackout on the spot. This is how much it should mean to me. It should make me giddy with something I can finally call my own.
Try it, he thought. Could be a good start.
WENSUM 