I had the dream again — in it, dad was still alive and was hiding somewhere in the house. Usually in the attic by the box fan — sitting under a light bulb, silent and watchful and bald, like some wise nesting bird. Other times, he was wedged up behind the top shelves of my mother’s closet; Or under the floorboards in a secret, unseen chamber.
I gasped awake and as always, it took a couple of minutes for reality to reassert itself — dad, who I had just communed with, as if in a silent movie, was dead. I had watched that robust and healthy man slowly turn into a withering cadaver over the course of five years.
One late night, I paid him a visit. He was living in some un-renovated 1970s bachelor pad, with shaggy brown carpet and skylights and a sliding glass door facing out into some fog. A stagnant, murky pond was visible out one of the kitchen’s bay windows. We sat across a table from each other drinking cold coffee.
“How have you been, dad,” I asked.
“Not so good, son.”
It took me a minute to remember that I wanted to ask him something, something important.
“What happened to the cancer, dad?”
“It’s gone into remission, son.”
“Well, that’s good.” I looked him over, radiation hairless, alone out here in this fog.
“What are you doing living out here? Why aren’t you staying with mom?”
“I’m living out here now…” he looked down at the floor. I thought this was weird because my parents never divorced.
Then there was some other very important question, the one I would always forget to ask. The dream would always end before I could remember what the question was.
Each time I came back to the house, year after year, it felt a little bit more malevolent-feeling — as if whatever it was did not have infinite patience and was getting sick of waiting for me to get it right.
I kept having dreams. Sometimes the dreams seeped into reality.
One weekend, my mother and brother left to go to the beach, I offered to stay at their house and feed the cats. I sat in the living room, watching the van back down the driveway and leave.
It had been years since I had spent the night in the house alone. That had been a thing I did when I was young and unafraid. That was back when the house seemed to buttress me, to be on my side.
Now it felt sad and strange. The old mirror in the dining room seemed to bend.
It was getting dark so I went through the house turning on lights and all the TVs and locking the doors. Psychos are out there.
I felt a strong urge to escape the silence and be back in the world of the living — cigarettes, lights, drinks, people, music, laughter.
This was the suburbs, so I walked out of the neighborhood to the Han-Dee-Hugo to get some cigarettes and some beer. I walked fast on the broken sidewalk alongside the dense traffic of cars and trucks rumbling past, headlights in my eyes. Someone shouted something at me from the open window of a truck.
When I got back home I drank until I fell asleep with the light on.
I woke up in the night and went to take a shit in my mom’s bathroom, beside the closet I’ve often dreamt of.
After I was done, I looked down into the toilet at my work — five brown segments, floating in the water formed a distinct arrow, distinctly pointing towards the closet.
I crawled back through the coats and jackets in the hallway closet. Inside I found a hidden room. Dad was huddled back in the corner, looking up at me with empty eyes.
“Where have you been?” he said.
“I saw you in dream but I didn’t know you were actually in here.”
“I’ve been waiting for you to come.” He began to sob.
“Where have you gone?”
“I don’t know. Different places. I had to go.”
“Had to leave? You couldn’t stick around for your family? This is a nice place.”
I nodded, “It is nice.”
“I stuck around for two months after but everyone told me I should go live my life. So I traveled aimlessly. I hitchhiked up the East Coast alone. I went to different towns. I met a divorcee and we spoke Spanish together and I got a ride from an interesting schizophrenic. I met some weird goth people, their apartment was dark and there were porno VHS tapes all over the walls. Then I ended up in Vermont and bummed around Brattleboro for a while, then followed a few folk-punkers and this really talented kid, Johnny Hobo, and his friends who were doing this folk punk Western musical.”
“I don’t care. You found nothing out there. You could have been building something here the whole time. You piddled your life away.” he said.
I nodded because he was, in fact, right.
“And I’ve been up here the entire time. Maybe you’ve felt my disappointment.”
“Sometimes I have.”
“It has changed somehow.”
He held up arms draped with tags and IVs and tubes, grinning a little bit,
“I’m connected to the house through these things.”
I started to cry. As I did, my dad drew me in, I thought he wanted to give me a hug. But I just felt the claw-like arm tighten harder and harder on my shoulder.
Then, in a blink of an eye, it’s been a decade. Ten year anniversary of the death. I’m back home.
I had expected that after so much time we would have moved on, or made progress in some way.
We still celebrated his birthdays with a cake and a song. Like a seance. My mom still spoke to him, asking the spirit for advice and guidance. My brother had dreams where he felt our dad getting into bed with him and cuddling him.
We got dressed and got my brother dressed and loaded him into the handicapped van and drove out through the old, 60s-built subdivision, past the cul-de-sac that led to the hidden graveyard, to the Episcopal church.
The same old Episcopalian service, the same preacher. I recognized some of the kids I went to Sunday School with, now all grown up, with little families of their own.
“Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again!”
Hallelujah, Hallelujah, the congregation answered.
A recessional played and we filed out behind the little gathering of priests and ushers in their white robes and rainbow sashes behind the narthex to the little memorial garden and columbarium.
My dad’s old friend, with his big mustache now turned gray, came up beside me.
“The prodigal son returns!”
“Oh, I don’t know about that…”
He shook his head and his eyes glistened.
“It’s hard to believe it’s been ten years. I sure do miss your daddy,” he said, before wandering off.
I stood alongside my family, trying to hide.
Sensing that I was trying to make myself invisible, my mom pulled people over to meet me, “You know my OTHER son, Aaron, right?”
“Oh, I didn’t know you had another son, well nice to meet you,” they said, shaking my hand. It was their community, a community I had walked away from, and hadn’t been back to for a long time.
One of the older red-haired priests, the one who had comforted me at the wake grabbed me and hugged me: “Honeypie, sweetie-pie, pumpkin, I want you to know we’re all so proud of you, traveling around the world doing your thing. We are jealous of your adventures.”
She winked. “Do it and enjoy it while you can. You’re living the dream!”
The memorial garden was packed — all the people from ten years before, and more people — all a little grayer, a little older, but mostly still there.
My mother stood in front of the internment wall with the names of the departed. The wall was plastered, taped with photos of our family from that time before, like some kind of 9/11 wall.
My mom cleared her throat: “We’re so thankful to you all for coming. He loved all of you, he cared so much for you all, I believe he’s still watching over all of us. I know he’s here.”
All the people were staring at us again and the priests and bishops were sprinkling dust and saying their little Latin incantations, and I had to turn my eyes away.
How does it look to the dead, to those who are missing, this swift passage of human years? Are they watching us sadly or laughing at us, or calling out to us as we speed toward our own graves to join them?
At the beginning of the pandemic, I found myself back home staying with my family and once again thinking about the romantic, historic hidden graveyard tucked in the center of my town — Hillcrest Cemetery — the one we had frolicked in at night when we were teenagers.
I had been thinking about where I wanted to be buried. It wasn’t urgent but it wasn’t not urgent. I had seen a number of people have their number get called as they got into their late 30s.
I knew I didn’t want to end up in the P.O. Box-sized cremation slots at our family’s church.
I had been living in Sweden and I also felt that I didn’t want to get buried there, up in Ultima Thule, the land beyond the gods, in one of their rain-blotted, treeless graveyards.
I wanted to see if I could get a plot in the graveyard of my dreams. A quick phone call revealed that it was full, very full. Everyone wanted to get in at Hillcrest. I put my name on a waiting list, just in case.
Some weeks after, I got a call from a number I didn’t recognize. It was a man, maybe in his fifties, coastal North Carolina accent. He sounded kind of sweaty and preoccupied on the other end of the line. He said he was from around Morehead City.
He said he had a plot available in Hillcrest — it was his parents — but they were going to be buried Down East. Would I like to meet to have a look?
Yes, I would, I said.
Well, I’ll be up there in a couple of days. There’s another woman who’s interested. I can meet you both at the same time.
OK, I said.
The decided day came and I pulled up to the graveyard and walked through the gates and found the guy who looked like how I imagined the guy I had spoken to on the phone would look, and a woman who was in her 60s, with tinted glasses. They were walking around the graves looking down, searching intently for something.
“We’re trying to find it,” they said. Between a few flat granite grave stones there was a little patch of unmarked turf. “It’s here somewhere, it’s got to be in here somewhere.”
The lady seemed annoyed, she glared at me, “I was here first.”
She looked me up and down, scanning me to see if I showed any signs of a visibly-sick-young-man.
“And I think I need it more than you do.”
I laughed and agreed and we joked a little bit, but it was clear she meant business.
We looked for another 15 minutes, and ultimately he couldn’t find the actual plot his family owned. “I’m sorry, y’all, but I swear it’s in here somewhere. I’ll go home and look at the papers and text you.”
The whole thing seemed kind of weird. And the woman seemed like she would be the one to get it, if it was for real. So I forgot about it. I wasn’t going to die anytime soon anyway, right, so what was the rush. It was just morbidity.
A few weeks later, I was down at the coast alone. I had been drinking, listening to music and thinking about my problems, and the phone rang with a number I didn’t recognize.
“Hey, it’s me, calling about the grave plot.”
“Oh, hey.”
“You still interested?”
“What happened to the lady who was there?”
“She didn’t end up taking it. So, you interested?”
I looked at the clock. It was after 11 PM. I looked out the black windows at the inlet.
“Maybeeee,” I said. “Let me do a bit more research.”
I said I’d call him back if I was interested.
I called the town that week, they said the plot was for real. But the truth was, I had no idea how to buy a grave plot. What to offer, how to make sure it was legit, how to do the papers, etc.
A week or so later — alone again at night, drinking again — my phone rang again around midnight. I let it go to voicemail. The guy again, sounding weird and tired.
I felt bad and called him back.
“Hey,” the voice said, “it’s the guy with the grave plot. You still interested?”
What the fuck was up with this guy? Who calls about graves at midnight? Maybe he got off work late or worked third-shift, but it still felt off.
“It’s pretty late to be calling about a grave,” I said, hoping we might laugh together or make a joke out of it. He didn’t laugh.
How much, I asked? He said the price, the same price as before.
I begged off again. (In the back of my scheming mind, I also felt that I might get him to drop the price.)
The whole thing sketched me out — was he for real? I started to wonder if he was a kind of demon or spirit taken on a human form, to mock me — I had asked for something and, out of nowhere, my wishes were being granted, it was being given to me. And now I was being asked whether I was really serious about dying, about planning to die.
I wasn’t. He called back a few more times, I said I wasn’t interested. In the end, his weird insistence called my bluff. Sometimes we’re given what we say we want and it shows us what we really want. I realized I didn’t really want to think about graves, people in graves, being dead myself in a grave. What I wanted was to live, to be alive, to think about the life I have remaining and what I was going to do with it.