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A QUIET
REVOLUTION FOR
DEATH
Jack Dann
No other epoch has laid so much stress as the expiring Middle Ages on the
thought of death.
—
]. HUIZINGA
It is a lovely day for a drive and a picnic. There is not a hint of rain in
the cerulean sky, and the superhighway snakes out ahead like a cement
canal. The cars are moving in slow motion like gondolas skiffing through
God’s magical city.
“What a day,” says Roger as he leans back in his cushioned seat.
Although the car is on automatic, he holds the steering stick lightly
between his thumb and forefinger. His green Chevrolet shifts lanes and
accelerates to 130 miles an hour. “This is what God intended when he
made Sunday,” Roger says as he lets go of the steering stick to wave his
arms in a stylized way. He dreams that he is an angel of God guiding the
eyeless through His realms.
The children are in the back seat where they can fight and squeal and
spill their makeup until Sandra becomes frustrated enough to give them
some
Easy-Sleep
to make the trip go faster. But the monotony of the
beautiful countryside and the hiss of air pushing past rubber and glass
must have lulled Sandra to sleep. She is sitting beside Roger. Her head
lolls, beautiful blonde hair hiding her beautiful face.
“I’m practicing to be an angel,” shouts Bennie, Roger’s oldest and
favorite son. The other children giggle and make muffled shushing noises.
 Roger turns around and sees that his son has painted his face and
smeared it with ashes. He’s done a fair job, Roger thinks. Blue and grey
rings of makeup circle Bennie’s wide brown eyes. “That’s very good,
indeed,” Roger says. “Your face is even more impressive than your
costume.”
“
I
could do better if I wanted to,” says Rose Marie, who is seven and
dressed in a mock crinoline gown with great cloth roses sewn across the
bodice.
But Bennie is nonplused. He beams at his father and says, “You said
that everyone,—even kids,—must have their own special vision of death.
Well, my vision is just like yours.” Bennie is twelve. He’s the little man of
the family, and next year, with God’s help, he will be bar mitzvahed, since
Sandra is half-Jewish and believes that children need even more ceremony
than adults.
Rose Marie primps herself and says “ha” over and over. Samson and
Lilly, ages five and six respectively, are quietly playing “feelie” together.
But Samson—who will be the spitting image of his father, same cleft in his
chin, same nose—is naked and shivering. Roger raises the car’s
temperature to 79 degrees and then turns back to Bennie.
“How do you know what my vision is?” Roger asks, trying to find a
comfortable position. His cheek touches the headrest and his knee touches
Sandra’s bristly leg. Sandra moves closer to the door.
“You’re nuts over Guyot Marchant and Holbein,” says Bennie. “I’ve
read your library fiche. Don’t you think I’m acquainted intellectually with
the painted dances of death? Well, ha, I know the poetry of Jean Le Fevre,
and I’ve seen the holos of the mural paintings in the church of La
Chaise-Dieu. I’ve read Gedeon Huet in fiche and I’ve even looked at your
books —I’m reading
Totentanz,
and I’m almost finished.”
“You must ask permission,” says Roger, but he is proud of his son. He
certainly is the little man of the family, Roger tells himself. The other
children only want to nag and cry and eat and play “feelie.”
Sandra wakes up, pulls her hair away from her face, and asks: “How
much longer?” Her neck and face are glossy with perspiration. She lowers
the temperature, makes a choking noise, and insists that this trip is too
long and she’s hungry.
“I’m hungry, too,” says Rose Marie. “And it’s hot in here and
everything’s sticky.”
“We’ll be there soon,” Roger says to his family as he gazes out the large
 windshield at the steaming highway ahead. The air seems to shimmer
from the exhaust of other cars, and God has created little mirages of blue
water.
“See the mirages on the highway,” Roger says to his family. What a day
to be alive! What a day to be with your family. He watches a red
convertible zoom right through a blue mirage and come out unscathed.
“What a day,” he shouts. He grins and squeezes Sandra’s knee.
But Sandra swats his hand as if it were a gnat.
Still, it
is
a beautiful day.
“Well, here we are,” says an excited Roger as the dashboard lights flash
green, indicating that everyone can now get out of the car.
What a view! The car is parked on the sixteenth tier of a grand parking
lot which overlooks the grandest cemetery in the East. From this vantage
ground (it is certainly worth the forty-dollar parking fee) Roger can view
beautiful Chastellain Cemetery and its environs. There, to the north, are
rolling hills and a green swath which must be pine forest. To the west are
great mountains which have been worn down by God’s hand. The world is
a pastel pallet: it is the first blush of autumn.
The cemetery is a festival of living movement. Roger imagines that he
has slipped back in time to fifteenth-century Paris. He is the noble
Boucicaut and the duke of Berry combined. He looks down at the common
folk strolling under the cloisters. The peasants are lounging amidst the
burials and exhumations and sniffing the stink of death.
“I’m hungry,” whines Rose Marie, “and it’s windy up here.”
“We came up here for the view,” Roger says. “So enjoy it.”
“Let’s go eat and put this day behind us,” Sandra says.
“Mommy lives in her left brain, huh, Dad?” says Bennie. “She suffers
from the conditioning and brainwashing of the olden days.”
“You shouldn’t talk about your mother that way,” Roger says as he
opens the trunk of the car and hands everyone a picnic basket.
“But mother is old-fashioned,” Bennie says as they walk toward the
elevators. “She thinks everyone must conform to society to tame the world.
But she is committed only to appearances; she cares nothing for
substance.”
“You think your father’s so modern?” Sandra says to Bennie, who is
 walking behind her like a good son.
“You’re an antique,” Bennie says. “You don’t understand right-brain
living. You can’t accept death as an ally.”
“Then what am I doing here?”
“You came because of Dad. You hate cemeteries.”
“I certainly do not.”
But the argument dies as the silvery elevator doors slide open to take
them all away from left-brain thinking.
“Let’s take a stroll around the cemetery,” Roger says as they pass under
a portiere which is the cemetery’s flag and insignia. Roger pays the
gateman who wears the cemetery’s colors on the sleeves and epaulets of
his somber blue uniform.
“That’s
fifty-three
dollars, sir,” says the gateman. He points at Bennie
and says, “I must count him as an adult; it’s the rules.”
Roger cheerfully pays and leads his noisy family through the open
wrought-iron gates. Before him is Chastellain Cemetery, the “real thing,”
he tells himself—there it is, full of movement and life, neighbor beside
neighbor, everyone eating, drinking, loving, selling, buying, and a few are
even dying. It is a world cut off from the world.
“This is the famous Avenue d’Auvergne,” Roger says, for he has
carefully studied Hodel’s
Guidebook to Old and Modern Cemeteries.
“Here
are some of the finest restaurants to be found in any cemetery,” he says as
they pass under brightly colored restaurant awnings.
“I want to go in here,” Rose Marie says as she takes a menu card from
a doorman and holds it to her nose. “I can smell aubergine fritters and
pig’s fry and
paupiette de veau
and I’m sick of Mommy’s cooking. I want
to go in here.”
The doorman grins (probably thinking of his commission) and hands
Roger a menu card.
“We have a fine picnic lunch of our own,” Roger says, and he reminds
himself that he’s sick of French food anyway.
As they stroll north on the beautiful Avenue d’Auvergne which is
shaded by old wych-elms, restaurants give way to tiny shops. Farther
north, the avenue becomes a dirty cobblestone street filled with beggars
and hawkers pushing wooden handcarts.
 “I don’t like it here,” says Rose Marie as she stares at the jettatura
charms and lodestone ashtrays which are arrayed behind a dirty
shop-window.
“You can find all manner of occult items in these little shops,” Roger
says. “This cemetery is a sanctuary for necromancy. Some of the finest
astrologers and mediums work right here.” Roger pauses before a shop
which specializes in candles and oils and incense made of odoriferous
woods and herbs. “What a wonderful place,” Roger says as he takes
Sandra’s hand in his own. “Perhaps we should buy a little something for
the children.”
A hunchbacked beggar pulls at Roger’s sleeve and says, “Alms for the
poor,” but Roger ignores his entreaties.
“The children are getting restless,” Sandra says, her hand resting
limply in Roger’s. “Let’s find a nice spot where they can play and we can
have our picnic.”
“This is a nice spot,” Bennie says as he winks at a little girl standing in
an alleyway.
“Hello, big boy,” says the girl, who cannot be more than twelve or
thirteen. “Fifty dollars will plant you some life in this body.” She wiggles
stylishly, leans against a shop window, and wrinkles her nose. “Well?” She
turns to Roger and asks, “Does Daddy want to buy his son some life?”
Then she smiles like an angel.
Roger smiles at Bennie, who resembles one of the death dancers
painted on the walls of the Church of the Children.
“C’mon, Dad, please,” Bennie whines.
“Don’t even consider it,” Sandra says to Roger. “We brought the
children here to acquaint them with death, not sex.”
“That smacks of left-brain thinking,” says the little girl as she wags her
finger at Sandra. “Death is an orgasm, not a social artifact.”
“She’s right about that,” Roger says to Sandra. Only youth can live
without pretense, he thinks. Imagining death as a simple return to
nature’s flow, he hands Bennie a crisp fifty-dollar bill.
“Thanks, Dad,” and Bennie is off, hand in hand with his five-minute
friend. They disappear into a dark alley that separates two long
tumbledown buildings.
“He shouldn’t be alone,” Sandra says. “Who knows what kind of people
might be skulking about in that alley?”
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