a car at SFO and followed Horvak’s instructions door to door. He’d left a key in the mailbox. I walked inside and planted myself on the couch and sat there for hours in silence. Flipping channels. Smoking cigarettes. Tending to my confusion. The television was on, but the volume was all the way down. There was a stack of bad magazines on the coffee table, and sleep wasn’t really an option. My head was swimming. I’d come to the conclusion that I had very little understanding of what anything actually meant. That right there was the extent of my knowledge.
Sometime after midnight, I stubbed out another cigarette and rose from the couch. I walked over to the window and pulled back the curtain. Down below, life was happening. Cars were rolling by, rattling and coughing exhaust. Christmas trees and menorahs were glowing in windows. Streetlights were shining. The fog was moving in. People were walking along the sidewalks, wrapped in hats and scarves. I wondered who they were, where they were going, what they did. I wondered what their stories were. I wondered what would happen to them. I watched them disappearing, one by one and two by two, lost in the direction of wherever it was that they were headed. And none of them even knew I was there.
The ancient Egyptians mummified their dead. They treated their corpses with spices, herbs, and chemicals, and then they wrapped them in cotton cloth and stuffed them inside of a wooden case. Then they put that wooden case inside of another case. Then they decorated the outer case with information about the life of the wealthy dead person. Then they painted it and adorned it with jewels. The entire contraption was then stuffed inside a coffin, which was then stuffed inside a sarcophagus.
The Parsis, a Zoroastrian religious community in India, place their dead atop twenty-foot-high stone structures called “towers of silence,” so the vultures can more easily devour them.
Australia’s Aborigines have been known to leave dead bodies in treetops.
In New Caledonia and among Borneo’s inland mountain people, dead bodies are placed erect inside the trunks of trees. The bark of the tree is then replaced over them.
The Jivaro peoples of South America inter their dead women and children under the floor. This practice dates back ten thousand years, to the rituals of urbanites in Mesopotamia.
Muslim people bathe their corpses carefully, with warm water and scented oils. Male corpses are bathed by men, and female corpses are bathed by women. Both men and women can bathe a dead child. The corpses are then wrapped in a plain cloth called a kafan, placed in a casket, and buried underground.
Jews wrap their dead in simple cloth and bury them underground too. Once the corpse is lowered underground, family members often toss a few handfuls of dirt into the hole. They might also tear a piece of their clothing, or a black ribbon, to signify their loss. This practice is called kriah, a tradition that many believe dates all the way back to Jacob’s reaction to the supposed death of Joseph.
In certain parts of Indonesia, it is customary for widows to smear themselves with fluids from the bodies of their dead husbands.
In central Asia, mourners often get masochistic, lacerating their arms and faces in honor of the deceased.
In Tanzania, young men and women of the Nyakyusa tribe customarily copulate at the site of a dead person’s grave, as a show of respect.
In some nomadic Arctic cultures, a doll of the deceased is carved from wood and treated as though it were alive. The doll is often kept for years. It is placed in positions of honor. It is taken on family outings. Food offerings are made to it. Widows have been known to sleep with the wooden doll in their beds, in remembrance of the deceased.
Earlier in the year, the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick and the baseball player Joe DiMaggio had died within a day of each other. Kubrick passed away on March 7, 1999. A heart attack did him in. DiMaggio died on March 8, of lung cancer and pneumonia. I learned about both deaths on the morning of March 9. My alarm clock went off, same as usual, and I heard Bob Edwards talking about their deaths on National Public Radio. I remember lying in bed, looking at the ceiling, hearing the news. I found myself feeling sad in a vague and peculiar kind of way.
Later that same day, I was driving around Boulder, running errands, headed north on Twenty-eighth Street, trying to make a left turn. Up ahead I saw two little girls standing on the side of the road, darling little Japanese girls, sisters holding hands. They darted out into the road, right in front of a guy in an Oldsmobile Cutlass. Traffic was thick, so the guy wasn’t going very fast—maybe twenty miles per hour. He slammed on his brakes, but by then, it was too late. The nose of the Olds struck the little girls, and they popped up in the air like rag dolls. One of them landed on the street. The other one landed on the hood. It was terribly surreal.
Everything started happening fast. Suddenly, I was out of my Jeep and running across the street. I arrived at the scene, and the little girls were lying there. The younger one was wailing. The older one was trembling, in shock. Both were conscious, and there wasn’t any blood. Onlookers were rushing in from every direction. Everyone was crowding in around the girls, trying to comfort them, asking them if they were all right. I felt nauseous. I looked to my left and saw a woman standing there. By the looks of her, she was a mother. She had her hands on her head, as though she were wearing a wig and the wind might blow it away. “Oh my God,” she kept saying. “Oh my God, oh my God…”
I took my jacket off and tried to drape it over one of the little girls, the older one. I’d read somewhere that people injured in accidents should be covered with blankets or coats, to keep them warm, to treat them for shock. The little girl wanted no part of my jacket. She threw it off her shoulders, looked at me, and started bawling. She said she wanted to go home. Having all of these strange adults around her was scaring her. I backed away, holding my jacket. I felt silly—dejected, almost.
Sirens rang in the distance.
The little girl sobbed.
“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” someone said to her. “Help is on the way.”
“I don’t want to go to jail,” she said.
Everyone assured her that she wouldn’t be going to jail.
The woman to my left crouched down and gave her a hug.
The driver of the Oldsmobile was short and middle-aged. He was wearing a Colorado Rockies cap, standing to my right with his hands in his pockets. He looked a little bit like Al Pacino, and he was oddly calm, talking to another onlooker.
“I didn’t see ’em,” he said. “I didn’t see ’em at all. They came out of nowhere. I had no way of seeing ’em. I didn’t see a thing until they were up on my hood. I didn’t see a thing. All of a sudden I looked up, and bam, there they were. There wasn’t even a crosswalk there. I couldn’t have seen ’em.”
An ambulance arrived, followed by two fire trucks and two cop cars. The circle of onlookers opened up, and the paramedics came through. The older girl kept saying that she wanted to go home and see her mommy. The little one just sat there crying. After a while, people started to disperse. I walked back over to my truck, climbed inside, and drove away. My hands were shaking, and I drove very slowly. It was a cold wintry day, and there were giant towering clouds rolling in over the mountains. It was a very
